Feeling slightly awkward, Coburn shook hands with O’Halloran. ‘I guess this is it,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow as soon as I know everything’s ready to go.’
‘I’ll be waiting for your call. Good luck.’
‘You too.’ Coburn went to the ladder, turning to wave before he steadied himself against the hull and clambered down into the Zodiac.
As though the Somalian saw nothing unusual in picking up a passenger from a US warship, he nodded his hello. ‘Thanks to Allah, it seems we have all made a safe journey,’ he said. ‘There is no luggage you bring?’
‘Only this.’ Coburn showed him the rolled up chart. ‘How’s everything on the Selina?’
‘We have not been so good at rationing our food supplies, but for many days it has been too hot on board to eat, so it is only a small problem for us.’ Pushing off from the Sandpiper, the Somalian opened the throttle of the outboard and turned the Zodiac north towards some pinpoints of light that were twinkling in the distance.
The lights were those of the Korean fishing boats. They were anchored 4 to 500 yards from the shore of the island Hari had mentioned, strung out in an uneven line at the end of which, riding without lights, was the Selina.
To greet Coburn, Hari had assembled his crew on deck — not that there were many of them.
One was Indiri’s husband who, after saying a shy hello, handed Coburn a grimy and crumpled envelope that he said Heather had asked him to deliver. The other two men were strangers whom Coburn couldn’t recall meeting at the village.
Hari introduced them as Susilo and Ali, smooth-muscled, fit-looking Indonesians who, he explained, were experienced pearl divers from Bengkalis and therefore accustomed to working underwater.
They too were shy, keeping their eyes lowered while Coburn shook hands with them and then hurrying off as soon as formalities were over.
Although the strain of the trip was showing on Hari’s face, for the moment at least he seemed reasonably happy. ‘Not by sea before have I travelled this far so quickly,’ he said. ‘Never again shall I attempt such a journey. Come so we can talk and you can tell me if you are still confident of locating our target tomorrow.’
‘He’s shown up already.’ Coburn accompanied Hari to the deckhouse. ‘We got a radar fix on him earlier this evening. The Sandpiper’s going to lead him right into your lap tomorrow night. That’s why I’ve brought this chart.’
‘It shows where we will be able to find him?’
‘Pretty much. I’ll go over it with you later.’
‘After you have read your letter from Miss Cameron.’ Hari grinned. ‘Perhaps it is to say that when you return she will no longer wish to sleep with you.’
Like the envelope, the note inside it had suffered from the rigours of the voyage. The paper was so damp and creased that in places the handwriting was badly smudged, but the message was just about decipherable:
If you don’t come back in one piece, I’ll tell my godfather about you and he’ll tell the IMB, then you won’t have a job anymore.
Please be careful. H xx
To stop Hari asking what it said, Coburn let him read it for himself.
‘Ah. I have heard of this argument before.’ He gave the note back. ‘When I first tell Miss Cameron I am not one hundred per cent certain I can help you, she says that because her godfather is the director of a big marine insurance company in London, he would be most interested to learn of my business. For a young woman she can be quite persuasive.’
‘I know.’ Coburn didn’t need reminding. ‘How many mines did you bring?’
‘You tell me we will need four, so, in case we chance upon a good opportunity to use one on our way here, we bring five. We have also conducted some experiments with them. If you will follow me I can show you how it is we have modified their magnets.’
After the comparatively civilized environment on board the Sandpiper, conditions below the deck of the stripped-out Selina were appalling.
Made worse by the impossibly high temperature, the smell of hot engine oil, cigarette smoke and cooking was as overpowering as the fumes coming from puddles of spilled fuel, while scattered around everywhere were empty drums of diesel, wet clothes, water containers and boxes of canned food, milk powder and toilet rolls.
‘Over here.’ Hari had found a bulb to screw into one of the overhead sockets. ‘Now you can see.’
Packed in individual foam-lined crates and jammed between some halogen lights and parts of the Selina’s disassembled machine-gun, the mines were of a type Coburn was familiar with, squat black pancakes already secured to their attachment magnets and equipped with electronic triggers and aerials to receive the radio signals that would detonate them.
What he hadn’t seen before were football-sized air bladders that had been fitted to the bases of the magnets.
‘You are looking at a new development,’ Hari said. ‘Tomorrow night, to guard against Ali and Susilo being detected by radar, first they will use wooden oars and a rubber dinghy to transport the mines. Then, when they are close to the patrol boat they will swim underwater and tow the mines behind them. But the mines are very heavy, so for that to be possible a flotation aid must be provided. Now you will understand the reason for the bladders, I think, but they also serve another purpose.’
‘What?’ Coburn couldn’t think of one.
‘When such powerful magnets are offered up to the side of a steel hull, they will jump from your hands and by making a loud clang when they first make contact they can alert the crew.’
‘But that won’t happen with these,’ Coburn said. ‘Because the bladders will act as cushions.’
‘To begin with, but there is another feature.’ Hari pointed to a small plug on the side of a bladder. ‘When that is removed, the air will escape allowing the magnets to attach themselves slowly and in silence.’
The idea was fairly ingenious, Coburn thought, perhaps not so much a technological breakthrough as an example of Hari’s ability to foresee risks that needed to be addressed, and why, maybe for the first time, Yegorov was going to be up against someone trickier than he was.
But would that be enough, he wondered? When the end game was more likely to be played out months from now in the corridors of Washington rather than on the night after next in the Yellow Sea, would Ritchie’s testimony be a match for the reputation of a brigadier general whose life appeared to have been dedicated to the preservation of American ideals?
Knowing it was senseless trying to predict the outcome of an inquiry over which he would have no influence, he put the whole business out of his mind, and instead decided this would be as good an opportunity as any to bring Hari properly up to date.
He started by explaining the reason for O’Halloran’s presence on the Sandpiper then, while Hari smoked his way through countless cigarettes, went on to describe how the explosion of the Canyon City munitions store had allowed them to access Shriver’s records, and how that in turn had revealed the FAL plan to stage what would look like an unjustified and unprovoked attack on a US warship by the North Korean Navy.
At midnight, too wide awake to contemplate sleeping, and unwilling to go below, he decided to stay on deck, hoping that by this time tomorrow his confidence would have received a boost, because by then he’d know for certain whether the mines were in place awaiting the signal that twelve hours later would finally bring his part of the mission to an end.