Timebomb

by Timebomb (retail) (epub)

  ‘What the hell are you going there for?’

  ‘Because that’s where our German friend is holding his party. I was wrong about Fulham, and it took an RAF pilot to put me right – which is embarrassing enough for an ex-Navy officer. We need armed support on Sheppey and the surrounding area as quickly as possible.’

  ‘No way, Richter. I’m going to have a hell of a job explaining Fulham, as it is. I’m not doing anything else until you tell me exactly what’s going on.’

  ‘OK.’ Richter paused for a second or two, marshalling his arguments. ‘If I’m right, it’s been staring us in the face ever since I got back from Germany. You remember that old tramp who had his throat cut, the one whose body fetched up down the coast at Reculver?’

  ‘Yes,’ Simpson replied. ‘What about him? You mean he’s linked to this somehow?’

  ‘Only indirectly. According to the forensic evidence, he was actually killed at Sheerness, and I think he died because of what he witnessed that night.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, but almost certainly a diver checking on the wreck of a ship.’

  ‘So?’ Simpson still sounded unconvinced, but Richter forged on.

  ‘Just off Sheerness lies what’s left of the Richard Montgomery, the Liberty Ship that sank during the Second World War. That Kent detective, Mason, came up with a theory about terrorists taking explosives out of the wreck, but we wrote off that suggestion, because we didn’t consider it feasible. But the wreck itself is real enough.

  ‘Gregory Stevens overheard some members of the group discussing the London event, and they used the initials “FRB”. Those three letters could stand for “Fulham Railway Bridge”, but now I’m convinced that they don’t. Stevens told me that Morschel often used code words to identify his targets, and I think that’s exactly what he’s done here. In fact, it’s a kind of double-bluff.

  ‘In one sense, “FRB” does mean the bridge at Fulham, but that’s only the shorthand code he’d decided to use for convenience. The important thing wasn’t the bridge itself, but its geographical location. The Ordnance Survey National Grid identifier for Fulham Railway Bridge is TQ 243756.’

  ‘Richter, you’re talking in riddles. Get to the point.’

  ‘That is the point. Forget the “TQ” part – 243756 was the official ship number of the SS Richard Montgomery. That’s been their target all along.’

  ‘So you mean terrorists are busy taking stuff out of the wreck, and that’s what the old tramp saw?’

  ‘No,’ Richter said. ‘It’s a lot simpler than that. Morschel isn’t planning on taking stuff out of the wreck. Instead, he’s intending to blow it up, which would create the world’s biggest ever non-nuclear explosion. There are over three and a half thousand tons of highly unstable munitions in that wreck, about half of that weight being the explosive, and they’ve been lying there for the last half-century. It’s assessed as being so dangerous that there’s a permanent exclusion zone around it, and the area is under constant radar surveillance. No vessels are allowed within five hundred feet of it, just in case one hits the wreck by accident and it blows.’

  ‘Why the hell wasn’t that cargo cleared during the last war, or just after it?’

  ‘Probably because Sheppey is a long way from Westminster. I can guarantee that if this ship had sunk right outside the Houses of Parliament, they’d have shifted it in a couple of weeks. It wasn’t a high priority then, so they just left it where it was, and now it’s too dangerous to even try moving it. It’s inspected every year by highly-experienced divers, but that, and imposing the exclusion zone, is about all that’s been done about it.’

  ‘What sort of explosives are we talking about?’

  ‘The details of the original manifest are well established, but what’s not quite so clear is exactly what was removed from the wreck immediately after it was stranded. There are several different assessments of what’s left inside her, but it’s generally believed that the contents of holds one, two and three were hardly touched. That means mainly bombs between two hundred and fifty and two thousand pounds which are filled with TNT – which is unaffected by immersion in sea water – plus phosphorous smoke bombs. The biggest danger is that around one hundred and seventy five tons of fragmentation cluster bombs were stored on the deck immediately above the holds. If the deck plating gives way and they fall on the rest of the cargo, you can almost guarantee the whole lot will blow.’

  ‘It’s that unstable?’ Simpson didn’t sound entirely convinced.

  ‘Absolutely. In 1967 preliminary work was being done on a Polish ship named the Kielce that sank off Folkestone in 1946, with about the same tonnage of munitions on board. The salvage company fired three small cutting charges to start clearing collapsed hull plating. The first two didn’t do anything except cut steel, but the third caused the cargo itself to explode. It detonated with a force equivalent to an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale and caused a seismic shockwave that was detectable about five thousand miles away. But that wreck was lying in ninety feet of water and so most of the energy of the detonation was directed downwards, into the seabed. The situation with the Richard Montgomery is entirely different, because it’s lying in shallow water.

  ‘So if Morschel can get most of the cargo to cook off, that could equate to about a one and a half kiloton blast. To put this into perspective, the Hiroshima nuclear weapon’s yield has been calculated at around fifteen kilotons, so we’re looking at an explosion equivalent to one tenth of that, or about the same as a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon. Such a detonation would flatten most of Sheppey and the Isle of Grain – including the power station, the container port and the natural-gas import facility – but that would only be the start. The most significant destruction would be caused by the Thames itself, because water’s incompressible.

  ‘Look at the damage the Asian tsunami did a few years ago. A one and a half kiloton blast on the seabed off Sheppey would cause a tidal wave that would sweep across the Thames Estuary and do significant damage to the south coast of Essex, and especially to Southend and Canvey Island. The towns of Rochester and Gillingham would suffer as well but, because the entrance to the River Medway between Sheppey and the Isle of Grain is comparatively narrow, there’d be a lot less damage.

  ‘But our real problem would be London. The Thames is shaped like a funnel that narrows significantly when it reaches the centre of the city. A four to six feet wave out in the estuary by Sheppey – and that’s the sort of height this explosion could easily cause – could reach twenty or thirty feet or even more by the time it gets to Gravesend, where the Thames narrows and the banks force the water even higher, and at the same time make it move quicker. We could then have a twenty-foot-high wall of water surging up the river at thirty miles an hour, getting higher and faster as it nears central London. And it’s worth saying that one calculation has suggested the explosion could create a column of water and debris over a thousand feet wide that would reach about ten thousand feet into the air, and cause a wave over fifteen feet high, off Sheppey. If that’s accurate, we could have a forty-foot high tsunami running right through the centre of London.’

  ‘What about the Thames Barrier?’ Simpson asked.

  ‘A complete waste of time,’ Richter said. ‘The Barrier’s intended to cope with spring tides, not something on this scale.’

  ‘But won’t most of the force of the explosion be dissipated in the open water lying to the east of Sheppey?’

  ‘Yes, but that wouldn’t help. The explosion would cause a wave that would radiate in all directions more or less equally, so there’d still be a massive wall of water heading up the Thames.’

  ‘Have you worked all this out for yourself, Richter, or have you spoken to somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about?’

  ‘It’s not just my take on it. I spent an interesting few minutes on the phone to a hydrodynamicist from London University. The figures – or rather the guesses – I�
��ve given you are his, not mine. And there’s a refinement that I only just found out about from this same scientist, who’s now probably packing his bags and heading for higher ground. Have you noticed the moon?’

  ‘What?’ The apparent non-sequitur obviously threw Simpson. ‘The moon? What about it?’

  ‘It’s a new moon, and that’s important. About once every eighteen months, there’s a phenomenon known as the Proxigean Spring Tide. It occurs when the moon is at its closest point to the Earth, its perigee or proxigee, and is directly between us and the sun. That gives rise to unusually high tides and –’

  ‘Don’t tell me. It’s today.’

  ‘Got it in one,’ Richter confirmed. ‘I think Morschel must have carefully planned this some time ago, and if he succeeds it will devastate London. The underground networks and all the tunnels under the Thames will be flooded. Certainly the City, the East End and most of the rest of London will suffer massive flooding. The sewers will be flushed out, filling the streets with excrement and God knows what else. The water supplies will break down. Electricity sub-stations will flood, too, and power will fail over almost the whole city.

  ‘We’re talking national catastrophe here, Simpson, not just a few days paddling around in green wellies. The total bill for repairing the damage could run into billions of pounds, maybe even tens of billions, and if we don’t do something the loss of life that’s forecast will reach over a hundred thousand. That’s a conservative estimate and depends on exactly when the wave hits. In all, this would make 9/11 look like a minor traffic accident.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Simpson muttered.

  ‘That’s a fair summary,’ Richter agreed.

  ‘But what does this fucking German want? What’s his motivation? Just blackmail?’

  ‘He’s already got the money he wants from the bank raids, and if it was blackmail, he’d have issued some demand by now, and then we’d know exactly what he was threatening. No, this is a simple plan with a simple objective. From what Karl Wolff told me over in Germany, Hans Morschel is a pure terrorist, a straight-line descendant of Andreas Baader. He’s even named his gang after the prison in Stuttgart where Baader and the other members of the Red Army Faction were held – which was also where they died. Morschel is only interested in destruction, I think. He organized these robberies to get some walking-around money and also as a diversion to attract the woodentops and get them well out of his way while he attacked his real target.’

  ‘So what can we do? Start an evacuation?’

  ‘Evacuate Greater London? At this time in the afternoon and at about an hour’s notice? Good luck with it. Considering the time we’ve got left I doubt if we could even evacuate Sheerness. If you agree with the logic, I suggest you pass on my suspicions immediately to Five and the Met. Dump it on them – it’s really not our problem. Oh, and I suppose they could close the Thames Barrier as a precaution, not that it’ll do much good.’

  ‘While you do what?’

  Richter glanced at his watch before replying. ‘High tide’s in just over an hour so, assuming I’m right, by then Morschel or whoever’s triggering this thing will have to get a boat full of explosives either on or near the wreck of the Richard Montgomery. I’m going to find them, and do my best to stop them. Could you tell Five to bell the Kent police and ask them to start an immediate search for Hans Morschel. He’s got to have either bought or stolen a boat of some sort, so if they could check the boatyards and marinas on Sheppey and in the Medway area, they might just trace him. They’ll need firearms officers and ARVs on hand, because he’ll certainly be carrying a weapon.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, the obvious. Alert the coastguards to what we think is happening. And if there are any Royal Navy ships in the area, make sure they get Flash signals from CINCFLEET at Northwood so they’re in the loop. If any of them have choppers on board, getting them airborne wouldn’t do any harm as extra sets of eyes in the sky, that kind of thing. But unless they can reach Sheppey within about half an hour, it’ll probably be too late. If you need to get a message to me, contact 22 Squadron at RAF Wattisham. They’ll either be able to call the chopper directly or relay it through local ATC.’

  ‘What about kicking the SAS into gear?’

  ‘Good idea,’ Richter said. ‘We might well need them to help track these guys down, but the first thing is to stop that bomb going off, and they won’t get there in time to do anything about that.’

  ‘Richter,’ Simpson said, after a pause, ‘one point. If you do find this fucking German, don’t bother bringing him back. Just take care of everything out there, OK?’

  ‘I hadn’t planned on him ever enjoying the privilege of standing trial,’ Richter replied, and broke the connection.

  Back in Hammersmith, Simpson stretched out a hand for the telephone.

  Medway, Kent

  When Morschel had originally devised the plan that they were now implementing, he’d spent considerable time studying maps and charts of the area. He’d realized immediately that to get his boat laden with explosives from any of the Medway marinas out into the Thames Estuary, he couldn’t rely totally on an automatic pilot and GPS navigation system. There were just too many other boats and too many obstructions, including shallow water and several small islands. That was why he and Hagen were now steering their two vessels around the last section of the S-shaped bends in the River Medway, between the motorway bridge south-west of Rochester and Lower Upnor. At that point, the river widened dramatically and would offer them a more or less straight run out to Sheppey and the estuary beyond.

  The first of the waypoints Morschel had put into the GPS was a spot in the open water just north of Darnet Fort. From there, the boat would be able to steer almost due east for some two miles before turning north-east for the actual mouth of the Medway. But before they reached that point, once they were over Hoo Flats, lying north of Hoo Fort, with plenty of water under their keels on the flood tide, and no other boats anywhere near them, Morschel signalled to Hagen and throttled back, keeping the boat’s bow pointing east and maintaining just enough throttle to hold the craft in position.

  Hagen expertly brought the stolen boat alongside, only a few metres clear, and kept pace with Morschel’s vessel as his fellow German prepared to abandon ship.

  ‘Watch this carefully, Badri,’ Morschel instructed. ‘These are the connections for the main detonator and the anti-tamper charges.’ He swiftly completed all the necessary connections. ‘Right, now it’s all up to you,’ he said. ‘You’re happy with the controls?’

  In fact, Badri had been at the wheel of the boat virtually since it had nosed out of the riverside marina, and the German was quite satisfied that this young man could handle the vessel competently.

  ‘Yes, no problem.’

  ‘And you know the exact coordinates of the target? And how to disarm the anti-handling devices if you need to?’

  Badri nodded. ‘I know precisely where to go, and I’m now perfectly familiar with all the connections onboard. Don’t worry, Mr Morschel, I know exactly what I’m doing.’

  ‘I’m just checking, that’s all.’ Morschel bent down to unzip a bag on the floor of the cockpit. ‘Now, have you ever used one of these before?’

  He reached inside the bag and pulled out a Heckler & Koch MP5.

  ‘No,’ Badri admitted, ‘but I have used a Kalashnikov.’

  ‘In Pakistan?’ Morschel asked.

  ‘Afghanistan, actually, a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Well, this is similar. It’s smaller, lighter and more accurate than the AK47, but it works the same way.’

  ‘Point it and pull the trigger?’ Badri suggested.

  ‘Exactly. You shouldn’t have to use it, but it’s there, just in case, with a few spare magazines. Anything else?’

  ‘No, nothing. Mr Morschel, now you should leave.’

  ‘Right. Once I’m aboard the other boat, press this’ – Morschel pointed to a button on the box he’d clipped to the con
trol panel – ‘to engage the autopilot and then don’t touch anything else. The whole route is pre-planned from here on, and all the controls are fitted with anti-tampering devices. If you even touch them, the charges attached to the controls will blow up. If the autopilot fails, or you have to take manual control for some other reason, you’ll have to undo all the connections you just saw me complete. OK, now we’ll follow you a short distance out towards the estuary, just to check everything’s working properly.’

  He straightened up and gestured to Hagen, who immediately closed the gap between the two vessels long enough for Morschel to step across the narrow gap between them.

  ‘Back to the marina?’ Hagen asked.

  Morschel shook his head. ‘Not yet. This is a one-shot operation. We’ll follow the boat for a few minutes, just to make sure that the GPS is doing its stuff properly.’

  As they watched, Badri pressed the button as instructed and sat back, waiting. After a few seconds, the GPS obviously completed its calculations because the autopilot smoothly opened the throttle on the other boat and the vessel began to increase speed. Hagen then accelerated to match its speed, but deliberately dropped back about fifty metres.

  ‘How far do you want us to follow?’ Hagen asked. ‘The first waypoint?’

  ‘That should do,’ Morschel agreed.

  About five minutes later, they watched the wheel on the smaller boat make about half a turn clockwise, and the direction in which the vessel was travelling changed slightly. Hagen copied the turn, and watched the small compass mounted above the wheel settle onto a new heading.

  ‘Due east,’ he confirmed. ‘Looks OK to me.’

  ‘Me too,’ Morschel agreed. ‘Close up on him again.’

  Hagen accelerated until the craft was alongside Badri’s. The young Arab turned to them, smiled and waved.

  ‘Right, there’s nothing else we can do,’ Morschel said. ‘Let’s get out of here, Ernst.’

  SAR Sea King helicopter, callsign ‘Rescue 24’