rehab stay, and where the Dustboat had been docked, and went across the western Mediterranean Sea, out past Gibraltar, and into the Atlantic, it was as if he’d been injected with a sedative. He’d sleep, wake up, eat—and then fall right back to sleep again.
He felt so odd, he asked Crash, the team’s medic, about it during one of his few waking moments. Was something wrong with him? Yes, there was, Crash replied. There was something wrong with all of them. Since they’d started their new enterprise three months before, they’d been so busy, none of them had gotten anything resembling a good night’s sleep. The closest thing to it had been alcohol-induced slumber, which inevitably came with a hangover.
Crash’s diagnosis: Nolan was suffering from exhaustion. They all were.
And the cure?
Sleep—and lots of it.
Nolan enjoyed the new experience. No card playing, no DVDs, and definitely no reading. Just deep, peaceful sleep.
Until their fourth night out on the Atlantic.
He had slept that whole day, and had planned to do the same that night. But sometime just after midnight, he suddenly woke up—and this time, when he lay down again, he didn’t instantly fall back to sleep. Instead, his mind started racing, and for him, that was not a good thing. When the past ten years of his life started going through his head, it was like a highlights reel stuck in fast forward. Except these weren’t exactly his favorite memories.
That last day at Tora Bora. Their OK from Higher Authority to pursue bin Laden, the excitement of actually seeing him, catching up to him, chasing him down, only to be called back at the worst moment by the pissheads in Washington—it was a reoccurring nightmare that Nolan couldn’t stop, or even slow down. The battle that followed, unauthorized as it was, cost him his eye and Twitch his leg.
The aftermath. While the others were given dishonorable discharges and immediately booted from the military, Nolan was laid out as the ultimate sacrificial lamb. He had no lawyer, no means of defense, yet he was still court-martialed, found guilty by a secret court, sentenced to prison indefinitely and banned from ever setting foot on American soil again.
Frequent escape attempts followed, which led to him being bounced from prison to prison—Gitmo, Sardinia and finally Baghdad. He busted out twice from the Iraqi prison and was found walking across the desert intent on getting back to Afghanistan, back to Tora Bora, as if there he could resume his pursuit of the mass murderer.
Once he was released by the U.S. military more trouble followed, and Nolan was eventually thrown back into prison, this time in Kuwait. That’s where the rest of the team found him.
Frustration at their subsequent low-paying jobs as security cops in Saudi Arabia led them to form their anti-piracy unit, and there had been no looking back since. But still, all the good things that had happened in the past three months could not erase memories of the horrific events he had experienced in the past ten years. Jailed, homeless, a man without a country? Some scars ran deep, and some wounds would never heal.
And then there was the Dutch Cloud.
His four days of slumber had brought their share of odd dreams, but the subject of the Dutch Cloud was a real-life ghost story. At least for Nolan.
It started with the team’s gig for the Russian mob, to protect a cruise ship trip through the Aegean Sea. Saving the Red Mafia bigwigs from a mass poisoning attack had been a bonanza for Team Whiskey. Not only were they paid handsomely for three days of work, along with a $50,000 tip; their client, a mobster named Bebe, had passed on to the team valuable intelligence, which helped them catch up to and finally kill Zeek the Pirate. And it was Bebe who told Nolan about the Dutch Cloud.
It was a seemingly mythical vessel, a phantom ship said to have gone missing shortly after 9/11 and endlessly sailing the seas ever since, its contents unknown and the subject of much speculation. Bebe said that if the team were to capture the Dutch Cloud, they would be in for a reward of $50 million, payable by none other than the CIA.
It sounded like drunken Russian bullshit—and in truth both Nolan and Bebe were highly intoxicated when the mobster told him the tale. But then Nolan actually saw the ghost ship. It happened while Whiskey was heading toward an island near Zanzibar to help recover buried treasure