The Oregon was halfway through the turn. Cabrillo had judged it precisely. He backed his ship with the expertise of a truck driver parallel-parking a big rig. The stern came mere inches from the muddy bank. They were so close that someone standing near the jack staff could have plucked leaves from the trees. Then she swung around, almost pivoting on a dime, so her fantail was pointed eastward toward the open ocean.
Eric gave Cabrillo a look of respect bordering on hero worship. He never would have dared maneuver the ship so fast through such a tight channel.
“Think you can take it from here?” the Chairman asked his helmsman.
“I got her, boss man.” The ship automatically recorded its position using the constellation of GPS satellites. All Stone had to do now that the trickiest corner had been negotiated was run a reverse course through the nava-computer and the ship would steer herself around the tricky swamps and shifting shoals. He already had the coordinates where the derelict fishing boat awaiting Mohammad Didi had been pre-positioned.
Juan got up from his command chair and turned to Giuseppe Farina. “Let’s figure out who you want to keep and who’s going over the side. I want the pirates off the ship before we clear the mangroves.”
He led the Italian observer down several decks to the Oregon’s boat garage. Here, near the waterline, was a large door that could be opened to the sea. There was a ramp built into the ship, covered in Teflon to make it slick. From it, the crew could launch Zodiacs, Jet Skis, or her RHIB—rigid-hull inflatable boat. That particular craft was built for the Navy SEALs, with a bladder of air around its hull to give it buoyancy in any conditions and a pair of powerful outboards that could shoot it across the waves at better than fifty knots. The lighting was white fluorescents, but red battle lamps could be lit for night operations.
The crew had already inflated a large black raft, and the unconscious forms of the pirates had been loosely bound to it. Once they awoke, they would be able to free one another and paddle the raft back to shore. Hux still had the wounded in the medical bay, while the dead would be given burials at sea.
“We’ll take this one and this one and that guy on the far side,” Farina said, pointing to Malik and Aziz. “When they took the ship, they appeared to have some leadership role. Who knows, they might prove to be an intelligence asset.”
“The younger one probably isn’t worth it. Guy smokes more dope than a hippie at a Grateful Dead concert.”
“They no longer tour, you know,” ’Seppe teased.
“You know what I mean.”
“We’ll use him anyway. A little forced detoxification might do him some good.”
Thirty minutes later, Hux arrived in the boat garage with a couple of crewmen acting as orderlies. They wheeled down several gurneys for the injured pirates.
“How are they?” Juan asked.
“We have a casualty,” Hux told him.
“What? Why wasn’t I told?”
“No sense informing you until I had him stable.”
“Who is it? What happened?”
“One of those triple-A rounds penetrated Sam Pryor’s cabin. He took some shrapnel to his back. I pulled out about twenty small fragments. He lost a good amount of blood, and there’s some torn muscle, but he’s going to be fine.”
“Thank God,” Juan breathed, thinking about the reprimand Mark Murphy had coming. He should have had the stern Gatling online much sooner. “So what about these guys?”
“Two have hearing loss,” Dr. Huxley replied in a no-nonsense tone. “I don’t know if it’s permanent, and there isn’t much I could do either way. Couple more have superficial wounds. I dug out the shrapnel, cleaned and dressed them, and pumped them with as much antibiotic as I dared. If they get infected, they’re in for a rough time of it, considering the conditions they live in.”
The two Somalis who’d been shot had been given a nylon satchel. Cabrillo guessed they contained additional medication and written instructions on how to use it. He also guessed the men wouldn’t take the drugs and they would end up on Somalia’s booming black market.
The wounded were set on the raft and the outer door was cranked open. Juan called up to the op center for Eric to bring the ship to a stop. At the leisurely speed they were doing, it took only a few minutes for the pump jets to slow the ship until she was wallowing in the gentle waves like an old sow. Water lapped just below the bottom edge of the ramp. Beyond, Cabrillo could see they were just about to break out of the mangroves. With the tide coming in, the raft would drift westward until it became entangled in the swamp. The men would wake in about an hour, so other than mild dehydration they would be fine.
He helped push the raft until it was sliding down the ramp. It hit the water without a splash, and its momentum carried it a few yards from the ship.
Juan tapped the intercom button again. “Okay, Eric, take us away nice and easy, and when they’re a quarter mile astern open her up and get us to the fishing boat.”
“Roger that.”
A half hour later, Juan and ’Seppe Farina were outside, standing on the wing bridge. Crewmen were at work repairing the cosmetic damage caused by the RPG attacks. Railings were being replaced and scorch marks covered in thick marine paint. Men were slung over the side on bosun’s chairs welding patches to the hull where the antiaircraft rounds had pierced the armor. Other men were inside, restoring the cabins with mattresses and furniture from the ship’s stores. Max Hanley was compiling a list of everything they would need to buy in order to put the old freighter back to her former “glory.”
The Oregon plowed through the calm waves at better than thirty knots, far from her maximum speed, when Linda Ross’s already high-pitched voice squeaked from the tinny speaker. “Chairman, we have a radar contact four miles dead ahead.”
Juan swung a pair of binoculars to his eyes and a moment later saw a speck on the otherwise deserted ocean. It took a few more minutes for it to resolve itself into a fishing boat much like the one that had initially attacked.
“When is the American destroyer going to be in this area?” Juan asked his friend.
“Dawn tomorrow. More than enough time for us to steal off into the night. Didi and the others probably won’t be awake yet, and, if they are, they will be so nauseated by the drug they’ll be as docile as lambs. And do not worry, the boat has no radio or fuel, and the chance someone will happen across it before your Navy is absolutely zero.”
Eric brought the Oregon alongside the old fishing vessel so that men in the boat garage could simply leap aboard her with lines to secure it to the freighter. Cabrillo and Farina personally carried Mohammad Didi onto the stinking boat. They lugged him into the cabin below the pilothouse, and when they tossed him on an unmade bunk they might accidentally have thrown him too hard. His head hit the frame with a satisfying clunk.
Cabrillo looked down on the warlord with utter contempt. “We should’ve had your ass Gitmo’d for all the suffering you’ve caused, but that wasn’t my call. The worst cell in the worst jail in the world is too good for you. Imprisonment in Europe will probably feel like a vacation after living like you have, so all that I can hope is that when they hand down that life sentence you have the decency to die on the spot.”
Back on deck he couldn’t help but chuckle. Linc and Eddie had tied Aziz to a chair with a fishing rod in one hand and a bottle of beer taped in the other.
No sooner had the ropes been cast away than Hali Kasim, the Oregon’s communications specialist, came over the intercom. “Chairman, you have an urgent call from Langston Overholt.”
“Pipe it down here.” Juan waited a beat, and said, “Lang, it’s Juan. Just so you know, you’re on speakerphone. With me is our Italian liaison.”