The Pirate Hunters (32 page)

The galley had been ransacked of food and water. A liquor cabinet in the kitchen was empty. There were no guns on board, but plenty of empty ammunition boxes. Bloody prints on the galley deck showed the murderers had been barefoot. It all led to one conclusion.

“Somali pirates,” Crash said.

Nolan nodded. “No doubt about it. They must have caught these guys with their pants down, snorting their lunch.”

They both tasted a bit of the powder left on the table. It was cocaine.

“I’m guessing these morons were drug runners,” Crash observed. “Drug runners who thought they’d go digging for something maybe?”

“Bingo again,” Nolan replied. “They just picked the wrong time to play Indiana Jones.”

The team had no choice but to move on—recovering the bodies of drug mules wasn’t in their plan. They made a sat-phone call to the International Maritime Hotline in London and reported what they had found and where. Then they hung up before giving any of their own information.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER
, they came upon another boat drifting in the water.

There was no doubt who this vessel belonged to. It was a long, thin motorboat with dual engines and a small control house. There were ten black gunmen aboard it, all dead. All were barefoot; all had been shot multiple times by a large caliber weapon. The boat itself was riddled with bullet holes and barely afloat.

“And here are our perps,” Nolan said, studying the boat full of bodies from the nose of the DUS-7 and seeing it was filled with food, bags of cocaine, and liquor bottles. “Ten less Somali pirates to worry about.”

But what had happened to them?

Gunner was the weapons expert. He looked at the carnage from stern to bow. It appeared that, just as the pirates had probably surprised the drug runners, someone had probably surprised the pirates. But who?

“From the angle of the bullet holes?” Gunner said, shaking his head. “Hard to say.”

Just then, they heard a low, droning sound. An airplane was coming at them out of the south. It was an updated Grumman Goose, a two-engine, high-wing seaplane usually seen island-hopping in the Caribbean or the Pacific.

It flew right by them, close to their port side, going very fast and disappearing into the darkening clouds to the north.

“Someone out here running pirate-watching trips?” Crash asked dryly.

The droning noise gradually faded away, but then grew loud again. The plane passed them again, this time on their starboard side, flying south, very low.

“Someone on board must have forgotten something,” Gunner said.

“Either that or they’re trying to get a good look at us,” Batman replied.

Now the seaplane turned yet again and came back a third time. This time, Nolan sensed something was wrong.

It was slowing down and passing them on the port side again. It seemed almost like it was going to attempt a landing.

“Maybe they’re in trouble?” Crash wondered. “Maybe they need us to rescue them.”

That idea was shattered by what happened next. As the innocuous plane went by, they could see two of the windows in the fuselage were open. Suddenly bullets were flying all around the bridge. It took the team a few moments to realize the gunfire was coming from the passing airplane.

“What the fuck?” Crash roared. “Whose fucking air force is that?”

Gunner yelled, “Now we know who killed those pirates.”

The team sprung into action. They lowered the blast visor on the bridge and everyone grabbed their M4s. Gunner ran outside to one of the bridge-mounted 50-calibers, newly installed in its movable seat. But there was a problem. The machine guns elevated only 45 degrees—when the Kilos engineers installed them, it had never dawned on them they might be needed to shoot at airborne targets. They were meant strictly for battling pirates and seaborne adversaries. The same was true for the 50-calibers installed near the stern railing.

Now the plane was turning and coming back. And unless it flew really,
really
low, the team’s best weapons would be useless against it.

Dr. Stevenson and Squire had appeared on the deck by now, attracted by the commotion. They were carrying two high-powered hunting rifles.

The plane went by again, strafing the upper deck, hitting the cargo masts, and perforating the work copter sitting un-shielded on its landing platform. Everyone in Team Whiskey
fired back at the attacker with their M4s, but the effort was stymied by lack of range and the airplane’s speed.

The plane turned and strafed them again on the port side, heavily damaging their life boats and snapping their main communications antenna.

This was getting serious. Nolan knew a well-placed barrage from the airplane hitting the bridge or the fuel supply could cripple them at least, and at worst, sink them. Yet there was no way they could fight back against the attacking aircraft.

“Blow smoke and come to all stop!” Nolan told the Senegals suddenly. The others were puzzled by the order, but it soon made sense. The
Dustboat
quickly slowed to a crawl and smoke began billowing out of its stack, creating a temporary smoke screen. Meanwhile, Nolan borrowed the doctor’s hunting rifles, handing one to Gunner. Together they climbed the two starboard cargo masts.

The plane turned and approached them again on the starboard side. The ship had emerged from the smoke cloud by now, meaning Nolan and Gunner had to act fast. They drew a bead on the airplane with the high-powered rifles. As it went by strafing the deck below, Nolan and Gunner opened up from atop the masts.

They missed the plane’s pilot but shot the two men who were firing at them from the passenger compartment. The plane staggered for a moment. Their bullets had caught one of its engines, too. It started smoking and dipped a little before regaining its lost altitude. Now the low drone was replaced by the sound of an engine backfiring.

The plane did not turn back toward the DUS-7 this time. It continued flying south, a cloud of oily smoke trailing behind it. It finally disappeared over the horizon.

The doctor quickly checked everyone for injuries. Incredibly, no one had been hit in the strafing attack. But again, the ship’s new communications tower had been shot to pieces, and one of the portside cargo masts had been cut in two. Worst of all, the work copter had taken a dozen rounds to its
rotor and tail section. The damage was irreparable; their air asset was out of commission.

Looking at the trail of smoke still visible in the southern sky, Twitch said, “So much for our welcoming committee.”

THEY SPOTTED THE
island about a half hour later.

Though the skies were clear and the ocean still calm, their destination, sitting out on the southern horizon, was mostly engulfed in fog.

“No wonder no one can ever find this place,” Crash said, standing on the bridge, scanning the murky place through high-powered binoculars. “It reminds me of our old digs back in Malacca.”

Gunner was right beside him, also studying the mist-enshrouded island. “Isn’t this where King Kong lives?” he asked.

Nolan was looking at the place through his special one-eye scope. He couldn’t disagree with his colleagues. Lots of thick jungle, waves crashing on shore. Even what appeared to be an extinct volcano. It was right out of a ’30s Hollywood movie.

Then he spotted something else. Anchored a few hundred feet off the north end of the island was the seaplane that had shot at them. This was not a big surprise.

“I know the first thing we have to do,” he said.

THEY WERE SOON
within a half-mile of the island. Their communications were out, but they still had sea surface radar, and this allowed them to sweep the waters around them in case any other vessels were nearby. They spotted nothing.

They made for the seaplane. Nolan, studying it through his spyglass as it bobbed in the shallow waves off the rocky shore, could see the two open windows he and Gunner had shot at; streams of blood dripped down the fuselage beneath them. The cowling on the plane’s left engine was also up, as if someone had tried to fix the damage the team’s high-powered gunfire had done. Nolan was familiar enough with this kind of plane to know it could still fly on one engine. Which meant it could still be dangerous to them.

They moved the DUS-7 to within a hundred feet of the moored seaplane. One more check of the surface radar told them they were still alone on this side of the island. A scan of the nearby shoreline also turned up nothing.

Gunner had been manning the M102 field gun since the seaplane was spotted. He took it very personally when someone shot at him. This would be his measure of revenge.

When Nolan gave him the signal from the bridge, Gunner loaded the weapon, closed the breech, eyeballed the aiming guide and fired the gun. The crashing waves masked most of the sound as the shell hit the seaplane below the wing root, blowing it to pieces and collapsing the fuselage in on itself. The plane sank in mere seconds, going down with one big glub. A cheer went up from the DUS-7. It had been a perfect shot.

“He’s getting pretty good with that shooter,” Batman observed.

Watching it all from the railing with the rest of them, Twitch said: “I hope we didn’t need that thing to get out of here.”

THE DUS-7 CONTINUED
its way around the island. Reaching a large outcrop of rock in the southwest side, they picked up a small blip on the sea surface radar. Peering through the fog, they could see some type of vessel anchored on the far end of the island.

It was important that they keep their presence here secret, so Nolan ordered the DUS-7 to back away out of sight. Then he and Batman went out in a small boat and paddled up to the rocky outcrop. Using it as cover, they were able to see the vessel, anchored about 1,000 yards away.

It was a catamaran—a large one. Easily 200 feet long, it was two hulls connected by a bridging section and a large bow structure.

“Seaplanes? Catamarans?” Batman said. “Is there a casino out here?”

Nolan studied the catamaran and concluded it was probably built as a car ferry. But at the moment, it wasn’t cars but
digging equipment being offloaded from it. They could see a work barge transporting a front-end loader and a small army of men with shovels to the shore.

“Whoever these guys are, they’re not screwing around,” Nolan said. “They got enough stuff to dig up every inch of this place.”

“Which gotta mean they’re looking for the same thing we are,” Batman replied.

They returned to the DUS-7 and had the Senegals bring it back around to the northeast side of the island. Here they found a small cove surrounded by high coral reefs. Large waves were crashing onto these reefs, however, making the inlet’s entrance an extremely hazardous passage.

Nolan asked the Senegals if they thought they could maneuver the DUS-7 past the reefs and into the cove, in order to hide it close to shore. They assured him they could. But from that commenced ten minutes of high drama as the West African sailors inched the freighter through a channel barely thirty feet across. The DUS-7 itself was twenty-five feet wide; the clearance was so small, both sides of the ship scraped against the cement-like coral going in. It was brutal to watch, but in the end, an amazing feat of seamanship.

Once inside the calmer waters of the inlet, the ship nestled itself near some overhanging flora, practically unseen from the waters beyond the reefs.

They had their hiding place.

THEY WENT ASHORE
in two boats.

Nolan, the doctor, Squire and Crash went in one; Batman, Gunner, Twitch and one of the Senegals in the other. The rest of the Senegals remained on the DUS-7, their weapons ready, with the engines muted on idle.

The two boat parties hooked up and immediately plunged into the jungle. The island was about a half-mile around and, besides the rocky beaches, it appeared to be all jungle and one volcanic mountain. Some streams ran through it, but their water was curiously the color of blood.

Not two minutes into the jungle, they came upon the wreckage
of a small two-engine De Havilland seaplane. It had crashed into a thick tree bank and had made it to the ground remarkably intact.

The passenger compartment was empty, but the two pilots were still in their seats, still wearing their company uniforms and even their hats and headphones. Their skeletal hands still clutched the controls, condemned forever to fly a doomed plane.

“This must be the crash the mystery man survived,” the doctor said. “That means it all started right here.”

They continued through the jungle, heading south, walking carefully with their weapons up, ever aware that they weren’t the only ones on the island. Twitch was in the lead, scanning everything around him with each step.

He suddenly held up his hand, bringing the team to a stop. He said not a word, just pointed to the ground about two feet in front of him. Nolan looked over his shoulder.

Barely visible in the heavy foliage was a large square pit dug into the hard sand. It was about ten feet deep. At the bottom were a dozen bamboo sticks, sharpened ends pointing up.

“Punji sticks,” Twitch said. “Looks like monkey shit on the tips. If the fall doesn’t kill you, the infection will.”

Nolan looked deeper into the pit and saw bones at the bottom. Animal? Human? It was hard to tell. But his guess was the booby trap had been here for a while, probably set up by pirates or drug dealers. Because of its location right off the beach, it was meant as a cruel warning to anyone who would come here looking for buried treasure—of any kind.

Once the rest of the team saw the trap, Nolan told them, “We all got to watch our step. These things are guaranteed to ruin your day.”

TEN MINUTES LATER
, they reached a clearing, only to make another gruesome discovery: three bodies stuffed under some rubber trees, barely hidden in the brush. Each had been bound and gagged; each had two bullets in the back of the neck. The bodies were still warm.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Batman asked Nolan.

Nolan nodded grimly. “I’m guessing these guys are what’s left of our seaplane crew,” he said. “They were hired guns who were paid to sink or at least turn away anyone who came close to this island. But it’s like what usually happens with rookie hit men: their employers get rid of them to keep them quiet, whether they’ve succeeded or not.”