Sea of Gold

by Nick Elliott

  SEA OF GOLD

  Nick Elliott

  Seaward Publishing

  SEA OF GOLD

  By Nick Elliott

  Published by Seaward Publishing

  Amazon Edition

  Copyright © Nick Elliott, 2014

  The right of Nick Elliott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, other than that in which it was purchased, without the written permission of the author.

  ISBN 978-0-9929028-1-0

  Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Formatted by Writer’s Block Author Services

  To the memory of my brother Tim

  ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,

  Which taken at the flood,

  Leads on to fortune;

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

  On such a full sea are we now afloat,

  And we must take the current when it serves,

  Or lose our ventures.’

  William Shakespeare, ‘Julius Caesar’, Act 4, Scene 3

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  April 2002

  Levan eased the car out from where he’d parked and sounded the horn to warn the young drunk weaving across our path in front of the airport. As we took off I caught sight of him in the wing mirror. Staggering, he flung the bottle towards us before fading away in our cloud of dust. The bottle shattered against the back of the car. It was eight-thirty in the morning.

  ‘Welcome to Tbilisi,’ said Levan as we drove away. We were heading north towards the city centre amidst commuter traffic and the occasional horse and cart.

  ‘It reminds me of home,’ I said to reassure him that early morning drunks were not exclusive to Georgia.

  Levan glanced at me. ‘You told me once that Greece was a café society. They’re not big drinkers are they?’

  ‘I was thinking of Scotland.’

  ‘Ah! That’s the weather. You drink to forget how miserable it is, eh?’

  ‘Something like that.’ I didn’t want to get into a discussion about Scots’ drinking habits.

  ‘You live in Greece, Angus. Isn’t that home for you now?’

  ‘I travel between the two but yes, I guess Greece is home.’ I was not really sure where I belonged.

  Georgia’s roads were not the finest example of civil engineering back in those days. We cleared the city and took the road to Poti, a three hundred kilometre obstacle course of potholes, some the size of small bomb craters. Perhaps that’s what they were.

  Levan flung the old Mercedes round them or just ploughed straight through. With no seat belt I braced myself, feet against the bulkhead between the foot-well and the engine.

  ‘Relax will you, Angus,’ he shouted above the noise from the engine. ‘I drive down here every few weeks. I know this road like the palm of my hand.’

  He lit a foul-smelling cigarette and swerved to avoid an old Soviet-era truck that was veering towards us.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘It’s a panic reaction,’ I said. ‘Anyway, you mean like the back of your hand.’

  ‘No, like my palm,’ he argued.

  ‘Have it your own way, Levan. Tell me about these guys will you? You said they were from Ossetia. Which one, North or South?’

  ‘For sure they’re from Ossetia. Probably North. It doesn’t make much difference.

  ‘It might to me,’ I said. ‘I want to hear the whole story. And before we get to Poti.’

  ‘My friend, it is complicated,’ he began. Levan Beridze was a lawyer. He liked things complicated.

  ‘When the good old USSR collapsed,’ he began, ‘the KGB left a few unexploded “devices” for us here in Georgia. They encouraged ethnic conflicts which had been festering for many years. They, how do you say it, stirred things up. They did this so they could justify keeping their military bases in our country to “assist” us in settling any outbreaks of ethnic unrest that they themselves were keeping warm. Ossetia was one of those time bombs.’

  We were out of the city now, travelling through orchards and vineyards then, as we went further, through meadows carpeted with wildflowers. We passed hayricks and ragged boys herding goats. To our right the snowy peaks of the North Caucasus shone in the bright sunlight of early spring.

  ‘Ossetia was always part of our homeland,’ Levan said morosely. ‘They took it from us.’ The drooping moustache and dark patches under his eyes added to the sense of a man who had regrets about many things in life, but Levan was not a depressive. He was a jovial old bear. I remembered a time in Istanbul when we’d been at the same conference. In the evening, at a nightclub in Besiktas, he was the life and soul of the party; carousing and competing with the belly-dancers, singing Georgian folksongs over the bus’s PA system on the way back to the hotel. The Georgians like to sing, and everyone liked Levan.

  As I understood it, the Russians had established a strategic military platform in North Ossetia, a friendly neighbour in a troubled region they would argue, in order to control unruly breakaway republics in the North Caucasus which they considered were within their sphere of influence. Enclaves like Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan and Abkhazia. But I wasn’t going to argue the politics with Levan. I was more concerned with the matter in hand.

  Which was that a cargo of ethyl alcohol discharged from a ship called the Med Runner had been released from the port of Poti to a bunch of gangsters against production of false documents. If it had been that alone it would have been just another case for me, but it had become a whole lot more complicated when the Caledonian Marine Mutual P&I Association had, in its infinite wisdom, sent a rookie case-handler to Poti to deal with it. And the case-handler had failed to report back.

  Grant Douglas was Chief Executive of the CMM, and he didn’t phone often. The P&I Club, as such mutuals were known, offered shipowners protection and indemnity cover against third-party liabilities including claims for loss of cargo. As their correspondent in the East Med I didn’t show up on Grant’s radar much, but this was different and I sensed the anxiety in his normally urbane New England manner.

  Why the hell did you send her, I’d asked. Surely he knew that pretty much all trade invo
lving alcohol in these parts was controlled by violent criminal gangs?

  ‘I made a judgement, Angus. That line’s been trading in and out of Poti for a couple of years now and this is the first trouble they’ve had.’

  ‘Sure, Grant, the Caucasus, where as we all know business is conducted to the highest ethical standards and if you have a complaint you simply report it to the relevant authority on the requisite form and they will see to it straightaway.’

  ‘Your sarcasm can be tiring at times, Angus. I know what these places are like but Claire was persuasive and finally we agreed it would be good experience for her to go.

  ‘And anyway, these people must learn what it means to follow the rule of law if they want to do business with the West.’

  I laughed. ‘Really? I’ll be sure to tell them that.’

  Claire Scott was in her mid-twenties and considered a rising star in the CMM. For all I knew, she’d never been beyond the French Riviera, never mind to Georgia which, when all this blew up, was not the kind of place to send anyone on their first case.

  Grant was unrepentant. ‘We briefed her thoroughly. She knew she was to investigate the release of the cargo against fraudulent bills of lading, and no more than that. We made it clear to her that chasing down the crooks was not part of the brief. She knows the Club Rules as well as you and I do.’

  ‘The shipper’s claimed against the line, who in this case are the charterers. They passed it on to the owners who’ve passed it on to us. We’ll negotiate with cargo underwriters and settle on the best terms we can manage, provided we’re satisfied the master or his agent weren’t complicit or negligent in releasing the cargo to the wrong consignee. You know how it works.’

  He paused again. Then his voice hardened. ‘Just go and get her out of there will you?’

  And so it was that we were rattling along the road to Poti. Levan knew how these cases worked as well as Grant Douglas and I did – that Claire Scott’s job had been to ascertain with reasonable certainty what had happened to the cargo, not to play cops and robbers. He’d taken her down this same road and left her in Poti just a week earlier. Since when, no one had heard a word from her.

  ‘She was absolutely adamant she didn’t want my help,’ he said.

  I had to wonder about that. ‘Didn’t you think to override her Levan? She’s just a kid.’

  ‘Have you met her?’

  ‘No I haven’t.’

  ‘Well I tell you Angus, she is not one to be “overridden”, as you put it. She is very self-confident – arrogant even, I would say. She told me she’d call me when she wished to return. I felt like I was her driver. So I left her to it.

  ‘Anyway, it’s not a war zone you know. Poti is a peaceful place. And I told her whatever she found out, not to pursue these people. They must have disappeared long ago up into the mountains. I warned her they would be armed and dangerous.’ His voice trailed off as he realised the implications of what he’d just said.

  The port, when we finally rolled in, was a scene of chaos. Containers were stacked five or six high on uneven waste ground. Antique forklifts and the odd creaking old reachstacker trundled around inside and outside the terminal’s perimeter fencing. Trucks queued up the dusty road into the distance, engines running, black smoke billowing from their exhausts. Hungry-looking dogs, their coats patchy with mange, roamed the streets.

  We started at the agent’s office, a dilapidated building with a pale green exterior. It looked like mould growing up the walls rather than the intended finish. Perhaps years ago the architect and his builder had stood back to admire its post-Stalinist functional grace but I doubted it.

  There were four people in the outer office. Levan asked to see Gia Nozadze and we were ushered through to a small glass cubicle in the corner. This part of the office was much like the rest except that it was graced by a dirty grey carpet which was curling up at the edges.

  Gia was a malnourished-looking character in his early twenties. His card announced that he was the branch manager. He looked nervous.

  Levan introduced me and I began gently. The lad’s English was poor so Levan translated to make my questions clear. Georgian was incomprehensible to me. Levan had said it was unlike any other language. Where else would the word for mother be deda and for father, mama?

  ‘We want to hear from you about this case of the missing containers, and we want to know where Miss Scott is, the lady who came here last week.’

  Gia took a file from a shelf behind him. I sat well back so he had to come round to my side of the desk to show it to me.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said, patting the chair in front of me. He sat.

  I looked at the copy bills of lading covering the fifty-three forty-foot containers of ethyl alcohol shipped from Antwerp. They weren’t bad as these kinds of forgeries go and I could almost believe him when he said he’d thought they were genuine.

  The carrier’s funnel markings showing the letters MBSCL and the name – Med Black Sea Container Line – were printed on the bill in what appeared to be their original design, font and colours. Other details of the shipment, including the ship’s name and the cargo description, looked authentic enough.

  ‘Tell me about the people who presented these to you,’ I said.

  They weren’t consignees he’d seen before. They were well dressed. Five of them. In two black BMWs. Nice cars.

  ‘Their trucks were there too to collect the containers,’ he said. ‘The bills of lading looked okay so I issued the DO.’

  They could present the Delivery Order at the port gate, collect the containers from inside the port and bingo, a million and a half dollars’ worth of hooch was theirs. Only by the time it was turned into cacha vodka for the Russian black market it would be worth a good deal more.

  ‘So how many trucks?’

  ‘Two,’ said Gia.

  ‘Just two? And how long did it take them to remove all the containers?’

  Two days he thought.

  ‘So each truck was making twelve or more round trips a day,’ I said. ‘Allowing for loading and unloading there’s no way they’d make it to North Ossetia, right? They’d get about thirty kilometres or so up the road at best.’

  ‘To a yard or a warehouse or somewhere they could hold the containers or transfer what was in them,’ Levan interjected. Gia shifted uncomfortably and looked at the floor.

  I drew my chair closer to his. ‘Levan, I want you to translate every word I say to our young friend here – slowly and carefully.

  ‘Now listen laddie. You’re going to tell us everything you know about this little venture – who these people are, where they’re offloading the containers and what they’ve done with Miss Scott. So get started, now.’

  Levan translated but Gia answered sullenly in English. ‘I know nothing. They came into this office. They presented the bills of lading. And then they left. That’s all I know.’

  I kicked the leg of his chair hard enough to make him jump. ‘Not good enough, Gia. You tell us where the cargo was transferred or we will make it hard for you. And we don’t have much time, so make it quick.’

  Levan translated again, up close to Gia’s face, menacing him. I didn’t much like this way of doing things but I needed information. We could take off up the road to Ossetia like the Keystone Cops and find nothing. I needed to know where they’d gone and Gia was my best bet right now.

  Levan had grabbed hold of Gia’s hair to get the point home. His resistance dissolved soon enough. ‘They took the Zugdidi road. I don’t know more than that. They said I shouldn’t speak to anyone. They’re mafia. They’ll come back for me.’

  ‘And the woman?’

  ‘She met them. One of them who had come to the office came back in one of the trucks. She wanted to meet them. She went off in the truck. That’s all I can tell you.’

  Was she out of her mind? I turned to Levan. ‘Zugdidi. How far?’

  ‘Forty kilometres maybe, but my guess is we’ll find them before that. There’re a few pl
aces on the way where they could offload these boxes, Angus. Storage yards, old warehouses …’

  We took Gia with us. He didn’t want to come but I figured if we acted as if we’d forced him then the Ossetians, if that’s what they were, might realise he’d been coerced rather than simply blown the whistle on them.

  It didn’t take us long. Half an hour from the port we saw the containers emblazoned with the line’s livery, strewn across a bare patch of land a hundred metres or so off the road. Nearby was an old building, more a shack than a house. Levan stopped the car.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this, Angus? These guys aren’t from your Salvation Army you know.’

  I didn’t see that we had a choice.

  Several of the containers that had already been emptied were aligned into a block. I could see that the others were still closed with intact Customs seals on their doors.

  As we approached a man came out from one of the containers. He was wearing a black leather jacket, sunglasses and carrying what I recognised as an AK-47 rifle. And he was big. Levan stopped the car ten metres in front of him. We got out and I walked towards the man.

  ‘Hi! I’m Angus,’ I shouted, giving him my best attempt at a warm and friendly smile. I held out my hand, which he ignored. ‘We’re looking for a colleague, a British woman. Have you seen her?’

  Levan started talking to him in Georgian. I looked behind them to the interior of the containers. One had a white plastic table and chairs placed just inside its doors. Another was being used to store what looked like cartons of food and bottled water. Inside the third container a small portable generator was running. It looked like a makeshift workshop.

  ‘He says this is private property and we should leave,’ Levan translated. ‘He says he hasn’t seen any woman.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘he won’t mind if we just have a quick look around then will he.’

  I moved towards the container with the table and chairs. The man stepped across my path.

  I raised my arms in a gesture of reassurance and smiled. ‘It’s okay Ivan. I just want to have a quick look.’