Operation Sea Ghost

10

SHADEY HADARI WAS Gottabang’s Master Cutter.

He’d been employed at the breaking yard since it opened nearly twenty years before. This was substantial longevity as the Gottabang operation averaged one death, and usually a dozen mangling injuries, per day. Due to its outrageously hazardous working conditions, people looked up to Hadari as a sort of holy man, simply because he’d lasted so long at the most dangerous job in the world.

All these years of work had taken a toll on him, though. He was missing his left arm up to the elbow. He had just two fingers and a thumb on his right hand. His right foot was devoid of toes; his left ear was gone, as was all his hair, including his eyebrows and eyelashes. He had exactly two teeth left in his mouth.

He needed the help of a cane to walk and an ancient hearing aid to carry on a conversation. Though he was just thirty-eight years old, he looked twice that age at least.

He resided in a shack that was close to the beach and set away from the shantytowns where the rest of the cutting crews lived. Though built like the others, of wood and leftover ship paneling, the shack’s location was considered a perk, the only reward for Hadari’s long service to the multimillionaires who owned the ship-breaking operation. Its location was ideal only because most of the toxic smoke that rose from the beach did not usually blow in his direction.

Still, Hadari rarely slept, so numerous were his ailments. That’s why he was wide awake when Benja, his second cousin’s half-nephew, came to his shack in the dead of night asking if they could talk.

Benja was just twenty years old, but he, too, was covered with scars and bubbled skin, the result of coming in contact with so many harmful chemicals. He’d worked at Gottabang just six years, but in the day-to-day operations, he was considered a senior man as well.

Hadari motioned him inside, indicating he should close the rickety door behind him so no rats would get in.

“Visitors are here to talk to you,” Benja told Hadari. “They are looking for a missing ship.”

Hadari did not understand. Visitors? No one ever visited Gottabang.

“I found them, or I should say they found me, down at the water’s edge,” Benja went on nervously. “They want to know about a certain ship that came here to be chopped. I told them you were the wisest man on the beach. That if anyone knew, you would.”

But Hadari still didn’t understand. He’d been hit on the head by various objects so many times over the years, some things just didn’t register. He was still stumped by Benja’s news that visitors had come to the beach.

“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” he finally replied, his voice raspy and barely above a whisper. “If they are looking for a ship, let them float around in the bay, searching for its name. If it’s not here, let them walk among the junk piles on shore and see if they recognize what’s left of it.”

Benja fidgeted a bit. “They have done that, uncle, with only partial results. They are pressed for time and they feel they shouldn’t really be here in the first place.”

“And if they are outsiders, then they are right,” Hadari shot back at him. “So why did you bring them to me?”

Benja replied by taking something out of his shirt pocket. It was a hundred-dollar bill, the equivalent of a year’s pay for him.

“Because they gave me this,” he said. “And they said they’d give you even more, if you would talk to them.”

Hadari’s eyes went wide at the sight of the bill.

“Well, then bring them in, you fool!” he roared. “Why do you delay?”

Alpha Squad squeezed itself into the tiny shack a moment later.

Hadari’s expression said it all. This was not what he’d been expecting. He’d assumed the “visitors” were just some steamer bums looking for their lost wreck—rich steamer bums, but bums nevertheless. These people were soldiers, dressed in battle armor and carrying enormous weapons.

“My God, are you Americans?” Hadari asked them.

“We’re working for Americans,” Nolan corrected him.

“Not those cursed environmentalists, I hope?” Hadari said.

Nolan emphatically shook his head no. “Not a chance.”

“Is that a woman with you?” Hadari asked, looking at the heavily armored Emma Simms.

“She’s just along for the ride,” Nolan said, hastily pushing her to the rear of the group. He couldn’t imagine what would happen if word got out that the world’s most famous actress was here, in the worst place on earth.

Hadari looked her up and down again, but bought the explanation.

“You people lost a ship?” he asked them in creaky English.

“We are looking for one, yes,” Nolan replied. “We know it’s already been broken.”

“Then you really haven’t lost it,” Hadari said with a toothless smile.

“What we need is information on it,” Nolan said. “We think pirates were involved in bringing it here. Can you help us?”

Hadari hesitated. Talking to the Americans alone could get him severely punished, if not killed, by Gottabang’s brutal overseers. Adding the topic of pirates would only seal a painful death.

But Nolan had assumed as much, so he pulled out a wad of cash—his best weapon of all—and peeled off a hundred-dollar bill.

He stuffed it in Hadari’s ragged shirt pocket.

“This is for your trouble,” Nolan told him. “For starters…”

Hadari considered the money for a moment and then yelled to his half-nephew. “Get outside and keep a watch out. If you see any guards coming, you must tell us before you run away like a little child. Do you understand?”

Benja understood. He disappeared out the front door and took up station just outside the little shack.

“Now, we can talk,” Hadari said. “There was a ship that came in here late yesterday. And yes, it had a crew of pirates—they called themselves the Tangs. The whole thing was very hush-hush, though. Their ship went to the head of the line of those waiting to come up to the beach.

“Our men tore it down in just a matter of hours. The big boss put every available person on it. It ceased looking anything like itself within the first hour.”

“What about the cargo it was carrying?” he asked Hadari.

Hadari nodded slowly. “It is so unusual that a ship arrives here still bearing cargo. When one does, it’s a bit of news. And yes, this ship was full of guns and something else.”

Nolan got excited. “What was the ‘something else?’”

But Hadari just shook his head. “Something strange, very unusual. But at least to me, something unknown. Before the ship was cracked, the pirates made arrangements to transfer their guns and this unusual thing to another ship. Something along the lines of a seagoing tug, I believe. Pirates favor such boats, especially if they are on the run, because they tend to blend in.”

Hadari lit a cigarette. “What is it that you’re really looking for then? The guns or the unusual thing?”

Nolan took off his helmet and rubbed his tired eye.

“The ‘unusual thing,’” he replied wearily.

Hadari used his cane to tap him twice on the shoulder. It was almost a fatherly gesture even though they were close to the same age.

“You are looking in the wrong place,” Hadari said. “Whatever the ‘unusual thing’ is, it’s gone from here by now.”

Nolan peeled off two more hundreds. He passed them to Hadari, whose eyes welled up at the sight of the money.

“Thank you, sir,” Nolan told him.

“Good luck in your quest,” Hadari started to say … but he was interrupted by Benja bursting through the door,

“The security guards are coming!” he said breathlessly.

“How many?” Hadari asked anxiously.

“At least twenty,” Benja replied. “They have their machine guns and machetes. They might be heading for the Black Hole.”

Then as predicted, Benja ran away.

“Go…” Hadari told Nolan and company urgently. “Out the back door and through the worker’s settlements. Make your way back to the beach from there. But don’t stop for anything—no matter what you see!”

* * *

SUDDENLY, THEY WERE running.

Gunner was up front. Then came Emma Simms, the Senegals still in a protective formation around her. Nolan was bringing up the rear.

In their previous line of work as special operators for Delta Force, Nolan and Gunner had stolen into many unfriendly places, gathered intelligence and then gotten out, sometimes clean and smooth, sometimes with an army of bad guys on their heels. They excelled in both means of escape, but never with an uninvited guest along.

As soon as they went out the back of Hadari’s shack, they tumbled down a hill and found themselves on the edge of a massive slum. This was the Gottabang workers’ shantytown. It was a horrible sight, thousands of decrepit hovels stretching for as far as Nolan’s eye could see. Most were made of tin sheeting and cardboard, or leftover materials from the broken ships. They were crowded together in conditions that seemed impossible to support even the lowest of animal life, never mind humans. Yet, here they were.

The stink was unbelievable, even through the breathing masks. There was no sanitation here, no running water, certainly no electricity. Trash and excrement were everywhere. Even worse, the smoke from the toxic fires burning on the beach nearby hung over the slum like a cloud that refused to blow away. Animals—small dogs, cats, rats, chickens, snakes and some unidentifiable—scattered or slithered away as Alpha ran past.

Then there were the people. Nolan saw them only as eyes, staring out of the shadows, watery, frozen, unaffected as Alpha went splashing on by. With weapons pointing in all directions, night-vision goggles, heavy body armor and oversized Fritz helmets giving them an otherworldly appearance, Nolan would have thought, in the heat of the moment, these people would have shown some emotion: fright, wonder, amusement.

Something …

But they all looked dead inside.

Nolan could hear Emma Simms’s muffled voice screaming out complaints throughout this dash. They were moving too fast. The body armor was hurting her knees. The smell was making her sick. She was going to catch some disease because the people here were looking at her.

Truth was, had she not been with them, Alpha would have been able to move a lot quicker.

Finally Nolan shouted an order and the Senegals on either side of her, reached under her arms and began half carrying her, half dragging her.

This did not stop her from complaining, though. She began yapping faster and more virulently than before.

They were totally unfamiliar with the lay of the land; all Nolan knew was they were heading north, which was the general direction of where the Shin was waiting. He’d looked behind every few seconds to see if anyone was chasing them, but saw no one.

It took Alpha five minutes of flat-out running but Nolan finally spotted the other edge of the slum terminating at the base of a sandy hill. Beyond, he could see the water and the waiting Shin.

If they could just make it over that hill …

* * *

GUNNER WAS THE first to reach the top of the rise.

Even with all the confusion going on around them, Nolan clearly heard his colleague cry out. Not in pain, but in surprise.

The Senegals went over next, two carrying Emma Simms between them. They, too, cried out and came to a halt. Seconds later, Nolan scrambled up the crest—and he stopped cold as well, finally seeing what had frozen the others in their tracks.

It was another slum, much smaller, and separated from the one they’d just run through. Here, the shacks were clustered in a rough circle with a sewage ditch splitting it down the middle. But the shacks themselves looked more like cages. Most were fashioned out of cargo crates only two or three feet high.

It was obvious there was no running water here either, no electricity, no sanitation facilities. And, if anything, the stink was even more overwhelming, the conditions more putrid. It made the shantytown Alpha had just passed through look luxurious by comparison.

The Black Hole …

That’s what Hadari’s nephew had called it.

At first, though, Nolan thought the place was empty, only because he couldn’t believe anyone could actually live in a place like this.

But then he started seeing faces in the blackness. They looked especially eerie through his nightscope. They seemed to be floating in space at first. Initially a few pairs, then a few more. Then a dozen, then several dozen.

Gunner was the first to take out his flashlight and shine it into the center of the camp. What they saw was revolting.

There were about a hundred people here, staring out from the crates.

Auschwitz …

That was the first word that came to Nolan’s mind. These weren’t humans looking back at him as much as they were collections of bones wrapped in loose skin. They were emaciated beyond belief. Sunken eyes, sunken stomachs. Loose teeth. Many had lost their hair.

More grisly, though, many also bore the marks of being beaten—with fists or sticks, and maybe even slashed with machetes. Their wounds were infected and some still running with blood. It was also apparent that just about all these people were women and girls, with only a handful of males mixed in.

That’s when another word came to Nolan: Untouchables. Those people at the bottom of India’s caste system, people traditionally forced into the lowest kind of labor and rigidly demonized on the subcontinent.

Just what they were doing here at Gottabang also became apparent. There was a mountain of twisted pipes at one end of the Black Hole, barrels of sickly yellow powder at the other. All of the pipes had been taken from the broken ships, all of them were coated with the yellow insulation material. These people scraped the insulation from the pipes and then separated the two.

The problem was that many of the ships broken here were so old, their insulation materials almost always contained asbestos or some other equally hazardous substance.

So these people weren’t just hungry and mistreated by having the worst jobs at Gottabang, they were ghastly sick as well.

“I can’t take this,” Gunner cried out. It was too much for all of them. “We gotta get out of here.…”

But at that moment Alpha heard another sound. One that was all too familiar.

Gunfire.

Suddenly tracer bullets were flying all around them, coming from all directions.

Then came the sound of explosions, and bright flashes lighting up the appallingly smoky night.

Alpha Squad hit the dirt, dragging Emma Simms down with them. Nolan looked up to see the trails of high-caliber tracer ammunition going right over his head. And with each second those streaks of light were coming closer to them. It was clear. Gottabang’s notorious security forces had found them.

But everyone kept their cool—or at least the experienced members of the squad did. All her bullshit and bravado gone, Emma Simms was screaming through her battle helmet, absolutely terrified to suddenly be in the middle of yet another gunfight.

Nolan took stock of the situation. The incoming fire was unfocused and random, so he knew that whoever was shooting at them didn’t have them locked in, at least not yet.

On the far side of the Black Hole was a high sand dune, and beyond that was the sea. Even if the squad were unable to retrieve the RIB, if they reached the water, they would be able to summon the waiting Shin close to shore and get out that way. So, Nolan started the squad moving again.

They splashed their way through the center of the Black Hole, the sullen lifeless eyes seeming to burn right through them. Most of the gunfire was going by right over their heads, yet none of the Untouchables even flinched. To be shot, or not shot, didn’t seem to make a difference to them. They were dead to it all.

Nolan tried not to look at them as he rushed by, once again bringing up the rear, but it was impossible. He’d been to a lot of bizarre places in his career—but he’d never seen anything like this.

The squad finally made it to the top of the dune, the Senegals depositing the still-screaming Emma Simms face first in the sand and holding her there.

But then came something else.

Another noise. Mechanical. Whirring, yet also like a great gust of wind.

Was that a helicopter?

Nolan had heard that the goons who guarded this awful place might have a couple civilian copters converted to gunships. But this didn’t sound exactly like a helicopter. It seemed like something else.

But whatever it was, it was coming their way.

They’d just started moving to the other side of the dune when the dark object appeared above them. There was so much smoke, and so much tracer fire going over their heads, it was hard to see exactly what it was.

“Son of a bitch,” Nolan whispered, trying to make it out through the smoke and gunfire. This was the last thing they needed.

Actually, the second last thing.

Because at that moment Emma Simms decided to freak out for real.

She managed to scramble away from the Senegals, then stand up and whip off her battle helmet. Throwing the helmet away and with her blond hair wild and flying, she began screaming at Nolan and the others, demanding they get the gunfire to stop, demanding they get her away from the awful Black Hole, demanding the people living there, just down the dune, stop looking at her.…

She was hysterical—and if Nolan had been within reach of her, he would have slapped her back to reality. But she was about twenty feet from him, fists clenched, feet stomping like a child throwing a tantrum.

She was going to get them all killed …

But at that moment, with the object hovering not fifty feet above them, and with the violent downwash and smoke covering them all, one of the strangest things Nolan had ever seen happened.

A shaft of blinding light exploded out of the sky. At first Nolan thought someone on the mystery craft had turned on an extremely powerful searchlight. But whatever it was, it hit Emma Simms square in the face and knocked her off her feet.

Nolan couldn’t believe it. The light was so intense, she’d dropped like she’d been shot.

At first it seemed like the weight of the battle suit prevented Emma from getting up. But actually she lay there for a long time, the bright light burning into her eyes, she looking up at it, paralyzed.

Finally Gunner lifted his huge weapon and fired at the light. There was a loud explosion—and suddenly the light went out, and the helicopter, if that’s what it was, disappeared into the smoke again.

Only then were Nolan and Gunner finally able to scramble over to Emma Simms, retrieving her discarded battle helmet along the way.

She was not moving. She was on her back—eyes wide open, but lying completely still. Neither was she breathing.

“Jessuz, we killed her…” Gunner cried.

He peeled off his helmet and started giving her mouth-to-mouth.

But nothing happened.

He tried again, checking for a pulse.

Still nothing.

Nolan took off his battle glove and banged her hard, once in the chest.

No response.

Gunner tried mouth-to-mouth again. Nothing …

Nolan banged her chest a second time. She did not move.

For about ten seconds.

Then suddenly … she roared back to life.

She sat up and began shaking and gasping, like someone who’d been drowning suddenly coming up for air.

Nolan and Gunner couldn’t believe it. It was like she’d come back from the dead.

They tried to lift her up, tried to put the helmet back on her, tried to drag her toward the water, but she immediately started fighting with them.

“C’mon—we have to get out of here!” Nolan screamed at her.

But five sharp fingernails were suddenly piercing their way through his thick combat suit and into his skin. She had grabbed on to him and would not let go.

He tried to shake her, tried to tear her hand away. She was looking all around her, her expression confused and horrified. It was as if she didn’t know where she was, or even who she was.

Then her eyes fell on the Black Hole—and she screamed: “We can’t leave!”

“We have to leave!” Nolan yelled back. “Those goons are right on our asses…”

“We’re not leaving,” she insisted, her voice sounding different than before. “Not without those people…”

Nolan just stared back at her. She looked different, too.

“What people? What are you talking about?”

“Those people,” she said, pointing at the pitiful collection of humans huddled in the Black Hole below. “We have to save them. We have to get them out of here!”

“Save them?” Nolan yelled back, totally confused. “Why?”

“Because they’re human beings…”

Gunner took a look into the Black Hole.

“I don’t think any of them will be buying your latest DVD anytime soon,” he yelled at her.

She took a swing at him, missing widely, but causing all three of them to tumble to the ground. It was a good thing, too, as another stream of gunfire went over their heads a moment later.

“This is not about that!” she screamed at Gunner.

“Then what the hell is it about?” Nolan shouted back at her.

She was trying to look in all directions at once, even though she could barely keep her head upright. She looked totally confused and totally out of it.

“I don’t know!” she screamed back at them. “I just know we’ve got to do it!”

“But how?” Nolan shouted.

She started looking around again—it was obvious she was making it up as she went along.

Then she pointed out to the harbor. “We’ll take one of those old ships,” she said excitedly. “There’s plenty of them out there. We’ll take one—and we’ll load these people on. And we’ll get them away from this horrible place!”

Nolan almost couldn’t speak. He started stammering. It was like she was a different person.

“But … but…”

“But what?”

“But that’s just too … complicated,” he heard himself say.

“Why?” she asked. “Why is it complicated?”

Nolan was completely flustered now. “I don’t know,” was all he could say. “It just is…”

She was furious—and crying—at the same time.

“I thought you guys were supposed to be heroes,” she said angrily.

Gunner started yelling at her. “Is this the part where you tell us you hit your head and can’t remember who you are?”

She swung at him again—missing again, but knocking them all off their feet a second time.

She roared back him, “For the first time ever, I know who I am.…”

They ducked another barrage of tracer fire, this one extremely close.

Nolan said to her, “Look, how about if we come back for them?”

“Come back?” she replied. “When? And with who? When will you get them a ship if not now?”

She never gave Nolan a chance to answer. She started screaming: “Bolay! Bolay!” to the startled people below.

Then she grabbed Nolan’s M4 out of his hands and ran back down the dune and into the Black Hole, yelling at the emaciated people to follow her.

Nolan and Gunner just looked at each other, totally bewildered. The Senegals were simply stunned.

“Elle est devenue folle!” one of them yelled. She’s gone crazy …

But Alpha Squad had no choice. They couldn’t leave her here.

So they ran after her.

* * *

Gottabang Bay

THE TAIWAN SONG was a general-purpose cargo vessel.

Seventy years old, rusty and devoid of paint, it was 510 feet long, with a bridge at middeck and ancient loading cranes front and back. It was of utilitarian design, built decades before the first appearance of the super-sized modern ships, and ordinary in just about every way.

It had sailed around the world innumerable times, but now its engines were shot, it was leaking in dozens of places and its electrical systems barely worked at twenty percent. Filled with asbestos-coated pipes, paneling like flash paper and even a lead-lined water tank, its Malaysian owners decided it was time to give up the ghost. They’d made a deal with the Gottabang cutting operation to have the ship broken for a payment of $150,000 cash.

There were only four crewmen remaining on board tonight. The captain had left the day before, taking a dozen hands to a new command out of Singapore. The four who remained, South Koreans all, would stay with the ship until the end, which was scheduled for shortly after sun up.

In fact, the Taiwan Song was first in line to be broken that day. When the call came from shore, the small crew would start the ship’s balky engines and rev them up to the highest possible RPMs. Eventually steering toward the beach at absolute high tide, they would force the old ship up onto the sand as far as it could go—and that would be it. Once the vessel reached the beach, it would no longer be considered a sailing ship. At that moment, it would simply be “pre-scrap material.”

Or so they thought.

The four crewmen had spent this last night up on the bridge, mixing coffee with cheongju, getting buzzed while staying awake. It seemed the right thing to do for this ship that would soon cease to be a ship. Most merchant sailors had gruff, hard-core exteriors, but many were sentimental about the ships they’d served on. These four had crewed the Taiwan Song for a long time. They were sad to see her go.

But around 0100 hours, strange things began to happen. The crewmen had just brewed another pot of coffee and were sweetening it with their potent rice wine when they heard what sounded like gunfire coming from the shore.

They retrieved their rudimentary night-vision glasses and the senior man put them on. The first thing he saw were fireworks—or what he thought were fireworks—about a quarter mile away. There were dozens of red and orange streaks crisscrossing the sky over a small hill just up from the beach. He watched these pyrotechnics for about a minute—then he saw a helicopter. Or at least he thought it was a helicopter. There was so much smoke and fireworks going off, he couldn’t see it very clearly. Whatever it was came into view just above all the commotion, going into a lower hover. Seconds later, it illuminated a piece of ground with an extremely powerful light, something brighter than the senior crewman had ever seen coming from an aircraft.

This display lasted just a few seconds before the bright light suddenly went out. There was a chance that this aircraft was shot at, and possibly even shot down. Either way, the sailor lost sight of it a moment later.

About the same time, the fireworks doubled in intensity—but then just as quickly, they faded down to nothing and it was dark again on the other side of the hill.

The sailors knew the ship-breaking beach employed a ruthless security apparatus to keep its 20,000 laborers in line. Maybe some of these gunmen had been drinking too much and things got out of hand.

But then the senior man saw another curious sight. At least a hundred people were making their way over the hill, through the greasy saw grass and down to the beach. Women and children mostly, they were all dressed in rags and many seemed sick. Some couldn’t walk and had to be helped by others.

The senior crewman’s first thought was that these people were somehow responsible for all the tumult he’d just seen and were about to be executed by the Gottabang security forces. But how exactly? Were the security people going to shoot all these women and children? Or slash them to death? Or walk them into the dirty water and drown them?

None of the sailors wanted to see that.

But just as the senior man was about to turn away, another weird thing happened. Off to his left, a huge plane came into view.

It roared over their ship, its large nose pointing toward the water’s surface. Just when it seemed the plane was going straight into the sea, the sailor realized it was an amphibian and it was landing on the water.

But why?

The hundred people were on the beach by now, and the seaplane was moving over toward them. But the senior man knew that a plane that size could hold maybe forty people tops.

The attention of the four sailors was so locked on what was happening on the beach for the next few minutes, they never noticed the two shadowy shapes sneak onto the bridge behind them.

It was the reflection in the ship’s windshield that finally gave them away. The sailors turned to find two huge individuals in combat suits and giant helmets holding enormous weapons on them.

“We’re really sorry, boys,” one finally said in English, “but we have to borrow your ship.”