Marine G SBS

by David Monnery

  The ship’s steps were now being lifted, and the steady hum of her engines was competing with the onshore music and the rasp of the anchor-raising machinery. Fifteen minutes more and another group of men emerged, two of them still struggling with their trousers. They also dropped off the jetty and out of sight for a few moments, before a sleek speedboat emerged into view and roared away down the channel.

  ‘Advance lookout,’ Marker murmured.

  Five minutes later the container ship itself was underway, inching its huge bulk south towards the open sea, bearing a new identity, the same £50-million cargo, two crews and a couple of stowaways.

  Marker and Dubery watched it recede from view, until only the top of the funnel was visible above a distant headland.

  ‘How long should we wait before the recce, boss?’ asked Dubery.

  ‘I guess we let them wear themselves out in pleasure,’ Marker said drily. ‘The man who delivered the girls is still on his boat, so maybe he’s expecting to take them back to wherever they came from tonight. Maybe parties break up early in Indonesia.’ He paused. ‘But there doesn’t seem much point in hanging around out here. I think it’s time we worked our way back around to the other side. Find somewhere for you to park yourself while I do my impersonation of a cat burglar . . .’

  ‘Hey, boss, I don’t want to be parked somewhere . . . ’ Dubery began indignantly.

  ‘Bad choice of words,’ Marker admitted. ‘But I’m doing this alone. One of us has to get back home, or Rob and Finn are even further out on a limb than they think they are. Right?’

  Dubery thought about it. ‘Aye,’ he agreed reluctantly.

  ‘Not to mention getting the sampan back to its rightful owner. Now let’s get going. And let’s be extra-careful – there’s no telling how many fucking couples we may trip over in the dark.’

  On board the Botany Bay Cafell and Finn had found a temporary home in a deep, canyon-like space between rows of stacked containers. Sometime in the early hours, once the ship’s routine had been established and half its crew were asleep, they planned to start exploring the superstructure, which loomed above the mountain of containers some two hundred yards aft. For now they could do little but sit and wait. The narrow line of sky above was overcast, depriving them of the chance to employ their celestial navigation skills, but since both men were carrying a compass that didn’t much matter. The ship had followed the channel south to regain the open sea, and then shifted course to the south-east. This might indicate a destination elsewhere in the thousand-mile-long Indonesian archipelago, or simply betoken a reluctance to risk the ship being seen in the Singapore Straits, even wearing its new disguise. Either way, by morning the two SBS men would have a much clearer idea of where fate and the pirates were taking them.

  In the stores cabin on the first floor of the ship’s superstructure Spiros Lamrakis listened as one of his crew members beat a fist against the locked door. Since their incarceration some eighteen hours earlier no one had seen either a morsel of food or a drop of water. The lack of any toilet facilities and the terrible heat had turned the cabin into a fetid hell-hole, and several of the men were already in severe distress.

  The knocking on the door subsided, as much from a dearth of hope as a failure of energy. No one had come to answer on the other occasions, and Lamrakis knew in his heart that no one would come this time either. His ship had been taken by men without scruples or compassion.

  Having retraced their original route to the crest of the hill, Marker and Dubery crouched down inside the ruined mosque. Even in the darkness Marker could make out the shards of ceramic tile which littered the ground, and the older he got, the more sadness such evidence of things vanished seemed to evoke in him. He supposed it was just mortality tapping him on the shoulder.

  The sound of partying was still wafting up the hill from the base below, and there was no reason to suppose there would be much change in the next few hours. The sooner they got back to Singapore the better, he thought. There was no point in hanging around.

  Marker said as much to Dubery, who nodded, wished his boss luck, and watched him disappear into the tunnel through the trees which accompanied the telegraph poles down the slope. For a few seconds he could hear Marker’s progress, but then there were only the sounds of jungle, generator and distant music. Dubery settled down in the shadows, conscious of that sense of inner peace which always seemed to accompany his being alone. He sometimes wondered why, when he was so used to feeling like this, he had ever got married, ever joined the team-oriented SBS.

  The answer, of course, was simple. He loved Helen, and he loved the SBS. Almost as much as he loved being alone in situations like this, surrounded by the natural world. He had only returned from a week’s leave with his family in the Outer Hebrides ten days before, and had still been working his way through the usual period of readjustment to life in Poole when the orders came through for the trip to Singapore. He supposed the latter was a fascinating city, but exploring crowded streets could never compete with the excitement of being out in a strange boat in unfamiliar waters. Or crouching in a ruined mosque on an island he had never heard of, with geckos scurrying across the walls and monkeys screaming somewhere in the distance. Though he could have done without the mosquitoes.

  A quarter of a mile away, Marker was edging an eye around the side of a tree. Across about ten yards of open ground the water-tower rose into the overcast night sky. Through its girder support he could see the oil storage tanks, the empty jetty and the patrol boat, which, bereft of comparison with the container ship, seemed larger than it had. To the right of the tower, beyond a stretch of open grass worn down by sport of some kind, was the first of the buildings. It was about forty feet long by twenty wide, and raised off the ground on breeze-blocks. No one was visible through the open door, but the occasional shout of merriment was clearly audible.

  As he watched, a woman – or girl, more like it – emerged in the doorway, lit a cigarette, and sat herself down on the concrete steps. She was wearing just a T-shirt and knickers, and in the dim light the dark sockets of her eyes seemed to fill her face.

  It didn’t seem likely that this building housed any administrative functions – the furthest building, which contained the telephone connection, seemed the obvious bet – but he had to be sure. After doing his best to imprint the overall geography of the base on his mind, Marker slipped back into the darkness of the trees and started working his way round to the back of the building. Five minutes later he had found a vantage point on the slope from which he could see through several of the screened windows.

  It was a dormitory barracks, and there seemed to be movement of one sort or another on most of the visible beds. In the middle of the floor one naked girl was rummaging through a pile of cassettes next to a stereo system, a look almost of wonder on her face.

  Marker moved on towards the next building, the largest of the three. As he had suspected, it contained the base kitchen, canteen and recreation room. In the latter another naked girl was being fucked on the table-tennis table, her body arched back, her feet hanging above the floor. The man had not even bothered to remove his trousers, and the look of intense concentration on his face made a striking contrast with the vacant expression on hers. She could have been an inflatable doll, Marker thought. From both his point of view and hers.

  He wondered if this party took place every Friday, or only after a successful act of piracy. If the unit here was getting even a half-decent cut of the proceeds, he supposed it could afford a boatload of girls every night.

  He moved on towards the third building. This was in darkness, and he had no choice but to put his face up against the two back windows. A room full of stores greeted his gaze at the first, but he found what he was looking for at the second – a large office with a single desk and a table piled with papers. On the far wall the only door hung open.

  Marker edged silently along the side of the building, the MP5 cradled in his arms, and slid an eye around its corne
r. Two men were sitting on the jetty with their backs to him, the smoke from their cigarettes curling up above their heads, but no one else was in sight. Marker waited a few seconds more to be sure, then slipped the five paces along the front of the low building, up the steps and in through the open door.

  He waited for a few seconds behind the door jamb, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the faint yellow glow which bathed the room, and then moved across to the table with the piles of paper. It took only a minute to realize that the party responsible had never heard of filing. Each stack contained a bewildering array of store requisitions, food invoices, fuel records, even newspapers. It would take days to go through them all. Wasted days, most likely.

  He tried the top and the drawers of the desk, and found more of the same. Looking round, he noticed something else, and his heart sank. A waste bin containing long strips of paper sat beneath a covered machine. It was a shredder, he realized, and pulled off the cover to confirm his suspicions.

  That seemed to be that. They had been shredding something, and the piles on the table proved it wasn’t base records.

  And then he noticed the fax machine half buried by the papers on the desk. It was one of those new ones which Finn had been raving about in the Singapore shopping arcade. And two sheets were still sitting in its tray.

  Both were written in Bahasa. The top one was short and sweet, but Marker had no idea what it was about. The other contained five words he understood – ‘Ocean’, ‘Carousel’, ‘Hong’, ‘Kong’ and ‘Singapore’ – and a lot more which he didn’t. But those five were enough to make him extremely curious about the rest. He took one of the base invoices and began making copies of both fax messages, just as Gerry and the Pacemakers’ ‘Ferry Across the Mersey’ began playing somewhere outside. Marker inwardly shook his head at the absurdity of it all – faxes, shredders, thirty-year-old British pop, all sharing space on a little tropical island in the back of beyond. They probably had Baywatch on the rec room TV. Like an actor friend of his dad’s had once said: shrink the world and you shrink people.

  His copying finished, he was taking one last look around when footsteps suddenly sounded on the path outside. With no time to find a hiding place, he simply sank to his haunches, his back against the wall, the dull sheen of the MP5 all but covered by his arms. Two figures appeared in the doorway, a man and a woman.

  Be still, Marker told himself, his mind going back years to a theatre in Cleethorpes, and his mother trying to teach him how to be a tree. ‘You have to believe you are a tree,’ she had said. ‘Think like one . . . And don’t breathe so loud. Let your lungs do it for you.’

  The couple were halfway across the room now, the man half pulling the girl towards the door which led into the storeroom, oblivious to Marker’s presence. He had a brief glimpse of the girl’s face in the amber light – she was no more than sixteen, and looked both angry and frightened. A few seconds after the two of them had disappeared from view a heavy slap was audible above the distant music, followed by the sound of tearing cloth and a whimper from the girl.

  Marker stood up slowly, aching to intervene but knowing he could not. Cafell and Finn’s safety might well rest on his making an undetected exit. And there was always the crew of the Ocean Carousel to consider.

  The man said something sharply, and the girl whimpered again. Marker walked quietly round the edge of the office, keeping to the deepest shadows, and reached the frame of the open door. Fifty yards or so to his left a couple were dancing on the grass outside the dormitory barracks, swaying gently in each other’s arms to Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. He watched them for several seconds longer than he needed to, struck by the unlikely poignancy of the scene, then slipped out of the door, down the steps, and along the front of the building. Once out of sight he paused for a moment, listening for any indication that he had been seen, then continued on his way, following the line of telegraph poles up the steep slope to the ruined mosque, where Dubery was waiting. The relief on the younger man’s face was eloquent enough, but no actual words were spoken until they were almost halfway back to the sampan.

  ‘Any joy, boss?’ the Scot asked in a whisper.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know,’ Marker told him. ‘I found a couple of faxes,’ he added, and the expression on Dubery’s face almost made him laugh out loud.

  3

  Cafell explained what their options were. ‘We can bury ourselves right at the bottom of the ship,’ he said, ‘either in the steering-gear chamber or the paint store. I don’t fancy a week in the chemical storeroom – there’s no knowing what fumes we’d be breathing.’

  ‘None of it sounds exactly inviting,’ Finn remarked.

  ‘It isn’t,’ Cafell agreed, ‘and there’s a chance we’d get locked in down there. But it’s unlikely we’ll be found.’

  ‘Try me with another option.’

  ‘We could look for an empty cabin above decks, but the risk of running into someone would be a lot higher.’

  ‘What about the cargo holds?’ Finn asked.

  ‘A good place to get trapped.’

  ‘What about staying where we are?’

  ‘Fine, until we run into a typhoon, and then we’ll just get washed overboard by the first wave.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, who came up with this stupid idea?’

  ‘I thought you did.’

  ‘Yeah. OK, well, I don’t mind taking the odd risk for a bit of extra comfort. This bunch don’t know the ship very well, do they? We should be able to lock ourselves in somewhere, and if anyone rattles the door we can slip out while they’re off looking for a key.’

  ‘Slip out to where?’ Cafell asked. He was beginning to wonder whether they should stay where they were. The two-hundred-yard journey aft, whether down the open walkways by the rails or across two hundred yards of unevenly stacked containers, seemed anything but an appealing prospect, particularly if there was a moon.

  ‘And at least we’ll have a fighting chance of getting off the damn boat if we’re at deck level,’ Finn went on. ‘If we’re found in the paint store there’s no way out.’

  ‘Maybe we could stay here,’ Cafell said thoughtfully.

  ‘Where did the typhoon go?’ Finn wanted to know.

  Cafell studied the side of the container they were leaning against. ‘We have rope. If the worst came to the worst we could tie ourselves in.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, I saw that film,’ Finn said.

  It was a little after four in the morning when Marker and Dubery brought the sampan home to the Marine Police HQ in Queenstown, and both men slept through most of the half-hour taxi ride which brought them into the heart of Singapore. In the command centre overlooking Marina Bay they found Commodore Xiao Guo-feng, the Singaporean who had been chosen as the overall coordinator of the multinational operation, and Tanaka Sukiman, the Malay from the Kuala Lumpur Anti-Piracy Centre. Both men looked tired, and were doubtless wondering why the British SBS commander had radioed ahead to request this meeting with just the two of them at such an unfortunate hour.

  They were also much too polite to demand an explanation. ‘We’ve ordered coffee,’ Sukiman announced, and the words were no sooner out of his mouth than a knock on the door heralded its arrival. Marker and Dubery, who had not eaten for almost twenty-four hours, fell on the accompanying pastries.

  ‘How did things turn out yesterday?’ Marker asked, after taking a gulp of the strong black coffee.

  Xiao grimaced. ‘It was just a Vietnamese street gang with ideas above their station, he said bitterly. ‘Another ten minutes and the tanker would have grounded itself on a reef, with heaven knows what consequences. As it is, there are four crewmen to bury, including the captain, and another two men are still critical in hospital.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Just children,’ he said.

  ‘Did you catch them?’ Marker asked.

  ‘They caught themselves. Our boats followed them in towards the harbour, and they tried to shake off the pursuit by cutting through the con
struction area for the new terminal on Pulau Brani. Their boat must have been travelling at around fifty knots when it hit the concrete piling. There was one survivor, and half his bones are broken. They’ll probably have to carry him to the scaffold.’

  Sukiman put down his coffee and smiled at the two Brits. ‘Now, can you tell us why you wanted this meeting? And where you have been for the last twenty-four hours.’

  Marker told them about the patrol boat base on Batam, the new identity for the Ocean Carousel, the decision to put two of his men on board the container ship, the searching of the base. ‘These are the pictures we took,’ he said, taking the two rolls from his pocket, ‘and this is my copy of the two faxes.’ He passed the bedraggled sheet of paper to Sukiman.

  ‘I do not understand Bahasa very well,’ the Malay said after a few seconds, ‘but one thing is clear – the longer message originated here in Singapore.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Marker said, ‘and that’s why I wanted this meeting. I hope neither of you will take offence at what I’m about to say . . . but I’ve done two tours of duty in Hong Kong, mostly on drug interception exercises, and I have a pretty good idea how long the reach of the Triads is. If they’re involved in this, and it seems likely to me that they are, then the less people there are in the know the better. For one thing, my two men will be sitting ducks if the pirates find out they’re on board. For another, we need to get a hold of whoever sent that fax before he finds out we’re looking for him, or any incriminating evidence will wind up in a shredder.’

  Xiao looked at the table, but when he raised his face there was no resentment. ‘There is certainly Triad activity here in Singapore,’ he said, ‘both legitimate and criminal. Up until a year or so ago I would have said the growth in their power was mostly a reflection of the recent influx from Hong Kong, but there doesn’t seem much doubt that lately there have been a growing number of Singaporean Chinese who have been persuaded to join their ranks. Still, I would be surprised to find that any of the officers involved in this operation had Triad connections.’ He shrugged. ‘But of course I understand your concern. No one outside this room need know the whereabouts of your men, and as for the other matter . . . well, if we end up moving against one of the Triad factions we shall need to mobilize a considerable force, and we shall just have to hope that we can keep the target secret until the last possible moment.’