‘It’s a small menu, Steve,’ said Seymour.
‘Still, it looks as if the LPG tanker idea was a blind alley,’ said Hill. He rose to leave and return to London.
‘There is one thing that worries me, Mr Hill,’ said the cargo egghead.
‘It’s Steve,’ said Hill. The SIS has always maintained the tradition of first names, from the highest to the humblest, with the sole exception of the Chief himself. The informality underwrites the one-team ethos.
‘Well, three months ago an LPG tanker was lost with all hands.’
‘So?’
‘No one actually saw her go down. Her captain came on the radio in high distress to say he had a catastrophic engine-room fire and did not think he could save his ship. Then . . . nothing. She was the Java Star.’
‘Any traces?’ asked Seymour.
‘Well, yes. Traces. Before he went off the air he gave his exact position. First on the scene was a refrigerator ship coming up from the south. Her captain reported self-inflating dinghies, lifebelts, and various flotsam at the spot. No sign of survivors. Captain and crew have never been heard of since.’
‘Tragic, but so what?’ asked Hill.
‘It was where it happened, sir . . . er . . . Steve. In the Celebes Sea. Two hundred miles from a place called Labuan Island.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said Steve Hill and left for London.
While Martin was driving, the Countess of Richmond crossed the Equator. She was heading north by north-west, and only her navigator knew exactly where. He was going for a spot eight hundred miles west of the Azores and twelve hundred miles east of the American coast. If extended due west, her track would bring her to Baltimore at the top of the vastly populated Chesapeake Bay.
Some of those on board the Countess began their early preparations for the entry into paradise. This involved the shaving of all body hair and the writing of the last testaments of faith. These were done into the camera lens and the last wills were read out by each writer.
The Afghan did his as well, but he chose to speak in Pashto. Yusuf Ibrahim, from his time in Afghanistan, had a few words of the language, and strained to understand, but even if he had been fluent he could not have faulted the testament.
The man from the Tora Bora spoke of the destruction of his family by an American rocket and his joy that he would soon see them again while bringing justice at last to the Great Satan. As he spoke, he realized that none of this was ever going to reach any shore in physical form. It would all have to be transmitted by Suleiman in datastream before he too died and his equipment with him. What no one seemed to know was how they would die and what justice would be visited upon the USA – the exceptions being the explosives expert and Ibrahim himself. But they revealed nothing.
Given that the entire crew was surviving on cold tinned food, no one noticed that a steel carving knife with a seven-inch blade was missing from the galley.
When he was unobserved Martin was quietly honing its blade to a razor edge with the whetstone in the knife drawer. He thought of using the dead of night to drop over the stern to slash the dinghy, but rejected the idea.
He was with the four men who slept in bunks in the crew quarters up in the bow. There was always a helmsman at the wheel, which was right next to the access point for going over the stern on a rope. The radio expert practically lived in his tiny communications shack behind the bridge and the engineer was always down in his engine room, below the bridge at the stern. Any of them could put a head outside and see him.
And the damage would be spotted. A saboteur would be known about at once. The loss of the dinghy would be a setback but not enough to abort the mission. And there might be time to patch the damage. He dropped the idea but kept the rag-sheathed knife strapped to the small of his back. Each spell at the bridge he tried to work out which port they were going for and what lay inside the sea containers that he might be able to sabotage to destruction. Neither answer appeared, and the Countess steamed north by north-west.
The global hunt switched and narrowed. All the marine giants, all the tankers and all the gas ships had been checked and verified. All the ID transponders conformed to their required transmissions; all the course and tracks conformed to their predicted journeys; three thousand captains had spoken in voice to their head offices and agents, giving personal birth and background details so that, even if they were under duress, no hijacker could know whether they were lying or not.
The USA, her Navy, Marines and Coast Guards, stretched to the limits without furlough or time off, was boarding and escorting in every cargo vessel seeking berth in a major port. This was causing economic inconvenience, but nothing big enough to inflict real damage to the biggest economy on earth.
After the tip from Ipswich the origins and ownership of the Java Star were checked with a toothcomb. Because she was small, her owning company concealed itself behind a ‘shell’ company lodged with a bank that turned out to be a brass plate in a Far-Eastern tax haven. The Borneo refinery that had provided the cargo was legitimate but knew little about the ship itself. Her builders were traced – she had had six owners in her life – and provided plans. A sister ship was found and swarmed over by Americans with measuring tapes. Computer imaging produced an exact replica of the Java Star, but not the ship itself.
The government of the flag of convenience she flew when last seen was visited in force. But it was a Polynesian atoll republic and the checkers were soon satisfied that the gas tanker had never even been there.
The western world needed answers to three questions: was she really dead? If not, where was she now? And what was her new name? The KH-11 satellites were instructed to narrow their search to something resembling the Java Star.
In the first week of April the joint operation at Edzell air base in Scotland was stood down. There was no more it could do that was not now being done far more officially by the main western intel-gathering agencies.
Michael McDonald returned with relief to his native Washington. He stayed with the hunt for the ghost ship, but out of Langley. Part of the CIA’s mission was to reinterrogate any detainee in any of its covert detention centres who might, before capture, have heard a whisper of a project called Al-Isra. And they called in every source they had out in the shadowy world of Islamist terrorism. There were no takers. The very phrase referring to the magical journey through the night to great enlightenment seemed to have been born and died with an Egyptian terror-financier who went off a balcony in Peshawar in September.
With regret Colonel Mike Martin was presumed to have been lost on mission. He had clearly done what he could, and if the Java Star or another floating bomb were discovered heading for the USA, he would be deemed to have succeeded. But no one expected to see him again. It had simply been too long since his last sign of life in a diver’s kitbag on Labuan.
Three days before the G8 meeting patience finally ran out, and at the highest level, with the global search based on the British tip-off. Marek Gumienny, at his desk in Langley, called Steve Hill on a secure line with the news.
‘Steve, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you and even more so for your man Mike Martin. But the conviction here is that he’s gone and with the biggest trawl of global shipping ever attempted, he must have been wrong.’
‘And Sam Seymour’s theory?’ asked Hill.
‘Same thing. No dice. We have checked out just about every goddam tanker on the planet, all categories. About fifty left to locate and identify, then it’s over. Whatever this Al-Isra phrase meant, either we’ll never find out or it means nothing or it has been long discontinued. Hold on . . . I’ll kill the other line.’
In a moment, he came back on. ‘There’s a ship overdue. Left Trinidad for Puerto Rico four days ago. Due yesterday. Never showed. Won’t answer.’
‘What kind of ship?’ asked Hill.
‘A tanker. Three thousand tonnes. Look, she may have foundered. But we’re checking now.’
‘What was she carrying?’ asked Hill.
‘Liquefied petroleum gas,’ was the answer.
It was a Keyhole KH-11 satellite that found her, six hours after the complaint from Puerto Rico to the head office of the oil-company owners of the refinery, based in Houston, was turned into a major alarm situation.
Sweeping through the eastern Caribbean with its cameras and listening sensors checking on a five-hundred-mile wide swathe of sea and islands, the Keyhole heard a transponder signal from far below and its computer confirmed it was from the missing Doña Maria.
The knowledge went instantly to a variety of agencies, which was why Marek Gumienny was interrupted in his phone call to London. Others in the loop were SOCOM headquarters at Tampa, Florida, the US Navy and the Coast Guards. All were given the exact grid reference of the missing vessel.
In not switching off the transponder, the hijackers were either being very stupid or hoping to get very lucky. But they were only following their orders. With the transponder emitting, they gave away their name and position. With it switched off, they became immediately suspect as a possible rogue ship.
The small LPG tanker was still being navigated and steered by a terrified Captain Montalban, four days without sleep, save only a few catnaps before he was kicked awake again. She had slipped past Puerto Rico in the darkness, passed west of the Turks and Caicos Islands and lost herself for a while in the cluster of seven hundred islands that make up the Bahamas.
When the Keyhole found her she was steaming due west just south of Bimini, the westernmost island of the whole archipelago.
At Tampa her course was plotted and extended forward. It went straight into the open mouth of the Port of Miami, a waterway that leads into the heart of the city.
Within ten minutes the small tanker was attracting real company. A P-3 Orion sub-hunter, aloft from the naval air station at Key West, found her, dropped to a few thousand feet and began to circle, filming her from every angle. She appeared on a wall-sized plasma screen in the near-darkness of the ops room at Tampa, almost life-size.
‘Jesus, would you look at that,’ murmured an operator to no one in particular.
While at sea someone had gone over the stern of the tanker with a brush and white paint to daub a cross-bar over the letter ‘i’ in Maria. It attempted to rechristen her the Doña Marta but the white smear was simply too crude to dupe any onlooker for more than a few seconds.
There are two coastguard cutters operating out of Charleston, South Carolina, both Hamilton class and both were at sea. They are the 717 USCG Mellon and her sister ship the Morgenthau. The Mellon was closer and turned towards the hijacked fugitive, moved from optimum cruise revolutions to flank speed. Her navigator rapidly plotted her intercept at ninety minutes, just before sundown.
The word ‘cutter’ hardly does the Mellon justice; she can perform like a small destroyer at 150 metres in length and 3,300 tons deadweight. As she raced through the Atlantic swell of early April her crew ran to prepare her armament – just in case. The missing tanker was already rated as ‘likely hostile’.
The Mellon’s weaponry is not to be trifled with. Lightest of her three systems is the six-barrel 20-mm Gatling gun which pumps out such a blizzard of ordnance that it is used as an antimissile weapon. In theory even an incoming rocket would be torn apart by flying through such a hail of bullets. But the Phalanx gun does not have to be used against missiles; it can tear almost anything apart but it needs to be fairly close.
She also carried two Bushmaster 25-mm cannon, not as rapid but heavier and enough to give a small tanker a completely spoiled day. And she has her deck-mounted Oto Melara 76-mm rapid-fire cannon. By the time the Doña Maria became a speck on the horizon all three systems were crewed and ready, and the men crouching over what so far they had only used in training would have been more than saintly if they did not harbour a sneaking lust to use them in real action.
With the Orion above them, filming everything in real time and passing the images to Tampa, the Mellon curved round the stern of the tanker and came abreast of her, throttling back to format just two hundred yards off the beam. Then the Mellon called on the Doña Maria with her loudhailer.
‘Unidentified tanker, this is United States Coast Guard vessel Mellon. Heave to. I say again, heave to. We are coming aboard.’
Powerful field glasses could pick up the figure at the helm holding the wheel, and two other figures flanking the man. There was no response. The tanker did not slow down. The message was repeated.
After the third message the captain gave the order for a single shell to be fired into the sea ahead of the tanker’s bow. As the water spout erupted over the bow, soaking the tarpaulins with which someone had vainly tried to hide the network of pipes and tubes that betray any tanker’s real purpose, those on the bridge of the Doña Maria must have got the message. Still she did not slow down.
Then two figures appeared from the door of the sterncastle, just behind the bridge. One had an M60 machine gun slung round his neck. It was a futile gesture and sealed the tanker’s fate. His North African features were clearly visible in the setting sun. He loosed off a short burst that went over the top of the Mellon, then took a bullet in the chest from one of the four M16 carbines being aimed at him from the deck of the Mellon.
That was the end of negotiations. As the Algerian’s body slumped backwards and the steel door through which he had stepped slammed shut, the captain of the Mellon asked for permission to sink the runaway. But permission was denied. The message from base was unequivocal.
‘Pull away from her. Make distance now and make it fast. She’s a floating bomb. Resume station a mile from the tanker.’
Regretfully the Mellon turned away, powered up to maximum speed and left the tanker alone to her fate. The two F-16 Falcons were already airborne and three minutes distant.
There is a squadron at Pensacola Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle that maintains a five-minute-to-scramble standby readiness round the clock. Its primary use is against drug smugglers, airborne and sometimes seaborne, trying to slip into Florida and neighbouring states with (mainly) cocaine.
They came out of the sunset in a clear darkling sky, locked on to the tanker west of Bimini and armed their Maverick missiles. Each pilot’s visual display showed him the smart missiles’ lock on the target and the death of the tanker was very mechanical, very precise, very devoid of emotion.
There was a clipped command from the element leader and both Mavericks left their racks beneath the fighters and followed their noses. Seconds later two warheads involving 135 kilograms of unpleasantness hit the tanker.
Even though her cargo was not air-mixed for maximum power the detonations of the Mavericks deep inside the petrol jelly were enough.
From a mile away the crew of the Mellon watched her torch and were duly impressed. They felt the heat wash over their faces and smelled the stench of concentrated gasoline on fire. It was quick. There was nothing left to smoulder on the surface. The forward and stern ends of the tanker went down as two separate pieces of molten junk. The last of her heavier fuel oil flickered for five minutes, then the sea claimed it all.
Just as Ali Aziz al-Khattab had intended.
Within an hour the President of the USA was interrupted at a state banquet with a brief whispered message. He nodded, demanded a full verbal report at eight the next morning in the Oval Office, and returned to his soup.
At five minutes before eight the Director of the CIA with Marek Gumienny at his side were shown into the Oval Office. Gumienny had been in that room twice before and it still impressed the hell out of him. The President and the other five of the six principals were there.
The formalities were brief. Marek Gumienny was bidden to report on the progress and termination of a lengthy exercise in counter-terrorism known as Crowbar.
He kept it short, aware that the man sitting under the round window giving on to the Rose Garden, with its six-inch bullet-proof glass, loathed long explanations. The rule of thumb was always ‘fifteen minutes and then sh
ut up’. Marek Gumienny telescoped the complexities of Crowbar into twelve.
There was silence when he stopped.
‘So the tip from the Brits turned out to be right?’ said the Vice-President.
‘Yes, sir. The agent they slipped inside Al-Qaeda, a very brave officer whom I had the privilege of meeting last fall, must be presumed dead. If not he would have shown sign of life by now. But he got the message out. The terror weapon was indeed a ship.’
‘I had no idea cargoes that dangerous were being carried around the world on a daily basis,’ marvelled the Secretary of State in the ensuing silence.
‘Nor I,’ said the President. ‘Now, regarding the G8 Conference, what is your advice to me?’
The Secretary of Defense glanced at the Director of National Intelligence and nodded. They had clearly prepared their go-ahead.
‘Mr President, we have every reason to believe the terrorist threat to this country, notably to the city of Miami, was destroyed last night. The peril is over. Regarding the G8, during the entire conference you will be under the protection of the US Navy, and the Navy has pledged its word that no harm will come to you. Our advice therefore is that you go ahead to your G8 with an easy mind!’
‘Why then, that’s what I shall surely do,’ said the President of the USA.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
David Gundlach reckoned he had the best job in the world. Second-best, anyway. To have that fourth gold ring on the sleeve or epaulette and be the captain of the vessel would be even better, but he happily settled for First Officer.
On an April evening he stood at the starboard wing of the huge bridge and looked down at the swarming humanity on the dock of the new Brooklyn Terminal two hundred feet below him. The borough of Brooklyn was not above him; at the height of a twenty-three-storey building, he was looking down on most of it.
Pier Twelve on Buttermilk Channel, which was being inaugurated that very evening, is not a small dock but this liner took up all of it. At 1,132 feet long, 135 feet in the beam and drawing 39 feet so that the whole channel had had to be deepened for her, she was the biggest passenger liner afloat by a big margin. The more First Officer Gundlach, on his first crossing since his promotion, looked at her, the more magnificent she seemed.