Chapter 105
The name had been his nemesis.
If his rough deciphering of the letters was correct, he may have cornered the ghost he’d chased over two continents – between London, Athens, Lagos, Cape Town and Freetown.
Before anything else, he needed to establish whether it really was the Stratos or not. The name plate in the wheelhouse mightn’t mean anything at all. It might easily have been salvaged from the real Captain Stratos before it was sunk by Christoforou and kept as a souvenir. Ashby imagined the Greek laughing over the incident. The nameplate could turn out to be nothing – yet again.
Verifying the ship’s identity would involve completing the same survey exercise which Meyer had carried out on the Marseillaise. Once they had that information, Simon Wells could substantiate what they’d found on provenance, dimensions, structure and build.
When the Sergeant had at last climbed all the way to the bridge and was in the wheelhouse, Ashby said to him, “What do you think of that ?” and pointed to the plaque and the lettering.
“Ha, ha – it's Russian – I can’t read Russian.”
“It isn’t Russian – it's Greek.”
“You know Greek ?”
“Not much modern Greek but I know some letters in ancient Greek.”
“They’re different, aren’t they ?”
“Some are and some aren’t. Letters from the ancient Greek alphabet are still used in maths today. Look at this second word – seven letters – Sigma – an ‘S’. Then a ‘T’. I think that’s the same letter as in English. Then something. Then an Alpha – ‘A’. Then another ‘T’. Then an ‘O’, again I think it's the same as in English. Then another Sigma – ‘S’. If the third letter is an ‘R’, altogether, it would say ‘Stratos’.
“You think this ship is the Captain Stratos ? But wasn’t it supposed to have sunk ?”
“Correct – supposed to have sunk. But this could be it. I had a look around the bridge before you came up. The officers must have been Greek and by the look of it, so was the Captain.”
“What was his name again ?”
“Christoforou.”
“Yes, that was it. So, instead of being sunk, you think that he sailed this ship here to Freetown to be used for gun-running. Is that what happened ?”
“Maybe. But it's essential I get the loss adjuster to come back and do a complete report on what we’ve found. Would it be possible for you to radio someone at your station to get a message to him ? He should still be at his hotel – he had a flight to Lagos booked for this afternoon. We need him to head straight back here to the breaker’s yard – with his camera.”
For the next three days, Ashby, the loss adjuster, Jonathon Mzenga and a police team went over the entire ship, taking hundreds of photographs, noting serial numbers on fittings and machinery and collecting what they found in some of the cabins.
When they’d finished, Mzenga worked through the night, typing up the record of his inspection. The next morning, it was faxed to Simon Wells who was astounded at the discovery, as were Meredith and Riordan.
From all of the documentary evidence they’d received from Ridgeford Anthony and Hellas Global for the hearing, it seemed likely that the vessel was indeed, the Captain Stratos. To make doubly sure, Wells went to the library at the LRE and searched through the marine registers and directories. In all of these, the information from Freetown matched the official data and was reliable.
Ashby ordered an embargo on telling anyone what they had found and to be especially careful inside Plantation. He wasn’t to know that Black and Grenville had an arrangement with Waring that all faxes were to be delivered to them in the first instance. Ashby’s intention was to have Elefthriou and Thanakis arrested but he knew that issuing warrants would take time. He also wasn’t to know that the Greeks had already disappeared.
In the interim, Meredith and Riordan lost no time preparing a strike-out application to eliminate Hellas Global’s claim altogether. There was also the small matter of a Companies Court judge restoring Plantation’s name to the register of companies : if Hedley’s order requiring twenty million pounds to be paid into court was invalid and the claim on which it was based was fraudulent, there could be no default judgment. In any event, Ransome, Garrick and Ridgefords could not stand in the way.
Although Kikuna refused to say anything, it was apparent that the weapons had merely been stored on the Provencale. When they had finished painting and re-fitting the Captain Stratos, the Provencale was to be sunk and the Stratos was to assume its identity. Like the original Marseillaise before it, the Provencale’s bulkheads were so decayed that it had no scrap value ; the easiest way to dispose of it was to sink it.
One week after the inspection was completed, the site was mysteriously destroyed. Both of the ships were blown to pieces. The police in Freetown suspected the South Africans. (Their suspicions were correct but they couldn’t prove it.) Brandt had arranged for a special forces squad secretly to enter Sierra Leone. They’d made sure that the ANC couldn’t use the ships to smuggle arms any more.
The irony was therefore that shortly after Ashby had discovered it, the Captain Stratos really was destroyed, not on the sea floor of the North Atlantic but in huge segments rusting away on the coast of Sierra Leone.
Plantation A Legal Thriller Page 105