THE LEADER of the seven masked terrorists set his men to work with a methodical precision that he had evidently rehearsed over many hours in his own mind. He issued a rapid stream of orders in a language neither Captain Larsen nor his own officers and the young seaman could understand.
Five of the masked men herded the two officers and seaman to the rear of the bridge, well away from the instrument panels, and surrounded them. The leader jerked his handgun at Captain Larsen and said in English:
“Your cabin, if you please, Captain.”
In single file, Larsen leading, the leader of the terrorists next, and one of his henchmen with a submachine carbine bringing up the rear, the three men descended the stairs from the bridge to D deck, one flight below. Halfway down the stairs, at the turn, Larsen turned to look back and up at his two captors, measuring the distances, calculating whether he could overcome them both.
“Don’t even try it,” said the voice behind the mask at his shoulder. “No one in his right mind argues with a submachine gun at a range of ten feet.”
Larsen led them onward down the stairs. D deck was the senior officers’ living quarters. The captain’s suite was in the extreme starboard corner of the great sweep of superstructure. Moving to port, next came a small chart library, the door open to reveal locker after locker of high-quality sea charts, enough to take him into any ocean, any bay, any suitable anchorage in the world. They were all copies of originals made by the British Admiralty, and the best in the world.
Next was the conference suite, a spacious cabin where the captain or owner could, if he wished, receive a sizable number of visitors all at one time. Next to this were the owner’s staterooms, closed and empty, reserved for the chairman, should he ever wish to sail with his ship. At the port end was another suite of cabins identical but in reverse to the captain’s quarters. Here the chief engineer lived.
Aft of the captain’s cabins was the smaller suite for the first officer, and aft of the chief engineer dwelt the chief steward. The whole complex formed a hollow square, whose center was taken up by the flight of stairs going around and around and downward to A deck, three levels below.
Thor Larsen led his captors to his own cabin and stepped into the dayroom. The terrorist leader followed him in and quickly ran through the other rooms, bedroom and bathroom. There was no one else present.
“Sit down, Captain,” he said, the voice slightly muffled by the mask. “You will remain here until I return. Please do not move. Place your hands on the table and keep them there, palms downward.”
There was another stream of orders in a foreign language, and the machine gunner took up a position with his back to the far bulkhead of the cabin, facing Thor Larsen but twelve feet away, the barrel of his gun pointing straight at the white crew-neck sweater Thor Larsen wore. The leader checked to see that all the curtains were well drawn, then left, closing the door behind him. The other two inhabitants of the deck were asleep in their respective cabins and heard nothing. Within minutes the leader was back on the bridge.
“You”—he pointed his gun at the boyish seaman—“come with me.”
The lad looked imploringly at First Officer Stig Lundquist.
“You harm that boy and I'll personally hang you out to dry,” said Tom Keller in his American accent. Two submachine-gun barrels moved slightly in the hands of the ring of men around him.
“Your chivalry is admirable, your sense of reality deplorable,” said the voice behind the leader’s mask. “No one gets hurt unless you try something stupid. Then there’ll be a bloodbath, and you’ll be right under the taps.”
Lundquist nodded to the seaman.
“Go with him,” he said. “Do what he wants.”
The seaman was escorted back down the stairs. At the D deck level, the terrorist stopped him.
“Apart from the captain, who lives on this deck?” he asked.
“The chief engineer, over there,” said the seaman. “The first officer, over there, but he’s up on the bridge now. And the chief steward, there.”
There was no sign of life behind any of the doors.
“The paint locker, where is it?” asked the terrorist. Without a word the seaman turned and headed down the stairs. They went through C deck and B deck. Once a murmur of voices came to them, from behind the door of the seamen’s messroom, where four men who could not sleep were apparently playing cards over coffee.
At A deck they had reached the level of the base of the superstructure. The seaman opened an exterior door and stepped outside. The terrorist followed nun. The cold night air made them both shiver after the warmth of the interior. They found themselves aft of the superstructure on the poop. To one side of the door from which they emerged, the bulk of the funnel towered a hundred feet up toward the stars.
The seaman led the way across the poop to where a small steel structure stood. It was six feet by six and about the same in height. In one side of it there was a steel door, closed by two great screw bolts with butterfly nuts on the outside.
“Down there,” said the seaman.
“Go on down,” said the terrorist. The boy spun the twin butterfly handles, unscrewing the cleats, and pulled them back. Seizing the door handle, he swung it open. There was a light inside, showing a tiny platform and a steel stairway running down to the bowels of the Freya. At a jerk from the gun, the seaman stepped inside and began to head downward, the terrorist behind him.
Over seventy feet of the stairs led down, past several galleries from which steel doors led off. When they reached the bottom they were well below waterline, only the keel beneath the deck plating under their feet. They were in an enclosure with four steel doors. The terrorist nodded to the one facing aft.
“What’s that lead to?”
“Steering-gear housing.”
“Let’s have a look.”
When the door was open, it showed a great vaulted hall all in metal and painted pale green. It was well lit. Most of the center of the deck space was taken up by a mountain of encased machinery the device which, receiving its orders from the computers of the bridge, would move the rudder. The walls of the cavity were curved to the nethermost part of the ship’s hull. Aft of the chamber, beyond the steel, the great rudder of the Freya would be hanging inert in the black waters of the North Sea. The terrorist ordered the door closed again and bolted shut.
Port and starboard of the steering-gear chamber were, respectively, a chemical store and a paint store. The chemical store the terrorist ignored; he was not going to make men prisoners where there was acid to play with. The paint store was better. It was quite large, airy, well ventilated, and its outer wall was the hull of the ship.
“What’s the fourth door?” asked the terrorist. The fourth was the only door with no handles.
“It leads to the rear of the engine room,” said the seaman. “It is bolted on the other side.”
The terrorist pushed against the steel door. It was rock-solid. He seemed satisfied.
“How many men on this ship?” he asked. “Or women. No tricks. If there is one more than the figure you give, we’ll shoot them.”
The boy ran his tongue over dry lips.
“There are no women,” he said. “There might be wives next trip, but not on the maiden voyage. There are thirty men, including Captain Larsen.”
Knowing what he needed to know, the terrorist pushed the frightened young man into the paint locker, swung the door closed, and threw one of the twin bolts into its socket. Then he returned back up the ladder.
Emerging on the poop deck, he avoided the interior stairs and raced back up the outside ladders to the bridge, stepping in from outside where they reached the bridgewing.
He nodded to his five companions, who still held the two officers at gunpoint, and issued a stream of further orders. Minutes later the two bridge officers, joined by the chief steward and chief engineer, roused from their beds on D deck below the bridge, were marched down to the paint locker. Most of the crew were asleep on B deck, where the bulk of the cabins were situated, much smaller than the officers’ accommodations above their heads, on C and D.
There were protests, exclamations, bitter language, as they were herded out and down. But at every stage the leader of the terrorists, the only one who spoke at all, informed them in English that their captain was held in his own cabin and would die in the event of any resistance. The officers and men obeyed their orders.
Down in the paint locker the crew was finally counted: twenty-nine. The first cook and two of the four stewards were allowed to return to the galley on A deck and ferry down to the paint store trays of buns and rolls, along with crates of bottled lemonade and canned beer. Two buckets were provided for toilets.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” the terrorist leader told the twenty-nine angry men who stared back at him from inside the paint locker. “You won’t be here long. Thirty hours at most. One last thing. Your captain wants the pumpman. Who is he?”
A Swede called Martinsson stepped forward.
“I’m the pumpman,” he said.
“Come with me.” It was four-thirty.
A deck, the ground floor of the superstructure, was entirely devoted to the rooms containing the services of the marine giant. Located there were the main galley, deepfreeze chamber, cool room, other assorted food stores, liquor store, soiled-linen store, automatic laundry, cargo-control room, including the inert-gas control, and the firefighting-control room, also called the foam room.
Above it was B deck, with all nonofficer accommodations, cinema, library, four recreation rooms, and three bars.
C deck held the officer cabins apart from the four on the level above, plus the officers’ dining salon and smoking room, and the crew’s club, with swimming pool, sauna, and gymnasium.
It was the cargo-control room on A deck that interested the terrorist, and he ordered the pumpman to bring him to it. There were no windows; it was centrally heated, air-conditioned, silent, and well lit. Behind his mask the eyes of the terrorist chief flickered over the banks of switches and settled on the rear bulkhead. Here behind the control console where the pumpman now sat, a visual display board, nine feet wide and four feet tall, occupied the wall. It showed in map form the crude-tank layout of the Freya’s cargo capacity.
“If you try to trick me,” he told the pumpman, “it may cost me the life of one of my men, but I shall surely find out If I do, I shall not shoot you, my friend, I shall shoot your Captain Larsen. Now, point out to me where the ballast holds are, and where the cargo holds.”
Martinsson was not going to argue, with his captain’s life at stake. He was in his mid-twenties, and Thor Larsen was a generation older. He had sailed with Larsen twice before, including his first-ever voyage as pumpman, and like all the crew he had enormous respect and liking for the towering Norwegian, who had a reputation for unflagging consideration for his crew and for being the best mariner in the Nordia fleet. He pointed at the diagram in front of him.
The sixty holds were laid out in sets of three across the beam of the Freya; twenty such sets.
“Up here in the forepart,” said Martinsson, “the port and starboard tanks are full of crude. The center is the slop tank, empty now, like a buoyancy tank, because we are on our maiden voyage and have not discharged cargo yet. So there has been no need to scour the cargo tanks and pump the slops in here. One row back, all three are ballast tanks. They were full of seawater from Japan to the Gulf; now they are full of air.”
“Open the valves,” said the terrorist, “between all three ballast tanks and the slop tank.” Martinsson hesitated. “Go on, do it.”
Martinsson pressed three square plastic controls on the console in front of him. There was a low humming from behind the console. A quarter of a mile in front of them, down below the steel deck, great valves the size of normal garage doors swung open, forming a single, linked unit out of the four tanks, each capable of holding twenty thousand tons of liquid. Not only air but any liquid now entering one of the tanks would flow freely to the other three.
“Where are the next ballast tanks?” asked the terrorist. With his forefinger Martinsson pointed halfway down the ship.
“Here, amidships, there are three in a row, side by side,” he said.
“Leave them alone,” said the terrorist “Where are the others?”
“There are nine ballast tanks in all,” said Martinsson. “The last three are here, side by side as usual, right up close to the superstructure.”
“Open the valves so they communicate with each other.”
Martinsson did as he was bid.
“Good,” said the terrorist. “Now, can the ballast tanks be linked straight through to the cargo tanks?”
“No,” said Martinsson, “it’s not possible. The ballast tanks are permanent for ballast—that is, seawater or air—but never oil. The cargo tanks are the reverse. The two systems do not interconnect.”
“Fine,” said the masked man. “We can change all that. One last thing. Open all the valves between all the cargo tanks, laterally and longitudinally, so that all fifty communicate with each other.”
It took fifteen seconds for all the necessary control buttons to be pushed. Far down in the treacly blackness of the crude oil, scores of gigantic valves swung open, forming one enormous, single tank containing a million tons of crude. Martins-son stared at his handiwork in horror.
“If she sinks with one tank ruptured,” he whispered, “the whole million tons will flow out.”
“Then the authorities had better make sure she doesn’t sink,” said the terrorist. “Where is the master power source from this control panel to the hydraulic pumps that control the valves?”
Martinsson gestured to an electrical junction box on the wall near the ceiling. The terrorist reached up, opened the box, and pulled the contact breaker downward. With the box dead, he removed the ten fuses and pocketed them. The pumpman looked on with fear in his eyes. The valve-opening process had become irreversible. There were spare fuses, and he knew where they were stored. But he would be in the paint locker. No stranger entering his sanctum could find them in time to close those vital valves.
Bengt Martinsson knew, because it was his job to know, that a tanker cannot simply be loaded or unloaded haphazardly. If all the starboard cargo tanks are filled on their own, with the others left empty, the ship will roll over and sink. If the port tanks are filled alone, she will roll the other way. If the forward tanks are filled but not balanced at the stern, she will dive by the nose, her stern high in the air; and the reverse if the stern half is full of liquid and the for’ard empty.
But if the stem and stern ballast tanks are allowed to flood with water while the center section is buoyant with air, she will arch like an acrobat doing a backspring. Tankers are not designed for such strains; the Freya’s massive spine would break at the midsection.
“One last thing,” said the terrorist. “What would happen if we opened all the fifty inspection hatches to the cargo tanks?”
Martinsson was tempted, sorely tempted, to let them try it. He thought of Captain Larsen sitting high above him, facing a submachine carbine. He swallowed.
“You’d die,” he said, “unless you had breathing apparatus.”
He explained to the masked man beside him that when a tanker’s holds are full, the liquid crude is never quite up to the ceilings of the holds. In the gap between the slopping surface of the oil and the ceiling of the hold, gases form, given off by the crude oil. They are volatile gases, highly explosive. If they were not bled off, they would turn the ship into a bomb.
Years earlier, the system for bleeding them off was by way of gas lines fitted with pressure valves so that the gases could escape to the atmosphere above deck, where, being very light, they would go straight upward. More recently, a far safer system had been devised: inert gases from the main engine exhaust flue were fed into the holds to expel oxygen and seal the surface of the crude oil; carbon monoxide was the principal constituent of these inert gases.
Because the inert gases created a completely oxygen-free atmosphere, fire or spark, which requires oxygen, was banished. But every tank had a one-meter circular inspection hatch let into the main deck; if a hatch were opened by an incautious visitor, he would immediately be enveloped in a carpet of inert gas reaching to above his head. He would die choking, asphyxiated in an atmosphere containing no oxygen.
“Thank you,” said the terrorist. “Who handles the breathing apparatus?”
“The first officer is in charge of it,” said Martinsson. “But we are all trained to use it.”
Two minutes later he was back in the paint store with the rest of the crew. It was five o’clock.
While the leader of the masked men had been in the cargo-control room with Martinsson, and another held Thor Larsen prisoner in his own cabin, the remaining five had unloaded their launch. The ten suitcases of explosive stood on the deck amidships at the top of the courtesy ladder, awaiting the leader’s instructions for placing. These orders he gave with crisp precision. Far away on the foredeck the inspection hatches of the port and starboard ballast tanks were unscrewed and removed, revealing the single steel ladder descending eighty feet into the black depths of musty air.
Azamat Krim took off his mask, stuffed it in his pocket, took his flashlight, and descended into the first. Two suitcases were lowered after him on long cords. Working in the base of the hold by lamplight, he placed one entire suitcase against the outer hull of the Freya and lashed it to one of the vertical ribs with cord. He opened the other case and extracted its contents in two halves. One half went against the forward bulkhead, beyond which lay twenty thousand tons of oil; the other half went against the aft bulkhead, behind which was another twenty thousand tons of crude. Sandbags, also brought from the launch, were packed around the charges to concentrate the blast When he was satisfied that the detonators were in place and linked to the triggering device, he came back to the starlight on deck.
The same process was repeated on the other side of the Freya, and then twice again in the port and starboard ballast tanks close up to the superstructure. He had used eight of his suitcases in four ballast holds. The ninth he placed in the center ballast tank amidships, not to blast a hole for the waiting sea, but to help crack the spine.
The tenth was brought down to the engine room. Here in the curvature of the Freya’s hull, close up against the bulkhead to the paint locker, strong enough to break both open simultaneously, it was laid and primed. If it went off, those men in the paint locker a half-inch of steel away who survived the blast would drown when the sea, under immense pressure at eighty feet below the waves, came pounding through. It was six-fifteen and dawn was breaking over the Freya’s silent decks when he reported to Andrew Drake.
“The charges are laid and primed, Andriy,” he said. “I pray to God we never set them off.”
“We won’t have to,” said Drake. “But I have to convince Captain Larsen. Only when he has seen and believed, will he convince the authorities. Then they’ll have to do as we want. They’ll have no alternative.”
Two of the crew were brought from the paint locker, made to don protective clothing, face masks, and oxygen bottles, and proceed down the deck from the fo’c’sle to the housing, opening every one of the fifty inspection hatches to the oil-cargo tanks. When the job was done, the men were returned to the paint locker. The steel door was closed and the two bolts screwed shut on the outside, not to be opened again until two prisoners were safe in Israel.
At six-thirty, Andrew Drake, still masked, returned to the captain’s day cabin. Wearily he sat down, facing Thor Larsen, and told him from start to finish what had been done. The Norwegian stared back at him impassively, held in check by the submachine gun pointing at him from the corner of the room.
When he had finished, Drake held up a black plastic instrument and showed it to Larsen. It was no larger than two king-size cigarette packs bound together; there was a single red button on the face of it, and a four-inch steel aerial sticking from the top.
“Do you know what this is, Captain?” asked the masked Drake. Larsen shrugged. He knew enough about radio to recognize a small transistorized transmitter.
“It’s an oscillator,” said Drake. “If that red button is pressed, it will emit a single VHF note, rising steadily in tone and pitch to a scream that our ears could not begin to listen to. But attached to every single charge on this ship is a receiver that can and will listen. As the tonal pitch rises, a dial on the receivers will show the pitch, the needles moving around the dials until they can go no further. When that happens, the devices will blow their fuses and a current will be cut. The cutting of that current in each receiver will convey its message to the detonators, which will then operate. You know what that would mean?”
Thor Larsen stared back at the masked face across the table from him. His ship, his beloved Freya, was being raped, and there was nothing he could do about it. His crew was crowded into a steel coffin inches away through a steel bulkhead from a charge that would crush them all, and cover them in seconds with freezing seawater.
His mind’s eye conjured a picture of hell. If the charges blew, great holes would be torn in the port and starboard sides of four of his ballast tanks. Roaring mountains of sea would rush in, filling both the outer and the center ballast tanks in minutes. Being heavier than the crude oil, the sea-water would have the greater pressure; it would push through the other gaping holes inside the tanks to the neighboring cargo holds, spewing the crude oil upward through the inspection hatches, so that six more holds would fill with water. This would happen right up in the forepeak, and right aft, beneath his feet. In minutes the engine room would be flooded with tens of thousands of tons of green water. The stern and the bow would drop at least ten feet, but the buoyant midsection would ride high, its ballast tanks untouched. The Freya, most beautiful of all the Norse goddesses, would arch her back once, in pain, and split in two. Both sections would drop straight, without rolling, twenty-five feet to the seabed beneath, to sit there with fifty inspection hatches open and facing upward. A million tons of crude would gurgle out to the surface of the North Sea.
It might take an hour for the mighty goddess to sink completely, but the process would be irreversible. In such shallow water, part of her bridge might still be above the tide, but she could never be refloated. It might take three days for the last of her cargo to reach the surface, but no diver could work among fifty columns of vertically rising crude oil. No one would close the hatches again. The escape of the oil, like the destruction of his ship, would be irreversible.
He stared back at the masked face but made no reply. There was a deep, seething anger inside him, growing with each passing minute, but he gave no sign of it.
“What do you want?” he growled. The terrorist glanced at the digital display clock on the wall. It read a quarter to seven.
“We’re going to the radio room,” he said. “We talk to Rotterdam. Or rather, you talk to Rotterdam.”
Twenty-seven miles to the east, the rising sun had dimmed the great yellow flames that spout day and night from the oil refineries of the Europoort. Through the night, from the bridge of the Freya, it had been possible to see these flames in the dark sky above Chevron, Shell, British Petroleum, and even, far beyond them, the cool blue glow of Rotterdam’s streetlighting.
The refineries and the labyrinthine complexity of the Europoort, the greatest oil terminal in the world, lie on the south shore of the Maas Estuary. On the north shore in the Hook of Holland, with its ferry terminal and the Maas Control building, squatting beneath its whirling radar antennae.
Here at six-forty-five on the morning of April 1, duty officer Bernhard Dijkstra yawned and stretched. He would be going home in fifteen minutes for a well-earned breakfast. Later, after a sleep, he would motor back from his home at Gravenzande in his spare time to see the new supergiant tanker pass through the estuary. It should be quite a day. As if to answer his thoughts, the speaker in front of him came to life.
“Pilot Maas, Pilot Mass, this is the Freya.”
The supertanker was on Channel 20, the usual channel for a tanker out at sea to call up Mass Control by radiotelephone. Dijkstra leaned forward and flicked a switch.
“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. Go ahead.”
“Pilot Maas, this is the Freya. Captain Thor Larsen speaking. Where is the launch with my berthing crew?”
Dijkstra consulted a clipboard to the left of his console.
“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. They left the Hook over an hour ago. They should be with you in twenty minutes.”
What followed caused Dijkstra to shoot bolt-upright in his chair.
“Freya to Pilot Maas. Contact the launch immediately and tell them to return to port. We cannot accept them on board. Inform the Maas pilots not to take off—repeat, not to take off. We cannot accept them on board. We have an emergency—I repeat, we have an emergency.”
Dijkstra covered the speaker with his hand and yelled to his fellow duty officer to throw the switch on the tape recorder. When it was spinning to record the conversation, Dijkstra removed his hand and said carefully:
“Freya, this is Pilot Maas. Understand you do not wish the berthing crew to come alongside. Understand you do not wish the pilots to take off. Please confirm.”
“Pilot Maas, this is Freya. Confirm. Confirm.”
“Freya, please give details of your emergency.”
There was silence for ten seconds, as if a consultation were taking place on the Freya’s bridge far out at sea. Then Larsen’s voice boomed out again in the control room.
“Pilot Maas, Freya. I cannot give the nature of the emergency. But if any attempt is made by anyone to approach the Freya, people will get killed. Please stay away. Do not make any further attempt to contact the Freya by radio or telephone. Finally, the Freya will contact you again at oh-nine-hundred hours exactly. Have the chairman of the Rotterdam Port Authority present in the control room. That is all.”
The voice ended, and there was a loud click. Dijkstra tried to call back two or three times. Then he looked across at his colleague.
“What the hell did that mean?”
Officer Wilhelm Schipper shrugged in perplexity. “I didn’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Captain Larsen sounded as if he might be in danger.”
“He spoke of men getting killed,” said Dijkstra. “How killed? What’s he got, a mutiny? Someone run amok?”
“We’d better do what he says until this is sorted out,” said Schipper.
“Right,” said Dijkstra. “You get on to the chairman. I’ll contact the launch and the two pilots up at Schiphol.”
The launch bearing the berthing crew was chugging at a steady ten knots across the flat calm toward the Freya, with three miles still to go. It was developing into a beautiful spring morning, warm for the time of year. At three miles the bulk of the giant tanker was already looming large, and the ten Dutchmen who would help her berth, but who had never seen her before, were craning their necks as they came closer.
No one thought anything when the ship-to-shore radio by the helmsman’s side crackled and squawked. He took the handset off its cradle and held it to his ear. With a frown he cut the engine to idling, and asked for a repeat. When he got it, he put the helm hard a-starboard and brought the launch around in a semicircle.
“We’re going back,” he told the men, who looked at him with puzzlement. “There’s something wrong. Captain Larsen’s not ready for you yet.”
Behind them the Freya receded again toward the horizon as they headed back to the Hook.
Up at Schiphol Airport, south of Amsterdam, the two estuary pilots were walking toward the Port Authority helicopter that would airlift them out to the deck of the tanker. It was routine procedure; they always went out to waiting ships by whirlybird.
The senior pilot, a grizzled veteran with twenty years at sea, a master’s ticket, and fifteen years as a Maas Pilot, carried his “brown box,” the instrument that would help him steer her to within a yard of seawater if he wished to be so precise. With the Freya clearing twenty feet only from the shoals and the Inner Channel barely fifty feet wider than the Freya herself, he would need it this morning.
As they ducked underneath the whirling blades, the helicopter pilot leaned out and wagged a warning finger at them.
“Something seems to be wrong,” he yelled above the roar of the engine. “We have to wait. I’m closing her down.”
The engine cut, the blades swished to a stop.
“What the hell’s all that about?” asked the second pilot.
The helicopter flier shrugged.
“Don’t ask me,” he said. “Just came through from Maas Control. The ship isn’t ready for you yet.”
At his handsome country house outside Vlaardingen, Dirk Van Gelder, chairman of the Port Authority, was at breakfast a few minutes before eight when the phone rang. His wife answered it.
“It’s for you,” she called, and went back to the kitchen, where the coffee was perking. Van Gelder rose from the breakfast table, dropped his newspaper on the chair, and shuffled in carpet slippers out to the hallway.
“Van Gelder,” he said into the telephone. As he listened, he stiffened, his brow furrowed.
“What did he mean, killed?” he asked.
There was another stream of words into his ear.
“Right,” said Van Gelder. “Stay there. I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.”
He slammed the phone down, kicked off the slippers, and put on his shoes and jacket. Two minutes later he was at his garage doors. As he climbed into his Mercedes and backed out to the gravel driveway, he was fighting back thoughts of his personal and abiding nightmare.
“Dear God, not a hijack. Please, not a hijack.”
After replacing the VHF radiotelephone on the bridge of the Freya, Captain Thor Larsen had been taken at gunpoint on a tour of his own ship, peering with flashlight into the forward ballast holds to note the big packages strapped far down below the waterline.
Returning down the deck, he had seen the launch with the berthing crew turn, three miles out, and head back for the shore. To seaward a small freighter had passed, heading south, and had greeted the leviathan at anchor with a cheery hoot. It was not returned.
He had seen the single charge in the center ballast tank amidships, and the further charges in the after ballast tanks close by the superstructure. He did not need to see the paint locker. He knew where it was, and could imagine how close the charges were placed.
At half past eight, while Dirk Van Gelder was striding into the Maas Control Building to listen to the tape recording, Thor Larsen was being escorted back to his day cabin. He had noted one of the terrorists, muffled against the chill, perched right up in the fo’c’sle apron of the Freya, watching the arc of the sea out in front of the vessel. Another was high on the top of the funnel casing, over a hundred feet up, with a commanding view of the sea around him. A third was on the bridge, patrolling the radar screens, able, thanks to the Freya’s own technology, to see a circle of ocean with a radius of forty-eight miles, and most of the sea beneath her.
Of the remaining four, two, the leader and another, were with him; the other two must be below decks somewhere.
The terrorist leader forced him to sit at his own table in his own cabin. The man tapped the oscillator, which was clipped to his belt.
“Captain, please don’t force me to press this red button. And please don’t think that I will not—either if there is any attempt at heroics on this ship or if my demands are not met. Now, please read this.”
He handed Captain Larsen a sheaf of three sheets of foolscap paper covered with typed writing in English. Larsen went rapidly through it.
“At nine o’clock you are going to read that message over the ship-to-shore radio to the chairman of the Port Authority of Rotterdam. No more, and no less. No breaking into Dutch or Norwegian. No supplementary questions. Just the message. Understand?”
Larsen nodded grimly. The door opened, and a masked terrorist came in. He had apparently been in the galley. He bore a tray with fried eggs, butter, jam, and coffee, which he placed on the table between them.
“Breakfast,” said the terrorist leader. He gestured toward Larsen. “You might as well eat.”
Larsen shook his head, but drank the coffee. He had been awake all night, and had risen from his bed the previous morning at seven. Twenty-six hours awake, and many more to go. He needed to stay alert, and guessed the black coffee might help. He calculated also that the terrorist across the table from him had been awake the same amount of time.
The terrorist signaled the remaining gunman to leave. As the door closed they were alone, but the broad expanse of table put the terrorist well out of Larsen’s reach. The gun lay within inches of the man’s right hand; the oscillator was at his waist.
“I don’t think we shall have to abuse your hospitality for more than thirty hours, maybe forty,” said the masked man. “But if I wear this mask during that time, I shall suffocate. You have never seen me before, and after tomorrow you will never see me again.”
With his left hand, the man pulled the black balaclava helmet from his head. Larsen found himself staring at a man in his early thirties, with brown eyes and medium-brown hair. He puzzled Larsen. The man spoke like an Englishman, behaved like one. But Englishmen did not hijack tankers, surely. Irish, perhaps? IRA? But he had referred to friends of his in prison in Germany. Arab, perhaps? There were PLO terrorists in prison in Germany. And he spoke a strange language to his companions. Not Arabic by the sound of it, yet there were scores of different dialects in Arabic, and Larsen knew only the Gulf Arabs. Again, Irish perhaps.
“What do I call you?” he asked the man whom he would never know as Andriy Drach or Andrew Drake. The man thought for a moment as he ate.
“You can call me ‘Svoboda,’ ” he said at length. “It is a common name in my language. But it is also a word. It means freedom.’ ”
“That’s not Arabic,” said Larsen.
The man smiled for the first time.
“Certainly not. We are not Arabs. We are Ukrainian freedom fighters, and proud of it.”
“And you think the authorities will free your friends in prison?” asked Larsen.
“They will have to,” said Drake confidently. “They have no alternative. Come, it is almost nine o’clock.”