Hidden Order: A Thriller Read Free Page A

The three men who disagreed had been hired on the spot.
    Parachuting onto the rear deck of the supertanker Sienna Star was considered a kamikaze mission, but they’d made it. One of the team members was injured on the landing, but they still managed to retake the ship and free its crew. What they hadn’t bargained for, though, was that the tanker’s captain had been smuggled to shore earlier as an insurance policy against any such rescue attempt. This had placed Harvath and his team in a very difficult position.
    The assignment called for the successful recapture of the ship and the recovery of the entire crew. In order to beat out the other private contractors for the job, Harvath’s boss had proposed an exorbitant fee, but with the caveat that the ship’s owners owed them nothing unless the operation was one hundred percent successful.
    As a former Navy SEAL with a storied career now working for a private intelligence agency, he lived for this kind of work. That said, it was an extremely risky operation and it wasn’t the first they had been forcedto take. Recently, his employer and the company’s namesake, Reed Carlton, had been targeted for assassination. The killers had also targeted the Carlton Group’s top operations personnel. Harvath and Carlton had been lucky enough to survive, but they had lost so many key players that their organization was unable to function at its previous level and ended up losing its biggest and sole government contract with the Defense Department. Because of that loss, they had been forced to take any and all assignments—sometimes under ridiculous terms—in order to rebuild their organization.
    The Old Man, as Harvath referred to Carlton, had put everything on the line for this assignment, advancing a small fortune that included funding a secondary team out in the Gulf of Aden to conduct drone reconnaissance on the Sienna Star for the last week and a half.
    Despite this surveillance, though, no one had realized that the pirates had smuggled the captain off the tanker. It wasn’t until Harvath and his team had retaken the ship that they discovered his absence. At that point, they were left with only one option. They had to recover him.
    Their hope was that the last thing the pirates would ever expect was that their pursuers would risk following them to their own village.
    As was typical with Somalis, the pirates had imported engineers—mostly from Kenya—who could operate the hijacked vessels until their owners, or more often their insurance companies, paid whatever ransom was being asked for. In the case of the Sienna Star, though, the tanker’s navigator had been murdered in the initial throes of the hijacking and the ship’s owners wanted to send a message. They wanted all of the pirates killed.
    Considering that the Somalis had murdered a crew member, Harvath didn’t have a problem with that. If any of them posed a threat, they’d be dealt with accordingly. That was exactly how his team had handled retaking the ship. The Kenyan engineer recruited by the pirates was another matter entirely.
    Not only had he been helpful on board the Sienna Star, but Mukami had assisted Harvath in drawing up a rescue plan for the captain. He knew where the pirates were holding him and had even offered to take Harvath there, if the price was right. Harvath had agreed to his terms.
    Mukami had come up with the idea to turn the tables on the pirates by hijacking their own supply boat when it came out to resupply the tanker with food, water, and fresh khat.
    In addition to getting paid, the man had requested only one additional item. He had asked that his cousin Pili, also an engineer from Kenya and who would be coming out on the resupply boat, not be harmed. Harvath had agreed to that as well.
    Leaving their injured colleague plus an additional man behind to hold the Sienna Star, Harvath and his remaining teammate—a former SEAL named Matt Sanchez—used a smiling and waving Mukami as bait and