The Pirate Hunters (6 page)

TURK HEARD THE
helicopter coming.

The high-pitched whirring cut like a knife above the deceptively calm sea, sounding eerie and mechanical at the same time.

He was still in the wheelhouse, watching the
Global Warrior
and feeling uneasy. All of the ship’s lights were still on; it was dimly lit from bow to stern. It was still moving north, slowly. He could even see his speedboats, or at least three of them, tied up to its side.

He just couldn’t tell what was happening onboard.

It had been ten minutes since he’d received a message from his men—their orders were to call him every two minutes. He’d been trying to raise Mdoobi or anyone else on the ship for the past eight minutes, with no response.

The only explanation was that Mdoobi’s sat phone must have gone on the blink—and at the worst possible time. Turk had two men and one motorboat left on the tugboat with him. He was about to send these men over to the
Global Warrior
with another sat phone when he first heard the whirring noise.

A few seconds later he saw it: a tiny helicopter coming out of the darkness just to the left of the cargo ship. It was a work aircraft, something usually found servicing offshore drilling platforms or oil fields. But this one had four men hanging out of its open bay, two on each side. They were carrying weapons on their laps. And they were coming right for him.

What was going on here?

He got his answer a moment later.

The four men hanging off the copter turned their weapons toward him. Turk froze. The helicopter whooshed over the bow and the men began strafing his tug with machine guns.

He hit the deck just as a massive barrage crashed into the wheelhouse, covering him with burning glass. The volley took out all the bridge windows, the outer deck rails, the bridge ladder and the safety buoys.

Turk scrambled back to his cabin behind the wheelhouse. He looked for a weapon—a pistol, anything—but found none. The copter doubled back and went into a hover over the tug’s
bridge. The four men fired directly into the wheelhouse. Turk could hear all of his newly acquired electronics being shot to pieces. Then he heard the main mast fall, taking the Morse lamp, the shortwave antenna and the funnel with it.

The copter began flying figure eights around the tug, allowing each pair of gunmen to fire on the vessel at close range. They blew away the aft propulsion hatch, which allowed them to shoot down into the engine room, striking power cables and hydraulic lines. They severed the boat’s steering controls and demolished the tug’s long-range communications antenna and its navigation cone. The tug was now deaf and blind.

Turk hugged the deck, hands over his ears, screaming for the noise to stop. The helicopter was now hovering right outside his cabin’s porthole, letting the gunmen pour fire directly into his quarters. The cabin was systematically torn to shreds. All the furnishings, all his belongings, even the walls were reduced to sizzling metallic splinters.

He crawled to the far corner of the room just as a huge explosion rocked the tug. Its power plants had blown up, lifting the
Yabu
right out of the water. It came back down, hard, and immediately went over on its starboard side. That’s when Turk heard his two remaining crewmen jump ship and try to swim away.

The copter returned outside his cabin, firing more intensely than before. A fire started in the head. Another was blazing out of control in the wheelhouse. A weapon that sounded like a small artillery piece was relentlessly firing at the tug’s lower hull. It finally punched a large hole just below the water line, allowing the sea to rush in. The tug went over, turning completely upside down.

Turk’s cabin flooded quickly, smashing him against the far bulkhead. Suddenly he was under water, looking up at his cabin floor. There was no way out.

Though completely submerged, he could still hear the gunmen crazily firing into the crippled tugboat, using way too much ammunition.

In his last conscious moment, as the water flowed into his lungs, Turk couldn’t help but think: “Who
are
these people?”

Port of Aden, Yemen
The next night

THE PORT WAS
huge.

Almost five miles of docks, tie-ups and harbor slips; massive cranes gliding like dinosaurs in the mist; armies of dock-workers moving nonstop, loading and unloading ships. Forty or more vessels were in process here on any given night, all under a canopy of ghostly sodium light.

This place spanned history itself. To the east, up in the hills, Cain and Abel were said to be buried. To the west, off the place called Steamer Point, the
USS Cole
had its hull blasted open by al Qaeda bombers. Located exactly halfway between India and Egypt, the Port of Aden had been a crossroads of civilization for thousands of years.

Towering over the docks stood a building that looked out of place. Made of ultramodern gray glass and steel, soaring thirty stories above structures built by Cain and Abel’s ancestors, this was the district office of Kilos Shipping.

THE MD-600 HELICOPTER
circled the building twice before landing on its roof. The luxurious copter’s doors opened, and four men dressed in identical suits stepped out. Each held a Steyr machine pistol.

It was close to midnight, yet the four were wearing sunglasses. They scanned the helipad and the roofs of the nearby buildings; they also gave the once over to a smaller, far less opulent helicopter parked on the edge of the helipad. They signaled a fifth man still sitting in the MD-600, and he climbed out. He was Mikos Kilos, shipping magnate and number 201 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men.

He lit a cigarette and began puffing like mad. “My own goddamn helicopter,” he grumbled, “and I can’t even smoke in it.”

Sixty-two years old with a shock of jet-black hair, Kilos had made his fortune as a young man in the 1970s building
cargo ships that could transport dry goods such as grain, electronics and automobiles to the Middle East—then, after being thoroughly washed and cleaned, carry oil back to Europe on the return trip.

During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Kilos’s ships were the only vessels that dared take on oil from Iran’s vast Kharg Island loading facility. Even though they were easy targets for Iraqi aircraft carrying anti-ship missiles, in eight years of war, none of Kilos’s vessels received so much as a scratch—and every gallon of oil they carried was delivered. His profits soared. When he later expanded into container ships and port management, Kilos’s millions became billions. These days, his company operated more than one hundred ships.

One of them was the
Global Warrior.

HIS BODYGUARDS HUSTLED
him off the roof, throwing away his cigarette for him. They escorted him down two flights of stairs to a dark corridor on the twenty-eighth floor.

Only one of the dozens of offices here still had its lights on. A bodyguard opened its door and Kilos walked in. Covered with wall charts and maps, the office was not at all like the palatial suite in London where he usually did his business. In fact, his servants’ closets were bigger and better appointed than this. Yet here he was.

The forty-ish man sitting behind the office desk jumped to his feet at the first sight of him. He was Mark Conley, ex-NYPD detective and now Middle East security manager for Kilos Shipping.

“Relax,” Kilos told him. “It’s only me.”

One of Kilos’s security men retrieved a chair and let his boss sit down. The four bodyguards then took up positions near the closed office door.

“Where are they?” Kilos asked Conley plainly, loosening his tie.

Conley indicated a door that led to an adjacent inner office. “Waiting, in there,” he said.

“And the news is still all good?” Kilos asked him.

Conley nodded. “The
Global Warrior
and its cargo are safe and sound.”

Kilos relaxed considerably. He signaled his bodyguards that they could now wait outside.

“This was a close-run thing, wasn’t it?” he asked Conley once his goons were gone.

“That’s because our opponents were not typical Somali pirates,” the hard-nosed ex-detective told him. “They were a gang run by a guy named Turk Kurjan. He’d been able to take some of that Somali rabble and organize them, and for a very short while, he’d been doing a hell of a job at it. Even the other pirates were afraid of him. Until last night, when our new employees took care of the problem, no muss, no fuss.”

“Who are these guys?” Kilos asked. “Where did you find them?”

“They’re all ex-Delta Force,” Conley said, acknowledging the gravity of his words. “I found them working as rent-a-cops in Saudi Arabia. I heard they were looking to get into maritime security, so I gave them a shot.”

Kilos was immediately wary. “But why would ex-Delta operators be working as rent-a-cops? The world grows more dangerous every day, yet these people were barely employed? You mean, even Blackwater wouldn’t hire them—or whatever it is called these days?”

“They told me they were considered too ‘disruptive’ for Blackwater,” Conley replied. “Or any other private security company.”

“An odd word, ‘disruptive,’ ” Kilos said.

“It has to do with why they were bounced from Delta,” Conley told him. “I did some checking. They went on an unauthorized mission—to kill bin Laden himself. But just when he was in their grasp, Washington told them to let him go.”

Kilos was amazed. “Really?”

Conley nodded. “They were victims of the politics, I guess. An ugly severance from the U.S. military followed, and because all their old friends now work for Blackwater, they wanted nothing to do with them.”

Conley paused, then asked: “Want to meet them?”

“I do,” Kilos said. “I’d like to thank the people who just saved us a hundred million dollars.”

Conley grabbed his laptop and a briefcase and they walked into the adjacent office. Here they found the five men, dressed in black camouflage uniforms, lounging on the office’s three couches. Their exotic weaponry was scattered around the room.

Cowboys.
That was the first word to come to Kilos’s mind. All five were undeniably American in their looks and demeanor. But he could tell they were also hard-bitten, hard-drinking, cynical, bitter—and very tough. They made his bodyguards look like choirboys.

They were all in their late thirties or so, he guessed, but each man appeared old beyond his years. All of them had scars on their hands and faces. One wore a black patch over his left eye. Another had a prosthetic leg.

When Kilos walked in, they slowly got to their feet. He embraced each man, kissing them on both cheeks. They were less than warm in returning the gesture—but it didn’t matter. These men had just done Kilos an enormous favor.

“It is my good fortune that you were available when we needed you,” he told them. “It would have been disastrous if those pirates actually got away with our ship.”

There was only a token amount of mumbled acknowledgment from the five men.

Kilos went on: “I’m also told you kept the gunplay down to a minimum while dealing with those animals—again, just as we had hoped.”

One man spoke up. He had spiked, bleached blond hair, though he seemed a little old for such a style.

“Sure didn’t want to pop any windshields on those BMWs,” he said. “That glass must go for at least a grand, right?”

Both Kilos and Conley laughed. “It was not the BMWs we were worried about,” Conley said. Then he asked, “How much do you know about the pirate gang you squashed last night?”

“Just what you told us,” the man with the eye patch said. “That they attacked a Filipino trawler and a Danish freighter the night before.”

“Well, those ships were carrying stuff off the manifest, too,” Conley revealed. “The Filipino ship had fifty pounds of heroin on board. The Danish ship was carrying illegal ammunition for delivery to Hamas.”

“Did you just say ‘too?’ ” the man with the eye patch asked. “You mean there was something else on your ship besides BMWs?”

Conley contemplated them for a moment, then looked at Kilos. The shipping magnate nodded once and said: “They’re big boys. They can take it.”

Conley opened his laptop and put it on the table in front of the men. “We want to show you something,” he said.

The laptop’s screen came to life and they were soon taking a virtual tour of the
Global Warrior
’s cargo hold, the same place where the men had hunted down and killed four of the pirates the night before.

Though it still looked like a vast forest of stacked BMWs, a digital overlay revealed something else: a cache of large military weapons including rocket launchers, crates of air-to-air missiles, several large antiaircraft guns, armored cars and smart bombs, all shrink-wrapped, all hidden among the used luxury cars.

“This
is what you saved for me,” Kilos said. “Shall we call it ‘secondhand military hardware?’ In any case, there’s more value there than in a thousand used BMWs, especially to the people we’re moving it for. However, if one stray bullet had hit one of those air-to-air missiles, or a smart bomb? The whole ship would have gone up—and you along with it. That’s why we requested you keep the gunplay to a minimum. And
that’s
why we are so appreciative.”

He nodded to Conley, and the security manager opened his briefcase. Inside were several packs of crisp $500 bills held together by rubber bands. Kilos counted out $10,000 for each man and handed it to him.

“We heard the leader of that pirate gang was bad news,” Kilos told them as Conley distributed the money. “Apparently he was nothing like the Somalis who hijack ships using canoes and knives. May I ask you just how you did it?”

The man with the eye patch shrugged. “As soon as we got
on board, we asked your crew to stop one of the engines,” he said, still studying the screen showing the hidden weapons. “We figured at the very least these guys would spot us traveling slow, and so far off the shipping lanes, we’d be too good of a target to pass up. And once they came on board, well . . .”

He let his voice trail off. Kilos knew that was all the explanation he was going to get.