It was an exercise in futility. Although at least half the people he approached understood what he was saying, after half an hour of asking questions he had obtained not a single lead.
The problem stemmed from the insularity of rival shipyards, he decided. Despite them all occupying the same beach, each yard had guards watching over their own ships, and whilst the sharing of work gangs was common practice, the sharing of information wasn’t.
Making the job more difficult was his inability to distinguish one damn shipyard from another. At sea level, even if you could close yourself off from the noise, the smell and the mass of humanity that was Fauzdarhat beach, finding your way around was a major problem when the boundaries between yards were largely arbitrary and unmarked.
The only real clue to which company was breaking which vessel were the remains of the ships themselves, and then only if Coburn could see past the buildings and the piles of scrap that were waiting to be trucked away to the furnaces of the Chittagong steel mill.
More than anything it was the ships that dominated the skyline — most of them giant supertankers that had reached the end of their lives, or old single-skinned vessels that as a result of the Exxon Valdez disaster had long ago become the white elephants of the sea.
Over the last ten minutes, having decided that the beach was more like an abattoir than a graveyard, Coburn had stopped looking at the ships, rapidly losing enthusiasm and beginning to wish he’d told London what they could do with a job he hadn’t wanted to begin with.
He’d also given up asking for directions. Instead, relying on the assumption that the girl would most likely be operating in an area where children were being worked, he’d started restricting his search to places where there seemed to be a higher concentration of them.
They weren’t hard to find. Ahead of him, a long straggly line of undernourished boys were being used as a conveyor belt. Half-naked and no older than ten or eleven, they were recovering a heavy electrical cable that was being dragged from the gaping bowels of a huge beached tanker, each boy supporting the cable above his head and passing it mechanically to the next in line so a group of men on drier ground could coil it on a pallet ready for collection.
Since this was one of the larger gangs he’d come across, and because the work looked tough enough to attract the attention of someone who was here to try and limit the exploitation of children, Coburn changed direction and was wandering over to the men who were coiling the cable when, above the noise of hammering, came the sound of engines.
At any one time at any given point along the beach, convoys of battered trucks and pickups could be seen making their way slowly across the mud.
But the vehicles approaching Coburn now were neither battered nor slow moving.
There were two of them, Nissan Landcruisers travelling at high speed in a cloud of spray, both painted in olive-drab, and each armed with a heavy machine-gun mounted on the tray behind the cab.
They were Bangladeshi Army vehicles, heading directly for the tanker where the children were at work.
To avoid the spray, Coburn ducked behind a nearby stack of oil drums, wondering what the hell was going on and only realizing the danger he was in when he heard the clamour of automatic weapons.
For a second he thought the machine-guns had opened fire. But he could not have been more wrong.
The leading Landcruiser was cartwheeling in a ball of flame, its driver already dead from a hail of bullets that was coming not from the Nissans but from a truck that Coburn had seen before — the one that little more than an hour ago had drawn up behind him at the roadside.
It had emerged from shadows cast by the tanker’s hull and was accelerating towards the second Landcruiser on a deliberate collision course, the men in the back emptying their magazines by firing indiscriminately in all directions until, at the last minute, the driver of the Landcruiser lost his nerve and swerved.
For the soldiers inside, the end was mercifully swift. Close to tipping over and travelling far too fast, the vehicle slammed head-on into a thirty foot-high pile of metal scrap, dislodging an avalanche of thick steel plates that all but buried it.
The children were less lucky. Terrified by the gunfire, in their haste to escape, many had either run the wrong way or, on bare feet made slippery by the mud, had been too slow.
Making not the slightest attempt to avoid them, the truck driver mowed them down like skittles, continuing to accelerate on his chosen course without giving them a glance.
The act had been among the most callous Coburn had ever seen — so appalling and so unnecessary that for several seconds after the truck had gone he found himself still struggling to come to terms with an incident that had created a trail of crushed and broken children who had been treated as though they were nothing more than road-kill.
How many had died, he didn’t know. Nor could he guess how many had been injured. What he did know was that he’d just witnessed something that was going to be fairly difficult to forget.
Having no clear idea of what he was going to do, he joined a throng of men and women who were rushing to assist those children who were still alive, pushing his way through a circle of people who having already arrived on the scene were standing motionless with their heads in their hands.
At least six of the boys were beyond help, lying in pools of blood that had accumulated in the wheel tracks, their eyes still open and with their limbs twisted and distorted by the impact. Three or four others looked as though they weren’t going to make it, and another three were trying ineffectively to crawl across the mud.
Further away were more casualties. These weren’t children but workers who had fallen victim to the gunfire — some sitting down endeavouring to stem the flow of blood from flesh wounds, several others dazed and bewildered, but on their feet searching for someone to help them.
And on her knees in the middle of it all, her hands red with blood and her uniform smeared with silt and fuel oil, was the young woman whom Coburn had been sent to find.
CHAPTER 2
She’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.