of all pouts when she emerged from the flight deck. Nolan’s spirits lifted a little. Maybe an assault on her fashion sense was all they needed.
He was praying that she’d lock herself back inside her cabin—and allow them to proceed unencumbered. But no such luck. She stomped her way back up to the team and reluctantly started putting on the battle suit.
Nolan and Gunner groaned in unison. Even the Senegals were shaking their heads.
Nolan rubbed his tired eye. “What the hell have we gotten into?” he thought aloud.
It took a few extra minutes for her to get dressed. Of course, nothing fit to her liking. Everything was just too big for her, too tight, too heavy.
Even after she was in the battle suit, she couldn’t stop complaining.
“I can’t go anywhere in this thing,” she said, her voice muffled by the helmet’s mouth plate. “It’s like a suit of armor.”
“No kidding,” Nolan replied, angrily fastening it a few places in the back that she couldn’t reach.
When she was done, Gunner and the Senegals looked her up and down—then put their hands to their mouths to stop from laughing. They couldn’t help it. All encompassing helmet, thick black visor, oxygen mask. Full torso body armor with shoulder pads, elbow pads and highly armored gloves. Kevlar bottoms with padding on the knees and ankles. Thick armored “ski boots.”
She looked like a kid wearing a RoboCop costume.
“I will confiscate any camera that takes a picture of me besides mine!” she bellowed from behind the mask.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nolan said, pushing her to the rear of the plane. “No one here cares that much about you.”
* * *
TIED DOWN AT the back of the cargo bay was Alpha Squad’s next mode of transport: the RIB.
Standing for Rigid-hull Inflatable Boat, it was a combination rubber raft and speedboat designed by the British Special Air Service, the famous SAS. Jet-black and almost impossible to see at night, Whiskey had been lugging one around since they’d gone into the pirate-busting business. Now they would get to use it.
Upon inflating the RIB, they would slip out of the back of the flying boat’s large rear hatch and dip into Gottabang Bay. Then, after one last check of their equipment, the search for the Pacific Star would begin in earnest.
The Stormos kept the Shin-1’s big engines turning, just in case a quick getaway was needed. But the RIB inflated with no problems, and its powerful near-silent engine came to life right away. The squad and Emma Simms climbed in, and finally, they were off.
Gunner piloted the boat. Nolan and the five Senegals sat around the edges with Emma Simms smack in the middle. Body armor or not, the arrangement guaranteed that if the RIB was fired on, someone else would catch the bullet before her.
They were soon moving in and out of the traffic jam of ships clogging Gottabang Bay. They had to act like detectives now, looking for one vessel among many. Though some of the ships had had their names scraped from their hulls, the remaining silhouettes were fairly easy to read via the team’s night-vision scopes. Many of the ships also appeared devoid of crew. Very few had any lights burning—and all of them looked like they were barely able to stay afloat.
Nolan was trying to look in every direction at once, but there was a lot to take in. The only clue they had besides the missing ship’s name, which the pirates might have changed anyway, was that the Pacific Star was a combination cargo ship and fishing boat. But in this floating graveyard, where virtually every ship looked the same, that wasn’t much to go on.
The RIB was highly maneuverable and Gunner knew how to put it through its paces. Through all the swishing and shushing, though, Nolan could hear Emma Simms loudly complaining under her helmet that she was going to fall out, that they were going to capsize, or they were going to hit something and she would sink to the bottom, so heavy was her armored body suit. But everyone in the squad just ignored her.
The waterborne search took almost thirty minutes, weaving around the ghostly fleet of ships, checking their hull conditions and trying to decipher their scraped-off names. In the end it all proved fruitless. None of the vessels was named Pacific Star, and none of them fit the barebones description the CIA had given them.
This meant on to Plan B. Alpha Squad would have to go ashore and