Operation Caribe (4 page)

His first official duty this morning was to sign for a diplomatic pouch that had been delivered by courier from the Saudi consulate. Inside was an envelope sealed with red wax. When Conley opened the envelope, an international money-wire transfer slip fell out. It was documentation for Prince Saud el-Saud’s $15 million payment to the team for saving his LNG tanker.

Attached to the slip was a plain banker’s check for an additional $1 million—a tip for the team’s efforts. Conley sipped his coffee and smiled. This was the third time the team had done such a good job that the client saw fit to pay a gratuity.

These two payments increased the team’s fortunes to nearly $25 million, tax-free, all of it made in just the past three months. This growing pile of cash was in a special Kilos-controlled vault within the Port of Aden National Bank. Under armed guard 24/7, it was accessible only to Conley and the Team Whiskey members.

Taking a brochure Nolan had left for him from his desk drawer, Conley realized the team’s bank account was almost large enough to enable them to buy what they considered their ultimate anti-pirate weapon: a used British Aerospace Harrier jumpjet.

“Someday,” he thought, returning the brochure to the drawer.

*   *   *

AROUND 8
A.M.
, Conley reheated his coffee, hoping for a break, but getting no such thing. In the past hour alone there had been twenty more calls, all of them from people desperate to buy Team Whiskey’s unique protection services.

Luckily, Conley didn’t have to actually answer the phone. He saw the name and company of each caller on his computer screen. After noting each call, he forwarded it directly to his voice mail, where a computer program converted the voice message to text. This way, Conley could read over the job offers without ever talking to anyone. It was categorizing all the information that took time.

At least his method of triaging the offers was simple: The highest-paying jobs that would take the least amount of effort got the most consideration; everything else got a pass. As it was, Whiskey had been released from a U.S. Navy rehab hospital in Italy only a few scant hours before the Saud el-Saud job materialized. Each member was still suffering the aftereffects of their small war against Zeek the Pirate. Batman Bob Graves had lost his hand. Nolan had nearly drowned in the Indian Ocean during a climatic death match with Zeek himself. Crash, Gunner and Twitch were also nursing a bevy of smaller wounds.

Conley knew these things also had to be taken into consideration when choosing the team’s next job. That’s why one particular offer appeared so intriguing. The climate was good. The problem seemed manageable, especially when compared to taking on Zeek’s pirate army or protecting the Russian mob. And the price was right. And Conley thought the team could wrap up the gig in just a few days—a week at the most.

Plus, it was on the other side of the world, also a positive. Conley believed getting the team out of the Indian Ocean for a while was not a bad idea. Technically speaking, what they’d been doing in the area lately—arming cargo ships, running unauthorized combat missions inside sovereign borders—wasn’t exactly legal. With just a little push, any number of seafaring countries could have them locked up for a slew of maritime violations.

“Yes,” Conley thought, checking the job’s details again. “A change of scenery will do them good.”

4

Five days later

SNAKE NOLAN HAD looked forward to crossing the Atlantic.

The weather forecast had promised no storms, calm seas, and warm winds for most of the five days it would take to complete the journey.

Besides bringing him closer to the country he loved but could not enter legally, Nolan had envisioned himself actually relaxing during the trip. Playing poker with the guys, watching DVDs, maybe even doing some reading. The fact that a large Kilos container ship, the
Georgia June,
was sailing along with them, acting as an enormous floating bodyguard, took some of the uncertainty away from the 4,000-mile voyage west.

That concern came from the team’s own vessel. Rusty, oily, with a single stack and four cargo masts, it looked barely seaworthy. But looks could be deceiving. Technically, it was a DUS-7 coastal freighter, the type of ship used for short trips up and down coastlines, and not normally for transoceanic journeys. Just 120 feet long and twenty-four feet wide, it looked every bit of its fifty-plus years afloat. It was so battered, if it had washed up on a beach somewhere, it wouldn’t have gotten a second look.

In the eyes of Team Whiskey, though, its shabby appearance was an asset. When they first went to war against Zeek the Pirate, Kilos Shipping had offered them one of the company’s “workboats,” a barely disguised, intentionally misnamed vessel that was actually a long-range mega-yacht, full of communications equipment and weapons, like something from a James Bond movie. Though high on the comfort scale, Whiskey knew such a boat would have made them too obvious when operating in Zeek’s Indonesian home waters, an area full of container ships, supertankers, steamers and fishing boats. So, Kilos gave them the DUS-7 instead.

It was exactly what the team needed. Like the Kilos workboats, the small freighter, in its former life, had transported highly sensitive cargos to some of the company’s shadier customers. To this end, the DUS-7 had a so-called rubber room hidden deep within its lower decks. It was a compartment where up to ten tons of cargo—usually arms and ammunition—could be sealed off behind false panels that even the most ardent NATO search party would miss. In this hidden storage cabin now sat Team Whiskey’s small arsenal of weapons, communications equipment and various gadgets of the special operations trade.

The DUS-7 had another important attribute: With not one, but two propulsion systems, the old coastal freighter was much faster than it looked.

Its primary means of motion was a dual diesel-based system that turned twin screws and moved the ship at about eighteen knots in a calm sea. But because the old freighter was specially adapted by Kilos for cargoes that absolutely had to get there—“sensitive shipments,” in the company’s parlance—Kilos engineers had added a small gas turbine as a second propulsion unit. Hundreds of gallons of seawater sucked into huge tanks in the hold of the ship were condensed and, using power from the spinning turbine, shot out the back of the ship at high velocity in the form of jet sprays. When the ship needed some extra speed and the crew turned on these jets, it was like switching on the afterburner in an F-16. With this added power, the freighter could top forty knots, faster than some of the U.S. Navy’s speediest warships.

Along with the ship, Kilos had also provided Whiskey with a crew of five Senegalese nationals. Widely regarded as excellent sailors, these longtime employees of Kilos Shipping were loyal, smart, funny, and could pilot the ship under even the worst circumstances. They also knew their way around combat weaponry. But because their names were just about impossible to pronounce, the team just referred to them as the Senegals.

And the team had a nickname for their ship, too.

They called it the
Dustboat.

*   *   *

AS IT TURNED out, Nolan slept for almost the entire trip west.

From the day they’d set off from southern Italy, the location of their rehab stay, and where the
Dustboat
had been docked, and went across the western Mediterranean Sea, out past Gibraltar, and into the Atlantic, it was as if he’d been injected with a sedative. He’d sleep, wake up, eat—and then fall right back to sleep again.

He felt so odd, he asked Crash, the team’s medic, about it during one of his few waking moments. Was something wrong with him? Yes, there was, Crash replied. There was something wrong with
all
of them. Since they’d started their new enterprise three months before, they’d been so busy, none of them had gotten anything resembling a good night’s sleep. The closest thing to it had been alcohol-induced slumber, which inevitably came with a hangover.

Crash’s diagnosis: Nolan was suffering from exhaustion. They all were.

And the cure?

Sleep—and lots of it.

Nolan enjoyed the new experience. No card playing, no DVDs, and definitely no reading. Just deep, peaceful sleep.

Until their fourth night out on the Atlantic.

He had slept that whole day, and had planned to do the same that night. But sometime just after midnight, he suddenly woke up—and this time, when he lay down again, he didn’t instantly fall back to sleep. Instead, his mind started racing, and for him, that was not a good thing. When the past ten years of his life started going through his head, it was like a highlights reel stuck in fast forward. Except these weren’t exactly his favorite memories.

That last day at Tora Bora. Their OK from Higher Authority to pursue bin Laden, the excitement of actually seeing him, catching up to him, chasing him down, only to be called back at the worst moment by the pissheads in Washington—it was a reoccurring nightmare that Nolan couldn’t stop, or even slow down. The battle that followed, unauthorized as it was, cost him his eye and Twitch his leg.

The aftermath. While the others were given dishonorable discharges and immediately booted from the military, Nolan was laid out as the ultimate sacrificial lamb. He had no lawyer, no means of defense, yet he was still court-martialed, found guilty by a secret court, sentenced to prison indefinitely and banned from ever setting foot on American soil again.

Frequent escape attempts followed, which led to him being bounced from prison to prison—Gitmo, Sardinia and finally Baghdad. He busted out twice from the Iraqi prison and was found walking across the desert intent on getting back to Afghanistan, back to Tora Bora, as if there he could resume his pursuit of the mass murderer.

Once he was released by the U.S. military more trouble followed, and Nolan was eventually thrown back into prison, this time in Kuwait. That’s where the rest of the team found him.

Frustration at their subsequent low-paying jobs as security cops in Saudi Arabia led them to form their anti-piracy unit, and there had been no looking back since. But still, all the good things that had happened in the past three months could not erase memories of the horrific events he had experienced in the past ten years. Jailed, homeless, a man without a country? Some scars ran deep, and some wounds would never heal.

And then there was the
Dutch Cloud.

His four days of slumber had brought their share of odd dreams, but the subject of the
Dutch Cloud
was a real-life ghost story. At least for Nolan.

It started with the team’s gig for the Russian mob, to protect a cruise ship trip through the Aegean Sea. Saving the Red Mafia bigwigs from a mass poisoning attack had been a bonanza for Team Whiskey. Not only were they paid handsomely for three days of work, along with a $50,000 tip; their client, a mobster named Bebe, had passed on to the team valuable intelligence, which helped them catch up to and finally kill Zeek the Pirate. And it was Bebe who told Nolan about the
Dutch Cloud
.

It was a seemingly mythical vessel, a phantom ship said to have gone missing shortly after 9/11 and endlessly sailing the seas ever since, its contents unknown and the subject of much speculation. Bebe said that if the team were to capture the
Dutch Cloud
, they would be in for a reward of $50 million, payable by none other than the CIA.

It sounded like drunken Russian bullshit—and in truth both Nolan and Bebe were highly intoxicated when the mobster told him the tale. But then Nolan actually
saw
the ghost ship. It happened while Whiskey was heading toward an island near Zanzibar to help recover buried treasure containing a billion-dollar microchip. One night, he had just awakened from an alcohol-induced dream, when he went out on the deck of the
Dustboat
in a gale and saw the spectral ship pass about a thousand yards off their port side, only to be quickly lost again in the storm and fog.

Or at least that’s what he
thought
happened. Because when he woke up that next morning, brutally hung over, he found himself in the care of the Senegals, who for some reason had not seen what he thought he had just seen a few hours earlier.

Another strange memory.

*   *   *

NOW AFTER MANY days and nights of deep slumber, he was suddenly wide awake, feeling the Atlantic rolling the
Dustboat
, his heart pounding in his chest. He felt anxious, he needed air, and he was in no mood to contemplate what lay ahead or what had happened before.

So he rolled out of his bunk, grabbed a six-pack from his small fridge and went up on deck.

At the moment their guardian angel, the
Georgia June,
was sailing about a mile in front of them. The rest of the team was asleep and the Senegals were steering the ship. Nolan walked back to the stern alone, and the beer started going down fast. He quickly quaffed three beers and the darkness engulfed him, and that’s when he saw it again.

The
Dutch Cloud.
It was moving north just as the
Dustboat
was moving west. It was about a thousand yards off the stern and looked just as it had the first time he saw it: a long, dark container ship, bearing one yellow, one green and one red light. Painted mostly black, it had a white bridge. But as before, the vessel seemed strangely lifeless, as if there was no one in control, no one on board.

It was a dark night with no moon, and Nolan didn’t have his one-eye electronic telescope with him. He could see the ship with his good eye for only about ten seconds, and then it was gone, covered over once again by the darkness.

In fact, it disappeared
so
fast that he immediately wondered if he’d seen it at all—or if it was a figment of his imagination or a side effect of his clinical exhaustion.

Or maybe he was still asleep and dreaming.

*   *   *

HE WALKED UP to the bridge and was greeted warmly by the Senegals.

He hesitated to ask if they’d seen the mystery ship, since the last time this had happened, they’d seen nothing.