A few moments later, the superstructure was crawling with personnel to deal with the unconscious gunmen. Giuseppe appeared at Juan’s side and handed him a water bottle glistening with dew. He walked with Juan as the Chairman headed for the op center. The Italian had to lengthen his stride to keep pace.
“I was thinking,
The only saving grace was that the ship’s ballast tanks were full to make her look heavily laden, so only one of her secret decks was exposed. One round penetrated the executive boardroom and blew through a pair of leather-backed chairs before embedding itself in the far wall. Another entered the pantry and tore apart a pallet of flour so the air became a solid-white curtain of dust. A third exploded into the cabin of an off-duty engineer. He’d been sitting at his desk, watching the battle on the ship’s closed-circuit television system, which saved his legs from the blast of shrapnel, but his back and neck were shredded as though he’d been mauled.
This all happened in the blink of an eye. Mark watched helplessly. He was impotent until the computer told him the second gun was ready.
“Wepps, what the hell?” Juan growled without taking his attention off the delicate maneuver of turning the big ship.
“One more sec . . .”
Murphy’s board turned green, and he unleashed the weapon. The jungle where the technical lay hidden was swept away by the onslaught. Trees up to a foot thick were mowed down like wheat before a combine. One trunk plummeted to the earth, a halo of wood chips choking the area. It smashed into the technical’s bed, silencing its twin cannons, but Mark kept up the remorseless torrent of rounds until the trees were gone and all that remained of the truck and crew was a smoldering ruin of torn metal and rended flesh.
The
Eric gave Cabrillo a look of respect bordering on hero worship. He never would have dared maneuver the ship so fast through such a tight channel.
“Think you can take it from here?” the Chairman asked his helmsman.
“I got her, boss man.” The ship automatically recorded its position using the constellation of GPS satellites. All Stone had to do now that the trickiest corner had been negotiated was run a reverse course through the nava-computer and the ship would steer herself around the tricky swamps and shifting shoals. He already had the coordinates where the derelict fishing boat awaiting Mohammad Didi had been pre-positioned.
Juan got up from his command chair and turned to Giuseppe Farina. “Let’s figure out who you want to keep and who’s going over the side. I want the pirates off the ship before we clear the mangroves.”
He led the Italian observer down several decks to the
The crew had already inflated a large black raft, and the unconscious forms of the pirates had been loosely bound to it. Once they awoke, they would be able to free one another and paddle the raft back to shore. Hux still had the wounded in the medical bay, while the dead would be given burials at sea.
“We’ll take this one and this one and that guy on the far side,” Farina said, pointing to Malik and Aziz. “When they took the ship, they appeared to have some leadership role. Who knows, they might prove to be an intelligence asset.”
“The younger one probably isn’t worth it. Guy smokes more dope than a hippie at a Grateful Dead concert.”
“They no longer tour, you know,” ’Seppe teased.
“You know what I mean.”
“We’ll use him anyway. A little forced detoxification might do him some good.”
Thirty minutes later, Hux arrived in the boat garage with a couple of crewmen acting as orderlies. They wheeled down several gurneys for the injured pirates.
“How are they?” Juan asked.
“We have a casualty,” Hux told him.
“What? Why wasn’t I told?”
“No sense informing you until I had him stable.”
“Who is it? What happened?”
“One of those triple-A rounds penetrated Sam Pryor’s cabin. He took some shrapnel to his back. I pulled out about twenty small fragments. He lost a good amount of blood, and there’s some torn muscle, but he’s going to be fine.”
“Thank God,” Juan breathed, thinking about the reprimand Mark Murphy had coming. He should have had the stern Gatling online much sooner. “So what about these guys?”
“Two have hearing loss,” Dr. Huxley replied in a no-nonsense tone. “I don’t know if it’s permanent, and there isn’t much I could do either way. Couple more have superficial wounds. I dug out the shrapnel, cleaned and dressed them, and pumped them with as much antibiotic as I dared. If they get infected, they’re in for a rough time of it, considering the conditions they live in.”
The two Somalis who’d been shot had been given a nylon satchel. Cabrillo guessed they contained additional medication and written instructions on how to use it. He also guessed the men wouldn’t take the drugs and they would end up on Somalia’s booming black market.
The wounded were set on the raft and the outer door was cranked open. Juan called up to the op center for Eric to bring the ship to a stop. At the leisurely speed they were doing, it took only a few minutes for the pump jets to slow the ship until she was wallowing in the gentle waves like an old sow. Water lapped just below the bottom edge of the ramp. Beyond, Cabrillo could see they were just about to break out of the mangroves. With the tide coming in, the raft would drift westward until it became entangled in the swamp. The men would wake in about an hour, so other than mild dehydration they would be fine.
He helped push the raft until it was sliding down the ramp. It hit the water without a splash, and its momentum carried it a few yards from the ship.
Juan tapped the intercom button again. “Okay, Eric, take us away nice and easy, and when they’re a quarter mile astern open her up and get us to the fishing boat.”
“Roger that.”
A half hour later, Juan and ’Seppe Farina were outside, standing on the wing bridge. Crewmen were at work repairing the cosmetic damage caused by the RPG attacks. Railings were being replaced and scorch marks covered in thick marine paint. Men were slung over the side on bosun’s chairs welding patches to the hull where the antiaircraft rounds had pierced the armor. Other men were inside, restoring the cabins with mattresses and furniture from the ship’s stores. Max Hanley was compiling a list of everything they would need to buy in order to put the old freighter back to her former “glory.”
The
Juan swung a pair of binoculars to his eyes and a moment later saw a speck on the otherwise deserted ocean. It took a few more minutes for it to resolve itself into a fishing boat much like the one that had initially attacked.
“When is the American destroyer going to be in this area?” Juan asked his friend.
“Dawn tomorrow. More than enough time for us to steal off into the night. Didi and the others probably won’t be awake yet, and, if they are, they will be so nauseated by the drug they’ll be as docile as lambs. And do not worry, the boat has no radio or fuel, and the chance someone will happen across it before your Navy is absolutely zero.”
Eric brought the
Cabrillo looked down on the warlord with utter contempt. “We should’ve had your ass Gitmo’d for all the suffering you’ve caused, but that wasn’t my call. The worst cell in the worst jail in the world is too good for you. Imprisonment in Europe will probably feel like a vacation after living like you have, so all that I can hope is that when they hand down that life sentence you have the decency to die on the spot.”
Back on deck he couldn’t help but chuckle. Linc and Eddie had tied Aziz to a chair with a fishing rod in one hand and a bottle of beer taped in the other.
No sooner had the ropes been cast away than Hali Kasim, the
“Pipe it down here.” Juan waited a beat, and said, “Lang, it’s Juan. Just so you know, you’re on speakerphone. With me is our Italian liaison.”
“I’ll cut the pleasantries for now,” Overholt said from his Langley office. “How soon can you be in Tripoli?”
“Depending on traffic through the Suez Canal, maybe four days. Why?”
“The Secretary of State was on her way there for some preliminary talks. We just lost communication with her plane. We fear it crashed.”
“We’ll be there in three.”
SEVEN
OVER THE SAHARA DESERT
The violin was her refuge from the world. With bow in hand she could empty her mind of all distractions and concentrate solely on the music. There was no other activity or hobby that could quiet her thoughts so thoroughly. She often credited it with keeping her sane, especially since accepting the appointment to head the State Department.
Fiona Katamora was one of those rare creatures who come along once in a generation. By her sixth birthday, she was giving violin concerts as a soloist. Her parents, who had been interned during World War II because both had been born in Japan, had taught her Japanese while she taught herself Arabic, Mandarin, and Russian. She entered Harvard when she was fifteen and law school when she was eighteen. Before taking the bar exam, she took time off to sharpen her fencing skills, and would have gone on to the Olympics had she not torn a ligament in her knee a week before the opening ceremony.
She did all this and much more and made it look effortless. Fiona Katamora possessed a near-photographic memory, and required only four hours of sleep a night. Apart from her athletic, academic, and musical talents, she was charming, gracious, and possessed an infectious smile that could brighten any room.
Fiona had over a hundred job offers to consider when she passed the bar, including a teaching position at her alma mater, but she wanted to dedicate herself to serving the public trust. She joined a Washington think tank specializing in energy matters, and quickly made a name for herself with her ability to see causalities others simply couldn’t. After five years, one of her papers was submitted as a doctoral thesis, and she was awarded a Ph.D.
Her reputation within the Beltway grew to the point that she was a regular consultant at the White House for Presidents of both parties. It was only a matter of time before she was tapped for a cabinet post.