Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

Moved on toward the west side of the field and started back to our camp. I knew my guys would be alert and ready, so I used the mike to call them.

“Have a nice walk?” Travis asked.

“You bet. Outposts on the north and south end, guys in the watchtower, at least five pickups with guns. I managed to spike the gun in the tower and one in a pickup in the hangar. No airplanes.”

“What about the others?”

“We’ll take them out if and when.”

“Did you leave tracks?”

“Yep. Nothing I can do about that. Dirt is pretty hard, though. I’m betting they don’t notice them. Just in case, we’ll keep one guy on guard duty around the clock. Four hours on, eight off.”

“Want a beer?”

“Sure.”

I had about finished it when Jake Grafton called on the satellite phone. I made sure the others weren’t listening. When I had reported, he gave me a tentative “this is what we’re planning” heads-up. I listened, didn’t say anything. He told me about Mike Rosen’s e-mail, relaying a threat from Ragnar to kill everyone if the ransom wasn’t paid within a week.

“How the hell is he gonna do that?” I asked. “Machine-gun them?”

“If anyone runs, yes, he’ll probably do that. Now, tomorrow, next week. But we think he’s off-loaded tons of fertilizer from a ship he hijacked in September. The insurance company wrote off the ship, which is lying in the mud below the fort. It’s possible he stuck some of that stuff under the fort, or in the old magazines and sealed them off. We’ve got some aerial recon from the navy, and we could use anything you guys can get with the drones.”

“Been windy here today, too windy for the drones. Still blowing pretty hard.”

“Then go eyeball it up. Tonight.”

“Roger, eyeball.”

“Even if we pay the ransom,” Grafton said, “the Shabab may try to kill the hostages. Probably by setting off that crude bomb.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“I don’t know anything for a fact. I have rumors and possibilities. Threats. I want you to check out what is physically there, to the extent you can.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

He told me what he knew about the fort. I had already studied the satellite images, but he told me things the images didn’t reveal. I didn’t ask where he got his information, although of course I was curious. I didn’t have a need to know. That’s sorta the way it goes in the CIA, the mushroom agency.

When he ran down, I told him, “When this is over, I want out.”

“Out of what?”

“The CIA.”

“Any particular reason?”

“A dozen or two. First and foremost, I am tired of killing people.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s at the top of the list.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Tommy, there are eight hundred fifty civilian prisoners in that fortress, give or take.”

I didn’t say anything.

“These pirates are not nice people,” Grafton remarked. “The Shabab dudes are even worse.”

He had a bad habit of stating the obvious when I wanted some insight, profound or stupid. I thought I was used to it, but it irritated me occasionally, like now.

“The only nice person I know is my mom,” I shot back, “and I’m not really sure about her.” That was a lie, but I was in no mood for a pep talk from Grafton … or anyone else.

Grafton apparently got the message. “Let me know how it goes,” he said, quite superfluously. “Good night.” He hung up.

I sat there a while with the phone in my hand, then put it back in its cradle.

Yeah, the world is full of assholes. We can’t kill them all. Even if we could, what would that make us?

THE FORTRESS

The people in captivity settled down to another long evening. Somehow the ship’s cooks managed to prepare enough food to feed all eight hundred fifty people, which was quite a feat over open fires. They even made enough tea to give everyone two cups. Coffee was more precious, and was all gone by the time Suzanne and Irene got to the pots. They took tea and loaded it with sugar, a treat women their age didn’t often put in their mouths.

The sisters found a spot to sit while they nursed the cups of hot, thick, sweet tea. “What is that smell?” Irene asked. “This place reeks of it.”

“What I wouldn’t give for a bath,” Suzanne mused. “Hot water, shampoo…”

All around them tired, hungry, dirty people were gobbling the food as fast as they could shovel it in. Not everyone was eating, though. Some of the elderly people didn’t bother. Merely drank tea or coffee and sat staring at nothing at all, or holding hands, or whispering with someone beside them.

The ship’s crew, men and women, didn’t mix with the passengers. They hung out in little groups, apparently self-selected because of nationality. The Brits in one group, the Indians in another, the Indonesians in a third and so on.

“Have you seen Rosen?” Suzanne asked Irene.

“No.”

“I hope he’s okay.”

“Yeah.”

Suzanne got up to get a refill on her tea. Her route took her past a knot of ship’s officers, who apparently didn’t realize she was in earshot.

“… took her this evening,” one of them said.

“Did they say why? When they’d bring her back?”

“I only know they took her. Didn’t say a word. Just grabbed her by both arms and hauled her off. Her daughter had hysterics. That al-Said rotter was leading them.”

Suzanne butted right in. “Who did they take?’”

“Nora Neidlinger. From Denver.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Unfortunately, I’m not.”

“What are you people doing to get her back?”

The captain came over. Arch Penney. “Suzanne … sorry, Ms.…?”

“Ranta.”

“Ms. Ranta, we’re doing everything we can.”

“Which is nothing.”

“Ms. Ranta-”

“They’re going to rape her.”

The statement hung in the fetid air like a wet fart. “I don’t know, Ms. Ranta. They told us nothing. Merely took her.”

“Jesus, you can’t-”

“Ms. Ranta,” the captain said in his best no-nonsense tone. He could have stopped a riot with that steely voice. “Get a grip. We are doing what we can, whenever we can. The object of this exercise is to feed and house everyone … keep you alive, get you home safely.”

“Remember Nine Eleven?” Suzanne demanded.

“Nine Eleven?”

“They wanted to murder everybody. This Shabab thing is part of al Qaeda.”

Arch Penney seized her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “We are doing everything we can,” he said softly, almost a whisper. “It won’t help for you to panic these people. Look around you. Don’t you see? They’re right on the edge now.”

EYL AIRPORT

I talked to my drone guys, Wilbur and Orville, just to make sure. Those weren’t their real names, of course, but they answered to them. Orv whipped out a pocket device he held up in the wind. It had an analog wind speed gauge attached.

“Gusting over twenty,” he said. “Might crash it or lose it, and we can’t get more of them out here.”

Travis, E.D. and I put on our night-vision goggles, picked up our gear and set out. The best way to get to the fort was to walk since it and the airport were on the same side of the river. I just needed help spotting the people so I could avoid them.

When we got to a little rise where we could see the fort, we used the infrared scopes on the silenced sniper rifles-not the big Sakos-and night-vision binoculars, to check it out. We could see the black presence of the old fort, the roads, the paths, the guards-I assumed they were guards-around that big pile of masonry, and we could see a hot spot that had to be the remnants of the evening cooking fire.