‘Your wife?’
‘She wasn’t there, but her sister was. She said she’s house sitting while Alison and the kids are on vacation somewhere down in Mexico. I knew they were going, but I’d forgotten when.’
‘Well, there you are then,’ Coburn said. ‘You can head off home and stop worrying about them, can’t you?’
‘I made a couple of other calls too — one to the office. You were right about Yegorov.’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s flying out to South Korea tomorrow night — Korean Airline’s flight 411 from San Francisco to Seoul. The department can’t access internal flight information for foreign countries, so he could be going anywhere after that. Still, I guess it pretty much confirms things.’
‘I told you,’ Coburn said.
‘Right. All you have to do now is convince a US Navy Commander you’re not out of your mind and then sink Yegorov’s patrol boat at some unknown place in the Yellow Sea at exactly the right time in the middle of the night.’
‘Meaning you don’t believe I can.’
O’Halloran smiled slightly. ‘So you work for the International Marine Bureau, and you’re good at blowing up buildings. How much ice do you think that’s going to cut with Ritchie? Give him half an hour to run a check on you — and I guarantee he will — and he’ll know that before you got yourself killed in an explosion in Singapore, you were giving Sumatran pirates a hand to raid ships in the Malacca Strait. I can’t see that helping your credibility a hell of a lot, can you?’
Despite being aware of the problem Coburn had given no more thought as to how his plan might be received by a US naval officer he’d never met before.
‘Do you know what your weakest link is?’ O’Halloran said. ‘It’s you.’
‘Yeah, well. There’s not much I can do about that, is there? I’ll figure out something.’
‘Don’t bother.’ O’Halloran stood up. ‘I’ve done it for you. Just get your stuff together and pay our motel bill. I’ve already booked our flights, and it’s a long way to South Korea, so we’d best get a move on.’
CHAPTER 18
In the thirty-six hours it had taken them to reach the city of Jinhae in South Korea, Coburn had determined only two things. By telephoning Hari from the airport on their arrival in Seoul, he’d learned that a commendably early start by the Selina and favourable weather conditions in the South China Sea were allowing Hari to make good time. And by questioning O’Halloran during their long flight from Los Angeles, he’d decided that the American either didn’t know why he’d suddenly chosen to accompany Coburn, or if he did know, he considered the reason to be nobody’s business but his own.
A third piece of information which Coburn had acquired more recently concerned the name of the naval base they were about to visit. According to the English-speaking taxi driver, who half an hour ago had collected them from their hotel, the base was called Chinhae, but the port and the city it served had been renamed Jinhae — a change that the driver assured them had been as unnecessary as it was stupid, and one that by and large westerners failed to appreciate or generally ignored.
The city itself was more pleasant than Coburn had imagined it would be. Located on the south-east coast of the peninsula, it looked out on a sheltered island-studded bay and was almost completely surrounded by mountains covered in pine trees.
By Korean standards it was a comparatively small place, appearing to be supported almost entirely by Korean naval personnel and their families, and by workers employed by the neighbouring shipyards and a world-scale petrochemical plant they’d come across yesterday on the outskirts of town when O’Halloran had decided they should have an exploratory look round before attending their meeting with Ritchie at nine o’clock this morning.
It had been O’Halloran who’d arranged the meeting. In a telephone call that had lasted no more than three or four minutes, he’d bypassed two secretaries and a junior officer before speaking to Ritchie directly, introducing himself as a member of the US National Counter-Proliferation Centre and explaining that he’d come to Korea for the specific purpose of alerting the commander to a major threat to the safety of the Sandpiper and her crew.
Coburn had been impressed, knowing that if he’d been left to get the message through by himself he could have fallen at the first hurdle.
As it was, the next hurdle was going to be the tough one, he thought, a meeting at which they’d agreed O’Halloran would do the talking, calling on Coburn only if his input was required to back up their proposal.
Now the taxi was approaching the harbour, Coburn could see cranes, razor-wire fences and what looked like gigantic fibreglass venetian blinds flanking two of the larger south-east quays.
‘Wind-breaks,’ O’Halloran said. ‘Probably to stop nuclear ships from dragging their anchors or breaking their moorings in the tropical cyclones they get hit with in this part of the world. Do you think our driver knows where he’s going?’
It seemed unlikely. At the main gates to the base the driver had slowed the car and was endeavouring to read a Christmas-tree of Korean signs, presumably searching for the correct route to take through a maze of ram-proof concrete bollards, speed humps and barriers.
The security measures were extensive. Steel gates prevented unauthorized access to numerous truck lanes and railroad lines, while running alongside the docks, rows of military containers and a modern state-of-the-art gantry system were being guarded by armed military police.
‘Try and force your way in here and you wouldn’t get too far,’ O’Halloran said. ‘The Koreans don’t mess about, do they?’
The driver turned round in his seat. ‘Only for the next six hundred metres am I permitted to follow the yellow line,’ he said. ‘After that I can go no further.’
From what Coburn was able to see, the installation seemed to be spread over several hundred acres, nearly all of it concrete and, with the exception of the American section, occupied entirely by ships of the South Korean Navy.
Identified by a sign reading US NAVCOMM DET CHINHAE, the US base was protected by its own crash-proof fence, rows of retracted steel columns that in an emergency could be raised from the road leading to its centre and guarded by two marines standing to attention at the gate.
Coburn paid for the taxi, then accompanied O’Halloran over to an air-conditioned building where, once their passports had been inspected and their names ticked off against a list, one of the marines used his phone before escorting them briskly back outside.
‘Commander Ritchie apologizes for keeping you waiting,’ he said. ‘He’s sending a Jeep right away.’
It was already coming, being driven by a young woman. Because she was in uniform, Coburn found himself wondering if she was one of the new Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialists who’d been mentioned in the clipping Shriver had copied from the Baltimore Leader.
While she checked to make sure she was picking up the right passengers and issued them with security passes and identity tags, he considered asking her name. But he decided not to, and instead, once she was behind the wheel again and they were underway, he tried to gain an impression of what life on a US naval base was like.
The surroundings could hardly be anything but American. As well as having a medical centre, a library and a school, the base was provided with a chapel, a café called Duffy’s Morning Calm and even a bowling alley. The buildings had an American flavour to them too, he thought, a little different to those on the west coast of Oregon or California, although the tiles and roofs on some of the houses looked slightly more Korean than North American.