The Malmö’s automatic identification system had been picked up instantly. It was monitored by the British Maritime Trade Operations out of Dubai and the American MARLO, the maritime liaison out of Bahrain. A score of NATO and EU warships were alerted to her problem, but, as Jimali knew, none would attack.
The Andersson Line maintained a night-and-day operations room in Stockholm, which was immediately advised. The shipping HQ called the Malmö. Jimali indicated that Capt. Eklund could take the call but put it on the bridge speaker and converse only in English. Even before he spoke, Stockholm knew he was in the presence of armed Somalis and every word should be guarded.
Captain Eklund confirmed that the Malmö had been taken in the night. His men were all safe and were being well treated. There were no injuries. They were steaming under orders for the coast of Somalia.
The shipowner, Harry Andersson, was roused over breakfast in his palatial home in a walled park in Östermalm, Stockholm. He finished dressing while his car was brought to the door, then drove straight to his operations room. The fleet controller of the night shift had stayed on. He explained everything that the emergency services and Capt. Eklund had been able to tell him.
Mr. Andersson had become a very successful, and thus rich, man because he had two very useful talents, among others. One was to assimilate a situation with extreme speed and, having done so, create a plan of action based on realities, not fantasies, and then go for it.
He stood, plunged in thought, in the middle of his operations room. No one dared disturb him. His ship had been taken by pirates, his first ever. Armed assault at sea would trigger a massacre and was simply not going to be attempted. The Malmö would therefore make the Somali coast and be anchored there. His first duty was to his fifteen employees, then to recover ship and cargo if possible. And then there was the question of his son.
“Bring my car to the door,” he said. “Call Björn, wherever he is, and tell him to get the plane ready for immediate takeoff. Flight plan for Northolt, London. Book me a suite at the Connaught. Hannah, you have your passport with you? Then come with me.”
Minutes later, in the back of his Bentley, his PA Hannah beside him, speeding to Bromma airport, he used his mobile phone to plan the immediate future.
It was a matter for the insurers now. He insured through a specialist syndicate of underwriters at Lloyd’s. They would have the whip hand because the money at risk was theirs. That was what he paid them an annual fortune for.
Before he was airborne, he had learned his underwriters’ negotiator of choice—and they definitely had been down this road before—was a firm called Chauncey Reynolds, which had a track record of negotiated recoveries. He knew he would be in London long before his ship would reach the Somali shore. Before his Learjet reached the Swedish coast, he had an appointment with the lawyers at six p.m. Well, they would damn well have to work late.
While he was on the glide path of Northolt t
ouchdown, Chauncey Reynolds was preparing. They were trying the Surrey home of their negotiator of choice, the half-retired ace of his strange profession. His wife fetched him from among the beehives in the garden.
He had learned his skills as a hostage-recovery negotiator for the Metropolitan Police. He was a deceptively slow-spoken Welshman named Gareth Evans.
• • •
The Troll was very dead when Opal arrived. Opal had been seen by the spotter down the road and recognized because the captain had seen him before, at the earlier beach meeting with Benny. Again the pulse went red in the captain’s hand and the roadblock came into being.
Opal suddenly saw the group of robed figures in his dim headlight, the swinging torch, the pointing assault rifles. Like all secret agents far behind enemy lines and facing a bad death in the event of unmasking, he had a small panic attack.
Were his papers in order? Would his story of job seeking in Marka stand up? What could the mutawa possibly want on that road in the middle of the night?
The man with the torch approached and stared at his face. The moon came out from behind a bank of clouds, harbinger of the coming monsoon. Two black faces, inches apart in the night, one dark by nature, the other smeared with commando’s night-fighting cream.
“Shalom, Opal. Come, off the road. There is a truck coming.”
The men vanished into the trees and couch grass, taking the trail bike with them. The truck passed. Then the captain showed Opal the crash site.
The Troll’s pickup had seemingly had a complete blowout of the front offside wheel. The nail was still protruding from the tread, where human hands had hammered it. Out of control, the pickup must have slewed to one side. By ill chance, this was in the center of the concrete bridge.
It had toppled at speed over the edge, slamming into the far steep bank of the wadi. The impact had hurled the driver into the windshield and the steering wheel into his chest with enough force to shatter both head and thorax. Someone had seemingly eased him out of the cab and laid him beside the vehicle. In death he stared unseeing up at the wispy tips of the casuarina trees between him and the moon.
“Now, let us talk,” said the captain. He briefed Opal exactly as Benny had told him on the secure line between the trawler and Tel Aviv. Word for word. Then he gave him a sheaf of papers and a red baseball cap.
“These are what the dying man gave you before he passed away. You did your best, but there was no hope. He was too far gone. Any questions?”
Opal shook his head. The story was feasible. He tucked the papers inside his windbreaker. The captain of the Sayeret Matkal held out a hand.
“We must go back to the sea. Good luck, my friend. Mazel tov.”
It took a few moments to brush the last footprints from the dust, all save those of Opal. Then they were gone, back across the dark ocean to the waiting fishing boat. Opal hauled his trail bike back to the road and continued to the north.
• • •
Those who gathered in the office of Chauncey Reynolds were all experienced at what, over a decade of piracy, had become a mutually agreed ritual. The pirates were all clan chiefs of Puntland, operating out of an eight-hundred-mile coast from Boosaaso in the north to Mareeg, just up the coast from Mogadishu.
They were in piracy for money and that was all. Their excuse was that, years ago, fishing fleets from South Korea and Taiwan had arrived and gutted their traditional fishing grounds, from which they had made a livelihood. Whatever the rights and wrongs, they had turned to piracy and since then made huge earnings, far more than those generated by a few tuna.