by Nick Elliott
‘Who do you report to Yvonne? Who’s your line manager?’
‘Normally, direct to our head of logistics in Cape Town but in this case it’s our VP Asia-Pacific in Singapore. He runs our Philippine ops, which is where the plant was headed for. General Santos port in Mindanao then up to our Mount Buwan Bundok copper and gold concession in Sarangani province. The exploration work’s complete and all the approvals are in place. We were all set to get on with production.
‘This will delay us by months if not years. It was a turnkey operation. We were shipping everything right down to the catering equipment, the IT equipment, the accommodation block – it was all going up there so we could start mining and production by the end of the year. Everything including the loo rolls, for God’s sake.
‘As logistics manager, this was my project, my baby. I’d been working on it for over two years.’ She spoke softly but with bitterness. She was a professional and typical of her kind: good at managing projects, nurturing, owning them and seeing them through to the end.
‘And who’s this VP Asia-Pacific?’ I asked.
‘A guy called Peter Stark. I’ve been up to the site with him half a dozen times. I know him well. He’s fuella too of course – pissed off as hell. Everyone is. Setting aside the loss of earnings from the concession, the construction and commissioning of the plant and equipment itself is worth five hundred and sixty million dollars, carriage and insurance paid through to destination, delivered to site and installed including transport, the lot. The Astro Maria’s cargo was just a part of it. That alone was seventy-five million dollars’ worth. Then there’s equipment and supplies already stored in our General Santos warehouse. And more project cargo from other places still to be shipped. Plus what we’ve paid out to the different parties. It’s a long list.
‘Anyway, I’ve emailed him daily reports from here. And I’ve mentioned you to him too. This is a shared loss.’
‘I hope your emails are encrypted,’ I said. ‘We can’t be sure of anyone on or off this tub.’
‘Of course. And I hook up to our Virtual Private Network so no one can look in. I hope,’ she added.
‘I want to see him,’ I said. ‘He must know what’s going on in Mindanao and I have a feeling the answer to all this lies there.’
‘I can fix it. Are you staying on board till we get back to Singapore?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘I hope so, Angus. I feel safer with you around.’
‘We’ll get this sorted out,’ I said, with more confidence than I felt.
‘I want to see a couple of those photos again,’ she said.
We’d spent half an hour or so going through the photos. I’d done this several times already, the last time on the plane out to Perth. I’d seen nothing unusual about them. Now, with Yvonne poring over them too, I was hoping we might find something useful.
We zoomed in on some shots of the big crates stowed in the upper part of the tween-decks, port and starboard. He’d taken these from the hatch coaming looking down into the cargo spaces, illuminating them with flash. The camera took sixteen-megapixel images, so by zooming in we could see the fine detail of each shot, detail which Yvonne, familiar with every item of the cargo, noticed and that I had missed.
She peered closer at one in particular.
‘Let me zoom in closer,’ she said, taking over the touchpad of my laptop. ‘There’s something here. I saw these crates when they were still in our warehouse. This one. And look, this one too,’ she said turning to another photo showing a similar large crate stowed on the other side of the tween-deck in number three hold. ‘I’m one hundred per cent sure the lids are on the wrong way round on this one. The marks and numbers on the top should be aligned with the same marks and numbers on the side. But they’re not. Are they?’
‘What was in these crates then?’ I asked.
‘Look. It’s stencilled onto the side and the top of each crate. When we checked them out of the warehouse they contained ball mills. Maybe that’s where they planted those really big explosive charges Mike Horrocks was on about, sometime between leaving our warehouse and loading in Durban.’
‘Maybe. We may never know. If you’re right, that’s where the full force of those final explosions would have been centred and there’ll be precious little left in the way of evidence.’
‘We can get the ROV to take some video now we’ve got this far.’
‘We could,’ I said. ‘But let’s keep this to ourselves for now. We’d be foolish to think we can trust everyone here. And remember, Timson was killed, probably to ensure his permanent silence in case people like us started getting too close. And we’re sitting here browsing through his photos.’
‘All surveyors take photos,’ she said. ‘It’s part of the report. But he must have realised these could incriminate him.’
‘Maybe they were his proof that he’d done the job. He could show them to whoever had hired him and get free from whatever they had on him. He wasn’t interested in money for the sake of it as far as I know.’
‘So they coerced him?’
‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘I wonder what they did have on him? Had he borrowed to pay off a debt he’d run up in Africa – a failed business venture? And this was his way of paying it off?’
‘Or woman trouble?’ she suggested.
‘And there’s something else I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘If an expert had rigged the explosives it would have taken time. With crewmembers and stevedores about surely he would have been noticed. Did the crew know of the plan to sink their ship? If so, were they bribed to keep silent, thinking they’d be rescued well before the explosion took place?’
‘We may never know the answer to that either,’ she sighed.
If we were edging closer to an answer, then given the methods adopted by the perpetrators up to this point, it felt like edging closer to a snake pit, in the dark.
Yvonne shivered. ‘Let’s get a drink.’
CHAPTER 19
We all pored over the data and video images that the ROVs had produced. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the ship had gone down suddenly following a massive explosion or explosions in or around holds three and four. More than that it was difficult to say. But Yvonne and I were keeping quiet as to what we had found. This troubled me. Shouldn’t we share our findings with Charles Harrison? After all, he was in charge of the investigation and he seemed both competent and reliable.
‘Listen,’ Yvonne insisted, ‘we tell Harrison now and he’s going to share it with everyone. He’d have to. You said yourself that any one of the people on this ship could be involved in the sinking of the Astro Maria. We’d be mad to tip them off.’
I didn’t need much persuading. For now we would keep our counsel, but I was becoming restless as to matters back on dry land which were demanding my attention too, and feeling a growing need to get back to them. I was in daily contact with both my own office in Piraeus and the CMM in Leith. Everything was under control, but Grant was asking if I thought it would be a good idea for one of the young case-handlers to spend a few weeks in my Piraeus office to ‘keep an eye on things’. I stalled him. I didn’t want some young hotshot stepping in to fill a perceived void and making a name for himself in the process.
Then there was Dougal. He’d emailed me saying we needed to talk. I Skyped him from the ship. He sounded agitated. ‘I cannae tell you over this line, Angus. I think I’ve found what you’re looking for mind. You’ll be fair beside yourself when you see what I’ve got.’
‘Well, is it something you can email to me?’
‘Aye, it’s a PDF. But is it going to be secure?’
I told him how to lock the PDF and he gave me the password he’d use.
‘I’ll get back to you once I’ve looked at it, Dougal. How did you get hold of it by the way?’
‘You dinnae want to know, Angus. Let’s just say it involved the deployment of some of the darker arts of the trade, ken?’
‘Does a
nyone besides you and I know you have this file?’
‘No way! I …’
‘Okay, Dougal,’ I interrupted. ‘Just send it to me and I’ll get back to you.’
The file came through minutes after we’d finished the call. It was headed: ‘The Revival – A Strategic Overview’. Nothing could have prepared me for what I read now, bent over my laptop in the little cabin:
Gentlemen, Friends,
Welcome to this, the tenth Annual General Meeting of the Revival. Tonight, as we modestly celebrate our achievements and look to our future plans, as your Chairman I will remind you of our roots and our inspiration, of our philosophy, and of our reasoning, and of the opportunities before us.
I will then hand over to our executive colleagues to present their progress reports on our current undertakings.
But first, let me start with two quotations.
The late Mr Steve Jobs said: ‘It is better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.’
But perhaps more apposite is this from Shakespeare’s Marcus Junius Brutus in ‘Julius Caesar’:
‘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.’
Gentlemen, you have heard me say many times now that Adventurism is a worthy cause; that the buccaneering spirit is a noble one.
Let me remind you of the coat of arms hanging on the wall behind me, and particularly the motto which, literally translated, states, ‘Where the world is opened up, its strength, being united, becomes stronger.’
This is the coat of arms and the motto of the Company of Scotland from which we draw our inspiration and our vision.
The Darien Scheme may have failed spectacularly but the idea, the dream behind it, was nothing less than inspired.
I stopped reading. The Darien Scheme – I remembered our history master calling it a debacle and not knowing what that word meant. In the 1690s Scotland had aspired to become a world trading power. The plan was to set up a colony called New Caledonia in Panama. Beset by poor logistical planning, weak leadership, disease and food shortages, the surviving Scottish colonists abandoned the territory. Along with poor harvests back home, the Darien project just about broke the back of the Scottish economy, weakening the Scots’ resistance to the Act of Union with England. I turned back to the screen and read on, struggling to grasp the significance of what was before me.
Yes, it failed, but Gentlemen, it was the beginning of our country’s transformation into a modern nation with business at its heart. It was our Age of Discovery, leading to the era of that noble yet much maligned politician, Henry Dundas, and to his domination of the East India Company.
And let us remember too that the first three Governor Generals of India were Scots.
Many of us here tonight can tell their own story of a noble ancestor. Many of us in this room can proudly claim to descend from some young Scot who ventured forth, whether westward to the Americas, or to the East, to drive a stake into the soil of some primitive, inhospitable corner of the globe; not just to say he had done it, but to lay claim to the rewards, whether they lay in the ground beneath him, as mineral riches, or as a shipowner or merchant on the high seas. Others of you may not boast such noble heritage but have nonetheless proved yourselves worthy supporters of our cause.
Like our forebears, we too have an eye for a fortune, and are proud to follow in their footsteps with courage and audacity.
Whatever happened to our Scottish entrepreneurial flair, to our buccaneering spirit, to the days when Adventurism was an accepted and necessary way of doing business out there in the real world? What happened to our nation’s dreams of riches won from far-off lands? Where is Scotland’s influence in the world today?
We, as members of the Revival, are resurrecting that spirit, covertly yes, and that is the way it must be.
We have chosen the world’s ungoverned spaces – whether the high seas or within failed states and aspiring secessionist movements – as our hunting grounds. And we have chosen the shipping industry and some of the world’s richest mineral resources as our prey.
The opportunities are abundant, Gentlemen. Let me tell you this. In the twentieth century two hundred and ninety-one coups d’état were recorded around the world. To date in this century, already twenty-one. Not all succeed, but that is not my point. My point is that each one of these rebellions represents an opportunity. These unstable political environments are our natural hunting grounds and I urge you to keep yourselves closely informed of such geopolitical upheavals.
And rest assured, we are not alone. There are like-minded people within the corridors of power in Whitehall as well as in Holyrood who seek to turn Great Britain once again into a proud imperial power. And there are those with us tonight – patriotic Scots to a man – who themselves walk those corridors, within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, within the country’s intelligence and diplomatic communities, who share such aims, and who subtly direct and influence others towards our goal.
But before we indulge in arrogant triumphalism, a word of caution. Let wisdom and sound judgement be our guide. There are scenarios that have been put forward to our Development Committee which are simply too risky. Certain lands may look ripe for intervention, resource-rich and politically unstable too. But that does not make them viable opportunities. Where the mother state or neighbour states pose a threat, then let us remember that discretion is the better part of valour. We will only intervene where we know we can win. We are opportunists Gentlemen, not fools.
And how shall we achieve our goals? I will leave it to my colleagues here tonight to explain in depth, but suffice to say our war chest is well stocked.
And let me make one more thing clear. I have heard murmurings of dissatisfaction from certain quarters. Inevitable we may say, given that we are each formidable individuals. But we can tolerate no dissent within our ranks my friends, for united we stand, and divided we must surely fall. Take this as a friendly warning.
So let us raise our glasses then to Adventurism, to the buccaneering spirit, and to a new Imperialism!
Thank you, Gentlemen.
The file was titled simply DR10. On the off-chance, I right-clicked to look at the document properties but they gave no clues as to the author. God knows where Dougal had lifted it from, though I had shared my hunches when briefing him.
I tried calling him back, but not for the first time the ship’s comms were down.
My head was spinning. I’d told Dougal to pursue the circumstances surrounding Timson’s death. I’d told him I suspected he was involved in the sinking of the Astro Maria and that I believed this could be part of a wider conspiracy involving maritime fraud on a large scale. Dougal had promised he would start by tracing Timson’s recent comings and goings and go wherever that took him.
So somehow, if I was right, the document I’d just read was connected to the wreck that was lying four thousand metres beneath me. If I was right.
Piecing it all together – the fraud cases, the Astro Maria’s sinking, now this extraordinary discourse, a picture began to emerge, but with more questions than answers. Was this Revival movement a bunch of crackpots or a sophisticated cabal of criminal power-brokers? Not only did they have a name and a creed, they had a whole strategy working, it seemed, in collusion with highly placed British government officials, to expand their lawless agenda into a full-blown neo-imperial order. But who were they, and what was their real aim? Was it just delusional bluster and smug self-righteousness? Or were these people really behind the murders of Pruang Wongsurin, Derek Timson and the eighteen crewmembers entombed in their steel coffin below me now? And what did they really plan to do with their ill-gotten gains? What really was their end game? I didn’t fully buy into the new imperialism ideal.
For the first time I felt the stirri
ngs of fear. And the more I thought about it the more anxious I became, cooped up on that damned ship. I decided to get off, which was not going to be so straightforward. The Super Puma was running to and from the Cocos twice weekly, but its schedule was often disrupted by bad weather. Provided the Thursday flight was operating I would take it, pick up a Virgin Blue plane from the Cocos to Christmas Island and the Saturday Firefly flight on to Kuala Lumpur. From there it was a short hop down to Singapore. I was keen to meet Peter Stark of Coreminex.
I put this to Yvonne without telling her of Dougal’s email. We agreed she would stay on the Geo Venturer to monitor the results of the wreck search. She then set about arranging a meeting for me on the Sunday morning at Stark’s home.
‘Peter will offer you a fee too, Angus,’ she said. ‘But think carefully before you accept it. He will ask you to do things he cannot do himself, dangerous things.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
When the helicopter arrived, besides several relief crew, it was carrying eighteen bunches of white lilies in a box. This had been Yvonne’s idea, and the Geo Venturer’s skipper had readily agreed to hold a short service to commemorate those who had lost their lives in these lonely waters.
And so, each of us nursing our own thoughts, we gathered on the ship’s after-deck and, as she rolled gently in the swell, the captain spoke.
‘We all know the wrath of the sea, particularly those of us who have done sea time; the danger of storm, or the risk of collision or some other accident caused by human error. It can be a dangerous place, where we work.
‘But what happened out here was neither the hand of God nor the carelessness of man. It was the deliberate hand of man.’
As he continued I looked around the group wondering who knew more than they were showing. When he’d finished, the captain turned to me and asked me to read out the crewmembers’ names. As I did so eighteen from our group and the ship’s officers, each cast a bunch of lilies into the water. They floated away in a forlorn, ragged white circle.