Chapter 97
Having heard nothing from Ashby after half an hour, Meyer went looking for him and found him, next to Keo on the engine-room floor. A few light slaps on the cheek brought him round but he was groggy and disorientated. The engineer remained unconscious.
“I need some water,” said Ashby, his eyes half-opened, as he tried to focus on the scene around him. “Can you get me some ?”
When Meyer found a half-empty water bottle further along the deck, Ashby took out a small brown bottle from his pocket. It was full of white capsules with a pink seal in the middle. He popped one in his mouth and drank a mouthful of water to wash it down.
“I’ll be alright in a moment.....sometimes I black out if I don’t take these,” he said, shaking the pills in the bottle. “But let me tell you what happened.”
After slowly describing his scuffle with the engineer, Meyer left him and ran back up to the main deck to find Brandt. After ten minutes, they could be heard, clambering down the flights of steel steps to the engine room. Brandt had brought with him one of the Port inspectors. A group of them then examined the scene of the accident while Meyer hurried off the ship to ring the police superintendant and for an ambulance. Another half hour passed before the medics arrived. Amazingly, the engineer was still breathing but was haemorrhaging and had to be rushed to hospital.
When the commotion had died down, Brandt and the Port inspectors listened to Ashby’s description of events – that the engineer had been on the Captain Stratos and was back from the dead. It seemed apparent that he was linked to the smuggling operation.
The discovery of Keo on the Marseillaise was sufficient excuse for the ship to be impounded. An hour later, the man from Interpol arrived and went into conference with Brandt. As for the Captain and crew, they were all arrested and taken to Cape Town lock-up for questioning.
“It won’t be long before the news gets out that the latest consignment of whatever they’ve brought in, isn’t going to arrive,” said the Super. “We’d better work fast to find the stuff or we’ll have them down here trying to get onto the ship.”
They headed to the cabins of the Captain, engineer and crew and went through each of them, one by one. Ashby had rightly guessed the identity of his attacker. In Keo’s cabin, there were two false passports and a genuine passport which showed that he’d left Athens in April 1979, had only returned once in March 1980 and had not been back since. Using the other passports, they were able to piece together his movements during the previous three years. He’d travelled extensively, mainly in west Africa – Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Namibia and South Africa. In most of these countries, there were civil wars raging ; freedom fighters and revolutionaries were receiving support from sources which the intelligence agencies were unable to track. Part of the mystery may now have been solved.
At the police station, the Captain of the Marseillaise refused to say anything to his captors but several of his crew did, as they were eager to get out of South Africa. In exchange for quick deportation, they revealed how they’d hidden large crates in the inner bulkhead of the forward holds. After the general cargo had been checked by customs for unloading, the crates were to be mixed in so that no-one would know the difference.
It took the police two hours to remove the crates as a small section of bulkhead had to be carefully removed. Eventually they recovered twenty crates of rifles, sub-machineguns, mortars, grenades and explosives, enough to equip a small army.
“I’ve seen these before,” said Brandt. “They’re mostly Czech. We’ve found them coming through the border with Namibia. They’ve been transported from further north, possibly Ghana, even Algeria. When these crates were included with the rest of the cargo, their friends would pick them up later on. Maybe the crew can give us more information about where it came from.”
Having seen the arms shipment and spoken to Brandt, the Interpol man left the ship to ring his Nigerian colleague. A warrant was to be issued for the arrest of Kikuna in Lagos. Later that day, word came back that Benin Maritime’s office had been cleaned out : there had been a tip-off before the police arrived and once again, the bird had flown.
“It's a shame they missed him,” said Brandt. “We could have tracked down the source of their supplier and closed down the operation for good.”
“We might still be able to do that,” said Ashby.
In the Captain’s cabin, there was the ship’s log, dating back six months. It contained nothing remarkable. The ship had been laid up for repairs in Freetown for several months and the Nigerian owners had arranged for a consignment of machine parts and scrap metal to be freighted to Cape Town. There were no other logs from earlier years.
A twenty four hour police guard was placed on the ship to prevent anyone getting on board. Ashby, Meyer and Brandt were allowed to finish their inspection. From this, it became evident that despite the re-fitting, the Marseillaise was unseaworthy.
“The Port Authority will probably tow her out to sea and sink her. That would be the least expensive option. No scrap metal dealer would pay anything for her,” said Meyer.
During the next few days Ashby continued going over the ship, to see whether there were any clues about the Marseillaise, its owners and its history. Every name plate, manufacturer’s label, serial number or other identification had been cut away, ripped out or somehow obliterated to prevent anyone finding out where the ship came from. It was indeed, a phantom ship.
Nevertheless, he’d succeeded in establishing a link between Benin Maritime and Christoforou – in the person of the Chief Engineer, Keo who still lay in hospital, in a coma. The doctors said that it was uncertain whether he’d recover from his injuries. That he’d survived at all was surprising. Brandt and the Superintendant were hoping Keo would return to consciousness : there were a list of things they wanted to ask him. In the meantime, a police guard sat outside his room.
Why Christoforou and Keo went to Lagos after the sinking of the Captain Stratos still remained a mystery. Yet the Marseillaise was connected to it and to Hellas Global’s arms smuggling.
“If we could find out more about the Marseillaise, it might tell us about the Lagos connection and what the Greeks were doing there,” said Ashby. “My theorem tells me there’s a link between Hellas Global, Christoforou, the smugglers, Lagos, Benin Maritime, the Captain Stratos and the Marseillaise – there is a common pattern....”
“Your theorem ?” asked Meyer. “You mean your ‘theory’ ?”
“No.....uh, never mind. Anyway, if we did a survey of the Marseillaise, we might be able to match that up with whatever the Exchange could tell us.” (The London Risk Exchange had been the source of information for everything to do with ships and the global shipping industry for centuries.) “They may have tried to disguise the ship but there must be something to connect it with the smugglers who are linked to Christoforou and Hellas Global. You can’t hide its actual build. There can’t be too many cargo carriers like this still afloat and that might help us with our search. Let’s hope London can give us the answer.”
They had a basic plan of the ship. After Meyer had finished examining and measuring everything, he wrote his survey report for Ashby which seemed to reveal nothing further.
At that stage, Ashby decided to ring Stefanides and Simon Wells to tell them what had been going on in Cape Town.
According to Stefanides, Christoforou had remained tight-lipped and the police had given up on him. The same applied to his family who said that they hadn’t heard from him in years. While this was utter fiction, Stefanides was encouraged to hear that Keo had been found.
“His wife told us a fine story, didn’t she ? We could’ve chased him for months, maybe years, trying to find him on the wrong ship. I think I’ll go and see her and tell her the news. She may have heard anyway. Then we’ll see what she has to say about her husband.”
When Ashby rang Simon Wells, he was confronted with the news that Plantation was in liquidation.
After he’d finished cursing Grenville and Black and the rest of the board, he asked Wells, “What do the lawyers say ? Does this mean the end of Plantation or is there a way out ?”
“It really depends on whether you can get categoric proof of the fraud. To use their words, the situation isn’t “irretrievable”. But the way things are going, now that Waring is in charge of the company, you haven’t got long. Oh and Chuck Fairweather of Texas Alamo Fire & Guaranty rang you. He said he will back you “one hundred per cent”.”
“Ha, he would say that – well, at least someone’s behind us. Anyway, let’s get cracking. Don’t mention to Waring that I rang you – as far as they’re concerned, I’m now an irrelevance.” And he described what had transpired since he’d left Lagos. “Somehow, Hellas Global are mixed up in all of this. It was no co-incidence that the Chief Engineer, Keo was on the Marseillaise.”
“A thought just occurred to me – there may be one way you could find out its history,” said Wells who had been a ship’s master himself years earlier. “From what you’ve said, she’s an old carrier, built in the fifties or just after the war – probably in Europe. Ships have a provenance, a chain of ownership going back to the time when they were launched. In those days, each shipyard had its own methods of construction, based on its own designs and marine architecture. Sometimes, these were influenced by the grades and quantities of finished steel that they could get from the steel mills and at the prices they wanted to pay. Things were different in the post-war world. In those says, there were often shortages of materials. Not all ships were constructed in the same way or using the same types of steel or to the same specifications. This was before the time when shipbuilding in the Far East became competitive on pricing, design and quality. There were many ways in which the building techniques of particular shipyards were deployed. It might depend on the types of plate steel used in constructing the hull. Sometimes, these varied but often, you can determine the age of a ship by its component parts and then trace them back to the yard and the steel mill.”
“The adjuster finished his report only today,” said Ashby. “If you wait a moment, I might be able to tell you the type of materials which went into its construction such as the hull plating.”
After hearing what Meyer had set out in his report and Ashby’s quotation of the technical details, Wells said he would speak with the LRE and one or two naval architects in Plymouth and Portsmouth and contact him again later that day.
After faxing a copy of Meyer’s report to Wells, Ashby spent the next four hours staring out from the balcony of his hotel room, wondering once more, whether he’d reached the end of the line. While he was buoyed by the discoveries on the Marseillaise, he still couldn’t fend off the claim of barratry which was as strong as ever. He still had to prove an illegal purpose – that Elefthriou, Thanakis, Christoforou, Keo and the crew were all involved in gun-running and that they’d conspired to scuttle the Captain Stratos.
At seven fifteen, the phone rang. Wells had been busy. He’d chased various people at the LRE and made a nuisance of himself to the Royal Naval Dockyards. Now, he thought he had the answer.
“The materials which were used to build the Marseillaise came from a British shipyard, Tyne & Clyde which went out of business years ago. There were only three cargo carriers they built which matched the dimensions, weight, structure, fittings and so on of the Marseillaise. All of them were launched in the early fifties. Two were scrapped in the seventies. The third ship, the Ayrton was sold in the mid seventies to an offshore company based in the Bahamas. The ship was re-named and re-fitted but apparently later capsized. And its name was.....the Aegean Star.”
Plantation A Legal Thriller Page 97