by Fritz Galt
The skipper raised his binoculars and scanned the horizon in all directions. Sean noticed that the radar screen was turned off. Perhaps the skipper was playing it safe and not letting the freighter emit a signal that the authorities could pick up and identify.
The skipper’s unusual combination of skills prompted Sean to want to know more about the man.
“So what is it that drives you?” he asked.
“You are persistent,” the skipper said.
“I just want to know. Do you have a personal gripe with some government? Did the Israelis torture your family? Why are you doing all this? Surely killing people isn’t in the Koran.”
“I’m not killing people,” the skipper said fiercely, the first time Sean saw him lose control of his tightly held emotions.
“Okay,” Sean said. “So you don’t kill. Why are you terrorizing people like this?”
“I’m not terrorizing anyone. Look at me. Who am I terrorizing?”
“Okay, so you’re not a terrorist. I always thought that term was overused anyway.”
“So do I. Our movement is not trying to frighten, harm or destroy people or civilizations. We’re about change.”
“So you’re the Howard Dean of world politics.”
The man laughed. “Perhaps so.”
“Back to the question: Why?”
“When we eventually succeed, we will democratize the levers of power in society and the economy. We’re fighting for control over our lives.”
“What are you, a progressive?”
The skipper looked at him, his expression somewhat hurt.
“What?” Sean said, unable to withhold a smile. “That’s it, isn’t it? How frightening. You’re a progressive. That’s all you are. Ooooh,” he said in a wavering voice. “Let’s form a Department of Homeland Security, here come the Progressives!”
Suddenly the skipper stiffened. Sean had struck a nerve. He had gone too far.
“Mark my words,” the skipper said evenly, his voice taking on ominous undertones. “Your country will be the first to go. It’s the evil weed that is choking out my people. And in the next few days, you will help me pull it out by its roots.”
He reached into his briefcase and handed Sean some papers. “Here. I want you to fill these out.”
Sean glanced over the documents. Once again, the skipper wanted to change the ship’s identity. He was holding forms from a company in Vienna, Virginia, that would add their ship to Liberia’s open registry.
Meanwhile, the skipper leaned over, opened a small compartment and pulled out a flag.
He unfurled it, revealing a white star against a blue field in one corner, and red and white stripes covering the rest, not unlike an American flag.
“Today we will turn Liberian,” the skipper said.
Sean looked out at the open sea. Based on its name, Liberia must have been founded on the basis of Liberty. And the skipper was seeking freedom for his entire people at America’s expense. If only he could be free… The concept seemed so distant and unattainable.
The skipper handed Sean a pen.
Reflagging, renaming and re-registering a ship under a different identity every few days must have felt liberating for the skipper. But filling out the forms would only further seal Sean’s fate, the fate of his family, and the fate of his nation.
Dawn broke suddenly and without warning in the tropics as Sandi left her hotel for the Philippine Ports Authority. Her taxi driver steered her expertly through the crowded streets of Manila. How a city could wake up so early after a night of karaoke singing and hip swinging was beyond her.
Men were busy shining shoes, delivering goods and carrying boxes on their shoulders, their clothes freshly pressed. Children in uniforms walked dutifully to school under the care of older sisters and brothers. Women in flip-flops hurried back and forth across the narrow, potholed lanes.
Sandi’s taxi approached a vast, breezy park fringed with palm trees, beyond which lay the widespread crescent of Manila Bay. She caught her breath. Fleecy clouds rimmed the horizon. A lone helicopter crawled across the sky over the empty sea.
It looked like a scene right out of a war movie, where American vessels would steam to the aid of the stricken populace, or Japanese would capture and torture starving soldiers and send them on a death march through Bataan Province. And all the while, they were surrounded by a stunningly beautiful sea and islands that were as lush as gardens.
They passed a long line of people patiently queued up beside the road. They wore baseball caps and Major League jerseys and tight jeans. Was there a ballpark along the shoreline?
Then she did a double take. Above the building flew an American flag. It was the American Embassy and the people had lined up long before opening hours to get their visas. Could it be that Filipinos knew something about America that she didn’t?
A few minutes later, the taxi pulled to a halt before the Philippine Ports Authority building. Twenty pesos did the trick. She threw in an extra five for efficient service.
The head of the ports authority was already waiting for her. He was a short man with unctuous manners, a proud bearing and various military ribbons pinned to his barrel-shaped chest.
“Captain Albano at your service, ma’am.”
She introduced herself and shook his hand. He looked ready to kiss it, but must have changed his mind.
Stepping inside, Sandi looked around the large, cluttered office. The captain was the only one wearing his particular kind of green uniform. Perhaps it was a holdover from a previous regime. Then she noticed that just about everyone wore a different style and color of uniform. Perhaps there had been many regime changes, and fashions had a hard time keeping up.
As they walked to Captain Albano’s control room, he asked her in a circumspect voice, “Why are you using our radios? Why don’t you use that U.S. Navy ship out there patrolling the waters?”
She smiled at the thought. “Let’s just say that we’re on completely different missions,” she said.
He shrugged and gestured to the worn wooden doors that opened onto a control room with a commanding view of the bay.
A row of radio operators communicated with ships as they entered Philippine waters. While the captain set her up with a radio transmitter, she listened in on the heavily accented English of the radio operators who were communicating with the ships. It sounded like most of the ships were just passing through Philippine territorial waters on the heavily traveled sea-lanes that formed the crossroads between East Asia and Southeast Asia and the Americas. Only a few cargo ships sought permission to enter the ports located on the island.
She donned a headset and cupped both earphones over her ears. Transmissions by ship captains were even more difficult to understand.
How did these people understand one another when they had no language in common but English that even a native speaker couldn’t make out? No wonder there were so many ferry disasters in the Philippines. And small wonder that there weren’t more maritime accidents in the sea-lanes.
Already the air was muggy, and she pulled her blouse away from her perspiring chest. She fought to concentrate.
The radio operators were busy checking ships’ positions. To her amazement, there were no radar screens tracking the vessels. Apparently, knowing what ship was where was a far less organized business than tracking airplanes that sent out signals identifying themselves to air traffic controllers.
Suddenly a responding voice on a weak signal caught her attention.
“This is the Ariana,” the weak, but distinctly American voice announced. Bingo, just as Caleb Perkins had said. It was Sean Cooper.
She smiled. What a darling. What was he doing on that ship? “Hi, Sean,” she interrupted, her finger pressing the microphone’s transmit button. “Remember me?”
“Sandi?” Sean said after a pause for him to remember her voice, shock registering over the crackling airwaves. “What are you doing in the Philippines?”
“I’m looking
for you.”
There was radio silence on the other end, just half-heard transmissions between other ships.
“There are some people who need you,” she said. “Real bad.”
“That’s the understatement of the year.”
“And I need you, too.”
“Please state your exact position,” a radio operator said.
“Damn. It’s 14º 34' North, 130º—” Sean’s voice began relaying the reading on the GPS receiver, but was cut short.
“Please repeat that,” the radio operator said.
There was no response. Sandi pressed her earphones tight over her ears and listened to the static for several minutes, but Sean had once again vanished from her life.
She stomped a heel against the linoleum floor.
Someone had cut off the transmission.
“Reflag immediately!” the skipper barked into the intercom, sending men scrambling up on deck like cockroaches from a fumigated wall.
I’m dead, Sean told himself as the skipper pried the unplugged transmitter from his fingers, shoved it back into its plastic cradle and turned off the radio receiver. He had been so close to divulging the Ariana’s location to someone who could make a difference, who could bring in the Feds.
The skipper hustled him out of the radio room and off the bridge, locking it shut behind him.
How desperate could Sean be, hoping for the Feds to come to his rescue? Just a few days earlier, he was trying to elude them at all costs.
All it took was one look at the fire in the skipper’s eyes and the determination in his furrowed brow. So he didn’t call himself a killer or a terrorist. Call him whatever, the man was hell-bent on destroying America and all that she stood for, and Sean, for one, wasn’t going to allow it.
“There’s no time. Paint over the name, quick,” the skipper bellowed down at the crew.
Paint buckets slopping over, the deckhands rushed to give the ship an instant makeover. The twin funnels lost their tiger stripes, and became glossy black that glistened in the noonday sun.
The skipper climbed down from the bridge and draped the Liberian flag over the stern.
Sean followed him to watch. Below him, men had been lowered on davits to paint over the name. They had stencils and a spray gun in hand.
“What do we call her?” one man shouted up from below, while the other busily painted over the former name.
Within an hour, the Ariana of Panama had become the Lost Horizon of Liberia.
Sean watched the workmen changing the props of their stage drama.
In the same fashion, the Chinese staff at his resort hotel on Hainan Island had done a wonderful job of transforming a colonial-style marble palace into a glitzy Hollywood mogul’s mansion.
The night of the pre-Academy Award celebration at Sanya, Sandi had appeared to him like a movie star in a slim, sequined ballroom gown, her backlit hair bouncing with life. She had shed her slinky bikini and was transformed into a romantic vision. She was ready for her close-up.
During their encounter, which consisted of drinks, dancing and light dining followed by fireworks, she had slipped him her business card. She had been softening him up for the kill.
Now she was zeroing in on him as he floated helplessly in a rust bucket in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
He reached down and pulled out his wallet. He flipped to her business card. It read Sandi DiMartino, Global Oil Incorporated, and gave her office and cell phone numbers.
What was she doing at the Philippine port, taking down ships’ GPS readings? What kind of oil company lawyer did that sort of thing?
Was she friend or foe? He was on the verge of ripping up the business card.
But it didn’t matter any longer who got to him first. If she represented the president or the prosecutor, whether he faced a hit squad or life imprisonment, whether he’d ever get a shot at finding his family, first he had to get the terrorists off his back.
He watched the skipper approach with slow, menacing steps. “File those documents immediately,” the skipper said, his voice harsh.
Sean looked down at the papers he would have to transmit to the company in Virginia.
“Come with me. We’ll use the fax in my quarters.”
In the radio room of the USS Endorse, Seaman Anthony Carlson played back the most recent recording that he had made of the conversation between Cooper and the woman in Manila.
“You’re sure that’s Cooper?” Lieutenant Terrence Whitcomb asked, leaning over his shoulder.
Anthony keyed in the filename of Cooper’ voiceprint. He dragged the zigzagging lines across the screen to the voice he had just recorded. The peaks and valleys of the waveform matched exactly.
Terry considered for a moment. “Do you recognize the woman’s voice in Manila?” he asked.
Anthony, whose job required that he live by the ear, had a good audible memory, whereas his lieutenant did not. He shook his head. He didn’t know the woman his commanding officer was talking about.
“At any rate,” Terry said, straightening his back and looking down the long aisle of consoles. “We have to inform the Pentagon that we got another hit and this one included a more accurate reading of Cooper’ position.”
In his Pentagon office suite, Secretary of Defense Kenneth Spaulding needed to ensure that he had interpreted the president correctly.
It wasn’t every day that the Navy blew a foreign freighter out of the water, under any pretext.
He set down the specific GPS coordinates that had just arrived from the Pacific theater, picked up his phone and punched in the number of the White House Chief of Staff.
“Chuck Romer here.”
“This is Kenneth,” he said in his stentorian voice. “I need to make sure I understand the president correctly about the terrorist ship.”
“You brought it up at the meeting,” Chuck reminded him.
“Yes, but I want to be clear on our decision. The president asked me to nuke the ship.”
“Nuke? That’s an expression.”
“I figured that. I’m not about to waste a nuclear warhead on a freighter.”
“Ha ha. That would be ridiculous.”
There was an awkward silence.
So Kenneth tried to clarify further. “So you’re saying…”
“Don’t you hear me? I’m saying to nuke the ship. Ha. Now, I’ve got a wedding consultant on hold.”
Chuck hung up on him.
Right. One didn’t want to be on record making that sort of statement.
Slowly, Kenneth set down the phone and pressed his intercom button. He heard the buzz at his secretary’s desk.
“Get me the USS Endorse,” he requested.
Lieutenant Terrence Whitcomb stared out at the sea dotted with freighters and fishing trawlers of varying profiles and sizes.
The USS Endorse had been steaming eastward in an attempt to catch up with the fleeing terrorist ship. It was not an easy task, as the Endorse wasn’t designed for speed. A floating brick was faster.
But within the past twenty-four hours, Terry calculated, they may have closed half the distance.
The partial GPS reading that Cooper had given out cut a large swath across sea-lanes going in both directions. Some sea-lanes headed north-south, while others headed toward the West Coast of the United States. They would have to identify the ship by sight, however, in the busy waters around the Philippines, how could they figure out which was the Ariana?
A visual identification of the terrorist ship would be like finding a specific anchovy in a school of fish. Carefully monitoring ship-to-shore radio transmissions had paid off only to the extent that they were faced with an annoyingly large number of suspects.
“Call from Washington, sir.”
Terry jumped at the sound of the radioman’s voice.
“Hello?” he said, taking the phone.
“Do you know who this is?”
Terry frowned. Was this some joke? It sounded just like the Secretary of Defens
e.
“Yes, sir,” he replied uncertainly.
“That’s Mr. Secretary.”
“Yes, Mr. Secretary.”
“Do you have the terrorist ship in your sights?”
Terry stared at the fifty ships sprayed across his radarscope. It didn’t sound like Secretary Spaulding was in a good mood. Terry had better tell him what he wanted to hear. “Yes, we do, Mr. Secretary.”
“Then torpedo it!” the Secretary of Defense shouted.
“Ah, aye aye, sir, Mr. Secretary.”
He found himself talking to a dead phone.
“What is it, sir?” radioman Anthony Carlson asked gently.
Terry turned toward the glowing radar screen below him. A long line of freighters lay bow to stern in the wide GPS area that Cooper had indicated.
“We have to torpedo one of those ships,” he said, his voice cracking.
“But we don’t have torpedoes.”
One point of light on the radar screen was a different color. It was a light red, accompanied by a seven-digit code. As opposed to commercial vessels, the military sent out beacons that other naval ships could use to identify them. The computer overlaid the military ship’s location over the radar screen, forming a composite display.
Terry pointed to the red dot. Its code indicated all he needed to know. It was the USS Stuart, a naval destroyer, equipped to sink everything from submarines to attack ships.
“Our ship doesn’t have jack, but she can sink the terrorists.”
Anthony stared at the crowded scope. “And which one is the Ariana?”
Chapter 18
Hadi Ahmed climbed nimbly up the now-familiar footpath that led to Osama’s mountain hideout. He adjusted the knife in his belt and began the climb straight up the final ascent.
His forefathers, the Waziris, had much the same profession as he had that night. They were the robbers and highwaymen who owned the Khyber Pass. They had defeated the other Pathan tribes and the British in the 19th Century. And they were still at it.
