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.
By dawn he was tired and glad when work was interrupted by the arrival of the fuel supply boat.
Coburn had never asked where the village obtained its fuel, always assuming it was purchased in bulk from one of the coastal townships – a guess that seemed to be confirmed when the captain called out to him and started waving a large manila envelope that looked as though it could be mail from the outside world.
Today the fuel boat was in the care o
f Hari’s trusted lieutenant, the versatile Somalian who, once he’d tied up alongside the Selina hurried across to hand the envelope to Coburn.
‘Please to deliver this,’ he said.
The envelope had been sent by courier from Singapore to Bengkalis. It was addressed to Hari, marked urgent and, by the feel of it, contained documents of some kind.
‘You do it now?’ the Somalian asked.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Coburn was glad of the excuse to leave. ‘You worry about unloading the fuel. I’ll find Hari.’
The overnight restoration of the jetty made his return trip easy. Locating Hari was more difficult.
The Frenchman wasn’t celebrating victory with any of the village ladies he liked to call his wives. Neither was he supervising the demolition of the ruined huts nor, according to a little girl who was busy collecting spent bullet casings, had he visited either of the containers lately.
He was at Coburn’s hut, drinking coffee with Heather in the kitchenette. The strain of last night was showing on his face and he looked weary.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘You come from the river?’
‘Yep. This is for you.’ Coburn tossed the envelope on to the table. ‘The fuel boat brought it.’
‘Ah.’ Hari put it to one side. ‘You enjoy the fight?’
‘No.’ In the light of day, everything seemed too damn normal, Coburn thought. One of the windows in the hut had been shattered by a stray bullet, and in the corner of the room his Steyr that Heather had brought back for him was propped up against the wall beside her M16, but otherwise, in this part of the village at least, today could have been any other day.
‘You have by chance searched the bodies on board the boat?’ Hari asked.
Coburn shook his head.
‘Then you will not have seen these.’ Hari produced four small photographs which he slid across the table.
Two were charred around the edges, the other two were smeared in blood, and all of them were photographs of Coburn.
‘Oh, Jesus.’ He sat down.
‘They are interesting, are they not?’ Hari picked up one. ‘Together with cheap cameras of the kind you can throw away, the men who die in the swamp carry these pictures of you in their pockets.’
Coburn knew where they’d come from. So did Heather.
‘They’re copies from your IMB job application file,’ she said. ‘Look at the back of the one that’s burnt the most.’
Coburn read out what was scrawled across it in ballpoint pen. ‘Twenty thousand ringgit,’ he said.
‘It’s a bounty.’ She took the photo from him. ‘Don’t you see? It’s the Pishan all over again. We weren’t attacked by local pirates who wanted to take over the village; we were attacked by men who thought they could get a big reward for killing you.’
‘Twenty thousand ringgit in exchange for a photo of me with a hole in my head?’
Hari was grinning. ‘For such money I myself would deliver your head with a hole in it,’ he said. ‘You are lucky to be so valuable.’
Coburn felt more bewildered than lucky, unable to comprehend how he could have become such a threat that, twice in the space of a single week, an attempt had been made to kill him – the latest not during a raid far out at sea, but by launching an attack on a whole village in which women and children lived.
‘The IMB,’ Heather said. ‘It’s them. It has to be.’
‘No it doesn’t.’ In the back of his mind something was warning Coburn to be cautious, something so fleeting that it was gone before he could figure out what it was, dispelled in part by Hari ripping open the end of his envelope and removing a sheet of paper.
‘So.’ The Frenchman read through what appeared to be a note then emptied the contents of the envelope on to the table. ‘Please to look,’ he said.
Spread out in front of Coburn now was another set of photographs. But these weren’t of him. They were of the Pishan tied up at a wharf against a background of cranes and warehouses. The photos were also much larger; half the size of an A4 sheet and taken by someone who’d used a powerful telescopic lens.
Except for one, they’d been shot from the same vantage point in bright daylight, a dozen or more high-definition colour prints, each showing a different man in the process of disembarking from the freighter.
‘How the hell did you get these?’ Coburn was astonished.
‘After we fail in our raid on the Pishan I tell you to leave the matter in my hands. That is why I telephone a business associate in Singapore and ask him for this favour. Two months ago I help him recover a small quantity of cocaine for which he was not paid, so he has been happy to do what he can for me when the freighter berths in Singapore. Please to tell me which of these pictures shows the man who drives his truck in Bangladesh.’
Coburn was trying to find him. The Pishan’s captain was easy to recognize, and a few members of the crew had faces that seemed familiar, but there were other faces he knew he’d never seen before – the gunmen who’d been lying in wait in the lighter, he realized.
‘He is there?’ Hari sounded anxious.
‘Hang on.’ Coburn was still looking, wanting to be absolutely sure. ‘This guy with his collar up.’ He pointed. ‘That’s the bastard right there.’
‘Then we are fortunate. He thinks he is clever by obtaining a picture of you, but now we also have a picture of him.’
‘So what?’
‘So it seems he is not so clever after all.’ Hari finished his coffee and lit up a cigarette. ‘You see, according to the note that comes with these photographs, my associate believed he could have obtained more pictures by going to the building where all arrivals must show their passports before they are permitted to enter Singapore. But he discovers many closed circuit television cameras inside, so he decided it was not wise for him to try. Instead, he says he waited and watched.’
‘And?’
‘Of all the men who come off the ship, only one was careful to shield his face with his hand so that the CCTV cameras could not get good photos of him.’
‘Our friend with his collar up?’
‘Indeed.’ Hari thumbed through the prints until he found the one he wanted. ‘The man makes only this small mistake, but my associate was suspicious enough to follow him by taxi to the cheap hotel you see here.’ He gave the photo to Coburn. ‘Now we know where he stays in the city, and now our boats have fuel again, I shall make arrangements for us to visit him tomorrow.’
‘I’ve told you once,’ Coburn said, ‘it’s not your business. I’ll do it.’
Hari shook his head. ‘You are wrong. For last night, and for what this man does to us on the Pishan, he has made it my business. Please do not interfere.’
Too worn out to press the point, and knowing that if Hari hadn’t chosen to become involved the breakthrough would have never happened, Coburn wanted to believe this was at last a lead that was going to provide some answers. It damn well better, he thought, because if it didn’t he had no idea of where else to look, and even less idea of what the hell he was supposed to be looking for.
CHAPTER 8
HARI’S BUSINESS ASSOCIATE was a Chinese gentleman called Lin, a giant of a man with such heavily tattooed arms that it looked as though the black singlet he was wearing had multi-coloured sleeves, yet who was as softly spoken as he was well mannered.
From the moment he’d picked them up in a dinghy after their trip across the Strait in the Selina, he’d been particularly polite to Heather, and had twice apologized unnecessarily for his less than faultless English.
After a delayed start from the village to allow the Selina’s machinegun to be removed, the crossing back to Singapore had been uneventful, marked only by the disposal of the bodies which Hari had heaved overboard unceremoniously in mid-Strait until a long line of them had been left bobbing up and down in the Selina’s wake.
They would sink later, he’d explained, although he’d also said he couldn’t see it mattering if they didn’t – a remark that Coburn had t
hought might have elicited a reply from Heather. But she’d kept her opinions to herself, appearing to accept the need to dump the bodies with the same peculiar equanimity that she’d accepted the violence of last night.
This morning she hadn’t said much about anything and refusing to let Coburn help her disembark when they’d dropped anchor off a coastal promontory some thirty miles east of the city – a suitably remote location that, according to Hari, would guarantee them privacy if they were later forced to bring their prisoner on board for the purposes of interrogation.
Even after they’d reached the shore she’d remained in one of her quieter moods and had spent the last three-quarters of an hour sitting beside Coburn in the back seat of the car with her mouth shut as though she had no intention of opening a conversation.
Quite what he’d done to fall out of favour, he wasn’t sure. In recent days, having discovered that the harder he tried not to think about her the more he tended to do so, he’d been making a conscious effort to treat her as he had done when he’d first met her, telling himself that she was no more interested in him than she was in anyone else.
Today her attitude was verging on hostile, mainly he thought, because she’d overheard him talking to Hari about the wisdom of bringing her back to Singapore, and because after the attack on the village she’d changed her mind about being ready to leave and for reasons of her own had wanted to stay on there.
Now they were well into the suburbs of the city, Lin was being forced to drive more slowly, being careful to look after his Mercedes in the heavy traffic. The car was a late-model CL500, bought with drug money, Coburn presumed, or with the profits from whatever other business the large man was in.
‘Soon we shall be there.’ Lin reached into the glove compartment and took out two small cardboard boxes, one of which he gave to Hari and the other to Coburn. ‘I bring these guns for you,’ he said. ‘They are gifts so you should not laugh at the calibre. At close range they are most effective. A round from a.25 will penetrate a man’s skull, but because it has not the energy to leave again it will go round many times inside his head.’
The Rybinsk Deception Page 9