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“You got it,” said the American.
The freighter had been photographed off Finisterre just before sundown on the previous day. A crewman was busying himself with a routine task on the foredeck, while another man stood on the wing of the bridge looking at him. As McCready and Rowse watched, the ship grew bigger and bigger on the screen, and still the definition held. The fore-peak and stern of the vessel disappeared offscreen and the figure of the man standing alone grew larger.
“How high is that bird?” asked Rowse.
“Hundred and ten miles,” said the technician.
“Boy, that’s some technology,” said Rowse.
“Pick up a license plate, clearly readable,” said the American proudly.
There were more than twenty frames of that particular freighter. When the man on the bridge-wing filled most of the wall, Rowse asked for all of them to be screened with the same magnification. As the images flashed, the man seemed to move, like one of those stick figures in a Victorian biograph.
The figure turned from looking at the seaman and stared out to sea. Then he removed his peaked cap to run a hand through his thin hair. Perhaps a seabird called above him. Whatever, he raised his face.
“Freeze,” called Rowse. “Closer.”
The technician magnified the face until finally it began to blur.
“Bingo,” McCready whispered over Rowse’s shoulder. “That’s him. Johnson.”
The tired old eyes beneath the thin jet-black hair stared out at them from the screen. The old man from the corner of the Apollonia dining terrace. The has-been.
“The name of the ship,” said McCready. “We need the name of the ship.”
It was on her bow, and the satellite, as she dropped over the horizon to the north, had still been filming. A single, low-angle shot caught the words beside the anchor: Regina IV. McCready reached for the phone and called his man at Lloyds Shipping Intelligence.
“Can’t be,” said the man when he called back thirty minutes later. “Regina IV is over ten thousand tons, and she’s off the coast of Venezuela. You must have got it wrong.”
“No mistake,” said McCready. “She’s about two thousand tons, and she’s steaming north, by now off Bordeaux.”
“Hang about,” said the cheerful voice from Colchester. “Is she up to something naughty?”
“Almost certainly,” said McCready.
“I’ll call you back,” said the Lloyds man. He did, almost an hour later. McCready had spent most of that time on the telephone to some people based at Poole, in Dorset.
“Regina,” said the man from Lloyds, “is a very common name. Like Stella Marts. That’s why they have letters or Roman numerals after the name. To distinguish one from another. It happens there’s a Regina VI registered at Limassol, now believed to be berthed at Paphos. About two thousand tons. German skipper, Greek Cypriot crew. New owners—a shell company registered in Luxembourg.”
“The Libyan government,” thought McCready. It would be a simple ruse. Leave the Mediterranean as the Regina VI; out in the Atlantic, paint out the single numeral after the V and paint another in before it. Skilled hands could alter the ship’s papers to match. The agents would book the thoroughly reputable Regina IV into Bremerhaven with a cargo of office machinery and general cargo from Canada, and who would know that the real Regina IV was off Venezuela?
At dawn of the third day, Captain Holst stared out of the forward windows of his bridge at the slowly lightening sea. There was no mistaking the flare that had burst into the sky
straight ahead of him, hung for a moment, then fluttered back to the water. Maroon. A distress flare. Peering through the half-light, he could make out something else a mile or two ahead of him: the yellow fluttering of a flame. He ordered his engine room to make half-speed, lifted a handset, and called one of his passengers in his bunk below. The man joined him less than a minute later.
Captain Holst pointed silently through the windshield. On the calm water ahead of them, a forty-foot motor fishing vessel rolled drunkenly. She had clearly suffered an explosion in her engine area; a black smudge of smoke drifted up from below her deck, mingling with a flicker of orange flame. Her topsides were scorched and blackened.
“Where are we?” asked Stephen Johnson.
“In the North Sea, between Yorkshire and the Dutch coast,” said Holst.
Johnson took the Captain’s binoculars and focused on the small fishing boat ahead. Fair Maid, Whitby, could be made out on her bow.
“We have to stop and give them help,” Holst said in English. “It is the law of the sea.”
He did not know what his own vessel was carrying, and he did not want to know. His employers had given him their orders and an extremely extravagant bonus. His crew had also been taken care of financially. The crated olives from Cyprus had come onboard at Paphos and were totally legitimate. During the two-day stopover in Sirte, on the coast of Libya, part of the cargo had been removed and then returned. It looked the same. He knew there must be illicit cargo in there somewhere, but he could not spot it and did not want to try.
The proof that his cargo was extremely dangerous lay in the six passengers—two were from Cyprus, and four more were from Sirte. And the changing of the numerals as soon as he had passed the Pillars of Hercules. In twelve hours, he expected to be rid of them all. He would sail back through the North Sea, convert again to the Regina VI at sea, and return calmly to his home port of Limassol, a much richer man.