Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

It would give the shooter such a sense of power. Almost orgasmic.

Beck felt warm as he thought about it.

Power. The power of life and death.

Heinrich Beck lit a cigarette and sat watching the smoke rise toward the return duct where the coke was stashed. It swirled a little and dissipated, but the duct sucked it up nonetheless.

The capture of a cruise ship by Somali pirates was headline news worldwide, or would be when Europe and America woke up. The Pentagon received the Flash message from Task Force 151 so knew of it first. The bald facts went from the Pentagon’s duty officers to the White House night staff and assorted other government agencies within minutes.

Jake Grafton was sound asleep at home when he received a call from the CIA situation room. Half awake, he grunted three or four times as he tried to absorb the story.

“The director wants to meet with you and the other department heads at seven thirty.”

“Fine,” Jake said and hung up.

His wife, Callie, had awakened. The incident would certainly not be a secret long, he knew, so he said, “Task Force 151 reports Somali pirates have captured a cruise ship in the Gulf of Aden. About five hundred passengers and three hundred fifty crewmen.”

Callie came wide awake. “Isn’t Toad Tarkington in command of that task force?”

“Yes.”

Toad had served as Jake’s aide for years when Jake was on active duty in the navy. After Jake retired, Toad went on to various assignments and had obviously impressed his superiors with his competence. Now he was a two-star admiral.

Jake knew Toad had probably had a damn rough day in the Indian Ocean, and, if anything, tomorrow was going to be worse. Every politician from Washington to Doha, Beijing and Tokyo was going to tell Tarkington what he had done wrong. Being second-guessed went with the job. Jake forgot about Toad and began mulling the probable reaction of those same politicians after they stopped grousing and started thinking.

He climbed from the bed and padded into the kitchen, where he fired off the coffeepot. Two in the morning, according to the clock in the microwave. As the coffee was brewing, he turned on the television.

Within sixty seconds Fox News had it. News Flash . He flipped channels. Soon all the cable news networks were giving the story a big play. By the time the coffee was ready, one news channel was airing a photo of the ship, Sultan of the Seas, probably one the producer had just downloaded from the Internet.

Callie came in wearing a robe over her pajamas, and together they watched the idiot tube as they sipped hot coffee. The news organizations didn’t have any more details, just the facts as announced by the Pentagon, so the talking heads began speculating. They wondered how much money the pirates would demand as ransom.

A lot, Jake thought.

“My God,” Callie whispered, “I’m glad we aren’t on that ship. And Amy isn’t.” Amy was their daughter.

Jake finished his coffee. “Well, a lot of people are on that tub, and I guarantee you they all wish they weren’t.”

He headed for the bathroom. Might as well shower, shave, get dressed and go to Langley. Before he went to the seven-thirty meeting he wanted to learn everything he could about the capture, read the follow-up message traffic, and talk to the people at the National Security Agency who monitored telephone and radio traffic in Somalia.

In the shower, thinking about the crew and passengers on Sultan, he muttered, “Hang in there, people,” but no one heard him.

* * *

Mustafa al-Said had thirty-two men, three boatloads, aboard Sultan of the Seas . Their main defense against allied warships, airplanes and marines was the passengers and crew that they held captive. The civilians were hostages, pure and simple. If necessary, Mustafa knew he could shoot a handful every hour for a couple of days and still have plenty of people left alive to ransom. Of course, there was a risk. If he started shooting hostages, the enemy commander might decide to attack in order to rescue as many live hostages as possible. Mustafa certainly didn’t want to goad that infidel into pulling a big trigger.

After leaving two men who could actually read a compass to keep a wary eye on the captain and his surviving officers, Mustafa went aft and began assigning topside positions to his men.

Any attack, Mustafa thought, would probably come from the air. Helicopters would hover over the only open area topside, the pool area amidships, which was between the forward and aft superstructures. If attacking helos were allowed to machine-gun the top decks, clearing them of Somali fighters, then they could hover and marines could rappel to the deck. Mustafa was a realist; his men were pirates, not trained soldiers. The people they shot at didn’t shoot back. If more than a handful of marines got aboard, his men would be outfought, killed or captured.

To keep attackers at bay he placed two machine guns forward, half-hidden inside the skin of the ship, with large windows to fire through. He had the men break out the glass. The third machine gun he placed aft, giving it the best possible field of fire. Men with RPG launchers were spotted inside the superstructure, out of sight of any helicopters that might approach, in position to step out and launch grenades when the choppers were in range and flying slowly.

Finally, he sent below for twenty passengers, whom he had tied to deck chairs beside the pool, in plain sight of any helicopter or jet pilot passing by.

While Mustafa was busy with all this, the first woman was raped on the second deck. She was a cook’s helper, twenty-three years old, from Sri Lanka. Three men dragged her to a bunk and took turns raping her while the others held the other three women in the compartment at bay with rifles.

The pirates had been told to leave the women alone, but. They were young, ignorant, illiterate, and bucked with life. They had guns and no one else did. They were going to be rich. Here was opportunity and no one to tell them no. After all, fucking an infidel couldn’t be a sin. Didn’t the Prophet, may He rest in peace, say to kill all infidels?

At first the woman fought. One blow broke her jaw, and she ceased her struggles. Just for good measure, the pirate whacked her with the butt of his gun on the side of her head, caving in an eye socket. She lay comatose as the man ripped off her clothes and opened his trousers. The sight of her naked body and the excitement of the morning had done their work. He spread her legs and jabbed his erect penis in as his mates laughed heartily.

When they had all had their turn, they left, slamming the door behind them.

* * *

USS Richard Ward was the first warship to obtain a visual sighting on Sultan of the Seas. An E-2 was a hundred miles away and had the ships on radar, so their symbols appeared on the computer-driven tactical displays of every ship in the task force, including the flagship, Chosin Reservoir.

Sultan was proceeding south at nineteen knots, which Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington thought was probably her normal cruising speed. If she held this speed, she would make the harbor at Eyl, Somalia, roughly at dawn tomorrow. If she was going to Eyl. Toad certainly didn’t know.

The weather was gorgeous, with just a high, thin cirrus layer diffusing the direct rays of the sun. Visibility was thirty or forty miles; wind out of the northwest off the Arabian Peninsula at five knots, a dry wind. Even the swells of the morning had dissipated until the ocean was a gentle, undulating mirror reflecting the sky.

His staff was sorting though the message traffic from his superiors and dashing off replies. They handed him clipboards full of this stuff, which he quickly scanned and handed back.