to see one of the pilots was indeed taking photos. He had a camera sticking out the cockpit window and was snapping pictures of the top deck.
Once the copter had departed, only then did the team get serious about planning their new mission. From the start, they knew it wouldn’t be easy.
“It means we’ll have to split up,” Nolan said. “The time element demands it. Half of us will have to go to Monte Carlo, while the other half goes to Gottabang.”
There was murmured agreement around the table.
“But the question is, how?” Nolan added. “Those places are about two thousand miles in opposite directions. That’s way beyond the range of our copters, without a hundred refuelings, that is.”
“Even on a fast ship, it would still take us days to get to Monte Carlo,” Gunner said, adding, “And it isn’t like you can fly commercial to Gottabang.”
It seemed like a huge problem.
“So, how are we going to do it then?” Twitch asked.
At that moment they heard another voice. A female voice. It was coming from right above them, not five feet away, on the bridge deck, the highest point on the yacht.
“For God’s sake, tell them they can use the seaplanes if they’ll just stop yapping down there. The tone of their voices is stressing out my epidermis.…”
Nolan just looked at the others, stunned.
The voice unquestionably belonged to Emma Simms.
And this meant only one thing: she’d been up above them the whole time, sunbathing—and listening to everything.
“Well,” Gunner said dryly. “Now we know what the spooks were taking pictures of.”
* * *
A MINUTE LATER, an elderly man in a flowing white gown and a gray beard climbed down off the bridge. He looked like a character from the Old Testament. He was Emma Simms’s on-call shaman. They’d seen him at the party.
He approached the team, gleaming wide smile in place.
“You know in our business we shoot people who eavesdrop on private conversations,” Gunner told him.
The man smiled even wider. “And in my business, people are smart enough to keep their voices down and be discreet.”
The team was mortified. Here they were laughing at the CIA for their fake-hijacking-gone-wrong fuckup, and they themselves had just committed one of the biggest rookie mistakes possible: assuming they were out of earshot of everybody.
“But let’s not dwell on negatives,” the shaman went on. “As it turns out, my dear friend Emma has already arranged for two seaplanes to ferry some of our guests to the mainland. Once they are free, you can have use of them for as long as needed.”
He pulled a BlackBerry from his robe and showed them a photograph of the planes in question.
“Will these do?” he asked.
The team looked at the photo and was shocked again. It was an image of two P-1 Shin Meiwas. Originally built by the Japanese military for antisubmarine duty, the more commonly called Shin was one of the world’s last modern amphibian aircraft. It was a large plane, 108 feet from front to back with a wingspan almost as long. Though powered only by four propellers, it could fly nearly five miles high while cruising at a respectable 230 knots. Most important, the Shin had an unrefueled range of nearly 2,500 miles.
It could hardly be called a seaplane, though. A more apt description was “flying boat.”
But whatever the size, a couple Shins would certainly solve Whiskey’s problem. It’s just that they were coming from the most unlikely source.
And that made them highly suspicious.
“What’s the catch?” Twitch asked the shaman directly.
The man smiled again. In fact, he never stopped smiling.
“My good friend Emma is merely appreciative of your assistance yesterday, that’s all,” he said diplomatically while retreating back toward the bridge. “Besides, ‘why does everything have to have a catch?’”
* * *
THE PAIR OF Shins arrived thirty minutes later.
Between a shuttle service of private helicopters and the two flying boats, the revelers were off the yacht by midafternoon, all without so much as a good-bye wave from their very famous friend.
Whiskey spent the time planning their operation. Basically, they were facing two separate missions: an armed recon to Gottabang, and an undercover intelligence-gathering mission to Monte Carlo. So, splitting up did make the most sense. But who would go where?
After some discussion, it was agreed that Nolan and Gunner would make up “Alpha Squad.” They would fly to Gottabang in the first Shin and hopefully find evidence that the pirates were there or had been recently.
Meanwhile, Batman and Twitch would become “Beta Squad.” They would take the