The Rybinsk Deception Read online

  Still limping and still retreating, she almost backed in to Coburn who had gone to see what the problem was.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ She reached out to take the box he was holding.

  He didn’t let her have it. ‘Doesn’t look as though you’ll be needing this now,’ he said.

  ‘No. It’s all right though. I can carry it back.’

  ‘It’s heavy.’ He kept hold of it. ‘Are you packing up because of the paramedics?’

  ‘The local health authorities don’t much like me being here. I’m not a Muslim, and the shipyard owners think I’m making trouble for them.’ She glanced back at the ambulances. ‘If you’re the person who’s brought the Rad Block and the AED, you’re two days too late.’

  Having no idea what she was talking about, he decided to start again. ‘My name’s David Coburn,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what Rad Block is, and I’m afraid I’ve never heard of AED.’

  ‘What are you doing here then?’

  ‘Looking for someone called Heather Cameron. That’s you isn’t it?’

  ‘What if it is?’

  Had the circumstances been different, her bluntness could have been amusing. As things were, Coburn wasn’t sure if it was a reflection of the strain she’d been under, or whether she was finding it hard to distance herself from what she’d just been dealing with.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you want to talk to me here, that’s fine. But if you want to know why I’ve been looking for you, how about inviting me back to that nice shipping container of yours?’

  ‘All right.’ She began to walk off, trying not to wince in pain from what was obviously some kind of injury to her leg.

  ‘Hey.’ Coburn stopped her. ‘Did you get hurt?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’ She pushed past and limped away, keeping ahead of him until she reached the container and having to wait there until he gave her back the key for the padlock.

  He helped her swing open the doors and accompanied her inside, this time remembering to remove his shoes. ‘Do you live here permanently?’ he asked.

  ‘Mostly. If I can save up enough money, once in a while I treat myself to a hotel room in Chittagong.’ She found a folding chair for him to sit on and disappeared behind the wall of cardboard boxes. ‘You can talk to me while I clean up and get changed. What is it you want?’

  Because it was a difficult question, Coburn elected to start somewhere else. ‘How about this?’ he said. ‘Suppose I tell you what I know, then you can tell me how much of it I’ve got wrong.’

  ‘Is it about the Rybinsk?’ She put her head round the wall. ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  Although he half remembered seeing the name on the stern of the supertanker where the boys had been working, London had made no mention of it.

  ‘Was it the Rybinsk that arrived here with the sick crew?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. I’m still waiting to hear what you want.’

  ‘OK.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I work for the IMB – that’s the International Marine Bureau in London, but for the last three months I’ve been on loan to the Singapore Government.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want to tell me.’

  Coburn ignored the remark and carried on. ‘About a week ago someone called Sir Anthony Fraser contacted the IMB and told them he had information about the possible radioactive contamination of a Russian ship that was being broken up on a beach in Bangladesh. He said that the crew of the ship arrived here suffering from what could be radiation sickness and suggested it might be a good idea if the IMB were to send someone to check things out.’

  ‘And that’s you?’

  ‘I happened to be in Singapore, and I used to know a bit about nuclear radiation, so here I am.’ He paused. ‘Does any of that make sense?’

  ‘Mm.’ She came back into the kitchen. ‘Yes it does.’ She was wearing a cotton blouse and was buckling up the belt of a pair of shorts while she tried unsuccessfully to inspect the back of her right leg.

  ‘Let me see that.’ He knelt down. ‘Turn round a minute.’

  She had a wound in her thigh, a nasty jagged cut about half an inch long. It wasn’t bleeding, but the edges were puckered and inflamed, and to Coburn it didn’t look too good at all.

  ‘Well?’ She stepped away from him.

  ‘How close were you to the shooting?’

  ‘I don’t know. A hundred and fifty yards or so. Why?’

  ‘My guess is you’ve picked up a metal fragment from the jacket of a bullet that’s ricocheted off something. Whatever it is, it’s going to have to come out.’

  ‘You’re an expert on these things, are you?’ She sounded slightly scathing.

  ‘Just trying to help. Was it you who decided the crew of the Rybinsk had been exposed to radiation?’

  She nodded. ‘I hadn’t seen the symptoms anywhere before, so I was really slow to get on to it – you know, because I didn’t believe that’s what it could be. It was only after the men got worse that I started making phone calls and began to think they might be suffering from radiation poisoning. Even then I wasn’t certain.’

  ‘But you contacted UNICEF anyway.’

  ‘No. I’m fairly sure UNICEF have forgotten all about me. They only sent me here to write a report on child labour in the shipyards. I’m not supposed to be working as a nurse. Anyway, if I was right, I needed anti-radiation drugs in a hurry, and it takes months and months to get anything out of the UN.’

  ‘So you got hold of someone else instead.’

  She nodded again. ‘Anthony Fraser’s my godfather. He’s a director of a London company of insurance underwriters called Maritime Fidelity. I called him one evening and explained the whole thing to him on my sat-phone.’

  ‘And he promised to send you this Rad Block and AED stuff you thought I’d brought?’ Coburn was starting to put the pieces together. ‘They’re anti-radiation drugs, are they?’

  ‘Rad Block is just potassium iodide. It’s been around since the meltdown at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. But I couldn’t find any in Bangladesh. AED is different. It’s a brand new adrenal gland hormone called 5-androstenediol that stimulates marrow-cell growth. It’s supposed to work really well.’ She paused. ‘Not that it would’ve helped as things turned out. The last crewmember of the Rybinsk died in Chittagong hospital two days ago. He was the cook.’

  ‘How many have died altogether?’

  ‘All of them – six Malaysians. Ships that come here to be broken up only have tiny delivery crews.’ She went to stand at the open doors. ‘Now we’ve got this too – dead soldiers, people with bullet wounds and all those poor boys.’

  ‘Do you think there’s a connection?’ Coburn had already decided there had to be one.

  ‘I suppose it depends whether you believe certain ships are unlucky.’ She turned round. ‘If you talk to seamen, that’s what they think. Perhaps the Rybinsk is one of those.’

  ‘It might just be unlucky because of the port it sailed from. Do you know where that was?’

  ‘Vladivostok on the Russian coast. It was at sea for about three weeks. That’s not long, but it was long enough for whatever’s on board to irradiate the crew.’

  ‘Nuclear power plant,’ Coburn said. ‘If it’s an old Soviet-era ship, maybe that’s the problem.’

  ‘That’s what I thought too. But the Rybinsk isn’t nuclear powered.’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t?’

  The question had annoyed her. ‘Because I asked the captain, and because I went to see. And if you think I misdiagnosed the crew’s symptoms, I didn’t – nausea, vomiting, bloody diarrhoea, fever, internal haemorrhages, anaemia and emaciation. How does that sound?’

  ‘Did you do a white blood-cell count?’

  ‘Have a look around.’ She kept her voice level. ‘Does this look like a testing lab to you? Why do you think I had to get the men transferred to hospital? The last I heard their white cell count was around two hundred a
nd dropping. Is that low enough for you?’

  ‘It’s what you’d expect in someone who’s been exposed to a good three week dose of something like six or seven hundred Rem.’

  ‘So you believe me?’

  ‘I never said I didn’t.’ He was thinking, wondering how best to locate the source in a quarter of a mile-long steel-hulled vessel that was in the process of being cut up into pieces. ‘I’ll go and have a look,’ he said.

  ‘You won’t know where to begin. If you haven’t been on board a supertanker before, you’ll either end up being gassed to death at the bottom of an empty tank, or you’ll spend days and days finding your way around.’

  Coburn thought she was probably right, but after all the time it had taken him to get here, another day or so wasn’t going to make much difference. ‘Have any of the Bangladeshis got sick yet?’ he asked. ‘I mean the ones working on the ship.’

  She shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily have heard if they have. I’m not running an emergency clinic. I’m just doing what I can for the children. I only got involved with the crew of the Rybinsk because the captain came begging me for medicine. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, if the shipyard workers aren’t showing symptoms, it’s probably because none of them have been close to the source of the radiation for long enough.’

  ‘But the crew were?’

  He nodded. ‘Maybe for the whole time they were at sea they were sitting right on top of it.’

  ‘Living quarters,’ she said. ‘Or somewhere near the cabins.’

  ‘Good place to start looking, don’t you think?’

  ‘There’s nothing to see. I’ve been inside the deckhouse – when I went to visit men who were too ill to leave their cabins.’

  ‘You don’t see radiation,’ Coburn said, ‘you hunt it down with a Geiger counter.’

  ‘Did you bring one?’

  ‘It’s in my car. If you can put me in touch with someone who can get me on board, I’ll go and have a poke around with it.’

  She leaned back against the door. ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘How are you going to do that when you can’t walk properly?’

  ‘You fetch your Geiger counter and let me worry about my leg. I’m good at metal splinters. I’ll have it out by the time you get back.’

  Doubting that she would, and in two minds about having her accompany him anywhere, Coburn put his shoes back on and went to see if the imaginatively named Peace, Happiness and Prosperity Company had requisitioned his car for scrap.

  They hadn’t. It was still parked where he’d left it, and the Geiger counter he’d bought in Singapore was still in its box inside the boot.

  Along this section of the beach, although a few people were standing around watching the last of the ambulances depart, work was being carried on much as it had been before, uninterrupted by an incident that had taken place two shipyards away and therefore of little consequence.

  To find out if the same was true elsewhere, on his way back, Coburn made a detour that took him nearer to the Rybinsk.

  Except for the electrical cable lying on the mud where the boys had dropped it, there was no obvious evidence left of the events he’d witnessed.

  A tracked vehicle was recovering the remains of the burned-out Landcruiser, but otherwise it was hard to believe that anything of significance had happened here at all – proof if he needed it of how cheap life was at Fauzdarhat beach, Coburn thought, and why, no matter how hard people like Heather Cameron tried to change things, they were never going to make a difference.

  He’d expected her to be waiting for him at the door. But she wasn’t. She was in the other room lying face down on the bed. Beside her was a saucer on which she’d placed a scalpel and a pair of tweezers.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve only just met me, but there’s not anyone else I can ask. I can’t twist myself round far enough, so you’re going to have to do it for me. I’ve got something to bite on, so you can be as rough as you want.’

  ‘Forget it.’ He didn’t bother to re-inspect the wound. ‘You’re not that brave. Whatever you got hit with is in too deep. You need a local anaesthetic and a doctor who knows what he’s doing. I’ll drive you to Chittagong.’

  ‘If I don’t take you out to the ship first you’ll have to wait until tomorrow because of the tide.’ She rolled over on to her back and stood up. ‘My leg’s not that bad, and it’s not going to get any worse in the time we’ll have before the water’s too deep for us to get back.’

  It was hardly a persuasive argument, but in the absence of anyone else he could ask, he was half inclined to accept her offer. She was anxious to prove she was right about the radioactivity, he decided, and if, like him, she believed the mayhem on the beach had something to do with the Rybinsk, she’d be equally anxious to find a reason for that too.

  ‘Well?’ She was waiting for him to agree.

  ‘OK. Can you find a plaster to stick on your leg?’

  ‘I thought I’d just let the cut get filled with muck so my leg will turn gangrenous and I’ll have to have it amputated. You’re not very impressed with me, are you?’ She spent a minute or two wrapping a waterproof bandage around her thigh, then reached under the pillow and took out a large flashlight. ‘If we’re going inside the hull we’ll need this and we’ll need some hard hats. I’ve got one for myself, but we’ll have to borrow one for you.’

  ‘Wait until we get there,’ Coburn said. ‘If the living quarters are in the deckhouse, we might not have to go anywhere that’s dangerous.’

  For the first time since he’d met her she managed a faint smile. ‘The whole beach is dangerous. Fauzdarhat averages a fatality a week. Come on, I’ll show you why.’

  On their way across the foreshore she was careful where she walked, reeling off the names of carcinogenic chemicals and heavy metals that were converting the beach into what she called a toxic swamp, paying little attention to Coburn until he interrupted her to ask how many ships were processed here each year.

  ‘Around forty,’ she said. ‘A few years ago it used to be closer to seventy. The yard owners are still making a fortune though. They can make a profit of nearly two million American dollars from a single ship.’ She pointed ahead. ‘More from a big one like the Rybinsk.’

  Only twice before had Coburn been this close to a supertanker, on both occasions when he’d been out with Hari on night raids in the Strait of Malacca. Then, viewed in the dark from the deck of a forty-foot launch, the ships had seemed frighteningly large, enormous slab-sided walls of steel sliding by in the blackness as though they’d go on forever.

  But the Rybinsk wasn’t just large; it was gigantic. Nor was it at sea weighed down by thousands of tons of crude in tanks below its waterline. It was beached; its exposed hull stretching skywards from keel to deck to a height that he guessed was at least a hundred feet.

  Dwarfed by the size of the vessel and looking more like ants than men, lines of Bangladeshis were entering and leaving through the huge hole that had been opened up in the starboard side, but the majority of the disassembly work was being undertaken near the bow on the main deck where, high above him amidst cascades of bright red sparks, scores of men were busy salvaging cargo pumps and cutting up lengths of large-diameter steel piping.

  The girl was saying something, struggling to make herself heard above the din of the hammering. ‘We’re lucky,’ she shouted. ‘They haven’t started on the deckhouse yet.’

  She took a quick glance at the incoming tide, then led him over to the foot of one of half-a-dozen sets of fabricated steel steps that had been welded to the hull. ‘You go up ahead of me,’ she shouted.

  In cooler conditions it would have been an easy enough climb. But at this time of year, with waves of heat rippling off the side of the ship, the experience was thoroughly unpleasant – so much so that by the time she joined him at the top she was drenched in sweat and breathing hard.

  ‘How’s the leg holding up?’ No
w they were on deck and away from the worst of the noise he was able to ask without raising his voice.

  ‘All right. Do you want to go straight to the cabins?’

  ‘Might as well. If you know where they are I’ll just follow you.’ He switched on the Geiger counter, uncertain of what the background level of radiation was going to be, but expecting it to be high.

  It was, but for a ship that had spent its entire life filled with oil that had been pumped out of the ground from wells all over the world, the reading didn’t seem too bad.

  Except for a marginal increase in the level as he approached an open hatch that led into the deckhouse there was little indication that he was on the right track.

  ‘The cabins are on two upper decks beneath the bridge,’ she said. ‘But to reach the companionway we have to go down this corridor to the dining-room and galley.’

  Hatches along the corridor led to what could once have been a laundry and a stripped-out washroom littered with cigarette ends, old newspapers and centrefolds torn from copies of a Russian girly magazine called Medved.

  Facing the laundry was a larger room equipped with a urinal and a row of toilet cubicles from which the pipework, the doors and even the hinges had been salvaged.

  The galley and dining-room were in a similar state. Nothing of any value remained in either of them. Coburn, though, had barely noticed. Instead, endeavouring not to be distracted by a sudden increase in the frequency of the clicks from his Geiger counter, his attention was focused on a crude hole in the bulkhead that formed the dining-room’s rear wall.

  Six feet wide and high enough for a man to crawl through, the hole looked as though it had been flame-cut by someone in a hurry, and when he placed his hand on the surrounding steel it was still quite warm.

  Heather had started backing away, evidently alarmed by what had become an urgent and almost continuous clicking from the Geiger counter.

  ‘It’s OK.’ He smiled at her. ‘It’s not that serious. Just because we’re picking up radiation it doesn’t mean we’re getting a dose that’s going to make us glow in the dark.’