Operation Sea Ghost

22

Somewhere in the Indian Ocean

NOLAN KNEW HE was dead because an angel was looking down at him.

She was smiling and laughing and he could see her wings. There was a halo around her head and a bright white light behind her. This light was as bright as the sun and it felt warm and safe and it made Nolan feel like he’d wasted way too many years suffering on Earth, when the afterlife was so much better.

In the next second, though, he was awake for real, feeling cold and wet, with just about every body appendage feeling like it was falling off.

But … still, there was an angel hovering over him.

The blond hair flying everywhere. The enormous blue eyes. The wide smile …

It was Emma.

Alive, somehow …

As soon as he opened his eyes, she hugged him as hard as she could. He thought she would squeeze out what little life he had left in him.

“How?” was all he could mumble through his salt-cracked lips. “How…”

“I swam here, silly,” she replied, squeezing him even tighter.

“I mean, how did you make it off the boat?”

“The fat guy threw me on a life raft just as the other boat shot at us,” she explained breathlessly. “But when he tried to jump on, he missed—and that was the end of him. The raft had some bullet holes in it, but it got me far enough away so I could swim for it.”

She finally released him from the monster embrace and touched his face.

“At least I was dressed for it,” she said, referring to her very brief bathing suit.

At this point, at least one of Nolan’s appendages was beginning to get some feeling back.

“How long was I out?” he asked her.

“A few hours at least,” she replied. “I looked all over for you.”

Nolan wiped the grit from his eye. “At least I got some sleep,” he mumbled.

“Think you can stand up?” she asked him. “You’ve got to see what I’ve found here.”

“Please tell me it’s a bottle of scotch…”

“We’re not that lucky,” she replied. “But I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.”

She got him to his feet and steadied him.

“Where are we?” he asked her, looking around as his faculties slowly came back to him. The island was like something from a travel brochure, all palm trees and lush tropical vegetation.

“I’ve got no idea,” she replied. “We traveled a long way last night. I was trying to keep track. I wish I knew how to navigate by the stars, but I think we were going north. Then that storm blew up—and then we got sunk. So, we’re lost, I guess. We could be anywhere.”

“Sounds like something from a film,” he said, only half-kidding.

She nudged him. “Please,” she said. “That’s now a four-letter word in my book.”

They walked up the beach and over a rise. On the other side they could see the northern tip of the island. It was made up of a small lagoon bordered on three sides by tall palm trees and extremely thick jungle foliage. The flora was so dense, it completely hid the small bay.

A typical pirates’ lair.

“But I see nothing but more trees and more water,” Nolan said.

“Come with me,” she told him.

She led him down a winding path that brought them through the jungle. After a minute or so, they reached a smaller beach lining the lagoon.

That’s when Nolan saw the bodies.

There were at least a dozen of them lying in the sand. Some had been shot. Others had been stabbed. Most appeared Asian.

About a hundred feet out in the bay, partially hidden by a coral reef and overhanging trees, were the remains of a seagoing tugboat. It was about three quarters sunk and had been partially burned. And just at the water’s edge, there were several large deep grooves in the sand, indicating a helicopter had landed here recently.

Nolan knew what he was looking at. It was the aftermath of a battle.

But who had fought who—and why?

Emma walked him over to the nearest body and lifted up an arm.

“This is totally gross,” she said. “But look at his tattoo.”

Nolan saw the stylized scrolling on the man’s bicep. It read: Kupak Tangs.

He couldn’t believe it. The Tang pirates? Here?

“Aren’t these the guys you’re supposed to be looking for?” she asked him. “The guys who had the box?”

Nolan scratched his head. “Yeah, these are them. And that tug out there is the kind of vessel that guy at Gottabang said the Tangs were using. But what were the chances we’d stumble upon this?”

Emma just laughed at him. “After what we’ve been through in the past few days?” she said. “I wouldn’t question anything.”

They walked further onto the beach. It was clear the Tangs had been overwhelmed by an opponent who had more firepower and who had gotten the drop of them. It was more a massacre than a battle.

Emma was proceeding gingerly amidst the carnage. She told him: “I want to go on record as saying that being near all of these dead bodies is icky.”

“Duly noted,” Nolan replied.

One of the bodies was different from the rest. It was dressed in black camos and the person wearing it was not Asian, but rather looked European. He’d been shot once, and stabbed a few times. But his legs were also broken.

“This guy is a long way from home,” Nolan said. “Just as the Tangs were.”

“Just like we are,” she added.

Nolan tried to take in the whole scene and divine what had happened here.

“I think the guys in black camos came here in a helicopter,” he began, pointing to the dead European. “They got the Z-box from the Tangs, maybe as a business transaction at first, but then they started shooting. They killed a lot of the pirates, but this guy might have been wounded and fell off the copter as it was trying to get away.”

“But who were these guys on the helicopter?” she asked.

It was a good question. Nolan went through the pockets of the dead guy in the black camos and came out with just one thing: a sales receipt. It was for chocolates—and it was written in German.

Germans? Nolan thought. The ex-Stazi guys from Bad Sweeten?

Who else could it be?

“So the Stazis come here,” Nolan said, continuing the reconstruction, “and they rip off the Tangs, take the box and kill them all, with a loss of one of their guys.”

“So the box was here?” she asked him.

“It could have been,” Nolan replied. “Take a look at this place. It’s a perfect hiding spot for pirates. It has access to the sea, but you can’t see it unless you’re right up on it.”

He studied the helicopter marks again and determined they were made by a substantial aircraft, probably something along the lines of a Russian-made Hind.

He said, “The question is, where did the box go from here?”

Emma found one more clue. It was a bunch of packing receipts, the kind used for overnight shipments. There were maybe a dozen, held together by a rubber band, not far from the dead German’s body.

“These must have fallen out of the helicopter maybe?” she said, handing them to Nolan.

He agreed, but this just made it even more of a mystery.

“So, the Stazis got the box,” he said. “And they’re going to ship it somewhere. But where?”

Emma studied the receipts. They were all blank, but she thought she could detect some indentations on the top slip, as if someone had started writing on a packing slip a couple on top of this one, made a mistake and started writing another.

She took the top slip from the rest of the bunch.

“I was in a kid’s detective movie once,” she told him. “We solved the case like this.”

She took a dab of seawater and ran it over the address box of the receipt. Sure enough, some scribbling caused by the indentations on the receipt showed up.

The package dimensions were filled in—it was four feet by two feet and weighed about twelve pounds. This was just about the size of the Z-box as Audette had explained it to them. But the entire address had not been filled in, only parts of it had.

What was clear was the street address: 45 Park Place. And the zip code: 10007.

“10007?” she said. “That must be in the United States. But where?”

Nolan just shook his head. “You asking the wrong person,” he said. “I’ve been out of the country for more than ten years. But if they’re shipping the box to the United States, where does the Monte Carlo connection come in?”

At that moment they heard a dull roar approaching from overhead.

For a second, Nolan thought it might be the helicopter returning to the island. But then the noise changed, got deeper. That’s when they both recognized it.

They ran—through the jungle, over the rise and back to the place where Emma had found Nolan, half dead on the shore.

Their eyes skyward, they started waving their arms madly.

High above them, the unmistakable shape of the Shin-1 appeared and began wagging its wings in reply.

“They said they’d look for us,” Emma said excitedly. “Isn’t that great?”

Nolan was torn.

Here he was, on a quasi-paradise island, with the most beautiful girl in the world—and in a bikini yet.

Not exactly the best moment to be saved.

“Duty calls,” he whispered.