Thomas Prescott Superpack (83 page)

Torrey Royal sat upright in the tall black chair in the command center and scanned the faces of the seven other men that had comprised SEAL Team Six. To his left were Chase, Reed, Frost, and Sanchez. To his right were Sam, Pollock, and Deeter. There wasn’t a set of brothers on the planet that were any closer. Each would take a bullet for the other.

So far, they knew little about
Operation Water Moccasin,
only that it would take place in the warm waters 70 miles off the coast of South Africa and they were to rendezvous with a Virginia Class sub at 0800 hours.

Royal turned his attention to DevGru Commander Lawrence Fuller. Fuller had been in the inaugural class of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, so when Fuller spoke the words, “Before we talk specs here, I just want you guys to know I’ll be accompanying you on this mission,” Royal knew
Operation Water Moccasin
would be unlike anything they’d seen in their previous ops.

Glenn Sanchez—a Colorado kid who was the best shot in the Navy, capable of putting a bullet through someone’s pupil from 1500 meters—sat upright and said, “You serious?”

“You think I would kid about this.”

Fuller wasn’t exactly the kidding type.

Pollock, a lanky white kid from South Beach who had beaten Royal by two hundredths of a millisecond in the 200 Free at Nationals and had never let Royal forget it, asked, “You sure you’ll be able to keep up, old man?”

At the age of 56, Fuller could swim farther and drink more than each of the eight men sitting down before him. “With you fucking pansies? No sweat.”

All eight of them laughed.

Fuller flicked a switch and a three-dimensional hologram of a cruise ship hovered over the oval glass table in front of them. This was Royal’s third time aboard the Mercury and each time he got the sense he was sitting on the Starship Enterprise.

“This is the
Afrikaans
,” said Fuller. “It’s a luxury cruise liner. Two hundred and eight passengers, a hundred and sixty-four person crew. Yesterday the ship was hijacked by African pirates.”

Over the course of the next hour,
Six was brought up to speed on the situation, the opposition, and the layout of the
Afrikaans.

The plan was laid out and drilled into each of them for the next hour. When Fuller was finished, Deeter, at 24 the youngest of the SEALS by three years, started clapping his hands together. Sanchez soon followed suit. And within seconds, all eight of them were thumping in unison.

THE BRIDGE

1:33
a.m.

Neither man had said a word to her as they dragged her up the stairs, but she could tell from the smirks on their faces—especially the gap-toothed one with the beret whom Thomas had referred to as the
Warlord
—that finding her was the equivalent of finding a Monet at a garage sale.

Once they’d reached Deck 7, the Warlord had made her walk to the front of the ship and into a control room of sorts. On the glass door it read, “Bridge.”

They pushed her down in a chair and both stared at her. The man on the left, the one Thomas had referred to as the
Professor
, looked like just that. In his high collared gown and expensive glasses he looked like he should be teaching Anthropology at Georgetown University.

The Professor said, “Rikki Drough.”

Rikki found herself nodding.

“Where have you been?”

In any other situation, this would have been a simple question. She decided against a narrative of her last day and a half and simply said, “I’ve been in the hot tub.”

To her surprise the Professor laughed. Then he said, “Well, I highly doubt that.” He paused. “No matter. We have you now.”

Yes. Yes, they did. They
had
her.

Rikki wondered if their plans included letting her go. But then she remembered the bomb. No one on the ship would be let go. Including her. Unless. Unless, her dad—Track—was smart enough to make them release her. Maybe, this wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe she would be the one person who would survive this mess. Track hands over a couple hundred thousand and they put her in one of those boats and say, “Bon Voyage.”

But as she glanced up at the Warlord, all hope of her survival vanished. She did not have one iota of doubt this man was going to kill her.

“Will your father pay?”

She turned her gaze back to the Professor. She thought about the question. How could she know? She didn’t even know the guy, had never laid an eye on him. Once, she thought she’d seen a man at her restaurant that resembled the pictures she’d seen of him in the tabloids, but if it were him, he would have said so. Right?

She asked, “How much?” She hadn’t expected the question coming out. It just had.

“Two billion dollars.”

“Two
billion
dollars?”

He nodded.

Rikki didn’t even know if her father had two billion dollars. In truth, she hadn’t wanted to know. But then she thought back to the article that she read. He
was
the 11
th
richest man on Earth. She didn’t know what that computed to. She’d heard in passing that Bill Gates was worth something like 60 billion, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what her father was worth. Now, thinking about it, he must have billions. Her gut told her Track Bowe would not pay, but she couldn’t just laugh and say,
Are you kidding me? Two billion dollars. You’d have a better chance drinking the ocean than getting my old man to fork over a hundred dollars, let alone two billion
.

If she said this, she might already be dead. Or even worse, the Professor might just nod at the Warlord and tell him he might as well have some fun.

She looked the Professor hard in the eye and said, “Yes, he will pay.”

He smiled.

“How did you know he was my father?” she asked.

The Professor leaned back. He appeared reluctant to answer the question. But then either deciding it didn’t matter because she would soon be dead or because he thought in some way maybe she deserved to know, he answered. “We have been looking for the right person for three years. We pay very expensive people to investigate prospective—” he paused, thinking for the
right word, then apparently finding it, added, “—clients.”

She found this hard to believe. There were only three people on the planet that knew of her connection to her father. One was her. The other was him. And the third, her mother. If anyone else had made the connection, it would have been plastered on the front page of every tabloid on the planet:
Track Bowe has Illegitimate Child.

But then again, she wasn’t sure what
very expensive people
were capable of. Maybe they were able to hack into her bank account and somehow connected the large deposits to Track. Still, it was one thing to find a connection to a millionaire, it was another to find a connection to the 11
th
richest man on the planet. Too big of a coincidence for Rikki.

“Well, you hit the jackpot, didn’t you,” she said defiantly.

The Professor shrugged with his face, then said, “We shall see.”

He then turned and walked to one of the many control panels behind him and popped open a beautiful briefcase. From fifteen feet away, Rikki could make out a laptop computer among other electronics. He returned with a small video camera. He stopped five feet shy of her and pointed the camera in her direction. Rikki watched as he adjusted the zoom and framing. When he was satisfied he gave a slight nod to the Warlord.

The Warlord smiled, reared back, and smashed his fist into the side of her face.

PTUTSI

1:52
a.m.

“W
e’re here.”

Gina lightly shook the resting Timon, and said again, “We’re here.”

Timon leaned up, his eyes flashing intense pain. He gazed around, his eyes opening even wider. A small smile seemed to appear on his face, but it was hard to tell because his face looked like a punching bag. He said, “Yes. Yes, we are.”

But they weren’t the only ones. For the last ten miles, it had been bumper-to-bumper traffic. The hundreds of vehicles that had been in front of her now filled the expansive plains on both sides of the road as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of buses and rusty sedans were now empty, their passengers somewhere up ahead. And that wasn’t to mention the exponentially increasing foot traffic.

The Jeep was parked off the battered road, slipped between two rusty cars, situated at the crest of a large hill. A three-quarter moon lit the small village at the base of the hill five hundred feet below in a soft glow. Two sets of fences, as the literature had promised, surrounded 50 small thatch huts. Gina understood why Timon had smiled. It was beautiful.

But the beauty of the small village wasn’t the reason Gina was leaning forward, almost standing behind the wheel. On the long expanse of hill in front of them—maybe a half-mile of open field—there were well over a thousand people. Many of the truck beds were still littered with the sick and feeble. Others sat in circles in the grass. Others cooked over an open fire. Gina was prepared to see a vast assembly, but the sheer number of people was remarkable.

Gina turned her attention to Timon, giving him a quick evaluation. His blood pressure and pulse were good. She checked the wounds and save for a small amount of bleeding, they looked better than she expected. She cleaned them, then changed the bandaging. She put another couple of Vicodin on Timon’s tongue and after taking them he mumbled, “I like medicine.”

Gina laughed.

She then grabbed Timon’s backpack and took out some food. She ripped a banana into small pieces and fed it to the quickly fading Timon. She gave him another dose of Cipro, and minutes later he was snoring through a swollen nose.

Timon’s snoring was broken by a low chime. It took Gina a moment to find the phone. She answered the call, “South African Child Rescue, Gina speaking.”

“Good one,” Paul said.

Gina could tell from the two words alone the man was exhausted. She imagined the deep crease between his two dark eyebrows. After a moment’s pause, he said, “Are you there?”

“Yeah, we actually got here about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Any trouble?”

She decided against telling him about the
trouble
and said, “Nothing we couldn’t handle.”

He let out a breath. She knew he wouldn’t push her. He asked, “How are the roads?”

“The roads leading into Ladysmith were okay, but after that they were pretty rough. The last fifty miles was all dirt.”

“And the village?”

“It’s there.” She paused then added, “I think you should know that thousands of Africans have made their way to the village.”

“I heard.”

She listened as he recounted the news report.

“We didn’t see any news vans.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re surrounded by ten white vans when you wake up, don’t be surprised.”

Gina asked him about the Red Cross and the promised AIDS relief.

“They deny any responsibility. We’re having trouble tracing the ads, but it would appear—to me at least—that the ads were paid for by the pirates. They think if they can get a couple thousand sick Africans to that village, it will force our hand.”

“And will it?”

“You know we can’t cave to their demands. It would be one thing if these Africans just came to the village, it is entirely different when they are threatening the lives of four hundred individuals.”

“And what are the other countries doing?”

“Well, all the countries in the UN have the same policy so at this point they’re all standing down. Our biggest problem is private organizations. Even yours.”

“The World Health Organization?”

“Yeah, they want to send in a team of doctors and tons of medicine. The order had to come from the President himself that they would do no such thing. He threatened to court martial any party that interceded on behalf of the United States.”

“And organizations from other countries?”

“So far so good. Most of the other organizations aren’t heavily enough funded to do any real damage. Plus, I just got word the South African army will be setting up roadblocks sometime tomorrow. They will continue to let Africans in, but I hardly think a team of doctors will get through.” He hesitated, as if remembering something, then asked, “Did the South African Rand trade above ten?”

“Yeah, just over,” she lied. No sense getting into an argument over currency at a time like this. She added, “You sound exhausted.”

“I was exhausted five hours ago. There isn’t a word for what I’m feeling right now. I probably sat in on twenty hours of meetings the last two days and I’ve held eight press conferences. At this point, I’m not at liberty to disclose anything so the press is getting restless. They’re ripping me to shreds.”