The Pirate Hunters (19 page)

“Our chances?” Nolan finally replied. “Ten of us against eighty or so of them? I’d say fifty-fifty.”

Twitch had just climbed into the back of the helicopter. He’d heard what they were talking about.

“Fifty-fifty?” he said to Nolan. “Once again, always the optimist.”

With that, Batman hit the throttles and eased the overloaded copter into the air.

BACK ON THE
stern, Crash and Gunner watched the copter go overhead. That was their cue to start the next part of the plan.

They tied the rope holding the Bailey String to the stern railing and climbed down to a rubber boat cinched to the back of the unmoving ship. Gunner was carrying a backpack filled with explosives.

Once in the rubber boat, Gunner carefully laid down the backpack. Then Crash handed him his M107 sniper rifle. The huge weapon was still warm from the five shots Crash had just fired, taking out the five pirates who had come out to investigate the mystery lights off the island’s shoreline.

“You’re sure you know how to use it, right?” the ex-SEAL asked him.

Gunner studied the big M107. “Hey—I’m the weapons guy here, remember?” he said. “I can fire anything.”

With that, Crash went over the side of the rubber boat and into the water.

“Jesuszz, I thought it would be like bathtub warm down here,” he gasped. “It’s freaking freezing.”

“Global warming,” Gunner told him. “Or cooling? I don’t know, ask Al Gore.”

Gunner handed Crash the backpack full of explosives. Crash strapped it on—and immediately began to sink.

Gunner reached down and grabbed him, pulling him back to the surface.

“Damn, are you going to be able to do this?” he asked his colleague. “That pack is too heavy for you to swim with.”

Crash readjusted the pack and tried it again. He didn’t sink this time, but it was obvious that the loaded backpack was weighing him down.

“Are you sure you can make it?” Gunner asked him again.

“I have to,” Crash told him. “Just take good care of my gun.”

With that, he swam away into the dark.

Gunner watched him go, then looked the sniper rifle up and down again. Yes, he was the team’s weapons master, but he’d
never dealt with this type of gun before. It was a third longer than a typical combat weapon and felt twice as heavy. Its scope was almost as long as its barrel, and it had an elaborate foldout brace on its tip to steady it when it was fired. It took an enormous 12.7mm round. If it hit right, a bullet that size could cut a person in two.

Gunner climbed back up to the stern of the ship. His job now: If any of the pirates directed anything, from a flashlight to a searchlight at one of the Bailey String rafts or the
Dustboat
itself, he was to shoot them immediately with Crash’s M107. This way they would eventually stop trying to find out what was going on out beyond their shoreline.

But as Gunner tried to set himself on the stern, he studied the weapon a third time and just shook his head.

“How the hell does he shoot this thing?” he said.

THE WORK COPTER
circled the island once, and its occupants took stock of the situation below. Crash was on his way. Gunner was in place. The blacked-out DUS-7 was anchored where it needed to be, the cannonade machine armed and ready to go. It was time for the copter to make its presence known.

Flying with no running lights, Batman pushed the aircraft down to just twenty feet and flew right over the pirates’ HQ, gun pod blazing, making an ungodly noise. The barrage tore into the concrete structure, causing an explosion of fire and rock. The attack was on—and the clock was ticking.

The flash from the explosion lit up the entire pirate camp. In its glow, the pirates could be seen scattering or hitting the dirt. Batman turned the copter over and pointed it toward the finger dock. He squeezed the gun pod trigger and took out many of the pirates’ boats that hadn’t been sunk in the initial barrage from the ship.

Another twist, and now Batman had lined up in back of the main group of pirates, coming at them from the south. He opened up again with the gun pod while Nolan and Twitch added rounds from their M4s. From ground level, it was hard to figure out just what was going on. There was a lot of smoke,
dust and spray in the air—and a lot of noise. Many of the pirates couldn’t even see the helicopter; many thought the gunfire was coming from the ships offshore. At this point, Zeek’s black bandana bodyguards started firing their 50-caliber machine guns, but not at any real targets. A lot of their return fire was falling harmlessly into the lagoon.

Batman turned the copter around and strafed the HQ again. They were so close to the ground that Nolan could see chips of concrete flying off Zeek’s lair. Again, he and Twitch added their M4s to the fusillade, blasting any pirates who came within their enhanced field of vision.

Once Zeek’s elite bodyguards realized they were being attacked from both air
and
sea, most of them scattered. But a few regular pirates stood their ground and finally seeing the copter, raised their weapons to get a shot at it.

This didn’t deter Batman. He dove even lower on the camp, the gun pod spitting out massive streams of tracer fire. A lot of this was now hitting its mark and the copter crew could see pirates falling to the ground, wounded or killed, some of them in pieces.

The team’s plan seemed to be working. Those pirates who could were fleeing toward the north end of the lagoon. The unlit, darkened DUS-7 was lying in wait for them; the Senegals had the cannonade machine ready to fire. Their fusillade would come from nowhere, and the pirates would have nowhere else to go. At least that was the plan.

Nolan just hoped it worked—this time.

The last of Zeek’s bodyguards were close to all-out panic by now. They began waving their 50-caliber machine guns around madly, but again, they couldn’t find anything real to shoot at.

Amid the chaos, one bodyguard turned on his ancient portable phone, only to find there was no service. Other bodyguards tried their phones, also to no avail. They’d never been told that, just as their fuel dump had been destroyed, their secure, if antiquated, phone system had lost its transmitting dish.

Now it seemed tracers were washing all over the island, like a wave crashing to shore. The remaining bodyguards
freaked out and started firing wildly in all directions, but wound up cutting down some of their own men. They were still convinced a small offshore navy was bombarding the pirates’ camp, while a ghostly aircraft of some kind was shooting at them from above.

One of the bodyguards finally took out a personal cell phone—a strict violation of Zeek’s rules, but a necessary act of desperation. Under the intense fire, he called the only people who could help the pirates in a situation like this: their partners in crime, the Indonesian military. Dialing the local naval headquarters, the bodyguard, saying he was under direct orders from Zeek, hastily explained that the Boss needed assistance on Pirate Island quickly, and that he was willing to pay any amount of money to get it.

But the Indonesian naval officer on the other end of the phone turned him down flat. Not because of the danger—but because he’d heard Zeek wouldn’t be able to pay.

“Word is your boss got no money to operate,” the officer said. “And that he has much bad luck on him.”

The bodyguard was stunned. He’d heard nothing of this—but he had to think quickly.

“We will pay you in girls,” he told the navy officer.

But the man said no again. “All your girls are gone, too. Your brothel is empty. Your whores are on their way to Bangkok.”

Again, the bodyguard was shocked.

But he had one more form of currency to offer the officer.

“Ecstasy,” he said. “One thousand hits, free to you.”

The officer just laughed at him and started to hang up.

“OK—make it two thousand,” the bodyguard said, pleading.

There was a long silence. Then the officer said, “Make it three thousand and you’ve got a deal.”

THE WORK COPTER
made more passes over the camp; the gun pod was lit and smoking, and Nolan and Twitch were spraying gunfire everywhere. His anxiety gone, Nolan felt the adrenalin pumping through his body. He was high from it.
Soon, the next part of the plan would kick in: finding Zeek himself. Nolan was getting psyched for that.

He had plans for Zeek. They all did. The photos Twitch had taken of the massacre on Sumhai were impossible to erase from his mind. As hideous as it sounded, he wanted to do to Zeek what Zeek had done to those innocent villagers. Scald him to death. Drown him in boiling oil. Tear open his guts and leave him to try to stuff them back in.

People going into combat have fantasies, too—and these were Nolan’s. But he knew they were stupid, unworkable, and that dead is dead and their plan to quickly ice Zeek and his gang was the only way to go.

The trouble was, Twitch was harboring the same kind of fantasies. And he planned to act on them.

THE COPTER HAD
turned and was making another low-level run, firing at the pirates to keep them moving toward the north end of the beach when Twitch suddenly unbuckled his seat harness and jumped out.

Neither Nolan nor Batman knew he was gone until they swung around from the last strafing pass and saw their colleague on the ground, in the middle of the chaos of pirates running toward the sandbar.

“Jesus—I don’t believe this guy,” Batman said. “Is he
trying
to get killed?”

“That’s a distinct possibility,” Nolan replied.

TWITCH WAS WELL
prepared.

He was wearing his black camouflage battle suit. His flak vest. His oversized Fritz helmet with blast visor and multi-wire connections. Armored knee pads and black high-top paratrooper boots. He was carrying his huge MX automatic carbine with a belt already fed into it and two more crisscrossing his chest. He also had an extra-long, razor-sharp serrated Gryphon-Terzuola combat knife.

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.