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of you, armed with machine guns on board, with the American crew held in one place. You still hold all the cards.
    “We will send over a military aircraft that will drop on deck a fluorescent bag containing the money, which you will retrieve. And all the while I shall be on an open line to Captain Corcoran. When the money is in
your hands, you and your two guards will disembark onto a boat of your own, leaving our crew and our ship unharmed.”
    “Sounds reasonable,” replied Wolde.
    “However, I should warn you that if you make one unusual move, or harm any member of the crew between now and the drop, you will never get off that ship alive.”
    “If you hold to your part of the bargain, there will be no need for anything unpleasant,” said Wolde. “But how do I know you won’t attack my own ship once we clear the area with the money?”
    “Mostly because we don’t want to become more unpopular than we already are in East Africa,” replied Admiral Bradfield. “We have no intention of indulging in any senseless killing. Certainly not by publicly bombing a fishing boat or whatever you use. Also, it’s not our money.”
    “Okay, you have my word. I have yours,” said Wolde. “I abide by what you say. I am ordering my boat in now to take off my men. We have one captain on board our own boat, and we had twelve in the assault force at the start of the mission. There are two dead, two skiff drivers are not here, and eight men are on board. Captain Corcoran will see five of them leave in the next hour.”
    “Put him on,” snapped Admiral Bradfield. “Put him on the line.”
    Fred Corcoran was very subdued. “We never had a chance, sir,” he said. “There were too many, all armed with machine guns. And two of them boarded us before we even knew they were there. We tried to fight, but it was hopeless. We had two baseball bats against seven rifles and one heavy machine gun.”
    “I’m sure you did all you could,” said the CNO. “And we have arranged for someone to pay the ransom—your union, matter of fact, the Seafarers International, looking after your interests.”
    “Thanks very much, sir. We’re all getting a little scared right now.”
    “Don’t be. I will be talking to you whenever I wish. These bastards smell cash right now, and they’ll do what we tell them. I gave that one a firm talking to.”
    “I know you did, sir. He’s a quiverin’ wreck compared to two hours ago.”
    “Okay, now they’re taking five men off and keeping two guards with you. When we make the cash drop, they will vacate the Niagara Falls , leaving you and the crew to proceed. I’ve told them if anything goes wrong, they will not get out of this alive. Any of them.”

    “And what about the cargo? The aid for the Somalis?”
    “Well, we’re not driving that ship into a Somali port where she’ll be surrounded by a different set of pirates. So screw ’em. That cargo goes right back to Diego Garcia under escort. We’ll give it to someone else. And that will seriously piss off the Somali government. They might think we’re soft. But we’re not that fucking soft.”
    “Spoken like a Christian,” replied Fred Corcoran in his rich Dublin accent. “Screw ’em.”
    By this time, General Lancaster had set in motion the procedures to handle any form of United States disaster on the high seas. He had walked up to the office of the secretary of defense, the fifty-eight-year-old Simon Andre, and informed him of the capture and hijacking of the Niagara Falls .
    Andre, a calm, assured man who held a Harvard degree and had written books on naval and military strategy, had been a career diplomat, who, by a series of personal miscalculations, had somehow ended up in the US Embassies of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nairobi, Zagreb, and Beijing. Lancaster once said he’d seen more explosions than Rommel.
    But today he was in no mood for heroics. There were a lot of things he found difficult, and one of them was announcing to the