‘OK. I’ll see what he thinks. Don’t go anywhere.’
What Ritchie’s reply might have been Coburn would never know.
As a squall of rain swept across the deck of the Selina, everything started happening at once.
No sooner had Hari returned to the focsle than the trailing dot on the screen began to accelerate, and at the same time over the phone, an urgent message from O’Halloran was drowned out by the voice of someone on the Sandpiper’s bridge yelling the word ‘closing’.
Elbowing Coburn out of the way, Hari took over the wheel. ‘The man Yegorov makes his run, I think,’ he said. ‘In your haste to press the button, do not be too quick.’
Conscious of the cramp in his fingers, Coburn was more concerned about not being able to press the damn thing at all. Assuring O’Halloran that he was aware of what was taking place, he opened the focsle hatch and glanced outside.
The squall had been short-lived, already over and leaving behind it clearer air. The lights on the island were twinkling again, and now in the distance the Sandpiper’s lights were easily visible as well. What he couldn’t see was the Osa.
O’Halloran seemed happy to rely entirely on the Sandpiper’s radar. ‘Ritchie wants to know if you’re set to go,’ he said.
‘Tell him it’s a stupid fucking question.’ Coburn steadied himself against a bulkhead. ‘I can hear what’s going on your end, so if you want to hold up your phone when Yegorov makes contact, it’ll give me an idea of how long I’ll have. Is he still coming?’
Rather than waiting for O’Halloran to check, Hari answered the question. ‘He has increased his speed, but moving to the north,’ he said. ‘By doing so he will attack from the side where he will have a larger target. Please prepare yourself.’
Coburn didn’t think he could be more prepared than he was already. Doing his best to stay calm, he tried to filter out the muffled voices from the Sandpiper’s bridge while he strained to hear the first few words of a message that would set everything in motion.
They weren’t long coming. A second after he heard O’Halloran telling him to standby, he was listening to a statement that had been so over-rehearsed its effect was somehow made more chilling.
‘This is DPRK patrol boat S19 calling US warship Sandpiper. You are north of the 38th parallel and in violation of the 1953 Panmunjom Agreement defining the maritime boundary of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. If you fail to change course and do not at once return to the waters of South Korea, military action will be taken against you. You will receive no further warning of this transgression.’
Coburn didn’t hesitate. He pressed the button and held it down, staring out to sea, searching for a flash that would tell him where the Osa was.
There was no flash — no burst of light, no indication of any kind that the mines had detonated.
Hari hadn’t bothered to look. He’d gone to the door, shielding his face from the wind and only relaxing when the windows of the focsle were rattled by the deep thud of an explosion.
O’Halloran had heard it too. ‘Hole in one,’ he said. ‘What can you see from where you are?’
Coburn was about to say he couldn’t see anything when to the north, where the sea had suddenly started to glow red, a brilliant spear of horizontal flame shot out into the night.
Realizing that somehow Yegorov had managed to launch a Styx, Coburn shouted a warning over the phone, watching despairingly as the missile streaked out towards the Sandpiper.
It was unstable. On full boost, but with its guidance system compromised, and discharged from a burning hangar on a badly listing boat, it narrowly avoided hitting the water before soaring skywards, climbing higher and higher in a series of increasingly wild spirals until it tore itself to pieces in a starburst of incandescent debris.
O’Halloran took his time to come back on the line. ‘Holy shit,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again.’
Coburn had yet to take a breath, not just wondering how in God’s name they’d ever got away with it, but not quite able to believe how incredibly lucky the Sandpiper’s crew had been, and equally amazed that Ritchie had held his fire.
‘You’d better tell the commander to get his boats in the water,’ he said. ‘From here on, it’s up to him.’
‘No, no.’ Hari was shaking his head. ‘We ourselves have more to do.’ Having watched the flight of the missile through binoculars he seemed to have decided something wasn’t right. He handed the glasses to Coburn. ‘If you will look at the Osa, you can see our work tonight is not yet finished.’
The crew were abandoning their stricken vessel and beginning to swim away from it, but at the stern, illuminated in flames billowing from the hangars, a figure was clambering down into a small motor-driven runabout.
Coburn didn’t need binoculars to know who it was. Hari, too, had guessed. He’d already opened the Selina’s throttles and was calling for the halogens to be switched on, but Coburn knew he was being optimistic.
With the island only a few short miles away, in easy reach and surrounded by enormous banks of silt on which, even at high tide, the Selina would quickly run aground, Yegorov stood every chance of making it to land. And once he did that, Coburn realized, neither Ritchie nor anyone else would have a hope in hell of finding him.
CHAPTER 22
Quick though the Selina had been to gather speed, it was proving to be no match for the runabout, which had all but vanished before Indiri’s husband was able to turn on the halogens.
To escape from the light, Yegorov was throwing the runabout into a series of sharp turns, still heading for the island, but adopting a zigzag course that was slowing him down and putting him at risk.
Twice when the runabout was side-on to the increasingly high waves it looked as though he would capsize, and twice he managed to recover, pulling steadily away from the Selina on his way to land.
O’Halloran had seen what was happening and was already on the phone. ‘Those are your floodlights, right?’ he said.
‘Right.’ Anticipating what the American was going to say next, Coburn said it for him. ‘Yeah I know it’s Yegorov, and yeah, I know we’re not going to catch him.’
Hari didn’t agree. Handing over the wheel to the Somalian he instructed him to keep watching the depth finder, then propelled Coburn from the focsle. ‘All is not lost,’ he said. ‘If you would be good enough to remove the lashings from the Zodiac, I shall fetch Ali and Susilo to help us.’
Coburn had forgotten about the Zodiac. It wouldn’t be fast enough to overhaul the runabout, he thought, but it might give them a chance of keeping up.
Conditions on the afterdeck were unpleasant. Crouched behind the halogens, Indiri’s husband was being drenched in spray, and already the Zodiac had several inches of water sloshing around in the bottom of it.
With Coburn’s fingers still suffering from the after-effects of his cramp, he found the wet ropes difficult to unfasten. Each time the lightweight boat was raised by the wind the lashings tightened, and it wasn’t until Hari and the two divers came to offer their assistance that he was able to untie the last of the knots.
‘Not for much longer can we continue like this,’ Hari shouted. ‘Before we reach the shallows we will secure the Zodiac to the Selina with a rope and throw it over the side. That means it will be necessary for you and I to jump in after it. You are happy to do this?’