by Mack Maloney
Twitch sat down at the table. The crowd re-gathered around him. Another pirate was pushed forward and sat down across from Twitch, putting on a black bandana. This man was about three times the size of the diminutive Hawaiian and looked drunk and heavily stoned.
Twitch contemplated him, then suddenly yelled: “Let’s go all out!”
His opponent was confused. He screwed up his face and asked: “All out?”
Twitch laughed manically, then took the gun placed before him and filled the chamber until it held not one bullet, but five.
“Yes—all out!” Twitch yelled again. “Reverse Russian roulette!”
The crowd was thunderous with delight. Once again, thousands of dollars changed hands in seconds. They gathered in even tighter. But this was strange—so strange even Sunny Hi looked a little on edge.
Without the slightest bit of hesitation or fear, or feeling, Twitch hissed at his befuddled opponent: “Do you feel lucky today, punk?”
It was at that moment that Nolan knew Twitch, already unstable, had completely lost his mind.
The gun was placed in the middle of the table. A card was drawn to see who would spin the weapon. Twitch won. He spun the gun violently. His huge opponent looked extremely nervous. The tension in the bar was almost unbearable.
The huge handgun stopped spinning, its barrel pointing at Twitch’s opponent.
This man was now sweating profusely. He suddenly had no stomach to play this revised game.
But when he went to reach for the pistol, to the surprise of everyone in the room, Twitch beat him to it.
“Let me show you how it’s done!” Twitch yelled, knocking the man’s hand away. He picked up the gun, spun the cylinder, put it up to his temple and squeezed the trigger.
Nolan couldn’t look.
It took forever, but then finally he heard …
Click!
The crowd roared. Money began flying around the room once again.
Twitch then passed the pistol to the man on the other side of the table.
The man was shaking mightily, sweat pouring down his face. He picked up the gun, spun the cylinder and put the muzzle up to his own temple.
He began to squeeze the trigger—again, Nolan just couldn’t look.
Click!
It was unbearable. Nolan was trying to get Twitch to look at him, but his colleague’s eyes were insanely fixed on his opponent.
The room never stopped going crazy, with money changing hands and much yelling and screaming. Standing right next to Nolan, even Sunny Hi was transfixed as Twitch picked up the gun again and put it to his temple.
But at that moment, Nolan realized something: Twitch hadn’t spun the revolver’s cylinder. That meant a bullet had to be in the firing chamber.
Twitch began laughing crazily again, never taking his eyes off his opponent.
He began to squeeze the trigger.
And finally, Nolan couldn’t help himself.
He screamed: “Fuck, no!”
And this time, something actually came out.
But it was too late.
Twitch pulled the trigger, but the gun was no longer against his temple. It was up on Sunny Hi’s forehead. The bullet hit the gangster right between the eyes. His head came apart as he was thrown backward, toppling over the table and collapsing it.
Then, with eerie calmness, Twitch fired one bullet into the head of each of the gangster’s three bodyguards standing nearby.
With the last bullet, he shot out the room’s only light.
* * *
RUNNING.
That’s all Nolan could do. The light went out, gunfire erupted, bullet trails streaked through the room, and the next thing he knew, he was running. In fact, Twitch was yanking him along as if he could see where he was going when no one else could.
They went out through the kitchen—the lights in here had gone out, too. A stream of bullets followed them, smashing into bottles, pans, kettles, glasses. So many rounds were ricocheting around them, it looked like a laser light show. Combined with the sound of people screaming and cursing in many languages, it was deafening.
Nolan had no choice but to follow Twitch’s lead. They found themselves running through endless hallways, up and down stairs, coming to blind corners, turning back, trying to stay as low as possible as a continuous fusillade went over their heads.
Finally, somehow, some way, Twitch found a door. He hit it without slowing down, breaking it off its hinges.
They were outside.
They stopped a moment to catch their breath. They were on a typical Old Shanghai street, twisting, turning, smelly and full of trash. A maze of alleys surrounded them. Instantly there was an armada of SUVs behind them, and many people were firing lots of weapons at them.
Again …
But this time, something was different. They had no idea where to go …
Then Twitch sniffed the air.
“Follow me!” he yelled to Nolan. “The water is this way!”
And for the first time in the whole fucked-up night, it seemed like one of them actually knew what he was doing.
So off they went.
They ran and ran and ran—dodging bullets, people, cars, diving for cover, keeping as low as possible whenever they could. And Nolan stayed glued to Twitch’s tail. It was his show now.
They ran for five minutes nonstop. Then they turned a corner and suddenly were running past the Mister Donuts coffee shop.
Then, two blocks down and over one, they were running underneath the elevated highway.
Gunfire still rattled behind them, but it was getting more distant with each block.
Every place they came to looked familiar. Somehow, Twitch knew when to turn and when to run straight.
They ran past the butcher shop their car crash had destroyed. The street in front of it was filled with crushed vegetables and chicken feathers. They ran a few more blocks and found themselves passing the Red Lantern, its two massive bouncers barely noticing them run by. Twenty blocks later, they were running past the Sea Witch, pausing just long enough for Twitch to curse at the female dwarf still sitting by the door.
“You little bitch!” he screamed.
And then, somehow, they reached the waterfront—and found that the Ocean Song was gone.
Nolan and Twitch finally stopped running, collapsing on the pier, violently out of breath.
“Those asshole twins,” Twitch gasped. “They must have been serious when they said they were taking the ship.”
Nolan couldn’t believe it—yet it was the only explanation.
But where was the rest of Whiskey?
Behind them now they heard not only the unmistakable roar of many SUVs heading in their direction, but also the wail of sirens.
The gangsters and the cops were chasing them.
“And the way those guys drive,” Twitch said, “they’ll be here in thirty seconds.”
In fact, they could already see the cascade of headlights heading their way.
That’s when they spotted the remains of the large crate lying on the dock in front of them.
Stenciled on one of the wooden pieces were the words: OPEN ONLY IN EMERGENCY.
Then, amid the cacophony of sounds, they heard a voice:
“Hey! Up there!”
They both looked over the side of the pier, down onto the water—and saw what might have been the most beautiful sight ever: the Arado Ar-95W seaplane.
All unfolded, engine turning, ready to go.
Batman stuck his head out of the cockpit and yelled up at them. “What are you waiting for? You got half of China on your ass!”
At that moment, the sky opened up and the rain came down in buckets amid glaring lightning and booming thunder.
But it was still not enough to drown out the sound of the small army of gangsters and cops racing toward the docks.
Nolan and Twitch immediately jumped. They hit the water at the same time, creating a mighty splash just off the seaplane’s left wing.
>
As soon as they surfaced, the Senegals were leaning out of the plane’s rear hatch, yanking them aboard.
“What the fuck happened?” Crash yelled as they were pulled into the seaplane’s passenger compartment.
“We greased the bastard!” Twitch yelled back. “But nothing went like it should have!”
“Join the club,” Gunner said. “Or did you not notice the fucking boat was gone?”
“Yeah we know,” Twitch said. “These two identical-looking assholes had it moved by their gang. They’re the same guys who got my watch.”
Gunner and Crash looked at each other for a moment.
“Someone has your watch?” Crash asked. “Because we’ve been watching the transponder’s receiver all night and we thought you guys were just sitting in a bar someplace.”
Twitch made as if to hit them, but then just laughed.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“Well, luckily we had Plan B here,” Gunner said, tapping the interior of the seaplane. “We kept this thing in the crate up on the dock. When those assholes came to take the ship, we just left quietly, and off they went. Then we unfolded this thing and we’ve been waiting for you ever since.”
“Yeah, well, wait until those assholes find out all that sugar is really sand,” Crash added.
Stevenson and Mace quickly checked out Twitch and Nolan. They declared for the moment neither looked worse for the wear.
Twitch ran a towel over his head, drying himself off, and then passed it to Nolan.
“Are you all right, Major?” Twitch asked him. “It’s OK to answer me now. It’s OK to talk.”
Nolan dried off his face and wiped his good eye. Everyone jammed inside the plane was looking at him. So he opened his mouth—and to his great relief, words did start tumbling out.
“Thank you, brother,” he said to Twitch with a croak. “Thanks for getting us out of there and saving my life.”
They gave each other a bear hug.
“Anytime, Major,” Twitch told him. “Though I got to admit, it wasn’t as much fun as I thought it was going to be.”
Batman had started taxiing the airplane out into the harbor by this time, but it was hard to see, the rain was coming down so hard. The only illumination he had to navigate by was coming from the frequent lightning flashes.
But now, mixed in with those flashes, were streaks of tracer fire. Back by the docks, three separate groups were shooting at them: the gangsters who had been chasing them all along; their old friends the Shanghai police; and now the military boat that had been cruising the harbor, the same one they paid off earlier.
Sirens were going off. Bells were ringing, Klaxons screaming.
They got to the middle of the harbor somehow, though.
“I just hope all the wood in this thing really does make it a low-tech stealth plane,” Nolan yelled ahead to Batman in the cockpit. “If not, we’ll have half the Chinese Air Force on our tail.”
“We’re going to find out,” Batman yelled back to him, gunning the seaplane’s huge engine.
They were dangerously overloaded, with a dozen people crowded onboard. Still, Batman managed to get the plane up out of the water.
Through a huge barrage of gunfire and lit by the nonstop lightning flashes, the plane climbed into the storm and escaped over the horizon.
PART FOUR
Team Whiskey and
The Phantom Pirates
16
Two weeks later
IT WAS A slow night in Morrisville.
The clock atop the only church in the tiny southeastern Virginia hamlet clanged twice. Morrisville had only four policemen; two were on patrol tonight. The bell’s toll signaled that their coffee break was over.
Parked near the town ball field, officers Perry and Tripp had just finished their thermos of black, no sugar, when they got a call from their dispatcher. A citizen claimed to have seen four men climbing into the Morrisville National Bank through an open window.
Perry and Tripp didn’t believe the report. They couldn’t imagine anyone breaking into their tiny bank. There was so little money inside, stealing it didn’t seem worth the effort.
Still, they drove the quarter mile to the bank on Main Street, and as they were rolling by, happened to see the silhouette of a man passing in front of the bank’s side window.
Maybe the bank got a night cleaning crew? Perry wondered. Tripp said no—Morrisville was so small, if the bank had hired a night cleaning crew, it would have been front-page news.
They parked their cruiser around the corner on Elm Street and approached the bank on foot. They did not draw their guns. Peering through the bank’s front window, sure enough, they spotted three more dark figures inside.
Curiously, these people weren’t near the bank’s tiny vault; rather, they were gathered around its main computer terminal, looking intently at its low-lit screen.
Perry and Tripp moved to the rear entrance. Here, they found the open window, its alarm wire disconnected. There were greasy palm prints all over the sill, along with remains of the snipped wires. Below the window, large chunks of grass had been torn up, caused by the men climbing in.
There was a large briar hedge at the rear of the bank. Perry and Tripp stepped behind it and waited. The four men climbed out the open window a minute later.
Perry and Tripp finally drew their weapons and showed themselves. They ordered the men to the ground. The intruders hesitated. Each was dressed in black, ski masks and baseball caps.
They stayed frozen for a moment, looking bewildered that someone had actually caught them. Finally, they obeyed the officers’ orders and lay down on the damp grass.
But Perry and Tripp were still baffled. The whole thing didn’t seem real.
Perry began thinking these people might be terrorists, possibly homegrown terrorists.
He reached down, intent on pulling the ski mask off one of them. But then he heard a thump and saw his partner’s body crumple beside him. He turned just as the butt of a rifle came down on top of his head.
Then everything went black.
When both cops woke up about ten minutes later, the four men were gone. The bank window was closed. The greasy handprints had been cleaned off, and even the pieces of grass that had been torn up had been replaced and tamped down.
It was as if nothing had happened at all.
17
Eleuthera
The Bahamas
THE ULTRA-LONG-RANGE BUSINESS jet landed at Rock Sound International Airport and taxied over to the lone terminal.
Despite its impressive name, the airfield was tiny, with just a single runway long enough to handle large passenger planes.
Located on one of the more northeastern islands of the Bahamas, the airfield was primarily used by sportsmen who wanted to avoid the hustle and bustle of the more populous parts of the islands.
This was fine for the ten passengers aboard the private jet. The aircraft had been leased to Kilos Shipping’s Import-Export Analysis Division. On board were Team Whiskey and the five Senegals—and the fewer people who saw them here, the better.
They’d just completed their third trans-Atlantic crossing in a month, and their second trip to the Bahamas, concluding a fourteen-hour nonstop flight from Aden. But this time, their stay in the islands would be brief.
They were here only to recover the Dustboat. With the Georgia June as their escort once again, they would sail the little coastal freighter back to Aden, where they expected to return to what they did best: providing anti-pirate protection for shipping in and around the Indian Ocean.
They were all still exhausted from their mission to Shanghai. Their low-level escape from China in the Arado seaplane had been uncomfortable, but uneventful; no one had pursued them. Once out of Chinese airspace, the seaplane made a series of mid-ocean stops, rendezvousing with prepositioned Kilos vessels to take on fuel until they finally made it back to Aden.
Nolan had gone back under the knife there. Stevenson and
Mace removed the hidden stitches around his eyes, and the not-so-hidden ones around his neck. They also replaced his missing incisor with a single false tooth. By this time, the skin-darkening agent had also started to fade, and he was back to wearing his eye patch.
But he felt awful. His muscles, his bones, his brain. He felt as if he’d played a game of tackle football without pads. The Shanghai mission had been a success. The world had one less super-criminal to worry about, and a major force in Asian piracy was now gone. But Nolan was so blown out, physically and mentally, after his one night in Shanghai that he wasn’t sure he’d ever be the same again.
The plan now was to lease a helicopter, which would bring them back to the tiny island of Denny Cay, where the Dustboat had remained. A mini-hurricane had roared through the Bahamas while the team was on the other side of the world, a harbinger of things to come when hurricane season started in earnest on June first, not that far away. But from all reports, Denny Cay had survived unscathed.
* * *
ONCE REACHING DENNY Cay, the team planned to get the Dustboat ready for its long journey home, which would begin the next day.
That idea vaporized, though, as soon as the team filed off the plane. Instead of finding their baggage inside the terminal, they were met by two Bahamian policemen who said the team had to report to the airport’s security office. Here, they found not a Bahamian security agent sitting behind the desk, but a middle-aged, balding man wearing a bad suit and cheap sunglasses.
They groaned when they saw him. He was Agent Harold Harry of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the seaborne version of the CIA. Simply put, the ONI had been a thorn in the side of Team Whiskey’s anti-pirating business from just about day one.
“I thought they fired your ass,” Batman told him bluntly.
“They did,” Harry replied. “But once you guys got my dickhead partner canned, the brass had to bring me back.”
Harry was drinking a cup of coffee. He tipped it their way in a mock toast.
“Thanks for that, by the way,” he said. “It means I’ll get my pension back as well.”
Nolan was in no mood for this—none of them were. Anytime the ONI showed up, they always tried to get Whiskey to do something they didn’t want to do. Not happy that ex-Delta guys were operating a paramilitary business right under their noses, the Navy intelligence group had harassed the team throughout their first few jobs in and around the Indian Ocean, threatening them with arrest or worse if they didn’t spill the beans about their operations and tactics. At one point they even suggested that, for geopolitical reasons, Whiskey not go after the murderous Zeek the Pirate. In fact, the team believed it was Harry’s young protégé who’d been responsible for arranging a near disastrous air attack on the Dustboat by two unwitting Navy F-18s. So, there was no love lost between the two groups.
