The pirate leader had heard the gunfire and met up with Aziz halfway down from the bridge. He was holding his pistol like he had seen in music videos, arched at arm’s length and turned flat on its side, and his eyes were bright with anger.
“Who was shooting, and why?” He didn’t slow his pace when they met, forcing Aziz to double back quickly.
“The mess hall is empty, and Ahmed thought he saw someone. He and Malik are searching now.”
Hakeem wasn’t sure what he was hearing. “What do you mean the mess hall is empty?”
“The crew is all gone. The wire was still on the door and Ahmed was awake, but somehow they are gone.”
The mess door was barely ajar when they arrived, so Hakeem kicked it open with all his strength. It crashed against the doorstop with a booming echo. Just as they had left the crew hours earlier, all twenty-two members were still seated around the tables. They all had tense, anxious expressions.
“What was that gunfire?” Captain Kwan asked.
Hakeem gave Aziz a murderous look. “A rat.”
He grabbed the younger man by the arm and pushed him from the room. As soon as the door was closed behind Hakeem, he slapped Aziz across the face and backhanded him in a perfect follow-through. “You fool. You’re so stoned right now, you don’t know which is your dung hand.”
“No, Hakeem. I swear it. We all saw—”
“Enough! I catch you smoking bang during one of my operations again, I will shoot you where you stand. Got it?” Aziz’s eyes were cast down, and he said nothing. Hakeem grabbed Aziz’s jaw so their eyes met. “Got it?” he repeated.
“Yes, Hakeem.”
“Retie this door, and find Malik and Ahmed before they shoot up more of the ship.”
Aziz did as he was ordered while Hakeem lingered. Hakeem pressed his ear to the door but couldn’t hear anything through the thick metal. He glanced around the empty corridor. There was nothing out of the ordinary, but he had the sudden sense that someone was watching him. The sensation tingled at the base of his skull and raced down his back so that he visibly quivered. Damn fools will have me chasing shadows next.
Two DECKS BELOW THE MESS, in a section of the ship the pirates couldn’t dream existed, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo watched the Somali shiver. A slight smile played at the corners of his mouth.
“Boo,” he said at the image on the large, flat-panel display that dominated the front of the room known as the Operations Center.
The op center was the high-tech brains of the vessel, a low-ceilinged space that glowed faintly blue from the countless computer screens. The floors were covered in antiskid, antistatic rubber, and the consoles were done in smoky grays and black. The effect, as was the intention, was a darker version of the bridge of television’s star-ship Enterprise. The two seats directly in front of the main display panel were the ship’s helm and weapons-control station. Ringing the room were workstations for radio, radar, sonar, engineering, and damage control.
In the middle sat what was known as the Kirk Chair. From it, Cabrillo had an unobstructed view of everything taking place around him, and from the computer built into the arm of the well-padded seat he could take control of any function aboard his ship.
“You shouldn’t have let them do that,” admonished Max Hanley, the president of the Corporation. Cabrillo held the title of chairman. “What if Mohammad Didi’s boys came back when the secret door was open?”
“Max, you worry like my grandmother. We would have retaken the Oregon from them and gone to plan B.”
“Which is?”
“I’d tell you as soon as I came up with it.” Juan stood and stretched his arms over his head.
He was solidly built, topping out near six feet, with a strong, weathered face and startlingly blue eyes. He kept his hair in a long crew cut. An upbringing on the beaches of southern California and a lifetime of swimming had bleached it white blond. Though he was on the other side of forty, it was still thick and stiff.
There was a compelling aura about Cabrillo that people picked up almost immediately but could never really put their fingers on. He didn’t have the polish of a corporate heavy hitter or the rigidity of a career soldier. It was more a sense that he knew what he wanted out of life and made certain he got it every day. That, and he possessed a wellspring of confidence that knew no bottom—a confidence earned over a lifetime of achievement.
Max Hanley, on the other hand, was in his early sixties and a veteran of two tours in Vietnam. He was shorter than Cabrillo, with a bright, florid face and a halo of ginger curls in the shape of a horseshoe around his balding head. He could stand to lose a few pounds, something Juan delighted in teasing him about, but Max was rock solid in every sense of the word.
The Corporation had been Cabrillo’s brainchild, but it was Max’s steady hand that made it such a success. He managed the day-today affairs of the multimillion-dollar company and also acted as the Oregon’s chief engineer. If any man loved the ship more than Juan, it was Max Hanley.
Despite the seven heavily armed pirates roaming the vessel and the twenty-two crew members held “captive” in the mess hall, there was no concern in the op center, especially on Cabrillo’s part.
This operation had been planned with meticulous attention to detail. When the pirates had first come aboard—arguably, the most critical moment, because no one knew how they were going to treat the crew—snipers positioned in the bows had held all seven Somalis in their sights. Also, the deck crew wore micro-thin body armor, which was still under development in Germany for NATO.
There were pinhole cameras and listening devices secreted in every hallway and room in the “public” parts of the ship, so the gunmen were observed at all times. Wherever they went, at least two members of the Corporation shadowed them from inside the Oregon ’s hidden compartments, ready to react to any situation.
The old freighter was really two ships in one. On the outside, she was little more than a derelict trying to stay one step ahead of the brea