Pirate Alley

Book 11: Jake Grafton Novels

by Stephen Coonts

Genres: Sea Adventures; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

Grafton and Carmellini are back, battling terrorists on the high seas alongside a top-notch team of Navy SEALs in an action-packed tale by New York Times bestselling author Stephen Coonts.

A luxurious vacation cruise to the exotic locales of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden turns into a nightmare for passengers and crew when their ship is suddenly attacked and captured by a band of bloodthirsty Somali pirates. An initial rescue mission ends in failure, and the decks are covered in blood. Unless they are paid a ransom of $200 million within seven days, the pirates threaten to execute all their hostages. But information gleaned from a captured Al Qaeda operative indicates that there is a far more dangerous conspiracy afoot.

Once the ransom is paid, Islamic militants intend to swoop in and slaughter the passengers in an orgy of terror, hoping to provoke a massive American military response that will set the Muslim world aflame. Jake Grafton is assigned to negotiate with the brutal pirate chief while his right-hand man, Tommy Carmellini, and a team of CIA and Navy SEAL operatives mount an undercover operation to save the hostages and keep the United States from being maneuvered into a murderous war.

Release date: May 7, 2013

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

Mogadishu, Somalia

The little drone made a low buzzing sound, a bit more than a dragon- fly. It was about twice the size of that insect and weighed three and a half ounces.
We were on the roof of a three-story building. The locals would have been unhappy if they knew, but so far, our presence was our little secret.
I'm Tommy Carmellini, and sneaking around is what the CIA pays me for. It's in my job description somewhere. I was here today with Travis Clay and Joe Bob Sweet, who were what the agency likes to refer to as "covert operatives."
I watched the drone soar above our heads, watched Clay maneuver it around with the joystick on the control unit until he was sure it was functioning properly and the telemetry was good. I checked the small television screen, adjusted the contrast and brightness, and then nodded at Trav.He flew the drone off the edge of the roof and dropped it gently, stopping at each window as it came up on the monitor.
We thought our guy was in this three-story apartment building—or what had once been an apartment building back when the people of
Somalia paid rent and obeyed laws. They didn't do either anymore.
Before we went in to get him, we wanted to know where in the building he was and who else was there, and in what rooms.
I watched the monitor over Travis' shoulder, and when he flew the thing to the next window, I glanced around. We were squatting near a water tank. People on the street couldn't see us, and people some distance away, or across the street in that dump building, who couldn't tell who we were or what we were up to.
Mogadishu reminded me of some sections of Newark and Detroit, only worse. Dirt streets, trash, abandoned vehicles and ruined buildings, the stench of raw sewage, dirty people in rags carrying weapons . . . all in all, I thought it looked like hell might look when I got there. Seventeen years of civil war had brought them to this.
Believe it or not, when I joined the CIA I thought I would be spending my time in Europe or Russia or exotic places like China or Istanbul. I did a little of that, sure, but these days it seemed that the third—no, make that the fourth—world had my name upon it. Tommy Carmellini.
Using a device that picked up electromagnetic energy, I checked the satellite transceiver mounted on the roof one more time. It was hot. As amazing as it sounds, someone in the building was on the Internet.
After the drone had looked in every window, Travis flew it back to the roof and we conferred. The third-floor rooms were empty except for one man, who we thought was the guy we were after. Travis stowed the drone in his backpack.
I checked across the roof. Joe Bob Sweet was hunkered behind the re- mains of a chimney, keeping watch on the street below, the main drag.
Like me, Travis and Joe Bob were wearing dashikis and sported unruly beards. They also wore sweatbands that kept long, unkempt hair out of their eyes. Compared to them, I looked like a boot recruit. We smelled as bad as we looked.
I nodded at my two colleagues, who had their backpacks on and their weapons in their hands, then opened the door that led down into the building. I was following the wire from the satellite antenna. The installation expert hadn't bothered to drill holes in the walls or floors to get the wire out of the way; he had merely unrolled the thing, so it ran down the steep stairs, then along the poorly lit, trash-infested hallway to a closed door. The insulated wire ran under the door.
My little EMI receiver indicated the wire was hot.
Travis and Joe Bob already had silenced MP-5s in their hands. I put the electronic gizmo away and got out my Ruger with the silencer on the barrel. Travis looked at me and I looked at him as I slowly turned the knob on the door. Didn't see any locks. After all, locks only kept honest people out, and in Somalia, there weren't many of those folks left alive.
The door moved a millimeter.
I took a deep breath and opened it slowly, oh so slowly.
There was a guy sitting at a table by the window with his back to me. He was staring at a computer monitor; didn't see anyone else.
I walked across the space between us as slowly and silently as I could. The man must have seen my reflection in the computer screen, because he turned suddenly, startled. I jammed the silencer barrel against his teeth, and he froze.
Travis was right behind me. Joe Bob charged for the open doorway that led into another room, a room we couldn't see.
Fear. I could see it in the eyes of my guy. He was one scared fella, which was fine with me. He had a right to be. if he even twitched, I was going to kill him as dead as a man can get. Maybe he saw that in my face, because he remained frozen, immobile, as I turned him slightly and began checking him for weapons.
Behind me I heard a single shot, then a stutter from the MP-5. Then, another. I didn't even turn around.
Travis went charging for the other room. He was in there too long.
"Guys?"
"Joe Bob caught one."
Shit! I thought this floor was empty!
The shot must have been heard all over this building. We had mere seconds.
"Help me," I said urgently.
Travis whipped out a plastic tie and secured my computer guy's hands behind his back. Then he pulled out a preloaded syringe from a bag on his belt. "Sweet's gut shot," he said. "A fucking kid."
"Where'd he come from?"
"Oh, fuck!"
The computer guy was trying to watch Travis and me; his eyes got big as saucers when he saw the syringe. Whatever he had been expecting, that wasn't it.
Clay didn't bother pulling up the guy's sleeve or any of that nurse stuff; he merely jabbed the syringe needle through the dirty shirt straight into the muscle and pushed the plunger.
The guy collapsed before Clay could get the syringe put away. Clay stepped quickly back into the other room.
I stowed the Ruger and checked out the computer, which was an old IBM clone. I was prepared to operate—take out the hard drive—but saw that the computer box wasn't very big. I jerked the plugs off it, stuffed it into my backpack and carefully put both arms through the armholes.
I ran the three steps into the other room. Joe Bob had taken a slug right in the gut, then put three into the kid's heart. I merely glanced at the kid, sprawled across a filthy mattress. I saw he was small and dead; his pistol lay near his hand.
Joe Bob was on one knee, bleeding.
"Help me get him up," I grunted at Travis. The two of us lifted Joe Bob onto my shoulder. He weighed about a hundred and eighty, so I wasn't going to move fast with him there. "Goddamn fat slob," I told Sweet as I walked into the other room. Travis picked up the computer guy like he weighed about fifty pounds and tossed him over his shoulder. Clay weighed maybe a hundred and fifty, but it was all muscle and bone.
"We got him," I said into my headset and received two mike clicks in reply.
Away we went, back the way we had come onto the roof. Kept going to another roof, then another. I wasn't going fast, not with Joe Bob draped over my shoulder and his MP-5 in my hands. If anyone was curious about the gunshot, they were waiting for the news to find them.
I could hear the chopper coming. Glanced around, saw it and stepped out where the pilot could see me. It was an Italian chopper and carried the markings of an Italian petroleum company.
There was just enough room on that roof. The pilot eased that thing in there slick as a whistle, and Travis tossed our prisoner through the open door onto the floor, then scrambled aboard. The crewman on the chopper helped me with Joe Bob, and then grabbed my hand and I vaulted in.
The floor came up and threatened to hit me in the face.
I turned and glanced at Travis, who was bent over Joe Bob working on him. He didn't have to say anything to me. I could see Joe Bob's pasty face and see his eyelids flutter as he tried to remain conscious. We were going to have to get him to a doctor quick or he was going to die.
The bad news was that the nearest doctor and surgical facility were at a French base in Tadjourah, Djibouti, which was at least eight hours away by chopper.
I looked at the unconscious computer guy and wondered if he was worth the life of Joe Bob Sweet, a twenty-nine year old Texan, a Special Forces sergeant on temporary duty with the CIA, an all-around good guy and father of two little towheaded kids.

The chopper flew us northwest toward our base. Joe Bob bled out during the flight. After a while the brown eyes in his chalk face focused on infinity, and Travis and I could get no reaction from him. No pulse. No respiration.
I took a seat by the door and watched Africa go by.
A V-22 Osprey delivered us to the desert two weeks ago, to a site the experts had picked for us. Actually it was in Ethiopia, not Somalia, but I am probably not supposed to say that. I don't think anyone in the American government asked the Ethiopians if we could use their desert, but I am something of a cynic. It was about as lonely a place as one could find on the planet, and conditions were a bit Spartan. We hammered a tube into the ground to piss in and dug a hole to poop in. We erected four tents, built up dirt berms around them to stop shrapnel and bullets, and between them built a food and ammo dump below ground level. Two of the tents were for the other guys to sleep in, one housed the com gear, and one was mine. All mine. With my own cot and vermin and flashlight. I felt like an Eagle Scout.
We did some serious camping. The sand and dirt got into everything, including our food. We bitched a lot, but that didn't help. Gave up shaving. and bathing. Worked out every day, cleaned our weapons and played cards. At one point I was $152,000 ahead, but I lost twenty grand and the deed to my ranch the next day when one of the guys filled an inside straight. I tried to keep my gambling wealth in proper perspective; the bastards would never pay off.
This afternoon when we arrived in a cloud of dirt, the other guys got busy refueling the chopper while I sent an encrypted message via satellite telephone to my current—and I hoped temporary—boss, Jake Grafton, head of Middle Eastern covert ops for the CIA, telling him we had Omar Ali and one KIA.
Walk into a room and collect a bullet in the gut from a kid.
Truth was, I suspected, that Joe Bob hesitated half a second when he saw it was just a kid . . . and the kid drilled him while he hesitated.
You can train and train and train until you are eligible for your pension, but in the real world, you are going to hesitate for just an instant.
So the boy shot Joe Bob, and he still had to kill him.
We put Joe Bob in a body bag and settled in with beer to wait for Ali to wake up. He slept the rest of the afternoon.
Our two interrogation experts checked him from time to time to en- sure he wasn't over-sedated, and we got on with the evening meal, which consisted of MREs and Tabasco sauce. Man, you eat that stuff for weeks; you become a hot sauce junkie.
The interrogation guys, Joe and Skeeter, talked to me over a beer, ensuring they knew precisely the information we wanted from Ali. This certainly wasn't the first guy this team had snatched and, if the world kept turning, wouldn't be the last. In fact, snatching bad guys was our mission, why the Company sent us here in the first place. What with all the Islamic fundamentalist rebels, terror groups and jihadists, we were in no danger of running out of bad guys any time soon. Looked like a career to us.
What happened to them after we squeezed them dry kinda depended on how bad each dude was. Real bad actors went into a hole in the ground. Guys from mud-hut villages who were doing the bad-guy thing because they were bored, or it was the only game in town, could be sent to Gitmo, there to rot while American politicians wrung their hands and wept. Gofers and kids and hangers-on could be relocated in the middle of the night and turned loose with an admonition to go forth and sin no more. No one knew if they did or didn't—sin anymore—but there is a place in this world for hope.
Omar Ali was a case in point. He was the computer geek for a pirate named Ragnar up the coast from Mogadishu. This past summer Ragnar's boys captured a yacht with four adults on it, two men, two women, and Ali got busy on the Internet trying to find out what these four captives might be worth in the ransom market. Then the gig went sour, somehow, and the pirate captain on the yacht killed all four of them.
So our boy Omar Ali was up to his nuts in conspiracy, piracy and murder. He also knew all about the pirates, who, what, where, when and why, how they operated, and so on. Hence the snatch.
That night we sat in the African dirt, stuffed with food containing enough preservatives to mummify King Tut, which we had washed down with Tabasco sauce and beer, looking at the stars on a black African night while we waited for Omar Ali to wake completely up. We talked about everything on the planet except Joe Bob Sweet. Finally the encrypted satellite phone started buzzing.
It was Jake Grafton, my boss.
Now don't get me wrong; I personally like Grafton and have worked for him several times through the years. It's just that the stuff he handled these days was usually red hot, and in dump places, like the Middle East and the horn of Africa. I am on the Company payroll as a tech-support guy, which means I crack safes, plant and monitor bugs, tap telephone lines, diddle with other people's computers, stuff like that, usually in fairly decent places, like Europe or China or Japan or Australia or Canada or California or Washington or . . . Oops, I'm probably not supposed to mention the stateside stuff. Anyway, Grafton borrowed me from time to time to handle chores for him. Like I said, I liked him well enough but wanted our professional association to be temporary, and the more temporary, the better.
Tonight, after exchanging pleasantries with me, he said, "The Osprey is coming for Ali. Put him and Sweet on it."
"You want us to find out what he knows before we send him?" "No. That wouldn't play well in an American court."
I couldn't believe it. Just when you think there are no more surprises left in life. "They're actually going to try this guy? Let him lawyer up and cry for the cameras?"
"Justice thinks they got enough on this dude to lock him up for life. They want to give it a whirl."
"Yes sir. But after the press release, don't plan on us going back to
Mogadishu to snatch anyone else. It'll be impossible."
"I'm sorry about Joe Bob, Tommy. I'll write a letter to his wife, and we'll send someone to see her, get the process started. Ain't much, I know, but Joe Bob signed on for the king's shilling and knew the risks." Sympathy was not one of Grafton's major virtues. Maybe he had seen too many corpses. "Yeah," I said.
"Tell the guys to hang tough, Tommy."
"We need more beer and gasoline for the generator."
"You got it."
Omar Ali went flying out of our lives an hour later. After we had off- loaded the fuel drums and some boxes of rations, we put Ali on the V-22 Osprey with his computer. We strapped him to a stretcher and gave him another shot, so he was sleeping like a baby. Joe Bob's corpse went on, too. The tilt-rotor Osprey lifted off, raising the usual cloud of dirt, and flew away low with its lights off, across the desert toward the sea.
Good-bye, shipmate.
We put on flea powder and cleaned our weapons again and used the hole in the ground.
"Next time it could be you or me," Travis Clay muttered. "Any one of us. Or all."
"Yeah," I said and tossed him another beer.

CHAPTER ONE

Gulf of Aden, November 9

At dawn the sea was moderate, with a four-foot swell with a nice distance between the crests. The rising wind occasionally ripped spindrift from the tops. The boat rode well, topping the crests and shipping just a little water over the gunwales and collecting at the bottom.
Mustafa had two men with cans bailing as water accumulated in the boat. There wasn't much of it, so all it really did was soak clothes and weapons. There were a dozen men, so they took turns bailing. The activity helped keep them warm and alert.
They had left the island of Abd Al Kuri off the coast of Somalia in the middle of the night. Above them was a high overcast layer that hid the stars. Mustafa used a compass to hold a northerly course. It was in the hour or so before dawn that Mustafa first saw stars. The wind freshened.
The handheld radio in his pocket came to life. Mustafa held it to his ear. "She is doing thirteen knots, at coordinates—" and the voice read them off. Mustafa wrote the numbers down, and then repeated them.
Yes, he had them right. He typed the numbers into his GPS, a little rectangular thing not much bigger than his hand, and watched the numbers light up. Now he had a course and distance. Only forty miles. Three- three-zero degrees.
Of course, she was heading northeast, along the coast of Yemen, so he would point a little more to the west to intercept.
Another voice, distinctive. "Mine is at—" and he read off the coordinates. "They will pass each other in two hours and ten minutes."
There were three other boats in sight in the early light, before the sun rose. They had followed the little light on the masthead. Mustafa turned it off.
The dawn revealed a clear sky and a restless, empty sea. There was a freighter to the east, but Mustafa ignored it and held his course. They were in the sea lanes that ran into and out of the Bab al Mandeb, the asshole of the Red Sea. Only twenty miles wide, that strait handled all the traffic headed to and from the Suez Canal, twenty-three thousand ships a year, almost two thousand a month, an average of sixty-three ships a day. The narrow Gulf of Suez, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden were a maritime superhighway, perhaps the busiest on the planet—and it was infested with pirates. Pirate Alley, some people called it, and for good reason. Still, ships had to go through these waters to get to the Suez Canal, or else they had to transit all the way around the continent of Africa, down around the Cape of Good Hope, a place that Mustafa had never been but had heard about. Mustafa had never actually seen a world globe, but he had been told all this and had looked at rough sketches in the dirt, and like many illiterates, he had a good memory.
Mustafa al-Said was good at his job and made a fine living working at it. No other job in Somalia paid as well as being a pirate captain, except of course being the pirate sheikh, a warlord, and having a dozen or so captains with their own boats working for you. Pirating was dangerous work, but so was fishing on the open ocean, and pirating paid so much better.
Better to die at sea than starve to death, Mustafa thought.
So here they were, under a cloudless sky, on a wide, empty, restless ocean. The men were looking around in every direction, searching the horizon for a mast, a wisp of smoke, anything. The weather was far from ideal for a pirate ship: Every minute they were here increased the chances that a patrol plane would fly over to check them out. Or that the mast peeking over the horizon would turn out to be a warship.
Mustafa didn't know how radar worked, but he knew the warships could see through night and fog and his chances of spending the day here at sea undiscovered were slim. Further, he knew the warships could easily outrun his skiff, which normally had a top speed of perhaps twenty knots in a calm sea. In this swell, with ten men and weapons aboard, something less. However, for this mission the boat sported a new engine, one that pushed it at thirty knots when run flat out. The other two boats following him to the left and right were similarly equipped.
Mustafa listened to the steady throb of the engine and smiled. German. For this victim they would need the extra speed.
The men sensed their precarious position, and they were restless, even though they said nothing to Mustafa, in whom they had confidence. He had earned it. He had been to sea fifteen times in the past year and had taken six vessels, which had put plenty of money in the pockets of the men who sailed with him. The men knew his reputation and vied to crew for him. Sixty men had volunteered for this voyage, and he had picked his crew from among them. Some of them had sailed with him before, and he trusted them to obey orders. The others were recommended by powerful men in the village and on the coast, warlords, so he had taken them to preserve his relationships.
He was thinking of relationships now, of the political riptides that ruled the villages along the coast, of the money to be earned, of the protection he needed when ashore to ensure no one stole his money or killed him to take it. He needed a warlord and the warlord needed him.
He also needed the warlord's organization to ransom the ships and crews he captured. He, Mustafa al-Said, couldn't demand ransom from shipping and insurance companies spread around the globe, but a warlord could. His was Sheikh Ragnar, and he had the contacts Mustafa lacked. Without a warlord, Mustafa was merely a poor bandit with a boat. With Ragnar, he was a successful pirate, with money and women and a future.
He kept the skiff heading northwest for another hour. He got another call on the radio, from a different fishing boat. His victim had been sighted again. Mustafa updated his GPS.
"They will pass each other in an hour and twenty-two minutes." Mustafa looked at his watch, then at his GPS. He throttled back a few hundred RPM.
The boat rode better taking the swells at an angle. Mustafa wished he could increase his speed. The faster he went, the less chance he would be intercepted by warships. Still, today he didn't want to arrive early. Timing would be the key to this capture.
He had sufficient fuel to run all day at this speed, then turn back for the Somali coast this evening and make the village on the island with a comfortable margin.
One of the men pointed out a plane running high, merely a speck against the blue sky. The dawn was here, and in minutes the sun would be rising.
Mustafa checked the engine RPMs, oil pressure, temperature and the boat's heading. He glanced at the GPS. Soon, he thought. Soon.
"Allah akbar," he shouted, God is great, and the men responded. One fired his weapon into the air. The reports were flat, lost in the vastness of this wilderness of sea and water. Still, all the men cheered. They were confident and ready. They drank water and ate and stared into the distance, looking for a smudge of smoke, a mast, some telltale mark upon the horizon.
If only they could find that ship . . .
Soon, Mustafa thought.

The captain of Sultan of the Seas was a Brit—all the officers were British, Australian or South African. His name was Arch Penney. In addition to his professional qualifications, which were absolutely top-notch, he had another trait that fueled his rise to the top in the cruise ship business: He had an uncanny ability to remember faces and names. He knew—and used—the names of every officer and man and woman in the crew, and he was quickly memorizing the passengers on this voyage. This morning as the sun peeped over the eastern horizon he was walking the deck, saying hello to early risers. He called most of them by name.
Captain Penney was a few years over forty, looked eight or so years younger and was about five feet eight inches tall. He was tanned from years of standing on open bridge wings and wore his hair short so the sea winds wouldn't mess it up or put it in his eyes. His looks were only aver- age, but his personality made him unforgettable. His smile lit up his face, and he used it often because he was a genuinely nice guy who liked people. His officers liked to speculate about when he was going to retire from the cruise line and go into politics, where his charisma, personality and phenomenal ability to put faces and names together would undoubtedly be richly rewarded.
What his officers didn't know was that he had been offered the rank of senior officer of the cruise line, in charge of the operations of all five of its ships, and he had turned down the post. He liked what he did, and he liked having his own ship.
Whenever possible, his wife and children accompanied him on his various cruises. Arch Penney was that rarity, a truly happy man.
Last night, leaving his officers to complete the transit of the Bab al Mandeb, he walked about the passenger lounges murmuring names. "Mr. Bass, Mrs. Bass." He shook hands, smiled, asked the routine questions about how were they enjoying the cruise, were their accommodations adequate, and how was the service?
A German who still used the old "von" was aboard, Von Platen. He was accompanied by three men who apparently were his lieutenants in a car manufacturing company, Juergen Hoff, a man named Schaffler, and a young man with an unruly mop of hair, Boltz. There were some Italians, an Irish construction mogul named Enda Clancy who was apparently out of the house-building business after the housing market collapse, a retinue of British dowagers and the usual mob of Americans, which comprised about half the passenger list.
Last night he greeted the sisters, Irene and Suzanne, by name, and the Denver radio talk-show host, Mike Rosen, a genial, intelligent man with the demeanor of a college professor in mufti. The Americans liked to be called by their first names, so Arch Penney obliged. "Keith, Dilma, Ari, Buck, Chad, Chuck, Betty, Toby, Obed . . ."
Then there was Meyer Brown, a sixty-something retiree on the make, if Arch's instincts were right. What he didn't know was that Irene and Suzanne called Brown "Putty," since he had made a remark at the bar last night that set them giggling. "I'm just putty in a woman's hands, al- though everything I have isn't all putty."
Brown apparently had an American woman, Nora, in his sights. Nora's daughter was nowhere to be seen. Brown was hovering over Nora, trying to keep his eyes off the striking cleavage, and entertaining her with stories of his many adventures.
The North African, Mohammed Atom, was reading something and studiously avoiding his fellow passengers, so Arch passed him with only a head nod, which Atom didn't return. Penney knew Atom's reputation, that he was an arms dealer to rebels all over the Middle East, including al Qaeda, although no one had yet caught him with enough evidence to prosecute.
This was Arch Penney thought, a typical passenger list for this time of year. Almost no children and many gray heads.
This morning there were only three exercise nuts on the upper deck, jogging to burn off alcohol and last night's gourmet feast. Penney completed his circuit, greeting the crewmen he met by name, running his eye over everything, and headed for the bridge, where he found his first officer had things well in hand, just as Penney knew he would. The chief officer was Harry Zopp, from South Africa. It was, Penney thought, just a matter of time before Zopp got his own ship.
"Captain," Zopp said respectfully.
"Harry. How goes it?"
"We're smack in the middle of the northern eastbound traffic lane. We're five miles behind an empty tanker, matching his speed, which is thirteen knots. Six other ships on the radar, closest point of approach will be four thousand yards."
"Fishing boats?"
"Fifteen."
"How are the engineers coming on repairing that evaporator?" "Expect to be finished by noon, sir."
"Where and when do you expect to pass this tanker that's ahead of us?" The Sultan couldn't remain on schedule if she loafed along at thirteen knots for more than a few hours.
Zopp told him, referring to the chart and the radar screen.
Arch Penney nodded his approval.
Zopp handed the captain three sheets of paper stapled together. To- day's Somali Pirate Update from the NATO shipping center. The captain took the time to read every word.
"November 15, Somali Basin. Latitude 07 01 S, Longitude 041 22 E. Alert Number 165/2011. Warning—Warning—Warning—At 0403 UTC November 15 a merchant vessel is currently under attack by pirates in the above position.
"Alert Number 164/2011." The position followed. "A Pirate Action Group consisting of 2 x skiff with 5 POB, weapons and ladders reported in the above position."
There was more, two pages of it. Arch Penney read every entry, taking the time to refer to the chart to check the various positions.
"The murdering bastards are busier than they were last month," Zopp remarked. "The international task force has a chopper patrolling this sea lane this morning. He went over about twenty minutes ago, heading northeast, probably to check out the Stella Maris." The Stella Maris was another cruise ship, one that had sailed from Doha and was on its way to the Suez Canal, backtracking the route just traveled by the Sultan. They were scheduled to pass each other this morning.
Penney nodded and handed the report back without comment. He went out onto the open wing of the bridge to catch a few moments of peace before the passengers all woke up and the day really got under way. There was a high overcast and a nice breeze from the west. This time of year the wind wasn't warm, but it was very dry.
Novembers had wonderful reputations for perfect weather in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The summer monsoon was over, and the heat of the deserts to both sides was beginning to dissipate. Truly, the Red Sea was something special. Without a river running into it carrying silt and debris, it was the cleanest ocean on earth, with clear water and hundreds of coral reefs.
The Gulf of Aden, however, was another matter. This was merely an arm of the Indian Ocean. Windy and choppy this morning.
Captain Penney drew in a deep breath of the wind off the Arabian Peninsula. Clean and dry. "Pure," the Arabs liked to say, "like Islam." Penney thought the desert wind smelled