Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

They showed him the containers that were stowed in such a way that they could be opened at sea: when you looked at a stack of containers so all you could see were the doors, the ones you could open were at ten o’clock and two o’clock. Sabaya would have picked those spots.

Exhausted, Mac’s brain buzzed, his eyesight was not doing well under the greenish tinge of the ship lighting.

He keyed the radio mic. ‘Captain Sawtell, you there?’

‘Sawtell, copy that.’

‘Mate, I’m going out to help Alden. There’s nothing I can do here.’

‘Mac, can you support us down here fi rst? We’ve got crew secured in the mess. Over.’

‘Haven’t told them what we’re looking for, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’

Mac took Nagai down with him. Wanted a bloke with authority and good English. Wanted to look at these blokes’ eyes, see the reactions.

They were lined up, those who’d been sleeping in their underwear, others in pale blue ovies, the default uniform on commercial shipping. Mac looked for the odd man, the stare, the aversion, the wide eyes of the guilty guy, the slits of the liar. He looked for hands too deep in pockets, feet splayed all wrong, hips cocked with the wrong kind of tension.

But Mac saw only fear. Not all Japanese were sophisticated urbanites, as Westerners were led to believe. What Mac was looking at was a bunch of rural hicks who were just clever enough to know that men in bio-hazards didn’t land on your ship in the middle of the Java Sea unless something was very wrong.

All the Green Berets had stripped back their hoods and respirators, their glass masks hanging under their chins.

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.

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.