Operation Caribe (11 page)

“Bada bing!” Gunner yelled.

Nolan pulled the copter up and over the camp, making way for Batman and
Bad Dawg One
. It streaked underneath them, MP3 blaring, flash bombs still falling from its weapons points. Batman immediately opened up with his forward cannon and took out the chain gun on the eastern edge of the camp. Then came a quick turn, another cannon barrage, and the western edge chain gun was destroyed as well.

Nolan flew over the hideout a second time. Flipping down his special night-vision telescope, he scanned the ground below. Lots of heat sources were moving about—and for a moment, it seemed like more than just three dozen people running around. But one thing was clear—the pirates seemed in a panic.

Their plan was working.

Both copters now backed off and started a slow orbit 1,500 feet above the treeline. A small white mushroom cloud was rising over the camp, the aftereffect of the stinkpot explosion. Crash’s MP3 was still blaring as well.

Again Nolan studied the camp below. So much smoke covered the target area, it was hard to distinguish the heat signatures of the pirates from the residue of the flash bombs. But that was not surprising. Everything was unfolding as they’d hoped.

The team gave the stinkpot bomb two more minutes to do its work. Then Nolan and Batman turned their copters over and began to dive again.

“Now comes the fun part,” Nolan thought grimly.

He armed all his weapons. The .50-caliber machine guns mounted on his winglets were ready to fire, as was the huge 30mm cannon sticking out of the copter’s nose. Gunner and Twitch both had their M4s up on the starboard side weapons mounts, connected to continuous belts of ammunition.

Both copters were soon down to just ten feet off the deck, quickly slowing to half speed. In this dangerous maneuver, they wanted the pirates to fire at them and reveal themselves, so Whiskey would know where to fire back. Nolan was in the lead, with Batman a little behind and off to the right. Anyone who showed himself to shoot at Nolan would find himself in Batman’s sights an instant later.

The noise of the two copters flying so low was deafening—but Nolan could still hear Crash’s soundtrack booming between his ears. The attack quickly turned nuts. It was loud and fast and full of smoke and flames and flashes of light going off in all directions.

But … something was wrong.

Nolan knew it right away.

No one—not a single pirate—was shooting back at them. In fact, he could see nothing at all moving around the camp.

The pirates were not a disciplined army; there was no way they’d
all
taken cover and were keeping their heads down.

Nolan completed his pass and did another quick infrared scan of the camp. He saw heat sources strewn all over, but none of them was moving. It was almost as if they were all dead already.

His radio suddenly came to life. It was Batman.

“You see what I see?” he asked Nolan.

“I think I do,” Nolan replied. “It’s already a ghost town.”

Batman radioed back: “But there’s no way we greased
any
of these guys already. We just got here.”

Nolan’s head started spinning. The gig had been almost too easy up to this point. Now this curveball—and he had no idea how to explain it.

“We got to find out what’s happened down there,” he radioed back to Batman.

Batman clicked his radio mike twice.

“Roger that,” he told Nolan. “See you on the ground.”

*   *   *

A MINUTE LATER, the two copters had set down in a field just west of the small camp.

The five team members climbed out and checked their equipment. They were all dressed the same: black camouflage battle suits, flak jackets and oversized battle helmets. Each man was carrying an M4 assault rifle equipped with a night scope, and each was breathing through a gas mask. Each man was wearing his OAS badge as well.

But they were also wearing huge American flags on their backs. This was their version of the Jolly Roger. They’d believed nothing would put the fear of God into the brigands like seeing the Stars and Stripes coming at them.

That’s why Twitch quipped, “Maybe we
scared
them all to death.”

Whatever happened, though, the smell was awful.

“At least your stink bomb worked,” Crash yelled through his mask to Gunner. “It smells like one skunk crawled up another skunk’s ass and died.”

Could that have done it? Nolan wondered. Had the smell from the stinkpot been so overwhelming, it had actually killed all the pirates?

He didn’t think so. It
had
to be something else.

The team formed up on the edge of the hideout, then put about twenty feet between them. Weapons ready, they began walking into the encampment.

They moved slowly, sweeping the camp with their night-vision goggles, ready for anything, working their way through the stink and fog.

But they could see no movement at all. No one was trying to run. No one was throwing up from the putrid cloud. No one was shooting or resisting them in any way.

Nolan gave out a loud, short whistle—the signal that the team should be wary of booby traps or an ambush. But as they moved cautiously into the camp, their weapons pointing in every direction at once, it was soon obvious there
was
no opposition.

They found the first pirate in the middle of the camp. He was lying face down near the huge bonfire, not far from where the stink bomb had hit.

But he hadn’t been shot, or burned or “stunk to death.”

His throat had been cut. Even stranger, his right ear had been cut off.

“We sure as hell didn’t do that.…” Twitch said through his gas mask.

They came upon four more pirates in front of a shack nearby. They, too, had had their throats slit, and one ear removed. Behind the shack were two more. Both had their necks sliced open, both were missing an ear.

It went on like this for the next five minutes. The team found groups of pirates in the shacks and in the jungle nearby. None had been shot or hit by ordnance. All of them had died from getting their throats slit. Each one had had an ear cut off.

This was totally baffling and bizarre. The Whiskey guys were all veterans of some of the heaviest missions of Delta Force. They rightly thought they’d seen it all.

But they’d never seen anything like this.

They moved down near the river that ran past the camp, and here they found the six men who’d run back to the encampment from the beach at the beginning of the attack. Their throats, too, had been slashed, and one ear had been removed from each of them. The blood from their hideous wounds was turning the river bright red.

The team finally stopped and had a muffled conversation through their gas masks.

“They’re
all fucking dead
?” Crash was yelling.
“All of them?”

“Every one, so far,” Batman said. “And none of them went pretty.”

“But how?” Crash asked.

No one knew.…

“Are we going to get blamed for this?” Twitch wondered loudly.

Nolan just shook his aching head.
Blamed?
An odd choice of words, he thought.

They stayed together, checking each hut and finding many more bodies, all of them with their necks cut open, each with an ear sliced off.

Finally they reached the last shack—the one occupied by Captain Black himself. There were four pirates piled up near the entrance. All were dead from knife wounds to the throat, all missing one ear.

But one pirate inside was still alive. It was Black himself.

Crumpled in the far corner of the rickety structure, his throat was severely cut and his right ear was missing. He was bleeding heavily all over his white clothes, but somehow he was still breathing. They gathered around him. Medic kit in hand, Crash desperately tried to stem the flow of blood from his wounds, but couldn’t. He looked up at the others and just shook his head.

Black could barely speak, his words coming out in a bloody gurgle. Still, he tried.

“Are you blokes the cops?” he asked them weakly.

Still talking through his gas mask, Nolan yelled that they were part of the OAS.

“Never heard of you,” Black gurgled back.

Nolan knelt down beside the dying pirate. He
had
to know what transpired between the time the team first dropped the stink bomb and when they started the aborted attack on the camp, five minutes at the most.

“What happened here?” Nolan asked him. “Why is everyone dead?”

The pirate could only shake his head. “I don’t know, mon,” he replied with great difficulty. “We was drunk and high. Asleep. Passed out. Then, a stink bomb comes in. Weird screaming. I woke up, but I couldn’t see anything. And I couldn’t breathe because my fingers are on my nose.”

He coughed once, ejecting a small river of blood.

“Next thing I know, all my men around me are dead—and my own throat is cut, and my ear is gone. I didn’t see nobody. I didn’t hear nobody.”

Another cough, more blood.

“Ghosts,” Black struggled to say. “We were killed by ghosts.”

But Nolan didn’t believe him. He couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense. He believed Whiskey had actually stumbled upon some weird mass murder-suicide. It was the only rational explanation.

Batman knelt down beside the dying pirate as well. He lit up a joint, pulled up his gas mask, took a drag, then lifted Black’s head off the bloody floor and put the joint to his lips. The pirate drew in deep.

“Want to get clean now while you can?” Batman asked him.

The pirate nodded yes, a bubble of blood coming out of his open throat.

Batman shouted behind him: “Who’s got the fucking video camera?”

Gunner was soon beside him, a small video camera in hand.

“Get all of this,” Batman told him.

He turned back to Black.

“You guys knocked off all those yachts, right?” Batman asked him.

Black nodded slowly. “Just trying to make some scratch, you know, general?”

Batman gave him another puff of pot.

“And all those people?” he asked. “You threw them into the sea?”

“Couldn’t have any witnesses, you know?” Black said. “It’s bad luck. But a lot of their stuff is here. You can have it. No good to me now.”

“You might have gotten away with it,” Batman said, taking another hit himself under his mask, “if your pilot hadn’t been a junkie and had been more careful.”

“Always a pain in the ass, that guy,” Black said after another toke. “I hope he crashes someday.”

Batman nodded. “Yeah, me, too. But you know what really screwed you? Taking those yachts on Easter. And killing those cops, man? That was fucked up. That’s what got everyone pissed off, and set everything in motion against you. That’s why they called us in.”

Black accepted another weak puff of the pot—and then a strange look came across his face.

“We done all that you say before,” he coughed, fading fast. “But no three yachts on Easter Day, mon. And definitely no cops. That was not us. We were all drunk on Easter. We could not move. That was someone else.”

“Bullshit,” Gunner said, still recording it all. “He’s freaking stoned even as he’s checking out.”

But now Nolan wasn’t so sure.

“If it wasn’t you guys,” he asked Black. “Who did it?”

But the pirate captain could no longer reply. His eyes were going up into his head, his body was starting to convulse.

Batman threw the joint away and started shaking him.

He repeated Nolan’s question: “If it wasn’t you on Easter, who was it?”

Black came back to life for just a few more seconds. Long enough for him to manage a weak grin.

“No idea, mon,” he said. “Guess the big joke is on you.”

Then, he died.

10

THE BRIGHTLY PAINTED Bell 430 helicopter appeared above the
Dustboat
around noon the next day.

With help from two of the Senegals, the copter landed on the coastal freighter’s empty helipad and four people stepped out.

One was Mr. Jobo, the OAS officer the team had met at the beginning of the mission. Jennessa and two other women from BABE were with him.

The women, dressed in very sexy island wear, with perfectly coiffed hair blowing in the breeze, were carrying a huge ice bucket full of champagne bottles and glasses.

Batman was immediately on hand to greet them. Jennessa gave him a warm hug and took out the first bottle and popped the cork.

“You did it!” she said happily. “You rid us of those horrible Muy Capaz people.”

Batman nodded weakly. “Apparently,” he replied.

“We got the report this morning,” she said happily. “The Bahamian police are already crawling all over that island. They’re finding all kinds of things: weapons, drugs, IDs and personal effects from a lot of the missing people. You guys did in three days what those idiots have been pretending to do for years.”

Batman didn’t reply this time—he just sipped his champagne.

“So, it’s my pleasure then,” Jennessa went on, “to give you this…”

She handed him a cashier’s check for $5 million.

“… and this,” she added, giving Batman a huge kiss on both cheeks.

Then she shook his hand and said, “If only all our vendors were as good as you.”

But Batman was still uneasy. “We usually provide a post-action debrief after a job,” he told her. “It lets you know what we did and when. And how your money was spent. It also gives details of what went on.”

Jennessa just laughed.

“No need,” she replied, adding with a whisper: “However you did it, that’s fine with us.”

Mr. Jobo agreed.

“You did the whole world a favor,” he said in his booming voice. “And especially our little piece of the world here. You know?”

Batman pulled Jobo aside.

“Look, there’s something you might want to know,” he told the OAS officer. “Those guys are gone, but—”

Jobo put up his hand and stopped Batman mid-sentence.

“Are they gone forever?” he asked. “Buried in a mass grave out there?”

Batman hesitated—but then nodded yes.

“And was that not the point of your mission? To get rid of them?”