Colin D. Peel
THE TUNNEL: A Ben Hope Story
‘North Korea’s growing ties to organized crime groups and illicit shipping networks could be used to facilitate weapons-of-mass-destruction shipments.’
‘It is unlikely that North Koreans will roll out of bed in the morning and say: “We are going to get out of the nuclear weapons business”.’
CHAPTER 1
Fauzdarhat was the nearest thing to a beach from hell. Coburn hadn’t expected it to be a pretty sight, but he’d never imagined any beach could look like this.
He pulled off the road at the top of a rise and got out of the car, trying not to breathe in the smell of what was reputed to be one of the most dangerously polluted places anywhere on Earth.
From where he was standing, in either direction for as far as he could see, the scene was one of devastation on an almost unthinkable scale, a vast wasteland of blackened, oil-soaked sand and mud on which stood the rusting skeletons of ships that had come here to die before they were stripped and broken up for scrap. And everywhere, attended to by armies of bucket-carrying workers, were the fires — hundreds of them burning along a seven-mile stretch of foreshore — an easy way to get rid of material that was unsaleable, Coburn guessed, and an equally easy method of disposing of toxic oil and sludge that was too contaminated to be reclaimed.
Here and there, so thick was the smoke that it was difficult for him to see anything at all. It was obscuring the sun, hanging in a pall over the entire length of the beach, and only slowly being carried out to sea by a breeze that was doing nothing to relieve the mugginess of the morning.
Already Coburn could feel the sweat soaking into his shirt. In midsummer, Bangladesh wasn’t a place where you’d want to be, he thought. Once you ventured outside your air-conditioned hotel, there was no escape from a combination of temperature and humidity that sucked the very life out of you, and at this time of year, for men toiling on the shoreline, the conditions would be intolerable. There were countless thousands of them, struggling with their bare hands to cut up and recover sections of superstructure so large and so unwieldy it was impossible to believe that manpower alone could hope to free them from the mud and silt the tide had left behind.
Now he was actually here, it seemed even less likely that his trip would turn out to be worthwhile. If this was where Heather Cameron had chosen to spend her summer, she was either crazy or deluded, and irrespective of how well connected she happened to be, he didn’t much care what it was she believed she might have tripped over.
The crunch of tyres on gravel made him turn round. During his drive from Chittagong, most of the morning traffic had been travelling towards him — trucks and trailers of all shapes and sizes, each laden down with everything from toilet pans to enormous chunks of steel plate.
Only on one occasion had he overtaken a slower vehicle that, like him, had been bound for the coast — an open-roofed, slat-sided cattle truck crammed with what Coburn had supposed at the time were local Bangladeshis heading out for a day’s shift work at the beach.
The truck that had pulled up behind him was the same one, but the occupants were wearing bandannas they hadn’t been wearing before, and no longer looked like the labourers he’d assumed they were — an impression that was reinforced when he caught sight of the assault rifles that some of the men were failing to properly conceal.
Conscious of being a foreigner, Coburn was careful not to stare, showing his indifference to the arrival of the truck by unzipping his fly and relieving himself against the rear wheel of his rental car. The tactic was one he’d employed in the past, but on this occasion it proved to be unnecessary.
Once the driver had finished consulting a map and made a brief call on a mobile phone he eased the truck back on to the tarmac, gunning his engine as he went past without displaying the slightest interest in the stranger at the roadside.
For Coburn it was a reminder, a chance encounter that could have equally well turned sour, although judging from the appearance of the men, he thought they were more likely to have been anti-government revolutionaries than local bandits who were out looking for any easy hit.
He waited until the truck had disappeared then drove down slowly to the foreshore, wondering how the hell he was going to find someone called Heather Cameron among the throngs of Bangladeshis who called this place their home.
Soon the road began to deteriorate, splitting in to dozens of rutted tracks, each leading to a different shipyard, and every one of them flanked by a collection of ramshackle buildings.
Having spent the best part of the last three months working in the swamp marshes of Sumatra, Coburn was familiar enough with shanty town shacks of plastic sheeting and corrugated iron, but these were buildings unlike any he’d encountered anywhere before.
A few were fabricated from rough-cast concrete, but many of the others had been cobbled together using materials scavenged from the ships — irregular-shaped panels of flame-cut steel mixed with pieces of broken plywood, tar-paper, asbestos sheeting and buckled metal pipes that also served as clothes lines.
Alongside were latrines, kitchens, dormitories and God knows what else, all red with rust, none of them weatherproof and, as far as Coburn could make out, without a single window between them.
Now he was closer to the fires and ships, the noise of hammering was deafening, and the smell was a good deal stronger — not just of smoke, but of hot steel and from the sweat of the thousands of men who were wielding the cutting torches.
Choosing a track at random, he parked his car beside what seemed to be an office building. More soundly constructed than the neighbouring structures, it looked as though at one time someone had even given it a lick of paint. Sign written in English on a splintered wooden plaque above the door were the words PEACE, HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY SHIPBREAKING AND RECYCLING LTD.
At a desk inside, a Bangladeshi teenager was too busy using a calculator to notice he had a visitor.
‘Hi there.’ Coburn interrupted him. ‘Do you speak English?’
The boy turned round.
‘I’m looking for someone.’ Coburn pointed to a pen on the desk. ‘Can I borrow that?’
The boy nodded and produced a sheet of paper.
‘She’s a nurse who works for the United Nations.’ Coburn wrote down the name Heather Cameron and printed out the letters UNICEF. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’
There was no reaction from the boy until Coburn put his hands inside his shirt and clenched his fists to simulate a pair of breasts. ‘A white girl.’
The boy started to grin, but then became confused when Coburn made the mistake of repeating the word nurse, and pretended to inject himself with an imaginary syringe.
‘OK. Never mind.’ He returned the pen but took the sheet of paper with him, hoping he’d meet with better luck elsewhere, but already realizing how hard this was going to be.
The last communication he’d received from London had been as sketchy as the others, instructing him to proceed with caution if he was able to confirm the girl’s suspicions, but otherwise providing little in the way of new information except for the name of the beach where she was based and the departure time and number of his prepaid flight from Singapore — information that was as good as useless when he was faced with an unending length of coastline that had people crawling over every inch of it.
Leaving his car where it was he set off along the shore, endeavouring to avoid the mud and the heaps of asbestos fibre that were drying in the sun while he showed the sheet of paper to any Bangladeshis who looked as though they might speak English.