The western world needed answers to three questions: was she really dead? If not, where was she now? And what was her new name? The KH-11 satellites were instructed to narrow their search to something resembling the Java Star.
In the first week of April the joint operation at Edzell air base in Scotland was stood down. There was no more it could do that was not now being done far more officially by the main western intel-gathering agencies.
Michael McDonald returned with relief to his native Washington. He stayed with the hunt for the ghost ship, but out of Langley. Part of the CIA’s mission was to reinterrogate any detainee in any of its covert detention centres who might, before capture, have heard a whisper of a project called Al-Isra. And they called in every source they had out in the shadowy world of Islamist terrorism. There were no takers. The very phrase referring to the magical journey through the night to great enlightenment seemed to have been born and died with an Egyptian terror-financier who went off a balcony in Peshawar in September.
With regret Colonel Mike Martin was presumed to have been lost on mission. He had clearly done what he could, and if the Java Star or another floating bomb were discovered heading for the USA, he would be deemed to have succeeded. But no one expected to see him again. It had simply been too long since his last sign of life in a diver’s kitbag on Labuan.
Three days before the G8 meeting patience finally ran out, and at the highest level, with the global search based on the British tip-off. Marek Gumienny, at his desk in Langley, called Steve Hill on a secure line with the news.
‘Steve, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you and even more so for your man Mike Martin. But the conviction here is that he’s gone and with the biggest trawl of global shipping ever attempted, he must have been wrong.’
‘And Sam Seymour’s theory?’ asked Hill.
‘Same thing. No dice. We have checked out just about every goddam tanker on the planet, all categories. About fifty left to locate and identify, then it’s over. Whatever this Al-Isra phrase meant, either we’ll never find out or it means nothing or it has been long discontinued. Hold on . . . I’ll kill the other line.’
In a moment, he came back on. ‘There’s a ship overdue. Left Trinidad for Puerto Rico four days ago. Due yesterday. Never showed. Won’t answer.’
‘What kind of ship?’ asked Hill.
‘A tanker. Three thousand tonnes. Look, she may have foundered. But we’re checking now.’
‘What was she carrying?’ asked Hill.
‘Liquefied petroleum gas,’ was the answer.
It was a Keyhole KH-11 satellite that found her, six hours after the complaint from Puerto Rico to the head office of the oil-company owners of the refinery, based in Houston, was turned into a major alarm situation.
Sweeping through the eastern Caribbean with its cameras and listening sensors checking on a five-hundred-mile wide swathe of sea and islands, the Keyhole heard a transponder signal from far below and its computer confirmed it was from the missing Doña Maria.
The knowledge went instantly to a variety of agencies, which was why Marek Gumienny was interrupted in his phone call to London. Others in the loop were SOCOM headquarters at Tampa, Florida, the US Navy and the Coast Guards. All were given the exact grid reference of the missing vessel.
In not switching off the transponder, the hijackers were either being very stupid or hoping to get very lucky. But they were only following their orders. With the transponder emitting, they gave away their name and position. With it switched off, they became immediately suspect as a possible rogue ship.
The small LPG tanker was still being navigated and steered by a terrified Captain Montalban, four days without sleep, save only a few catnaps before he was kicked awake again. She had slipped past Puerto Rico in the darkness, passed west of the Turks and Caicos Islands and lost herself for a while in the cluster of seven hundred islands that make up the Bahamas.
When the Keyhole found her she was steaming due west just south of Bimini, the westernmost island of the whole archipelago.
At Tampa her course was plotted and extended forward. It went straight into the open mouth of the Port of Miami, a waterway that leads into the heart of the city.
Within ten minutes the small tanker was attracting real company. A P-3 Orion sub-hunter, aloft from the naval air station at Key West, found her, dropped to a few thousand feet and began to circle, filming her from every angle. She appeared on a wall-sized plasma screen in the near-darkness of the ops room at Tampa, almost life-size.
‘Jesus, would you look at that,’ murmured an operator to no one in particular.
While at sea someone had gone over the stern of the tanker with a brush and white paint to daub a cross-bar over the letter ‘i’ in Maria. It attempted to rechristen her the Doña Marta but the white smear was simply too crude to dupe any onlooker for more than a few seconds.
There are two coastguard cutters operating out of Charleston, South Carolina, both Hamilton class and both were at sea. They are the 717 USCG Mellon and her sister ship the Morgenthau. The Mellon was closer and turned towards the hijacked fugitive, moved from optimum cruise revolutions to flank speed. Her navigator rapidly plotted her intercept at ninety minutes, just before sundown.
The word ‘cutter’ hardly does the Mellon justice; she can perform like a small destroyer at 150 metres in length and 3,300 tons deadweight. As she raced through the Atlantic swell of early April her crew ran to prepare her armament – just in case. The missing tanker was already rated as ‘likely hostile’.
The Mellon’s weaponry is not to be trifled with. Lightest of her three systems is the six-barrel 20-mm Gatling gun which pumps out such a blizzard of ordnance that it is used as an antimissile weapon. In theory even an incoming rocket would be torn apart by flying through such a hail of bullets. But the Phalanx gun does not have to be used against missiles; it can tear almost anything apart but it needs to be fairly close.
She also carried two Bushmaster 25-mm cannon, not as rapid but heavier and enough to give a small tanker a completely spoiled day. And she has her deck-mounted Oto Melara 76-mm rapid-fire cannon. By the time the Doña Maria became a speck on the horizon all three systems were crewed and ready, and the men crouching over what so far they had only used in training would have been more than saintly if they did not harbour a sneaking lust to use them in real action.
With the Orion above them, filming everything in real time and passing the images to Tampa, the Mellon curved round the stern of the tanker and came abreast of her, throttling back to format just two hundred yards off the beam. Then the Mellon called on the Doña Maria with her loudhailer.
‘Unidentified tanker, this is United States Coast Guard vessel Mellon. Heave to. I say again, heave to. We are coming aboard.’
Powerful field glasses could pick up the figure at the helm holding the wheel, and two other figures flanking the man. There was no response. The tanker did not slow down. The message was repeated.