during his more recent pirate-hunting gigs.
Nolan swallowed both with another can of energy drink. The combination kept him sharp, alert and wide-awake for the next three hours. But this did nothing to help him achieve that elusive kill shot. And as the rain got worse, he found himself taking his eye off the scope more and more and just wanting to breathe.
Finally, he had to take a break. He visited the tiny commode located in the aft part of the forward compartment, then he made his way back to the rear of the cockpit to check on Emma. She was sleeping peacefully, or as peacefully as could be expected. The others were as well.
Nolan sat down close by and stuck his head out the cockpit vent window, hoping to breathe in some fresh, if damp air. That’s when he saw a cargo ship passing them in the near distance.
This seemed odd. They had not seen any other vessels during the trip. Now this one was no more than a quarter mile away.
But Nolan quickly realized this was not some ordinary ship. It was a container vessel, painted mostly black with some green and white on the upper decks.
He was stunned. He didn’t even have to read the two words on the side of the ship to know its name.
He knew it was the Dutch Cloud.
Batman had his ethereal visions—and Nolan had his. Both men were haunted by things they couldn’t explain. For Nolan, it all started a few months before, during Whiskey’s gig for the Russian mafia. Protecting a cruise liner full of mobsters as they took a “business trip” through the Aegean Sea, their client, a gangster named Bebe, had told Nolan about the Dutch Cloud.
It was a near-mythical vessel, a phantom ship said to have disappeared shortly after 9/11. Endlessly sailing the seas ever since, its contents were unknown but subject of much speculation. Bebe said that if Whiskey were ever able to capture the Dutch Cloud, they would be in for a huge reward, payable by none other than the CIA.
It had sounded like drunken Russian bullshit at the time. But then Nolan actually saw the ghost ship. It happened while Whiskey was heading toward an island near Zanzibar to help recover a buried treasure containing a billion-dollar microchip. He was out on the rail one particular stormy night and saw the spectral ship passing just off their port side, only to be quickly lost again in the gale and fog.
Then just a month later, Nolan saw the ship once more, this time while the team was crossing the mid-Atlantic to the Bahamas for another gig.
Now, he was in the northeast Atlantic—and here it was again.
In the middle of a storm, just like before.
* * *
THE NEXT THING Nolan knew, he was awake again, slumped against the vent window where he’d just paused for a breath of fresh air.
Yes, the pep pills and the energy drinks had delivered him a great rush, but then they hit him with a sudden crash. He’d gone to sleep in a very awkward position for about two hours.
When he awoke, the first thing he saw was a seabird flying overhead. Then he looked out on the brightening sky and saw other ships, all shapes and sizes, plying the ocean.
He took in a deep breath and for the first time in a long time, detected something more in the air than just the smell of the sea.
This time, he smelled land.
* * *
FAHIM SHABAZZ HAD done nothing for most of the past twenty-four hours but duck bullets, both real and imaginary.
Shortly after the first three shots were fired at them, he’d peeked out the back of the boat and was astonished to see that the rival Italian racing yacht had not only gained on him, but was practically right behind them. This didn’t seem possible, as he thought he could see more than two people crammed into its cockpit, vastly overloading it. But after a few more large caliber rounds had gone zipping by his head, Fahim Shabazz had stopped wondering how it happened, and started worrying about how he could get away from his pursuers without getting killed first.
As a result, he’d spent a lot of time crouched down below the Smoke-Lar’s control panel, checking his settings only occasionally, but always making sure that the autopilot was still engaged. This gave him a lot of time to think as to why he was being chased—and eventually he started to put it