Elevated Threat

by William Robson

  Anne just about crushed her coffee mug in one hand, but kept her poker face on.

  “When you contacted me you said you liked my blog. Well, I am always looking for ways to improve it, and I’m sure if I could read some of your work it would help me make my blogs become more polished. You said you promised your boss you wouldn’t let anyone else “have” the story, but what if I just read it? Since you wouldn’t be giving it to me your promise would still be kept and I could have the benefit of learning your prose. What do you say?”

  Rebecca thought that reasoning made perfect sense. It was not really breaking the rules, and yet it was still just a little sneaky. The thought of just slightly bending the rules made her feel invigorated.

  The ladies finished their lunch with some small talk and then they walked together back to the Times office. Rebecca proudly buzzed Anne into the building and walked her upstairs to her corner desk. When Rebecca displayed her original copy of the story on her computer screen, and after a prodding by Anne, agreed to get her a cappuccino from the new coffee machine in the lobby. She was all smiles. Apparently Rebecca never heard of smart phone cameras. Bless her heart.

  Anne made a big fuss to Rebecca about the sentence structure and use of words in the report and drank her coffee. Soon there was not much left to say and Anne was dying to dig into the report, so she excused herself and thanked Rebecca profusely, then found her way out of the Times.

  Anne quickly made her way back to her own office, which was the back table at the Starbucks by her apartment, and started re-reading Rebecca’s version of events on the docks. Anne was not expecting to see such a thorough and well-constructed story of the events. Despite her social behavior, Rebecca could actually write a decent story.

  There were three pieces of information that had been illuminated by Anne’s meeting with Rebecca that demanded some answers. If the activity on the docks that day was really just a false alarm, why would the Times’ editor allow some unknown person to edit Rebecca’s report? Also, Rebecca’s original report noted that one trucker was unaccounted for by the staff on April 15th. No other article she could find mentioned that. Lastly, Rebecca had noted that there had been several other alerts generated by the system that same day prior to the docks shutdown. Why didn’t those other alerts shut down the docks and bring in the calvary like the last one? The plot was definitely thickening.

  April 24, 2015

  Seattle, Washington

  Since Clyde had been the only worker that had bothered to give Anne the time of day, he seemed like a good place to start looking for answers to the new questions that had come to light.

  Every good investigator knows that getting down to the meat of a story can often emmerge with a change in venue. And it doesn’t hurt when the change in scene includes a drink or two. Clyde had let it slip in an earlier conversation that Ivar’s on the Seattle waterfront was his regular hangout after work. Ivar’s was within walking distance from Anne’s apartment, so it seemed logical for her to try and “accidentally” run into him there.

  Fridays were usually slow days on the docks and, whenever possible, Clyde would slide out early and drop by Ivar’s and watch the island commuters scurry to catch the various ferries back to Bremerton or Bainbridge while sipping on his happy hour margaritas. Well, the second one was always sipped anyway. The first margarita seemed to always disappear super fast. This particular Friday, there must have been supernatural powers at work as Clyde was already working on his third margarita before Anne caught sight of him.

  “Hi, Clyde. You’re not drinking alone on this lovely day, are you?” asked Anne innocently.

  Clyde was surprised but happy for some company.

  “Well, if it isn’t my new favorite reporter. I was just saving you a spot right here by the rail.”

  Anne eagerly accepted the invitation and ordered up her first pear martini. The talk was small, the drinks were refreshing, and they were being consumed quickly. The sun was still well above the horizon before Anne began to tell Clyde the story of her meeting with Rebecca Jones. After nonchalantly going over the boring bits Anne dropped the hammer.

  “Here’s the weirdest part Clyde: her editor took her story and rewrote it before it got published, and her boss claimed it was for security reasons. Is that crazy? Whatever happened to free speech? What I really don’t understand is why he took out some of the details, like the fact that one of the drivers didn’t show up for work that day, or ever again. And he even took out the part about the multiple false alarms that went off that day. What do you think they are trying to hide from us?”

  Maybe it was the fact that he had been “working” as an expert witness for Agent Andrews lately that had pumped up his ego, or maybe it was just the six margaritas he had now consumed, but Clyde was no longer paranoid about talking about the subject with his new friend. Besides, Clyde reasoned that if Anne already knew about all this stuff, it must not be much of a secret anyway. Clyde shifted in his seat and rubbed his eyes. Nope, it was just the margaritas. Anne saw Clyde was starting to cave so she decided to go all in.

  “Tell me Clyde, do you think the alerts in the other three ports were real like the one in Seattle, or do you think they were really false alarms like they said about yours? By the way, what did your brother in Portland say about what happened there?”

  For some reason Clyde now saw one image in his head of Agent Andrews beating him up for talking to Anne, and another image of Anne beating him up for not talking to her. Clyde rubbed his eyes again and looked deep into her blue eyes and decided he would rather get beat up by a guy. The two new drinking buddies ended up talking for hours, and Clyde wound up telling Anne everything. What he saw when he looked in the container, how Assad was stopped on the road after he had reset the detectors, even how Agent Andrews was now going to turn him into fish food for telling the story to her. Clyde made a half-ass attempt to ask Anne not to tell anyone else but, even with his eyes now at half-mast, he knew better.

  Anne was very grateful that she lived within walking distance of Ivar’s as her head was now feeling like it had been beaten by Blue Thunder, the Seahawks drum team. Clyde only made it four blocks toward home before he left an unnatural treat in the back of the cab he was riding in. That indiscretion cost him an extra twenty dollars on the fare for cleaning and fifteen minutes of time while getting chewed out in some unintelligible language.

  It’s safe to say that Anne’s exposé of the mysterious happenings on the western US and Canadian seaports in her April 25th blog, which ended up getting sourced to most of the major news outlets, was the catalyst that opened the floodgates on the story of the docks. Once her story hit the major newswires, every reporter and news outlet wanted to join in on the bandwagon. In today’s world there is no putting the genie back in the bottle once it’s out.

  When Homeland Security’s chief of staff held a late news conference to try and explain away the facts Anne had raised in her blog, the story of his deception went viral. The chief’s continual misdirection to the questions raised by the reporters rang hollow. It was obvious to all that he was hiding something from the public. Something that is happening way too often these days.

  Anne’s hard work and guts to report the story caught the eye of the Associated Press management, and they offered her a paid position that very day. When Anne agreed to hand over all future rights from her work on the story to the AP West Coast office, they even agreed to give her a substantial signing bonus.

  Anne promptly called Clyde and offered to pay for the next round of happy hour drinks.

  CRUISING FOR TROUBLE

  Name: Arditi Beqiri PhD

  Age: 43

  Nationality: Albanian

  Education: Universiteti Politeknik i Tiranës. Studied in Computer Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence.

  Professional History: Seven years post-doctoral studies at the Albanian Institute of Science (studies unknown). Abruptly quit November, 2013.

  Family history
: Father (Edon), Mother (Ardita). Family descended from 4 generations of Fishermen/Merchant Sailors.

  Current whereabouts: Unknown

  Current watch-list status: Green

  April 26, 2015

  Miami, Florida

  At over 235,000 gross tonnage, the new cruise ship Maurou was already famous before it left the dock for the first time. Its size of over 370 meters long and carrying capacity of 5,600 passengers, made the Maurou bigger than even the Oasis class ships operated by the Royal Caribbean line. With sixteen passenger decks, the top of the bridge deck was nearly eighty meters above the sea. This glorious ship would stand as a testament to the ingenuity of modern ship builders. The owners of this magnificent ship, all nephews from the royal family in Qatar, were wall-to-wall smiles at the press conference called to promote the Maurou’s first voyage, now only two days away.

  No stone had been left unturned to ensure that the maiden voyage of the Maurou would be remembered by the press, and hopefully, the paying public. Everything was going to be first class, from the hand-cut glass chandeliers in the companies dockside office to the French chocolate mints on the stateroom pillows. The advertisements for the maiden voyage were right; a cruise on the Maurou would be an adventure you would never forget.

  Cruise line companies have been enduring a series of embarrassing setbacks for the last several years. They have had everything from ships running aground, to gut-wrenching viruses sickening half the guests, to power outages that required the ships to be ingloriously towed back to port by tugboats. All these tribulations had been displayed routinely over the last couple of years on the six o’clock news. Cruise lines were giving massive discounts to try and draw passengers back on board. Several cruise lines were all but giving away vacation packages in the hopes they could restore some good will and start to erase the public’s memory of the industry’s problems. Many executives in the cruise line business thought this was a strange climate in which to be launching the world’s largest and costliest cruise ship.

  Despite the fierce independence of the Maurou’s owners for doing everything their own way, they did have to make one concession to its competitors. As a startup operation, they did not yet own any of their own destination ports like many of the other big companies in the business. They were forced to make agreements to lease rights to some of the destination ports. Negotiations were already under way to secure a unique port of call.

  Despite these small setbacks, there was no pessimism to be found in the air on the morning of the Maurou’s first sold-out sailing as the guests sipped their champagne and lined up in the dockside offices to receive their room assignments. Naturally, the “special” guests were flown directly to the on-board landing pad by one of the three helicopters made available for the guests that couldn’t be bothered by actually standing in a line, and had the cash to allow for it. Ironically, with nearly 25% of the Maurou’s state rooms costing slightly more than a five-star hotel in Hong Kong, the number of passengers that fell into that “special” category had resulted in the wait for one of the three helicopters to grow to nearly four hours. Conversely, the new onboarding software used by the gate attendants resulted in the walk-up guests being able to board in less than thirty minutes. Many of the crew enjoyed the karma of it all.

  Building the world’s largest passenger ship takes some serious thought by the designers. The ship must stay level in high winds and seas, it must displace enough water volume to be stable, yet it must sit shallow enough in the water that it can go into established ports. It must have massive power capability to push the immense weight, but still be able to maneuver efficiently in port on its thrusters. To accomplish all these contrary goals, the Finnish builders of the Maurou had adapted design concepts from several different types of vessels.

  They chose to give the Maurou a very wide (sixty meter) beam, but gave the massive ship a shallow draught of only nine meters. They were depending on the massive width and overall size to keep the ship stable in high seas. However, with so much of the ship’s weight carried high, the builders added one more high-tech trick to make sure it would remain stable in any possible weather. After all, it would be imperative that they kept the Maurou passengers $100 drinks from spilling by an unexpectedly rough sea.

  The design scheme used to keep the Maurou stable in all conditions was taken from the systems employed on some ocean going cargo ships. These cargo ships have constantly varying weight loads on the hull depending on the type of cargo they are carrying and on the placement of the containers. To balance out those shifts in weight, many cargo ships employ a water ballast system that fills tanks with sea water to counteract the weight of the cargo.

  Naturally the Maurou’s builders and deep-pocket owners would not settle for a basic and mundane set of stabilizers from a cargo ship. Like everything else about the grand lady, the Maurou was given a stateof-the-art stabilizing system, one that had never been attempted on a cruise ship. The Maurou’s stabilizer design started with fourteen deep-welled ballast tanks lining the side walls of the ship’s cavernous hull. Many cargo ships have used a similar ballast system to even out loads. The difference was that the Maurou also employed an active system of sensors, controls, and massive pumps that continuously moved all the stabilizing water from one ballast tank to the next in real time as the load shifted or as the wind and seas dictated.

  To accomplish this engineering marvel, a set of gyroscopic instruments were adapted from the newest helicopter technology and placed strategically around the ship. These sensors would send signals back to the stabilizing software applications which would analyze the data from the sensors, take into account the wave frequency and weight movements over the last 60 seconds, examine wind data, interrogate crew inputs, and then calculate what action to take on the ballast. To be able to move the volumes of water that the computer commanded, the Maurou would require some serious electrical power. Fortunately there was plenty on tap.

  If the computer decided some mechanical intervention was required, electrical energy would then be extracted from each of the ship’s two main Wartsila 2V46D engines (each providing 18,590 hp.) and would then be delivered to each of the four massive 5,500-kilowatt (7,380 hp.) pump motors. These massive pump motors would then move the ballast water to and from each stabilizing tank as directed. Every two hundred milliseconds the stabilizer control system would monitor the status and determine what further action was needed. With this leveling system in operation, the juice from the guests roast duck would not even run from the plate in gale-force winds. One of the less refined ship owners liked to tell the reporters that the Maurou’s stability system was just like the active suspension on his Ferrari.

  The Maurou’s owners decided to do anything required to separate their cruises from the competition, even changing the typical afternoon departure times to the morning. And so at precisely 10:38 a.m. EST Captain Pickard gave the order to remove the mooring lines, add power to the starboard transverse bow thrusters, and begin the process of moving the largest cruise ship ever built out to the open sea and away from the Port of Miami. Most of the passengers lined the sides of the ship to watch it pull away from the city in the bright morning sun. At nearly 200 feet above the water, the view of the Miami skyline from the upper passenger deck was spectacular. Many passengers noted that they could not even feel the water below; the sensation was of being on dry land. For even the queasiest of passengers, the Dramamine would remain in the $700 mirrored medicine cabinets on this trip.

  While many of the thirteen hundred crew members were novices in the cruise ship business, Captain Pickard and all of his top officers were well-seasoned masters. Collectively, the top five men in control of the Maurou had over 100 years of at-sea experience. They had seen and done it all, or so they thought when the Maurou saw the Miami landscape for the last time.

  The grand ship had only been at sea for a short time before Captain Pickard snuck away for a quick bite to eat before he got busy with his guests. His attempt to
get a few minutes of peace and quiet was short lived as Third Officer Mackey sheepishly interrupted the captain’s lunch of spicy Mexican scampi and seaweed wrap. Third Officer Mackey was very apologetic.

  “I am very sorry for the interruption sir, but I thought you should see this communication from the Coast Guard.”

  The captain was a very meticulous man and never left port without reading every communication about the weather, navigation alerts, or naval exercise warnings. He even made sure he didn’t miss any last minute requests from his wife, so he was fairly assured that Third Officer Mackey was just being overzealous.

  “So Mackey, what do our “racing stripe” buddies have to say that’s more important than me finishing off this delicious little sea creature?”

  Third Officer Mackey handed Captain Pickard a copy of the communication. The Coast Guard alert had been sent from the US Coast Guard Field Intelligence Support Teams in Miami. The alert was addressed to all commercial vessels sailing in the Eastern Atlantic.

  “1300 EST - All ships, be advised that this morning at 1203 EST we intercepted a suspicious message from a known active terrorist group on our watch-list. At this time, we believe the message refers to the Carnival Destiny which is now sailing just south of Grand Bahama Island at approximately 26° 15’ N and 76° 0’ W. We have not yet verified that any direct threat exists to the Destiny or any other ships. This is just a cautionary warning. We will continue to monitor the situation. We expect to provide an update on this situation by 1430. CGFI – Miami Station.”

  Captain Pickard rubbed his greying beard and looked annoyed.

  “Well, Mackey, not much we can do with this. If they send out an update let me know, otherwise let me finish my lunch before it’s completely cold.”

  “You got it, boss,” Mackey said as he scurried off to his duties.

  In the old seafaring days, a ship’s captain was a swashbuckling type that would actually guide the ships to far-off lands. They were the manly leaders of restless crews that sought out adventure, reveled in the unknown, and enjoyed the chance to work out-side the confines of a desk, an office, or even the same city day after day. Today’s cruise ship captain is more of a PR man for the owners. He is often only used to glad-hand the special guests that arrive by helicopter. Even the Maurou’s uniforms were starting to remind Captain Pickard of something worn by an organ grinder on a street corner. If it wasn’t for the fact that he had pocketed just over $230,000 last year by wearing his organ grinder suit, money which enabled him to send his oldest daughter to a private college in Connecticut, he would have considered retiring early and building that cabin he always wanted. Grass is always greener.