Rip Tide

But it was the process of despatching the aid that had led to this morning’s phone call. An UCSO aid ship, bound for Mombasa on the first leg of an operation to transport aid inland to the Republic of the Congo, had been subject to a hijacking attempt. Thanks to providence, in the form of a French Navy patrol, the attempt had been foiled. But what was agitating Mitchell Berger, as he watched a black-clad woman on the street below haggling over a bag of oranges, was that this was not the first time pirates had struck. Twice before UCSO ships had been attacked, and both times the ships had been successfully hijacked.

The first incident, a year or so before, had initially seemed to be a freakish one-off. It came during a flurry of hijackings of oil tankers off Somalia; these were the richest pickings for pirates, as the multinational oil companies which owned them were usually keen to settle quickly. From UCSO the pirates had originally demanded £1 million, but after apparently recognising that they weren’t dealing with wealthy owners on this occasion, they had eventually settled with the charity’s insurers for half that sum. However, when the ship was returned, the cargo, which had been unusually valuable, had gone.

The second hijacking had come six months later. Again, the ship had been carrying high-value cargo – more than the normal quantity of drugs (morphine, anaesthetic, antibiotics), which would have fetched good money in many markets. Also, lodged in the Captain’s safe, there had been $200,000 in cash, intended for the UCSO people on the ground to use to grease certain palms, and thus ensure that the cargo arrived at its intended destination. Unsavoury but necessary; UCSO was effective precisely because it didn’t let idealism get in the way of practicality.

The ship had been recovered after a month, though this time the ransom demanded had stayed firmly fixed at £1 million. Again most of the cargo had been removed and the bank notes were no longer in the safe.

And now there had been a third attempt. Thank God it had failed, thought Berger, since after the first two, the insurance companies had raised the premium for continued cover to a near-impossible level. UCSO’s donors wanted their money to go straight to helping desperate people in desperate straits, not towards paying premiums to insurance companies in glitzy City offices.

Berger, still standing looking out of the window, was no longer noticing what was going on in the street outside. He was thinking instead about this third attack. Since the last hijacking, six other UCSO shipments had sailed unmolested through the waters off the Horn of Africa, despite an overall increase in the numbers of hijackings in the region. Why had the pirates targeted the Aristides? A Greek-registered merchant ship, which regularly sailed those waters, was surely a far less attractive target than a tanker.

Berger wanted to believe it was pure chance that UCSO had been targeted three times, but his professional experience had taught him to be suspicious of apparent coincidence. Like the two other hijacked UCSO vessels, the Aristides had been carrying an exceptionally valuable cargo. The customary medical supplies were on board, in addition to food, clothing, tents and reconstruction equipment – all the staples of the charity’s aid programme. But also on board was some particularly expensive kit – the equivalent of half a dozen field hospitals – which would allow surgical procedures to be undertaken miles away from the nearest city, ranging from simple amputations to open heart surgery and the complex treatment of burns victims. In addition there were a dozen of the latest all-terrain vehicles, and again the Captain’s safe contained cash – this time gold coins enough to open most of the doors initially closed to the charity workers on the ground. All of this was easily saleable in a way that a cargo of oil was not.

So the pirates would have struck lucky with the Aristides even if UCSO could not raise their ransom. But was it pure coincidence that all three ships that had been attacked were carrying such valuable disposable cargoes? Berger didn’t think so. Hadn’t Goldfinger remarked memorably to James Bond that meeting him once was happenstance, twice was coincidence, but their third encounter constituted enemy action?

Lunchtime was approaching and down on the street the shoppers were beginning to head home, retreating from the mounting heat. In London it would be mid-morning, a good time to call. Berger picked up the receiver and dialled. A secretary answered.

‘Hello, Val,’ he said. ‘Is David there?’

‘Yes, Mr Berger. I’ll just put you through.’

He waited patiently, thinking about the man to whom he was about to speak – David Blakey, head of UCSO and Berger’s boss.