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brochure to the drawer.
    *   *   *
    AROUND 8 A.M. , Conley reheated his coffee, hoping for a break, but getting no such thing. In the past hour alone there had been twenty more calls, all of them from people desperate to buy Team Whiskey’s unique protection services.
    Luckily, Conley didn’t have to actually answer the phone. He saw the name and company of each caller on his computer screen. After noting each call, he forwarded it directly to his voice mail, where a computer program converted the voice message to text. This way, Conley could read over the job offers without ever talking to anyone. It was categorizing all the information that took time.
    At least his method of triaging the offers was simple: The highest-paying jobs that would take the least amount of effort got the most consideration; everything else got a pass. As it was, Whiskey had been released from a U.S. Navy rehab hospital in Italy only a few scant hours before the Saud el-Saud job materialized. Each member was still suffering the aftereffects of their small war against Zeek the Pirate. Batman Bob Graves had lost his hand. Nolan had nearly drowned in the Indian Ocean during a climatic death match with Zeek himself. Crash, Gunner and Twitch were also nursing a bevy of smaller wounds.
    Conley knew these things also had to be taken into consideration when choosing the team’s next job. That’s why one particular offer appeared so intriguing. The climate was good. The problem seemed manageable, especially when compared to taking on Zeek’s pirate army or protecting the Russian mob. And the price was right. And Conley thought the team could wrap up the gig in just a few days—a week at the most.
    Plus, it was on the other side of the world, also a positive. Conley believed getting the team out of the Indian Ocean for a while was not a bad idea. Technically speaking, what they’d been doing in the area lately—arming cargo ships, running unauthorized combat missions inside sovereign borders—wasn’t exactly legal. With just a little push, any number of seafaring countries could have them locked up for a slew of maritime violations.
    “Yes,” Conley thought, checking the job’s details again. “A change of scenery will do them good.”

4
    Five days later
    SNAKE NOLAN HAD looked forward to crossing the Atlantic.
    The weather forecast had promised no storms, calm seas, and warm winds for most of the five days it would take to complete the journey.
    Besides bringing him closer to the country he loved but could not enter legally, Nolan had envisioned himself actually relaxing during the trip. Playing poker with the guys, watching DVDs, maybe even doing some reading. The fact that a large Kilos container ship, the Georgia June, was sailing along with them, acting as an enormous floating bodyguard, took some of the uncertainty away from the 4,000-mile voyage west.
    That concern came from the team’s own vessel. Rusty, oily, with a single stack and four cargo masts, it looked barely seaworthy. But looks could be deceiving. Technically, it was a DUS-7 coastal freighter, the type of ship used for short trips up and down coastlines, and not normally for transoceanic journeys. Just 120 feet long and twenty-four feet wide, it looked every bit of its fifty-plus years afloat. It was so battered, if it had washed up on a beach somewhere, it wouldn’t have gotten a second look.
    In the eyes of Team Whiskey, though, its shabby appearance was an asset. When they first went to war against Zeek the Pirate, Kilos Shipping had offered them one of the company’s “workboats,” a barely disguised, intentionally misnamed vessel that was actually a long-range mega-yacht, full of communications equipment and weapons, like something from a James Bond movie. Though high on the comfort scale, Whiskey knew such a boat would have made them too obvious when operating in Zeek’s Indonesian home waters, an area full of container ships, supertankers, steamers and