The Pirate Hunters ph-1

by Mack Maloney

  Best of all, he had his empty Coke bottle. As soon as he hit he ground, he poured some of the air on himself. Then he went to work.

  The sudden appearance of a futuristically dressed soldier in their midst panicked the pirates further. No one tried to shoot him or stab him or challenge him at all. They were just trying to get away from him… and for good reason. Twitch was firing madly at them, cutting down pirates all around him. He put the carbine on his right hip, and while firing with one hand, used his combat knife in the other to slash and cut pirates running past him.

  Nolan and Batman could see flashes of the whole thing through their night-vision equipment. It looked like something from a real-life Rambo movie, right down to the bloody bandage Twitch was wearing on his arm, covering his wound from the night before.

  “We’ve got to get him back!” Nolan yelled to Batman. “Before those guys get wise and cut him to pieces.”

  Batman pushed the copter up and around again as Nolan got ready to grab Twitch and haul him back into the chopper. But by the time they’d returned to the spot where Twitch had jumped out, amid the fury and the smoke and the dark and flames, they discovered their colleague had vanished.

  * * *

  This was what Twitch wanted to do: kill as many pirates as possible with his own hands. No bombs. No strafing attacks. No sniper rounds fired from a quarter mile away. He wanted his face to be the last thing many of the pirates would see. He wanted them to feel the horror the people of Sumhai had felt. Twitch thought he owed that to them.

  He moved quickly through the dust and smoke, firing nonstop at anyone he saw, slashing anyone close to him. He was running on the loose sand — and that alone was remarkable. Usually he had a hard time running on such a surface with his prosthetic leg. But now he was moving with the grace of an Olympic sprinter. Make that an invisible Olympic sprinter.

  He broke into the chow hall and shot it to pieces with his carbine. Some pirates seeking refuge here had hidden under the tables. Twitch hunted down every last one and shot them without mercy. Then he fired into one of the propane tanks near a cooking table until it blew up and started a massive fire. When several more pirates tried to flee the burning building, Twitch cut them down like animals. He finally ambled outside, barely aware of the burning timbers falling all around him.

  He walked into the next building, a workshop where the gang repaired their boat engines. Again, some pirates had tried to hide here, squeezing themselves in amongst the tools and old engine parts. Again, Twitch calmly hunted them down, stabbing those he could reach with his knife, shooting those he couldn’t. Before leaving, he fired into a full gas can, causing an explosion that quickly engulfed the wood and rope structure. He moved on, the screams of more pirates burning to death ringing in his ears.

  He coolly shot several more pirates who were running past him, and then stumbled into the next building over — the gang’s tiny sick bay.

  There were six pirates in here, all in beds, some in bandages, others suffering from drug overdoses. All were unable to move. Twitch walked from bed to bed, shooting each ailing pirate in the head.

  Then he reached the sixth bed. Here, he found a man lying on his back, his head and face covered with bandages, a blanket pulled to his chin. Twitch ripped the bandages from the pirate’s face — and was stunned.

  He recognized the man.

  It was Bantang, the white-haired pirate.

  He’d been viciously beaten all over his body and his left arm had been cut off. This was Zeek’s punishment for allowing the “haki” into their midst. Twitch just stood there, looking at the broken man, even as Bantang was looking up at him, a monster in black armor holding a gun that looked like a small cannon.

  Twitch slowly raised his visor and let Bantang see who he was. The pirate’s eyes grew large.

  “You?” was all the pirate could say.

  “Me,” Twitch replied.

  Bantang started crying. “Shoot me,” he said. “Please — just shoot me.”

  Twitch put the barrel of his carbine next to Bantang’s ear.

  The pirate was trembling mightily.

  “Please — do it,” he pleaded.

  But Twitch never moved the gun. He squeezed the trigger, firing a round into the pillow, blowing out Bantang’s eardrums in the process.

  Then, he turned on his heel and walked out.

  * * *

  The swim in from the DUS-7 had been brutal.

  Crash became exhausted halfway across the lagoon; at one point he even thought about turning back. Swimming with the backpack was harder than anything he’d faced during Hell Week back in his SEAL training days. And with that memory, he realized that brutal training had been more than a dozen years ago, and he was that much older now. His mind began racing. Maybe he had to stop fooling himself. He wasn’t a SEAL anymore — he was an ex-SEAL. And there was a big difference.

  But turning back would mean he’d failed the rest of the team, and he’d rather die than let that happen. So on sheer determination, he pushed himself across the lagoon, past all the gunfire, and finally reached his target: sitting alone, at its own berth in the stream, far from the finger dock, Zeek’s armored yacht. It was the vessel they were sure the Pirate King would use if he did eventually move to the east coast of Africa. No matter what happened then, the team thought it was crucial they destroy this vessel. By doing so, at the very least, they would know that any move west by Zeek would be delayed if not thwarted.

  The question had been, how to do it? The copter and the rest of the team would have their hands full with the heavily armed pirate army. Shooting up the yacht with assault weapons would damage but probably not destroy it. Plus, they needed that ammunition to deal with the pirates.

  So they decided to place a large explosive charge under the yacht’s hull and detonate it. That’s what the explosives in Crash’s backpack were for.

  Once he’d reached the yacht and regained his strength, Crash went to work.

  He took out the heavy explosive charge and, diving underneath the vessel, attached it under the hull at the all-important center point. But getting the charge to stick took longer than he’d anticipated. The only available adhesive was marine duct tape, which didn’t work very well under water.

  With his lungs about to burst, Crash finally got the charge to hold, and desperately swam to the surface. It took him almost a minute to catch his breath, as gunfire and tracer rounds streaked all around him. He had two more dives to make: one, to attach the underwater detonation cord, and another to arm the fuse. He planned to set the fuse to 120 seconds, enough time for him to swim a safe distance away.

  He went below again and attached the detonation cord fairly easily. But when he returned to the surface, he found three pirates wearing black bandanas standing on the yacht’s midship railing, looking down at him.

  This was disastrous. Crash had no weapon with him, not even a knife. And these three were pointing AK-47s at him.

  He instantly dove again and set the fuse. AK-47 bullets were zipping through the water all around him, the noise they made when breaking the surface nearly splitting his eardrums. He stayed down as long as possible, but he was trapped. The yacht’s dock prevented him from swimming in that direction, and the gunmen were firing into the water on the remaining three sides. Once again, his lungs threatened to burst.

  He went back to the surface again to find two of the pirates had jumped into the water. They grabbed him and began pummeling him. Crash tried his best to break away, but he couldn’t. They all went underwater, the pirates trying to slash at him with their knives, and he had nothing to fight back with. He was certain he was going to die here, either drowned, gutted, or blown up.

  A strange calmness came over him, though. He thought: If this is the end, at least he’d accomplished what he wanted. He’d put Team Whiskey back together, and they had done some good, right?

  He somehow broke away from his attackers, but was cut in many places — and by this time he barely
had the strength to reach the surface and take in a breath. He was sure it would be his last, but he needed it anyway.

  So he surfaced, drew it in — and awaited his fate.

  The two assailants surfaced right beside him and came at him with knives glistening.

  Then he heard three of the most beautiful sounds ever: Pop! Pop! Pop!

  A bullet for each of his two attackers in the water and for the one who had stayed on the railing, firing at him. All three pirates cried out — then died instantly.

  The next thing Crash knew, he was alone, surrounded only by the bloody water.

  “Gunner,” he thought.

  He’d figured out how to fire the large sniper weapon, and like a guardian angel, he’d been watching over him.

  An instant later, Crash began swimming like hell.

  Twenty seconds after that, the yacht blew up. The explosion was so powerful it lifted the huge vessel right off the water and sent it crashing back down again.

  It broke in two and immediately sank to the bottom.

  * * *

  The work copter was going over the armed yacht just about the time it blew up. Batman had to turn on the jets to escape being caught up in the explosion.

  “Fucking Crash!” Batman yelled. “SEALs come through again!”

  Nolan scanned the lagoon and saw the team’s sniper calmly swimming back out to the channel, free of the heavy backpack. He and Batman did a fist-bump. A major part of their plan had just been accomplished. The armed yacht was gone. So no matter what happened, Zeek and his gang weren’t going west to Africa anytime soon.

  But Whiskey wasn’t done yet.

  Again, Nolan was glad he was not flying the work copter. Batman was throwing them all over the sky, shooting here, dodging stray enemy fire there, always wary that something as small as a ricocheting AK-47 round could bring them down as quickly as a SAM missile.

  Finally, Batman got the copter pointing north again, and that’s when they realized most of the pirates were just where they wanted them to be — at least fifty of them were crowded on the tiny sandbar on the northern side of the beach, the last place they could go. Batman pulled the copter into a hover about 100 yards away from where the pirates were congregated.

  Nolan felt a twinge in his stomach. He could see through his night-vision scope that most of the pirates were milling around, completely exposed, hoping the attack was over. They had no idea what was about to happen to them.

  “Man, this is fish in a barrel,” he said to Batman, knowing their plan worked too well. “These mooks don’t have a chance.”

  Batman could only shrug. “What else can we do, Snake?” he asked, adjusting his own night-vision goggles. “Capture them and rehabilitate them? Give them a slap on the wrist and tell them not to be bad boys anymore? You saw what they did to those villagers — and God knows how many other people. These guys are garbage.”

  Nolan couldn’t disagree. Zeek’s gang was a brutal bunch. But again the feeling came over him. Doing dirty ops for his country had been one thing. But doing it for a paycheck? Quite another…

  He pushed the sat phone to on and called the DUS-7. When one of the Senegals answered, Nolan said just one word: “Now… ”

  Hidden in the murk, behind some high reeds, the gallery of machine guns on the old freighter opened up. Their streams of fire filled the night with tracer rounds. With a minimum of moving back and forth, the fusillade hit just where the team wanted it to go, directly into the crowd of pirates caught out in the open on the constricted sandbar. The barrage lasted less than thirty seconds; some of the pirates looked like they were fast dancing as they were getting hit. When it was over, most of Zeek’s gang were dead or dying.

  Batman took the copter out of its hover and slowly flew above the killing field. Already the sands were running thick with blood. He fired single shots from the gun pod at any body he thought was still moving. Nolan also added a few rounds from his M4.

  It took about a minute, but finally they could see no more signs of life below.

  All the pirates were dead.

  * * *

  Now came the hard part.

  Batman once again put the copter in a bone-crunching turn and was soon back hovering over the compound.

  “Am I still green on this thing?” he yelled to Nolan.

  Nolan looked out the open doorway and checked the object the copter was carrying on the right-side hard point. Again, for this flight, instead of hauling around an extra fuel tank to balance the gun pod, the copter was carrying the APO, the powerful “asymmetrical piece of ordnance”—Delta-speak for homemade bomb.

  It was Twitch’s concoction, a mixture of gasoline, diesel fuel and Jell-O, all soaked up into rags and old newspapers. The canister, made of an empty fuel tank, was also filled with nails, screws and bolts — instant shrapnel. Sandpaper and a nine-volt battery served as the contact fuse. In all, it weighed close to 200 pounds.

  The target: Zeek’s concrete headquarters.

  “It looks good,” Nolan yelled back to him. “Or as good as it can look.”

  Batman replied: “Then hang on.”

  He put the copter into a sharp left turn, swooped past the concrete building, turned again, and was now heading right back for it. Nolan could see people shooting at them from several of the building’s windows. He slung his M4 out the open doorway and fired back. Then, flying as fast as the work copter could go, Batman yanked the release lever, and the homemade bomb fell off the bottom of the copter, just twenty feet above the building.

  The explosion was tremendous. Batman put the copter into a fierce left turn, but still the shock wave almost knocked the aircraft out of the sky. Batman quickly recovered safe flight and, climbing to two hundred and fifty feet, overflew the concrete building — or what was left of it — once more. The bomb had been delivered right on target and had worked perfectly. The building was now a pile of burning rubble falling into a newly formed hole.

  “Nice shooting,” Nolan told him with another fist bump.

  But then they saw something strange: a river of water was gushing from the lagoon to the blast site. It took them a few moments to realize what was going on. The bomb had worked so well, it had blown a hole down below the island’s water table, creating a huge crater and collapsing the beach all around it. Water from the lagoon was now quickly filling this crater. The lower parts of the island, including what was left of Zeek’s headquarters, would soon be under water.

  “Shit! This is not good!” Batman yelled.

  “Get me down, quick!” Nolan yelled to him.

  A burst from the gun pod made sure the bodies of several scattered bodyguards nearby were really dead. Then Batman put the copter down, landing about twenty feet from the burning, sinking building.

  Nolan immediately jumped out. He had his M4 in one hand and a small disposable camera in the other. This was the most important part of the mission. He had to get proof their job was finished, that Zeek was dead.

  He ran up to the demolished building, finding it even more obliterated than they had previously thought. It was little more than a heap of smoking rubble, and the water from the lagoon was quickly filling a large area all around it.

  As Batman watched nearby, Nolan started moving among chunks of concrete, trying to get to the bottom of the pile before the sizzling water submerged them. Zeek was known to dress in purple, so Nolan was looking for anything that bore that color. It was a race against time, as the lagoon water was coming in fast.

  Nolan moved one piece of concrete to the side and saw a leg and an arm sticking out of the rubble. Both were wearing purple. He snapped two pictures — but suddenly sensed someone was behind him.

  He swung around and almost shot the person — until he saw it was Twitch, standing there. He looked dazed and was white as a ghost.

  “What the hell did I just do?” he was mumbling. “Was that real?”

  Nolan wanted to throttle him for his dangerous behavior, but there was no time for that. I
nstead, Nolan just told him to help move the rubble near the body before the water covered it all.

  Then he yelled back to Batman in the work copter: “All we have to do is move a couple more rocks, snap a few more pics, and we’re home free!”

  That’s when Batman received a call from the DUS-7. It was Gunner. All he said was: “We got company…”

  * * *

  The DUS-7’s low-tech, rudimentary surface radar set had picked up a blip moving up the Pautang Channel toward Pirate Island.

  Within thirty seconds, using his night-vision goggles, Gunner could see a small warship heading in their direction. It was an Indonesian Navy patrol boat.

  The team had found evidence at Brothel Beach that Zeek had ties to the Indonesian military. Plus, Twitch had seen a boat similar to this one standing by the night that Zeek’s gang seized the oil tanker.

  Had the pirates or the bodyguards gotten through to their allies-in-crime somehow? Was this ship investigating reports of the battle? Or was its presence here simply a coincidence?

  There was no way to tell. But while fighting a bunch of bloodthirsty pirates was one thing, going up against the Indonesian Navy was quite another. Their patrol boats were heavily armed and known to carry antiaircraft missiles.

  “Time to go, guys,” Batman called to Nolan.

  “But we only have one more piece to move,” Nolan yelled back.

  “Nope — let’s go now!”

  Nolan didn’t want to argue. He pulled Twitch off the rubble, took a few more pictures, then ran back to the copter. He threw Twitch onboard, then scrambled on himself.

  They rose above the smoldering compound and headed into the night. Meanwhile the DUS-7 had hauled anchor, picked up Crash, and was quickly leaving the scene as the Indonesian gunship approached.