The Rybinsk Deception (18 page)

‘No, no. You know it is not the cost.’ The tone of Hari’s voice had changed. ‘Although it is this man Yegorov who spoils our raid on the
Pishan
and mounts an attack on the village, I think it is not sufficient reason for me to embark on such a mission.’

‘I’ll give you a better reason then,’ Coburn said. ‘I’m going to sort this out one way or another whether you help me or not, but if everything turns to shit on me, there’s a good chance you’ll be bombed out of existence. The FAL have satellite images of the village, and the
Pishan
’s captain has been forced to write a statement claiming he heard your men saying where they were from and admitting they’re insurgents and terrorists. Do you want to risk that kind of information being handed over to the Indonesian Government?’

‘I do not wish to think of it, but you cannot expect me to decide so quickly. I must have more time.’

‘There isn’t any time,’ Coburn said. ‘Either you start getting the
Selina
ready or Heather will be on the next launch out to Singapore, and you’ll be left to bandage your own finger.’

‘Ah. You are a man who strikes a hard bargain. First I am threatened by bombs, and now by the departure of Miss Cameron. What can I say?’

‘Don’t say anything.’ Sensing a win, Coburn took the initiative. ‘Just listen. This is what you’ll need.’ He began reading from the list he’d made, checking off items one by one before suggesting it might be an idea for Hari to take back the satellite phone he’d loaned to Heather so he could use it to maintain communications.

‘She will not be so pleased to give it up.’

‘She won’t mind if she knows why,’ Coburn said. ‘I promised you’d explain things to her when you and I have finished talking. Don’t forget.’

‘I doubt Miss Cameron will allow me to forget. When it is not possible to predict the reward for a venture of this kind, we must hope it will prove interesting for us, must we not?’

Interesting was not the word Coburn would have chosen. ‘I’ll be in
touch as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘Once you know where I am, and we know how far you’ve got, we can figure out how long it’ll take you to get where you have to be.’

To give the impression that he considered the matter settled, he spent the next few minutes describing how he’d come to learn about Shriver and the FAL, not fully convinced that Hari was committed, but unable to think of any other arguments that might be more persuasive.

He said goodbye without asking to speak to Heather again, hoping she’d understand and telling himself he could rely on her to prevent Hari from having a last-minute change of heart.

The prospect of the
Selina
remaining in the estuary was not a possibility Coburn wanted to consider, and although as the evening wore on he was able to put aside his concern, the feeling of disquiet hadn’t quite gone away by the next morning when he went to see if O’Halloran had returned, or whether the American had disappeared for good.

The Chrysler was back in the car-park, but O’Halloran wasn’t in his room. He was in the motel restaurant, sitting at a table reading a newspaper. Today, instead of looking as though he’d spent the night sleeping in his clothes, he was freshly shaven and wearing a crisp white shirt.

‘I thought I might have been stuck here by myself,’ Coburn said.

‘There are worse places.’ O’Halloran put down his paper. ‘I just went for a drive. I think better when I’m driving.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Nowhere – up north into the forest until I wound up at some godforsaken hot springs on a Umatilla Indian Reservation. I met an old guy there who said I was the first black man he’d seen in two and a half years.’

‘Probably another of Shriver’s family friends.’ Coburn sat down. ‘How did the thinking turn out?’

‘I should have kept driving. I took your advice, though. I called Alison this morning.’

‘Your wife?’

‘She wasn’t there, but her sister was. She said she’s house sitting while Alison and the kids are on vacation somewhere down in Mexico. I knew they were going, but I’d forgotten when.’

‘Well, there you are then,’ Coburn said. ‘You can head off home and stop worrying about them, can’t you?’

‘I made a couple of other calls too – one to the office. You were right about Yegorov.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s flying out to South Korea tomorrow night – Korean Airline’s flight 411 from San Francisco to Seoul. The department can’t access internal flight information for foreign countries, so he could be going anywhere after that. Still, I guess it pretty much confirms things.’

‘I told you,’ Coburn said.

‘Right. All you have to do now is convince a US Navy Commander you’re not out of your mind and then sink Yegorov’s patrol boat at some unknown place in the Yellow Sea at exactly the right time in the middle of the night.’

‘Meaning you don’t believe I can.’

O’Halloran smiled slightly. ‘So you work for the International Marine Bureau, and you’re good at blowing up buildings. How much ice do you think that’s going to cut with Ritchie? Give him half an hour to run a check on you – and I guarantee he will – and he’ll know that before you got yourself killed in an explosion in Singapore, you were giving Sumatran pirates a hand to raid ships in the Malacca Strait. I can’t see that helping your credibility a hell of a lot, can you?’

Despite being aware of the problem Coburn had given no more thought as to how his plan might be received by a US naval officer he’d never met before.

‘Do you know what your weakest link is?’ O’Halloran said. ‘It’s you.’

‘Yeah, well. There’s not much I can do about that, is there? I’ll figure out something.’

‘Don’t bother.’ O’Halloran stood up. ‘I’ve done it for you. Just get your stuff together and pay our motel bill. I’ve already booked our flights, and it’s a long way to South Korea, so we’d best get a move on.’

I
N THE THIRTY-SIX
hours it had taken them to reach the city of Jinhae in South Korea, Coburn had determined only two things. By telephoning Hari from the airport on their arrival in Seoul, he’d learned that a commendably early start by the
Selina
and favourable weather conditions in the South China Sea were allowing Hari to make good time. And by questioning O’Halloran during their long flight from Los Angeles, he’d decided that the American either didn’t know why he’d suddenly chosen to accompany Coburn, or if he did know, he considered the reason to be nobody’s business but his own.

A third piece of information which Coburn had acquired more recently concerned the name of the naval base they were about to visit. According to the English-speaking taxi driver, who half an hour ago had collected them from their hotel, the base was called Chinhae, but the port and the city it served had been renamed Jinhae – a change that the driver assured them had been as unnecessary as it was stupid, and one that by and large westerners failed to appreciate or generally ignored.

The city itself was more pleasant than Coburn had imagined it would be. Located on the south-east coast of the peninsula, it looked out on a sheltered island-studded bay and was almost completely surrounded by mountains covered in pine trees.

By Korean standards it was a comparatively small place, appearing to be supported almost entirely by Korean naval personnel and their families, and by workers employed by the neighbouring shipyards and a world-scale petrochemical plant they’d come across yesterday on the
outskirts of town when O’Halloran had decided they should have an exploratory look round before attending their meeting with Ritchie at nine o’clock this morning.

It had been O’Halloran who’d arranged the meeting. In a telephone call that had lasted no more than three or four minutes, he’d bypassed two secretaries and a junior officer before speaking to Ritchie directly, introducing himself as a member of the US National Counter-Proliferation Centre and explaining that he’d come to Korea for the specific purpose of alerting the commander to a major threat to the safety of the
Sandpiper
and her crew.

Coburn had been impressed, knowing that if he’d been left to get the message through by himself he could have fallen at the first hurdle.

As it was, the next hurdle was going to be the tough one, he thought, a meeting at which they’d agreed O’Halloran would do the talking, calling on Coburn only if his input was required to back up their proposal.

Now the taxi was approaching the harbour, Coburn could see cranes, razor-wire fences and what looked like gigantic fibreglass venetian blinds flanking two of the larger south-east quays.

‘Wind-breaks,’ O’Halloran said. ‘Probably to stop nuclear ships from dragging their anchors or breaking their moorings in the tropical cyclones they get hit with in this part of the world. Do you think our driver knows where he’s going?’

It seemed unlikely. At the main gates to the base the driver had slowed the car and was endeavouring to read a Christmas-tree of Korean signs, presumably searching for the correct route to take through a maze of ram-proof concrete bollards, speed humps and barriers.

The security measures were extensive. Steel gates prevented unauthorized access to numerous truck lanes and railroad lines, while running alongside the docks, rows of military containers and a modern state-of-the-art gantry system were being guarded by armed military police.

‘Try and force your way in here and you wouldn’t get too far,’ O’Halloran said. ‘The Koreans don’t mess about, do they?’

The driver turned round in his seat. ‘Only for the next six hundred
metres am I permitted to follow the yellow line,’ he said. ‘After that I can go no further.’

From what Coburn was able to see, the installation seemed to be spread over several hundred acres, nearly all of it concrete and, with the exception of the American section, occupied entirely by ships of the South Korean Navy.

Identified by a sign reading
US NAVCOMM DET CHINHAE,
the US base was protected by its own crash-proof fence, rows of retracted steel columns that in an emergency could be raised from the road leading to its centre and guarded by two marines standing to attention at the gate.

Coburn paid for the taxi, then accompanied O’Halloran over to an air-conditioned building where, once their passports had been inspected and their names ticked off against a list, one of the marines used his phone before escorting them briskly back outside.

‘Commander Ritchie apologizes for keeping you waiting,’ he said. ‘He’s sending a Jeep right away.’

It was already coming, being driven by a young woman. Because she was in uniform, Coburn found himself wondering if she was one of the new Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialists who’d been mentioned in the clipping Shriver had copied from the
Baltimore Leader
.

While she checked to make sure she was picking up the right passengers and issued them with security passes and identity tags, he considered asking her name. But he decided not to, and instead, once she was behind the wheel again and they were underway, he tried to gain an impression of what life on a US naval base was like.

The surroundings could hardly be anything but American. As well as having a medical centre, a library and a school, the base was provided with a chapel, a café called Duffy’s Morning Calm and even a bowling alley. The buildings had an American flavour to them too, he thought, a little different to those on the west coast of Oregon or California, although the tiles and roofs on some of the houses looked slightly more Korean than North American.

The young woman brought the Jeep to a halt outside an administration block. ‘You’ll find the commander’s office at the end of the corridor,’ she said. ‘He’s expecting you, so you can go right in.’

Sam Ritchie was a compact wiry man in his late thirties with a mop of thick dark hair and almost equally thick dark eyebrows. He was wearing navy whites and waiting to greet his visitors at the door.

After introducing himself to O’Halloran he shook hands with Coburn. ‘You’re with the International Marine Bureau,’ he said. ‘Is that right?’

Coburn nodded. ‘I’m mostly working out of Singapore, but I report to a guy called Rick Armstrong in London.’

‘So he tells me.’ Ritchie smiled. ‘If I look as good as you do ten days after I’m dead, I’m going to be real pleased.’ He waved a hand at some chairs. ‘Sit down, gentlemen. It sounds as though we have some serious talking to do.’

‘Sorry to spring this on you,’ O’Halloran said. ‘But we didn’t know the full story ourselves until a couple of days ago. Do you want it from the beginning?’

‘Sure.’ Ritchie leaned back in his chair. ‘Go ahead.’

‘On June 10th of this year a Russian supertanker arrived at a breaker’s shipyard in Bangladesh with its crew dying of radiation poisoning. Do you remember hearing about it?’

‘The ship that turned out to be carrying some kind of nuclear waste for North Korea’s nuclear weapon programme – the one they’ve agreed to stop that they don’t want anybody to know about.’

‘That’s what you’re supposed to think,’ O’Halloran said. ‘It’s what the world’s supposed to think. At the time, while the ship was being broken up, it was fairly clear what had happened. The Koreans couldn’t pick up their nuclear shipment at sea because of a storm, so they were forced to wait until the
Rybinsk
was beached in Bangladesh and collect the stuff from there.’

‘The
Rybinsk
was the name of the supertanker, was it?’

O’Halloran nodded. ‘The IMB had sent Coburn to check it out and the Counter-Proliferation Centre sent me. That’s where we first ran into each other. It wasn’t until I was back in the States and Coburn came to see me that we realized the whole thing had been a set-up from the start.’

‘I’m not with you,’ Ritchie said. ‘What do you mean, a set-up?’

‘How about the
Rybinsk
being a covert operation by the US Government?’

Ritchie raised his eyebrows. ‘The US Government?’

‘That’s how it looked to begin with – a smart way for the Administration to persuade the American public to back a military strike against North Korea before Pyongyang decides to start launching nuclear warheads at Tokyo and Honolulu.’

‘But that’s only how it was supposed to look?’

‘Right. Trying to generate support for a pre-emptive strike is the reason for what happened in Bangladesh, but it wasn’t the Pentagon or the White House who were behind it. The
Rybinsk
was part of a programme that’s being run by an organization called the Free America League. It’s the brain-child of a retired US Brigadier General who won’t be happy until the Korean peninsula is on fire from the top to the 38th parallel. His name’s George Shriver. Have you heard of him?’

‘Who hasn’t?’ Ritchie said. ‘Ask our Korean friends. They think he’s stirring up trouble when relations between the North and South are probably the best they’ve ever been. He might not know it, but he’s doing a fair amount of damage here.’

‘He’s about to do a lot more.’ Placing his laptop on the desk where Ritchie could see it, O’Halloran opened up the screen and pressed a key to display the map of the
Sandpiper
’s route. ‘Shriver has this stored on his computer,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask how we got it. Just look.’

Ritchie studied it for a moment. ‘It’s a copy of a page in a classified monthly document NAVCOMM issues to the Korean Navy as a matter of courtesy,’ he said. ‘It means very little. I have complete authority over the route I choose to take, and absolute discretion to change it at any time for any reason I see fit. If some bright spark thinks it defines where my ship will be on a specific date, they’re likely to be disappointed.’

‘How about this then?’ O’Halloran scrolled up the press release. ‘Three days ago this is what Shriver was working on.’

Ritchie took his time to absorb the implications, going over and over the text to make certain he understood. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘How sure are you this is genuine?’

‘Sure as we can be. Don’t you believe it?’

‘I don’t know.’ By now, Ritchie was in control of his shock. ‘If this rogue Free America outfit are thinking about using a fully-armed Osa
Class fast attack craft, you don’t hire one of those from your nearest rent-a-boat outlet.’

‘Maybe they don’t need an Osa Class attack craft,’ Coburn said. ‘The FAL spent a couple of million dollars buying radioactive waste to put on board the
Rybinsk
. Why wouldn’t they just buy the missiles and install them on a boat that’s going to produce more or less the same radar echo as the real thing?’

Ritchie shook his head. ‘Not a chance. Sure, if you’ve got the cash you can buy all the ex-Soviet weapons you want on the black market, but Styx missiles need a lot of ancillary equipment – proper hangars, launch platforms and electronics. And they won’t operate without GARPUN radar. Have you ever seen a Styx?’

O’Halloran evidently hadn’t.

Coburn hadn’t either, but he’d heard of them. ‘I know they’re Russian or ex-Soviet,’ he said. ‘They’re a kind of crude surface to surface cruise-missile, aren’t they?’

‘Not that crude.’ Ritchie left his desk and went to stare out of a window. ‘They’re only about twenty feet long, but they can be fitted with three different types of warhead. They’re an old Soviet design so they’re fairly cheap and simple, but anywhere inside a range of forty or fifty kilometres a Styx can be pretty damn lethal.’ He turned round. ‘I guess if I wanted to use a couple, I’d surprise the crew of an Osa patrol boat when they were half asleep or looking the wrong way. Then I wouldn’t need a crash course on how to arm and fire a type of missile I hadn’t been trained to use.’

‘Because you’d be able to force the patrol boat crew to do it for you,’ Coburn said.

‘Sure. That’s not my problem, though, is it? The problem is what the hell I’m going to do about it. You’re expecting me to say the solution is obvious, but in a case like this, the obvious response to a threat isn’t always the right one. For a start, the US doesn’t recognize the Demarkation Line as an international boundary, and even if we did, I still have to follow accepted international rules and what are called the Laws of War.’

O’Halloran switched off his laptop. ‘Which stops any country from attacking a foreign ship without good reason,’ he said. ‘And from what
you’ve seen on my computer, you don’t think you’d have a good reason.’

‘Not good enough.’ Ritchie thought for a second. ‘I can take any measures I consider necessary to protect the interests of the United States and to defend my ship and my crew. That probably doesn’t include opening fire on a North Korean navy vessel whose captain has made the mistake of deciding I’ve strayed into foreign waters and has asked me to change course.’

‘That’s what we figured,’ O’Halloran said. ‘And why we think we have an answer for you.’

Ritchie allowed himself a smile. ‘I’m glad somebody has.’

Realizing O’Halloran was talking himself into a corner, Coburn took over. ‘The Counter-Proliferation people have nothing to do with what I’m about to say,’ he said. ‘And it’ll be best if you only know what you need to know.’

‘I see.’ Ritchie returned to stand beside his desk. ‘You’d better tell me what it is then, hadn’t you?’

‘OK. This is the deal. Two seconds after you’re told to make your course change, you’ll see the patrol boat have a big accident. You can decide for yourself what set it on fire and why it’s sinking. It’s only if that doesn’t happen that you’ll have to choose whether or not you use your guns.’ Giving Ritchie no opportunity to interrupt, Coburn placed a photograph on the desk. ‘While you’re picking up the crew, that’s the guy you have to get your hands on. His name’s Juri Yegorov. He works for Shriver, so he’s the key to shutting down the FAL.’

‘Because his presence on the Korean boat will confirm what you’ve been telling me this morning?’

‘You can’t afford to wait until then,’ Coburn said. ‘If we don’t sort this out now and work together, you might not have the chance to get anything confirmed.’