The young woman brought the Jeep to a halt outside an administration block. ‘You’ll find the commander’s office at the end of the corridor,’ she said. ‘He’s expecting you, so you can go right in.’
Sam Ritchie was a compact wiry man in his late thirties with a mop of thick dark hair and almost equally thick dark eyebrows. He was wearing navy whites and waiting to greet his visitors at the door.
After introducing himself to O’Halloran he shook hands with Coburn. ‘You’re with the International Marine Bureau,’ he said. ‘Is that right?’
Coburn nodded. ‘I’m mostly working out of Singapore, but I report to a guy called Rick Armstrong in London.’
‘So he tells me.’ Ritchie smiled. ‘If I look as good as you do ten days after I’m dead, I’m going to be real pleased.’ He waved a hand at some chairs. ‘Sit down, gentlemen. It sounds as though we have some serious talking to do.’
‘Sorry to spring this on you,’ O’Halloran said. ‘But we didn’t know the full story ourselves until a couple of days ago. Do you want it from the beginning?’
‘Sure.’ Ritchie leaned back in his chair. ‘Go ahead.’
‘On June 10th of this year a Russian supertanker arrived at a breaker’s shipyard in Bangladesh with its crew dying of radiation poisoning. Do you remember hearing about it?’
‘The ship that turned out to be carrying some kind of nuclear waste for North Korea’s nuclear weapon programme — the one they’ve agreed to stop that they don’t want anybody to know about.’
‘That’s what you’re supposed to think,’ O’Halloran said. ‘It’s what the world’s supposed to think. At the time, while the ship was being broken up, it was fairly clear what had happened. The Koreans couldn’t pick up their nuclear shipment at sea because of a storm, so they were forced to wait until the Rybinsk was beached in Bangladesh and collect the stuff from there.’
‘The Rybinsk was the name of the supertanker, was it?’
O’Halloran nodded. ‘The IMB had sent Coburn to check it out and the Counter-Proliferation Centre sent me. That’s where we first ran into each other. It wasn’t until I was back in the States and Coburn came to see me that we realized the whole thing had been a set-up from the start.’
‘I’m not with you,’ Ritchie said. ‘What do you mean, a set-up?’
‘How about the Rybinsk being a covert operation by the US Government?’
Ritchie raised his eyebrows. ‘The US Government?’
‘That’s how it looked to begin with — a smart way for the Administration to persuade the American public to back a military strike against North Korea before Pyongyang decides to start launching nuclear warheads at Tokyo and Honolulu.’
‘But that’s only how it was supposed to look?’
‘Right. Trying to generate support for a pre-emptive strike is the reason for what happened in Bangladesh, but it wasn’t the Pentagon or the White House who were behind it. The Rybinsk was part of a programme that’s being run by an organization called the Free America League. It’s the brain-child of a retired US Brigadier General who won’t be happy until the Korean peninsula is on fire from the top to the 38th parallel. His name’s George Shriver. Have you heard of him?’
‘Who hasn’t?’ Ritchie said. ‘Ask our Korean friends. They think he’s stirring up trouble when relations between the North and South are probably the best they’ve ever been. He might not know it, but he’s doing a fair amount of damage here.’
‘He’s about to do a lot more.’ Placing his laptop on the desk where Ritchie could see it, O’Halloran opened up the screen and pressed a key to display the map of the Sandpiper’s route. ‘Shriver has this stored on his computer,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask how we got it. Just look.’
Ritchie studied it for a moment. ‘It’s a copy of a page in a classified monthly document NAVCOMM issues to the Korean Navy as a matter of courtesy,’ he said. ‘It means very little. I have complete authority over the route I choose to take, and absolute discretion to change it at any time for any reason I see fit. If some bright spark thinks it defines where my ship will be on a specific date, they’re likely to be disappointed.’
‘How about this then?’ O’Halloran scrolled up the press release. ‘Three days ago this is what Shriver was working on.’
Ritchie took his time to absorb the implications, going over and over the text to make certain he understood. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘How sure are you this is genuine?’
‘Sure as we can be. Don’t you believe it?’
‘I don’t know.’ By now, Ritchie was in control of his shock. ‘If this rogue Free America outfit are thinking about using a fully-armed Osa Class fast attack craft, you don’t hire one of those from your nearest rent-a-boat outlet.’
‘Maybe they don’t need an Osa Class attack craft,’ Coburn said. ‘The FAL spent a couple of million dollars buying radioactive waste to put on board the Rybinsk. Why wouldn’t they just buy the missiles and install them on a boat that’s going to produce more or less the same radar echo as the real thing?’
Ritchie shook his head. ‘Not a chance. Sure, if you’ve got the cash you can buy all the ex-Soviet weapons you want on the black market, but Styx missiles need a lot of ancillary equipment — proper hangars, launch platforms and electronics. And they won’t operate without GARPUN radar. Have you ever seen a Styx?’
O’Halloran evidently hadn’t.
Coburn hadn’t either, but he’d heard of them. ‘I know they’re Russian or ex-Soviet,’ he said. ‘They’re a kind of crude surface to surface cruise-missile, aren’t they?’
‘Not that crude.’ Ritchie left his desk and went to stare out of a window. ‘They’re only about twenty feet long, but they can be fitted with three different types of warhead. They’re an old Soviet design so they’re fairly cheap and simple, but anywhere inside a range of forty or fifty kilometres a Styx can be pretty damn lethal.’ He turned round. ‘I guess if I wanted to use a couple, I’d surprise the crew of an Osa patrol boat when they were half asleep or looking the wrong way. Then I wouldn’t need a crash course on how to arm and fire a type of missile I hadn’t been trained to use.’
‘Because you’d be able to force the patrol boat crew to do it for you,’ Coburn said.
‘Sure. That’s not my problem, though, is it? The problem is what the hell I’m going to do about it. You’re expecting me to say the solution is obvious, but in a case like this, the obvious response to a threat isn’t always the right one. For a start, the US doesn’t recognize the Demarkation Line as an international boundary, and even if we did, I still have to follow accepted international rules and what are called the Laws of War.’
O’Halloran switched off his laptop. ‘Which stops any country from attacking a foreign ship without good reason,’ he said. ‘And from what you’ve seen on my computer, you don’t think you’d have a good reason.’
‘Not good enough.’ Ritchie thought for a second. ‘I can take any measures I consider necessary to protect the interests of the United States and to defend my ship and my crew. That probably doesn’t include opening fire on a North Korean navy vessel whose captain has made the mistake of deciding I’ve strayed into foreign waters and has asked me to change course.’
‘That’s what we figured,’ O’Halloran said. ‘And why we think we have an answer for you.’
Ritchie allowed himself a smile. ‘I’m glad somebody has.’
Realizing O’Halloran was talking himself into a corner, Coburn took over. ‘The Counter-Proliferation people have nothing to do with what I’m about to say,’ he said. ‘And it’ll be best if you only know what you need to know.’