The Pirate Hunters (5 page)

Mdoobi’s speedboat was the first to reach the
Global Warrior
, which was limping along at barely five knots. This, too, worked to Mdoobi’s favor, as it would make it that much easier to climb onboard.

His speedboat circled the ship once. As planned, two of his other boats shot to the front of the ship, where a gangway was partially retracted in an attempt to draw the pirates in. As the two boats approached, they were hit with spray from two fire hoses.

Meanwhile, Mdoobi and the two other boats went around to the back of the ship and threw a grappling hook with a rope ladder attached up to the stern handrail. In seconds, his men were clambering up to the ship’s main deck.

Mdoobi was the last to climb the rope ladder. On reaching the top, he found all his men were onboard and the crew had fled belowdecks. Three of his men were already securing the main deck; four more were ready to go below to search the cargo hold. One pirate had disconnected the LRAD, ending the annoying sound for good and allowing the others to take off their earmuffs. Another was waving to him from the bridge. Mdoobi immediately took out his sat phone and dialed his boss back on the tug.

“All is OK,” he reported. “No problems at all.”

THE PIRATE CAPTAIN
, Turk Kurjan, sat a quarter-mile away in the tug’s wheelhouse, watching the
Global Warrior
through night-vision goggles. A middle-aged Indonesian with a long scar splitting his nose in two, he wore his years at sea on his weathered face. He didn’t dress like the Somali pirates, who favored American-style ghetto chic once they had some money in their pockets. Turk always dressed in puffy rayon shirts, tight leather pants and combat boots. He wore earrings in both lobes and his head was shaved, except for a long, braided ponytail in back.

He’d been a pirate all his adult life, not in the Gulf of Aden or off Somalia, but in and around the Java Sea. Born of a long line of pirates, he and his brother had spent years attacking ships moving through the Strait of Malacca, stealing everything from
SUVs to iPods to food aid meant for tsunami victims. It had made them wealthy men.

But with the number of ships transiting the waters of the Gulf of Aden increasing every day, Turk, the older brother, had decided to move his operations westward. He stole the tug, gathered a crew and quickly went to work. Now, flush from his deadly attacks the night before, he was ready to go for a bigger prize.

But the
Global Warrior
was not just any victim. Turk had selected tonight’s prey very carefully. In his hold were the spoils from the previous night. From the Danish ship, not cheap furniture and brand-x computers, but five tons of 7.62mm ammunition being smuggled to Hamas on the Gaza Strip. From the Filipino fishing trawler, not tuna or fish bones, but fifty pounds of pure China White heroin, found secreted in one of the cutting crew’s footlockers.

Turk had known about these things prior to attacking the ships because, before moving his operations to this part of the world, he had set up a network of spies that stretched from Mumbai to the Suez. Eyes and ears in just about every major port reported which ships were going where and which vessels were carrying things they shouldn’t—which, truth be told, was the majority of flagged vessels sailing these waters. Smuggling by sea was as old as seafaring itself. And so was stealing from the smugglers.

Turk was not interested in hijacking tankers or cargo ships and becoming entangled in lengthy negotiations with their owners, just to squeeze a two-million dollar ransom out of them. He’d leave that to the Somalis. He could get twice that amount selling the valuable ammunition to the highest bidder, and probably three or four times more than that by selling the heroin to his contacts in Sicily.

Turk was a real pirate. He didn’t hijack ships, he attacked them. He took booty, not hostages. He had just one hard-and-fast rule: Leave no witnesses in your wake.

A slew of stolen electronics surrounded him in the wheelhouse. Sat phones, a GPS system, a ship-to-shore shortwave radio, a long-range portable radar. One supreme piece of
eavesdropping equipment was the military-issue communications suite known as the ANQ-202, which could monitor the shipboard communications of just about any vessel anywhere on the globe.

But again Turk counted on HUMINT—his human intelligence-gathering network—and this had paid off for him tonight. According to his spies, the
Global Warrior
’s manifest listed 202 used BMWs on board; they were being taken from Dubai back to Germany, where they would be reconditioned and sold again. Perhaps some of these cars were stolen and on their way to chop shops, but that isn’t what interested Turk. His informants reported that shortly before the
Global Warrior
’s departure from Dubai, a section of its loading pier had been cordoned off and a number of mysterious crates put aboard.

Turk was guessing that, just like the smack on the trawler and the bullets on the Danish ship, there was something more valuable than dinged-up BMWs in the
Global Warrior
’s hold.

He was intent on stealing it.

BACK ON THE
deck of the cargo ship, all was still going well for Mdoobi and his men. They were in complete control of the vessel and the crew would be found and snuffed out in due time. Meanwhile, the pirates had thrown the LRAD overboard, along with all of the ship’s radios. And four of them had already gone below to search the cargo hold.

So far, so good.

Mdoobi flipped open his sat phone, intending to update Turk on all this, when he felt something cold against his back. He turned just enough to see the silhouette of a man standing behind him. Mdoobi froze. Then he heard the sound of a trigger being squeezed. A moment later, he was looking down at a gigantic hole in his chest.

The gun blast echoed across the deck, startling the other pirates up top. They saw Mdoobi go over, but couldn’t see what had happened to him. The pirate who’d raced up to the bridge came out to investigate. He was killed by a shotgun blast to the back of his head.

The pirate who had thrown the LRAD and the radios overboard ran to see if Mdoobi was really dead. As he was checking on his boss, a pistol came out of the darkness and shot him point-blank in the temple.

The pirate fell backward and was suddenly looking up at the stars. He never saw the person who shot him.

His last thought was:
I’ve been killed by a ghost.

THE FOUR PIRATES
who went below to search the
Global Warrior
’s cargo hold had found the place unexpectedly dark and creepy.

The ship was not only moving at half speed, its electrical systems were working at half power, too. The light in the vast cargo hold was so dim, the pirates could barely see their way around. Making matters worse, a steam line had broken somewhere, and it had filled the hold with a weird kind of fog. Otherworldly sounds were coming from the deepest parts of the huge steel cavern, emanating from places where it was pitch black and the pirates could not see at all.

Displaying a lot less verve than when they first climbed down, they’d started to move into the hold itself when they heard three loud gun blasts come from up top. The pirates froze in place, their hands shaking as they tried to hold their Uzis steady.

A minute passed—but they heard nothing more from above. They had no sat phones, no way to talk to Mdoobi, so they decided one man would turn around, climb back up to the main deck and see what had happened. As this man disappeared into the mist, the three other pirates timidly forged ahead.

The fog became thicker the deeper they went into the cargo hold, a canyon of shrink-wrapped BMWs stacked five high and forty rows deep, creaking and groaning with the rolling of the ship.

Because there was almost no light down here, the pirates were forced to feel their way along the outer stack of cars. The unsettling ethereal noises grew louder as they crept forward. They sounded like the noise a ship’s engine would make, only
amplified. At the same time, the foggy air was also filled with electronic squeals and the sounds of people wailing in the background.

The pirates moved slowly. Walking in a line, they gingerly poked their rifles up under the shrink-wraps, but found nothing except chrome rims and the occasional flat tire. They became frustrated and scared. Where was the great treasure Turk had promised they’d find here?

At one point, the first two pirates turned to discover that the third pirate was missing. They whispered his name as loud as they dared, but got no response. He’d vanished.

This didn’t make sense—he’d been out of their sight for ten seconds at the most. They began backtracking, wondering if the man had lost his nerve and had decided to return up top.

But they soon found him, between two stacks of cars, fifteen feet away. He was crumpled on the oily deck, bleeding profusely from a stab wound to the neck. A nine-inch dagger had pierced his throat just below the Adam’s apple and exited behind his left ear, severing his vocal chords and his windpipe—preventing him from screaming. His eyes were still open, an expression of horror on his face. He’d been killed, silently, in less than ten seconds.

The two pirates dropped their weapons and started running. All thoughts of looking for Turk’s magical booty were now gone. They headed straight for the ladder they’d used to climb down into the belly of the beast. But just two steps up they found their way blocked by the body of the man who’d turned back to investigate the noise up top. He was hanging upside down on the ladder rungs, his torso grotesquely contorted, holes from two bullets shot at close range puncturing his forehead.

The two pirates fell back to the cargo deck, terrified. They were in full panic now, trapped among the creaking BMWs, the steam almost enveloping them, the weird noises coming at them from all sides.

They began running for their lives. They could hear footsteps chasing them—but any time they dared look behind them, no one was there.

“They are hunting us!” one man yelled to the other. “They will kill us both!”

They reached the far end of the hold and found themselves in the propulsion area, a series of dark, narrow passageways with fading lights and a blanket of even thicker fog. The strange noises were almost deafening here.

Spotting the refrigerator room ahead, one of the pirates bolted for it, thinking it was a good place to hide. Just as he was about to reach for its door, though, the butt of a rifle slammed him in the face. He fell backward, smashing his head. When his vision cleared, he found himself looking up through the mist into the barrel of a shotgun. It was the last thing he ever saw. The weapon was lowered to the pirate’s chest and the trigger was pulled. There was a moment of tremendous pain, but then everything went black.

Only one pirate was left below now. He stumbled on to the engine room but realized it was not a refuge but a trap. He ran farther down the foggy passageway, spotting a bulkhead door ajar up ahead. He darted up to it, looked inside—and was astonished to find the ship’s crew, Eastern Europeans most of them, sitting around a table, drinking coffee.

They didn’t seem too surprised to see him. He was terrified, and they were strangely calm. When he spewed out some Somali curse words, the crewmen laughed at him. One man stood up, forced him back out into the passageway, and slammed the door in his face.

The pirate turned and started running back through the cargo hold, trying to find another access ladder. Unseen pursuers previously hidden in the shadows began chasing him. As he pleaded with them not to shoot him, their footsteps grew closer.

He began weaving his way around the shrink-wrapped cars, hoping to elude the phantoms, but then two shots rang out at close range. Both hit the pirate in the back. Another bullet got him in the buttocks. He staggered to a nearby ladder and tried to climb up, but two more rounds, fired from just a few feet away, hit him in the legs. With all the strength he could muster, he hauled himself up to the next deck only to find a man in black camouflage waiting for him.

“No need to waste a bullet on you,” the man in black said, kicking the pirate in the face instead. The pirate fell down the ladder, cracking his skull on the deck below.

THERE WERE ONLY
three pirates left alive aboard the ship now, all on the main deck. Two managed to make it down one of the rope ladders to a speedboat tied up below. But in the rush, one man pushed the other, causing him to fall headfirst into the water. He was soon churned up by the huge ship’s wake.

The pirate who made it into speedboat tried to start the engine. But before he could turn the key, a torrent of bullets came raining down on him. Some kind of massive weapon put twenty large holes in both boat and pirate, blowing them to pieces.

Now only one pirate remained. He found himself running around the expansive main deck, being chased by at least four ghostly figures who were trying their best to take him down with one careful, fatal shot. He’d thrown away his gun and his knife by this time and yelled in surrender, but his pursuers were relentless.

In his terror, the pirate passed an odd sight: a small helicopter parked on a makeshift metal pad on the bow of the ship. Its engine was running, its rotors were turning, but no one was in it.

If only I could fly that thing
, he thought.

He continued running, dodging bullets by ducking behind crates and various pieces of equipment on the deck. He made one entire circuit of the ship this way, out of breath and in a complete panic, somehow finding himself on the stern again.

And here he finally stopped, collapsing to his knees, unable to go on.

He turned slowly to find a tall man dressed in black had appeared above him.

The man was holding a gigantic .45 automatic. He also had a black patch over his left eye.

He pressed the pistol against the pirate’s mouth and said: “Suck on this.”

Then he pulled the trigger.