Fair Game (34 page)

‘I’m sure you’ll win them over, you always do,’ said Button. ‘They’ll be your new best friends in no time.’

‘Any news on the yacht crew?’

‘The kidnappers have made contact with the relatives, including Katie’s parents. We’ve made sure that there’s no publicity and we’ve put minders with all of them. I’m running negotiations from here. They’re asking for five million and I’ve said I’ll get back to them.’

‘You’ve got a number to call?’

‘They phoned us but only to give me an email address. It’s being done by email now.’

‘Charlie, what if I’m on a wild goose chase? What if Crazy Boy doesn’t take the
Athena
?’

‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,’ said Button.

‘What about proof of life?’

‘They’ve emailed photographs and put a video up on a website. We’ve managed to block visitors to the site so no one else can see it. They look the worse for wear but they’re alive.’

‘OK, I’ll check in tomorrow. Send me a text message to this phone if anything breaks.’

‘Sweet dreams,’ said Button, and sounded as if she actually meant it.

Shepherd tapped in Martin O’Brien’s number. The phone clicked several times and then rang out and O’Brien answered almost immediately. ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he asked.

‘We’ve just left port. You?’

‘Nairobi,’ said O’Brien. ‘Just waiting for the Bradford boys to put in an appearance and then we’re moving to Ethiopia.’

‘Ethiopia?’ repeated Shepherd. ‘Where’s that come from?’

‘It’s closer to Puntland than Kenya and it’s easier to move around. It’s full of white men in SUVs working for all the NGOs there. No one will pay us any attention. I’ve got contacts with a business that handles cash transits for the Ethiopian government and they’ve let me use a small airfield near the border with Somalia. We’ve scouted a base and we have the ground transport in place and I’ve a plane arriving tomorrow. I’ve arranged a short-term lease on a C-23 Sherpa.’

‘The money’s coming through OK?’

‘Your Charlie Button’s a magician,’ said O’Brien. ‘Money just appears in the account. Never more than ten grand at a time and from all sorts of places.’

‘Yeah, she’ll be making sure it can’t be traced, keeping below the notifiable limit and washing it through multiple accounts.’

‘She’s a smart cookie, all right. Have you given her one yet?’

‘Hell’s bells, Martin, she’s my boss.’

‘Yeah, but she’s fit, right enough.’

‘And I’m not sure how secure this sat-phone is either.’

O’Brien laughed. ‘You think she’s listening in?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past her. I’ll check in with you tomorrow.’

‘Give the Bangladeshi cabin boy my best.’

‘There are no cabin boys, idiot,’ said Shepherd, and ended the call.

Shepherd woke at eight o’clock in the morning, showered and went down to the mess room. The long table had been set for breakfast with boxes of cereal and jugs of milk, but there was nobody around. Jimmy the messman appeared from the galley, smiling apologetically. ‘Sorry, sir, breakfast at seven, finished already.’

There was a bowl of fruit on a side table and Shepherd helped himself to two large green apples. ‘No problem, Jimmy.’

‘If you want I can ask the cook to make you eggs.’

‘No thanks, no special treatment for me, Jimmy, I’ll be on time tomorrow.’ Shepherd took the stairs up to the bridge on the top floor and pushed open the door. The second officer was standing by the controls and looking at the radar screen on the left.

Shepherd introduced himself and the second officer shook his hand. ‘I didn’t see you at dinner last night,’ said Shepherd.

The second officer shrugged. ‘We eat with the crew, the third officer and me.’ He grinned. ‘We prefer Filipino food. We get withdrawal symptoms if we don’t eat rice every day.’

Shepherd took a bite out of one of his apples and looked out of the windows. The sea appeared as smooth and flat as glass, with barely any flecks of white on the wave crests. ‘Is it always as smooth as this?’ he asked.

‘It’s not that smooth,’ said the second officer. ‘Those waves down there are probably a metre or two high. You don’t notice it because we’re such a big vessel. If you were in a twenty-footer you’d be finding it very rough going.’

Shepherd looked port and starboard but couldn’t see any other vessels, just sea and sky. ‘I thought there’d be more traffic,’ he said.

‘The Bay of Bengal is a big sea,’ said the second officer. ‘We probably won’t see many other vessels until we round Sri Lanka. Then we’re into the Arabian Sea which isn’t much busier. There’ll be traffic in and out of Karachi but once we get to the Gulf of Aden and Suez, that’s when we’ll be busy.’

‘Pirate waters,’ said Shepherd.

‘Yes,’ said the second officer. ‘It can be dangerous. The Gulf of Aden, anyway. And maybe the Red Sea.’

‘Have you ever had a problem there?’

The second officer shook his head. ‘This ship is too big,’ he said. ‘Too big and too fast.’

Shepherd spent the next couple of hours sitting on the bridge, getting a feel for what went into operating a ship that was the size of a tower block that had been placed on its side. The autopilot took care of the steering and speed; the job of the officer on duty was to monitor the radio, check the three radar screens and keep an eye out for traffic that didn’t appear on the radar.

There were three radar scanners, one on the forward mast and two on the roof of the bridge. While they were at sea they were set for six miles, twelve miles and twenty-four miles, but as accurate as they were they still didn’t pick up small wooden vessels and there was no substitute for a pair of human eyes, albeit helped by powerful binoculars. Also on the console was a screen showing the
Athena
’s position and course on a satellite map of the area.

Every hour the officer would go to the chart desk and plot the ship’s position on the Admiralty chart. On the desk were two screens giving the GPS coordinates of the ship and the ship’s clock, but despite the high-tech wizardry the distances on the charts were measured with an old-fashioned pair of brass compasses.

At 10.30 Shepherd went back to his cabin and changed into a T-shirt, shorts and training shoes, and then went down to the gym. Hainrich was right; it was a big disappointment, a room not much bigger than his cabin with a treadmill, an exercise bike, a table tennis table and a dartboard on one wall. There were three square portholes looking out over the sea. There was a door to the left that led through to a small blue-tiled swimming pool, barely fifteen feet square, but there was no water in it and it was covered with a white rope net.

Shepherd climbed on to the treadmill and programmed it for an hour at a small incline. He began to run but the action was jerky and he had trouble getting into a steady rhythm. He tried slowing it down but that wasn’t any better, and the only way he could maintain any sort of pace was to hold on to the handrails as he ran, and doing it that way meant he couldn’t manage much more than a jog. He gave up after thirty minutes and had barely worked up a sweat.

He began to hit the punchbag. There was a pair of boxing gloves on top of a cabinet by the dartboard, but he ignored them. He’d always regarded boxing gloves as a waste of time, like high-tech running shoes. When he needed to fight for real there was never any time to put on gloves. Fights came unexpectedly and when they came he had to be able to hit with his bare hands and to hit hard. There were a lot of small bones in the human hand and they were easily broken so it was crucial to know how to punch properly.

He ran through various combinations of punches, and then began to use his legs, striking with his knees and feet. He worked the bag hard and fast and after fifteen minutes he was bathed in sweat, but he pushed himself for another ten minutes, by which time every muscle in his arms and legs was screaming in pain. He stopped and steadied his breathing as the bag carried on swinging from side to side.

When his breathing and pulse had returned to normal he dropped down and did a hundred press-ups and then rolled over and did fifty quick crunches followed by fifty slow ones. By the time he had finished his T-shirt and shorts were soaking wet. He headed back to his cabin, showered and changed and at twelve o’clock on the dot he went down to the officers’ mess.

Lunch was vegetable soup with pasta in it followed by roast chicken, fried courgettes and mashed potato. Dominik was there with Hainrich when Shepherd walked in, and when he was halfway through his soup the door opened and a big man in a company polo shirt walked in and sat down heavily. He had bulging forearms, hands as big as shovels and hair that had been shaved close to the skull. ‘You’re the spy?’ said the new arrival. Like Dominik and Hainrich he had a strong Polish accent.

‘Spy?’ said Shepherd, wondering what he meant.

‘The company spy? The man who decides who to fire to cut costs.’

‘Oliver Blackburn,’ said Shepherd, offering his hand. ‘Human resources.’

The man’s hand dwarfed Shepherd’s and stopped just short of being painful. ‘Tomasz Gorski,’ he said. ‘Chief engineer.’ He grinned, showing slab-like grey teeth. ‘You can’t sack me, without me the ship would grind to a halt.’

‘Unless the second engineer is around,’ said Dominik, smearing soft cheese across a hunk of French bread.

‘Which he isn’t because he’s always in his cabin watching porn on his laptop,’ said Tomasz. His eyes widened in mock horror and he put his hand over his mouth. ‘Have I said too much?’ he said. ‘Will you report me to the company?’

‘Guys, I’m not a spy, really. I’m just here to file a report on how the crew functions, who does what and when, and then someone at a higher pay grade will make any decision that needs to be made.’

He finished his soup and Jimmy replaced Shepherd’s empty bowl with his main course. The messman asked Tomasz if he wanted soup and he shook his head. ‘Just the chicken and the courgettes,’ he said, helping himself to salad, scooping lettuce, cucumber, green pepper and tomato from a bowl on to his side plate. He sighed as he looked at the salad, then at Shepherd. ‘This is the company’s fault,’ he said. ‘They said I have to lose weight.’ He pointed his fork at Hainrich. ‘Him too. So now we have to count calories like a couple of supermodels.’ He gestured at Shepherd’s plate. ‘I see you don’t have to watch your weight.’

‘I exercise,’ said Shepherd.

‘Yeah? Pilates? Yoga?’ He chuckled and said something in Polish to Hainrich. Hainrich laughed and nodded.

‘I run,’ said Shepherd. ‘When I can.’

‘Yeah, well, I work with engines and that’s real work, my friend, not like sitting at a desk all day.’ He poured olive oil over his salad and then added a splash of vinegar. ‘These company medicals are a joke,’ he said. ‘Who’s the most famous sailor of all time?’ He waved his fork at Shepherd. ‘Answer me that, can you, Mr Human Resources? You’re English, you must know.’

‘Nelson?’

‘Exactly,’ said Tomasz. ‘Admiral Horatio Nelson. A man with one eye and one arm. How do you think he’d have fared with the company’s medical? Do you think they’d have passed him as fit to sail?’

‘Probably not,’ said Shepherd, making a mental note to tell Charlotte Button to never again use human resources as a legend.

‘So there you go,’ said Tomasz. Jimmy placed a plate of roast chicken and courgettes down in front of him and the engineer grunted his thanks. ‘So why the hell does it matter if I’m a hundred kilos or ninety or eighty? I’m as good at my job now as I’ve ever been. My weight’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘I get it,’ said Shepherd, and kept his head down as he ate.

Dominik, Hainrich and Tomasz switched into Polish and spent the rest of the meal talking and joking in their own language. Shepherd couldn’t tell whether or not they were talking about him, but he was pretty sure that they were, especially when Tomasz looked over at him and scowled.

Jimmy brought Shepherd a cup of coffee once he’d finished his meal. The door opened and a man in his twenties entered. He was well over six feet tall and thin but with broad shoulders. He had a boxer’s nose and a shaved head, but he smiled pleasantly and stuck out his hand. ‘You’re the company man?’ he said, with only a trace of an accent. ‘I’m Janko. Deck cadet.’

‘Oliver Blackburn.’

As Shepherd sipped his coffee, Dominik left with the chief officer and the chief engineer. On the way out, Hainrich pointed at Shepherd. ‘Tonight, ping-pong? Five past eight after I finish my watch, OK?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘I’ll be there.’

‘He’ll beat you,’ said Janko as the door closed. Jimmy asked the cadet if he wanted soup and Janko nodded.

‘How come?’

‘He beats everyone. He’s been playing since he was a kid.’

‘You’re from Slovenia, right?’ said Shepherd.

Janko looked surprised. ‘How do you know? Most people think I’m Polish or Croatian.’ He sat down and grabbed a chunk of French bread and smeared butter on it.

Shepherd knew because he’d read the man’s details on the crew manifest that Button had given him. ‘You sound like my au pair,’ he said. ‘Katra. She’s from Slovenia.’

‘What part?’

Shepherd frowned. ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘I’ve never asked.’

‘I’m from Koper,’ said Janko. ‘My father was a sailor, and his father. And probably his father’s father too.’

‘It’s in the blood,’ said Shepherd.

‘I think it’ll end with me,’ Janko said. ‘In fact first chance I get it’ll be off the ships and into the head office. You should give me your card, maybe you can help me sometime.’

‘Sure. I’ve no cards on me but I’ll give you one before I leave,’ lied Shepherd. ‘But why would a cadet not want to be on a ship?’

Janko laughed. Jimmy put a bowl of soup down in front of him and went back to the galley. ‘My dad wanted me to be a sailor, and I’m happy enough to work in shipping, but the job’s changed since he was at sea.’ He waved his hand in the air. ‘This isn’t a ship, not really. It’s . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what it is. A floating warehouse, maybe. It’s not about the ship, it’s about the cargo, and the cargo is just boxes. Thousands of identical boxes. And the boxes are nothing to do with us. Most of the time we don’t even know what’s inside them. We go from port to port and someone takes boxes off and puts more boxes on. That’s all we’re doing, moving boxes around.’