Operation Sea Ghost

2

Gulf of Aden

Present Day

THE SWARM OF paparazzi helicopters finally dispersed around sunset.

The armada of fast boats and Zodiacs carrying even more photographers left shortly afterward. Those villagers who’d gathered on the nearby cliffs at Ghadir also called it a day and went home. The western end of the Gulf of Aden was calm again at last.

The center of attention was a 210-foot Blenheim & Koch mega-yacht named The Immaculate Perception. At the request of the U.S. consulate in Aden, the giant luxury craft had skirted the Yemeni coast for about twenty miles, allowing a few people in the highly troubled, impoverished country, as well as the crush of international media, to get a fleeting glimpse of the vessel’s very famous passenger, American film star Emma Simms.

Now that the show was over, the yacht’s captain turned away from the barren coastline and headed toward Bab el Mandeb, the narrow strait that separated Yemen and Djibouti and served as the southern mouth of the Red Sea. Ordering the yacht’s running lights turned on, he upped his speed to seventeen knots and settled in behind the steering wheel.

It was an ideal night for traveling; the early moon had set and the stars were coming out. The weather was clear with hardly any wind.

The sea was like glass.

* * *

THE PLAN FROM here was for The Immaculate Perception to sail up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean and then on to Italy where Emma Simms was to begin shooting her next movie. The film’s production company was already in place in Rome, set construction was finished, her costars were rehearsed and waiting. All they needed was for Emma Simms to arrive.

However, she’d just completed a whirlwind publicity tour of Africa. In the span of forty-eight hours, she’d visited an AIDS hospital in Kenya, dedicated another in Cameroon, cut a ribbon at a girls’ school in Liberia, read to blind children in Botswana and visited an orphanage in Nigeria. She’d posed for so many pictures and done so many interviews, she’d lost count.

After the colossal two-day media blitz was finished, she’d declared herself too stressed to fly directly to Italy. She’d opted instead to lease the enormous mega-yacht out of Oman and sail up to Rome instead, a trip of seven days. It would be a relaxing way to spend the week, plus she would arrive fashionably late for her first day on set, something that made her high-powered publicists very happy.

Such was life for the person People magazine had christened “the world’s favorite movie star.” Emma was gorgeous; that was beyond dispute. Just twenty-six years old, five-foot-five and nicely shaped, she was impeccably blond, redhead or brunette depending on her mood. Her image regularly graced the covers of every celebrity magazine on the planet. Her movies were hits everywhere; they’d already grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, and that included dirt-poor places like Yemen where she was extremely popular. Her celebrity spanned religious, ethnic and cultural barriers. Though thoroughly American, she was considered a citizen of the world. Her Facebook page received a million hits a day and millions more around the globe followed her every move on Twitter. She was a certified international phenomenon.

But being Emma Simms was not easy. She spent five hours every day in the gym working with her personal trainers. Another three hours were devoted to creating new hairdos and makeup schemes with her stylist. Her life coach took up another two hours, as did her personal spiritualist and her nutritionist. Hundreds of millions of people adored her, so all the hard work must have been paying off.

Still, she could be demanding. Her morning toast had to be exactly 76 degrees Fahrenheit or she would not eat it. Bad for digestion, her nutritionist had told her. She had to have exactly five one-inch-square ice cubes in every glass of Bavarian spring water she drank, as anything less would not provide the optimal temperature for proper skin hydration. The clothes closets on the rented yacht—which she insisted undergo a $100,000 redesign overnight before she agreed to step on board—were organized in four distinct categories: day of the week, time of day, disposition of the moment and strength of aura as calculated by her ever-present shaman.

Anywhere she traveled, the hired help were told not to look at her directly—after all, that’s how auras were stolen. The help also had to be white, or at least not too dark. She’d told the mega-yacht’s owners that after her recent tour, she’d “had enough of Africans for a while,” leaving them to scramble to find fifty-three Caucasian maids, cooks, butlers and crewmen on just a few hours’ notice.

Her own lily-white entourage numbered in the dozens, and her luggage consisted of more than a hundred suitcases, many filled up with her extensive collection of sunglasses, which simply had to go with her wherever she went. And to keep herself centered at all times while on the yacht, whatever outfit she was wearing up on deck, all the pillows and cushions within her line of sight had to be of the same color or they damn well better be made up of complementary hues.

There had already been a couple of tirades about this, and heads had rolled.

* * *

EMMA SIMMS WAS intensely sure of herself. She had more balls than any of her leading men. She rarely forgot her lines. She could play happy just as well as sad, light as well as dark. And though she’d starred in a couple of romantic comedies early in her career, her bread and butter was the action-adventure film. She looked her best on screen when she appeared to be kicking someone’s ass. She even hoped to do her own stunts someday, to get a deeper connection to her characters. But at the moment, her management was dead set against that idea. Stunt doubles still threw the punches, took the tumbles, crashed the cars.

Emma was just too valuable to do them herself.

* * *

THE IMMACULATE PERCEPTION sailed through the evening, gliding atop the quiet sea.

It was not entirely alone. The Omani Navy had provided an armed frigate, currently sailing a quarter mile behind, to watch over both megastar and mega-yacht during this part of the journey. A favor from her friend, the Sultan of Oman, the warship was scheduled to stay with her until an Egyptian patrol boat met the yacht off the Red Sea island of Perim around midnight. From there, the Egyptian navy would take over escort duty right up through the Suez Canal.

A small glitch arose in this plan, though. Emma was below in her luxurious cabin, staring at proofs of her new children’s book, Everyone Wants to Be Me, when word arrived that the Egyptian boat had been slightly delayed due to some celebrity reporters demanding they come aboard and record its cruise. Her personal physician had just left, having injected her with her nightly cocktail of mood elevators and sleeping aids, and she was already feeling the effects.

The plan now was for the Egyptian vessel to rendezvous with the mega-yacht just before 1:00 A.M., a little north of Perim. This was not a problem. Though low fuel had forced the Omani frigate to turn back at 12:30 A.M., by that time, the Egyptian patrol boat was just ten miles away. Considering the two vessels were heading right for each other, The Immaculate Perception would be without escort for less than twenty minutes.

But that’s all it took.

Because just as soon as the Omani ship disappeared over the horizon, the pirates struck.

* * *

THEY’D BEEN LURKING off Perim, hidden among the rocks near the island’s treacherous south side.

Using two fast boats, each carrying six heavily armed gunmen and extra fuel tanks, they’d come up behind the yacht and, hidden by the darkness, climbed aboard unmolested. Only when two of the pirates appeared in the yacht’s control room did the crew know something was amiss. The vessel’s onboard security team, four bouncers from Ankara, vanished in an instant. Once the yacht’s captain realized how quickly they were being overrun, he ordered his fifty-five-man crew not to resist. He also suggested Emma’s entourage do the same.

It all happened very fast. Sixty seconds after climbing aboard, the dozen Somali pirates were in control of The Immaculate Perception.

* * *

WHEN THE FIRST pirate walked into Emma Simms’s cabin, she thought he was one of her waiters, inexplicably dressed in blackface and rags.

“Why are you in that getup?” she’d asked him.

The man didn’t speak English, but he didn’t have to. He simply raised his AK-47, fired a burst into the ceiling. Then he yanked her to her feet and began to drag her up to the main deck.

“No!” she screamed, terrified—but it was no use. He pulled her up top where she saw the crew had been made to kneel against the railing, her own contingent right beside them. The pirates’ two large speedboats were tied up alongside the yacht, which by now had stopped dead in the water.

Armed men were everywhere: up on the bridge, on the foredeck, up on both helicopter pads and along both rails. From what Emma could see, everyone else on board had been aware of the pirate attack long before she was.

“So what the hell is this?” she suddenly bellowed to no one in particular. “These guys came looking for me last?”

Two pirates blindfolded Emma and her stylist and forced them into one of their speedboats. Emma complained loudly, slapping and kicking the gunmen, but to no avail. The rest of the pirates looted the yacht, robbing everyone on board and stealing Emma’s extensive sunglasses collection. They disabled the yacht’s engines and shot out its radio equipment, then left.

Had it been another time and place, the pirates might have stolen The Immaculate Perception itself.

But not tonight.

Emma had been their target all along.