The Ocean Dove

by Carlos Luxul

  Choukri sat on the floor, drew his knees up and clasped his arms around them, his eyes raking the gun, happy in his contemplative silence. Khan stood quietly to one side, leaning his back against the wall.

  Minutes passed before Choukri shook his head softly and looked across to him. They talked through processes for a while, of things that still had to be done, such as programming the wish list.

  ‘I must bring the chief engineer and his crew here. Four o’clock?’ Choukri said.

  ‘Sure. I’ll go through everything with them. All the drawings are on disk too,’ Khan said, looking around at his creations, nodding to himself as Choukri followed his gaze, keen not to miss a single detail.

  As they got up to leave, Khan patted his pocket and took out a small box the size of a cigarette pack. ‘I nearly forgot. These came for you.’

  Twenty-two

  ‘You’re quiet,’ Vikram said, swinging his chair round and considering the back of a motionless head on a hunched neck, staring at a screen. For the past half an hour he’d heard nothing but sighs and random mutterings – ‘steelwork’, and ‘no way,’ and ‘fuck it’.

  There was no answer. He turned back to his desk, hearing footsteps clomp towards the door. A minute later, a cup of coffee was put down at his side.

  ‘Take a look,’ Dan said, gesturing to his empty desk before stepping across to the window.

  The room was quiet as Vikram read.

  ‘Well,’ he said, coming to the end and looking round. ‘Seems pretty clear to me.’

  ‘Yeah, too clear.’

  Vikram’s eyes screwed up. ‘Can’t you just let it go?’

  ‘I know,’ Dan said.

  ‘Do you? I think you got off pretty lightly. LaSalle’s been nothing but fair – you do see that, don’t you?’ He paused. ‘Okay, JC’s been a pain in the arse, but …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I hear you.’

  Vikram shook his head. The words were clear enough. Believing them was another thing.

  ‘Come on, I’ll buy you lunch,’ he said.

  They walked down Bell Street in silence and though Vikram wanted to break it, every thought that crossed his mind had the empty ring of platitude about it. He bowed to Dan’s greater knowledge of the subject but not to his attitude, though he had a sneaking regard for how he stood up for what he felt was right. It was probably this, he thought, that LaSalle saw merit in. Without flattering himself that he knew LaSalle, what little he did know led him to feel that he was above the ordinary considerations of mortals like himself, having one sole ambition, or ideal – what was best for the security of the country. LaSalle evidently respected Dan’s opinion. He also, evidently, thought he was wrong in this case. The mere fact of it bolstered his own opinion. But, once again, it was only data, though it was hard data, hard evidence, which fell in line with every other piece of evidence and data. It also fell in with Dan’s stock refrain of it being ‘convenient’ and ‘too neat’.

  ‘It’s just paper,’ Dan said as they walked along.

  It didn’t sound like either a statement or a question. It seemed to Vikram that he was simply giving voice to a private thought. ‘What’s just paper?’

  ‘What they got from Sharjah. Just paper. Copies of emails, accounting, letters. And still no one’s been on the ship or the shipyard. It’s just paper.’

  Vikram nodded without commitment, relieved that the interruption of opening the door to Alf’s gave him an excuse not to reply. He slipped further from the hook when Dan’s mobile rang, though he felt sympathy at the caller ID which was waved in front of his eyes.

  ‘Yes, Jo, I’m just out at lunch with Vik,’ Dan said.

  Vikram ordered for both of them and sat down at a table while Dan dealt with the call. He heard him agree that the chain was clear and picked the point up when Dan joined him.

  ‘The chain of emails between Bulent Erkan and Khan,’ Dan said. ‘They started in January, Erkan complaining and Khan passing the buck. But now the Dove’s back at Bar Mhar for repairs to the repairs – more steelwork for the steelwork. And Khan’s paying. He’s pissed with it, but …’

  ‘And you knew the Ocean Dove was back at Bar Mhar anyway?’

  ‘No,’ Dan said facetiously. ‘I haven’t been checking. I’ve been getting on with productive stuff – for the team.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Vikram said, with equal insincerity. ‘And in addition to the solid reason for the Ocean Dove going back to Bar Mhar, there was nothing else to suggest, well, anything …’

  Dan shrugged. ‘So OceanBird came up clean. Just a normal hard-working company. We know Bulent Erkan’s shagging a girl from the duty-free shop when he’s not booking hookers on his phone. We know they keep a lot of cash – but cash and ships aren’t exactly strangers. And when the rest of it comes in, we won’t find anything there either.’

  OceanBird’s communications were a priority. All the phone, fax and email logs had been checked and the contents examined. The long job of sifting through paper files was going to take a while yet, handled by local security operatives and a team from MI6’s Gulf section sitting in a warehouse in the UAE. Experience was already telling everyone that it too would draw a blank.

  Vikram left it at that, dropping his eyes to the coffee Alf had just put on the table. Further comment would serve no good purpose. He sympathised with Dan’s position. The disappointment was palpable, the brave face understandable.

  ‘And it’s due to sail this weekend,’ Dan said after a while, glancing absently out of the window. ‘Back to honest work, earning a crust.’

  ‘Like you. Like JC just reminded you.’

  ‘Like JC just reminded me,’ Dan agreed. ‘And talking of reminders, I’d better drop LaSalle a line.’

  Vikram was intending to leave early for the weekend just after five o’clock. As he cleared his desk, Dan took a call on his mobile. From his tone, Vikram sensed the caller had something of interest. He was pleased to hear enthusiasm in Dan’s voice, but the feeling went decidedly flat when he heard him say, ‘Okay, Salim, six o’clock.’

  ‘What are you doing now?’ he said.

  Dan turned in his chair. ‘It’s nothing. A Friday night drink. Just a couple of details to wrap up. Two pints and home.’

  ‘Why don’t I believe you?’ Vikram said. ‘He’s bad news and you should know it.’

  ~

  It was a clear spring evening. The sun was low, picking out sprays of daffodils in iron grills at the feet of the plane trees. With a few minutes to kill, the slightly longer route along the river offered a chance to stretch his legs and pump some fresh blood into his tired mind. He was also apprehensive, subconsciously delaying his arrival at another new pub, the Brigadier Munro, behind Eaton Square, one of London’s wealthiest enclaves.

  The outcome of the OceanBird raid was difficult to accept and, while his heart was pinning its hopes on Salim Hak, something was telling his head not to. Salim Hak. Did he like him? Or was he just patronising him because he was useful? Did he need to like him? The notion of pity felt wrong. Was Hak damaged goods – as the water-cooler gossip had it – or fighting his demons the only way he had found so far? Azmi probably knew him better than anyone and was quick to defend his corner. Was that because Azmi was the kind of man who stood up for the effective operators in his team, regardless of the less well-informed opinions of others, or was it guilt, because he had sent him on that fateful mission into Afghanistan? On both counts, he conceded, he simply didn’t know. He turned it over, drawn back to usefulness, which also begged the question: just who was more useful to whom?

  No, he thought, there was no clear answer. Hak was impossible to categorise, probably flawed, enigmatic, but compelling. He drank like a fish but never slurred his words, nor was he indiscreet. He stuck to salient facts and, Dan had to acknowledge, there was an object lesson for himself in that. And, he was more experienced and knew the game much better than he did. It was something he realised he shouldn’t lose sight of.

  Hak was alr
eady at the bar, his back to him. He didn’t turn but Dan could see the ornate mirror across the back wall was providing him with a commanding view.

  ‘Pint of Guinness and another large Merlot,’ Hak said as Dan arrived at his side. He reached into his pocket before flicking his eyes to an empty table over by the far wall. ‘I’ve got to make a call. Take a look at this,’ he said, handing some papers across.

  ‘Good news?’ Dan said. ‘I need some.’

  ‘You’ll be the judge of that.’ Hak shrugged. ‘Bad day?’

  ‘I’ve known better …’

  After handing some cash to the barman, Hak turned back to him. ‘Anything specific?’

  ‘Just the usual shit.’

  With a dip of his shoulder, Hak set off towards the door. Through a window, Dan saw him check up and down the street before crossing over and disappearing into a shadow.

  The table Hak had indicated was now taken. Dan looked around the noisy bar. The crowd were young, well heeled, the accents taking him back to his days at the staff college.

  There was an empty table at the far end. He sat with his back to the wall and smoothed the pages out in his hands. The report form was an official IsC document. The agent and mission were identified by code words and reference numbers. Today’s date was at the top. It was countersigned by Azmi and, Dan realised, it shouldn’t have been out of the office.

  He read it through quickly in one go, taking in phrases – Makran Highway, three nights in the cliffs, minimal security, Ocean Dove repairs, gained access to, access to, Bulent Erkan, access to … After a second reading he folded it slowly and slipped it into his pocket, tilted his head back and closed his eyes. The scrape of a chair made him sit up straight.

  Hak’s elbows were on the table, hands together, fingers propped under his nose. There was a studying silence before he leant in.

  ‘But the good news is there’s nothing going on there,’ he said.

  Dan shrugged. ‘Good news?’

  ‘Bit bloodthirsty, aren’t we? No terrorists. No Bofors. No threat. Isn’t that what we want?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dan said, opening his hands in reluctant acceptance. He took a long drink from his pint and settled the glass down gently, allowing a respectful silence to pass in acknowledgement of the greater truth: there was no threat, and it was what they all should want.

  ‘It’s just the … disappointment, I guess,’ he said. ‘I’d hoped, you know.’

  Hak merely nodded, though it seemed to Dan there was understanding in his face.

  ‘And the waiting … it was early Feb when we set this up, and now it’s mid-April.’

  Hak held his hands up. ‘These things take time, dear boy.’

  Yeah, Dan thought, everything likes to take its time. The delay in the OceanBird raid was understandable. There was delicate ground to go over, new protocols, the building of trust in the rekindled relationship. In Pakistan, why hadn’t it just been a case of Hak and Azmi getting their heads together, allocating an agent to the job and issuing the order? But he saw there was nothing to gain from pressing the point. The report was clear. He ran the facts through his head again, accepting them but still probing for an omission or inconsistency.

  ‘So Erkan was there for just one night?’ he said, tying it in his mind to the OceanBird raid.

  ‘He arrived on the early flight from Dubai,’ Hak said. ‘The yard sent a car for him, an ancient Toyota with a blowing exhaust. Khan did not send his own car and driver. It sat on the yard all day – so what does that tell you?’

  ‘That he wasn’t an important visitor.’

  ‘Precisely. Just some irritating client.’

  Hak drained his glass and looked round at the bar before turning back. ‘My man was in those cliffs for three nights. He watched by day and slipped down to the yard by night. Virtually no security, just one old fat guy in a shed who never went out. He saw everything – and all it amounts to is a ship in a shipyard being repaired.’

  Dan nodded. ‘You’re right. Except, was he your man? It isn’t the guy you told me about.’

  ‘Azmi’s man,’ Hak said, sportingly conceding a point. ‘I’d lined my guy up, knows the ground, experienced. But when Azmi disagrees …’

  And again, generously, he left the silence that followed to hang, allowing time for Dan to go through his thoughts. After a while Hak put his open hand over the table. Dan reached into his pocket and returned the report to him.

  It had been thorough. Dan had a picture of Azmi’s man in his mind’s eye. He could see him motionless in the cliffs by day, binoculars trained on the yard and ship, a darkly dressed figure moving silently through the shadows by night, in the offices, the technical drawings on Khan’s desk, in the warehouses and workshops, the steel plate cut, labelled and laid out ready for installation. The ship’s gangway raised every night – something he knew was a correctly noted detail, a detail of procedure carried out regardless of any perceived notion of security in an isolated and remote shipyard. And then there was the optical probe, slipped into an empty hold via a ventilation duct at the side of the hatch coaming – once again, a clearly noted and technically accurate detail. And the panels cut out from the hold floor precisely where Erkan’s photographs had illustrated the buckling and deficient welding. It all had such a ringing finality.

  ‘He knows about ships, this guy?’ Dan said.

  ‘Does he?’ Hak said, neutrally.

  ‘It’s nothing. Just the language he used,’ Dan said, noting and weighing Hak’s uninterested reply. He considered some of the points again before turning back to him with a sigh. ‘And I suppose you heard about my whale?’

  ‘I heard.’

  The sympathy in his tone was a comfort. Melissa Lopez, back in her laboratory in the USA, had concentrated on the blurred satellite image. She had considered anything that could conceivably have been in the water – packs of timber, shipping containers or other cargoes washed from the decks of freighters, flotsam and jetsam, ocean waste, submarines and, of course, small boats. All had been discounted for various well-reasoned grounds. Finally, with input from the Oceanography Institute and some orca experts, they had narrowed it down to a whale.

  ‘You know they swim at twelve knots in dead straight lines and migrate in those waters at that time of year,’ Dan said, shaking his head. ‘Right shape, right size, mostly black, bit of grey, bit of white …’

  Hak merely nodded his head and set his empty glass down on the table. He looked up. ‘When I was new to this I had a serious down on a guy in Lahore. Everything that went through there was going straight out the back door. I was convinced it was him, and—’

  ‘And you made yourself a pain in the arse and you were wrong.’

  ‘I fucked up his career and lost the service a good man. The smell – my smell, clung to him.’

  ‘Are you patronising me?’

  ‘Are you patronising me?’

  ‘I asked myself that on the way over here,’ Dan said, with a conciliatory smile.

  ‘Me too,’ Hak replied lightly.

  Dan smiled again. ‘We don’t know each other, do we? But I guess you know more about me. I don’t know where you live, if you’re married, children, where you’re from. I know you had a bad time in Afghanistan, but everyone knows that. And you went to Cambridge and you’re some kind of high-class backgammon player, going to tournaments in places like Rome and Ravenna.’

  Hak frowned. ‘Never been to Ravenna, or Rome. Mean to, one day.’

  ‘Rome or somewhere. Vikram told me.’

  ‘Rimini?’

  ‘Yeah, Rimini. That’s the one.’

  A wry smile of resignation spread across Hak’s face. ‘Not my finest hour. Out in the first round. Some devious Egyptian, I think. May the curse of the pharaohs be upon him.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ Dan said, swallowing his surprise at the prospect of the Egyptian conceivably being Mubarak.

  ‘Luck?’ Hak said with distaste. ‘It’s never luck.’

  Dan looked dow
n at Hak’s empty glass. Too right, he thought. It’s never luck. The raid on both OceanBird’s offices and the shipyard had left him with nothing but stark confirmation of his own misjudgement, his fallibility. Forget luck. Luck had not come into it. He had been wrong. Others had been right. Every route was emphatically blocked. There was nowhere to turn on this doubly disappointing day, except he could choose to follow Hak’s lead; there was always drink and the thought of it had rarely been more appealing.

  Twenty-three

  Choukri looked around the table. There was only one subject at dinner that evening in the Ocean Dove’s mess. The demonstration of the guns in the warehouse had made an indelible impression. He could sense the crew felt lifted, their confidence bolstered, see the animation in their faces. Doubts were justifiable. The hijacking of the Danske Prince had been an undoubted success, but it was only a memory now, a long time ago, last year even. Euphoria evaporated quickly, leaving a void that long periods at sea only dulled further. They had planted a seed under dead ground but there had been nothing to see. Now it was sprouting, ripening into flower, and soon it would burst into fruit.

  The chief engineer and his team had stayed late with Khan, going over technical details. Now they were debating among themselves about power sources, rates of flow and grades of lubricating oil. It was the kind of disagreement Choukri wanted to hear, unlike the one across the table.

  The mess was crowded this evening, rows of bodies cramped along both sides. The window was near him but the room was becoming hot and airless.

  ‘I murk him, yeah,’ Snoop said. ‘Glock and soft nose, back of the head, real close.’

  Assam sneered. ‘No way. He’s mine.’

  ‘Then I do the toy cops, yeah,’ Snoop countered, jabbing his spoon in Assam’s side for emphasis.

  Assam scowled at the ice-cream stains on his shirt and swung an elbow, catching him squarely in the ribs. ‘Motherfucker!’

  Snoop’s head jerked up, appealing across the table. ‘You saw that! I get them, yeah. Don’t I?’