Sea of Gold

by Nick Elliott

  Claire was sandwiched between us. Whether by training or instinct, she suddenly dropped downwards and simultaneously twisted her body round, slipping from his grasp. He wasn’t expecting it. I had him by the wrist with my right hand and Claire had twisted herself free but was now on her knees between us. She wriggled free and must have pulled the gun from an ankle holster. I was pushing him towards the edge of the cliff but he had hold of my right arm and at this rate we’d both go over. The dull ache from the healing bullet wound in my side had sharpened into a shooting pain. I had hold of his wrist, forcing it up and away from me, but we were still inching closer to the edge.

  ‘Get back, Angus, back!’ Claire was shouting. I tried to jerk back to free myself from his grip. His face was inches from mine, the knife still held above us. Desperately I strained to pull back from the edge but he had the advantage of height and weight.

  I bent my knees in an effort to lever him towards me. I was still partly blocking Claire’s line of fire but she took her chance, firing at close range inches from my head, hitting him in the left shoulder. The blast was deafening. His eyes widened, a look of shocked disbelief on his face. Like Hamilton-Hunter, he staggered backwards, releasing his grip, the knife falling, his arms flailing as he tried to steady himself before falling out into the void. There was a moment of silence, Claire and I staring at each other. Then came screams from below. I looked over. He’d landed at the edge of the procession. Worshippers were crowding round him. A black-robed priest was moving amidst the throng which parted to let him through. But Barclay was beyond the last rites.

  I turned back to Claire, my ears still ringing from the gunshot.

  ‘Barclay!’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that was Barclay,’ I bent to pick up the knife he’d dropped. It was the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife Dougal had told me about, a slender double-edged dagger with a ring-patterned foil-like grip. It had a menacing beauty to it, like the stiletto that had inspired it.

  ‘Alastair said he’d died on the Delfina.’ The gun was in her hand. I’d had no idea she was still carrying one.

  ‘He was wrong about that, wasn’t he,’ I said, wondering how Barclay had got away in Perama, and whether Alastair had really believed he’d been killed, or for his own opaque reasons just wanted me to believe it.

  ‘We’d better get moving.’ It was only a matter of time before the police would be up here. We made our way through the narrow back streets and headed back to Alastair’s place in the Land Rover. I was banking on him getting us off the island before any local investigation led back in our direction.

  We drove in silence. Claire was staring straight in front of her, unseeing. Finally she turned to me. ‘Tell me it’s all over, Angus.’ She spoke so softly I hardly heard her above the engine. I reached my hand out to hold her arm. She was trembling.

  ‘It’s all over,’ I said. But neither of us quite believed it.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘Zoe, can you set up a conference call with Peter Stark in Singapore and Yvonne Grey in Cape Town, as soon as they’re available, preferably in the next half hour.’ I gave her their numbers and walked over to the window. I could just see down to Akti Miaouli and the waters of the harbour. Summer had arrived now. There were more people around, sitting outside at the cafés or just generally out and about; tourists too with their backpacks and cases, heading for the ferries to take them off to the islands.

  It had been a couple of weeks since I’d returned to the office and only now was I getting on top of the caseload. Obviously Grant Douglas thought he was doing me a favour by telling his syndicates to resume issuing me with instructions on their Greek cases.

  Zoe called through. ‘I’ve emailed them with the dial-in instructions. I’ve said eleven o’clock Greek time so we should still get Singapore before they finish for the day. Yvonne accepted straight away.’

  ‘Thanks, Zoe.’ I could tell she was glad to have things back to normal, or as normal as they ever got in this business. So was I.

  But I’d been reading up about gold. Gold brings good fortune. Gold attracts power. Gold drives people crazy. Do we have gold or does gold have us? Behind the clichés was the harsh reality and the National Geographic feature didn’t pull any punches. On the one hand there were the impoverished miners who battled toxic gases, tunnel collapses and the kind of conditions I’d witnessed at close quarters at Buwan Bundok. On the other were the mining conglomerates like Coreminex and the ruthless battles fought for the riches buried in someone else’s sacred mountains and forests.

  For all its appeal, both the human and environmental costs were immense. The fascination, as well as the problem, was that there was so little of it. Only a hundred and sixty thousand tons of gold have ever been mined, but that mining has generated more waste per ounce than any other metal. The scars left on mountainsides like Buwan Bundok can be seen from space, yet the particles mined are so small that in many cases more than two hundred could fit on the head of a pin.

  Warlords like the Malatans with their private armies, terrorise and murder desperate small-scale miners while the security forces of the big mining companies have been known to burn tribal villages to make way for their projects.

  There was something else too. I’d heard from Yvonne that Peter Stark was planning to retire and return to Australia. He had health issues, which didn’t surprise me. Yvonne had no idea who would take his place but she was worried they wouldn’t be as concerned about protecting the B’laan’s interests as Stark.

  I was pondering this when the call came through.

  ‘Ah, McKinnon, you’ll be calling about your fee no doubt.’ Stark was his usual bombastic self.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking. I want the money to be placed into a charitable trust – for the B’laan.

  There was a long pause on the line before Yvonne spoke. ‘Angus, we’re already doing what we can for them.’

  ‘I doubt that’s enough. What I want to see is a stewardship trust whereby the land gives life to the people and the people give life to the land. They’re doing it on a country estate in Scotland. Of course, it’ll be different in Mindanao. It’ll focus on poverty alleviation. There’s more to it than that though. I’ve prepared a draft programme which complements yours. I’ll email it to you and we can discuss it in detail, because you lot will need to be directly involved. And I want Coreminex to match-fund my million bucks, in addition to what you’ve already pledged.’

  Another pause. ‘I don’t know,’ said Stark. ‘We’ll need to look at what you’re proposing.’

  ‘Sure. It’s a three-pronged approach dealing with environmental, social and territorial issues. Everything from restoring the mountainside and forests to the welfare of the tribe, and respect for their beliefs and birth rights. The B’laan are fighting this tribal war too, a pangayaw they call it. They need help settling such disputes.

  ‘And I don’t want money just thrown at them. I want them to develop in their own way. They can’t stay as they are, however much they’d like to. So the transition needs proper handling. And I want regular assessments, audits of the programme’s progress carried out by Carlos Torres and Manish Chavan. They’ll be appointed as co-trustees. I’ve already spoken to them. I’ll be involved of course, but this can all be done in the name of Coreminex.’

  I knew Yvonne would be amenable but I also knew Stark would dig his heels in. I could tell he was dubious, but I figured it was more because he didn’t like being told what to do than because of any real objection.

  ‘Think of the brand awareness,’ I said, ‘of your reputation – the positive publicity. And your own legacy. I hear you’re retiring.’ He liked that, and at the end of the day he knew that Coreminex wouldn’t even have a concession on Buwan Bundok if it hadn’t been for the successful outcome of the campaign against the Malatans.

  ‘That was a good start,’ I said to Zoe after I’d finished the call. She’d been listening in. Both had ended up enthusiastic about the scheme
and willing to serve as trustees.

  ‘There’s a lot of work, Angus, running a programme like that from here.’

  ‘We’ll be steering it. Anyway, Zoe, I thought you liked keeping busy.’

  ***

  It was late the following afternoon when Zoe came through to my office in a state of excitement. With some difficulty she was carrying a parcel.

  ‘Courier!’ she declared. This in itself was not an unusual occurrence.

  ‘So? Who’s it from?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s heavy though.’

  ‘I can see that, Zoe. Let’s have a look.’

  ‘Mineral samples, it says. It’s from Georgia, Angus.’

  ‘Well, get a knife and we’ll open it.’

  She slit open the plastic bag to reveal a wooden box with two brass clips. Inside that was another wooden case. This one had a thick glass front behind which was an oval wooden dish-shaped vessel about half a metre long. It looked old. I guessed it was made from ash or a similar wood. Stretched across it was a sheep’s fleece. It was glistening. I looked closer and could see that it was heavily ingrained with flecks of gold.

  Zoe gasped. ‘Angus, it’s a golden fleece. It’s what Jason and the Argonauts went to find.’

  Boris Kaliyagin was clearly alive and well. There was a note. It said: ‘Ulots’aven, Boris K.’ That was all: ‘Greetings’. He’d started this whole case off way back with his cacha scam and now he was drawing a line under it. Boris might have been a crook, but he was a smart one. And I wasn’t fooled. This was not so much a gift as his way of saying he was still in the game, still a player.

  ‘What will you do with it?’

  I looked around. ‘I don’t know, Zoe. How about we hang it on the wall?’

  ‘Well, you’d better insure it first,’ she said. ‘It must be worth a fortune. Oh, and Eleni called. She wanted to know when you’d be …’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Call and tell her I’m on my way.’

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nick Elliott began his career as a boarding agent attending ships in Edinburgh’s port of Leith. He moved to Hong Kong in the Seventies and lived throughout the Far East for twenty years before relocating to Greece and eventually back to the UK.

  Throughout, he has worked, lived and breathed shipping and more than a few of the events described in Sea of Gold are inspired by his own experiences. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers.

  Married with two daughters, he divides his time between Scotland and a Greek island.

  Sea of Gold is his first novel.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have received encouragement from everyone who knew of this project and am grateful to them all, especially my wife Liz and my daughters Louise and Melanie.

  My particular thanks go to Helen Bleck, my editor and something of a mentor; to Peter Flannery and our band of Scottish Borders Scribblers for sharing their ideas, their views and their own travails; and to Mags Fenner for her diligent proofreading.

  My thanks also to Captain Henk Eijkenaar who put me right on certain issues concerning distress signals, shipwrecks and the realities of search and rescue; and to Bob Gardiner and Tim Overfield for sharing their knowledge of and expertise in the subsea industry.

  Rear Admiral (ret’d) Roger Lockwood was invaluable on a range of matters including lighthouse beams, while Christos Makrialeas, Ian Lawrie and Rodney Cook kindly advised on some finer points of Greek, chartering and P&I, respectively.