‘Are the men in position?’
‘They are.’
The tanker had no working radio communications; in fact, most of its rotting and rusting deck was impassable, a fact that they had discovered a few months ago when a repair crew member had broken right through a weak spot. The rusted, paper-thin metal had split under his weight and, with a scream that Chetty had yet to erase from his memory, he had tumbled more than thirty metres to his death.
For the voyage out to sea, the two crew members would remain on deck, but in one of the few small areas that, like the tanker’s entire hull, had been properly patched and repaired.
The powerful tugboat responded instantly to Chetty’s commands. The engines pushed the craft forward, travelling slowly until the slack in the towrope had been taken up. Then he heard the change in their tune; a deeper, growling noise as they took up the immense weight of the tanker and started to move her relentlessly forward.
It would take a while for their speed to build up, but they were now on course. They were moving out of the harbour and nothing, nothing at all, could stop them now.
44
On the other side of the drums, Bradley let out a cry of pain. A thud followed, as if he’d staggered sideways into one of the barrels.
He’d been hit. Shots had been fired and Inspector Pillay’s bullet had found its mark.
A moment later, she heard Pillay’s rather breathless voice again.
‘Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air.’
A whimper from Bradley.
‘I can’t. I can’t do that. My shoulder …’
‘Drop your weapon now.’
Pillay’s command was followed by a clattering sound that could only be Bradley’s gun hitting the floor.
Jade stepped out from behind the empty drums.
Bradley was motionless, as if pinned in place against the barrels by the beam of the torch. He was grasping his right shoulder with his now-bloody left hand.
‘Jade!’ Pillay glanced up at her in surprise before returning his attention to his prisoner. ‘Get down on the floor. Down. Flat on your stomach. Put your arms behind your back.’
‘My shoulder …’
‘I don’t care about your shoulder.’ Pillay stepped closer. ‘You should have thought about the consequences before you fired your weapon at a police officer.’
The drum rattled as Bradley lowered himself awkwardly to the floor.
‘He wasn’t only planning on shooting you,’ Jade said. She pointed towards the barred doorway. ‘Those missing people you’ve been looking for—well, they’re in there. They were forcibly recruited for the tanker repair job. They’re sick from exposure to the oil, and probably from malnutrition as well. The job is finished now and he was going to shoot them all and leave the bodies here.’
‘I see.’ Pillay briefly knelt down to slip a pair of handcuffs onto the now-prone Bradley’s wrists. ‘Here. Put your hands in front of you and I’ll cuff them that way round.’
Then, keeping his gun trained on Bradley’s chest, Pillay dialled a number on his cellphone.
‘Moodley?’ he asked, and Jade realised he was speaking to his assistant. His voice sounded firm, although his hands were trembling like branches in a high wind. ‘Yes, I’m inside already. I came in through the big entrance where the railway tracks run. You can join me, but first call an ambulance. In fact, call three of them. I have one man with a gunshot wound and a number of other people who require immediate medical attention. Oh, and I’ve got one dead body too.’
He waited, listened, glanced at his phone, and then his expression changed.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said. ‘I have to go. Captain Macpherson from the Environmental Management Inspectorate is on the line.’
Jade listened to the one-sided conversation as the detective spoke to the official from the highly specialised environmental police unit that was popularly known as the Green Scorpions. Pillay’s responses were brief and she saw his hopeful expression change to one of helpless disappointment.
Inside her, the knot of anxiety tightened. They had been in time to save the lives of the workers, but if the entire St Lucia estuary was contaminated, the criminals would have won.
Jade didn’t know what could be done out at sea. Perhaps a navy vessel could be dispatched to stop them. Hell, if necessary, perhaps a military helicopter could be used. Surely some contingency plan could be put into place within the limited time.
After the call came to an end, the police officer turned to Jade. ‘The EMI crew won’t be in time,’ he said. ‘They’re still fifteen minutes away from the harbour and they’ve learned that the tanker has just left shore. He says there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Not at such short notice. The closest navy vessel is in Durban and they were unable to requisition a helicopter. They will be able to prosecute the offenders, but by then the damage will have been done. The estuary will have been destroyed.’
Ten depressing minutes later, Pillay’s assistant arrived.
‘Attach a pair of handcuffs to this suspect’s ankles, please,’ Pillay told him. ‘Then go and fetch the first-aid box from the van. We need a dressing and a bandage to protect his bullet wound while we wait for the ambulance to arrive.’
Bradley didn’t utter a sound as Moodley fastened a pair of handcuffs around his ankles.
Pillay bent down and unfastened the bunch of keys hanging from Bradley’s belt.
‘I wonder if any of these open that security door,’ he said.
He walked over, stepping carefully over Kobus’s body as he called out a sympathetic-sounding greeting to the men locked inside.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll get you out of there as soon as we can and the paramedics are on their way.’ He paused, then unclipped a small torch from his belt and shone it into the dingy room. ‘Mr Baloyi, is that you over there? I recognise you from your photograph, sir. You’ve been on our Missing Persons list since August. And Mr Padayachee? You’ll be glad to hear that we have already reported your missing truck.’
Sounding as happy as if he’d just arrived at a long-awaited school reunion, Pillay set about unlocking the big steel-barred door.
Jade didn’t share his emotions. Perhaps that was because her world was too black and white. You lost or you won and, right now, they had lost and the criminals they’d tried so hard to beat had won.
Frustration boiled inside her as she thought of the tanker, sailing out of the harbour, every minute taking it closer towards its intended destination. It was impossible that it could not be stopped; that the ship could sail freely for another half-hour until it reached its destination.
Dammit, she didn’t even want to think about that beautiful blue ocean. Those golden sands. The wealth of ocean life. All soon to be blackened, poisoned, eradicated after the ship was scuttled, which would presumably be done through strategically placed explosives. They would punch through the hull, sinking the ship and sending her lethal load of oil spewing out into the ocean.
Who would press the button? Jade wondered.
And then she remembered what Kobus had said before he died.
‘And then you make the call.’
There must be a remote control trigger for the detonator. Nowadays, these devices could easily be set off by making a simple cellphone call.
Then Jade thought about the chunky phone that was around Bradley’s neck. He seemed to wear it permanently. In fact, there it was now, lying on the concrete next to him, attached to its owner by a tough-looking lanyard.
Was it possible? Jade wondered.
Was it?
She felt in the waistband of her borrowed Lycra pants and took out the tiny knife that the paramedic had given her. Then she walked over to where Bradley was lying, his eyes closed, having his wounded shoulder bandaged by Pillay’s assistant.
‘Excuse me,’ she said.
She opened the knife, knelt down and, in one swift movement, cut through the lanyard.
The phone felt strangely heavy i
n her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ Moodley asked.
At that point, Bradley opened his eyes. When he saw she had his phone he reacted immediately.
‘Hey!’ he screamed. ‘Give that back!’
He started to jackknife like a stranded fish, bucking and writhing in a vain effort to get free of the handcuffs that bound him. Moodley dropped the bandage and sprang to his feet, fumbling for his gun.
‘Er … Ms De Jong, that phone may contain important evidence. Please don’t tamper with it,’ Pillay shouted, his voice worried.
Jade ignored him.
Bradley’s reaction had told her everything she needed to know. The trigger code for the detonator was right here, hidden in the cellphone’s address book. She was sure of it. If she could find and dial the right number in time, the oil would still be spilled, but hopefully the spillage would be confined to the harbour area where it would cause far less damage than if the tanker was scuttled near the estuary.
The question was, which number was it?
She was sure Bradley would have it saved on his phone, ready to dial.
She scrolled through his list of contacts. How would she recognise it? It could be saved under a random name. There was a number for Chetty. Another one there—her heart jumped in surprise—for Monique. More numbers—for steel suppliers, welding equipment rental, harbour security, and a few more names of women.
She couldn’t dial each of them in turn. The list was too long. Too many numbers saved on this phone.
And then she saw it.
It was so obvious she could have laughed.
Karachi.
Bradley was still yelling, but his voice was beginning to sound ragged. He was pounding his fists on the concrete in front of him.
Jade had no idea if this would work or not, but she knew she had to try.
She punched the dial button and waited for the call to connect.
45
Zulu stared through the back window of the captain’s cabin. Behind him, all he could see was the great bulk of the rusty tanker, so close that it almost seemed as if the ship would run them down. Zulu had little knowledge of ships and sailing, but he’d seen the skill with which Chetty had handled the tug, sending the craft back and forth across the waves with such power and dexterity that the sea underneath them had felt like a hard, rutted dirt road.
He was confident that the Karachi would not mow them down.
‘Five more minutes and we’ll be out of the harbour,’ Chetty said.
Zulu didn’t want to tempt fate by responding to the comment.
In spite of the impenetrable front he presented, he was still far from confident that this operation would succeed.
The problem was that not everything had gone according to plan. He just hoped that he himself would not be implicated in any way. At least he’d tried to put failsafe plans in place for that.
Chetty had made all the arrangements with Bradley, his second-in-command. The phone calls that Chetty had made to Pakistan and the companies that he had dealt with were all part of Zulu’s plan to implicate him as a terrorist sympathiser. He’d made other calls on the man’s office line as well, calls that would later be traced to people connected with known terrorist organisations. And while they had been working so closely together, he’d even managed to send a few emails from Chetty’s laptop that, in due course, he was sure would be picked up by the police.
As for the money he’d paid him for his role in this project—even those funds had been transferred from a Karachi bank that in turn had obtained it from a shell account whose owner would prove to be untraceable.
Hopefully, when the investigation was completed, it would become clear that Chetty had willingly committed this act of environmental sabotage after being well paid to do so by an extremist group.
‘Watch your seas, people of the Western world.’ That would be the message that this tanker would send. ‘You think you are safe from us now. You believe your airways to be secure. But what about your oceans? We have more oil. We have enough oil, new and used, to destroy every beach from Miami to Chesapeake Bay, from Cornwall to the Gold Reef.’
Zulu hoped that the message, even if unwritten, would be clearly understood once the trail of evidence had been followed.
And, of course, Chetty himself would not be alive to argue the facts, having committed suicide shortly after jettisoning his lethal load.
He was sorry for whoever found his body, because it would not be a pretty sight.
Neither would Bradley’s.
Zulu smiled grimly as he thought of his arrangements for disposing of the engineer who’d handled the repair project so efficiently. He had no doubt that this, at least, would succeed.
He himself had arranged for his private helicopter to take him off the tugboat and out of sight. The helicopter was already standing by, and the pilot could definitely be trusted as he was Zulu’s eldest son.
It hurt him to admit it, even to himself, but he had made some poor decisions. What had started out as a multi-billion rand business, thriving and cash-rich, had turned into a financial black hole that was devouring all the money he had poured into it. The dunes he currently had permission to mine were now depleted of minerals. He’d used his final chunk of capital in attempting to rehabilitate them—a process that if not correctly followed would lose him the contract he was so desperately hoping for.
The one that would turn his business around, the one that would make him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams—permission to mine the dunes inside the conservation zone.
Though extreme, the damage caused by the capsized tanker would not be irreversible. Given time, Nature would heal herself. The lagoon and beach would eventually be repopulated, although admittedly they would never be the same, as many of the indigenous plants and animals would have been permanently wiped out.
The repopulation, Zulu estimated, would take about ten years. Possibly a little longer.
In the short term, the tourism and fishing industries in the area would collapse. This would cause a massive loss of jobs and bring the property industry to its knees. The local economy would be dealt what was, to all intents and purposes, a death blow.
And, in the light of this environmental catastrophe, the prospect of dune mining in a park that was otherwise a wasteland would suddenly seem a whole lot less important. In fact, it could be seen as a solution to the new—and serious—problems that would beset the area.
Mining would provide jobs that could no longer be offered by tourism. Zulu was certain that in the event of an act of environmental terrorism that put a stop to tourist-related activities in the area, the industrial and mining sectors would, through necessity, be encouraged to grow.
And legislation would be swiftly changed to allow it.
It had all seemed so good on paper, and putting the plan into action with the help of the corrupt harbour master and his Pakistani connections had seemed so surprisingly easy.
Until that damn blackmail attempt. He should have ignored it; told Bradley to pay the woman a couple of grand, which would have kept her quiet for long enough. And he would have, if he hadn’t feared that somehow the blackmailer had found out about this operation, that Bradley had let something slip.
After that, everything had started going wrong. That single decision had precipitated a chain of events that would prove to be as destructive as acid water leaking from a badly drained mine. Starting, of course, with the shocking discovery that the wrong woman had been murdered at the resort where Bradley’s blackmailer was working. Why had Kobus done that? Even though he hadn’t admitted to it, this error had almost jeopardised the entire operation.
There were still some loose ends to tie up—the policeman in hospital was one that he still had to sort out, and he hoped he would be able to do that discreetly and in time.
Whatever happened next, the Karachi would complete its deadly mission, providing the opportunity for Richards Mining to move into the iSimangaliso Wetland Pa
rk.
‘Almost out of harbour waters,’ Chetty said.
And then Zulu was jerked away from his thoughts as, suddenly, the impossible happened.
The tug tilted up like a see-saw, throwing him off his feet and flinging him back against the window he’d so recently been staring out of. The back of his head hit the glass and his vision blurred.
Then the tugboat was hit by a massive shockwave and the sea turned from rippling velvet into a jagged series of peaks and troughs. Huge waves crashed around them, flinging the tug from side to side.
‘What the hell?’ he heard Chetty cry. The engines accelerated to a scream as the Amandla bravely struggled to obey her captain’s demands, but, even on maximum power, her efforts had no effect.
Again the deck tilted backwards. Steeper and steeper. Coffee cups, glasses and pieces of equipment tumbled off the shelves and slid around the floor.
Struggling to his feet, Zulu grabbed hold of the wall in front of him, which was now slanted at a forty-five-degree angle. He peered out through the porthole, unable to believe what he was seeing.
The Karachi was sinking, and fast. Faster than he had ever believed a ship could go down. Her prow was already fully underwater. As Zulu looked on in horror, a wave hit the glass of the captain’s cabin and left behind a streak of oil.
‘Hayibo!’ he cried in shock. Her hull had been breached and there was only one way that it could have happened so suddenly and violently. The explosives that had been so carefully placed at strategic points on the newly built hull must have been triggered.
Once the hull was pierced, the rusting vessel would have no integrity against the waves. Water would shoot straight up into her decaying body. Inside, the Karachi was like a colander. He remembered Bradley saying that.
Like a colander.
Two hundred tons of colander. Enough to drag the Amandla down with her.
‘Get the cable undone!’ he screamed at Chetty. ‘The towrope. Get rid of it! The ship’s going to drag us under!’
‘The men are gone!’ Chetty wailed. ‘The men on the Karachi must have fallen overboard. They aren’t responding to my requests.’
The Fallen Page 23