Operation Sea Ghost

8

Aboard The Immaculate Perception

Gulf of Aden

THE MORNING DAWNED hot and humid.

The sun was crimson bright, turning the Gulf of Aden blood red. There was no wind. No waves. No sound. It was an uneasy calm.

The Immaculate Perception was still off Yemen, its Omani escorts in tow, doing long meandering figure eights at barely five knots.

Nolan, Gunner and Twitch had spent the night taking shifts up on the yacht’s bow, keeping Batman quiet and away from the other guests. It hadn’t been that difficult. While the party had grown wilder and noisier throughout the night, it finally ended with a whimper a couple hours before sunrise. Those guests who’d lacked the stamina to make it to their cabins still littered the decks. Sleeping off their inebriation, they looked like dead soldiers in the aftermath of a battle.

The sound of a helicopter approaching stirred Nolan from a half sleep. He opened his good eye just in time to see the aircraft fly overhead. It was a UH-61 Blackhawk, painted dark silver, with no markings, but with lots of antennas sticking out of its roof, nose and tail.

Nolan groaned. Only one outfit flew helicopters like this: the CIA.

Splayed on the lounge chair next to him, Gunner was now half awake, too. He saw the copter and instantly knew its origin.

“Why are they out here?” he asked with a yawn.

“Taking pictures,” Nolan guessed sleepily. “Looking for someone topless.”

They both expected the copter to just fly on past, but it suddenly turned sharply and came in for a landing on the yacht’s stern-mounted helipad.

“They’re making a house call here?” Gunner asked. “Really?”

Nolan was fully awake now. “Maybe they want to talk to the ice princess about her ordeal,” he mumbled, stretching his legs. “Or get her autograph.”

The copter settled down and a lone passenger climbed out. Nolan and Gunner pegged him right away: the off-the-rack clothes, the bad haircut, the cheap sunglasses, an overall disheveled look; there was no doubt about it. He was from the Agency.

“Freaking spooks,” Gunner mused. “They really do all look alike, don’t they?”

The man signaled the copter pilots to kill their engines. They heard him yell: “This might take a while…”

Then he approached two of the yacht’s clean-up crew and had a brief conversation. At the end of it, the workers pointed not toward Emma Simms’s cabin below, but up to the bow where Whiskey was stationed.

“Oh f*ck,” Nolan grumbled. “What do they want with us?”

Gunner woke Twitch and Batman while Nolan met the man halfway up the bow.

“You’re Whiskey?” the visitor asked him.

Nolan nodded. There were no handshakes, no introductions.

“I’ve got to talk to you and your guys,” the man said urgently. He was middle-aged, bald and paunchy. This guy was a station chief, Nolan thought. And definitely not a field officer.

“Talk? Before breakfast?” Nolan asked him.

“Yes,” the man replied sternly. “As in right now.”

They climbed up to the bow. The others were waiting at a table right below the bridge deck. Everyone sat down.

Nolan pulled his chair next to Batman.

“How are you doing?” he asked him in a low voice.

Batman gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

“One thousand percent improvement,” he whispered in reply. “Nothing beats sleeping it off.”

Nolan believed him. Batman looked much better than the night before.

The CIA man got right to the point. “We’ve been following your activities since yesterday,” he said. “The kidnapping. The Somalis. The rescue mission. We figured you’d still be out here.”

“But you’re a little late,” Gunner told him, pretending to look at his watch. “The party ended a couple hours ago.”

The agent ignored him. “I’m here because we’ve got a major problem in Asia and, as much as it goes against my nature to admit it, we require some expert assistance.”

“Just for the record, who’s ‘we?’” Nolan asked him.

The agent just stared back at him. “Who do you think?” he asked.

Then the agent began a strange story. Two months before, the wreckage of a C-130 cargo plane was unearthed in a remote area of Vietnam near the Laotian border. The aircraft had been shot down in 1968, crashing into a rice paddy. Apparently the paddy had become flooded soon after, as a result of heavy monsoons, causing the wreck to sink in the mud and hiding it for more than forty years. It was discovered only when local villagers looking for metal to make cooking pots began digging in the area.

Four skeletal bodies were found in the wreckage; the villagers quickly buried them. But they also found an unusual cargo container. This container was made of highly reinforced material and was marked only with a single “Z.” The villagers repeatedly tried to open it, but failed each time. Eventually they turned it over to authorities.

Old hands in the Vietnamese military recognized the container as an SMT, something the U.S. used during the Indochina War to carry anything from classified documents to secret weapons to hazardous materials. Because this one was marked with a “Z”, which they interpreted as meaning “hazardous,” the Vietnamese wanted nothing to do with it. Their military intelligence service asked Swiss intermediaries to contact the CIA’s Bangkok station and inform them of what had been found.

News of the container’s discovery rippled through the Bangkok office, where a couple of semiretired contract workers remembered what the Z-box mission was all about. In fact, the Agency had looked for the Z-box for years after the war, using satellite surveillance, infiltrating U.S.-Vietnamese body recovery teams, and even sending in undercover agents to scour the Vietnamese countryside.

Now that it had been found, the Bangkok office wanted to get it out of Vietnam and dispose of it as soon as possible. But they wanted to do it in such a way that no one in the CIA would actually come in contact with it. Their reason: The box’s contents were so potentially embarrassing, no one in the know wanted to get their fingerprints on it.

So they cooked up a plan. The idea was to have the Vietnamese put the container on a ship leaving Haiphong. The ship, called the Pacific Star, would also have a few tons of weapons stashed aboard, captured M-16s left over from the war that the Vietnamese also wanted to get rid of. These were referred to as “the bait.” After a few days at sea, and once the ship was approximately twenty miles off the west coast of Sumatra, it would be taken over by “pirates,” who were actually Filipino seamen in the CIA’s employ. At that point, a U.S. Navy warship would engage the vessel, battle the “pirates,” rescue the crew, and then sink the ship right over the Java Trench, sending it and the Z-box to one of the deepest parts of the seven seas.

“So, what happened?” Nolan asked the briefer. “I’m guessing it’s not a happy ending.”

The agent shook his head no.

“Our ‘pirates’ never made it onto the ship,” he said. “The freaking thing was taken over by real pirates before our guys could get into position. So now the ship, the old M-16s and this Z-box are floating around out there somewhere, but we’ve got no idea where.”

Nolan looked at the other Whiskey members. They were all on the verge of laughing. They’d all heard some crazy CIA stories before, but this one was crazier than usual.

The agent went on. “Now, this thing was hatched strictly by the Bangkok office. No one in the White House or the Pentagon has any idea the operation was going on. The cruiser we used is assigned to us for special ops, and ninety-nine percent of its crew didn’t have a clue what was up, either. But what was supposed to be a mission to avoid embarrassment for the Agency has now become an incident that could draw huge negative publicity for everyone involved. Just because no one ever counted on the ship being seized by real pirates…”

Finally the team burst out laughing—they couldn’t help it. Lamebrained didn’t come close to describing the scheme.

But the briefer surprised them by saying: “Let me finish, because it gets worse. The people in charge were so sure this would work, they’d prepared a press release to be sent out once the ‘pirate ship’ was sunk.

“Now, thank God the people on the Navy ship were smart enough not to issue it—but some dumb-ass in our Bangkok field office discovered his computer might have been hacked and now this press release might be out there, somewhere, too. At any moment, the world might hear the U.S. Navy sank a pirate ship off the coast of Sumatra, rescuing its Vietnamese crew in the process. The press release even says something like the ‘first full-scale U.S. Navy sea battle with pirates since the 1800s.’ But when it gets out that there was no battle, no heroes, no pirate ship sunk … it will be very bad for all involved.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

“So, why are you telling us this?” Nolan finally asked him.

The agent wiped some sweat from his forehead; he seemed a little out of his element here.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he replied. “You’re the Pirate Hunters. We want you to hunt down these pirates and get this Z-box back, before they realize what they have.”

“And what do they have exactly?” Nolan asked; it was the question on everyone’s mind. “What’s in the box?”

But the agent shook his head gravely. “I can’t tell you,” he replied. “In our own lingo, the box, and what it was doing on that plane that night, has been described to me as both ‘catastrophically compromising’ and ‘potentially horrific and beyond any plausible deniability.’ If you speak the language, you know what all that means. But what’s inside is no concern of yours. It could be feathers and popcorn for all you care. Just get it back and we’ll pay you handsomely.”

“OK—then can you define ‘handsomely?’” Gunner asked.

“How’s a hundred million sound?” the agent replied.

The team gasped.

“A hundred million dollars?” Gunner whispered.

The agent nodded. “You heard right … that’s how bad we want this thing back.”

The team was stunned into silence. It was an enormous figure.

“And that’s tax-free,” the agent went on. “But, there are guidelines you must follow or there will be no payment.”

“I knew there’d be a catch,” Twitch muttered, speaking for the first time. “There’s always a catch.…”

“Well, this is a big one,” the agent told them. “Like I said, no one in the Pentagon or in the White House is aware this Z-box has been found—and it must stay that way. This means no help can be asked of any U.S. military units or any other U.S. government agency in looking for this thing. None. If word of this leaks out from you guys, the whole thing goes down the drain—and I don’t care if your fingers are three inches away from grabbing the box. The lid on this has to be sealed tight and you should all go down fighting before anyone gets a peep out of you.”

Twitch raised his hand—his way of asking if he could ask a question.

“Why doesn’t the Agency just go after this thing itself? You got a worldwide network; you got spies, informants, satellites. It seems you could find it quicker than us or anyone else.”

Once again, the agent was shaking his head. He seemed anxious—and disorganized.

“I know that makes the most sense,” he said. “But again, this thing, the original ‘Z-box mission’ was so off-the-reservation, that even forty years later, the Agency can’t be seen anywhere near it. We can’t put our fingerprints on it, we can’t have a paper trail, we can’t even breathe next to it. Had we dug it up ourselves that would have been a different story. But now that it’s out of our control—well, that’s why we’ll pony up so much money for you guys to get it back.”

Another silence. Then Nolan summed it up: “So if we find the pirates, the hijacked ship, and get your box back without any outside help, you’ll pay us a hundred million dollars.”

The agent nodded. “And I don’t want to know how you are doing it, what methods you’re using, what happens to the pirates, nothing. In fact, I was never here. My name is Audette, but that’s all you have to know. I’ll give you two sat-phones, a number and a code word. Once you’ve found the box, or can confirm its whereabouts, call me and give me the code word. And that’s how I’ll know what’s happened. Agreed?”

Nolan looked at the team. They all nodded quickly. For a hundred-million-dollar payday, they’d swim to the moon and back.

The agent smiled nervously. “I’m hoping you guys hit gold right away, so this thing will be simpler than we thought.”

But no sooner were those words out of his mouth than his sat-phone started beeping. The agent did all the listening in the conversation that followed.

When he hung up, he had to wipe some newly formed perspiration from his brow.

“There’s been a development,” he said, slowly. “Not a pleasant one…”

He held up his sat-phone. “That was my contact in Bangkok. Apparently the Prince of Monaco is now involved in this thing.”

The team members laughed again.

“The Prince of Monaco?” Gunner exclaimed. “How the f*ck…”

The agent explained: “We just got word that not too long after that target ship was hijacked, a sat-phone on board made seven calls, all within five minutes. One was to a number in Germany, a place called Bad Sweeten. Ever hear of it? It’s a dumpy little city, some place still stuck in the old East Germany. But it’s also a hotbed for al Qaeda types, as well as people who in the past have brokered ransom deals for Somali pirates. We believe many of these brokers are ex-Stazi agents—you know, the old East German secret police?”

“That’s not good…” Gunner said.

The agent went on. “Another call from the same cell phone went to the Prince’s Palace in Monaco. Then the rest went to other phones at unknown locations within Monte Carlo.”

“Monaco? Monte Carlo?” Gunner said. “What could all that possibly mean?”

The agent shook his head. “I’ve got no idea—but we were able to track down the phone by satellite. They found it, still turned on, left adrift on a small raft not far from where the target ship was hijacked.”

Whiskey groaned as one. There was no mystery to this part of the story. It was an old spy trick. By setting the sat phone adrift, the pirates were trying to confuse anyone in pursuit. It also confirmed they were smarter than previously thought.

“This means they know they have something more important than a bunch of old M-16s in their possession,” Nolan said. “They must have found the box and determined it has value to somebody. But how?”

The agent shook his head. “Who knows? Those Vietnamese sailors might have mentioned the Agency in the confusion. That’s all it would take, maybe.”

Nolan said, “Well, for whatever reason, if they’re talking about it to money brokers in this Bad Sweeten place, and in Monte Carlo, then I’m guessing they’re trying to sell it somehow. I’m also guessing they’ll try to get rid of that ship they hijacked as quickly as possible.”

At this, the team nodded as one; the agent detected something.

He studied them for a moment and then asked, “So now that you have all this information, is there any chance you guys know where these mooks might be heading?”

Nolan shrugged. “Nothing is exact in our business,” he said. “Most pirates are drug addicts and drunks. Few of them have ever been educated. But—if they think someone is out there looking for them, someone with the resources of the U.S. Navy or the CIA? Yes, they’ll want to dump that ship quick, quiet and permanently. And for that there’s only one place they’ll go.”

“And where is that?” the agent wanted to know.

“Ever hear of Gottabang?” Nolan asked.

* * *

GOTTABANG WAS A place where old ships went to die.

It was a vast scrap yard located on a beach in northwest India.

The place had unusual tide changes, thirty feet from high to low, which made it an ideal place to “break” ships.

An old ship destined to be broken—that is, cut up and sold for scrap—would appear off Gottabang and ride in on the high tide at full speed, intentionally beaching itself. As soon as the tide ebbed, a small army of workers would descend on the beach and, armed with cutting torches and sledgehammers, would tear into the ship like vultures, carrying it away one piece at a time until there was nothing left.

Many of the ships that met their end like this were thirty years old or more. This meant they were full of hazardous materials such as asbestos, PCBs and highly toxic hydraulic fluids and fuel.

When a ship was gutted, a lot of these harmful contents spilled out onto the beach—and most of them stayed there, to be eventually burned, which simply spread their toxicity over an even larger area. In fact, fires big and small burned along Gottabang’s beach day and night, providing a poisonous atmosphere for the 20,000 people who worked and lived there.

As a result, Gottabang looked like a doomed landscape where industrialism and pollution had run rampant. On any given day, more than 100 ships sat offshore, waiting to be called to their death.

There were a few other places in Asia where ships could be broken, larger places. But Gottabang had a special distinction: It was the least regulated of all the ship-breaking operations. If pirates or anyone else wanted to get rid of a ship with no questions asked, Gottabang was the place to go.

The procedure was simple: A typical-size 500-foot cargo transporter could produce enough scrap metal to see a million-dollar profit or more. But if a pirate band wanted to quickly lose evidence of a hijacking, they could bring a ship to Gottabang and get it broken in return for a mere fraction of that amount, if anything at all, letting the bulk of the profit go to the millionaires in Bombay who owned the ship-breaking operation.

The important thing was, if such a deal could be struck between the pirates and those owners, then the ship in question would be moved to the front of the line and would cease to exist in a matter of hours.

* * *

THE CIA AGENT listened intently. Southwest Asia was not in his purview, but he’d heard of the notorious ship-breaking operations at Chittagong in Bangladesh and Arang in southern India.

“New ones opened up in Pakistan and Turkey in just the past year,” Nolan told him. “It’s the same situation at all of them. A few people make a lot of money by using near-slave labor and polluting a piece of the planet.”

“So much for being ‘green,’” the agent said.

“Only the money is green,” Twitch interjected.

Nolan went on: “The pirates realize the stolen ship has more than those weapons on board, but they’ll also want to cover their tracks. The people who run Gottabang are corrupt as hell. They’ll have no problem breaking the hijacked ship, no questions asked.”

“Let’s say your scenario is correct,” the agent said. “What will they do with the Z-box?”

Nolan replied. “Before that phone call just now, I would have said that maybe they’d make like old-time pirates and bury it with those M-16s someplace. Or maybe they’d try to unload it on to the crooks at Gottabang. But now, contacting those ransom brokers and people in Monte Carlo? They’ve got to be trying to sell it for big bucks.”

“But how can we find out for sure?” the agent asked.

“First thing is to find the pirates,” Nolan replied. “And that means getting to Gottabang fast. Maybe we can beat them there. But even if we don’t, we can find out if they’ve been sniffing around and that will at least let us zero in on their location. And that sure beats looking all over the globe for them.”

The agent was growing very anxious.

“Well, all this means you guys got to get cracking,” he said. “And I mean, immediately.”

* * *

HE LEFT THEM with two sat-phones and a business envelope holding his secure number and the code word.

The agent then retreated to the silver helicopter, looking more disheveled than before. The copter took off and, as it gained a little height, it swung back over the mega-yacht. Flying low and slow, the team was surprised to see one of the pilots was indeed taking photos. He had a camera sticking out the cockpit window and was snapping pictures of the top deck.

Once the copter had departed, only then did the team get serious about planning their new mission. From the start, they knew it wouldn’t be easy.

“It means we’ll have to split up,” Nolan said. “The time element demands it. Half of us will have to go to Monte Carlo, while the other half goes to Gottabang.”

There was murmured agreement around the table.

“But the question is, how?” Nolan added. “Those places are about two thousand miles in opposite directions. That’s way beyond the range of our copters, without a hundred refuelings, that is.”

“Even on a fast ship, it would still take us days to get to Monte Carlo,” Gunner said, adding, “And it isn’t like you can fly commercial to Gottabang.”

It seemed like a huge problem.

“So, how are we going to do it then?” Twitch asked.

At that moment they heard another voice. A female voice. It was coming from right above them, not five feet away, on the bridge deck, the highest point on the yacht.

“For God’s sake, tell them they can use the seaplanes if they’ll just stop yapping down there. The tone of their voices is stressing out my epidermis.…”

Nolan just looked at the others, stunned.

The voice unquestionably belonged to Emma Simms.

And this meant only one thing: she’d been up above them the whole time, sunbathing—and listening to everything.

“Well,” Gunner said dryly. “Now we know what the spooks were taking pictures of.”

* * *

A MINUTE LATER, an elderly man in a flowing white gown and a gray beard climbed down off the bridge. He looked like a character from the Old Testament. He was Emma Simms’s on-call shaman. They’d seen him at the party.

He approached the team, gleaming wide smile in place.

“You know in our business we shoot people who eavesdrop on private conversations,” Gunner told him.

The man smiled even wider. “And in my business, people are smart enough to keep their voices down and be discreet.”

The team was mortified. Here they were laughing at the CIA for their fake-hijacking-gone-wrong f*ckup, and they themselves had just committed one of the biggest rookie mistakes possible: assuming they were out of earshot of everybody.

“But let’s not dwell on negatives,” the shaman went on. “As it turns out, my dear friend Emma has already arranged for two seaplanes to ferry some of our guests to the mainland. Once they are free, you can have use of them for as long as needed.”

He pulled a BlackBerry from his robe and showed them a photograph of the planes in question.

“Will these do?” he asked.

The team looked at the photo and was shocked again. It was an image of two P-1 Shin Meiwas. Originally built by the Japanese military for antisubmarine duty, the more commonly called Shin was one of the world’s last modern amphibian aircraft. It was a large plane, 108 feet from front to back with a wingspan almost as long. Though powered only by four propellers, it could fly nearly five miles high while cruising at a respectable 230 knots. Most important, the Shin had an unrefueled range of nearly 2,500 miles.

It could hardly be called a seaplane, though. A more apt description was “flying boat.”

But whatever the size, a couple Shins would certainly solve Whiskey’s problem. It’s just that they were coming from the most unlikely source.

And that made them highly suspicious.

“What’s the catch?” Twitch asked the shaman directly.

The man smiled again. In fact, he never stopped smiling.

“My good friend Emma is merely appreciative of your assistance yesterday, that’s all,” he said diplomatically while retreating back toward the bridge. “Besides, ‘why does everything have to have a catch?’”

* * *

THE PAIR OF Shins arrived thirty minutes later.

Between a shuttle service of private helicopters and the two flying boats, the revelers were off the yacht by midafternoon, all without so much as a good-bye wave from their very famous friend.

Whiskey spent the time planning their operation. Basically, they were facing two separate missions: an armed recon to Gottabang, and an undercover intelligence-gathering mission to Monte Carlo. So, splitting up did make the most sense. But who would go where?

After some discussion, it was agreed that Nolan and Gunner would make up “Alpha Squad.” They would fly to Gottabang in the first Shin and hopefully find evidence that the pirates were there or had been recently.

Meanwhile, Batman and Twitch would become “Beta Squad.” They would take the second Shin to Monte Carlo, the other end of this trans-world puzzle, and snoop around, trying to figure out who the pirates called in the prestigious playground of the wealthy and how they might be connected to the Z-box.

The only hiccup was the matter of Batman’s mental state. Nolan was able to talk to him privately late in the morning when the others went below for coffee. While Batman had just about convinced Nolan that he was back among the living, and that whatever happened the night before was already ancient history, the one-handed copter pilot didn’t squawk when Nolan suggested he honcho the more subtle, “Beta” side of the plan.

“You’ll look better in Monte Carlo than I will,” Nolan told him.

* * *

THE ATTACK COPTER they’d used in the hostage rescue, one of two the team owned, would not play a role in the upcoming mission. Whiskey arranged to have it ferried back to Aden by the same pilot who’d flown the Bell helicopter during the attack on the pirate base.

When the Bell arrived on the mega-yacht to drop off the ferry pilot, it was also carrying another important component of Team Whiskey: The Senegals. The five seagoing soldiers of fortune, employees of the team’s parent company, Kilos Shipping, had been a vital cog in Whiskey’s success. But because their names were so hard to pronounce, the team just called them the Senegals, after their country of origin. Preferring a day of rest to attending a poofy party, the five West Africans had stayed in Aden after participating in the hostage rescue, relaxing at the team’s headquarters high atop the Kilos Shipping building.

But now that the team had a new mission, they were back. All five would fly out with Alpha Squad.

* * *

WHISKEY WAS READY to go by sunset.

The two Shins had come alongside The Immaculate Perception, one tying up in front, the other in back. Up close, they were odd-looking birds. They had outrageously angled wings, and a radar dome that stuck out from under the raised cockpit, looking like a swollen red nose. And truly, they looked more like boats with wings than airplanes that could land on water. But Shins also had an unsurpassed reputation for ruggedness. And they were a breeze to fly.

The yacht’s crew helped load Whiskey’s gear into the flying boats and then fueled the OH-6 and the Bell for their trip back to Aden. Through it all, the mega-yacht’s very famous passenger never showed her face.

Finally, as the others climbed aboard their respective planes, Nolan and Batman had one last thing to do before they went their separate ways. Standing on the mid deck gangway, Nolan gave one of the sat-phones provided by the agent to Batman, taking the other for himself. Then he opened the business envelope the agent had given him. Inside he found two index cards. Written on one was the agent’s secure phone number. Written on the other was the all-important code word they would use if and when they found the Z-box.

Nolan read it first—and suddenly froze.

Then he said the code word aloud: “Moonglow.”

Batman almost fell over. Nolan immediately felt his metallic hand digging into his arm.

Moonglow …

The exact word Batman said he’d heard from the apparition.

“Stay cool, man,” Nolan told him now, pulling Batman’s metal fingers out of his skin. “It’s just a coincidence. It means nothing.”

But Batman wasn’t so sure.

“You know what they say about coincidences,” he whispered. “‘If they don’t mean anything, how come they happen all the time?’”