a scowl, but all she’d done was smile. We’d closed on the boat and began thinking through the assault.
The average landlubber sees the size of container ships, then hears stories about pirates in Somalia taking them over and can’t reconcile how that happens. I mean, after all, the ships are enormous, up to three football fields in length, and riding above the sea like skyscrapers. How could a few skinny Somali pirates take that thing over?
The truth is that the ships
are
large, but once on the open ocean they ride fairly low in the water. A gap of only about fifteen meters separates a small boat running alongside with the main deck. Get a ladder to that, and you can start scampering up like monkeys.
Usually, the next question is how can they possibly get enough pirates on the boat before the massive crew begins to react, but the little known truth is that the enormous cargo vessels do one thing: Transport cargo. Because of that, there isn’t a large crew. There’s no lido deck, no cruise director, no company of cooks down below. The average container ship has a crew of fifteen to twenty, and they work on shifts, so at any given time a third are asleep. The pirates need to take down about seven people. Not that hard when the target has no weapons.
Because of international agreements, no merchant marine vessel is armed, which guarantees easy pickings. If you can get to the main deck of a merchant marine cargo vessel with a gun in your hand, you can take the ship. Pile on three or four other pirates and you’re looking at a fait accompli.
Our problem was that we were going against men we
knew
were armed, and thus we needed a little stealth. We had to get on top of them before they realized they’d been attacked. And we had to do it without dropping anyone in the ocean, which meant Jennifer going up first.
Halfway up her climb the boat had bucked, coming perilously close to the hull of the container ship. Jennifer had been flung out, her feet losing contact with the ladder. Brett had expertly held the course, neither jerking the wheel to compensate nor allowing us to collide, and Jennifer whipped her legs up like a trapeze artist, locking them back in place. A few moments later, she was clambering up as if nothing had happened.
She reached the top and leaned over, flashing a penlight to let us know she was okay. We watched her pull the grapple off the deck and reseat it into a well, guaranteeing that, short of Brett driving off and severing the ladder with brute horsepower, we would all make it to the top.
Knuckles said, “She is scary good,” then started climbing.
Eight minutes after that I was swinging in space, learning in real time what
scary good
really meant. The ladder—and I use that term loosely—was swinging back and forth like a hammock, and the spray from the water was threatening my tenuous grip. I saw the water rushing below, the boat weaving back and forth, almost colliding into the hull of the giant ship, and knew if I fell, I’d be dead.
It took me twice as long, my hands and legs vise gripped on the ladder, but I finally made it to the top. I rolled on the deck and heard Knuckles say, “Man, you are slow as shit.”
I said, “You weren’t saying that swimming to the island, when you were running out of air.”
I rolled upright and cast off the ladder, letting Brett drift off, keeping us in overwatch. He’d either see the ship stop and my flare, or he’d circle the water waiting for the cavalry to arrive from the alert we’d given to the Taskforce over the Internet BGAN terminal.
Chapter 12
I slid my MP7 off my back and prepared for the assault, seeing Knuckles had already done so with his own. Jennifer was holding an MP5, a weapon she’d taken from the pirate in the boat. All in all we had two MP7s, one MP5, and two Glock 19s. Sounds like a pretty potent arsenal, but the problem was the MP7s used a different round from the MP5 and the Glocks. They fired a weird cartridge of
The average landlubber sees the size of container ships, then hears stories about pirates in Somalia taking them over and can’t reconcile how that happens. I mean, after all, the ships are enormous, up to three football fields in length, and riding above the sea like skyscrapers. How could a few skinny Somali pirates take that thing over?
The truth is that the ships
are
large, but once on the open ocean they ride fairly low in the water. A gap of only about fifteen meters separates a small boat running alongside with the main deck. Get a ladder to that, and you can start scampering up like monkeys.
Usually, the next question is how can they possibly get enough pirates on the boat before the massive crew begins to react, but the little known truth is that the enormous cargo vessels do one thing: Transport cargo. Because of that, there isn’t a large crew. There’s no lido deck, no cruise director, no company of cooks down below. The average container ship has a crew of fifteen to twenty, and they work on shifts, so at any given time a third are asleep. The pirates need to take down about seven people. Not that hard when the target has no weapons.
Because of international agreements, no merchant marine vessel is armed, which guarantees easy pickings. If you can get to the main deck of a merchant marine cargo vessel with a gun in your hand, you can take the ship. Pile on three or four other pirates and you’re looking at a fait accompli.
Our problem was that we were going against men we
knew
were armed, and thus we needed a little stealth. We had to get on top of them before they realized they’d been attacked. And we had to do it without dropping anyone in the ocean, which meant Jennifer going up first.
Halfway up her climb the boat had bucked, coming perilously close to the hull of the container ship. Jennifer had been flung out, her feet losing contact with the ladder. Brett had expertly held the course, neither jerking the wheel to compensate nor allowing us to collide, and Jennifer whipped her legs up like a trapeze artist, locking them back in place. A few moments later, she was clambering up as if nothing had happened.
She reached the top and leaned over, flashing a penlight to let us know she was okay. We watched her pull the grapple off the deck and reseat it into a well, guaranteeing that, short of Brett driving off and severing the ladder with brute horsepower, we would all make it to the top.
Knuckles said, “She is scary good,” then started climbing.
Eight minutes after that I was swinging in space, learning in real time what
scary good
really meant. The ladder—and I use that term loosely—was swinging back and forth like a hammock, and the spray from the water was threatening my tenuous grip. I saw the water rushing below, the boat weaving back and forth, almost colliding into the hull of the giant ship, and knew if I fell, I’d be dead.
It took me twice as long, my hands and legs vise gripped on the ladder, but I finally made it to the top. I rolled on the deck and heard Knuckles say, “Man, you are slow as shit.”
I said, “You weren’t saying that swimming to the island, when you were running out of air.”
I rolled upright and cast off the ladder, letting Brett drift off, keeping us in overwatch. He’d either see the ship stop and my flare, or he’d circle the water waiting for the cavalry to arrive from the alert we’d given to the Taskforce over the Internet BGAN terminal.
Chapter 12
I slid my MP7 off my back and prepared for the assault, seeing Knuckles had already done so with his own. Jennifer was holding an MP5, a weapon she’d taken from the pirate in the boat. All in all we had two MP7s, one MP5, and two Glock 19s. Sounds like a pretty potent arsenal, but the problem was the MP7s used a different round from the MP5 and the Glocks. They fired a weird cartridge of
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