Operation Caribe

PART THREE


The Sugar Men





11

Aden, Yemen

MARK CONLEY ARRIVED at the Kilos building an hour before sunrise.

Coffee in hand, he took his seat inside the OSS suite, glanced at his computer screen and let out a long sigh. More than three dozen requests for Whiskey’s services had come in overnight. Representatives from the governments of Japan, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Spain were inquiring about the team’s availability. Companies from Greece, Taiwan, Sri Lanka and The Netherlands were also hoping to book them. They’d even received an inquiry from someone at a company in Los Angeles that simply said, “Call me.”

“We should just franchise this thing,” Conley thought aloud as he began the process of transferring the voice messages to text. “Then they can take over this whole freaking building.”

A letter was waiting on his desk. It was postmarked the Bahamas, three days before. Inside was a funds transfer slip from the Royal Bahamian Bank of Nassau to the Kilos-controlled OSS account in the First National Bank of Aden. The transfer was for five million dollars. An attached note read: “Wish you were here.” It was signed by Batman Bob Graves.

Wiseass, Conley thought.

The day went on. Conley split his time between OSS stuff and his real job of running Kilos Shipping’s Middle East security department. By 11 A.M., he was ready for lunch.

He left the Kilos building and headed for the docks. There was a falafel stand down there that actually sold hot dogs. Hebrew National hot dogs, yet.

Conley ordered his usual: three pups and a Saudi Arabian Pepsi. Packing it all in a brown paper bag, he headed back to the office.

Upon crossing San’nah Street, though, he found his way blocked by a huge black limousine.

As he approached, the limo’s rear door opened. A large man inside was beckoning to Conley.

“Hello, friend of my friends,” the man called out to him.

He was wearing a thick wool suit and had hands the size of baked hams. His skin was pasty white, his teeth were gold and yellow, and his nose appeared to have been broken so many times, the cartilage didn’t know which way to go next. Judging by the bulge under the man’s suit coat pocket, he was packing a firearm the size of a small cannon.

Conley knew who he was right away.

“Comrade Bebe, I presume?” he asked.

“And you are ex-Big Apple cop?” the man replied. “Good to meet you.”

Bebe was the Russian gangster who’d hired Whiskey to provide security for a cruise ship full of Russian mobsters during a trip through the Aegean Sea not two months before. As unlikely as it seemed, the gangster took a liking to the team and had provided them with crucial information about how to finally track down and kill Zeek the Pirate.

Conley had heard so much about Bebe from the team members that he would have known him anywhere.

But what was he doing here, in Aden? In a limo that barely fit through the narrow streets? And in that suit? It was almost 95 degrees and it wasn’t even noon.

“Ride with me,” he said to Conley. “I’m just needing a few minutes.”

Armed only with his hot dogs and soda, Conley climbed into the limo and it sped off. Bebe took his lunch bag from him, looked inside, and then passed him an envelope full of photos.

“Do you know this man?” Bebe asked him.

Conley studied the photos. They showed a slight, well-dressed Asian man going in and out of various buildings, walking along the street, sitting in a park. All of the photos were candids, as if the man had been under surveillance, and the locations ranged from slums to typical Chinese streets to a building that looked nothing short of Shangri-la.

The photos were blurry in spots, but that didn’t matter. Conley knew who the man was: Sunny Hi.

He was one of the most dangerous criminals in the world, yet virtually unknown outside Asia. Boss of the Shanghai crime syndicate, Sunny Hi commanded an underworld organization so vast, its tentacles had a stranglehold not only on all of China, but on every other country along the Pacific Rim as well. Drugs, money laundering, prostitution, arms sales, murder for hire—Sunny Hi was so powerful, the ruling elite in Beijing reportedly kissed his ring whenever he requested a private meeting with them.

At his core, Sunny Hi was a pirate. His gang started out hijacking ships in the South China Sea, killing their crews, unloading the stolen cargo on the black market and then selling the commandeered ships themselves. Weapons and heroin dealing followed, as did white slavery and contract hits, and finally, a thriving business in child prostitution. His personal fortune was said to be more than $70 billion. His immediate gang numbered in the thousands; his activities affected, directly or indirectly, millions of people around the world.

But he was famously known never to have had his photo taken, or even be seen in public, which was why Conley was surprised to see so many images of him now.

“He is usually like a bug who crawls out only at night and in places where you cannot see him,” Bebe explained. “But more of late, he shows himself in the daytime. He even walks streets with his wife sometimes. He is trying to make it look like he’s leaving the criminal world behind because something grave has happened in his life. But it’s all show when it comes to his business. Inside dope says he’s as evil as ever.”

Bebe singled out a photo that showed Sunny Hi looking down into the cargo hold of a ship that was literally full of young females, several hundred at least, presumably being shipped out for prostitution around the Asian continent. They looked like cattle, and judging from the demeanor of some of the heavily armed guards also caught by the interloping camera, anyone who resisted was most likely beaten or killed, just to make an example.

“Sunny Hi has been scum of Earth,” Bebe concluded. “And when you hear that coming from man like me, you know I’m serious. I mean—criminal or not, we all have to make living, no? But selling these girls? Killing those who resist? Torturing their families? Even I know these things are wrong.”

Bebe lit up a cigarette.

“This man affects maybe one quarter of people on planet right now,” he went on. “In five years, maybe half. In ten years, the way Chinese dragon is behaving, who knows? Maybe he will control entire world?”

Conley put all the photos back in the envelope and tried to hand it back to Bebe. But the Russian insisted he keep it.

“I know you and your friends have major beef with Sunny Hi,” Bebe told him. “He was money man behind the departed Zeek. Plus, you and friends know this man is capable of many bad things. So, you must stop him somehow. Especially now that he loosens up, showing himself more in the light.”

Conley was more than a little surprised.

“Us?” he asked Bebe. “Why us?”

The gangster smiled, displaying his mouth full of dingy, gold-capped teeth.

“Because these days, you are superheroes,” the Russian said. “And no one else will dare do it. No country. No mafia. No military will go after him. They are afraid or too busy elsewhere. Fate of world is in your hands.”

With that, Bebe signaled his driver to stop. The limo door opened and Conley realized they were back where they started on San’nah Street.

“Take my word for this,” Bebe went on. “Now is time to whack this monkey. It won’t be easy. Will be very dangerous, in fact. I will be in touch with more information on his location, but I know foolproof plan is needed here because this man is not stupid. He is very, very smart. But you must help world. Save kids. He is pirate. You are pirate killers. Think it over.”

Conley stepped out onto crowded San’nah Street. Bebe waved to him, then closed the door and the limo roared away.

Only then did Conley realize Bebe still had his hot dogs and soda.



The Gulf of Siam

One week later

THE HONG SONG STAR was a mid-sized, Kilos-owned freighter home-ported in Ko Si Chung, Thailand.

Sailing off the Thai coast, one day out of port, the freighter was overtaken by pirates. Ten of them in all, they approached in a large motorboat, hooded and armed with machine guns. Climbing a ladder left unattended on the bow, they quickly rounded up the crew and seized the bridge without firing a shot.

In all, it took less than five minutes for the Hong Song Star to fall to the hijackers. In its cargo hold was 12,000 tons of sugar, worth about eight million dollars. Or at least that’s what it said on the ship’s manifest.

The pirates immediately locked the crew in the engine room, giving them plenty of food and water and DVD players for entertainment. There they remained while the hijackers repainted and renumbered the ship. By the next morning, the freighter had been rechristened the Ocean Song.

At noon that day, the crew was brought back up on deck and fed a hot meal. While they ate, a fleet of Vietnamese fishing boats approached in the distance. Confirming with the freighter’s captain that all was OK, the pirates put the crew overboard in life rafts. The Vietnamese fishermen picked them up within minutes. The master of the fishing fleet immediately radioed the International Piracy Center and reported what had happened.

Meanwhile, the hijacked ship disappeared into heavy fog to the east.

Only once the Vietnamese fishing boats were out of the ship’s sight did the pirates finally take off their masks.

There were ten of them in all: the five Senegals and the five members of Team Whiskey.

“If hijacking ships is really that easy,” Batman said, throwing his mask into the sea, “maybe we’re in the wrong business.”

* * *

AN HOUR LATER, a Chinook helicopter appeared over the ship.

Flying out of a secret Royal Navy installation near Singapore, the copter hovered about fifty feet from the freighter’s stern while two men slid down an access rope, both landing with a thump.

One was Dr. Alan Stevenson, the ex-Special Air Service physician who had hired Team Whiskey almost two months before to retrieve the mother of all microchips after it had been buried on an island off Zanzibar. The second man was also ex-SAS, a surgeon named Dr. Mace.

The Senegals helped them to their feet and picked up their heavy bags. Stevenson gave a thumbs-up to the copter pilot, and the huge aircraft flew away.

Both doctors were quickly brought below.



Two hours later

BATMAN KNOCKED TWICE on Nolan’s cabin door and went in.

He found his friend sitting on his bunk, eye patch in place, staring into space.

“Are you ready for this?” Batman asked him.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Nolan replied.

Batman said, “I mean, are you sure you want to go through with it?”

Nolan shrugged. “No, I’m not—but I’m going to do it anyway.”

Batman shook his head. “You realize we’re not so deep into this thing that we can’t call it off. Who would know?”

Nolan shrugged again. “Well, I’d know. And so would all the people this guy has terrorized or will terrorize. It’s a long list.”

Batman started to say something but stopped. He knew it was virtually impossible to change Nolan’s mind once it was made up. Still, he felt he had to at least talk to him about it.

He pulled out a joint, lit it and offered Nolan a toke. Nolan just waved the smoke away.

“Don’t let those SAS guys see you smoking that,” he told Batman.

Batman laughed. “Who do you think I got it from?”

Nolan retrieved a beer from his fridge and opened it. “Just what I want to hear,” he said glumly.

He still hadn’t gotten over the strange incident in the Bahamas a week before. The non-attack on the Muy Capaz hideout kept replaying over and over in his mind, taunting him, making him more uneasy than usual. Things just hadn’t seemed the same since.

Batman started up again. “We’re talking about something pretty drastic here,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it since we dreamed it up. We’ve all done undercover stuff before, as well as the disguise thing—but never to this degree. You’re the group leader. Nothing says you have to go.”

Nolan drained his beer and opened another. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately either, always a bad sign.

“We’ve gone over this a hundred times,” he told Batman wearily. “Two people have to do this gig. Twitch can pass for just about any race on Earth and he speaks a bit of the language—so, aside from the fact that he’s freaking nuts, we’re lucky there. But he can’t go alone; someone has to watch his back. Gunner would be perfect, but he’s just too big for this part of the world. Crash admits he wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut, and neither could you. So, that leaves me.”

“Leaves you doing a charity gig, you mean,” Batman reminded him. “They’ll be no payday for this one. No tip. In fact, it’s costing us money.”

Nolan drank his beer. “We already got a pile of money in the bank. It won’t hurt us to do a freebie every once and a while.”

“OK, Charlie Chan,” Batman finally told him, taking another toke and then stubbing out the joint. “It’s your fortune cookie.”

Nolan finished his second beer, crushed the can and fired it into his wastebasket.

“Just show me the weapon,” he told Batman.

Batman took a small plastic case from his pocket. He opened it to reveal a tiny white ball, no larger than the head of a pin. Nolan had to get his good eye up close to it to even make it out. “You sure that isn’t a head louse or something?” he asked.

Batman picked up the tiny ball with his fingertips. “It’s ricin, compliments of your friend, Bebe. One of the most lethal poisons on earth. If you look closely, you can see it’s embedded in a tiny sphere of wax. Now, that wax outer coating is tough, but it will dissolve in about a second in the presence of heat. So, if this goes into hot food or drink, it will work in a few minutes. But if it’s somehow injected into the blood stream, it will work almost instantaneously.”

Batman put the tiny ball back into its case and gave it to Nolan.

“Uric acid will neutralize it,” he said. “But even then, it’s still hazardous. So, be careful with it at all times. It’s very nasty stuff.”

* * *

FIVE MINUTES LATER, Nolan and Batman walked into the ship’s makeshift sick bay.

Stevenson and Mace were waiting for them. Both physicians were wearing scrubs, rubber gloves and untied surgical masks. Both looked particularly grim.

The first thing Mace did was show Nolan a large syringe, big enough to treat a horse. It was filled with a clear fluid.

“This is methoxsalen,” Mace said. “It’s an anti-vitiligo drug. It’s been around for years and has no side effects—except the obvious reaction. With your permission?”

Nolan rolled up his sleeve and allowed Mace to inject him. He was then led over to a hastily prepared operating table and asked to lie down. Mace and Stevenson tied up their surgical masks while Batman retreated to the corner.

Nolan’s eye patch was removed. He could see the doctors wince as they looked into his empty, damaged socket.

Mace retrieved another syringe, smaller, but filled with a hideous-looking red fluid.

“This will help a bit,” Mace said. “Not a lot, though.”

He injected it just below Nolan’s jaw. It felt like a dagger going in, but the pain was quickly replaced by a dulling sensation. In a few seconds, Nolan felt paralyzed from his neck to his nipples.

Out of the corner of his good eye, Nolan could see Mace was holding a large sewing needle and a long string of black thread.

“Are you ready, Major?” Mace asked him.

Nolan couldn’t speak—so he just gave a weak thumbs-up.

The procedure began.

* * *

THE FIRST PART of the operation lasted just fifteen minutes—but that was the only good thing about it. Even though his neck muscles were numb, Nolan still felt the pain every time the sewing needle pierced the skin above his throat and tightened it just a little more. It was like someone was slowly strangling him.

Once the surgeons had finished, they produced a small paint can and a pair of brushes. They stripped off Nolan’s clothes and proceeded to coat his entire body with a solution from the can.

“Highly diluted nitric acid,” Mace told him. “Normally this would turn pale skin to bright yellow, but when used in conjunction with the methoxsalen? Well, let’s just see what happens.”

The ten-minute application filled the room with a nauseating odor. Then the doctors performed two more suturing procedures, this time on Nolan’s eyes. Because no painkiller could be used so close to his optic nerves, he again had to take the sting each time the surgical needle went in and out of his skin.

Next the doctors brought in a portable dentist’s drill. Like everything else in the operation, it was courtesy of the SAS special equipment division.

Mace hooked up the drill to its battery pack and proceeded to bore a tiny hole about the size of a golf ball dimple into Nolan’s number seven incisor. Into this, Mace inserted a tiny one-way radio. This would allow anyone on the other end to hear every conversation going on around Nolan—an ironic twist, it would turn out. This procedure could not be done with Novocain, though, as any residue might interfere with the radio’s signals. So, once again, Nolan had to endure the pain.

When that was done, Mace used yet another large syringe to inject Nolan’s lips with a massive amount of collagen.

It was at that point Nolan realized Batman had been right. This was absurd. If he were married, if he had a wife and kids, or just some significant other, he would never have considered doing any of it.

But in reality, he had nobody—and thus, nothing to lose. Maybe that was why he was going ahead with it.

Truth was, he wasn’t really sure himself.

* * *

AT LAST, ALL the cutting and sewing was done.

Mace looked down at Nolan, flashing a small light in his good eye.

“Still with us, Major?” he asked.

Nolan could barely nod in reply.

Mace showed him one last hypodermic needle.

“Novapol,” the surgeon said. “It will help you sleep.”

The SAS surgeon injected him yet again, then said, “Count backward, slowly, from one hundred.”

The two doctors then replaced the surgical light with an ultraviolet lamp. Nolan could feel its heat burning his body almost immediately. He could also see Batman, still standing in the shadows, staring at him with a look of revulsion on his face.

Counting down as Mace suggested, Nolan passed into unconsciousness before he reached ninety.



24 hours later

NOLAN WAS OUT cold for an entire day. When he finally woke up, the Ocean Song was four hundred miles closer to its goal.

Stevenson and Batman were there when he opened his eyes. His first words to them were, “I dreamed about someone losing a nuclear submarine.”

Stevenson gave him a quick once-over and pronounced him no worse for the wear.

But then Batman came up with a mirror.

“Ready for this?” he asked Nolan.

“Just get it over with,” Nolan managed to say.

Batman put the mirror up to Nolan’s good eye—but Nolan did not recognize the person looking back at him.

His face was darkened and jaundiced. The corners of his eyes—both the good and bad one—had been stretched to an oval shape. His lips were hideously puffed out, as was his nose. He didn’t look Asian exactly, which was the whole point of this. But he certainly didn’t look Caucasian anymore, either.

The most shocking thing about his appearance, though, was the long, ragged line of stitches stretched across his neck. All Mace had done was put harmless, if painful, sutures into his skin. But looking at them now—puffed out and intentionally untreated—the result was monster-ish. Nolan looked like someone who’d barely survived a brutal throat slashing.

Before Nolan’s world came to an end at Tora Bora, before he was even commissioned as an officer, his picture had appeared on Army recruiting posters. His image had been selected because he embodied everything the Army wanted its recruits to think signing up was all about: You become all-American and handsome, heroic and hunky. That’s how ruggedly good-looking Nolan had been.

Now, not only wasn’t he all-American-looking—he was actually grotesque.

In other words, his disguise was complete.

He was ready to murder Sunny Hi.