Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

Already the toilet facilities reeked. There was no privacy, not with all these people trying to use just three holes in the floor. Many people found squatting difficult, especially on a wet, filthy, slick floor amid the miasma of human excrement.

Eight hundred fifty tired, dirty and emotionally exhausted people welcomed the dawn.

Captain Arch Penney, who had only managed two hours’ sleep and spent the rest of the night reliving the murders of his officers and men, went to see his chief steward, who soon had water boiling for tea. The chief had a small army of crewmen carrying water, cooking and trying to scrape up old garbage for removal.

Penney took a cup of tea back to his cubbyhole for his wife, who accepted it gratefully. Marjorie had joined them and was still asleep beside her.

“What’s going to happen to us, Archie?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“We can’t stay here very long. The older people are going to get sick. Soon we’ll have people in real medical distress.”

“All I can do is talk to the pirates. I think we are here because they have nowhere else to put us. Still, dead hostages won’t get them any money. I’ll see what I can do.”

In the early light he could see her smile, a wan, tired smile. She squeezed his arm and went back to her tea.

The ship’s doctor was a Nigerian in his early thirties, educated in London. He looked stressed to the max. “I brought the medical supplies I could carry with me, Captain. Left a lot aboard in the dispensary. I am afraid we are going to need everything and then some. I’d like to go back to the ship with some crewmen and bring everything.”

“I’ll talk to the pirates,” Arch Penney promised.

People buttonholed him right and left, some with complaints and some with suggestions. Everyone wanted bedding and blankets and more eating utensils.

“I’ll see what I can do,” the captain said.

But he knew he could do little. Only what the pirates permitted, and the hostages’ comfort was not their concern, he thought. The Somalis he saw through the cannon ports on guard duty outside the fortress were in foxholes watching the sky, waiting.

Waiting for an assault, he suspected.

He went to the entrance of the fortress, which had no door, and told the guards there he wanted to talk to Mustafa al-Said. “Mustafa al-Said,” he repeated, slowly and loudly. “Talk.”

They merely nodded and motioned him back inside.

Through a cannon port Arch glimpsed the sun rising on a shiny sea.

INDIAN OCEAN, NOVEMBER 12

Admiral Toad Tarkington read the messages over his morning coffee. Jake Grafton was in charge of the Sultan hostage “situation,” he read, and smiled grimly. Toad had been Jake’s aide, then executive assistant, for years. If the powers that be had put Grafton in charge, Toad suspected the pirates were in for a rough time.

One of the messages was a personal from Grafton asking him for his recommendations on several questions. Could the hostages be rescued? How would he do it? How would he transport them if the Sultan were inoperable? What resources did he have that he could use, and what did he need? The message also asked for all the reconnaissance Task Force 151 could muster. Grafton wanted to know what was happening in Eyl every hour of every day.

Toad called his staff together. They discussed the problem over breakfast in the flag wardroom.

“Why a rescue?” Flip Haducek wanted to know. “Are the ship owners going to pay the ransom, or not?”

“Two hundred million dollars?” Ops asked. “Are you nuts?”

“The pirates will take less. That’s just their opening position for negotiations. And that ship is worth more than that. Maybe twice that. The insurance company will fall all over themselves taking the cheapest option.”

“So what are the people worth?”

“In this day and age, not much. World is full of people.”

“We should offer the pirates ten bucks and their lives and see what they say.”

Tarkington cut off the chatter. “I don’t know what our government intends. I don’t know what the ship’s owners or insurance company want to do. I don’t know what other governments think or their intentions or willingness to cooperate. Let’s answer the questions we have been asked, and people paid more than we are can worry about all of that. Get your people together and start planning. In the meantime, shut down all unofficial Internet access from this task force. No satellite telephone calls. I want no leaks. None.”

“I think there is a journalist aboard, sir. From France. It’s a woman, I believe.”

“She is now incommunicado. Nothing goes out but official encrypted message traffic. Jump on this recon request ASAP.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Several hours later Toad took the time to read the routine messages, which had been sorted by date-time group and placed on a clipboard. It was then that he learned the Justice Department had decided to try the three Somalis the task force had pulled from the water. The admiral was told to put them on a carrier-on-board delivery plane when able and send them to the States, where they would be indicted and tried for piracy.

Well, we gotta do something with them, Toad thought, but we’re so far behind the eight-ball it’s pathetic.

He said a common, crude word, and turned to the next message.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Jake Grafton soon found himself awash in information from Sultan of the Seas . The pirates had Mike Rosen pounding out e-mails to his radio station, and the folks there immediately put them on the wire services as news. Grafton got it about the same time as the cable news shows, which was within minutes after Rosen clicked on the SEND icon.

Rosen could have put everything in one giant e-mail, but he didn’t bother. When he had filled up a page or so, he sent it and began another missive.

Mike was handicapped by the fact he was being held aboard ship and his shipmates were all ashore, except for a couple of guys in the engine room keeping the diesel running that turned the generator that provided a minimum power level to the ship-and to the e-com center and server. He was putting anything that Ragnar wanted the world to know in the e-mails, such as the amount of ransom it would take to buy the kidnapped passengers and crew out of hock, the names and nationalities of the people Ragnar held, how wonderfully they were being treated and vague threats of what might happen to them if the ransom demands weren’t met. The hostages were, Ragnar said through Mustafa, under Ragnar’s protection, secure from the terrorists and unwashed savage hordes that roamed the northern Somali coast. Without the benevolent protection of Sheikh Ragnar … well, the reader was left to consult his fevered imagination for the answer to that contingency.

Yet after he had typed the messages from Ragnar to the world, Rosen typed what he, Mike Rosen, wanted the world to know about the passengers and crew of Sultan of the Seas . The pirates didn’t care what he wrote. After all, they couldn’t read English. Rosen wondered if they could read any of the earth’s languages. The pirates merely talked back and forth between themselves and watched him type.

He e-mailed physical descriptions of Ragnar and Mustafa al-Said, described what he had been told by various witnesses about the events aboard ship, and editorialized shamelessly, which after all was his shtick at the radio station.

A half-dozen of these cyber essays landed on Jake Grafton’s desk at Langley all in a heap. It was late in the evening in Washington and the admiral was exhausted, but he had another sip of coffee and settled down to read them in the order in which they were sent.