Syren's Song (6 page)

“Is that unusual, Captain?”

“Not necessarily, but it would be nice to know so we can prepare. Flag officers all have their idiosyncracies.”

The radio crackled as she spoke. The radio operator lifted his headphones momentarily to say, “Captain, an admiral is inbound.”

“Already? The message said they aren't supposed to be here for a few hours.”

“Sorry, Captain, that's all we know. The RHIB just left the seawall and should be here in about twenty minutes,” the operator replied.

“Damn it, is a little freaking common courtesy unreasonable?” she muttered under her breath. “Bobby, call down and have them make sure the VIP stateroom is ready.” There was little reason it wouldn't be. The stateroom was never used unless there was a dignitary or senior officer on board.

Johnson made her way across the bridge to the 1MC—the shipwide radio. “Good morning,
LeFon
. I know you'll be disappointed, but we weigh anchor at 0700 tomorrow on a temporary assignment. The Supply Department will provide one beer per person to those who wish it at tomorrow evening's meal. You'll enjoy it. Before we left San Diego I replaced the bottom-shelf beer the Navy provides with Guinness—for strength. Now, attend to your duties. We have a flag officer arriving in a few minutes. Show the admiral what I already know—
LeFon
is the finest ship and crew in the fleet. Have a good day and live your profession.
LeFon
Actual, out.” Even through the bulkheads she heard the crew explode in applause and cheers.

Johnson, Fisk, the navigator, and the quartermaster pored over the charts of the harbor and the Strait of Malacca as they sipped freshly brewed coffee. The starboard watch entered the bridge with her binoculars in hand.

“Captain, one of our small boats is arriving.”

Johnson checked her watch. Had the RHIB been on full throttle the whole way? She grabbed her binoculars as Fisk followed her to the bridge wing. She saw the small boat only three hundred yards from their anchorage, and it was, as she suspected, on full throttle. What the hell was her small boat crew thinking? She brought the binoculars up and focused on the approaching boat. Something was odd about the crew. They weren't positioned as her boat crews were instructed to be, they were coming in too fast, and they hadn't notified the ship when they were at four hundred yards. There was one more person on board than normal—it had to be the arriving admiral. But why was the boat crew disobeying her instructions? Her mind flashed back briefly to
the events on
Kirkwall
, when an incoming small boat had spelled doom to most of her crew.

“Bobby, hail them!” she ordered. Then she yelled to the bow gun crews: “Train weapons on that small boat.” They immediately did as she directed.

“Nothing from the small boat, ma'am.”

She took the hand-held radio. “This is Warship 125. Small boat, you are on a direct course with us. Veer off now or we will fire.”

The boat slowed and veered to port. Through the binoculars she saw the passenger flailing his arms and yelling at her boat crew. The small boat's commander reached for the radio.

“Warship 125, this is
Tomcat
, requesting permission to come alongside with our passenger.”

Johnson breathed a sigh of relief, then ordered Bobby to give permission and called to the gun crews to stand down.

Bobby stood close to Johnson on the bridge wing and pulled up his own binoculars. When the boat's occupants came into focus he gasped. “Oh, fuck,” he said aloud.

Johnson was shocked. She had
never
heard Bobby curse, not even a “damn.” The baby-faced ensign looked and acted like a choirboy. “What's the problem, Ensign Fisk?” The boat was now only fifty yards away.

“That admiral, ma'am. I mean . . . I didn't realize he made flag. I don't know how he could have. And he's coming here. And I'm here. Oh, fuck, ma'am. I'm screwed.”

“You're not making any sense. What the hell's the matter?”

“It's him, ma'am. Daniel Rossberg. He was my CO on
Bennington
last year.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn't have stood down the gun crews.”

Malacca Strait

The cargo ship
Nanjing Mazu
had just exited the north end of the Singapore Strait, a day out of port. The dockworkers and government inspectors in Singapore had been well paid to ignore the seventh forty-foot container unit loaded onto the ship. Gala had made sure it was positioned close to the aft superstructure, behind all the other containers. That had been easy to do with the ship's high-tech deck crane. A software program called Tetris, named after the old computer game in which the player had to fit various shapes into a compact
pattern, controlled the crane and organized the placement of the containers based on their destination to facilitate speedier unloading. The transfer had appeared completely ordinary. Nevertheless, Gala wanted to make certain the container's contents were properly secured.

The wind had picked up by the time Gala was certain that no Singaporean coast guard craft had followed them. The sea was choppy now that the ship had left the lee of the land to the west and east. He pushed his 120-pound body against the heavy hatch, which refused to open. A passing sailor assisted him and told him to be careful on the deck. Gala immediately went to the container, unsealed it, and entered. He hadn't counted on the rolling sea. The door swung closed when he was halfway inside and struck him in the back, launching him head first into the crated equipment.

In the darkness, Gala tried to cry out for help, aware that no one would hear him above the drone of the engines and the wind. His hands shook as he struggled to find the flashlight in his pocket. The sea rolled again, opening the door and shedding light into the container. He grabbed the crate and held on as his attempted cry became a sob. At least the crate was here and safe. Gala had spent months trying to find this piece of equipment after the first had been damaged in an accident.

The door swung closed again, plunging him back into darkness. He found his flashlight and shone the light on the crate. The hydrostatic extrusion press was safe inside within several layers of shrink-wrap. Satisfied that all was as it should be, he turned to leave. The door creaked open and then slammed shut as the ship rolled, taunting him, beckoning him to exit as it opened and denying him just as quickly when it closed. He knew he wasn't fast enough or coordinated enough to judge the right time to jump through, so he decided to stay with the crate for a while. As he turned back toward the equipment, he noticed a red spot on the shrink-wrap. He instinctively brought his free hand to his head and felt the place where it had struck the crate. His head was wet. He shone the flashlight on his hand, now red with his own blood. He felt light-headed, nervous, and fearful. Suddenly shaking, Gala dropped the flashlight, which broke into two pieces as it hit the floor. His legs gave out beneath him and he collapsed onto the floor. The door slammed shut and this time did not open again, even when he pounded on it.

The accidental loss of the first extrusion press had been a devastating setback. Even with the new replacement, though, he needed more people and more resources to extend his research. He had tried to explain that to Vanni,
but his leader had said only that there were too few people to spare. His Chinese assistants would have to suffice until more people were inspired to join the cause. Once that happened Gala would have all the workers he needed. If only Vanni had given him just two strong men, he reflected bitterly, he would not be clinging to a crate inside a dark container while his blood pooled on the deck below. Would he have to hang on like this for two more days until they reached Sri Lanka?

Gala felt the great ship surge forward on a rolling wave and his stomach lurched. Life at sea was foreign to him, but not to Vanni, who saw the sea as the great liberator of his people. In fact, Gala had first met Vanni on a ship—a large freighter that had been intentionally beached, along with many others, at one of the largest breaking yards in the world. Gala had watched in awe as Vanni tore through the ship, savagely ripping away pipes, culling every piece of valuable metal for reclamation that would profit the rich of Sri Lanka while the local Tamils labored at the dangerous work for paltry pay. Gala had struggled to do the manual labor while his mind naturally gravitated toward ways to make their jobs easier.

Gala's time working in the Mullaitivu Breakers was short-lived. Vanni quickly recognized the young man's intelligence—a gift that would be wasted in hard physical labor. “Gala,” Vanni had declared during a brief work break when they were given time to sip some water, “you came here from school. Now you must return to school and learn more. Much more. I will see to it.”

A few days later a manager came to take him away. Vanni had nodded once at the manager and once at Gala, and with that Gala was sent to school in Trincomalee and then eventually to university in Beijing. And when Gala's scientific training was complete, Vanni had contacted him. Gala could not deny the man who was his benefactor.

Now Gala was alone and afraid; he could think of nothing to counter the forces of nature that held him in a prison as dark and dank as the ships in the Breakers yard. He turned back to the crate. Inside was his salvation—the means to get back into Vanni's good graces and to save his people from the powerful elite who ran Sri Lanka. He just needed to escort it safely until he could transfer it to its final destination.

DAY 3
DAY 3

M/V
Syren
, Laccadive Sea

S
yren
hummed along effortlessly toward Colombo at twenty-five knots. Stark left control of the bridge to his helmsman and began the underway inspection of the ship. He made his way down the ladder, through the galley, past the combat information center, and to the cargo bay. The sixity-foot-wide aft cargo bay doors were open, and some crewmembers were working on the RHIB launch platform. All were wearing the Highland Maritime uniform—light gray coveralls with yellow nametags and charcoal gray ball caps with the company logo.

Six twenty-foot containers lined each side of the cargo bay. The first on his right and left were extra crew quarters, each able to house eight personnel. The next container on the right was labeled “Weapons.” Inside he found Gunny Willis cleaning pistols with two of the Highland Maritime guards. Willis acknowledged his captain's presence but kept on with his work; this wasn't the military. He had worked long enough with Stark to know that Stark preferred informality so that training and maintenance duties could proceed uninterrupted. The ship was well provisioned with weapons and ammunition, a necessity for ships operating in the Gulf of Aden. Other private security firms relied on the twenty-two floating armories stationed from the Red Sea to Sri Lanka for their weapons, but many of these facilities were operated by questionable Ukrainian or Russian companies. With
Syren
's storage capacity and port agreements Stark had no need to deal with ships and personnel who looked more like the depraved misfits in the post-apocalyptic movie
Waterworld
than legitimate twenty-first-century businessmen.

Next on Stark's right—which was actually the port side of the ship because he was walking from bow to stern—were three containers with food, uniforms,
and ammunition. One container was a reefer—a refrigeration unit—that held enough to feed the crew for a couple of months if necessary. The last container on Stark's right held two commercial UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles more popularly known as drones. Though Stark preferred manned airborne craft like helicopters for multimission roles, he recognized the cost savings and low maintenance the UAVs afforded.

Each of the five remaining starboard containers was devoted to a particular crew component—gear for the boatswains, repair equipment and extra parts for the engineering department, a medical bay, and a sealed container that only one man was allowed to open.

As if on cue, the big redhead strolled past Stark humming. “Hiya, boss,” he said as he reached out to type in the code for the door lock. He waited until Stark looked away to enter the numbers.

“Jay, what kind of toys are you playing with in there?” Stark asked.

“No, no, no, boss. No way do people see my stuff until it's ready. You agreed to that. And don't forget, we have yoga in thirty minutes.”

How could Stark forget? It was one of the conditions he had reluctantly agreed to when he hired Jay. But to his surprise, Jay's yoga sessions had proved as beneficial as the more strenuous routines that Gunny Willis had instituted. And Willis admitted that the flexibility the crew gained from yoga was a good complement to their other physical training. Even Stark had embraced the discipline.

With that the mad scientist, still humming, entered the darkened container and secured the door behind him.

Stark had a penchant for hiring misfits—at least the right ones. When he first met Jay on
Syren
—back when the U.S. Navy was still calling her
Sea Fighter
—Warren already had a reputation for being a nonconformist. And then he lost his job with the federal government after some minor indiscretions. When Stark purchased the discarded experimental SWATH (small waterplane-area twin-hull) ship, Warren was the first person he hired. Stark tracked him down in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he was living in a doublewide with no furniture except a bed and working in a barn full of unrecognizable equipment.

Stark made his way further aft and observed the deck crew working on the stern boat ramp. Of all the legacy systems on the ship, this was the one that never seemed to work properly. They'd have to completely redesign it after this assignment. In the meantime, one of the crew was trying to jury-rig the small-boat recovery system.

A few minutes later Stark made his way topside.
Syren
rode smoothly at twenty knots in the calm seas between India and Sri Lanka. Dozens of local fishing boats peppered the waters, but the helm deftly guided the ship and steered well clear of them. A large long-line trawler from China was the only foreign ship present. Stark recognized the construction. Chinese trawlers were quickly depleting the world's few remaining untouched fisheries. The world had no interest in stopping them because many other nations did it themselves.

Stark had never been to Sri Lanka, but he didn't expect to spend much time there on this mission. After resupplying in Colombo, their assignment was to head to the northeast coast where the Tamil Tigers were thought to be based, as they had been in the recent civil war. If he could find the Sea Tigers' base of operations, he might be able to prevent another civil war and needless deaths. If not, then Stark and
Syren
would simply leave and head to the Gulf of Aden. And then he could return to Ullapool and Maggie.

“Four weeks,” he said aloud, though no one was topside to hear him. Four weeks of patrolling waters he didn't know. There was always an element of risk in Highland Maritime's operations. Stark had faced such a risk—and paid a high cost—when he had intervened in the Quebec separatist affair. People had died, including someone close to him. It had cost him his career in the Navy and had made him an expatriate, a man without a country. Then there was the incident in Yemen he had been drawn into just months before. More people had died, some by Stark's own hand, but he had averted a wider conflict. Now Sri Lanka. He vowed to himself that there would be no more deaths if he could help it.

Mullaitivu District

Melanie pulled herself together and started out again, desperately trying not to think about what she had just seen and the evil men could do left unchecked, unaccountable, unexposed. She had vowed to expose the evildoers and make them accountable through her work.

Only weeks before, while she was on a retreat in Thailand, a Buddhist monk had told her that he had lost contact with some members of his order in Sri Lanka. Neither he nor anyone he knew had heard from them in months. The Sri Lankan government would not help, and even the local Tamils refused to investigate. The monastery had stood for nearly sixteen hundred years on Mount Iranamadu in the Mullaitivu District, the highest point in northeastern Sri Lanka. Would she help, he asked?

How could she say no? She and the monk shared the same dojo in Phuket, where she had been based as a freelance journalist for the better part of two years learning the martial art of
muay thai
. The monk had been her spiritual guide in the aftermath of her last assignment in the jungles of South America, where her life had shattered into tiny pieces. She was still trying to put it back together.

Her boss at the newspaper had told her it would be a simple but dangerous short-term assignment. And she would need to take a photographer. Her sister Callie had recently graduated from journalism school and was ready—begging—for her first assignment. Melanie put her off, but the boss had other plans. The paper wanted a sister act—journalist and photographer. The storytellers would become a story themselves. And so the paper hired Melanie and Callie and sent them to the tri-border region of South America known as Ciudad del Este to investigate the ties between the drug trade and a terrorist organization.

Things went wrong when Melanie began checking sources with local law enforcement. The next day three men dragged the young women from their hotel room, threw them into a van, and took them to an encampment a few miles from town. They gagged and bound the two to stakes facing one another, the older protective sister in no position to help the baby of the family. Melanie was forced to watch for two days as the cartel brutes beat her sister—forced to look into Callie's pleading eyes. Whenever the gag was removed she cried out to Melanie, who fought wildly against the rope binding her to the stake. By the end, Callie could no longer cry out. When she was nearly dead from the pain and exhaustion, they threw water on her face to wake her just long enough to look at Melanie one more time as one of the thugs took a knife and slit her throat. Melanie watched the blood pour out of her sister's body as it slumped limply against the stake. Never, if she lived to be a hundred, would she forget Callie's eyes as the life drained from her body.

The cartel men focused on Melanie the next day. She said nothing, refused to cry out, only stared at each attacker's face, memorizing every feature. She was barely conscious when she heard gunfire and saw the cartel members running around haphazardly. She fought to stay awake, to record everything in her memory. She suspected the men were special forces because they killed each of the dozen men swiftly and mercilessly. They unbound Melanie and then untied her sister, respectfully covering her body.

She wrote the story—all of it—for the paper and promptly resigned. Every assignment from now on would be of her choosing, and she chose to shine
light into the shadows cast by drugs and terrorism. She vowed never to allow any photographer to work with her again. And, she decided, she needed to know how to defend herself. That was what had brought her to Thailand and the dojo, and the Buddhist monk.

She had seen many signs of violence since coming to Sri Lanka, though it wasn't clear who was responsible. She intended to find out. She turned her back on the mass grave, repacked her bag, drank some water, and started once more toward Mount Iranamadu.

By midafternoon she was within a few miles of the mountain and monastery. When she heard voices she stopped and took cover beneath some tall ferns. Five men in tiger-striped fatigues and ball caps with weapons slung on their shoulders walked by thirty yards to her left. One was talking, another was laughing. She carefully brought out her camera and took some quick shots just after they passed her, taking care to stay low.

Even that slight movement was enough to alarm a bird sitting on a branch above her. The sound of its flapping startled the soldiers. Two of the men immediately swung around and took their weapons off their shoulders. A few more birds took off, and one of the men laughed and motioned the others forward. One man, however, remained behind to take a closer look. He had walked ten yards in her direction when he saw her. Fortunately, he wasn't one of the soldiers who had unslung his weapon.

Melanie had no choice. She shoved the camera inside her backpack and ran as fast as she could, jumping over a fallen tree and ducking branches as deftly as if she were on the rugby pitch back at school. She heard shouting behind her as the soldiers took up the chase. She had a full hundred-yard lead on them, but she didn't know the area. She heard some shots and darted to the left. The telltale sign of birds flying from their perches as she passed suggested the soldiers would have no difficulty following her.

Melanie eyed a grove of trees ahead and summoned another sprint. When she was out of sight, she stopped briefly behind a clump of three trees with thick ferns growing at the base. She reached into her backpack and turned on the voice recorder and her mobile phone's recorder, and then tucked the backpack under a fern. Another shot was fired. She couldn't see her pursuers yet, but she knew they were closing in. She rose to her feet and ran again, this time away from the backpack at an angle perpendicular to the approaching soldiers. In less than a minute she had crossed the grove and reached an open field half the size of a rugby pitch two hundred yards away. She looked back and saw the
way was clear, then darted across the field. Her rugby days were years behind her, but she had never run faster.

She made it to the far side of the field and ran north along its perimeter before entering the jungle again. Someone was shooting behind her, but that was no longer important. Far more pressing were the five soldiers standing ahead of her, weapons raised. She had been so concerned with escaping the ones she saw that she hadn't considered that other teams would be nearby.

At least this time they didn't get my equipment
, she thought.
And this time they won't get my baby sister
.

Singapore

The white complex of buildings where Golzari awaited his contact took up an entire city block between North Bridge Road and Beach Road in the heart of Singapore. It had been the colonial house for the British government prior to World War II; after Japan's successful invasion in 1941 it became Japanese headquarters. Today the complex included a luxury hotel and several bars. A bar seemed an unlikely place for a meeting, but Golzari's contact had insisted on it—and had insisted as well that the Diplomatic Security agent pay for the meal. Golzari had been to Raffles several times, but he preferred the hotel's formal dining room to the historic bar, which fell short of his standards of cleanliness. He shuddered when he shifted in his chair and the discarded peanut shells on the floor crunched beneath his elegant Ferragamo shoes.

Mallosia imperatrix
is a beetle found in the Middle East. One of Golzari's few memories of his childhood in Iran, before his family fled after the Ayatollah rose to power, was crushing one of those beetles. Its tan-and-yellow body had a honeycomb pattern not unlike that of the roasted peanut shells he was now stepping on. The beetle had made a distinctive crunch when young Damien pressed his sandal onto it. The peanut shells on the floor made the same sort of sound when stepped on, but much louder, like the crushing of dozens of beetles. He imagined the peanuts as bugs, their exoskeletons breaking from the weight of his shoe as their guts spilled out.