Strike Force Delta Read Free Page A

replied.
    As the five ex-prisoners quickly made their way to the copter, its side door opened and three men stepped out. Two were crewmen of the aircraft; the third man looked sick. His eyes were downcast, his hands shaking slightly. He’d been a darkly handsome individual at one time—but his face had fallen, his eyes had sunken in, and his lips seemed permanently sealed by worry and anxiety. The five men tried to talk to him, but he was oblivious to their presence.
    Finch took the ailing man by the arm and led him away from the copter. “Take good care of him,” one of the guys in the orange suits said. “He’s important to us.”
    His new charge now standing a safe distance away, Finch returned to the helicopter and handed the prisoners a bag he’d been keeping under his jacket. It contained a dozen doughnuts. The men looked in the bag and laughed. It was an inside joke.
    They all shook hands and the prisoners climbed into the helicopter. But suddenly they heard a voice calling out over the twin noises being made by the futuristic transport and the Superhawk.
    â€œThere’s one more!”
    That’s when a sixth person stepped out of the top-secret VTOL aircraft. Dressed all in white, long black hair blowing behind her like some Asian goddess, she was beyond beautiful.
    Her name was Mary Li Cho.
    Everything just stopped. All the noise and the wind and the sound of the sea below. Just stopped . . . as she seemed to glide across the field separating the two aircraft,the futuristic plane taking off behind her. Finch focused in on her and whispered to the five men in orange: “Is
that
her?”
    They all nodded.
    â€œThat’s
her
,” they confirmed.
    They made way for her and she climbed aboard the Superhawk first, followed by the five men and their doughnuts. They all turned and saluted Finch, even the Asian beauty. He saluted back.
    The copter gunned its engines, causing a huge downwash of air and exhaust. Finch stepped back, his hat flying off into the breeze—but he didn’t care. This was more exciting than anything he’d experienced in his twenty-five-plus years with the Coast Guard.
    It pays to have friends in high places
, he thought.
    He watched as the helicopter seemed to fall right off the side of the cliff, descending to the rusty ship below. The copter landed on the ship’s middeck not a minute later—and promptly disappeared, another trick in its arsenal.
    The ship was already moving when the helicopter set down. It had pulled anchor and was now halfway into a 180-degree turn, pointing its stern east, out to sea.
    Back up on the cliff, Finch watched as the containership completed its turn and then, with a roar of power that sounded like a handful of jet engines, which was not far from the truth, the ship soon shot ahead at incredible speed, nearly 40 knots in just two minutes, and quickly disappeared over the darkened horizon.
    Finch stood there for a long time, the downcast man silently joining him at his side.
    Finally, Finch whispered to himself: “Good luck, guys—I’ll keep the coffee warm for you.”

Chapter 3
    The containership’s name was the
Ocean Voyager
. Eight hundred feet long, 105 feet wide, and 60 feet from the top of the mast to the bottom of its cargo bay, it weighed thirty-thousand tons empty. It was square and rusty and at least a dozen paint jobs behind the curve. When it was originally built back in the early 1980s, on a good day it could barely make 15 knots.
    The ship was ugly—and that might have been its best asset. Its deck was a jungle of tie-offs and ropes and winches and chains and a million other things to trip over. The deck was also crowded with containers, in some places stacked three or four high. Most of them were as rusty as the ship. Lashed together with creaky bars and hinges, they looked like a bunch of railroad cars that had somehow become lost at sea. In other words, the vessel