Mac saw Spikey, and turned to Nagai, said, ‘Captain, could you tell them something for me?’
When Nagai had fi nished translating, the crew was in an uproar.
Tears, pictures of children being waved at Nagai. Mac had no Japanese but the general feeling was: Get me the fuck off this fl oating freak show!
Mac looked for the guilty one. He wasn’t there. The Green Berets held their line, guns shouldered, the crew begging with them. The words weren’t understood, but the eyes pleaded – one working man to another – to take them off this death ship.
Mac had laid it on pretty thick, describing what nerve agent did, how it killed you and how irreversible it was once it was out of its bottle.
Sawtell’s men looked at Mac. Sweat dripped off top lips.
Mac looked at Nagai, said, ‘Thanks, Captain. We’re going to search the decks. Crew seems okay.’
‘Did we have to do it like that?’ asked Sawtell as they got to the elevator.
Mac nodded his head. ‘Only way to do it, mate. If any one of the blokes was in on it, they’d be giving up their own mothers by now.
No seaman will go along with that caper once they know what they’re sailing on.’
Mac looked up at the main stack of container boxes. It was like a small building at sea. The ship wallowed and Mac had to distribute his weight not to fall. He saw what Nagai and Tokada had told him: three containers at two o’clock were not closed off by lashing or bracing. He and the others had been on the Hokkaido Spirit for thirty-fi ve minutes. The respirator would be out of air soon.
There were huge steel ladders stowed lengthwise beside the gantry that ran bow-stern down each side of the container mountain. They were the lashing ladders. Stevedores used sus pended cages to do the lashing in port but at sea the crews used the ladders for emergency work. Mac pointed, rasped through his mouthpiece to Alden. ‘Let’s get a bloke up there.’
It took three of the Twentieth’s science guys to pick up the ladder and set it where it had to go. Mac and Alden held the feet of the thing which had large neoprene pads on the bottom. They couldn’t quite get the angle they wanted. It stood almost upright and felt incredibly unsafe.
The soldier made good time for a bloke in a bio-hazard. He was rasping too by the time he got to the top. If it felt unstable at the feet, the top of the ladder must have been swinging like a metronome. Mac didn’t like it, said to Alden, ‘Poor bastard must have wondered why he didn’t bring his life vest rather than the China Syndrome costume.’
The bloke up the ladder heard that and chuckled. Alden was about to pull him down when something came in on his radio.
Alden looked out at Mac through the Level-A hood and the glass mask. Held up his hand for quiet.
‘Manila International found the orphan box. Should have been on the Golden Serpent.’
Mac’s heart jumped a little. ‘Where to?’
‘Singapore,’ said Alden.
CHAPTER 31
The Chinook could cruise at a little under two hundred miles per hour – pretty quick for a lumbering freight donkey, but still about ten mph faster than the smaller Black Hawk. Neither of the aircraft had much more than two hundred miles range in the tank. So the fi rst thing Hatfi eld ordered when they were back over the sides was a fuel stop at Surabaya Naval Base.
Mac was soaked with sweat, tasting rubber deep in his lungs.
He stood in line to get de-suited as everyone took turns helping the other guy out of the suits. The other blokes kept on their fi rst layer of protections, the coveralls. This was just the beginning of their day.
The situation room was going crazy. The brass in Manila and Honolulu screamed over the air phone to get the hell into Singapore.
Yesterday.
The screens showed the Golden Serpent alongside a landmass. When Mac asked Don where the ship was, he slumped his face down on his hands. ‘Port of Singapore. Keppel Terminal.’
Hatfi eld had his BDU jacket off, going ape into his phone.
‘I don’t give a shit, you hear me?! I have one hundred and eighty bombs containing nerve agent sitting in a container on that ship!’
Mac saw a new map on the situation table. It was of the south side of Singapore Island. A steel marker – like a stainless-steel chess piece – sat on an area called Keppel Terminal. It was just a few blocks from Cantonment Road. Straight up the hill were the big residential suburbs of Queenstown and Newton. Behind it were the skyscrapers, the hotels, banks and shipping companies. Keppel was on the doorstep of Singapore city.
Hatfi eld wasn’t getting through to someone. He was trying to explain that the Twentieth was ninety minutes away at least and the Singapore government had to go to what he called Em-Con -
Emergency Contingency. His folder said Singapore had one. The bloke on the other end had no idea what Hatfi eld was on about.
The air phone crackled with breathless, panicked American voices followed by laidback Singaporean accents saying, ‘Yeah. Right.
Uh-huh. Yeah.’
Brown worked his panels like a piano player. He was kicking something upstairs, but while CINCPAC in Manila had become involved on a joint military level, nothing seemed to be happening.
‘I need to speak with the security chief,’ Hatfi eld blared into his phone. ‘Okay, okay, the vice-president of security, whatever. I – I know what time of the goddamn morning it is, thank you very much.
What? Hatfi eld! General Louis Hatfi eld, United States Army!’
The atmosphere in the situation room was pandemonium. The Twentieth was a classifi ed operation, reports on their operations didn’t go before house committees, they weren’t picked apart on CNN. Their only mission was to respond to any CBNRE emergency at any time, anywhere in the world. Their budget wasn’t limitless but it was in the same deep-pocket league as Delta Force and the geo-spatial guys. Now they had American VX nerve agent wrapped in American CL-20 and a rogue American spook running it.
And the whole freak show had sailed into the Port of Singapore, the world’s busiest port.
Mac felt the revs coming up and the massive surge of turbine exhaust and shrieking of horsepower as the Chinook lifted away from Surabaya Naval Base.
Hatfi eld barely noticed. He was a dynamo.
Mac thought about how Sabaya and Garrison had probably lured the tail and, once out of sight of land, got an airlift to the other side of Borneo, RV’ing with Golden Serpent, and leaving the tail nothing but assumptions.
Mac might have picked it if he hadn’t been so tired. But even then, you had to start with the obvious. You never wanted to get lost in the double-reverse psychology department. That was for theorists and second-guessers, people who wanted a bigger offi ce. Sabaya and Garrison had probably had a couple of insiders on board Golden Serpent and no doubt one of the captain’s kids was hidden away somewhere.
He wondered what they wanted.
What they wanted!
The missing piece.
‘Mate, what do they want?’ he asked Don between phone calls.
Don stared at him. ‘Who?’
‘Garrison and Sabaya. Has anyone talked to them?’
Don shrugged.
‘Has MPA spoken with the skipper?’
Now Hatfi eld was listening too. ‘MPA?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Maritime and Port Authority,’ said Mac. ‘Their harbour-control people. The Port Master and operations manager will be there.’
Hatfi eld leaned down on the phone cradle, hit a speed dial, got back to the person he’d been speaking with.
