Chapter 94
By late afternoon in the street outside, the sun bore down relentlessly and in the hinterland, it was baking hot. Everyone in the centre of town seemed to shift down a gear to cope with the heat.
By half past four, Ashby and the adjuster were still waiting. In the hotel bar, they’d finished their second coffee and were about to order a beer when a man approached them, wearing the uniform of a ship’s officer.
“Mr Ashby ?”
“Yes, I’m Robert Ashby.”
“Can we go somewhere less crowded ?”
“And you are, Mr.....?”
“Let’s talk outside.”
As they walked together down the road, the officer said “I’m Brandt. At least, that’s my work name. Now, we can talk freely. Let’s find a seat in the park across the road – one on its own. Now, the three of us are set to go on the Marseillaise shortly after she docks tonight at around half past seven. You needn’t look so worried, Mr Meyer...”
“You know me ?”
“Of course. Anyway, never mind that – listen. The three of us will be joining the Port Authority inspectors and the customs men when they go on the ship. We want to avoid alerting the crew why we’re there. We want them to think it's a routine inspection. We won’t have long to look around, maybe an hour. There will be uniforms for you when we go to the customs office. Here is a plan of the ship. The Marseillaise is a bit of a wreck. A cargo carrier. Around thirty five years in service. Well past the time she should’ve been scrapped. Re-fitted several times in recent years. Laid up for a long while in Sierra Leone. Said to transport freight from Europe and the Med to west Africa. The manifest says she’s carrying machine parts and scrap metal for re-cycling. Well, let’s see if that’s really what she’s got. Before Cape Town, she was at Freetown and Algiers, at least, from what we know so far.”
“If she’s carrying anything illegal, where would it be kept ?”
“Probably in the forward hold away from the engine room and the steerage and above waterline, if it’s anything dodgy.”
“If it’s in the hold, won’t the customs officers find it ?”
“No, they won’t have time to look in every single crate which is unloaded. They might look in a sample but not the entire lot. And anyway, if there is contraband on board, it mightn’t be in crates in the hold, it might be hidden somewhere else.”
“So, where should we be looking ?”
“The customs men will get all the crew together and keep them busy going through their passports – they’re all from Sierra Leone, according to my information. Customs will check the freight for importation before it's unloaded. We won’t be able to open all of the crates but we should get some idea whether there’s anything funny in them. Apart from the crates, we should look in other accessible parts of the ship.”
“How will we do that ?”
“Leave that to me.”
Meyer said, “We could find our way around on our own but we’ll need longer than an hour.”
“Let’s see how things develop. We might be able to get the customs boys to slow things down. Right then,” said Brandt, looking at his watch. “It's six o’clock now. We’re due to go on board at around eight.”
“If we could get a look at the ship’s logs, that could help us,” said Ashby. “We want to see what the Marseillaise was doing in 1980. Could we get the Captain to produce them for us ?”
“Probably not. I wouldn’t expect Benin Maritime to keep all its ship’s records organised when they’re smuggling stuff along the coast. But then again, we’ll be with the Port Authority inspectors. They’ll want to know that the ship is seaworthy and has had no major incidents which might affect its stay. The log is the most important thing on the ship and is the responsibility of the Captain. We might be able to get them – and if we can’t, that might be a pretext for detaining the Captain and officers for questioning,” said Brandt, thinking aloud.
At seven o’clock, they met outside the Port Authority office at wharf eight where the Marseillaise was due to dock. The customs uniforms they were given were navy blue jackets and hats which were either tight-fitting or over-size.
“How do I look ?” said Meyer, as he was unable to do up the buttons of his jacket and his hat was too big.
When they were ready, they joined two of the customs men and a Port Authority officer and walked almost a half a mile across the vast shipping terminal to the wharf. When they got there, they could see the Marseillaise being towed up the channel by two tugs. Forty minutes later, she was edged into position and tied up at the dock.
One look at the ship told you that she was an old tramp, worn out from thirty years of storms and high seas. Her hull was a matt black and in quite a few areas, patches of rust showed through. The lines of her superstructure were from a different era, after the war had ended and the shipping industry around the world was recovering.
When the gangway was lowered, the port officers led the way to the main deck where the Captain and the first mate were waiting for them.
“Captain Nuruma ?” said the officer, shaking hands with the ship’s master. “You’re ready for inspection ?”
“Certainly. The Chart Room and the Saloon are at your disposal,” and he led the boarding party along the main deck to some stairs and the upper deck where the Ward Room was located. When they arrived, the Captain went to a bar in the corner of the room, uncorked a bottle, poured himself a large whisky and said “May I offer you some refreshment, gentlemen ?”
“Thank you but not now. We’d like to start with the usual Port Clearance Certificates – we understand you left Freetown two days ago ?”
While the Captain was kept busy going through the paperwork, the customs officers had set up on the opposite side of the room. All of the crew wanted to go ashore and were in a line with their passports ready.
Brandt whispered to Meyer and Ashby, “Now’s the time. Come on, let’s have a look around.”
“Where should we start ?” said Meyer.
“Best to split up. You know the general layout of the ship. The Marseillaise is a middle three island cargo vessel with four holds, two aft in the lower section and two in the forward section. I’ll take the forward holds and you take the aft ones and then we’ll meet back here in half an hour. If you find anything before then, come and get me.”
“I want to look in the engine room,” said Ashby. “It shouldn’t take me long.”
“Why do you want to go there ?” asked Meyer.
“I want to find out all I can about this ship. The machinery in the engine room should identify it for us.”
“Alright, you’re the boss but I think you’ll be wasting your time. I’ll either be in hold number three or four.”
They each set off in their various directions. Ashby found his way along the main deck below the funnel, past the ventilators to the entrance to the stairs leading down to the second deck and then lower to the third deck where the engine room was located.
The further down he went, the hotter and more stifling it became. The scene inside showed how old the Marseillaise really was – decades past her prime and ready for scrapping. While the paint job on her external hull and superstructure looked slapdash as if applied in a hurry, inside the ship, no-one had bothered to paint anything for decades. The rust was eating into the bulkheads below the waterline. In some places, the iron plating and framework on the inner hull was crumbling off in pieces. There was a double hull and this was what the inner hull looked like. The outer hull was probably consumed by rust and leaking badly in areas where it couldn’t be seen.
Eventually, he reached a landing which overlooked the main part of the engine room and the generators, compressors, pumps and turbines which drove the propeller and powered the electrical systems. He decided to look for any notations or serial numbers on the blower, gauge board, switchboard, condenser and manoeuvring valve to indicate where the machinery had been manufactured and when it had been installed. There
was nothing which offered any clues as to the yard in which the ship had been constructed.
After descending a final flight of steps, he walked slowly past the boiler which was red hot and gave off waves of intense heat. His shirt was sticking to him and beads of sweat fell from his forehead onto the floor. He ambled on, past the circulating pump, the turbines and the thrust block, stopping momentarily to make some drawings and take down the numbers on the plate housing of the machinery.
Almost nothing of the original maker’s marks were visible. Some had been scratched or filed off. Some had been painted over so that what lay beneath was illegible. Parts of the boiler plating appeared to be new while some of the original remained. He could barely read the name of the manufacturer but it looked like a British or a German name, he couldn’t tell which. There were some technical specifications which had mostly been obliterated but these he quickly noted down.
As he was trying to scratch off some of the layers of paint, he heard someone behind him shouting in broken English, “Hey, what you doing there ?”
He turned around and was confronted by a crewman who appeared to be an oiler but might have been an engineer. The man was wielding a large spanner and brought it down on one of the metal gantries with a deafening ‘clang’.
He was fat but muscular and wore a dirty, grease-covered singlet. His features were southern European, probably from a country bordering on the Mediterranean. His presence was unusual as the rest of the crew were African including the Captain.
“Why you here, mister ?” he asked Ashby with deadly seriousness.
“I’m with the customs officers and the Port inspectors and we’re looking over the ship. Who are you ?”
The man made no answer. Then, looking at Ashby’s handwritten notes and drawings, he said, “You’re a snooper. What you after, mister ?”
“That’s nothing to do with you. I’m here to inspect the ship. Get out of my way or I’ll call the Captain.”
“You ain’t going to call no-one, ‘cause I’m going to fix you,” said the oiler as he advanced closer to Ashby while waving the spanner from side to side and hitting it against the metal framework.
As Ashby moved backwards, his only means of escape was up a flight of steps, leading to the third deck overlooking the engine room. He quickly ran up but almost tripped while his pursuer was close behind him. When he reached the landing, he took a wrong turn and was boxed in, caught in a dead end with nowhere to go.
“I’m not here on my own,” said Ashby. “There are five or six others with me. If I don’t return, they’ll come looking for me and they’ll get you.”
“They not get me – I gone – and you too.” And with that, he swung the spanner and crashed it against the plate iron wall of the compressor, narrowly missing Ashby’s head.
In the few minutes since the oiler had attacked him, he wondered if anyone had heard the commotion but he could hear nothing from the decks above them. He’d never had to fight for his life before. And yet here he was, having to fend off this madman. He quickly decided that the only way of escaping was to outwit him.
“You’re Greek, aren’t you ?” said Ashby while trying to taunt the oiler and unnerve him. His opponent took another swing at him and missed.
“You were with Christoforou, weren’t you ? You were his engineer on the Captain Stratos.....Keo.....you’re Keo, aren’t you ?”
Again, his adversary wielded the spanner like a short sword and clipped Ashby’s arm which began bleeding. “Next time, you dead,” he said while edging ever closer.
“The police have Christoforou in Athens. He’s in prison – and that’s where you’re going, Keo – to join him in a prison cell.”
“I go nowhere. You go over side.”
It seemed to Ashby that the risk of injury from doing nothing was greater than if he took his opponent in a head-on assault. Before making his move and rushing at the engineer, he yelled “Meyer, over here !” while waving his arms and looking upwards. For a split second, the Greek’s eyes were diverted as if to look behind him. That was enough for Ashby to run at him in a rugby tackle, smashing Keo’s right hand with the spanner against the iron railing which forced him to drop the weapon as they grappled with each other on the upper deck.
At school, Ashby played wing three quarter and instead of a scrum where they were fighting for the ball, the spanner lay nearby as the engineer frantically tried to reach it. Ashby was taller and longer than the Greek and succeeded in kicking the spanner off the deck until it fell below to the engine room floor with a loud clang.
Although he was taller, Keo was heavier. As they wrestled, the Greek was about to pin him down when Ashby managed to wriggle out of his grasp and quickly got up to try and get away. But Keo barred his way and suddenly ran at him and pushed him backwards against the safety railing as if to send him over the edge to the metal deck fifty feet below. While Ashby was trying with all his might to push his attacker away, the engineer slipped on the greasy deck, lost his balance, toppled forward, then headlong over the railing. With a final scream, as if in slow motion, he crashed onto the deck below to lay where he’d fallen and moved no more. When Ashby reached him, there was no pulse.
At the same moment, Ashby himself collapsed and was unconscious.
Plantation A Legal Thriller Page 94
