The Devil's Alternative

“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?”