The Delta Solution (54 page)

WITH ALMOST ALL OF HIS MEN airlifted over to the
Chafee,
Commander Bedford was watching a luxury motor yacht, about seventy feet long, moving slowly in about a half mile off the stern of the
Ocean Princess
. And then, to his amazement, he saw the boat slow down and pick up the three swimmers, the pirates who had just jumped ship into the Indian Ocean.

“Who the hell are they?” he muttered to Cody, who was staring at the rescue through powerful SEAL binoculars.

“God knows,” replied the chief. “I got a coupla black guys hauling the two kids aboard and that weird-looking prick climbing in last, up a ladder.”

“Is that the goddamned pirate mother ship?” said Mack.

“I don’t know,” said Chief Sharp. “But there’s a couple of long, narrow skiffs towing off her aft end.”

“It has to be the pirate command ship—these guys are together.”

“Pirate command ship!” exclaimed Cody. “Steady, boss. That sonofabitch
cost the fat end of ten million bucks. Anyone owned that, he sure wouldn’t need to be a pirate.”

“Could be a couple of merciful towel-head princes, right?” chuckled Mack.

“With a couple of native canoes hanging off the stern? But maybe they found ’em just floating around.”

“And maybe they didn’t,” said Mack. “Remember one thing, Cody. These bastards have stolen a couple of giant oil tankers plus this cruise liner in the last month. I’m guessing they stole that motor yacht and are about to make their getaway with the only survivors from their mission.”

“Well, we better find out, right? I believe our policy is to leave no trace of our activities.”

“Correct, chief. That’s our policy. Hop up that gangway and ask the captain to close in on them. We’ll board and find out exactly who they are.”

“Okay, boss. Be right back.”

Cody made his way up to the bridge and explained the problem to
Chafee
’s Captain Marks, who immediately turned the wheel hard to starboard and headed out toward the stationary
Desert Shark
.

First thing Mack saw was the Saudi flag flying off the stern. Then he saw the name. Someone handed him a bullhorn and he yelled for the master of the
Desert Shark
to identify his boat and its passengers, none of whom were visible.

Captain Hassan, who was in the wheelhouse, completely ignored the request, which was an unusual thing to do given that he had one of the most powerful warships in the world, armed with heavy navy guns and missiles, standing off about forty feet from his hull.

Mack yelled again. “
DESERT SHARK!
You are flying the flag of the Islamic kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is a United Sates naval destroyer. We are your country’s principal ally. Please identify yourselves. There has been a fatal act of terrorism here, and you have taken on board three of the perpetrators. You must identify yourselves.”

Captain Hassan was terrified. He had no idea what to say to this American officer. Elijah was below with the three soaking-wet pirates who had escaped. Hassan was alone in the wheelhouse. He said nothing but began to turn his sleek and very fast craft away from the
Chafee
. He’d outrun it; that was the game.

“If you do not comply with my request,” bellowed Mack, “my men will
board the
Desert Shark
and arrest all of you on suspicion of piracy on the high seas . . . in the name of the government of the United States of America.”

Hassan hit the throttle and rammed it open with such force that the
Desert Shark
almost lurched up on her rear end. But she flattened out and blasted clear of the US warship, making 30 knots plus, heading west, with the three pirates rolling around on the floor of the stateroom, trying to regain their balance.

“
Jesus Christ!
” shouted Mack. “Captain Marks, sink that ship! And stay well clear. She’s probably loaded with high explosives.”

Captain Marks ordered an antiship action. The
Desert Shark
was racing away so quickly they would need to make decisions fast—like gunfire or missile—and by warship standards the
Shark
was not much of a target.

The
Chafee
’s missile director called to the bridge: “
Taking
Desert Shark
out with a SLAMMER
”—navy-speak for Standoff Land Attack Missile Expanded Response. A Boeing Harpoon guided missile: an all-weather, over-the-horizon, sea-skimming, low-level, 570 miles per hour ship-killer with a five-hundred-pound-blast warhead, one of the destroyer’s many steel-cased angels of death.

The
Desert Shark
was ten minutes and six miles away on the horizon when the Harpoon launched, lancing out of the tube with a fiery blast and hurtling toward the fleeing Hassan. Within twenty-eight seconds it had switched on its seeker, swerved, and then smashed into the port quarter of the elegant white-hulled yacht.

Designed to knock over a full-sized enemy warship, it practically blew the stern off the
Shark
and reduced the rest of the vessel to burning matchwood. The explosion was, however, not in scale to the size of the boat, which was, as Mack Bedford had feared, packed with high explosives: hand grenades, RPGs, dynamite, and ammunition.

It was a spectacular display of pure combustion, flames and black smoke billowing three hundred feet in the air. One of the trailing skiffs did a passable imitation of the space shuttle as it blew skyward, 250 vertical feet, totally engulfed in flame.

A passerby would have assumed that someone had hit and sunk an aircraft carrier. And long after she had slipped beneath the waves, there were deep, muffled sounds of explosions, and great, oily bubbles broke on the
surface. No luxurious motor yacht, in all of maritime history, ever went to the bottom with a greater roar of belching rage and protest.

The sailors watching from the deck of the
Chafee
, even from a six-mile distance, could not believe the volume of the explosion that signalled the end of the pirate ship.

If Hassan and Kifle were on their way to hell, they must surely have made a grand entrance.

The
Ocean Princess
mission had been a disaster for Haradheere. There were no survivors, not one pirate left to tell the tale. Everything they had brought with them was gone, their food and equipment had vanished, and there was no trace of the boat or the men who had sailed with her.

Mohammed Salat, worried out of his mind, still could not reach Wolde or Ahmed. The last message he received had been six hours earlier: “
Somali pirates control the
Ocean Princess
. Speaking to owner Hyland shortly. Ten million asked and agreement expected. Ismael.
”

At that point Salat had issued the secondary tranche of “Operation Princess” stocks, 10,000 more at $30, and there had been a buying stampede. The market had waited with immense patience for news that a ransom had been agreed upon.

But since then, the silence had been endless. Salat was in possession of several numbers: Ismael’s cell, Elmi’s cell, Captain Hassan’s cell, the fixed cell on board the
Desert Shark
. But all lines had been dead for two hours. And there was only one possible conclusion left. Somehow, his Somali Marines had been stopped in their tracks. Only death or capture could have prevented them from taking a call from pirate HQ, Haradheere, the garrison to which their personal fortunes were so irrevocably bound.

There was the slightest possibility that a band of pirates could receive ransom money and then flee across the ocean with ten sacks of one-hundred-dollar bills to live happily ever after.

But that was not the character of Wolde and his men. Most of the Somali Marines had left their entire families in Haradheere—wives, children, fathers, mothers, and other relatives. Even more importantly, the shipowners and insurers had not had time to pay a ransom. No, in Salat’s opinion something had gone catastrophically wrong. At 6:00 p.m. that evening, the Haradheere Stock Market crashed.

Salat’s despondency was infectious. He was being bombarded with questions by his investors. He’d been in the stock exchange for several hours, and in a twenty-minute period, the price of the bonds issued for Operation Princess had crashed from $30 to $4. Everyone was trying to bail out, to preserve some of their money, and there was a desperation about the investors who had gone in at $30.

Guards had already gone back to the garrison and returned with cash to pay off the bondholders. Even the pirates’ relatives were trying to get out. There were the local big hitters who’d gone in for 1,000 shares at the original $20, and they were getting out for between $4,000 and $6,000.

Out in the street, a throng of Africans was spreading over the entire town, and their mournful cry echoed in the morning air. It was at once a sound of loss, sadness, and an unmistakable expression of tribal melancholy . . .
O-O-O-O-H-H CRY FOR THE SOMALI WARRIOR!! DEATH HAS TAKEN OUR HEROES . . . O-O-O-O-H WHOMBA!!

Deep in the garrison, Salat’s staff tried to make contact with the outside world, tuning the television to the satellites and searching out the twenty-four-hour news channels from the Western world. This was never easy, but now, even when they managed to get connected, there was no news of any mayhem in the Indian Ocean.

They even tried e-mailing their New York agent, Peter Kilimo, but there was no Internet connection. Salat tried a phone call to Najib Saleh in Yemen, but the arms dealer knew nothing, and Salat’s news about a possible disaster practically gave him palpitations since he might need to explain the disappearance of the
Desert Shark
to her Saudi owners.

Late in the afternoon, the first breach in the mystery appeared. American radio stations were announcing that a pirate attempt on a US cruise ship in the Indian Ocean, close to the Maldives, had failed. Nothing else. No details. The press release appeared to have emanated from the Pentagon, an organization that does not respond to questions from outsiders.

Salat’s radio operators picked it up, and Haradheere shares in Operation Princess crashed to zero. The only remaining question was whether any of the pirates had made it out alive. No one knew the answer.

EVERY US WARSHIP either actively involved or standing by during the effort to free the
Ocean Princess
was bound by the navy’s highest rules of
classification. There was a complete communications blackout. No one, repeat no one, was permitted to utter one word about the operation.

And that included the recently arrived aircraft carrier CVN-75, the 100,000-ton
Harry S. Truman
, with eighty fighter/bombers embarked. In this instance, the United States Navy was sworn to secrecy. And the reason had shades of Robin Hood written all over it.

Zack Lancaster, Mark Bradfield, and Andy Carlow had heard the stories of the $78 million stashed away in Haradheere. They wanted the pirate operation and all of its finances smashed. In addition they wanted the money back. They planned to return it to the shipping organizations that had paid it, with the rest going to US Navy charities.

Their biggest fear was if the main players in this all-African enterprise heard the Americans were coming, they would pack up the money and flee to Kenya or somewhere else, never to be heard from again. Hence the highly classified nature of the operation, with a total news blackout, worldwide, every shutter slammed tight, essentially to prevent Salat Mohammed from finding out what had happened on board the
Ocean Princess
.

At this point, there were about a dozen men who understood the plan, and the leader was the SEAL commander Mack Bedford. He’d been closeted in the captain’s office for almost a half hour on a conference call to General Lancaster and Admiral Bradfield. And he was ready to outline the strategy for the SEALs’ next attack.

They were steaming slowly west, directly toward the coast of Somalia eight hundred miles away. Captain Marks ordered an immediate increase in speed, up to 30 knots, which would get them to within ten miles of Haradheere in twenty-seven hours, around 2100 the following night.