The Delta Solution (15 page)

M
R. PETER KILIMO RAN THE OPERATIONS DIVISION OF ATHENA Shipping from a twentieth-floor office in New York’s 570-foot-tall Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second Street. Peter’s father, Omar, had worked as a butler for Aristotle Onassis, the man who was largely responsible for building the tower in the early 1970s.

The operations division in any big-city shipbroking house represents the heart of the corporation. It is the computerized engine room of the business—the room where the world’s shipping lanes are tracked and the satellite signals come in, having located giant cargo vessels and tankers all over the globe.

There’s nothing glamorous about this section of the work—guys in “ops” don’t lunch in fancy Manhattan restaurants wooing potential clients. Guys in ops have their finger on the maritime pulse. They don’t have time for lunch. But they can tell you in a split second if a 300,000-ton VLCC is likely to miss the tide when it finally turns up the Yangtze River toward Shanghai.

Peter had been in the shipping game all his life. Mr. Onassis had liked
him from the start, this tall twelve-year-old son of one of his most trusted butlers, a Somalian named Omar Kilimo. And Peter, who had been born Ali, became Westernized and was schooled in New York while his father lived and worked in the sprawling Onassis residence in the Olympic Tower.

When the great man died in 1977, Peter Kilimo was headhunted by a rival shipping line that also had offices in the tower. And while Peter subsequently made a respectable living, $250,000 a year plus annual bonuses that often ran to a similar sum, his loyalty to any corporation vanished with the demise of his friend Aristotle Onassis.

Peter was sixty years old now and probably knew more than any man about the world’s shipping lanes and the enormous oceangoing vessels that rode them. He knew their cargo capacities and the seaports that could handle them. Tankers were his specialty. Massive tankers, that is. The VLCCs that take four miles to stop after someone applies the brakes.

Peter was a family man. He was married to a New York girl, and they had brought up three children in the outer suburb of Bronxville. And from them he harbored a very deep secret. In 2005, he had met a somewhat engaging financier at a United Nations reception for East African diplomats and been offered a private consultancy position, which would require little of his time but a certain amount of detail about voyages of crude oil and petrochemical tankers sailing out of the Persian Gulf.

It was a weekly task that Peter Kilimo could have done in his sleep. In recent months he had been disconcerted to notice that his e-mailed reports to his “chairman” contained the names of several big merchant vessels subsequently hijacked for heavy cash ransoms off the coast of Somalia. His chairman’s name was Mr. Mohammed Salat.

It occurred to Peter that he may be becoming an important wheel in a major pirate operation. And soon he became an expert on the activities of Mr. Salat, who plainly ran an enormous illegal operation out of Haradheere and was very likely wanted by Interpol and God knows who else.

Every alarm bell in Peter’s mind was sounding off. He could not possibly become implicated in such a nefarious world. He could be ruined, maybe even prosecuted. But he loved that $20,000 wire transfer that kept showing up in a private bank account he had opened in Westchester County. No one knew about that. Especially the IRS.

He justified his little sideline business by telling himself he had deep
and abiding roots in Somalia. He had, after all, been born in Mogadishu and had lived there until his father, in 1958, accepted a position in the royal household of Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa before moving to Athens to work for Onassis.

It was only in very recent months that Peter, the highly respectable shipping executive who commuted into Manhattan every working morning, became really concerned about the intricate level of shipping details he was supplying to the pirate master on the coast of Somalia.

One ship in particular was on his mind, the
Queen Beatrix
, a 300,000-ton crude-oil tanker owned by the Rotterdam Tanker Corporation in Holland and currently on charter to Athena Shipping, the Greek-owned and New York- and Monaco-based brokerage that employed him.

Currently the
Beatrix
was 1,000 miles south of the Strait of Hormuz and past the vast estuary of the Red Sea with 345,000 cubic meters of Saudi crude in her gigantic cargo tanks. At more than 1,000 feet long, she was one of the largest visitors to the offshore Sea Island loading docks and was now well on her way down the northern coast of Somalia, making around 12 knots seven hundred miles from the shore.

Her route would take her straight down the sixtieth line of longitude before making her hard left turn and running south of the Maldives but north of Diego Garcia, en route to the Malacca Strait.

The final destination of the
Beatrix
was Zhan-Jiang, 250 miles southwest of Hong Kong and just about the first major oil port in China for a ship steaming north around the island of Hainan.

Zhan-Jiang was a very lucrative tanker route for Athena Shipping. Her giant refineries were in the heavily industrialized seaport, and under the current trading agreement, the China National Oil Corporation had paid a full 20 percent deposit on this cargo and would settle the balance at $60 a barrel when the ship docked.

The
Beatrix
carried almost 2.9 million barrels, and she was one of a limited number of the world’s biggest tankers to make the journey along the shortest route to the South China Sea, through the five-hundred-mile-long Malacca Strait, which divides Malaysia from the enormous island of Sumatra.

The strait is only eighty-two feet deep, but the almost new
Beatrix
was one of the first of a new breed of two-hundred-foot-wide, double-hulled
VLCCs with a sufficiently shallow draft to enter this critical if narrow seaway, saving hundreds of miles each way.

But there was a problem deep in the massive heart of the
Beatrix
, an intermittent vibration on the main shaft, probably traceable to the stern tube bearings or the coupled flywheel at the forward end. Either way it was not life-threatening, but any minor problem that affects the shaft alignment needs to be examined by the engineering team sooner rather than later.

Bearing in mind the main shaft in a VLCC is about the size of a giant redwood tree, the vibration, to a wary skipper, sounded like a seven pointer on the Richter scale. And the problem, as on all super-tankers, was the same as always: Do we slow down right now, try to eliminate the vibration, and risk being late into Zhan-Jiang? Or do we press on hard, hope to hell it doesn’t get worse, and get it fixed in China, where the company will almost certainly get royally ripped off by the local shipyard?

Answer: Let’s see what our engineers can do.

Peter knew the giant ship was planning to slow down in the open waters of the Indian Ocean, probably at night. And because of the pressures of arriving on time, she may need to make two stops while her engineers attempted to make tiny adjustments in the engine room, millimeters rather than inches.

Because the huge ship was one of Athena’s own, he had felt a severe pang of guilt when sending that last communiqué to Mohammed Salat informing him of the route of the
Queen Beatrix
and of the problem that would require attention in the next couple of days.

He had also informed Salat that the heavily laden ship was riding low in the water under the command of a Dutch captain, Jan van Marchant. In Peter’s opinion the ship would not attempt to exceed 10 knots until the shaft problem was thoroughly solved and that right now she was running south 60.00E 10.00N.

She operated under a Liberian flag of convenience, and the majority of her crew were from the Philippines, except for the first officers and the engineers, who were all Dutch. He enclosed the phone number of Athena Shipping in Monaco, where he knew the Greek boss of the corporation was in residence.

For a pirate, this information was priceless because the
Beatrix
was carrying cargo worth $200 million on the international market. However,
tankers that big are an extremely difficult target, especially when running at maximum speed. To board her was a death-defying maneuver, and her senior officers could be armed in defiance of the current rules.

The better news was the presence of maybe thirty Filipinos who owed not one shred of loyalty to the New York charter company and none to the owners in Rotterdam. Most of them did not know where Rotterdam was, and neither did they care. Theirs were well-paid but menial jobs—cleaning, cooking, laundry, stewarding, and occasionally helping with the docking. Nothing else.

Not one of them was interested in laying down his life for the
Queen Beatrix
, and if past acts of piracy were any guide, the raiders’ biggest danger was being trampled to death in the Filipinos’ stampede to surrender.

If the Somali Marines were to launch an attack, they would need their top team, and their number-one commander, Ismael Wolde, who had only been ashore for ten days since the successful attack on the
Niagara Falls
. But this was a huge opportunity. It was almost midnight local time when Mohammed Salat dialled Ismael’s cell phone.

The pirate assault commander was at home working on plans for an extension to his six-room home on the smart side of Haradheere. He planned to build a garage for his new 4 x 4 Honda, a billiards room, and a television room, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms above. Ismael was not married but he had a spectacular-looking Ethiopian girlfriend. And they had two children.

He listened carefully to the hot news from Mohammed and confirmed that the
Mombassa
was fuelled and ready to go, except that Captain Hassan was very obviously drunk in the bar next to the stock exchange. Two other members of the marines, Omar and Abdul, were similarly inebriated. And they all had an excuse. It was Captain Hassan’s birthday. Elmi Ahmed was with them but he never touched alcohol.

Ismael was an extremely ambitious pirate, and the vision of the stalled VLCC in open water in the dark, swarming with passive Filipinos and $200 million worth of crude oil in the holding tanks was almost too much for him to grasp.

“That’s just beautiful,” he said. “Do we have a fix on the ship’s position?”

“Right now she’s steaming south, down the sixtieth line of longitude,” replied Salat. “She’s maybe seven hundred miles off the Somali coast and probably slowing down. ’Bout ten degrees north.”

Ismael smiled to himself. “You have all the weapons and ammunition?” he said. “In the armory, right?”

“Everything is ready. I have six men on duty, ready to assist any way you want.”

“Sir, high tide is 3:00 a.m. That means the
Mombassa
needs to be afloat by 5:00 a.m. She’s a big ship and we’ll need a lot of people to haul her down the beach. If we’re not under way by 5:00 a.m., we’re stuck for another ten hours and that’s obviously hopeless.”

“How about the captain? He can’t take command if he’s shit-faced, can he?”

“No, but Elmi Ahmed can.”

“Okay, can you get the marines together?”

“I think so. Omar Farah, Zenawi, Ougoure, and Sofian will be ready to go in an hour. The boat’s freshwater tanks were filled today, but we’ll need food, which I’ll have to leave to your men. We’ll load the three drunks with the provisions. They can sleep it off on board.”

“Okay. I’ll have the guards go door to door in the town, round up some guys to haul the boat to the water,” said Salat. “How many will you need?”

“Maybe fifty men on the lines, if we can get the big winch to work and all four tractors will start. We’ll first need to drag the winch down to the water.”

“Okay, Ismael. Can I announce the new mission on the stock exchange?”

“I don’t know why not. What’s my bonus?”

“Two thousand shares on a $10 launch. Then your leader’s share of the prize, 5,000 stocks at closing market value when the boats return.”

“Can we rendezvous on the beach, say at 2:30 a.m.? It’ll take a while to get everyone ready.”

“Especially the drunks,” said Salat. “I’m afraid we’re reaching the stage where alcohol must be banned from all marine personnel.

“Our present information network is working so well,” muttered Salat. “All key personnel must be on near permanent standby.”

And so, in the small hours, the second major pirate launch from Haradheere in two weeks was under way. But this time there was no cheering and chanting. In the still of the hot, humid night, lines of men took up position on the ropes attached to the
Mombassa
. The SUVs, two of them hitched up on either side of the former longline fishing boat, were
revving, ready to take the strain. Down by the water, the diesel engine on the big winch roared.

By 2:45 a.m., the gear was loaded on board: food, water, boarding equipment, machine guns, RPGs, ammunition belts, and grenades. The gas tanks were full, and the erect figure of Ismael Wolde could be seen standing next to the 1,500-ton beached vessel.

The
Mombassa
began to move after ten seconds. The fifty men pulled with all their strength, but the heavy muscle of the SUVs made a huge difference, and the old but powerful winch made up for a hundred men as it wound in the cable, dragging the boat down the sand to the water.

It took maybe seven minutes to get the stern wet. Because the engines could no longer drag it, the
Mombassa
had to be pushed the final yards with the tide washing in around everyone’s ankles. Ahmed and his men hitched up the skiffs to the long ropes and drove them out into the breakers.

Everyone grabbed the lines and, on the command, heaved, waiting for the wave that would lift the boat and swing her around. Others rushed in and jammed their shoulders into the sweep of the starboard bow. Everyone pushed on that side; everyone else tried to pull without falling under the water, and the big Yamahas roared.