The Delta Solution

by Patrick Robinson

  However, Charlie Wyatt in particular believed that if the skipper opened fire first, and he and Rick stood by on the ship’s rail to repel boarders with the Louisville Sluggers, someone was going to find it real tough to board the Niagara Falls.

  Their second line of defense was to have everyone go immediately below on the freight elevators and seal off the rest of the ship. This would keep them safe for a while, but it would hand the vessel over to the Somali attackers and Rick Barnwell, a former offensive guard at Penn State, preferred to stand up and fight in the event of a piratical visit.

  It was beyond his comprehension that any attackers could get close enough without the Niagara’s watch-keepers locating an unknown ship. The big ex—US Navy supply ship had outstanding long-range radar fitted in the Norfolk Navy Yard’s ISC Cardion SPS-55 surface-search I-band.

  But Captain Hassan also had state-of-the-art radar, purchased with the bridging loan Mohammed Salat’s exchange had advanced the Somali Marines. The Somali captain also had a newly reconditioned engine running sweetly in the stern of the ship, driving her forward on one powerful single shaft.

  The Mombassa may have looked like a wreck, but that was the idea. In truth she was a supercharged rogue pirate ship, armed to the teeth in the style of an eighteenth-century privateer and hell-bent on big prize money and a triumphant homecoming. She was, effectively, a guided missile in need of a few coats of paint.

  The crew had rigged up a tarpaulin to provide shade from the burning sun. Young Kifle Zenawi, a twenty-four-year-old native of Haradheere, was second in command of the ship but not the operation. He and the pirate chief, Ismael Wolde, a native of Ethiopia, had jury-rigged the shaded area and now sat with their colleagues sipping cold fruit juice. Captain Hassan did not allow alcohol on board.

  Wolde was a critical team leader. He had attended the National University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city, where his father had owned an agricultural machinery import business. Wolde, father and son, spoke fluent English, but Ismael sought fortune and adventure. Not secondhand tractors.

  Also in the group was the thirty-five-year-old missile director, Elmi Ahmed, who had seen active service with the armies of the Somali government in their endless fight against the militant Islamists. Ahmed had found himself in command of a Brigade in the suburbs of Mogadishu, when the fighting was ferocious in early 2009.

  Commander Elmi Ahmed preferred the less dangerous life of an oceangoing pirate to the murderous artillery and machine gun battles that had just about flattened the capital city of his country.

  Ahmed’s skill with guided missiles was outstanding. While his principal duty was to fire rocket propelled grenades across the bows of the pirate target without setting the ship on fire, he was also occasionally required to slam a missile straight into the upper works to discourage unarmed merchant captains from making a run for it.

  Like Kifle Zenawi, Ahmed was a native of Haradheere, and the two families had been friends for generations. A long time ago they were all fishermen, before the huge foreign factory ships, especially those from Japan, ransacked the local waters of their stocks, thus adding to the general destruction caused by their toxic waste dumping.

  For the Somali people, everywhere they looked there was destruction, by land and by sea, none of it their fault. And there’s no reasoning with people who believe they have been robbed of everything. You could talk to the people of Haradheere for a thousand years and they’d never understand why it was illegal to hit back at the foreigners, any foreigners, and somehow make them pay for the damage they had done.

  Captain Hassan, protected from the sun by a bulletproof reinforced roof to his control room, ran with his wide windows open and the hot breezes rushing through. At the helm was Abadula Sofian, a native-born Somalian from Mogadishu who had a dual-purpose role on the mission. An experienced gunner from the government forces in the south, he was a skilled fisherman and knew how to drive the boat. He was also a veteran assault trooper and would go with Ismael Wolde, the Ethiopian boarding expert who would lead the opening attack on Niagara Falls. If and when they found her.

  Stationed on the stern end of the deck was Hamdan Ougoure, another Somalian from Mogadishu and Wolde’s head of ordnance. He was currently checking through the arsenal of weapons, which included a twenty-one-pound machine gun with a stack of ammunition belts, all smuggled out of Afghanistan after an al-Qaeda attack on a truckload of US Marines.

  The big gun had arrived in Haradheere on the usual route, by road to Iran and by air to Yemen, in an expensive arms shipment financed by Mohammed Salat, who, it must be said, wanted only the best for his pirate teams. Arms flights landed by night in Mogadishu from Yemen’s international airport on the north side of Aden—a 660-mile journey due south, straight across the Horn of Africa.

  Ougoure was also in command of the RPGs and packs of TNT and dynamite. Wolde’s commandoes always attempted to capture a ship by “peaceful” but threatening behavior. But when they went in, they were never joking and, if necessary, fully prepared to carry out their threats.

  The powerful commercial overtones that surround acts of piracy mostly ruled out violence because everyone was wary. The kidnapped boat crews were mindful of the laws they would be breaking if they decided to shoot their attackers; the pirates themselves accepted that the world was hostile but, so far, not too hostile since no one had yet been murdered; and the shipowners themselves were always anxious to pay up and get on with the regular business of making money.

  Only the US government had ever threatened to become a total pain in the ass to the grab-and-ransom Somali operations by refusing to negotiate or even speak to the pirates. The US preferred to let the commercial interests work it out for themselves.

  The possibility of an attack on the aid ship Niagara Falls, however, was a sensitive area because it would throw the hawkish US Navy into direct conflict with shipping executives who just wanted to pay up and be damned.

  The two ships were still some 850 miles apart and closing. On board the Mombassa there was much to be done. The two skiffs had been hauled inboard and made fast to a couple of jury-rigged davits fashioned from the outboard fishing net “arms,” which still betrayed a former life as a trawler.

  Those skiffs were critical to the operation. The Mombassa would be no match for the Niagara Falls if Captain Corcoran opened his throttles and elected to repel boarders. The skiffs were there for a fast, quiet approach, coming in from Corcoran’s stern arcs in the dead of the tropical night.

  The trick with an illegal boarding is speed. Tangled ropes might be fatal. The well-organized pirates had a couple of very slick rope ladders with brass rungs, also attached to grappling lines. These would enable even the least experienced climbers to make it on board the aid ship in quick time.

  These hot, sultry equatorial days invariably heralded calm seas, and the Indian Ocean, while never as aggressive as the Atlantic or the Pacific, was especially good for fast, effortless running.

  All through the day, Captain Hassan posted a lookout on the bow: a young Somalian named Bouh Adan who sat on deck astride a rail post and peered out at the horizon using a pair of Russian binoculars. Every couple of hours he was relieved, and then the captain relied on the sweep of his radar to locate traffic. But he was an old-fashioned skipper and liked to have human contact at all points on the ship.

  Bouh Adan also had dual duties on these missions. At twenty-two, he was extremely athletic and could scale the side of a target ship like a mountain goat. When the pirates boarded, Bouh climbed right alongside Ismael Wolde with an AK-47 slung over his back in identical manner to his leader.

  Hassan kept the speed at a steady 15 knots all through that first day and all through the night. The morning passed slowly, but by noontime they had covered almost four hundred miles. And all the while, the Niagara Falls was steaming hard toward them. With her huge load, she was not as fast, but she was three hundred miles closer and some 150 miles from the spot on the ocean where Yusuf ha
d forecast she would meet the Mombassa.

  ON THE BRIDGE OF THE AID SHIP, Captain Corcoran spent much time staring at the first mate’s computer, in which Charlie Wyatt had installed software that highlighted every site of every act of piracy since the Somali Civil War had begun in the early 1990s. “Nothing much to worry about, sir,” he said. “There’ve only been two hundred ships captured. We’ll be alright.”

  Fred Corcoran had tried to avoid the irony and countered with, “I know. I know. But how many have happened out here . . . What are we, 650 miles off the coast of Somalia?”

  “’Bout that,” replied Charlie. “And the answer is about fourteen, all of them in the last five months. And thirteen of ’em paid the ransom money. No one died.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Fred.

  Able Seaman Jimmy Tevez brought them tea and a big jug of iced lemonade in the late afternoon. By this time, Second Mate Barnwell had the helm, and the engineer Paul Schuyler, an ex—US Navy PO, was asking what time he could reduce some of the power being pumped out by the generators.

  “I guess the temperature will drop some after dark,” said the captain. “We could try then. We don’t have a problem, do we?”

  “Nothing yet,” said Schuyler, “but those generators have been going flat out for a lot of hours and it’d be a real bitch if one of’em got tired.”

  Jimmy Tevez was basically hanging around to check up on the latest baseball scores. He was from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the same Caribbean island as Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, and he believed that this geographic revelation made him a world authority on America’s national pastime.

  His devotion to the cause of the Red Sox brought him into good-natured conflict with Yankees fan Paul Schuyler, while Charlie Wyatt, from the baseball-gripped city of Baltimore, home of the Babe, considered both of them to be Johnny-come-latelies—guys who had latched on to a team when it was winning.

  Whereas he, Charlie, was a real fan, born a few streets from the Babe’s actual birthplace, and a supporter, with Orioles blood in his veins, since childhood. He considered Camden Yards to be the cathedral of the game and believed that one day the deified Orioles would rise to their rightful place in the baseball firmament.

  Right now, Charlie was trying to avoid any mention of the Orioles 9–0 loss to the Detroit Tigers, but he still had time to comment on the fact the Red Sox had blown a 5–0 lead to the Blue Jays and were slipping games behind the Yanks every day.

  DARKNESS FALLS VERY SUDDENLY on the Indian Ocean. As night closed in, there was still no “paint” on the radar. It was the loneliest of seaways. Rick Barnwell had the screen on long-range mode, accurate to twenty-five miles in all directions, but the steady green-colored arm of the system just swept endlessly around, showing precisely nothing in the way.

  It was much the same in the Mombassa. But Captain Hassan at least had a target area, and he knew he was approaching it steadily. The captain and his staff in the Niagara Falls were basically groping around in the dark.

  They took turns taking two-hour naps, and as midnight approached they were just about thirty miles from the spot Yusuf had forecast the two ships would meet. The Mombassa was already in the area, making a lazy racetrack pattern in the water. She showed no lights and transmitted nothing, but she’d picked up the American aid ship on her screen and made a ten-second check every half hour.

  The Niagara Falls had also spotted her, but the US radar had also located another fishing boat twelve miles off her port beam, which they thought might be Japanese. The much smaller vessel was obviously fishing and Captain Corcoran was not concerned either way. In his mind, pirate ships would be very obvious. Every major hijack out here, way offshore, had been conducted from the “base camp” of a “mother ship”—quite often a stolen freighter or small tanker, and Fred Corcoran’s radar had located no vessel of that size.

  The slow-moving trawler was showing no radio or radar transmissions. It was plainly harmless and very small compared to his 18,000-ton merchantman.

  The result of all this radar cat-and-mouse was that the Mombassa was somehow watching the Americans, but the Americans were paying little or no attention to the former longline tuna boat from Thailand.

  As the powerful freighter from Diego Garcia rolled ever forward, Captain Hassan steered out to a position eight miles off the Niagara Falls’s starboard quarter. From there he could watch the screen as the Americans went past. And now he came around, facing south in a slightly rising sea, beneath a bright moon and phosphorescent water.

  Hassan could see her starboard lights as she steamed along the horizon, making that same steady 12 knots she’d been recording throughout her journey.

  By now Ismael Wolde was standing next to him staring through the Russian binoculars. “We come straight in on her stern?” he asked.

  “We don’t have much choice,” replied Hassan. “We don’t fire across the bows. We move up on them very carefully. This is a bright night, and I don’t want them to see us. I’d recommend the skiffs track him for a couple of very quiet miles, no lights. And then close in at high speed for the final five hundred yards, staying in the portside shadow of the ship for the attack.”

  Captain Hassan fell in astern of the Niagara Falls, about eight miles off her starboard quarter. His plan was to track the Americans for maybe twenty-four miles, drifting to his portside, closing all the way, until the Mombassa was only a mile back and dead astern. Then they would lower the skiffs and move unobtrusively in for the attack. No lights, no revs, quiet running until they came alongside their quarry.

  The Americans might catch a “paint” of the tuna boat, but they would not see the skiffs moving in below the radar, showing nothing on the screen for the last mile. Captain Hassan turned off all of his electronics and they proceeded forward in dark silence.

  Captain Hassan opened his throttles at 0100 and came in much faster to his chosen spot, making 18 knots through the water for the six-mile journey. It took him less than twenty minutes, and there was heavy activity on deck as Ismael Wolde’s men prepared to lower the two fully laden skiffs over the side.

  As long as they were on board, Captain Hassan gave the orders, and at 0140, he called down, “Okay, Ismael. Lower away.”

  The skiffs reached the water with two men already aboard each one, and the Yamahas kicked into life. On either side of the ship, Ismael’s men moved expertly down the rope ladders. The pirate leader came last, climbing down to the starboard skiff, which would be helmed by Abadula Sofian.

  Also in this boat was the slim, athletic Somali lookout, Bouh Adan, and the missile director, Elmi Ahmed. Two other young bloods from the old fishing fleet completed the six-man crew. Each boarding pirate carried an AK-47 plus two grenades.

  On the portside, Hamdan Ougoure, Wolde’s head of ordnance, would take the helm. Omar Ali Farah would ride with the big machine gun and the veteran Somali army sergeant Ibrahim Yacin would be first up the grappling ropes. Gacal Gueleh, a former fisherman from Mogadishu, was in charge of fixing the rope ladders up the side of the Niagara Falls just as soon as the first grappling hook sailed over the gunwales.

  Somalia’s pirates had learned the hard way that rope ladders were about a hundred times quicker to climb than having the men climbing ropes, hand over hand, their feet struggling to find a grip.

  And now, with everyone seated and the boats low in the water, Captain Hassan cast off and sent them away. Three of the departing pirates had cell phones with open lines to Hassan’s bridge.

  The skiffs moved through the water at 20 knots. They were barely a mile behind the US aid ship, which was, as ever, making 12 knots. Gaining eight miles an hour, that meant a seven-minute run for the skiffs to catch her, and Wolde was confident they were under the radar.

  The stern lights on the Niagara Falls grew closer, and the men from Haradheere could see the silhouette of the 18,000 tonner in the moonlight as she rode the long swells toward the coast of Africa.

  It was 0155 when they
hit the first rough chop from the freighter’s mighty bronze single screw. Wolde, in the lead boat, ordered Abadula Sofian to steer into the smoother water to the portside and then run in along the hull, cutting the speed and holding position in the shadows.

  This was easier said than achieved. There was by now a bow wave rolling back, and the Niagara Falls’s quarter deck was higher than Yusuf’s sketch e-mailed from Washington, DC. It was, in fact, an old military helicopter landing pad, and immediately forward the deck dropped down to its lowest point. There was a fifty-foot “window” to throw the grapplers. It was up to the helmsmen to hold the skiffs at zero speed relative to the forward motion of the freighter.

  The upper works too were higher than Wolde had expected, but the deck was much lower and the Somali pirate king assessed the grapplers needed to fly fourteen feet above the water in order to clear the rails and grip. The good news was there was not a sound from the crew of the Niagara Falls, most of whom were sound asleep.

  Wolde’s boat was right where he wanted it. Abadula had the skiff balanced. The engines ran softly. The only sound was the occasional clink as the grappling men stood clear of their shipmates, waiting to throw, awaiting the command.

  Hard astern, Hamdan Ougoure was having minor problems getting Skiff Two balanced against the hull, and the sea was now rising perhaps four feet on the swell. But his team was made up of experts. The grapplers were ready. The crew stood back for the throw.

  Ismael Wolde positioned himself on the stern to ensure his command would be heard by both boats.

  “Ready?” he snapped.

  “Affirmative,” called Ibrahim Yacin, a former Somali gunrunner who believed he was the reincarnation of General Rommel.

  “LET’S GO!!” called Wolde. In the same split second, four grappling hooks whirled around three times and then flew upward. Each rope was marked with a thick red wool tie, showing the precise place the throwers should tighten their grip to avoid the grapplers rolling around on deck.