Corsair

It took Hakeem fifteen frustrating minutes to maneuver the big freighter to the dock, once approaching so fast that the people standing on it fled back to the riverbank. It would have taken longer, but Cabrillo finally had enough of the Somali’s pathetic attempts and docked the ship himself. Pirates on the rail threw ropes down to the crowd below, and the ship was made fast against the pier.

The thick smoke that had poured from the funnel trickled off to a wisp. Hakeem gave a blast on the horn, and the crowd redoubled their cheers. He sent Aziz to find help lowering the boarding stairs so Mohammad Didi could see for himself what they had captured.

In THE op CENTER, Giuseppe Farina pointed at the monitor. “There’s our man right in the center.”

“The one with the chicken feathers growing off his face?” Max Hanley asked.

“Si. He is not much to look at, but he is a hardened killer.” Farina wore Italian Army fatigues, and black boots so shiny they looked like patent leather. He was handsome, with dark eyes and hair, olive skin, and a sculpted face. The laugh lines at the corners of his mouth and across his forehead were earned from having a well-developed sense of fun and mischief. When Juan had been in the CIA working a Russian contact in Rome, he and ’Seppe had torn up the town on more than one occasion.

“Just so our orders are clear, we have to wait until Didi boards the Oregon, right?” Juan asked. Farina nodded, so he added, “Then what?”

“Then you capture him any way you want. This is a flagged vessel, and therefore the sovereign property of . . . Where is this ship registered?”

“Iran.”

“You joke.”

“Nope,” Juan said with a lazy smile. “Can you think of a better country to deflect suspicion of us being an American-backed espionage ship?”

“No,” Giuseppe conceded with a nervous frown, “but that might raise eyebrows in The Hague.”

“Relax, ’Seppe. We also carry papers listing the Oregon as the Grandam Phoenix, registered in Panama.”

“Odd name.”

“It was a ship in a book I read years go. Kinda liked it. There won’t be any problems once you get Didi to the World Court.”

“Sí. As soon as he steps foot on your ship, he is no longer in Somalia. So he is, ah, fair game.”

“How are you guys going to explain in court that an Italian colonel happened to be on a freighter hijacked by a guy who’s got a half-million-dollar bounty on his head and a standing indictment?”

“We don’t,” Farina said. “Your involvement will never be known. I have brought a drug with me that will wipe out his memories of the past twenty-four hours. He will awake with the worst hangover in history, but there is no permanent harm. We have a captured fishing boat standing by beyond Somalia’s twelve-mile territorial limit. You transfer Didi to it in international waters, and then the American cruiser, performing interdiction duties, boards her and finds the prize. Slick and simple, and no rendition.”

“Madness,” Max grumbled.

“Chairman,” Mark Murphy said to get Juan’s attention. Murph was the ship’s defenses operator. From his workstation next to the helm, he could unleash the awesome array of weapons built into the former lumber carrier. He could launch torpedoes, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, fire any number of .30 caliber machine guns hidden aboard as well as the radar-guided 20mm Vulcan cannons, the 40mm Orlikon, and the big 120mm gun in its bow redoubt.

Cabrillo looked past Murphy and saw on the screen that the boarding stairs were down and Mohammad Didi was moving toward them.

“ ‘ Come into my web,’ said the spider to the fly.”

FOUR

BAHIRET EL BIBANE, TUNISIA

ALANA DIDN’T MIND THE Sand or THE TREMENDOUS HEAT that blasted out of the desert in unending waves. What got to her were the flies. No matter how much cream she slathered onto her skin or how often she checked her tent’s mosquito netting at night, there seemed to be no relief from the winged devils. After nearly two months on the dig, she couldn’t tell where one welt ended and its neighbor began. To her dismay, the local workers didn’t seem to even notice the biting insects. To make herself feel a little better, she’d tried to think up some discomfort in her native Arizona that these people couldn’t handle but couldn’t come up with anything worse than traffic congestion.

There were eleven Americans and nearly fifty hired laborers on the archaeological dig, all under the leadership of Professor William Galt. Six of the eleven were postdocs like Alana Shepard. The other five were still in grad school at the University of Arizona. Men outnumbered women eight to three, but so far that hadn’t become an issue.