The Delta Solution Page 34

  Her captain, one of Najib Saleh’s employees, brought her inshore and dropped anchor into the sandy ocean bottom about fifty yards off the beach. Mohammed Salat and Captain Hassan came out in one of the skiffs to board her and inspect their latest pirate attack ship.

  There was no doubt she was a beautiful boat, and her Saudi flag kept her safe from attack by other Somali gangs. No one fools with the property of the Saudi princes since most of them have the power to call in the entire Saudi Navy to help them out. The ruling family maintains an iron grip on the vast area surrounding the Arabian Peninsula.

  The biggest problem was refuelling. There were no jetties, and the operation had to be done by one of Salat’s tankers, which was driven down the beach. They’d done this before and it was not easy, eight boats positioned every few yards, all the way out to the Shark.

  Across this pontoon they would run the long diesel line and couple it to the new arrival’s tanks. They then pumped the gas until she was full, and the little boats hauled the line back inshore. The whole operation took about fifty minutes, and Captain Hassan stayed on board until it was completed.

  They unloaded the merchandise the following morning—a shipment of Kalashnikov machine guns, RPGs, and ammunition. Then Salat’s guards took the Shark’s crew to their regular helicopter landing site, from where they were flown home to Yemen.

  The remainder of the day was spent with the entire village helping to restock the boat in readiness for what Salat believed might be the biggest operation they’d ever mounted—the attack on the Ocean Princess, crammed as she was with wealthy Americans without a gun between them.

  Ismael Wolde did not pretend this would be easy. He was certain it was possible, but no more than that. The truth was that no pirate gang had ever gone for a passenger ship, for the very obvious reason that they always carried large crews. Also there was the danger of a shoot-out involving innocent civilians. The whole operation would be fraught with unforeseen danger.

  The capture of the Ocean Princess, if successful, would be a first. Wolde studied online photographs of the ship, trying to imagine what she would look like from the water, close-up. The boarding problem would be, as ever, the most difficult part, and there was no doubt this had to be done from the stern.

  With so many people aboard, the attack would need to be highly coordinated; companionways would need to be taken and held immediately, making movement through the decks impossible for anyone except the pirates. The assault on the bridge, probably at three o’clock in the morning, would need to be swift and brutal. In Wolde’s experience, masters of big ocean liners were reluctant to give up without resistance.

  That meant he and his men must attack suddenly, with all the advantages of surprise, and perhaps blow the door to the bridge off its hinges and then charge forward. Ideally he would like to secure the ship in secret, with none of the passengers aware of what had happened. But that could be hoping for too much.

  Down on the beach the residents of Haradheere were ferrying the equipment out to the Desert Shark in small boats. Stocking sufficient food would be less of a problem because the luxury yacht had a big galley with plenty of storage space, all of it refrigerated. There was a huge, fresh-water tank, both for drinking and washing.

  They loaded six cases of bottled water. Captain Hassan’s ban on any open flame was still in force, which more or less ruled out cooking—but the boat had a microwave, which was agreeable to the boss and would go far in quieting the crew’s discontent.

  For this longer voyage, Wolde appointed a village cook who had not served with them before. He was a twenty-four-year-old local named Elijah Sarami, who had worked as an assistant chef in two restaurants in Cape Town but had left the last one suspiciously fast after the head chef had been found murdered.

  Elijah was plainly “wanted” in South Africa and had escaped to seek refuge in his homeland. He had not been found guilty of anything yet, but when Wolde interviewed him, the commander of the Somali Marines was left with a distinct impression that Elijah might prove just as handy with a machine gun as he would with a frying pan.

  Elijah fitted right in, stationed himself in the galley, and supervised the provisioning of the new pirate boat. He ordered frozen food from the only local store in Haradheere, ready-cooked stuff that he could heat in the microwave, which was a gigantic step up from the usual cold, roast goat sandwiches on stale pita bread.

  He was a tall, good-natured man with an athletic build. He quickly pleased the captain by how he finished storing the food and then moved immediately onto the starboard deck to help load the ammunition boxes.

  Brand-new guns for the voyage came out in three cases—light Kalashnikovs, six-packed together. For this mission they also brought three heavy machine guns and four thousand rounds of ammunition. No one had forgotten that they had twice come under attack on the Mustang mission and everyone agreed they needed major firepower.

  They also had a box of RPGs, a stack of dynamite, and three boxes of hand grenades. They had a dozen pairs of night-glasses and big leather gloves for the boarding: strictly for that moment when the grapplers held, and they might need to hold fast to the knotted climbing ropes if the ocean liner tried to pull away from them.

  They took four grappling irons and six rope ladders with the brass rungs. It took hours to transport the boxes from the garrison, down the beach, and out to the Desert Shark in the skiffs, and then lift the heavy cases up and over the side and into the dry lockers.

  In the mid-afternoon, Salat’s stock market launched the new issue of shares for “Operation Princess.” He offered 10,000 shares at $20 each, and the wealthy citizens of Haradheere snapped up the first 5,000 in about twenty minutes, many people going in for one hundred at a time. Salat himself bought 1,000, and Wolde’s wife took 500 for herself. Elmi Ahmed’s father also went for 500.

  At least their investment covered the cost of the boat charter, and Salat was planning to issue 10,000 more, just as soon as Admiral Wolde informed him he had the Ocean Princess in his sights. Once the ship had been captured, he’d issue another 10,000 at 30 each. The buzz around the stock exchange was that these stocks would go to 120 if the mission was successful. And right now the good folk of Haradheere were used to nothing but success.

  That night, Salat posted six of his most trusted guard commanders on the Desert Shark as she rode her anchor off the beach. The crew were all permitted to sleep ashore until it was time to depart.

  While most of the town gathered excitedly in the local bars, Salat concentrated on tracking down their target. He called the local hotel in Mahe in the Seychelles and found the number of the harbormaster, who confirmed that the Ocean Princess had arrived that afternoon for a two-day stay.

  It was 960 miles from Mahe to the One and a Half Degree Channel, which meant the Princess was two-and-a-half-days’ running time from the pirates’ ops area. It was Tuesday, and if she left Mahe on Thursday afternoon she’d be on station in the channel around midnight on Saturday.

  Captain Hassan planned to cruise out there at an easy 20 knots, but it was 1,250 miles from Haradheere, and that was also around sixty hours’ running time or two and a half days. The Desert Shark would pull out at first light on Thursday morning. For the moment she would remain offshore with her generators gently running.

  Mohammed Salat kept a regular check on the Ocean Princess and put in a call every six hours to make certain she was still at her berth. The assault team went down to the skiffs late on Wednesday afternoon and began to ferry out to the new ship. All of the regular men were there: In addition to Ismael and Elmi, there was the ex–army sergeant Ibrahim Yacin, Omar Ali Farah, Abadula Sofian, Hamdan Ougoure, Abdul Mesfin, and Kifle Zenawi, the man who shot Sam McLean. They were joined by the new gastro-killer Elijah Sarami.

  The four junior pirates who had served so professionally on the Mustang mission were there, driving the skiffs back and forth. No pirate attack had ever been so well prepared.

  They slept on the boat th
at night, two or three of them in each of the carpeted cabins, with a four-man guard patrol on watch at all times. Wolde and Hassan shared the stateroom.

  Dawn came very suddenly. The sun rose out of the eastern horizon in a great blood-red ball, and Captain Hassan blew two short blasts on the Desert Shark’s horn. He revved the engines quietly and then slipped into gear, hauling the wheel over and turning the boat away from the shores of Somalia.

  He set course one-zero-five coming fractionally south of due east and ran for two miles at a careful 8 knots just to allow the big turbines to run easily before their marathon journey. He was an old-fashioned captain and believed that engines should be allowed time to warm up before the throttles were opened.

  Elmi Ahmed was the next man on the bridge and took the seat next to Hassan. Wolde followed and turned on the navigation aids, radar, GPS, and computer. The time was 0610, and the Shark was cutting smoothly through a calm sea. A couple of miles offshore, Captain Hassan opened the throttle, and the boat increased speed.

  Little by little he worked it up to a steady 20 knots, which allowed her to cruise effortlessly, well within herself, running quietly with a sure and sympathetic hand on the controls.

  At 7:00 a.m. three plates of scrambled eggs and toast were delivered to the bridge, and down below, the crew was clustered around the galley, where Elijah was on his way to becoming the most popular man on board.

  He made fresh coffee and cleared everything away before he went to help rig the tripod for the heavy machine gun on the foredeck. The Somali Marines understood how quickly an enemy could appear, and though they hoped the Saudi flag flying from the stern would discourage intruders, Wolde insisted they take no chances. Anyone who came near the Shark on this outward leg of the mission would not live to tell the tale.

  The sea got up around noon, not in a short, choppy way, but in long ocean swells that required careful steering. It’s necessary to proceed at just the right speed, maybe a little faster, maybe a little slower, because all good helmsmen hate thumping a vessel into the oncoming trough. They try to ride the waves, crest to crest, but never to put her bow down into the approaching wall of water.

  Hassan was a master. He kicked the Shark up a few notches and made her just too fast for the ocean, smiling as the expensive motor yacht sliced over the tops of the rollers, ripping along at 25 knots without even straining.

  Elijah produced dinner just as they approached the Chain Ridge, where the Indian Ocean floor rises up to a depth of a thousand fathoms instead of the 3,000-fathom depth of the central areas. The cook served a mixture of frozen meals that had been reheated in the microwave: roast beef, roast lamb, steak, and sausages. It was a steaming-hot culinary mishmash, but it tasted very good, all mixed together with a pile of garden peas. Admiral Wolde’s masterstroke was undoubtedly Elijah Sarami, and the pirates drank a fruit juice toast to the chef as they sat around the stern promenade deck, watching the sun set behind them.

  At the same time, the Ocean Princess was clearing the jetties at Port Victoria on the island of Mahe. This old seat of British colonial government had provided a fascinating couple of days for Tom Carlow.

  He sat outside watching the island slide away astern, and he felt the warm, tropical wind on his face as the Princess shouldered her way into a rising sea, heading northeast across deep, lonely waters, up to the wide channel that divides the northern and central Maldives from the southern atolls.

  Miranda Carlow could very easily have lived without this 960-mile journey between the islands. Like most people she found an endless sea voyage with no land in sight for hundreds of miles a tiresome exercise. But she knew that her husband loved it, everything about it, the rise of the ship on the waves, the gusting blue-water breeze, the swish of the bow wave, the familiar motion of the deck.

  Because for him, it brought back a thousand memories, a thousand adventures, and a thousand lost friends, shipmates he had once known but would very likely never see again. War and the passage of time do that—they heighten the best moments, making old friendships seem more poignant than they were and, above all, recalling far-lost triumphs as if they were yesterday.

  Sometimes Miranda joined her husband gazing out over the ocean as they made their way to the northeast, and when she did, she knew it would not be long before he transported her again to the shattering noise of the gun deck of the USS Maddox under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. She’d heard it so many times she almost believed she had been there, and she smiled as an unmistakable light of battle gleamed once more in Admiral Tom Carlow’s eyes as he crossed the mighty waters.

  THE DESERT SHARK was going for her life, running at close to 30 knots across a flat-calm Friday afternoon sea. They were 850 miles into their journey—four hundred to go—and they had seen only a couple of fishing boats all the way from Haradheere.

  They were passing the top right-hand corner of the square Mark Bradfield had mapped out for the four anti-pirate US warships, all of which were deep into that area: the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, the destroyers USS Chafee and USS Momsen, and the Harpoon missile frigate USS Reuben James.

  In addition, the aircraft carrier the Harry S. Truman, was due to reach the square that night, bearing the huge insertion helicopter the Sikorsky CH-53D Sea Stallion, which could transport up to forty marines.

  The level of ignorance on the Indian Ocean was at an all-time high: The pirates knew nothing of the presence of US warships, and the high command of the warships had no idea that the smooth-looking Saudi motor yacht was chock-full of armed brigands, although the Chafee had logged its presence on the ocean surface. And the captain of the oncoming Ocean Princess had not the slightest idea of what would be waiting for them in the One and a Half Degree Channel—or that help was at hand.

  But the biggest secret of all was in the US naval base in Djibouti, a thousand miles west of the square.

  Friday evening on the Desert Shark passed without incident as they ran through the night, although a sudden squall had blown up and the sea had become more difficult. Captain Hassan cut the speed back to 20 knots and pressed on while most of the crew sat watching a movie and eating ham-and-cheese omelettes, which Elijah had managed to make, four at a time, in the microwave.

  The captain went to bed around 11:00 p.m. and Elmi Ahmed took over the helm, with Ibrahim Yacin assisting and checking the navigation. They were still right on course heading almost due east, and when the sun rose in the morning they’d be within 120 miles of their ops area.

  Elijah’s considerable skills did not compare with the gastronomic splendor of the Ocean Princess, where Admiral and Mrs. Carlow once more dined with Captain Parker Lansdale, an ex–US Navy commander who had served with considerable distinction in the second Gulf War.

  Dinner at the captain’s table consisted of oysters and smoked salmon followed by baby lamb chops with new potatoes and leaf spinach. They were treated to a selection of French cheeses before being presented with a dessert trolley resplendent with pastries and cakes.

  Miranda called a halt after the lamb chops but the admiral enjoyed every course, concluding the evening by sitting up with the captain and swapping naval stories. At one point Tom asked Captain Lansdale if he had any concern about the known pirate activity in the surrounding waters, and the master of the Ocean Princess was dismissive.

  “It almost always happens to the north of here,” he said, “and for whatever reason, they do not seem to favor cruise ships. Especially American ones. They have never attacked one.”

  “Do you have a contingency plan should they change their minds?” asked Tom.

  “Well, I always have guards on duty on my ship, although we do not identify them as such. They are professional security people, but we disguise them as deckhands or engineers. Don’t really want the paying customers to be alarmed when there’s no need.”

  “Are they armed?”

  “Not officially. But they wouldn’t be much good if they weren’t, eh? These friggin’ pirates attack with Kalash
nikovs. And we have one other thing that might discourage them: This is a high-sided ship, hard to board. If we caught them in the act, they’d be at a bad disadvantage.”

  “Yes,” replied Tom, “I guess they would. By the way, do you keep firearms on the bridge, just in case?”

  “Again, not officially because firearms are banned by the insurance companies. But between you and me, sir, my first mate and I have immediate access to a couple of machine guns if it became necessary.”

  “Does he know how to use one?”

  “Oh, sure. Johnny’s ex–US Navy, like us.”

  AS THEY APPROACHED THE CHANNEL, the water became even choppier, and Captain Hassan throttled back to 15 knots. It was a little after noon when they arrived at the western end, and they guessed the Ocean Princess would probably edge over to the northern half of the throughway.

  Wolde had insisted on a thorough recce before they placed themselves out in the middle, and he picked up the cruise liner on the radar as soon as she came within range. As usual, they would come in on her stern with the skiffs primed, loaded, crewed, and ready for action. The Shark would tow them in before releasing them to make a dash for the hull.

  They were all surprised by the heavy swells they encountered in the channel, but since none of the pirates were surfers, they had no way of knowing they were among some of the world’s most spectacular shoreline waves, great rollers caused by the so-called Roaring Forties that form in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean. Surfers regard the distant shores of the One and a Half Degree Channel as the best waves in the Maldives. The pirates, however, did not share their admiration.

  The Desert Shark was riding the crests but it was not comfortable and a couple of the juniors felt seasick. Captain Hassan promised he would look for flatter water, but out in the middle of the channel he was not going to find it.