My body pressing against the steel of the
African Spirit
’s hull, I could feel its mechanical heart beating within, a pulse that felt almost alive. I twisted around and hauled myself up, getting my hand within reach of the next rung. This was my damaged hand, the one still swollen from the snake venom, and it ached painfully when it took my weight. But my boot found the lowest of the footholds pretty much right away and up I went.
My eyes were now fully adjusted to the dark. Looking toward the east, there was still no hint of the sun’s arrival, but it wouldn’t be long in coming. Raising my head slowly above the edge of the gunnel, I could see two of the pirates on watch, smoking and talking. They wore black urban assault body armor, FN FAL assault rifles slung over their shoulders like the guy I’d seen the night before; they also had NVGs, though one had his set pushed up on his head while the other’s dangled uselessly around his neck. The smell in the night air told me they were smoking weed. Off they strolled to the opposite side of the deck, having a nice chat and a joint. Their training mightn’t have been worth a pinch of shit, but their weapons loadout was top shelf. Two words popped into my head: von Weiss.
I waited another minute, listening, observing. Close by, sitting on top of the hatch cover over the hold closest to the ship’s superstructure and taking up a lot of room, was something beneath a canvas tarp. Hearing and seeing nothing else noteworthy, I hopped over onto the deck and went to investigate what it might be. Ducking under the bottom edge of the canvas, I crawled in. It was dark in there even though the sky was now hinting at the coming dawn. Though I couldn’t see a thing, my fingertips reported the smooth hull of a boat. Working along to its stern, I found three large outboards hanging off the back.
A deep rumble that thrummed up through the steel plate beneath my feet combined with a slight loss of balance to inform my senses that we were moving.
Shit.
T
he tender’s fuel tanks were enormous, and further augmented by a collapsible 270-gallon bladder. So not only did this baby undoubtedly have some go, it also had range. The light improved as I continued to investigate, locating a cooler stocked with – among other things – thirty bottles of chilled mineral water. Lucky for me because, with the sun climbing above the horizon, there was already enough heat under this tarp to bake a chicken. Those other things, by the way, included a dozen bottles of Krug champagne, several kilos of smoked salmon, cured hams and salamis, a selection of cheeses and four large tubs of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream – a cut above the usual survival rations, in my experience.
I found no IDs on the runabout, but I did find a locker beneath the floor. Inside it were two pairs of shooter’s gloves, size large; two FN FAL assault rifles and half a dozen extra mags to go with them; two pairs of NVGs; half a dozen M26 frag hand grenades; two black urban assault body armor vests with webbing; and, most surprisingly, a drum-fed Atchisson AA-12 fully automatic assault shotgun with spare drum. I’d seen this weapon demonstrated but never used one. From memory, it could pump out three hundred rounds per minute and packed a kick like Chuck Norris with a hangover. Food, horsepower, guns and gas: was this some kind of escape pod, or a means for the
African Spirit
to project a little power? It was certainly capable of both.
Small holes and tears in the tarp provided ventilation and gave me a view across the deck Within an hour of sunrise, we were well out to sea. I’d counted eight Somalis so far, a couple heavily armed, the rest not. All were thin, underfed specimens in cast-off clothing. Two fair-skinned men in their forties hurried by wearing neatly pressed green coveralls. These guys looked vaguely Middle Eastern in origin. Iranian, maybe. In all, an interesting cast of characters. I wondered how many of these fuckers were among the deadbeats who’d given Randy the treatment back in Dar.
And then two guys came by who got me all excited because, for one thing, they wore flat caps at a jaunty angle, had solitaire diamonds in their earlobes and looked like gangstas from a Snoop Dogg video. And, for another, I recognized them from Rio and from my brief time in the Congo. They were members of Falco and Charles White’s close protection squad, colleagues of the guy Shilling and I had rolled off Sugarloaf Mountain. Even more exciting than that was seeing the bodies they were guarding: Gamal Abdul-Jabbar, alias the tarantula, and Mohammed Ali-Bakr al Mohammed, the Somali pirate kingpin.
The state-of-the-art military technology, the high-powered luxury tender, the presence of the Whites’ security team, the pirate boss and his eight-legged assistant . . . I’d landed square in the middle of von Weiss’s plan as it was being put into effect. Only, what exactly was the plan? As I considered this, Ali-Bakr al Mohammed stopped to urinate over the side of the boat. If he’d been alone, I could have dropped a major fly in von Weiss’s ointment by giving the guy a little push, dropping him in the drink.
There had to be others on board who hadn’t conveniently wandered past my hide. How many, I couldn’t be sure. And what about those Iranians? Were they, in fact, Iranians? If they were, what were they here for? They seemed out of place. Did they have something to do with the W80? And was the bomb actually on board the ship? I believed it was, and presumably so did Randy. Was it tucked away in one of the holds? At some point, I’d have to leave the safety of my hide and search the ship. That gizmo Petinski had shown me – the arsenic wafer or whatever it was called – that would’ve come in handy. It could’ve told me for sure if the bomb was here somewhere. And that got me to thinking: if it was on board, then what was I gonna do about it all on my lonesome? I finished off another bottle of chilled Evian water, sweated, and put an eye up to one of the holes. The way
khat
scrambled my thoughts was starting to get on my nerves . . . Gallium arsenide wafer – that’s what it was called.
From the position of the sun, we were heading roughly north. Time, nine a.m. I was stuck here slowly cooking till the night came down in around ten hours time. And in maybe three days time the hands on Randy’s nuclear clock would be chiming midnight; after which the world would be a very different place, with the knowledge that our nuclear stockpile was fair game for criminals. I urinated into the now-empty water bottle, peeped through the holes in the tarp, and hoped the effects of the damn
khat
would just hurry up and wear the fuck off so that I could get some damn sleep.
A horn sounded over the decks and all the armed men immediately ran for cover inside the main superstructure, leaving the unarmed Somalis, who continued doing whatever they were doing, which was mostly smoking, spitting and picking their noses. I released the ammo drum on the AA to get a feel for the weapon’s action, and because the crap in my system just wouldn’t let me sit still, then snapped it back into place. A few seconds later, I heard the sound of jet engines. I got a visual on them through a tear in the tarp – a flight of two Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets, flaps lowered, going slow, cruising parallel to our course. They ran past us, heading in the opposite direction, around three hundred feet off the drink. There was a lot of ocean out here. Without doubt, they’d come specifically to check us out. A couple of the Somalis gave the fighter-bombers a friendly wave as they roared on by. There was no second pass, which suggested that the
African Spirit
had checked out just fine. The horn sounded a second time across the decks, two short blasts, and the armed men came back out.
The presence of the Navy Super Hornets told me there had to be a carrier within the vicinity – probably within two hundred miles of our position. It had to be the big E –
Enterprise
– the carrier that had recently joined the multinational anti-pirate Task Force 151 operation.
I yawned and closed my eyes. I needed to shut down for a few hours. I rested my head against the side of the tender, put my feet in the chiller, lay a couple of packs of smoked salmon over my head and snuggled up to a cold leg of ham. Sleep. Please just let me sleep.
*
My wish was granted, but I was only aware of it when I woke with a start and saw that the hands on my watch had advanced nine and a half hours as if by magic. Jesus, that was a big chunk of time. Now when I looked out of the tarp the orange sun was touching the horizon behind a gauze of heat haze.
I found a small paring knife and cut a chunk off the now body-temperature ham, ate some sloppy Ben & Jerry’s and drank a half-gallon of warm water. The chiller had stopped working, the batteries now well and truly exhausted. But unlike them, I felt okay. The
khat
was sweated out of my system along with the last vestiges of snake venom. And the food in this joint really was first class.
I killed the half hour till twilight tidying up the boat and surveying the activity on deck. Some unfamiliar faces wandered by, Somalis and more of those maybe-Iranians. A few wore ski masks, hiding their faces. I figured there had to be at least twenty men on board, possibly as many as twenty-five, many of whom were heavily armed. The Atchisson AA and I couldn’t take them all. But maybe there was a smarter approach. First priority, I had to scout the ship to see if the W80 was aboard. And, with a bit of luck, perhaps there were just enough folks of different shapes, sizes and nationalities for me to pass at least a casual inspection, as long as I dressed right.
The body armor went on first, webbing over that, and I filled the ammo rack on my chest with the spare FN mags and velcroed in a couple of M26s. I tied the red scarf around my neck and pulled on the ski mask. Over that I fitted the NVGs, turned them on and tested them, taking in the view through one of the larger tears in the tarp. The gadget worked fine, the evening sky a bright green above a green-black sea. In the front of my webbing, below the FN mags, was a velcro pouch that fitted the Desert Eagle perfectly. The .38 and its sweating handgrip went back in my sock. The remaining spare rounds – five – were still in my pocket. Finally, I slipped on a pair of the shooter’s gloves. As for the AA, I hadn’t seen anyone else packing one, which meant I had to leave it behind for now; carrying it around would instantly mark me out as someone different. So I placed it on the deck beneath a flap of the tarp, along with the spare drum loaded with twenty rounds of twelve-gauge double-aught. If I needed it in a hurry later, it’d be easy to pick up on the run.
By the time I’d done all this and familiarized my hands with the positions of everything stored around my body, it was well and truly night. There were stars, but the haze cut their brilliance. I had no idea what the moon was doing, there being too much smoke hanging over Dar to know whether it was up or down. With any luck it wouldn’t appear. A small amount of light from the boat’s superstructure fell onto the darkened deck, almost unnoticeable with the naked eye but amplified by the NVGs. The deck up this end of the ship, close to the superstructure, was clear of activity for the moment so I ducked under the tarp and came up in the cool night air. I shivered when it hit my skin, downright cold compared to my sweatbox hide.
I assumed the easy stroll of the armed guards I’d seen and ambled nice and slow toward the bow. A man approached me from the other side of the deck, one of the Iranians. I tensed. I hadn’t known he was out here. Had he seen me pop out from under the tarp? My finger twitched against the trigger guard of the Desert Eagle and I took the selector off safety. He started babbling at me. And in Farsi. That was a language I recognized the sound of. They spoke it in Afghanistan. It was also the national language of Iran. Interesting. Maybe I was right about where these guys were from after all.
There wasn’t a lot of illumination up this end of the deck. To anyone not wearing light-enhancing hardware, I’d be little more than a dark mass on two legs. The guy produced a cigarette, holding it in front of my NVG lenses, letting me know what he wanted – a light. I waved him away and kept walking, but he stood his ground, deriding me for being uncomradely. So I turned and patted down my pockets, making like I was going to accommodate him, and pulled something from a pocket. That quietened him down. I stood between him and the wind as if to shield the flame. We were close to the gunnel. He never saw the hit, a short, sharp rip to his midsection. I held him up by his shirtfront and he gawked at me with horror and confusion while he attempted to suck in some air. I scanned the deck, confirming that we were still alone. We were. ‘Sorry, pal,’ I whispered, pushing him back. He took two small steps, overbalanced, and slipped over the side without any kind of sound at all, into the wash boiling off the bow. One down. I pocketed the lighter, which was in fact one of the dum-dums for the .38.
I stepped up onto the steel plate doors that sealed the forward hold to investigate a sliver of light from below, escaping up through a crack. Why would a cargo hold need to be lit? Next stop, the bow. When I got there I stopped to have another look around to get my bearings and let the wind dry the sweat out of my clothes a little. The horizon, what I could see of it unobscured by cranes and superstructure, was completely empty. A door opened in the superstructure and light flared bright green and then died as the door closed behind an armed guard. I turned and walked back toward him. My intention was to shoot him if he made any fast moves, but the guy ignored me completely when I passed him – not even a nod.
I kept walking toward the superstructure, alongside the boat beneath the tarp. I flipped up the NVG lenses and then opened the door, yellow light flooding out along with oil fumes. I stepped inside and closed the hatch. The immediate area was empty, the steel walls painted cream above and red below, the floor painted green and all of it covered by a layer of grime. There were narrow ladders up and down, and passageways heading back toward the rear of the boat and along the front of the superstructure. Somewhere deep within, the heart of the ship whined louder, the pulse of it here more certain than it was out on the deck in the wind. A sign on the wall had a man slipping on a jagged red arrow pointing downward. Captions in both English and Arabic advised that care should be taken on the ladders. I took the advice and got a firm grip of the railing.
When I was halfway down, two Somalis arrived at the bottom and waited for me to complete the descent. Somewhere nearby, music was playing – Arabic or maybe Iranian. Arriving at the base of the steps, I ignored the Africans and got the same treatment in return.
An Iranian and a couple of armed Africans were moving around, coming from somewhere and going someplace. This looked to be the accommodation deck. I went on a recon stroll along a dimly lit passageway, the dead air heavy with human funk, pot and tobacco smoke. A door was open here and there, revealing tiny steel cells with small beds and no personal effects. An Iranian squeezed past carrying a spool of electrical wire in each hand and a pack on his back. I decided to follow him.
He took me on a tour down four decks, then through a series of passageways and bulkheads, working forward away from the engine noise. Down here the walls, floors and ceilings were spotted with corrosion cancers and glistened as if they were sweating. A bulkhead hatch opened ahead and three Africans ducked through into a blaze of white light. I followed the guy with the wire spools through the hatch. Once inside the hold, what I saw caused me to gasp. The people I took to be Iranian were climbing over the cargo, at least thirty fifty-five-gallon drums painted gray and ordered in neat rows. The word
GASOLINE
was stenciled in black on most of the drums. The Iranians were working hard at fitting electrical relays, detonators and Primacord to the drums. If I didn’t know better, they were rigging the boat for a massive explosion.
Stepping down onto the deck, I made my way to one side where enough room had been left beside the drums to provide a walkway. Ahead, I could see that a large section of the bulkheads between the holds had been roughly cut out, effectively creating one very large hold. In the center and forward holds were more lights, more drums, more Iranians, more Primacord. And in the forward hold, raised up on a bench with a rig, were two people in suits marked NBC – Nuclear Biological Chemical – working on something that looked a hell of a lot like a bulk milk can. My mouth was open. Our W80.
Our fucking nuke!
The damn thing
was
here. I took a few idle steps, concentrating on stopping my knees from shaking. I felt like sitting, and hard. Sweat bloomed on my forehead, the smell of gasoline in the hold suddenly suffocating. It was tempting to rip the ski mask off, though I wasn’t sure what purpose that would serve other than to get me instantly killed. I left it on and tried to make my brain think of something a bit more constructive. It stammered that it didn’t have enough information to make a call on my next move, so my legs took my brain forward into the second hold to see if that would help any. I moved slow and hoped I appeared nonchalant. There were more gasoline drums here, ordered just like they were in the first hold. Same again in the forward hold. Every second drum was rigged to blow, the ones in between sporting some kind of pump.