“If you try to trick me,” he told the pumpman, “it may cost me the life of one of my men, but I shall surely find out If I do, I shall not shoot you, my friend, I shall shoot your Captain Larsen. Now, point out to me where the ballast holds are, and where the cargo holds.”
Martinsson was not going to argue, with his captain’s life at stake. He was in his mid-twenties, and Thor Larsen was a generation older. He had sailed with Larsen twice before, including his first-ever voyage as pumpman, and like all the crew he had enormous respect and liking for the towering Norwegian, who had a reputation for unflagging consideration for his crew and for being the best mariner in the Nordia fleet. He pointed at the diagram in front of him.
The sixty holds were laid out in sets of three across the beam of the Freya; twenty such sets.
“Up here in the forepart,” said Martinsson, “the port and starboard tanks are full of crude. The center is the slop tank, empty now, like a buoyancy tank, because we are on our maiden voyage and have not discharged cargo yet. So there has been no need to scour the cargo tanks and pump the slops in here. One row back, all three are ballast tanks. They were full of seawater from Japan to the Gulf; now they are full of air.”
“Open the valves,” said the terrorist, “between all three ballast tanks and the slop tank.” Martinsson hesitated. “Go on, do it.”
Martinsson pressed three square plastic controls on the console in front of him. There was a low humming from behind the console. A quarter of a mile in front of them, down below the steel deck, great valves the size of normal garage doors swung open, forming a single, linked unit out of the four tanks, each capable of holding twenty thousand tons of liquid. Not only air but any liquid now entering one of the tanks would flow freely to the other three.
“Where are the next ballast tanks?” asked the terrorist. With his forefinger Martinsson pointed halfway down the ship.
“Here, amidships, there are three in a row, side by side,” he said.
“Leave them alone,” said the terrorist “Where are the others?”
“There are nine ballast tanks in all,” said Martinsson. “The last three are here, side by side as usual, right up close to the superstructure.”
“Open the valves so they communicate with each other.”
Martinsson did as he was bid.
“Good,” said the terrorist. “Now, can the ballast tanks be linked straight through to the cargo tanks?”
“No,” said Martinsson, “it’s not possible. The ballast tanks are permanent for ballast—that is, seawater or air—but never oil. The cargo tanks are the reverse. The two systems do not interconnect.”
“Fine,” said the masked man. “We can change all that. One last thing. Open all the valves between all the cargo tanks, laterally and longitudinally, so that all fifty communicate with each other.”
It took fifteen seconds for all the necessary control buttons to be pushed. Far down in the treacly blackness of the crude oil, scores of gigantic valves swung open, forming one enormous, single tank containing a million tons of crude. Martins-son stared at his handiwork in horror.
“If she sinks with one tank ruptured,” he whispered, “the whole million tons will flow out.”
“Then the authorities had better make sure she doesn’t sink,” said the terrorist. “Where is the master power source from this control panel to the hydraulic pumps that control the valves?”
Martinsson gestured to an electrical junction box on the wall near the ceiling. The terrorist reached up, opened the box, and pulled the contact breaker downward. With the box dead, he removed the ten fuses and pocketed them. The pumpman looked on with fear in his eyes. The valve-opening process had become irreversible. There were spare fuses, and he knew where they were stored. But he would be in the paint locker. No stranger entering his sanctum could find them in time to close those vital valves.
Bengt Martinsson knew, because it was his job to know, that a tanker cannot simply be loaded or unloaded haphazardly. If all the starboard cargo tanks are filled on their own, with the others left empty, the ship will roll over and sink. If the port tanks are filled alone, she will roll the other way. If the forward tanks are filled but not balanced at the stern, she will dive by the nose, her stern high in the air; and the reverse if the stern half is full of liquid and the for’ard empty.
But if the stem and stern ballast tanks are allowed to flood with water while the center section is buoyant with air, she will arch like an acrobat doing a backspring. Tankers are not designed for such strains; the Freya’s massive spine would break at the midsection.
“One last thing,” said the terrorist. “What would happen if we opened all the fifty inspection hatches to the cargo tanks?”
Martinsson was tempted, sorely tempted, to let them try it. He thought of Captain Larsen sitting high above him, facing a submachine carbine. He swallowed.
“You’d die,” he said, “unless you had breathing apparatus.”
He explained to the masked man beside him that when a tanker’s holds are full, the liquid crude is never quite up to the ceilings of the holds. In the gap between the slopping surface of the oil and the ceiling of the hold, gases form, given off by the crude oil. They are volatile gases, highly explosive. If they were not bled off, they would turn the ship into a bomb.
Years earlier, the system for bleeding them off was by way of gas lines fitted with pressure valves so that the gases could escape to the atmosphere above deck, where, being very light, they would go straight upward. More recently, a far safer system had been devised: inert gases from the main engine exhaust flue were fed into the holds to expel oxygen and seal the surface of the crude oil; carbon monoxide was the principal constituent of these inert gases.
Because the inert gases created a completely oxygen-free atmosphere, fire or spark, which requires oxygen, was banished. But every tank had a one-meter circular inspection hatch let into the main deck; if a hatch were opened by an incautious visitor, he would immediately be enveloped in a carpet of inert gas reaching to above his head. He would die choking, asphyxiated in an atmosphere containing no oxygen.
“Thank you,” said the terrorist. “Who handles the breathing apparatus?”
“The first officer is in charge of it,” said Martinsson. “But we are all trained to use it.”
Two minutes later he was back in the paint store with the rest of the crew. It was five o’clock.
While the leader of the masked men had been in the cargo-control room with Martinsson, and another held Thor Larsen prisoner in his own cabin, the remaining five had unloaded their launch. The ten suitcases of explosive stood on the deck amidships at the top of the courtesy ladder, awaiting the leader’s instructions for placing. These orders he gave with crisp precision. Far away on the foredeck the inspection hatches of the port and starboard ballast tanks were unscrewed and removed, revealing the single steel ladder descending eighty feet into the black depths of musty air.
Azamat Krim took off his mask, stuffed it in his pocket, took his flashlight, and descended into the first. Two suitcases were lowered after him on long cords. Working in the base of the hold by lamplight, he placed one entire suitcase against the outer hull of the Freya and lashed it to one of the vertical ribs with cord. He opened the other case and extracted its contents in two halves. One half went against the forward bulkhead, beyond which lay twenty thousand tons of oil; the other half went against the aft bulkhead, behind which was another twenty thousand tons of crude. Sandbags, also brought from the launch, were packed around the charges to concentrate the blast When he was satisfied that the detonators were in place and linked to the triggering device, he came back to the starlight on deck.