The Pirate Hunters (40 page)

The answer was no.

Li was so furious he nearly threw the sat phone into the harbor. End of mystery—the freighter’s crew had tracked them here via satellite.

Li called over two ship’s engineers and ordered them to find the AIS beacon wherever it was on the
Pasha
and destroy it. Then he went back to studying the battered old freighter.

Thanks to his contacts in the Chinese intelligence services, Li knew a good deal about the people he believes were on the ship. Nolan, Graves, Kapula, Lapook and Stacks. He knew their lineage—from their glory days in Delta Force to their fall from grace within the U.S. black ops community, to their sudden emergence as the darlings of maritime security. He knew all about their battles, their gigs, where they’d been and what they’d been up to in the past month or so, even how much money they’d made. Li had done his homework on the
“Whiskey Team” before leaving Indonesia, knowing that Zeek might run into them again. And rusty ship or not, he recognized them as dangerous adversaries.

But he refused to believe the freighter’s crew was double-lucky blessed, as some people back in Indonesia claimed. That they’d become ghosts on a ship called the
Global Warrior
, which allowed them to kill with ease a pirate crew run by Zeek’s late brother. Or that they were able to spread so much bad luck on Zeek himself they’d caused him to go broke overnight. Nor did he believe the tale that, after fighting a typhoon while trying to catch up to the INS
Vidynut
, the freighter—which should have been a half an ocean away—wound up just a mile behind the hijacked Indian ship at the precise moment it needed to be there.

No—no one was
that
blessed.

True, they had come within a half-minute of sinking the
Pasha
and killing them all. But that bid had been foiled by their own countrymen shooting at them. How
un
lucky was that?

And finding them here at Calzino? Again, not some black magic. They’d simply had some earthly help called an AIS computer chip.

Yes, Li had studied them and tried to learn as much as he could about them. Just as he knew these people and knew what they had done, he also knew—as maybe the Whiskey Team didn’t—that luck was like something you could pour out of a bottle. Each person had only so much of it, and at some point, it simply ran dry. And that’s what was going to happen to these cowboys now. They were running out of luck. Li could just feel it.

The
Pasha
’s junior bridge officer now served as the battered ship’s commander. Li ordered him to immediately reposition the ship so it was sitting in the center of the harbor, just twenty-five feet off the beach. This took several minutes, and when it was done, the
Pasha
was blocking most of the sight-line from the harbor entrance to the small town itself.

In other words, it was in the way.

Now Li took a monstrous gamble. He ordered the
Pasha
’s weapons crew to man the forward-mounted five-inch gun and
had another crew member turn on the ship’s battery-powered searchlight and point it directly at the recently arrived freighter.

Then Li took the ship’s bullhorn, positioned himself on the stern of his ship, and addressed the newcomers in perfect English.

He informed them that the pirates had taken over the town, had severed all communications, and were holding hostages, including four American females. They would kill them all if the Whiskey Team took any action against them. Zeek expected to leave the harbor at a time of his choosing with no interference from the team.

At that point, Li ordered his gun crew to fire a shell over the top of the freighter. Poorly aimed, the shell nevertheless sailed over the rusty ship, passing through the empty air where, had they not been destroyed, the cargo masts would have been.

Li watched now through his night-vision goggles as the people on the freighter scrambled to what for them must have been battle stations, one man each on bridge-mounted 50-caliber machine guns, one man back to the ship’s tiny work copter. Two more manned the enormous howitzer these crazy people had somehow installed on the bow of their ship.

They also moved the freighter back from the harbor’s entrance and behind the north side jetty, making it less of a target for the
Pasha
’s deck gun.

The pirate ship’s gun crew stayed on station, but only fired that one shot. They had just a single shell left, and Li wasn’t going to waste it.

Now it was time for Li to put himself into the mind of his enemy. The M198 was a powerful weapon—almost too powerful for this situation. If the freighter crew fired it at the
Pasha
, one shot might sink the 352 in seconds. But, because the freighter was rolling in moderate seas beyond the jetty, Li thought it almost impossible that its crew could get an accurate shot at him. And missing in this situation would mean taking out half the town—and that meant endangering the hostages.

And Li was sure the Whiskey Team had no more “smart
shells”; they would have used them during the sea battle. So the chances of a perfectly accurate shot at the
Pasha
were zero, and Li was sure the freighter’s crew knew that as well as he did.

In other words, they were in a standoff.

Li zoomed in his night-vision goggles all the way so he could study the freighter up close.

The first thing he saw after focusing was a man with an eye patch, standing on the freighter’s bow, also with a night-vision device, looking right back at him.

A FORTY-FOOT CLIFF
on the north side of Calzino’s harbor looked out over the jetty that formed one half the entrance to the small island’s anchorage. This vantage point offered a close-up, unobstructed view of the DUS-7 freighter, anchored only a hundred feet away.

Commander Li ordered two of his best men to steal out of the town, climb up the cliff and set up a spy post. From their position, they could practically look right down onto the old freighter; they could even hear the people on board talking. An old pair of walkie-talkies taken from the dive shop kept these men in constant contact with Li.

No sooner were the two spies in place, though, when they reported a strange noise coming from farther out to sea. They could see everyone on the old freighter get their weapons up and ready. They even heard one of the crewmen yell:
“Who the fuck is this?”

A boat was coming out of the north and heading toward Calzino’s harbor at high speed. The spies worried it was law enforcement or even a Seychelles naval vessel. Then they heard raucous laughter and loud music playing, and they could see brightly colored lights draped around the boat’s hull.

They reported back to Li: “This is not the police. It’s the island’s scuba diving boat returning to port.”

Someone on the freighter fired a flare gun; the fiery shell went right across the bow of the dive boat. The boat slowed immediately, and the music and laughter abruptly stopped.

The freighter maneuvered slightly, blocking the dive boat’s entrance to the harbor. In seconds, the small freighter was right up alongside the dive boat.

Watching it all through night-vision goggles, the spies reported the people on the dive boat looked confused and drunk. Sizing up the battered old freighter, with so many armed men on board, the people on the dive boat came to the only logical conclusion.

The spies heard someone on the dive boat yell: “Pirates!”

But then someone on the freighter fired another flare and yelled back: “We’re not pirates. Send some people over. We’ll explain everything.”

The spies saw five people go from the dive boat to the freighter: the captain and his four diving customers, all wearing beachwear, baseball caps and sneakers. They had a quick conversation with the freighter’s crew, distinct in their blue, very
non
-pirate uniforms, and then all went belowdecks.

The two parties emerged a few minutes later. The people in the beachwear climbed back onto dive boat and quickly disengaged from the freighter. They revved their engine and took off at high speed, away from the harbor and toward the southwest.

“They are certainly heading for the next island,” the spies told Li. “They’re probably going to get help.”

Li checked his watch. It would take a boat like that eight hours or more to reach the next island, a hundred miles away.

He hoped his ship would be gone long before then.

As Li was following all this, he heard a commotion back on shore. He saw two pirates were dragging another girl out of the bar, tearing her sundress and forcing her up the stairs to the penthouse.

Another pirate came down, walked to the water’s edge and yelled out to Li: “The Boss wants to know if we are going to be attacked anytime soon.”

Li was perturbed that Zeek would be so cavalier about the situation, but he kept his cool.

“Tell him it’s under control for the moment,” he yelled back. “They will not attack—not just yet.”

BUT LI KNEW
the Whiskey Team
would
attack, somehow, some way. Their reputation depended on it, and it is what they’d done in the past. In fact, he could almost
hear
them plotting aboard the rusty freighter just beyond the jetty. They were cooking up something.

But what would it be this time?

Would they attack his larger force with a lightning-fast air strike as they did against Zeek’s headquarters back in the Talua Tangs? Li thought the Whiskey Team might not because of the hostages involved.

So, would they wait until the
Pasha
put out to sea and fight another ocean battle, this one close-in and more reminiscent of the
Vidynut
incident? Li thought the Whiskey Team probably did not want this either, because this time they would not be fighting a ragtag bunch of Somalis in the ship-to-ship encounter, but rather a large, experienced armed force with a working naval gun
and
innocent lives aboard.

So, again, how would the attack come? Based on his knowledge of the Whiskey Team, Li thought he knew the answer. Other than the area around the harbor, the rest of Calzino’s terrain was impassable. When he Googled the island earlier, the description read: “Made up of impenetrable fields of jagged rocks, an old granite quarry, and hundreds of pools of bubbling tar which present insurmountable obstacles to humans and animals alike.”

This meant the Whiskey Team only had one option left—which was good, because Li would be ready for it.

He took a rubber raft from the ship and traveled the twenty-five or so feet to shore in a matter of seconds. Then he ordered his pirates to assemble in the street. Inside a minute, his small army was standing before him, except the people guarding the hostages, the two spies up on the cliff, and the crewmembers still on the
Pasha
.

Li told them he suspected the freighter crew would attempt a simultaneous attack-and-rescue mission. They would drive
their ship into the harbor to get as close as possible to the
Pasha
for an accurate shot at it with their M198 howitzer. At the same time, they would use their helicopter to locate and rescue the hostages. If they were successful in both these things, the Whiskey Team could then back off and shell the town with impunity, dooming the pirate army.

“These people are worthy adversaries,” Li told his men. “They not only found the
Pasha
moving in the shipping lanes, they successfully forced us into the open and they came close to sinking us and killing us all. So, to be clear, these people
will
attack us—it’s just a matter of when.”

It was a nightmare scenario that rattled many of the pirates. After all, they were brigands and outlaws, not elite soldiers. But Li told them not to worry, as he already had the perfect countermeasures in mind.

He told his men their biggest advantage was in their numbers. Roughly sixty fighters survived the attack at sea, along with twelve ship’s crewmen who could use a weapon if need be. Nearly six dozen AK-47s firing at once would sent up a giant wall of lead, a gauntlet that even a ship the size of the freighter would have a hard time getting through. A ruptured fuel line or some kind of catastrophic explosion would spell immediate doom for the battered ship. Simply killing the tenman crew in a long coordinated, fusillade also would work. Either way, the pirates would present a formidable field of fire—enough, Li told them, to turn the freighter’s mad dash into a suicide mission.

He turned and pointed at the rusty freighter waiting on the other side of the jetty.

“We just need to keep our eyes on their helicopter,” he told them. “When that copter moves, then they will move. They’re reckless, and that means they’re dangerous. We outnumber them almost eight to one. But we cannot allow them to surprise us. So—
watch that helicopter.
When it leaves, that’s when they’ll attack.”

Li put the majority of his men along the harbor seawall, spacing them every five feet or so all along the brief shoreline. The rest of the pirates stood at the doorways of the three
buildings. He ordered them to watch the skies around them at all times.

Li then checked with each man, making sure he knew his role, making sure his weapon was in working condition and that he had enough ammunition. He bolstered them with good thoughts and good morale, while forbidding them to take any kind of drugs until the battle was over. By the time he reached the end of the defensive line, his men were hyped up and just waiting for the freighter to attack.

But deep down, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself, Li was anxious. He prayed for the supply copter to get there soon with the power transfer knuckle and especially the five-inch shells. When that happened, they could repair the ship and fire their five-inch gun at the rusty freighter at will, knowing the cowboys would probably not fire back for fear of hitting the hostages. They might even get lucky and sink the damn Whiskey boat before it even had a chance to attack.

But that all depended on when the supply copter arrived.

Only then would the equation change.

LESS THAN AN
hour later, Li’s prayers were answered.