Chapter 23

Port of Durban.

A thick fog rolled in from the Indian Ocean like a slow-moving beast, coiling and spreading its pall over the city of Durban. Already, spectral tendrils licked the coastal buildings, clutching at the alleys and roads with clammy insistence. The mist was cold and damp, and it crawled without sound or hurry, smothering the world in its path. There was no wind — only stillness. An ominous, expectant silence clung to the night air, as if the city itself were holding its breath.

Durban slept uneasily. The city lay half-submerged in a haunted twilight, its streets abandoned, save for the blinking of traffic lights switching dumbly through their cycles. Green. Amber. Red. Green again. There were no cars to obey them. No footsteps in the alleys. No dogs barking in the distance. Just the electric murmur of city infrastructure and the growing dampness of the fog, which now began to swallow the dim halos of the streetlamps.

The sky above was void — no moon to watch, no stars to pierce the murk. Even the heavens had turned their gaze. The sodium glow of the city lights fought a losing battle as the mist thickened into a colourless blanket. Within an hour, the skyline would vanish altogether, and Durban would be consumed in white oblivion.

Down in the harbour, at the Port of Durban, the waters heaved in a slow, ceaseless rhythm beneath the darkened sky. The ships moored along the quay shifted against their lines like restless phantoms, their hulls creaking and sighing as if reluctant to be chained. Massive gangplanks groaned and flexed between vessel and shore, echoing like ancient timbers in a crypt. The occasional clank of chain or splash of brine only emphasized the silence all around.

The container cranes loomed like skeletal sentinels, cold and immobile in the fog. Only two of them moved, methodically lifting and lowering twenty-foot containers with the solemnity of machines long since desensitised to the human cargo and secrets they handled. They worked like ancient gods — indifferent, blind, relentless.

One of these steel giants loomed over the ASL South Sea Spirit, a behemoth of modern maritime might. The vessel’s vast hull, painted in the fading blues and greys of its corporate livery, was barely visible through the fog. She stretched 366 meters long, 51 meters wide, and drew fifteen meters of ocean beneath her. A floating fortress. A leviathan in steel.

Her home port was Hamburg, and she flew the German flag, but there was little of Europe aboard her. Her crew were a patchwork of passports, mostly Palestinian seamen hardened by years on unpredictable seas. She was a merchant of global trade — textiles, electronics, machine parts ... and sometimes, other things. Quieter things. Things not listed on manifests.

Tonight, the South Sea Spirit was nearly ready for departure. At first light, she would slip her moorings and vanish into the ocean mist, bound to round the Cape of Good Hope and cross to Gibraltar, where the Atlantic yields to the ancient blue of the Mediterranean. Her ultimate destination: Beirut. But tonight, something else was afoot.

Up on the bridge, the dim glow of the consoles threw pale light across the weathered face of First Officer Abu Fadi al-Maqdisi. He stood with the posture of a man used to long hours and longer silences, his dark eyes scanning the harbour through thick glass streaked with salt and condensation. He was alone. Captain Omar Salameh rested in his quarters below, to be roused shortly before the scheduled departure.

It was all routine. Almost.

Except for the crate.

It should have been delivered hours ago. And still, it had not come.

Abu Fadi checked his watch again — futilely, obsessively. The crate was not listed on the official shipping manifest. It was not something they would speak of on any radio. Its arrival was meant to be swift, discreet, handled by a trusted hand. But the night was ticking away, and the fog would soon smother every approach to the dock. Something was wrong.

He turned his gaze out across the harbour where shadows seemed to gather and pool at unnatural depths. Beyond the edge of visibility, forklifts dozed under tarps and seagulls perched like vultures on rusted railings. A single light blinked from the far end of the pier. Too slow. Too irregular. Not port authority.

Abu Fadi’s jaw tightened.

South African law demanded that a licensed pilot from the Port of Durban guide any ship of this size in or out. It was standard, enforced, unavoidable. No exceptions, especially for a 14,000 TEU (twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) beast like the South Sea Spirit. The pilot would arrive by boat or chopper near dawn. He would assume control until they were well clear of the treacherous harbour, with its sandbanks, shifting currents, and unseen wrecks.

But before then, that crate must be aboard.

If it didn’t arrive soon, there would be ... complications.

Back in the shadows, somewhere in the gloom between fog and floodlight, a dark van idled without headlights. It hadn’t moved in fifteen minutes.

And in the unseen distance, beyond the veil of the mist, a second presence watched the harbour through night-vision glass, unmoving. Waiting.

Something more than trade was being moved through the Port of Durban tonight. Something older than commerce and more dangerous than politics. And time was running out.

Port of Cape Town.

A light drizzle sifted down from low, bruised clouds that hung over Cape Town like a damp wool blanket. It wasn’t rain in the proper sense—more like a fine, half-hearted mist that couldn’t decide if it wanted to fall or just hang there, sulking. The kind that settled into your clothes and made your skin feel sticky no matter how many layers you wore.

The harbour lights shimmered across the rolling black water, casting streaky bands of red and orange across the swell, like neon spilled on oil. Everything was wet — ropes, railings, crates, the dock itself. Even the air felt like it had been soaked and wrung out a few times.

Over on the eastern side of Duncan Dock, a vessel with a red-painted hull and a bright white superstructure swayed gently on its moorings. She looked a little out of place among the sleek modern freighters and commercial vessels — older, leaner, rougher around the edges. But there was dignity in her bones.

The Ocean Wanderer had just returned from the deep south — the bottom of the world — where she’d been cutting through polar waters and bumping ice with her reinforced hull. On the way back, she’d swung past Marion Island to pick up a few scientists who’d had enough wind, weather, and isolation for one season. Now, she was back in her home port.

She was a ship with history, no doubt about that. Built in 1977 by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Shimonoseki, Japan, she’d served under the South African government for decades, ferrying researchers to Antarctica, Marion, and Gough Island. A floating lab. A supply line. A lifeline. She used to wear the badge SAS — South African Ship, but those days were over.

Retired from government service in 2012, she passed briefly through the hands of the South African Maritime Safety Authority before being quietly acquired by a private entity known simply as the Foundation for Law and Order — the FLO. Not quite a government owned enterprise. Not quite a military. But powerful enough to own ships, move money, and operate in places where no flag flies and no questions get asked.

Since then, she’d been overhauled bow to stern. Not patch jobs or retrofits — transformations. She was now outfitted with systems that would make NASA, the CIA, MI5, MI6 — even the Russian FSB, SVR, and GRU — blink ... and drool. Satellite sync arrays, fibre-optic command cores, signal-shielded compartments. She still had the outward look of a tough old research ship, but beneath the skin? She was something else entirely.

LRS Ice Class 1, forged for heavy seas. 111.95 meters long, 18 meters wide, and drawing six meters of water. Displacement: 1,837 tons, but dense and rugged — like a tool forged to punch through continents. She ran on dual Mirrlees Blackstone KMR6 diesels, pushing her to a cruise speed of 12.5 knots, 14 if pushed. Her range was 15,000 nautical miles, and she could stay on station for ninety days without needing a port or permission.

She was designed to carry two Atlas Oryx helicopters, but for this mission, one had been quietly swapped for something more suitable: a Eurocopter AS332J Super Puma, a fast, stealth-capable platform built for special forces insertions at sea. She also carried a submersible, secured in a reinforced bay behind folding bulkheads — just in case this mission went below the waterline.

Superstitious types will tell you it’s bad luck to rename a ship. Something about Neptune’s ledger — or Poseidon’s, if you’re in the Mediterranean mood. Maritime folklore insists you have to purge every trace of the old name, burn the logs, toast the gods, and in one crude variant, recruit a virgin to relieve herself on the bow. But no one here’s overly sentimental about curses. Or if they are, they’ve made peace with them.