The Rybinsk Deception (8 page)

She nodded. ‘I sleep in a bed right next to yours every night, but even when you do talk to me you never say anything about yourself.’

To make it sound as though he didn’t care, he kept it brief. ‘Remember those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?’ he said.

‘The ones that weren’t there?’

‘Fourteen months after the Americans went into Iraq they decided that the reason they hadn’t found any was because they had the wrong people searching for them. I’d just come off a nuclear hazard course, so the British decided to lend them me.’

She sipped at her water. ‘But you couldn’t find any either.’

‘I didn’t spend that much time looking. Half the places we went to were under the control of Sunni insurgents, so we were too busy keeping out of trouble. Everything was booby-trapped – shops, rubbish bins, doorways, parked cars. You couldn’t even stop to pick up the bodies of women and children that had been left rotting in the streets because of IEDs that had been hidden under them, or inside them.’

‘What are IEDs?’

‘Improvised explosive devices. It was a couple of those that caught me out.’

‘Oh.’ Her expression changed. ‘I didn’t realize you were injured there.’

‘I wasn’t. I was with a bunch of Americans driving through a town call Baqubah about thirty miles north of Baghdad. We were in two Nyala RG31s – they’re armoured troop carriers. It was the kind of day when you just knew you were going to run out of luck. It was as hot as hell and we were heading down the west side of town when the driver of the carrier ahead of us had to get past a dead horse that was lying in the gutter on one side of the street and a burned out pickup truck on the other. It didn’t look dangerous and I didn’t think too much about it until I saw a woman standing behind a wall with a radio transmitter in her hand.’

‘And it was a trap?’

Coburn nodded. ‘The horse and the pickup had both been rigged.
I had just enough time to see the woman press a button before the explosion blew the leading RG31 to bits. There were four guys in it who died, and a twenty-year-old girl from Boston.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I was the first one out of our carrier, so I was the one who shot the woman. I shot her four times. Big mistake.’

‘I don’t see why. Anyone would’ve done the same.’

‘Not if they were smart, they wouldn’t. It was exactly what the Sunnis wanted. They’d set up cameras all along the street so they had great video footage of what I did. You can guess how it looked and sounded on tape – defenceless mother of two executed in cold blood by British soldier. The whole thing was screened on TV right across the country on the same night.’ He paused. ‘Are you happy now?’

She wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘Was the idea of a court-martial just to satisfy the Iraqi Government?’

‘Pretty much. I got locked up for a month until the press had forgotten about what happened, then I got a discharge and was sent home.’

‘Is that why you took the job with the IMB – because that meant you could lose yourself in a place like this? Was that the reason?’

‘Sort of. I’d met Armstrong a couple of times in Baghdad. He was out there for a while running the IMB office in the Green Zone. When I got back to England he gave me a ring and asked if I’d be interested in working for him. I didn’t have anything else to do, so it sounded like a good idea at the time.’

‘But now you’re not so sure?’

Coburn wished he knew. ‘Depends what he has to say about the
Pishan
, and whether I’ll get a chance to ask him about O’Halloran.’

To avoid having to do any more explaining, Coburn went to rescue a swamp moth that had either found its way into the hut during the day, or come in with Heather while the bug screen had been open.

He caught it in his hand and took it outside, not releasing it until he’d carried it over to the edge of the marsh where there was less light and where the noise of insects was all around him.

The sound had become almost too familiar, he thought, a reminder of how many nights he’d been here and of the need to place
his call to London so he could begin to finalize his plans to go somewhere else.

Not yet certain of what he was going to say he made his way across to the armoury, collected a satellite phone from one of the racks then wandered back outside to sit on the veranda steps and keyed in the number of Armstrong’s office.

Armstrong was slow to answer, and from his tone of voice it was impossible to judge whether or not he’d been anticipating the call.

‘Thought I’d better fill you in on the
Pishan
,’ Coburn said.

‘When are you sending the chip?’

‘You won’t be getting any chip. It was a screw-up. Someone got to hear about the raid ahead of time.’

‘How do you know that?’

Coburn was ready for the question. ‘There were people waiting for us who had enough firepower to knock over half the pirates in the Strait,’ he said. ‘It was an ambush. I’m calling to find out where the leak came from.’

‘How would I know? If there’s been a leak it didn’t come from this end. Try finding out which one of your pirate friends has done a deal behind your back.’

‘I will.’ Coburn kept his voice level. ‘Who else knew besides O’Halloran?’

‘Ask him. All the requests we received from the States came through his Counter-Proliferation Centre. But it won’t be them, will it? Give me one reason why the Americans would want to sabotage an operation that was their idea to begin with.’

‘I haven’t got a reason – not yet.’ Coburn was trying to decide on the wisdom of mentioning the link between the
Rybinsk
and the
Pishan
, but reluctant to describe the Fauzdarhat truck driver in case the IMB was more involved than Armstrong was admitting.

‘Do something for me, will you?’ Coburn said. ‘Check to see if the captain of the
Pishan
has put in a report about being boarded.’

‘He hasn’t. We’d know by now if he had. Does it matter?’

‘If he and his crew were being held hostage by the guys who were expecting us, it’ll explain why he’ll be better off keeping his mouth shut, won’t it?’

‘You’ve been away from home too long.’ Armstrong made no attempt to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. ‘Maybe you’re the problem. Who have you been talking to that you shouldn’t have been talking to?’

‘No one. Has anybody besides O’Halloran been asking about me?’

‘Not unless you count Sir Anthony Fraser. They were both sent copies of your personal file. You remember who Sir Anthony is, don’t you?’

‘I’m not likely to forget,’ Coburn said, ‘not while I’m looking after his goddaughter for him.’

‘What’s she like?’

He deflected the question by asking Armstrong to contact him in Singapore if any news on the
Pishan
came through, then ended the call prematurely, hoping he hadn’t prejudiced his position and knowing that he was no further ahead than he had been ten minutes ago.

He took the phone back to the armoury, but instead of returning to the hut, sat down again on the veranda steps to think.

He was still there when Heather came to find him. She was wearing the same white halter-top, but had put on a yellow skirt he hadn’t seen her in before – clothes that in the moonlight seemed to make her uncomfortably desirable.

She joined him on the step. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I’ve just phoned Armstrong.’

‘You said you weren’t sure whether you could trust him.’

‘I don’t think it makes any difference,’ Coburn said. ‘He wasn’t much help anyway. Whatever it is I’m missing, I’m going to have to figure out by myself.’

‘You miss a lot of things, don’t you?’

Had her statement been less ambiguous it would have been easier to figure out what she meant. As it was, before he could decide, a small green frog jumped on to her lap, and the chance to find out had gone – an opportunity that over the next four days was not to repeat itself because she started spending more and more time with the children, or in the company of her friend Indiri.

It was on the evening of the fifth day while she was sitting quietly on the jetty with him that she chose to make her announcement,
informing him that she was signing off her patients at the village and that, if he was ready to return to Singapore, she was ready to go with him.

She could have chosen her moment better. No sooner had he started to remind her that neither the
Selina
nor the launches could make the trip until fresh fuel supplies arrived, than Hari came hurrying out on to the jetty.

The Frenchman was breathing hard and looked uncharacteristically concerned. ‘I fear we have trouble,’ he said. ‘Since early this afternoon two boats have been anchored off Bengkalis. They are not familiar to the fisherman who sends me this message on his radio, and he says that above the deck on one of them, steel plates are being fitted in which gun slits have been cut.’

For Coburn, the information was particularly worrying, made worse by it following so closely on the heels of the abortive raid the other night. ‘How long do you reckon we’ve got?’ he said.

‘I cannot be certain, but in less than one hour the tide will be at its highest, and it will be dark, so by then our preparations must be complete. If you would take responsibility for arming yourself, perhaps Miss Cameron could arrange for the children and the wounded men to be transferred to the containers where they will be safer.’

Even if Coburn had been visiting the village by himself, the news would have been disturbing. But he wasn’t here by himself, and although he hadn’t expected Heather to come to grips with how insecure life in the marshes could really be, if accounts of previous attacks were anything to go by, this was not the way for her to learn.

And it was his fault, he thought. By agreeing to let her stay on, he’d put her at risk and made another mistake – this one so serious that if things were to go badly wrong she could be faced with more casualties than she could handle, or worse still, in the event of the village being overrun, even be confronted with the unthinkable possibility of being shot or raped at gunpoint.

J
UST AS IT
had been Hari who’d decreed that the village should have no name, so had it been Hari who’d designed the village’s defences. Consequently, as Coburn had learned over the last half-hour, the little settlement was far from being without teeth.

Foremost amongst its defences were the minefields, a feature he’d least expected to hear about. Having always been told, and having always believed that the surrounding marshland was too waterlogged to walk on, he’d been surprised when Hari had told him that, under drought conditions in mid-summer, the tracks and trails could become sufficiently useable to pose a threat.

To counter it, the minefields had been laid – although not with conventional mines. Instead, they’d been seeded with Austrian-made mines of a kind that could be armed or disarmed remotely by shortwave radio signals – according to Hari a precaution to protect children who might venture off the plateau, and as a means of preventing accidents caused by porcupines, mouse-deer and the long-tailed macaques that sometimes descended from the trees to forage on the ground.

Since the state of emergency had been declared the village had been busy. With the exception of a still-damaged launch that remained tied up at the river-bank, the other boats had been moved downstream. The last to leave had been the
Selina
, delayed by the need to have its heavy machine-gun put in place, and because of the time it had taken to turn the vessel round in the narrow confines of the estuary.

As far as Coburn could make out, the
Selina
was a backup, staying
out of sight unless the ground defences were in danger of being over-whelmed and more serious measures were to be called for.

He couldn’t foresee the circumstances in which they would be. Although the majority of the men had been deployed along the inland perimeter of the plateau, those who’d been left to protect the river boundary had Hari’s secret weapons to rely on – the drainage ditches and the jetty.

The ditches served two purposes. Besides being the equivalent of trenches from which gunfire could be directed out into the estuary, in the ditch running closest to the water, drums of gasoline and diesel now stood ready to be spilled and ignited by explosive charges that in the case of an extreme emergency would throw up a hundred-yard-long wall of flame.

The protection offered by the jetty was similarly difficult to discern – a central section from which the supporting pins had already been removed so that under the weight of the first man to put foot on it the whole structure would collapse to render the jetty useless as a landing stage.

Despite the defences being an odd mixture of the very old and the very new, the set-up was pretty damn good, Coburn had decided, a stronghold guarded on one side by fire and a medieval trick draw-bridge, and on the other sides by men armed with modern weapons equipped with the best high-tech night sights that Hari had been able to buy.

For his own protection Coburn was carrying a 5.45mm Steyr assault rifle, a gun he’d chosen partly because he was familiar with it, but mainly because in the trench where he’d taken up position, a short-barrelled gun was easier to handle and would be easier to reload.

He wasn’t expecting to have to reload. As though Hari had wanted to avoid exposing his guest to unnecessary risk, the position he’d recommended was unlikely to see much action, located some way from the jetty at the end of a ditch that drained water directly into the estuary itself.

Tonight, only the very bottom of the ditch was damp, just moist enough to attract frogs of the kind that had jumped on to Heather’s skirt.

That had only been an hour ago, Coburn realized. Yet in such a short length of time the village had been put on what amounted to a war footing – a lesson on how swiftly conditions could change in a place like this, and why all he could do now preparations were complete was hope like hell that everyone’s time had been well spent.

He was less apprehensive than he’d been before the raid on the
Pishan
, listening for the sound of an approaching boat above the noise of the insects, knowing that he alone was responsible for guarding a thirty-yard stretch of river-bank, but gaining in confidence whenever he lifted the Steyr to his shoulder and sighted in on some distant moonlit mark.

He was doing just that when he discovered that he wasn’t going to be alone at all.

Heather had arrived. She was carrying a rifle and she’d brought someone with her.

‘Hi.’ She jumped into the ditch and waited for her companion to join her. ‘This is Indiri.’

Coburn had seen the young woman working around the village. Apart from a missing front tooth she was quite pretty, but until tonight she’d always been too shy to say hello or return his smile.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he said.

Heather checked the safety on her rifle before she answered. ‘Hari sent us to say that one of the boats has stopped upstream to unload men, but the other one looks like it’s coming here.’

‘OK. You’ve told me. Now get back to where you’re supposed to be. Go on – do it.’

‘No, no.’ Indiri shook her head. ‘The containers have room only for the wounded and for mothers with young children. Like Heather I have no babies, so we both must help to stop these men who wish to drive us from our homes.’

Coburn swore under his breath. ‘Have you any idea how to use that?’ He pointed at the rifle she was holding.

‘My family comes from Aceh.’

Since she evidently saw no need to elaborate, he didn’t enquire again. Nor was Heather going to let him question her ability to handle the M16 she’d brought with her from the armoury.

‘Don’t ask,’ she said. ‘While you were in Iraq, I was running food convoys in Darfur. If you want to worry about something, what about those three huts that have still got their lights switched on? One of them has even got music coming from it.’

Coburn had been told about the lights, but this close to the water it was impossible to hear anything above the buzzing and clicking of the millions of insects that came to life after dark along the river-bank.

‘The huts are come-ons,’ he said. ‘Hari called them sacrificial. They’re supposed to make it look as though we’re not expecting company. That’s why the launch has been left there too.’

‘That’s silly.’ She tried to see the launch in the moonlight. ‘No one’s going to be stupid enough to be taken in by a boat and a few lights.’

Indiri knew better. ‘The men we must fight will not be stupid,’ she said. ‘They will be crazy – crazy in their heads from the amphetamines they are given, or from the mixture of rum and gunpowder they are forced to drink before they come. They are told it will make them brave, but instead it makes them easier to kill.’

So casually had the information been supplied that she could have been talking about cockroaches, Coburn thought, an indictment if there ever was one of the culture Hari was fostering in the village.

He listened again for the sound of an engine, endeavouring to filter out the background noise while he searched for signs of movement in the estuary.

‘Maybe both of the boats have stopped,’ Heather said.

‘Maybe. Did Hari say anything about who could be behind this?’

‘He’s telling everybody that only natives or local pirates would know the marsh trails are OK to use at the moment, but after what happened on the
Pishan
I think he believes the whole thing’s been organized by someone from outside.’

‘Who’s paid good money for a swamp guide and a couple of fishing boats.’ The possibility had already occurred to Coburn. ‘Someone who’s hired themselves enough men to finish a job they didn’t get done the other night?’

‘Hari didn’t say that.’

No one had to, he thought. Although two or three rival groups of
pirates could easily have joined forces, if the reason for the attack had its roots elsewhere, the implications were alarming.

Heather was whispering to him, lining up her rifle with the estuary.

At first sight, the boat was only faintly sinister, more ugly than menacing, and with its engine at a standstill, moving so slowly that not a ripple was disturbing the water around its bow.

Continuing to lose what little forward speed it had, it kept coming until its hull scraped along the jetty and it came to a silent halt.

The manoeuvre should have been successful, but it wasn’t. Even at slack water in the estuary, the river current below the surface never really stopped, and already the stern of the boat was beginning to swing out towards mid-stream.

To prevent it from swinging too far, two men emerged from the armoured superstructure, both of them carrying ropes which they hurriedly looped over the mooring posts at the jetty’s end.

The men were wary, keeping in shadow and staying out on deck no longer than they had to.

‘Now what?’ Heather whispered.

‘They’re waiting for something.’ Coburn could feel the sweat stinging in the cuts beneath his arm. ‘Maybe the main attack’s coming from the swamp.’

The sudden thud of exploding mines told him that it was. Simultaneously from the same area came the hammering of automatic weapons – a signal for men on the boat to open fire on the village.

Muzzle flashes from the gun slits showed that more than a dozen of them were behind the armour, all concentrating their attention on Hari’s sacrificial huts.

Whether it was because in the dark they couldn’t see anything else, Coburn didn’t know. From his own position in the ditch it was hard enough to pick out any details on the boat, let alone identify a specific target – the reason, he supposed, why along the entire length of the estuary boundary not one of Hari’s men had yet responded.

The explanation was more subtle.

Deceived into thinking the village was asleep or undefended, and relying on what they imagined was their superior fire-power, gunmen
were starting to disembark – the first two getting no further than halfway along the jetty before the central section gave way beneath them, the others caught out in the open on deck, floodlit in intense white light from banks of hidden halogens.

What followed was unpleasant. The men who had fallen through the jetty were already dead, their throats cut by a villager who’d slithered out of the ditch and executed them the minute they’d reached dry land.

On board the boat, others who hadn’t been shot where they stood had taken refuge behind the steel plates where, having managed to restart their engine, they were endeavouring to get underway, firing from the gun slits once again – this time not at the village, but in a desperate attempt to sever their mooring ropes.

The idea was good, but a line of tracers streaking out of the darkness showed how untenable their situation was.

The
Selina
had arrived. In the light of the halogens a weakness in the armour of the enemy’s boat had been detected, Coburn realized. And to exploit it a radio message had been sent downstream.

The tracers were being directed at the unprotected front of the superstructure, turning it to matchwood in a matter of seconds and silencing every gun on board so quickly that the act amounted to a little less than slaughter.

Take no prisoners, Coburn thought, the reality of life in the marshes perhaps, but still a leftover from another century that even in a place like this seemed unnecessarily harsh and unforgiving.

Crouched in the ditch beside him, Indiri had fired her rifle twice, although at what he had no idea. She’d already put down her gun and was smiling broadly at Heather.

‘So we do well,’ she said. ‘If our marsh defences have held, it seems that the village is safe and that we now have a new boat.’

Heather didn’t answer, either unwilling to point out that the acquisition of the boat had cost the men on board their lives, or because despite her remark about being in Darfur, she’d been shocked by the level of violence. Once the
Selina
had opened fire, she too had put her gun down, deciding like Coburn that the outcome was inevitable. Whether she’d have ever used it in anger he couldn’t tell.

Nor could he tell how things were going on the other sides of the village. The shouting had stopped some time ago, and the gunfire was becoming more sporadic – an encouraging sign, he thought, although it might be too early to be certain.

Confirmation that the attack was over came a few minutes later, delivered by a young man who’d been charged with the responsibility of crossing the plateau to convey the good news. He was Indiri’s husband, limping from the bullet wound he’d received at sea, and so relieved to find her safe that she had to remind him to speak in English.

Hari had sent him, he explained. No one had been seriously hurt, the perimeter was secure and surviving attackers were being allowed to escape in their boat so they would spread word of the village’s true strength.

‘How bad’s the damage?’ Coburn asked.

The young man shrugged. ‘In the dark it is not so easy to be sure. The huts in which the lights were burning are beyond repair, and a fuel line to the generator has been cut, but within the hour it will be repaired so we shall soon have power again.’ He peered out at the boat in the estuary. ‘There are prisoners?’

‘No.’ Coburn was watching the
Selina
which was in the process of drawing up alongside the captured vessel so that men could extinguish a small fire that had broken out on board.

In the light of the flames, he could see that everything above the deck had been reduced to a splintered mess. So little of the woodwork remained intact that he began to wonder if there was a chance of the steel plates collapsing now there was nothing left to hold them up.

To warn the men of the danger, he left Heather in the care of Indiri and her husband and waded out into the estuary until he’d reached the still submerged section of the jetty and was able to clamber up one of the mooring posts to get on board.

Although the destruction was less extensive than it had appeared to be from the river-bank, as a safety measure he gathered together some lengths of broken timber and, after wedging them in place to act as braces for the plates, spent the rest of the night making himself useful in any way he could, clearing up debris, checking for unseen damage and, once the last of the bodies had been transferred to the
Selina
for
disposal later in the deep water of the Strait, connecting up a hose to wash away the blood.