The Rybinsk Deception by Colin D. Peel Page A

to. If you hadn’t been wearing it, you’d be dead.’ She used her tweezers again. ‘I know this hurts, but I’ve nearly finished. You don’t realize how lucky you were.’
    He didn’t need reminding. Of the men who had been rescued by the launches, three members of the boarding party were suffering from gunshot wounds, and two of the Pishan ’s crew were dead, killed in the water after they’d abandoned their ship in a vain attempt to avoid the crossfire on the deck.
    That the raid had been a disaster was not in doubt. The reason for the disaster was something Coburn had been struggling to figure out ever since he’d regained consciousness in the bottom of one of the launches.
    Because Heather had so far made no mention of the Selina , he asked her if it had returned to the village yet.
    ‘It came in about an hour ago. That’s where I’ve been – patching up the men who got hurt. Why?’
    ‘Did Hari say when he’d be coming to see me?’
    ‘When he’s finished talking to their families. He’s impressed with you. He said if you hadn’t realized it was a trap you’d probably all be dead.’
    ‘And he wants to know how I guessed.’
    ‘Mm.’ She looked at him. ‘So do I.’
    Unlike Hari who, after transferring his injured men to the Selina , had chosen to accompany them on a gentler but slower return trip, Coburn had elected to remain on the launch that had picked him up, hoping to arrive back early so he could assemble his thoughts before he was presented with questions for which he had no good answers.
    Even now, the few answers he did have made little sense and he was far from being ready to offer anything in the way of an explanation.
    Heather had stopped probing his armpit for more fragments of aluminium. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’ she said.
    ‘It wasn’t a trap for Hari: It was a trap for me. The guy who was driving that truck at the beach was on board the Pishan . He was standing right in front of me. Whatever the connection is between what happened last night and what happened at Fauzdarhat, it isn’t Hari.’
    ‘So you’ve decided you’re the connection?’ She looked doubtful.
    ‘Or you,’ Coburn said. ‘The only three people who have anything in common with last night and a ship-breaking yard thousands of miles away are you, me and that driver.’
    ‘It doesn’t mean he was on board the Pishan to kill you.’
    ‘It does if that’s the new job he’s been given. Whoever it is who wants me out of the way must have known the Pishan was going to be raided and somehow or other they knew I’d be part of the boarding party.’
    ‘How could they?’ Her cheeks started to go red. ‘You don’t think it was me, do you?’ she said. ‘I didn’t tell anyone.’
    ‘If it wasn’t you or me, and if it wasn’t Hari, that only leaves two other people.’
    ‘You mean O’Halloran – or Armstrong at the IMB?’
    ‘Or both of them,’ Coburn said. ‘Which it can’t be – not when it was the IMB that sent me to find you in Bangladesh, and not when it was the CIA and O’Halloran’s Counter-Proliferation Centre who wanted me to check out the Pishan on their behalf. Have you got any more bright ideas like that one?’
    ‘No. I don’t really trust the Americans though.’
    Coburn grinned at her. ‘Because you think they’re paranoid about North Korea?’
    ‘They are.’ She made him wince by swabbing hydrogen peroxide over his cuts. ‘After you’d left last night a girl called Indiri came to see me. She’s the wife of one of the men who got hurt. I think Hari had asked her to make sure I was all right while you were away. She said that whenever her husband’s out on a raid she stops herself from worrying about him by watching satellite television all night. So I went with her.’
    ‘And?’ Coburn put his shirt back on.
    ‘If you’d spent hours watching TV broadcasts instead of getting yourself knocked out in the middle of the Strait, you’d know exactly how paranoid