The Delta Solution Read online

  And with that, Mack Bedford was gone, jogging fast across the dunes, headed for perhaps the most brutal training ground in the world—Coronado’s Obstacle Course, a fifteen-part open-air torture school, a place so hard on new recruits it is often used by fully fledged SEAL combat teams on their final warm-up before deploying to a war zone.

  The O-Course is composed of rope climbs, a sixty-foot cargo net, climbing walls, barbed wire, gymnastic vaults and parallel bars, rope bridges, and places with sinister names like The Weaver. Mack’s class would almost certainly show up there toward the end of the afternoon. But there were three SEAL teams shortly deploying to Afghanistan, and they were scheduled to work there right after lunch.

  Mack grabbed a sandwich and then stationed himself right in the middle of the place where he could see and locate SEAL team members with special talents for climbing and agility; men with supreme balance, forearms made of blue twisted steel; men who could scale the side of a big ship that had been commandeered by armed Somali pirates.

  After the first SEALs arrived, Mack watched the hardened combat veterans scale the eighty-foot climbing ropes and then slide down, fast but steady. No mistakes. This particular group performed the exercise three times, and of the thirty men who tackled it, Mack noticed just two. They were all outstanding, but these two were very fast, and one of them was, unsurprisingly, the team leader. Mack had no interest in removing him from his platoon just before they went into a theater of war.

  The other man was Shane Cannel, a twenty-three-year-old, newly promoted petty officer second class from Orange County, California, surfer, athlete, and guitar player. Specialist: 200 meters, 21.2 seconds. And he could scale those ropes like a six-foot-tall Rhesus monkey.

  Mack moved on to the cargo net, where men worked two or three at a time. Here he could make a comparison, and Shane Cannel was just as good in a discipline where everyone was very accomplished, since the net is identical to the one SEALs use to board and disembark ships and submarines.

  Young Shane seemed to sense the big rope footholds. He might have been climbing a regular set of stairs. Never faltered. Went straight past both his Team Ten buddies, who were no slouches themselves. Neither of them even looked sideways, and Shane was up and over the big log at the top before the other two had reached the fifty-foot mark.

  Guess he always goes by’em like that, thought Mack, and he wrote down the kid’s name.

  Down at the swinging rope bridge, Mack found another young SEAL from the same Alpha Platoon, Team Ten. He was Josh Malone from Iowa, about six feet tall, a farm boy who graduated from Annapolis and served as a gunnery officer on a destroyer.

  The swinging bridge makes everyone look bad, especially the big guys whose weight is inclined to swerve the main walking rope. Lt. Josh Malone stepped lightly across it under a full pack, as sure-footed as that character who tightroped over Niagara Falls. Mack had noticed Josh on the cargo net and selected him as the one guy who might have given Shane Cannel a run for his money.

  Next stop was the wall, and Mack stood watching for almost an hour as teams of SEALs came thundering into its base, grabbed a rope and tried to walk straight up, a kind of backward rappel.

  Watching an expert, it looked dead easy. And to a large extent they were all experts. But just as with most groupings, two out of ten are merely average, four are not bad, two are very good, one is excellent, and one is supreme. It was that last cat for whom Mack was searching, the one with automatic coordination, the one with strength and rhythm, no fear and no doubts about his ability.

  All afternoon Mack Bedford checked out that wall, watched dozens of men climb it and drop down the other side. Only one of them caught his eye, a SEAL who was a little older than the others, Chief Petty Officer Brad Charlton from Colorado, a mountain man, climber, skier, son of a coal miner, aged thirty-one. Machine gunner by profession, SEAL Team Two.

  Brad went up that wall as if he were merely going uphill, straddled and rolled the top beam and kind of walked at high speed down the other side. Mack followed CPO Charlton down to the rope bridge and witnessed another effortless example of battleground coordination, full pack and rifle, not a foot wrong.

  Mack hit the buttons of his cell phone to run an instant check on the CPO and discovered he was a skilled marksman, Honor Man at Sniper School, a decorated veteran who served with distinction in Baghdad, and earmarked for officer training school after his next tour of duty in Helmand Province.

  The following morning, Petty Officer Shane Cannel, Lieutenant Josh Malone, and CPO Brad Charlton were all informed they were to continue their final preparations for deployment with their teams, but they would not be accompanying their platoon to Afghanistan. When their teams began pack-down for their departure, they were to report instead to the newly formed Delta Platoon under the exclusive command of Commander Mackenzie Bedford.

  No explanations were given, except an order to observe normal rules involving highly classified operations. And to await further orders from Commander Bedford.

  THE EQUATORIAL SUN ROSE SLOWLY above the eastern horizon of the Indian Ocean in a burning sphere of pure fire. It cast upon the water a deepred, shimmering highway along which the Mombassa seemed to be travelling, directly into the inferno.

  Captain Hassan had missed the first sunrise of this voyage while he was nursing a stupendous hangover with cold towels on his head and sufficient Alka-Seltzer to fizz up Lake Michigan.

  He had recovered by lunchtime and took over the wheel somewhat sheepishly. Captain Hassan was one of nature’s autocrats and was monumentally embarrassed at having been too drunk to drive his own ship. Still, he had not expected to be under way for several more days, and he felt obliged to make that clear to all members of the crew at regular intervals of approximately thirty minutes.

  This applied especially to Ismael Wolde, who was making no secret of his rank displeasure with the members of his highly paid assault team who had been clearly unfit for duty. The savior of the operation was Elmi Ahmed, the Haradheere-born former Somali brigade commander in the government army.

  The thirty-five-year-old teetotaller had stepped right up into the captain’s shoes and taken over the operation of the Mombassa from the start of the mission, checking out the oil and fuel levels, setting the instruments, taking the helm, and driving the ship carefully, slowly out through the shallows, then out beyond the crashing night breakers.

  He had set her correct easterly course and stayed at the wheel for a total of ten hours before Captain Hassan took over. Before they left, Ismael Wolde had requested a formal promotion for Elmi, and Mohammed Salat had his guards deliver a personal citation to the beach.

  It was printed on the Somali Marines letterhead, upon which there was a facsimile of Admiral Lord Nelson’s coat of arms, posthumously bestowed upon the victor of the Battle of Trafalgar. The letter congratulated Elmi Ahmed on his devotion to the Somali cause and promoted him in the field, effective immediately, to Commodore Ahmed, signed by the Honorary Admiral of the Fleet, First Sea Lord Mohammed Salat.

  Right now he sat at Captain Hassan’s right hand. They were 580 miles off the Somali coast and pounding their way forward through the normal long swells of the Indian Ocean. At 0700 most of the crew were not yet awake, although someone was preparing fruit salad, North African flatbread, and canned ham for breakfast.

  Captain Hassan forbade having a propane gas cooker on board. Not with high explosives around. So no one was in much of a hurry to rise and shine since there was no hot coffee, toast, or eggs. The only other crew member in action was Hamdan Ougoure, who had taken first morning watch on the bow of the ship, standing lookout for the skipper.

  Commodore Ahmed was engrossed in navigation and the radar screen. He was trying to calculate precisely how far the Queen Beatrix might have travelled from her last known position 10.00N 60.00E. That had been around midnight, about thirty-one hours ago. And there was an air of approximation about those numbers, relayed as they had been from the computer screen of
Peter Kilimo on Fifth Avenue in New York.

  Armed with Peter’s critical information about her course, that she intended to run south and then cut left somewhere between the Maldives and Diego Garcia, Ahmed was mildly surprised at the rapid progress they had made and how close the Mombassa must be to her quarry. Running twice as fast east, they had gained probably five hundred miles on her.

  And they were still gaining. There was of course nothing on the radar screen yet, but Ahmed would not have been surprised if they picked up a paint late in the afternoon. At one point, Ismael Wolde made satellite communication with Mohammed Salat and requested an update on the Beatrix’s progress, given that the Indian Ocean is such a gigantic body of water.

  But the First Sea Lord of Haradheere had declined to pursue that inquiry with Peter Kilimo since it would plainly frighten him to death, especially if they proceeded to hijack the 300,000-ton ship later that night. Salat did not wish to lose his principal New York eyes on the shipping world.

  So Captain Hassan ran on through the dawn, and his boat came slowly awake. By 10:00 a.m. the crew was attending to its tasks in readiness for a possible assault. The priority was the ropes and grappling irons because the Beatrix would need to be boarded.

  There was no question of stopping her by firing a couple of RPGs across her bow. The officers on her bridge were so far away from the bow they would hardly see it. As for stopping the ship by force of arms or threat of explosive, that was out of the question. No one could stop it, not even her captain; the oceangoing monolith would plow on for miles even with the engines at a dead stop.

  If the Queen Beatrix had been balanced on her stern end, she would have been one hundred feet taller than the Eiffel Tower. She was two-and-a-half times taller than the highest point of Sydney Harbor Bridge. It was mind-blowing even to consider capturing her, except for three factors: (A) She might be stopped in the water or travelling at a very slow speed; (B) She would be riding very low on her lines, thanks to her colossal cargo of crude oil; and (C) Her unarmed crew, comprised 90 percent of foreigners, would most certainly not fight to save her from a marauding Somali Marine force, heavily armed with machine guns and hand grenades. The only difficulty was getting on board without being seen.

  Wolde had studied a thousand plans of the world’s big tankers, and he understood the boarding, if and when they found her, would have to be at the stern, where the entire crew would be stationed. To attempt anything at the bow end would be to invite disaster because every member of the assault group would somehow have to traverse the entire length of the ship, three hundred yards, with no cover.

  If the captain or one of his officers did have a machine gun, Wolde and his men could be picked off like desert jackals as they raced aft along the barren steel roof of the vast holding tanks.

  Wolde had a reasonably good drawing of the rear end of the ship and, fully laden, there were rails not too high off the water. This mission would live or die by the skill of his grappling-iron men, and he had already ordered Kifle Zenawi, Ibrahim Yacin, and Elmi Ahmed to work on those lines.

  They needed to insure they were ready to go instantly, no knots, no tangles, no screwups. Setbacks such as these could occur all too easily in the drastically confined space of the attack skiffs. And the ropes needed to be carefully coiled and placed in handmade, square open boxes like thin, plaited snakes.

  The cast-steel irons were the time-honored four-hook variety, unchanged in design since the US Army’s Second Battalion Rangers Assault Group used them to scale the heights of Pointe du Hoc four miles west of Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.

  Those anchor hooks could grab into anything—rocks, boulders, sand, bushes, even trees with the right angle. The steel post and rails on the deck of a big ship were probably the easiest target ever invented. All Wolde’s men needed was to clear the top rail on the first throw.

  Omar Ali Farah was tasked with checking the weapons, especially the big machine gun, which could spell the difference between life and death. He also conducted a thorough overall of every Kalashnikov in the pirate arsenal, cleaning the barrels, fitting the new magazines, making certain the spares were laid out in order for each man. One malfunctioning rifle could be fatal for them all.

  Lunch was probably the most boring meal ever created on any wealthy, working ship in maritime history—for the fifth time in a row, fruit salad and canned ham sandwiches utilizing African flatbread that was growing staler by the day and resembled, according to Wolde, the outer cardboard of a small ammunition box.

  They couldn’t even throw a line over the side and catch a fish because there was nowhere to cook it. Bottom-dwelling shellfish, which could be eaten raw, was out of the question since the ocean was about two miles deep.

  They ran on under a sweltering sun all through the afternoon. Commodore Elmi Ahmed checked the GPS and made long pencil lines across his charts, plotting the possible course and position of the Beatrix. He figured she must be somewhere within one hundred miles of them. If she had stopped and examined her shaft, she might be fifty miles away. Either way, they had a fighting chance of finding her that night.

  CAPTAIN JAN VAN MARCHANT was a forty-eight-year-old lifelong tanker man from the little south Holland town of Delft, a ten-minute train ride from the world’s greatest deep-water oil terminal of Rotterdam. He was the son of a master glazer at one of the Delft china factories and spent his early years living in constant dread of ending up on the workbench next to his father, shining up the famous blue-and-white pots and figurines.

  Jan van Marchant was on a train to Rotterdam at the age of sixteen to begin a two-year tour of duty as a deckhand on a 100,000-ton tanker before either of his parents realized he had gone. When he returned at eighteen, his father had died, and for the past twenty-seven years he had helped support his mother from his ample salary.

  Van Marchant had his master’s certificate before he was twenty-one, and his first overall command of a freighter at twenty-eight. He became a first officer for the Rotterdam Tanker Corporation at thirty-one and assumed command of his first VLCC two days after his thirty-third birthday.

  Established shipping corporations could charter these gigantic ships from Rotterdam, but the Queen Beatrix could only be taken if Captain van Marchant stayed in command. He was widely considered one of the principal masters in the world oil business, a skilled navigator with a near-flawless record of having delivered a billion tons of crude all over the globe, on time, every time, barring engine malfunction or impossible weather. He was an expert entering and leaving a hundred different harbors and knew how to pull strings with every loadmaster on every crude-oil dock in the world.

  When he retired at fifty-five, if he so wished, Jan van Marchant would do so with a full-salary pension for life and an agreed golden handshake of $5 million. Such was his reputation. It was never even contemplated that this tall, fair-haired athletic Dutchman would ever be challenged, never mind captured.

  On every voyage stood his two closest colleagues, Johan van Nistelroy and Pietr van der Saar, both age thirty, first mate and bosun respectively. They formed a trio of very tough, competent world seamen, but they obeyed the law and never carried firearms, mostly because they thought this mighty oil fortress at sea was impregnable.

  But Holland, befitting a country situated almost entirely below sea level, has an enviable record as a centuries-old naval power. Navy training is top class, and all submariners learn those instinctive reactions to heavy-duty machinery, functioning under the surface of the ocean.

  Every one of their submarine crews learns to listen, and Pietr van der Saar was especially gifted. He could pick up an irregular beat on a camshaft in an instant. Same with a hydro-problem, a malfunctioning ballast tank, a “knock” on a generator. It was Pietr who picked up the vibration on the main shaft of the Beatrix.

  And Captain van Marchant was only a few minutes behind him. He detected it while Pietr wandered down to the enormous engine rooms below the upper works just to see if he could get a
handle on the problem.

  But it was well hidden. And he returned to the bridge to find the captain, leaving Johan van Nistelroy at the helm. Deep down in the lower enclaves of the engine room, both men could hear the distant, deep shudder below the waterline. Jan van Marchant thought it not too serious. But they each thought someone should have a good look when sea conditions were okay.

  As they pressed on toward the equator, it seemed to flatten out. But later that night, Pietr sensed it, rather than heard it, again. At this time he had the helm himself, but he thought the shudder sufficiently serious to hand over to Johan, awaken the boss, and once more go down to the engine room for a check.

  As the gigantic ship ran on through the ocean, both men decided formally to bring it to a complete halt at first light when the watch changed, and then take the full engineering team below to make some adjustments.

  They were 120 miles north of the equator, which was just about as far south as they intended to go. The captain backed eight degrees north of ninety, still heading east, straight at the northernmost point of land on distant Sumatra, gateway to the Malacca Strait.

  The problem on the Beatrix was that the shudder seemed to come and go. There was scarcely time to make any mechanical move before it stopped. However this was the third time that both the captain and bosun had heard and felt a very definite problem on the shaft.

  And while neither of them thought the rise and fall of the swell would have much effect on the ship, they agreed it would be better to conduct their investigation, and any repairs, in flat calm if possible.

  It was mid-afternoon now, and the majority of the engineering staff would be reporting for what the US Navy calls the First Dogwatch at 1600. They’d give it a shot then, if the sea was subsiding in a dying afternoon breeze.

  By 5:00 p.m. the engineers in the Beatrix had made minor adjustments. By 6:00 p.m. she was well under way, back up to speed and running approximately fifty miles ahead of the Mombassa, which was still going twice as fast, closing in on her starboard quarter.