Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  He picked up a rental car at the general aviation terminal and slogged through the tail end of the morning rush hour as he drove to the Romanos offices in Glyfada. Jake was looking out the window of Athena’s conference room, searching through the gray mist for the island of Aegina, when she walked in.

  She was holding the acrylic tombstone they’d swapped out of the agent’s office.

  “Did it work?” she asked.

  “It did,” Jake said. “We’ve made a preliminary identification of the man we were looking for.”

  “Preliminary? Are you telling me he still hasn’t been arrested?”

  “Arrangements are being made.”

  “But I can fire the agent?”

  “Ms. Romanos—”

  “You only call me that when you’re about to tell me something I won’t like.”

  Jake’s expression acknowledged the point.

  “We need more time. We have to let this play out.”

  Athena pulled a sheet of paper from her jacket and unfolded it on the table.

  “This is the crew list for the Symi. Twenty-three men: sixteen Filipinos, four Eastern Europeans, and three Greeks.”

  She read each name aloud and gave the paper to Jake.

  “I will not send them to their deaths.”

  She walked out of the conference room.

  * * *

  —

  JAKE WAITED IN the reception area. Athena passed by half an hour later, surprised to see him.

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” she said.

  “There is.”

  She kept walking.

  Jake kept waiting.

  An hour later, the receptionist picked up her phone, looked up at Jake, and said something in Greek into the phone.

  Athena stepped out of her office.

  “I have a lunch meeting,” she said to Jake. “Walk me downstairs.”

  When they were alone in the elevator, she said, “Just so it’s one hundred percent clear, the Symi left Kuwait two days ago. In two more days, it will be in the Arabian Sea. You have until tomorrow to arrest the pirates, otherwise I’m turning the ship around.”

  Two men entered the elevator on the third floor, and the rest of the trip passed in silence.

  Athena strode through the lobby to her reserved parking space and left in the silver Jaguar.

  Jake was waiting in the reception area again when she returned.

  She shook her head and walked past him.

  It was six thirty p.m. when she finished work.

  Jake was still waiting.

  “I need five minutes,” he said.

  “I’m late.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  She cursed at him in Greek. At least he thought it was a curse. He’d been cursed at before, and though the language was different, the tone and the facial expression seemed consistent.

  “I have dinner plans,” she said.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Fine!” she said, exasperated. “Five minutes, eight o’clock, at the house.”

  Jake was ten minutes early when he turned onto the gravel driveway. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see—maybe the fiancé, maybe a whole dinner party—but the parking area was empty and the house looked the same.

  Maybe they had an underground garage.

  One of the household staff escorted him inside, and Jake saw Athena sitting alone at the dining room table with her back to him. The room was bathed in candlelight, and the table set intimately for two. Across from her was a napkin on the table and a half-finished glass of red wine.

  Jake turned and nearly collided with Giánnis.

  The older man greeted Jake warmly and invited him into the dining room.

  Athena turned and glared.

  “He and I are meeting after dinner, Father. He can wait in the living room.”

  “Can’t he have a glass of wine first?”

  Giánnis was seated at the head of the table, with Athena on his left. He pulled out a chair for Jake on his right—directly across from Athena.

  The glaring intensified.

  One of the staff brought a glass for Jake and filled it with a French Bordeaux that was at least a decade older than he was.

  “You’ve been here before,” said Giánnis. He remembered Jake’s face, but the dementia had erased the details. “Are you Athena’s fiancé?”

  Athena put her face in her hands.

  “No, Father. He’s here for work.”

  “Are you in shipping?”

  “I work for the U.S. Department of State, Mr. Romanos.”

  “And what brings you here?”

  “I’m part of a counterpiracy task force.”

  Giánnis nodded slowly. “My son is a ship captain.”

  Athena stood, took a deep breath, and placed her napkin on the table.

  “Father, would you mind if we finished dinner so I could meet with this man from America?”

  Giánnis stood. “Of course.”

  One of the staff led him to his room.

  “I need some air,” said Athena. “There’s a Land Rover parked around the corner. Would you bring it around? The keys are in it, but I can’t walk across the driveway in these heels.”

  Jake nodded. It was a steel-gray Defender with a Bimini top and the doors removed. He pulled to the side of the house and picked her up. She’d put on a jacket and pointed to a road on the edge of the property. It ended at a private beach. He parked facing the water.

  The rain had stopped, but it was barely fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and Jake left the engine running and turned up the heat. They stayed in the car.

  “Sometimes my father asks me when my brother is coming home,” said Athena. “He thinks he’s still on a ship somewhere.”

  A tear slid down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away.

  “Have you ever lost anyone close to you?” she asked.

  Jake hesitated for a minute. His life as Zac Miller was top secret, code-word classified, but he understood the pain she felt.

  “I lost both my parents when I was fourteen,” he said.

  Athena didn’t know what answer she’d been hoping for, but it certainly wasn’t that.

  “I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”

  “It was. I went to live with an aunt and uncle, but they had their own issues. It wasn’t a happy childhood.”

  She turned to face him.

  “Yet you still think I should send the Symi into the Gulf. That I should risk the lives of all those men and potentially leave their children with that same lifetime of loss?”

  “You’re in a terrible position,” Jake said. “If I had never come to Greece you wouldn’t know that your men might be in danger, but now you do.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I figured out the danger had returned after my brother disappeared,”

  “Of course, what I meant—”

  “I know what you meant, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s gone and I can protect these men by turning that ship around.”

  “But you know that turning the ship around will make the pirates suspicious, and they’ll talk to the banker in Mogadishu, and he’ll call the intermediary in Switzerland, and he’ll phone your shipping agent, who will say that, coincidentally enough, Athena Romanos was just in his office for the first time ever . . . Then the pirate leader will go to ground and we’ll spend five years searching for him while he escapes justice.”

  “I could alter the Symi’s course. I could divert it a hundred miles west of the route they’re expecting.”

  “I have no idea if the pirates are targeting the Symi, but I don’t want you to delude yourself that altering course would stop them. They’ve been tracking their targets using the automatic identification system. They’re going to find wha
tever ship they’re looking for.”

  Athena put her hands in her face again, displeased with all of her options.

  “When will you arrest him?”

  “As soon as we get approval from Washington.”

  “What could they be waiting for?”

  “It’s a bureaucracy,” Jake said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I should call INTERPOL. They would arrest him immediately.”

  “INTERPOL doesn’t have an enforcement arm. They’ll just pass the information to the Somalis and the pirates have sources inside the government. There’s a one hundred percent chance that he’ll get a heads-up and maybe a five percent chance that the authorities will even look for him. It will only make him harder to catch.”

  Athena looked out over the sea again. Moonlight was breaking through the clouds.

  “We don’t know that they’re targeting the Symi,” Jake repeated.

  “They are.”

  Jake hesitated. “It’s possible, but they could be working with other agents too. There could be dozens of potential targets.”

  “And yet you’re convinced that turning one ship around will ruin your whole plan? ‘Either your men die or many more will.’ Isn’t that what you said the first time we met?”

  “I only meant that—”

  “I’m sorry. I know you’re trying to help.”

  The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “Does the Symi have a citadel?” Jake said.

  “All of our ships do. We installed them after my brother died.”

  “Then remind the crew to follow procedures and get everyone into the citadel at the first sign of trouble. They’ll be safe there.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE GENERAL ALARM was wailing throughout the ship.

  The crew had been alerted to something—probably all of their electronics turning to mush at the same time.

  Shit happens, thought the pirate commander.

  Eight of his assaulters stacked up outside the bridge. The second man tried the handle on the metal door, but it was locked. He stepped back and signaled for the team’s breacher—a man trained to gain entry where others hoped to heep them out. He did a two-second evaluation of the door, the lock, and the door frame before lighting a handheld cutting torch. Though it looked like a road flare, the Breachpen burned at 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cut through the door and the stainless steel deadbolt in twenty seconds.

  The breacher stepped back and the next man in the stack kicked open the door. The eight pirates streamed inside and fanned out against the walls, rifles up and ready for action, but the bridge was empty. They’d met no resistance from a vessel protection detachment, and a quick search of the accommodations area revealed no crewmen—which left one inescapable conclusion.

  The crew had retreated to a citadel.

  It took four and a half minutes for the assault team to locate it.

  But with half-inch-thick steel walls and a waterproof hatch, another Breachpen wasn’t going to get them inside. One of the pirates fried the two exterior CCTV cameras with a high-powered laser while the breacher unloaded his backpack.

  The team had encountered citadels before.

  He removed a four-foot nylon circle with an adhesive backing and slapped it against the wall, then attached nine pounds of explosives and braced it with what looked like a pair of tent poles.

  The team retreated behind cover as the breacher unspooled fifty feet of detonating cord and tucked in safely around a corner. After a quick check of the system, he pulled the trigger on the firing mechanism.

  The explosion was deafening.

  The wall looked as if a four-foot-wide bullet had been fired through it. Two assaulters approached from the sides and lobbed hand grenades into the opposite corners of the room, left/low, right/high, in a well-rehearsed routine to eliminate any chance that they might collide in the air, before juking back behind the steel walls.

  Metal fragments ricocheted inside the citadel as the grenades exploded.

  Four pirates climbed through the hole and dead-checked the downed sailors with 5.45mm bullets to the chest, more a function of training than necessity—the breaching charge and the fragmentation grenades had already done most of the killing.

  A small drone operated by the pirates continued orbiting the ship, its thermal sensors scanning the deck for signs of life while the assault team searched the interior. One man was found in the pump room, two others in the engine control room, and they died where they stood, for there could be no survivors. The pirates would be out of business if the outside world ever learned of their tactics.

  Back on the bridge, the boarding team leader shut off the ship’s position-reporting system and turned the tanker southeast, toward Indonesia, where the cargo would be unloaded at an unscrupulous tank farm and blended with other crudes to obscure its origin. In a few weeks the oil would be sold to legitimate buyers in Asia with falsified bills of lading.

  One of the pirates lowered the ship’s Greek flag and tossed it overboard.

  The Symi had been off the grid for less than fifteen minutes.

  THIRTY-TWO

  JAKE SPENT THE night at the Westin and took off from Athens International Airport just after ten in the morning. He was nearly to Mogadishu when the flight crew told him he had an incoming call on the Gulfstream’s encrypted communications set.

  It was Ted Graves.

  “Another tanker is missing.”

  “What was its last known position?” Jake said.

  “Gulf of Oman—around two hundred fifty miles past the Strait of Hormuz.”

  Jake did some quick math in his head.

  “It was the Symi, wasn’t it?”

  He knew the ship’s route and timing.

  Graves was silent.

  “You sacrificed the one ship that hurts us the most.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” said Graves. “We needed to validate the intelligence.”

  “Melodramatic? You had me fly here to persuade Athena Romanos for more time, and then you used that time to send twenty-three of her men to their graves. You betrayed her trust and mine.”

  “We’re not here to make friends, Keller. We’re here to protect the interests of the United States of America. And don’t worry about Romanos—today is the day she was going to turn the ship around. It would have been too late anyway.”

  “She would have turned it around four days ago if I hadn’t begged her not to.”

  “You were doing your job. She’ll understand that. People don’t become billionaires by playing nice all the time.”

  “Ted, I want to make sure you understand that there is a very real chance that she’s going to go to INTERPOL, either because she thinks we’re incompetent or she realizes that we’ve been lying to her. If she does that, they’ll alert the Somalis, and Yaxaas will vanish. The mission will be over.”

  Graves leaned back in his chair and cracked his knuckles.

  “Where are you now?”

  “We just passed Djibouti,” Jake said. “We’ll be wheels-down in Mogadishu in an hour.”

  “Make a U-turn.”

  “What?”

  Graves spoke slowly, as if speaking to a child.

  “Ask the nice men in the front of the airplane to turn it around . . . The Ground Branch team got hung up battling a group of insurgents and won’t be able to get to Mogadishu for a few more days, which means we won’t be able to get to Yaxaas, which means you need to head back to Greece and convince Ms. Romanos to stay away from INTERPOL, because if those idiots go to the Somali authorities and Yaxaas learns about it, he’s gone, and that absolutely, positively, cannot fucking happen.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  IT WAS JUST after five p.m. when the Gulfstream touched down in Athens. Jake had called ahead for another rental car, and he
floored it as he left the airport. Graves might have rationalized the deaths of the twenty-three innocent crewmen to himself, but Jake knew CIA could have stopped it, and he saw it as his responsibility to tell Athena about the Symi face-to-face. By the time he reached her office building in Glyfada, most of the lights were off, but the silver Jaguar was still in its parking space.

  He stopped in front of the main entrance and was headed for the security desk when Athena emerged from the elevator.

  “You lied to me!” she yelled across the lobby.

  The armed security guard stepped in front of her protectively. He had his hand on his holstered weapon.

  She said something in Greek and the man stepped aside, but he kept his hand on his gun and glared at Jake.

  Athena brushed by Jake and stormed out the front door without saying another word.

  “Athena!” he said, once they were both on the street.

  She stopped and turned around with fury in her eyes.

  “We stopped getting position updates from the Symi six hours ago,” she said. “I deluded myself that they were just having communications issues, or maybe they were busy with bad weather, but then you showed up, and I knew.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I trusted you. I believed the citadel would protect my men, but they’re all dead now, aren’t they? You sent them to their graves.”

  She looked at her watch.

  “Damn it!” She opened her car door. “I need to get home.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. You’ve wasted the lives of my crew. I’m calling INTERPOL and ending this lunacy.”

  “Please let me explain.”

  “Fine!” It was easier for her to say “yes” than to keep arguing, and she needed to take care of Giánnis.

  She gunned the engine and chirped the tires as she turned south onto Poseidonos Avenue, the coastal road between Glyfada and Vouliagmeni. By the time Jake reached his rental car, the silver Jaguar was long gone, and he sped under the streetlights for several minutes without so much as catching a glimpse of the car.