He gave up the following to Bahrami with very little persuasion: One, Sheik Rastani had not been a passenger on the ship; he had met them when they docked in Muscat. Two, Cyrus deferred to an older, serious man with a thick black beard who rarely left his cabin and seemed to be the leader. He didn’t know the man’s name or nationality. Nor was he able to understand what the man was saying, because he didn’t speak Arabic, only his native Urdu.
Three, the ship was run by a small crew of Middle Eastern men and Filipinos. Also on board were a half-dozen men who exercised on deck and prayed often, kept to themselves, and could be some sort of commandos. Four, he had been hired to accompany Sheik Rastani from Muscat to Kuwait. From there, he was supposed to fly back to Karachi.
Five, he said he wasn’t aware that Brigitte and Malie were on board until they disembarked in Muscat. Six, he claimed that he had taken the job to help his wife, who was suffering from cancer of the bladder.
The question Crocker faced: What to do now?
It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. The celebration on the third floor seemed to have ended. Chief Warrant Officer Crocker found Akil and Davis helping the nurses clean up empty wine bottles and cans of soda.
“Where’d everyone go?” Crocker asked.
“Klausen and Anders went with the Norwegian ambassador to look in on Malie. The others scattered.”
“Where is she?”
“The critical care ward on four.”
Ironically, the kidnappers and their former victim were recuperating on the same floor.
“You know the room number?”
“I’ll show you,” volunteered the African nurse with the scars.
The half-dozen men gathered in front of the door reminded him of excited teenagers stealing looks at pictures in Playboy. They were taking turns peering through the six-inch-square window in the door.
“Crocker, you want to look?” Mikael Klausen asked.
The room was dimly lit and bigger than the others, the walls a dirty yellowish color. A nurse and a doctor blocked his view of the bed. When they moved away, Crocker saw Malie sitting up, wide awake.
Her skin gave off a pink healthy glow, and her blue eyes sparkled. Seeing his eyes through the little window, she smiled as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Her composed serenity took Crocker’s breath away.
“She looks well, doesn’t she?” Klausen asked.
Crocker took a second look to make sure. “I’d heard that Norwegians were hearty people, but I never expected a recovery as fast as this,” he remarked.
“The doctor thinks that in another day or two she’ll be able to return to Oslo,” Klausen said proudly.
Seeing her like this suffused the American with renewed energy. “Before you men disperse, there’s something important we need to discuss.”
“What?”
Klausen, Anders, the Norwegian ambassador, Akil, Davis, and Bahrami followed him to the nurses’ station in the middle of the hall.
“Here’s the situation…” It took great mental concentration for Crocker to recount what he had learned from the former Pakistani policeman and bend his mind around the reasons why the ship posed an impending threat. Exhaustion, pain, and a sense of dislocation had taken their toll.
The Norwegians weren’t interested. They’d gotten what they wanted and were pulling away from the group, which was disappointing but understandable. But the American and Omani participants immediately grasped the threat the ship might pose to commerce in the Persian Gulf, which accounted for roughly 25 percent of the world’s crude-oil supply.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, was particularly important. One of al-Qaeda’s long-standing goals was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family, who controlled the holy mosque in Mecca.
Jim Anders was struck by the new information about the commandos aboard the ship and their bearded leader. He and Bahrami agreed that in the little time they had before the Syrena either disappeared from sight or completed its mission, they needed to establish its current location and either warn the Saudis or secure the necessary equipment and permissions to board the vessel and inspect it.
Bahrami offered to talk to his superiors, a critical step because any operation launched from Omani soil would require their approval.
“First we need to establish the position of the ship.”
Crocker asked Akil and Davis to visit the port dispatch officer and solicit his help.
“Will do.”
“If he can’t pinpoint the Syrena’s current location, ask him who can.”
“We’ll find out, boss, one way or another.”
“Good.”
That’s when Anders grabbed Crocker by the shoulder. “I can’t let you go active without consulting you-know-who.”
“Where is Donaldson, anyway?”
“He went back to the Sheraton, about half a mile away.”
“You got wheels?”
“Yeah, I have a vehicle downstairs.”
“Then let’s go see him.”
“Mr. Donaldson is probably asleep.”
Crocker just smiled.
Chapter Twenty
Don’t wait! The time will never be just right.
– Napoleon Hill
Four and a half hours later, the first delicate flicks of sunlight danced off the water. The heavy churning of engines pounded his head.
Crocker peered out the side window of the British-built Super Lynx helicopter to the Persian Gulf below. Sun-baked Iran to the north, the Saudi desert to the south, the two political and Islamic rivals separated by the wide ribbon of water.
Past the tail rotor, the horizon was turning rich deep gold. The land, air, and water were all serene. But no sign of the ship.
The SEAL Team Six assault leader had gotten authorization from the CIA, his CO in Virginia, and Oman’s ISS to go on a last-minute reconnaissance mission. He and his men had orders to locate the Syrena and follow it until it reached Iranian waters. Crocker had argued for, and failed to win, approval to board and search the ship.
He and his men were doing this by the seat of their pants-no plan, no rest, no real prep. They didn’t even have a detailed description of the Syrena, except that it was a small tanker of Yemeni registry with an orange-red hull and a white bridge.
Crocker half listened to the Omani copilot telling Akil about a boatload of Afghan opium smugglers they had battled a week ago. How the leader had bled to death on the same bench where Akil and Ritchie were sitting now.
Davis and Mancini sat across from them. All four men looked determined and alert.
Crocker, meanwhile, was trying to stay focused. The combination of pain medicine for his knee and shoulder, fear, and lack of sleep brought back strange memories. Like sitting in a matinee with his father and uncle when he was six, watching a cowboy riding into the sunset, a crooner on the soundtrack singing:
Saddle your blues to a wild mustang
And gallop your blues away.
The helicopter radio spit out an urgent stream of Arabic as Crocker sorted through random childhood images. Helping his mother fold laundry. Making rifles out of sticks with his friends. Chasing through the woods, ambushing imaginary bad guys-Indians, Russians, Chinese.
Akil leaned toward his ear. “Boss, according to the latest satellite intel, the Syrena has turned and is headed toward the south shore of the Gulf.”
Mention of the Syrena’s change of direction hit him like a bucket of cold water. “What? I thought it was going to Bushehr, in Iran.”
“The ship made a sharp turn and is approaching Ras Tanura.”
Crocker jolted to attention. Ras Tanura was the world’s most important oil export terminal. Something like 80 percent of the nine million barrels a day pumped from Saudi oil fields passed through Ras Tanura, where it was loaded onto supertankers bound for the West.