The Sanction

by Mark Sennen

  ‘Swarovski, nice,’ he said examining the pair of spotting scopes. ‘Easily a couple of grand each.’

  ‘Any good though?’ Silva said.

  ‘Are you kidding me? You could make out the hairs on my backside at five hundred metres if you wanted to.’

  ‘I’ll pass, thanks.’ Silva nodded at the rest of the kit Itchy had requested. ‘What about the other stuff?’

  ‘Top notch. Your Mr Fairchild doesn’t mind splashing the cash, does he? Three grand for the video camera and lens, a survey-quality GPS, Zeiss binos. All I can say is me likey verily muchly.’ Itchy replaced the scope in its case and glanced at Silva. ‘Is this legit, Silvi? You said Fairchild owed your father but this is a hell of a way to pay him back.’

  The thought had crossed Silva’s mind too. Fairchild had plenty of money but that wasn’t the point. He was risking much more than his bank balance by sponsoring the operation.

  ‘If it’s not because he owes my dad then I guess it must be ideological,’ Silva said. It was the truth and Itchy appeared to accept her answer. She pointed to the far side of the room where a long aluminium flight case sat apart from everything else. ‘We’d better take a look at that. The rifle.’

  ‘Oooh yes, let’s!’ Itchy rubbed his hands and moved across. He stopped next to the case, made a bowing gesture, and swept his arm to one side. ‘I mean, after you, of course.’

  They shifted the case to the low coffee table and Silva clicked open the catches and opened the lid.

  ‘Perfect!’ Itchy peered in at the weapon encased in foam. ‘Our trusty old L115A3.’

  The weapon was identical to the rifle Silva had used in the army. Bolt action with a five-shot magazine firing .338 rounds. Also in the case was a telescopic sight and a suppressor to minimise sound and muzzle flash.

  ‘There are better, but I’m used to it. No point trying something new.’

  ‘This is a one-shot mission, right?’ Itchy said as Silva ran her fingers over the gun’s stock. ‘No second chances.’

  ‘There’s going to be a firework display, so a miss might not be noticed. But if I hit her with a non-killing shot it’s unlikely I’ll get another one in.’ Even as she spoke there was a small part of her that recoiled at the clinical way she’d said the words.

  ‘We’d better make sure you don’t miss, then.’ Itchy walked over to the dining table where he’d laid out maps and satellite imagery. ‘Do some practice at the exact distance and get some information into the DOPE book. You ready for that, Silvi?’

  ‘Yes, I guess.’ She turned to Itchy. He was head down over the documents, working on the numbers. She knew this was black and white for him. Hope had been complicit in the deaths of innocent people and was guilty as charged. All that remained was to carry out the sentence.

  The DOPE book was the data of previous engagements, a data reference specific to each individual weapon. Since Silva had never fired this particular rifle, the book was empty. Only by firing the weapon multiple times in different conditions could they work out how to set up the rifle and scope.

  Itchy continued to pore over the maps and the pictures, and within a few minutes he had the distance and elevation figures for Positano.

  ‘Fairchild chose good,’ Itchy said, pointing down at the map. ‘One thousand, two hundred and twenty-nine metres is my best guess until we get in on the ground. I don’t know if he knew what he was doing but there’s a height difference of just twenty metres and perfect line of sight, albeit it at an acute angle. Should make doing the ballistic calcs a doddle. We’ve just got to hope a sirocco doesn’t blow up from the south. Pushing against the cliffs it would cause one hell of an updraught. Accuracy would go out the window.’

  ‘What would I do without you?’

  ‘Miss.’ Itchy laughed. ‘Then again, I’ve got to do something for the money, right?’

  ‘Aside from the wind, what will the weather be like?’

  ‘You know forecasts, but probably warm. Low to mid-twenties in the evening. Humidity around sixty-five per cent. Air pressure something like one thousand and fifteen millibars.’

  ‘Sounds perfect.’

  ‘It needs to be.’ Itchy shook his head and looked at the satellite image. He traced his finger from one side of the bay to the other. ‘It’s one hell of a shot. The bullet’s going to be arcing down like the end of a rainbow by the time it reaches Hope. Be a drop of something like ten metres. And if you’ve only got one chance…’

  ‘We’d best get out and practise, then,’ Silva said. ‘Come on.’

  They hiked up to the trail Gavin had pointed out, leaving the rifle behind but taking stakes, a steel target board and the GPS. They set up a firing position on top of the ridge and selected a suitable target location across a small valley. Navigating their way down through the thick macchia and up the other side was almost impossible, and by the time they got to the top Silva was scratched all over. She pulled out a water bottle from her sack and took a long draught while Itchy wandered around taking GPS readings.

  ‘Here,’ he said, scuffing the ground with his foot. ‘One-two-two-nine with a twenty-metre difference in elevation. We should be able to simulate the shot perfectly aside from the barometrics. We can adjust for that later.’

  ‘I’d half forgotten all this stuff. Didn’t think I’d ever be using it again.’

  They rigged the steel plate, stuck a paper target to it and headed off back down the valley and up the other side. Itchy took some more GPS readings to double check and they returned to the lodge for lunch.

  After they’d eaten, Itchy cleared away the plates.

  ‘You ready?’ he said. ‘For the serious business?’

  Silva nodded, but in truth she felt far from ready. The last time she’d fired a weapon it had ended in tragedy and now all of a sudden the reality of the situation struck her. She was planning to kill Karen Hope, but Hope wasn’t a soldier belonging to an opposing force. She was a civilian. She was guilty of a horrendous crime, but shouldn’t any punishment be legally sanctioned by a court of law?

  ‘Silvi?’ Itchy stood beside her. ‘She killed your mother.’

  ‘Yes.’ Silva nodded. ‘You’re right. Let’s do it.’

  She gave the rifle a final check and grabbed a box of cartridges. They spent the next few minutes loading several magazines and firing a few close-range shots in the field at the front of the lodge in order to zero the sights. Then they hiked back up the side of the mountain. Itchy set up his spotting scope and pulled out his phone. He opened his ballistics app and shielded the screen from the glare as he began to input various figures. Silva eased herself down and tried to get comfortable with the rifle as she lay on the rough ground. She bent to the scope and tried to acquire the target.

  ‘It’s a long way,’ she said. ‘I can’t see much.’

  ‘Follow the treeline until you get to the vertical rock face. Go up a little and you’re there.’

  ‘Got it.’ The target didn’t exactly spring into view – the circles were tiny – but at least she could see the thing. ‘I hope this is going to be a lot easier when we get to Positano.’

  Itchy didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he began to give her some figures to dial into the scope. She clicked the dials round.

  ‘All good,’ Itchy said, bending to the spotting scope. ‘Send when ready.’

  Silva took several deep breaths and held steady. Did no more than caress the trigger.

  A crack came from the rifle and Itchy was speaking long before the retort echoed back at them off the facing ridge. Silva noted the puff of dust fly out from the rocks above the target.

  ‘You’re two metres up and around thirty centimetres right.’

  Silva made another adjustment to the scope and settled again.

  Crack. A puff of dust.

  Itchy gave her more instructions.

  Crack. Dust. Crack. Dust.

  Silva let off another shot and changed the magazine. Several more shots followed until a ping came back a
t them from the ridge.

  ‘Shot. You hit the plate.’

  Another adjustment.

  Crack. Ping.

  And another.

  Crack. Ping.

  Finally, after a dozen more rounds, Itchy peered through his spotting scope. ‘Nice. That last one was almost dead centre. Let’s try some groupings now.’

  With the scope adjusted, Silva shot through the rest of the magazines until they were out of ammunition.

  ‘You haven’t lost it, Silvi,’ Itchy said. ‘Those groupings. Tight as ever you were. The army must have been crazy to get rid of you.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I just did.’ Itchy grinned. ‘Come on. If we hike across to the target now, I can stick a new one up ready for tomorrow. Means I can have a lie-in.’

  Silva pushed herself up from the ground and dusted herself off. She picked up the rifle and stared across to the far ridge. Positano at night was going to be a very different proposition.

  ‘We shoot tomorrow, but the day after we don’t come up here until sunset,’ Silva said. ‘We’ll take a couple of torches over to the targets to illuminate the area and shoot once it’s fully dark. We need to simulate the conditions.’

  ‘You’re right. Different atmospherics and temperature at night. We’ll have to account for the variation in humidity at the coast too.’ Itchy reached for the spotting scope and began to detach it from the tripod. ‘I didn’t factor that in. Stupid.’

  Silva watched as Itchy packed away the kit. She wondered what else they hadn’t factored in.

  * * *

  The Border Force didn’t hang around and the next morning an email with several attachments dropped into Holm’s inbox. Javed stood by his shoulder as he opened one of the spreadsheets.

  ‘Jesus,’ Holm said as myriad lines of data scrolled on his screen. ‘Cornish was spot on. Needle in a haystack. I don’t see how we can find anything.’

  ‘Three months’ worth of container movements,’ Javed said. ‘Ten thousand containers a day, so that’s close to a million separate entries across all the spreadsheets.’

  ‘This is a nightmare.’ Holm took in the top few rows. Toys from China. Car parts from Hungary. Textiles from Vietnam. ‘We’ll be here until my retirement before we can make sense of this.’

  ‘Not at all. We’ll pull all the records into one file. Remove the ones unrelated to SeaPak and use a bit of programming to identify any anomalies. Write a formula or a macro or something.’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘Do you mind, sir?’ Javed gestured at Holm’s seat. ‘If I could sit down and have a look. Perhaps this time you could get the coffees?’

  For a moment Holm thought about saying he wasn’t anyone’s dogsbody, but then he looked at the rows and rows of figures on the screen. Clicking a mouse button was at the top end of his technical ability; formulas and macros were a foreign language. A coffee and a cake might be just the thing.

  He went to the canteen where he bought two coffees and a couple of pastries and returned to his office to find Javed leaning back in the chair, working on his nails with his clippers.

  ‘We’ve hit gold, sir,’ Javed said, looking overly smug with himself as he gestured at the screen. ‘Took me all of five minutes.’

  Holm sighed. He didn’t know if he was pleased or disappointed. ‘Show me.’

  ‘First, I extracted the SeaPak data. Then I de-duped the port destinations and the ship names, then—’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Removed duplicates so there were only unique port and ship names as the end points and carriers for the containers.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Then I began to write a formula intending to pull out data for use in a graph. However, I pretty soon found an error.’ Javed pointed to the screen. ‘Look at this container. SPKZ300176. The SPK is the owner identifier – in this case SeaPak. The Z specifies the container type product code, the six-figure number is the container identifier. This particular container pops up in May, June and July. It produces the same error in my formula too.’

  Holm shook his head. ‘Which is?’

  ‘The start point and the end point are identical. Look, the container was loaded onto the boat in Felixstowe. The boat is the Excelsior and she makes regular trips between Rotterdam and Felixstowe. However, according to the records the container wasn’t offloaded in Rotterdam, but rather came back to Felixstowe. It never left the ship.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘In short, it means the container went from the UK and travelled to the Netherlands, but because it wasn’t disembarked, to all intents and purposes it never left English soil. Which means it was never checked when it came back to the UK. The records show the container had a domestic origin, hence it wasn’t flagged for inspection.’

  ‘So there could have been anything inside?’

  ‘Precisely. The set-up Cornish showed us at Felixstowe was redundant, because the container would have been let through with no checks.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. If it originated from the UK then there’s no smuggling going on.’

  ‘Right, that’s what I thought until I looked through some more records and found a sister container which was loaded at Rotterdam. That container returned to Rotterdam without leaving the ship. Start and end port were the same.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s an error in the document.’

  ‘Not at all. Now, when they load the cargo I’m guessing there’s some kind of algorithm so they position containers according to weight and destination. You don’t want to have to unload cargo if it’s going to an onward destination.’

  ‘You’re losing me, Farakh.’

  ‘Hang in there, we’re almost finished.’ Javed pointed at the screen, his finger hovering over one of the cells on the spreadsheet. ‘That’s the location on the boat where the container is stored. Take a look at our original container from Felixstowe and the second container from Rotterdam.’

  Javed flicked between locations on the spreadsheet. Figures swirled and changed and the beginnings of a headache began to throb right between Holm’s eyes.

  ‘I…’ He felt enfeebled, left behind. He knew he should have gone on more courses, but it was too late now. He closed his eyes for a moment and then blinked them open. ‘For God’s sake put me out of my misery.’

  ‘There. The loading locations on board the Excelsior. Container Alpha and container Zulu have location IDs which differ by only one digit.’ Javed turned from the screen. ‘I’m guessing that means they were slap bang next to each other on the boat.’

  * * *

  Late the next afternoon a swirl of dust at the end of the track signalled they had visitors. Silva got up from where she was sitting on the veranda and called into the house for Gavin.

  ‘Trouble,’ she said when he emerged. She pointed down the valley to where a red sports car was dodging the potholes. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Gavin said. ‘That’s Mr Fairchild.’

  Fairchild swung the car round in front of the house and clambered out. Lona, the woman Silva had seen with Gavin in Plymouth, was with him. She wore jeans and a tight top which emphasised her breasts. Her lipstick matched the colour of the car to a shade.

  ‘Who is she?’ Itchy whispered, awestruck.

  ‘Your wife’s got a kid on the way, Itch.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. My bad.’

  ‘Rebecca!’ Fairchild bounded up the steps. He turned to Itchy. ‘And you must be Richard. Heard all about you. Top bloke, from what Rebecca told me.’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘This is Lona.’ Fairchild gestured at the woman and she climbed the steps and moved forward to kiss them, Italian style, each in turn. Itchy’s eyes grew in size as she bent close. ‘Lona’s here to coordinate everything. She’ll be your CO on the op – right, Lona?’

  ‘Sure thing, Matthew.’

  ‘In my absence, what she says, goes.’

  ‘Mr Fairchild?’ Gavin had come across. H
e glared at Lona. ‘But we’re all set. Equipment in order. Everything ready. Good to go.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it, Gavin.’ Fairchild gave a half wave, dismissing any argument. He moved across to a wicker sofa and sat. ‘Now, drinks. A toast to the success of the operation.’

  For a moment Gavin stood, impassive. Then he turned and went inside.

  ‘Don’t you think celebrating is a bit premature?’ Silva said. ‘Sort of counting your chickens?’

  ‘Oh, I have no doubt as to the outcome. On the morning of the sixteenth the news will be about Karen Hope. Stories will begin to emerge about her background. Questions will be asked. It will cascade onwards from there over the next few days, becoming an avalanche within a week.’

  ‘You’ll leak the material?’

  ‘Just so. Then all of a sudden the imperative will be to flip the situation. The death of Hope will be spun not as a tragedy but as a lucky escape. A staid but reliable candidate will step into the breach and be elected.’ Fairchild turned his head as Gavin emerged with a tray which held an ice bucket with a bottle in and several glasses. ‘Great. Richard, you’ll do the honours? You look like a man who knows how to handle a fine champagne.’

  Itchy shifted uncomfortably. As far as Silva knew the closest he’d come to opening a fine champagne was twisting the top off a bottle of cheap Prosecco.

  Gavin put the tray down on the low table and Itchy reached for the bottle and began to remove the foil covering. He loosened the wire and eased out the cork. There was a loud pop and the cork shot from his hand, skimming Fairchild’s shoulder and disappearing into the meadow.

  ‘Well, I hope Rebecca’s a better shot than you.’ Fairchild said. He pointed at the bottle where the froth was beginning to bubble out. ‘Well, pour it, man. I don’t like to see good fizz going to waste.’

  Itchy sloshed champagne into the glasses and Fairchild reached for one and raised it to the light.

  ‘To a steady hand and a good, clean kill,’ he said. ‘Cheers.’

  * * *

  ‘When are we going to tell Huxtable?’ Javed asked.

  Holm shrugged. They’d worked on the info and had come up with a theory. The container put on the ship in Rotterdam had made the cross-channel journey six times, twice each month in May, June and July. It had joined the Excelsior at Rotterdam and gone to Felixstowe and back to Rotterdam. According to the manifests it never left the ship. The other container had done the same journey except it had joined at Felixstowe. The ship took the route weekly and every second week the two containers were on board. They were, without fail, next to each other on the boat.