‘Natural gas, liquid form?’ asked Gumienny. He was trying to think how many ports in the USA imported concentrates of gas for industrial power, and the number was becoming unsettling. But surely these docking facilities were miles from massed humanity?
‘Liquid natural gas, known as LNG, is hard to ignite,’ Seymour countered. ‘It is stored at minus two hundred and fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit in special double-hulled vessels. Even if you took one over, the stuff would have to leak into the atmosphere for hours before it became combustible. But according to the eggheads there is one that frightens the hell out of them. LPG. Liquid Petroleum Gas.
‘It is so awful that a quite small tanker, if torched within ten minutes of catastrophic rupture, would unleash the power of thirty Hiroshima bombs. It would be the biggest non-nuclear explosion on this planet.’
There was total silence in the room above the Thames. Steve Hill rose, strolled to the window and looked down at the river flowing past in the April sunshine.
‘In layman’s language, what have you come here to say, Sam?’
‘I think we have been looking for the wrong ship in the wrong ocean. Our only break is that this is a tiny and very specialist market. But the biggest importer of LPG is the USA. I know there is a mood in Washington that all this may be a wild-goose chase. I think we should go the last mile. The USA can check out every LPG tanker expected in her waters, and not just from the Far East. And stop them until boarded. From Lloyd’s I can check out every other LPG cargo worldwide; from any point in the compass.’
Marek Gumienny took the next flight back to Washington. He had conferences to attend and work to do. As he flew out of Heathrow the Countess of Richmond came round Cape Agulhas, South Africa, and entered the Atlantic.
She had made good speed and her navigator, one of the three Indonesians, estimated the Agulhas Current and the north-running Benguela Current would give her an extra day and plenty of time to reach her intended destination.
Further out into the seas off the Cape, and on into the Atlantic, other ships were moving from the Indian Ocean to head for Europe or North America. Some were huge ore carriers; others general cargo ships bringing the ever-increasing amount of Asian goods to both western continents as marketers ‘outsourced’ their manufacturing bases to the low-cost workshops of the East. Others still were supertankers too big even for the Suez Canal, their computers following the hundred-fathom line from the east to the west while their crews played cards.
They were all noted. High above, out of sight and mind, the satellites drifted across inner space, their cameras passing back to Washington every line of their structure and the names on their sterns. More, under recent legislation they all carried transponders emitting their individual call-sign to the listening ears. Each identification was checked out, and that included the Countess of Richmond, vouched for by Lloyd’s and Siebart and Abercrombie as being a Liverpool-registered small freighter bringing a legitimate cargo on a foreseen route from Surabaya to Baltimore. For the USA there was no point in probing deeper; she was thousands of miles from the American coast.
Within hours of the return of Marek Gumienny to Washington changes were made to the US precautions. In the Pacific the check-out-and-examine cordon was brought to a thousand-mile band off the coast. A similar cordon was established in the Atlantic from Labrador to Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean Sea to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Without fuss or announcement the emphasis abandoned the giant tankers and freighters (which by then had all been checked) and looked hard at the scores of smaller tankers that ply the seas from Venezuela to the St Lawrence River. Every P-3 Orion available was pressed into coastal patrol, flying over hundreds of thousands of square miles of tropical and subtropical sea looking for small tankers, and especially for those bearing gas.
American industry cooperated to the full, supplying details of every cargo expected, where and when due. The data from industry was cross-indexed with the sightings at sea and they all checked out. Gas tankers were permitted to arrive and dock, but only after taking on board a posse of US Navy, Marines or Coast Guards to escort them in under guard, from a point two hundred miles out.
The Doña Maria was back in Port of Spain when the two terrorists she harboured in her crew saw the signal they had been briefed to expect. As instructed, when they saw the signal they acted.
The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is a major supplier of petrochemical products across a wide spectrum to the United States. The Doña Maria was berthed at the offshore sea island, the tank farm where tankers large and small could approach, take cargo on board and leave without ever approaching the city itself.
Doña Maria was one of the smaller tankers, a member of that fleet of vessels that service the islands whose facilities neither need nor can accommodate the giants. The big vessels are wont to bring in the Venezuelan crude, which is refined down to its various ‘fractions’ at the onshore refinery, then piped out to the sea island for loading into the onward handlers.
Along with two other small tankers, the Doña Maria was at a specially remote section of the tank farm. Her cargo after all was liquefied petroleum gas, and no one wanted to be too close during the loading. It was late afternoon when she was finished and Captain Montalban prepared her for sea.
There were still two hours of tropical daylight left when she slipped her mooring lines and eased away from the jetty. A mile offshore she passed close to a rigid inflatable launch in which four men sat with fishing rods. It was the awaited sign.
The two Indians left their posts, ran below to their lockers and returned with handguns. One went to the waist of the tanker, where the scuppers were closest to the water and the men would board. The other went to the bridge and pointed his gun straight at the temple of Captain Montalban.
‘Do nothing, please, Captain,’ he said with great courtesy. ‘There is no need to slow down. My friends will board in a few minutes. Do not attempt to broadcast or I will have to shoot you.’
The captain was simply too amazed to fail to obey. As he recovered he glanced at the radio at one side of the bridge but the Indian caught his glance and shook his head. At that, all resistance was snuffed out. Minutes later the four terrorists were aboard and opposition became futile.
The last man out of the inflatable slashed it with a carving knife and it sank in the wake when the painter was released. The other three men had already hefted their canvas grips and stepped over the spaghetti-mix of pipes, tubes and tank hatches that define a tanker’s foredeck as they made their way aft.
They appeared on the bridge seconds later: two Algerians and two Moroccans, the ones Dr Al-Khattab had sent over a month earlier. They spoke only Moorish Arabic but the two Indians, still courteous, translated. The four South American crewmen were to be summoned to the foredeck and would wait there. A new sea course would be calculated and adhered to.
An hour after dark the four crewmen were coldly murdered and tossed overboard after a length of chain from the forward locker had been wired to each body’s ankle. If Captain Montalban had had any spirit to resist left in him, that was the end of it. The executions were very mechanical; the two Algerians had, back at home, been in the AIG, the Armed Islamic Group, and had slaughtered hundreds of helpless fellagha, outback farmers whose mass murder was simply a way of sending a message to the government in Algiers. Men, women, children, sick and old, they had killed them all many times, so four sailors was a formality.
Through the night the Doña Maria steamed north, but no longer towards her scheduled destination of Puerto Rico. To her port side was the expanse of the Caribbean basin, unbroken all the way to Me
xico. To starboard, quite close, were the two chains called the Windward and Leeward Islands, whose warm seas are often thought of only as vacation targets but are alive with hundreds of small tramps and tankers who keep the islands victualled and alive for the tourists.
Into this blizzard of coastal freighters and islands the Doña Maria would disappear and remain disappeared until she was logged overdue at Puerto Rico.
When the Countess of Richmond reached the doldrums the sea calmed and Yusuf Ibrahim emerged from his cabin. He was pale and drained by nausea but the hate-filled black eyes were the same as he gave his orders. The crew brought out from its storage place in the engine room a twenty-foot inflatable speedboat. When it was fully rigid, it was suspended from the two davits above the stern.
It took six men, sweating and grunting, to bring up the 100-hp outboard engine from below and fix it to the rear of the speedboat. Then it was winched down into the gentle swell beneath the stern.
Fuel tanks were lowered and hooked up. After several false starts the engine coughed into life. The Indonesian navigator was at the helm and took the speedboat away for a fast circle round the Countess.