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good.’ He checked his watch.
    Jose had stayed aboard the second fishing boat until Alex and the rest of the men had boarded the
Oslo Star
. Once Alex had seized the ship, Jose had abandoned the trawlers and made for the coast at top speed in an inflatable boat. His job on land was to oversee shipment of the stolen vehicles. The operation on land was as slick as the hijacking at sea. Alex saw a dozen young African men trudging through the sand towards them. His contact in Johannesburg had promised him a small army of drivers to collect individual vehicles, as well as half-a-dozen car transporter trucks. The more the merrier, Alex thought. He was getting paid per vehicle at the end of the day.
    â€˜Keep ’em moving, Jose,’ Alex said. The command was unnecessary as the Mozambican was already in a vehicle, which he drove up onto the car transporter.
    Alex climbed down from the truck, turned and ran back down the dunes to the stranded ship to get another vehicle.
    The
Oslo Star
stuck out like a beached white whale. When he reached the shoreline he saw Sarah behind the wheel of the next vehicle to roll off. She pulled to a halt on the beach beside him, short of Danielle’s tent.
    â€˜Feeling better?’ he asked her, leaning in the window.
    â€˜This is the best job yet, Alex. I’d do you now if I could.’
    He leaned into the cab and kissed her hard. He felt Danielle’s eyes boring into the back of his head from up the beach. ‘Keep moving.’
    â€˜Aye aye, Captain,’ Sarah licked her lips and drove off.

3
    G eorge Penfold sipped freshly squeezed orange juice as he checked his emails.
    London was waking outside in the half-light of dawn. An habitual early riser, Penfold was in his top-floor office, dressed for work, by 6.05 am. Other executives might travel by Rover or Rolls, but George ran through the city streets every day, regardless of the weather. His security people had told him he was at risk, but risk-taking was what had grown his father’s cross-Channel shipping business into an international merchant fleet that was one of the maritime world’s top ten.
    The fourteenth message – how he hated emails – was the International Maritime Bureau’s weekly piracy report, prepared by the IMB’s Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The IMB, a division of the International Chamber of Commerce, to which Penfold Shipping belonged, kept tabs on all types of maritime crime and malpractice around the world. The busy Strait of Malacca, between Singapore and Malaysia, had traditionally been the number-one hot spot for modern piracy, hence the location of the reporting centre in the South-East Asian country.
    Piracy hadn’t been a serious problem for Penfold Shipping. Much of the company’s trade had traditionally been transatlantic, thoughthe expansion into the Far and Middle East had increased the risk of attack. Only one Penfold ship had been targeted so far, and that had been by a fairly amateurish bunch who had boarded a tanker docked in Monrovia, Liberia, for running repairs. The men, armed with machetes, had robbed the crew of their valuables and taken some navigational gear from the bridge. Thankfully, none of Penfold’s people had been injured.
    He read this week’s report, however, with renewed interest, given his plans for expansion into African waters.
    The Somali coast had been Africa’s worst locale for pirate attacks in recent years, but the increased presence of US and other western warships in the region following a spate of daring, high-profile attacks had forced the pirates to sail further and further from their home waters. The problem of piracy was spreading like cancer, southwards down Africa’s less patrolled east coast, as far down as the waters off Mozambique and South Africa. It would be an issue he would have to confront if the purchase of De Witt Shipping was successful as the line plied all of