Thomas Prescott Superpack (70 page)

The AIDS epidemic in Africa had raged for going on twenty years, with no end in sight. It was only a matter of time before someone took things into their own hands. Roger Garret had no empathy for these men, and he would have no qualms advising the President to kill every last one of them, but he understood them. Understood that sometimes violence is the only answer.

The intercom on the phone squawked, “Your conference call is ready.”

Garret hit the flashing button and said, “Admirals.”

Both men chimed their hellos.

Garret said, “I trust your last six hours have been as uneventful as mine.”

“I haven’t finished the Sudoku yet, if that’s what you mean,” came the sharp reply of Dexter Causic, the Chief Admiral of Naval Operations for the U.S. Navy.

His South African counterpart, Admiral Reggie Darcy answered, “Yes, I have been very busy.”

“It’s got to be nearly midnight over there Reggie,” spat Causic. Roger knew the two most powerful men of their respective naval programs were well acquainted.

“Yes, but I do not expect to get much sleep this evening.”

Garret said: “So what exactly are we up against here?”

Admiral Darcy: “I had a recon team do a series of flybys—”

“Those cruise liners have pretty good radar, I assume you took this into account.”

“My guys didn’t break fifty thousand feet. Plus, the radar on that ship has a ceiling of five thousand feet, its purpose is solely so the cruise ship doesn’t run into other boats. Anyhow, it took the better part of four hours, but we finally located the
Afrikaans.
It dropped anchor roughly sixty-seven miles off the eastern coast of South Africa.”

“Is it unusual for a ship to be out that far?”

“Not really. They’re only a couple miles off their intended path. At any rate, when my guys finally located the ship, the sun had set, but we were able to snap some infrared shots. They aren’t much help. We’ll do another round in the morning.”

“Don’t worry about it Reggie,” said Causic. “Just give us the coordinates and we’ll take some satellite images. These guys might have brought some of their own equipment aboard. I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

Reggie agreed.

“Do we have any idea how many pirates are aboard?” asked Garret.

“From the photos we can see three small fishing boats tied to the hull of the ship,” replied Darcy. “Each of these fishing boats could carry up to six passengers.”

“So there could be as many as eighteen of them?”

“Eighteen would be pushing it. Ten or twelve would be my best guess.”

“What about other ships in the area?”

Admiral Dexter said, “Lucky us, we have a Virginia Class nuclear sub in the area, the USS New Hampshire, which just so happened to be asleep thirteen miles off the Somali’s coast.”

Reggie gave a laugh. “Thirteen miles huh?”

“Yep.”

The first twelve miles off any coast belonged to the respective country, after that it was international waters. The international waterways off the coast of Somalia were infamous for their treachery and their piracy. There had been more than fifty attempts to hijack vessels moving through the area in the past three years and a number of them had been successful. There were still nine ships that remained under the control of Somali pirates. A year earlier, there had even been an attempt on a cruise ship, but the cruise liner was able to outrun the fishing boats, using their LRAD, Long Range Acoustical Device, to ward off the pirates’ attack.

“I take it the sub is no longer asleep?” probed Garret.

“She’s headed due south at twenty-five knots. She could be parked there by late Monday.”

“Monday night? That’s two days from now.”

“Sorry, she’s the only ship in the area. But it’s the best of our fleet. We have a Los Angeles class sub halfway between Africa and Antarctica, but she probably wouldn’t get there any faster.”

“How bout you, Admiral Darcy?”

“We don’t exactly have the budget of the US Navy, but the few subs I do have in the water are doing a training exercise off the coast of Angola. They are headed south as we speak, but my girls don’t move as fast as yours. We’d be lucky to have one there by daybreak Tuesday.”

“All right. Admiral Darcy, what are the odds of keeping this thing quiet?”

“Right now, I’d say pretty
good. Only a handful of my best men have been briefed.”

“Good. Do your best to keep a lid on it. If this finds its way back to the States, this thing will explode.” Roger Garret thought about his son, standing in front of the podium of the White House Press room, doing his best to dodge the reporters’ darts. He added, “This is just the beginning. I want to make sure we have our asses covered. If this guy puts us in a position where we feel these people’s lives are in imminent danger, I want to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.”

Admiral Darcy asked, “Have they tried to contact you yet General?”

“No. They haven’t.”

“I don’t know how much you know about these two men, but both have done unspeakable things in the past. I saw the aftermath of the hospital Quaroni took over several years earlier. He executed three doctors and one nurse. All four shot between the eyes. This man does not think of himself as a killer, he thinks of himself as a crusader. He will not blink twice before he kills every person aboard that ship. And I can only hope that Quaroni kills them all before The Mosquito gets hold of them. If he does, everyone aboard the ship will pray for death.”

SHOW LOUNGE

11:34
p.m.

“Here you go.” Lacy handed the small cup of water to Susie and she gulped it down. “How are you feeling?”

“Just a little shaky,” replied Susie.

“Do you want more water?”

Susie nodded—the beads in her hair clacking off one another—and the two headed back to
the women’s bathroom to refill the small cup.

I looked at Frank and said, “You ever have to deal with her not having her insulin?”

“Once the pharmacy gave her the wrong kind and it took a day and a half to figure it out. She wasn’t doing very well by the end.”

I knew diabetes took a while to do its damage and most people ultimately died from kidney failure. But, I also knew diabetes could kill on a whim. And being that Susie was the all-time worst diabetic on the planet, I didn’t see her lasting more than another day. Two tops.

“She’ll be all right. We’ll figure something out.”

If Frank felt encouraged by my words, he didn’t show it.

Lacy and Susie returned. I patted Lacy’s leg next to me and said, “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

Lacy had missed three sets of pills already, and in three more hours, it would be four. She said, “More hungry than anything.”

The last meal I’d had was lamb chops with a mint pesto and rosemary mashed potatoes, followed by a pumpkin creme brulee, but that had been more than twenty-four hours earlier. There had been a point when I could feel my stomach growling, but it didn’t last long. I think my brain saw what Susie was going through and told my stomach to stop being such a pussy.

“Good,” I responded, knowing full well that if Lacy had felt anything, she would keep it to herself. In the case of her temporary blindness two years earlier, she’d kept it to herself for an entire day (close your eyes and see how long you last.)

This made me feel better about having not told Lacy about Rikki. When I’d gotten back to my room that morning, Lacy was still asleep. I joined her and we both slept until past noon. Once awake, she asked me how my night had gone and I told her about the casino, and Mika, and the cafe, but I’d left out the part about my tryst. As for the trystee, over the following days, I kept a lookout for Rikki, scouring the boat for her, but to no avail. I even went to her room once and knocked. I could have sworn I heard her walk up to the door, could feel her looking through the peephole, but she didn’t answer.

Then I realized that she didn’t want to go back to the well. I’d been a one-night-stand.

Needless to say, I was not accustomed to this sort of behavior and I started to have grave concerns about my sexual prowess. Had I not delivered sexually? We’d only had one go, but it was quite the go and she’d been the one to fall asleep afterward. What could I have done differently? Should I have moved this leg here? Should I have gone counterclockwise with my tongue? Should I not have done my Rodney Dangerfield impressions?

This is what I was thinking about when I heard, “How you guys holding up?”

Berta and Reen were standing in the walkway. They were both looking at Trinity.

“Better now,” said Trinity. She had cried for about two hours after being molested by the Warlord. Gilroy was more sympathetic than I expected, only telling her to, “Oh, quit your crying,” six different times.

“How about you guys?” asked Lacy.

“We’re doing alright,” said Reen. “Starting to get a little restless, but we’re a tough bunch.”

Most softball teams are.

“You look familiar,” Berta said, looking at J.J., then her face lighting up, she added, “Oh, you’re the comic.”

“That’s meeeeeeeeeeeee.”

“You were so funny!” cried Reen.

Did these two see the same show I did?

“What was that bit you did on dinosaurs?”

J.J. took a deep breath and said, “And what’s the deal with dinosaurs? Seriously? I mean, how old are they? A gazillion years old. A million gazillion? They’re so old that they were around when they were around. [
Laughing at his own joke.]
They’re so old that dust collects them. They’re so old that they think the
Big Bang Theory
isn’t just a TV Show. [
Laughing at his own joke.]
They’re so old that they went extinct.”

Berta and Reen were laughing uncontrollably. Walter and Marge were both smiling. Even Frank was chuckling.

Was there something that I wasn’t getting? Why did these people find this stuff funny while I wanted to put J.J. through a wood chipper like in
Fargo
.

When Berta got her breath back, she asked Lacy, “Did you really knee that guy in the balls?”

Lacy smiled coyly and said, “You don’t mess with Queen Latifah and Amelia Earhart.” That was what Lacy had named her tits.

The
lesbos got a kick out of this. When they settled down Reen asked, “So what do you think our government is doing?”

For all the alphabet soup of government agencies I’d worked with, I didn’t know much about the bureaucracy of the U.S. of A. As an act of terrorism, I was sure this situation either fell under the jurisdiction of the CIA or NSA, maybe even Homeland Security. But being on the water, I had a hunch if any sort of rescue was to be attempted, it would be at the hands of the U.S. Navy.

On this note Frank said, “It’s still pretty early on, so they’re probably still gathering information. Trying to figure out who these guys are, how dangerous they are, how credible the threat is. But I’m sure the Navy has been alerted and at least a theoretical rescue plan is taking form.”

“By who?” Trinity asked.

“The Navy SEALs. This is their bread and butter.”

I visualized a bunch of guys in black suits crawling up the ship and taking these pirates out
one by one. But the SEALs weren’t plan A, or B, or even F. The SEALs were plan Z. We still had a long way to go before we got there.

But, Frank knew an awful lot about the SEALs and he spent the next ten minutes telling a story about how the SEALs had rescued a group of anti-whaling activists who had been taken hostage aboard a Japanese whaling ship. Frank was an excellent storyteller and everyone, even Walter, was glued to the narrative. When he was finished, the many smiles circling me spoke to the confidence my hostage friends felt that we would be saved in the same climatic fashion.

I was a bit more cynical.

Anyhow, after a short lull, Reen asked, “Do you guys believe this is all about AIDS?”

Well it wasn’t all about AIDS. It was also about a young British girl, but I wasn’t sure how that factored in yet and until I did, I was keeping that information close to the vest. But Gilroy, proving he wasn’t as big of a blockhead as he appeared said, “This isn’t about AIDS.”

I wondered if he’d seen Rikki around the boat. Heck, maybe he’d had his own tryst with her.

He scoffed and said, “It’s about hydrocarbon.”

Okay, so he was a
bigger
blockhead than he appeared.

Who or what was
Hydrocarbon?
Was he one of the Avengers?

“Hydrocarbon?” asked Lacy, with a wrinkled forehead.

“Oil,” clarified Frank.

“Yes, oil,” scoffed Gilroy. “Everything always comes down to oil.”

Except a hijacked cruise ship off the coast of
South Africa
. But maybe Gilroy thought he’d signed up for an 11-day Middle Eastern cruise.