Novels Written by Experts: Reviewing The Ransom Drop

 

Finished a fascinating novel by Rob Phayre, The Ransom Drop, narrated on Audible. 

I'm not sure there's an elite category for "procedural" thrillers written by expert practitioners. If so, Ransom Drop would fit in that category. Author Phayre was a lead consultant in arranging for thirty ransom deliveries in and around Somalia. 

The novel narrates the seizure of Hibernia III, a supertanker chartered to carry gasoline and other petroleum products to Mombasa, Kenya. 

Ransom Drop, unlike the typical thriller that paints antagonists in simple tones of evil, offers a close view of life in the Somali beachfront village that serves as the pirates' base. Phayre manages to get the reader to regard them with some empathy, while also making it clear that piracy poses great danger to people and the ocean environment. Even if nobody is killed in the process, it corrupts the economy, wastes resources, and traumatizes the hostages. 

Unlike the authors of thrillers who work mainly from news articles or their imagination, and would quickly pass over how an emergency response team acquires cash, equipment, and weapons, Ransom Drop walks the reader through every detail. For example: assembling a pallet-load of fresh currency and shifting it from a bank in Athens to a bizjet at the city airport takes days of paperwork and the efforts of many people, including a "cash in transit" firm that is bonded and insured to move such sums a few miles here or there. We learn about the precautions the shipowner's team takes to see that the pirates fulfill their part of the deal: freeing hostages, ship, and cargo. 

We see into the psychological tactics that negotiators use to move the dealings forward while not giving up too much. All this is done under the eyes of a lawyer for the shipowner's insurance firm. We can hope pirates don't take up Phayre's book -- they'd probably learn some things. 

While very little is left out of the process, Phayre does mention without elaborating that the families of the hostages, if they take advantage of press coverage, can interfere with the steps being taken by shipowner, response team, and insurance company. Families and reporters are not part of the ensemble of this book.

Phayre does combine past and present. The narrative appears to be set partially in the present, given the references to some present-day technology. But it also reaches into the past, presenting this hijacking as the first one along the Somali coast. The pirates have to learn how to board a supertanker and subdue its crew with only three fighters; and the response team has to figure how to deliver hundreds of pounds of cash without something going wrong.

Know Your Adversary: Another Lesson from World War II

Sun Tzu advised leaders to know the enemy as well as they know themselves. It’s sound advice … so sound that it’s rarely taken. 

Lesson from World War II:  Besides Mein Kampf, one opportunity to see into the enemy’s goals and fears before the war was a German book called Germany Prepares for War (1933), laying out its propaganda case for aggression. Another harbinger of events was the German and Japanese reaction to a set of books by the American expatriate Homer Lea. Two decades before World War II, Lea predicted the general outlines of the war along with weaknesses in American and British defenses. 

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, American air war planners identified targets across the Reich, using documents drawn up to support industrial loans. The British used their own research efforts when organizing hundreds of deception operations. These shielded Allied efforts, wasted the enemy’s effort, and exploited weaknesses among the Axis. One of the most interesting was a plan dubbed “Headache for Der Fuerher,” which used faked communications to force the recall of a highly effective commander of a Panzer division in North Africa. The British did this by making the Gestapo believe that a disgraced German officer was sending secret, conspiratorial messages to the commander the British had targeted for removal. 

Fortunately for people today who take Sun Tzu’s advice seriously, adversaries still reveal their agendas in books, articles, or speeches. Often these are written early in their careers, before they gain power. Or they are written by others. Jihadists swear by Sayyid Qutb’s Signposts and Abdel Salam Faraq’s Neglected Duty. 

Those who wonder about Vladimir Putin’s plans should read his biography of 2000, Ot Pervogo Litsa: Razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym (“From the First Person, Vladimir Putin”). And even before that book and before taking power, back in graduate school, Putin wrote that he wanted to build a new empire founded on controlling access to energy, with a strong authoritarian figure at the center. The Caucasus is an energy corridor (what World War II theorists in logistic science called a “center of gravity”) and therefore is critical to that plan. To put a measure on Putin’s ambition, think of Peter the Great. His biography describes the significance of the Great Patriotic War in his family background, and his love of martial arts training (called sambo).