TWENTY-FOUR

The commercial freighter, which was flying a Danish flag, was just two days away from the Port of Philadelphia, the largest freshwater harbor in America.

The captain, a Danish transplant from Russia, was in the wheel-house, checking his logs, making sure the paperwork was in order: bills of lading, commercial invoices. He couldn’t afford any unusual inspections, not with the nightmare cargo he was freighting.

He turned to his chief mate and remarked, “En klar dag for sejlads.”

The sailor smiled back. “Yes, a fine, clear day for shipping.”

It would be an easy cruise up the Delaware River to the busy harbor. The channels were deep and easily navigable, ending in a substantially deep harbor, unlike Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose harbor was too shallow. A grounded ship would be a disaster for the mission. And the big, open sea harbors of New York, Boston, and Norfolk had too much heightened security, too much military presence. Of course taking a freighter as far inland as Philadelphia had its own risks. It was an audacious plan, but there was also a great payoff. It was close, so close, to the two targeted cities.

The captain remained ignorant of the cargo’s history to deliberately maintain plausible deniability. If he was captured by the Americans, he couldn’t confess to what he didn’t know, even under pressure. So the plotters kept each of the captains along the route in the dark about the details.

The cargo had previously been split between two ships. The two terrible half brothers had been spawned from two monstrous mothers. Now their containers lay side by side in the hold of the ship. Though they housed deadly potential, they still required final assembly and detonation.

One container had come from a ship belonging to IRISL, the commercial line of the Republic of Iran. It had shipped out of the Port of Bandar Abbas, bound for Karachi, Pakistan. There the name of the ship was changed, as well as its flag, to avoid tracking. But the cargo stayed aboard. From there it shipped out for Durban, South Africa. It was now called The Tigris, referring to the Middle Eastern river. But the ancient root of the word meant something else as well — it meant “arrow.”

Meanwhile, the North Korean container started its journey in the bottom of a small commercial vessel named Dai Hong. When it arrived in Hong Kong, the ship’s flag was changed to Indonesian colors. The ship’s name was changed too. Now Asian Flower was painted on the side of its prow.

After a few weeks, The Tigris docked in Durban. A few days later, the Asian Flower joined it. The container from The Tigris was then unloaded and transferred to the cargo hold of the Asian Flower to join its evil twin.

The Danish captain had boarded the ship in South Africa. Once again, the name and flag had been changed, this time to reflect a commercial shipping line from Denmark. His job was simple. Head straight to the Port of Philadelphia. An encrypted satellite tracking device had been installed so that the group of plotters who remained behind in Kyrgyzstan could follow its passage across the sea.

The plan was flawless. No one — none of the vessel watchdogs at the Lloyds international shipping registry office in England, nor U.S. Homeland Security — had picked up the flag and name changes, or the notorious cargo, or the convergence of effort among North Korea, Iran, and Russia. The cargo continued to move to its destination without trouble.

In any one of these harbors — Hong Kong, Bandar Abbas, Karachi, and Durban — bells might have rung, at least for a few of the veteran naval monitors. It was the same route, after all, used a decade before by Iranian ships to carry illegal contraband, including weaponry, in violation of international sanctions.

The Danish captain and the first mate stood behind the seaman at the control panel of the ship. They had rounded Cape May and were well into the Delaware Bay. Soon they would be required to check in with the harbor master and receive a harbor pilot, who would go along for the ride. Pro forma.

Then the docking and the unloading. With that, the pilot’s job would be finished, and for America, the nightmare would begin.