The Ocean Dove

by Carlos Luxul

  ‘You know where to put them,’ Choukri said, nodding at the explosives. ‘I’ll be at the bows with Assam. Radio me when you’re done.’

  They split up. Choukri’s earlier instructions had been clear. Faisel and Tariq were to head down to the engine room and put a mine on either side of the hull, below the waterline. Another was to be placed at the end of the propeller shaft where it exited the hull, to blow the seals out. Snoop was to make his way below the hold, down among the ballast and fuel tanks in the bowels of the ship.

  Choukri and Assam lifted the IED from the basket and shuffled sideways in tandem. The hold door was narrow. Sweat ran into Choukri’s eyes, his grip clammy as they pivoted. He looked over his shoulder along the cramped, ill-lit passageway, its floor slippery and stinking of fuel oil.

  They edged towards the bows, checked their position, and set the IED down. Choukri studied the shape of the hull and made a mental calculation of where, on the other side of the hull, the waterline divided sea and air. The blast had to be concentrated on an area just on and slightly above the waterline. When he was certain, he marked the spot and slid the package across the floor.

  Assam stiffened at the sound of scraping along the hull.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s the dhow,’ Choukri said.

  They listened, their ears to the hull walls. Coming from the other side was the murmur of voices.

  ‘Yeah, they’re right on us, exactly,’ Choukri said, nodding in satisfaction.

  Captain Mubarak’s voice came over the walkie-talkie to confirm trans-shipment of the Danske Prince’s cargo was now complete. Then Faisel reported in and, moments later, Snoop. Their mines were in position.

  ‘Okay, everyone. Set for 17.20 and wait for my mark,’ Choukri said, punching 17.18 into the IED’s timer.

  He checked his watch. It was 17.13. Five minutes to get off the Danske Prince and back the Ocean Dove away to a safe distance.

  ‘Three, two, one, set!’

  With Assam behind, they scrambled back along the passageway and into the hold, securing the door open before climbing the steps to the main deck.

  Choukri sent Assam aft to check while he went forward. The others were already back on the Ocean Dove. They met again at the gangway.

  ‘Go,’ he said, looking up and down.

  Along the walkway were assorted items the fishermen had gathered from the Danske Prince – lifebelts, a hard hat, the captain’s binoculars case, a shirt, a cushion, a cooking pot, a coil of rope and a bucket.

  Had anything been forgotten? It was too late now. He unhooked the mooring lines and threw them over the rail, jumping across as the Ocean Dove’s funnel belched smoke.

  The crew were at the rail, quiet, still, their expectant eyes fixed on the Danske Prince. Water lapped at the hull, the sea between them motionless. Only the throb of the main engine broke the eerie silence as it ticked over.

  Choukri turned to Mubarak.

  ‘Make the first entries.’

  They stepped back to the bridge. Mubarak sat at the chart table with Choukri standing over him, watching the captain’s familiar routine of writing the daily log in a notebook, in Arabic, before he would type it in English on his computer the next morning. In Arabic he wrote:

  16.50. Smoke vicinity D.Prince. She’s stopped. Hailing her. No response.

  16.55. Still no response. Turning back.

  17.18. Explosion. Sent Mayday.

  17.20. Explosion. Repeated Mayday.

  ‘Exactly,’ Choukri said, nodding to himself.

  Mubarak put the log away and they both stepped outside, scanning the horizon, looking for an elusive dot. Somewhere out there was the small RIB – rigid inflatable boat – they had slipped over the side of the Ocean Dove when the trap was set for the Danske Prince. A duplicate set of the Ocean Dove’s positioning, datalog and communications equipment was fitted to it. At Choukri’s signal, the dummy kit had been switched on as Mubarak turned the Ocean Dove’s off, with the RIB powering away at the same twelve knots the Ocean Dove had been making, on precisely the same course and heading. To the world’s monitoring systems, it looked just like the mother ship continuing on its unbroken course, while the Ocean Dove became a ghost.

  The Danske Prince was hailed at 16.50 – when the Ocean Dove had supposedly seen smoke. The RIB turned at 16.55 when no response was received, carefully copying the wide turning circle of a ship. And at 17.18, just as Mubarak had recorded in the fictitious log, it would send a Mayday and repeat it at 17.20 when the gap between itself and the last known location of the Danske Prince had closed to twelve miles.

  All the signals and data would be picked up by other ships, by monitoring stations and by the relevant authorities. They would all plot position, speed and heading. All would confirm the Ocean Dove had been nowhere near the Danske Prince at the moment of its disappearance.

  Out on the wings, Choukri looked at Mubarak, then across the shimmering water.

  Seconds later the IED tore through the hull of the Danske Prince; it bucked, and a thunderclap echoed between the ships as the dhow shattered, hurling debris into the air and showering down, the water in turmoil, a bow wave surging towards them.

  Instinctively, the watching crew ducked. As they straightened, they turned as one and lifted their faces to the bridge, punching the air and chanting Choukri’s name. Moments later, jubilant voices were drowned by the successive detonation of five mines.

  The Danske Prince shuddered as though a giant hand had picked it up and slapped it back down to the water. Flames shot from vents and a pall of smoke rose. In minutes the ship began to sink, the stern flooding and the bows rising to reveal a hole in its side big enough to drive a car through. The bows were almost vertical when it slipped below the surface, a whirlpool fanning out in an increasing circle of foaming water.

  At walking pace, the Ocean Dove edged across the debris-strewn water. Fuel from the Danske Prince’s ruptured tanks was spreading in an oily slick around dead and stunned fish. The ship quartered the area systematically, the crew scanning the water. The search had to be methodical and thorough. It took an hour. Things they didn’t want to be found would be pulled from the water. Nothing else would be touched. It needed to be left as it was for the authorities to deal with.

  ‘There,’ Choukri said, pointing to a speck in the distance, low in the water to the north-east.

  ‘I’ll make the entry …’ Mubarak said.

  18.20. Arrived on location. One hour after second explosions.

  The RIB cut its engine and glided to a halt, nestling into the hull. Choukri looked down from the rail. It appeared unmanned, its crew of two dressed in black and blending in. He checked that both Mubarak and the RIB’s crewmen could see him before he signalled: the RIB’s phantom communications were switched off and the Ocean Dove’s turned back on.

  ‘No complications?’ Choukri said.

  ‘Textbook,’ the RIB’s driver replied, climbing the ladder and handing him a bag containing copies of the communication and positional data.

  ‘Then get your people and go.’

  The dhow’s fishermen were on deck, ready to climb down and melt away into the dusk, leaving the Ocean Dove with its regulation crew and the illusion of normality.

  Faisel was at Choukri’s side. Below them, in the hull’s shadow at the waterline, the RIB bobbed – predominantly matt black, with random patches of grey and off-white.

  ‘It’s uncanny,’ Faisel said, shaking his head. ‘Even from here it looks like the real thing.’

  Choukri smiled. ‘Exactly. Let’s hope others see it the same way.’

  He made his way back up to the bridge, where Mubarak was busy on the radio with ships responding to the Mayday. He spoke in English with the Topaz, a Thai freighter, and in German with the Stadt Hamburg. The Topaz said they were altering course and would be on station around 21.00, the Stadt Hamburg an hour after that.

  Choukri’s ears were pricked, listening intently. His fingers were at his collar working a small, smo
oth disc between them that was hanging from a chain around his neck. Two minutes later he pumped a fist.

  ‘Yes!’

  Turning to the others, he waved his hands up and down to suppress any noise. A French navy vessel, a La Fayette class frigate, was coming over clearly on the speaker, advising the earliest they could get there was first light on Monday morning. He and Mubarak had plotted other ships’ positions throughout the previous week, accepting a clandestine naval vessel, running dark with its identification systems switched off, might well have been in the vicinity. It was a calculated risk they had to take.

  He called the crew together. ‘We clean the ship from top to bottom. The French will be here and we must impress them, and we don’t know what they’ll want …’

  ‘They’ll just want café et croissants,’ Snoop drawled.

  Some laughed, but not Choukri; his face was devoid of humour. He prodded Snoop’s chest, his eyes sweeping around them all. ‘We’ve achieved nothing yet, and it’ll all turn to shit if some idiot shoots his mouth off.’

  ~

  Just before six o’clock on Sunday evening, Dan Brooks shuffled the supermarket bags in his hands and slipped a key into the lock of his first-floor flat in Shepherd’s Bush, London. There were three of them living there now and it was starting to feel cramped, but a tube link to Westminster was a five-minute walk away and it wasn’t the time to take on greater financial commitments while he was still trying to find his feet at MI5. Government pay wasn’t generous anyway.

  Julie was at her laptop, her long legs stretched out under the kitchen table. Up against the wall their daughter, Phoebe, was thrashing around unhappily in her cot.

  ‘I think she needs changing,’ Julie said, looking up as Dan kissed her. ‘I’ve got to finish this for tomorrow.’

  ‘Great,’ Dan said, glancing around for the nappies. ‘What is it – some MP and an underage hooker?’

  ‘Not this time,’ Julie said, rubbing her temples as she stared at the screen.

  She was a partner in a small PR firm, working in the political field. They had put all their money into it. While it gave her some flexibility on time and the chance to work from home when necessary, it was only providing a meagre return.

  ‘Come on, baby,’ Dan said, picking his daughter up and rubbing noses with her, though it failed to raise a smile. He opened a window and started to change her on the worktop. It was cold outside; the sash rattled; the papers next to Julie’s laptop rustled.

  He lifted his daughter’s legs and recoiled with a grimace. ‘Perhaps I should use my tongue? I’m getting good at arse-licking.’

  Taking a deep breath from the open window, he pondered the smeared mess before getting stuck in at the business end. In moments the nappy was bagged and binned with a flourish.

  ‘Who’s a lucky girl then?’ he said, smiling as he cleaned her up. ‘Big handsome Dad, navy hero, ship’s captain, secret agent, licensed to kill anyone who disses me. But fortunately for you I’m in touch with my feminine side, a real new man – as your sexy mother will confirm. And now, best of all, I’m an arse-licking junior clerk. You lucky girl!’

  Julie turned. It was the second time he’d said ‘arse-licking’.

  ‘Nice try.’ She smiled. ‘But you forgot boneheaded. And you aren’t handsome – though it gets easier for me with wine.’

  ‘And I’m fantastic in … the kitchen.’

  There was cold meat in the fridge and an open bottle of Chardonnay. He put some potatoes in the oven to bake, poured a glass of wine and took a beer out for himself.

  Julie shut her laptop, pushed it away and got up from the table.

  ‘What about the Monday meeting?’ she said, wrapping her arms around him from behind, her chin on his shoulder.

  ‘Dry … I suppose,’ he said, knowing she understood what Mondays were beginning to mean to him.

  ‘It’ll get better.’

  ‘Is that a promise?’ he said, turning and brushing stray hairs from her eyes, the back of his finger stroking a sharp cheekbone. ‘You remember the selection process – a major impact. They said major.’

  Julie would have remembered it only too well: her own background vetting, interviews, home visits. The intrusion had been disturbing for both of them, though she had told him that what they knew about her already was more so.

  Necessarily, the details of what Dan would do at the agency had not been disclosed to her, while he barely knew more than the grade he would start at and the broad scope of how his specialist knowledge would be brought to bear on the nation’s security. But he had pinned his hope on the major impact.

  ‘The only major impact I’m having is on Jo Clymer’s networking,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to change the world, I know that, but I also know that everything the agency faces now comes out of the left field. It needs exceptional people, big hitters, and definitely not political careerists. And I don’t know if I’m one of them.’

  ‘One of them, or one of the exceptional people?’

  ‘Good question.’ He shrugged, turning away as his phone rang on the worktop.

  ‘Lars. How is it?’

  ‘Total shit. Eight crew. Wives, children. One was turning eighteen in two days – a trainee doing his experience from the nautical college. A fucking kid, you know? I just seen his mother on the local TV news. Total shit.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dan said. ‘It’s terrible.’

  ‘Yeah, total shit.’

  Dan was plugged in to newsfeeds and alerts on duty and off, so the fate of the Danish ship had reached him late on Saturday evening. Lars had been his first thought; he had been his first captain after leaving the Royal Navy, on the Astrid, a commercial ship. Now, like Dan, Lars was behind a desk, based at Denmark’s Maritime Authority in Copenhagen. He would be heading up the enquiry into the Danske Prince’s disappearance.

  ‘Do you know any more?’ Dan asked. ‘I’ve been following the news, but …’

  ‘No, nothing. Some guys from the shipowner were here today with all the manifests, packing lists, stowage plans and shit, but they don’t tell us anything. It’s all correct. These guys know what they’re doing, but I just don’t get it …’

  ‘And the shippers?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re checking. They could easy fuck up.’

  ‘And there was a ship near?’

  ‘Yeah, the Ocean Dove, but too far away. It’s heading to Bar Mhar now for maintenance. It’s an old Claus Reederie vessel, like our Astrid, but run out of Sharjah now. I spoke to some guys in the market. Good operators, they say. Anyway, that’s it. Total weird. Total shit.’

  ‘And you know the shipper is British-owned. Can you send me something?’ Dan said.

  ‘Yeah. End of the week?’

  ‘Thanks. And thanks for getting back to me.’

  ‘No problem. Look, I gotta run. Say hi to Julie for me.’

  Dan put the phone down and gave Julie’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘Lars says hi.’

  He thought about the shippers – the cargo suppliers. It wasn’t glamorous work in the despatch department of a large corporation, usually low paid and undervalued. Lars was right. The Danske Prince’s owners and crew knew the ropes. They carried dangerous cargoes but they were experts. Legislation had tightened and accidents had become fewer. When something did go wrong it was usually traced back to the supply chain, inadequate training, misunderstandings and the bottom line.

  Total weird. Total shit. It’s definitely both, Dan thought, remembering Lars’s words and the baffled, exasperated tone of his voice.

  And who was going to care about the deaths of some foreign seamen in an accident far away? They weren’t tourists being deprived of a dream holiday, the recurring nightmare running through the DNA of the security services. The point had been pressed home during his induction. Nothing inflamed public opinion more. A mining executive could be murdered by Boko Haram in Mali and it was their own fault for being there. But a husband and wife murdered on holiday in Egypt was our guardians’ faul
t – and pray God he wasn’t a teacher and she wasn’t a nurse.

  It had disturbed him at first, but within a few months he’d seen it was no exaggeration. This was one of several uncomfortable aspects of the job he was having to come to terms with. Worst was not being able to chew the problems over at home. Then there were the friends he had to tell, in the vaguest possible way, that he was a civil servant attached to the naval section at the Ministry of Defence, dealing mostly with policy administration. It was routine stuff, he’d say, before apologising for being bound by the Official Secrets Act and assuring them he couldn’t see any reason why it applied to his own mundane workload.

  ‘What’s terrible?’ Julie asked, taking a sip of wine.

  ‘A Danish ship disappeared yesterday afternoon. All the crew lost. I got the alert, you know.’

  ‘Not nice,’ she said, lowering her eyes without pressing for more.

  The Danske Prince’s fate was public knowledge, though unreported in the mainstream media, so it was okay to skirt around it with small talk without details, without him disclosing if or why the security services had an interest in it. He was grateful that Julie understood politics in all its hues, Westminster, corporate or institutional. She’d studied it at university, joined the BBC and moved on to The Times as a parliamentary reporter before setting up the PR company with former colleagues. Now and then it was prudent for her to keep aspects of her own work to herself, and as a quid pro quo in their relationship, he respected the fact that it helped to balance his sealed working life.

  After supper, with Phoebe sleeping soundly in her cot, Julie turned in for an early night. Dan reached under the sofa and pulled out a small wooden box. Inside were papers, card and a wrap of weed. He rolled a one-skinner, set the music on his phone to shuffle and sat back, the sound of old reggae clear in the headphones.

  Ten drags on a small spliff. Eyes closed. Feet on the coffee table. Julie warming the bed. Phoebe soundly asleep.

  Twenty minutes later, with his mind drifting in the Indian Ocean, he opened an eye lazily as Dennis Brown’s sweet voice faded away, plaintively denouncing the world’s many and varied cheats. Then his other eye opened sharply. He sat up and pressed pause. Was it the weed or was there a spooky significance in the random shuffle that had just played ‘Ordinary Man’, ‘Lonely Soldier’, Too Late’ and ‘Cheater’ – in that order? He shook his head, smiled weakly in denial and tapped resume.