The Rybinsk Deception (16 page)

The American looked as though he’d been running. He was breathing hard, and sweat on his face was glistening in the moonlight.

‘Drive,’ he said.

‘How did you get on?’

‘For Christ’s sake. Just drive, will you?’

‘OK, OK.’ Coburn started the engine and eased the Chrysler out of the shadows, skirting the pot-holes and delaying switching on his lights until he was clear of the track and able to turn north on the highway.

‘Why the big rush?’ he said.

‘If someone’s decided that fucking bang of yours was no accident, they could’ve called the police. We don’t want to run into a roadblock.’

Coburn thought the possibility unlikely, preferring to believe that, since their luck had held up to now, there was no reason for it to suddenly go bad on them.

‘Let me know when you’ve calmed down,’ he said.

‘Sorry.’ O’Halloran took off his jacket and used the lining to wipe his face. ‘It was pretty damn easy. I didn’t see any cameras, so I had plenty of time to sneak around outside the house and have a look through the windows of a couple of rooms that had lights on. Once I’d got an idea of the layout, I figured I’d find somewhere to wait on the west side.’

‘Behind the house?’

O’Halloran nodded. ‘Ten seconds after you blew the magazine, every light came on and men started pouring out of every damn door in the place. I didn’t count how many men there were – six or seven maybe.’

‘Was Shriver one?’

‘Yep. I had a good look at him. When everything had died down, I let myself in and went straight to the room where I’d seen him sitting at a desk. I took a couple of photos and spent the rest of my time playing with his computer.’

‘Does that mean the password worked?’ Coburn said.

‘I didn’t need it. Shriver was in such a hurry, he forgot to switch off his computer. I got to it before it went in to standby.’

‘And?’ Coburn controlled his impatience.

‘I didn’t check out every single file. I just downloaded data from his E-drive. Don’t ask me if it’s going to be any good. We won’t know until we can have a proper look at it.’

‘What’s an E-drive?’

‘Just a data file – the place where people like Shriver store the kind of information we’re after. Half of his documents were crap – old notes he’d used for his TV appearances. But I turned up what looks like a draft press release he was in the middle of working on, and I copied some other stuff that might be pretty interesting.’

Instead of asking what it was, Coburn pointed.

Adding to the light streaming from every window of the ranch house was light coming from the open garage and the stable block, while all along the driveway, flood lamps hidden in the shrubbery were illuminating the garden and the Long Creek Ranch sign hanging above the entrance to the property.

Coburn hadn’t only been looking at the lights. He’d been looking at the backdrop – at a sky no longer glowing red, but streaked in orange, and so filled with smoke that, even inside the car from this far away, the acrid smell of burning was unmistakable.

Some diversion, he thought, nasty enough for anyone, and if O’Halloran wasn’t being over-optimistic, big enough maybe to have given them the break they needed.

On their drive back to the motel, he kept the Chrysler’s speed down, approaching the south end of Canyon City with extra caution in case he was wrong about a roadblock, but finding that now the bar had closed, instead of the place being ready to go to sleep, it was asleep.

John Day was equally quiet. A young couple were locked in an embrace in the doorway of the hardware store, and a man outside a butcher’s shop was unloading a carcass from his pickup, but the main street was otherwise deserted.

Highway 395 was deserted too. For the entire duration of their journey, they encountered fewer than a dozen vehicles, most of them late-night delivery trucks or cars being driven by people in a hurry to get home.

It was close to 1.00 a.m. when they pulled into the motel car park, and because O’Halloran insisted on having a shower before he did anything else, nearly 1.30 before the American was ready to sit down in front of his laptop.

Coburn had half-expected to be disappointed. But no sooner had he
begun viewing the data on the screen than he knew he wasn’t going to be, and five minutes after that, intrigued and struggling to understand the implications, he’d started to wonder what the hell it was they’d stumbled on.

O
F THE NINE FILES
O’Halloran had copied, one listed the names and addresses of FAL members in different US states, another provided a record of those companies who, over the last twelve months, had donated sums in excess of $10,000 to the League. Two other files were of even less interest, appearing to be early versions of a speech Shriver had delivered after the
Rybinsk
incident in which he condemned North Korea for maintaining what he claimed was a covert programme to develop more nuclear weapons.

It was the remaining five files that were intriguing – a collection of information consisting of a clipping from an obscure suburban newspaper, a map, two data sheets and the draft press release that O’Halloran had mentioned.

Like Coburn, the American was trying to make sense of what they were looking at, scrolling backwards and forwards through the files, and irritating Coburn in the process.

‘Give it a rest.’ Coburn reached over and brought up the copy of the newspaper clipping on to the screen. ‘Just leave that where it is for a second. If you don’t want to read it again, I do.’

The clipping was dated 27 July and had been taken from the
Baltimore Leader
:

Taken in isolation, the clipping was unremarkable, so unremarkable that if it hadn’t been for the mention of North Korea and the map in one of the other files, Coburn would have paid it little attention.

To cross-reference the two pieces of information he scrolled up the map again. It was in colour, centred on the west coast of the Korean Peninsula at Kyonggi Bay where the international Maritime Demarkation Line separated the waters of North Korea from the waters of the South.

Marked in red was the route to be taken by the USS
Sandpiper
between the dates of 1 August and 20 August.

This was a dotted line, showing that the ship would be keeping well inside South Korea’s territorial waters for the majority of its voyage, and only on one occasion would it be venturing anywhere near the heavily guarded and heavily patrolled waters of the North.

Printed along the bottom of the map was a warning:

‘Brigadier’s been busy,’ Coburn said. ‘How would he have got hold of something like this?’

O’Halloran shrugged. ‘You don’t need much in the way of security clearance to get your hands on stuff that’s only classified as restricted. He could’ve got it from anybody. What we need to figure out is why he wanted it.’

Coburn had a disturbing feeling that he might already know. Wary of jumping to conclusions, instead of going straight to the draft of the press release, he pushed a key to display the data sheets.

There were two: one providing a photograph and a description of a typical US Osprey Class Minehunter, the other providing similar information for high-speed, Russian-built missile-attack craft of the Osa Class.

The sheets were primarily specifications, listing the displacement, length, beam, draught, top speed and range for each vessel. Separate sections were devoted to electronic countermeasures, radar, sonar, and armaments. In the case of the Osa patrol boats, the number of countries using them was also given – including an entry for North Korea around which someone had drawn a box to highlight the fact.

There was nothing particularly secret or confidential about the data sheets, Coburn decided, which meant that, before he could confirm his suspicions, he’d need to somehow connect them with the map and Shriver’s draft of the press statement.

The draft showed signs of being an early attempt. Some of the rhetoric needed to be toned down, and the text was unfinished. But now Coburn had managed to assemble most of the puzzle, the picture it painted was as clear as it was chilling:

Busy thinking now the full significance had hit home, Coburn removed his hand from the keyboard and stepped away.

O’Halloran had taken longer to realize the implications, but now he too had reached the same conclusion he quickly brought the map back up on the screen. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What’s the date today?’

‘July 24th. Why?’

The American pointed at the red line. ‘August 9th – the day when the
Sandpiper
will be closest to the Demarkation Line. That’s twelve days from now.’

Coburn said nothing, still coming to grips with the ambitiousness of the plan. The
Rybinsk
had shown him what the FAL were capable of, but not once had he imagined them attempting something on a scale like this. Except it wasn’t just an attempt, he realized, not when arrangements were already so advanced that Shriver was preparing a statement for the media.

O’Halloran leaned back in his chair. ‘So here we go again,’ he said. ‘Another excuse for the world to blame North Korea for something they didn’t do. I can see the headlines now. Sickening death toll after North Korea launches unprovoked attacks on US warship. If Washington’s searching for a reason to lose their temper, this might just do it – assuming the FAL can pull off their trick, of course. They might have trouble getting themselves a North Korean patrol boat.’

‘Is that all you have to say?’ Coburn looked at him.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘We’ve got enough evidence here to indict Shriver for treason. Show this stuff to the right people and the FAL are history.’

O’Halloran shook his head. ‘Wrong. Think about it. We’ve got a newspaper clipping, a map of the Yellow Sea, specifications for a ship and a boat, and a press statement that could’ve been written by anybody with a grudge again Shriver. You could’ve written it; so could I. This stuff isn’t proof of anything, and it sure as hell doesn’t prove the FAL are going to be hijacking a North Korean patrol boat so they can use it to launch missiles at a US minehunter.’

‘Is that what you think – that they’re going to hijack one of those Osa attack boats?’

‘Don’t ask me. When you’re not working undercover for the
International Marine Bureau, you’re they guy who’s the pirate. Stealing boats is more in your line of business than it is mine. How hard would it be?’

Not very, Coburn thought. Give Hari the job and he’d have it organized in an afternoon. ‘Forget about how the FAL are going to get the boat,’ he said. ‘That’s not the problem, is it? If you’re saying we haven’t got enough proof, how do we get more?’

‘I don’t know.’ O’Halloran stood up. ‘And right now I don’t care. I’ve done enough thinking for one night. I’m going to bed. If you want to stick around and play with my computer, help yourself.’

Coburn didn’t take up the offer. Instead he went to his room, kicking off his shoes before he slumped down in a chair, not yet certain that O’Halloran was right about having insufficient proof and even less certain of what, if anything, they were going to do about it.

By three o’clock, grappling with a new set of problems to add to all his others, and with no obvious solutions to any of them, he made himself think about Heather, wondering if he should phone her, but falling asleep before he’d decided whether to or not.

It was late in the morning when he was awoken by O’Halloran banging on his door.

The American was unshaven and looked as though he was either suffering from a lack of sleep, or worried about something. ‘Trouble,’ he said.

‘Like what?’

Pushing his way inside, O’Halloran tossed an envelope on to the table. ‘One of the maids just brought that round. She said it was delivered by hand, but she didn’t say who by. Have a read.’

The envelope contained a note, dated today and typed on FAL-headed notepaper:

‘Shit.’ This was the last thing Coburn had been expecting, made worse by it coming so closely on the heels of last night.

‘So much for us not screwing up,’ O’Halloran said. ‘The bastard knows we’re staying here, he knows where we had lunch the other day, and you can bet your fucking life he knows we’ve been out at his ranch.’

‘That doesn’t mean he knows you’ve downloaded nine of his files.’

‘If he doesn’t, why would he want a meeting?’ O’Halloran took back the note. ‘Good job we’re not overseas. From what you’ve said about the way Yegorov operates, if the pair of us were back in Bangladesh, we’d have been lucky to make it through the night.’

Luck had nothing to do with it, Coburn thought. It was because Shriver had something else in mind. And whether they liked the idea or not, in a couple of hours from now, they were going to have to find out what that was.