“You guys tell me.”
“So the pirates didn’t get a bomb on the boat, the whale attached it to the boat? Is that your thinking?” Brooke asked as she watched the endless replay of stock footage of the giant car-carrying ship on CNN.
“Unless you believe in coincidence. I am informed there was a small detachment of JDF marines in addition to the helo stationed on that ship.”
“Is that standard procedure now for cargo ships, Bill?” Joey asked as he jotted down something.
“Only this one — it was carrying Toyota pickups.”
“Oh.” Joey nodded.
“Wanna clue me in?” Brooke prompted with her hand.
“Those trucks are the ones the ragtag guys in battles all around the world use for ‘shoot and scoot’ attacks. Somebody could make a lot of money selling them to outlaw forces.”
“So that’s why they didn’t sink the ship.” Brooke re-ran the voice print video.
“The captain was radioed and told that the bombs were placed above and below the waterline and if he didn’t surrender they would remotely blow the submerged bombs.” Bill said.
“Bill, what happened to the chopper?” Joey said.
“He landed before they knew of the bombs. Once he learned they were going to surrender, he literally had the thing pushed off the deck and into the ocean. Smart move, too.”
“Scratch one heavy weapons platform for the pirates to use in their next attack.”
“The captain and crew and the JDF guys gave up three days ago, the ship was reported missing two days ago, and then presumed lost yesterday. Today the pirates called with the ransom demands for the ship and crew, but not the cargo,” Bill said over the speakerphone.
“Sure, the trucks are already halfway to the killing zones.”
“So they steamed to a port within three days of their last known location?” Brooke said.
Bill posted a map on the SCIAD screen that had the range/search overlay, “JDF and the seventh fleet tactical air units are doing the fan-outs now.”
Brooke paused the playback, “The captain mentioned fishing boats?”
“As far as Naval intelligence has it, they were just that.” Bill said.
“So command control and communications were all centered in the whale?” Joey said.
“Unless the pirates have a satellite.”
When the conversation ended, Joey noticed the box on the end of the table. “Mind?”
“No, go ahead; tell me what you think.”
“Nice boots; you get ’em on sale?”
“Yeah.”
“How you gonna chase down bad guys in five-inch heels?
“These babies aren’t for chasing bad guys, they’re for catching bad boys.”
The crew of the Shobi Maru had been herded off the ship, blindfolded and roped together, and driven in the beds of trucks for four hours over rough roads. The last hour or so was off-road but on soft terrain. On the first morning, Kasogi scanned the terrain surrounding the camp and mentally classified it as scrub desert. That was a good sign, because any vegetation meant some water somewhere, if they were to escape. The three JDF marines and the helicopter pilot had been separated from him and his crew sometime in the night. They were warriors, which meant they might have been summarily executed or were being held elsewhere.
Kasogi Toshihira was mindful that he was still in command of his crew, albeit they were all now the prisoners of the pirates. To that end, he woke everyone at an early hour, stressed exercise, and encouraged story and tale telling to pass the hours. Ostensibly this was to keep up the morale of men who, without having signed up for it, were suddenly prisoners of war. But he also knew that if an opportunity presented itself to escape, his authority would be crucial in moving everyone in the direction of freedom, and their physical strength would be sorely tested if they made it beyond the fence line into the bush.
Therefore, he was trying to negotiate with the seeming leader of these pirates, a skinny twenty-two-year-old kid who never separated from his AK-47, even when he prayed five times a day. The bone of contention was the quality of the food, which was disgusting and laced with various insects. Although the pirates didn’t eat much better, he staged the mild protest for his crew’s benefit. He had to keep them hopeful, disciplined and regarding him as still in command.
After much hand gesturing and trying to translate Japanese to Sudanese with some English and French thrown in, the kid was nodding, but Kasogi didn’t know what that meant. Two hours later, the slop they called a meal was delivered. However, a separate plate was handed to him. To his surprise, there was a higher quality of a food-like substance on his plate than on the tin plates of the others. So the kid thought I was lobbying for myself, Kasogi thought as he looked down at this relative feast and saw a way to keep the unity of the group even tighter.
He rose and went over to a group of oilers and engine mechanics. One of them, Oshi, had kept doing jumping jacks after he had called rest. He took the obscene plate from Oshi’s hands and replaced it with his. “You have shown great respect for me and our men. You deserve this today.”
The men quickly got the notion.
As he walked away, he felt that the pirate kid had handed him the key to ensuring that all his men would survive this ordeal. He looked up at the night sky and from the three dots of stars that make up Orion’s Belt he “dead reckoned” he was in mid- to southern Africa.
“As-salaam-alaikum,” the nomadic tribesman said to the official, who was inspecting his documents as if he had never seen papers before. He watched the twitching of the official’s nose as the man stepped away from the vehicle, putting more distance between himself and the huge stinking pile of dung in the bed of the rusted truck. Meanwhile, the driver, a shabby denizen of the desert, whose olfactory senses had been already bludgeoned by the reeking pile in his truck, looked up. Here, at an outpost in the middle of nowhere, the night sky was un-obliterated by man-made light, allowing him to imagine the shepherds of legend who created astronomy by connecting those dots in the sky into pictures of archers, crabs, lions, and water carriers. He mentally tried to connect those pinholes in the deep black blanket into what a modern day shepherd such as himself might imagine; a coffee cup, an iPad, and a Prius, if you left off the right wheel. He mused about these things because, as he had found in the past, getting your mind off your actual mission during intense moments like this was the best way to not unconsciously tip off your enemy, who might not even know he was your enemy.
“Where are you headed?” the uniformed man asked.
The nomad’s hand cleared the way to the belt-slung knife under his overcoat as he answered in the dialect of the Bedouin, “Wherever the next flock is in need of shepherding or shearing. I work for ranchers and those who live off the animals. I follow the animals.”
“Well, you have a problem.”
His right hand was an inch from the handle of the knife. “What could that be?” He shifted his weight to give him more leverage with which to slash the throat and stab the heart of this checkpoint jackal.
“There are no goats within a hundred miles of this place.”
“That is Allah’s will, praise unto him.”
The sweaty cop looked into the Bedouin’s eyes. The silence lasted past the point of comfort.
“You may go.”
“His blessings upon you.” With that, the herder got back into his dilapidated Daihatsu Grand Max pickup and rumbled off in a cloud of dust and sand.
At a distance of three miles beyond the checkpoint, the pickup made a hard left and rumbled on the uneven desert surface. Twenty minutes later, with the lights off, the herder left the vehicle and walked to the top of a rise. Peering over the top, he produced a night vision scope. He panned the valley down below until he spied the outline of a makeshift camp. He noted a few guards and something a little odd. About twenty men were out in the night air, exercising! They couldn’t be other guards or soldiers — in that they were shabbily dressed and somewhat emaciated, they must be the crew. Sgt. Bridgestone calculated that the chances of his plan succeeding had just increased 200 percent.