Free Pirate Alley: A Novel by Stephen Coonts

for twenty passengers, whom he had tied to deck chairs beside the pool, in plain sight of any helicopter or jet pilot passing by.
    While Mustafa was busy with all this, the first woman was raped on the second deck. She was a cook’s helper, twenty-three years old, from Sri Lanka. Three men dragged her to a bunk and took turns raping her while the others held the other three women in the compartment at bay with rifles.
    The pirates had been told to leave the women alone, but. They were young, ignorant, illiterate, and bucked with life. They had guns and no one else did. They were going to be rich. Here was opportunity and no one to tell them no. After all, fucking an infidel couldn’t be a sin. Didn’t the Prophet, may He rest in peace, say to kill all infidels?
    At first the woman fought. One blow broke her jaw, and she ceased her struggles. Just for good measure, the pirate whacked her with the butt of his gun on the side of her head, caving in an eye socket. She lay comatose as the man ripped off her clothes and opened his trousers. The sight of her naked body and the excitement of the morning had done their work. He spread her legs and jabbed his erect penis in as his mates laughed heartily.
    When they had all had their turn, they left, slamming the door behind them.
    *   *   *
    USS Richard Ward was the first warship to obtain a visual sighting on Sultan of the Seas. An E-2 was a hundred miles away and had the ships on radar, so their symbols appeared on the computer-driven tactical displays of every ship in the task force, including the flagship, Chosin Reservoir.
    Sultan was proceeding south at nineteen knots, which Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington thought was probably her normal cruising speed. If she held this speed, she would make the harbor at Eyl, Somalia, roughly at dawn tomorrow. If she was going to Eyl. Toad certainly didn’t know.
    The weather was gorgeous, with just a high, thin cirrus layer diffusing the direct rays of the sun. Visibility was thirty or forty miles; wind out of the northwest off the Arabian Peninsula at five knots, a dry wind. Even the swells of the morning had dissipated until the ocean was a gentle, undulating mirror reflecting the sky.
    His staff was sorting though the message traffic from his superiors and dashing off replies. They handed him clipboards full of this stuff, which he quickly scanned and handed back.
    Washington wanted the impossible: the Sultan recaptured without the loss of a single civilian life.
    The marine Force Reconnaissance team had taken down pirates aboard several merchant ships before, a bulk carrier and a container ship. Both had small crews. The Force Recon team knocked out topside opposition, boarded, then fought their way through the ship, killing any pirates who didn’t surrender. Most of them did.
    Yet today the captured ship contained eight hundred and fifty people, literally people in every compartment, under the control of three boatloads of pirates, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, all armed, headed for a safe harbor where they would anchor and demand ransom. Don’t pay, they kill people. Board, they kill people. Pay the money and you get everyone back alive. They’ll even give you back your ship. Then, since that went so wonderfully well and the pirates all got filthy rich, they’ll recruit hundreds more pirates, buy more boats and weapons, and motor out into Pirate Alley or the great wide ocean to capture more ships and crews and passengers to hold for ransom, all over again.
    The fact that the pirates had a safe harbor to operate from and go back to was the crux of the problem, but one that wouldn’t get solved today or tomorrow, so Toad didn’t waste any time thinking about it. “Above my pay grade,” he once told his chief of staff, Flip Haducek, who was expounding on the wisdom of wiping out pirate nests.
    A real-time television picture of Sultan appeared on the monitor above the tac display. The camera was on one of the