Cabrillo crossed to his desk and removed a cheroot from an inlaid box. He listened to Ross as he prepared the fine-leafed Cuban cigar and lit it with a gold and onyx Dunhill.

“What your friend Hiro is reporting sounds more like the bad old days of the mob hijacking trucks at Kennedy Airport. The pirates are well-armed, well-trained, and highly motivated. They are also as brutal as hell. Four ships have vanished completely. No sign of the crew at all. The most recent was a tanker owned by your friend’s company, the Toya Maru. Several others have been hit with significant, and I might add unnecessary, loss of life since none of the crew reported putting up any resistance.”

“What are the pirates taking?”

“Sometimes the ship’s payroll.” It was customary for cargo ships to carry enough cash to pay their crews at the end of a voyage in case some men didn’t wish to continue on. To Cabrillo this sounded like overkill for fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. “Other times they take shipping containers, transferring them to their own vessels, which, from the sketchy descriptions, sound like converted fishing trawlers mounted with cranes. And like I said, sometimes entire ships just disappear.”

Juan let that sink in, watching jets of smoke bloom against the teak coffered ceiling where he blew them. “And Hiro and his consortium want us to put a stop to it?”

Linda glanced at her clipboard. “His words are, ‘Make them pay like a quarterback facing the Raiders defense.’ ”

Cabrillo smiled, recalling Hiro’s fondness for American football and especially for the Raiders when they played in L.A. Then his smile faded. Because of the Corporation’s structure, each crew member was an owner, their percentages determined by their rank and years of service. Dick Truitt’s unexpected retirement had put a dent in the Corporation’s cash reserves. The timing couldn’t have been worse, because the Corporation was heavily invested in a real estate deal in Rio de Janeiro that wouldn’t show a return for another two months. He could bail out of the deal now, but the expected profits were too great to ignore. The just-finished job for Langston Overholt would cover what Dick was entitled to, but that left Cabrillo in a bit of a cash crunch to keep up with payments on the Oregon, insurance for his people, and all the other myriad expenses that any company must meet month to month. Just because they operated outside the law didn’t mean he could avoid the financial realities of a capitalistic world.

“What are they offering?”

Linda consulted her clipboard once again. “One hundred thousand a week for a minimum of eight weeks and a maximum of sixteen, plus a million dollars for each pirate ship we destroy.”

Cabrillo’s frown deepened. The pay structure would cover expenses, barely. What bothered him was that by agreeing, he was stuck for two months and would be unable to take off if something more lucrative should arise. But it did buy him the time he needed before his Brazilian investment paid out, and once that was in, the Corporation would be deep into the black once again. Also, Juan held every mariner’s contempt for piracy and would like nothing more than to help put an end to the scourge of the sea.

From reports he’d read, he knew that modern-day pirates bore no resemblance to the swashbuckling legends of old. There were no more bearded captains with eye patches and parrots on their shoulders. Today’s pirates, at least the ones he’d read about operating in the Straits of Malacca, were usually poor fishermen armed with whatever they could scrounge. They attacked at night and vanished just as quickly, taking whatever they could carry in their dugouts and pirogues. There had been murders, surely, but nothing on the scale Linda described.

Juan had always harbored a fear that one day a leader would come along to organize pirates the way Lucky Luciano had formed Murder Inc., turning a ragtag band of criminals into a well-oiled machine. Had that day come? Had a mastermind entered the picture, convincing others that by organizing they could double or triple their profits, and elevated piracy to an act as deadly as terrorism? It certainly wasn’t inconceivable. And as he sat at his desk, Cabrillo wondered if the two weren’t linked. In the years since 9/11, terrorist funding had dried up over much of the world. It was possible, no, he thought, it was likely that groups like Al-Qaeda would turn to piracy and other illegal enterprises to fill their war chests once again.

That link cinched it for him. It was true that Cabrillo and his crew did a great deal of covert work for the U.S. government. This would be one of those times that a private sector operation would also benefit American interests and save Uncle Sam from picking up the tab. He turned his gaze back to his VP of Operations. “Did he say how many pirate ships they suspect are operating out there?”

“There are no firm numbers, but they’re believed to have at least four converted trawlers because of distances and the timing of some of the attacks.”

That would translate into four million dollars. It sounded like a great deal of money, but Cabrillo knew well just how quickly the Corporation could eat up that sum. If they’d done structural damage to the Disco minisub, a replacement would set them back two million dollars. He considered the proposal for another moment. “Contact Hiroshi, tell him we’ll take on the contract with two provisions. Number one is that the bonus for each ship sunk is two million and that we reserve the right to sever the contract at our discretion with one day’s notice.” A single ship-to-ship missile from the Oregon’s launcher cost just under a million dollars. “Then get in touch with Overholt at Langley and tell him what we’re up to and let him know I’ll have a detailed after-action report to him in a couple of days.”

“What about Eddie Seng?” Eddie had been promised two weeks’ vacation for having to endure the same amount of time locked in the minisub.

Cabrillo flicked on the plasma monitor on his desk and moused through a few screens before finding the one that showed the Oregon’s location. He calculated distances and the range of the Robinson R-44 helicopter stowed in a concealed hangar under an aft hatch. “We can fly him to Seoul sometime tomorrow. He can catch a commercial flight from there.”

“That’s not the problem. He told Julia that he doesn’t want to leave.”

Juan wasn’t surprised. “You can lead a man to vacation; you can’t make him relax.”

“I’m just concerned that he’s pushing himself too far. He’s been through hell since we cut him loose two weeks ago.”

As chairman, Juan Cabrillo was the only member of the Corporation to know every detail of his crew’s files. He wondered if he’d be breaking a confidence by telling Linda how back in his CIA days Eddie had spent two months under double cover, first as a Taiwanese traitor eager to sell the Red Chinese information about Taiwan’s military disposition along the Formosa Strait and then as a counterspy with the ultimate goal of discrediting the group of Chinese generals who had bought his information. He’d pulled off the coup brilliantly, and four of China’s best battlefield commanders were transferred to an outpost in the Gobi Desert while the government wasted millions of dollars building fortifications for an invasion that would never come. It had been his last mission before his transfer to Washington. Juan left the story untold and merely said, “If Eddie wants to stay on board, I’m not going to argue with him.”

“Okay.”

“Did Hiro provide details of the attacks?”

“His communiqué said that he’d transmit them if we took the assignment.”

“As soon as they arrive get Mark Murphy and Eric Stone working on a computer model of where the pirates are likely to strike next and have them come up with a cover story to make us sound like a juicy target.” Young Murph was the Oregon’s weapons specialist and a dogged researcher with an uncanny eye for pattern recognition.