by Mack Maloney
* * *
FIVE MINUTES LATER, the two SEAL fast-boats were heading into the thickest part of the fog bank.
They were equipped with a smaller version of the sea surface radar. With surprisingly little difficulty, they were soon approaching what everyone had been calling “the target.” At first, it looked exactly as it had been described to them: a rusty old ship.
One of the SEALs’ boats came up alongside the elderly vessel and several SEALs rappelled up to it. But as soon as they were on board they knew something was wrong.
This ship was way older and way smaller than what they were expecting. Plus, there didn’t seem to be anyone on board.
They searched the bridge, the cabins and the engine rooms, but found no one. And there was certainly no large shipment of old M-16 rifles or small black box that had a big “Z” stenciled onto it.
The SEAL team leader called back to the USS Messia with some very disturbing news.
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, sir,” he said to the Messia’s captain. “But this ain’t the ship we want.”
* * *
BACK ON THE Messia, the captain had retreated to his cabin, hoping to figure out what had gone wrong.
He received a subsequent report from the SEALs saying they’d picked up a bunch of Vietnamese seamen in the water, but no one was exactly sure quite yet who they were.
The ship’s communications officer appeared at his door a moment later holding a dispatch he’d just written.
He passed it to the captain who read it aloud: “On this date, in the area of the Mentawai Islands, the USS Messia engaged a cargo vessel of Vietnamese origin which had been taken over by pirates twenty-four hours before. A brief battle using five-inch naval guns ensued. The hijacked ship was sunk during this action but its captive Vietnamese crew was rescued. All pirates either died in the exchange or are missing.”
The captain gave a grim laugh.
“Let’s make sure we delete all copies of this right now,” he told the communications officer. “And that’s an order.…”
8
Aboard The Immaculate Perception
Gulf of Aden
THE MORNING DAWNED hot and humid.
The sun was crimson bright, turning the Gulf of Aden blood red. There was no wind. No waves. No sound. It was an uneasy calm.
The Immaculate Perception was still off Yemen, its Omani escorts in tow, doing long meandering figure eights at barely five knots.
Nolan, Gunner and Twitch had spent the night taking shifts up on the yacht’s bow, keeping Batman quiet and away from the other guests. It hadn’t been that difficult. While the party had grown wilder and noisier throughout the night, it finally ended with a whimper a couple hours before sunrise. Those guests who’d lacked the stamina to make it to their cabins still littered the decks. Sleeping off their inebriation, they looked like dead soldiers in the aftermath of a battle.
The sound of a helicopter approaching stirred Nolan from a half sleep. He opened his good eye just in time to see the aircraft fly overhead. It was a UH-61 Blackhawk, painted dark silver, with no markings, but with lots of antennas sticking out of its roof, nose and tail.
Nolan groaned. Only one outfit flew helicopters like this: the CIA.
Splayed on the lounge chair next to him, Gunner was now half awake, too. He saw the copter and instantly knew its origin.
“Why are they out here?” he asked with a yawn.
“Taking pictures,” Nolan guessed sleepily. “Looking for someone topless.”
They both expected the copter to just fly on past, but it suddenly turned sharply and came in for a landing on the yacht’s stern-mounted helipad.
“They’re making a house call here?” Gunner asked. “Really?”
Nolan was fully awake now. “Maybe they want to talk to the ice princess about her ordeal,” he mumbled, stretching his legs. “Or get her autograph.”
The copter settled down and a lone passenger climbed out. Nolan and Gunner pegged him right away: the off-the-rack clothes, the bad haircut, the cheap sunglasses, an overall disheveled look; there was no doubt about it. He was from the Agency.
“Freaking spooks,” Gunner mused. “They really do all look alike, don’t they?”
The man signaled the copter pilots to kill their engines. They heard him yell: “This might take a while…”
Then he approached two of the yacht’s clean-up crew and had a brief conversation. At the end of it, the workers pointed not toward Emma Simms’s cabin below, but up to the bow where Whiskey was stationed.
“Oh fuck,” Nolan grumbled. “What do they want with us?”
Gunner woke Twitch and Batman while Nolan met the man halfway up the bow.
“You’re Whiskey?” the visitor asked him.
Nolan nodded. There were no handshakes, no introductions.
“I’ve got to talk to you and your guys,” the man said urgently. He was middle-aged, bald and paunchy. This guy was a station chief, Nolan thought. And definitely not a field officer.
“Talk? Before breakfast?” Nolan asked him.
“Yes,” the man replied sternly. “As in right now.”
They climbed up to the bow. The others were waiting at a table right below the bridge deck. Everyone sat down.
Nolan pulled his chair next to Batman.
“How are you doing?” he asked him in a low voice.
Batman gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
“One thousand percent improvement,” he whispered in reply. “Nothing beats sleeping it off.”
Nolan believed him. Batman looked much better than the night before.
The CIA man got right to the point. “We’ve been following your activities since yesterday,” he said. “The kidnapping. The Somalis. The rescue mission. We figured you’d still be out here.”
“But you’re a little late,” Gunner told him, pretending to look at his watch. “The party ended a couple hours ago.”
The agent ignored him. “I’m here because we’ve got a major problem in Asia and, as much as it goes against my nature to admit it, we require some expert assistance.”
“Just for the record, who’s ‘we?’” Nolan asked him.
The agent just stared back at him. “Who do you think?” he asked.
Then the agent began a strange story. Two months before, the wreckage of a C-130 cargo plane was unearthed in a remote area of Vietnam near the Laotian border. The aircraft had been shot down in 1968, crashing into a rice paddy. Apparently the paddy had become flooded soon after, as a result of heavy monsoons, causing the wreck to sink in the mud and hiding it for more than forty years. It was discovered only when local villagers looking for metal to make cooking pots began digging in the area.
Four skeletal bodies were found in the wreckage; the villagers quickly buried them. But they also found an unusual cargo container. This container was made of highly reinforced material and was marked only with a single “Z.” The villagers repeatedly tried to open it, but failed each time. Eventually they turned it over to authorities.
Old hands in the Vietnamese military recognized the container as an SMT, something the U.S. used during the Indochina War to carry anything from classified documents to secret weapons to hazardous materials. Because this one was marked with a “Z”, which they interpreted as meaning “hazardous,” the Vietnamese wanted nothing to do with it. Their military intelligence service asked Swiss intermediaries to contact the CIA’s Bangkok station and inform them of what had been found.
News of the container’s discovery rippled through the Bangkok office, where a couple of semiretired contract workers remembered what the Z-box mission was all about. In fact, the Agency had looked for the Z-box for years after the war, using satellite surveillance, infiltrating U.S.-Vietnamese body recovery teams, and even sending in undercover agents to scour the Vietnamese countryside.
Now that it had been found, the Bangkok office wanted to get it out of Vietnam and dispose of it as soon as possible. But they
wanted to do it in such a way that no one in the CIA would actually come in contact with it. Their reason: The box’s contents were so potentially embarrassing, no one in the know wanted to get their fingerprints on it.
So they cooked up a plan. The idea was to have the Vietnamese put the container on a ship leaving Haiphong. The ship, called the Pacific Star, would also have a few tons of weapons stashed aboard, captured M-16s left over from the war that the Vietnamese also wanted to get rid of. These were referred to as “the bait.” After a few days at sea, and once the ship was approximately twenty miles off the west coast of Sumatra, it would be taken over by “pirates,” who were actually Filipino seamen in the CIA’s employ. At that point, a U.S. Navy warship would engage the vessel, battle the “pirates,” rescue the crew, and then sink the ship right over the Java Trench, sending it and the Z-box to one of the deepest parts of the seven seas.
“So, what happened?” Nolan asked the briefer. “I’m guessing it’s not a happy ending.”
The agent shook his head no.
“Our ‘pirates’ never made it onto the ship,” he said. “The freaking thing was taken over by real pirates before our guys could get into position. So now the ship, the old M-16s and this Z-box are floating around out there somewhere, but we’ve got no idea where.”
Nolan looked at the other Whiskey members. They were all on the verge of laughing. They’d all heard some crazy CIA stories before, but this one was crazier than usual.
The agent went on. “Now, this thing was hatched strictly by the Bangkok office. No one in the White House or the Pentagon has any idea the operation was going on. The cruiser we used is assigned to us for special ops, and ninety-nine percent of its crew didn’t have a clue what was up, either. But what was supposed to be a mission to avoid embarrassment for the Agency has now become an incident that could draw huge negative publicity for everyone involved. Just because no one ever counted on the ship being seized by real pirates…”
Finally the team burst out laughing—they couldn’t help it. Lamebrained didn’t come close to describing the scheme.
But the briefer surprised them by saying: “Let me finish, because it gets worse. The people in charge were so sure this would work, they’d prepared a press release to be sent out once the ‘pirate ship’ was sunk.
“Now, thank God the people on the Navy ship were smart enough not to issue it—but some dumb-ass in our Bangkok field office discovered his computer might have been hacked and now this press release might be out there, somewhere, too. At any moment, the world might hear the U.S. Navy sank a pirate ship off the coast of Sumatra, rescuing its Vietnamese crew in the process. The press release even says something like the ‘first full-scale U.S. Navy sea battle with pirates since the 1800s.’ But when it gets out that there was no battle, no heroes, no pirate ship sunk … it will be very bad for all involved.”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence.
“So, why are you telling us this?” Nolan finally asked him.
The agent wiped some sweat from his forehead; he seemed a little out of his element here.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he replied. “You’re the Pirate Hunters. We want you to hunt down these pirates and get this Z-box back, before they realize what they have.”
“And what do they have exactly?” Nolan asked; it was the question on everyone’s mind. “What’s in the box?”
But the agent shook his head gravely. “I can’t tell you,” he replied. “In our own lingo, the box, and what it was doing on that plane that night, has been described to me as both ‘catastrophically compromising’ and ‘potentially horrific and beyond any plausible deniability.’ If you speak the language, you know what all that means. But what’s inside is no concern of yours. It could be feathers and popcorn for all you care. Just get it back and we’ll pay you handsomely.”
“OK—then can you define ‘handsomely?’” Gunner asked.
“How’s a hundred million sound?” the agent replied.
The team gasped.
“A hundred million dollars?” Gunner whispered.
The agent nodded. “You heard right … that’s how bad we want this thing back.”
The team was stunned into silence. It was an enormous figure.
“And that’s tax-free,” the agent went on. “But, there are guidelines you must follow or there will be no payment.”
“I knew there’d be a catch,” Twitch muttered, speaking for the first time. “There’s always a catch.…”
“Well, this is a big one,” the agent told them. “Like I said, no one in the Pentagon or in the White House is aware this Z-box has been found—and it must stay that way. This means no help can be asked of any U.S. military units or any other U.S. government agency in looking for this thing. None. If word of this leaks out from you guys, the whole thing goes down the drain—and I don’t care if your fingers are three inches away from grabbing the box. The lid on this has to be sealed tight and you should all go down fighting before anyone gets a peep out of you.”
Twitch raised his hand—his way of asking if he could ask a question.
“Why doesn’t the Agency just go after this thing itself? You got a worldwide network; you got spies, informants, satellites. It seems you could find it quicker than us or anyone else.”
Once again, the agent was shaking his head. He seemed anxious—and disorganized.
“I know that makes the most sense,” he said. “But again, this thing, the original ‘Z-box mission’ was so off-the-reservation, that even forty years later, the Agency can’t be seen anywhere near it. We can’t put our fingerprints on it, we can’t have a paper trail, we can’t even breathe next to it. Had we dug it up ourselves that would have been a different story. But now that it’s out of our control—well, that’s why we’ll pony up so much money for you guys to get it back.”
Another silence. Then Nolan summed it up: “So if we find the pirates, the hijacked ship, and get your box back without any outside help, you’ll pay us a hundred million dollars.”
The agent nodded. “And I don’t want to know how you are doing it, what methods you’re using, what happens to the pirates, nothing. In fact, I was never here. My name is Audette, but that’s all you have to know. I’ll give you two sat-phones, a number and a code word. Once you’ve found the box, or can confirm its whereabouts, call me and give me the code word. And that’s how I’ll know what’s happened. Agreed?”
Nolan looked at the team. They all nodded quickly. For a hundred-million-dollar payday, they’d swim to the moon and back.
The agent smiled nervously. “I’m hoping you guys hit gold right away, so this thing will be simpler than we thought.”
But no sooner were those words out of his mouth than his sat-phone started beeping. The agent did all the listening in the conversation that followed.
When he hung up, he had to wipe some newly formed perspiration from his brow.
“There’s been a development,” he said, slowly. “Not a pleasant one…”
He held up his sat-phone. “That was my contact in Bangkok. Apparently the Prince of Monaco is now involved in this thing.”
The team members laughed again.
“The Prince of Monaco?” Gunner exclaimed. “How the fuck…”
The agent explained: “We just got word that not too long after that target ship was hijacked, a sat-phone on board made seven calls, all within five minutes. One was to a number in Germany, a place called Bad Sweeten. Ever hear of it? It’s a dumpy little city, some place still stuck in the old East Germany. But it’s also a hotbed for al Qaeda types, as well as people who in the past have brokered ransom deals for Somali pirates. We believe many of these brokers are ex-Stazi agents—you know, the old East German secret police?”
“That’s not good…” Gunner said.
The agent went on. “Another call from the same cell phone went to the Prince’s Palace in Monaco. Then the rest went to other phones at unknown locations within Monte Carlo.”
“Monaco? Monte Carlo?” Gunner said. “What could all that possibly mean?”
The agent shook his head. “I’ve got no idea—but we were able to track down the phone by satellite. They found it, still turned on, left adrift on a small raft not far from where the target ship was hijacked.”
Whiskey groaned as one. There was no mystery to this part of the story. It was an old spy trick. By setting the sat phone adrift, the pirates were trying to confuse anyone in pursuit. It also confirmed they were smarter than previously thought.
“This means they know they have something more important than a bunch of old M-16s in their possession,” Nolan said. “They must have found the box and determined it has value to somebody. But how?”
The agent shook his head. “Who knows? Those Vietnamese sailors might have mentioned the Agency in the confusion. That’s all it would take, maybe.”
Nolan said, “Well, for whatever reason, if they’re talking about it to money brokers in this Bad Sweeten place, and in Monte Carlo, then I’m guessing they’re trying to sell it somehow. I’m also guessing they’ll try to get rid of that ship they hijacked as quickly as possible.”
At this, the team nodded as one; the agent detected something.
He studied them for a moment and then asked, “So now that you have all this information, is there any chance you guys know where these mooks might be heading?”
Nolan shrugged. “Nothing is exact in our business,” he said. “Most pirates are drug addicts and drunks. Few of them have ever been educated. But—if they think someone is out there looking for them, someone with the resources of the U.S. Navy or the CIA? Yes, they’ll want to dump that ship quick, quiet and permanently. And for that there’s only one place they’ll go.”
“And where is that?” the agent wanted to know.
“Ever hear of Gottabang?” Nolan asked.
* * *
GOTTABANG WAS A place where old ships went to die.
It was a vast scrap yard located on a beach in northwest India.
The place had unusual tide changes, thirty feet from high to low, which made it an ideal place to “break” ships.
