Timebomb
Page 37
On the 20th of August, the Richard Montgomery began drifting towards Sheerness Middle Sand, driven by a northerly wind and buoyed by a spring tide. Despite nearby ships trying to attract the attention of her crew, nobody on board the Richard Montgomery did anything constructive until the ship actually ran aground, when they all took to the lifeboats. This was the worst case scenario: the ship was heavily laden and had struck the sandbank at high water.
As the tide ebbed, the ship stuck fast and a further problem soon became apparent. The Liberty Ships were built very quickly using a welded plate design – the record for completion of a ship from laying the keel to launching was under five days – and, as the Richard Montgomery settled onto the sandbank, her welded hull plates began cracking open, a noise audible over a mile away.
Salvage operations commenced almost immediately, and over the next weeks about half the cargo of munitions was successfully removed, holds numbers 4 and 5 and the mast locker being completely emptied. Four days after grounding, the hull split just forward of number three hold, flooding that hold and numbers one and two, virtually stopping any further salvage efforts in them, and the ship broke her back early in September.
The wreck was finally abandoned on 25th September, by which date only 2,954 tons of munitions had been removed, and no subsequent salvage attempts have been made. The contents of holds one, two and three were virtually untouched, leaving nearly three thousand two hundred tons of high explosive, mainly 250, 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs, white phosphorus smoke bombs and cluster fragmentation bombs in the wreck, a mere three thousand yards from the seaside town of Sheerness.
Roger Foley was posted to another department immediately after the ship grounded, to ensure that his evidence wouldn’t be heard at the subsequent Board of Inquiry. Bizarrely, despite the fact that the grounding of the vessel was entirely caused by Walmsley’s gross incompetence, the ship’s captain and chief officer were found guilty of placing their vessel in a hazardous position
Since 1944, the wreck has broken into three pieces, and has sunk a little way into the sand, but is still only just below the surface, the masts clearly visible. The remains are cautiously inspected by divers every year or so, and there have been representations to the British Government by everyone from the people of Sheerness, who are pretty much at ground zero, to the American Government, which still nominally owns the cargo, suggesting it might be time to either remove the explosives or make them safe. Every approach has been rejected, presumably on the grounds that the wreck isn’t close enough to Westminster to be of any real concern to the politicians.
It’s argued by some that the longer the wreck stays there, the safer it gets. This suggestion is somewhat naïve because the bulk of the explosive material is TNT which, just like the plastic explosives C4 and Semtex, is largely unaffected by submersion in water. The reality is that the Richard Montgomery’s cargo is just about as lethal today as it was when the ship was stranded.
In 1970, the British Government produced a report which estimated that the explosion of the wrecked ship’s cargo would punch a 1,000 feet wide column of water and debris 10,000 feet into the sky, and generate a wave over fifteen feet high. It would be the world’s largest ever non-nuclear explosion.
Sheerness and the surrounding areas – including the oil refinery on Sheppey, and the eastern end of the Isle of Grain – would suffer catastrophic damage. And the destruction wouldn’t stop there. It’s probable that the wave resulting from the explosion would swamp Canvey Island, South Benfleet and Southend-on-Sea on the south Essex coast. It would also sweep into the Medway and cause flooding in Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham. But possibly the most destructive effects of the wave would be felt some distance away. The narrowing Thames estuary would have the effect of increasing the height of the wave as it approached Greater London. It would probably overwhelm the Thames Barrier and flood the lower-lying areas of the city, including much of the underground system and the road tunnels under the river, causing considerable loss of life and widespread destruction that would take months to rectify.
The explosion would be, quite simply, the biggest economic and environmental disaster ever to strike the United Kingdom, infinitely more destructive than all the bombs and V-weapons that fell on London during the Second World War, and equivalent to the north-east corner of the Isle of Sheppey being hit by a tactical-yield one-and-a-half kiloton nuclear weapon.
The Special Group
The Special Group was created by President Eisenhower under the auspices of the National Security Council as a sub-cabinet level organisation. Then known as the 5412 Committee, it was tasked with oversight of all the country’s clandestine operations and, more importantly, of insulating the president from official knowledge of those operations. The Special Group was, and is, the most secret organisation in America.
The name has been changed frequently – over the years it’s been known by numerous innocuous titles such as ‘The 303’ and ‘The 40 Committee’ in a modest attempt to muddy the waters – but its concept and purpose have remained unchanged. Normally headed by the president’s National Security Advisor, and including the Director of National Intelligence (formerly the Director of Central Intelligence until this post was disestablished after 9/11), the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, The Special Group approves all sensitive, and especially all illegal, activities proposed by the CIA.
These ‘projects’ have included the various attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro; building and operating the U-2 spy plane; Iran-Contra; the murder of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973; financing anti-government rebels in Mauritius; attempts to destabilise the Libyan regime; providing the Mujahadin in Afghanistan with money and weapons to counter the Russian invasion, and money-laundering plots almost without number. The latter included the smuggling of a ton of pure cocaine into the United States from Venezuela in 1990, cocaine that was later sold on the streets of America after a complex and unworkable plan to ensnare drug traffickers had failed.
Each of these ventures was, of course, approved by the then president, but never in writing. The Special Group would assess the viability and utility of each proposed operation, and brief the president verbally about it. If he agreed, also verbally, the CIA would be directed by the Group to implement the plan. If – or, more likely with many CIA operations, when – the operation failed or was exposed to public scrutiny, the president could legitimately disavow all knowledge of it, and the lack of any paper trail would support that denial.
As with so many political matters, what’s important isn’t the truth, but what somebody can prove to be the truth.
Next in An Agent Paul Richter Thriller:
Payback
The sixth Paul Richter novel is an utterly exhilarating and no-holds-barred thriller with a race-against-time series ending that will leave you stunned.
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2008 by Pan Macmillan
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © James Barrington, 2008
The moral right of James Barrington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781910859568
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales
is entirely coincidental.
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