Heroes Proved

by Oliver North

  Looking forward through the canted bridge windows, Cohen could catch only brief glimpses of the bow through the sheets of wind-driven rain as the ship plunged into the raging swells. Off to the port side he could see low, scudding clouds of an approaching line squall. He braced himself as a roiling wave crashed against the weather rail and green water cascaded down the length of the ship.

  When Ahmad entered the enclosed bridge he secured the hatch, pointed to the captain, and said to Cohen, “Tell him what to do. I have told him you are an admiral in the American Navy.”

  Cohen, holding on to the chart table, looked at the disheveled captain and his helmsman and asked in Spanish the only questions that made sense at the moment: “Where are we and what’s our heading?”

  The captain struggled out of his chair and staggered to the chart table. Gripping a handhold with his left hand, he flipped back the soaking-wet canvas cover to reveal an ancient navigational chart of the Gulf of Mexico. Pointing to a penciled tic mark west of Cuba and north of the Yucatan Peninsula, he said, “I think we are here.”

  The distinct odor of alcohol on the captain’s breath was unmistakable. Looking around the bridge at the aging navigation and communications equipment, Cohen asked, “Where does your GPS say we are?”

  “The antenna was on the mast. It is gone,” the captain slurred.

  “Do you have any other satellite navigation equipment aboard?”

  “Nothing is working.”

  “Radar?”

  “Gone. It was on the mast.”

  “Satellite data link for NOAA?”

  “Don’t you understand? All of the antennas are gone! Nothing is working. Even the autopilot is disabled.”

  “Where is your first officer, your exec—or whatever you call him?”

  “He and one of my men were swept over the side trying to secure the mast after it tore loose.”

  Cohen, bracing himself against the binnacle, glanced down at the compass, noted that the course being steered was roughly 100 degrees magnetic—a little south of due east—and asked, “Where is your radio equipment?”

  The captain pointed to a curtain aft of the hatch they had entered. But as Cohen headed for the little compartment, Ahmad stopped him, saying, “You cannot transmit on the radio.”

  “It is not to transmit, it is to receive. I need to know where we are and where the storm is if we are to survive.”

  “Do not deceive me, Jew. If you communicate with anyone I will kill you.”

  Cohen shrugged and grappled his way into the little compartment. Bracing himself against the rack holding the electronic equipment, he examined their available resources. There wasn’t much.

  The antique Axion weather satellite receiver was dead. He tried the equally old Motorola maritime GPS, single-sideband radio transceiver, VHF radio, and standard digital radio receiver—none worked. The electronic wind gauge was frozen at 47.5 knots. When he pressed the reset button, the screen went dark. He guessed the anemometer—likely mounted atop the mast—was also gone.

  On the bulkhead he found the only piece of working equipment, an old-fashioned aneroid barometer showing the barometric pressure was just 1001 millibars. He tapped the face of the device and the needle dropped to 998 mb.

  With Ahmad watching him closely, Cohen turned on the VHF radio and punched into the keypad 162.400—the frequency for WXJ95—hoping he could pick up the signal from the NOAA weather broadcast station on Sugarloaf Key, more than three hundred miles to their northeast. All he could hear was static. He got the same result on the other six NOAA frequencies.

  Cohen had no better results with any of the other equipment. None of the vessel’s electronic gear was working. As he rummaged through drawers, cubbyholes, and lockers searching for something he could use to rig a makeshift antenna, one of the Ileana Rosario crewmen burst into the pilothouse and shouted, “The water in the engine room is getting deeper!”

  “I need to go below and see how much water we are taking aboard,” Cohen said to his captor.

  “No. You cannot leave. The captain is drunk. You just said you needed to find out where we are. Do that first.”

  “It is more important to stop us from sinking.”

  Ahmad was pondering this when the squall line hit and the vessel abruptly rolled heavily to starboard. As the wind rose to a scream, their list increased dramatically. Cohen struggled to crab his way across the canted deck, moving from handhold to handhold into the pilothouse. Outside, everything had gone white—the rain pelting so hard it was impossible to see more than a foot or two in any direction. Water was cascading through holes ripped in the overhead when the mast collapsed.

  “We’re going to capsize! Turn right to two-five-zero degrees!” he shouted. The man at the helm was frozen in place.

  Cohen lurched forward, up the canted deck, fell into the helmsman, pushed him aside, and spun the wheel hard to the right.

  Slowly, as the Ileana Rosario fell off the wind, the list began to subside. Cohen, still gripping the wheel, said, “We must hold this course. It is more difficult to steer in a following sea, but it will be safer. Come, take the wheel.”

  As the displaced helmsman resumed his station, Cohen said to the captain, “I need to go below and see if we can get the pumps running.”

  The captain motioned to the seaman who delivered the bad news and said, “Take him.”

  Led by the reluctant sailor, Cohen, Ahmad, and his accomplice headed back into the violence of the storm, carefully making their way down to a hatch at the base of the stairs. Timing their entry to avoid the towering waves racing up behind them, the four men piled breathlessly through the hatch, slammed it closed, and stood panting in the small compartment above the engine room.

  “Does anyone have a flashlight?” Cohen shouted over the howling wind and the hammering of the auxiliary engine as he peered into the darkness below.

  “Sí,” said the seaman, who then tugged a small light, suspended by a leather lanyard, from around his neck.

  As he took the light and draped the cord over his head, Cohen noticed that the man who gave it to him was just a boy—certainly younger than the sailors he once commanded on nuclear submarines. He asked, “Gracias. ¿Cómo se llama usted?”

  “Me llamo Tico.”

  “How old are you, Tico?”

  “Eighteen.”

  Cohen turned to his chief captor and said, “I know your name is Ahmad. What is the name of your friend?”

  “His name is Karim. What do you care, Jew?”

  “I like to know the people with whom I go to sea, Ahmad. It’s an old habit.” With that, Cohen switched on the light hanging around his neck and started to descend the ladder, bracing himself as the ship pitched forward, careening down the slope of a wave like a toboggan on a steep hill.

  “I will come with you!” shouted Ahmad over the din.

  “Okay, just don’t step on my Jewish hands.”

  Hanging on to the bottom of the ladder with one hand, Cohen was swinging the light around the engine compartment assessing the situation when Ahmad arrived beside him. Even in the dim glow of the flashlight, Cohen spotted something he had not yet seen in the terrorist’s eyes: fear.

  The old admiral concluded it was a reasonable reaction to their current predicament. They were five feet below the waterline of a decrepit rust bucket, tossed about in the chaos of a major storm with little to no power. Though the effect of the vessel’s pitching and yawing was diminished by being lower, the slamming of the hull and the noise of the diesel-powered generator were unnerving to the uninitiated.

  He moved the flashlight beam from the fire-damaged main engine over to the slowly rotating shaft, then shifted the ball of light aft and shook his head at the amount of seawater seeping in from the bearing seals. He was about to check on the small diesel engine powering the generator when Ahmad grabbed his sleeve and pointed down.

  Immediately below the grate on which they were standing, several feet of oily water sloshed back and fort
h, forward and back, as the sea pounded the Ileana Rosario’s outer hull. From the sewage plant stench, Cohen concluded a wastewater line or tank had ruptured somewhere.

  He located the circuit board on the bulkhead aft of the generator and found the switches labeled motor de la bomba. The breakers on all four were tripped. Several attempts to reset them produced no results. As he traced one of the lines forward and down seeking a short circuit, he heard Ahmad retch. Cohen smiled. In the sodden, fetid air, even he—never seasick—felt nauseous.

  Moving back to the ladder, Cohen shouted up to the crewman waiting at the top, “¿Tico, dónde está el electricista?” Where is the electrician?

  The response, “Ricardo está muerto,” meant the pumps weren’t going to get restarted anytime soon, and the old admiral grimaced in frustration. Any of his U.S. Navy crews, well trained in damage control, would have quickly rerouted cables from the generator to get the pumps working and save their vessel.

  While he was considering what else they could do, Ahmad grabbed his arm and pointed down, shouting, “Look, the water is getting higher!”

  Cohen nodded. The putrid fluid had been several inches below the floor grates when they arrived in the engine compartment. Now it was sloshing on their shoes. He turned to Ahmad and shouted, “Let’s go! There is nothing we can do here!”

  “What do you mean? You cannot fix the pump?”

  “It’s not just one pump—it’s four pumps—and none of them are working.”

  “What will happen?”

  “The way we’re taking on water, this ship is going to sink. We need to get off before it does.”

  * * * *

  After he and Ahmad climbed out of the engine room, Cohen told them all—in English and Spanish—they must time their sprint out the hatch, forward beneath the broken mast, then up the stairs and into the pilothouse to avoid being caught on deck by one of the towering waves chasing them. He thought they all understood. Perhaps they did. But none of them saw it coming.

  Ahmad, at the top of the stairs, had just opened the bridge hatch. Cohen was right on his heels when it hit them from behind. The monstrous wave first pitched the bow down, deep into the foam, and then thousands of tons of water came crashing over the stern. Ahmad and Cohen were catapulted into the pilothouse, sliding on their backs across the deck and into a painful pileup against the port bulkhead. Tico, Karim, and the broken mast disappeared.

  For an interminable moment, the Ileana Rosario seemed to wallow, half under and half above the water. Cohen said to himself, She’s going to founder. But then, somehow, the bow rose, the water started draining off the midship tank covers, and the dilapidated vessel remained upright.

  The torrent of water that delivered Ahmad and Cohen into the pilothouse momentarily roused the captain to action. He scrambled out of his chair to secure the hatch and dogged it down before the next deluge. Noticing his crewman was missing, he shouted, “Where is Tico?”

  “Gone. Washed overboard,” Cohen replied as he crawled to the binnacle and pulled himself up to check their heading. He marveled that the compass was swinging back and forth plus or minus 10 degrees of the 250-degree course he ordered.

  “¿Cómo se llama usted?” he shouted at the helmsman, who was working hard, especially given their slow speed, to hold the vessel on a steady course.

  “Rikki,” said the boy, barely taking his eyes off the compass.

  The old admiral pointed to the binnacle, patted the boy on the shoulder, and shouted over the screaming wind and rain, “¡Muy bien, Rikki!”

  The captain, until now seemingly oblivious to the catastrophe happening around him, returned to his pilot’s chair and proceeded to wail, “Oh, Tico, Tico . . .”

  Cohen made his way over to the chair, grabbed the morose figure by the arm, and shouted over the wind howling outside the thick Plexiglas window, “Get hold of yourself, man. He’s gone. The pumps cannot be fixed. We are sinking. What is your name?”

  “Roberto.”

  “Good. Now, Roberto, where are your life rafts?”

  The question seemed to drag the captain from his stupor and he replied, “There are three six-man inflatable lifeboats. One is cradled on the rail at each stern quarter and there’s another up there,” he said, pointing to the overhead.

  “The one on the starboard side is gone.”

  “Gone?” asked Roberto.

  “When the mast came down it took out the rail. Where are more of these?” asked Cohen, pointing to his life belt and its self-contained inflatable life jacket.

  Roberto pointed to a locker beneath the chart table.

  The old admiral turned to his captor, who was bracing himself against the chart table, and shouted, “Ahmad, get the life belts out of that locker and make sure everyone has one on!”

  The kidnapper looked as though he was about to vomit. “Don’t give me orders, Jew!” he snarled, but then got down on his knees and removed ten life belts like the one Cohen was wearing. He slid two of them across the sopping-wet deck.

  Cohen handed one to the captain, then crabbed his way to the helmsman and proceeded to fasten it around his waist so the young man would not have to take his hands from the wheel. Turning to Ahmad again, he shouted, “Make sure all your men have life belts on and bring them up here! We don’t have long!”

  Ahmad put on a life belt, looped four more over his arm, and grappled his way to the hatch, prepared to confront the elements once again. As he started lifting the handle to undog the hatch, Cohen felt the fantail begin to rise and yelled, “Wait! Hold on!”

  An instant later the bow dug into the water as another enormous wave lifted the stern, sending the ship careening at a sickening angle deep into a trough. Seconds later, the peak of the wave broke over the pilothouse and forward across the tank covers. The Ileana Rosario shuddered and, for a moment, seemed to be dead in the water.

  “She won’t take much more of this,” Roberto said as the vessel’s bow slowly appeared, barely visible through the sheets of rain and the deepening gloom.

  “You’re right,” replied Cohen. He turned to Ahmad, frozen at the portal. “Go now. I’ll secure the hatch behind you. Be careful bringing your men back up. Don’t get caught by one of those big waves.”

  For a split second it looked as though the Iranian was going to say something. But then he lifted the handle, pushed open the heavy door, and charged down the stairs. Cohen slammed the hatch behind him, dogged it down, turned to the captain, and asked, “Roberto, do all three of your lifeboats have EPIRBs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know which type? Are they automatic?”

  “I do not know. I just know they are certified by your Coast Guard. The paperwork is in a drawer in the communications compartment.”

  Cohen half slid, half crawled back into the comm shack and started pulling damp and moldy paperwork from the desk until he found what he was looking for. He tore open the plastic envelope, quickly scanned the documents, and shoved it all beneath a pile of other paper as he heard feet pounding up the metal stairs outside the bulkhead. By the time the five kidnappers piled into the pilothouse, he was braced against the equipment rack, looking at the barometer. Seeing him near the radio sets, Ahmad burst into the cramped space and shouted, “Get away from the radios, Jew!”

  Cohen looked at him, noticed he was now armed with a small submachine gun slung over his shoulder, and said, “The radios don’t work, Ahmad. I am checking the barometric pressure. And my name is Martin.”

  “I don’t care about your name, Jew,” he spat through a twisted sneer. “What does this barometer tell you?”

  Cohen tapped the glass and watched the needle drop to 981 mb. Turning back to his captor he said, “It tells me, Ahmad, the atmospheric pressure is still dropping and the worst is yet to come.”

  * * * *

  Over the next half hour, as the storm intensified and the sky darkened, Cohen prepared the five terrorists and the two surviving members of the Ileana Rosario crew for abandon
ing ship. First, he went out on the port bridge wing and confirmed the life raft canister on that side was still intact. He then sent the two crewmen up the ladder welded to the starboard side of the pilothouse to ensure the raft canister mounted above them was not damaged by the falling mast. Having verified they did indeed have the means to escape, he told them all to sit on the deck with their backpacks against a bulkhead. Roberto remained planted in his chair and Rikki stayed at the helm.

  With Ahmad translating, the old admiral first asked them their names, explained the tanker was sinking, and warned it could happen very suddenly. Cohen then demonstrated—much like a flight attendant—how to open the pouch on their life belts and pull the life vests over their heads, how to activate the nitrogen canisters for inflation, and how to use their whistles and chemical lights if they found themselves separated in the wind-tossed waves.

  He then assigned them to their lifeboats: Ahmad, Cohen, Rikki, and Ebi to the boat on the port-side aft; Roberto, Hassan, Massoud, and Rostam to the boat on top of the pilothouse. His explanation on how to activate the life raft was as precise as possible under the circumstances, but he assured them that both he and Roberto would be able to initiate inflation, erect the canopy, and deploy the sea anchor. The only detail he omitted was the purpose and function of the EPIRB.

  When he finished his “lecture” he asked if there were any questions. With Ahmad translating, Ebi asked the one most pertinent to a mariner in distress: “Where is the nearest land?”

  Cohen pulled himself to his feet, lurched across the pitching deck to the chart table, grabbed the soggy sheet, and sat down in the slop on the deck. Pointing to the tic mark on the chart, he said, “If we were here when we changed course to run downwind, we are probably seventy-five to one hundred miles northeast of Telchac Puerto on the Yucatan Peninsula. The storm will continue to blow us toward land until the eye passes—then the wind will shift and blow us back out to sea.”