From a dossier provided by Bernhard Volkmann, Savich knew that the fifty-two-year-old Singh had raised himself up from a Lahore slum where from an early age he’d used his size and strength as tools of intimidation. He didn’t have his first legitimate job until the age of twenty-six, when he purchased controlling interest in a Pakistani import-export company at the time the United States was funneling money into the region to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the conflict raging in that mountainous country, steady streams of opium smugglers still managed to get their product to Karachi, and Singh was more than willing to forward on their raw product to the heroin-producing centers in Amsterdam, Marseilles, and Rome.
Singh understood that American support guaranteed an Afghan win, so by the time the Taliban came into power and eradicated the opium trade, he had shifted his focus elsewhere. He diversified, using bribery to secure timber rights in Malaysia, Indonesia, and New Guinea. He bought a fleet of his own ships to haul the lumber. He sold private hunting rights to wealthy Chinese so they could harvest tigers on his land and have their bones ground into aphrodisiacs. Nearly every legitimate venture he embarked upon had an illegal angle to it. Four of the twelve apartment buildings one of his companies built in Taiwan collapsed during a mild earthquake because he’d ordered the use of substandard materials. So long as his wealth continued to increase, Shere Singh didn’t care how or where he made his money.
No doubt, Savich thought as the Sikh stepped across to the catwalk, there was an illicit side to the Karamita Breakers Yard.
“Very impressive,” the Russian answered, looking at what the driver had called a ship saw and not bothering to meet Singh’s reptilian gaze.
Singh lit a cigarette in front of a No Smoking sign. “Only one like it in Asia,” he boasted. “The trick to it is the teeth. Even carbon steel would wear out. The metal in the teeth was produced in Germany. Strongest in the world. We can cut ten ships before teeth need to be replaced. Have technician come from Hamburg to show us how. We call him dentist.” When Savich didn’t laugh, Singh plowed on. “You know, fix teeth. Dentist. Is very funny.”
Savich waved a hand to encompass the echoing shed. “This must have been expensive.”
“You have no idea. But Indonesian government gave me tax credits if I modernize. Of course they don’t think that I can fire a thousand workers because of this. Which is good thing. These monkeys are clumsy. Cost me a hundred thousand rupia to family every time some fool gets himself killed breaking ship. Fifteen die last week when a cutter didn’t vent a bunker fuel tank and blew up a container ship in the bay.
“But now that I have the ship saw, government inspectors won’t be around so much. I can start dumping all the asbestos we’ve stripped off ships back in ocean rather than haul to special dump. With the price of scrap ships down and the value of steel up, and a thousand Indonesian monkeys off my payroll, this will pay for itself in two years. So yes, expensive in short run. Profitable in long run.” Singh tried another smile. “And I always say life is marathon.”
An alarm Klaxon sounded. Singh flipped the ear protectors down, and Savich just managed to get his into position when the eight-inch-wide saw blade began to rotate. It spooled up smoothly, rattling only when it ran around the two large sprocket gears near the ceiling. Like a boa constrictor squeezing its victim, hydraulic rams began to tighten the saw around the freighter five feet aft of the previous cut. When the chain reached its required speed, the rams choked back even farther, and the teeth bit into the ship’s keel. The sound filled the metal shed, rebounding off the walls so it assaulted the two men on the catwalk from every direction. Water cannons on either side of the hull automatically tracked the toothed belt as it sliced the ship and kept the cuts lubricated and cool. Steel shavings and steam exploded from where the teeth ripped into the ship’s keel, turning the metal red hot. The smoke coiling from the cut was dense and rank. Once through the solid keel, the saw shredded the much thinner hull plating like a chain saw cutting through rotted wood.
In just ten minutes the rotating chain had cut up to the main deck. Savich watched spellbound as the deck began to glow from the heat of the teeth cutting the metal, and then the chain emerged in an eruption of torn steel and cut through the freighter’s railings as though they weren’t there. A sophisticated braking system stopped the chain, and the entire mechanism retracted toward the ceiling. The dismembered section of hull had already been secured to a rolling crane that spanned the shed. The crane lifted the hull slice as the forward doors opened and the four small locomotives backed in to accept the load.
“They will lay the piece on its side out in the yard,” Singh explained. “Men with hand cutters will chop it up to send to the steel plant. The only parts we can’t cut with the saw are the ship’s main diesels, but they are easy to remove once we cut our way into the engine room. By hand it takes two weeks to scrap a ship this size. We can do it in two days.”
“Very impressive,” Savich repeated.
Shere Singh led the Russian back toward the elevator. “So what is it Volkmann sent you around the world to tell me?”
“We’ll discuss it in your office.”
Fifteen minutes later they were seated in an office attached to the largest bungalow. Framed pictures of Singh’s eleven children were arranged along one wall dominated by a studio portrait of his wife, a heavyset dowager of a woman with a bovine expression. Savich had declined a beer and drank bottled water instead. Singh drank through a bottle of Filipino San Miguel and was on his second by the time Savich had his briefcase opened.
“The consortium accepted everything Volkmann and I proposed,” Savich said. “It’s time to expand what we already started.”
The Sikh laughed. “Was there any doubt?”
Savich ignored the sarcasm and slid across a file. “These are our projected needs for the next year. Can you fulfill them?”
Singh perched a pair of reading glasses on his large nose and scanned the list, mumbling the salient figures. “An additional thousand immediately, two hundred a month first two months. Four hundred next two. Six hundred after that.” He looked across at the Russian. “Why the increase?”
“Disease. By then we expect typhoid and cholera to run rampant.”
“Ah.”
Their discussion of specifics over the next several hours was Savich’s way of making certain Singh fully understood the plan he and Volkmann had perfected since learning of the German central bank’s intention to sell off their gold reserves. To his credit, or perhaps discredit, the Sikh had an inherent grasp of criminal enterprise and was even able to contribute a few inspired refinements.
Satisfied that everything on this end was handled, Savich said his good-byes two hours before sunset so as to have ample time to chopper back to Jakarta. There was no way he’d fly in the small helicopter after dark. He planned on staying in the city overnight before commencing the next leg of his journey, a roundabout odyssey of a half dozen flights to get him back to Russia. He wasn’t looking forward to it.
Ten minutes after Savich left his office at the Karamita Breakers Yard, Shere Singh was on the phone to his son, Abhay. Because of the nature of his work, the senior Singh trusted only his sons to know the full scope of his business, which is why he had had six of them. His five daughters were merely a financial drain, one of whom hadn’t yet married, meaning he still had her dowry to consider. She was the youngest and marginally his favorite, so he’d have to top the two million dollars he’d given the horse-faced Mamta.