The Delta Solution (46 page)

Mohammed Salat’s personal wealth increased by at least $2 million. But he was the brains, he had organized the intelligence, and he had backed the mission with hard cash, provided the equipment and the firepower, without which the operation may well have floundered. No one begrudged Mr. Salat one dollar of his earnings. It was the biggest payout in the history of the Haradheere Stock Exchange.

The weary warriors of “Mission Mustang” had retired to bed. Only the new guards were wide awake on the ramparts of the garrison. But Salat, ever the 24/7 chief executive, elected to take one final look at his e-mail for the evening. All communications from Europe and the East Coast of the United States came in late, and tonight there was only one.

It was unsigned but Mohammed knew who had sent it—the contact who’d been given a $40,000 reward for the
Mustang
, a man who needed to be continually nurtured. And here he was again, transmitting priceless information about a rich cruise ship that would be sailing into the range of the Somali Marines in the very near future.

ADMIRAL TOM CARLOW and Miranda were about as far away, metaphorically, from the high and windy, late-autumn slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains as it was possible to be and still remain on planet earth. Tom was at sea level, sipping a local version of Planter’s Punch, the ice-cold, fruity and spicy rum cocktail beloved by the colonial rulers in the former British East Africa.

Miranda was slightly below sea level, swimming in the warm Indian Ocean, forty yards off glorious Shanzu Beach, twenty miles from Mombassa. A five-day break at the luxurious Serena Beach Hotel, shaded by coconut palms in an exotic corner of the Swahili coastline, was everything their travel agent had promised.

They were not scheduled to join the
Ocean Princess
for another couple of days. Tom was looking forward to the cruise, steaming south to Zanzibar and then east to the Seychelles for a few days before heading northeast to the Maldives, inadvertently cutting the corner of a vast square of naval operations as designated by the CNO in Washington.

The admiral did not, of course, know this, only that this vast and ancient ocean was 13,000 feet deep all the way to the Maldives and that the remote One and a Half Degree Channel was a place where nothing could be seen on the surface for miles and miles.

He’d been through there before, as a US Navy gunnery officer, but he remembered little beyond its vast expanse. Except that once the navigation officer, in the destroyer in which Tom served, had told him there was a “goddamned sandbank” in the middle of that channel, which rose up from the ocean floor to a depth of only six fathoms.

To understand the romance of that piece of navigational minutiae, it helps to have been a serving admiral. And Admiral Tom Carlow had enough of that in his soul to have come completely equipped for the journey, almost as if he were commanding the
Ocean Princess
. In his luggage, he had a photocopy of the original charts of that Maldive channel drawn by the British captain Robert Moresby, the first man to chart the region back in the 1830s.

His work was so exemplary that the charts were in regular use until the 1990s, when the first satellite improvements were made. But many captains still would not go through the rough, treacherous waters south of the Haddumati Atoll without copies of Moresby’s originals in the chart
drawer. If the master of the
Princess
had been in any way remiss, Admiral Tom Carlow would whip him sharply into line—much as he had been treating lower ranks for most of his working life.

The other eccentricity Tom maintained from his days as a combat sailor was using his old seaman’s leather duffel bag, a battered dark-blue navy hold-all that still bore the faint golden insignia of the embattled destroyer USS
Maddox
.

Hidden deep in the dark recesses of the bag was a small pouch in which Tom had always kept a vial of cyanide pills, in case of capture and torture by the Vietcong. He never went on a cruise without the bag, but the vial of pills was long gone—replaced by his cell phone and GPS unit.

Sipping a cocktail beside the pool in the late-afternoon sun, Tom Carlow had his life under control. Miranda, looking at least twenty-five years younger than her seventy summers, was walking elegantly toward him. The only aspect of the vacation of which he would not have approved had been put in place without his knowledge.

A discreet phone call had been made from Lt. Com. Jay Souchak in the Pentagon informing the president of Southern Islander that they had a VIP on board the
Princess
and that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs would consider it a personal favor if the parents of the SEAL C-in-C, Admiral Andrew Carlow, were treated like royalty. Nothing less.

MOHAMMED SALAT checked his computerized charts before retiring. He pulled up the pages on the
Ocean Princess
and noted her size and height from the water at the stern end. He estimated that she was a little taller than the
Global Mustang
but still well within the range of Ismael Wolde’s grappling hooks.

This was plainly a ship for which someone would pay a great deal of money to free from the clutches of pirates. Salat checked the rates for cabins, staterooms, and suites. The first thing that struck him was the absence of any inexpensive fares.

This was first-class all the way. There would be no one on board who was worried about the next hot meal. In fact the rates for the top cabins, those on the Promenade Deck both port and starboard, were more than $1,000 per day. The cost of the Presidential Suite on the upper deck would have refurbished the entire road system of Haradheere.

Salat’s assault teams had never hit a passenger ship. His antennae told him that it might be the way to ruin—attracting the firepower and anger of the whole maritime world, especially if someone was hurt or killed.

Mohammed always stressed to his commandoes that killing people was a very bad idea. “You can get away with darn near anything,” he told them, “except murder. Because that makes people very mad at you.”

Thus it was that the Somali Marines had never killed anyone, until the gunfight on board the
Niagara Falls
, which had not been their fault. And then the three men on the
Mustang
who had unwittingly shown up when the pirates were climbing in, trapped on ropes down the ship’s hull, their most vulnerable point.

Aside from those unfortunate incidents, there had been no killing in more than twenty-five operations launched from the Haradheere base. Mohammed was proud of that. It was part of a CEO’s job to issue the warnings, identify the potential problems, and avoid trouble wherever possible.

The only other serious warning he had tried to follow was to avoid American ships because of the natural arrogance and power of their armed services. Salat believed that the men in the Pentagon were capable of the most vicious reprisals against the pirates. If there was any way to hit another nation’s ships instead, that would always be his plan. Dutch, British, French, Spanish, Japanese, Greek—all fine but not Russian and definitely not American.

The trouble was, so far as Mohammed was concerned, his information out of New York and Washington was so outstanding that he had little choice these days. Kilimo provided impeccable data: times, dates, positions, and speeds. Pirate attacks were safer when conducted far out to sea, and the precise quality of Kilimo’s work consistently made it safer and easier to hit an American ship than waste time roaring around the ocean, burning fuel, and looking for poorly charted Dutch or Greek vessels.

Salat stared at the image of the
Ocean Princess
. She was not a freighter, and she would have many, many more crew, hopefully none of them armed. Of course most of the two hundred passengers would be asleep, but nonetheless, a gunfight on this ship might result in the deaths of dozens of people, and the owners were American. If this went wrong, it would probably be the end of the Somali Marines.

And yet . . . the
Ocean Princess
had to be extremely vulnerable, almost
certainly without armed guards for the very reason Mohammed had just outlined. No one could afford a gunfight with the marines.

From the charts, it seemed to Mohammed that this channel was hundreds of miles from nowhere. He didn’t even know whether US warships ever went through there. Certainly he had no such record. The warships were always farther west. So here it was, a totally vulnerable passenger ship, miles from anywhere, almost certainly unarmed with a couple of hundred wealthy people on board, some of them perhaps hugely important.

Salat reached for his calculator. At first he worked on a per-head system. What would one of these wealthy families pay to get their loved ones back—perhaps $100,000? How much would the shipowners come up with to get this beautiful moneymaker back—$5 million? And how much would the insurers pay to avoid a massive payout if someone were hurt—$3 million?

The numbers looked good to him. They looked very good. And Ismael Wolde’s men had been so successful lately, they were so confident; it would be a shame to miss such an opportunity.

He guessed there would be a lot of valuable trinkets on board the ship: jewelry, gold, precious stones, watches, not to mention cash. Could be a tremendous haul. And the same rules still applied: You can steal to your heart’s content. What you cannot do is shoot people.

Mohammed Salat went to bed very happy, reminding himself to wire $20,000 to Peter Kilimo’s Westchester bank account, win, lose, or draw, with a $30,000 bonus to come if the mission was accomplished. As usual, he made the transfer by e-mail from his account in Nairobi.

BART MEINHOFF was his real name, East German by birth and a member of perhaps the most feared secret police organization in old Europe, the Stasi. He was one of the most naturally suspicious policemen in the free world, which he was damned lucky to be in. Meinhoff had been “turned” just in time by one of the CIA’s top operators behind the iron curtain, the present director at Langley, Bob Birmingham.

Bart Meinhoff made it to the West with about six months to spare, but not before he had smashed the lives of countless East German families suspected of disloyalty to the Soviet regime. Fifteen times he had personally
discovered individuals with wives and children trying to make a break for freedom over the Berlin Wall. And fifteen times, instead of having them arrested, he let them proceed. He saw to it that every last one of them was shot dead by the guards as they struggled across the narrow, floodlit noman’s-land between East and West.

When he was finally called into Langley, two months after President Reagan’s iron will had removed the hated concrete barrier across the city, Bart had betrayed every single one of his former colleagues to the CIA, supplying their names and addresses, their crimes against humanity.

He was a man with scarcely a friend in the world. Bob Birmingham loathed Meinhoff for everything that he was, but he recognized his value and considered he was forcing the ex-Stasi man to pay penance for his evil on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency.