The Delta Solution Page 32

  No more was expected of Peter Kilimo. Just accurate numbers fixing the course and forthcoming position of the ship. And the contact. He deleted the message from the café’s computer screen, picked up his briefcase, and left, making his way back to Grand Central Station for the train home.

  On the other side of the world it was 0100 in the morning. The Somali Marines had landed at around 7:00 p.m. the previous evening and there had been great rejoicing on the beach when the Mombassa came home bearing the $10 million ransom.

  Ismael Wolde and Elmi Ahmed were carried shoulder high across the sand and then driven with an armed escort into the village, where both they and Captain Hassan dined at the home of Mohammed Salat. The pirates were extremely tired but the feeling of pure exhilaration kept them running the rest of the evening on adrenalin alone.

  Salat had arranged long trestle tables and a grand feast for all of the pirates in the courtyard of the garrison, and there was champagne and red wine for everyone—wives, girlfriends, and anyone claiming a relationship to the heroes of the hour. During the evening, the village elders and officials called to pay their respects, and Mohammed handed out special cash bonuses to all of the heroes who had captured the Global Mustang.

  The assault crew received an extra $5,000 each, Hassan and Ahmed were given an extra $8,000, and Wolde was given an envelope that contained $12,000. Down the road at the stock exchange, shares in the mission were worth $100 and settlement day was tomorrow, when cash certificates would be issued to all investors—locals who had put up the original $10 bonds to finance the mission.

  There were at least twenty people in Haradheere who had purchased five hundred shares and they saw their money multiply tenfold. Wolde’s total reward, when the 10 percent cut for the crew had been divided up, came to $110,000.

  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.

  The former Bart Meinhoff, fifty-five and living on the outskirts of Washington under the name of Bart Merritt, was the agent investigating the US end of the Somali pirate operation. And as he had with every aspect of his duties in East Germany, he was consumed by a single fact. In this case, the new Monte Carlo phone number of Constantine Livanos, which no one in America knew except for Jerry Jackson, Athena’s president, and his chief of operations, Peter Kilimo. Someone had given it to the villains of Haradheere.

  Bart Merritt was as certain as he had ever been that Kilimo was the man tipping off the pirate organization to the exact position of certain ships. He was unsure of how illegal this was and he certainly could not have the shipping exec gunned down. Not here in the US. But he was going to nail him. That was for certain.

  Bart’s line of attack was through the banks, all of which were prepared to jump to it when the CIA came calling. He reasoned that if Kilimo was transmitting intricate details of the voyages of big tankers in the Indian Ocean, someone must be paying him.

  He would have trouble finding access to Kilimo’s account since Athena’s head of operations had not been found guilty of any wrongdoing. But the money must have been sent to him somehow, and since the capture of the Global Mustang had been extremely recent, the cash must have either just arrived or be on its way.

  Bart doubted whether any bank in Mogadishu was capable of such sophistication. So he searched for the nearest point of contact in a neighboring country, the obvious one being Kenya. He checked with MI6 in London whether there were obvious links between Kenya and Somalia, and to his surprise the Brits came up with a good one.

  They described an unusual suburb east of Nairobi, a bustling former slum called Eastleigh, which for the past couple of years had been burgeoning with new high-rise apartment blocks that were springing up all over the place. The area had a strange atmosphere of prosperity: new vehicles, lavishly decorated homes, even some expensive bars and restaurants.

  But there was nothing that resembled town planning. Buildings were springing up in a haphazard and often garish way, and, according to the Brits, the local Kenyans did not like it. The exceptions were the Nairobi builders who were constructing wildly overpriced real estate with somebody else’s money.

  And it was not just expensive homes. There were at least two major shopping malls going up in Eastleigh. This was more than a real estate bubble. This was heavily backed development with no signs of a slowdown.

  The MI6 guys had taken a closer look and discovered that the place was known as “Little Mogadishu” because the cash being used was unquestionably pirate money from that benighted land north of the Kenyan border. It had to be. There was no other money worth talking about in the whole of Somalia.

  This rapid development was being bankrolled by some very heavy hitters. No one knew precisely who. What everyone did know, however, was that Swahili had ceased to be spoken in this affluent suburb. The native language of Eastleigh was Somali. And somewhere beyond the new high-rise walls there must have been a clue to the identity of the main backers, but the Brits had yet to find it.

  Mohammed Salat was very careful about that sort of thing. But his Swiss bank account was no longer adequate for the enormous sums of money that he and his chief executives were earning. The funds needed to be invested somewhere outside of Somalia. The far more urbane capital of Kenya was ideal: not too far away, with a stable, Westernized banking system, and very few questions asked.

  Not surprisingly, the frenzy of economic activity attracted new branches of established banks. Barclays ha
d so far refrained but the East African National was there. And so was the Mercantile Bank of South Africa. The Chinese-owned Africa and Shanghai Banking Corporation was on its way.

  Bart Merritt would be able to summon up substantial help, if necessary, from US banking institutions, acting as he was in the national interest on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. Armed with his new knowledge, he went in search of important-looking wire transfers from the Dark Continent to New York.

  A week ago, the search would have been broad, Africa wide. But now it could be narrowed down to East Africa. Better still it could almost certainly be narrowed down to a transfer from Kenya, though Switzerland was still a possibility.

  But Bart had a hunch, honed from an instinct forged in the brutal communist regime. He believed that the money, if it existed, must have been wired not just from Nairobi but from the suburb of Eastleigh, Little Mogadishu. And there were only two international banks there: the East African National and the Mercantile Bank of South Africa.

  Bart put four of his agents on the case. They were to search for a sum of money between $5,000 and $50,000 wired from one of those banks to an account either in New York City or in the suburb of Bronxville, where he knew that Peter Kilimo lived.

  Initially they found nothing. In fact there had been just one dollar transfer to anywhere beyond the regular trading corporations that dealt with coffee, tea, horticultural products, and cotton garments. The previous day there had been a $20,000 cash transfer from the East African National in Eastleigh directly to an account in Westchester County, not Bronxville. No one, but no one, was going to provide the name of that particular client, not without some powerful political clout behind the request.