The Pirate Hunters (35 page)

It was Bebe, the Russian gangster.

“I have news for you,” Bebe began the conversation. “Are sitting at present?”

“I am,” Nolan lied, shouting over the music. What was this about? he thought.

They’d received payment from Bebe with no problem, and even a big tip. Did the Russian Mob want the money back?

“Is good you are sitting,” Bebe said. “Because news will make you faint.”

“Please just tell me,” Nolan said.

“Your friend, Pirate Zeek?” Bebe said gravely. “Is alive. He lives and is back at old tricks.”

Nolan collapsed into the nearest chair. He thought for a moment that Bebe was drunk and this was his idea of a practical joke. But he knew that a guy like Bebe was always drunk and probably didn’t play practical jokes.

“How do you know this?” he asked the gangster.

“A friend of friend of friend just sold him guns for new boat,” Bebe replied. “Boat is modified Type 352 German minesweeper. Boat will bring Zeek and his posse across Indian Ocean to Somalia. Somalia warlords are waiting to give him open-arms greeting. They to give Zeek political asylum. Zeek to organize their Somali crazy people into better pirates, cause big trouble there. This his plan.”

Nolan knew Bebe was on the level, for one reason: During their conversations, Nolan never told the gangster that they suspected Zeek’s plan all along was to move his operations to Somalia.

“Check out what I say,” Bebe went on. “I thought you should know this.”

Nolan thanked him, and at the same time, tried to think of what to do next. Bebe actually gave him his answer.

The gangster told him: “Zeek person is dangerous and crafty—and has much luck in him. You, your friends, are good at job. But you must learn one thing: Zeek the Pirate? He doesn’t die easily. You gotta kill a guy like that more than once.”

With that, Bebe said good-bye and hung up.

And at that point, everything started spinning for Nolan
once again. But definitely not in a good way. In the blink of an eye,
everything
had changed.

He took off his onion bag and threw it across the bar.

Then he yelled, “Party’s over!”

WORK ON THE
DUS-7 began immediately.

Most of the damage done by the seaplane to the boat itself—holes in the deck, holes on the bridge—was patched but not painted. Two new cargo masts were quickly installed. The communication antenna was replaced.

The work copter was repaired by changing out the engine and replacing two rotor blades, but some of the bullet holes in the cockpit windows could not be fixed in time, so they remained.

The biggest change was in the ship’s armament—a surprise, courtesy of Conley. The original customer for the M102 artillery piece needed to take delivery of it, so the field gun had to be hoisted off the DUS-7. But Conley had an even more interesting weapon to take its place.

It was an M198 155mm howitzer. This weapon was a monster. At eight tons, it was nearly four times heavier than the M102, and at thirty-six feet, its barrel was three times longer than the old field gun. In this case, size did matter. Not only could the M198 use a wide range of shells, from armor-piercing to high-explosive to anti-personnel—it could fire them more than twenty miles, in some cases right over the horizon, meaning the intended victim might not know their demise was coming. And despite its bulk, the M198 was actually easier to operate than the M102 because it came with a computer-assisted targeting system.

As Conley told the crew when the huge cannon was being installed, “Way back when, the people who were tracking down real pirates would have given their right arm for a weapon like this.”

All the refit work was done by the same Kilos engineers who’d patched them up before the Zanzibar run. These were the people, many of them veterans of military navies, who assembled or disassembled a lot of Kilos Shipping’s blackmarket
weapons. They were used to operating at night, doing their jobs quickly and keeping their mouths shut.

THE WORK ON
the DUS-7 was done inside Kilos’s immense enclosed maintenance bay located next to the Kilos office building in Aden. By the next morning, the battered freighter was floated out of the bay and back to the Kilos loading dock where ammunition, fuel and more supplies were loaded on.

Nolan was belowdecks, helping to store shells for their new gun. More than eight hours had passed since Bebe’s call, but he still felt sick. His head was pounding, his stomach twisted in knots. He was hoping the hard labor would exorcise some of these post-hangover demons, but so far, no luck.

How could this have happened? The team’s entire reputation was built on the belief that they had put Zeek out of business back in Malacca. Their name had gone around the maritime world at the speed of light based on that one fact, and their sudden superstar status in that world had led to the three subsequent, highly lucrative jobs.

But now this? The revelation that they didn’t even complete their biggest job successfully? To Nolan’s battered psyche, this skewed everything. Their credibility. Their tactics. Their fees. None of it seemed justified to him. He was furious with himself. He was the first to admit that deep down, with each success, he’d fallen into the biggest pitfall a celebrity can face. He’d begun believing his own headlines.

Only one thing could right this wrong. They had to go do it all over again. Find Zeek and kill him a second time. If they couldn’t do that, they had no business working as pirate hunters. And he knew the rest of the team agreed with him.

IT WAS NOW
midmorning. Nolan was still sweating and aching from lots of heavy lifting and absolutely no sleep when he heard a collective groan from the deck above.

“Now what?” he grunted.

He climbed the forward ladder and saw what the grief was about. Down on the dock was a man dressed in a bad suit, wearing a bad haircut and cheap sunglasses, even though it
was a cloudy day. It was an ONI agent. Not Agent Harry, though. It was his young sidekick.

Batman had already started down the gangway to talk to him, but Nolan called him back.

“Let me do this,” he said.

Nolan went down to the dock and confronted the under-cover naval officer before the man could get any nearer to the ship.

“Private property, pal,” he told the agent. “And there’s no soliciting.”

The agent ignored his remarks. He pulled out his ID card instead and, for the first time, Nolan actually saw his name: Agent Curt Hush.

“Where’s your Uncle Harry?” Nolan asked him.

“Put out to pasture,” Hush replied. “Forced retirement.”

“How come?”

“Too old,” Hush replied coldly. “Too out of it. And
way
too easy on you guys.”

Nolan gave him a mock salute. “OK, thanks for the news flash,” he said, starting to walk away.

Hush called after him. “I insist on asking you some questions right now. Or else . . .”

Nolan spun around. He was just itching to punch someone in the face.

“You
insist
? Why is that?”

“Because I’ve been keeping track of your recent activities,” Hush told him. “And my bosses at ONI believe you might soon be directly interfering with the interests of the United States.”

“So?” Nolan said with a straight face.

“So, it’s in
your
best interest to comply this time,” Hush told him, adding ominously: “. . . for many reasons.”

Nolan immediately went nose to nose with him. “I get it now—you were the bad cop of the act. Is that it?”

“From what you and your friends are up to,” Hush replied, getting heated himself, “you’re lucky a real cop isn’t here.”

He pointed to the DUS-7. Even though the new 155mm gun had been covered with cargo nets and the mounted M2
50-calibers draped with packing blankets, it was obvious the ship had military weapons on board. In fact, the Senegals were in the process of lifting yet another pallet of artillery shells up to the deck at that moment. Kilos engineers were also completing some final repairs of the work copter.

“For instance,” Hush said. “What’s going on here?”

“We’re repainting the ship,” Nolan said plainly. “It’s getting rusty on the gunwales.”

“And where are the gunwales on this vessel, Major Nolan?”

“Beats me,” Nolan replied. “But I know they’re getting a fresh coat.”

“Look,” Hush said. “We know you’re going after Zeek Kurjan.”

“And you got a problem with that?”

Hush nodded emphatically. “Higher authority has a big problem with it. Higher authority thinks it’s best we let the situation stand as it is.”

“I don’t speak ‘Navy,’ ” Nolan said. “Just tell me what you’re saying.”

“Let Zeek go to Somalia to do his thing,” Hush said directly. “Can I be any simpler than that?”

Nolan really laughed at him now—until he saw he was serious.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he growled at him. “This guy Zeek is a monster. He’s a mass murderer. He’s drug dealer. He kills kids, for Christ’s sake. We thought we greased him already—you guys know that. But we missed him somehow, and now he’s back and now he’s got to be stopped again. So you telling me to hold back makes no sense to me. If we did that, it would be like letting him get away with it all.”

The agent smiled disdainfully. “I don’t expect someone like you to understand the intricacies of this,” he said. “But there are logical geopolitical reasons for us to let this happen.”

“Name one,” Nolan challenged him.

“The Strait of Malacca is of much more strategic importance than the coast of Somalia or even the Gulf of Aden,” Hush began. “These Somali mooks grab a cargo ship or some
oil coming from Saudi Arabia? Who cares? It’s all a scam anyway—the insurance companies just pay off the shipping company or they write it off as a loss.

“But if Zeek stays in the Strait of Malacca, he might get smart someday and decide to not hijack a ship there, but sink one or two or three ships. You block that waterway and you screw up commerce around the world. Even when they clear it, everything will cost more because the insurance rates will skyrocket. The military would have to pour in money and people to provide security.”

Nolan laughed at him again—he couldn’t help it. He’d dealt with pinheads like this for years in Delta. They got one little idea in their gray matter, and no matter how wrong it was, they stuck with it until their will was done, or another stupid little idea took its place.

“You’re making my argument for me, genius,” he told Hush. “We plan on icing this prick once and for all. It’s our fault we didn’t do it right the first time. So now we got to go back and do it again. But if we’re successful this time, then
we’ve
done our jobs and
you
have one less problem to worry about. In fact, we’ll send you a bill after we whack him.”

It seemed to make too much sense. And, of course, the ONI agent wasn’t buying it.

“No—there will be a problem if Zeek gets hit,” he said.

Nolan was stumped. “But why? Who wants him to stay alive? Certainly not the Indonesians around the Talua Tangs. If he’s out of the equation, they won’t be under his smelly little thumb anymore.”

“It’s not the little Indonesians we’re worried about,” Hush said. “It’s the Chinese.”

Nolan just stared at him. “The Chinese? How do they have a dog in this fight?”

“They’re Zeek’s godfathers,” Hush revealed. “They’ve been quietly providing his protection for years. They’re the reason he’s been able to get away with all this stuff. He’s been sending them a percentage of everything he takes in—and they’ve been watching his back in return.”

Nolan still didn’t understand. He knew the Chinese government
was run by a bunch of scumbags. Ripping off U.S. citizens with shitty products. Hacking into U.S. defense mainframes. Their involvement in the misery of Darfur. And a million other things. That sort of stuff didn’t surprise him. But why would they get in bed with a common pirate?

“You’re telling me those assholes in Beijing give a crap about a mook like Zeek?” he asked the agent.

Now it was Hush’s turn to laugh. “And you call me a cub scout?” he said. “I’m not talking about the people in Beijing. They don’t run that country. I’m talking about the crime syndicates in Shanghai.
They’re
the grease that makes that whole enterprise go, and one of them—a guy named Sunny Hi—is very close to Zeek.
He’s
the guy who provides him with cover.”

“And he’s in love with Zeek because? . . .”

“Because Zeek provides Shanghai with Happy-Happy girls,” Hush replied. “Of all shapes and sizes.”

“And ages?”

The ONI agent shrugged. “It’s just another form of currency in that part of the world,” he said. “You better learn that if you want to play with the big boys. And know this too: If you piss off Sunny Hi, he can make things very difficult for us. He can slow down seaborne shipments to the U.S. He can prevent our cargo ships from docking in China. He can convince his buddies in Beijing to stop buying U.S. Treasury notes. It’s a long list—all of it bad.”

Nolan tried to let this all digest. Then it hit him.

“You bastards,” he swore at Hush. “You
knew
we didn’t grease Zeek when you came to see us that first time. You just wanted the dirt on how we did it so—so what? So you could tell him how to avoid us next time?”

Hush’s face turned crimson.

“Who the fuck’s side are you guys on?” Nolan spit at him.

“Look, Nolan,” Hush said, taking a step backward. “We know you’ve been able to make an incredible amount of money here in the last few weeks. Why don’t you just relax and enjoy it. It’s like making a killing at the poker table. You’ve got to know when to walk away. I mean, at the very heart of it, you’re
running an illegal enterprise here. Technically speaking, you’re as much a criminal as the guys you’ve been paid to stop.”

The whole Team Whiskey crew was crowded around them by now, listening to the exchange.

“And here’s another thing,” Hush said. “We know your situation at home. You play ball here and maybe we can help you with it. Get the military court to reverse its order. Get you back on home turf again. That’s gotta be what you want, right?”