“I am sorry sir. Agent Scholes is not available at this time. If this is an emergency please press one and leave a message. The officer in charge will be notified immediately.”
Captain Pickard was now frantic.
“Scholes, this is Captain Pickard. The Maurou is in deep trouble. We are having problems with both our propulsion and ballast systems. The bridge guidance and electronics are all showing normal readings but the ship is listing dangerously starboard.”
Before the Captain could finish his call he was interrupted by Bridge Officer Adams.
“Captain, Ballmer just called up and said the aft ballast tanks are now completely empty and the portside tanks are almost dry as well. The starboard pumps are still running at full speed and …Ballmer, what the hell just happened?”
“Captain – Ballmer says the starboard engine power just went to 0% and the port engine speed is now increasing, it’s at 20% and climbing.”
The only thing keeping the weight of the now full starboard ballast tanks from tipping the ship was the imbalance of the drive from the two massive propellers. The bridge was now reporting that the drive that was keeping them upright had been reversed. Now the giant propellers were pushing the weight farther down into the ocean. Everyone on deck knew that if they couldn’t reverse the propellers, and fast, the giant ship was lost. Captain Pickard yelled at his communications officer to sound the general alarm and find out if the life boats had all been lowered. Then Captain Pickard instructed him to put out a mayday call to direct all available ships to the Maurou’s location as soon as possible. Then the Captain addressed the control room crew.
“Gentlemen, it’s not over yet. Find me a way to get power back to the starboard engine. I don’t care how, just do it. Ballmer, find a way to shut down those starboard pumps. Break every computer down there if you have to but shut down those pumps.”
“Yes, sir.”
Twenty-three minutes later the last wave was created as the two 26 ton propellers slipped under the sea. The undertow from the massive hole in the ocean opened by the Maurou sucked in three of the five lifeboats that managed to get off the side before it went down. There was no You Tube or camera phone videos of the sinking. None of the 47 survivors could even relate to the people on the rescue ships that plucked them from the water what had happened. All the survivors knew was that one minute they were having drinks at an after party with the band and the next thing they knew some guy had run by and hollered at them to jump in the life boat. They all said it was a miracle they made it.
The Maurou had just set the record as the greatest single-event loss of life in American civilian history, and with no video or reliable details to go on, the only thing the twenty-four hour news stations had to report was rampant speculation for the cause of the ship’s demise, and the raw statistics it created:
1302 – Crew members lost – 17 survivors
5596 – Passengers lost – 30 survivors
The world’s largest cruise ship was gone without a sound, the Maurou had become the 21st century’s Titanic.
May 1, 2015
Miami, Florida
8:30 PM EST
Eighteen hours after the first mayday message was sent from the Maurou, Agent Scholes found himself sitting in a semi-dark office deep in the bowels of his Miami office trying to make sense of it all. How did Walker do it? Who helped him, and most importantly, what happened to him? Just then a secure coded message arrived on his laptop.
“Diver team one, found the captain’s safe, all contents secured. No thumb drive was recovered.”
Agent Scholes sat back in his chair and rubbed his now beyond weary eyes. He was too tired to even swear at the continuous dead ends. He needed some good news badly. Agent Michaels rushed into the darkened office. It didn’t take a supersleuth to see he was over-the-topexcited about something.
“Sir – while checking through all the ship-to-ship communications from the Maurou, we have discovered that the Maurou sent a suspicious email message through its secured VPN channel to fourteen other cruise ships while it was in port at Castaway Cay. We have been able to secure a copy of the email from the IT provider. The email contents were empty of text but it contained a single JPG image of some lady with the name “Auntie”. When we examined the image, we found it to have some encrypted data imbedded in the image along with some sort of MSI installer which we are still investigating.”
Agent Scholes knew the answer but had to ask:
“Let me guess. All the ships have opened this email by now.”
“Yes, sir. That’s what we have been told.”
Agent Scholes rubbed his eyes.
“Just perfect.”
A few uncomfortable moments of silence later, Michaels noticed Agent Scholes had a puzzled look on his face.
“Michaels, how many ships were in the Maurou address book?”
“Umm, let’s see – it looks like eighty-six.”
“All right then, before you and your team go home. I want to know why that email from the Maurou was sent to only those fourteen ships and not the others. What’s different about them and why were they selected? And get me the electronic interdiction section-manager on the line.”
“Yes sir.”
May 2, 2015
Castaway Cay, Bahamas
1 PM
The Sand Bar is a local drinking establishment that sits right on the beachfront in Castaway Cay. It is a favorite of the locals and tourists alike. At the cabana overlooking the ocean sat a rather dapper man in a fashionable Panama hat drinking his coffee and watching families frolic in the water of Pelican Plunge Bay. He had the expression of a man without a care in the world. The service at the Sand Bar was very good. Even before his coffee cup was emptied, the waiter had returned:
“Excuse me, Mister?”
“Arnold. Ben Arnold. Please, just call me Ben.”
“That’s a very interesting name, sir. Do you ever get comments about it? I understand that name is quite famous.”
“Indeed. Yes, I do.”
“Very well, Ben. Are you ready for a refill?”
“Yes, please.”
While Mr. Arnold was waiting for his refill, his phone buzzed indicating a message had been received. Mr. Arnold glanced at the text.
“Congratulations. A new record. Preparations for the next meal is well underway. Auntie sends her love.”
Mr. Arnold didn’t reply to the text, he just watched the kids play in the bay while he finished his cup of coffee.
NO POLITICAL WILL
Name: Henry (Hank) Cameron
Age: 32
Nationality: First Generation US
Education: Boston University. Master’s program in Arab Studies.
Professional History: Worked with Gaza Relief Fund, suspected of providing illegal funds to Hamas.
Family history: Palestinian. Existing records known to be false
Current whereabouts: Unknown
Current watch-list status: Yellow
May 2, 2015
Washington, DC
The President’s speech was eloquent as always. He has a way of making the loss of loved ones, and the viewing audience, feel as though the situation is personal to him. As “Comforter in Chief” he is secondary to none. But after all the cameras are put away and the families who have lost loved ones look around their now empty houses, the loss does not become diminished for them. The President’s words are indeed comforting, but the loss they have is forever. Worse, there never seems to be any retribution against the perpetrators of these events. To many, revenge is still sweet but a delicacy that is rarely tasted.
After his words of comfort to the loved ones, the President turned his attention to the rampant speculation about the cause of the sinking. He reiterated to the audience several times that every effort was underway to determine the cause of the Maurou’s sinking and stressed that it had not yet been determined. The preliminary results indicated that faulty onboard electronics had created a swift chan
ge in ballast forcing, the nose of the ship into the water.
The President forcefully reminded the viewers that, as yet, no direct evidence was available that even hinted at the sinking being caused by anything more than a tragic accident. He reminded the viewers that no credible groups or individual had made a claim of responsibility for the sinking. He looked straight in the camera and assured us all that the best experts available were pouring over every inch of the ship, and that every effort was being expended to find out what really happened. He then attempted to reassure us by explaining he had ordered every cruise ship company to run diagnostics on their electronics to make sure this type of situation could never happen again.
The President closed his speech with one more heartfelt comment to the families. He never mentioned the recent activities on the shipping docks that had happened on the West Coast.
Despite the President’s assurances, many in the audience were just not willing to accept that the sinking of the grand ship on its maiden voyage was an accident. Many still wanted to tie the sinking with the activities on the West Coast. Many felt that they were being misled. With Anne’s now widely published report about the scare on the West Coast still fresh on the public’s mind, having two major events occur within a few weeks of each other seemed just a little too coincidental for many. It wasn’t only the conspiracy theorists who were now harboring an uneasy feeling that the government was hiding something. While it was true that no group had yet claimed responsibility for the Maurou’s sinking, there had been so many terrorist events over the last few years that every time something came on the news that could not be readily explained, it was becoming a conditioned response for many to believe that something sinister was at work.
With each new event, frustration at our impotence to stop the attack was building across the country. The hawks in congress and the conservative press were jumping from one tirade to the next utilizing the pulpit of 24-hour news to decry our lack of response to the not so silent war. These war mongers loved to remind anyone who would listen that there had been 16 acts of terrorism against Americans or our allies in the last two years. Their rallying cry of, “16 and counting”, was starting to take hold. Even late night talk shows were doing skits about it. The Republicans were giddy about the thought of carrying the slogan over into the coming election season. The posters using the Republican’s disparaging slogan are already in print.
Despite all the handwringing by the usual suspects in congress, and on the conservative talk shows crying from their bully pulpit for WWIII to be launched, the facts kept getting in their way. The inconvenient truth for them was that there simply was no definitive known evidence of terrorism taking place on the Maurou. The information about John Walker and his suspected tampering had not yet disseminated beyond the CIA security teams at Langley and the FBI. For once, the secrets were staying secret, for now.
In an attempt to control the national conversation, the administration’s spokesmen were paraded out to all the talk shows and asked the war mongers, “Given the lack of evidence that any individuals or groups were complicit in these acts, who would you suggest we bomb today?” The loggerhead between the Republicans and Democrats in public was looking more and more like trench warfare from WWI than ever before.
May 5, 2015
Miami, Florida
The lawyers had been lining up at the feeding trough from the minute they heard of the Maurou’s demise. The pitches they gave to the grieving family members on why they should be chosen to represent them were eerily similar.
“I am so sorry for your loss. If I could get your loved one back I would, but I can do the next best thing. I can make those responsible be held accountable and pay for your loss with the only thing they hold dear, their money. And I can get you the most of it. The quicker you sign with me, the sooner the millions will be rolling in.”
The lawyers for the third cousins of the famous who were onboard were especially salivating. They would not have to cold call and grovel for business like the other sharks. Their meal tickets were already punched when they had arranged for ironclad exclusive retainers during the client’s last divorce. The feeding frenzy by the sharks on the land was going to be even greater than by those at sea on that dreadful night.
There were three impediments standing in the way of arraigning for a quick settlement for the grieving families and the insatiable lawyers. The first was that the federal government had refused to release the ship itself or any of the forensic findings they had from it to the lawyer’s private investigators. They kept claiming it was under a federal investigation and the data was protected by national security. The second major stumbling block was the fact that the ship’s insurers (UAE-IL) were not from the US, but were a company that was incorporated in Dubai. That meant that they had little interest in bowing to American pressure to make it easy for anyone to get their money. The third problem was that the UAE government had a large stake in the outcome of the investigation due to the royal family’s investment in the project. Since their engineers had designed significant portions of the ship, they were especially keen to make sure they were not associated in any way with any litigation that said the ship was doomed by incompetence in design or execution. The government supported every action the UAE Insurer’s Limited’s lawyers asked for.
The total value of insurance settlements to claimants, when a mass loss of life occurs, is capped by US law and is based on the cause of the event. For example, there is one cap for accidents where no one is at fault, a different cap if there is human error, and still another when equipment failure is to blame. The differences in the payout for a large event like the sinking of the Maurou could potentially be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Even in the rarified air that the corporations in the UAE live in, that amount is noticeable. Therefore, the insurance company, UAE-IL, had a great deal of interest in hoping they could prove it was human error that sunk the Maurou.
How the UAE diplomats were able to convince the US Government to allow a private dive team from UAE-IL to have direct access to the ship is anyone’s guess. The five senators who quietly announced plans for a fact-finding trip to Dubai, along with the sizable donations they received for their reelection committees, most certainly had nothing to do with the decision.
However they managed it, the investigative UAE-IL dive team soon found itself standing on the now inglorious hull of the Maurou under 195 feet of crystal-blue water. Armed with the engine and propulsion rooms’ maps, along with detailed information from the ship’s designers on what to look for, the UAE-IL divers made a total of 17 trips down to the Maurou before they had collected all the information they needed.
While the US divers had been busy retrieving the ship’s navigational recorder and the communications recorders from the bridge and main engine rooms, the US divers somehow overlooked searching the aft engine room’s duplicate ship’s systems recorder. This secondary recorder had kept a separate record of the instructions sent to the main engine room, and more critically, it had recorded the analog gauge readings of the ballast status. These were the same indicators Specialist Marks had referenced when he informed the bridge crew that the ballast tank motors were out of control.
Bingo! The UAE-IL team hit the proverbial lottery. Even better than human error, the evidence they found in the engine room recordings led them to believe that the Maurou sinking was not an accident at all. In fact, they loudly proclaimed it was an intentional sinking. Despite the UAE engineers not being able to show how it was done, or by whom, they made the argument that the applications designed to control the ballast could not on its own create the situation the instruments showed when the ship was sinking. Their conclusion was that someone must have manipulated the software, either intentionally or by misuse. The company lawyers for the UAE-IL were more than happy to point out the small print in the contracts that describe how acts of terrorism effected their client’s liability.
Everyone at the state department, while tryi
ng to defend the rights of the American citizens, looked like their dog died when officials from the UAE government came out publicly and supported the UAE-IL’s claims that the Maurou sinking was caused by a manual override of the ship’s electronics. UAE government officials purported that the Maurou’s computers had been somehow compromised and that they were then manipulated in such a way that caused a catastrophic adjustment in the ballast system. Despite the claims, they did not offer to show any proof to the US investigators for their claims, nor did they offer up any theories on who could have had the knowledge or the skill to pull off such a grand scheme.
As expected, the US government tried hard to reject that theory. They brought out their experts who categorically denied such a manipulation of the ship’s electronics was possible. The experts referred to logs from the Maurou’s own records that showed no such manipulation had taken place. US government officials were quick to point out that the UAE had a couple hundred million reasons at stake to try and prove malfeasance by the crew or by some unknown sinister force.
Sure, the US diplomats were aware of the loss in the value of the claims to the families that would occur if the UAE was proven correct, but far more important to the administration was the stigma that would be created if, in the face of their own firm denials, a foreign government successfully proved that a terrorist attack of this magnitude was actually perpetrated against US citizens.
The administration’s perceived ineptitude of not preventing a Bengasi attack or Boston Marathon tragedy from happening was one thing, but the death of 7,000 passengers on a cruise ship was in a shit-storm league all its own. Most importantly to them, the Democrats would never pull off the 2016 election, if this was left hanging over them.
Elevated Threat Page 9