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.
Winded and disoriented he fought to regain the surface, using all his strength to kick his way upwards until he was able to take in his first desperate breath.
To his right, the freighter was once again being bathed in light from the launches in a frantic and futile attempt to blind the gunmen on the Pishan who were redirecting their fire to finish what they’d started.
Coburn didn’t hesitate. With bullets smacking into the water all around him he gulped in another lungful of air then, keeping as close to the freighter’s hull as he could, headed straight back down.
The bullets followed him. He could hear them and see the trails they left behind — lethal spears of light-filled bubbles that with each burst from the halogens were moving ever closer.
But he neither heard nor saw the hand grenades.
Accompanied by a searing pain in his side, the blast from the first one was bad enough.
The shockwave from the second was much worse, slamming his head against the hull so hard that he was glad when the blackness took away the pain and he found he no longer had the need to breathe.
CHAPTER 6
Now Heather had pulled back the other curtain to let more light into the hut, every time she leaned over him she had the afternoon sunshine in her hair, a distraction that, for the moment, Coburn could have done without.
‘Your Mr Armstrong isn’t going to be very pleased with you,’ she said.
‘Because he won’t know whether the Pishan is carrying nuclear stuff, or not?’
‘No.’ She showed him a piece of twisted aluminium that she’d just extracted from his armpit. ‘Because these bits are all that’s left of his nice radiation detector. When are you going to tell the IMB they won’t be getting it back?’
‘It didn’t belong to them. The CIA got it from O’Halloran’s outfit, and they won’t care. No one’s going to care.’
‘You ought to. If you hadn’t been wearing it, you’d be dead.’ She used her tweezers again. ‘I know this hurts, but I’ve nearly finished. You don’t realize how lucky you were.’
He didn’t need reminding. Of the men who had been rescued by the launches, three members of the boarding party were suffering from gunshot wounds, and two of the Pishan’s crew were dead, killed in the water after they’d abandoned their ship in a vain attempt to avoid the crossfire on the deck.
That the raid had been a disaster was not in doubt. The reason for the disaster was something Coburn had been struggling to figure out ever since he’d regained consciousness in the bottom of one of the launches.
Because Heather had so far made no mention of the Selina, he asked her if it had returned to the village yet.
‘It came in about an hour ago. That’s where I’ve been — patching up the men who got hurt. Why?’
‘Did Hari say when he’d be coming to see me?’
‘When he’s finished talking to their families. He’s impressed with you. He said if you hadn’t realized it was a trap you’d probably all be dead.’
‘And he wants to know how I guessed.’
‘Mm.’ She looked at him. ‘So do I.’
Unlike Hari who, after transferring his injured men to the Selina, had chosen to accompany them on a gentler but slower return trip, Coburn had elected to remain on the launch that had picked him up, hoping to arrive back early so he could assemble his thoughts before he was presented with questions for which he had no good answers.