On their way across the foreshore she was careful where she walked, reeling off the names of carcinogenic chemicals and heavy metals that were converting the beach into what she called a toxic swamp, paying little attention to Coburn until he interrupted her to ask how many ships were processed here each year.
‘Around forty,’ she said. ‘A few years ago it used to be closer to seventy. The yard owners are still making a fortune though. They can make a profit of nearly two million American dollars from a single ship.’ She pointed ahead. ‘More from a big one like the Rybinsk.’
Only twice before had Coburn been this close to a supertanker, on both occasions when he’d been out with Hari on night raids in the Strait of Malacca. Then, viewed in the dark from the deck of a forty-foot launch, the ships had seemed frighteningly large, enormous slab-sided walls of steel sliding by in the blackness as though they’d go on forever.
But the Rybinsk wasn’t just large; it was gigantic. Nor was it at sea weighed down by thousands of tons of crude in tanks below its waterline. It was beached; its exposed hull stretching skywards from keel to deck to a height that he guessed was at least a hundred feet.
Dwarfed by the size of the vessel and looking more like ants than men, lines of Bangladeshis were entering and leaving through the huge hole that had been opened up in the starboard side, but the majority of the disassembly work was being undertaken near the bow on the main deck where, high above him amidst cascades of bright red sparks, scores of men were busy salvaging cargo pumps and cutting up lengths of large-diameter steel piping.
The girl was saying something, struggling to make herself heard above the din of the hammering. ‘We’re lucky,’ she shouted. ‘They haven’t started on the deckhouse yet.’
She took a quick glance at the incoming tide, then led him over to the foot of one of half-a-dozen sets of fabricated steel steps that had been welded to the hull. ‘You go up ahead of me,’ she shouted.
In cooler conditions it would have been an easy enough climb. But at this time of year, with waves of heat rippling off the side of the ship, the experience was thoroughly unpleasant — so much so that by the time she joined him at the top she was drenched in sweat and breathing hard.
‘How’s the leg holding up?’ Now they were on deck and away from the worst of the noise he was able to ask without raising his voice.
‘All right. Do you want to go straight to the cabins?’
‘Might as well. If you know where they are I’ll just follow you.’ He switched on the Geiger counter, uncertain of what the background level of radiation was going to be, but expecting it to be high.
It was, but for a ship that had spent its entire life filled with oil that had been pumped out of the ground from wells all over the world, the reading didn’t seem too bad.
Except for a marginal increase in the level as he approached an open hatch that led into the deckhouse there was little indication that he was on the right track.
‘The cabins are on two upper decks beneath the bridge,’ she said. ‘But to reach the companionway we have to go down this corridor to the dining-room and galley.’
Hatches along the corridor led to what could once have been a laundry and a stripped-out washroom littered with cigarette ends, old newspapers and centrefolds torn from copies of a Russian girly magazine called Medved.
Facing the laundry was a larger room equipped with a urinal and a row of toilet cubicles from which the pipework, the doors and even the hinges had been salvaged.
The galley and dining-room were in a similar state. Nothing of any value remained in either of them. Coburn, though, had barely noticed. Instead, endeavouring not to be distracted by a sudden increase in the frequency of the clicks from his Geiger counter, his attention was focused on a crude hole in the bulkhead that formed the dining-room’s rear wall.
Six feet wide and high enough for a man to crawl through, the hole looked as though it had been flame-cut by someone in a hurry, and when he placed his hand on the surrounding steel it was still quite warm.
Heather had started backing away, evidently alarmed by what had become an urgent and almost continuous clicking from the Geiger counter.
‘It’s OK.’ He smiled at her. ‘It’s not that serious. Just because we’re picking up radiation it doesn’t mean we’re getting a dose that’s going to make us glow in the dark.’
She was unconvinced. ‘What does it mean then?’
‘I don’t know yet.’ He took the flashlight from her. ‘Probably that whatever was behind this bulkhead isn’t here any more.’
‘Because those men in the truck took it away with them?’
‘They didn’t come here for nothing.’ Coburn switched off the Geiger counter and knelt down. ‘Let’s see if we’re too late.’
Illuminated in the beam of the flashlight, two identical wooden crates were standing on the floor inside the cavity. Separated by a gap where a third one could have been, they were the size of small coffins, each provided with a rope handle and bearing a cardboard consignment label printed in what he thought was Russian.
‘What are they?’ She knelt down beside him. ‘What do you think’s inside them?’
‘Who knows.’ Apart from the corner of another label and some fresh wood shavings that could have resulted from the rough handling the missing crate had received during its removal, there was nothing that might provide a clue.
He retrieved the piece of label then ripped off the other two and handed them out to her. ‘Hang on to those,’ he said. ‘And hold the light for me. I’ll pull out the crates one at a time.’
He’d been over optimistic. On his knees, in such a confined space, he was unable to move either of them.
‘Are they too heavy?’ She put down the flashlight.
‘They are for me. See if you can find a piece of steel I can use to lever off the lids.’
‘Won’t that be dangerous?’
‘Not if we’re quick. The crew of the Rybinsk had three weeks of exposure. This is only going to take us five minutes.’ He withdrew his head from the hole. ‘I’m pretty sure the hot stuff is long gone. All we’ve got here is a bit of residual radiation.’
While she was away he made a closer examination of the diningroom, discovering that in order to provide a reasonably undetectable hiding place for the crates, the whole of the bulkhead had been replaced. The welds around the edges were new, the panel was made of thinner steel than the original and, unlike the other walls which were stained with nicotine and streaked with congealed fat from the galley, the new bulkhead was disfigured only by recent heat from the cutting torch and the hole itself.
He was reconsidering the wisdom of opening up a crate when she limped back into the room with a large crowbar in her hands.
‘Will this do?’ She gave it to him.
‘Could be a bit big.’ This time he worked from the outside of the cavity, selecting the left-hand crate and using the weight of the crowbar first to create an opening and then to lever up the lid until the gap was large enough for him to insert the flashlight.
Inside, shielded from any radiation by a thin lead liner, the crate was packed with guns — Russian-made Kalashnikov rifles, still in their factory grease, and wrapped in layers of vapour-inhibiting paper.
‘What can you see?’ she asked. ‘Tell me. I want to know.’
‘Guns.’ He wasn’t sure whether to be surprised or not. ‘Lots of AK47s worth lots of money.’
‘That doesn’t make sense. If they’re worth a lot of money, why did those men leave them behind?’
‘Maybe because they couldn’t shift the crates either, or because they got interrupted by the Bangladeshi Army. They wouldn’t have cared about the guns anyway — not once they’d got their hands on the crate they’d come to get. If it was full of nuclear material they’d have just decided to cut their losses and take off.’