Wishing he’d got here sooner, Coburn went to enquire about her leg.
Instead of saying hello, she reached into her pocket and took out a small piece of polished metal. ‘You were right about this being from a bullet jacket,’ she said. ‘But you were wrong about how deep in it was. One of the doctors hooked it out in a couple of minutes.’
‘Can you walk any better?’
‘Mm. I’ve just got a fresh bandage and some antibiotics to take.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Why does this man O’Halloran want to see us?’
‘I don’t know. Looks like you might have started some sort of international witch hunt.’
‘He’s arranged for a room here where we can talk.’ She glanced at the American. ‘But I don’t see the point — not when I’ve already told him what we found.’
There wasn’t any point, Coburn thought. If the US hoped to recover the missing crate, they either had no idea of how things worked in a place like Bangladesh, or they were looking for a lead they stood not the slightest chance of finding.
On both counts he had misunderstood. Within minutes of them accompanying O’Halloran to a small air-conditioned room in the hospital’s basement, Coburn had started to realize there was rather more to this than he’d imagined.
Displayed on the screen of O’Halloran’s laptop was a red line that had been superimposed on a map of the Far East. Extending south from the coast of Russia, first through the Sea of Japan, and then down in to the East China Sea, the line curled round Singapore on the southern tip of Malaysia before swinging north and ending up in the Bay of Bengal on the south coast of Bangladesh.
‘Route of the Rybinsk.’ O’Halloran pointed at the line. ‘This is what we think. A week or so before the ship sailed from Vladivostok, somebody who knew it was on its last voyage hid a bunch of Kalashnikovs and a crate of Russian nuclear reactor fuel rods behind that bulkhead you found in the deckhouse. Because the shipment was only supposed to be on board for a few days, whoever was doing the smuggling skimped on the shielding for the nasty stuff.’
Coburn interrupted. ‘How do you know that?’ he said. ‘What makes you think the crates were only supposed to be on board for a few days?’
‘I’ll show you.’ O’Halloran pressed a key on his computer to bring up an English translation of the labels Coburn had removed from the crates of guns.
CONSIGNMENT PZ16B, WAREHOUSE 17, PLANT 38
HUICHON, JAGGANG
To Coburn, the words Consignment, Warehouse and Plant seemed no more significant than the Russian originals had been. ‘Are Huichon and Jaggang places in China?’ he asked.
‘No.’ O’Halloran shook his head. ‘They’re both in the northern province of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — the DPRK, or North Korea to you and me. Plant 38 is the largest armament factory in the world. That’s where the guns were going — probably for distribution to the North Korean army.’
Heather had a question. ‘What about that scrap of torn label we found?’ she said. ‘None of the letters on that match the letters on the other two.’
‘This one you mean.’ O’Halloran pressed another key to display the letters UROH. ‘You’re looking at the end of the Russian word Bjuroh. That translates to the English word Bureau. We know a fair bit about North Korea’s Bureau 39. It’s the most heavily guarded and most highly classified place in the whole country. It’s the headquarters for everything dirty, from counterfeiting to smuggling to drug trafficking. If North Korea wanted a few more kilogrammes of plutonium or enriched uranium for their nuclear programme, Bureau 39 is the outfit that would go out and source it.’
Judging by her expression, Heather was having no more success in keeping up than Coburn was. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t make sense. If the crates were supposed to go to North Korea, how did they end up in Bangladesh?’
‘Bad luck and bad timing.’ O’Halloran returned the map to his screen. ‘The Rybinsk sailed from Vladivostok on Tuesday, May 20th. The very next day on the 21st, the Japanese coastguard launched a week-long campaign to stamp out piracy right across the Sea of Japan. Mr Coburn here can tell you a whole lot more about modern-day piracy than I can, but as I understand it, the problem’s pretty much out of control everywhere in the world. That’s why the Japanese decided they needed to have a big clean up.’
She looked doubtful. ‘Are you saying North Korea had arranged to pick up the crates while the Rybinsk was passing through the Sea of Japan?’
‘Probably a covert navy team the Koreans sent out to board the ship.’
‘And you think they were caught by the Japanese coastguard?’
‘Right.’ O’Halloran nodded. ‘Good for us. Not so good for Bureau 39.’
‘The crew of the Rybinsk wouldn’t have let anyone on board.’
‘Yes they would.’ Coburn interrupted. ‘It happens all the time. Crews don’t get paid to fight off anyone who wants to board them. They’re not going to risk getting shot or thrown overboard for interfering with something that isn’t their business.’
She studied the map on the screen. ‘Why use a ship at all? Why not just truck the crates from Russia to North Korea? It’s not that far, is it?’
‘Easy answer,’ O’Halloran said. ‘Border controls. Shipping illegal stuff by sea is always going to be a better bet. Who’s going to take any notice of an old tanker on its way to be scrapped in a third world country like Bangladesh?’
Coburn was impressed. Overnight, someone in O’Halloran’s department had done a lot of work, he thought, approaching the problem with the usual urgency that had followed in the wake of 9/11 and whenever the US sensed a nuclear threat from somewhere in the world.
Heather’s perspective was quite different. ‘That’s horrible,’ she said. ‘It means the crew of the Rybinsk were just unlucky. If the crates had been collected on time, those poor men wouldn’t have got sick at all. Instead of that, for the whole voyage whenever they went to the dining-room or the deckhouse they were being exposed to radiation.’
O’Halloran nodded. ‘Pity we don’t know what the actual source of radiation was. By now it’ll either be on another ship, or halfway to North Korea on a cargo plane.’
‘What do you think it was?’ Coburn asked.
‘Probably not weapons grade plutonium or uranium. People have got it into their heads that plutonium-329 and highly enriched uranium-235 are as dangerous as hell. Build yourself a bomb out of them and they are, but in real life they don’t put out that much radiation, and they’re pretty safe to handle if you know what you’re doing. Like I said, if I had to guess I’d go for spent fuel rods from a decommissioned reactor.’
‘A Russian one?’ Coburn said.
‘Bound to be. The old Soviet Union’s awash with the goddamn things, and security in Russia isn’t just bad, it’s non-existent. I guess it doesn’t much matter what it was. The Koreans will be happy to get hold of anything that’s going to help them with their bomb programme.’
‘I thought they’d agreed to give that up.’ Coburn remembered reading about it.
‘They have — after they’d been handed God knows how many billion dollars of aid and an emergency shipment of fifty thousand tons of oil. That doesn’t mean they’ve stopped. With Dear Leader Kim Jong running the country, you can trust Pyongyang about as far as you can spit.’
While O’Halloran had been speaking, Coburn’s thoughts had drifted back to yesterday. ‘Have your guys got a theory about what happened at the beach?’ he said.
O’Halloran nodded. ‘Doesn’t take much to figure out. The way we see it, once Bureau 39 realized there had been a screw up, as soon as the Rybinsk hit the beach at Fauzdarhat they hired themselves a bunch of Bangladeshi hard-men who were paid to cut open that bulkhead and grab the stuff. If you’re buying up nuclear waste, another fifty thousand dollars isn’t going to break the bank.’