Well before Rensselaer met Katy when he was in New Orleans fitting out Athena, the Marseilles director of the Compagnie Navale Fraissinet, as he often did, had lunch one day in the Old Port. Headquarters in Paris had been swallowed by a huge German conglomerate that, emphasizing Fraissinet’s tanker and bulk carrier fleets, was undecided about its cruise business, which operated three 150-passenger specialty ships out of Marseilles. The director feared that despite the recent program of steering other than French holiday-makers his way, the Germans wanted to get rid of his ships so as to concentrate upon their core business. This, as well as the fact that he was now working for Germans, was the cause of ever-increasing resentment.
But because the spring sun was out, the colors were bright, the sea opalescent, and his bouillabaisse excellent, he was momentarily untroubled by his troubles. While tearing apart a baguette, he felt a very, very slight movement of air across the bridge of his nose. Looking up, he saw a butterfly passing before him so closely that he thought it would collide with his face. It made him smile. This caught the eye of a woman at the next table, who thought his smile was directed at her. Shy by nature, he could never have managed such a self-possessed and confident expression had he merely willed it himself.
She returned his unwitting flirtation with a look so hot and easy that he felt a kind of jolt. Like him, she was about forty-five, and her chest and firm cleavage was freckled and dark with sun, for him a sign of maturity’s slow sexual burn, which he found irresistible. They began their affair almost immediately. It was exclusively sexual, and because both were married it could take place only in hotels. Because she was wealthy, he felt constrained to carry on in the top establishments and to give her gifts he couldn’t afford. And because he had trouble understanding that Germans were actually people, he felt no guilt in appropriating from corporate accounts to support his trysts. Increasingly obsessed with her almost savage eroticism and the bronzed and freckled bosom that contrasted magnificently with his gift of a turquoise and silver necklace arrayed upon it, he embezzled to the point where the theft was almost as exciting as the illicit sex that made it necessary. The cruise subsidiary was doomed anyway.
But these were Germans, and they had German accountants. As German accountants inevitably and ineluctably would, the German accountants sensed that in Marseilles the figures were not always right. So, not surprisingly, the German accountants scheduled an audit. Relatively panicked (he was so far gone anyway), upon realizing that he might go to jail the director put his affair on hold and concentrated upon a scheme to refill the accounts before the German accountants arrived.
After visiting Australia, French Polynesia, and India, the ship l’Étoile Océanique, carrying 124 passengers and 52 crew, had made its most recent stop in the Maldives. Scheduled to come straight home through the Suez Canal, it was diverted to a safer route around the Cape of Good Hope so as to avoid the hostilities in the Middle East. The much longer route and many more days at sea necessitated tremendous fuel, labor, and provision expenses, which would make the voyage highly unprofitable.
So, for a bribe of €5,000, the provider of fuel in Cape Town would return sub rosa an advance payment of more than €100,000 and keep his fuel, receipts all in order. Nothing on the receipts was marked “Cape Town,” but only the worldwide bunkerage company that fueled all Fraissinet ships. This was enough money to make the director’s embezzlements whole, and then some, and with luck no one would know, not even German accountants.
It required, however, that l’Étoile Océanique come through Suez so as not to need the extra fuel that would have cost what the company would now unwittingly pay the director in Marseilles. So he ordered the captain to avoid the area of conflict in the Arabian Sea, dip slightly south into the Indian Ocean, and then sail north along the coast of East Africa to the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, and the Canal.
The captain protested with one word: “Piracy.” To which the director replied, “All you need do in the limited area where piracy has been more or less completely suppressed is turn off your transponder, extinguish lights, and proceeded at maximum speed so as to limit your exposure. If you bring the ship around the Cape, this line, struggling for its life, will go out of business.”
The captain replied, as a sort of compromise that was nonetheless meaningless, “Will spoof A.I.S. where appropriate.” That is, he would manipulate his Automatic Identification System transponder to indicate a false position, which was equivalent to going dark, as no one, pirates or otherwise, would know the true location of his ship.
Thereupon, unbeknownst to its passengers, senior management, or the maritime and naval authorities, l’Étoile Océanique would loop south into the Indian Ocean and then turn toward the Horn of Africa.
*
l’Étoile Océanique’s passengers were mostly middle-aged or retired: you had to have some money to take such a cruise, even if you got it by saving all your life. Nonetheless, it was in only the lower middle range of luxury. For example, the director had won promotion to director by coming up with the idea that the dining room should be as close as possible a reproduction of a Parisian bistro, with food to match. The savings on plush furniture and decoration, haute cuisine, and overly numerous waiters cut the catering budget in half, while the passengers enjoyed the satisfying mean between excessively luxurious and insufficiently good food. People were more relaxed about coming to dinner, they put on less weight and fewer airs, and they had less indigestion. Three seatings tended to sort themselves out into cliques, age groups, and character. All in all, because l’Étoile Océanique was small and offered two classes separated only by the difference between a cabin porthole and a larger, rectangular window, the passengers experienced none of the discomfort common to ocean liners with a dozen different levels of privilege.
Separated by as many characteristics as one can name, they were united in sharing the same elemental circumstances on board. The aristocrats among the passengers were several infants and half a dozen toddlers. Unlike most cruise ships, l’Étoile Océanique had no nursery or children’s programs. Parents stayed with their offspring, and their children basked in the love of the many old people who felt in their presence an inner glow worth more than a thousand prescriptions.
Next in age, and touching in their awkward loveliness, were six French lycéennes chaperoned by one Madame Eugénie, of brittle, blonde hair, icy blue eyes that somehow seemed not to see anything, and so much pale makeup that a moon lander might have alighted softly and soundlessly on her face. On their spectacular school trip, when not in port the students passed the long days at sea obsessively occupied in their assigned summer reading: Don Quixote, War and Peace, The Red and the Black, Crime and Punishment, Dickens, and a dozen other titles, none of which was famous for brevity.
The girls found chairs in the lounges or chaises on deck, and were still for hours as they read themselves into the kind of trance impossible for arthritic older people who could not hold the same position for half an hour, much less a day. These girls, with whom it was hard to engage in conversation because they were always reading, had the charm and sincerity of youth, especially a girl named Sophie, with red hair, blue eyes, braces, and such tender affection for the characters in her thick tomes that she could often be seen in a chair, with the ocean streaming by, its light glistening in the tears that filled her eyes but seldom dropped.
Five or six young couples, unmarried but on de facto honeymoons, broadcast both unwittingly and unknowingly in every movement, glance, and smile that they spent their waking moments in their cabins, attending to sex. Most of the other passengers old enough to understand this treated it with a combination of irritation, amusement, and contempt. None with envy, for in the case of anyone who had at one time been thus transfixed, it seemed only as enviable as the exasperating stages of late adolescence.
In random portraits of some among the 124 souls, the eye might light upon several dozen retired couples from all walks of life, the slow bearers of gray hair, aging bodies, and fashions that had played out, returned, and played out yet again. They were a United Nations of Europe: mainly French but also Swedes, Poles, Slovaks, Italians, and Germans.
In addition to five widowers were four Swedish bachelors, former postal workers who never associated with anyone else unless, when drunk, they fished among the reefs of widows. And among the widowers was one tall, gray-haired, inscrutable, and lean older man who never spoke to anyone at all, carried a binocular hanging from a neck strap, seemed to be ex-military, and, unbeknownst to anyone else, was taking the cruise his departed wife had wanted to take and never could. He spoke to her silently, describing everything he did and everything he saw. In one sense, he was the most engaged and active of them all. His companion, whom he knew so well, was always with him, as close as if two souls could inhabit one body.
The widows, too, were fishing, with no luck. None of them wanted a drunken, retired, Swedish postal worker, all were vainly besotted with the tall, handsome binocular widower, and, as if to console themselves, at dinner they wore ridiculous gowns and were almost as made-up as Madame Eugénie. Their costuming was a nightly spectacle: a floor-length white taffeta gown trimmed with billows of white lace, topped with a white taffeta turban in the center of which was a green frog-brooch; a purple-sequined gown so low cut that one could see the hefty widow’s extremely substantial bosom rolling with the movement of the ship; and so on. People were shocked, and yet the widows, shamed and saddened, could not but persist.
No one failed to marvel at a middle-aged, fat, bald, badly dressed Argentine and his young, very short and slight Brazilian Adonis-who-was-anything-but-an-Adonis, who walked in a very peculiar way that made him look like he was being continually bitten by horseflies. The two of them fought continuously and seemed perpetually embarrassed, the Argentine because he could have only a midget who walked as if stung by horseflies, and the midget because he was bought by someone so fat, bald, and badly dressed. It was strange when they passed, fighting in hostile undertones, but after a while no one gave them a second thought.
And then there were Martin and Petra, he a French Jew, she a gorgeous, statuesque German who had gone to Paris specifically to marry a Jew so as to assuage her guilt about the Holocaust, which she had neither committed, aided, nor abetted. Though an intellectual and a scientist (a chemist), Martin, at six-foot-four, was a physical match for his wife, being athletic and gentle, which she loved no end. They had been lucky, amazed, and delighted that the love they had for one another had nothing to do with either the Holocaust, her guilt, or their differences. That they had accidentally fallen into a kind of paradise radiated from them as it often does from such rare couples.
The captain was a Dane, the officers were French, and except for a few French waiters the crew was Filipino—very polite, obliging, hard workers who lived lonely lives at sea far from their families. Sometimes the people they served were kind and approachable, sometimes they were awkward, sometimes cruel. But they all disappeared, replaced by a new set as indistinguishable to the crew as the crew was indistinguishable to them. For most of the Filipinos on board it was exquisitely difficult when the ship neared the Philippines only to pass them by.
*
The passengers hadn’t been informed either of the plan to sail around the Cape, its cancellation, or the dip into the Indian Ocean to bypass the Arabian Sea. The southward detour meant that they were off the major sea-lanes and saw no other ships. Sea life in the open ocean was of a much different character than that of the coastal waters in which they had spent most of the cruise, and the position of sun and stars made the ship’s course seem unnatural and skewed. To varying degrees, each passenger, even if he did not know it, felt tugged left and south toward the part of the world’s open oceans least trafficked: the southern Indian Ocean and the cruel Southern Ocean itself. Whereas the Arctic is a largely frozen sea circled by land, the Antarctic, land circled by ocean, is its polar opposite. And the Southern Ocean is so cold, stormy, and unwelcoming that the world has been forced mainly to ignore it.
Although as it veered south-southwest l’Étoile Océanique would not fall too far south, where it was winter, still, nothing but open sea lay between them and the Antarctic. Many of the passengers experienced, albeit dismissible, a sense of dread. Day after day, nothing was in sight, the sun rose and set where it shouldn’t have, the electronic positioning chart outside the main dining room was “out of order,” and the captain no longer attended dinner.
For the French girls, the discomfort was intensified perhaps because most of them were now reading Crime and Punishment. The widows and widowers grew even more depressed, and soon the retirees followed. The sexually obsessed younger people and the Filipinos were oblivious of everything, the former being too hot to be intelligent, the latter always busy, and resigned to being carried hither and thither across the world with neither say as to or care about where they were going.
In addition to dread, the captain and his officers felt the nauseating fear that comes when one persists in following a course one knows is not merely dangerous but also unnecessary, avoidable, and wrong.
But perhaps the most remarkable sensibilities belonged to Martin and Petra. On the second night of altered course, after they had returned from dinner and sat for a while in their cabin watching the empty ocean run by, he turned to her and said, “I don’t know why . . . I have no idea why, but something is terribly wrong.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Exactly. I feel the same way. Something is wrong.”
*
One of the kitchen workers, whose job for eight hours a day was to debone chicken, was a Filipino from Jolo, the center of Islamic piracy and terrorism in the Philippines. He was anything but friendly with his Christian compatriots, and his hatred of their unbelief had combined with both his resentment of his lowly position and his deep hurt that, unlike him, they were relatively happy. He kept largely to himself and spoke only when spoken to.
Middle-aged and pudgy, he had left behind a large family including a younger brother who drifted in and out of Abu Sayyaf, the Jolo terrorist body that, pressed on land by Philippine forces, had turned to kidnaping, of a most violent sort, at sea. l’Étoile Océanique’s chicken deboner, who had signed on using the decidedly non-Muslim name Jesus Magalap, knew that he was installed in a particularly rich target. But the ship neither went close enough to Philippine waters nor stopped in a port within reach of them in time to share intelligence with his brother. Nor did it follow a course that he could communicate with certainty.
When the war broke out, however, and the ship was on its way to the Maldives, the diversion around the Cape was planned and the catering staff apprised of the need to take on stores in Cape Town. Magalap, thus alerted, made a point to learn the course. Although he did not know of the cancellation of the first diversion and l’Étoile Océanique’s new and secret directive to come through Suez, he volunteered to take lunch up to the bridge, and there, in chirpy, friendly tones, he asked an officer to explain where they were going. Happy to oblige, the officer took him to the chart. Focusing upon one waypoint within reasonable reach of the Somali coast, Jesus Magalap memorized the coordinates and the time, and chanted these to himself as he rushed to his cabin to write them down.
In the Maldives, while the ship was tied up in Malé—a parti-colored city of low high-rises stuffed onto a lily-pad islet dangerously close to sea level—Magalap went to the post office and called home. Speaking very fast in his local dialect and using slang and abbreviations, he was able to convey to his brother the coordinates, the time of arrival, and an idea of who was on board l’Étoile. By the time he got to the six French girls it had been almost as if, singing of the twelve days of Christmas, he was talking about red hens, turtledoves, and a partridge in a pear tree. After his brother noted what he had said, Magalap hung up, walked through pastel-colored neighborhoods to the mosque, and prayed. Then he returned to the ship, where, pregnant with anticipation, he was now happy. His whole life and his career at sea had pointed at a violent dénouement. Only in that would he find relief from the torture of waiting for the worldwide supremacy of Islam. The violence was both to speed things up and to punish the unbelievers for having slowed the triumphant march of the faith.
He had no confidence that the phone call to his brother would bring results, but he had done what he could. In doing his duty, he had been good, and he enjoyed that he had appealed to allies far more powerful than the many on board who were more powerful than was he, so much so that most of them did not even know or care that he existed.
*
Martin and Petra kept to themselves not because they were besotted and intoxicated new lovers but because they were comfortable with being alone together. And like the young French girls, they were deeply absorbed in their reading.
“Being on a ship is strange,” he said to her shortly after they had returned to their cabin for the night. “It’s like the optical illusion that you see one way and then another. You have weeks at sea with nothing but water and sky for three hundred and sixty degrees all the way to the horizon, and at night you can see stars billions of light-years away. What could be more expansive than that?”
“And yet,” she finished for him, “one is confined to a small vessel, all the smaller for the limitlessness outside, in a small cabin, with a small bathroom, and a short bathtub. At least for us.”
“That’s what I mean. Which is it? Neither and both. You go back and forth, as in the optical illusion.”
“And the vibration,” she added. She was speaking in German, he in French; sometimes they switched, and it was ever alluring. “It never stops—the forward motion, the sea slipping away, the hypnotic slap of the waves. It’ll be nice when we get back to our garden. I miss Paris as never before.”
“Too late to save anything if the weather’s been dry. The grass will be so high there might be pheasants in it.”
Not everyone may agree, but in a sleeping car in the Alps or on a ship at sea the rocking motion, repetitive sound, and great volumes of pristine air make for a deep, black, sound sleep that no anaesthesia can match. But such rest is nonetheless interruptible if the unconscious mind senses a primal threat.
At four in the morning, hours after the ship had turned onto a northward course three hundred miles off the Somali coast, Petra was awakened by a thud. At first she thought Martin had rolled out of bed, but he was fast asleep beside her.
Then she heard another thud, and a metallic slap against steel. She looked toward the window (they had paid for the larger cabin, with a rectangular window rather than a porthole), where she saw two lines moving left to right, right to left, vibrating with strain. They reminded her of musical instrument strings. Then she saw a person in dark clothes climbing up them using what she knew from her time in the mountains were called ascenders. Window cleaners who work on skyscrapers use them, but it was a strange time to be cleaning windows.
She woke Martin. “What is that?” she asked, looking at the window. When his eyes focused, he saw the ropes. Immediately alarmed, he held his reaction in abeyance. Probability suggested that it wasn’t a boarding. So, staring at the window, he waited. Then another form appeared, once again a man in dark clothing, going up. Now both Martin and Petra froze, sensing that their intuitions had been correct. Something terrible was about to happen. When the man’s rifle banged against the window, they knew it was so.
As they dressed, Petra asked if they should pull the fire alarm.
“No, that’ll get everyone out of their cabins and on deck. They’ll”—meaning the boarders—“probably pull the fire alarm themselves. We’ve got to alert the crew somehow, and hide.”
“How?”
“We’ll find a place—it’s a big enough ship. I’ll warn them, and come back to you, if I can.”
Then they heard muffled gunshots. She was terrified, but she retained her self-possession.
“Now they know,” Martin told her. “We have to hide. I hope the captain has had the good sense and opportunity to get rid of the passenger and crew manifests.” As they sped through the corridors and down the stairs, he thought that there was always so much that should be done that isn’t.
Many decks below, a wide central corridor went almost from bow to stern. Off this were the kitchens, storage, and crew quarters. On this level, near the main elevators and stairwell was a double row of dressing rooms for the always impeccably clad waiters, who had to turn out in what looked like highly starched, organ-grinder’s-monkey uniforms, some even, according to rank, with a pillbox hat. Three of these rooms lay on each side of the hall stub leading to starboard. At the end of each row was an electrical closet. The doors were numbered with edged plastic strips that slid into aluminum holders. The same signage identified the electrical closet, only on this, written in red, with the symbol of a lightning bolt, were the words High Voltage, followed by an exclamation point. Martin switched the signs around.
Leaving Petra inside a dressing room that was now identified as an electrical closet, he went to the kitchen nearby. Deep below decks, he was unable to hear the submachine-gun fire above.
As he was looking through the kitchen, the fire alarm sounded. He sped up so much that he hardly knew what he was grabbing: three boxes of water crackers, a Gouda the size of a small loaf of bread, a foot-long knife, and some apples in a net sack. Forgetting that there was a water tap in the dressing room, he opened a huge refrigerator door and was confronted with fifty magnums of Champagne. He took one, and raced back.
Once inside, he and Petra threw the steel bolt on the door and, in the flattering, warm light cast by a fixture over the mirror, came to grips with their refuge. Behind the bolted steel door were a sink, a toilet, a typically short nautical bathtub, a chair, and a small counter. With no assurance they would remain undiscovered, at least they had done the best they could.
*
Ten men in each of three skiffs had approached the gaily lit ship, its lights glittering in gold as it crossed their path, and tied up to it by means of goatskin-covered grappling hooks noiselessly heaved onto the rails. Later, the boats would be made fast to deck cleats and towed astern on both sides of the wake.
It took a while for all thirty to come aboard, but long before they deployed their full complement they stormed the bridge. Bursts of fire were directed at the radio room, followed by the wholesale smashing of equipment with the steel butts of automatic rifles and submachine guns.
In his cabin when he heard the gunfire, the first mate correctly placed it in or near the radio room. Under the impression that NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield and/or the EU’s Operation Atalanta still deployed assets locally in Combined Task Force 151—though in fact only Athena was present—he pointed his satellite phone out an open porthole and, with the press of a single, pre-programmed button, called NATO Maritime Command HQ in Northwood, UK.
An efficient operator with a lovely voice received his call and report of approximate position. “Just one moment, please.” When she came back on the line, she said, “Your reported position, in the Seychelles SRR, is in conflict with A.I.S. data. Please clarify.”
“We spoofed it.” Then he gave her the real position as best he could.
“What is your verification signal?”
“I don’t know. It’s on the bridge, I’m in my cabin.”
“How many attackers?”
“I don’t know. I’m in my cabin. I heard submachine-gun fire.”
“We have no other distress signal.”
“I believe they’ve destroyed our communications. I have a sat-phone.”
“All right. Sit tight. Don’t do anything that will bring harm to your passengers. Cooperate as much as possible. We will immediately notify the appropriate operators. Anything else?”
“No.”
“We’re on it. Communicate if you can. Good luck.”
When the first mate put down the phone, even without knowing that the only naval ship off East Africa was only a small, battered, coastal patrol ship, he felt the hollowness and fear of being completely alone among an unpredictable enemy.
*
At 0421 during the morning watch, following procedure, Velez took a message to Pisecki, the OOD. Pisecki asked him to deliver it to the captain. Awakened by the kind of knock that meant something was amiss, Rensselaer swung his feet from his rack and, without turning on the light, went to the door. Velez’s expression told him that he would not be able to go back to bed. At first he bumped, and then settled into, his chair, hitting the desk light switch as he did. In what to his eyes was bright glare, he read once, and again. Seizing the mic of the 1MC, he ordered the OOD to summon the XO and Holworthy to the bridge, and then dressed.
Once on the bridge, he didn’t have to wait long while Movius and Holworthy read the message just as carefully as he had.
“Commander,” Rensselaer said addressing Holworthy, “now you’ve got something in your bailiwick.”
Holworthy seemed already to be planning, and Movius said, “We’ve got two conflicting positions, one a hundred and fifty-six nautical miles southeast of the Seychelles, as reported by A.I.S., and the other—”
“Wait a minute,” Rensselaer interrupted, and ordered Pisecki, the OOD, to summon the quartermaster.
“The other,” Movius resumed, “according to the mate’s sat-phone estimate, is approximately three hundred nautical miles east of the Somali coast and, given the heading, presumed to be moving toward the Somalia SRR. What are we to believe?”
“The mate said they spoofed the A.I.S.,” Rensselaer stated. “It’s reasonable that they would. And it’s probably gone dark now that the ship is seized. Anyway, he’s called for help at that position, and there is no call from near the Seychelles. We’ll go with the mate.”
The quartermaster arrived. “Sir?” he inquired.
“Buck, we have a piracy. A small, specialized cruise ship, French registry, last reported position zero four, forty-one, four point two north, fifty-three, zero nine, twenty-six point zero nine east; heading, fifty-two degrees. It looks as if originally the ship was trying, just as we did, to slip between the Horn and Socotra. But if it’s pirates they’ll direct to the coast. What does a ship like that make, eighteen knots?”
“That sounds right.”
“We’re close enough. Plot an intercept course slightly to the north of the last reported position.”
Velez arrived just as Buck Lanham went to his charts. “Another message, sir. Fleet.”
Rensselaer read it. “Okay,” he said, and read to all who were within earshot.
“‘Reconnaissance only. Take no action. French ships will depart Toulon at ten hundred Zulu Time to relieve you. Repeat. Take no action.’
“Of course,” Rensselaer added, “reconnaissance is an action, so the order is contradictory and ambiguous. We should be at the intercept before the end of the forenoon watch.” Looking at Holworthy, Movius, and Pisecki, he said, “Let the watches change normally, and then make ready for general quarters. This is different from the Sahand. With the Sahand it was a fight. Here, it’ll be all negotiation and maneuver. So look lively, but expect to hold your fire.”
*
After the fire alarm had been sounded on board l’Étoile Océanique, every passenger other than Martin and Petra had responsibly reported to lifeboat stations, with children in bathrobes and adults in various states of dress. There, they were shocked to discover two dozen armed men, none of whom spoke any European tongue, and who—with angry shouts in impenetrable language that in its deep, rapid-fire, guttural sounds seemed both primitive and threatening in itself—herded all of them at gunpoint into the main salon. Though perhaps had it been sung gently or spoken by a woman, their speech might have been beautiful, when they spoke it was as if it had been howled by jackals.
On the bridge, four black-clad leaders forced the officers into a corner. Their chief, who had lost an eye and whose remaining one was fierce and inflamed, spoke in good English and ordered the captain to provide both the passenger and the crew manifests.
“We threw them overboard as you approached,” the captain said.
“You did not. Bring them now, or I will immediately kill ten passengers.”
The captain judged the man by the way he spoke, his one eye, and the way he carried himself. Unlike the fishermen-pirates of whom the captain had heard many stories from other mariners, the leader was completely confident, cold, in control of himself, and calm. He spoke quietly and those who heard him were sure he would carry out the threat. So the captain nodded, and, escorted, went to fetch the manifests.
Once these were supplied, the chief gave them to one of his men. He then ordered another to divert the ship, steering a course that he supplied, at fifteen knots. Then he marched the captain and his officers to the main salon, where the passengers and the rest of the crew were surrounded by more than two dozen men wielding Kalashnikovs, Uzis, and M4s. Many of the boarders carried grenades, and for good measure two were clad in suicide vests. Other than the leader and his lieutenants, all were Somalis.
Magalap, the kitchen worker who had provided the intelligence to his brother, was afraid to appeal to the hijackers in front of the crew, should the hijacking go wrong, so he stayed quiet, waiting to declare his loyalties less conspicuously. He moved to the front of the crowd, hoping to be able to separate himself off when the opportunity presented itself.
To quiet the murmur among the passengers, who despite their fright still lived within the illusion that they could speak and speculate, the chief fired a burst into the overhead. Plaster and fiberglass, some of it fine dust almost like snow, rained down in silence.
The chief was terrifying. No one aboard had ever directly encountered such a person. His remaining eye, doing double duty, seemed to be constantly and voraciously in motion. As evil people often do, he smiled broadly after everything he said, as if what he said, upon which the lives of the passengers, their wives, husbands, and children precariously depended, was miraculous and wonderful. It was as if he expected them to be grateful for his every word, while at the same time he made clear that they were nothing, and meant nothing, and that he was their supreme lord—which, for the moment, he was.
With each utterance followed by his crazed smile, he said, “Welcome. I am Amir-al-Bahri,” which meant Emir of the Sea, or Admiral, and was the Arabic origin of the word in English and other languages, “Kaysar Hadawi, deputy to Sheikh Abdul Qadir al Mu’min, rais of the Wilayat-a-Somal of the Islamic State. As such, I have jurisdiction over you, and have taken command of this ship.” He smiled so broadly and for so long that it was as if he had just informed them that their every wish had been granted.
“The ship will sail under a new flag.” He motioned, and the black flag of ISIS was spread out by two of his men. In large white letters on black was written in Arabic (here simplified without the case endings), La Allah Illah Allah, or, there is no Allah (God) other than Allah. In black letters within a white circle, it read, from top to bottom, Allahi rasul Muhammadu, which was sensible only if read from bottom to top, Muhammadu rasul Allahi, Muhammad is the prophet of Allah. Perhaps it was preferable to order the words in reverse so that Allah would not be relegated to the bottom.
Among the passengers was a retired Swiss hydrologist who knew Arabic. He ached to ask why the sentence was inverted, but he dared not, because he knew that sometimes questioning—much less disputing—even a diacritical point in Arabic could call down a sentence of death.
The leader went on, and the more he spoke, the more he terrified. “I was educated at Saint Antony’s College, Oxford. So you will listen to me. You see?” And then the smile. “We expect complete obedience. Any infraction will be punished with death. In the corrupt West, death is feared and hated. Among believers, it is a friend. It is loved.” His eyes glinted like the colorless sparks off flint. “As death is nothing to us, it is less than nothing—which would make it positive, yes? A minus times a minus? Especially if it comes to unbelievers. I will show you.”
He pointed to a gray-haired, older woman who had the misfortune of standing in the front row, and beckoned her toward him. Her husband, who was even older, perhaps in his late seventies, held her back and stepped forward in her place. “No, not you. Her.”
She hesitated, but then did as ordered. “You must obey,” said Kaysar Hadawi. He withdrew a pistol, and, very quickly, as if swatting away a fly, shot her in the forehead. As she fell back among the gasps of the crowd, her husband lunged at her executioner, but was slammed to the floor by one of the guards. “Did I say you?” Hadawi asked quietly, holding his smile. “No. You must obey. Now, sit. If you move again, I will kill ten people. Everybody sit.”
They all sat, most of them immediately, some rather slowly, but then, after catching a displeased look from the guards, with awkward dispatch. Some took seats; others sat directly on the floor. “We will match your passports to the manifest. If anyone is hiding, he will die. Please be kind.” His last sentence was inexplicable. The body of the woman he had executed was left bleeding on the floor in front of her despairing husband. Although he was still living, he was dead.
*
Neither Martin nor Petra had heard the shot, but they understood that were they to be found they might be killed. “It depends on who it is,” Martin said. “If they’re fishermen turned pirates, they may not hurt us. But if it’s ISIS or As-Shabab, they may.”
“ISIS or As-Shabab would rape me, wouldn’t they?” she asked.
“Probably.”
“They’d do it in front of you, then kill me, then kill you.”
“They do that, yes. They would probably keep you for use.” She was horrified. And she was shocked but perhaps encouraged by how calm he seemed. “Listen closely,” he said. “We can’t afford emotion or fear. What we have to do is make it so that they can’t harm us. At first we have to hide. But if that fails, we fight. Don’t be afraid. If you master your fear, you won’t suffer. Even physical pain will remain outside you. We have to survive. That means you have to banish all fear, even of death. Not only is it possible, we have no other choice.”
She nodded.
“There’s a problem,” he said, almost disinterestedly. “The changing rooms lock from the inside, and have no keyholes. The electrical closets lock from the outside, and they have keyholes. If they look, will they note that—because of the way we changed the signs—they’ll be able to open all the changing rooms except one, which will require a key? That was a mistake. I’ll change it back.”
He opened the door a crack, listened, and dashed out, quickly switching signs. Then he returned, his heart beating fast.
“Will they even check?” she asked. “Will they even be able to read the signs in French? Will they come? Would they force the doors?”
“We can’t know what’ll happen, but if they don’t search, or they don’t wonder, or they can’t read French, or they haven’t got the manifests, we may be able to stay here for a long time. And if not, as they say in Arabic, wa i’la, fa’la, if not, then not.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went to Algeria once, for a week.”
*
Things were quite different on Athena, a warship bristling with guns and missiles. Every man was armed with a personal weapon, each SEAL with an arsenal. They had trained hard. They had been blooded in three battles and had prevailed against far greater force. And they had been away long enough that, as they were steadily hardened by war and the sea, home and family had receded. At least for now, their souls had turned into the strange souls of soldiers—who assume that they will fight without fear for the rest of their lives, and that they will be apart from other men, in a world of its own with laws and time of its own. Veterans of combat, they would always think of it as the elemental reality to which they could at any moment be instantly thrown back, and that everything else was a dream.
Without knowing what awaited them as they sped to intercept l’Étoile Océanique, they approached it at a fast clip over the waves. At the calculated intercept they saw nothing, and began a search grid. A sailor was posted as high on the masts as he could go, and from the bridge they scanned with the surviving surface-search radar, which ordinarily was used mainly for identifying land features when coming into port or navigating among islets.
On board l’Étoile, Hadawi had demanded to see the A.I.S. early on, with the idea of turning it off (and then, for good measure, shooting it). Not trusting the explanation of the navigation officer, he actually read in the manual and was quick enough to see that it was reporting a course near the Seychelles, many hundreds of miles to the south. “I have read your manual,” he told the navigation officer, a slight, bespectacled young Frenchman. “Why is it reporting our position inaccurately?”
“We spoofed it,” was the answer.
“To avoid us?”
“Yes, you could say that. To avoid people like you.”
“But we have no way, in our little boats, to read it.”
“We didn’t know that, so perhaps it was pointless.”
“It was, but not now. I was going to destroy it. Why do so if it falsely reports our position? Leave it on. If anyone tries to alter it, I’ll kill him. We are not primitives. We speak your languages. We can read your manuals, and we can use your machines, with which you would mislead us, to mislead you. Your navies, if any are left that have not gone to the Gulf, will try to find you near the Seychelles.”
Kaysar Hadawi, however, did not take and could not have taken into account the young redhead at Northwood. On her lunch break she sat alone in the cafeteria, thinking about the calls she had handled that morning and dutifully passed up the line. It was now in the hands of officers trained to deal with such things. But as she was having tea and biscuits, something struck her. She inhaled quickly, stood, and, without finishing, rushed to the control center.
Approaching the officer in charge, who had recently relieved the one to whom she had reported, she presented her idea.
“I’m sure that’s been done,” he said, superciliously.
“But you said you’re sure it has been done, not that it has been done.”
“Are you suggesting that Commander Whately doesn’t know his job?”
“No, sir, but what if it didn’t occur to him?”
“Well, it occurred to you.” This was demeaning, very much on purpose.
“Nevertheless, may I check?”
“Check if you wish, but I suggest for your sake that you contact directly the American ship Athena, to which the incident report pertains. If you go through channels there may be unpleasant blowback. Here.” He handed her a folder with Athena’s direct link written in longhand at the top of the cover.
Very shortly thereafter, if not half than a third of the world away, Velez summoned Rensselaer.
“Mr. Velez?”
“A radio call in the clear, Captain. There’s a woman on the phone.” At first, Rensselaer felt a jolt, thinking it might be Katy.
“Who?”
“Someone from Northwood.”
“Patch it over.”
“I have to be careful. I don’t want to lose it.”
After a while, it worked. “This is Captain Rensselaer of the Athena.”
“Captain,” the lovely voice said. After weeks at sea, it was a delight to hear. “This is Northwood. Given the immediacy of the situation, I was asked to contact you directly. Are you aware that l’Étoile Océanique’s A.I.S. didn’t go dark, and is still functioning, as it was before the seizure, but that it was spoofed?”
“I knew it was spoofed, but I assumed that it had gone dark after the seizure.”
“No one has told you?”
“No. I’ve just been informed of where Fleet believes l’Étoile might be.”
“Well, then. It continues to send. Given that we may know a former real position because one of its crew reported by sat-phone, you should be able from the A.I.S.-reported movements to calculate its exact whereabouts by using the reported position as the baseline. I can read you the A.I.S.-reported positions including those in real time so you can superimpose its relative movements and pinpoint it, if you wish. This was not relayed to you?”
“No. And you’re doing this in the clear?”
“I haven’t the time to go through channels. Let’s hope for the best. We’re on a sat-link with a narrow reception footprint, and although it isn’t encrypted it requires a validated handshake for every burst.”
“I know. Okay. Go ahead. Please read the positions to Lieutenant Velez, and stay in touch with him. Thank you. Your voice is beautiful.”
“I’m blushing,” she said.
“You should get a medal. Here you go.” He switched back to Velez.
Turning to his officers and Chief Pisecki, Rensselaer explained the situation, and said, “As soon as Velez gives us the relative coordinates, we can plot a course straight to target—thanks to an English girl who sounds like she’s eighteen.”
Movius said, “Athena,” and soon the hunter’s course was set.
*
L’Étoile’s radar was higher off the water than Athena’s, and Hadawi was using it. When it hooked on to Athena he sent a man aloft with a night-vision binocular, and not long after, he knew he was being followed by a warship.
On Athena, the man tied in awkwardly aloft hadn’t yet seen l’Étoile, but as he wiggled in discomfort, trying to relieve the pressure of his harness, he inadvertently awakened his walkie-talkie. Not long after, everyone on the bridge heard, “The pines against the blue, and the wind whistling through them.” Then there was silence.
Rensselaer replied, “Seaman Kelly, are you talking to yourself, or was that a message of strategic import?”
“Sorry, sir. I was thinking of . . . land.”
“So do we all.”
On l’Étoile, Hadawi stood at the binnacle and stared for a while into the black glass dome of the compass. Then he said, “Stop engines and turn on the lights.”
Seaman Kelly had been slowly scanning to port. When his night-vision, at 12 power, slewed to zero degrees relative, he exclaimed over his channel, “Jesus! Dead ahead! All lit up like a Christmas tree!”
From the bridge, one could see only a pinhole of gold light upon the horizon. Everyone lifted his binocular and watched as one golden flash after another appeared to rise from the black of the sea until the ship was entirely visible, dead in the water, rocking slightly and throwing off light.
“Sound general quarters,” Rensselaer commanded. “They must want to talk. Hailing frequencies.” He clicked on his mic. “This is the United States Navy. The USS Athena is on your stern. Identify yourself.”
Hadawi heard. One of his lieutenants began to bring him a mic, but he refused it.
“I say again: this is the United States Navy. Identify yourself.” After a while, Rensselaer ordered, “Maintain speed, come to hailing distance off their port side.”
The helmsman repeated the order and asked for an exact distance.
“Three hundred yards,” Rensselaer answered.
“Three hundred yards off her port side, aye sir.”
When Athena slowly pulled level with l’Étoile, seeing no weaponry other than Kalashnikovs and RPGs in the hands of the bandit-like guards posted on deck, Rensselaer ordered engines full astern. The propellers churned the sea into white foam two or three feet above the surface. Then the engines were stopped, and Athena came to rest.
Through the hailer, Rensselaer demanded identification yet again. To see more clearly, he had stepped onto the starboard bridge wing. Hadawi remained out of sight as he answered. “I am Amir-al-Bahri of the Islamic State, Kaysar Hadawi.”
“I can see your flag,” Rensselaer said, calmly. “What are your demands?”
“We have no demands.”
“Very well. Then we are prepared to take aboard the passengers and crew.”
“Then, Captain,” Hadawi answered, “whom shall I kill every hour until all are dead but the women to be sold?”
As this echoed across the water and sank into the hearts of the passengers and crew crammed into the main salon, Rensselaer had to pause. “Tell us your demands,” he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard what had just been said, because he could think of nothing else to say.
“I say again,” Hadawi returned, deliberately mocking the naval parlance, “we have no demands. We need not ask anything. It will take about a week to execute them all, and in that week we will command the attention of the world. Every unbeliever will imagine himself in the place of his brothers and sisters, every hour, as they kneel for the executioner’s sword. And if a ship greater than your little boat arrives, and its intent is to storm us, I will kill them all at once.”
“What do you want?” Rensselaer asked, impatiently.
“Just what I have said. You may be instructed to buy time. You may have it. I give the world a week in which to watch the executions.”
*
Immediately, for Hadawi had given the order by hand signal as he was speaking, passengers and crew were herded onto the promenade deck. Trying to take note of individual characteristics, weaponry, and dress so as not to register anyone twice, Holworthy counted the armed men. Pressing a binocular to his eyes, he dictated the details to O’Connor. The hijackers were everywhere. He logged twenty, and had to assume there were more.
As the hostages assembled, the body of the executed woman was carried out by two of the terrorists, one grasping her wrists, the other her ankles, and swung back and forth to get momentum before she was cast over the railing. Her head bumped the teak top rail, and this made her body turn. After she hit the water, arms trailing and splaying, she disappeared.
“What can we give you to stop the executions?” Rensselaer asked over the hailer, observing, as did Holworthy, that two terrorists among the hostages wore suicide vests.
Hadawi responded with alacrity. “We have yet to show you. For all you know, she may have died in her sleep.”
“I believe you, Mr. Hadawi: you don’t have to show us.”
“Admiral Hadawi.”
“Admiral, then. You are in control. We understand.”
“Let me deepen your understanding.”
“Admiral, I will of course report everything, but in wartime, given operational secrecy, I doubt that my superiors will convey it to the press. No one will know. You need not execute anyone.”
“Your problem, Captain. We’ll leave one or two alive to tell the story. If your citizens are kept in the dark now, so much the better for us. For when they find out, they will force your government to send soldiers to fight us, which is what we want.”
“Then give us the ones to be spared,” Rensselaer said.
“Here is what I will give you,” was Hadawi’s answer.
Many of the men on Athena—among them Rensselaer himself, Holworthy, and most of his SEALs—were no strangers to the butcheries of combat, having witnessed the incineration, tearing up, and shredding of friend and foe. They had seen as well the corpses of massacred civilians that had been bulldozed into pits and left unburied. But none had experienced what they were now forced to witness.
Among the hostages, two rows back and previously inconspicuous, was a young French family. In her early twenties, the mother, who was diminutive and very pretty, wore a jacket slightly darker than her auburn hair. The color, Rensselaer noted to himself, despite increasing helplessness that he determined not to show, was Roxburghe, a word for which until that time he had had no use, but now would stay with him for the rest of his life.
She held her baby in her arms. Ten months or so, perhaps a year, the baby was dressed in blue and white. No one on Athena could make out the baby’s face, and later they would thank God for that.
The guards parted the crowd around the mother and child, which made her husband leap in front of them. Not a big man, he was the match for his wife, and in general when people saw them many thought the child would grow to be diminutive, too, and this they took as a sign of fineness and delicacy to be admired and protected.
Though the father was courageous, the guards easily threw him aside and brought his wife and baby into a cleared space near the rails. The words “No, no,” and “Oh God, no,” were repeated many times on l’Étoile and on Athena, some silently, some very quietly, and some aloud. One of the terrorists commanded the mother to kneel. She did, bending her head protectively over the baby.
Now Magalap decided to come forward and announce himself, and leapt away from the stewards toward Hadawi, as if the stewards would have held him back. Seeing this, one of Hadawi’s men fired a burst from his rifle into Magalap’s chest. It was all so matter-of-fact that they turned right back to the mother and her baby as if nothing had happened.
As if from nowhere, a sword appeared. It was long and slightly crescent, with a green handle from which hung brown cords. The father broke from the guard restraining him and charged the man with the sword. A burst of fire was made to hit him in the legs and lower back, deliberately so as not to kill him. In physical agony, he struggled to move to his wife and child, but could only flail. Athena’s officers could see through l’Étoile’s white rails that a black-clad man knelt by the mother and held his arms out to receive the baby. Slowly, she complied. Even from a distance on Athena, where everyone had almost stopped breathing, it was possible to feel the mother’s despair.
When the man who had taken the baby stood, and as the mother watched, he drew a knife. What he did then made the sailors of Athena try to turn away even though they couldn’t. And some of them, though they were far from home, in the company of men, and battle-hardened, simply wept.
As the dead child was tossed overboard, the mother and father became still. And as the sword was raised he tried to lunge, but to no avail.
When it came down in force and cleaved his wife’s head from her body, he stopped forever, having come to his end, in utter defeat, wanting only to die. They unceremoniously tossed her body overboard, in two parts, and turned to him. Over five breathless minutes for the hostages and Athena’s crew, they watched him in his agony. Then, while he was still alive, they picked him up by his wrists and ankles, swung him back and forth, and threw him over the railing. And they did the same to Magalap, who had been trying to tell them that he was one of them but could not speak. His desperation showed in his eyes.
The hostages were herded back inside as the terrorists took up watch positions on l’Étoile while it and Athena slowly rocked.
*
“Chief,” Rensselaer ordered a shaken Pisecki, “you’re the OOD. Take her a thousand yards to l’Étoile’s stern, prow steady on. If l’Étoile moves, maintain that distance and let me know course and speed.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Mr. Velez?”
“Sir?”
“Wardroom. Pad and pen. XO and Mr. Holworthy: wardroom.”
When the officers had taken their seats at the wardroom table, Rensselaer turned to Velez. “We don’t have much time. Send this message to Fifth Fleet, to Northwood, and—jump the chain—the White House.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“I’ll tell you how to go encrypted straight to the military advisor to the vice president.”
“They’ll kill you for that,” Holworthy said.
“They keep trying. I don’t want to get gummed up in the command structure as everything slowly percolates up to the top—where it’s going to go anyway—a day and twenty-four dead later.”
He dictated his message, had it read back, made a few corrections, and sent Velez off, saying, “Mr. Velez, be right there for the response, bring it to me immediately, and don’t read it.”
“Don’t read it, sir?”
“Avert your eyes, fold the paper, I don’t care, do whatever you have to do. Don’t read it.”
“Aye, sir.”
Rensselaer spoke calmly and with concentration. “We’ve got forty-five minutes left to the next execution, which I doubt we’ll be able to prevent, although I’ll offer again to negotiate.” He turned to Holworthy. “I’ve been over it, and I see no way in. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I can’t. They’ve got at least twenty men, probably quite a few more out of sight. They’re at the railings, sometimes in pairs, all around the ship. Approach with the RHIB and they’ll hear us all the way out to here. If underway, they’d hear or see us long before we could make fast. If they continue to drift and we swim, given the sentries, there’s no way to board surreptitiously. Even if we could parachute to the sundeck, by the time we got to the hostages the suicide vests would blow. The only way to prevent that would be to appear from the inside and shoot the suicide bombers, but we can’t walk through steel. We don’t even know the layout, not having a plan of the ship. Maybe we could get one, but it wouldn’t make much difference. I’m sorry, Captain.”
“XO?” Rensselaer queried.
“Offer again to negotiate. That can’t hurt. Do it immediately. When turned down, which almost certainly will be the case, steam just out of sight. Deploy the RHIB to go a little closer so they can’t get away from us, but with the RHIB unseen close to the water and us apparently gone, they may calm down. They want attention. Maybe they won’t kill unless they have an audience. Hadawi seemed to enjoy sparring with you. It could be worth a try.”
“He did take a lot of pleasure in that,” Rensselaer said. “That may be a way to get to him. We’ll make another offer, deprive him of an audience, and await instructions.”
They returned to the bridge, made their offer—which was not even acknowledged—then moved east and eventually out of sight, leaving the RHIB to watch l’Étoile from a distance, unseen.
*
Two hours later, Velez ran through the passageways with a folded printout. “I didn’t read it.”
Rensselaer did, but only to himself. It read, “Track commandeered ship until arrival of French forces. Manifests show no Americans on board. Assist French command only if requested. Take no action independent of task force arriving four plus days. Restore communications through regular channels only.” He crumpled the paper and shoved it into his pocket. “Mr. Velez, send this message.”
“Through regular channels?”
“No. As before.”
“Ready.”
“I say again.” This was uncommonly rude, and Rensselaer knew it. “Hostages to be executed every hour. French task force will arrive too late. Request permission to engage should opportunity arise.”
The message was answered almost instantly. Velez came running with it, folded as before. It read, “Request denied,” and it was signed by the CNO.
“Velez. Send this: ‘Is USS Athena, American ship of war, commanded to ignore its obligation to aid mariners in distress? By what authority if so? Clarify.’”
“Sir, they’re gonna kill you.”
“So I am told. Mr. Velez, you are ignorant of their message, do you understand? And therefore you cannot offer an opinion in regard to my reply.”
“Okay.”
“Send my reply.”
It didn’t take even ten minutes for the answer to arrive. As Rensselaer unfolded the paper, he said, before reading, informed by the rapidity of the response, “They must be in the Situation Room, as they should be. The SECNAV and the president will be kicking themselves.”
“Why?” Movius asked.
“Because they put me here. I’d love to see their faces.” He read the reply to himself: Await further clarification. “They must be talking to their lawyers, the Secretary of State, their political people. They don’t know what to do. Neither do we. But they’re . . . they’re just the worst, so far away from what America once was. We’ve got a simple issue here. These bastards are executing innocent people. If we can strike, we should. The French will arrive too late.”
“What’s going on?” Holworthy asked. What do they say?”
“Essentially nothing,” was the answer. “They must be deliberating. So, at the moment it’s apparently up to us. And we’re paralyzed.”
*
At 0300, Rensselaer was summoned to the bridge. Hadawi was on the hailing frequency. “If you are within range, at zero seven hundred, pick up ten I will spare. Then you must depart and not track us.”
“Will comply,” was Rensselaer’s immediate answer.
“Starboard side,” Hadawi said.
“Your British English is impressive,” Rensselaer said. “Perhaps we should speak more.”
“You want to establish rapport. Very transparent. But I will tell you that I learned English in the excellent universities of the West, where I saw that your people are cowards and weak of mind. When we tell them that we will exterminate them, they apologize to us.”
“You haven’t yet plumbed the depths of the West,” Rensselaer asserted.
“We shall see.”
“Yes, we shall. At zero seven hundred, I’ll send the RHIB.”
“No. We will take them to you in our boats.” Hadawi clicked off.
“I don’t like this, but we have to do it,” Rensselaer said. “At zero six hundred, sound general quarters and bring us two thousand yards starboard of l’Étoile. For now, steer for her at three knots, hold position when she’s fully in sight, and call in the RHIB.”
Over unbreaking, almost oily-smooth swells, Athena moved toward the glow on the horizon that soon turned into a jewel-work of golden lights, quite different from the harsh glare of stern-facing floodlamps as the RHIB sped over Athena’s wake and into its berth.