The Delta Solution (53 page)

Approaching the southern shoreline, they got their first glimpse of the
Ocean Princess
in the choppy waters of the One and a Half Degree Channel, and the radio operator opened up the line to Admiral Tom Carlow.

Deep inside the wardrobe, the cell phone played its ring tone, “Anchors Aweigh,” and the admiral swiftly locked the cabin door. Mack Bedford’s voice greeted him but there was no chitchat: “Tom, do you favor a stern or bow landing for Delta?”

“Definitely bow,” said the veteran admiral. “The stern’s full of staterooms, and every one of the passengers is in the aft lounge. I’m assessing there are four pirates on guard in there. The rest are on the bridge. If you have to fight your way in, the bridge makes a proper target. The stern area of this ship is a goddamned mess. Stay away from it.”

“Roger that!” shouted Mack. “Over and out.”

The Sea Stallion hurtled toward the cruise liner. Mack Bedford yelled above the din: “
GO FOR THE STERN, THEN MAKE A LAST-MINUTE SWING TO THE BOW END!
”

“Roger that!” shouted the pilot.

The SEALs immediately went to action stations and lined up at the doors, port and starboard. Chief Sharp checked the ropes while the enormous helo made its descent to fifty feet, then forty. With both rotors pounding the hot ocean air, the doors were opened and the thick ropes dropped down to the deck.

Mack Bedford scanned the wide bridge that stretched the entire width of the ship, right in front of the enormous yellow funnel. It was probably eighty feet from the point of the bow, white-painted and glass-fronted.

There was no sign of life on the foredeck of the
Princess
, and Mack ordered the SEALs, “
DESCEND TO TARGET!
”

One by one they gripped the rope, leapt out of the doorway, and started down. There were three of them on each rope when Mack spotted the
portside bridge window smash, and the barrel of a heavy machine gun come jutting out. Wolde’s defenses, not surprisingly, were up, and the pirate chief had ordered the gun to open fire on the SEALs at their most vulnerable point.

“FUCK!” yelled Mack as he viewed an assault commander’s nightmare—they’d been spotted and would be fired upon by the enemy as they made their descent. Instinctively, he raised his rifle and sent a volley through the door, straight over the heads of the SEALs and into the bridge.

But he was too late, way too late. With two sirens blaring loud enough to frighten the bejesus out of a passing school of porpoise, the Cobra came swooping in from the port side, thirty feet above the deck, as subtle as a train crash, and ripped a pair of antitank missiles straight at the bridge windows of the
Ocean Princess.

Chief Conners watched them fly, slashing through the air with a white tail behind, before slamming through the glass and instantly killing Ismael Wolde and Elmi Ahmed and blasting the control room to smithereens, blowing out the entire front end.

The lead SEALs were pouring out of the Sikorsky. And down the ropes they came, sliding, shouting, and gripping with their leather gloves but landing like snowflakes, moving deftly away from the landing square and grabbing for their rifles.

Mack Bedford and Chief Sharp came last, one on each rope holding their heavy gun in a sling between them in an outrageous display of strength. There was no return fire from anywhere on the ship, not after Billy Ray’s rockets, and Mack ordered the advance, two teams of eighteen moving down the deck, port and starboard.

No one knew where the pirates were. There was, apparently, no one in the upper works of the ship. Everyone must have been at deck level or below.

“Okay, guys,” ordered Mack, “fan out in teams of three and take the corridors one by one, usual house-to-house procedures. Any door doesn’t open, blast it. We assault the big room together. Order the passengers to hit the deck and then take out the terrorists. Shoot to kill.”

“Is that no prisoners, sir?” asked Lt. Josh Malone.

“Can’t risk prisoners, bro,” said the boss. “They booby-trapped their last ship, and they might have done the same to this one too.”

“Dead men can’t press detonators, right, sir?” said Josh.

“You got it, kid. In our business you don’t have time to fuck about.”

A short ripple of suppressed laughter ran through the SEAL ranks as they moved aft down each side of the ship. None of them knew there were seven pirates left or that the two leaders and the veteran combat trooper Ibrahim Yacin were dead.

Down below Omar Ali Farah and his buddy Abadula Sofian had been detailed to hold the corridor running inside down the starboard side of the main deck. They’d heard the roar of the arriving helos but had not dared go outside, and they’d heard the blast of the rockets on the bridge and not dared even to look.

But now the silence of the SEALs unnerved them even more. The sound of the rotors had gone and the intercom was dead. There was no reply from Wolde’s cell phone, and they debated throwing down their rifles and surrendering to whoever the hell had come on board.

They could smell smoke wafting through the air-conditioning system, and they decided to get out from the stifling corridor into the fresh air, where they would have the chance to jump overboard and make it back to the
Desert Shark
.

They pushed open the double doors and there was an immediate bellow of “
HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, PAL! AND DROP YOUR FUCKING RIFLE RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE.
”

Omar Ali and Abadula had not a clue about military precision, and Omar swung around to see who was yelling. But he had failed to drop his rifle, and in a split second it was pointing directly at Mack Bedford and Lieutenant Malone.

Mack and Josh’s rifles spat fire and two of the youngest pirates were each hit eight times, crumpling dead to the floor. The SEALs never broke stride.

O
N CAME THE SEALS IN A FORMIDABLE HALF CROUCH, HALF run through the decks of the
Ocean Princess
. They were watched by one terrified junior pirate who had been sent up from the dining hall to reconnoiter the ship and try to find out who precisely was there.

But the kid was only eighteen, and he was too afraid to hang around when he saw the seemingly giant Americans advancing in menacing formation. He simply fled back to his boss, Kifle Zenawi, who was in command of the entire complement of passengers in the dining room. The boy was so frightened, he could only report, “They comin’, boss. They . . . they . . . they’re most certainly comin’. Yessir. They comin’ alright.”

Zenawi’s worst fears were crowding in on him. He stared at the kid, and he gazed around the room at his prisoners. He too had heard the muffled explosions high on the bridge, and he knew that every line of communication he had was down. In addition to the two kids, he knew Abdul Mesfin was still alive, but he had the gravest doubts about the rest. It was possible that Wolde was as dead as his cell phone.

Kifle’s instincts told him to surrender to whomever was in charge. But
that was as scary as death. What if the military force was Russian and they took the remaining Somali Marines prisoner and transported them back to Moscow, like those other guys from Puntland? That could mean a lifetime incarcerated in the Lubyanka or somewhere worse. Out of the question. Kifle and his men would fight to the death because there was still a chance they could make it back to the
Desert Shark
and make a getaway. The chances of completing the mission and raising a ransom from the ship’s owners were somewhere between remote and out of the question.

Abdul Mesfin, on roving guard duty, knew something really bad had happened, but he was uncertain precisely what it was. Hamdan Ougoure, manning the second heavy machine gun just above deck level portside, was completely in the dark. From his vantage point he could not see the advancing SEALs led by Chief Sharp.

But he heard them and, using his best judgment, opened fire before he saw them, hoping to frighten them to death. The bullets hit nothing worthwhile, but they prompted Cody to send Barney Wilkes around to the starboard blind side to take the hapless gunner Ougoure from the rear.

Barney shot him dead with two bullets to the head. Hamdan died slumped over his heavy Kalashnikov, the long ammunition belt dangling around his neck.

“That got the easy part done,” said Mack Bedford. “Now let’s drop down a deck and take control of the ship.”

But just then, Chief Charlton came skidding around the corner, yelling, “Sir, sir, the fucking bridge is on fire! . . . Really burning . . . we need to get it out!”

“Take four guys and find the crew,” snapped the commander. “There are 140 of them somewhere. Then send ’em up there with the firefighting gear.”

The speed with which Brad Charlton charged back down the companionway demonstrated just how concerned he was about the fire on the bridge. And Abdul Mesfin’s half-crazed dash for freedom, straight for the starboard rail and over the side, showed much the same state of mind.

If he’d dumped his rifle and charged for the ocean, he might have made it. But when an enemy’s running hard down a corridor, directly at an advancing SEAL assault squad, with his rifle in firing position, that’s suicide. With coldhearted certainty, Shane Cannell shot him dead.

Kifle Zenawi, flanked by two teenaged rookies, knew the ball was in his
court. Before him were close to two hundred prisoners, unarmed but growing angry. The last of the pirates understood they were on their own and that a trained military force was aboard, a force that would not hesitate to gun down the three of them.

He had no appetite for this fight, but he desperately wanted to avoid being taken prisoner. He’d heard the short bursts of gunfire, the last from the starboard side of the ship. He signalled to the two kids to follow him out of the door and up the wide staircase to the portside throughway.

They made it to the outside deck and found themselves about twenty yards behind the SEAL team led by Chief Sharp.

“
JUMP!
” yelled Kifle,“
JUMP OVERBOARD!
”

Everyone heard him and, as the SEALs spun around, the three Somali Marines cleared the rails and hurled themselves into the ocean thirty feet below.

“
HOLD YOUR FIRE!
” shouted Chief Sharp. “
WE’RE NOT SHOOTING FISH IN A GODDAMNED BARREL! . . .
Two of those guys looked like they shoulda been in school.”

Thus ended the siege of the
Ocean Princess
. Brad Charlton raised the firefighting team, and it took about an hour to bring the blaze on the bridge under control, by which time the
Chafee
was alongside. A special team from the American warship was dispatched to take charge of the cruise liner since she no longer had a captain.

Her engines, propulsion systems, generators, and electronics were intact, but there was no way to control her since the steering and acceleration gear had been blown apart. The situation was, however, not as bad as it looked. Two of
Chafee
’s engineers masterminded a kind of jury-rigged steering, and three others fixed temporary speed controls.

She would head under escort with the
Port Royal
to Diego Garcia, from where the United States Air Force would fly the passengers back to Mombassa to await flights home.

Delta Platoon meanwhile was making a helicopter transfer back to the SEAL base aboard the
Chafee.
They had suffered no casualties, but they had several days more of this mission ahead of them.

Commander Bedford spoke on the phone to Andy Carlow and reported that no passengers had been injured and that he knew his parents were safe. So far as Mack could tell, Admiral Tom Carlow had more or less directed the entire operation from his closet.

Admiral Andy Carlow confirmed the procedures the navy would follow over the next few days. A press release would be issued stating only that a pirate attack on a US cruise liner in the Maldives had failed. Nothing more. No details of the SEAL attack.

Commander Bedford was to proceed with the mission as agreed by Mark Bradfield and General Lancaster. The commanding officer of the USS
Chafee
was under orders to transport Delta Platoon to her next theater of operations. Any further supplies the team needed would be air-dropped from a Djibouti-based aircraft.

“Mack, how much equipment did you use?”

“Nothing much. Couple dozen rounds of ammunition. Cobra launched a coupla missiles. That’s all. Everything else was either unused or recovered, including the fast-rope gloves.”

“Great job, bro,” said the SEAL C-in-C. “Any of the pirates survive?”

“Coupla kids and some weird-looking black fucker. Crazy pricks jumped overboard.”

“You didn’t intimidate anyone, did you?” laughed the admiral. “You know, contrary to section 189, part 10, sections C, D, and M, paragraph 6,073?”

“Never,” joshed Mack. “Fuck that.”

“See you, bro,” said Andy as he hung up the phone.