The Rybinsk Deception Read online

  THE RYBINSK

  DECEPTION

  Colin D. Peel

  ‘North Korea’s growing ties to organized crime groups and illicit shipping networks could be used to facilitate weapons-of-mass-destruction shipments.’

  David Asher

  Chief Monitor of the US State Department

  ‘It is unlikely that North Koreans will roll out of bed in the morning and say: “We are going to get out of the nuclear weapons business”.’

  Christopher Hill

  US Assistant Secretary of State

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  FAUZDARHAT WAS THE nearest thing to a beach from hell. Coburn hadn’t expected it to be a pretty sight, but he’d never imagined any beach could look like this.

  He pulled off the road at the top of a rise and got out of the car, trying not to breathe in the smell of what was reputed to be one of the most dangerously polluted places anywhere on Earth.

  From where he was standing, in either direction for as far as he could see, the scene was one of devastation on an almost unthinkable scale, a vast wasteland of blackened, oil-soaked sand and mud on which stood the rusting skeletons of ships that had come here to die before they were stripped and broken up for scrap. And everywhere, attended to by armies of bucket-carrying workers, were the fires – hundreds of them burning along a seven-mile stretch of foreshore – an easy way to get rid of material that was unsaleable, Coburn guessed, and an equally easy method of disposing of toxic oil and sludge that was too contaminated to be reclaimed.

  Here and there, so thick was the smoke that it was difficult for him to see anything at all. It was obscuring the sun, hanging in a pall over the entire length of the beach, and only slowly being carried out to sea by a breeze that was doing nothing to relieve the mugginess of the morning.

  Already Coburn could feel the sweat soaking into his shirt. In midsummer, Bangladesh wasn’t a place where you’d want to be, he thought. Once you ventured outside your air-conditioned hotel, there was no escape from a combination of temperature and humidity that sucked the very life out of you, and at this time of year, for men toiling on the shoreline, the conditions would be intolerable. There were countless thousands of them, struggling with their bare hands to cut up and recover sections of superstructure so large and so unwieldy it was impossible to believe that manpower alone could hope to free them from the mud and silt the tide had left behind.

  Now he was actually here, it seemed even less likely that his trip would turn out to be worthwhile. If this was where Heather Cameron had chosen to spend her summer, she was either crazy or deluded, and irrespective of how well connected she happened to be, he didn’t much care what it was she believed she might have tripped over.

  The crunch of tyres on gravel made him turn round. During his drive from Chittagong, most of the morning traffic had been travelling towards him – trucks and trailers of all shapes and sizes, each laden down with everything from toilet pans to enormous chunks of steel plate.

  Only on one occasion had he overtaken a slower vehicle that, like him, had been bound for the coast – an open-roofed, slat-sided cattle truck crammed with what Coburn had supposed at the time were local Bangladeshis heading out for a day’s shift work at the beach.

  The truck that had pulled up behind him was the same one, but the occupants were wearing bandannas they hadn’t been wearing before, and no longer looked like the labourers he’d assumed they were – an impression that was reinforced when he caught sight of the assault rifles that some of the men were failing to properly conceal.

  Conscious of being a foreigner, Coburn was careful not to stare, showing his indifference to the arrival of the truck by unzipping his fly and relieving himself against the rear wheel of his rental car. The tactic was one he’d employed in the past, but on this occasion it proved to be unnecessary.

  Once the driver had finished consulting a map and made a brief call on a mobile phone he eased the truck back on to the tarmac, gunning his engine as he went past without displaying the slightest interest in the stranger at the roadside.

  For Coburn it was a reminder, a chance encounter that could have equally well turned sour, although judging from the appearance of the men, he thought they were more likely to have been anti-government revolutionaries than local bandits who were out looking for any easy hit.

  He waited until the truck had disappeared then drove down slowly to the foreshore, wondering how the hell he was going to find someone called Heather Cameron among the throngs of Bangladeshis who called this place their home.

  Soon the road began to deteriorate, splitting in to dozens of rutted tracks, each leading to a different shipyard, and every one of them flanked by a collection of ramshackle buildings.

  Having spent the best part of the last three months working in the swamp marshes of Sumatra, Coburn was familiar enough with shanty town shacks of plastic sheeting and corrugated iron, but these were buildings unlike any he’d encountered anywhere before.

  A few were fabricated from rough-cast concrete, but many of the others had been cobbled together using materials scavenged from the ships – irregular-shaped panels of flame-cut steel mixed with pieces of broken plywood, tar-paper, asbestos sheeting and buckled metal pipes that also served as clothes lines.

  Alongside were latrines, kitchens, dormitories and God knows what else, all red with rust, none of them weatherproof and, as far as Coburn could make out, without a single window between them.

  Now he was closer to the fires and ships, the noise of hammering was deafening, and the smell was a good deal stronger – not just of smoke, but of hot steel and from the sweat of the thousands of men who were wielding the cutting torches.

  Choosing a track at random, he parked his car beside what seemed to be an office building. More soundly constructed than the neighbouring structures, it looked as though at one time someone had even given it a lick of paint. Sign written in English on a splintered wooden plaque above the door were the words PEACE, HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY SHIPBREAKING AND RECYCLING LTD.

  At a desk inside, a Bangladeshi teenager was too busy using a calculator to notice he had a visitor.

  ‘Hi there.’ Coburn interrupted him. ‘Do you speak English?’

  The boy turned round.

  ‘I’m looking for someone.’ Coburn pointed to a pen on the desk. ‘Can I borrow that?’

  The boy nodded and produced a sheet of paper.

  ‘She’s a nurse who works for the United Nations.’ Coburn wrote down the name Heather Cameron and printed out the letters UNICEF. ‘Do you know where I can find her?’

  There was no reaction from the boy until Coburn put his hands inside his shirt and clenched his fists to simulate a pair of breasts. ‘A white girl.’

  The boy started to grin, but then became confused when Coburn made the mistake of repeating the word nurse, and pretended to inject himself with an imaginary syringe.

  ‘OK. Never mind.’ He returned the pen but
took the sheet of paper with him, hoping he’d meet with better luck elsewhere, but already realizing how hard this was going to be.

  The last communication he’d received from London had been as sketchy as the others, instructing him to proceed with caution if he was able to confirm the girl’s suspicions, but otherwise providing little in the way of new information except for the name of the beach where she was based and the departure time and number of his prepaid flight from Singapore – information that was as good as useless when he was faced with an unending length of coastline that had people crawling over every inch of it.

  Leaving his car where it was he set off along the shore, endeavouring to avoid the mud and the heaps of asbestos fibre that were drying in the sun while he showed the sheet of paper to any Bangladeshis who looked as though they might speak English.

  It was an exercise in futility. Although at least half the people he approached understood what he was saying, after half an hour of asking questions he had obtained not a single lead.

  The problem stemmed from the insularity of rival shipyards, he decided. Despite them all occupying the same beach, each yard had guards watching over their own ships, and whilst the sharing of work gangs was common practice, the sharing of information wasn’t.

  Making the job more difficult was his inability to distinguish one damn shipyard from another. At sea level, even if you could close yourself off from the noise, the smell and the mass of humanity that was Fauzdarhat beach, finding your way around was a major problem when the boundaries between yards were largely arbitrary and unmarked.

  The only real clue to which company was breaking which vessel were the remains of the ships themselves, and then only if Coburn could see past the buildings and the piles of scrap that were waiting to be trucked away to the furnaces of the Chittagong steel mill.

  More than anything it was the ships that dominated the skyline – most of them giant supertankers that had reached the end of their lives, or old single-skinned vessels that as a result of the Exxon Valdez disaster had long ago become the white elephants of the sea.

  Over the last ten minutes, having decided that the beach was more like an abattoir than a graveyard, Coburn had stopped looking at the ships, rapidly losing enthusiasm and beginning to wish he’d told London what they could do with a job he hadn’t wanted to begin with.

  He’d also given up asking for directions. Instead, relying on the assumption that the girl would most likely be operating in an area where children were being worked, he’d started restricting his search to places where there seemed to be a higher concentration of them.

  They weren’t hard to find. Ahead of him, a long straggly line of undernourished boys were being used as a conveyor belt. Half-naked and no older than ten or eleven, they were recovering a heavy electrical cable that was being dragged from the gaping bowels of a huge beached tanker, each boy supporting the cable above his head and passing it mechanically to the next in line so a group of men on drier ground could coil it on a pallet ready for collection.

  Since this was one of the larger gangs he’d come across, and because the work looked tough enough to attract the attention of someone who was here to try and limit the exploitation of children, Coburn changed direction and was wandering over to the men who were coiling the cable when, above the noise of hammering, came the sound of engines.

  At any one time at any given point along the beach, convoys of battered trucks and pickups could be seen making their way slowly across the mud.

  But the vehicles approaching Coburn now were neither battered nor slow moving.

  There were two of them, Nissan Landcruisers travelling at high speed in a cloud of spray, both painted in olive-drab, and each armed with a heavy machine-gun mounted on the tray behind the cab.

  They were Bangladeshi Army vehicles, heading directly for the tanker where the children were at work.

  To avoid the spray, Coburn ducked behind a nearby stack of oil drums, wondering what the hell was going on and only realizing the danger he was in when he heard the clamour of automatic weapons.

  For a second he thought the machine-guns had opened fire. But he could not have been more wrong.

  The leading Landcruiser was cartwheeling in a ball of flame, its driver already dead from a hail of bullets that was coming not from the Nissans but from a truck that Coburn had seen before – the one that little more than an hour ago had drawn up behind him at the roadside.

  It had emerged from shadows cast by the tanker’s hull and was accelerating towards the second Landcruiser on a deliberate collision course, the men in the back emptying their magazines by firing indiscriminately in all directions until, at the last minute, the driver of the Landcruiser lost his nerve and swerved.

  For the soldiers inside, the end was mercifully swift. Close to tipping over and travelling far too fast, the vehicle slammed head-on into a thirty foot-high pile of metal scrap, dislodging an avalanche of thick steel plates that all but buried it.

  The children were less lucky. Terrified by the gunfire, in their haste to escape, many had either run the wrong way or, on bare feet made slippery by the mud, had been too slow.

  Making not the slightest attempt to avoid them, the truck driver mowed them down like skittles, continuing to accelerate on his chosen course without giving them a glance.

  The act had been among the most callous Coburn had ever seen – so appalling and so unnecessary that for several seconds after the truck had gone he found himself still struggling to come to terms with an incident that had created a trail of crushed and broken children who had been treated as though they were nothing more than road-kill.

  How many had died, he didn’t know. Nor could he guess how many had been injured. What he did know was that he’d just witnessed something that was going to be fairly difficult to forget.

  Having no clear idea of what he was going to do, he joined a throng of men and women who were rushing to assist those children who were still alive, pushing his way through a circle of people who having already arrived on the scene were standing motionless with their heads in their hands.

  At least six of the boys were beyond help, lying in pools of blood that had accumulated in the wheel tracks, their eyes still open and with their limbs twisted and distorted by the impact. Three or four others looked as though they weren’t going to make it, and another three were trying ineffectively to crawl across the mud.

  Further away were more casualties. These weren’t children but workers who had fallen victim to the gunfire – some sitting down endeavouring to stem the flow of blood from flesh wounds, several others dazed and bewildered, but on their feet searching for someone to help them.

  And on her knees in the middle of it all, her hands red with blood and her uniform smeared with silt and fuel oil, was the young woman whom Coburn had been sent to find.

  CHAPTER 2

  SHE’D BEEN EASY to recognize. Surrounded by a sea of brown faces and brown bodies, Heather Cameron was a fair-skinned blonde, working furiously to bandage the leg of an injured boy, doing what she could to reassure him by forcing a smile before she limped over to attend to another youngster who had white bone protruding from his forearm.

  By now, one by one, other people had begun to respond. As soon as each of the children had received some kind of rudimentary treatment, Bangladeshi women were carrying them off to places that Coburn imagined would offer them little more comfort than the stretch of beach on which the tragedy had occurred.

  Conscious of a growing anger against the men who had inflicted the carnage, and knowing that the longer he stood around doing nothing the angrier he was going to get, he was pleased when he saw the girl stand up and beckon to him.

  He went over to her, intending to introduce himself, but was given no opportunity to do so.

  Before he could open his mouth she handed him a key and pointed. ‘Shipping container with white doors,’ she said. ‘It’s over there by one of the big winches. You can’t miss it. I need more bandage
s, more disinfectant and as much bottled water as you can carry.’ She knelt down again beside the boy with the broken arm. ‘Don’t forget to lock up when you leave.’

  The container was sitting at an angle on the beach about a hundred yards away. Just as she’d said, the doors at one end were painted white, but the rest of the outside was flaked in rust, and in an advanced state of disrepair.

  The inside, though, was a revelation. No sooner had he undone the padlock and eased open one of the doors than the stench of the beach was replaced by the fresh smell of soap, and he found himself stepping into what for all the world looked like a cross between a storeroom and a mobile home that had been constructed with materials from a scrapyard.

  The place was as clean as it was tidy, ventilated by panels of secondhand louvres welded over holes cut in the walls, and illuminated by sunshine filtering through two cracked skylights in the roof.

  A primitive kitchen was separated from a bedroom by a screen of cardboard boxes, while at the rear of the container behind a sheet of plywood, stood a chemical toilet and a foot pump that fed water to an ancient shower-head bolted to the wall.

  Realizing too late that he was tracking mud everywhere, he searched around for the items she wanted, finding bandages and antiseptic in a bedroom cupboard and dumping them in an empty box together with several bottles of water he collected from the kitchen.

  Remembering at the last minute to refasten the padlock, he hurried back to the crowd of people, intending to see if there was anything else he could do.

  There wasn’t.

  An ambulance was speeding across the mud, and in the distance, two more were on their way.

  Quite how they’d managed to get here this quickly, Coburn didn’t know. But wherever they’d come from, for some reason or another, the wail of sirens had been a signal for Heather Cameron to abandon her efforts.

  Even before paramedics started spilling out of the ambulance, she’d been retreating, reaching into her pocket for a headscarf to hastily cover up her hair, and evidently no longer prepared to play an active role or hang around in case she could.