The Delta Solution (21 page)

“Rotterdam Tankers makes no insurance claims for this kind of thing,” said the Dutch-American voice. “No claims whatsoever. The ship is in your care. If she’s lost, it’s your problem. Trust me.”

“Well, it seems no shipping company in the world is immune to the activities of the Somali pirates,” replied Sowerby. “And right now, under the rules of the European Union, we’re not allowed to have armed guards and certainly not permitted to open fire on the assault parties.”

“I know,” replied Rotterdam. “Only the Americans reserve the right to defend their ships by force of arms. As members of the EU, both the Dutch and the Greeks are bound by the rules governing human rights.”

Sowerby relayed the GPS position of the
Queen Beatrix
. He supplied the times and dates as best he could and confirmed the number of crew members and that there were no casualties. He also reported that his chairman, Constantine Livanos, had come to an arrangement with the pirate’s senior commander and that a ransom had been agreed upon.

He added that the Greek ambassador in Washington was talking to the Americans about a warship escort for the cash handover, and that Athena Shipping expected Rotterdam Tankers to make a $2 million contribution to the overall sum demanded by the pirates.

“That’s out of the question,” said the voice from the Netherlands, predictably. “The issue here is cargo. And so far as we are concerned, that’s all down to you.”

“So it may be,” replied Sowerby. “Although that would depend upon how many times in the future you would like us to charter big ships from you. Think about it.”

Outmaneuvered and outgunned by this rude bastard from New York, young Hans Cruyf, the twenty-five-year-old son of the tanker corporation’s managing director, decided to make a name for himself. So he called the offices of Netherlands 3 Television and asked to speak to the news desk.

He identified himself as a director of Rotterdam Tankers and said he wished to provide an exclusive report concerning the capture of one of the biggest oil tankers in the world by Somali pirates. He provided as much detail as possible and confirmed that his family corporation owned the massive ship and that his father would be taking charge of the investigation.

He told the reporters that he believed a ransom had been worked out and that the Americans had agreed to assist his father with a warship on station next to the
Queen Beatrix
. By the time Hans had finished, his father, Jorgen Cruyf, sounded like the new ruler of all the oceans with Hans as his very obvious right-hand man.

But the grandiose family picture the young Dutchman painted did not affect the guts of the story. The 300,000-ton
Beatrix
had been commandeered by pirates, and this was the first news of the action on the Indian Ocean.

Netherlands 3 came out with the exclusive story on their 10:00 p.m. television news bulletin. The Reuters man in Rotterdam, Jack Hardy spotted it in a city bar and called his London office. In turn they called their man in New York, who checked in with their office in Riyadh. No one knew a single thing about such a maritime outrage.

Either the Dutch TV station knew something no one else did or there was a major hoax taking place. The trouble was the news bulletin did not name the tanker’s owner, only that it believed it to be Dutch on charter to a Greek shipping corporation.

Which left the world’s newshounds spinning around in circles. There was no point calling the United States Navy since they were not involved in the actual hijack. The Somali media was close to useless as it made no difference, and the ship had never even been to America.

The Reuters office in London searched online and checked out all media outlets broadcasting or publishing at night, and no one had a single sentence about the plight of the
Queen Beatrix
. The only lead the Rotterdam
Reuters stringer had was the television station itself, and that was located on the outskirts of Amsterdam, thirty-five miles away.

So Jack hit the road north and burned rubber all the way up the E-19 highway, past Schipol Airport and into Holland’s capital city. At Netherlands 3, he went in search of the news editor. It was almost midnight and the place was quiet, but they located the reporter on the phone.

Yes, he did have a note on the owners of the
Queen Beatrix
. She was owned by Rotterdam Tankers, which had a head office down near the docks. There was a phone number, and the name of the night spokesman was Hans Cruyf.

Apparently Hans’s father owned the corporation, not to mention the ship, and this was a wild exaggeration for a man who owned a couple of thousand shares in the company and operated on an executive level similar to that enjoyed by Tom Sowerby at Athena Shipping in New York.

Jack Hardy tried to get Rotterdam Tankers on the phone but he had no private numbers, only the main switchboard. Hans was in there somewhere but it was midnight and he might be sleeping.

So Jack hit the road again, straight back down the E-19 to Rotterdam, taking the same route as his original night dash in search of the
Queen Beatrix
. It took him only a half hour to reach the offices of Rotterdam Tanker. There were lights inside but the door was locked. Jack rang the bell hard.

After five minutes someone answered and agreed to take the man from Reuters up to the office of the night duty officer. And after Jack had shown his press card, Hans Cruyf, plainly flattered to be the subject of international media attention, recounted all that he knew about the hijacked
Queen Beatrix
.

He even provided photographs of him and his father standing with the giant tanker. He furnished Jack Hardy with the names and staff photographs of Captain Jan van Marchant and his two senior officers, Johan Nistelroy and Pietr van der Saar. He provided home addresses for all three of them and confirmed the number of crew members.

Jack Hardy was astonished with gratitude. Because Hans Cruyf held back nothing. He’d provided the name and addresses of the chartering company, Athena Shipping, in New York, and provided a phone number and name for the boss there, Tom Sowerby.

He’d briefed Jack on the Greek ambassador and the connection with the fabled Livanos family. And when the interview was complete, he explained that the original communication had not come from a member of the pirate gang. It had come from their shore-based Somali commander, though he did not know the location of the base.

The man from Reuters left wearing a brand-new Rotterdam Tankerman baseball cap. And he went directly back to his office and made some calls. He failed to connect with Tom Sowerby or the Greek ambassador in Washington but he nonetheless filed his story. It was 2:00 a.m. in Holland, 1:00 a.m. in London, and 8:00 p.m. in New York.

And the Reuters story hit the print and airwaves like a pirate’s RPG. The revered international news agency slugged it:

There followed a knock-down-drag-out account of the giant tanker being boarded by the machine-gun-toting gang in the dead of night eight hundred miles offshore in the Indian Ocean and the crew being held at gunpoint.

Jack Hardy covered every base: the ransom demand, the threats, the hostages, the phone call to a member of the Livanos family who had the ship on charter. And the possibility that a ransom had been agreed to by the Greeks and the raiders.

When he’d completed the action part of his story, Jack Hardy filed another six hundred words on the recent history of piracy off the coast of Somalia, pulling up the Internet accounts of the
Niagara Falls
incident from only a couple of weeks ago.

He delved into the Reuters archives and pulled out another recent story about the lady who had traded her alimony rocket launcher for shares in two pirate operations and walked out with a $78,000 profit.

Emboldened by the new organization of the pirate raids, Jack took the opportunity to take a serious lead among journalists covering this murky world. He stepped out of the strict news and recap business and stepped into the speculation game.

And he ended his piece with a flourish:

Jack Hardy acquired those names from a government directory on the Web. And altogether they added to a sparkling little cluster of facts with which he rounded off his world scoop.

Some of the “facts” might even have been true.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, General Zack Lancaster, Admirals Mark Bradfield and Andy Carlow, not to mention Commander Mack Bedford, were as furious as anyone can be without blowing a gasket.

Military people detest the glare of publicity, and the
Queen Beatrix
debacle was supposed to be kept strictly under wraps, mostly because the subject was hideously sensitive and the very mention of it riled the public, the politicians, and the media to a degree second only to civil war and mass murder.

Everyone involved had been hoping for a swift and silent payment of the ransom, which would send the
Beatrix
peacefully on her way into the Malacca Strait and then China.

But this suddenly huge story, incontrovertibly linked to the
Niagara Falls
incident, appeared in almost every news publication in the United States, many of which plastered it on their front page. There were pictures of the crew, pictures and diagrams of the ship, valuations placed on its cargo of crude oil, and quotations from executives.

Various publications had attempted to force a quote out of the Chinese National Oil Corporation in Shanghai. And one breathtakingly enterprising
New York radio reporter had tried to get through to the private residence of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands to find out how upset she was at losing her ship.

It all had the slightly crazed atmosphere that accompanies news stories when the journalists know only about one-fifth of the facts.

And now the admirals could expect the roof to fall in, once again finding themselves fielding press demands asking why this was being allowed to happen. That the United States, with the biggest navy in the history of modern warfare, could possibly allow a bunch of half-naked African bandits to run circles around them. Every week.

A police line was formed outside the Olympic Tower to prevent the media from launching a mass entry to the twentieth floor to find Tom Sowerby, who had been mentioned that morning in newspapers and news broadcasts more often than the president.

The Fourth Estate attacked from all angles. They stationed men outside the home of Captain van Marchant’s mother in Delft; they ran to ground the families of the captured Johan Nistelroy and Pietr van der Saar outside Rotterdam; they besieged the apartment block in Monte Carlo trying to reach Constantine Livanos; they laid siege to the Greek Embassy in Washington, DC; and they fearlessly tried to smart-talk a whole fleet of lieutenant commanders in the United States Navy Press Office.

More than one spokesman was moved to ask inquiring reporters, “Why in God’s name are you so excited about this? No one’s in any danger, and we are doing everything possible to solve the problem. It should all be over in another day. What do you want from us?”

And the answer from all the reporters followed the same lines: “Because it’s in the public interest, our readers/listeners/viewers deserve to know the dangers present on the high seas. If these pirates can take a ship that big, they can take anything. This tanker is managed from New York City, and our readers/listeners/viewers need to know why the US Navy is apparently helpless.”

By noontime, General Zack Lancaster was being pressured from the White House either to act or make some kind of statement through the DOD Press Office. But action was out of the question until Mack Bedford’s trainees came on line. And any statement would be construed as vacuous.

The general’s advice never varied: “Everyone keep their heads well down and keep repeating, ‘It’s not even our goddamned ship, and neither
the owners, nor the insurance companies, nor the crew, wish us to intervene in any way.”

Meanwhile he privately ordered Admiral Mark Bradfield to send in the destroyer from Diego Garcia to help the
Queen Beatrix
, if necessary, during the ransom payment operation. “Because if something goes wrong and people get killed,” he added, “we, sure as hell, are going to get the blame right here in the US.”