Marine G SBS

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  The metallic clang of the grappling hooks on the stern rail was lost in the rumble of the oil-tanker’s engines and the swish of her passage through the ocean swell. For the seven young Vietnamese in the stolen speedboat the next few moments spent trying to position themselves alongside the inviting bamboo ladders were anxious ones. However, no enquiring silhouette appeared on the deck above them, and eventually a combination of luck and judgement produced the desired juxtaposition. Two of the youths began rapidly climbing the fifty-foot wall of the tanker’s stern.

  At the top they paused briefly, eyes raised above the parapet, before slipping across the rails in unison. Having drawn their shiny new guns, they scoured the dimly lit poop deck for a few moments and then signalled down to the speedboat for reinforcements.

  Another four men clambered over the rail, grins breaking out on their faces now that the hard part was over. The leader took them off in search of a route up to the bridge, walking on his toes the way ninjas do in the movies.

  They came to an auspicious-looking door in the superstructure, and filed inside, the sound of their collective breathing suddenly audible. A metal stairway beckoned, but before they could start up, someone else started down, half running, to judge by the clattering urgency of the footfalls. The leader had no time to think, no time to do anything but see the surprised face, raise the pistol and pull the trigger.

  The noise sounded deafening in the enclosed space, and seemed to echo wildly, like a ricocheting bullet. The sailor, a Malay or Filipino, collapsed on to his back and then slid down the stairs, landing at their feet with a bullet hole in his forehead and a glassy stare of incomprehension.

  For a moment the leader looked as stunned as the other youths by his accuracy of shot, but he quickly recovered, flexing the gun and flashing an arrogant grin at his followers before leading the way up the stairs.

  On the bridge of the Liberian-flagged Antares Captain Martin Lansing had just been told that there was a speedboat hanging off his starboard stern, and had immediately assumed the worst. One of the world’s black spots for modern piracy, the Singapore Straits rivalled the north-east coastline of Brazil and the anchorages of West Africa, and in recent years no ship, no matter how large, could be considered safe from attack. The shot was only dimly audible on the bridge, and in other circumstances might well have been mistaken for something else. Here and now, however, it simply removed any lingering doubts.

  ‘Get out a distress call,’ Lansing told Sánchez, his Mexican radio officer.

  He could see the distant lights of Singapore off the starboard bow, still shining brightly at two in the morning. Maybe the mayday signal would elicit a practical response, but Lansing didn’t feel too optimistic. In Hong Kong a couple of months earlier an old friend had recounted the story of another ship in this situation, whose captain had been told: ‘Sorry, we’d love to help, but we don’t actually have anything to help you with.’

  Lansing kept a revolver in the adjoining cabin, but he had no intention of using it. The latest guidelines advised no resistance, and with good reason – once armed pirates were aboard your ship there was no way to fight them. The last captain to try had been shot in the head, along with two of his crew. Merchant seamen were not soldiers.

  He should caution the rest of his crew, Lansing suddenly realized, but before he could act on the thought the first of the hijackers appeared in the bridge doorway, revolver in hand. At the same moment Sánchez emerged from the adjoining radio room, and Lansing caught a glimpse of a smile on the man’s face before the sight of the intruders wiped it away.

  Almost thirty-five miles to the east of the Antares, and about eight miles north of the Indonesian island of Batam, an innocent-looking sampan rocked to and fro in the waters of the strait. Several items of clothing hung on the line which had been raised above the craft’s covered section, but from a distance it was not possible to read the labels, most of which bore the exotic brand names of C&A and Marks & Spencer. Nor was it obvious to a casual glance that the sampan boasted an impressive array of communications equipment and an engine capable of propelling the craft at an almost unseemly twenty-five knots.

  The boat’s occupants, though, were clearly neither Chinese nor Malay.

  ‘They’ve received a distress call,’ Lieutenant Robert Cafell shouted out through the covered section’s open doorway.

  ‘Where?’ Captain Callum Marker and Corporal Stuart Finn asked in unison. Both men were sitting on the foredeck, along with the fourth member of the team, Corporal Ian Dubery.

  There was a short pause.

  ‘In the Phillip Channel,’ Cafell replied, disgust in his voice.

  ‘Fuck,’ Finn said. ‘Four fucking nights and the locals get all the fun.’

  ‘So it goes,’ Marker muttered, though he felt equally disappointed. In the week since the Special Boat Squadron team had arrived in Singapore they had seen enough bureaucratic in-fighting to last them a lifetime, but precious little in the way of real action. Marker suspected that the team’s current position, way out at the eastern end of the pirates’ normal range of operations, had been chosen as a means of minimizing their chances of active involvement. Malaysia and Singapore had been fully independent for several decades now, but the colonial past was far from forgotten, and a lingering resentment of the white races persisted. He could understand the reasons why, but that didn’t make it any less irritating to be on the receiving end. They had, after all, been invited out East to share their expertise.

  It was the usual international cock-up. The SBS team’s official host was the new computerized piracy centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but this centre was financed internationally, and each donor expected a say in how the money was spent. Marker knew this particular crack-down was being funded for the most part by the shipowners’ International Maritime Federation, the International Chamber of Commerce’s Maritime Bureau and a bevy of shipping insurance companies, Lloyd’s of London prominent among them.

  The operation itself was being conducted in a stretch of ocean where the maritime boundaries of three nations – and three national egos – rubbed up against each other in one of the world’s busiest shipping channels. One of these nations – Indonesia – had been neither invited to nor informed of the exercise now in progress. There was a very simple reason for this – the Indonesian naval forces in the area were known to have turned a blind eye to the recent epidemic of piracy, and were suspected of worse – of being actively involved.

  So the flotilla of craft strung out along the Straits was manned by the Singapore Maritime Police, the Singapore naval defence forces, their Malaysian equivalents and, representing world order in general and the interests of Western financial concerns in particular, Britain’s SBS.

  And up until a few moments ago the whole business had looked and felt like one of those well-intentioned ideas whose time had not yet come. Now it seemed as if someone had finally swum into the waiting net.

  ‘What now, boss?’ Cafell asked from inside the covered section.

  ‘Just keep listening,’ Marker told him. ‘They might come our way.’

  ‘Yeah, and Arsenal might start playing attractive football,’ Finn said sourly.

  Marker smiled. The younger man was probably right. If the pirates’ home base was hidden somewhere out in the western reaches of the Riau Islands, then they would have presumably boarded the Antares a couple of hours earlier. It looked like another quiet night for the SBS team.

  On the tanker’s bridge three
of the Vietnamese were holding guns on Lansing, Sánchez and two other members of the crew whom they had collected en route. The other four hijackers had gone to secure the remainder of the eleven-man crew in their sleeping quarters. Most ominously, the leader, whose grasp of English was less than adequate, had refused to allow anyone near the controls. When Lansing had explained that the ship must either be stopped or guided, the leader had simply ignored him. One of the pirates had actually giggled, like a small boy with a secret to savour.

  By Lansing’s estimation they had less than an hour to spare before the Antares ploughed into one of the eastern islands of the Riau Archipelago and disgorged enough oil to wipe out half the local ecology. Since the fully loaded ship would need almost half that time to reach a dead halt the situation was rapidly becoming serious. And the recent guidelines’ instruction to play for time once the distress signal had been sent was seeming less and less appropriate.

  One of the hijackers burst back on to the bridge, and fired several indecipherable sentences at the leader. The latter, apparently satisfied, turned to Lansing. ‘Crew all prisoners,’ he said. ‘Now, show safe.’ He waved the gun to reinforce his demand, and Lansing noticed for the first time that the safety-catch was off.

  ‘It’s in my cabin – this way,’ he said, starting slowly for the door. Guidelines for dealing with pirates were all very well, but this lot were not much beyond adolescence. Even the leader, who sported a wispy goatee, seemed barely out of his teens. Lansing found himself wishing that there was something of value inside the safe.

  So, apparently, did the pirates’ leader. After rummaging among the worthless papers it contained, he jerked round angrily, raising the revolver and pushing the barrel to within a few inches of Lansing’s nose. ‘Safe,’ he repeated.

  ‘This is the safe,’ Lansing told him.

  ‘Gems,’ the man said. ‘Gems.’

  ‘There are no gems. This is an oil-tanker.’

  ‘You . . .’ the man began, but his vocabulary didn’t include the words he needed, and as his hand began to shake with frustration the gun went off, sending a bullet through the centre of the tanker captain’s brain.

  There was a moment of silent surprise, and then the Vietnamese cursed, swung a foot at the crumpled corpse, and abruptly started back towards the bridge. How was this possible? he asked himself. The information had seemed so precise, and up until this moment everything had gone so perfectly. It felt almost like a betrayal, but if that was the case he couldn’t begin to imagine why.

  Back on the bridge the three crewmen eyed his return with frightened eyes, but he was more concerned with the growing doubt he saw in the faces of his followers. This was not what he had promised them.

  ‘Look!’ one of his men suddenly shouted, pointing through the starboard window.

  In the distance two pinpoints of light seemed to be converging on the tanker.

  The bastards had sent a distress call. The leader coldly turned his revolver on the Mexican and pulled the trigger. The two other crewmen started to plead – but to no avail. One witness would be one too many.

  On the customized sampan Finn had just come to relieve Cafell in the ‘radio room’ when the container ship made its first appearance on the radar screen. It was probably heading for Singapore, one last port of call before sailing west with another load of assorted high-tech treasure. The SBS team had watched a steady stream of such ships pass through the Straits during the past few days and nights, and most of those travelling west seemed appreciably lower in the water than those travelling east. It was a sign of the times.

  Once they had established eye contact, this particular ship proved no exception, for the white superstructure and dark funnel, set alongside each other to aft, seemed almost dwarfed by the row upon row of piled containers on the long forward deck. Somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand tonnes, it was travelling at around twenty knots and visibly slowing as it entered the mouth of the Straits.

  It was also about to receive company. No other craft was visible to the naked eye, but the flickering trace on the radar scanner could only be a small boat rapidly closing on the container ship. Either that, Finn thought, or he’d just tracked the biggest, fastest flying fish the world had ever seen. Or Dawn French was out windsurfing.

  ‘Boss,’ he called out softly, ‘come and have a look at this.’

  Marker stood at his shoulder for a moment, watching the screen. ‘What’s happening with the other lot?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘They’re in pursuit. In a northerly direction. Probably headed back towards Singapore.’

  ‘Two attacks in one night seems like a bit too much of a coincidence,’ Marker murmured, as much to himself as to Finn.

  The young Londoner raised an eyebrow. ‘Meaning?’

  Marker shrugged. ‘Don’t know. But the first attack certainly worked as a diversion, even if it wasn’t intended as one . . .’

  ‘Shall I let our gallant allies in on the secret?’ Finn asked.

  ‘No,’ Marker said. The two dots on the radar screen had now merged into one. ‘If the first attack was a diversion, then Long John Silver out there will be listening in to make sure it’s worked. Let’s foster his illusions for a while.’

  On the bridge of the container ship Ocean Carousel Captain Spiros Lamrakis was staring out along the length of his fully loaded ship, and wondering what was happening further into the Straits. His radio operator had picked up the distress call from the Antares, and handed it on to the captain more as a matter of interest than of practical value. Even if there had been any assistance they could offer the beleaguered tanker, both men knew that they were too far away to offer it. ‘There but for fortune,’ the American had said, leaving Lamrakis with a sense of relief which was only vaguely tinged with guilt.

  It was like airline crashes, he thought, staring out at the dark sea. Each time there was one, he felt a little safer flying. Lightning usually had the decency to wait a while before it struck again in the same place.

  He turned his mind back to the topic which had been occupying it before the distress call – his sixteen-year-old son. He suspected it would have been hard enough for a father who lived at home to influence the boy’s behaviour for the better, let alone a father who spent more than half each year at sea. But as her latest letter made clear, his wife was rapidly reaching the end of her patience with the boy, and Lamrakis had the distinct feeling that he had to either come up with something brilliant or accept a permanent rift in the family.

  He wondered if the captain of the tanker up ahead had a son.

  Unknown to Lamrakis, the Ocean Carousel had already been boarded by more than a dozen armed men. These were not the children of unwanted Vietnamese migrants, sucked into violent crime by vicious discrimination and the collapse of their parents’ world. These were professionals: members of the Indonesian armed forces by day, pirates by night. They had access to the most modern weaponry and equipment, intelligence of sailings and cargoes which would have made Francis Drake green with envy, and a territorial base which could not be violated by the forces of international law and order without risking a major war.

  And as Lamrakis would soon discover, they were not interested in small pickings. These pirates had not come simply to steal his cargo – they had come to steal his ship too.

  Aboard the sampan the SBS men were taking turns keeping the nightscope on the distant container ship. At first it seemed as if the rendezvous with the smaller vessel might have been innocent after all, for there was no change in the ship’s course or speed, no sign that anything untoward had occurred. Perhaps, Marker mused, the container ship’s captain was new to these waters, and had asked for a pilot. But in that case the small boat had come from the wrong direction . . .

  ‘She’s turning to port,’ Finn announced.

  ‘She’s heading for the Riau Channel,’ Cafell said, looking enquiringly at Marker.

  ‘In that case . . .’ Marker began.

  ‘I’m picking up
a message from command,’ Dubery interrupted him from inside the covered section.

  The other three waited, their eyes on the distant silhouette of the container ship.

  ‘They’re alerting the land forces on Singapore,’ Dubery reported. ‘And they’ve just boarded the tanker. Several of the crew are dead. The op’s being abandoned for the night.’

  ‘Acknowledge,’ Marker told him, ‘and tell them we’re on our way in.’ He smiled grimly at the other two. ‘Just in case anyone’s listening in,’ he explained. ‘Now let’s get this thing moving. Rob, take the wheel. Keep the island between us and them. Finn, take lookout. I’ll start thinking up excuses for being in Indonesian waters with a souped-up sampan.’

  ‘Practising for the Olympics,’ Finn suggested. ‘Sampan foursomes.’

  ‘Looking for Michael Palin?’ Cafell offered.

  Marker sighed. ‘You know what I like about working with Ian?’ he asked the other two. ‘He sometimes has nothing to say.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Cafell said with a grin.

  ‘I’m hurt now,’ Finn muttered.

  Marker smiled and sat back with his hands behind his head. The four of them made a good team: Cafell with his cheerful practicality and navigational skills, Dubery with his dependability and boat-handling, Finn... well, Finn was clever, he was curious, and as far as Marker could tell he wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything.

  They had first worked together the previous summer. Marker and Cafell had been sent to the Turks and Caicos Islands in the West Indies to investigate possible drug smuggling and the disappearance of a retired SBS officer. They had ended up uncovering a trade in spare parts for transplant surgery, a trail of blood which originated in a Haitian prison orphanage and ended on the operating tables of a chain of Florida hospitals. As the investigation had proceeded, reinforcements had been deemed necessary, and Dubery and Finn had been flown out from England. The four-man team had put a stop to the trade, and most of the principals were now either dead or behind bars in the US. All except the head honcho, who had managed to distance himself from the whole business.