Fighting back the churning bile, he peeked around the door jamb again. There was blood everywhere—on the floor, the ceiling and the walls. The pirates had hacked off the crewmen’s hands, arms, legs and even one man’s head, which lay alone in the center of a pool of blood. It was so horrific that he could hardly make sense of what he saw. He pulled back and held his breath, praying it was an illusion.
After a few moments, he looked again, knowing now that everyone was dead. It was too much. His stomach flipped and the bile churned, forcing him to turn away again. He quickly retreated to the internal stairway. No longer able hold back the seething bile, he vomited into a corner of the landing.
He leaned heavily against the wall, smelling the stench of vomit and listening intently as loud popping sounds permeated the stairwell again. There seemed to be dozens of pops this time, continuing for more than a minute. Even after they had ceased, Singh could still hear the sound ringing in his ears. He stood frozen once more, clinging to the wall of the stairwell, his fear again welding him in place for several minutes before he started climbing slowly up the stairs as if to face the inevitability of his own execution.
At the top of the stairs, he stopped and listened. It was deathly quiet. He waited for several minutes, struggling to hear the captain or the third mate, but there was nothing, not even the crackle of radio traffic. Summoning his courage yet again, he stepped into the companionway and immediately stopped. Across the companionway from the radio room were three men he did not recognize. They were all dressed in black and sprawled on the floor with a pool of blood surrounding them. Above them, the wall was filled with blood splatter and bullet holes. His heart began to beat so strongly that he thought it might leap out of his chest.
Clutching the gun tightly, Singh raised it to his shoulder, preparing to fire. He was shaking so badly that he doubted he could hit anything even in the tight quarters of the companionway. Slowly, he began moving forward down the companionway toward the radio room. It was all he could do to force himself forward. With each step, the urge to run grew stronger.
He staggered past the captain’s mess and the captain’s quarters, pointing the gun into each room and taking only quick cursory glances through the open cabin doors at the ransacked rooms. He stopped two steps from the radio room door, straining to hear anything. The only sound he heard was the sound of radio static. No one spoke. There was no heavy breathing as the captain was known to do when angry.
He leaned heavily against the wall as the companionway began to spin. He took several deep breaths, struggling not to faint. The air was ripe with the metallic odor of blood which assaulted his senses. Finally, he couldn’t take not knowing any longer, so he swung himself into the doorway and peered inside.
The sight before him caused him to instantly vomit. The captain and the third mate lay dead in a huge pool of blood on the floor. The captain had been shot in the face several times, completely obliterating it. The third mate had been shot in the side of the head and the chest. The grizzly sight caused his stomach to convulse again, but with nothing left in his guts, he retched out a dry heave before turning away and leaving the room.
In the companionway, he leaned on the wall and waited until he was sure he wouldn’t double over and dry heave again. He moved a few feet down the companionway, where he slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. Waves of despair washed over him. How would he manage to survive if the captain couldn’t?
His head dropped to his knees, tears welling up in his eyes. He silently sobbed and let his gun drop to the floor next to him. He was cut off from the world. The radios were smashed and smoldering. The ship’s controls were smashed or stolen, and he had no idea if any of the crew had survived.
After a while, it was shame that finally prompted him to stand and then search the ship for other survivors. Shame that he hadn’t fired a single shot or even saw one pirate. Shame that he had survived when other men had not.
In the purser’s office, he discovered the safe had been blown open, its contents strewn across the floor; and the ship’s payroll, which was customary to carry in cash, was gone. Close to one hundred thousand American dollars.
It was obvious; it was the payroll the pirates had been after. Anything they might have stolen from the crew was icing on the cake. Later, upon inspection, it was found that they hadn’t opened a single container, which confirmed the payroll theory.
That night, the pirates killed all but seven men out of a crew of twenty-five. The company gave each of the surviving members of the crew bonus pay and/or promotions. Singh had been promoted to captain and cited for bravery by the company for PR purposes. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to decline because he had done nothing brave that night. He had simply survived.
CHAPTER TWO
Despite the tragedy, the ship’s owners failed to make any significant changes to the way they handled piracy. After five years, the company still refused to allow their crew to be armed. They were afraid there might be an accident that would damage the cargo, or a crewman may attack another crewman over who knows what, and then they’d have to face lawsuits. Lawsuits are the corporate taboo, deep pockets and all.
The company was clearly more concerned about litigation problems than their crew’s lives. After all, the families would be bought off with insurance payouts should a crewman be killed, and a replacement would be hired the same day. Such is the job market in Southeast Asia and the Indian sub-continent. The companies did their best to turn a blind eye to the piracy problem, considering it to be just another cost of doing business.
When the opportunity came to change ships, Singh took it. He had done so partly to escape the bad memories of that night, and partly because his new ship was a supertanker—a less attractive target due to its smaller crew and the fact that there wasn’t any merchandise that could easily be stolen and sold on the black market. Combine that with the fact that not a single supertanker had ever been attacked, and it made his choice that much easier.
Singh told his new crew that he wasn’t going to ask if they had brought any weapons on board, but he fully expected that they had, despite the strict company policy to the contrary. Every sailor who had sailed these waters more than once knew the piracy threat was real and that the company wasn’t going to protect them. So most, if not all, crewmen carried some kind of gun on every voyage now.
The only thing Singh asked of them was that they not flash their guns around, and if they weren’t proficient with them, to practice shooting trash off the stern until they were. He also explained that he, himself, was armed with his own assault rifle, the very one he’d been given by his late captain on the ill-fated voyage five years ago. He also carried a .40 caliber Sig Sauer at all times because the pirates had grown bolder and were making daytime attacks now. At night, he slept with the handgun under his pillow.
With tonight’s heavy overcast creating the perfect “pirate’s night,” Captain Singh had the entire crew stand the third watch as a precaution. He also ordered every light on board be turned on and the crew to walk the deck in pairs, shining flashlights over the side. Singh even had the electricians rig a couple of large spotlights to shine off the stern, illuminating the pirate’s favorite spot for boarding. As an added bit of defense, he had two armed men stand in the shadows behind the lights to keep watch, as well. This had been his standard operating procedure since that terrible night five years ago, when the night had been black as tar, and he’d almost lost his life.
On this current trip, they were eastbound for Inchon, South Korea, with 4.5 million cubic feet of liquefied natural gas. The ship made four trips a month between Bahrain and one of several ports in the Far East. Usually, it was Korea or Japan, but they would occasionally stop in the Philippines or Taiwan.
Four trips a month, around and around they would go. Most of the crewmen worked on two month contracts which meant that after two months, they would take two months off, then rejoin the crew after the break and do it all over again. It wa
s a good life for many of them, far better than the life they would have had if they had stayed ashore in the third world countries of their birth. As a crewman aboard a supertanker, they earned twenty times the wage of the average worker in the Far East or on the sub-continent.
At three a.m., Captain Singh had the cook bring each man a large cup of coffee to help keep them awake. As the cook passed out coffee, Singh looked into the night. It was still just as a dark as before, though the light breeze had been replaced by a brisk wind that was whipping up a small chop in the straits, bolstering Captain Singh’s spirits. If the weather turned foul and the water grew rough enough, the pirates and their small boats would head for shore, leaving them alone for another voyage.
The pirates stalking his ship tonight, though, were not the usual pirates who prowled the night looking for the unsuspecting. These men were different. They were fanatics—religious fanatics. Their mission was not to rob the passing ship but to destroy it.
Three men in an inflatable boat filled with explosives kept pace with the supertanker, safely hidden in the darkness a few hundred yards starboard of the ship. The ship was well-lit and had a heavy crew presence on deck. These developments had caught them off guard since they weren’t expecting such a well-lit ship and this many crew on deck.
Their mission was to attach a series of explosives to the hull of the tanker, then setting them off in sequence, one after the other. They had been informed that by doing so it would cause a massive explosion and fireball. They had been assigned the task by their local commander who, in turn, had received the mission from someone else halfway around the world.
LNG supertankers are built similar to the oil supertankers. They both have double hulls as a safety measure to protect the cargo from accidental release in the event of a collision with another ship, reef or equipment while loading and unloading. Both utilize bleeder valves and ballast leveling systems to allow the built-up gases to escape and to level the load based on sea conditions, reducing the chances of pressure explosions.
The LNG supertankers, despite the flammable nature of their cargo when it’s in a gaseous state, are relatively safe from that type of explosion as long as the pressure is maintained at proper levels. Liquefied natural gas is non-explosive and non-flammable as long as it remains at -260 degrees Fahrenheit and the air pressure remains at atmospheric zero.
An additional step to ensure safety is to install an expandable foam bumper between the hulls, which is designed to help absorb the energy from a collision. It’s kind of like an airbag in a car and, thus, reduces the chance of a pressure vessel being ruptured. Combined with a second hull around each of the pressure vessels themselves, lined with shock-absorbing foam, they provide solid protection for LNG supertankers against disaster.
Keeping to the darkness, the small boat swung wider to starboard and approached amidships. The lights failed to penetrate here since the crew members in charge of illumination had chosen to stop short of meeting in the middle of the ship. With its large motor muffled to lessen the roar of its one hundred and fifty-five horsepower outboard, the small rubber boat had no trouble overtaking the supertanker, allowing them to make the side intercept course possible. As they approached, the pirates watched the crew making their rounds. They would wait until the crew turned around short of the midpoint, then they would rush the ship.
When the opportunity came, it took all of the skill the pilot of the small boat had to keep it from being sucked into the wake of the ship as he brought the small boat alongside the gigantic supertanker.
Once he’d matched the pace of the ship, he used the crest of the wake stream to slip closer and closer until he had the small boat riding the crest of the wake stream within an arm’s length of the ship. He slowly allowed the small boat to slip along the side of the more than quarter-mile long hulk by reducing his forward speed. Once he had matched the ship’s speed, his partners would attach the six one hundred pound magnetized bombs, set one hundred fifty feet apart just above the small boat’s gunnels.
They completed the task in less than five minutes, despite the challenges of riding the supertanker’s wake, and sped off into the darkness. Captain Singh and the crew of the Formosa’s Pride never heard or saw a thing.
The supertanker sailed on into the night as the small boat opened up its throttle and raced away at over thirty knots in the opposite direction. With the wind continuing to build, a medium chop was quickly forming on the surface of the straits, considerably slowing the pirates’ progress.
According to their handheld GPS, it took them more than fifteen minutes to reach the minimum safe distance. They idled back and slowly drifted to a stop. The three men then looked back over their shoulders at the small splotch of light in the distance that was Formosa’s Pride.
The leader of the small band of pirates yelled, “Allahu Akbar!” and pressed the radio-controlled detonator. Six flashes, one after the other, lit the sky with brilliant yellow/white flames that overwhelmed the ship’s lights momentarily.
The report of the explosions took three or four seconds to reach them. When it finally did, it sounded more like the dull peal of distant thunder than the ear-shattering explosions they had been told to expect. If they hadn’t known what had caused the sound, they could have passed it off as just that—distant thunder.
To their horror, there was no huge fireball like they had been told would happen. They felt no shockwave blow over them, and there was no tsunami to deal with. The three men sat dumbfounded. The six charges had been placed exactly as they had been instructed, yet there wasn’t any huge explosion.
Captain Singh and his crew had been thrown to the deck by the sudden wave of sharp jolts that reverberated throughout the ship, but thankfully, most of the force had been absorbed by the foam between the hulls or had traveled outward over the open water towards the mangrove swamps, five kilometers away.
By sheer luck, the crew had suffered only minor cuts and bruises, with only a few requiring stitches. The helmsman suffered the worst injury—a broken arm—having caught his arm in the ship’s wheel when he was knocked to the deck.
Quick thinking by the second mate saved the ship from running aground in the aftermath of the explosion. He immediately grabbed the helm after seeing the helmsman fall. With a shipping lane only one-and-a-half kilometers wide in this portion of the straits, his fast reflexes saved the huge tanker from running aground on the shoals that lined the lane.
******
At first, Captain Singh could not comprehend what had happened, but after a few moments he knew. Pirates! The second mate pointed out that there seemed to have been multiple blasts, yet there was no apparent listing of the ship. He also reported that the crew was indicating that as far as they could tell there was no one attempting to board, which didn’t fit known pirate tactics.
Upon inspection of the ship by the first mate and the chief engineer, it was found that the double hull had saved them a loss of cargo and, possibly, death. The LNG, when suddenly exposed to open air, tends to become inert, rapidly gasifying and mixing harmlessly with the air. However, if it’s under pressure above atmospheric zero and is exposed to air, it tends to explode violently.
Another good bit of luck was that the blasts occurred several feet above the waterline, so as long as the water didn’t become too rough, they could make port in Singapore with little difficulty.
Captain Singh immediately began sending an S.O.S. over an encrypted channel to the Singaporean authorities, while ordering the ship to continue on its course at their current speed. He then instructed his crew to remain on watch for more pirates.
Checking his charts, Captain Singh quickly made the calculations in his head regarding how far it was to Singapore and his heart sank. It was still ten hours away.
The small boat bobbed in the chop as the pirates sat wondering what had gone wrong. They had done exactly as they were instructed. The bombs had been set to explode in series, but yet the ship continued into the night, apparent
ly only slightly damaged. Inshallah! It was God’s will!
CHAPTER THREE
“My brothers, it is an honor to meet with you again. May Allah be praised and may peace be upon you and your house. I hope your journeys were pleasant ones?” The emir of Eritrea, Hassam al-Kareem ibn Fahad spoke as he entered the cigar smoke-filled room and walked up to the large conference table but did not sit down. This was a meeting of the governing council of the “Brotherhood of the Sword.”
Reprisal!- The Eagle's Sorrow Page 2
