The Delta Solution (32 page)

The
Global Mustang
was scheduled to leave Ras Laffan in four hours bound for Japan. Her client was the largest corporation in that country, Tokyo Electric Power, and she would dock at its LNG port of Futtsu, forty miles down the bay from the great city itself.

All the Japanese corporations that imported liquefied gas were fantastically reliable. They paid on time, and they could not take delivery fast enough since almost every household in the country cooks on propane. Japan guzzles up 43 percent of the world’s LNG trading volume. And use of propane is on the increase, owing to the closing of several nuclear plants. Nine of the world’s twelve LNG exporters sell to Japan.

The
Global Mustang
had actually been built by the Japanese, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry in Nagasaki, and she headed back to the imperial empire twice a month—back and forth from Qatar to Tokyo Bay. She’d never even been to Houston. Bob Heseltine had never even seen her. The crew was changed and airlifted both in and out at various points along the route.

A spike in world natural gas prices to $20 for twenty-eight cubic meters made
Mustang
’s cargo worth a fortune—she carried 140,000 cubic meters
of liquid gas, which flashes off into a gaseous product six hundred times over. The math was dazzling, and Peter was not absolutely certain of the accurate format for assessing the value of the cargo to Tokyo Electric.

But he knew that Mohammed Salat would kill for information about her route. He could always gauge the pirate chief’s demeanor by the speed at which his payment arrived in Westchester County.

But now it was plainly over. The CIA was all over it, and the only thing that mattered was to get rid of that laptop and forget all about his Somali connection. He was gratified the president of Athena did not even bother to mention the visit of the agents, so unlikely did he consider the possibility they were harboring some kind of spy.

Peter left early that afternoon and walked to Grand Central Station for his daily homeward journey, fifteen miles to Bronxville on the Harlem line. He lived close to the station and walked home, knowing his wife would be out for the next couple of hours.

He walked into the garage, checked the trunk for the laptop, and placed it on the passenger seat. He knew he should smash it and then dump the remnants in the river. But he also knew a few sentences on that keyboard were worth $20,000 minimum. He might even ask for $30,000 for a vessel that was carrying cargo worth an astronomical sum. Then he could dump it.

Peter drove the familiar route to New Rochelle, parked in his usual spot, and searched for an Internet connection. He found it quickly and sent an e-mail to Mohammed Salat:

Peter concluded his note with the name and cell phone number of the president of Tokyo Electric, the home number in Houston of Bob Heseltine,
and that of Constantine Livanos in Monte Carlo. Customer, owner, and agent, the men who made the biggest decisions.

His action, he knew, was the function of boundless greed. Every instinct he had told him this was a very bad idea. But $20,000 was too tempting, and if he heard the G
lobal Mustang
had been hijacked, he would ask for another $10,000 or $20,000 as a bonus. Mr. Salat, he knew, was not a man to shirk a generous payment to reward a major informer.

He arrived home to find the house still empty and he took an axe to the laptop, obliterated it, and then, wearing gardening gloves, put the pieces back in the computer carrying case. Then he went out again and dropped the pieces into a succession of trash cans throughout the outskirts of town. He estimated it would take about twelve men four hundred years to find all the pieces if they started right now. Even then the tiny shards would mean nothing. The Haradheere link was down.

APPROXIMATELY ONE HOUR BEFORE the
Global Mustang
pulled out of Ras Laffan, steaming into the Arabian night, the
Ocean Dart
was manhandled out through the gentle surf of the dark but calm Indian Ocean. The beach was crowded with those who had helped her on her way, heaving on the ropes behind the horsepower of four SUVs and the clatter of the winch.

The Japanese factory ship they were speeding out to intercept was a minute objective compared with the LNG carrier, and navigation for the new pirate team was much simpler. The Indian Ocean was deep and deserted. The route of the
Mustang
carried her huge cargo past Qatar’s north gas field, the biggest on earth.

She would steam three hundred miles to the rugged point of the Musandam Peninsula, which juts into the Strait of Hormuz. And all along there is a jungle of oil and gas fields, pipelines, warnings, sandbanks, shoals, and restricted areas. Also the
Mustang
needed to run north for thirty miles and east for three hundred.

That route would take her ever closer to the glowering coastline of Iran with its hostile navy, which exercised endlessly on the edge of these vital free-trading waters. The master of the
Mustang
would stay well south of the Iranian big guns.

Her journey from Ras Laffan started on a latitude of 25.90N and she
would sail around the Musandam headland on 26.20N before coming 90 degrees right, southeast down the Gulf of Oman, and into the open ocean.

In general terms, the
Ocean Dart
tuna boat had little in common with the gargantuan gas vessel. But the citizens of Haradheere would, in time, hope fervently that fate would, in a sense, hurl the two ships together. And that the big bucks represented by the respective cargoes would somehow end up in their stock exchange, bringing joy, happiness, and prosperity to the community.

Meanwhile Mohammed Salat’s chief of staff had downloaded the communiqué from Peter Kilimo. It was getting light and he knew the chairman was asleep, so he left it on the desk in the private office.

It was thus almost ten o’clock in the morning before Mr. Salat read it. And when he did, he felt the victorious surge of a conqueror. The mighty cargo must certainly be worth the thick end of $10 million.

Life had rarely, if ever, looked better. He picked up the telephone and called Ismael Wolde, who was sitting across the street under a banana tree, sipping fruit juice and cleaning his AK-47, the way modern-day pirates do.

Five minutes later he was in the garrison office sitting next to Mohammed Salat, reading the unsigned message from New York and pulling up Internet pictures of the world’s biggest LNG tankers, including the
Global Mustang
.

When the four-domed giant popped out of the ether, Ismael whistled through his teeth as he scanned the picture for the best place to board the vessel. Again, he suggested it must be the stern, but it would not be easy, and he considered it too dangerous to persuade the captain to slow down with an RPG7.

“Mr. Salat!” he said. “If we accidentally put one of those Russian rocket grenades through one of those domes, she’d go up like an atom bomb. Wouldn’t be no survivors inside a five-mile radius. Sir, I’ll do what’s possible, but I don’t want to get fried by no Arab gas bomb.”

“No, I don’t want that to happen. And I think we agree we cannot attack this giant from the water. Our only chance is to take her by stealth. We need to board her in complete secrecy. And then plant four bombs at the base of each one of those holding tanks. We then capture the crew and tell them what we’ve done, mined their ship from the inside.”

“Okay, and what’s our threat?”

“Ten million dollars, cash, delivered on deck; otherwise we’ll blow the
Global Mustang
to high heaven.”

“And where will we be at the time of this disaster?”

“In the
Mombassa
, five miles off.”

“And the crew of the tanker?”

“We’ll have to escort them off. There’ll be about thirty of them in two lifeboats. We don’t leave until the deadline is approaching. Then we all leave and wait for the drop.”

“And how do we get the cash?”

“We keep the crew at gunpoint. Then we have four of our guys go in, collect the cash, and disarm the bombs. At that point the crew can go back and continue their journey.”

Wolde should have been smiling. But instead he was frowning, still staring at the close-up shots of the LNG tanker. “The issue is,” he said, “can we get on board? Because this ship, according to these photographs, rides higher in the water than a regular crude-oil tanker.”

“She does in these pictures, which were taken as she left Tokyo Bay. We should assume she was empty. Loaded, she’s got to be a lot lower, carrying thousands of tons of liquid.”

“I think so,” said Admiral Wolde. “The good news is that rail that seems to run right around the deck. If the grapplers go high enough, they’ll grip anywhere.”

“The rail’s lowest at the stern,” said Salat. “Drops down at least twelve feet to a kind of transom—that undercover area, like a quarterdeck, under the helicopter landing area.”

“How high do you think that is, under a full load?”

“I’d say about thirty to thirty-five feet. No more.

“Then we can get the hooks on. Because we don’t need accuracy. Just height. To get ’em up and over that rail.”

“Are you concerned about her speed?”

“Sure I am. A ship that size moving through the water at 20 knots is a very difficult target. But I doubt there’ll be guards. And we got good drivers; they’ll put us right on the hull moving at zero relative speed. We’ll use knotted ropes and then rope ladders. And it’s a night attack. But if the water’s rough, we cannot do it.”

“I accept that,” said Salat. “And I also accept that we cannot open fire on
this ship. Because if we hit and punctured one of those tanks, she would blow up.”

“Sir, I’ve never heard of anyone trying to capture an LNG vessel—I suppose for those very reasons. She’s too dangerous to hit, and too big and too fast to board, except for very skilled men. Like ours.”

Mohammed Salat was pulling up information on the Internet, and he said suddenly, “You know something, Ismael? These things have sailed 100 million miles around the world without a shipboard death or a major accident of any kind. Says it right here.”

“We’ll be the first, ha?” laughed Admiral Wolde. “We make naval history. Remember us in many books. Maybe get Somali Marines on television worldwide. Frighten our enemies!”

“I’m not sure about any of that,” said Salat, thoughtfully. “It’s much better if we stay very private.”

“If we hit the
Global Mustang
, we will be very public,” replied Ismael. “And very rich I think.”

“That’s the part I like most,” said the chairman.

WITH EIGHTEEN DAYS LEFT from deployment, Commander Bedford gathered his platoon to prepare them for the critical part of the forthcoming missions: the SEALs’ arrival at the mission headquarters, which would be some kind of a warship, out in the Indian Ocean.

“However we decide to attack these maniacs,” he said, “we’re almost certainly going to start off on a destroyer or even a carrier. Every scenario involves launching from one of our own ships.

“If the pirates are in command, we have to come in by air or by sea, maybe in helicopters, probably in little boats. But whatever it is, we kick off from a navy vessel.

“The most likely event is a signal to our Djibouti base instructing us to head out to an area where a US merchant ship has been captured. They’ll need to fly us to the warship immediately, possibly in a helicopter, but more likely in a fast, fixed-wing aircraft.