He remembered how he had felt then. His relief had been tempered by the uneasy feeling he always had after his encounters with Landor. With his close knowledge of Jack, and his press conferences that so adeptly whitewashed his operations as legitimate archaeology, Landor had always seemed one step ahead, like a criminal taunting a detective who never quite had the evidence to make an arrest. Jack had dealt with some intractable enemies in his career, with warlords who ruthlessly controlled the antiquities trade, with sadists who were driven by twisted ideology. With Landor, it was different, more complex. Archaeologists and treasure hunters were inevitably at loggerheads, their motivations so radically different, the moral case for archaeology unambiguous. Yet the personal element, the old friendship and the shared passion for diving in those formative years, had always stopped Jack from confronting him head-on, and Landor knew it. Sometimes it seemed as if Landor were his doppelgänger, a parallel version of himself in a universe with little morality, with no higher purpose, and yet with that shared passion that had set Landor apart from so many of the others he had come up against in the past.
This time, though, was different. This time Landor had gone one step too far, had let his greed and his bitterness, his desperation after his failure to raise the gold from Clan Macpherson, lead him into waters that were over his head. Jack was certain that he had ordered the gang to kidnap Costas as a bargaining chip to keep Jack out of the way until they had found the U-boat at the island. He had known that Landor would one day make a mistake that would destroy him, something more than his minor run-ins with governments in the past, but he had never guessed that it might be something this personal. He had spent most of the flight trying not to think of where Costas was now and what might be happening to him. He still had Zaheed’s blood under his fingernails, and that photo of his wife and little girl in his pocket. One thing was for certain: the Jack that Landor thought he knew was very different from the one who was going to be confronting him now.
The gunner drew back the bolt on the 50-caliber Browning machine gun and trained it on Deep Explorer, traversing it so that those watching from below could see. The pilot expertly maneuvered the helicopter over the stern of the ship, dropping to fifty feet and mimicking the ship’s course and speed. The loadmaster hooked Jack’s harness to the winch and gave a thumbs-up as the door light went green. Jack dropped out, feeling the rush of air from the rotor, and seconds later was down on the aft deck of the ship. There had been no formalities, no courtesy call to explain their intentions. Deep Explorer was just outside the exclusion zone, so the Somalis had no jurisdiction here. But legal niceties mattered little on the high seas when a ship was confronted by a machine gun capable of ripping apart the bridge and any crew in its sights, not to speak of the destructive potential of the twin rocket pods under the airframe. Landor had hired pirates whose livelihood was attacking unarmed ships in international waters; now the tables were turned, and he was about to reap his own whirlwind.
Jack took off his helmet, unclipped the carabiners, and cast off the line, pushing it out of the way as the loadmaster winched it up. The Huey drew forward and clattered deafeningly over the bow, the helmeted gunner with his machine gun clearly visible through the side door. Jack knew exactly where he was going, and went quickly up the steps to the bridge, pushing past several crewmen who had been ducking against the downdraft from the rotor. He pulled open the sliding door and stepped inside. The captain was at the helm, staring up at the helicopter with a mike in his hand. Jack shut the door noisily, and the captain turned round and saw him.
“Where’s Landor?” Jack snarled. The captain paused, as if judging the best response, then quickly picked up a phone. “Make a call now and they will shut you down,” Jack said, pointing out at the helicopter. “Your ship will be impounded and you will relocate to a stinking Mogadishu jail while I do all I can to block any attempt to release you.”
The captain held the phone and the mike for a moment longer, then lowered them both and jerked his head toward the door of the chart room at the back of the bridge. “Mr. Landor isn’t here, but Macinnes is. You can take whatever problem you have to him.”
Jack gestured at the helm. “Change course to bearing 320 degrees.”
“But that will take us into Somali territorial waters.”
Jack pointed up at the Huey again. “Do it, or he’ll empty one of those rocket pods into your rudder and screw, and you’ll drift with the current toward shore anyway.”
The captain pursed his lips, but stood behind the helm and did as he had been told. Jack checked the bearing, and then took out several plastic ties from his pocket. “Hands behind your back.” He put a tie around the man’s wrists and used another to attach it to a rail. “Apologies for the plastic,” he said. “The Somali navy officer who’ll be boarding in about half an hour when you enter territorial waters and impounding your ship has some real handcuffs.”
Jack pulled open the door to the chart room. Macinnes, the operations director he had last encountered off Sierra Leone, was sitting in the easy chair behind the chart table, tapping a mobile phone and putting it up to his ear, then trying again. “It’s called electronic countermeasures,” Jack said coldly. “No comms to or from this ship while the helicopter’s outside. That’s the Somali navy.”
Macinnes put the phone down, leaned back in the chair, and put his hands behind his head. “So, Dr. Howard. We meet again. The Somali navy? That’s a joke. We’re in international waters, and they can’t touch us. Mr. Landor has gone ashore in our helicopter to broker an agreement with the Somali government so they get a cut of anything we find, our usual percentage. We find that generally works in Third World holes like this. Whichever naval officer is in charge of this puny operation is about to lose his job. Now, get off this ship and go home.”
“We’re talking murder,” Jack said. “The murder of three Somali citizens, two of them marines, the third one a government employee in the museums service. That gives the Somali navy the right to make an arrest.”
“You’re in way out of your depth, Howard. You should stick to your dinky toy excavations and your bits of broken pot. This is the big time.”
“Yes, it is,” Jack said. “If you had any nautical sense you’d have noticed by now that the ship has changed course. In fifteen minutes you’ll have crossed into Somali territorial waters. That means you and everyone else on this ship will be arrested as accessories to murder. Next stop Mogadishu central jail, a really nice place for Westerners accused of messing around with this country, I hear.”
Macinnes got up, angrily pushing the chair aside. “This is outrageous. Get out of my way. I need to see the captain.” He advanced on Jack, who unholstered his Beretta and leveled it at him.
“One step closer, and I shoot.”
Macinnes sneered at him and tried to shove him aside. “Get out of my way. You haven’t got the guts.” Jack pushed him back, leveled the Beretta again and fired a round close to Macinnes’s ear, a deafening crack that made him reel back in pain. Then he kicked him into the chair, keeping the gun leveled.
“I know Landor’s not at some meeting in Mogadishu, as the naval commander has explained his implication in the murders to the Justice Minister and he’d be arrested on sight. In fact, he’s nowhere near Mogadishu. He’s gone for a trip to an island with your new friends, hasn’t he? Right now, I don’t care about that. I can deal with him later. All I want to know now is where is Dr. Kazantzakis?”