The Rybinsk Deception (2 page)

S
HE’D BEEN EASY
to recognize. Surrounded by a sea of brown faces and brown bodies, Heather Cameron was a fair-skinned blonde, working furiously to bandage the leg of an injured boy, doing what she could to reassure him by forcing a smile before she limped over to attend to another youngster who had white bone protruding from his forearm.

By now, one by one, other people had begun to respond. As soon as each of the children had received some kind of rudimentary treatment, Bangladeshi women were carrying them off to places that Coburn imagined would offer them little more comfort than the stretch of beach on which the tragedy had occurred.

Conscious of a growing anger against the men who had inflicted the carnage, and knowing that the longer he stood around doing nothing the angrier he was going to get, he was pleased when he saw the girl stand up and beckon to him.

He went over to her, intending to introduce himself, but was given no opportunity to do so.

Before he could open his mouth she handed him a key and pointed. ‘Shipping container with white doors,’ she said. ‘It’s over there by one of the big winches. You can’t miss it. I need more bandages, more disinfectant and as much bottled water as you can carry.’ She knelt down again beside the boy with the broken arm. ‘Don’t forget to lock up when you leave.’

The container was sitting at an angle on the beach about a hundred yards away. Just as she’d said, the doors at one end were painted white,
but the rest of the outside was flaked in rust, and in an advanced state of disrepair.

The inside, though, was a revelation. No sooner had he undone the padlock and eased open one of the doors than the stench of the beach was replaced by the fresh smell of soap, and he found himself stepping into what for all the world looked like a cross between a storeroom and a mobile home that had been constructed with materials from a scrapyard.

The place was as clean as it was tidy, ventilated by panels of secondhand louvres welded over holes cut in the walls, and illuminated by sunshine filtering through two cracked skylights in the roof.

A primitive kitchen was separated from a bedroom by a screen of cardboard boxes, while at the rear of the container behind a sheet of plywood, stood a chemical toilet and a foot pump that fed water to an ancient shower-head bolted to the wall.

Realizing too late that he was tracking mud everywhere, he searched around for the items she wanted, finding bandages and antiseptic in a bedroom cupboard and dumping them in an empty box together with several bottles of water he collected from the kitchen.

Remembering at the last minute to refasten the padlock, he hurried back to the crowd of people, intending to see if there was anything else he could do.

There wasn’t.

An ambulance was speeding across the mud, and in the distance, two more were on their way.

Quite how they’d managed to get here this quickly, Coburn didn’t know. But wherever they’d come from, for some reason or another, the wail of sirens had been a signal for Heather Cameron to abandon her efforts.

Even before paramedics started spilling out of the ambulance, she’d been retreating, reaching into her pocket for a headscarf to hastily cover up her hair, and evidently no longer prepared to play an active role or hang around in case she could.

Still limping and still retreating, she almost backed in to Coburn who had gone to see what the problem was.

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ She reached out to take the box he was holding.

He didn’t let her have it. ‘Doesn’t look as though you’ll be needing this now,’ he said.

‘No. It’s all right though. I can carry it back.’

‘It’s heavy.’ He kept hold of it. ‘Are you packing up because of the paramedics?’

‘The local health authorities don’t much like me being here. I’m not a Muslim, and the shipyard owners think I’m making trouble for them.’ She glanced back at the ambulances. ‘If you’re the person who’s brought the Rad Block and the AED, you’re two days too late.’

Having no idea what she was talking about, he decided to start again. ‘My name’s David Coburn,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what Rad Block is, and I’m afraid I’ve never heard of AED.’

‘What are you doing here then?’

‘Looking for someone called Heather Cameron. That’s you isn’t it?’

‘What if it is?’

Had the circumstances been different, her bluntness could have been amusing. As things were, Coburn wasn’t sure if it was a reflection of the strain she’d been under, or whether she was finding it hard to distance herself from what she’d just been dealing with.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you want to talk to me here, that’s fine. But if you want to know why I’ve been looking for you, how about inviting me back to that nice shipping container of yours?’

‘All right.’ She began to walk off, trying not to wince in pain from what was obviously some kind of injury to her leg.

‘Hey.’ Coburn stopped her. ‘Did you get hurt?’

‘It’s nothing.’ She pushed past and limped away, keeping ahead of him until she reached the container and having to wait there until he gave her back the key for the padlock.

He helped her swing open the doors and accompanied her inside, this time remembering to remove his shoes. ‘Do you live here permanently?’ he asked.

‘Mostly. If I can save up enough money, once in a while I treat myself to a hotel room in Chittagong.’ She found a folding chair for him to sit on and disappeared behind the wall of cardboard boxes. ‘You can talk to me while I clean up and get changed. What is it you want?’

Because it was a difficult question, Coburn elected to start somewhere
else. ‘How about this?’ he said. ‘Suppose I tell you what I know, then you can tell me how much of it I’ve got wrong.’

‘Is it about the
Rybinsk
?’ She put her head round the wall. ‘It is, isn’t it?’

Although he half remembered seeing the name on the stern of the supertanker where the boys had been working, London had made no mention of it.

‘Was it the
Rybinsk
that arrived here with the sick crew?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I’m still waiting to hear what you want.’

‘OK.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I work for the IMB – that’s the International Marine Bureau in London, but for the last three months I’ve been on loan to the Singapore Government.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Not if you don’t want to tell me.’

Coburn ignored the remark and carried on. ‘About a week ago someone called Sir Anthony Fraser contacted the IMB and told them he had information about the possible radioactive contamination of a Russian ship that was being broken up on a beach in Bangladesh. He said that the crew of the ship arrived here suffering from what could be radiation sickness and suggested it might be a good idea if the IMB were to send someone to check things out.’

‘And that’s you?’

‘I happened to be in Singapore, and I used to know a bit about nuclear radiation, so here I am.’ He paused. ‘Does any of that make sense?’

‘Mm.’ She came back into the kitchen. ‘Yes it does.’ She was wearing a cotton blouse and was buckling up the belt of a pair of shorts while she tried unsuccessfully to inspect the back of her right leg.

‘Let me see that.’ He knelt down. ‘Turn round a minute.’

She had a wound in her thigh, a nasty jagged cut about half an inch long. It wasn’t bleeding, but the edges were puckered and inflamed, and to Coburn it didn’t look too good at all.

‘Well?’ She stepped away from him.

‘How close were you to the shooting?’

‘I don’t know. A hundred and fifty yards or so. Why?’

‘My guess is you’ve picked up a metal fragment from the jacket of a bullet that’s ricocheted off something. Whatever it is, it’s going to have to come out.’

‘You’re an expert on these things, are you?’ She sounded slightly scathing.

‘Just trying to help. Was it you who decided the crew of the
Rybinsk
had been exposed to radiation?’

She nodded. ‘I hadn’t seen the symptoms anywhere before, so I was really slow to get on to it – you know, because I didn’t believe that’s what it could be. It was only after the men got worse that I started making phone calls and began to think they might be suffering from radiation poisoning. Even then I wasn’t certain.’

‘But you contacted UNICEF anyway.’

‘No. I’m fairly sure UNICEF have forgotten all about me. They only sent me here to write a report on child labour in the shipyards. I’m not supposed to be working as a nurse. Anyway, if I was right, I needed anti-radiation drugs in a hurry, and it takes months and months to get anything out of the UN.’

‘So you got hold of someone else instead.’

She nodded again. ‘Anthony Fraser’s my godfather. He’s a director of a London company of insurance underwriters called Maritime Fidelity. I called him one evening and explained the whole thing to him on my sat-phone.’

‘And he promised to send you this Rad Block and AED stuff you thought I’d brought?’ Coburn was starting to put the pieces together. ‘They’re anti-radiation drugs, are they?’

‘Rad Block is just potassium iodide. It’s been around since the meltdown at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. But I couldn’t find any in Bangladesh. AED is different. It’s a brand new adrenal gland hormone called 5-androstenediol that stimulates marrow-cell growth. It’s supposed to work really well.’ She paused. ‘Not that it would’ve helped as things turned out. The last crewmember of the
Rybinsk
died in Chittagong hospital two days ago. He was the cook.’

‘How many have died altogether?’

‘All of them – six Malaysians. Ships that come here to be broken up only have tiny delivery crews.’ She went to stand at the open doors.
‘Now we’ve got this too – dead soldiers, people with bullet wounds and all those poor boys.’

‘Do you think there’s a connection?’ Coburn had already decided there had to be one.

‘I suppose it depends whether you believe certain ships are unlucky.’ She turned round. ‘If you talk to seamen, that’s what they think. Perhaps the
Rybinsk
is one of those.’

‘It might just be unlucky because of the port it sailed from. Do you know where that was?’

‘Vladivostok on the Russian coast. It was at sea for about three weeks. That’s not long, but it was long enough for whatever’s on board to irradiate the crew.’

‘Nuclear power plant,’ Coburn said. ‘If it’s an old Soviet-era ship, maybe that’s the problem.’

‘That’s what I thought too. But the
Rybinsk
isn’t nuclear powered.’

‘How do you know it isn’t?’

The question had annoyed her. ‘Because I asked the captain, and because I went to see. And if you think I misdiagnosed the crew’s symptoms, I didn’t – nausea, vomiting, bloody diarrhoea, fever, internal haemorrhages, anaemia and emaciation. How does that sound?’

‘Did you do a white blood-cell count?’

‘Have a look around.’ She kept her voice level. ‘Does this look like a testing lab to you? Why do you think I had to get the men transferred to hospital? The last I heard their white cell count was around two hundred and dropping. Is that low enough for you?’

‘It’s what you’d expect in someone who’s been exposed to a good three week dose of something like six or seven hundred Rem.’

‘So you believe me?’

‘I never said I didn’t.’ He was thinking, wondering how best to locate the source in a quarter of a mile-long steel-hulled vessel that was in the process of being cut up into pieces. ‘I’ll go and have a look,’ he said.

‘You won’t know where to begin. If you haven’t been on board a supertanker before, you’ll either end up being gassed to death at the bottom of an empty tank, or you’ll spend days and days finding your way around.’

Coburn thought she was probably right, but after all the time it had taken him to get here, another day or so wasn’t going to make much difference. ‘Have any of the Bangladeshis got sick yet?’ he asked. ‘I mean the ones working on the ship.’

She shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily have heard if they have. I’m not running an emergency clinic. I’m just doing what I can for the children. I only got involved with the crew of the
Rybinsk
because the captain came begging me for medicine. Why do you want to know?’

‘Well, if the shipyard workers aren’t showing symptoms, it’s probably because none of them have been close to the source of the radiation for long enough.’

‘But the crew were?’

He nodded. ‘Maybe for the whole time they were at sea they were sitting right on top of it.’

‘Living quarters,’ she said. ‘Or somewhere near the cabins.’

‘Good place to start looking, don’t you think?’

‘There’s nothing to see. I’ve been inside the deckhouse – when I went to visit men who were too ill to leave their cabins.’

‘You don’t see radiation,’ Coburn said, ‘you hunt it down with a Geiger counter.’

‘Did you bring one?’

‘It’s in my car. If you can put me in touch with someone who can get me on board, I’ll go and have a poke around with it.’

She leaned back against the door. ‘I’ll take you.’

‘How are you going to do that when you can’t walk properly?’

‘You fetch your Geiger counter and let me worry about my leg. I’m good at metal splinters. I’ll have it out by the time you get back.’

Doubting that she would, and in two minds about having her accompany him anywhere, Coburn put his shoes back on and went to see if the imaginatively named Peace, Happiness and Prosperity Company had requisitioned his car for scrap.

They hadn’t. It was still parked where he’d left it, and the Geiger counter he’d bought in Singapore was still in its box inside the boot.

Along this section of the beach, although a few people were standing around watching the last of the ambulances depart, work was being carried on much as it had been before, uninterrupted by an incident
that had taken place two shipyards away and therefore of little consequence.

To find out if the same was true elsewhere, on his way back, Coburn made a detour that took him nearer to the
Rybinsk
.

Except for the electrical cable lying on the mud where the boys had dropped it, there was no obvious evidence left of the events he’d witnessed.