‘Oh. I didn’t realize. That’s six months’ wages for a shipyard worker. So, no, they won’t be there any more. They’ll have been unloaded overnight and sold.’
‘Let me worry about that.’ O’Halloran was as anxious to end the conversation as he was to end the meeting. ‘Nice to have met you, Mr Coburn,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch. Good hunting in the Strait.’ Without offering to shake hands he went to hold the door open for Heather.
The American’s abruptness had irritated her. Before leaving the room, she made a point of ignoring him and came over to say goodbye to Coburn.
‘Thank you for yesterday,’ she said. ‘I hope everything turns out all right for you.’
He hoped so too. ‘If you’re ever in Singapore, give me a ring,’ he said. ‘The IMB can tell you where to find me.’
‘Yes, I will. Goodbye.’
After she’d gone, for a while he stayed where he was, wondering why he hadn’t wanted to walk with her to the car-park, but in the end deciding that he had more important things to think about.
How important they were was difficult to judge, but his drive back across town helped clarify his thoughts, and by the time he reached his hotel he had some idea of how best to tackle the new problem he was facing, and had convinced himself that the prospect of getting to know Heather Cameron had always been more imaginary than it had been real.
In the hotel lobby he picked up copies of two English language newspapers, then went to his room intending to telephone London right away.
He was preparing to make the call, and was trying to work out whether or not the IMB office would have closed for the day when he caught sight of the headline and leading article on the front page of the Bangladesh Observer:
Nine shipyard workers and eight members of the Bangladeshi Army are dead following yesterday’s unprecedented raid by armed men on the beached Russian tanker Rybinsk in shipyard number four. The deaths are in addition to those of six Malaysian crewmen who arrived at Fauzdarhat on board the Rybinsk a week ago.
According to US sources, the fatalities are the result of North Korea’s continuing attempts to obtain illegal quantities of uranium or plutonium, and a blatant violation of the 2007 agreement which requires the Pyongyang government to suspend all work on nuclear weapons.
It now seems certain that a week-long anti-piracy sweep undertaken by Japanese authorities in May of this year has had unintended and tragic consequences. By interrupting a North Korean plan to rendezvous with the Rybinsk at sea, radioactive material concealed on board was not recovered on schedule, and remained in place for the entire duration of the tanker’s voyage from Vladivostok to Fauzdarhat.
This in turn caused the deaths of the crew who were exposed to high levels of radiation over an extended period of time, and ultimately forced Pyongyang to recover the nuclear shipment by mounting yesterday’s fatal raid.
Speaking by telephone from Calcutta last night, the Indian owner of the yard, Mr Azim Javed, says he is deeply shocked by events. He is flying to Chittagong today and will be seeing what can be done to assist the families of the victims.
In the meantime, Pyongyang has not responded to growing outrage in other countries. The United States in particular are said to be extremely concerned by North Korea’s continued disregard of its obligations under a recognized international treaty.
Coburn read through the article twice, more surprised by the speed at which the press had got hold of the story than he was about the absence of information on the guns and the lack of comment on how young some of the shipyard victims had been.
To see if any of the broadcast networks were carrying the story he switched on the television, selecting CNN as the channel he thought would be most likely covering the raid.
Rather as he’d expected, a news programme was in progress in which a young woman was interviewing a distinguished-looking, middle-aged man with silver hair who, according to a ribbon crawling across the bottom of the screen, was retired US Brigadier George Shriver from some organization called The Free America League.
The brigadier’s body language was as patronizing as his manner — traits that Coburn had seen before in Iraq when generals and politicians had visited on what were ostensibly fact-finding missions, but which in reality had been poorly received attempts to boost the morale of the US troops.
The BBC World Service had better coverage, but the reports added nothing to what he already knew, and although the other newspaper had a half-page picture of the Rybinsk, and an eyewitness account of the incident provided by a shipyard worker, there was no fresh information in that either.
Having decided it was probably too late to phone London now, for no good reason he could think of, for the next ten minutes he continued watching the interview with the brigadier, wondering if the story had been deliberately leaked by O’Halloran’s department, but soon becoming disenchanted by the familiar rhetoric about the dangers facing the US, and how the only means of protecting the American people was by turning North Korea into a nuclear wasteland.
Annoyed with himself for bothering to listen, he switched off the TV and except for taking a shower and eating dinner alone in the hotel restaurant, spent the remainder of the day doing nothing at all.
By the next morning, in spite of a vague feeling that there might be more behind the voyage of the Rybinsk than O’Halloran thought there was, he was ready to make his call to London, and by the morning after that, having had his future spelled out in a way that left him with no options if he wanted to keep his job, he was pleased to be getting out of Chittagong and equally pleased to be leaving Bangladesh.
For a weekday, the airport was reasonably quiet when he went through check-in, and at gate 17 the departure lounge for his flight was no more than half full.
The plane too was comparatively empty, giving him the opportunity to search for a row of seats where he could have three of them to himself.
He was waiting for a flight attendant to finish pushing her trolley down the aisle when he heard someone call his name.
It was Heather Cameron.
She was sitting by the window of an otherwise unoccupied row he’d just walked past, and was waving to attract his attention.
Hoping she wasn’t going to be stupid enough to pretend this was some kind of coincidence he went to sit beside her while he waited for an explanation.
She attempted a smile. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’
‘Depends. What are you doing on this flight?’
‘It’s sort of complicated.’ She leaned back and tried to make herself relax. ‘Mostly it’s because I’ve lost my job at Fauzdarhat. You see, by the time I got back to the beach my place had been broken into and trashed. One of the children told me my container is going to be used for storing asbestos fibre.’
‘Message from the shipyard owners?’
She nodded. ‘They blame me for what happened. They think that if I hadn’t made a fuss about the crew of the Rybinsk, those boys wouldn’t have been killed. I’ve been more or less run out of town, I suppose.’
‘How does that explain why you’re going to Singapore?’
‘It doesn’t. Well, not by itself it doesn’t. If you’ll stop asking questions for a minute I’ll tell you. Once I’d realized I couldn’t work at the beach any more, instead of waiting for UNICEF to send me somewhere I didn’t want to go, I thought I’d see if I could get myself reassigned to an interesting-sounding place I’d heard about — you know, because it would be a change.’
‘And that’s Singapore, is it?’