The Delta Solution (44 page)

News that a heavy ransom had been paid to free the
Global Mustang
had been transmitted worldwide. In the opinion of Ismael Wolde, there were probably a half dozen pirate ships out there searching for them, anxious to bully their way into a piece of the action.

No one, of course, in his right mind would dream of taking on the Somali Marines, not if he had any idea how heavily armed and skilled the warriors were on board the
Mombassa
. And the twenty men who had a better idea than most were lying dead on the ocean floor, close to the blasted
Somali Star
.

One of the night duty guards was Elmi Ahmed. He sat in the cockpit with Captain Hassan, his two loaded grenade launchers resting three feet from his right hand. If the boss called, “Action stations!” Elmi was approximately
twelve seconds from depositing any intruder on the ocean floor. Unsurprisingly, he never missed with that launcher, which was, like all of their gear, state-of-the-art.

By dawn, still running at flank speed, they were eighty miles from the last known position of the
Global Mustang
and her warship escort. The engines were humming sweetly, and Captain Hassan had posted ETA Haradheere at 6:00 p.m. the following day, which meant another thirty-six hours of hard running.

They had plenty of fuel but were light on food. The roast goat had almost run out before they hit the
Mustang
, and they were down to a couple of large cans of ham and some moderately stale flatbread. They had plenty of fruit juice, but in the general panic to get clear of the tanker, no one had thought to raid the heavily stocked galley and storeroom.

Fortunately the cans of ham were industrial size, and Omar Ali Farah, who would have been the cook had there been a stove, estimated there was sufficient meat for four sandwiches for each man on the return journey.

Hungry pirates are inclined to sulk, something to do with risking your life and still feeling like a pauper despite 10 million bucks lying on the floor. Everyone was sitting around on deck midway through the burning hot afternoon wishing there was a spare ham sandwich and paying not the slightest attention to anything except their boredom.

However they all snapped to it when the captain suddenly shouted:
GIVE ME SOME POSIDENT—THAT SHIP OUT THERE ’BOUT SIX MILES OFF OUR STARBOARD BOW!

Hands fumbled for the glasses and keen eyes focused on a sizeable fishing boat way out on the horizon—

Twice the size of the
Mombassa
. . .

Ismael Wolde spoke next. “Men,” he said, “with this cash cargo on board, we cannot take any chances. Can’t let that ship anywhere near us. She’s not official, is she? Coast guard or Indian Navy?”

“No sign of that,” called Hassan. “She’s not even flying a flag and she’s dark green in color. If she was official she’d be grey with national markings all over the place.”

“Well, whatever she is, she just changed course as if she wants to cross our bow. But she may not be fast enough. I’m not seeing an increase in her speed.” Abadula Sofian, a former Haradheere fisherman, loved the maritime aspect of his pirate job. And instantly he called again, “She’s raising some kind of a flag—can’t see what it is, but it’s white on black.”

“Looks like she’s closing but not gaining,” said Hassan. “ELMI! Stand by. The rest of you go to
ACTION STATIONS!
”

“You want me to sink her?” asked the missile director.

“I do,” replied Captain Hassan.

“So do I,” added Wolde. “And be darn quick about it.”

“I can hit her twice at one hundred yards,” replied Elmi.

“Don’t miss,” said Ismael. “Let’s slow down a bit to let her catch up.”

“Don’t let her get one inch closer than that hundred yards,” yelled the captain. “Because she might have missiles as well. I don’t want to get sunk.”

Elmi Ahmed carried his two launchers out from the cockpit and set up two of his four tripods on the starboard side. He screwed the launchers on and studied the range finders, focusing on the oncoming fishing boat, which was now two miles away off their starboard quarter and gaining.

These were ultramodern launchers, complete with telescopic crosshairs. Elmi, who had fought for the Somali government in the backstreets of Mogadishu with primitive, twenty-five-year-old RPGs, would find it almost impossible to miss with them.

So far as he was concerned this was a case of “fire and forget.”

“Who’s giving the order?” he shouted.

“No one,” answered Wolde. “It’s up to you. Fire at will.”

Elmi stood up and stared at the fishing boat as it came speeding in toward them, making around 15 knots. There was little more than a half mile between them, and the boat was not slowing. It looked as if she might ram them.

Elmi went back to his launch and stared once more through the range finder. He could see his quarry clearly, especially the four armed men on the foredeck. Seconds passed and then Elmi rammed back the launch trigger and the missile screamed out of the tube, a fiery tail behind it, which soon turned white.

Carefully, he moved to the second launcher, focused, and fired. As he did so, the first missile flashed across the foredeck of the oncoming boat
and blasted straight through the cockpit window, obliterating the glass. It almost blew the upper works clean off the deck.

Instantly the ship’s operations structure burst into flames, which enveloped the entire working deck. And into this maelstrom of fire ripped Elmi’s second RPG, detonating much nearer the waterline with a force that very nearly cleaved the ship in two.

She began to sink. Ahmed could see men burning alive on the deck, but only two of them. The rest of the crew could not possibly have survived a blast of such magnitude, and within moments, the ship had turned turtle, and with a huge hiss and giant plume of steam, she was gone. No one would ever know for sure what she had wanted with the
Mombassa
. But Ismael Wolde and his men were able to hazard a pretty good guess.

With evening closing in, everyone was extremely tired, and Wolde changed their night duties to two-hour watches instead of four. Captain Hassan had an old ship’s clock, which was rarely wound, but the pirate admiral went below to retrieve it and prepare it for a night’s work like everyone else.

Throughout the long evening homeward and then through the blackest of rain-swept nights, the clock tolled out the bells of the watch, four quick strikes and then eight for the changes. It was a kind of ghostly requiem for the forty-three men who had perished during the course of the $10 million mission against the giant LNG carrier.

R
EAR ADMIRAL ANDREW MACPHERSON CARLOW, C-IN-C SPECWARCOM, was born with the distant thunder of navy guns echoing through his soul. His father, Tom Carlow, was a retired US Navy admiral, and his grandfather, Admiral James Carlow, fought the entire span of World War II on board the greatest of all US warships, the 30,000-ton carrier
Enterprise
.

Of course, Navy SEALs fight on land and sea, and in Andy’s case this was possible because of his mother’s side of the family. Miranda Stuart Carlow, as svelte and beautiful at the age of seventy as any woman could hope to be, was a direct descendant of the swashbuckling Confederate major general Jeb Stuart, the cavalry commander who fought shoulder to shoulder with Stonewall in the valley.

Andrew was brought up listening to his grandfather’s tales of the Second World War. And he never tired of hearing James Carlow’s account of the Battle of Midway, when the
Enterprise
and
Yorktown
sent their dive bombers lancing down out of the sun like a silver waterfall blasting the decks of the Japanese carriers, sending four of the ships that had devastated Pearl Harbor to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Lieutenant Commander Carlow, who had been a landing signals officer at the battle, had never had a better audience, and young Andy, fists clenched with excitement, would sit enraptured at the feet of his grandpa. Even then he could hear the shouts and commands of the LSOs as they desperately tried to get the shot-up US aircraft back on the flight deck:
Too low . . . nose too high . . . lie up too far left . . . rate of descent off the mark . . . power control erratic!

At the age of eleven, Andy Carlow understood the hammer-locked relationship between the fliers and the officers who fought to bring home their aircraft—sometimes shot or malfunctioning, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in a big sea that caused the carrier to lurch upward on the rise of the wave, multiplying the danger a thousand times.

Never had landing officers represented such a stark delineation between life and death as in those terrible hours at Midway, when the embattled US pilots came screaming in to home base, out of the fire and carnage, with the Pacific war hanging in the balance.

James Carlow made it all the way up the ladder to vice admiral. His son, Tom, fell short by family standards, retiring as a rear admiral during the years when his own son, Andy, was commanding a SEAL platoon with Mack Bedford in the backstreets of Baghdad.

Whichever way you looked at it, Tom Carlow had groomed Andy for a career in dark blue, insisting he attend the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and uttering no objection when the young officer demanded to become a SEAL, just as soon as he completed his first tour of duty on a surface ship.

They were all from Virginia, and indeed Admiral Tom and Admiral James both concluded their naval careers at the navy’s Norfolk HQ. Family reunions always took place in Virginia, nowhere near the ocean. The Carlows traditionally gathered in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains at a white colonial mansion, Laurel Heights, owned for almost two hundred years by the family of Admiral Tom’s wife, Miranda Stuart Carlow.

Miranda Carlow had inherited the house after the death of her father when Andy was five. Years later, when Admiral Tom retired from the navy, they turned away from the sea for the first time since they were married and retired to the mountains.

Andy and his wife visited when they could but his SPECWARCOM command had, for the past three years, kept him tightly anchored in
Coronado. He could remember no other family home, and his own room, set to the rear of the house, had a spectacular view of the Blue Ridge Mountains sweeping away to the north.

In the late afternoon of southern Virginia’s mild winters, the endless stretch of the softly shaped peaks were swathed in lilac-blue mist and shadow. And you had to be on station at the precise right time to catch it. Then, and only then, could you understand firsthand how the mountains had acquired their name. The blue haze that hangs in the air is sufficiently thick for the sun to play games with it—sometimes turning it a fiery aquamarine and then, at sunset, turning the sapphire peaks to deep purple.

There is no great height to the Blue Ridge range, mostly only a couple of thousand feet above sea level. But its alma mater, the 2,000-mile long Appalachian chain of mountains, is a billion years old and its ancient peaks are long and rounded. Down in southern Virginia they seem to stretch forever, triumphant in their old age, protected by a thick and generous cloak of misty-blue trees.

Inside the house, there were large portraits of the still revered Confederate generals with whom Jeb Stuart had fought. Stuart’s portrait dominated the vast entrance hall and was flanked by another oil painting depicting one of the South’s most fearless and brilliant battlefield commanders, Lt. Gen. Ambrose Powell Hill, another Virginian, cut down by sniper fire when Petersburg fell on April 2, 1865.

“Remember, Andy,” said his father, “great victories are invariably born in the mind of the general. And remember always, whenever you go into combat, the blood of General Jeb Stuart runs through your veins.”

Andy Carlow loved his father and admired him above all other men. And when, at the age of twenty-four, he finally lined up on the grinder to receive his SEAL Trident, his mind was locked onto the admiral who pinned it upon his chest. But he could see his father, Admiral Tom Carlow, who sat watching in a seat of honor. And he clearly heard the words of the SEAL base commander, who told him quietly, “Well done, Andrew. Always remember you must earn this every day of your life.”

Despite Miranda’s love of the Virginian mountains, she allowed her occasionally irascible husband one major triumph every year. She agreed to accompany him on a vacation cruise so that once more he could hear the slash of the bow wave down the ship’s hull, listen to the boom of the ship’s horn, and stare out over the ocean through his sea-blue eyes.

Whenever he stood on a ship, even a cruise ship, his bearing was still upright and his white hair framed his permanent deepwater tan. Tom Carlow looked as if he ought to be in command of any ship he boarded. All year long, he would look forward to his cruise, and sometimes on a moonlit tropical night, he would leave their stateroom and walk outside, where he would lean on the rail and listen to the sounds of the ocean.