‘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.
CHAPTER 5
On 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.’