The Fallen (27 page)

Silence at the other end. Then, ‘Tonight?’ Craig repeated.

‘Yes.’

The medical rep walked out of the hospital again and headed purposefully towards her car. Jade circled round to stand behind the Renault.

‘The oil would flood the estuary. I don’t think you could avoid that happening. The problem is that the estuary is a sheltered environ. Now, if you’re going to have an oil spill, the two main issues are the time it will take the oil to disperse and the initial biological impacts of the spill.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘Ideally, you’d pray that it spilled on an exposed, rocky headland, where it would disperse in about six months. Next best would be a coarse-grained, sandy beach, which would be free of oil in about a year. Incidentally, that was what the beach in Sri Lanka was like. But an estuary is extremely vulnerable, because it can retain oil for more than ten years. And, of course, the numbers of species that will be affected by the spill will be extremely high.’

Ten years? Jade swallowed hard.

The sales rep moved closer, eyeing the BlackBerry in a way that told Jade her five minutes were already more than up.

‘Carry on,’ she said, edging away from the blonde woman. With any luck, she’d be able to keep the car between them for long enough to hear everything Craig had to say.

‘The oil would probably reach Lake St Lucia itself, and it would basically annihilate every small organism in its path. We’re talking instant and total destruction of everything from plankton to bivalves to the smaller crustaceans and urchins. It would wipe them out. It’s difficult to think of a bigger ecological disaster, because more than a hundred species of fish use the estuary as a nursery.’

‘What else?’

‘The other creatures that would be worst affected would be sea birds, larger fish and crustaceans, and those that survived the oil would no longer have a food supply.’

‘If you don’t mind …’ The sales rep’s voice was sharp. She headed around the back of the car towards Jade.

‘Just one more minute, please,’ Jade whispered to her, pressing a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.

‘The estuary and the surrounding beach would be a mess, of course. A blackened, stinking, desolate mess. The coral reefs and sponges would be totally contaminated. Boating and all other water activities would be banned until the oil had dispersed. Economically, the tourism industry would collapse. Fishing would no longer be possible. It would be …’

Craig paused for a moment. Then he spoke again with a new sharpness in his voice. ‘Jade, please tell me this is a hypothetical question. That there’s not a tanker drifting towards the shoreline right now. My God, if there was, if that happened—it would destroy everything we’ve been working so hard to achieve.’

‘It’s not at sea yet, but it will be soon,’ Jade said. ‘It will be heading out from Richards Bay harbour in a couple more hours.’

‘From the harbour? But why?’

‘Because the
CEO
of Richards Mining, a man called Patrick Zulu, is behind all of this. I think he’s been planning it for months, probably ever since he got hold of the report on the other tanker. He’s going to engineer an environmental catastrophe that will make it impossible for the government to rule in favour of the environmentalists, and will allow strip mining of the dunes within the nature reserve. Craig, I don’t know what you’ll be able to do in that time, but you need to do something. Call Pillay. Get him to get hold of the Green Scorpions. They’ll have to try and stop that tanker before it gets out into open water. And I have some other instructions for Pillay as well. These are very urgent. Please tell him it’s a life or death situation.’

‘I will.’ Craig’s voice sounded firm.

Jade told him, as fast and clearly as possible, what she needed Pillay to do.

‘And you need to organise a clean-up crew to get to the harbour as fast as possible.’

‘I know. I’ll get onto it immediately.’

‘Good.’

‘But, Jade, what about you?’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

Jade ended the call and, thanking the medical rep profusely,
handed the woman her phone. She was barefoot, wearing borrowed clothing. She had no
ID
on her and no money, and was armed only with a Christmas-cracker penknife. There was no way she’d get through the harbour gate again, and nothing she could do to stop the tanker from setting sail. But there was somewhere else she needed to go, because if Pillay didn’t make it there in time, people were going to die.

It was a ten-minute jog from the hospital entrance to the dilapidated block of flats where Jade had first seen Bradley. She ran the last section, praying that she wouldn’t land squarely on a piece of glass with her bare feet. She ran past a pub on the corner—or perhaps it was more of a shebeen. At any rate, it was the only sign of activity in the area. A few old cars were parked outside and through the open door she saw the drinkers—all black men—sitting at the bar.

Jade guessed that in this poorer part of town, black and white would still be strictly segregated. This wasn’t the well-off middle class with their starched shirts and leather briefcases, the ones that were shown drinking and laughing in the Castle Lager advertisements, all races together in brotherly unity. This was the ragged edge of society and, even though circumstances might force them to live side by side, they remained deeply distrustful of those who were different, the old scars of apartheid still as raw and ugly as they had always been.

Up ahead was the block of flats—number seventeen, where the Zulu mother had been caring for the noisy children. And flat number eighteen. Its windows were unlit.

The street outside the apartment was also quiet. No sign of any police cars, marked or unmarked. But Jade couldn’t let herself think about what would happen if Pillay had misunderstood what she wanted him to do. Or underestimated its urgency.

In the darkness, she had to cast around for a while before she found the narrow but well-used pathway she had been down the last time she was there.

Stumbling over roots and branches in what was now almost total darkness, she stopped halfway and listened for any sounds, but there was nothing to be heard.

And then she reached the embankment above the railway track.

Jade half climbed and half slid down the steep slope. Then she sprinted down the centre of the track, her feet barely making a noise on the railway sleepers, to the building she’d seen before. At the time, she had assumed it was occupied by squatters. With a chill, she now realised the truth of what she’d seen, but hadn’t understood.

She recalled the old train stood in the dilapidated station, seemingly neglected and forgotten, and those shiny well-used tracks that ran in the direction of the harbour. It was the same train that she’d seen chugging up the hill away from the harbour, as Bradley had taken them out to sea on the speedboat.

Most tellingly of all, she remembered the smell. That choking, filthy stink of used oil. At the time she’d thought it was coming from old machinery, but now she realised it wasn’t.

And she remembered the coughing sound she’d heard. A miserable, rough, painful cough, coming from damaged lungs.

Lungs that had, perhaps, been damaged by ongoing exposure to the fumes of used engine oil.

The oil tanker she’d seen was in no way seaworthy. So, if it was going to go out to sea carrying a load of toxic oil, it would have to be refitted first. Welded, patched, its hull repaired in order for the cargo to be loaded. That would have required materials—and also a labour force.

Now that she was closer to the station, the air smelt harsh, bitter, chemical-laced. She breathed in as slowly as possible, because the poisonous fumes were catching in her throat and burning her nose, and it was taking all the effort she possessed not to cough them straight back out again.

She moved closer to the large square entrance. This time, the huge gates were wide open. The interior of the building was dimly lit. She moved off the tracks and approached the entrance cautiously, crouching down before she peered round the edge of the doorway, hoping nobody would be watching the entrance.

The three-wagon train was inside, and the floor of the gloomy-looking station was covered with what looked like thousands of cylindrical objects, each about a metre in length and half as wide. They weren’t stacked neatly, but were scattered in higgledy-piggledy groups. Some lay on their sides, others were stacked on their tops in tall piles that reached almost to the ceiling.

Their shape looked familiar, although it took her a moment to realise what they were.

Oil drums.

There was a mass of drums here. The small space was filled with them. The oil smell was so sharp it seemed to cut through the air.

But if these drums represented the
Karachi’s
entire load, it was good news. A full tanker could carry the contents of hundreds of thousands of drums. So perhaps this meant the ship was not sailing with a full load. Perhaps this was all the oil they’d been able to get hold of. In which case, if it sank, the extent of the environmental damage would surely be far less.

Jade couldn’t see anybody in the disused station. She waited, listening.

Then, as quietly as she could, she walked across the floor, weaving her way around the piles of empty drums, grimacing as her bare feet encountered viscous and stinking puddles of oil. There must be a way through, an entrance that would lead her to the place where she had heard the man coughing.

A man who was not a vagrant; not a drunk.

A man who was one of those in their twenties and thirties that Pillay had told her had disappeared.

Fixing up a toxic tanker would require a labour force. And what better way to go about getting one than by kidnapping and imprisoning people who would be disposed of once the job was over?

At the far end of the building, she saw a door.

This was it. This was the place she’d heard the coughing.

The door was narrow, made of steel, and it was bolted shut from the outside. Its two giant metal bolts made the ones the handyman had welded to the doors of the chalets at the resort look like toys.

‘Hey!’ she shouted. She rapped on the door, leaned close and listened. ‘Anyone in there? I’ve come to let you out.’

Nothing but silence.

And then she heard a cough.

A deep, hoarse, rattling cough that immediately made her think of lungs that had been exposed to too many toxic oil fumes.

The men were in there. They were staying quiet, out of suspicion perhaps. They were sick. But at least they were alive.

Jade grabbed the lower bolt and wrestled it open. Then she turned her attention to the top one. This one was more difficult and she found she couldn’t budge it. Glancing around for something that could help her, she saw a number of bricks. Big, rough breeze blocks with holes through the middle. The same kind of bricks her captors had tied to Neil’s ankles before they had sent him on his final deadly plunge.

Jade picked one of them up. Using this would help her to knock the stubborn bolt open.

But just as she was about to strike the metal, she heard footsteps approaching. The piles of drums had a weird effect on the acoustics of the place. Although there was, logically, only one entrance to the building, Jade wouldn’t have been able to tell from which direction the steps were coming, because the sound was bouncing off the rounded surfaces of a thousand drums.

Could this be Pillay?

Jade’s heart quickened at the possibility. But if it wasn’t, she needed to get out of sight. Taking the brick with her, she squeezed behind one of the big piles of drums.

‘… How long to go now?’ A man’s voice, with a strong South African accent. Like the footsteps, the voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Jade shrank back behind her makeshift cover.

With a cold feeling, she realised that she was too late. There was no sign of the police, and these men must have come ready to dispose of the workforce.

‘They’re leaving the harbour now, Kobus.’ She recognised Bradley’s voice. High and tense. He sounded wired. A torch was turned on and the beam bobbed up and down, casting crazy
shadows on the ceiling, giving her a rough idea of where they were standing. ‘Another hour and the
Karachi
will be in position.’

‘And then you make the call?’ Kobus emphasised the word ‘you.’

‘Then I make the call.’

Both men laughed loudly. Then Kobus groaned. ‘I need medication, man. More of those pills. My arm is bloody killing me. That bitch. Drowning was too good for her. You should have let me …’

‘Hey!’ Bradley interrupted him.

‘What?’

‘The bottom bolt is open.’

‘Well, who was the last person to lock it?’

‘I was. When I brought the crew back here earlier.’

‘You wouldn’t forget something like that.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

The torch beam swung to and fro, searching. Jade ducked lower behind her cover.

‘Well, with all these drums around, you’re not going to find a prowler easily. Why the hell were they all dumped here, anyway?’

‘Insurance,’ Bradley said. ‘I told the bosses we didn’t need to top up, that three-quarters of a tanker-load would do the job. But they wanted more oil. They wanted that tanker so full of dirty oil that its pods were bursting. That’s what they told me. The heaviest load possible. So I got hold of another few thousand drums from another supplier in Pakistan and managed to ship them over in time. Just to be sure. It’s all inside the
Karachi
now.’

Jade bit her lip hard. This was the worst news possible. The tanker was fully loaded and it was going to spew the maximum load of oil into the ocean when it sank. Or, to be more accurate, when it was scuttled.

‘What’s going to happen to the drums?’ Kobus asked.

‘They’ll stay in here with the bodies. This building’s harbour property. It’ll be demolished next week. They’ll implode it and compact it and lay concrete over it. Quick and easy. It’ll hide everything.’

‘What about our payment?’

‘Your money’s in the bag here.’