bow where Whiskey was stationed.
“Oh fuck,” Nolan grumbled. “What do they want with us?”
Gunner woke Twitch and Batman while Nolan met the man halfway up the bow.
“You’re Whiskey?” the visitor asked him.
Nolan nodded. There were no handshakes, no introductions.
“I’ve got to talk to you and your guys,” the man said urgently. He was middle-aged, bald and paunchy. This guy was a station chief, Nolan thought. And definitely not a field officer.
“Talk? Before breakfast?” Nolan asked him.
“Yes,” the man replied sternly. “As in right now.”
They climbed up to the bow. The others were waiting at a table right below the bridge deck. Everyone sat down.
Nolan pulled his chair next to Batman.
“How are you doing?” he asked him in a low voice.
Batman gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
“One thousand percent improvement,” he whispered in reply. “Nothing beats sleeping it off.”
Nolan believed him. Batman looked much better than the night before.
The CIA man got right to the point. “We’ve been following your activities since yesterday,” he said. “The kidnapping. The Somalis. The rescue mission. We figured you’d still be out here.”
“But you’re a little late,” Gunner told him, pretending to look at his watch. “The party ended a couple hours ago.”
The agent ignored him. “I’m here because we’ve got a major problem in Asia and, as much as it goes against my nature to admit it, we require some expert assistance.”
“Just for the record, who’s ‘we?’” Nolan asked him.
The agent just stared back at him. “Who do you think?” he asked.
Then the agent began a strange story. Two months before, the wreckage of a C-130 cargo plane was unearthed in a remote area of Vietnam near the Laotian border. The aircraft had been shot down in 1968, crashing into a rice paddy. Apparently the paddy had become flooded soon after, as a result of heavy monsoons, causing the wreck to sink in the mud and hiding it for more than forty years. It was discovered only when local villagers looking for metal to make cooking pots began digging in the area.
Four skeletal bodies were found in the wreckage; the villagers quickly buried them. But they also found an unusual cargo container. This container was made of highly reinforced material and was marked only with a single “Z.” The villagers repeatedly tried to open it, but failed each time. Eventually they turned it over to authorities.
Old hands in the Vietnamese military recognized the container as an SMT, something the U.S. used during the Indochina War to carry anything from classified documents to secret weapons to hazardous materials. Because this one was marked with a “Z”, which they interpreted as meaning “hazardous,” the Vietnamese wanted nothing to do with it. Their military intelligence service asked Swiss intermediaries to contact the CIA’s Bangkok station and inform them of what had been found.
News of the container’s discovery rippled through the Bangkok office, where a couple of semiretired contract workers remembered what the Z-box mission was all about. In fact, the Agency had looked for the Z-box for years after the war, using satellite surveillance, infiltrating U.S.-Vietnamese body recovery teams, and even sending in undercover agents to scour the Vietnamese countryside.
Now that it had been found, the Bangkok office wanted to get it out of Vietnam and dispose of it as soon as possible. But they wanted to do it in such a way that no one in the CIA would actually come in contact with it. Their reason: The box’s contents were so potentially embarrassing, no one in the know wanted to get their fingerprints on it.
So they cooked up a plan. The idea was to have the Vietnamese put the container on a ship leaving Haiphong. The ship, called the Pacific Star, would also have a few tons of weapons stashed aboard, captured M-16s left over from the war that the Vietnamese also wanted to get rid of. These were referred to as “the bait.” After a few days at sea, and once the ship was approximately twenty miles off the west coast of Sumatra, it would be taken over by “pirates,” who were actually Filipino seamen in the CIA’s employ. At that point, a U.S. Navy warship would engage the vessel, battle the “pirates,” rescue the crew, and then sink the ship right over the Java Trench, sending it and the Z-box to one of the deepest parts of the seven seas.
“So, what happened?” Nolan asked the briefer. “I’m guessing it’s not a happy ending.”
The agent shook his head no.
“Our ‘pirates’ never made it onto the