02

 

Somewhere off the southern coast of Yemen

“In range,” Captain Samuel Bingham radioed to Vice Admiral Asher Truxton, who was listening in from a radio post at the US naval base in Manama, Bahrain, hundreds of miles away.

“What do you see?” Truxton asked.

There was a brief pause. “There are motorboats on one side,” Bingham answered. “The BPX is dead in the water. Our guys said they can see some activity on the decks.”

“Any sign of the BPX sailors?”

“Not that we can see, but we’ll know more when we get closer,” Bingham said.

Vice Admiral Asher Truxton—fresh off his successful defense of the Strait of Hormuz during the brief conflict with Iran—was troubled. It was hard to imagine that pirates could threaten big ships like the BPX Limited in open waters on the high seas. But that seemed to be the case.

“Can you take control?” Truxton asked.

Samuel Bingham, captain of the USS John McCain, had read the reports. He knew what the BPX Limited meant to the pirates that roamed the high seas off Somalia and Yemen. It was worth more than a ransom—its oil cargo was like black gold for the new breed of terrorism that was beginning to destabilize nation-states.

“I believe so,” Bingham radioed back. “The men are preparing to board.”

“So what do you make of the brief broadcast we got last night, right about when the pirates would have been coming aboard?”

“About the crew shutting down the engines and then locking themselves inside the engine room?”

“Yes,” Truxton said. “Do you buy it?”

“Actually, ever since the Russians freed that crew from one of their own tankers, I do,” Bingham answered. “We’ve been told that they’re training sailors on board to do more of that. The owners are moving away from hiring private security forces and opting to get their sailors out of the way of the pirates.”

“So you could board the ship?”

“Yes, Admiral, we could. I’d like permission to go in full force,” Bingham said.

Truxton didn’t hesitate. “You have it.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll report back as soon as I have news.”

The BPX Limited was an ugly ship. There were no visible markings and certainly nothing that might attract attention. So many heavy coats of paint had been applied over the years that it was nearly impossible to determine its original color. The BPX Limited’s engines always churned loudly and unimpressively when it sailed through the seas one hundred miles or so from the coastline of Yemen.

But to the sailors aboard a mother ship recently launched from the Somali town of Harardhere, Bingham knew the BPX Limited was a beautiful sight to behold. The ship might be ugly, but the light crude it carried was more wondrous than anything they could imagine. The oil was easily worth $50 million, even on the black market.

The Harardhere pirate group had their orders, and they were relatively straightforward. Take the ship by force, secure the unarmed sailors aboard in the cargo hold, and move the ship away from the waters off the coasts of Yemen and Somalia as quickly as possible.

This particular group of pirates had shifted its tactics in recent months, since pirating had become big business around the world. Gone were the days of targeting small passenger ships and extracting ransoms. Now the Harardhere pirates and several others had their sights on oil tankers and commercial ships. There was a market for their contents.

Yes, both the EU and the United States Navy patrolled the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, but they weren’t fast enough to catch pirates using mother ships and motorboats. What’s more, countries near Yemen and Somalia had grown weary of the chase and the efforts to lock pirates up. Some of the countries had already told the EU and the US that they would accept no more pirates.

The pirates of Somalia also benefited from their relationship to al Shabab, the terrorist organization that had long tried to overthrow the government of Somalia. While the deals were three and four times removed from the high-seas drama, the pirates discovered that someone, somewhere, was buying the oil from tankers such as this.

And that funding, in return, set al Shabab up to be a force to be reckoned with on the global stage. Big money tended to do that. It allowed al Shabab to export its own notions of jihad to other parts of the world.

It was hard to imagine, but three tankers nearly the same size as the BPX Limited—and their oil cargo—had simply vanished from the Arabian Sea in the past six months. Their crews were later found alive, wandering in either Yemen or Somalia. That’s why Truxton had chosen to redeploy a dozen Reapers from Afghanistan and Iraq for duty in the seas south of Yemen and Somalia. The pirates knew nothing of these drones, which at least gave the US Navy some sort of an edge.

The Reapers were all-seeing, with infrared “eyes,” and could fly for up to eighteen hours at a time. Their cameras could look down on suspected pirates from fifty thousand feet up, making them virtually invisible to the pirate mother ships that launched from Harardhere and Hobyo. The drones also could scan large areas for activity, so they were ideal in the vast waters where the pirates operated.

The trick, of course, was to spot a hijacking in progress and get there in time to find the pirates still aboard. Convincing his superiors at the joint chiefs to redeploy so many Reapers away from Afghanistan had been a tough sell for Truxton, but the change in pirate tactics to go after oil tankers had finally convinced the Pentagon leadership that more was going on than simple ransom hijackings. The pirates were beginning to fund terrorism, and that got the attention of the top brass at the Pentagon.

One of the Reapers had picked up a mother ship out of Harardhere two days ago. And just a day earlier, it had made the connection between the BPX Limited and the mother ship. So Truxton had quickly deployed the USS McCain to intercept both.

The firefight was intense, but brief. Captain Bingham could see it from the deck of the McCain. The pirates had opened fire immediately. They were well armed but no match for the American navy. Two of the pirates died in the gun battle. Another dozen, immediately arrested, were being detained aboard the McCain.

Once the BPX had been secured and swept, Captain Bingham came aboard the oil tanker. They’d guessed right. There were no BPX sailors to be found. They were either dead and tossed off the ship—or safely locked away.

Minutes later, one of his men shouted over the radio that the BPX sailors had been found, alive and well, inside the engine room. A minute later, other forces that had simultaneously boarded the Harardhere pirate mother ship also reported back.

“All clear here,” said one of the sailors under Bingham’s command. “But…”

“Yes?” Bingham asked.

“Well, we found things here in the hold of the ship that don’t make any sense.”

“Just report it, sailor,” Bingham said patiently. “We’ll make sense of it later.”

“We found boxes and boxes of white flags.”

“White flags?”

“Yes, hundreds of them. All new—piles and piles in boxes.”

“That’s certainly interesting,” Bingham mused.

“And we found other things. Maps of an overland route from al Hudaydah to Mecca.”

“Mecca, in Saudi Arabia?”

“Yes, sir. It appears to largely follow the coast. And there’s one other thing.”

Bingham smiled. “I can only imagine.”

“There’s a cache of weapons on one side of the hold,” the sailor reported. “But they’re useless.”

“Because?”

“They’re only a bunch of double-edged swords. Worthless in a fight. No one’s fought with swords like these in a hundred years. I can’t imagine what they’re for, or why they’re here.”

“I can’t either. But there’s a logical reason for everything—and someone will make sense of this, I’ll hazard.”

“Flags, swords, and a route to Mecca? That makes sense?”

“It certainly makes sense to someone,” Bingham answered.