by Peter Tonkin
As they passed Prince Consort Bank, just as Robin was relieving Sam Yung for the first dog watch at noon on Tuesday, she was aware that 200 kilometres further west, lurking behind the feature named for Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, stood a much more timeless and much larger collection of reefs and shoals named the Rifleman. And she was aware, as which navigating Officer in the area was not, that the Rifleman stood as outer marker to a series of hazards so difficult to chart or categorise that it all went by the name of Dangerous Ground, even on the most up-to-date Admiralty charts. The better part of 15,000 square kilometres of ship-killing Dangerous Ground stood all too close to the west of them, off Palawan Island in the Philippines. Its uncharted reefs and banks and atolls contained myriad tiny islands, home to who knew what pirate fleets of deadly cutthroats. But in the lazy azure blaze of the noon watch it was easy to disregard the dangers which might lie there. Really, there was nothing at all to worry about except the running and the handling of the ship, maintaining the security of the cargo and delivering them all, safe and sound to their port of destination.
*
‘Now, Captain Huuk,’ began Maggie, unconsciously curling her scarlet nails like cat’s claws, once her first crossquestion had been allowed, ‘you cannot seriously ask us to believe that this phone call just came in from out of the blue, giving you information like this without rhyme or reason.’
‘On the contrary, ma’am. This sort of thing occurs quite often. There were, at the last count, four individual Triad organisations jockeying for position in Hong Kong. We are often used as a blunt instrument, so to speak, in the activities of one against the other.’
‘You believed that your information, and what happened to the Sulu Queen, was the result of Triad action?’
‘I did not say that. I said that Triad action in the area made mysterious phone calls quite a regular occurrence in my office. In this case, we were not aware of any associated Triad action, but …’
‘But, Captain?’ Maggie’s gaze on the unusually hesitant Huuk did not waver.
‘Well,’ said Huuk, ‘I was going to say that of course the Triads are as aware as the rest of us that Hong Kong will become part of China in less than a fortnight now, and while no doubt they have made their plans, they must know that the People’s Republic has no intention of allowing the sort of Mafia-style activity which is said to have characterised some sections of the Soviet Union during the last few years.’
‘And so, Captain? I am afraid I do not altogether follow your reasoning.’
‘The result of this has been a combination of increased Triad activity as the foot soldiers jockey for position, and a breakdown of traditional associations and systems as many of the senior, traditional, figures — the godfathers, if you like — move away to San Francisco, London — America and Europe in general.’
‘Let me be quite clear about this. You were not surprised to receive this phone call because such things are increasingly common now that you can no longer trust the Triads to police themselves?’
‘Effectively, yes. With the big boys away, there is a lot to play for among the ambitious middle-rankers left.’
‘And so you went out to the Sulu Queen in disguise because you feared that you might be getting involved in a Triad war?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘What sort of an answer is that?’
‘I believed the situation was sufficiently complex and dangerous to warrant clandestine procedures.’
‘Because you believed the ship to be involved in Triad activity?’
‘Yes …’
There was still just the slightest hesitation in Huuk’s voice and Maggie was on it like a flash. ‘But you believed something more than that?’
‘The situation is complex, and politically sensitive.’
‘Oh, come along Captain. You cannot prevaricate with the court. What was it that you suspected? What was it that made you decide to put your men in disguise and take such a range of arms with you? Why such a complicated reaction to a simple telephone call?’
‘The ship, the Sulu Queen, was reported to us as being just outside our waters. The Navy could not go aboard, we had no jurisdiction. But we could not just leave her there without investigation, so we went out and boarded her at once but took no action until we established beyond doubt that she had drifted into Hong Kong territorial waters.’
‘But surely,’ purred Maggie, as the full relevance of Huuk’s admission hit her, ‘if the Sulu Queen was not in Hong Kong territorial waters when you received your mysterious call, and perhaps even when you went aboard, then she must have been in the territorial waters of the People’s Republic of China.’
‘It is possible.’
Maggie let that grudging admission slide for the moment, for she spotted bigger game here. ‘So, should you not have contacted the coastguard division of the Chinese People’s Navy and asked them to look into this derelict ship?’
‘No. The ship was clearly drifting towards our waters and would be in them before any action could be taken.’ He took a breath. ‘And in any case, the Sulu Queen is a Hong Kong registered vessel.’ He took another breath. ‘And besides, it is common knowledge amongst my command that, apart from Triads and their Filipino associates, the people most likely to be guilty of piracy in local waters are renegade Chinese naval units in any case.’
*
It was just coming up for 8 a.m., British Summer Time, in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, England.
Here, in Scrimshaw, Marine Drive, Phylidda Gough was making her way slowly down to breakfast. She had been awake since before six but she refused to come down until her normal breakfast time, otherwise she found that the days were far too long to handle, filled as they were with speculation as to the fate of Walter, her husband.
Friends and associates from the Heritage Mariner family had been to visit — Sir William Heritage himself had been down. They had given her the facts but explained that Wally was missing and could not be presumed dead yet. And a stiff police man had come in from the local station to inform her that her husband’s disappearance was the subject of an investigation in Singapore where he had disappeared and the Crown Colony of Hong Kong where his ship had been registered and where his dead crew had turned up. As captain’s wife, she had been den mother to the other officers’ families and her duty had been clear to her. She had called the other wives — widows all, now — aware that they had so much more than she to grieve over. She had posted a birthday present to Brian Jordan’s poor little girl. And she had waited for news.
Her son, called Walter like her husband and a junior deck officer with the Heritage Mariner shipping fleet, had been home for two weeks’ compassionate leave after Walter senior’s disappearance, but Phylidda found that, with no news of any kind, having him there upset her routines and got on her nerves so that he was as much of a hindrance as a help. A beloved hindrance, but a hindrance nevertheless.
She had set up a routine for herself and she stuck to it, following it religiously every day, from that first cuppa out of her old Breville Teasmaid at 6 a.m. through breakfast television — with Classic FM to fall back on when the antics on the screen bored, irritated or shocked her — to wrapping up in her dressing gown and coming down at eight. She would sort through the letters — and there had been so many letters — and make herself some toast before returning upstairs to wash, dress and prepare to answer the most pressing correspondence.
But not this morning.
This morning, 8:05 a.m. BST found her standing, stricken, on the doormat, looking at her left hand as though it had just turned leprous For there, tucked between the gas bill and another bloody letter from her bank was a postcard, well-travelled and dog-eared, bearing God alone knew what sort of a stamp, written in close-packed, slightly smudged, scrawling, shaky writing which could only belong to one man in all the world — her errant husband Wally.
Five minutes later she was on the phone and dialling — not the police; oh no — dialling the old
, familiar number of the twenty-four-hour secretariat on the top floor of Heritage House.
*
Not even Maggie DaSilva could extract more gold for the defence from Captain Huuk under cross-examination. She tried, but either the Judge would not allow her question or, when she asked it, Huuk had an answer which seemed acceptable to the jury. The captain, bloodied but unbowed, stepped down at 4.25 p.m. local time, just at the right moment for the judge to direct that the court rise for the evening, the jury take care not to discuss what they had heard with any person, and to demand that they should all reassemble here by 10 a.m. on the next day, Wednesday.
The defence all stood up, exhausted, as they had on the previous evening. Richard was taken back to his secure rooms at the Queen Elizabeth and Tom followed him for another consultation.
Maggie and Andrew pulled their papers together and retired to his office in order to discuss how today had gone and to prepare their strategy for tomorrow.
Isolated, lonely, ignored and a little jealous, Lata Patel followed them, like a younger sister sent as chaperone on a courtship. She ended up carrying most of the papers out of the court. She had to struggle to get the papers into the briefcase, while the other two discussed the case with more passion than was absolutely necessary beside the Aston Martin in the underground garage. She was directed — somewhat dismissively, she felt — to put the papers in the boot and to put herself into the back seat. And later she had to listen as Maggie admitted to her that she was as smitten as the solicitor. Maggie treated her junior much as though Lata was a younger sister, discussing her feelings for and interest in Andrew Balfour as the pair of them dressed for the evening in the rooms they had taken in Robin’s leave flat down the hill from the solicitor’s home, looking out past the temple of Tin Hau, goddess of the sea.
Lata had been invited, very much as an afterthought, and to add a third to the dinner table so obviously designed to be tête-à-tête. Andrew had booked a table at Saigon on Lockhart Road, Wanchai, for he and Maggie were both interested in Vietnamese food. Not a little angrily — though neither of the would-be lovers noticed her pique — Lata declined, saying she would meet them back at the flat in two hours’ time, and wandered off down Lockhart Road to find some cuisine more suited to her own palate.
It was early in the evening and the busy road was bustling. There was a lively, potent sense of excitement abroad. Long before Lata had been born, the Wanch had been The World of Suzie Wong, known worldwide as one of the most romantic areas which lonely men could visit; haunt of the mythically understanding bar girls. But such things were hardly on the minds of the bustling crowds this early in the evening and so Lata could wander, unmolested, along the roadway, entranced by the luminescent fruit stalls which reminded her of Berwick Street Market at home in the Soho she had come to know and love since leaving her family home in Edgware and settling into her bachelor flat off Wardour Street.
And, now that Lata looked around, she saw the Chinese food shops so familiar from Gerrard Street and Little China, the second-hand bookshops so reminiscent of the Charing Cross Road. So it was that she settled happily into the seedy, familiar air of the place; even the redlight clubs and the over-endowed, too easily available girls fitted comfortably into the familiar ambience. So at home here was she, in fact, that when the tall man dressed in black fell in beside her and showed every sign of trying to engage her in conversation, she was not even faintly embarrassed. She was on the point of telling him to leave her alone and go talk to the dark girl with the brass-blonde hair and the enormous chest across the road when he said, in a soft and cultured voice, ‘Miss Patel, it has been my ambition for the last week or so to engage you in some conversation and, perhaps, to offer you a little food.’
Lata stopped dead. ‘How do you know my name?’ she snapped. ‘Who are you?’
One or two of the amahs nearby, obviously out doing a little late shopping, paused as the tall man stopped and turned courteously towards his young companion. ‘My name is Ho. You may have heard the nickname Twelvetoes used. I am a close friend and sometime associate of Richard and Robin Mariner. It was Robin who mentioned your name when we were talking one evening a week or so ago. Please may I buy you dinner? I have a thought or two which might be useful to Ms DaSilva’s case and it would be so churlish to approach her directly this evening, don’t you think?’
‘Well …’ Lata hesitated, and wisely. He was unknown to her though his name was familiar enough. Goodness knew what she might be risking, going off somewhere with a strange man in such a strange city. All the wise words of her mother, all the direst warnings of her father, rushed into her head.
‘Somewhere public, needless to say,’ he continued, as though reading her mind. ‘Somewhere full of tourists where a simple word from you would call up all the aid you might require in an instant. I had thought the SMI Curry Centre close by which serves world-class Indonesian and Singaporean curries; but, if you would prefer something closer to home, there is the Maharajah just round the corner on Wanchai Road itself.’
That won her over. The Maharajah was a little further away than she had imagined but there were only two turnings, one to the right and another to the left, and Lata was never in any doubt as to the way back. As they walked, they chatted and it was no time at all before Lata found herself relaxing in Twelvetoes’ wise and witty company, and even beginning to take him a little into her confidence. He told her how he had met the Mariners because he had been chief steward on the company ships. How he had earned the name Twelvetoes because of his uncannily sure footing on even the slipperiest and most agitated deck. How each of the Mariners at one time or another had saved his life. How they had returned him to Hong Kong in possession of a fortune which he could never in his wildest dreams have hoped to amass by legal means. And she reciprocated by telling him of her life, of her family, her current employment and her ambitions. So wrapped up in their conversation was she that she did not notice the pattern of women who followed them facelessly along the road, nor the manner in which her host was welcomed into the restaurant and shown to the perfect spot, where their conversation could not be overheard but they could be overseen by the wide range of tourist clientele, and the little group of Chinese women who, unusually, decided to dine here too.
Like many people of slight build, Lata was a considerable trencherman. While she carved her way ecstatically through prawn puri and paratha, Twelvetoes nibbled on a plain poppadom. Then, while she ladled chicken korma onto a fragrant bed of pilau rice, and added to it a selection of mixed vegetable bahjee and one small stuffed paratha, he nibbled contentedly on a plain naan and asked for a bowl of undressed rice. And their conversation switched to business.
‘What do you know of the container trade?’ he asked.
‘Nothing, except what we have prepared for the case. That is that containerisation means that shippers can fill boxes of an agreed size with their produce and list the contents in the expectation that it will only rarely be checked. That ships are designed to take set numbers of containers below decks or on deck — forward deck or poop deck. That places like the Tanjong Pagar facility in Singapore and Tilbury in England can be run by computer, unloading and reloading these things without much human interference because they are all the same size, they all weigh effectively the same, and they all fit together like sections in an old-fashioned Rubik’s cube. Somewhere like Tanjong Pagar can turn a ship round with a standard sixty-three container load in about nine hours flat. Which is what it did with the Sulu Queen before Captain Mariner went aboard.’
‘Exactly so; a fine summation,’ purred Twelvetoes Ho. ‘But I ask you to consider this. What if a ship, let us say the Sulu Queen, had been especially designed to take not sixty-three containers of standard size but sixty-five containers, each one almost imperceptibly smaller than the normal? The standard handling equipment at most ports along her route might remain unaware of the small variation. Even the computerised lifting mechanisms at Tanjong Pagar must have an e
lement of variation built into their programs. Human beings, alas, are not always as invariably reliable as machines.’
‘Yes? And so?’ asked Lata, pausing in her flight to gastronomic heaven while she considered his carefully-weighed proposition.
‘So that, passing around the edges of the China Sea, in the hands of the China Queens Company, there would be two almost full-size containers on the Sulu Queen and, who knows, perhaps even on the Seram Queen as well. Two phantom containers which nobody knows are there. Two containers which are never declared on the manifest, never officially loaded or unloaded, never checked by the authorities. Two containers which can carry anything at all from anywhere to anywhere. Two phantom containers travelling between, let us say, Vladivostok and Sapporo, with summer excursions as far north as Magadan. Let us suppose that two containers which nobody knows about travel down to Fukuoka, to Naha and T’ai-pei, to Manila and General Santos, to Manado and Ujung Pandang, to Jakarta and Singapore, to Hong Kong, allowing contact, let us say, with Saigon — as it was — and Da Nang, Haiphong on occasion, and perhaps even to Guangzhou, past the coastguards like Daniel Huuk and up the Pearl River. Then on to Shanghai and perhaps Tianjin, allowing access to Beijing, and across to Seoul and down to Pusan and out again to Vladivostok. Can you imagine the worth of two containers per ship, two unknown, unchecked, unsuspected containers which could be taken between the Soviet Union, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Java and Sumatra, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Peoples’ Republic of China, and Korea? Imagine what could be carried in two such containers. Weapons-grade nuclear material; revolutionary computer parts of motorcar components; the new genetic materials; pirated goods of all sorts, from perfumes, shirts, watches and footwear with spurious brand names to CD-Roms and videotapes; drugs from the Golden Triangle; Western delicacies for the greedy mandarins of the People’s Republic. Imagine what such a cargo would be worth. Imagine, should its existence become known or even suspected, what some people would do in order to obtain
