The Delta Solution Read online

  While the transfers were being made, the pilot and his two guards sat and chatted with the men from Haradheere, who regaled them with breathless tales of how they had wiped out al-Qaeda’s army. The military efficiency, the courage, the ruthlessness. This was the stuff of tribal folklore.

  When the boxes had all been counted, Salat handed to the Yemeni crew a bag in which there was exactly $300,000 in cash, the agreed-upon price for the five hundred ammunition belts, the dynamite, the costs of transportation, and the surcharge.

  The pirate warriors stood back in the sand dunes and waved as the Russian aircraft lifted off, swivelled to the north, before tilting forward and clattering away, rising higher with every beat of the rotors. Salat’s convoy turned back toward the worst road in East Africa and braced themselves for the bumpy ride home, where they would refortify their tough, uncompromising little garrison.

  It was almost 10:00 p.m. when they drove into town, where there was an atmosphere of high excitement. A message had come through informing the pirate commander that a very large Japanese factory ship was steaming slowly west of the Maldives, having almost filled its lockers with a gigantic catch of bluefin tuna, squid, shark, and sardines.

  The information indicated that the Japanese were headed for a final trawl six hundred miles off the Somali coast, where fish had made a huge comeback since the polluted waters had cleared. This was the second or third time the Somalis had been told there was a fishing bonanza in their own ocean.

  Japanese visits were extremely rare, but when they did show up anywhere south of the Gulf of Aden, they were the Somalis’ favorite victims. Because the men from Kyushu and Yokohama worked for companies that only wanted the near-priceless catch, and if they had to, would pay any ransom to get these fishing leviathans freed up and sent home.

  Fish commands enormous prices in Japanese restaurants and the profits are very high. The advent of a Japanese factory ship heading toward the Somali coast spelled big dollars to the pirates. And that night there was more activity on the dark Haradheere beach than in the Norfolk navy yards.

  They had not yet worked out which pirate crew was going. The Mombassa was ready and fuelled up, but another crew had a newer, faster boat and were requesting exclusivity. This was not a cutthroat business. Everyone shared in everything, and there were already shares available for purchase in the late-night stock exchange.

  If the second crew won Mohammed Salat’s approval, they could take on the job. He held counsel on the beach half an hour after returning from the ammunition drop. And he decided that for the moment Admiral Wolde and his men had done enough. He awarded each of them fifty shares in the forthcoming tuna expedition at the opening price of $5.00. It was entirely likely that the Japanese fishing corporation would pay up to $500,000 to reclaim its ship and its catch, and the stock exchange was issuing only 20,000 shares. These could easily go up to $20 and everyone would be happy. The fishing boat did not represent the massive fortunes that could be made from tankers and major international freighters, but they were solid little earners, and the men from Haradheere were extremely adroit at capturing busy working boats from the Land of the Rising Sun.

  The phone number of the corporation and its president’s private line were contained in the message from the biggest fish wholesaler in the Far East—a greedy Japanese buyer who had the ear of the chief of their international trading division.

  He had long ago guessed the reason for his monthly check for $5,000 from Mohammed Salat-San. How he used the information was not his business. All he had ever done was to reveal the position, course, and speed of the biggest commercial fishing vessels in Japan.

  Meanwhile, the new pirate team had its boat in the water, a fast, fifty-five-foot-long, former Yemeni customs boat they had stolen from outside the harbor in Mogadishu. From whom, they did not know or care. It had been riding at anchor and been empty of both people and fuel, probably the property of drug smugglers, and definitely stolen.

  The pirates had seized it and towed it back to Haradheere. Now it was resting on its portside while local mechanics worked on its engine, fitting it with a new propeller, and bringing a tanker onto the hardtop at the top of the beach to refuel it. The name on the side was written in Arabic, and someone said it meant “Ocean Dart.”

  Salat’s guards arrived with a dozen new Kalashnikovs, which they distributed among the new men. They also brought grappling hooks from the garrison quartermaster and a brand new radar system that needed to be fitted. By all accounts the fishing boat was riding low on her lines, now less than six hundred miles from the shores of Somalia.

  Since the Japanese would never dream of taking part in a gun battle, they represented an extremely soft target. Certainly there were many other pirate crews who would have liked to join in the attack.

  But no one else knew where the floating tuna factory was. Mohammed Salat’s raiders had the operation to themselves in the open, desolate waters of the Indian Ocean.

  CHAPTER 8

  PETER KILIMO HAD BASICALLY LOST HIS NERVE. WELL, ALMOST. In a sense, he may have only mislaid it. But for the moment, on the twentieth floor of the Olympic Tower above Fifth Avenue, he was closer to becoming a quivering wreck than an international master spy.

  Peter had been visited by two CIA agents, men who had flown in from their headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They had been in contact with Constantine Livanos in Monte Carlo, and when they arrived they were taken into the offices of the president of Athena Shipping, Peter’s boss.

  Their question was simple: “How many people in this organization have access to the private numbers of Mr. Livanos in Monaco, London, and Athens?” Short answer: not many because that information was on a need-to-know basis.

  The president himself had the numbers. So did his senior vice president in New York, who was often at the helm of the corporation when the president was travelling. The vice president in charge of finance also had the numbers because he often spoke to Mr. Livanos personally about the transfer of money.

  The only other person in the organization who had the numbers was Peter Kilimo because the operations chief was the corporate troubleshooter, the one man who could be awakened at all hours of the day and night to deal with a crisis.

  It went with the territory. Well-paid executives in his position the world over occasionally had to shoulder immense responsibility. Peter’s last line of defense if a ship was sinking or in the face of some other catastrophe was to phone Mr. Livanos. But that was only in the absence of his two immediate superiors. Thus far he had not once needed to call Monte Carlo.

  He kept the European numbers on his cell, on his desktop, and in his personal contacts book, which he kept in his briefcase. The CIA men were perfectly pleasant and sat in his office sipping coffee. But they did wish to see the numbers on the computer, and the phone, and in the book.

  They then asked him who had access—wife, girlfriend, children, secretary? Anyone who could, by fair means or foul, end up with the private phone number of Constantine Livanos.

  Peter could not help them. He did not think his secretary could access the computer file that housed the numbers. He always kept his cell in his pocket. She did not have a key to his locked briefcase. And then they stepped up the heat.

  “Who else can get into this computer? Fellow workers in ops? Someone in this office must be able to get into it, right? What would happen if you dropped dead or got hit by a truck? The whole place wouldn’t grind to a halt, would it? Who else, Mr. Kilimo?

  They wanted to know about his wife. “Can she access the phone numbers on your cell? Does she ever look into or share your contacts book? We noticed there were personal numbers in there—surely friends of both you and your wife? Mrs. Kilimo must have had access, yes?”

  Peter had started the meeting feeling safe and confident. Twenty minutes later he felt under siege. Did they suspect him? Did these two hard-eyed government agents believe that he had a connection to the pirates in Somalia?

  He tried t
o control himself. The agents told him they would be looking into everyone’s phone records—everyone, that is, with Livanos’s numbers. He did not mind that, since all of his contacts with Mohammed Salat were conducted by e-mail and even that was one-way. The Somali pirate leader never responded.

  And here was Peter Kilimo’s masterstroke. Everything he sent to Haradheere was done on a laptop computer he had purchased especially for these weekly messages. He never brought it to his office, keeping it instead in the trunk of his car, under the floor on top of the spare tire. The only e-mails sent from that machine were to Haradheere.

  Peter’s blood ran cold when he thought that these two investigators might go to his home to talk to his wife and somehow discover the hidden laptop. He must have had a sixth sense that this day would come, because he never even had an e-mail account of his own.

  For his communiqué to Mohammed Salat, Peter always drove to the nearby suburb of New Rochelle, parked the car in the main street, and sent his message on any Internet hookup he could locate. The men from the CIA might find the computer, but they’d never find the evidence of communications. And they’d have to hurry. Tonight he would destroy that laptop with an axe and drop the pieces in the Hudson River.

  Eventually they left. But Peter knew they were unconvinced of his innocence. He’d heard them talking to the president and he’d heard his boss say, “Peter? Never. He’s been here for more than thirty years. He’s probably the most reliable man in the entire place.”

  Peter understood such a response could only have been elicited by someone who had made an accusatory remark against him. Jesus! What if someone found out about the secret bank account? And then traced the $20,000 payments to their source?

  He needed to get out and clean house. Give up the money and forget all about Somalia and everyone in it. Tonight he would begin doing precisely that.

  Somewhat forlornly, he looked down at his desk where there were downloaded schedules—sailing dates and times for several ships. And one of them he’d intended to relay to Mohammed Salat. She was an 80,000-ton deadweight LNG vessel named Global Mustang, and she was currently moored at the gigantic Ras Laffan Industrial City on the north coast of the Qatar Peninsula in the Persian Gulf.

  Ras Laffan is the largest liquid natural gas operation on earth, sprawling over forty square miles, fifty miles north of Dohar. The heavily dredged, deepwater port loading facility covers a total area of more than three square miles. Ras Laffan moves 40 million metric tons of liquefied gas every year.

  And what a sight the Mustang made. She was nine hundred feet long and drew thirty feet below the waterline. Along her deck were four enormous golden domes, independent spherical holding tanks, 130 feet in diameter. They carried 140,000 cubic meters of liquefied gas. Half of each dome was visible above the deck, and the other half was concealed below in the hull. She looked like a floating commercial for the University of Notre Dame. Her 23,000 horsepower turbines drove her through the water at 20 knots, much faster than any VLCC.

  The giant holding tanks carried gas that was frozen to–160ºC, the temperature at which the gas changes to liquid, and requires .06 of its original volume. The Mustang was owned by a Houston corporation, Texas Global Ships, whose president was Robert J. Heseltine III.

  In partnership with three US banks, Heseltine owned seven other oil industry vessels, but this was his only LNG carrier. He operated from an office on the thirty-second floor of his Travis Street headquarters. His international agents, who were responsible for keeping those ruinously expensive energy giants filled with oil and gas at all times, was Athena Shipping of New York in conjunction with their friends at Inchcape Shipping of Tokyo.

  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:

  LNG carrier Global Mustang clears Ras Laffan Qatar 0300 (local) today, Wednesday, bound for Tokyo. She carries four domed holding tanks, gold in color, and full of liquefied gas. She will make 20 knots down the Persian Gulf and is expected to enter the Arabian Sea Thursday 0900. She turns south off Muscat and runs 1500 miles. She makes her turn east Sunday at 1200 hours, 2.05N 60.00E—approx 700 miles off Somali coast.

  Her master is Captain Jack Pitman. Her cargo priceless: delivery to

  Tokyo Electric. Global Mustang sails under an American flag.

  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 Global 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.