Stolen Heroes

NASA astronaut Scotty McCullough slowly regained consciousness as he lay on the metal deck of the helicopter perched on the roof of a hotel in downtown Jakarta, Indonesia.
Behind him, he could hear men shouting but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. He heard the high-pitched whine of turbines and the whooshing sound of helicopter rotor blades. He tried to move his head to clear his vision, but it bumped heavily against something solid. It was cool against the side of his face. He tried to move, but found that his hands and feet were bound. He heard men shouting in a foreign language, but he could see nothing. He tried to speak, but felt something over his mouth. The sounds of the turbines and beating rotor blades became louder and his head bumped against the object as the helicopter lurched into the air. As his brain cleared, he remembered being startled awake in his Jakarta hotel room. As he had tried to sit up in his bed, he was pushed down roughly by four figures dressed in black. When he struggled to free himself from his attackers, he felt a sharp sting as a hypodermic needle punctured the skin of his arm. A hand pushed a damp, sweet-smelling cloth over his mouth and nose. He felt his strength slipping away.
As the helicopter banked sharply and sped at low altitude over southwestern Indonesia and out over the Indian Ocean, Scotty, fellow astronaut Roger Sherman, and Russian cosmonauts Svetlana Gagarin and Alexei Peshkov lay bound hand and foot, gagged, and blindfolded, by ISIS terrorists on the harsh metal floor of a Russian-made helicopter.
Scotty and the others were on a worldwide goodwill tour promoting peace by describing to admiring audiences how two old rivals - the United States and the former Soviet Union had worked cooperatively in a daring rescue of four Russian cosmonauts from their stranded, damaged spacecraft..
Scotty felt footsteps on the deck of the helicopter. Brusque hands rolled him over onto his back and harshly tore the heavy tape from his mouth.
“I don’t think there is any reason for you and your companions to be silenced any longer,” a heavily accented voice said. “From now on, only we will hear your voices.”
“Where am I and what is happening to us?” Scotty asked. His mouth was dry and his words slurred.
“We have taken you and your friends from your hotel in Jakarta,” the voice said. “As to what is happening to you, let us just say we are removing you from public view for a while. I am sure, that, after these past several months before the public, you will enjoy a little time to yourselves.”
The bindings on Scotty’s wrists tore into his skin and the weight of his body increased the pain. He struggled to loosen the bindings, only making it worse.
“I know you are uncomfortable,” the voice said. “Unfortunately, we cannot unbind you just yet. But, let me help you.” Scotty felt the sharp sting on his arm. In a moment, the pain began to subside and a warm feeling enveloped him. He felt himself drifting again back into darkness as the helicopter sped through the night over the Indian Ocean.
The container steamship, The Star of Hope, was of Liberian registry, but was owned by a Libyan conglomerate that was connected secretly to and carried out missions for ISIS. It had sailed from Perth, Australia headed for Tripoli, Libya with its cargo hold and decks filled with refrigerated containers of beef and mutton. The ship steamed steadily at half speed though the Indian Ocean while a heavy tropical storm loomed ahead. The Libyan captain stood on the ship’s port flying bridge, his powerful binoculars searched the darkness behind the ship. He looked for the tiny speck of light in the sky that would be the helicopter he was told would come. His instructions were clear; no one, was to go near the helicopter landing pad on the ship’s fantail, or near the cargo container that was secured to the deck just forward of the landing pad. Every member of the crew knew from experience that the captain was to be obeyed without question
He spotted the flashing anti-collision light just above the horizon. Even above the sound of the ship under way, he soon heard the high-pitched whine of the helicopter’s turbine engine and the distinctive “whup-whup” of the rotor blades as it approached the ship. Quickly, the helicopter touched down on the landing pad.
The cargo container blocked the captain’s view of the activity on the landing pad. “Better that I don’t know what is taking place back there,” he mused on the bridge forward of the main cargo deck.
On the pad, the kidnappers carried the unconscious hostages from the helicopter into the waiting container. Quickly the helicopter lifted off the stern of the ship. As the helicopter turned away from the ship, one of the kidnappers pressed a red button on the small black box he held in his hand. With a muffled “whump” the helicopter disintegrated in the air and settled to bottom of the Indian Ocean.
The kidnappers strapped their unconscious hostages to metal bunks welded to the deck in the container lashed to the ship as it approached the storm.
The captain had planned originally to transit the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. But in Perth, Australia, as the ship was being loaded, he received instructions from the ship’s owner that alerted him he would be intercepted at sea by helicopter and, after the intercept, he was to proceed to Tripoli, Libya via the Cape of Good Hope with refueling and provisioning stops at Toliara on the island of Madagascar and Libreville in Gabon.
He had received tentative but detailed instructions before they sailed from Libya a month earlier. The crewmembers of the Star of Hope were members of a secretive sub-group of ISIS, hired by one of Purcell’s agents to kidnap the astronauts and cosmonauts. Before this mission, various members of the crew served the organization for seven years using their ship and its specially designed container in a variety of secretive ways.
Sometimes the container served as a mobile, temporary hideout for organization members attempting to avoid arrest, or a “command post” for some terrorist expedition far from Libya. But, most of the time, the ship actually carried legitimate cargo on runs throughout the Middle East and Asia when that didn’t interfere with its primary mission of supporting ISIS. In addition to giving it legitimacy with foreign maritime authorities, its fees for carrying legal cargo brought to its owners, much needed “clean” revenue.
The captain and crew knew well enough not to ask any more questions than those absolutely necessary to do their jobs. The less they knew, the less information the authorities could force from them if they were boarded and arrested.
None of the ISIS kidnappers from the helicopter spoke to the ship's crew, but after they finished each meal, they would enter the galley, prepare four trays and deliver them to the container. Since the storm began the day before, the trays were coming back to the galley barely touched.
The hostages were seasick! As the hostages revived, the terrorists, their identities hidden by black masks, unstrapped the hostages from their bunks.
The constant pitch and roll of the container as the ship entered the storm kept the four continually off balance and, because there were no windows on the container, they could not see to prepare for the severity and direction of the ship’s next motion.
Every new movement came without warning. Standing and moving about without holding onto the wall railing was impossible. Their captors had come into the container as the storm began and ordered the hostages to secure all loose items.