The Delta Solution (35 page)

There were only twenty yards between them, hull to hull, and closing. “
GET AWAY FROM ME!
” bellowed Hassan.

“
STAND BY TO BOARD!
” shouted the major to his crew.

Captain Hassan snapped, “
Fire at will. Take them. AND TAKE THEM RIGHT NOW!
”

Ismael Wolde opened up the heavy machine gun and fired a volley straight through the doorway that hit Major Marro with such force it shot him ten feet backward, blood pouring from his shattered head and chest.

Wolde sprayed the deck, cutting down six of the astounded crew of the
Somali Star
. Elmi Ahmed launched one of his Russian RPG7s, which smashed into the wheelhouse and almost blew the superstructure off its mountings, detonating in a violent blast of fire and smoke.

Up from the deck rose Captain Hassan’s gunners led by Abadula Sofian in company with Abdul Mesfin and the ex–army sergeant Ibrahim Yacin. They fired their superbly accurate AK-47s at the now fleeing crew members of the
Somali Star
.

They fired steadily, hitting them in the back, head, legs, even blowing the brains out of three who tried to jump into the water. The noise was deafening and the fire was beginning to rage. The only two crew members still alive climbed onto the portside gunwale and tried to jump clear, but Ibrahim shot them both dead before they could leap into the water.

And into this uproar of fire, death, and carnage, stepped Omar Ali Farah, ripping the pin out of his hand grenade and hurling it across the narrow stretch of water and onto the deck, where it landed with a clatter, rolled, and nearly blew the
Somali Star
in half.

The blast split the deck asunder, flattened the main bulkhead, blew out the stern, tore the mast off its mountings, and smashed a gaping hole into the hull, which ripped downward below the water line. The force of the explosion hurled the former trawler into an upward spasm and broke her back.

In a hail of sparks, hissing steam, flames, and cordite, the
Somali Star
sank in three minutes. One dying crew member pathetically raised his old Kalashnikov out of the water, like a grotesque scene from Tennyson’s
Morte d’Arthur
, when the king’s sword, Excalibur, rose from the lake. Except this had less nobility. Ibrahim blew his brains out with a burst of machine gun fire.

As Captain Hassan had instructed, there were no survivors. There was almost no trace, except for a few patches of burning oil on the surface, a shredded life-belt, and a pall of gun-smoke and blood. And soon there would be nothing. Like the shattered, lime-soaked buried corpses of Sheikh Sharif’s broken army, the sunken wreck of the
Somali Star
would be a silent, unseen testament to the blind stupidity of attacking Mohammed Salat’s highly trained pirate brigade.

They had achieved their victory in less than three minutes. They had sustained no casualties. No one was even wounded. In fact not one of Major Marro’s men had managed to fire a return shot.

Captain Hassan was about to ask his crew to clear up the ship after the battle, but there was nothing to clear up. So each man just shouldered his rifle and stowed the ammunition and armament boxes. Kifle Zenawi took the helm, opened the throttle, and headed southeast.

AT 8:00 P.M. ON THAT FRIDAY NIGHT, Captain Jack Pitman sat down for dinner with two of his senior officers. The
Global Mustang
had an excellent dining room for the senior command, and the three men who ordered New York sirloin steaks were old friends, having sailed together ever since the ship had been commissioned three years previously.

Jack Pitman, along with a fellow native of Washington State, First Officer Dominic Rayforth, and the navigator, Ray Kiley, had brought the
Mustang
directly to the Persian Gulf on her maiden voyage from Nagasaki. It took a crew of thirty-two to drive her, including the four specialists who monitored the freezing, round tanks full of liquid natural gas.

At that time, the three officers had been with Bob Heseltine for many years but saw him only rarely. They were highly paid due to the enormous responsibilities each man carried, not to mention the four-month tours of duty they endured, four months when the only land they saw was the loading docks of Qatar and the unloading piers of Japan.

All three of them had passed their forty-sixth birthdays. And the great ship had obliterated two of their marriages. Mary Pitman and Sarah Kiley had tired of the long absences and filed for divorce.

Which left Jack and Ray owning small apartments in the Northwest and running through a list of totally unsuitable girlfriends, who at first thought it glamorous to be with wealthy international mariners, until they thought better of it.

Dominic Rayforth was still married. Barely. His wife and four children lived in the suburbs of Seattle and had reached the point where no one cared whether or not he came home. He provided for his family generously, but he kept a couple of girlfriends on either side of the world and had convinced his wife that his tours of duty were six months, rather than four. The previous year had seen him home for five weeks total.

All three of them were married to the
Global Mustang
. Every month their salaries were wired to their respective bank accounts: Pitman earned
$300,000 a year; the other two got $250,000. And every six months they received $200,000 bonuses for their role in transporting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gas safely around the world.

It was a lonely but also carefree existence. No bills to pay for their own living, plenty of money, and no worries for the rest of their lives. Kiley and Rayforth were fine with it. Jack Pitman, in his more reflective moments, understood he had paid one hell of a price for financial independence.

That night, staring out of the dining room’s portside windows, Jack could see the moonlight on the water. They were cutting through a black, calm sea and the ship was quiet. He had two watchmen on the bridge who occasionally scanned the radar screen, but essentially the
Mustang
was sailing herself on automatic.

If anything showed up that might impede them in the water, a couple of alarms would sound immediately, but the fact was that other vessels could pick up the colossal bulk of the LNG carrier in ample time to stay out of the way. For a skilled navigator, sailing the
Mustang
was relaxing, even boring. Jack, Ray, and Dominic could not remember a time when anything truly interesting had happened.

Everything was operated from the control panel on the bridge. Course and speed were set: They were through the Strait of Hormuz, down the Arabian Gulf, and heading south across the Indian Ocean, and the water was deep all the way. No rocks, no sandbanks, hardly any traffic. They were 760 miles from the point where they would make a hard easterly turn and head for the wide channel that cuts through the Maldives south of Male.

They finished dinner at 10:00 p.m. and sat chatting over coffee. Dominic had spent time browsing the Internet and noticed a breaking story about a big Japanese factory ship being taken by pirates some four hundred miles to the southwest.

“Have they asked for a ransom?” wondered Jack Pitman.

“I guess so,” replied Dominic. “But it doesn’t say anything definite. I did see that Reuters was quoting the president of a fishing outfit way south on Kyushu.”

“Didn’t say whether they were paying up, did it?”

“Not really. But it’ll be the same as always—the cargo’s worth a bundle of money and the pirates only want about 5 percent of its value to send it
on its way. Otherwise they’ll shoot everyone, scuttle the ship, and vanish into the night. It’s always easier, and a lot cheaper, to pay.”

“It’s the goddamned insurance companies that make the rules these days,” said Jack. “Because if a bad scenario takes place, like death or loss of ship or cargo, they end up footing a huge bill.

“And there’s the threat of heavy increases in premiums, which nobody wants but can’t afford not to pay. Seems to me the insurance outfits run the shipping lines. We’re getting to the point where we can’t live with them, but can’t live without them.”

“Well,” said Dominic, “you know one thing. They are always going to urge the owners to pay up. When Bob had that problem with the VLCC off Sumatra a couple of years ago, they said they’d share the cost of the ransom with him. They’re making it financially beneficial for themselves in the short term but encouraging the goddamned pirates to keep at it because they’re getting goddamned rich. Every time, seems to me.”

“I wonder what we’d do if they boarded us?”

“They seem to be boarding everyone,” said Jack. “But they’ve never boarded one of these things.”

“If they did, we couldn’t do much,” said Ray. “We have no weapons on board, nothing to shoot ’em with.”

“And you know why we don’t have anything to defend ourselves?” asked the captain sternly.

“Not really.”

“Because Bob’s insurers have threatened not to cover any ship that has guns of any type on board.”

“You wouldn’t think they’d care. And it would save a lot of ransom money if we had a couple of armed guards who could shoot the pirates.”

“Easier in one way, not in another,” said Jack. “Because there are lawyers out there just waiting to represent some poor Somali family whose pirate son got shot while he was climbing aboard. Poor kid, unarmed, just trying to hitch a ride, meant no harm to anyone . . .”

“Just get that weeping mother into the European court of human rights,” chuckled Dominic. “And give her 5 million bucks for the loss of her innocent son.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Captain Pitman. “How about a glass of brandy?”

T
HE
MOMBASSA
RAN EAST ACROSS THE INDIAN OCEAN FOR FORTY more hours after the attempt on its crew and wealth. Her new engines ran flawlessly, never slowing below 15 knots on a calm sea with little wind. By 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, they had put six hundred miles between them and the spot where the
Somali Star
had gone down.

Captain Hassan had adjusted the radar to its long-distance mode and stood in front of the screen with Wolde and Ahmed while Kifle Zenawi drove the boat. And they watched the seas to the north for the paint of a really big oceangoing tanker, which, with its huge golden domes above deck, was almost certainly sixty or seventy feet higher in the water than a regular VLCC.

When the
Global Mustang
showed, it would be unmistakable and almost certainly travelling very fast, both through the water and, comparatively, on the screen. The crew ate cold goat sandwiches and drank iced coffee in the heat of the wheelhouse. They watched the green radar arm make its endless revolutions, pinging its findings, electronically relayed from the all-seeing dish that swung on the roof.

The message from New York had suggested that the
Mustang
was steaming straight down the sixtieth line of longitude and would make her left turn when she reached a point three miles short of the second northern parallel. The
Mombassa
’s GPS showed her three miles south of that line, positioned exactly at 60E, and everyone was hoping they had not missed their quarry.

If they had, they could hardly be blamed. They had arrived at their rendezvous on time and were set to track the
Mustang
until after dark. Captain Hassan believed the hours after 10:00 p.m. were most favorable for their attack because on a long voyage, many of the crew would be asleep. Ismael and Elmi went along with that. But first they had to find the ship.

Eleven o’clock came and went. There was not a sign of anything in this lonely part of the Indian Ocean, southwest of Cape Comorin, the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent.

They passed the time taping the grappling hooks with thick, black electrical insulator. The hooks had no need to be sharp enough to dig into the ground. They just had to be bent hard to grab and hook the ship’s rail. The thick tape would almost eliminate the clatter on the steel deck, muffling it to a dull thud, hopefully too dull to be heard by anyone.