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Washington—it was a reoccurring nightmare that Nolan couldn’t stop, or even slow down. The battle that followed, unauthorized as it was, cost him his eye and Twitch his leg.
    The aftermath. While the others were given dishonorable discharges and immediately booted from the military, Nolan was laid out as the ultimate sacrificial lamb. He had no lawyer, no means of defense, yet he was still court-martialed, found guilty by a secret court, sentenced to prison indefinitely and banned from ever setting foot on American soil again.
    Frequent escape attempts followed, which led to him being bounced from prison to prison—Gitmo, Sardinia and finally Baghdad. He busted out twice from the Iraqi prison and was found walking across the desert intent on getting back to Afghanistan, back to Tora Bora, as if there he could resume his pursuit of the mass murderer.
    Once he was released by the U.S. military more trouble followed, and Nolan was eventually thrown back into prison, this time in Kuwait. That’s where the rest of the team found him.
    Frustration at their subsequent low-paying jobs as security cops in Saudi Arabia led them to form their anti-piracy unit, and there had been no looking back since. But still, all the good things that had happened in the past three months could not erase memories of the horrific events he had experienced in the past ten years. Jailed, homeless, a man without a country? Some scars ran deep, and some wounds would never heal.
    And then there was the Dutch Cloud.
    His four days of slumber had brought their share of odd dreams, but the subject of the Dutch Cloud was a real-life ghost story. At least for Nolan.
    It started with the team’s gig for the Russian mob, to protect a cruise ship trip through the Aegean Sea. Saving the Red Mafia bigwigs from a mass poisoning attack had been a bonanza for Team Whiskey. Not only were they paid handsomely for three days of work, along with a $50,000 tip; their client, a mobster named Bebe, had passed on to the team valuable intelligence, which helped them catch up to and finally kill Zeek the Pirate. And it was Bebe who told Nolan about the Dutch Cloud .
    It was a seemingly mythical vessel, a phantom ship said to have gone missing shortly after 9/11 and endlessly sailing the seas ever since, its contents unknown and the subject of much speculation. Bebe said that if the team were to capture the Dutch Cloud , they would be in for a reward of $50 million, payable by none other than the CIA.
    It sounded like drunken Russian bullshit—and in truth both Nolan and Bebe were highly intoxicated when the mobster told him the tale. But then Nolan actually saw the ghost ship. It happened while Whiskey was heading toward an island near Zanzibar to help recover buried treasure containing a billion-dollar microchip. One night, he had just awakened from an alcohol-induced dream, when he went out on the deck of the Dustboat in a gale and saw the spectral ship pass about a thousand yards off their port side, only to be quickly lost again in the storm and fog.
    Or at least that’s what he thought happened. Because when he woke up that next morning, brutally hung over, he found himself in the care of the Senegals, who for some reason had not seen what he thought he had just seen a few hours earlier.
    Another strange memory.
    *   *   *
    NOW AFTER MANY days and nights of deep slumber, he was suddenly wide awake, feeling the Atlantic rolling the Dustboat , his heart pounding in his chest. He felt anxious, he needed air, and he was in no mood to contemplate what lay ahead or what had happened before.
    So he rolled out of his bunk, grabbed a six-pack from his small fridge and went up on deck.
    At the moment their guardian angel, the Georgia June, was sailing about a mile in front of them. The rest of the team was asleep and the Senegals were steering the ship. Nolan walked back to the stern alone, and the beer started going down fast. He quickly quaffed three beers and the