The Pirate Hunters (33 page)

“But who whacked them?” Crash asked.

Nolan checked the ammo clip in his M4.

“Let’s find out,” he said.

THEY STOLE UP
onto the beach near where the huge catamaran had anchored. Dr. Stevenson carefully studied the men on shore nearby. All were dressed in black battle suits and stocking caps. He immediately recognized them as fitting the description of the armed men who’d invaded the Jersey Island pub that night.

“My guess is they’re South Africans,” the doctor said. “The witnesses in the pub that night were mostly tourists. They said the raiders spoke with British accents, but strange ones.”

The team watched as the catamaran crew tour off another front-end loader and more stacks of digging tools. Team Whiskey, by contrast, had brought only hand shovels and entrenchment tools.

“Frigging guys
are
serious,” Batman said. “And if they spot our tub and know that we’re on the island, they’ll hunt us down like . . .”

His last few words were drowned out by a loud whistling sound. A moment later, a flash of metallic light passed over their heads and landed squarely on the work barge bringing the front-end loader to shore. The explosion was so large it knocked everyone in Team Whiskey’s group to the ground. They wisely remained there and waited. When the smoke cleared, they looked back to the beach and found nothing left of the barge, the front-end loader or the men accompanying it.

Suddenly, more shells came screaming through the air. This was not their M102 firing; these were large-caliber naval
gun shells going over their heads. The barrage hit the beach, causing another minor earthquake.

Nolan jumped up, climbed the nearest tree, and—using his special spyglass—spotted a military ship coming toward the island from the east, moving very fast. He reported this to the team below.

“Who the fuck could it be?” Crash asked.

“Can you ID it?” Batman called up to him.

Nolan was able to read the numbers on the side of the ship.

“P331,” he said. “It’s a destroyer.”

Batman pulled out his BlackBerry, called up a special foreign navies app and started typing in Nolan’s information.

“God damn,” he said after a few moments. “Who ordered the
khoresht
?”

Nolan couldn’t believe it. “That’s an Iranian ship?”

Batman confirmed it: “It’s the
Jamaran
. Fifty-eight hundred tons. Guided missile destroyer. It was deployed to the Gulf of Aden a few months ago to help control the pirates. Looks like it’s gotten involved in some extracurricular activities instead.”

As he was speaking, the Iranian vessel unleashed a ferocious barrage of ship-to-ship missiles. They all hit the catamaran, blowing it to pieces. It was a frightening demonstration of enormous naval firepower.

“Christ—we’ll be part of tomorrow’s shish kabob if they find us out here,” Crash said. “And we got no way to call for help.”

“So what else is new?” Twitch said.

THE IRANIAN DESTROYER
anchored close by the wreckage of the catamaran.

It lowered four boats and began ferrying people to the shore, about two hundred and fifty feet away. The personnel in the boats were all dressed in civilian clothes; none was wearing a military uniform. Each had a shovel or a pick, and in that way they looked like an army of archeologists. But each was also carrying an assault rifle or a machine gun. Some were also lugging military-style metal detectors and even portable
ground-imaging radar sets. Looking like a large jackhammer, each instrument required three men to drag it across the ground while a fourth took readings of what it saw beneath the surface. Like a very elaborate mine detector, it could spot things buried almost ten feet underground.

The sun was starting to go down. The men who were ferried ashore worked on setting up a base camp and building two huge bonfires, using wood already gathered by the people their naval guns had just obliterated.

Watching all this from the jungle nearby were Nolan and Batman; the rest of the team had returned to the
Dustboat
.

This was a disturbing development. There had always been a chance that they could dig up the treasure and avoid the people in the catamaran. But trying to get away from the island—treasure in hand or not—would be almost impossible with the Iranian warship on the scene.

“There’s got to be about a hundred and fifty of those ass-holes already on shore,” Batman said, eyeing the Iranian base camp. “And what? Another three or four hundred still on the ship?”

“At least,” Nolan replied, studying the situation with his special spyglass. “I’m guessing these guys on the beach are Pazdaran. The top Iranian special ops group? Remember them from the Battle of Herat?”

“Just barely,” Batman replied. “And, you know, for this being a secret treasure, a lot of people seem to know about it.”

“Well, maybe these guys don’t know
exactly
where to dig for it,” Nolan theorized. “I mean, why else would they have so many people with so much equipment?”

“They do seem to be settling in for the night,” Batman said, noting the Iranians were building several more bonfires and setting up tents. “If you’re right, they might not start searching for the treasure until tomorrow morning.”

Nolan checked his watch and said, “Which means we only have a few hours to find it—in the dark.”

“But finding it will only be half the battle,” Batman said. “We still have to get away.”

Nolan thought a moment, then packed up his spyglass.

“Let’s find the damn thing first,” he said. “Then we’ll figure out how to get out of here.”

THEY RETURNED TO
the DUS-7 and helped cover it completely with tree branches and vines. Then, leaving the Senegals on board, the rest of the team went back into the jungle, following the map found on the faux BlackBerry.

Again, the fact that the Iranians had come ashore with metal detectors and portable ground radar imaging units suggested they weren’t really sure where to start digging. Whiskey barely had a shovel and some entrenching tools. However, they did have the original map. They were hoping this gave them an important advantage.

The map, crudely drawn, had been scanned and downloaded to the mystery man’s device. Though not elaborate, the version Dr. Stevenson had been able to recover did list some GPS coordinates as longitude and latitude. So in a way, looking for the treasure would be an exercise in “geocaching”—hiding an object at specific GPS coordinates to be found by someone else.

But the map actually showed
three
sites where the treasure could be buried—just why the dead man had chosen to give more than one location was a mystery. Most likely he wanted to make it harder for anyone who eventually found the map. The only real clue was a note that said the real treasure was buried in a “black spotted bag.”

After a tough slog through the heavy jungle, the team reached the first GPS point indicated, praying they would hit paydirt right away. The site was on a small hill on the north end of the island, not far from where they’d sunk the seaplane. The hill was covered with heavy vines, and the sandy ground was almost solid with roots. In fact, it was hard to tell where the vines ended and the ground began.

Using their night-vision capability, they were able to locate a spot near the GPS coordinates that appeared to have been dug up relatively recently. Still, the re-digging was arduous—much worse than what they had to do back in the Mirang Island graveyard, Crash reported. Their shovels were practically
useless here; at least the entrenching tools were sharp on the business end, allowing them to cut through the vines that had grown over the recently disturbed ground.

They took turns on the entrenching tools while Gunner kept watch. It was during a turn by the doctor and Batman that they hit not another tangle of vines but a piece of solid wood.

“Bingo,” Batman whispered, quickly adding: “I hope . . .”

They’d hit the top of a long, narrow wooden box—a coffin, they thought at first. But further digging revealed it to be a wooden shipping crate bearing U.S. military markings.

They pried off the cover and found within a pair of Stingers, the small portable surface-to-air missile that allowed a single person to shoot down an aircraft as big as an airliner. There were four more boxes under the one they’d uncovered, equaling ten Stingers in all.

“Jackpot!” Crash cried. “Right?”

At first, they all thought they’d guessed right by digging here. But then reality set in.

“This isn’t it,” Stevenson said. “Stingers are available all over world—and can be had on the black market fairly easily. Our dead courier friend didn’t deal in things so pedestrian—and let’s face it, this is hardly a pot of gold worth sending a Iranian warship to uncover.”

Plus, on closer examination, they determined the missiles were old, rusty and probably unworkable. At the very least they’d have to be recalibrated and expertly cleaned before anyone even thought of using them.

“He’s right,” Nolan said. “No way everyone got so hot and bothered about ten old missiles.”

THEY MOVED ON
to the second dig site.

Their GPS device told them it was on a beach on the western edge of the island, about a quarter mile from where the catamaran was sunk. The digging here was just as tough. The beach was rocky on top and muddy beneath, so with every two swipes of the entrenching tool, the mud flooded back in, filling half the hole again.

But after some heavy work, they finally hit something that was not mud. It was a large metal box this time, almost the size as the crate the Stingers were in. It took all their muscle power to pull it out of the ground, after which they discovered it had not one, but two combination locks on it. This presented a problem: Shooting the locks off would make too much noise; the Iranians were not that far away. Plus, if this box contained Stingers as well, a bullet in the wrong place would blow them to Kingdom Come. But they were running out of time.

Gunner stepped forward, indicating the others should move back. He studied the two locks, but then put his fingers under the box’s lid and began to pry it open. It seemed impossible at first; the box appeared to be solid metal. But Gunner was incredibly strong and eventually, he was able to bend the lid away from the combination locks and off the box completely.

The others were amazed.

“Fucking guy eats his Wheaties,” Batman said to Stevenson.

Beneath the lid was an old woolen blanket. Nolan pulled it away to reveal a large stash of brilliant, shimmering coins.

“Jesus Christ!” Crash exclaimed. “Are those gold?”

As it turned out, the answer was no.

Batman studied the coins—and then started laughing grimly.

“These are Soviet-era rubles,” he declared. “The Russians used to make them in both coin and script. They look like gold, but . . .”

“But?” Nolan asked.

“But,” Batman went on, “they are possibly the most useless currency on the planet at the moment.”

There was a collective groan from everyone on hand.

“Strike fucking two,” Crash said, throwing a handful of the coins into the water.

“This dead guy is dicking with us,” Gunner declared ominously. “The shitty Stingers, and now this worthless Russian crap? Has anyone considered that this whole thing might be a gag?”

A gloomy silence fell over them. No one wanted to think that.

Finally Twitch said: “Well, if it is, it’s a long way to go for a fucking joke.”

THEY GRIMLY MOVED
on to the third site, highly suspicious that they were on a wild goose chase. Finding and digging up the first two sites had taken much longer than they’d expected. The night had slipped away, and it was now only ninety minutes to dawn. The team was sure the island would soon be crawling with Iranian Special Forces.

Making a bad situation worse, the third site, according to the map, was located on a cliff just below the cone of the extinct volcano. They’d have to climb up to it.

This took almost an hour itself, and they were exhausted by the time they reached their goal. At first the ground here looked like concrete, but it was actually volcanic ash. Once the top layer was broken, it was like digging in hard sand. They went to work with the entrenching tools again, trying their best to stay on the spot the GPS was indicating.

More backbreaking work ensued, but finally they came upon yet another box. This one was plastic and about the size of a small TV. They opened it fairly easily and inside found a large, black spotted sack.

“Motherfucker . . .” Crash groaned. “I
knew
we should have started up here.”

“If there’s a jack-in-the-box in there,” Gunner announced. “I’m going on a shooting spree.”

They all recognized the sack as a “burn bag,” used by spies and other special ops people to burn sensitive items safely should adversaries be closing in.

They opened the sack and found it was stuffed with rags and a small blanket. Stevenson searched through them until he found a wooden box not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Inside this box, he found a smaller metal box and opened it, only to find yet
another
smaller box inside. It was the type of container that held fuses for airplanes. Inside it was a wad of plastic wrapped in electrical wire. Unraveling
this, they were left with a small jewelry box, something a ring would come in.

With much drama, the doctor opened this box—and took a look inside. Nolan was devastated. All the Whiskey guys were. The box held nothing but a tiny computer chip, something that might be found in a computer game. Sealed inside a little plastic case, it looked ordinary in every way.

“I knew it!” Gunner roared. “That prick was just yanking our chains!”

“This really
is
a bad joke . . .” Batman said angrily.

That’s when the guy named Squire stepped forward. He had said very little, until now.

“No, gentlemen,” he spoke coolly, inspecting the chip. “This
is
it. We’ve found the treasure—and it’s just what I suspected.”

Batman turned to Nolan and asked: “Is he nuts—or am I?”