The Pirate Hunters ph-1

by Mack Maloney

  But again Turk counted on HUMINT — his human intelligence-gathering network — and this had paid off for him tonight. According to his spies, the Global Warrior’s manifest listed 202 used BMWs on board; they were being taken from Dubai back to Germany, where they would be reconditioned and sold again. Perhaps some of these cars were stolen and on their way to chop shops, but that isn’t what interested Turk. His informants reported that shortly before the Global Warrior’s departure from Dubai, a section of its loading pier had been cordoned off and a number of mysterious crates put aboard.

  Turk was guessing that, just like the smack on the trawler and the bullets on the Danish ship, there was something more valuable than dinged-up BMWs in the Global Warrior’s hold.

  He was intent on stealing it.

  * * *

  Back on the deck of the cargo ship, all was still going well for Mdoobi and his men. They were in complete control of the vessel and the crew would be found and snuffed out in due time. Meanwhile, the pirates had thrown the LRAD overboard, along with all of the ship’s radios. And four of them had already gone below to search the cargo hold.

  So far, so good.

  Mdoobi flipped open his sat phone, intending to update Turk on all this, when he felt something cold against his back. He turned just enough to see the silhouette of a man standing behind him. Mdoobi froze. Then he heard the sound of a trigger being squeezed. A moment later, he was looking down at a gigantic hole in his chest.

  The gun blast echoed across the deck, startling the other pirates up top. They saw Mdoobi go over, but couldn’t see what had happened to him. The pirate who’d raced up to the bridge came out to investigate. He was killed by a shotgun blast to the back of his head.

  The pirate who had thrown the LRAD and the radios overboard ran to see if Mdoobi was really dead. As he was checking on his boss, a pistol came out of the darkness and shot him point-blank in the temple.

  The pirate fell backward and was suddenly looking up at the stars. He never saw the person who shot him.

  His last thought was: I’ve been killed by a ghost.

  * * *

  The four pirates who went below to search the Global Warrior’s cargo hold had found the place unexpectedly dark and creepy.

  The ship was not only moving at half speed, its electrical systems were working at half power, too. The light in the vast cargo hold was so dim, the pirates could barely see their way around. Making matters worse, a steam line had broken somewhere, and it had filled the hold with a weird kind of fog. Otherworldly sounds were coming from the deepest parts of the huge steel cavern, emanating from places where it was pitch black and the pirates could not see at all.

  Displaying a lot less verve than when they first climbed down, they’d started to move into the hold itself when they heard three loud gun blasts come from up top. The pirates froze in place, their hands shaking as they tried to hold their Uzis steady.

  A minute passed — but they heard nothing more from above. They had no sat phones, no way to talk to Mdoobi, so they decided one man would turn around, climb back up to the main deck and see what had happened. As this man disappeared into the mist, the three other pirates timidly forged ahead.

  The fog became thicker the deeper they went into the cargo hold, a canyon of shrink-wrapped BMWs stacked five high and forty rows deep, creaking and groaning with the rolling of the ship.

  Because there was almost no light down here, the pirates were forced to feel their way along the outer stack of cars. The unsettling ethereal noises grew louder as they crept forward. They sounded like the noise a ship’s engine would make, only amplified. At the same time, the foggy air was also filled with electronic squeals and the sounds of people wailing in the background.

  The pirates moved slowly. Walking in a line, they gingerly poked their rifles up under the shrink-wraps, but found nothing except chrome rims and the occasional flat tire. They became frustrated and scared. Where was the great treasure Turk had promised they’d find here?

  At one point, the first two pirates turned to discover that the third pirate was missing. They whispered his name as loud as they dared, but got no response. He’d vanished.

  This didn’t make sense — he’d been out of their sight for ten seconds at the most. They began backtracking, wondering if the man had lost his nerve and had decided to return up top.

  But they soon found him, between two stacks of cars, fifteen feet away. He was crumpled on the oily deck, bleeding profusely from a stab wound to the neck. A nine-inch dagger had pierced his throat just below the Adam’s apple and exited behind his left ear, severing his vocal chords and his windpipe — preventing him from screaming. His eyes were still open, an expression of horror on his face. He’d been killed, silently, in less than ten seconds.

  The two pirates dropped their weapons and started running. All thoughts of looking for Turk’s magical booty were now gone. They headed straight for the ladder they’d used to climb down into the belly of the beast. But just two steps up they found their way blocked by the body of the man who’d turned back to investigate the noise up top. He was hanging upside down on the ladder rungs, his torso grotesquely contorted, holes from two bullets shot at close range puncturing his forehead.

  The two pirates fell back to the cargo deck, terrified. They were in full panic now, trapped among the creaking BMWs, the steam almost enveloping them, the weird noises coming at them from all sides.

  They began running for their lives. They could hear footsteps chasing them — but any time they dared look behind them, no one was there.

  “They are hunting us!” one man yelled to the other. “They will kill us both!”

  They reached the far end of the hold and found themselves in the propulsion area, a series of dark, narrow passageways with fading lights and a blanket of even thicker fog. The strange noises were almost deafening here.

  Spotting the refrigerator room ahead, one of the pirates bolted for it, thinking it was a good place to hide. Just as he was about to reach for its door, though, the butt of a rifle slammed him in the face. He fell backward, smashing his head. When his vision cleared, he found himself looking up through the mist into the barrel of a shotgun. It was the last thing he ever saw. The weapon was lowered to the pirate’s chest and the trigger was pulled. There was a moment of tremendous pain, but then everything went black.

  Only one pirate was left below now. He stumbled on to the engine room but realized it was not a refuge but a trap. He ran farther down the foggy passageway, spotting a bulkhead door ajar up ahead. He darted up to it, looked inside — and was astonished to find the ship’s crew, Eastern Europeans most of them, sitting around a table, drinking coffee.

  They didn’t seem too surprised to see him. He was terrified, and they were strangely calm. When he spewed out some Somali curse words, the crewmen laughed at him. One man stood up, forced him back out into the passageway, and slammed the door in his face.

  The pirate turned and started running back through the cargo hold, trying to find another access ladder. Unseen pursuers previously hidden in the shadows began chasing him. As he pleaded with them not to shoot him, their footsteps grew closer.

  He began weaving his way around the shrink-wrapped cars, hoping to elude the phantoms, but then two shots rang out at close range. Both hit the pirate in the back. Another bullet got him in the buttocks. He staggered to a nearby ladder and tried to climb up, but two more rounds, fired from just a few feet away, hit him in the legs. With all the strength he could muster, he hauled himself up to the next deck only to find a man in black camouflage waiting for him.

  “No need to waste a bullet on you,” the man in black said, kicking the pirate in the face instead. The pirate fell down the ladder, cracking his skull on the deck below.

  * * *

  There were only three pirates left alive aboard the ship now, all on the main deck. Two managed to make it down one of the rope ladders to a speedboat tied up below. But in the rush, one man pushed the other,
causing him to fall headfirst into the water. He was soon churned up by the huge ship’s wake.

  The pirate who made it into speedboat tried to start the engine. But before he could turn the key, a torrent of bullets came raining down on him. Some kind of massive weapon put twenty large holes in both boat and pirate, blowing them to pieces.

  Now only one pirate remained. He found himself running around the expansive main deck, being chased by at least four ghostly figures who were trying their best to take him down with one careful, fatal shot. He’d thrown away his gun and his knife by this time and yelled in surrender, but his pursuers were relentless.

  In his terror, the pirate passed an odd sight: a small helicopter parked on a makeshift metal pad on the bow of the ship. Its engine was running, its rotors were turning, but no one was in it.

  If only I could fly that thing, he thought.

  He continued running, dodging bullets by ducking behind crates and various pieces of equipment on the deck. He made one entire circuit of the ship this way, out of breath and in a complete panic, somehow finding himself on the stern again.

  And here he finally stopped, collapsing to his knees, unable to go on.

  He turned slowly to find a tall man dressed in black had appeared above him.

  The man was holding a gigantic .45 automatic. He also had a black patch over his left eye.

  He pressed the pistol against the pirate’s mouth and said: “Suck on this.”

  Then he pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  Turk heard the helicopter coming.

  The high-pitched whirring cut like a knife above the deceptively calm sea, sounding eerie and mechanical at the same time.

  He was still in the wheelhouse, watching the Global Warrior and feeling uneasy. All of the ship’s lights were still on; it was dimly lit from bow to stern. It was still moving north, slowly. He could even see his speedboats, or at least three of them, tied up to its side.

  He just couldn’t tell what was happening onboard.

  It had been ten minutes since he’d received a message from his men — their orders were to call him every two minutes. He’d been trying to raise Mdoobi or anyone else on the ship for the past eight minutes, with no response.

  The only explanation was that Mdoobi’s sat phone must have gone on the blink — and at the worst possible time. Turk had two men and one motorboat left on the tugboat with him. He was about to send these men over to the Global Warrior with another sat phone when he first heard the whirring noise.

  A few seconds later he saw it: a tiny helicopter coming out of the darkness just to the left of the cargo ship. It was a work aircraft, something usually found servicing offshore drilling platforms or oil fields. But this one had four men hanging out of its open bay, two on each side. They were carrying weapons on their laps. And they were coming right for him.

  What was going on here?

  He got his answer a moment later.

  The four men hanging off the copter turned their weapons toward him. Turk froze. The helicopter whooshed over the bow and the men began strafing his tug with machine guns.

  He hit the deck just as a massive barrage crashed into the wheelhouse, covering him with burning glass. The volley took out all the bridge windows, the outer deck rails, the bridge ladder and the safety buoys.

  Turk scrambled back to his cabin behind the wheelhouse. He looked for a weapon — a pistol, anything — but found none. The copter doubled back and went into a hover over the tug’s bridge. The four men fired directly into the wheelhouse. Turk could hear all of his newly acquired electronics being shot to pieces. Then he heard the main mast fall, taking the Morse lamp, the shortwave antenna and the funnel with it.

  The copter began flying figure eights around the tug, allowing each pair of gunmen to fire on the vessel at close range. They blew away the aft propulsion hatch, which allowed them to shoot down into the engine room, striking power cables and hydraulic lines. They severed the boat’s steering controls and demolished the tug’s long-range communications antenna and its navigation cone. The tug was now deaf and blind.

  Turk hugged the deck, hands over his ears, screaming for the noise to stop. The helicopter was now hovering right outside his cabin’s porthole, letting the gunmen pour fire directly into his quarters. The cabin was systematically torn to shreds. All the furnishings, all his belongings, even the walls were reduced to sizzling metallic splinters.

  He crawled to the far corner of the room just as a huge explosion rocked the tug. Its power plants had blown up, lifting the Yabu right out of the water. It came back down, hard, and immediately went over on its starboard side. That’s when Turk heard his two remaining crewmen jump ship and try to swim away.

  The copter returned outside his cabin, firing more intensely than before. A fire started in the head. Another was blazing out of control in the wheelhouse. A weapon that sounded like a small artillery piece was relentlessly firing at the tug’s lower hull. It finally punched a large hole just below the water line, allowing the sea to rush in. The tug went over, turning completely upside down.

  Turk’s cabin flooded quickly, smashing him against the far bulkhead. Suddenly he was under water, looking up at his cabin floor. There was no way out.

  Though completely submerged, he could still hear the gunmen crazily firing into the crippled tugboat, using way too much ammunition.

  In his last conscious moment, as the water flowed into his lungs, Turk couldn’t help but think: “Who are these people?”

  4

  Port of Aden, Yemen

  The next night

  The port was huge.

  Almost five miles of docks, tie-ups and harbor slips; massive cranes gliding like dinosaurs in the mist; armies of dock-workers moving nonstop, loading and unloading ships. Forty or more vessels were in process here on any given night, all under a canopy of ghostly sodium light.

  This place spanned history itself. To the east, up in the hills, Cain and Abel were said to be buried. To the west, off the place called Steamer Point, the USS Cole had its hull blasted open by al Qaeda bombers. Located exactly halfway between India and Egypt, the Port of Aden had been a crossroads of civilization for thousands of years.

  Towering over the docks stood a building that looked out of place. Made of ultramodern gray glass and steel, soaring thirty stories above structures built by Cain and Abel’s ancestors, this was the district office of Kilos Shipping.

  * * *

  The MD-600 helicopter circled the building twice before landing on its roof. The luxurious copter’s doors opened, and four men dressed in identical suits stepped out. Each held a Steyr machine pistol.

  It was close to midnight, yet the four were wearing sunglasses. They scanned the helipad and the roofs of the nearby buildings; they also gave the once over to a smaller, far less opulent helicopter parked on the edge of the helipad. They signaled a fifth man still sitting in the MD-600, and he climbed out. He was Mikos Kilos, shipping magnate and number 201 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men.

  He lit a cigarette and began puffing like mad. “My own goddamn helicopter,” he grumbled, “and I can’t even smoke in it.”

  Sixty-two years old with a shock of jet-black hair, Kilos had made his fortune as a young man in the 1970s building cargo ships that could transport dry goods such as grain, electronics and automobiles to the Middle East — then, after being thoroughly washed and cleaned, carry oil back to Europe on the return trip.

  During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Kilos’s ships were the only vessels that dared take on oil from Iran’s vast Kharg Island loading facility. Even though they were easy targets for Iraqi aircraft carrying anti-ship missiles, in eight years of war, none of Kilos’s vessels received so much as a scratch — and every gallon of oil they carried was delivered. His profits soared. When he later expanded into container ships and port management, Kilos’s millions became billions. These days, his company operated more than one hundred ships.

  One of th
em was the Global Warrior.

  * * *

  His bodyguards hustled him off the roof, throwing away his cigarette for him. They escorted him down two flights of stairs to a dark corridor on the twenty-eighth floor.

  Only one of the dozens of offices here still had its lights on. A bodyguard opened its door and Kilos walked in. Covered with wall charts and maps, the office was not at all like the palatial suite in London where he usually did his business. In fact, his servants’ closets were bigger and better appointed than this. Yet here he was.

  The forty-ish man sitting behind the office desk jumped to his feet at the first sight of him. He was Mark Conley, ex-NYPD detective and now Middle East security manager for Kilos Shipping.

  “Relax,” Kilos told him. “It’s only me.”

  One of Kilos’s security men retrieved a chair and let his boss sit down. The four bodyguards then took up positions near the closed office door.

  “Where are they?” Kilos asked Conley plainly, loosening his tie.

  Conley indicated a door that led to an adjacent inner office. “Waiting, in there,” he said.

  “And the news is still all good?” Kilos asked him.

  Conley nodded. “The Global Warrior and its cargo are safe and sound.”

  Kilos relaxed considerably. He signaled his bodyguards that they could now wait outside.

  “This was a close-run thing, wasn’t it?” he asked Conley once his goons were gone.

  “That’s because our opponents were not typical Somali pirates,” the hard-nosed ex-detective told him. “They were a gang run by a guy named Turk Kurjan. He’d been able to take some of that Somali rabble and organize them, and for a very short while, he’d been doing a hell of a job at it. Even the other pirates were afraid of him. Until last night, when our new employees took care of the problem, no muss, no fuss.”

  “Who are these guys?” Kilos asked. “Where did you find them?”