Mirage tof-9

by Clive Cussler

  “No worries,” another of the bosses said. “Our al-Qaeda contacts have reached out to their Jemaah Islamiyah brothers in Jakarta. Idiot fanatics, the lot of them, but useful. They will make sure your arrival goes unmolested.”

  Juan could see that the guy from Baghdad didn’t like the mentioning of their al-Qaeda connections, so he quickly filled the uncomfortable silence. “Then I believe we are ready to load.”

  The customs official came forward to sign off on the seals of a container he’d done everything in his power not to notice.

  Juan watched the three Westerners shake each other’s hands. One called just loud enough for him to hear, “Good luck, Gunny.”

  Cabrillo winced. He’d hoped the American armed guard would be of a higher rank than gunnery sergeant, because it would be easier to see who was above him on the military food chain. At least now he knew the man had been a Marine. The sergeant had a duffel thrown over a shoulder, and Juan could clearly see the outline of an assault rifle inside it. The Iraqi crime bosses conferred with their men, doubtlessly going over communications protocols for the hundredth time. Juan had to wonder at the trust it took to turn over a billion dollars to a subaltern who most likely resented your status even as he licked your boots.

  The Chairman tried to shake each man’s hand as they stepped onto the gangway, but none took up the offer or reciprocated when he gave them his cover name. The three Iraqis and the three Americans marched by in silence, though each man studied their surroundings with predatory eyes. Four tough hombres, Juan thought, and wondered how they would get along over the next ten days.

  The boss from Baghdad threw Cabrillo an ironic salute and then waved his hand over his head. High above the pier, the crane operator had been waiting for this signal. The diesel generator that powered the crane’s motors came to life in a bellow of exhaust smoke. In seconds, the cables began to pay out, and the lift cradle, designed to hoist the standard-sized container, descended on the parked semitrailer. It settled with a metallic thunk and then automatically clamped onto The Container’s four corners. Cables were reversed and the box was lifted.

  Juan took a second to study the bosses and the three Americans on the dock. All of them were watching The Container with the same rapt expressions of greed soon to be realized. They had sat for years on a fortune they could not spend. In just a couple of weeks they would be given numbered accounts that could buy them anything their dark hearts desired.

  The crane operator shifted The Container out onto the boom so that it swung over the Oregon’s rail. The hatch had already been pulled on the number 2 hold, and The Container soon vanished inside. The semi had pulled away as soon as the trailer had been cleared, and another rig was in place with an identical container.

  She was not built for the container trade, but the Oregon’s hold could still accommodate twenty of them in stacked rows. The others were empty and were being shipped back to the Far East, where they were destined to be filled with goods ready for export once again. For good measure, five more empty containers were deck-loaded once the hatch was back in place.

  The bosses had retreated to their respective SUVs for the hours it took to load the ship. Cabrillo had watched the process from the bridge while the four armed guards were shown cabins that none of them had any intention of using. There was a single door into the hold, and even though the money was buried under a mountain of empty containers, all four intended to guard it for the week and a half it would take to cross the Indian Ocean.

  Max Hanley joined the Chairman, carrying a thermos of iced tea and two glasses. Though it was cooler at night, the temperature still hovered north of eighty. Cabrillo would have preferred a beer, but he was playing a Saudi, and who knew how many men were watching the ship through sniper’s scopes from the roofs of the nearby warehouses. He bet each of the bosses had at least two teams. He smiled to himself, thinking of when the last team to show up realized all the good spots to watch the transfer had been taken.

  “Penny for them,” Hanley said, pouring tea over fresh lemon wedges.

  “Sulky snipers.”

  Max considered the non sequitur for a moment before getting Juan’s joke. “Kinda like which of the goons down in the hold gets to actually lean against the door.”

  “I assume they’ll take shifts.”

  “Paranoid bunch.”

  “Billion dollars, my friend. Wouldn’t you be?”

  “It would be awfully nice if Uncle Sam would let us keep it. I’ve even come up with a couple of ideas for how we could steal it.”

  “Me too,” Juan admitted, then added with a larcenous grin, “but merely as a mental exercise.”

  “Of course.”

  Both men knew that neither was serious. Oh, they definitely devised plans to get their hands on it, but neither would ever consider actually stealing the money.

  “I just reviewed tape with Linda and the shots Eddie got with his lapel camera.”

  “And?”

  “We don’t have much. The three Americans who stayed behind looked up only when the container was swung aboard, but they were in pretty deep shadow. Plus the hats and shades. Facial recognition might not even be possible. They never got close enough to Eddie for a decent pic.”

  “I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. What about the gunny?”

  “Plenty of good snaps as he came aboard and was given the nickel tour of his cabin, the mess, and the door to the hold.”

  “Have they come up with a name yet?”

  “Pentagon is going through their database as we speak. Once we have his ID, they’ll go through all his duty stations and former COs, and then we start looking up the pecking order. Do you give any credence to Overholt’s idea that the American Mr. Big will meet the ship in Indonesia?”

  “He wasn’t here, that’s for sure. Mr. Big wouldn’t know a gunny from a hole in the ground. He’s too high up for that. I’m guessing one of the guys here today was a major who served over the gunnery sergeant and the other is a mutual friend of both Mr. Big and the major.”

  Max thought about this. “Ages seem right. Gunny and the major worked together, became friendly. They hatch the plot, take it to Mr. Big’s buddy to give them protection from above, and all of a sudden we’ve lost a billion in Benjamins. They’d still need a lot of help just to move that much cash.”

  “Most certainly. That’s where the Iraqis come in. They supply the labor while our little cabal of traitors supplies access to the money.”

  “I should tell Langston to have the Pentagon concentrate on majors once we have the gunny’s name.”

  Just then, the harbor pilot returned from the head. “Ah, and who is this, Captain Mohamed?”

  “My chief engineer, Fritz Zoeller.”

  Max greeted the man, using an outrageous German accent, before insisting that he had to return to his engine room as the loading was about complete.

  An hour later, the ship reached open water, and the pilot transferred to a small boat to return to port. There was a full moon, so only the brightest stars shown from the cloudless sky. As usual, the waters of the sheltered Persian Gulf were as calm and as warm as bathwater. The radar plot showed plenty of activity. The big returns were tankers, ferrying oil out of the Gulf or heading north to have their monstrous hulls filled with crude. Other, smaller blips were the countless fishing vessels that plied these waters. Most now were modern craft, but a few lateen-rigged dhows still roamed the Gulf as they had for hundreds of years.

  Radio traffic was heavy, with crews chatting with one another to keep awake during the long night watch. Not knowing if any of the four guards would venture up to the wheelhouse, Juan ordered it manned at all times. Cabrillo acted as officer on deck while Hali Kasim draped himself over the wooden wheel in an effort to stay awake. Juan enjoyed standing watch, even at night, while his communications expert was bored out of his mind. At midnight, just as if they were really conning the ship, they were relieved.

  Over the next two days it continued
like this, though there was really no point in maintaining the ruse on the bridge. The four men tasked with guarding The Container only left the hallway outside the hold to use the head. They must have formed some sort of loose pact, because they slept in shifts. Food was brought to them from the galley by one of the Oregon’s regular kitchen staff dressed not for the ship’s opulent dining hall but in the stained whites of a short-order cook.

  By now, they knew the lone American among them was Gunnery Sergeant Malcolm Winters USMC (Ret.). The Pentagon had e-mailed dozens of pictures of officers Winters had worked with over his twenty-year career, but neither Cabrillo nor Eddie could identify any as one of the other Americans on the pier. They were expecting more photos soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  They came at sunup on the third day of the trip. Just as Cabrillo had suspected, there were three boats — low, cigarette-style powerboats — that surged out of the predawn darkness like sharks circling in for the kill. They had less than a foot of freeboard showing, so they had never appeared on radar. There would be another vessel out here with them, a mother ship waiting over the horizon that would have towed the powerboats to the ambush point. There were five pirates on each craft, coffee-skinned Somalis who had turned this stretch of the Indian Ocean into one of the most dangerous places on earth. Juan suspected it was the crime lord from Başrah who had tipped them off and told them what ship to stalk. Başrah was a port city, after all, so he would have contacts in the pirates’ leadership.

  Most of the men brandished AK-47s, but one on each boat carried the distinctive RPG-7 rocket launcher. They attacked from astern so the watch standers on the bridge never saw them, didn’t know about them, in fact, until an RPG round slammed into the fantail just above the waterline in an attempt to disable the Oregon’s prop and rudder.

  On any other ship, the explosion would have left them dead in the water, but the Oregon was hardened and armored in critical areas so the rocket-propelled grenade did little but pucker the armored belt and singe some paint.

  Because they had to keep the bridge manned anyway, Cabrillo had decided to switch control to there from the op center and keep only one person manning the high-tech room rather than the customary two. Seconds after the blast echoed throughout the ship, MacD Lawless leapt from the Kirk Chair where he lolled in boredom to the weapons station in the front of the room. Although he was the newest member of the Corporation, he knew Oregon’s systems as well as any of them.

  It took him just a few seconds of channeling through camera feeds to spot the pirate boats. They were standing off about fifty yards from the ship, well beyond the range of fire hoses that some freighters deployed to protect themselves. They were waiting for their quarry to slow from the damage they’d inflicted with the RPG. If it did not slow, then another couple of RPGs would be fired into her. One way or another, they would not be deprived of their prize.

  MacD at first considered using the ship’s 20mm Gatling guns, but their four guests were all ex-military and would know the industrial whine of the Gatling rattling off at three thousand rounds per minute. Best he deploy a more likely weapon on a smuggler’s ship. In one corner of the main view screen, a hidden camera showed the four guards down by the hold, paralyzed by indecision. They did not know what to do. Should they go topside and help defend the ship or should they remain at their post and be ready to make a last stand should pirates make it this far?

  MacD activated a pair of M60 machine guns that Juan called their “boarder repellants.” The guns were hidden inside oil drums welded to the deck near the ship’s rail. The barrels’ lids popped open, and the weapons emerged, muzzle first, before rotating to a horizontal firing position. He clicked the targeting icon on his computer screen, locking in the automated firing plots, and let the guns loose.

  The guns fired a NATO standard 7.62mm round, and while not particularly large or powerful, this weapon made up for it in sheer volume of fire. The first cigarette boat was raked from stem to stern with fifty rounds before anyone aboard knew what was happening. The driver was killed instantly, two of the gunmen as well. The other two were tossed into the ocean when the out-of-control boat barreled into a wave and flipped.

  On the other side of the Oregon, the second gun had an even more devastating effect on another of the pirates’ boats. This one exploded when gas from the punctured tank ignited off the hot engine. The fireball was something out of Hollywood. The third attacking boat took heed and raced for the horizon before the M60 could target it, but the mother boat, which had foolishly approached, either didn’t see or didn’t understand what had happened to their comrades. They held a steady course so that they could launch another RPG at their prey’s fantail.

  MacD hit the target icon again. On deck, the M60’s barrel moved mechanically and aimed ever so slightly upward to compensate for the increased distance and a little windage. The computer even took into consideration the ballistic changes caused by the barrel being heated from the first barrage.

  The gun chattered again just as the rocket man heaved the launch tube to his shoulder. He was hit multiple times but managed to pull the trigger before he died. The problem for his teammates was that the RPG was pointed straight at the deck of their own boat when the igniter engaged. The rocket blew through the bottom of the mother boat with barely a check in speed and sank quickly out of sight without exploding. The hole in the hull became a huge rend that would have doomed the crew even had the machine-gun fire not continued to pour in on them.

  In all, it took just a few seconds from the opening shot to the last. Lawless blew out a long breath while crewmen surged into the op center, Cabrillo being one of the first. He wore a pair of swim trunks under a cotton terry robe and dripped water onto the deck without noticing. He smelled of chlorine from the ship’s pool.

  “Pirates in cigarette boats. Three in total. Two were greased, while the last one ran for the horizon. Then the mother ship approached and took a powder too,” MacD reported without being prompted. He knew what the Chairman wanted.

  “Damage?”

  “One RPG to the stern. Awaiting a report from damage control. Speed and course are unaffected. The guns are already stowed.”

  Juan looked at the camera feed showing the four guards at the entrance to the hold. They were talking animatedly among themselves and finally reached some sort of decision. One of them shouldered his rifle and started for the nearest stairwell that would lead him to the main deck.

  “I suppose,” Juan said, “I should go tell him what happened. MacD, pop two of the guns out again. Linc and I will pretend we fired them.”

  Max Hanley finally made his appearance.

  “Damage?” Juan asked, for he knew Max would check on his beloved ship before anything else.

  “We won’t be changing our name anytime soon. My magnetic sign is all messed up, but other than that we’re good.”

  “All right, we suspected this was coming. Now we’ll wait to see if we get attacked again and prove once and for all there’s no honor among thieves.”

  Linda Ross was manning the op center six days later as the Oregon was coming abreast of the island of Sumatra for the final dash to Jakarta. Juan and Hali had the topside con. Every few minutes, she would scan all the various computer screens and control panels for any sign that there was some sort of trouble aboard the ship. Then she would scan the main display. On it were shots of the sea, both fore and aft, as well as a radar plot refreshed by the repeater’s swing arm. Another part of the screen was a cable news feed where talking heads were discussing heightened tensions between China and Japan over the discovery of a massive gas field near some disputed islands. Yet another was a peek into the hallway outside the hold where their four guests guarded the door. The men were unshaven, and the strain of maintaining vigilance over the past days showed in the hollowness of their eyes and the stoop to their shoulders.

  She had to give them props. They were untrusting strangers who had held it together. Although the three
Arabs now allowed themselves a half hour on deck each day, Winters never left his post.

  She didn’t see anything happen and only realized something was wrong after staring at the screen for another twenty seconds.

  In all the days and nights since they’d boarded, only one of the guards slept at a time while the others kept watch. Studying the image, she took valuable time to recognize that three of the guards were sleeping and the fourth was gone. The resolution wasn’t the best, but she quickly realized it was Gunny Winters she could no longer see, and the three men lying on the deck had each been shot execution style. There was remarkably little blood, but each had a bullet hole in their head.

  She was about to call Juan up on the bridge and tell him what was happening when the engines abruptly cut off. Winters had had more than enough time to get from the hold to the bridge and take command of the ship. Linda was certain that he’d ordered Juan to cut power. The Oregon was now adrift under the command of a traitor and thief. And just like when the Somalis had struck, Cabrillo had predicted something like this too. And his first standing order when the next attack came was to simply wait it out and see where it headed.

  Linda called Max to the op center along with Eric and Mark. She kept helm control up on the bridge for now, but they would want the A Team in place when they retook their ship. She checked the radar repeater. There was a vessel about eighty miles away, and, as she watched, the icon split into two distinct returns. She knew in just a few seconds that this fast-approaching mystery ship had launched a helicopter and it was inbound at better than a hundred knots.

  “Here we go.”

  Cabrillo could have ended Malcolm Winters’s mutiny in the first few seconds had he so chosen. Winters had been good, stalking his way to the wheelhouse, but Cabrillo had seen him creeping up on him in the reflection of an old coffee urn that sat on a shelf below the fore windows.