Dead Water (41 page)

The kid throws the key to one of his fellows, who stoops to pick it up. His gun goes off. The bullet punctures the false ceiling, bounces off a steel joist, and enters Bose’s skull through his left eye. Second Officer Bose falls, stiff as a tree, his knife cleaving a complex path through the intruders.

The boy threatening Nageen drops his gun and grapples him, pulling him away from the door. Nageen lets himself be hauled aside. The kid is too strong for his own good. He tugs the handle and it comes away in his hand. He kicks the door and it slams wide open, and, as he steps through, Nageen grabs the gun, raises it and fires, point-blank, into the boy’s back.

On the same day, Havard Moyse, sixty-year-old adopted son of Eric Moyse, founder of the Moyse Line, flies into London’s City Airport. It’s rush hour, not worth the bother of booking a driver, and by 09:30 he’s riding the dinky elevated Docklands Light Railway into town like any ageing salaryman. As usual, the interchange at Bank is a screaming nightmare and he has to stand on the Tube all the way to Bond Street, where he ascends to street level. He walks east towards Oxford Circus and fetches up in what used to be a dowdy Italian sandwich shop. Now the breakfast menu declares: ‘Respect for the Sussex landscape and wildlife is a central part of the ethos of our Breakfast, featuring Milk from local small dairies, free-range Plymouth Rock eggs, Gloucestershire Old Spot sausages and dry cured bacon, Cox’s apple juice, seasonal fruit, and tasty Local jams, mustards and
Marmalades!
’

Marmalades!
With a ‘!’ for God’s sake.

Over breakfast he phones Lyndon Ferry: ‘I’m downstairs.’ ‘I’m on a call. Come up.’

As usual, Lyndon has forgotten that Havard doesn’t have the code for the door. As usual, he won’t give it out. ‘Buzz me, I’ll let you in.’

The office is a large, featureless white room above a milliner’s shop. Ferry has filled it with large fibreboard tables, the latest Apple computers, and a couple of cheap bouncy armchairs from Ikea. Outwardly it cannot be distinguished from any of the hundreds of other PR firms, Internet start-ups and would-be production companies that look, from their third- and fourth-floor eyries, over the relentless commodification of Soho.

Lyndon Ferry’s own appearance and behaviour maintain the illusion: Ted Baker suit, candy-stripe shirt, no tie. Shoes that want to be anything but shoes. For Ferry and his generation industrial intelligence is simply another digital commodity: stuff to be mined, filleted, mashed up, repackaged. Everyone is in the intelligence business now.

Lyndon’screw–hecallsthemhis‘crew’–areattendinganOSINTconference in Cambridge. ‘Open Source Intelligence.’ Today, anyone with a broadband connection and half an ounce of sense can drill down to information once considered the prerogative of CIA analysts. Games designers, TV producers and TED junkies are the new intelligence elite. Most of Lyndon’s operation consists of mashing up public data: everything from port plans to airborne imagery to LIDAR.

‘It’s a 120-metre unbadged Japanese cargo vessel called the
Ka-Bham
.

Tongan registry, Valletta on the stern.’

Havard studies the paper cup he brought up from the cafe: ‘1066’, cyan print on magenta. A cup that wants to be noticed. The coffee’s a sight more drinkable than anything the Italians ever slopped out.

‘Mitsubishi rolled it out of the Nagasaki shipyard in 1987.’ Lyndon is still proffering the factsheet, insisting that Havard engage. It is, after all, his ship. Havard, president of Moyse Line, the world’s third-largest container company, drains his cup and reads.

The
Ka-Bham
’s dead weight is 12,000 tonnes. A single screw powered by a 1,740 kW Wärtsilä, swallowing 480 litres of engine fuel per hour. It has its own gear: three wire-luffing MacGregor Navires. These cranes, if well maintained, are worth a good fraction of the boat.

‘Well, we can write off the ship.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the cargo?’

‘In terms of value, aluminium. Running at US$1970 a tonne, we’re talking just under the eight.’

Eight million dollars. Havard works this through. ‘Which leaves a lot of cargo space.’

Lyndon nods, bouncing slightly in his Ikea chair. These chairs are, Havard decides, with distaste, a sort of adult baby bouncer. ‘Five holds. B to D are tween-decked and over the containers we’ve got consignments of razor wire, paint pigment, hardwood bundles and mixed recyclables: nothing over a thousand dollars a tonne. There’s copper. We’ve fifty bundles of ingots, each bundle weighs a metric tonne. At today’s price that’s about US$360,000. The rest is –’ He turns and reads from his screen.

‘Well, shit, basically.’

‘Let me see.’

The printer next to Havard’s chair whines into motion.

‘Have we had a demand?’

‘It came through while you were in the air. I haven’t had time to assess it.’ ‘Tell me anyway.’

‘Fifty for the safe return of ship and crew.’ Lyndon pauses to let this sink in. ‘The ship, I’d say, is worth two.’

‘What’s the complement?’

‘Twelve.’

‘Feed them to the sharks.’

No reaction from Lyndon.

‘I’m kidding.’

‘There’s a complication. The captain has his wife and son on board.’ Havard picks up his coffee cup, discovers it’s empty, puts it down.

‘Shit.’

‘Do you want –?’

‘Let’s finish this.’ Havard mulls over the ransom demand. ‘Fifty million.

Is it a typo?’

‘Say what you’re thinking.’

‘
Five
million for boat and crew.’

‘Yes.’

‘But –’ Havard hunkers forward in his chair. ‘
What’s wrong with the boat?
’ A ship like the
Ka-Bham
is an ideal mothership. So why don’t they just take it? Lyndon smiles. ‘My first thought is: these are local lads on a spree. They want the cargo for resale but they’ve neither the money nor the organization to operate a mothership. They’re not professionals. They’re fishermen. Only then I saw this.’ He scrolls back through his browser’s history and beckons Havard over to the screen. ‘I’ve been staring at this since you left Schiphol and I still can’t make sense of it. Look where the
Ka-Bham
was taken.’ He taps the screen.

‘Bloody Sri Lanka?’

‘I rang up a friend in Kuala Lumpur: the Piracy Reporting Centre has a list of harbour thefts in Sri Lanka as long as your arm, but in the last five years only a couple of half-hearted attempts at boarding a vessel in territorial waters. The country’s on a war footing, for heaven’s sake. Its navy cut its teeth on the Tamil Eelam. They have their coastline buttoned up. Or they thought they did.’

‘Are we off the IMB radar?’

‘The demand came through other channels.’

‘So it is a professional job, after all.’

‘Overpowering a ship a couple of miles outside Sri Lankan waters? I don’t know, is that professional or just incredibly stupid?’

Absently, Havard casts around for his cup again. Cyan on magenta... ‘They want to be noticed.’

Lyndon cycles further through his browser’s history. ‘They want
you
to notice. Who else would be interested? They’re not going to earn themselves any headlines seizing the
Ka-Bham
. The Indian Ocean equivalent of a Tesco home delivery van. If it had been a VLCC or a Suezmax I could understand it... There.’

A crude sales graphic fills the screen.

‘This is the only image we have of her.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘I’ll get one of the interns to trawl for a tourist snap.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘Reverse searching an image of the
Ka-Bham
? If there’s a photograph anywhere google-able, a couple of minutes. Then half a day chucking out the false-positives.
Ka-Bham
in public sources we can forget because I tried that over breakfast.’ He gestures at the cup: ‘Did you try their Old Spot bacon when you were down there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Flickr has a
Ka-Bhum
flagged Mongolia treading virtually the same waters, which is borderline annoying. For the deep net a mod_oai will take about twenty minutes. At worst we can have a 3D schematic by the end of the day and deploy Navy Seals by midnight GMT.’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘We won’t.’

This meeting’s working assumption is that the line will pay up. If declared, a 12,000-tonne cargo vessel from the 1980s will cost more than its resale value in increased insurance premiums, so seizures of this kind are kept off the books. This is why the ransom demand makes no sense: if it’s in the shipping line’s interest simply to write off the ship, then why are the pirates trying to sell it back to them?

Most times the syndicate that seizes the ship rebadges it and operates it for as long as it takes to run a handful of drug shipments across the China Sea, returning it to the line at the end of a stipulated operating period. The shipping line gives the ship back its old identity and the pirates disappear. The original crews are almost never harmed; some have even remained on board for pay and lodging equivalent to anything they’d get from their usual manning agent. A pirate’s standard defence is that he believed he was serving on a legitimate ship.

Sometimes the ship simply disappears. Repainted – a day’s work – and under a different name and flag, it never sees land again. Phantom ships are the new menace: motherships from which syndicates controlled from as far away as London or São Paulo or Toronto can deploy RIBs to seize, loot and otherwise terrorize legitimate shipping. Phantoms are an idea as old as piracy itself and went out of fashion only for as long as the Strait of Malacca offered easier, land-based pickings. Securing Malacca with ReCAAP has smashed the tumour and reinfected the whole ocean.

‘Are we missing something here? What about the crew?’

Lyndon shakes his head. ‘A bunch of Bangladeshis under the command of a mediocre captain. His wife is a Bollywood star travelling incognito and his son is a computer whizz who’s hacked the launch codes to the Fifth Fleet’s tactical nukes.’

‘Be serious.’

‘The wife’s a PA, the son’s twelve years old.’

Havard retires to his chair by the door. A little rocking and comforting would be good right now.
Fifty million?

Lyndon rattles away at his keyboard. He’s enjoying himself. Like all his profession, he’s attracted to the worst-case scenario: al-Qaeda scuttles a Very Large Crude Carrier in Phillip Channel, or blows up an LPG tanker in harbour, razing half of Singapore. Since events like this rarely happen more than once in a lifetime, Lyndon, priest-like, scans for auguries. Every atrocity is presaged by deep, difficult-to-interpret movements in the public and commercial commonweal: it’s his job to spot them. No wonder he took to the merchant marine sector so early: an industry so bound in paper regulation, and at the same time so radically free of constraint, it has turned ships into quick-change artists, concealing, transforming and recreating them all within the space of half a dozen well-crafted emails. It is a paranoiac’s paradise.

The printer by Havard’s elbow spools up again. ‘Just printing the shit.’

The shit. Certificate for pollution damage. of insurance in respect to civil Survey Certificate. Certificate of liability Registry. International Tonnage Certificate. International Load Line Certificate. Minimum Safe Manning Document. ISM Code Safety Management Certificate. Cargo Ship Safety Construction Certificate. Cargo Ship Safety Equipment Certificate. Cargo Ship Safety Radio Certificate. Cargo Ship Safety Certificate. Continuous Synopsis Record. International Ship Security Certificate. Crew list. Stowage plans. Seamen books. Crew contract papers. Maritime declarations of health. Derating certificates. Vaccination certificates. Oil record books.

In theory a ship’s identity is never entirely falsifiable and in this rapidly rising pile are clues that might one day reveal the whereabouts of the
Ka Bham
, however often it is reflagged and repainted. By this time tomorrow Lyndon’s cheery, minimalist interiors will be so stuffed with teetering piles of unread, mostly unreadable, printout that the office will resemble something out of
Bleak House
.