“We’ll set a picket line across the shipping lane here.” Nacay marked an area just north of the 13th parallel. “The mothership will set up in the middle, Team One will be three miles to the east, and Team Two will be three miles to the west. We’ll move south at three to five knots, each varying speed so it doesn’t look as if we’re traveling together, and wait for the target to pass.”

Yaxaas handed a printout of the ship’s plans to the man with the bandoliers. “Set it up.”

He left the building and began directing the camp workers. Men paced off distances and marked lines in the sand. They placed movable walls around the interior—some no more than bedsheets on wooden frames, while others were plywood panels with makeshift hatches and doors, but they were all placed precisely according to the ship’s plans, so the boarding team would know exactly what to expect from the moment they hauled themselves over the sides of the Amjad and onto her deck.

When the deck level was complete, the workers moved to another section of camp and set up the superstructure, the engine room, and the ship’s control rooms, where the oil was pumped and monitored.

Other support personnel set up the assaulters’ gear inside the camp mess hall. Each man used the same core kit, in the same configuration, to ensure interoperability. The rifles were short-barreled AKS-74Us, the pistols were Glock 17s, and the body armor was made from Dyneema, a synthetic fabric that could stop bullets and was buoyant enough to act as a life preserver.

The boarding team suited up in the mess hall once Nacay had finished his briefing and, half an hour later, they were back outside under the relentless sun and brilliant blue sky. The boat captain and assaulters from Team One were on the port side of the mockup while their counterparts from Team Two were on the starboard side.

Nacay stood atop a platform on the camp’s northern wall, from which he could see the entire exercise. He opened his laptop, ran through a quick radio check, and gave the order to begin.

The clock started ticking.

The boarding team simulated the climb up the ship’s sides and stepped over the lines drawn in the dirt. They were on deck. Nacay had stationed camp staff throughout the mockup, acting as the ship’s officers, crew, and security personnel. All of the weapons were loaded with blank cartridges, but the sound of gunfire and the sight of a dozen highly trained naval commandos wielding rifles was real enough to get everyone’s adrenaline pumping. Nacay started calling out random equipment malfunctions and other surprises—heavy seas on the port side, a jammed rifle, a locked door—but the team kept pushing. They pushed through the failures, they pushed through the choke points, they pushed through the opposition.