There was silence for ten seconds, as if a consultation were taking place on the Freya’s bridge far out at sea. Then Larsen’s voice boomed out again in the control room.
“Pilot Maas, Freya. I cannot give the nature of the emergency. But if any attempt is made by anyone to approach the Freya, people will get killed. Please stay away. Do not make any further attempt to contact the Freya by radio or telephone. Finally, the Freya will contact you again at oh-nine-hundred hours exactly. Have the chairman of the Rotterdam Port Authority present in the control room. That is all.”
The voice ended, and there was a loud click. Dijkstra tried to call back two or three times. Then he looked across at his colleague.
“What the hell did that mean?”
Officer Wilhelm Schipper shrugged in perplexity. “I didn’t like the sound of it,” he said. “Captain Larsen sounded as if he might be in danger.”
“He spoke of men getting killed,” said Dijkstra. “How killed? What’s he got, a mutiny? Someone run amok?”
“We’d better do what he says until this is sorted out,” said Schipper.
“Right,” said Dijkstra. “You get on to the chairman. I’ll contact the launch and the two pilots up at Schiphol.”
The launch bearing the berthing crew was chugging at a steady ten knots across the flat calm toward the Freya, with three miles still to go. It was developing into a beautiful spring morning, warm for the time of year. At three miles the bulk of the giant tanker was already looming large, and the ten Dutchmen who would help her berth, but who had never seen her before, were craning their necks as they came closer.
No one thought anything when the ship-to-shore radio by the helmsman’s side crackled and squawked. He took the handset off its cradle and held it to his ear. With a frown he cut the engine to idling, and asked for a repeat. When he got it, he put the helm hard a-starboard and brought the launch around in a semicircle.
“We’re going back,” he told the men, who looked at him with puzzlement. “There’s something wrong. Captain Larsen’s not ready for you yet.”
Behind them the Freya receded again toward the horizon as they headed back to the Hook.
Up at Schiphol Airport, south of Amsterdam, the two estuary pilots were walking toward the Port Authority helicopter that would airlift them out to the deck of the tanker. It was routine procedure; they always went out to waiting ships by whirlybird.
The senior pilot, a grizzled veteran with twenty years at sea, a master’s ticket, and fifteen years as a Maas Pilot, carried his “brown box,” the instrument that would help him steer her to within a yard of seawater if he wished to be so precise. With the Freya clearing twenty feet only from the shoals and the Inner Channel barely fifty feet wider than the Freya herself, he would need it this morning.
As they ducked underneath the whirling blades, the helicopter pilot leaned out and wagged a warning finger at them.
“Something seems to be wrong,” he yelled above the roar of the engine. “We have to wait. I’m closing her down.”
The engine cut, the blades swished to a stop.
“What the hell’s all that about?” asked the second pilot.
The helicopter flier shrugged.
“Don’t ask me,” he said. “Just came through from Maas Control. The ship isn’t ready for you yet.”
At his handsome country house outside Vlaardingen, Dirk Van Gelder, chairman of the Port Authority, was at breakfast a few minutes before eight when the phone rang. His wife answered it.
“It’s for you,” she called, and went back to the kitchen, where the coffee was perking. Van Gelder rose from the breakfast table, dropped his newspaper on the chair, and shuffled in carpet slippers out to the hallway.
“Van Gelder,” he said into the telephone. As he listened, he stiffened, his brow furrowed.
“What did he mean, killed?” he asked.
There was another stream of words into his ear.
“Right,” said Van Gelder. “Stay there. I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.”
He slammed the phone down, kicked off the slippers, and put on his shoes and jacket. Two minutes later he was at his garage doors. As he climbed into his Mercedes and backed out to the gravel driveway, he was fighting back thoughts of his personal and abiding nightmare.
“Dear God, not a hijack. Please, not a hijack.”
After replacing the VHF radiotelephone on the bridge of the Freya, Captain Thor Larsen had been taken at gunpoint on a tour of his own ship, peering with flashlight into the forward ballast holds to note the big packages strapped far down below the waterline.
Returning down the deck, he had seen the launch with the berthing crew turn, three miles out, and head back for the shore. To seaward a small freighter had passed, heading south, and had greeted the leviathan at anchor with a cheery hoot. It was not returned.
He had seen the single charge in the center ballast tank amidships, and the further charges in the after ballast tanks close by the superstructure. He did not need to see the paint locker. He knew where it was, and could imagine how close the charges were placed.
At half past eight, while Dirk Van Gelder was striding into the Maas Control Building to listen to the tape recording, Thor Larsen was being escorted back to his day cabin. He had noted one of the terrorists, muffled against the chill, perched right up in the fo’c’sle apron of the Freya, watching the arc of the sea out in front of the vessel. Another was high on the top of the funnel casing, over a hundred feet up, with a commanding view of the sea around him. A third was on the bridge, patrolling the radar screens, able, thanks to the Freya’s own technology, to see a circle of ocean with a radius of forty-eight miles, and most of the sea beneath her.
Of the remaining four, two, the leader and another, were with him; the other two must be below decks somewhere.
The terrorist leader forced him to sit at his own table in his own cabin. The man tapped the oscillator, which was clipped to his belt.
“Captain, please don’t force me to press this red button. And please don’t think that I will not—either if there is any attempt at heroics on this ship or if my demands are not met. Now, please read this.”
He handed Captain Larsen a sheaf of three sheets of foolscap paper covered with typed writing in English. Larsen went rapidly through it.
“At nine o’clock you are going to read that message over the ship-to-shore radio to the chairman of the Port Authority of Rotterdam. No more, and no less. No breaking into Dutch or Norwegian. No supplementary questions. Just the message. Understand?”
Larsen nodded grimly. The door opened, and a masked terrorist came in. He had apparently been in the galley. He bore a tray with fried eggs, butter, jam, and coffee, which he placed on the table between them.
“Breakfast,” said the terrorist leader. He gestured toward Larsen. “You might as well eat.”
Larsen shook his head, but drank the coffee. He had been awake all night, and had risen from his bed the previous morning at seven. Twenty-six hours awake, and many more to go. He needed to stay alert, and guessed the black coffee might help. He calculated also that the terrorist across the table from him had been awake the same amount of time.
The terrorist signaled the remaining gunman to leave. As the door closed they were alone, but the broad expanse of table put the terrorist well out of Larsen’s reach. The gun lay within inches of the man’s right hand; the oscillator was at his waist.
“I don’t think we shall have to abuse your hospitality for more than thirty hours, maybe forty,” said the masked man. “But if I wear this mask during that time, I shall suffocate. You have never seen me before, and after tomorrow you will never see me again.”