Task Force Desperate (44 page)

It was surprising how normal everything appeared. There weren’t any armed patrols, in fact there was no sign of the pirates we’d run into up in Hadibu. The gas station just outside the airport had its lights on, and was apparently open for business. There wasn’t really any traffic, which wasn’t all that surprising given the hour, but it felt strangely calm, as though none of the hell that was going on around the Gulf of Aden had any effect here. It was an illusion, one that we would shatter soon, but it was eerie, all the same.

We trundled down the road, which was in really good shape, better than some of the roads back in the States, as a matter of fact. There weren’t a lot of lights lit on Socotra at night, and the clouds had started to roll in off the Arabian Sea, so there wasn’t much starlight, either. The hills loomed on our right, their dark bulk more felt than seen, outside of the cone of light from our headlights. Nobody talked much.

After a while, Logan pulled the truck off the road, and we bounced along a rough dirt track in the dark, until the ground ahead suddenly disappeared from the headlights. Then he stopped the truck, killed the lights, and shut off the engine. When he got out of the cab, he simply said, “We’re here,” and started walking away.

We jumped out, hauling out our kitbags with us, and started after him. It quickly became apparent that the ground had disappeared because we were parked on the edge of a steep bank that sloped sharply down toward the shore. It was going to be rough climbing with our kit, but Logan already had a path picked out, and was marking it with small chemlights as he descended. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t as bad as it initially looked.

At the bottom, the waves lapped against the shore and the three Zodiac rubber boats that were mostly set up just above the waterline. The engines weren’t hooked up yet, but they were on the beach, along with five storm cases full of gear.

“Holy shit, Logan, you didn’t haul all this crap down here by yourself did you?” Larry asked.

“Yeah, I did,” was the gruff reply. “So what?”

“Just…damn.” There had to be the better part of a ton of gear down there on the beach, and Logan had humped it solo down that embankment. The guy gets a little…single-minded, sometimes.

Glancing at my watch, instinctively shielding the Indiglo with my hand, I saw that it was about 0230. We had about three hours or so before first light. That was going to make it unlikely that we’d manage to take the ship tonight. We still had too much setup to do. We got to it.

None of the boats was fully assembled; we had to finish inflating them and install the deck plates. The outboard motors had to be unpacked, fitted to the boats, and secured, then fueled, primed, and tested. All of our kit had to be brought out and checked. By the time everything was ready, it was almost dawn.

“Were you able to get eyes on the target?” Mike asked Logan, as we all sat down either on the storm cases, the boat gunwales, or rocks.

“No,” was the answer. It wasn’t surprising, considering that the weird bastard had spent however many hours hauling three boats and all their assorted gear down a rocky slope, instead of leaving it in the truck and waiting for us to get there to help out.

“We’re going to have to do some kind of reconnaissance,” I said. “The Colonel’s information is as up-to-date as he can make it, but it’s still old. We need eyes on before we try to board.”

“Well, anybody bring shorts?” Eddie asked with a laugh. “We can be tourists running around in a boat, skin diving.”

Without a word, Logan got up and hiked back up the bank toward the truck. We all kind of looked at each other, not sure what to make of this. When he came back down, he had a small overnight bag over his shoulder, which he tossed on the ground in the middle of the loose circle we had going.

“The Colonel thought they might be useful,” was all he said. Bob went over and opened up the bag. Inside were several sets of tropical shirts, shorts, and sandals; just the sort of thing tourists would be wearing in a place like Socotra.

“Leave it to the old man to think of shit we didn’t even think to ask about,” Bo said. To Bo, Tom was always “the old man,” since the two of them had served together in the Army, many years past.

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take Jim and Lee.” I tossed each of them a pair of shorts and sandals that might fit, and pulled out a loose white short-sleeved shirt and pair of board shorts that looked like I could get into. Without much fanfare, we started peeling out of our khakis and t-shirts for the tourist gear. “I’ll need binoculars and at least one camera, plus a cascade bag for weapons. Pistols only; if we need rifles, we’re fucked anyway, and the mission is blown.” I stopped talking to pull my t-shirt over my head. I got a good whiff of myself as I did, and damn near gagged. I couldn’t remember the last time any of us had had a shower. At least playing tourist out on the ocean for most of the day would give us a chance to rinse off, even if it was with salt water.

“It’s still about eleven klicks to the target area,” Alek said. “That’s within range of the icoms. I don’t want you taking tactical radios if we can avoid it. Keep comms up the whole time; if we’ve got to come after you, I want to know immediately.”

“Not my first rodeo, Alek,” I reminded him. “We’ll be up.”

He clapped a huge hand on my shoulder. “Not trying to armchair quarterback, here, brother. Just can’t afford for this to go sideways.”

I returned his shoulder-thump. “We’ll get it done, brother.” I rolled my trousers and shirt up and lay them on top of my hiking boots, next to my kitbag. I pulled my .45 out, checked the mag, and slipped it and two spares into a small waterproof bag, which was then clipped securely into the inside of the boat, next to Jim’s Kimber and Lee’s SIG. Lee already had the radio and the binos, and Jim was putting a digital camera in a waterproof case that would still let us use it.

On a thought, I grabbed my fins and a pair of Chuck Taylors out of the amphib gear, and clipped them in the boat, along with a mask and snorkel. They might come in handy. Jim saw me do it, and as soon as he was finished with the camera and had it installed in another waterproof bag, he did the same. As I clipped mine in, I saw that Lee had beaten me to the idea.

With our gear checked and loaded, we heaved the boat down the beach and into the water.

Chapter 31

I
t was almost possible to momentarily forget just how serious a situation we were in, as we started leisurely motoring our way along the Socotra coastline. As the sun climbed in the sky and cleared the broken clouds that had gathered over the island’s central peaks, we seemed to be a world away from the fire and bloodshed that had consumed our lives for weeks now.

The water was crystal clear, and we could look down and see schools of fish darting past. A pod of dolphins skimmed alongside the boat for a couple of kilometers, leaping clear out of the water on more than one occasion. We could almost relax and enjoy ourselves a little, especially since that was what we were supposed to be appearing to do anyway.

I’ve never made a good tourist, and from the looks of things, neither have Jim and Lee. It was all we could do to lounge in the boat rather than lay down on the gunwales and open the throttle, heading for the target. But there were eyes on shore, and out on the water, that would notice if we acted too much like American gunfighters, and not enough like tourists in awe of the natural beauty of Socotra.

It
was
a striking place, now that I took a moment to really look at it. The last time we’d been there, I had been watching the pirates, not the scenery.

The island reared up out of the Arabian Sea in a jumble of jagged towers, their slopes covered with more verdant greenery than any of us expected this close to either the Arabian Peninsula or the Horn of Africa. It wasn’t Hawaii, don’t get me wrong, but it definitely got more rain than Somalia did.

The water was warm, and we each took a turn or two going over the side to swim a bit, stretching tired muscles while rinsing the grime from our skin and looking like dumbassed tourists frolicking in the ocean only a little way from where pirates were openly operating. We never got too far from the boat, and kept away from anybody who might be a spotter. We didn’t want to get taken ourselves. It was unlikely; they used Socotra as a port, and most tourists went unmolested, most of them blissfully unaware of the nature of the murderers they got their pictures taken with.

After about an hour, we were roughly halfway to the port, and we could see three large merchant vessels sitting at anchor. We were getting close to where we could start actually reconnoitering the target vessel. We’d have to do it carefully, looking like slack-jawed gawkers taking pictures of everything, so there‘d be quite a bit of junk around the important pictures. Jim had taken the role of our resident shutter-bug, and had already set the pattern of taking enough photographs that if we had been actual tourists, our families would be looking for a shotgun to end it all about a quarter of the way through the slide show.

We drifted closer, and I picked out the
Frontier Rose
. She was sitting slightly farther out to sea than the other two, and while there was some activity around the two closer in, she seemed abandoned at first, almost dead in the water. There was no movement at all, except for the lap of the waves against her hull.

I brought the binoculars up, and peered at her, watching the superstructure and the bow more closely, trying to find lookouts or other signs of armed occupation. “Looks dead,” I said.

“I hope not,” Lee replied. “That would mean the crew is somewhere else, and I doubt we’ll be able to find them before tonight.”

Jim grumbled something under his breath. “What’s up?” I asked him.

“This whole damned clusterfuck started out trying to find hostages,” he said irritably. “And now here we are trying to find a
different
set of hostages.”

“Just the way the game plays out, brother,” I said, getting back on the binoculars.

“Wait a second,” Lee said. “Jeff, take a look over there.” He was pointing to our starboard, toward the far side of the pier. “Is that what I think it is?”

I turned the binoculars to where he was pointing. There was a dhow floating just on the other side of the farthest ship, drifting slowly down the coastline toward us. There were definitely armed men aboard it; I could see one with a badly-wrapped turban in the bow, with a Krinkov slung across his chest. There was a machinegun mounted on the forecastle behind him, too, though I couldn’t get a very good look at it.

“Yeah, it looks like they’ve got a patrol boat covering the port,” I said. “At least one heavy gun on it, and probably RPGs, too.” I lowered the binoculars. “Fucking hell. That’s going to make things more complicated.”

“Let’s just hang out for a while and see what they do,” Jim suggested. “At least we can try to figure out a pattern for their movements, so we might be able to avoid them at night. I doubt those Muslim Brotherhood assholes have been supplying the
pirates
with night vision, too.”

“Let’s hope not,” I said, as I raised the binos again. “This would work better if we had a couple of days to watch, but we’re getting a little down to the wire, if we’re going to make that meeting.”

“We can always hope they go home for the night,” Jim said.

“Yeah,” I said, watching the guy with the Krinkov. The longer I watched, the more I was convinced that he really wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings at all. He was leaning against the bow, letting the gun hang, and appeared to be smoking something. “You can hope in one hand, and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.” Jim chuckled.

We floated, making an effort to look like we really were snorkeling like good little tourists, while drifting closer to the seaward side of the
Frontier Rose
. We finally saw some movement on her deck. A single man in local clothing was walking along her side, from the bow toward the superstructure. At first look, he appeared to be unarmed, but Lee took the binoculars, and announced that he had a pistol in his waistband, sticking out of his shirt, in the usual “blow your own balls off” gangster carry.

So, there were armed pirates on the ship. We still didn’t have any confirmation that the crew was still aboard, aside from the last video message from the pirates, which was over five days old. They could very well have moved them, or even moved them from shore out to the ship to tape the message, then taken them back to shore. It didn’t sound likely, and pirates had shown a tendency to keep their hostages on the ships they hijacked, with a few exceptions, but it was a possibility.

The sun was starting its long slide toward the Somali coast, and we still didn’t have any confirmation that the crew was aboard. If we didn’t get the crew, we were fucked. I was increasingly convinced we could take the ship relatively easily; the pirates we could see were slacking off, bored, and paying little attention to their surroundings. There hadn’t been any attempt to take any of the ships they had, they probably hadn’t seen a US Navy ship in months, and they certainly weren’t worried about their captives trying anything.

But without the crew, taking the ship would be pointless. None of us knew how to run a container ship, plus the use of the ship was conditional on our rescuing the crew. We
had
to find them.

Just as I was starting to get to the point of thinking of doing something crazy and/or stupid to get in and see if I could get eyes on the crew, the pirates did us a favor.

It was probably about five in the afternoon when a small fishing boat with a single occupant pushed off from the shore and slowly motored out to the nearest inshore cargo ship, a bulk carrier called the
Hyram Horizon
. It disappeared behind the ship, but we could hear some yelled conversation, then the boat came chugging out from the shadow of the
Hyram
and headed for the
Frontier Rose.

This time, the boat pulled up to the ship’s flank where we could see. The guy in the boat yelled up to the deck, and after a minute, was answered by one of the pirates. This guy was carrying an AK and a radio, and spoke into the radio for a moment after the guy in the boat yelled up to him. Jim was taking pictures as fast as he could.