Alone in the Light

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

It was precisely 3:17 a.m., and a brilliant full April moon reflected off the black waters of the Istanbul Strait. As the heavily loaded oil tanker Vladivostok ploughed its way through the narrow shallow waters of the Bosphorus, a rapid series of muffled thuds emanated from the amidships area. The indistinct sound, noticed only in passing by a lone watchman making his night rounds on deck, quickly dissipated in the cool night breeze, leaving behind the drumming of the turbines deep below deck and the occasional distant shouts of crewmen on the attending tugboats. Thirty-seven seconds later, the fourteen-month-old supertanker split neatly into two pieces, as if cleaved by a stage magician's bow saw. It settled quickly to the bottom, leaving the still buoyant bow and stern sections protruding above the surface, dead in the center of the Bosphorus Strait, three hundred meters off the southern tip of European Istanbul.

At just under four hundred meters, with a fully loaded weight of 280,000 metric tons, the tanker Vladivostok was a quarter-mile-long monument to the ascendancy of the Russian petroleum industry. The mammoth vessel had been constructed in Japan by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, with the ship's operator—petroleum giant Petrograd—electing, despite enormous political pressure, to eschew Russian shipyards in favor of the least-cost alternative. Three years and nearly ten billion rubles later, the gigantic monopoly had become the proud operator of the world's largest, fastest, and safest double-hulled petroleum tanker.

It had required three more months of lively negotiation between the Turks and Russians to permit passage of Vladivostok through the labyrinthine waters of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, the strategically critical waterways connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. The Montreaux Agreement that governed maritime operations in the area placed strict limitations on vessel size and weight, limitations that the new Russian tanker so vastly exceeded that permission had been granted for its passage only after direct intervention by the Russian ambassador to Turkey. Even then, the Turks had only grudgingly agreed, subject to the stipulation that the Vladivostok, whether loaded or not, travel the entire nineteen twisting miles of the Bosphorus under control of no less than four tugs, and in constant radio communication with an operator of Turkey's new Vessel Traffic Management System. Under terms of the agreement, the short journey routinely required two full days.

This was the ship's third voyage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and the cargo this time was destined for Boston Harbor in the United States. With U.S./Middle East relations at an all-time low in recent years, the Americans had begun hedging their bets by significantly ratcheting up imports of Russian petroleum in the past twenty-four months. The new multi-year contract provided a steady and lucrative client for the rich new Tengiz field that lay beneath the north Caspian Sea, off the coast of Kazakhstan.

Three divers, equipped with bubble-less rebreather equipment, had spent an undetected hour and a half the previous night working beneath the Vladivostok. When their exacting efforts were completed, the only thing showing above the waterline was a thin, twelve-inch copper antenna, painted to blend into the neutral gray of the hull. This was all that was required for the newly installed system controller module to communicate with the constellation of Global Positioning System satellites orbiting eleven thousand miles overhead. The geographical coordinates that would initiate the detonation sequence were preprogrammed into the controller, which the divers had attached to the steel hull using strong beryllium magnets. Along with the controller, the divers also attached a string of seven interconnected and carefully sized and shaped packages of Czech-made Semtex plastic explosive. Varying in weight from ten to twenty kilograms, each was attached at a precise position along the hull. The tanker was brand new, double-hulled, and very strong. The Semtex, as it turned out, was stronger.

As the Turkish tugboats guided the fully-loaded vessel along its painstaking path through the intricate twists and turns of the lower Bosphorus, the tanker captain kept one knowing eye on the main control room's matrix of forty-inch plasma computer displays. There were six of the high-resolution color screens, arranged in a two-by-three array on which the crew could pull up any information concerning the ship's navigation, performance of the engines and other onboard systems, or cargo status. At the moment, the display on the lower right was showing a real-time channel map, overlaid with a small, slowly-moving symbol that represented Vladivostok. Also overlaid on the map was the projected path of the vessel, as well as all marine obstacles, whether fixed or moving, with which the ship might have occasion to interact. At this hour of the night, competing traffic on the water was minimal, but not nonexistent. Also displayed on the screen, in large red numbers at the lower right, was the number 2.75. This represented the distance in kilometers that Vladivostok would require to come to a full stop—more than 1.7 miles, even at her current speed of barely over one mile per hour.

The navigation screen also provided a numerical indication of the vessel's precise latitude and longitude. These were accurate to the tenth of an arc-second, and were updated by continuous GPS signals from no less than four simultaneous satellites. Suitably accurate on the open seas, the twenty-five-meter position resolution provided by the civilian version of GPS was insufficiently precise within the narrow confines of the strait. Thus the tanker captain relied almost solely on the tugs, with their extensive knowledge of the local waters and changing conditions. But despite its secondary status in the tanker's current situation, the GPS-provided coordinates were more than sufficiently accurate to provide the key data needed by the bomb controller.

The captain kept his other eye on the ship's bow, some thousand feet ahead and seven stories below, yet nevertheless clearly visible, bathed by the light of the full moon. At exactly thirty-six seconds after 3:17 a.m., the full moon slid behind one of the few clouds in the Turkish night sky, and the ship passed gracefully beneath the arching span of the Bosphorous Bridge. At that moment the tanker's navigation computer calculated a position of forty-one degrees eight minutes north latitude and twenty-nine degrees four minutes east longitude, which placed the ship approximately one hundred eighty meters from the Eastern wall of the 550-year-old Rumeli Fortress.

In the instant that the geographic coordinates of the tanker matched those stored in the bomb control computer, that system's digital control circuitry performed its final and most important function. It generated a series of seven precisely sequenced logic pulses, each lasting just fifty milliseconds, each routed to a different explosive packet. The electronic detonators embedded within each Semtex package amplified the weak pulses, imbuing them with sufficient strength to initiate the firing of a pre-charged capacitor. This discharge, in turn, caused the flash melting of a tiny bridge-wire,...