The Delta Solution

by Patrick Robinson

  Two hours later the Mombassa had covered forty more nautical miles. And the Beatrix had traversed only twenty, which made the distance between them precisely thirty miles.

  A half hour later, Commodore Elmi Ahmed picked up a slow-moving radar paint on the screen he had been studying for so long. It was bright green, and it came and went in rhythm with the endless circular sweep of the electronic radar arm, near the edge of the screen, on the twenty-mile circle.

  It was plainly a very large ship. A modern radar system easily differentiates between something big up ahead and something small. A trained operator will instantly catch a flock of seabirds five miles off the bow or even a small rain squall. A 300,000-ton VLCC does not look like either of those—more like the Taj Mahal just showed up in the Indian Ocean.

  Elmi Ahmed knew this particular tanker was going marginally slower than normal. Its speed, direction, and GPS coordinates all precisely matched those both reported and forecast by Mohammed Salat’s man in the New York shipbroker’s Fifth Avenue office.

  “We got her, boss,” said Ahmed. “Right here on the screen, GPS fits, size is right, speed correct, direction accurate. It’s the Beatrix, no doubt. Steaming twenty miles off our port bow. There’s not another ship of that size anywhere near us.”

  Elmi was proud of his grasp of the ocean’s highways, and the present route of the tanker coincided with his main pencil line on the chart. Captain Hassan replied, “Is she where you expected?”

  “She is.”

  “Good. Better get Ismael in here.”

  Five minutes later the Somali Marines’ assault team leader was on the bridge staring at the radar screen and the big green paint that showed up every time the indicator swept around.

  Wolde checked the numbers and nodded thoughtfully. Elmi, smiling, muttered, “She’s nearer than she was ten minutes ago. At this speed we’ll catch her inside a couple of hours. Easy.”

  Wolde checked his watch. It was twenty minutes before nine o’clock, pitch-black outside and still hot. The pirate ship did not, of course, have air-conditioning, which, in this heat, made the Mombassa even more of a rough-and-ready working vessel.

  “Start loading the skiffs,” said the assault team leader. “Let’s get the grappling ropes aboard, plus those rope ladders and the harnesses for the climbers. We’re getting in close, and the water’s calm right now, so we’ll lower away with the boats loaded.”

  He then asked Captain Hassan whether it was likely that the control room of the tanker could see them on their own radar screen. The veteran Somali fisherman replied that he thought it unlikely.

  “Any other ship on the seven seas I’d say yes,” he replied, “but not those VLCCs. The standard of seamanship is very poor. They are so big, the presence of a small vessel is meaningless to them. They could run over a 1,000-ton boat and never know they’d done it. And when a routine task doesn’t matter, in the end they ignore it.”

  Captain Hassan was right, but for different reasons. The giant ship was running in very deep water, hundreds of miles from land, on automatic pilot because all of the senior staff were below in the engine room, checking the turbine room, the camshaft room, the generators, the freshwater plant—every mechanical part that could have any bearing on the mysterious shudder that was so exercising the captain.

  All the while, the Queen Beatrix was inexorably slowing down, her speed now at only 5 knots and dropping. There was hardly a ripple on the dark waters beyond her hull, and she rode up scarcely a couple of feet on either end on the gentle lift of the ocean’s surface. Inside the cavernous area where the shaft runs aft toward the thirty-foot high propeller, the senior men stood and listened.

  Pietr van der Saar was positioned on a gantry, feeling the vibrations on the soles of his feet, and Jan van Marchant was below him. The shudder on the shaft was more regular now, as if the fault had settled in and would systematically haunt them for the rest of their 6,000-mile journey.

  The engineers felt helpless. There were small technical adjustments that could be made, and these were ideal conditions to try. On a flat calm, the speed of the Beatrix was still dropping. Also the radar screen was still unattended, despite showing the fast-approaching Mombassa as a clear paint.

  At 9:45 p.m. Hamdan Ougoure, the pirate lookout man on the bow, spotted the running lights of the tanker out on the horizon to the northeast, about five miles distant. He called up to the captain as he stared through his stolen Russian night binoculars and confirmed the presence of a VLCC steaming so slowly she looked as if she might have stopped altogether.

  This came as some relief to Elmi Ahmed, who was just beginning to doubt the accuracy of his navigation. He had already decided that either he had made a serious miscalculation or the Queen Beatrix was doing something unorthodox. They were now headed for a point beyond the tanker’s bow, not her stern, as planned.

  Of course, the news that she was more or less stopped in the water solved everything. Ahmed advised Captain Hassan to come hard left, almost due north, in order to squeeze back toward the tanker’s stern arc, rather than racing straight across her near-stationary bow.

  Hassan pulled the Mombassa back through a northerly sixty degrees and kept going, knocking off a mile every three minutes. But then he cut the speed, and the noise, and ran in very quietly to a point two miles off the stern of the Beatrix.

  Ismael joined him at the helm, and the captain pointed out the ship up ahead and the route they would take in order to get closer. He switched on his state-of-the-art shortwave radio system and tuned into the likely frequencies upon which he might expect some communication from a major vessel.

  But there was nothing. The entire senior command of the Beatrix was still below the massive green deck, just forward of the island, checking out the running of the shaft in the pristine seclusion of the spotless engine rooms.

  Captain Hassan’s fishing boat was now positioned dead astern of the tanker with about a mile of ocean water between them. He ordered the crew to lower the two skiffs and watched as the assault party climbed down the boarding rope ladders on either side of his ship. There were as always six men in each skiff, and tonight Ibrahim Yacin and Abadula Sofian were on the helms.

  By now the danger of being spotted onscreen was almost over because within a few hundred yards the small boats would be well under the tanker’s radar, which transmitted from an electronic dish thirty feet above the high deck outside the bridge.

  Ismael Wolde stayed to synchronize his watch with that of the captain and to insure that their satellite cell phones were just one push-button apart. He was the last man aboard the lead boat and gave the order to depart at 10:30 p.m.

  The Yamahas roared into life for the first time since they had left the beach at Haradheere, and the bows of both narrow skiffs rose off the surface as they lurched forward, Wolde’s boat indicating the speed they would travel. He was at first undecided whether to go for a fast approach or pure stealth in the pitch dark, and he kept his line open to Hassan just to establish there was still no radio contact with the Beatrix. The captain confirmed there was not a word.

  Ismael Wolde could not believe their luck—that after a journey of hundreds of miles, effectively stalking the huge tanker, no one knew that two Somali Marine attack boats, filled with armed assault troops and high explosives, were within a few hundred yards of hurling the grapplers.

  Abadula Sofian, driving Wolde’s leading skiff, was ripping across the water at more than 28 knots directly at the stern since there was no wake behind the stationary ship. They came in almost under the overhang, which would have looked like a tower block if she’d been empty. But right now, hard down on her lines, the Queen Beatrix at close quarters was a much less formidable target. It was almost beyond belief that she could be so low on her waterline and yet more than a thousand feet long.

  Sofian steered down her starboard side for only thirty or forty yards, and all six men stared up at the lowest point of the aft deck. In was hard to assess the exact distance
up to the rails, but in this stationary position it could not have been as much as twenty-five feet, well within the accuracy range of the hurlers, all three of whom were in Sofian’s boat.

  The helmsman made a 360-degree turn and came in twenty feet off the hull, holding the skiff motionless on the slight south-running current.

  They listened carefully above the rhythm of the idling engine, making its familiar pop-pop-popping beat on the night air. Ibrahim Yacin held the second skiff off, right under the stern of the ship. And still there was no sound or movement from the Queen Beatrix. It was a ghost ship.

  “Okay,” snapped Wolde. “Let’s go!”

  All three men began to whirl the grappling hooks, each one in a clockwise circle, just as they had practiced so many times, counting the revolutions off . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . and then NOW!

  On the fourth circle they let go and the irons flew upward, off a slight forward angle to the perpendicular. All three of them cleared the starboard rails and clattered onto the deck, chipping the pristine emeraldgreen paint.

  Wolde, Zenawi, and Ougoure, their individual ropes clipped to their wristbands, seized the lines and pulled back. All three of the grappling irons hooked and held on the steel posts and chain rails. The three pirates leaned back and let the irons take the strain. Wolde’s slipped a few inches and then snapped tight on the middle section.

  Sofian twisted the helm and worked the skiff closer into the tanker’s hull, while Zenawi and Ougoure shouldered their light, coiled hook lines and prepared to scale the side of the ship. At the top they would drop the lines back and then draw up the rope ladders, the ones with the brass rungs, which made it a simple task for the others to climb aboard.

  Wolde was the only man armed as the first three pirates swung out beyond the skiffs and then slowly climbed the ropes, barefoot, using hands and feet for grip, up to the rails, where they swung over and landed on the green deck. It took another three minutes to secure the rope ladders in readiness for the mass boarding of the Somali Marines.

  By now the crew of the Beatrix were back at their night stations. The shaft seemed to be turning smoothly and the engines were just beginning to increase power. But the luxury and efficiency of the ship was such that no one needed to go on deck at all. There were elevators, stairways, lights, and catering staff throughout all five stories of the executive island.

  No one heard the pirates’ grapplers clatter over the rails. Neither was there any longer a paint on the radar, denoting the arrival of either the Mombassa or her accompanying skiffs. In any event, no one was looking.

  The only activity beyond the bulkheads was the sound of a couple of Filipinos walking up from the accommodation block with glasses of iced fruit juice, which they proposed to sip out on the deck. One of them thought he heard something.

  “Who’s that?” he called.

  Ismael Wolde stepped out of the shadows, his Kalashnikov raised, and he answered calmly: “Raise your arms very high, both of you—otherwise I shall be forced to shoot you dead in the next five seconds.”

  The Filipinos had only a modest command of the English language but they understood. The tension nearly crackled as their glasses of fruit juice shattered on the deck’s green paint, so urgent was the crewmen’s desire to appease the ugly-looking black guy with an AK-47 machine gun.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE TWO FILIPINOS, MARCO AND PAUL, STOOD, HANDS HIGH, almost in shock watching the bizarre events unfold before their eyes. The character with the Kalashnikov was quickly joined by two others carrying identical weapons and then, up and over the rails, swarmed seven more pirates.

  Wolde spoke up. “How many on the bridge, including the captain?” he asked.

  Neither prisoner answered, both pretending not to comprehend. Then Marco said something in Spanish, and Wolde shook his head. He ordered two men to stand guard on this section of the deck and four armed men, led by Kifle Zenawi, to enter the island with Marco at gunpoint and take the companionway down to the crew’s quarters.

  Their orders were to capture every crew member, asleep or awake, in the shower or eating supper, and then parade them on this deck in fifteen minutes. Any resistance would be met with brutality but not death. One more of the team would move over to the portside and assume command below the bridge, his Kalashnikov primed.

  Wolde himself, in the company of two of his most trusted men, Elmi Ahmed and Hamdan Ougoure, armed with the heavy machine gun, would proceed with the prisoner Paul up to the bridge, where they would take command of the Queen Beatrix. Wolde was already assuming that the ship’s high command would not be armed warriors.

  In silence, Paul led the way to the executive elevator and pressed the button for the fifth floor. When they stepped out onto a carpeted foyer, a place where Paul had never before been, they were faced with a wooden door upon which brass letters proclaimed:

  BRIDGE AND CONTROL ROOM EXECUTIVES ONLY

  “Knock and wait,” commanded Ismael Wolde, and Paul tapped twice, waiting five seconds before Pietr van der Saar opened it. At which point, Pietr, Johan, and Jan van Marchant suffered the greatest shock of their collective seagoing years.

  The door cannoned back on its hinges as Elmi Ahmed slammed his shoulder into the brass letters and knocked van der Saar flying. Ougoure was right behind him and crashed over the prostrate Van der Saar and fired a short burst into the sidewall, wheeling left with his rifle aimed at the bridge officers.

  Ismael Wolde rushed across to the tall, white-shirted Van Marchant and rammed his rifle into the captain’s rib cage, right below the heart. All three Somali Marines were shouting to intimidate, waving their rifles, demanding, unnecessarily, that the terrified officers of the Queen Beatrix shut up.

  In the space of twenty-five seconds, Captain Jan van Marchant and his three executives, plus the deckhand Paul, had their backs to the wall, arms raised, without a word. Never in the entire history of ocean warfare had a ship this big been captured so swiftly by so few.

  “Captain van Marchant,” said Admiral Wolde, “you and your staff are my prisoners. The Queen Beatrix is now under the command of the Somali Marines and a substantial ransom will be asked for her return. No one has been hurt, so far, but if our demands are not met, we will begin shooting you all one by one and throwing you overboard. You understand your deaths are of no consequence to us whatsoever.”

  And he finished with a flourish. “Live or die, over the side or on board. None of it makes the slightest difference to us. I will never even think about you again. So you may as well obey my commands while you are still alive to do so.”

  His words had a more chilling effect on the highly paid officers than even Wolde imagined. “Well,” said the captain, “what do you wish us to do now?”

  “Sometime in the next ten minutes your entire crew will be brought on deck. I may as well inform you that I represent a force of ten heavily armed marines. We are in possession of both hand grenades and rocket propelled grenades and a very large amount of high explosives.

  “If we wished, we could sink this ship. And out on the water we have two high-powered skiffs with trained helmsmen, plus a fast 1,500-ton vessel to take us home. Right now, I would like you to turn the Queen Beatrix around and begin heading slowly back toward the coast of Somalia, eight hundred miles to the west. I shall leave my three armed bodyguards with you, and should any of you do anything rash, their orders are to shoot to kill.

  “For every indiscretion you commit, my men on the lower decks will execute one of your crew. But perhaps we will start with this man here who led us to the bridge. His usefulness to us is over.”

  Captain van Marchant could see no escape. There were only thirty-two men in his entire crew. No one was armed, and they were up against ten gunmen, cutthroats who had made it clear that they would kill without mercy. Like all masters of big oceangoing merchant marine ships, the captain knew all about piracy. He just thought it could never happen to him on a vessel this large.

  He stared at W
olde and said quietly, “Very well. Since we have no choice, my crew will do as you instruct. I imagine you will require communications to transmit your ransom demands?”

  “No need. I will speak to my own captain on the telephone, and the instructions will be relayed to Somalia and then to the chairman of Athena Shipping.”

  At that moment, Wolde’s cell phone vibrated. Kifle Zenawi was on the line from somewhere in the bowels of the ship.

  Wolde answered, and Zenawi’s report was succinct: “Twenty-seven crew members held at gunpoint. I can’t see any others. We’re keeping them in the crew dining area for now. What next?”

  “Keep them together. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Wolde turned to Captain van Marchant and asked, “How many in your crew total, including all five men in this room? I know how many we have prisoner, and if you lie to me, I will shoot this deckhand instantly.”

  Paul looked about as scared as any captured Filipino can ever be. “There are thirty-two men in my crew,” replied the captain, “not including myself. Five of us, as you can see, are on the bridge.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Wolde, relieved that everyone was accounted for. He was now prepared to grant Jan van Marchant the respect of one senior officer to another.

  “And now perhaps you’d face the ship to the west,” he said. “And restrict her speed to four or five knots. I will return in a few minutes. What’s through that door?”

  “Just a small deck.”

  “Good,” replied Wolde and walked outside, pushing a single button on his satellite cell phone as he went.

  “Ismael?”

  “Yes. It’s me, Hassan. We have captured the Queen Beatrix. The captain and his entire crew of thirty-two are my prisoners, all being held at gunpoint. I am personally in command of the ship, standing outside the bridge. Elmi and Hamdan have the heavy machine gun. They are guarding Captain van Marchant and his senior officers. Everyone else is confined below to the crew dining room.”