It was a vast scrap yard located on a beach in northwest India.
The place had unusual tide changes, thirty feet from high to low, which made it an ideal place to “break” ships.
An old ship destined to be broken—that is, cut up and sold for scrap—would appear off Gottabang and ride in on the high tide at full speed, intentionally beaching itself. As soon as the tide ebbed, a small army of workers would descend on the beach and, armed with cutting torches and sledgehammers, would tear into the ship like vultures, carrying it away one piece at a time until there was nothing left.
Many of the ships that met their end like this were thirty years old or more. This meant they were full of hazardous materials such as asbestos, PCBs and highly toxic hydraulic fluids and fuel.
When a ship was gutted, a lot of these harmful contents spilled out onto the beach—and most of them stayed there, to be eventually burned, which simply spread their toxicity over an even larger area. In fact, fires big and small burned along Gottabang’s beach day and night, providing a poisonous atmosphere for the 20,000 people who worked and lived there.
As a result, Gottabang looked like a doomed landscape where industrialism and pollution had run rampant. On any given day, more than 100 ships sat offshore, waiting to be called to their death.
There were a few other places in Asia where ships could be broken, larger places. But Gottabang had a special distinction: It was the least regulated of all the ship-breaking operations. If pirates or anyone else wanted to get rid of a ship with no questions asked, Gottabang was the place to go.
The procedure was simple: A typical-size 500-foot cargo transporter could produce enough scrap metal to see a million-dollar profit or more. But if a pirate band wanted to quickly lose evidence of a hijacking, they could bring a ship to Gottabang and get it broken in return for a mere fraction of that amount, if anything at all, letting the bulk of the profit go to the millionaires in Bombay who owned the ship-breaking operation.
The important thing was, if such a deal could be struck between the pirates and those owners, then the ship in question would be moved to the front of the line and would cease to exist in a matter of hours.
* * *
THE CIA AGENT listened intently. Southwest Asia was not in his purview, but he’d heard of the notorious ship-breaking operations at Chittagong in Bangladesh and Arang in southern India.
“New ones opened up in Pakistan and Turkey in just the past year,” Nolan told him. “It’s the same situation at all of them. A few people make a lot of money by using near-slave labor and polluting a piece of the planet.”
“So much for being ‘green,’” the agent said.
“Only the money is green,” Twitch interjected.
Nolan went on: “The pirates realize the stolen ship has more than those weapons on board, but they’ll also want to cover their tracks. The people who run Gottabang are corrupt as hell. They’ll have no problem breaking the hijacked ship, no questions asked.”
“Let’s say your scenario is correct,” the agent said. “What will they do with the Z-box?”
Nolan replied. “Before that phone call just now, I would have said that maybe they’d make like old-time pirates and bury it with those M-16s someplace. Or maybe they’d try to unload it on to the crooks at Gottabang. But now, contacting those ransom brokers and people in Monte Carlo? They’ve got to be trying to sell it for big bucks.”
“But how can we find out for sure?” the agent asked.
“First thing is to find the pirates,” Nolan replied. “And that means getting to Gottabang fast. Maybe we can beat them there. But even if we don’t, we can find out if they’ve been sniffing around and that will at least let us zero in on their location. And that sure beats looking all over the globe for them.”
The agent was growing very anxious.
“Well, all this means you guys got to get cracking,” he said. “And I mean, immediately.”
* * *
HE LEFT THEM with two sat-phones and a business envelope holding his secure number and the code word.
The agent then retreated to the silver helicopter, looking more disheveled than before. The copter took off and, as it gained a little height, it swung back over the mega-yacht. Flying low and slow, the team was surprised