Rosen was no hero, but he was a journalist, and he knew that he was sitting in the middle of the biggest story he had ever covered. Maybe as big as 9/11. He logged off the Internet and grabbed his computer bag, which held his laptop, and retreated into the office just off the computer room. It wasn’t much, just a desk and chair, a computer and monitor, and a telephone. The computer on the desk was an old Dell, just like the ones in the computer room for the passengers to use. Rosen carefully closed the door and turned on the computer. His hands were shaking as he logged on to the Internet.
Voila! It still worked. He was on. He was busy typing out a flash to the radio station in Denver when an automatic weapon burst went off outside the door.
Rosen grabbed his computer bag, slid the chair back and crawled under the desk.
More bursts from the computer room outside the door. And laughter.
When the blasts had finally subsided, maybe fifteen bursts, he estimated, he wasn’t really counting, the door flew open. He didn’t see it; he heard it. Another burst of rifle fire, this time so loud he cringed. Bits and pieces of the computer rained down on the carpet.
Then the door slammed shut.
Rosen waited a good five minutes, then went to the door and, as quietly as he could, opened it a crack. All he could see was remnants of the computers that had been lined up on one credenza facing the wall. The entire dozen were shot to shit.
Rosen carefully closed the door and examined the knob. It had a lock button. He pushed it.
He thoughtfully unpacked his laptop, raked the shards of the old monitor and keyboard off the desk and began setting up. The cord from the Internet connection to the late computer was intact, so he plugged it into his MacBook. Automatically he dug into his bag for the power supply and plugged that in to ensure his battery didn’t run down.
Then he tried to log on again to the Internet. Holy damn, it worked.
But what was he going to report? He didn’t know beans about what was going on.
He began searching the desk. Pulled out a board that acted as a writing extension, and there he found taped in place a list of the ship’s offices and phone numbers.
Might as well, he thought. He examined the telephone. It was intact. He picked a number, the ship’s head steward, and dialed.
“Yes.”
“How many people are dead? How many injured?”
“Who the hell is this?”
“I’m a spy for SMERSH, you moron. Now answer the question.”
“At least four dead on the bridge. Two passengers were shot before the pirates boarded; one of those has died. The other is in the infirmary. One woman was apparently raped to death.”
“That’s seven dead and one wounded.”
“There’s more wounded.”
“How many more?”
“Listen, you bloody American twit. Tying up the ship’s telephone lines to satisfy idle curiosity is wasting my time. Bugger off!” The phone went dead.
Rosen called the ship’s infirmary, a small space with three beds and one doctor.
A man answered.
“This is the second officer,” Rosen said firmly. “What do you have down there?”
“Four raped women. The men who carried them in weren’t shot, thank God.”
“Injuries?”
“One had a crushed eye socket. Two had all the usual damage of a gang rape. The fourth woman is dead.”
“Passengers or crew?”
“Crew.”
“Names.”
The male voice gave them to him.
“How many dead?”
“At least eight that I know of. Six crew, two passengers. There may be more. Probably are.”
“Thank you,” Rosen said and hung up abruptly.
He whistled absentmindedly to himself as he consulted the telephone list.
He called the aft dining room.
“Third officer.” He decided to give himself a demotion. “What’s your situation?”
“Fuckin’ pirates are gobbling everything in sight.”
“Any casualties up there?”
“Who the fuck are you, mate? You ain’t the bloody third.”
“Thanks for all your help. I’ll call you back in a while.”
He tried the radio room. No answer. Ship’s cruise director. A cultured female voice.
“Hello, this is Mike Rosen. I’m one of your passengers. Do you know how many pirates are aboard?”
“We have everything under control, Mr. Rosen. Please hang up and leave this line for crew to use. We’ll tell you all we can when the pirates allow us to again use the PA system.” He could tell that she was frightened.
“I really appreciate that. But do you or anyone there have any idea how many pirates are aboard?”
The woman took a deep breath and whispered, “One of the pool barmen said he thought about three dozen climbed aboard, but he didn’t get an accurate count. They’re swarming all over.”
“I see.”
“I have one in the passageway outside my office, strolling up and down, looking rather fierce. Please stay in your stateroom, obey the public address announcements.”
“You bet. Thanks for your help.”
He called the engine control room.
“What’s our speed and heading?”
“Eighteen knots, heading one-eight-zero.” Rosen couldn’t place the accent.
“What’s our destination?”
“Hell, maybe.”
“They haven’t told you?”
“No one ever tells me shit. You’ll get there when the rest of us do, shipmate, then you’ll know. Now bugger off.” He hung up on Rosen. Australian, the reporter decided.
Rosen thought for a minute, then called the engine room again. The Aussie answered after two rings.
“Why don’t you just shut down the engines?”
“You again! There are two nigger pirates down here, and they are primed to kill somebody. If the engines stop, they’ll kill the whole bleedin’ lot of us. The bastards don’t speak a word of English, yet they made that wonderfully clear. Marvelous communicators they are, regular MPs. Don’t call this number again.” He hung up.
* * *
Mustafa al-Said didn’t waste time. He asked direct questions and pressed until he found the three that had raped the crew women. They were on the fourth deck, at the head of the ladder leading to the crew’s quarters below, along with two other pirates. Mustafa picked one man, the nearest, shoved the AK into his chest and gave him a burst. Blood spewed out his back. With his heart shot to pieces and a severed backbone, the pirate was dead before he hit the carpeted deck.
Mustafa used the butt of the weapon on the side of the head of one of the guilty men. The other jerked his head back as the rifle butt swung and caught his nose, breaking it, smearing it across his face. Rich red blood poured from his nose.
Mustafa backed off and looked at the four men standing there.
“You were told what to do and what not to do. Touch another woman and I kill you and your family back in Eyl. Everyone.”
The injured men and the other two standing there looked properly cowed. Without Mustafa al-Said they would be starving in Eyl, a fact of which they were well aware.
“Throw this piece of dog dung over the side.” Mustafa gestured with his rifle barrel at the man on the deck with no chest, then turned and headed back to the bridge.
* * *
Mike Rosen figured he had enough information to write a story. He got into his onboard account, addressed an e-mail to the news director at his radio station in Denver, 850 KOA, and began typing.
Halfway through he wondered how much fuel the ship had aboard. Enough to reach the next port, certainly, but precisely how much? What was the range of the ship with her current fuel load?
He called the engine room one more time.
“What’s our range with existing fuel, at this sp-”
“Bugger yourself, you balmy bastard.” Bang. The phone went dead.
A dried-up source, Rosen reflected. Sources do that occasionally. He went back to typing. He had met the captain the other night, Arch Penney, so he described him, handsome and competent and all that, and checked the name of the cruise line on the stationery in the desk to ensure he got it right. He even found the length and displacement of Sultan and salted that in.
Hell of a good story, he thought as he maneuvered the little arrow over the SEND icon and launched his e-mail into cyberspace, via the satellite.
Of course, the cruise line would put the cost of the e-mail on his bill, but he could and would deduct it from his income taxes. Fuck Warren Buffett.
* * *
The night news lady at KOA Denver had seen the news of the Sultan’s capture, and knew Mike Rosen was aboard, so when she saw she had an e-mail from him she opened it immediately.
Three dozen pirates, a woman raped to death, three others injured by rapists, eight people believed dead … This was hot. Very very hot. The news director passed the e-mail to the on-air host, who read it into the microphone verbatim. She also sent it to the wire service. Then, with two keystrokes, she posted the e-mail on the radio station’s Web site.
Fifteen seconds after the e-mail hit the Web site, a lady from Littleton who couldn’t sleep started reading the story. A minute later she sent it to seventy-six friends. After five minutes, the e-mail had circled the earth twice and was being read by over five thousand people in thirty-two countries.
Ten minutes after Rosen’s e-mail arrived in Denver, the contents were on the cable news networks. MSNBC fretted that it was a hoax. A talking head on CNN read it without comment. Fox had the host read the e-mail on camera and ran the text across the bottom of the screen for deaf viewers or viewers with the audio turned off.
The Pentagon had heard all about Rosen’s e-mail, the casualties and the rapes by the time Admiral Toad Tarkington’s UNODIR message arrived. The duty officer conferred with the White House staff, who called senior government officials all over town, waking them up. The president had spent the evening in a critical meeting with his political advisers and had a full day scheduled for tomorrow with a foreign head of state, so the decision was made not to wake him. After all, the cruise ship was British and would still be captured in the morning. The Joint Chiefs were advised by the Pentagon staff, but in this age of political wars in shitty little places, American politicians ran military operations; all the military professionals did was obey orders and advise. Advise when asked.
The staff of the national security adviser, conferring by telephone, decided to respond to Admiral Tarkington’s UNODIR Flash message. They all had fine educations and were politically committed to this administration and its goals, and none of them had ever spent a day in uniform in their lives. Since SEAL Team Six whacked bin Laden, U.S. Navy SEALs were hot commodities, military rock stars who fought for civilization against evil Islamic devil-worshippers. SEAL warriors could accomplish anything, or so the staffers believed, to the greater glory of the administration with the guts to unleash them. Task Force 151 was ordered to attempt a SEAL team takedown of the pirates aboard Sultan of the Seas.
In effect, Admiral Tarkington’s operational plan was turned upside down.
CHAPTER FIVE
Irene and Suzanne had a stateroom on the fourth deck, which meant they had a porthole, not a balcony. When cruising they didn’t spend many of their waking hours in their stateroom, so regarded the extra money for a balcony as a needless extravagance. They were rethinking that now.
Oh sure, the stateroom was very pleasant. The air-conditioning was running perfectly, the porthole was intact, the commode flushed, and they had pretty well cleaned out the minibar refrigerator. The television in the room normally delivered twenty channels through some kind of satellite connection, channels like Fox News, the BBC, CNN, CNBC, and several European channels that broadcast nothing but soccer games. If you weren’t a fan of soccer, you were out of luck in the sports department.
On the other hand, Fox, CNN and the BBC were all news, all the time. The women were a bit peeved that they were off the air. When the pirates were spraying bullets around, one bullet, only one, severed a coaxial cable leading from the satellite antennae. Until it was repaired, the boob tube was silent. Which was just as well, because the news on those channels was about the capture of the Sultan.
The primary source, indeed, the only source, for news from the ship itself was Mike Rosen, tapping on his computer in the little office off the shot-up e-communication, or e-com, lounge. So it would have been interesting for the ship’s passengers to watch one of those news channels, and perhaps more so for the pirates, who might have been unhappy with Rosen’s activities. Since Mustafa al-Said remained blissfully unaware, life aboard ship went on under the pirates’ direction.
As they contemplated the uncertain, unpredictable future, Irene and Suzanne decided that whatever happened, they needed more booze to carry into captivity. They pocketed their stateroom keys, which were actually plastic cards the size of a credit card with their photos on them. Security, you understand. Suzanne opened the stateroom door and peeked out. No one in the passageway.
They sneaked along the passageway forward to the elevator well and stairs. At the foot of the stairs they stood and listened. They could hear two pirates talking somewhere above them; of course they were pirates, gabbling along in an incomprehensible language and laughing uproariously. These were two truly happy men.
The sisters went up one deck, looked and listened, then tiptoed along the port passageway toward Mike Rosen’s stateroom. Actually five of the Denver contingent were berthed on this deck, so if one wasn’t in, another might be. Before they reached Rosen’s room, however, they smelled something burning. The smell seemed to be coming from a stateroom.
“Something’s on fire,” Irene said and pounded on the door.
The door opened and a blast of pot smoke almost knocked them over. The room was hazy with it. There was so much it must have overwhelmed the air-conditioning.
Four men. Von Platen, the car guy, and three of his business friends were all smoking weed.
They offered the ladies a joint, but Irene and Suzanne refused. “This place stinks,” Irene declared.
“In light of our impending incarceration, we decided to consume our inventory.”
Von Platen looked to be in his early forties, the others a year or two younger. Perhaps it wasn’t the years that had caused the distinguished gray hairs at Von Platen’s temples but the miles. Or the pot.
The six chatted animatedly, getting acquainted, as the men puffed away on little roll-your-own cigarettes. The sisters from Denver pretended that watching people smoke pot was no big deal, although it was a life first for both of them.
Finally Suzanne said, “What the hell.” One of the men rolled her a cigarette and she lit up, to Irene’s horror.
* * *
Aboard Chosin Reservoir, Admiral Tarkington listened to his chief of staff, Captain Flip Haducek, his ops officer, Commander Myron Snyder, and his SEAL team leader as they tossed around the possibility of getting some SEALs aboard Sultan that night if the afternoon matinee didn’t work.
The first problem was intercepting the ship. Helicopters would need to put at least four rubber boats with six men each into the water ahead of Sultan. Assuming the Sultan didn’t turn, for any reason, the SEALs would have to motor alongside, shoot grappling hooks attached to ropes, and climb them about twenty feet to the fifth deck, the first one that had an entrance piercing the hull. The dangling pirate ropes were interesting, but no one had much faith in pirate technology. Besides, the ropes could be a trap.
“Radar?”
“Our rubber boats will be difficult to see on radar, sir.”
Toad raised an eyebrow. Cruise ships had good radars, he knew, because they had to constantly avoid small fishing and pleasure boats when going into and out of busy harbors. The real question was, Would anyone be watching the radar scope as Sultan charged along in the
hour or two before dawn?
“You’ll be lucky to get four men aboard,” Flip Haducek said to the SEAL officer. “And once aboard, you will … what?”
The SEAL team leader was Lieutenant Angel Cordova. With a plain, unmemorable face, he stood about five feet seven inches tall and had wide shoulders, huge arm and chest muscles, and a ridiculously thin waist. The veins in his arms stood out like cords. He looked like a professional bodybuilder, Toad Tarkington thought.
“Once aboard…?” the admiral murmured.
“Fight our way forward and up, sir, to the bridge. Kill the opposition as we go.”
“What if they start shooting hostages? What then?”
“We take them out with silenced weapons as we get to them, regardless.”
“Hostages or no hostages?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So how many pirates are aboard?”
“We estimate between twenty-five and fifty.”
“Estimate.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is the minimum number of men you need to get aboard to have any realistic chance of handling twenty-five to fifty armed pirates?”
“At least ten, sir.”
“Each of your boats holds six men?”
“Correct, sir.”
“So you must rendezvous with Sultan with at least two boats.” Toad looked from face to face. Small rubber boats on a night sea, trying to get alongside a ship doing ten knots-ten knots just now-getting swamped in the wash if they failed to get their grappling hooks to snag. Hoping no one on deck saw them and started shooting while they were climbing the ropes.
“What’s Plan B?” the admiral asked.
“We jump overboard. The saltwater will activate our beacons. Someone comes to pick us up.”
“Too iffy,” Toad said. “We need a better plan that this.”
The brain trust was still noodling when a yeoman brought Toad a Flash message from Washington. “Green light for SEAL mission.” There were several more paragraphs, but Toad didn’t bother reading them. He handed it to Commander Snyder, who actually read it while Toad listened to Angel Cordova.
Pirate Alley Page 7
