Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent (40 page)
They were naked, dry clothes sealed in their backpacks.
Mac brought them up beside the stern washboard of a moored mid-sized roll-on/roll-off ship. To their right was the large slipway for ships, and further on was the Coast Guard depot. No cops. No boats against the quay.
They went up a galvanised iron ladder onto the wharf. To their left was the western extreme of the Brani container terminal. None of the rubber tyre gantries were moving, there was no one to be seen.
They kicked off the Turtle Fins, looped them over their elbows.
Shook off the waterproofed backpacks and made for an area where forty-gallon drums had been stored against the side of a wide, squat security building with a central roller door entry.
Pulling off their nose clips and small swimming goggles they tore the velcroed rebreather bladders from their chests, breathing shallow in the morning sun, not talking. Each man pulled the double seal-lock bags from his backpack and retrieved dry clothes. They wiped themselves dry with a chamois, pulled on undies, put on hip rigs then ovies over the top. Put watches back on, turned them inside their wrists.
Mac checked the Mark I injector kit: a nerve agent antidote that neither of them had any faith in.
Paul pulled the radios out of a seal-lock. Booted up.
Mac pulled the Heckler out, pulled on his Hi-Tecs and did a quick recce, looking for eyes.
There were several buildings on Brani but the only movement seemed to be the cars of the employees trying to get off the island and onto the Gateway bridge. He couldn’t see to the north side of Brani so he couldn’t see
Golden Serpent
across the channel.
Coming back along the southern quay, he looked up at the ro-ro ship. It was white with blue and green piping, no evidence of a shipping line and no name. It seemed out of place amidst the behemoths on the other side of the island.
He froze as something caught his eye. Thought he saw movement on the upper decks, but couldn’t catch it again. Must have been a bird.
He kept moving, saw that the ship’s rear tail gate was down on the quay. But no people.
‘Place is deserted,’ said Mac, returning. ‘Can’t believe this is what they wanted.’
Paul nodded. ‘I see your point. It seems like a whole lot of trouble to go to and not push the button.’
Mac had talked Paul into the minimal approach if the bomb was detonated: jump into the water with rebreathers. It might not be foolproof, but VX was water-soluble and if they stayed in the water with their closed-circuit rebreathers they at least wouldn’t be breathing the stuff.
Paul got through to Weenie, nodded, signed off. ‘Development.
Our terrorist mates are broadcasting on maritime frequencies. They’re telling other captains what they’ve got and what they’re gonna do with it. They’re giving them an hour to get out of Dodge.’
‘I guess they’re still on the bridge, trying to create confusion, huh?’ said Mac, not entirely convinced.
‘Weenie reckons the message started going out about fi ve minutes ago.’
They looked at each other, puzzled. It was the weirdest terrorist incident they’d ever heard of.
Putting their dive gear into their webbing backpacks, they stowed them and readied themselves to speed-march a route north that would take them through the small forest in the middle of Brani and across the huge city of containers on Brani’s north shore.
As they set off, Mac thought he heard movement in the security building. Couldn’t be sure because at the same time the still air started vibrating as helos came into view. Two dark Singapore Army Apaches swept low over their position and headed north for the tip of Brani Island. Boeing’s AH-64D was one of the most heavily armed helicopters ever built and their mushroom pod above the main rotor gave them a sinister appearance. But with all their rockets and air-to-air missile capability, Mac knew they’d be pulling up well south of
Golden Serpent
. There wasn’t much that air power could achieve in the current situation. It would boil down to a couple of men getting onto the ship and doing what they had to do. It would be close-range and Mac was already nervous.
He got his mind focused on what was ahead. Tried to blot out the fear.
Mac and Paul jogged down the forested knoll in the centre of Brani and into the vast boulevards of the terminal, where container stacks took the place of buildings. Mac had lost the thread on
Golden Serpent
, wanted to get a closer look before he decided what to do.
‘Mate, Port Master is letting them go,’ Paul panted, putting his hand up to his ear.
‘Who?’ said Mac.
‘Ships, mate. Weenie says the Port Master just cleared a bunch of ships to leave, they’ve been threatening legal action.’
Mac kept hauling.
‘How they going to get out without tugs?’ asked Paul.
Mac thought back to the way those seamen looked on
Hokkaido Spirit
.
‘Mate, they’ll fi nd a way, believe me. They’ve all got bow-thrusters.’
They kept good pace. The wet frog gear dripped down Mac’s back, blending with the sweat.
They stood panting, hiding beside a stack of containers. Humidity was getting up. They shared a bottle of water.
Before them stood an eighty-metre stretch of concrete apron. Big rail lines sat lengthwise in the apron and the enormous portainers that ran along the rails sat idle. Across the channel behind Keppel Terminal was the city and the leafi er residential areas of the city-state.
Garrison and Sabaya had picked a good spot to blow the VX.
Paul worked the radio with Weenie. ‘Mate, can we get anything from the Americans? Yeah I know, mate, but …’
Mac looked through the Leicas. Scanned the
Golden Serpent
. No movement.
He held on the bridge as long as he could without getting eye-strain. The windows on the bridge were tinted so that the brighter the sun, the darker they got. He couldn’t say there was no movement. But he couldn’t see anything that would count for people either. He had no confi rmation that they were on the bridge.
They needed confi rmation on whether the hijackers were even on the ship.
Further down the Keppel quay two ships cast off, their bow-thrusters boiling, pushing them out from the container terminal.
Another ship was already making way up the channel and was about two minutes away from
Golden Serpent
.
Paul and Mac looked at one another. Neither of them wanted to be frogging across that channel with some of these three-hundred-metre giants in a race to get out of town.
‘What’s Weenie up to?’ asked Mac.
‘Been watching CNN. Reckons the place is in lockdown. Changi’s shut, railway stations closed down. Only things open are the causeways into Malaysia, which are packed. Total panic. Media’s not reporting what the stuff is but the assumption is that it’s serious.’
‘How’s that?’
‘An amateur grabbed footage of the US Army in their bio-hazards.
CNN were running it for a while, but it’s stopped. Government probably asked them to take it off.’
Mac nodded but something felt wrong. ‘Isn’t it time you got on to your military attache people? They got us into this game. They’re a part of the coalition, aren’t they?’
‘I don’t know if our people are down there. But you know what happens when the Yanks turn up. They control all outbound comms.
It’s their protocol, you know, because of the Nokia detonators.’
Mac hadn’t worked with the Americans at this sort of police-action level, but he’d heard they jammed all comms other than frequencies they approved to prevent the two most obvious ways a bomber detonated an IED: by Nokia phone or a simple radio switch.
Bombers could also use on-site detonation - made famous by suicide bombers - or a timer. If you wanted to make it really diffi cult, you put in a chemical tilt-switch which closed the detonator circuit when someone messed with the IED.
The Americans didn’t jam frequencies so they could show off.
They did it so bombers didn’t lure law enforcement and military on site and then detonate something right under the Emergency Operations Centre.
Mac did a three-sixty, put his hands on his hips, walked out onto the apron. Kept walking, down to the waterside. The helos had dispersed: one to the north, one to the south.
Paul stuck his head out from their hiding place beside the container stack. ‘Oi! What the fuck are you about?’
Mac stopped and turned. The frogman kit dripped down his left hip. ‘Come on.’
‘Sabaya said no one is to approach the ship. Aren’t we stealthing?’
Paul shouted.
‘Mate, they’re not on that ship.’
‘How do we know that?’
‘Because they’re too smart and whatever else they want, it has nothing to do with blowing themselves up on CNN.’
Paul walked out onto the apron, looking around, and stopped near Mac.
‘Just worked this out?’ he asked.
‘Been gnawing at me. You know.’
‘They’re not the vest types?’
Mac smiled. ‘I was thinking about what that much CL-20 could do to that ship. Those blokes have no intention of going down with it. And they can’t detonate remotely, not with the Yanks jamming the frequencies up.’
‘So how are they doing this?’ said Paul.
‘The same way they did Minky and the manager of the MPS store.’
‘Hostage?’
‘Or threat of it,’ said Mac. ‘You worked for Sabaya. Think it through, how would he be handling this?’
Paul looked to the horizon. ‘He’d have the captain and the XO really scared. Shitting themselves. They’d be reading from a song sheet.’
‘Literally.’
‘Well, yeah. Don’t you reckon?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mac. ‘I think you’re right. They’re shit scared and they have a script they’re reading from. They’re making their calls at the intervals Sabaya instructed. And Sabaya is listening in.’
‘How’s he doing that?’
‘Reckon he’s changed the settings on the Universal AIS.’
‘The what?’
‘The Universal Automatic Identifi cation System. It broadcasts a whole list of information to all other ships all the time. Helps them calculate time to collision, that sort of thing.’
‘What are these guys doing with it?’
Mac thought about it. ‘I think
Golden Serpent
‘s AIS is broadcasting a whole lot of info that Sabaya input. I think these other ships know exactly what’s on board because it’s coming up on their screens.
Sabaya wanted a stampede. He wanted it in the world’s busiest port,’
he said, pointing at the channel where fi ve ships were now vying for exit room. ‘And he’s got it.’
‘So how is Sabaya hearing the captain do his thing?’
‘The AIS is broadcasting from the bridge, Sabaya just opened the mics. It’s on the maritime VHF band and Sabaya is betting it’s one of the few frequencies the Americans would never shut down. Sabaya’s listening from somewhere and he’s running a watch on the poor bastards who are reading this stuff.’
Paul walked around in front of him, sceptical. ‘You heard that message from Sabaya. He warned about approaching the ship, said he’d blow it if we came anywhere near.’
‘He knows the Yanks have shut down the airwaves, so he can’t detonate remotely. So it’s either on a timer or it’s a hoax,’ said Mac.
‘What I don’t want happening is the media seeing us. If Sabaya’s got hostages, that’s when they die.’
Paul accepted the argument. ‘If Sabaya and Garrison aren’t on the ship, where are they?’
‘Dunno. But I know how we can fi nd out.’
They motored straight towards the port side of
Golden Serpent
. Mac was pretty sure that if Sabaya and Garrison were not on board, the crew would be relieved to see them. The problem was going to be ensuring that Sabaya was not listening in, that the place wasn’t bugged and that there were no Sabaya-friendly crew on lookout. Paul and Mac also had to make sure they didn’t show up on CNN because Sabaya and Garrison would be watching. The bomb was another matter. It was obviously on a timer, but neither of them wanted to dwell on that.
Midway across the channel Paul keyed the radio again to speak with Weenie. But the connection had gone. They’d moved into the jammed airspace and for the rest of the mission they’d be operating unsupported. They came alongside the huge ship. Helos thromped somewhere but were still standing off. Mac couldn’t see them. Paul cut the engines and they drifted until they touched, then he put a pole out, pushing off slightly to stop a thunk. As the tender wallowed, Paul pulled an eleven-millimetre grappling rope from his backpack. The line was thin brushed nylon with a small, heavy three-point hook on the end.
Mac looked up, doubted they had enough rope, doubted he had the ticker for this climb. The last time he’d done something like this he was in his twenties and now he was closer to forty than thirty. Still, there was no way he was going to whine about his wrist. Paul’s face was still a mess and he hadn’t heard a peep out of the bloke.
Paul couldn’t get a bite on the hook, so Mac had a crack and got it over the railing on the third go. It seemed to be a solid hold, but you never really knew about these things until you were halfway up the wall. They pulled on black fi ngerless gloves and Mac wiped the soles of his Hi-Tec Magnums by rubbing each on the opposite ovie leg.
He made a trial squeeze on the rope and the wrist didn’t feel too bad but he reckoned he had about forty seconds to do the business before he ran out of gas. It could be a wet ending.
Mac swung to the side of
Golden Serpent,
letting his knees bend as he hit painted steel. He felt his arms and wrists take the weight through his back, and he consciously kept his feet soft. Then he started to climb, right hand over left, small steps, trying to get the weight pushing out and letting the knees do the bending.
