legal action.’
Mac kept hauling.
‘How they going to get out without tugs?’ asked Paul.
Mac thought back to the way those seamen looked on Hokkaido Spirit .
‘Mate, they’ll fi nd a way, believe me. They’ve all got bow-thrusters.’
They kept good pace. The wet frog gear dripped down Mac’s back, blending with the sweat.
They stood panting, hiding beside a stack of containers. Humidity was getting up. They shared a bottle of water.
Before them stood an eighty-metre stretch of concrete apron. Big rail lines sat lengthwise in the apron and the enormous portainers that ran along the rails sat idle. Across the channel behind Keppel Terminal was the city and the leafi er residential areas of the city-state.
Garrison and Sabaya had picked a good spot to blow the VX.
Paul worked the radio with Weenie. ‘Mate, can we get anything from the Americans? Yeah I know, mate, but…’
Mac looked through the Leicas. Scanned the Golden Serpent. No movement.
He held on the bridge as long as he could without getting eye-strain. The windows on the bridge were tinted so that the brighter the sun, the darker they got. He couldn’t say there was no movement. But he couldn’t see anything that would count for people either. He had no confi rmation that they were on the bridge.
They needed confi rmation on whether the hijackers were even on the ship.
Further down the Keppel quay two ships cast off, their bow-thrusters boiling, pushing them out from the container terminal.
Another ship was already making way up the channel and was about two minutes away from Golden Serpent.
Paul and Mac looked at one another. Neither of them wanted to be frogging across that channel with some of these three-hundred-metre giants in a race to get out of town.
‘What’s Weenie up to?’ asked Mac.
‘Been watching CNN. Reckons the place is in lockdown. Changi’s shut, railway stations closed down. Only things open are the causeways into Malaysia, which are packed. Total panic. Media’s not reporting what the stuff is but the assumption is that it’s serious.’
‘How’s that?’
‘An amateur grabbed footage of the US Army in their bio-hazards.
CNN were running it for a while, but it’s stopped. Government probably asked them to take it off.’
Mac nodded but something felt wrong. ‘Isn’t it time you got on to your military attache people? They got us into this game. They’re a part of the coalition, aren’t they?’
‘I don’t know if our people are down there. But you know what happens when the Yanks turn up. They control all outbound comms.
It’s their protocol, you know, because of the Nokia detonators.’
Mac hadn’t worked with the Americans at this sort of police-action level, but he’d heard they jammed all comms other than frequencies they approved to prevent the two most obvious ways a bomber detonated an IED: by Nokia phone or a simple radio switch.
Bombers could also use on-site detonation – made famous by suicide bombers – or a timer. If you wanted to make it really diffi cult, you put in a chemical tilt-switch which closed the detonator circuit when someone messed with the IED.
The Americans didn’t jam frequencies so they could show off.
They did it so bombers didn’t lure law enforcement and military on site and then detonate something right under the Emergency Operations Centre.
Mac did a three-sixty, put his hands on his hips, walked out onto the apron. Kept walking, down to the waterside. The helos had dispersed: one to the north, one to the south.
Paul stuck his head out from their hiding place beside the container stack. ‘Oi! What the fuck are you about?’
Mac stopped and turned. The frogman kit dripped down his left hip. ‘Come on.’
‘Sabaya said no one is to approach the ship. Aren’t we stealthing?’
Paul shouted.
‘Mate, they’re not on that ship.’
‘How do we know that?’
‘Because they’re too smart and whatever else they want, it has nothing to do with blowing themselves up on CNN.’
Paul walked out onto the apron, looking around, and stopped near Mac.
‘Just worked this out?’ he asked.
‘Been gnawing at me. You know.’
‘They’re not the vest types?’
Mac smiled. ‘I was thinking about what that much CL-20 could do to that ship. Those blokes have no intention of going down with it. And they can’t detonate remotely, not with the Yanks jamming the frequencies up.’
‘So how are they doing this?’ said Paul.
‘The same way they did Minky and the manager of the MPS store.’
‘Hostage?’
‘Or threat of it,’ said Mac. ‘You worked for Sabaya. Think it through, how would he be handling this?’
Paul looked to the horizon. ‘He’d have the captain and the XO really scared. Shitting themselves. They’d be reading from a song sheet.’
‘Literally.’
‘Well, yeah. Don’t you reckon?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mac. ‘I think you’re right. They’re shit scared and they have a script they’re reading from. They’re making their calls at the intervals Sabaya instructed. And Sabaya is listening in.’
‘How’s he doing that?’
‘Reckon he’s changed the settings on the Universal AIS.’
‘The what?’
‘The Universal Automatic Identifi cation System. It broadcasts a whole list of information to all other ships all the time. Helps them calculate time to collision, that sort of thing.’
‘What are these guys doing with it?’
Mac thought about it. ‘I think Golden Serpent ‘s AIS is broadcasting a whole lot of info that Sabaya input. I think these other ships know exactly what’s on board because it’s coming up on their screens.
Sabaya wanted a stampede. He wanted it in the world’s busiest port,’ he said, pointing at the channel where fi ve ships were now vying for exit room. ‘And he’s got it.’
‘So how is Sabaya hearing the captain do his thing?’
‘The AIS is broadcasting from the bridge, Sabaya just opened the mics. It’s on the maritime VHF band and Sabaya is betting it’s one of the few frequencies the Americans would never shut down. Sabaya’s listening from somewhere and he’s running a watch on the poor bastards who are reading this stuff.’
Paul walked around in front of him, sceptical. ‘You heard that message from Sabaya. He warned about approaching the ship, said he’d blow it if we came anywhere near.’
‘He knows the Yanks have shut down the airwaves, so he can’t detonate remotely. So it’s either on a timer or it’s a hoax,’ said Mac.
‘What I don’t want happening is the media seeing us. If Sabaya’s got hostages, that’s when they die.’
Paul accepted the argument. ‘If Sabaya and Garrison aren’t on the ship, where are they?’
‘Dunno. But I know how we can fi nd out.’
They found an MPA tender craft moored two-thirds of the way down the Brani Terminal quay. It was a thirty- fi ve-foot rigid infl atable design with a small, functional cabin at the front. Paul found the key fi rst time, under the cushion on the skipper’s chair. He fi red up the two Evinrudes, pushed the throttles forward and banked the craft round as it struggled to get up on a plane. They had their rebreathers strapped to their chests, over the ovies. The dual corrugated rubber hoses fell away over the front of the breathing bags. It wasn’t as good as a bio-hazard suit,
