The Pirate Hunters (39 page)

NAVY CAPTAIN RANDY
Lynch was the flight leader of the F-18s. He and his wingman had left the aircraft carrier
USS Lincoln
in the Persian Gulf ninety minutes earlier after being assigned a classified anti-piracy mission in the Indian Ocean.

They’d been given a target described as a four-masted “tramp steamer.” The boat was said to be “heavily armed and a danger to shipping.” They were to intercept the ship, confirm its hostile intent, and “take all actions necessary to protect international shipping.”

In other words, it was a pirate ship—and they were here to sink it.

Lynch had been a Navy flier for nearly fifteen years. He’d flown missions in Iraq and over Afghanistan. He’d shot at people and people had shot at him. This was the first time, though, that he’d been ordered to shoot at pirates.

On their next pass, Lynch and his wingman opened up with the F-18’s nose-mounted cannons. They tore up the back of the rusty old ship and blew the top off the freighter’s stack. They turned, and this time came in from the west. Opening up at 500 feet out, both planes walked a line of cannon fire right down the center of the vessel. There were a handful of secondary explosions this time, indications that there were weapons or explosives belowdecks of the old ship.

They turned again, knowing that fuel constraints and the coming darkness meant this had to be a killing pass.

But before they came in for this fateful strafing run, Lynch saw something odd happening on the ship. Someone had climbed up one of the freighter’s masts, someone who didn’t look like a Somali pirate. He looked more like a soldier, and he was madly waving a flag.

An American flag.

Lynch immediately broke off his strafing run; his wingman did, too.

“Pirate or not,” Lynch radioed his partner, “there’s no way I’m shooting at that. I just can’t.”

“Neither can I,” the wingman radioed back. “Someone
might have got their wires crossed, because this didn’t seem right from the beginning. I think I just suddenly ran out of ammunition.”

“Roger that,” Lynch said. “Me, too.”

With that, the two fighters pulled up, turned as one and roared over the ship one more time. Then they disappeared into the approaching darkness to the northeast.

It took more than a minute for the roar of their engines to finally fade away.

DOWN ON THE
DUS-7, the crew was laying flat out on the bridge deck amidships, the most structurally sound place on the boat. This is where Batman and Crash found them, hands over their heads, hot metal and smoke all around them. All except Nolan.

They’d landed the work copter just seconds after the F-18s departed and had immediately run forward.

“Jesus Christ!” Batman fumed, looking at the damage. “I probably know those Navy flyboys. And if I don’t, I’m going to find out who they are and fuck them up.”

The others were just getting to their feet. The Senegals were especially shaken up. They’d never had powerful jet fighters shoot at them before. Incredibly, no one was hurt.

Batman helped Gunner to his feet, then looked up at the mast and saw Nolan starting to climb down, stars and stripes in hand.

“Good thing he had a flag,” Gunner said to Batman.

Batman just shrugged. “Yeah—go figure that.”

It took a few minutes, but eventually everyone was back to breathing normally again. The damage report was not good, though. Some of their ammunition had gone off in the Rubber Room down below, and the deck was full of holes. The most extensive damage was in the engine room, though.

“They fucked up the feed system for the gas turbine,” Crash reported. “And we have a major leak in one of diesels. We got about half our electrical power functioning. But we don’t have any afterburner anymore.”

Batman just wiped his hands over his sweaty head. “Could have been worse, I guess,” he said to Nolan, who joined them on the bridge.

“Don’t speak too soon,” Nolan said.

He held up his arms and indicated the sea all around of them. Batman could see nothing but water.

In the confusion, Zeek’s ship had slipped away.

Calzino Island
The Seychelles
Midnight

EIGHT PEOPLE WERE
inside Lazy Joe’s Bar: Four female college students from America, a bartender, a cook and two waiters.

Lazy Joe’s was one of three businesses—the others were a hotel and a scuba diving shop—jammed into a trio of small, brightly colored waterfront buildings. They were the only buildings on the tiny island of Calzino, the farthest-out atoll of the Seychelles chain, northeast of Madagascar. Just a mile long and a half-mile wide, Calzino was all but devoid of trees and vegetation. Its harbor, small and shallow, took up most of its eastern side. The nearest land, another Seychelles island called Mahe, was more than 100 miles away.

Scuba diving brought the tourists here. Some of the most exotic reefs on Earth were close by, reefs that resembled monstrous, multicolored globs of light emanating from the ocean floor. The best time to dive these bizarre reefs was at night.

The four girls at the bar were restless. They’d been drinking since early evening while their male friends were out diving for the fourth night in a row. After many Cosmos, the girls decided they were leaving the island the following morning, with or without their boyfriends.

Calzino was just too boring.

But that was about to change.

THE FIRST GUNMAN
burst through the door at the stroke of midnight, waving his assault rifle around wildly. At first, the patrons thought he was a policeman. He wore a black military suit and boots and a woolen cap. But there were no police on Calzino. The place was too small.

Without a word, the gunman shot the bartender between the eyes, dispelling any notion that he was law enforcement. The four girls screamed. A moment later, the plate glass window next to the bar exploded and two more gunmen burst in, firing their weapons indiscriminately. The girls screamed again, louder this time. The gunmen quickly knocked them to the floor and held them there with their boot heels. More gunmen appeared; two walked into the kitchen and shot the cook. When one of the waiters went to the aid of the girls, he was dragged out to the street and shot. Other gunmen broke into the hotel next door, roused the two employees and shot them in their beds. The three people who worked at the Night Dive marina were beaten, and one was shot trying to escape.

The gunmen then stole all their victims’ wallets, emptied all the cash registers, collected all cell phones and seized the hotel’s satellite phone. And that was it.

In less than three minutes, the little island of Calzino had been taken over by Zeek and his murderous crew.

NO ONE ON
the island had seen the
Pasha
enter the harbor. Smoking and battered, the battle-scarred 352 had slipped in and dropped anchor just a hundred feet offshore.

Yet despite their brutal efficiency in seizing the tiny town, Zeek and his men had big problems. The
Pasha
’s captain was dead, as were all his first officers, the only people experienced in sailing the ship. All of the vessel’s radios were destroyed, as was one of its two engines. The second engine was still working, but at only one-third power. Nearly all the electrical systems on board had short-circuited, all the navigation
computers were down, and even simple things like the bilge pumps and the intercom were out of order.

Most critical, the pirates needed ammunition for their deck-mounted five-inch gun. Many of its shells had to be thrown overboard during the sea battle with their shadowy pursuers, when one of the fires threatened to blow up the ship’s ammunition locker. This left the
Pasha
with exactly two shells, both of which were loaded inside the gun.

Zeek’s new
capo
, Commander Fun Li, was extremely unhappy with this state of affairs. Yes, they had given their pursuers the slip. But the
Pasha
was barely afloat, and they’d lost more than three dozen men killed in the surprise attack. They’d made it here, to a safe harbor, but their most formidable weapon was practically useless. Li’s military training had taught him to make the best of bad situations, to seize opportunity from chaos. This is why he’d strongly suggested to Zeek that the pirate band take refuge here on Calzino in the first place. It would allow them time to regroup.

And good news came just minutes after they’d arrived. The ship’s engineers, all of whom had survived the sea attack, told Li that getting the ship’s working engine back to 100 percent power required only one part: a power transfer knuckle. If one could be had, they could fix the ailing engine sufficiently to get the ship to Somalia with minimal delay.

But how could they get a power transfer knuckle?

Li made a phone call. Using the hotel’s confiscated satellite phone, he spoke to a contact in South Africa who promised to airlift the critical part to Calzino immediately, along with a crate of five-inch naval gun shells. The engineers assured Li that installation of the engine part would not be a problem. With any luck, the
Pasha
would be rearmed and on its way the following morning.

When Li reported all this to Zeek, who had hidden himself away in his large, luxurious cabin, the Pirate King took the news as confirmation that God was still with him, that he had left all the bad spirits back in Indonesia—another reason he wanted to get away from his homeland—and that his run of
luck, from surviving the sea attack to finding this tiny sanctuary, was still holding.

Only then did Zeek go ashore to see the hostages his men had taken.

THE GIRLS ON
the bar’s floor, still held at gunpoint, terrified and crying, gasped at the first sight of the fearsome Pirate king.

Striding in, dressed in brightly colored trousers, dress shirt and half coat, his beard in weird braids, his hair long and dirty, Zeek looked like something from a horror movie.

He scanned the shot-up bar, felt the veneer of the overly shellacked wooden tables, checked the overhanging aluminum lights for dust.

Then he casually pointed to the only brunette among the four girls and walked out. Two pirates yanked her to her feet and carried her, kicking and screaming, out the door.

The remaining girls could do nothing but cry as their friend was taken away.

THE TOP FLOOR
of Calzino’s three-story hotel held a penthouse of sorts. Slightly larger than the rest of the rooms, it had a massive waterbed, a hot tub and a small bar. The wall over the waterbed was adorned with the steering wheel of an old wooden ship; some very old spear guns and a diving helmet decorated the bathroom. When the room’s curtains were opened, a large picture window provided an impressive view of the island’s harbor and the ocean beyond.

This is where Zeek and the pirates brought the girl.

Zeek forced her to sit on the edge of the waterbed while his men ransacked the bar. They found only small bottles of white wine. Zeek drank one bottle in a single gulp, then had his men force the girl to drink six bottles, one right after another. She fought them mightily, but it made no difference. Her resistance only amused them.

On at a curt nod from Zeek, the other pirates left the room, closing the door tight and taking up stations in the hall outside. As soon as they left, the girl began to scream, then sounds
of a great struggle could be heard. Eventually these sounds were replaced by the girl’s pleas, begging Zeek to stop, and finally, by her sobs.

Then suddenly, the noise stopped completely.

The suite door opened and the young girl was flung out, landing hard on the hallway floor. She was naked, her face and chest covered with welts. She vomited, tried to get to her feet, and fell again.

One pirate slipped into the room. It looked as if a cyclone had gone through the place. Zeek lay on the bed, looking like someone who’d just finished a huge meal. The room smelled of blood and sex.

Zeek pointed to the curtains drawn across the room’s picture window next to the bed.

“Open them,” he ordered the pirate. “Then clean this place up.”

His man complied, drawing back the curtains, revealing the view of the harbor and the ocean beyond.

The man took one look out at the water, though, and softly swore: “Damn . . .”

Lying just outside the harbor, silhouetted by the light of the full moon, was the DUS-7.

COMMANDER LI HAD
spotted the rusty freighter seconds earlier.

He was standing on the wrecked bridge of the
Pasha
, hoping to get its computers working again, when the splintered masts of the DUS-7 appeared above the jetty leading into Calzino’s harbor.

Li was both fascinated and highly troubled by the ship’s sudden appearance.

“
They
made it, too?” he thought.

The last Li had seen of the rusty freighter, it was getting shot to pieces by two fighter jets. He knew the heavily armed freighter probably belonged to the merc unit Kilos Shipping had sent after Zeek, just as he knew the jets belonged to the U.S. Navy. So, he’d assumed it was a case of mistaken identity
and that the pilots mistook their adversaries for pirates. So intense was this attack, though, the freighter seemed doomed to sink, just as the
Pasha
had seemed doomed just seconds before. Yet somehow, it also had survived.

Studying the freighter through his night-vision glasses now, Li could see that, like the
Pasha
, the freighter was extensively damaged. Two of its cargo masts were missing; its bridge was in shambles. Lockers, ropes, chains, housings, the typical things that cluttered a ship of this type, were all gone from the deck. It was obvious that whatever wasn’t bolted down or working the freighter’s crew had been thrown overboard. This told Li the ship’s engines were also in bad shape, and that its crew had tried to lighten the vessel to keep it afloat and moving.

But
how
had their pursuers tracked them here?

Li again used the hotel’s sat phone, this time to call a contact in the Indonesian Navy. He had a question for him: Did Indonesian Navy ships have AIS on them—as in an automatic identification system? The answer was yes, all Indonesian Navy ships had the chip-in-the-ship beacon. Question two: Had Prince Seeodek thought to remove his AIS beacon when he took delivery of the 352 minesweeper?