Year of the Golden Ape (5 page)

^{Marine research was the latest scientific fad, the progressive thing to engage in, so the Canadian authorities gave little thought to the arrival of the trawler and its continued stay in their port. And, as he had once assured an Italian Customs official in Naples about the Alouette helicopter on the
Pêcheur's
deck - '. . . a new technique. We use it to spot fish shoals from the air . . .' - so he now set about reassuring a Canadian official.}

^{'We shall have a Sikorsky helicopter arriving here before we leave for the Galapagos . .. Certain places we want to explore we can only reach by chopper ...'}

^{The Canadian port official found George Bingham, the British marine biologist, an amiable fellow, and now he understood fully why the
Pêcheur
was still in harbour - she was waiting for the arrival of the helicopter.}

^{While in San Francisco Winter had found time to arrange with Walgren for the purchase and delivery of the Sikorsky, which would be flown to Canada by a pilot friend of Walgren - the man who can fly a Beechcraft cannot necessarily pilot a helicopter. Twenty-four hours after his arrival in Canada Winter was on his way to Alaska.}

^{He spent three weeks in Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, which lies at the head of the Cook Inlet, the site of the state's first oil discovery. Today, people think of the great North Slope field when they think of Alaskan oil, but when Winter was in Anchorage the only oil which flowed from Alaska to California, two thousand miles south, came from Cook Inlet. A shuttle service of tankers - one of them British - was moving backwards and forwards, carrying the desperately needed oil to San Francisco.}

^{During his long journey Winter had seen many signs of the way in which the fifty per cent oil cut controlled by Sheikh Gamal Tafak was crippling the West. Planes nearly always arrived late, due to fuel shortages; the street lights in California were turned off at ten o'clock at night; power blackouts were frequent, plunging whole cities into darkness without warning. And still, so far as Winter could see, there was no effective resistance to the sheikhs' blackmail. It was early December when he returned to Europe.}

^{'Have there been any whispers about the operation?' was his first question to LeCat when he arrived in Paris.}

^{'None so far,' LeCat replied, 'but I have set up listening posts in different countries...'}

^{They talked in French, one of the four languages Winter was fluent in, and Winter's question was a key question. When you organise an operation on a large scale, sooner or later there are liable to be rumours of something going on. It was, in a way, a race against time - to get the operation moving before a hint of it reached the outside world. From Winter's point of view, the listening posts would provide a warning if rumours began to spread, but LeCat regarded them in a very different light. If someone began making enquiries and he heard about it, then drastic action might have to be taken. After all, it would probably only mean killing whoever looked like getting in the way.}

⁵

^{Larry Sullivan, thirty-two years old, was in the same age range as Winter, and the similarity between the two men did not end there. Sullivan also was a lone wolf, which was one reason why his career in naval intelligence was brought to a rather abrupt conclusion; Sullivan, with the rank of lieutenant, did not suffer fools gladly - even when they held the rank of admiral. When it was indicated to him indirectly - he hated people who indicated things indirectly - that his route up the promotion ladder was blocked permanently unless he became more-flexible, he indicated his own reaction quite directly. 'You can stuff the job,' he told his superior.}

^{With his background and experience he had no trouble finding a job as an investigator with Lloyd's of London. Unlike the peacetime Navy, this unique organisation is anything but hide-bound in its methods; it has, in fact, a reputation for free-wheeling, for observing tradition in the face it presents to the public, while behind the scenes it breaks every rule in the book if that is the only way to get results. Only the British could have invented such an institution which, deservedly, has a world-wide reputation for integrity among all who deal with it. And Sullivan fitted in well.}

^{A lean-faced, smiling man, lightly built and five feet nine tall, he had a thatch of dark hair which women found attractive; so much so he had postponed any idea of marriage yearly. His job was as unique as the organisation he worked for. Investigating suspect insurance claims which might amount to twenty million pounds for a single vessel, he carried no authority in the outside world. He lived by his wits.}

^{He could lean on no one, give orders to no one, but this inhibition had its advantages. He was not too restricted in the methods he used - or persuaded others to use. He lived by his contacts and friendships, by getting to know people far outside the range of the shipping world. It was important to him to know police officials all over the globe, that he could phone certain Interpol officers and call them by their first names, that he attended Interpol conferences where he never stopped talking and listening. He was also one of the most persistent people who walked the face of the earth. 'Do it, get him off our backs', was a phrase often used behind his own back. Loaned by Lloyd's to their client, Harper Tankships, he started his enquiries about the whisper in January.}

^{One January evening - his diary shows it was Sunday January 5 - Sullivan was in Bordeaux, checking the most efficient grapevine in the shipping world, the waterfront bars where seamen gather and gossip. His style of dress was hardly elegant: he wore a none-too-clean sweater and stained trousers under a shabby overcoat.
Not that this choice of clothing fooled the men he talked to, but it helped them to feel less embarrassed at being seen talking to him.}

^{The Café Bleu was the normal, sleazy waterfront drink shop which is reproduced time and again all over the world; layers of blue smoke drifting at different levels like strato-cirrus at thirty thousand feet, lantern lights blurred by smoke, an unsavoury stench compounded of alcohol and smoke and human sweat.}

^{It always amazed Sullivan that men cooped up together in ships for weeks should, the moment they came ashore, rush to coop themselves up again in an atmosphere where oxygen was the least of the chemical elements present. 'Cognac,' he told the barman, Henri, 'and for a little information I could lose a little money ...'}

^{'Yes?' Henri, a low-browed, fat man in a white jacket which was surprisingly clean, pushed the cognac towards him. 'For a long time we do not see you, M. Sullivan ...'}

^{'Harper Tankships - British outfit. They could be ... looking forward to a little trouble, the whisper tells me.'}

^{'This whisper I do not know...' Henri leaned forward to polish the counter close to Sullivan's elbow and dropped his voice. 'You ask Georges - with the beret at the far end of the bar ...'}

^{'You ask him.'}

^{Henri shrugged, finished his polishing, took the cloth down to the far end of the crowded bar where a small man wearing a black beret sat. He talked with him briefly and then came back, shrugging. 'Georges does not know your whisper either ...'}

^{'Then why is he leaving so suddenly ?'}

^{'Maybe his ship sails, maybe his woman waits. Who knows about other men's problems ?'}

^{Henri waited until Sullivan had left the bar, then he used the phone. He couldn't be sure, but he knew a man who occasionally paid to hear who was snooping round the waterfront. ..}

^{Sullivan watched Henri making the call from the almost-closed door of the lavatory. He left the bar by the second exit. It probably meant nothing, but outside he walked close to the shut down shop-fronts, so he was walking as far away as possible from the harbour edge on the other side of the street. On a foggy evening it really is too easy to ram a knife into a man's back - when there is a ten-foot drop into fog-concealed, scummy water so conveniently at hand to dispose of the body. He visited nine more bars that night.}

^{It went on, day after day as Sullivan worked his way north up the west Atlantic coast, driving from port to port, prowling the bars and the brothels night after night, asking the same questions, getting the same negative answers. But not always. There were several occasions when seamen said they might know something, said it in low tones as they glanced carefully round.}

^{A meeting would be arranged, usually in daylight on the following morning, and for a quite different rendezvous. This suggestion was quite routine for Sullivan - informants did not like to tell him things which other ears might register. What was
not routine was the outcome. No one ever kept the appointment.}

^{Bordeaux ... La Rochelle ... Brest... Le Havre ... Ostend ... Antwerp.}

^{They followed his progress all the way up the coast, tracked it on a map of western Europe torn from a school atlas which they had pinned to the wall of the Left Bank apartment in Paris. A phone call came in. Bordeaux. 'An Anglais . . . Sullivan. Asking about Harper Tankships ...'}

^{The forty-four year old Andre Dupont, the man who had helped Winter disable the Italian Syndicate motor-cruiser by throwing a thermite bomb, relayed the message to the older man who was short and wide-shouldered, whose cruel, moustached face was only a shadow in the dimly lit room - Paris was enduring yet another voltage reduction. LeCat took the phone.}

^{'Next time, do not mention the firm's name - you do not wish to end up in an alley with a red half-moon where your throat should be? Follow him .. .'}

^{La Rochelle ... Brest... Le Havre ...}

^{The names were circled on the atlas map and the dates of Sullivan's visits to each port were carefully recorded. 'He will go home from Belgium,' LeCat predicted. 'He will give up and catch the Ostend ferry. He has found out nothing.'}

^{'Who is this man, Sullivan?'}

^{'An agent from Lloyd's of London. He has heard a whisper, no
more. Winter said it was inevitable. Why do you think we are paying out all this money to keep loose mouths shut ? I would handle it more cheaply - with a knife. But you know Winter ...'}

^{Ostend... Antwerp...}

^{'He is not going home,' Andre said. 'For a man who has had no answers to his questions he is very persistent. What if he goes to Hamburg?'}

^Hamburg...

^{On January 9 Sullivan arrived in Ostend. On January 9 Ross arrived in Hamburg.}

^{Mr Arnold Ross, managing director of Ross Tankers Ltd, registered in Bermuda, was an impressive figure. Over six feet tall, thin, bowler-hatted, he was faultlessly dressed in a dark business suit which looked as though it had just been collected from Savile Row. His black shoes positively glowed, his gold cufflinks showed discreetly as he shot his cuffs after taking off an overcoat which could not have cost less than three hundred guineas. Certainly he impressed Mr Paul Hahnemann, construction director of the Hamburg shipbuilding firm of Wilhelm Voss.}

^{'A fifty thousand ton tanker we would be interested to build in our yard,' he assured Mr Ross.}

^{'Cost, time of delivery - the key factors as usual,' Ross replied, staring out of a large picture window overlooking the yard. 'You do understand that this enquiry is very tentative; also that it is quite secret at this stage ?'}

^{'Of course, Mr Ross. We shall use our discretion. You can give us some details of the vessel you have in mind?'}

^{'Something very like a ship you built for Harper Tankships - the
Chieftain ...'}

^{Everyone at Wilhelm Voss was impressed by Arnold Ross, the most typical of Englishmen when he spoke in his clipped voice, when he absent-mindedly pulled at his neat, dark moustache. The
Chieftain,
it appeared, was very similar indeed to the ship Ross had in mind. Blueprints of the tanker were produced, spread out on a drawing table, and Ross spent a lot of time studying them, asking questions about
Chieftain's
design and structure.}

^{Hahnemann, a giant of a man who started work at seven each
morning and was lucky to drive home to Altona by nine in the evening, understood the reason for secrecy. Ross had implied the reason. 'For ten years we have built in Japan. The chairman thinks we should continue this policy. I want a complete scheme worked out before I tell him what I have in mind ...'}

^{Ross thawed a little over lunch, talked about his home in Yorkshire, about the place he kept in Belgravia for weekdays, his love of shooting. It all fitted in with Hahnemann's conception of how a certain sort of wealthy Englishman lived.}

^{During the afternoon a call came through from London, from the headquarters of Ross Tankers. Again discretion was preserved: the caller merely gave her name as Miss Sharpe. Hahnemann handed the receiver to Ross who was bent over yet another blueprint of the
Chieftain.
Ross took the phone, listened, said yes and no several times, then goodbye. 'Always a crisis while I'm away,' he remarked, and went back to his blueprint.}