The Rybinsk Deception Read online

  She was unconvinced. ‘What does it mean then?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ He took the flashlight from her. ‘Probably that whatever was behind this bulkhead isn’t here any more.’

  ‘Because those men in the truck took it away with them?’

  ‘They didn’t come here for nothing.’ Coburn switched off the Geiger counter and knelt down. ‘Let’s see if we’re too late.’

  Illuminated in the beam of the flashlight, two identical wooden crates were standing on the floor inside the cavity. Separated by a gap where a third one could have been, they were the size of small coffins, each provided with a rope handle and bearing a cardboard consignment label printed in what he thought was Russian.

  ‘What are they?’ She knelt down beside him. ‘What do you think’s inside them?’

  ‘Who knows.’ Apart from the corner of another label and some fresh wood shavings that could have resulted from the rough handling the missing crate had received during its removal, there was nothing that might provide a clue.

  He retrieved the piece of label then ripped off the other two and handed them out to her. ‘Hang on to those,’ he said. ‘And hold the light for me. I’ll pull out the crates one at a time.’

  He’d been over optimistic. On his knees, in such a confined space, he was unable to move either of them.

  ‘Are they too heavy?’ She put down the flashlight.

  ‘They are for me. See if you can find a piece of steel I can use to lever off the lids.’

  ‘Won’t that be dangerous?’

  ‘Not if we’re quick. The crew of the Rybinsk had three weeks of exposure. This is only going to take us five minutes.’ He withdrew his head from the hole. ‘I’m pretty sure the hot stuff is long gone. All we’ve got here is a bit of residual radiation.’

  While she was away he made a closer examination of the diningroom, discovering that in order to provide a reasonably undetectable hiding place for the crates, the whole of the bulkhead had been replaced. The welds around the edges were new, the panel was made of thinner steel than the original and, unlike the other walls which were stained with nicotine and streaked with congealed fat from the galley, the new bulkhead was disfigured only by recent heat from the cutting torch and the hole itself.

  He was reconsidering the wisdom of opening up a crate when she limped back into the room with a large crowbar in her hands.

  ‘Will this do?’ She gave it to him.

  ‘Could be a bit big.’ This time he worked from the outside of the cavity, selecting the left-hand crate and using the weight of the crowbar first to create an opening and then to lever up the lid until the gap was large enough for him to insert the flashlight.

  Inside, shielded from any radiation by a thin lead liner, the crate was packed with guns – Russian-made Kalashnikov rifles, still in their factory grease, and wrapped in layers of vapour-inhibiting paper.

  ‘What can you see?’ she asked. ‘Tell me. I want to know.’

  ‘Guns.’ He wasn’t sure whether to be surprised or not. ‘Lots of AK47s worth lots of money.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. If they’re worth a lot of money, why did those men leave them behind?’

  ‘Maybe because they couldn’t shift the crates either, or because they got interrupted by the Bangladeshi Army. They wouldn’t have cared about the guns anyway – not once they’d got their hands on the crate they’d come to get. If it was full of nuclear material they’d have just decided to cut their losses and take off.’

  She frowned. ‘And on their way back they just decided to kill and maim those children?’

  ‘If you’re in the business of running guns and smuggling nuclear waste, you don’t much care who gets in the way.’

  ‘Really. That’s something else you’re an expert on, is it?’

  He pretended not to have heard, getting to his feet with his head pounding from the heat inside the hole and unwilling to spend any more time in the deckhouse. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘That’ll do us.’

  It wasn’t until he’d escorted her back along the corridor and waited while she returned the crowbar to a worker that he remembered to ask her for the labels.

  ‘Why?’ She laid them on a hatch beside her. ‘What are these going to tell you?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ He studied the torn piece first. No larger than a cigarette packet, all it had written on it were the letters UROH and the number 39.

  It was hardly worth keeping, Coburn thought, and seeing as how the other two labels had come off nothing more sinister than a couple of crateloads of AK47s, London weren’t likely to be interested in them either.

  Wondering if he was missing something, he picked up one and had another look at it:

  ZAKAZ, PZ16B, SKLAD 17, ZAVOD 38,

  HUICHON, JAGGANG

  On the second label the PZ16 was followed by a C instead of a B, but was otherwise the same – an indication that, unless he was jumping to conclusions, crate A was the one that had disappeared.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Huichon or Jaggang?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘They don’t sound like places in Bangladesh, though. The names look more like Chinese than Bangladeshi or Bengali.’

  ‘Yeah, they do.’ Coburn gathered up the labels and stuck them in his pocket. ‘I guess that’s it. I’ll write London a report and fax them copies of these when I get back to my hotel. From there on if the IMB still figure they have a problem they can sort it out by themselves.’

  ‘So your job’s done, is it?’ She glanced at him. ‘Does this mean you’re just going to walk away?’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Don’t you care about what happened to those children today?’

  ‘Look,’ Coburn said, ‘wherever that radioactive stuff has gone, no one’s going to find it now, and whoever those bastards were who took it, no one’s going to find them either. The world’s a nasty place. You know that as well as I do. You’ll go crazy if you spend all your time trying to make it better.’

  ‘I know exactly what a nasty place the world is, Mr Coburn, and I don’t need a lecture from you about how many nasty people there are in it.’ Turning her back on him she walked away, endeavouring not to let him see how painful her leg had become, but having to stop and rest before she reached the top of the steel steps.

  Coburn let her go. Now that things at the beach had quietened down and he was able to look back on his day, in more ways than one it had been something of a surprise, he thought. As well as being unexpectedly eventful, it had been quite interesting – made more so by the presence of Heather Cameron, the self-assured young woman who’d been responsible for bringing him here, and who, as he’d started to realize over the last half hour, was not only self-assured but also rather pretty.

  CHAPTER 3

  THREE DAYS IN Chittagong hadn’t been long enough for Coburn to get a fix on the city’s roads. Yesterday evening on the return drive from Fauzdarhat, the worst of the downtown rush hour had been over, and with Heather acting as a navigator, the hospital hadn’t been too difficult to find.

  Today, though, driving by himself and lost in yet another maze of narrow back streets he was beginning to regret his offer to take her back to the beach this morning.

  The hospital had been her idea – quicker and easier than searching for a doctor, she’d claimed at the time. It had been easier, but because they’d inadvertently chosen the hospital that had admitted the victims from the beach, the staff had been struggling to cope and were overloaded to the point where by ten o’clock, and having still not been attended to, she’d insisted on Coburn leaving her there for the night.

  He’d felt guilty returning to his hotel, where he’d spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out why he did and wondering what it was about her that seemed so different.

  By this morning he’d decided that events were colouring his opinion, and it was nothing more than her abrasiveness that was making it hard to get her off his mind.

 
Ahead of him, an impatient passenger in a rickshaw had persuaded the hapless driver to pull out in to the face of oncoming traffic, forcing an approaching taxi to take to the sidewalk and causing a chain reaction in the line of vehicles behind it.

  The opportunity was too good to miss. Ramming his car into gear, Coburn dropped the clutch, following the rickshaw as closely as he could for the entire length of the street, and easing off only at the last minute when he turned left at a monument he thought he recognized.

  It was the wrong monument, but by making the turn he found himself travelling along the north shore of Foy’s lake on a wider and altogether more familiar road.

  Ten minutes later he was parking the car outside the visitors’ entrance of Chittagong’s Bina Das hospital.

  She was waiting for him in the foyer. But she wasn’t alone.

  Standing beside Heather Cameron was a tall, smartly dressed man. Black and in his early thirties with closely cropped hair, he was carrying a slim laptop computer and wearing a business suit, a crisp open-necked white shirt and expensive-looking shoes.

  He’d seen Coburn and was already coming to say hello.

  ‘David Coburn, right?’ He shook hands. ‘I’m Luther O’Halloran.’

  By the way he spoke, and with a name like that, he was almost certainly American, Coburn decided, someone with a bit of Irish or Scottish in his background. What he was doing here was more difficult to guess.

  O’Halloran opened a wallet and removed a small identity card. ‘This is me,’ he said. ‘I work for the US National Counter-Proliferation Centre. I’m based at the Radiobiology Research Institute at Bethesda in Maryland, but a couple of days ago I was told to cancel my weekend and get on a plane to Bangladesh.’

  Coburn didn’t bother to inspect the card. ‘If you’re interested in the Rybinsk, you might as well turn round and go home,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not that simple.’ O’Halloran showed no signs of being disappointed. ‘Particularly now Miss Cameron’s filled me in a bit more.’

  ‘How did you know she was here?’

  ‘Same way we heard about the ship – through your people at the International Marine Bureau in London. I didn’t get in to Chittagong until after midnight, so I had a bunch of faxes waiting for me at my hotel. One of them was a transcript of the report you sent to the IMB last night – the one where you said Miss Cameron was in hospital.’

  ‘You didn’t have to bother her,’ Coburn said, ‘not if all you want is a run down on what happened yesterday. You could’ve called me. The IMB know where I’m staying.’

  O’Halloran smiled. ‘I kind of figured you wouldn’t appreciate me waking you up in the middle of the night. It was easier for me to leave a message for Miss Cameron saying I’d meet her here this morning.’

  ‘And she told you I was coming to pick her up?’

  ‘She’s explained a few things while we’ve been waiting for you.’

  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 th
e 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.’