Russia’s grain exports left through Novorossiysk and one third of her oil. Surrounded on three sides by the Caucasus Mountains, the city of a quarter million sat nestled on the northern part of a deep-water bay that bore its name.
Ships weighing more than two thousand tons were required to report to the harbor master several days before entering the port, and a pilot was compulsory. With tankers of up to three hundred thousand dwt regularly visiting the oil terminal on the eastern side of the city, ocean-borne traffic was tightly monitored. This was why the eighty-foot commercial fisherman easing into the inner harbor just after dawn went unmolested by the maritime authorities. Only a few gulls paid it any attention at all, wheeling and diving above her stern deck, drawn to the smell of fish oil and scale but unable to find a meal.
The three men aboard the stolen fishing boat had trained on it for only as long as it took to get the vessel from Albania, through the Bosporus, and across the Black Sea, where the professional hijackers had taken their money and returned to their native country. The oldest of the three was a twenty-three-year-old Saudi, and while he headed the mission, a Syrian teen named Hasan was more adept at the controls.
They would have been incapable of taking the ship back out the Bosporus and around Turkey to the port of Ceyhan, as Al-Salibi had told Grigori Popov to convince him to help secure the plutonium. As it was they had a hard enough time covering the thirty miles across the sheltered bay of Novorossiysk.
Hasan’s thin, almost feminine, hands looked too delicate on the rough wheel, and he peered out on the world from behind long, curling lashes. His two comrades stood behind him in the cramped wheelhouse. One clutched a small Koran while the other’s fingers danced with the set of worry beads he’d been given by the leader of the madrassa religious school in Pakistan where he’d been recruited for this mission.
They’d been told that their martyrdom today would guarantee their place in heaven, where a
Hasan had never met an American but he’d been taught to hate them with a consuming passion he could barely understand. His teachers and friends and the imams at the mosques all said that America wanted to destroy Islam, that they had caused the tsunami in Indonesia that killed hundreds of thousands of his brothers and sisters, that they had tried to spread diseases in Muslim countries in Africa, that they themselves had destroyed the World Trade Center as an excuse to attack the Arab world.
He was a bright boy, had done well in school, and yet he never questioned anything he’d been told about the United States, because none of his friends did and he didn’t want to be ridiculed. In fact they would often boast among themselves, creating ever grander lies in an attempt to show off how much they hated America. Most of what they said was puerile and ribald-Americans have sex with animals or they eat their own excrement-but it served to fuel their ardor until Hasan volunteered to help put a stop to America’s offenses against God. In a sense, he had been peer-pressured into blowing himself up.
As they sailed deeper into the harbor, they could see the massive oil tankers at their moorings. Some were more than a thousand feet long, more resembling steel islands than vessels meant to cross the oceans. Next to them was a container port with a spidery gantry crane for unloading the ships. In the yard behind it, the brightly colored boxes resembled a child’s set of building blocks stacked in neat ranks. Even at this early hour workers were loading containers onto the vessel from flatbed trucks that were lined along the quay.
Their orders had been specific. They were to bring the fishing boat as close as they could to the tanker terminal before detonating the five hundred tons of fuel oil and fertilizer crammed in her holds. The special barrels brought to them the night before by the one-eyed man were sitting on the deck.
Hasan tried to clear his mind as they approached the tanker facility’s outer buoy. When that failed he tried to picture paradise, but all he kept seeing was the tears on his little sister’s face when he left Damascus to join the Pakistani madrassa where he’d been recruited by the great Saudi caliph, Mohammad bin Al-Salidi. He recalled his father staring at him stonily, not understanding why his son would rather die than take over the family hardware store. His mother had wailed inconsolably that morning and locked herself in her bedroom.
The cell’s leader, the acne-scarred Saudi named Abdullah, spotted the trouble first and hit Hasan’s shoulder. A sleek harbor patrol craft had rounded the tall bow of a tanker awaiting its turn to be filled with crude piped to the facility from Kazakhstan.
So wrapped in his own memories and feeling the weight of dread in his stomach, Hasan was startled as soon as he saw the patrol boat. Its lights weren’t on and they had yet to cross the boundary reserved for the supertankers, but he panicked nevertheless. He rammed the throttles to their stops and spun the wheel to its starboard lock so fast the spindles blurred.
While the hull and upper works of the fishing boat were weather-worn and used, she had a new Volvo marine diesel in her engine room. Black exhaust jetted from the twin stacks as the engine responded to Hasan’s inexperienced command.
The boat heeled over as it accelerated, the angle increasing as Hasan kept the rudder buried. In moments her port rail was awash. The netting hanging from her stern derrick was caught by a swell and wrenched off the vessel.
“Hasan! The barrels!”
The two barrels sitting on the foredeck had fallen over and were rolling toward the rail.
Behind them the harbor patrol had noted the fishing boat’s erratic behavior. The security forces at the new facility were well trained and responded immediately. Red and blue lights mounted on a horizontal bar above the open cockpit snapped on. The siren started to scream as the swift vessel began chasing after the fishing boat.
Hasan saw that they were about to lose the precious barrels, though he didn’t know what made them so important. He spun the wheel to the opposite lock without easing back on the throttles. The big fishing boat leaned over to starboard, stopping the barrels’ headlong plunge. But then they started rolling the other way. For a giddy moment it reminded Hasan of a handheld plastic game he had as a boy where you had to maneuver tiny metal balls into little cups and keep them from falling from their slots until you had them all in.
Only this game he lost. He was too slow reacting to the barrels’ inexorable slide. The first five-hundred-pound drum smashed into the salt-weakened railing. The metal sagged, but held. Then the second barrel caromed into the first. The rail tore away and both steel casks rolled over the side and vanished under the black waters of the bay.
Hasan looked to Abdullah, his beautiful face a mask of confusion and shame. “What do we do?” he cried.
The patrol boat was a half mile away and closing fast. There were three uniformed men aboard, one cradling a shotgun. While another steered the speedboat, the third was shouting into a walkie-talkie.
Abdullah cursed. This wasn’t how he envisioned meeting Allah, running from a little Russian boat. “Turn us back,” he snarled.
Hasan spun the wheel once more, cutting across their own wake and driving the boat closer to the tanker terminal.
When the patrol boat was fifty yards from the fishing boat, one of the sailors called across with a megaphone, and when his hails were ignored the man with the shotgun fired a blast across the bigger boat’s bows.
“They’re shooting at us,” Hasan screamed. “We must stop. We are not close enough. We can surrender.”
“No.” Abdullah held the detonator that would blow a small charge of plastic explosives set amid the barrels of ammonia nitrate and fuel oil.
The fishing boat was still a mile from the nearest tanker when it erupted. The explosion blew a hole in the sea a half mile wide and eighty feet deep. The fisherman and the patrol craft were atomized instantly while the shock wave that raced from the epicenter at supersonic speeds blew out every pane of glass in the harbor. Flimsier structures along the quay were blown flat. The container crane withstood the blast but the containers behind it were strewn in haphazard heaps, many of them broken open, their contents littering the ground.
The explosion sent a tidal wave rearing up in all directions. Part of it went harmlessly out into the open sea, while massive walls of water pounded the port facility. Because the tanker was waiting to be loaded, she carried no ballast and rode high in the water. The wave smashed into its thousand-foot flank, rolling the ponderous vessel on its side. The titanic forces acting on it split the hull at the keel and she started to sink. The sub-sea pipelines that
