Plus, it was on the other side of the world, also a positive. Conley believed getting the team out of the Indian Ocean for a while was not a bad idea. Technically speaking, what they’d been doing in the area lately—arming cargo ships, running unauthorized combat missions inside sovereign borders—wasn’t exactly legal. With just a little push, any number of seafaring countries could have them locked up for a slew of maritime violations.
“Yes,” Conley thought, checking the job’s details again. “A change of scenery will do them good.”
4
Five days later
SNAKE NOLAN HAD looked forward to crossing the Atlantic.
The weather forecast had promised no storms, calm seas, and warm winds for most of the five days it would take to complete the journey.
Besides bringing him closer to the country he loved but could not enter legally, Nolan had envisioned himself actually relaxing during the trip. Playing poker with the guys, watching DVDs, maybe even doing some reading. The fact that a large Kilos container ship, the Georgia June, was sailing along with them, acting as an enormous floating bodyguard, took some of the uncertainty away from the 4,000-mile voyage west.
That concern came from the team’s own vessel. Rusty, oily, with a single stack and four cargo masts, it looked barely seaworthy. But looks could be deceiving. Technically, it was a DUS-7 coastal freighter, the type of ship used for short trips up and down coastlines, and not normally for transoceanic journeys. Just 120 feet long and twenty-four feet wide, it looked every bit of its fifty-plus years afloat. It was so battered, if it had washed up on a beach somewhere, it wouldn’t have gotten a second look.
In the eyes of Team Whiskey, though, its shabby appearance was an asset. When they first went to war against Zeek the Pirate, Kilos Shipping had offered them one of the company’s “workboats,” a barely disguised, intentionally misnamed vessel that was actually a long-range mega-yacht, full of communications equipment and weapons, like something from a James Bond movie. Though high on the comfort scale, Whiskey knew such a boat would have made them too obvious when operating in Zeek’s Indonesian home waters, an area full of container ships, supertankers, steamers and fishing boats. So, Kilos gave them the DUS-7 instead.
It was exactly what the team needed. Like the Kilos workboats, the small freighter, in its former life, had transported highly sensitive cargos to some of the company’s shadier customers. To this end, the DUS-7 had a so-called rubber room hidden deep within its lower decks. It was a compartment where up to ten tons of cargo—usually arms and ammunition—could be sealed off behind false panels that even the most ardent NATO search party would miss. In this hidden storage cabin now sat Team Whiskey’s small arsenal of weapons, communications equipment and various gadgets of the special operations trade.
The DUS-7 had another important attribute: With not one, but two propulsion systems, the old coastal freighter was much faster than it looked.
Its primary means of motion was a dual diesel-based system that turned twin screws and moved the ship at about eighteen knots in a calm sea. But because the old freighter was specially adapted by Kilos for cargoes that absolutely had to get there—“sensitive shipments,” in the company’s parlance—Kilos engineers had added a small gas turbine as a second propulsion unit. Hundreds of gallons of seawater sucked into huge tanks in the hold of the ship were condensed and, using power from the spinning turbine, shot out the back of the ship at high velocity in the form of jet sprays. When the ship needed some extra speed and the crew turned on these jets, it was like switching on the afterburner in an F-16. With this added power, the freighter could top forty knots, faster than some of the U.S. Navy’s speediest warships.
Along with the ship, Kilos had also provided Whiskey with a crew of five Senegalese nationals. Widely regarded as excellent sailors, these longtime employees of Kilos Shipping were loyal, smart, funny, and could pilot the ship under even the worst circumstances. They also knew their way around combat weaponry. But because their names were just about impossible to pronounce, the team just referred to them as the Senegals.
And the team had a nickname for their ship, too.
They called it the Dustboat.
* * *
AS IT TURNED out, Nolan slept for almost the entire trip west.
From the day they’d set off from southern Italy, the location of their