Death Ship Read online

  Despite the decrepit exterior appearance of the old ship, it had a state-of-the-art interior and carried the most advanced electronics and telecommunications equipment available outside of a U.S. Navy vessel. Additionally, the ship’s hull had been reinforced with two-and-a-half inches of Kevlar armor and its power plant replaced with a Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine that could move the Kerkira at a top speed of twenty-six knots. Skin deep, the Kerkira appeared to be on its last legs. In reality, it was a high-speed craft—by tanker standards—with a hull made from the same materials used in a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

  Ahmed Boukali, a former senior officer with Muammar Khadafi’s intelligence service, the Mukhabarat el-Jamahiriya, had made a world-class fortune from arms and narcotics dealing and black market sales of Iranian oil. Some of his profits had been used to buy the Kerkira, part of a fleet of tankers Boukali now owned. He had also purchased land, office buildings, and luxury homes in dozens of cities around the world, from Bodrum, Turkey to Zurich, Switzerland. His ships were perfect vehicles for transporting narcotics, weapons, ammunition, and armaments. Hidden compartments had been installed below the main deck amidst crude oil holding tanks.

  But this cruise was of a wholly different nature. Boukali was a true believer of Islamic jihad. His motivation for being on board the Kerkira was all about striking at the heart of the Great Satan. It had been years since he had travelled aboard one of his ships. But this journey was different. And it was too important to trust to a subordinate.

  Despite his belief in the mission and the money he had been paid, Boukali felt conflicted. The Kerkira had served him well. The old ship had been around for many years and was a recognized craft in almost every large port in the Mediterranean, Ionian, Aegean, and Black Seas. It saddened him to think about the old girl being on her last voyage. He looked over the shoulder of one of the crewmen and watched a blip flash on a radar screen.

  “You’re certain that’s the boat?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the crewman said. “That’s the Zoe Mou. I confirmed it in the Automatic Identification System.” He pointed at a second screen. “The AIS shows the boat’s unique identification, position, course, and speed. No question. That’s the boat.”

  “What’s her distance?”

  “Twenty-two kilometers. South of Pozzallo near the southern end of Sicily. Ninety kilometers off the coast. It will probably navigate closer to shore as it rounds the little peninsula at the southeast corner of the island. From there it should make directly for Syracuse.”

  “There are a lot of other blips on the screen,” Boukali said.

  “There’s nothing within two miles of the boat. The scale’s so small, it looks like there are hundreds of craft in the immediate area.”

  Boukali tapped the man’s shoulder. “Good work.” Then he left the bridge, went down three levels of ladders, and walked to the aft end of the main deck. He knew the target boat was manned by three members of a delivery crew hired by Vangelos Charters, an Athens-based company owned by an American, John Hammond, his wife, Zoe, and his brother-in-law, Nicolaos Vangelos. Vangelos Charters had just purchased the two-year-old craft from a Tunisian company. The crew boarded the yacht in Tunis with instructions to cross the Mediterranean Sea, sail through the Strait of Sicily, around the southern tip of Sicily, and travel north to Syracuse. Boukali knew all this because he had an informer placed in the home office of the company that provided charter crews to boat owners.

  Boukali would have preferred to commandeer the yacht before it left Tunis, but Tunis was a busy port. There was risk someone might see something and contact the authorities. He knew the names of the crewmen, their histories, their skills, and even their personal habits. The three men had forty-six years of boating experience between them, but not a one was over thirty-five-years old.

  He also knew this was the first assignment this crew had with Vangelos Charters.

  On the Kerkira’s aft deck, Boukali joined the last three of nine men who had boarded the tanker in Tripoli. One team of three men had been off-loaded six hours earlier. Another three-man team had been dropped with an inflatable dinghy two hours ago. He knew nothing about any of these men other than they had been sent to him by the Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant.

  “As salaam allaikum,” Boukali said.

  “Allaikum as salaam,” the team leader answered.

  “It’s almost time,” Boukali said. “The target is less than twenty-two kilometers from our position. It’s on a heading that will put you in its path in less than an hour.”

  The team leader nodded. He turned to the other two men and said, “Get the dinghy in the water.”

  Boukali watched the men push the tethered craft over the side of the tanker and lower it to the water. Just like the previous two teams, these three carried a metal case and three duffel bags down the starboard side ladder and lowered them to the dinghy. Ten minutes later, they slipped the tether and drifted away from the Kerkira.

  CHAPTER 4

  Matt Peterson had worked as a contract captain for SVT Crews for sixteen years. This was his first assignment with Vangelos Charters. He and his crew, Colin Davis and Scott Farnwell, were trained and licensed to operate a wide variety of sailing and motor craft. As with Davis and Farnwell, Peterson was married with children.

  It seemed almost sinful to Peterson that he could spend a good part of his life at sea and get paid to do it. Especially on days like today, when the sun shone brightly, the temperature was cool, and the seas were calm. He had been on almost every significant body of water and visited dozens of countries. The negative aspect of his job were the long and frequent separations from his wife and two sons.

  Colin Davis climbed the companionway to the skylounge bridge. “You need a break?”

  “Nah, I’m fine. This boat is so sweet; I’ll hate to turn it over to the owner.”

  Davis laughed. “You’ve got to stop falling in love with every boat we crew.”

  “Who says?” Peterson said. But he laughed and added, “I do have that problem, don’t I?”

  Peterson swiped a hand over the polished wood of the helm and marveled at the quality workmanship that had gone into building this Endurance 870 LRC yacht. Hampton Yachts had built the craft in 2013 and sold it to a buyer from Tunisia. The boat was ninety-two feet long, had a fiberglass hull, was powered by two Caterpillar C32 diesel engines, and had a top speed of twenty-four knots at full load. It had an owner’s stateroom on the main deck and five staterooms and crew quarters for four on the lower deck. It was one sweet long range cruiser. Peterson had heard that the new owner bought it at a fire sale price of four million dollars, well below its original price of over eight million.

  Scott Farnwell interrupted Peterson’s musings when he shouted from the main deck, “Hey, you guys see that?” Peterson then saw Farnwell point over the bow toward the open sea and heard him shout, “Dead ahead!”

  Peterson lifted a pair of binoculars off the shelf behind the wheel and looked in the direction Farnwell pointed.

  “Sonofabitch,” Peterson exclaimed. “It’s a dinghy. Looks like three men inside. Colin, go down and help Scott bring them aboard.” Davis had almost cleared the pilothouse when Peterson said, “Be careful.”

  Davis looked back and frowned. “It’s a little far from Somalia to worry about pirates. Besides, they’re in an inflatable dinghy.”

  Peterson piloted the yacht toward the dinghy. Two hundred meters out, he pulled back on the throttle and let the boat drift toward the men, who frantically waved. He goosed the yacht’s twin engines to get close enough and then came about so the Zoe Mou’s stern faced the dinghy.

  One of the men in the dinghy tossed a line to Farnwell, who pulled it up against the Zoe Mou’s cockpit, the twelve-foot open deck area at the stern of the boat. The cockpit had been built larger than the standard cockpit on the Endurance 870 to allow passengers to fish off the stern or to sunbathe. Farnwell made the line fast to a cleat.r />
  Farnwell and Davis took duffel bags and a metal suitcase from the men in the dinghy and set them on one side of the cockpit. Then they helped the men aboard. The three of them wore personal floatation devices over short-sleeved polo shirts, jeans, and canvas shoes. They all appeared to be twenty-something Westerners—over six feet tall, fair complexions, brown hair—and were built like professional athletes. Muscles bulged on their arms and necks.

  “You guys came along just in time,” a man in the dinghy said in an English accent. “I would hate to have floated around in the dark with all the nighttime traffic in this area.”

  “What happened?” Davis asked.

  “What didn’t happen? First, we lost all the electronics on our sailboat; then we were becalmed. I mean the wind just stopped. Not a breeze. Finally, a thru-hull fitting failed and we took on water faster than the bilge pump’s capacity. We shot off a few flares but didn’t attract any attention. We had to abandon our boat. All we salvaged were our clothes, IDs, a few bottles of water, and some food.”

  Davis shook his head. “Bad luck.”

  The man from the dinghy said, “Are you the captain?”

  Davis said, “No. I’m Colin and that’s Scott.” He pointed up at the skylounge. “Matt Peterson’s the captain.”

  “I’d sure like to thank him.”

  Davis smiled. “Go ahead.” He pointed at the nearby ladder. “Take that to the upper deck. Go through the saloon. Matt’s at the helm.”

  Peterson heard footsteps behind him and to his left. He was about to turn when he looked at the video screen on the console in front of him. His heart seemed to stop. The two men on the deck removed pistols from under their personal flotation devices and fired at Davis and Farnwell. Peterson grabbed a fire extinguisher from a bracket attached to the cabinet. He whipped around, the steel canister in hand, just as the man on the companion stairway pointed a pistol at him and fired.

  The three men dragged the crewmen’s bodies to the Zoe Mou’s cockpit. They gathered up the men’s personal effects, passports, and IDs and taped them to their corpses. Then they wrapped them in the emergency anchor chain and rolled them overboard.

  The team leader took forged passports and SVT Crews corporate IDs from the metal case he’d brought and handed them to his teammates. “We speak only English from here on and use our Western names. Go over your new personas again. There can be no slipups, no mistakes. We are on a glorious mission.”

  “We already have a slipup,” the one using Farnwell’s name said. “We’re almost out of fuel.”

  The team leader cursed. “We’ll have to go into port to refuel.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It was a crisp, uncommonly cool June afternoon in the port of Syracuse. Sweater weather. Bob Danforth lounged in a chair beside the hotel pool. He had a view of the marina below and the Ionian Sea beyond. The wonderful smell of sea air wafted over him. He put his hands behind his neck, arched his back, and groaned.

  “Something wrong?” Liz Danforth asked. She reached over from her lounge chair to his left and placed a hand on his arm.

  Bob took her hand in his and kissed the palm. “That was a groan of pleasure.”

  Liz rolled on her side and faced him. “You can’t fool me. You’re bored.”

  “What! I’m in paradise, next to the most beautiful woman on earth, who happens to be the love of my life. We’re about to spend a month cruising the Ionian with our only grandchild and daughter-in-law. And other than our son, not a soul knows where we are or how to get hold of us. How could I be bored?”

  Liz released the laugh that had always reminded Bob of wind chimes. “You realize this is the first extended vacation we’ve ever taken?”

  “Yeah, honey, I realize it. And I’m damned sorry about that. You deserved better.”

  Liz squeezed his hand. “I never missed vacations, you dummy. It was the fear that something might happen to you that got to me.” She paused a beat and added, “Honest to God, you didn’t tell anyone at the Company where we’d be?”

  Bob crossed his heart. “Besides, I’m retired, and the last thing the CIA needs is a sixty-eight-year-old relic.”

  “Bull. It was less than two years ago that Jack Cole recruited you to manage Operation Lone Wolf. That bastard—”

  “Hey, Grandma and Grandpa; what are you guys doing?” Robbie Danforth called as he climbed out of the pool onto the deck in front of their chairs.

  “Just having a conversation about our brilliant grandchild, just what most old fogies do,” Bob said.

  Robbie smiled at his grandparents. “You really need to watch your language, Grams. I hope that word you used didn’t refer to me.”

  Bob stifled a laugh as he watched Liz’s face redden. “Your grandmother made a reference to my former employer, Robbie. When she talks about you, she only uses words like gorgeous, superstar, and brilliant.”

  Robbie smiled. “You had me worried there for a second. When does the boat arrive?”

  “The last I heard, it was due in port late this afternoon,” Bob said.

  Robbie nodded, sat on a lounge chair to Bob’s right, and took his cell phone from under a towel.

  “Remember our deal, Robbie,” Liz said. “No emails, no texting, no phone calls, no video games on this trip. You can do all that stuff at home.”

  A momentary frown crossed Robbie’s face, but then he smiled again. “Just checking the time. I thought it might be dinner time.”

  Bob released Liz’s hand and stood. “Let’s go, Grams. A whole three hours has gone by since our grandson last ate. He’s way overdue for another infusion of Italian food. I’ll call Miriana’s room to see if she wants to join us.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Zoe Mou, Zoe Mou, this is Vangelos Charters. Over,” Nick Vangelos radioed at 6:15 p.m. from his Piraeus, Greece office.

  “Vangelos Charters, this is the Zoe Mou.”

  “This is Nick Vangelos. Are you in port yet?”

  “This is Matt Peterson, Mister Vangelos,” the team leader said. “We won’t reach Syracuse until about twenty-two hundred hours tonight.”

  Nick looked at his watch and cursed under his breath. “I’ll fly over there to meet you.”

  “I thought we were supposed to turn the boat over to your representative in Syracuse.”

  “I’ve changed my mind, Peterson. Vangelos Charters, out.” Nick switched off the radio and emailed Bob Danforth with information about the boat’s delayed arrival. He suggested the Danforths postpone boarding until morning.

  Nick then called his partner, John Hammond.

  “Ya sou, Nico. Pos pie?”

  “Endoxie, John.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Yeah. The new boat won’t arrive in Syracuse until late tonight. The Danforths will have to spend another night in a hotel.”

  “I know that’s not what we promised, but it’s not the end of the world. Offer to pick up the tab for the additional hotel night.”

  “I think I’ll fly to Sicily to make sure nothing else goes wrong.”

  John laughed. “And then you’ll go on board the Zoe Mou and spend a few days at sea. Right?”

  “It might be a good thing to do. Ensure the clients don’t have any more problems.”

  John laughed again. “Enjoy the cruise. Just remember we have a meeting with the bankers on Wednesday.”

  Nick left the Piraeus office and got into a Vangelos Charters’ van. He jerked the Greek fisherman’s cap from his head, slapped it against his thigh, and then tossed it on the passenger seat. He ran a hand through his jet-black hair. He was proud of the fact that, despite being almost fifty, his hair showed no trace of gray. Neither did his thick mustache. His father, Petros, hadn’t gotten any gray until he was over fifty years old. The thought of his father caused Nick’s throat to tighten. He’d worked a fishing boat with Petros until assassins had murdered him. Petros had discovered the location of a Nazi treasure ship that had gone down off the island of Samos during a storm in 1945. The dis
covery of that ship had unleashed murder and mayhem that resulted in his father’s death, his sister’s kidnapping and assault, and John Hammond’s entry into the Vangelos family’s lives. Now John and Zoe were married and had two children, and John, Zoe, and Nick were partners in Vangelos Charters.

  Nick shook his head as though to clear it of unwanted bad memories. Other than being six inches taller than his father had been, he was the spitting image of the man. The same sharp, almost Turkic features, the same mahogany-colored eyes, the same wide mouth. Every time he looked in a mirror, he saw his father’s face.

  He sighed as he started the van and once again thought how much he missed being on the water. All I do now is administrative crap. A couple days at sea would do him good. The Danforth charter promised to be leisurely and interesting. He loved visiting the ancient sites on Sicily and, with only four passengers and two Vangelos Charters’ crewmen, the cruise wouldn’t be too demanding. He’d met the Danforths when they stopped in Athens, before they flew on to Sicily to meet the boat. Nice people.

  Liz Danforth was a handsome, gray-haired woman with classic features and a trim figure who didn’t look close to her age.

  The daughter-in-law, Miriana, was an exotic beauty with a body that was both lithe and voluptuous. He smiled to himself as he shook his head again to clear unwanted thoughts. His wife, Ariana, would threaten him with physical harm if she knew where his imagination had taken him.

  Nick thought the elder Danforth was a cold fish. He had eyes that bore right through you. He’d asked him what business he was in and was told “export-import.” He was surprised to learn Danforth spoke fluent Greek but wasn’t forthcoming when Nick asked if he’d lived in Greece.

  The kid was a gawky teenager with braces on his teeth and black hair down to his shirt collar. He looked slightly geeky, but he had the same damned eyes as the old man. At least he smiled once in a while.