He checked the time. It was already getting light and they had only about five minutes left before they would have to head back to the ship. So they had to do something fast.
He told Twitch to strap in as tightly as possible. He then rose to about 2,000 feet, turned the copter around, pushed the nose down and began his dive. Right away the aircraft started vibrating madly. The controls became heavy and the engine began screaming. Even Twitch seemed concerned.
But Nolan knew there was no turning back. About five hundred feet above the fuel tank, he hit the gun-pod trigger and kept it depressed until he finally peeled away just about fifty feet out. He’d been able to follow the gun pod’s tracer rounds as they streaked through the jungle toward the bare silhouette of the tank—and this initial barrage looked impressive. But there was no explosion. They would have to go around again.
Soaked in sweat again, Nolan once more climbed, turned the copter over and began a second dive. He started firing farther out this time, trying to concentrate on the line of red tracers as it tore through the trees. His dive was steeper and it lasted longer, but again, no explosion—just some flaming branches.
“We only have ninety-three shells left,” Twitch reported, checking the pod’s readout screen.
Nolan climbed for a third time. He was not diving steep enough, which meant not enough of his rounds were hitting the target in a concentrated area.
This time, he climbed to 2,500 feet, turned and pushed the nose of the copter into an extremely sharp dive.
Twitch let out a yelp as they started going nearly straight down. Nolan hit the trigger, and somehow Twitch recovered enough to stick his M4 out of the copter’s open door, adding its bullets to the gun pod’s rounds.
Nolan was using all his strength to keep the copter steady in the suicidal plunge—but the big Kenworth was starting to run off the road. Just as he thought he was going to lose it, there was a sudden bright flash followed by a plume of deep red fire. Only then did the force of the explosion hit them. Nolan turned the copter immediately, but it was the shock wave that actually saved them, throwing them sideways about a hundred feet, away from the fireball.
The explosion was gigantic. Though the noise was a bit muted—more of a
whomp!
—it was all Nolan could do to regain control of the copter. He pushed the throttle forward, getting them away just as the flames were licking at the tail rotor. Looking behind him, Nolan saw a huge hole in the jungle and the remains of not one, but actually three fuel tanks burning furiously.
Mission accomplished. . . .
He returned to the controls and the job of escaping, and only then did he realize that Twitch had been hit. A piece of shrapnel had come through his open doorway, ripped through his safety harness and tore into his upper right arm.
“Jesuszz, Twitch—talk to me!” Nolan yelled to him over the noise of the copter’s engine going full out.
“I’m still feeling no pain, sir,” Twitch yelled back. “And it’s just a nick. I’m OK.”
But he was bleeding, and at that moment, Nolan realized they didn’t have any bandages on the copter.
They looked around the cockpit for something, anything that could serve as a dressing. But the aircraft was small and spare to begin with, and they found nothing.
That’s when Nolan reached inside his flight suit and pulled out something else he’d been carrying with him: a small, slightly torn U.S. flag. He handed it to Twitch. “Use this,” he said.
Twitch looked at the flag and quickly realized he’d seen it before.
“This is the team flag,” he said, astonished. “Our flag from Tora Bora.”
Nolan didn’t say anything. He just concentrated on getting the copter on course and back to the ship.
Twitch applied the flag to his shoulder and soon the bleeding was down to a trickle.
Then he said to Nolan: “Our flag—you kept it after all these years?”
Nolan nodded slowly and just said: “Yeah—after all these years.”
Pirate Island
The next night
ZEEK’S GANG MEMBERS
were creatures of the night.
They did their robbing, hijacking, whoring, drug-taking and killing after dark. Then, like vampires, they were home before dawn, sleeping during the day, only to rise again when the sun went down.
That’s why, this night, none of the pirates were aware their fuel dump had been blown up less than twenty-four hours before. Most had been passed out in their bunks at the time of the explosion a few miles away; some were so intoxicated, a small atomic bomb wouldn’t have roused them. The noise, the smoke, the flames—Zeek’s army noticed none of it. Even those pirates charged with standing watch had been asleep when the dump went up.
The chow hall bell began ringing madly around 2100 hours, waking the pirates. Usually this was the signal for the first meal of their upside-down day. But those stumbling out of the
barracks felt a different vibe around the camp. Nights like this always started with a communal meal of boar and noodles, followed by more drinking. But those pirates approaching the mess hall couldn’t smell any boar cooking, nor could they see the steam that always filled the compound from the boiling of the noodles. And there was no alcohol anywhere to be found. All this was odd.
There was another strange thing: As the gang had taken a large ship not forty-eight hours before, many expected to get their share of the booty tonight, and to be paid by the gang’s paymasters. Saturday was payday for Zeek’s band. But none of the bagmen were in sight.
Zeek himself hadn’t been seen since the night before, but this was not unusual. The Boss slept during the day as well, and sometimes well into the night and even the next morning. But now, the pirates saw that Zeek’s concrete HQ was surrounded by his
Badan Menjaga
, his personal bodyguards, the dozen trusted inner-circle types who wore the coveted black bandana. They had set up 50-caliber machine guns behind sandbag barriers on all four sides of the building and were warning away any pirate who came close. Some of the older brigands on hand had been part of Zeek’s gang for more than ten years. They’d never seen anything like this.
One of Zeek’s lieutenants appeared in the mess hall and began ringing the communal bell again, a long series of three rings each. This was the signal that all the pirates should muster up and pay attention.
The lieutenant waited for the last of the group to assemble inside. When the mess hall was full, he began speaking.
“The Boss wants you to know trouble might be coming,” he told them starkly. “We’ve had a couple problems lately.”
A nervous murmur went through the crowd; the news was totally unexpected. The officer revealed that two of the gang’s members had been murdered two nights before, just after the rampage on Sumhai Island. Then, less than twenty-four hours ago, the pirates’ fuel dump had been blown up.
“The Boss is sure that we’re dealing with a rival gang,” the
officer went on. “Or maybe something connected to his brother Turk getting iced a little while ago. But either way, he says, don’t worry. We all know it’s hard to find us here.”
He spread his arms to indicate the hideout’s natural defenses. The pirate camp was on the edge of a lagoon that was so shallow it was hard for deep-water boats to get anywhere close to it. The lagoon itself was protected on three sides by heavy jungle, and the curve of the camp’s beach was such that, even on the fourth side, looking in from the north over the sandbar, it was extremely difficult to see the pirates’ encampment with the naked eye. In their many years of pirating, no one had ever come looking for them here.
The officer went on. “The Boss is sure our location is still a secret, because there are so many islands out here, it would take weeks for someone to search each and every one. But if this rival gang
does
find us here, we will take care of them quickly, because we are still the biggest gang in the area, and the Boss says when we get rid of these guys, it will make us that much stronger.”
The hungover pirates let out a groggy cheer. Then the officer signaled the chow hall crew to proceed. But instead of laying out the meal, they began distributing the gang’s drug of choice—Indonesian Ecstasy. This batch was filled with extra methamphetamine, to keep the fighters wide awake for whatever might be coming.
But what would that be, exactly?
The answer came a few moments later.
IT BEGAN WHEN
someone spotted two lights out on the water just beyond the entrance to the lagoon.
One was bright white, with a small red light beside it. Running lights for a good-sized vessel, the pirates figured. As word went around camp about the mysterious lights, two more popped on. The same white and red combination, about five hundred feet from the first two. Then two more blinked on about two hundred feet from them. Then four more—and four more after that.
Within a minute, it appeared that more than a dozen large boats had suddenly materialized off the pirates’ shoreline. Was this a fleet of lost fishing boats that wandered over from the nearby Pautang Channel? Or were these mother ships, launching a rival gang’s fleet of fast boats? If so, this meant Zeek’s gang was about to be overwhelmed by a horde of enemy pirates.
Zeek’s men had to find out what was going on. With their officers’ blessing, a handful of them climbed into one of their own fast boats and headed out of the lagoon. Not thirty seconds later, those back on the island heard five distinct
pops!
Then the fast boat floated back in again.
The five pirates were still in it. They were all dead—each with a massive gunshot wound to the head.
The pirates began to panic. Many ran to get their weapons, which they usually kept in their fast boats. But suddenly a long stream of tracer fire came out of the night, tearing into the gang’s boats along the crooked finger dock and systematically exploding them like car tires. As the pirates reacted to this, another stream of tracer fire riddled the island’s generator hut. In an instant, the power plant blew up and all the lights went out.
Pirate Island was suddenly in the dark.
Aboard the DUS-7
NOLAN CLIMBED INTO
the passenger seat of the work copter and strapped in.
“Now comes the hard part,” he thought aloud.
He laid his M4 across his knees and put his helmet on. He was dressed in his usual battle suit with several belts of ammunition slung over his shoulder. He was anxious about the upcoming action.
Batman climbed in behind the copter’s controls. Nolan was happy to let him do the flying; just getting inside the copter still gave him the shakes. Batman did a quick check of the flight systems and saw everything was green, including the
50-caliber gun pod attached to the copter’s left-side hard point and the APO—the asymmetrical piece of ordnance—they were carrying on the right.
Close by on the mid-deck, the Senegals were putting the finishing touches on an unusual weapon, a throwback to the Vietnam era: five M2 50-caliber machine guns attached to a steel frame about ten feet long. A single belt of ammunition fed each weapon, ninety rounds per belt. A rudimentary camshaft had been slotted through the M2s’ firing mechanisms and attached to a pulley on one end of the steel frame and a large rotating bolt on the other. Depending on the amount of cranking done on the pulley, from one to all five of the weapons could be fired at once.
The steel frame sat on a wooden pallet supported by four hydraulic jack stands. The pallet could be hand-moved up and down, and left and right, but not very far. Gunner, the contraption’s designer, had assured them that if all went well, a whole lot of aiming and moving wouldn’t be needed for this cannonade machine to work. One of the guns had just taken out the pirates’ rubber boat fleet and their generator. But would all five work in concert when they needed them? That remained to be seen.
At the far end of the DUS-7, Gunner and Crash were reeling out a long rope, on the end of which were fourteen wooden rafts, built in the
Dustboat
’s tiny workshop. Each raft held a battery-powered searchlight and a smaller blinking red light. Called a Bailey String, it was an old British trick from World War II designed to make an enemy think there was a squadron of unknown warships offshore when no such ships existed at all.
Like the cannonade machine, the rafts were about deception, which was just about the only advantage Team Whiskey had in its mission against Zeek. Though they had wounded their adversary by robbing his bank and busting up his spy ring, his fuel supply and his communications system, there was no getting around the fact that they were outnumbered at least eight to one. They were also somewhat limited in their ammunition, had no real heavy munitions, and had a diminishing
supply of aviation fuel. If they were going to get Zeek, it had to be tonight, on their terms. And it all had to happen in less than five minutes, because after that, the element of surprise would be gone.
“Cutting through all the bullshit,” Batman said to Nolan now, “what do you think the chances are that all this hocuspocus is going to work?”
Nolan didn’t answer right away. It was an odd question. When they were in the military, they never talked about how good a plan was, or their chances of making it. They just went and did it because it was their duty. Even their first job for Kilos, saving the
Global Warrior
from Turk’s gang, had been undertaken with that mind-set.
But this—this was different. They were directly taking on a superior force, in their enemy’s territory, against overwhelming odds, for—well, for a paycheck. Though there was an ancillary reason to rid the world of Zeek and his scum, basically it came down to the fact that they were now mercenaries doing a job that they would get paid for if all went well. And if things didn’t go well, there would be no one left to get paid.
Their plan was simple then—or as simple as they could make it. Now that they’d gotten the pirates’ attention with the Bailey String, and by popping their rubber boats and killing their electricity, they would use the copter to attack the pirates from the south side of the lagoon. This way, they hoped the confused brigands would flee to the north side of the camp, to the small sandbar located on the only side of the small island that was in any way exposed. Waiting for them there, just 300 feet offshore, would be the DUS-7 and the Senegals and their cannonade machine.