The Delta Solution Page 27

  Never had Mr. Tanigaki come awake so swiftly. “You’ve done what?!” he exclaimed.

  “We have taken command of the American LNG tanker Global Mustang . Right now she is heading west at two miles per hour, and my troops have planted massive, high-explosive bombs under each of her domed holding tanks.

  “I expect you want to know our price. It’s $10 million US, and when we receive it, we will send the ship on its way as we always do. Most people are happy to do business with us. We are men of our word.”

  Tanigaki sat back down on the bed. “You want my corporation to give you $10 million or you will blow up the ship?” he said.

  “And its crew,” said Salat. “Everyone dies. And you probably don’t want that on your conscience.”

  “Are you some kind of a madman?!” roared Tanigaki. “How do I know you have the ship? And why me? It’s not even our ship. We only own half the cargo. We don’t pay the rest until the Mustang docks.”

  “Mr. Tanigaki, listen to me very carefully.” Salat was the soul of reason. “We are not asking you for the $10 million. We are asking you to share in the $10 million. And we suggest $2.5 from the owners, $2.5 from you, same from the agents, Athena in New York, and the balance from the insurance company. My staff is talking to the others.”

  “How am I supposed to verify all of this?” yelled Tanigaki.

  “Well,” said Salat, “since the time is three o’clock yesterday afternoon in Houston, I’d start off by phoning Robert Heseltine if I were you. It’s his ship and your oil. Then you can both put the squeeze on Athena in New York. Phone Livanos in Monte Carlo and make the shipping agents share. They can also take care of the insurance company.”

  “This is the most disgraceful telephone call I have ever received,” said Mr. Tanigaki. “But give me the number of Texas Global Ships. Do they know what’s happened?”

  “By now, probably,” said Salat.

  “Do they realize I will be asking them to help pay a ransom? This is most embarrassing.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” retorted Salat.

  He terminated the call, mostly to stop himself from laughing.

  ADMIRAL WOLDE SIGNALLED for his prisoners to be escorted onto the private promenade deck, which ran around three sides of the bridge. When Abdul finally closed the door behind him, Ismael dialled the number of Texas Global Ships in Houston.

  He was told that Robert Heseltine was not in that afternoon.

  But Wolde had already rung off and was dialling the private line at the Heseltine home on the outskirts of the city. When the butler answered, the Somali admiral said, “Sir, I am calling from the bridge of Mr. Heseltine’s Global Mustang. I have captured the ship, and in the next five minutes I will blow it up with everyone on board. Put Mr. Heseltine on the line immediately.”

  Forty-five seconds later, Robert J. Heseltine III was on the line. And he sounded furious. “Just exactly who is this?” he demanded. “And what’s this bullshit you’ve been telling my staff?”

  “My name is not important. But I am the commander of the Somali Marines. We have taken possession of your ship the Global Mustang. The purpose of my call is to settle a final figure on the ransom . . .”

  “A final figure on WHAT?” bellowed the six-foot-five-inch, Texan shipowner.

  “Now you listen to me, boy,” he snapped. “I don’t take instructions from fucking pirates. I want to make that real clear. If I have to, I’ll call the president of the United States, and we’ll send in the goddamned navy, so you better quit even mentioning the word ‘ransom.’ You hear me, boy?”

  “I hear you, sir,” said Ismael softly. “The disturbing thing is, I don’t think you hear me, Mr. Heseltine. And I want this to be very simple. So let me finish . . .

  “My men have just placed a massive dynamite charge under each of the four domed holding tanks in the Mustang. Should we not reach agreement in the next few minutes, I will leave the ship and make my getaway in a very fast boat. From precisely one mile out, I intend to blast the Mustang out of existence with your entire crew on board.”

  “I don’t have any proof, you black bastard,” yelled Heseltine. “You have any idea who you’re talking to?”

  “Sir,” interrupted Ismael, “would you like to check my credentials with your captain, Jack Pitman? I’ll put him on the line for two minutes only.”

  So far as the blustering but canny shipping boss was concerned, that was probably game, set, and match to the pirates. Christ! He had Jack captive.

  “Hello, Bob,” said the Mustang’s captain. “I’m afraid this is for real. This character nearly blew the door off the bridge with a heavy machine gun, and he says he’ll blow up the goddamned ship. My advice is to listen to his terms. Everyone says the Somali pirates are usually reasonable. They just want to get paid and leave.”

  “Then there’s no doubt in your mind he can do what he says he’ll do?”

  “No doubt whatsoever, Bob. There’s apparently eleven in his gang, and they’re holding everyone at gunpoint. We’re in the middle of nowhere, way out in the Indian Ocean. There’s no help in sight, and if he has set bombs under the holding tanks, there’s not much we can do anyway.”

  “Thanks, Jack. Put that black bastard back on the line; let’s hear what he has to say.”

  “Mr. Heseltine,” said Admiral Wolde, “my price is $10 million. I’m suggesting you pay $2.5 million, and my colleague is negotiating with the president of Tokyo Electric Power for them to pay the same. My next call will be to the owner of Athena Shipping in New York; that’s Mr. Livanos in Monte Carlo, and I will ask him for another $2.5 million.”

  “What about the last installment?” rasped Heseltine. “Who pays that?”

  “I will suggest to Mr. Livanos that the insurance company pay it,” replied Wolde. “Let’s face it, this is a bargain for everyone. If or when I blow the ship, there will probably be 200 million dollars’ worth of natural gas obliterated. The ship must have cost you something like 200 million . . .”

  “Three hundred, asshole!” bellowed the Texan.

  Wolde ignored him. “So my little price of $10 million, $2.5 each, is a bargain. Not a lot of money for your corporations. A fortune for my poor people, many of whom have nothing, not even anywhere to live or fresh water. My people die of malnutrition every day. Damn your ship and your oil. I’ll blast it all to hell and never think of any of you again.”

  Heseltine knew he was being offered a bargain he could not refuse.

  “I’ll call you back on the captain’s line inside fifteen minutes,” he told the admiral.

  “Make it ten,” said Wolde. “I don’t have much time, and you have even less.”

  Heseltine slammed down the phone. “Black bastard!” he confirmed. And then he dialled the cell phone of his friend Masaki Tanigaki, startling the electricity tycoon for the second time that early morning. Their conversation was brief.

  MEANWHILE, ISMAEL WOLDE called the private line of Constantine Livanos in Monaco. He opened the conversation with a breathtakingly insolent remark: “Mr. Livanos, we are old friends. And I am afraid I have just captured another one of your ships.”

  The Greek shipping magnate exploded: “Christ! Not you again! What have you done this time?”

  “My men have captured the LNG tanker Global Mustang,” he replied. “As you know, she is fully laden with liquid gas. My price is $10 million for her release. Otherwise I will blow her up. I have dynamite charges set under all four of the holding tanks.”

  Constantine did not need reminding that the ship would go up like an atom bomb if someone detonated those charges. But the prospect of paying out $10 million was a serious shaker. He had an enormous amount of money, but it wasn’t even his ship, or his gas.

  Wolde stepped in to prevent the Greek going into a total decline. “Don’t worry, Constantine,” he said, smiling at his audacity to use his first name. “I have already suggested to Mr. Heseltine in Houston that each of you pay $2.5 million—that’s
Texas Ships, Tokyo Electric Power, Athena, and the insurance company.

  “Mr. Heseltine and Mr. Tanigaki are speaking right now. I suggest you talk to the insurers, who stand to lose more than anyone. They will certainly agree that $2.5 million is far better than a payout totalling hundreds of millions for the ship and the gas cargo.”

  “Not to mention stupendous claims for damages from the families of personnel who are killed in the blast,” said Livanos. So far as he was concerned, the $2.5 million was beginning to sound like small change. Like Heseltine and Tanigaki, he was beginning to think this sweet-talking desperado from East Africa represented the very essence of rational argument.

  Livanos was not involved in the heavy-hitting end of the financial conundrum, but Athena was in for perhaps a $20-million commission as shipping agent, sales agent, and loading agent. In a choice between blowing the vessel sky high and destroying the cargo, and cutting the commission to $17.5 million from the full $20 million, there was no discussion.

  “I will speak to Bob Heseltine and then to the insurance broker in London,” he said. “And I have the captain’s phone number on the bridge. I will be back on the line very soon with our offer for the ship’s freedom.”

  “No offers,” replied the pirate. “It’s $10 million. Or nothing. Fifteen minutes from now, the Global Mustang will not exist.” Wolde hung up the phone.

  Constantine Livanos called Nigel Pembroke, the Athena insurance broker, at his home in West London. News of the hijack both shocked and horrified him. The shipping market had been poor for his company in the past year, but this threatened to be one of the biggest maritime losses they had ever underwritten.

  “Christ!” said Nigel. “That bloody pirate blows the Mustang, they’ll ring the Lutine Bell for the first time since 9/11.”

  This was banter between two scions of long-established shipping and insurance families. And the bell to which Nigel referred was the ancient one-hundred-pound ship’s bell from the French frigate La Lutine, which went down off the Dutch coast in 1793 with 150 million dollars’ worth of cargo in gold and silver. The Lloyds brokers paid up.

  The Lutine’s bell had been salvaged off the ship and had hung ever since in the Lloyds underwriting room at their London headquarters. Traditionally it was rung for breaking news—one stroke for bad, two for good. But in recent years, it was used mostly for ceremonial occasions.

  It did, however, ring at the news of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. And in Nigel Pembroke’s opinion, it would be rung again when news of the Mustang broke. “Any way out of it?” he asked Livanos. “I mean, can this fucker be stopped?”

  “Well,” replied the Greek tycoon, “he wants $10 million for the release of the ship, its cargo, and its crew. But he’s asked $2.5 million from both the owners and the purchasers of the cargo. He wants the same from us as the agents and suggests the same from you.”

  “Two and a half mill—what’s that in real money?”

  “About 1.6 million British pounds.”

  “One point six to get us off the hook for a half-billion dollars! Hell, Constantine, that doesn’t want much looking at it, does it? I can tell you, we’ll pay it and so will the others. I imagine you wouldn’t have made this call, not if you’d thought any differently.”

  “Look, Nigel, this bastard sounded like he was going to blow up the ship in the next ten minutes. So I’d better get off the line and call someone back. It’s Bob Heseltine’s ship, so I guess he’ll make the running.”

  IN THE MEANTIME, back on board the Mustang, Admiral Wolde and two guards had marched Captain Pitman and First Officer Dominic Rayforth down to the bowels of the ship to assess his threat.

  Wolde told them he would take them to the base of each of the holding domes so they could see the bundles of dynamite taped together and attached to an electronic timer. Just so that everyone understood the Royal Somali Marines were not joking.

  Jack Pitman was totally astounded that these maniacs had somehow boarded his ship, right under the eyes of the lookouts and the rest of the crew, taken command of this gigantic floating edifice, in floodlit conditions, and then calmly placed explosives precisely where they wished.

  There they were, tucked right against the steel casing of the domes. There was no doubt in Jack’s mind: If the dynamite in just one of the bundles blew, it would park his ship in tiny pieces on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

  They walked back in single file, Pitman in the lead, a guard between him and Rayforth, followed by another guard and Wolde bringing up the rear, holding his AK-47 in firing position.

  They took the elevator up to the bridge floor, through the shattered wooden door and back into the control room. As they entered, the phone was ringing and Heseltine was on the line, asking to speak once more to the captain. Wolde permitted this contact but listened in on a phone hookup.

  Heseltine’s question was basic: “Jack, have you actually seen the explosives this guy says are planted around the gas domes?”

  “I have now. They just took me and First Officer Rayforth down to see their work. And it’s genuine. A big bundle of dynamite under each one, wired up, battery-operated detonator with a remote control fixture. He says he could blow the ship to pieces in under five minutes from the moment he leaves. I believe him, Bob. And so should you.”

  “Have there been any casualties?”

  “I cannot be certain. The entire crew is being held captive in the recreation room. But I have not been allowed a head count.”

  “Have you seen the assault crew? I mean, aside from the leader?”

  “Yessir. I’ve seen about six of them. All armed. But there’s more in the rec room. I saw them but not close-up.”

  “Okay, here’s what I need. I have an agreement with Japan Electric. And Livanos called and left a message that he’s willing to pay his $2.5 mill and so are the insurers. Put the leader on again. I need instructions for the payment method.”

  Wolde came on the line and said the $10 million must be paid in cash. “We require an aerial drop,” he said, “preferably on the deck of this ship. I’m talking big mailbags roped together with a float device and a luminous marker that we can see.”

  “Okay,” said Heseltine. “But this will take a few days. Not many banks have $10 million lying around in hundred-dollar bills.”

  “Then you’ll have to fly it in from a bank that does. Since you represent three very large international corporations, it should not be beyond your capability.”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll get it done somehow. Gimme a drop time.”

  “Since we now have a deal, I’m canceling my ten-minute threat and changing it to twenty-four hours. We work on Somali time, and on our coast it’s now 2:00 a.m. That’ll be 5:00 p.m. in Houston, correct?”

  “You got the time right—as well as a lot of other things,” said Heseltine. “Okay. You want the money dropped on the ship from an aircraft at 2:00 a.m. your time tomorrow?”

  “Make that 1:45 a.m. I’ll need two boats in the water, port and starboard, in case they miss the deck. If nothing’s happened by 2:00 a.m., I will assume you have changed your mind. At that point, the Royal Somali Marines will leave the ship, and five minutes later my four bombs will detonate.”

  “Will my crew still be on board?” asked Heseltine.

  “That will no longer be my concern,” replied the admiral.

  “How can you be sure the crew will not race for the bombs the minute you leave and deactivate them?”

  “That will be an interesting race against time,” said Wolde. “It took us twenty minutes to set them, not including travel time to the far end of the ship.

  “By the time they get out of the locked recreation room, they’ll have about four minutes to de-fuse. Impossible. Especially as we need only one to explode. I’d assume the Mustang will be destroyed if you don’t make the drop.”

  Rarely had Robert Heseltine III felt such an overpowering sense of frustration. And the entire nightmare was heightened by the
fact that the Global Mustang was his most treasured possession.

  “Okay. You better give me the ship’s GPS numbers. I assume she’s stationary. Put the captain on again.”

  “Bob, where the hell are you? We need good numbers for the ransom drop.”

  “There’s a problem with the GPS right now; a few wires got damaged when these guys blasted their way in.

  “But right now we are 712 miles off the Somali coat, about three miles north of 2.00 North. We were on 60 East longitude about an hour before we were stopped, heading east. Guess we’re at 60.10 East and stationary.”

  “Can you have the problem fixed for the rest of the journey?”

  “Yes. We have a computer technician on board, all the way to Japan.”

  “Good boy, Jack. Hang in there. Put the fucking wild man back on.”

  “Mr. Heseltine,” said Wolde, “I assume we have an agreement.”

  “We do. The money will be there at 1:45 a.m. your time tomorrow. God knows how but we’ll get it delivered. And I need your assurance that the bombs will be disconnected the moment you receive it.”

  “You have that assurance. I’ll send a disposal team to the base of all four domes at 1:30 a.m. If you check our record, you will find we have never reneged on an agreement. We are businessmen and we only want the money. Play your part, and the Mustang will be back in service.”

  IT WAS 6:00 P.M. IN NEW YORK, and Jerry Jackson, president of Athena Shipping, was still on the phone to Constantine Livanos. Neither man was as concerned with this latest hijacking as they were when the VLCC Queen Beatrix was captured. Because that had been an Athena charter.

  This latest outrage involved someone else’s ship and someone else’s cargo. Nonetheless, the Athena chief found himself in the middle of the ransom problem, trying to piece together the four components and organize them for the drop.

  Constantine Livanos had arranged for the insurance money. Nigel Pembroke in London was wiring $2.5 million to the Athena account in New York the following morning. Heseltine was wiring the same amount to the same account in the next ten minutes.