The Rybinsk Deception (6 page)

From there on, in spite of the tide being in their favour, in places the estuary was so shallow that, even with Hari’s local knowledge, it took them another twenty minutes to reach the flotilla of boats that were anchored along the river-bank and tied up at the village jetty.

For most of their journey down the estuary, Heather had been content to listen to Hari’s travelogue, occasionally wanting to know the names of birds and animals they saw, but in the main keeping her thoughts to herself.

But no sooner had she disembarked and accompanied Coburn to the hut that had been reserved for them than she’d started asking him question after question.

‘Hey.’ He put up his hand. ‘Slow down. If you hang on a second I’ll give you a guided tour.’

‘Is it all right for me to leave my bag here?’

‘This isn’t Fauzdarhat. You could leave hundred-dollar bills lying around, and they’d still be here when you got back. Where do you want to go first?’

‘I don’t mind.’ She glanced around the hut. ‘I didn’t expect anything like this. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘What?’

‘Bug screens, sliding windows, mosquito nets, curtains, polished wooden floors, nice furniture. Are all the huts the same?’

‘Most of them are a bit bigger than this one. Half the guys Hari has working for him have brought their families here. Come on, there’s a place you need to see where you’ll feel right at home.’

Outside the hut they were met by a group of neatly dressed children who had seen Heather arrive. There were ten or eleven of them; mostly girls who were as fascinated by the colour of her hair as she was by their clear bright eyes, their sparkling teeth and by the earphones and iPods several of them had dangling round their necks.

She stooped to allow a little girl to reach out and shyly touch her ponytail. ‘I can’t believe this,’ she said. ‘Freshly scrubbed children in clean clothes – and with iPods?’

‘Shows what a good social welfare programme can do. There’s nothing third world about this place. No one goes hungry, and anybody who needs medical attention gets taken straight to Singapore. Hari doesn’t mess around.’

Followed by the gaggle of children, Coburn set off along one of the pathways that led to the twenty foot-high pile of timber standing on the village’s southern boundary.

The village itself occupied nearly fifteen acres of cleared and reclaimed swamp. Triangular in shape, and flanked on two sides by marshland and on the other by the green water of the estuary, the clearing was drained by a network of deep ditches and, at some time in the past, the ground had been stabilized and reinforced by layers of hitech geotextiles. The result was a flat, vegetation-free plateau of dry peat on which the huts and pathways had been built.

But the heart of the village and its acknowledged social centre was nowhere near the centre of the clearing. Instead it lay close to the marsh behind a crude façade of piled up timber and lichen-covered concrete slabs.

Coburn was about to spring his surprise on her when they disturbed a yellow-throated marten that had been sunning itself on one of the logs. It scrambled up the heap, drawing Heather’s attention to the satellite disk and the forest of radio aerials he’d been hoping she wouldn’t see.

‘Go round to the side,’ he said. ‘That’s where the entrance is.’

Since his last visit, both of the shipping containers had been repainted and a small wooden veranda had been added to one of them.

He went and opened the door for her. ‘These are a bit more upmarket than yours at the beach,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

The first of the containers was completely lined, air-conditioned and provided with electric lighting. At the far end, in addition to a pool table, a coffee machine and a well-stocked bar, rows of wooden benches surrounded a flat screen plasma television to form the equivalent of a home theatre, while shelving along the walls was crammed with books, DVDs and a selection of children’s toys.

‘Oh, my goodness.’ She was amazed. ‘Where does the power come from?’

‘A petrol-driven generator. It’s in a shed at the edge of the marsh. That’s why you can’t hear it running.’

She walked over to the bar. ‘And all this is paid for by robbing ships, is it?’

‘It’s a business.’ He’d been half-expecting her disapproval. ‘If you want to start moralizing, have a look at Iraq, or at what some of the big multi-nationals are doing. Modern-day piracy isn’t the best thing that’s going on in the world, but it sure as hell isn’t the worst.’

‘I know that.’ She turned and beckoned to the children who had remained outside. ‘Why won’t they come in?’

‘They know they’re not allowed – not unless they have one of their mothers with them.’ He pointed to a connecting door. ‘Take a look through there and you’ll see why.’

The second container too was air-conditioned, but the purpose of this one was exclusively utilitarian. Fitted out with refrigerators and freezers, it was part warehouse and part cool store, but the majority of the space was taken up by racks of telemetry electronics and by the armoury.

Radio and radar equipment was stacked alongside mines and their powerful attachment magnets, M16 rifles, grenade launchers, radioactivated detonators, grappling hooks and crates of ammunition. On the walls, hanging between the boarding ladders were rows of wetsuits, and on the floor stood numerous boxes of spares and the halogen lights.

‘Nerve centre,’ Coburn said. ‘Hari uses spotters up and down the coast, and he’s in radio contact with local fishermen, but this is where he’ll get the best information on the
Pishan
.’

‘Is that the name of the freighter you’re supposed to be raiding?’

‘Yep.’ Coburn nodded. ‘It left Karachi on June 9th and it’s due to call in at Singapore on July 7th before it goes on to Wonsan in North Korea.’

‘You know this isn’t my fault, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You want me to think it is, but it isn’t.’

‘What isn’t your fault? What are you talking about?’

‘You having to go and search for signs of radioactivity while Hari and his men steal the zinc ingots. You’d go anyway because you want to go. You’re just pretending it’s part of your job. You expect me to be impressed with the village and all of this, but I’m not. Raiding ships at night might be a big adventure for you, but it’s still wrong. Don’t you care about the people Hari’s stealing from?’

‘Look,’ Coburn said, ‘you wanted to come here. If you don’t like it, I’ll get someone to take you back to your nice hotel in Singapore.’

‘I didn’t say I wanted to go back.’

‘You’d better learn the rules then. First off you don’t talk to anyone about what I have to do on board the
Pishan
. Is that clear?’

‘Of course it’s clear. I’m not stupid.’

‘The other thing you need to remember is what you have to do if something goes wrong while I’m not around. These marshes aren’t as uninhabited as you think they are. Half-a-dozen pirate groups hang out on this side of the Strait. They all know about this village, and every so often one of them decides to have a go at taking it over. If that happens, there’s only one place you want to be, and that’s where you’re standing right now.’

‘Oh.’ The warning had taken her aback. ‘Is that what those concrete slabs outside are for?’

‘The village can only be attacked from the estuary, so they work pretty well against small arms fire. The ground’s too soft for anyone to try from the marshes. Are you impressed now?’

This time she didn’t reply – probably because she hadn’t realized that life here had a darker aspect to it, Coburn thought, or maybe she’d decided she was getting off on the wrong foot.

For the remainder of the afternoon she was better company, charming everyone he introduced her to and revealing yet another side of her personality. She was interested in everything, wanting him to take her everywhere, listening to his description of the wildlife in the swamp as carefully as she’d absorbed the names of birds that Hari had identified for her earlier in the day, and even stopping to help a woman free an unruly goat that had become entangled in its tether.

They were back at the jetty talking to a skinny, leathery-faced man whom Hari had brought with him from Somalia when news of the
Pishan
first began to filter through.

‘For the launches, departure in forty-eight hours,’ the man informed them, ‘rendezvous in fifty-three – time enough in which to get ready and to pray to Allah for good weather.’

Over the next two days Coburn was to have more on his mind than the possibility of a change in the weather. As usual, the waiting was the hard part, complicated on this occasion by the feeling that he was somehow becoming responsible for the safety of the young woman he was about to leave to fend for herself.

In spite of her joining him for every meal, sharing a bathroom with him and spending each night sleeping in the bed next to his as though
he wasn’t there, he was beginning to suspect that her innocence was contrived and simply a convenient way for her to warn him off.

It wasn’t until the evening of the raid that he received a hint that made him think he might have got things wrong.

Having just returned from a final planning meeting and suffering from an attack of pre-raid jitters, Coburn was standing half-dressed in the bedroom endeavouring to secure a small flattened cylinder under his left armpit, and rapidly losing his temper with adhesive tape that was refusing to stick to his skin.

The cylinder was one part of the miniaturized radioactivity detector the IMB had sent him – a sensing head developed by the US Counter-Proliferation Centre and supplied by the CIA – a piece of equipment so sensitive that, if the instructions were to be believed, it was capable of picking up the gamma ray signatures from just about any radioactive isotope.

Unfortunately, instead of suggesting where to put the damn thing, the instructions were limited to a description of the head itself – in this case a spectroscopic portal monitor containing sodium iodide crystals.

The other part which he’d already tucked under his belt had no such fancy description and seemed to be little more that a chip on which data was stored for subsequent retrieval once the mission had been completed.

Cursing Armstrong for ever sending it, he went to see if Heather could suggest a better way for him to secure it in place.

She could. In less than a minute she’d made a harness from two loops of tape, one to go over his shoulder and another which she wrapped around his chest.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Will that do?’

‘It’s fine. Thanks.’ He pulled up the top of his wetsuit. ‘I’m running late and I need to help Hari load the towing hawser. Don’t go wandering off in to the marshes while I’m away.’

‘No. I hope the weather stays fine for you. And I hope the
Pishan
doesn’t have water cannon or acoustic guns.’ She looked embarrassed for a moment, then suddenly stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.

Surprised though he was, because he assumed she’d acted on impulse, over the next half an hour, as the shadows lengthened and as
the village slowly grew quiet and began to empty, he made himself forget about her.

He was standing in the dark waiting to board the last of the departing launches when he felt a hand on his arm and found that, as though to prevent him from forgetting, she’d taken the trouble to come out on the jetty to wish him good luck and say goodbye.

O
N THIS HIS
third trip into the Strait at night, Coburn had expected  to be less on edge. But he wasn’t, mostly because tonight’s exercise  was going to be unlike the other two, he decided. Instead of it  being simply a question of boarding a ship at gunpoint to off-load a  cargo that was easy to handle, this was an altogether more complicated  operation in which he’d been forced to play a role he hadn’t played  before.

The role of the
Selina
was more complicated too. Under the captaincy of Hari’s skinny Somalian colleague, it had left the village early in the afternoon, heading out in to the Strait alone to identify the
Pishan
while there was still sufficient daylight to do so, and since then had been shadowing the freighter under the cover of darkness, waiting for the four high-speed launches to make first contact with their target.

In the last ten minutes Hari had become busier, swearing over his radio alternately in French and English whenever the crews of the three lead launches were slow to report their positions or follow his instructions.

He was chain-smoking too, lighting one cigarette after another and spitting out the ends over the side at increasingly short intervals.

‘If you stop smoking you’ll have more time to yell into your radio,’ Coburn said.

‘I tell these men what they must do, yet still they must be reminded.’ Hari pointed ahead. ‘We receive good co-ordinates from the
Selina
, yes?’

In the moonlight, the
Pishan
was as easy to pick out as it was to
recognize. It was a Liberian-registered lighter-aboard-ship vessel known as a LASH, a twenty-year-old special-purpose freighter that was carrying its cargo in a dozen or more sixty foot-long steel lighters or barges that were lined up between the rails of the movable crane that spanned its deck.

Hari lit another cigarette. ‘The manifest lists thirty tons of zinc ingots in lighter nine,’ he said. ‘But there is no mention of how many men we will find on board.’

Coburn couldn’t see it mattering much. ‘As long as there’s someone who knows how to drive the crane, what do you care?’ he said. ‘You’re not worried about running into trouble, are you? It’s only a freighter.’

‘Always it is best to know the size of the crew. Even if our bluff works well, if the captain thinks he is cleverer than we are, things can still go wrong for us. I am more worried about what it is the
Selina
must do afterwards.’

Coburn could understand why. Forcing the
Pishan
’s crew to unload the lighter containing the ingots was one thing, but Hari’s master plan made no allowance for the risk to the
Selina
later on. As well as acting as a mother-ship to the launches and having to tow the lighter across busy shipping lanes in the middle of the night, both the
Selina
and the lighter were steel-hulled vessels that would be easy to track by radar if someone was to bother – a problem not shared by the wooden launches which were largely invisible to shore-based or ship-borne installations.

And then there was the problem of the early sunrise, Coburn thought. At sometime before dawn, the crew of the
Selina
still had to reach the deep-water inlet that lay seventy-five miles further up the coast where they would sink the lighter, and where it would remain sunk until Hari found a buyer for the ingots.

By now all of the launches were ready and preparing to close in, swiftly moving shadows that, but for their wakes, were almost impossible to see in the dark. Keeping pace with them, 500 yards away, the
Selina
was equally indistinct, a larger shadow that was there one minute and gone the next, visible only when the moon broke through the clouds.

To Coburn the whole scene had an air of unreality about it. He was
standing at the stern of the launch, less conscious of his nerves than he had been earlier, but unable to rid himself of the feeling that Hari’s bluff was never going to work.

Hari himself had no such doubt. He was using his radio again, this time with greater urgency, first instructing his men on the leading starboard launch to raise their bamboo pole with the mine and its magnets on it, and then, once he’d received confirmation that the mine had been attached to the
Pishan
’s hull, telling them to back off to a safer distance.

‘Well?’ Coburn was waiting to hear if the operation had been successful.

The Frenchman handed him a radio receiver. ‘With that you can listen for yourself,’ he said. ‘The mine is in position above the waterline four metres aft of the hawsehole for the anchor chain.’

The news was good, but not sufficiently reassuring to eliminate the knot in Coburn’s stomach. He was still apprehensive, knowing this was the easy bit, and until someone tried to get on board they would have no idea of the level of resistance they might encounter.

Hari was endeavouring to read a piece of paper in the moonlight. ‘If this information you give me from the IMB is correct, the captain’s name is Juan Celestino,’ he said. ‘So I think we shall alert him with our halogens to find out how pleased he is to hear from us.’

Coburn had seen the halogen lights in use before. The technique was intended to intimidate, illuminating the entire vessel in intense white light to blind any crew members who were keeping watch, but only switched on in two or three second bursts to prevent the lights and the launches from becoming targets.

On the one occasion that Coburn had witnessed the strategy in action, the response had been unexpected – a volley of rifle fire from a well-armed crew who somehow or other had received warning of an imminent boarding. Two of Hari’s men had been wounded, and only after a half-hour of negotiation and threats had the captain been persuaded to relinquish control of his ship.

Tonight there was no gunfire. The first burst of light had lit up the
Pishan
from bow to stern, revealing details of the freighter that had been impossible to see before, but so far it had generated no reaction of any kind.

To find out why, Hari used his radio to contact the bridge. ‘My name is Fuente,’ he said. ‘If I am not already speaking to Captain Celestino, you have thirty seconds to get him out of bed before I detonate mines which have been attached to your ship’s hull three metres below your waterline. These mines will also be detonated unless you immediately switch off your Automatic Identification System, or if any member of your crew attempts to communicate with other ships on other radio frequencies, or uses satellite phones, flares or issues distress signals of any kind, by any means.’

A delay of one or two seconds was followed by a crackling over the radio and the sound of someone coughing. ‘This is Celestino. What do you want?’

‘Good evening to you.’ Hari looked relieved. ‘I have four boats and twenty men alongside your vessel,’ he said. ‘You will maintain your present course but reduce speed to not more than five knots to allow my men to board you. Should you refuse to comply with these instructions, I will at once stand off and fire the mines. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand.’ Celestino sounded nervous. ‘You have still not told me what you want.’

‘We shall discuss it once I am on board and I have the pleasure of meeting you.’ Hari took a small transmitter from his pocket. ‘In the meantime, to prove I have the capability to do what I have said I can do, please inform your crew that this is a demonstration only.’ He grinned at Coburn, then pressed a button on the transmitter.

From the bow of the
Pishan
a brilliant flash of light was followed by a blast that left Coburn’s ears ringing. He was dazzled for several seconds, unable to tell whether the mine had actually holed the hull.

Whether it had or not, the so-called demonstration had changed his mind about how effective Hari’s bluff was likely to be, and it was difficult to imagine any captain wanting to find out if his ship was carrying more mines below its waterline.

The captain of the
Pishan
elected not to take the risk. The wave at the freighter’s bow started to drop, and at the same time the throbbing of its diesel began to ease.

Pleased that things were going well, Hari had temporarily stopped smoking. He spent one or two minutes talking over the radio to his
men then, after making contact with the
Selina
and unlashing one of the boarding ladders, put a fresh clip into his M16.

‘Are you going up first?’ Coburn asked.

‘Always I am an example to my men.’ The Frenchman grinned. ‘But tonight only because I am sure there will be no surprises for us. Even so, I think it prudent for you to stay here until we can be certain.’

Of the nineteen villagers Hari had brought with him, two men in each launch would remain behind, one at the helm, the other to act as an armed backup and to operate a halogen light in the event of an emergency.

The eight men that formed the boarding party had a more dangerous job. Calm though the sea was, Coburn knew how difficult it could be to scale a moving ladder in the dark – an acquired skill requiring a combination of balance and physical strength.

To simplify his own job he’d been making his own plans, trying to think of an excuse that would allow him to conduct his search of the
Pishan
without attracting too much attention.

The best opportunity would come while the lighter was being offloaded by the freighter’s crane, he decided, maybe the only real chance he’d have, unless there was going to be trouble in which case he’d be lucky to get on board at all.

There was no trouble.

Ten minutes after the last of the men had vacated the launches, Coburn received the all clear on his radio.

‘You may join us aboard,’ Hari said. ‘Captain Celestino tells me it is not possible for lighters to be unloaded from a moving ship, so he must first cut his engine. If you wait until the
Pishan
is drifting in the current you will find your transfer from the boat to be straightforward.’

Coburn wasn’t in the mood for waiting. He spoke briefly to the launch’s helmsman, asking him to narrow the gap between the two vessels, then as soon as the boarding ladder was within reach, made a grab for it, hauling himself up until he was able to secure a foothold on a lower rung.

The rest of the climb was easy, made easier by the lack of swell and because by now the freighter had lost what little forward speed it had.

On deck, under the guard of Hari’s men, the crew of the
Pishan
were
grouped outside the aft superstructure – the only part of the ship not taken up by the parked crane and its cargo of flat-topped lighters.

It wasn’t hard for Coburn to see how anxious the captain was. Unlike the members of his crew who were keeping together and avoiding eye contact with anyone in the boarding party, the
Pishan
’s captain was standing in a pool of moonlight by himself. He was a taller man than Hari, perhaps a Brazilian or a Colombian but, in the absence of a single gun to back him up, a less imposing figure and someone who knew when he was at a disadvantage.

While arrangements to operate the crane were being finalized, Coburn had a look around, realizing he’d misjudged the size of the lighters. Although on a vastly smaller scale than the cavernous oil tanks of the
Rybinsk
, they were equally inaccessible without the right equipment, and unlikely places for anyone to conceal a consignment of fuel rods or nuclear waste.

In which case his job was going to be much easier, he thought. If indeed his detector was going to pick up radiation, it probably wouldn’t be coming from the lighters, but from inside the superstructure below the bridge.

He began walking over to the deckhouse hatch, but had taken only a few steps when something stopped him in his tracks.

Had the
Pishan
’s crew not been blocking his way, he wouldn’t have given them a second glance, and if he hadn’t given them a second glance he’d never have recognized one of the men.

It was the truck driver who’d pulled up behind him on the road to Fauzdarhat, the man who later on the same day had run down the children so brutally at the beach.

The man had been quick to conceal his face in shadow, but he hadn’t been quick enough.

His features were unmistakable, as ingrained in Coburn’s memory as the images of the bloodstained bodies of the children. And he was here – right here in the Strait of Malacca, standing in the dark on board a foreign freighter bound for Singapore and North Korea – a coincidence so improbable that Coburn knew something was about to go terribly wrong.

Forcing himself not to hurry he went to find Hari.

‘Listen to me,’ Coburn said. ‘This is a trap. I’ll explain later. Get all your men over to the rail and tell them they’re going to have to jump. Pretend they’re in the way of the crane.’

‘I think there is no danger.’ Hari was unconcerned. ‘Without weapons the crew cannot surprise us, and we have checked for more men or hidden guns.’

‘I don’t give a shit what you think or what you’ve checked. If you don’t do something right now, we’re all going to wind up dead.’ Coburn had noticed a change in the captain’s demeanour. Instead of continuing to look distressed, the man was scared witless, his eyes focused on the lighter nearest to the bridge.

Coburn had underestimated Hari’s sense of self-preservation. The Frenchman had seen what Coburn had seen, and Hari Tan was a man who had only stayed alive this long by relying on his instincts.

He acted immediately, shouting a command to his men and using his radio to alert the
Selina
and the launches.

It was a mistake: Hari’s warning was a trigger.

Before Coburn could make it to the starboard rail, hatches on the top of the lighter were thrown open, and muzzle-flashes stabbed out at him from the dark.

If he hadn’t been moving fast already he would never have reached the rail at all.

Deafened by gunfire and with ricochets screaming off the deck between his feet, he sprinted the last few yards and hurled himself over the side into open space.

His impact with the water was severe, ripping off the hood of his wetsuit and driving every vestige of air from his lungs.