Shadow Tyrants (Oregon Files 13)

Tao’s hands were tied behind his back, but he hadn’t been put on the floor with the rest of his men. He watched as his crew on the Goreno was marched out of the superstructure with their hands in the air. They were accompanied by a dozen men and women with automatic rifles who aimed them at the man in the lifeboat until he was taken captive as well.

“Good job, everyone,” the Chairman said. “Not a shot fired.” He stepped back from Tao and bent to pull down his rolled-up pant leg. Tao could now see that Barbanegra had a prosthetic limb equipped with a hidden compartment, which the Chairman closed.

Tao gaped at the man who’d taken over his ship with such ease. “Who are you people?”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” the Chairman said with a wide grin as he removed the patch to reveal a second sky

blue eye. “Peg leg? Eye patch? Come on. You should know a pirate when you see one. Especially when you’re smugglers yourselves.”

“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tao stammered.

The Chairman raised his pistol and aimed it at Tao’s forehead. The pirate’s grin disappeared, replaced by a deadly serious gaze.

“We know what your secret cargo is,” the Chairman said. “We just don’t know where it is, and this is a pretty big ship you’ve got here. So tell me, Captain Tao. Where did you hide the chemical weapons?”

FOUR

Rasul Torkan, Asad’s identical twin brother, looked out the cabin porthole at the Triton Star crew being marched across the deck of the seemingly crippled cargo ship by armed men and women and knew they had to be here for him. He had only minutes to hide himself or the operation would be a complete failure.

There was only one place on the ship where he was sure they wouldn’t find him. Getting there in broad daylight without being seen would be a challenge, but he had the skills to do it. Rasul and his brother had risen through the ranks of Iran’s secret service together, their competitive natures driving each other to become top agents in the MOIS. While Asad’s specialty was sabotage, Rasul had excelled as an assassin, racking up fifteen successful kills during his stint as a government operative. Fed up with the bureaucracy and restrictions placed on them, they decided to retire and strike out on their own. Sometimes they worked as a team, other times on separate—and, in this case, complementary—missions.

Rasul was merely a passenger aboard the Triton Star. Tao would eventually give him up, but the hijackers wouldn’t see his name on the crew manifest, so they wouldn’t start searching for him right away. Since he was sharing quarters with two other crew members, he quickly tossed his belongings in with theirs. He couldn’t remain undetected for long, but maybe long enough.

He descended two flights of stairs and heard footsteps pounding behind him as he went through the outer door onto the weather deck. He crouched against the bulkhead, ready to silence anyone who emerged, but the men kept going down the stairs, heading to the lower decks.

His destination was the last row of containers. Between him and his objective, there was a gap between the containers and the superstructure that would leave him visible for a few seconds, but he had to risk it. He bent low and crabwalked until he was behind the stack.

No sirens, no shouts. He hadn’t been seen.

He kept going until he reached a refrigerated container near the stern of the Triton Star. It looked completely ordinary, as it was designed to. On the manifest, the reefer unit buried at the bottom of a stack of five was supposedly full of Mozambique oranges, lemons, and tangerines destined for the Indian market. Nothing made it stand out from the thousand other containers on board. Even if it were opened, inspectors would find nothing but fruit crates in the first twenty feet of the forty-foot-long unit. The concealed rear section, however, served a different purpose.

Rasul took a look around the corner and saw the aft end of the Goreno across the water. She was steadily righting herself from a list, something that should have been impossible for such a heavily damaged freighter. The tendrils of smoke had ceased rising from the hull.

Based on their skill in crafting a plan to take the Triton Star so easily, Rasul was sure this was more than a random hijacking. Besides, they were too far off the main shipping lanes for the attack to be a chance occurrence.

The Goreno had intercepted them on purpose. And Rasul knew what they wanted.

He ran his hand along one of the reinforcing corrugations. His finger clicked on a hidden button, and a section of the wall slid aside. He slipped inside and pressed the button to close it behind him. He flipped a switch, and halogen lamps came on.

The interior of the reefer unit had been modified to serve as a decontamination chamber. At the press of a large red button on the opposite wall, the light would turn red and nozzles in the ceiling would douse him with a concentrated hypochlorite solution that would neutralize nerve agent particles. When the decontamination procedure was complete, the light would turn green, at which point Rasul would exit through a door opposite the entrance.

During his first night on board the Triton Star, Rasul had brought his duffel to the chamber to make sure he kept the contents away from the curious hands of the crew. All they’d been told was that he had paid to be a passenger. Only Tao knew he was accompanying two containers to their destination.

Instead of the near-freezing temperature in the other half of the refrigerated container, the air-conditioning unit kept the chamber a balmy seventy degrees even in the sweltering tropics. A medical-grade filter purified the air.

He knelt down and loaded the two weapons he’d brought with him: a Glock .40 caliber semiautomatic pistol and a Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle with suppressor.

Next to the guns was a metal case. He opened it, revealing a cylindrical device pressed into a foam cutout. The size of a soda bottle, it had a metal carrying handle on top, a small spout on the bottom, and a touchpad on the front.

Rasul unzipped the duffel and removed the last item he would need for his mission.

It was a military-grade gas mask and airtight combat suit, commonly called an NBC suit for its ability to protect against nuclear, biological, and chemical contamination. It had the desert camouflage markings of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Rasul checked the equipment and made sure everything was in working order. It looked like he’d have to use them sooner than expected.

He took a seat on the floor and clicked on his phone’s encrypted texting app that was piggybacking on the Triton Star’s shipwide WiFi signal.

We have a problem, he texted.