Operation Sea Ghost (2 page)

After the colossal two-day media blitz was finished, she’d declared herself too stressed to fly directly to Italy. She’d opted instead to lease the enormous mega-yacht out of Oman and sail up to Rome instead, a trip of seven days. It would be a relaxing way to spend the week, plus she would arrive fashionably late for her first day on set, something that made her high-powered publicists very happy.

Such was life for the person
People
magazine had christened “the world’s favorite movie star.” Emma was gorgeous; that was beyond dispute. Just twenty-six years old, five-foot-five and nicely shaped, she was impeccably blond, redhead or brunette depending on her mood. Her image regularly graced the covers of every celebrity magazine on the planet. Her movies were hits everywhere; they’d already grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, and that included dirt-poor places like Yemen where she was extremely popular. Her celebrity spanned religious, ethnic and cultural barriers. Though thoroughly American, she was considered a citizen of the world. Her Facebook page received a million hits a day and millions more around the globe followed her every move on Twitter. She was a certified international phenomenon.

But being Emma Simms was not easy. She spent five hours every day in the gym working with her personal trainers. Another three hours were devoted to creating new hairdos and makeup schemes with her stylist. Her life coach took up another two hours, as did her personal spiritualist and her nutritionist. Hundreds of millions of people adored her, so all the hard work must have been paying off.

Still, she could be demanding. Her morning toast had to be exactly 76 degrees Fahrenheit or she would not eat it. Bad for digestion, her nutritionist had told her. She had to have exactly five one-inch-square ice cubes in every glass of Bavarian spring water she drank, as anything less would not provide the optimal temperature for proper skin hydration. The clothes closets on the rented yacht—which she insisted undergo a $100,000 redesign overnight before she agreed to step on board—were organized in four distinct categories: day of the week, time of day, disposition of the moment and strength of aura as calculated by her ever-present shaman.

Anywhere she traveled, the hired help were told not to look at her directly—after all, that’s how auras were stolen. The help also had to be white, or at least not too dark. She’d told the mega-yacht’s owners that after her recent tour, she’d “had enough of Africans for a while,” leaving them to scramble to find fifty-three Caucasian maids, cooks, butlers and crewmen on just a few hours’ notice.

Her own lily-white entourage numbered in the dozens, and her luggage consisted of more than a hundred suitcases, many filled up with her extensive collection of sunglasses, which simply had to go with her wherever she went. And to keep herself centered at all times while on the yacht, whatever outfit she was wearing up on deck, all the pillows and cushions within her line of sight had to be of the same color or they damn well better be made up of complementary hues.

There had already been a couple of tirades about this, and heads had rolled.

*   *   *

EMMA SIMMS WAS intensely sure of herself. She had more balls than any of her leading men. She rarely forgot her lines. She could play happy just as well as sad, light as well as dark. And though she’d starred in a couple of romantic comedies early in her career, her bread and butter was the action-adventure film. She looked her best on screen when she appeared to be kicking someone’s ass. She even hoped to do her own stunts someday, to get a deeper connection to her characters. But at the moment, her management was dead set against that idea. Stunt doubles still threw the punches, took the tumbles, crashed the cars.

Emma was just too valuable to do them herself.

*   *   *

THE IMMACULATE PERCEPTION
sailed through the evening, gliding atop the quiet sea.

It was not entirely alone. The Omani Navy had provided an armed frigate, currently sailing a quarter mile behind, to watch over both megastar and mega-yacht during this part of the journey. A favor from her friend, the Sultan of Oman, the warship was scheduled to stay with her until an Egyptian patrol boat met the yacht off the Red Sea island of Perim around midnight. From there, the Egyptian navy would take over escort duty right up through the Suez Canal.

A small glitch arose in this plan, though. Emma was below in her luxurious cabin, staring at proofs of her new children’s book,
Everyone Wants to Be Me,
when word arrived that the Egyptian boat had been slightly delayed due to some celebrity reporters demanding they come aboard and record its cruise. Her personal physician had just left, having injected her with her nightly cocktail of mood elevators and sleeping aids, and she was already feeling the effects.

The plan now was for the Egyptian vessel to rendezvous with the mega-yacht just before 1:00
A.M.
, a little north of Perim. This was not a problem. Though low fuel had forced the Omani frigate to turn back at 12:30
A.M.
, by that time, the Egyptian patrol boat was just ten miles away. Considering the two vessels were heading right for each other,
The Immaculate Perception
would be without escort for less than twenty minutes.

But that’s all it took.

Because just as soon as the Omani ship disappeared over the horizon, the pirates struck.

*   *   *

THEY’D BEEN LURKING off Perim, hidden among the rocks near the island’s treacherous south side.

Using two fast boats, each carrying six heavily armed gunmen and extra fuel tanks, they’d come up behind the yacht and, hidden by the darkness, climbed aboard unmolested. Only when two of the pirates appeared in the yacht’s control room did the crew know something was amiss. The vessel’s onboard security team, four bouncers from Ankara, vanished in an instant. Once the yacht’s captain realized how quickly they were being overrun, he ordered his fifty-five-man crew not to resist. He also suggested Emma’s entourage do the same.

It all happened very fast. Sixty seconds after climbing aboard, the dozen Somali pirates were in control of
The Immaculate Perception.

*   *   *

WHEN THE FIRST pirate walked into Emma Simms’s cabin, she thought he was one of her waiters, inexplicably dressed in blackface and rags.

“Why are you in that getup?” she’d asked him.

The man didn’t speak English, but he didn’t have to. He simply raised his AK-47, fired a burst into the ceiling. Then he yanked her to her feet and began to drag her up to the main deck.

“No!” she screamed, terrified—but it was no use. He pulled her up top where she saw the crew had been made to kneel against the railing, her own contingent right beside them. The pirates’ two large speedboats were tied up alongside the yacht, which by now had stopped dead in the water.

Armed men were everywhere: up on the bridge, on the foredeck, up on both helicopter pads and along both rails. From what Emma could see, everyone else on board had been aware of the pirate attack long before she was.

“So what the hell is this?” she suddenly bellowed to no one in particular. “These guys came looking for me
last
?”

Two pirates blindfolded Emma and her stylist and forced them into one of their speedboats. Emma complained loudly, slapping and kicking the gunmen, but to no avail. The rest of the pirates looted the yacht, robbing everyone on board and stealing Emma’s extensive sunglasses collection. They disabled the yacht’s engines and shot out its radio equipment, then left.

Had it been another time and place, the pirates might have stolen
The Immaculate Perception
itself.

But not tonight.

Emma had been their target all along.

3

THE TRIP TOOK two hours, a lot of it over choppy water.

Emma was only aware of sounds. The speedboat’s engine, her captors laughing, waves thumping against the bow. Loudest of all was her stylist wailing. At first, the woman tried to hold on to her so tight, her fingernails dug into Emma’s flesh. Finally Emma just pushed her away.

Once they’d reached their destination, the pirates drove the speedboat right up onto a beach. Still blindfolded, Emma was pulled out kicking and screaming, dragged across the hard sand and thrown in the back of a loud, rattling truck that squealed away in a cloud of exhaust. And suddenly she was alone. Her stylist was no longer with her.

The truck rumbled along for about fifteen minutes. Emma heard waves crashing along the way. She was on a coastal road somewhere; she prayed it wasn’t Somalia, the most horrible place in Africa. Just the thought of that made her sick to her stomach.

Eventually the truck stopped and she was hauled out and tied to either a pole or a tree, it was hard to tell. There was a lot of noise around her now: people cursing, fighting, weapons being fired; voices yammering in some strange language, spoken a mile a minute.

Someone eventually tore off her blindfold; her eyes adjusted to the bare light. She was in a clearing surrounded by dense jungle. A campfire was burning at its center. About a dozen wooden shacks were nearby. Three smaller shacks were standing a couple hundred feet away.

There were about thirty pirates in the camp. All were heavily armed and, oddly, many were wearing her sunglasses, even though it was night. This infuriated her. She screamed at them to take them off, but the pirates ignored her. They were so arrogant and dirty; she vowed never to wear any of the sunglasses again.

The pirates had picked the perfect place to hide—even she could see this. The thick forest concealed the camp from the ground, from the sea nearby and almost entirely from the air. She could just barely make out the stars above the overhanging jungle canopy. Their shimmering reminded her of her jewelry box back on the yacht.

The pirates began to build the campfire into a bonfire, adding wood and trash to make the flames go higher. A white female suddenly appeared among them. She was dressed in threadbare coveralls with a kerchief drawn around her nose and mouth, and a fisherman’s hat pulled over her forehead. Only her eyes were visible.

The pirates were ordering her about, making her carry firewood, and kicking her when she did not move fast enough. She was obviously another captive.

When she came close, gathering more wood for the fire, Emma whispered to her: “Do you know who I am?”

The woman barely acknowledged her. “I do,” was her muffled reply. She had a slight British accent. “Everyone does, I suppose.”

“Then don’t worry,” Emma told her. “When people find out
I’m
missing, they’ll come to rescue me. And they’ll rescue you, too.”

But the woman hissed back to her: “No one comes here to rescue anyone. You better learn that right away. You leave here only when someone pays your way out. I’ve been here two years and I’m
still
waiting. Others haven’t been so lucky. Some were shot just for taking up too much space.”

But Emma began arguing with her. “These filthy monkeys must know
who I am,
” she insisted. “They
must
realize I’m more valuable to them alive than dead.”

“Oh, they know
all
about you,” the woman replied, pretending to fuss with some scraps of wood. “Too much in fact. They knew you were in the area because you made such a big deal about it. So, they were just waiting to snatch you. You mean millions to them.”

“Well, you see then,” Emma boasted. “If they’re not going to kill me, I have no reason to be afraid, right?”

The woman just shook her head and moved on.

*   *   *

THE PIRATES SMOKED cigarettes, chewed qat and passed around Emma’s sunglasses. They drank alcohol from old oil cans, and the more they drank, the more boisterous they became. After a while, several began fighting, cutting each other with knives. Others were so drunk they were barely able to walk.

Emma cursed at them the whole time. She demanded to be untied. She demanded water. She demanded they stop wearing her sunglasses. She called them criminals, gangstas—and worse. But the pirates continued to ignore her, preferring instead to watch their bonfire grow. Some even stuffed pieces of cloth in their ears, just so they wouldn’t have to listen to her.

After an hour, another truck arrived. A tall black man in jungle camos climbed out. The other pirates flocked to him, calling him “Captain.”

This man had a copy of
People
magazine and showed it around to the delight of the other pirates. Emma caught a glimpse of it: July 7, 2011. Her face was on the cover.

The captain walked over to her. He smelled awful and she told him so. He had a digital camera and began to take her picture. She tried to look away, tried to hide her face, but the man grabbed her hair and made her pose. When she spat in his face, he raised his hand to strike her, but stopped.

“You can’t hurt me!” she screamed at him. “I’m worth too much!”

The man wiped the saliva from his face and glared at her, but then he turned and went back to the bonfire. Emma mocked him as he retreated. Even in this precarious situation, she felt in control, invulnerable and above it all.

Then the woman in the kerchief passed by her again, carrying more wood for the fire.

“You’re only making it worse for yourself,” she whispered to Emma. “If you just shut your mouth, they might get so drunk, they’ll forget about you for a while.”

Emma laughed. “I’m not making it that easy for them. Why should I? They’re animals. And like I said, they won’t dare kill me. So I have nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, but you do,” the woman warned her. “And instead of insulting them, you should be praying very hard. Because what they’re planning for you will be
worse
than dying.”

Emma laughed at her. “Nothing is worse than dying,” she said.

Clearly Emma wasn’t catching on, so the woman pointed to a pair of pirates sitting close to the raging fire. They were holding a steel rod over the flames. It was nearly white hot.

“They are going to use that on you,” the woman told her starkly. “To
brand
you—understand? Mark you up like a blooming pig or a cow.
That
makes you
their
property. And after that happens, they’ll rape you. Sodomize you. All of them, and more than once. And God be with you, because while you might survive, you will never be the same.…”