Free The Rybinsk Deception by Colin D. Peel

Instead of it  being simply a question of boarding a ship at gunpoint to off-load a  cargo that was easy to handle, this was an altogether more complicated  operation in which he’d been forced to play a role he hadn’t played  before.
    The role of the Selina was more complicated too. Under the captaincy of Hari’s skinny Somalian colleague, it had left the village early in the afternoon, heading out in to the Strait alone to identify the Pishan while there was still sufficient daylight to do so, and since then had been shadowing the freighter under the cover of darkness, waiting for the four high-speed launches to make first contact with their target.
    In the last ten minutes Hari had become busier, swearing over his radio alternately in French and English whenever the crews of the three lead launches were slow to report their positions or follow his instructions.
    He was chain-smoking too, lighting one cigarette after another and spitting out the ends over the side at increasingly short intervals.
    ‘If you stop smoking you’ll have more time to yell into your radio,’ Coburn said.
    ‘I tell these men what they must do, yet still they must be reminded.’ Hari pointed ahead. ‘We receive good co-ordinates from the Selina , yes?’
    In the moonlight, the Pishan was as easy to pick out as it was torecognize. It was a Liberian-registered lighter-aboard-ship vessel known as a LASH, a twenty-year-old special-purpose freighter that was carrying its cargo in a dozen or more sixty foot-long steel lighters or barges that were lined up between the rails of the movable crane that spanned its deck.
    Hari lit another cigarette. ‘The manifest lists thirty tons of zinc ingots in lighter nine,’ he said. ‘But there is no mention of how many men we will find on board.’
    Coburn couldn’t see it mattering much. ‘As long as there’s someone who knows how to drive the crane, what do you care?’ he said. ‘You’re not worried about running into trouble, are you? It’s only a freighter.’
    ‘Always it is best to know the size of the crew. Even if our bluff works well, if the captain thinks he is cleverer than we are, things can still go wrong for us. I am more worried about what it is the Selina must do afterwards.’
    Coburn could understand why. Forcing the Pishan ’s crew to unload the lighter containing the ingots was one thing, but Hari’s master plan made no allowance for the risk to the Selina later on. As well as acting as a mother-ship to the launches and having to tow the lighter across busy shipping lanes in the middle of the night, both the Selina and the lighter were steel-hulled vessels that would be easy to track by radar if someone was to bother – a problem not shared by the wooden launches which were largely invisible to shore-based or ship-borne installations.
    And then there was the problem of the early sunrise, Coburn thought. At sometime before dawn, the crew of the Selina still had to reach the deep-water inlet that lay seventy-five miles further up the coast where they would sink the lighter, and where it would remain sunk until Hari found a buyer for the ingots.
    By now all of the launches were ready and preparing to close in, swiftly moving shadows that, but for their wakes, were almost impossible to see in the dark. Keeping pace with them, 500 yards away, the Selina was equally indistinct, a larger shadow that was there one minute and gone the next, visible only when the moon broke through the clouds.
    To Coburn the whole scene had an air of unreality about it. He wasstanding at the stern of the launch, less conscious of his nerves than he had been earlier, but unable to rid himself of the feeling that Hari’s bluff was never going to work.
    Hari himself had no such doubt. He was using his radio again, this time with greater urgency, first instructing his men on the leading starboard launch to raise their bamboo pole with the mine and its magnets on it, and then, once he’d received