Black Reef

by Nick Elliott

  Loaded into each of the LCUs were four Jackals. Conway reeled off their virtues: ‘Emwimmiks we call them: Mobility Weapon-Mounted Installation Kits if you want to know what it stands for. Primary role is deep battlespace reconnaissance, rapid assault and fire support – roles where mobility, endurance and manoeuvrability are important. They’re agile and well-armed. These are what we’ll be using when we get wherever we’re going – all four of them. Five men per vehicle and as well as your good self we’ll bring along a few other specialists, so twenty of us in all.’

  We went up on deck to where four LCVP Mk5s were suspended from davits. Lieutenant Dave Stephenson, a cheerful Geordie from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, recited their purpose: ‘Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel. Primary role, putting men and equipment ashore. But we also use them as patrol boats. Can carry up to thirty-five fully-laden Marines and their equipment including Land Rovers.’ Stephenson’s special forces regiment was part of the British Army but I’d been told they worked closely with the SBS as well as the SAS.

  We met that evening in a bar next to the wardroom: Fraser, who was there by invitation according to unfathomable Navy protocol, Conway, Stephenson, our host Williams and myself. The ship’s officers were dressed in Red Sea rig: uniform trousers, open-neck tropical white shirt with boards and maroon cummerbund with the ship’s crest. On the advice of the captain I had borrowed a cummerbund to conform to this protocol. Fraser recommended Horse’s Necks meticulously prepared by the bar steward. Dinner with the other ship’s officers followed in the wardroom. It was all in striking contrast to life on a merchant vessel.

  By the following day we were crossing the Bay of Biscay which, in December, was as rough as its reputation. As commanding officer the captain was on the bridge frequently. The officer of the watch, navigating officer, lookout and quartermaster on the wheel were all there too, lending a mood of busy camaraderie though there was little idle chatter.

  But most of that day and those that followed were spent with Conway and his troop down in the dock or on shooting practice from the flight deck. Given the weather conditions, this was challenging. The targets were cardboard boxes and I was given a Colt Canada C8 assault rifle and a Sig P226 pistol to play with. For the rest of the voyage I practised for at least three hours daily. By the time we were ready to disembark I was getting the hang of it, and of the infrared night vision goggles.

  ‘Night vision illuminates the surrounding darkness while thermal imaging illuminates darkened targets,’ Conway explained. ‘While the optic itself is mounted on your rifle, what it sees is beamed via a Bluetooth connection to your head-mounted display so you can toggle between the two modes at the push of a button. Simple.’

  Throughout the voyage the ops room status was continuously at “ready for action” level. The ship was fully armed with missile systems ready for launch. And on day three we received confirmation that the Poseidon Pioneer had made her call at Porto and was sailing south. This information had come from Pedro, who had reported direct to Claire in Lisbon, and it had been cross-checked against a similar report from the Lloyd’s Agent in Porto. What Pedro had also discovered, and was not in the Lloyd’s report, was that three large trucks had driven off the vessel and proceeded to a location on the south bank of the Rio Douro several miles upstream from the city. They’d returned after eight hours and the ship had sailed. This put her around six hundred nautical miles ahead of our own present position on the Buttress.

  What was more, again from Pedro’s discreet enquiries, was the ship’s destination: the port of Nouadhibou in Mauritania. My case work had never taken me to this port but it was well known in shipping circles, for Nouadhibou was the biggest ships graveyard in the world. Vessels of all flags, mostly flags of convenience, big and small and from nations across the world were dumped here having outlived their usefulness or because the owners, for whatever reason, had wanted to steer clear of the international law of the sea.

  Now we knew our quarry’s destination, Buttress picked up speed to close the gap between the two ships. ‘Now the chase begins,’ Conway announced. ‘We can put some meat on the bones of those war games we’ve been playing.’ And after further reports channelled through Amber Dove, came in over the next couple of days, Conway was able to give Fraser, Williams, Stephenson and myself a briefing on how he saw the landside operation playing out.

  We gathered in Fraser’s dayroom but this was Conway’s show now. The atmosphere had changed: there was a palpable sense of urgency and anticipation of what lay before us. ‘Okay, I’ll keep this brief,’ he began. ‘First off, talking with Angus here, we can assume the Poseidon Pioneer is carrying gold in those three trucks, and we’re pretty sure that this op is going to be moving inland once the ship reaches Nouadhibou. So from here on in we’ll be sharing operational control with the Special Forces unit at RAF Akrotiri. There are several good reasons for this which I won’t go into now. Suffice it to say that Mauritania is manageable from Cyprus. Not that close but they have all the aircraft, men, equipment and logistics to support a long-range job like this and they’re used to operating in the desert: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan – these countries are Akrotiri’s backyard.

  ‘Buttress will be able to provide whatever further support we may need but will reduce speed and continue southwards serving as a decoy against any interest from foreign parties out there in the Atlantic, such as our Russian friends. Both the Americans and our own navy have assets able to defend any hostile action from that direction. However, I would stress this is primarily a criminal and not a military target we’re pursuing. And if all goes well, we would hope to wrap it up within thirty-six hours; but we have contingency planning in place for much longer if necessary.

  ‘So first we locate the Poseidon Pioneer in Nouadhibou. That’s Stephenson’s job with his LCVPs. If the gold is on board the ship then we’ll mount an assault there and then, but we’re all pretty certain our eyes in the sky will tell us that it’s not. Our guess: it’ll be heading ashore in those trucks. Right so far, Angus?’

  I nodded. We’d discussed it at length down in the dock. Now Conway continued.

  ‘In the air we’ll have an assortment of aircraft from Akrotiri including an E3D Sentry providing airborne early warning and control – AWAKS in other words; a Reaper UAV feeding real-time images back to Akrotiri with a downlink to me on the ground; and, crucially, two Hercules C130s – and you know what they’re for. They’ll only be called in once we’re ready. It’s a long way from Akrotiri and then on to Lisbon so we’ll have a Voyager air-to-air refuelling tanker in the air too.

  ‘Finally, you don’t need to be reminded that this is a black op: covert and fully deniable; under the radar.’

  Chapter 28

  The forty-mile-long peninsula that is Ras Nouadhibou runs down Africa’s Atlantic coastline parallel to the mainland. On a map it looks a bit like Baja California on the US west coast, but there the similarity ends, for this is the harsh, remote coast of the Sahara desert. The peninsula is split down the middle between the nations of Mauritania on the east and Western Sahara on the west. It’s also known as Cabo Blanco or Cap Blanc, depending on whose map you’re looking at.

  We arrived off the peninsula at 0200 hours. The sea was calm, the temperature in the mid-twenties. There was no moon and the night was awash with stars, the Milky Way a swathe of pale light painted diagonally across the sky.

  Despite objections from Conway I’d decided to join the team from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and at 0230 our LCVP was launched from its davits. On board was a six-man team led by Dave Stephenson. Our equipment included two Land Rovers. We set off around the cape in the little craft and headed up the gulf on the peninsula’s eastern side north of the port of Nouadhibou. Here was the graveyard. Spread out in the waters off the port lay over three hundred ships. Some were afloat, others aground on sandbanks and on the beach. They would never be removed. Mauritania was rich in iron ore and had no use for scrap metal. Anyway, the cost of removi
ng the oil and other hazardous liquids from their tanks would far outweigh their value as scrap. We moved in amongst them, our progress made easier by our shallow draft. It was somewhere here that the Poseidon Pioneer was anchored.

  With guidance from our eye in the sky we found her and hove to some fifty yards away. The ship had been run aground on a sandbank close to the beach. Her bow door was open. She was showing no lights and there was no sign of human activity on the deck: a dead ship. We approached to get a closer look then cautiously began circling her. When we came back round to the bow door I raised my arm for Stephenson to bring us to a stop. Pulling down my infrared goggles I peered into the mouth of the vessel. Now I could see clearly into the garage. It was empty.

  ‘I need to get on board,’ I said. ‘Can you back onto the bow ramp and give me fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Only if you agree to take a couple of guys with you.’

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed. It would speed up the search.

  Leaving from the vehicle deck, we carried out a search of the whole ship from the depths of the engine room to the monkey bridge, from stem to stern. It was cursory but I was pretty sure there was no one left on board. If there had been they’d have either come out at us or surrendered: we were armed to the teeth. But time wasn’t on our side. The Poseidon Pioneer’s cargo of trucks loaded with Nazi gold was gone. The ship had been abandoned to rust away like all the others in that strange, ghostly place.

  We rejoined the LCVP. Stephenson reported back to Conway on Buttress and got the go-ahead to land on the western side of the gulf and rendezvous with the SBS team at agreed coordinates. We headed out eastwards across the gulf. It was a distance of sixteen nautical miles and took us an hour and fifteen minutes maintaining half-speed so as not to alert any curious fishing boats.

  As we hit the beach on the other side we disturbed flocks of birds here on their breeding grounds. Thousands of flamingos, sandpipers, pelicans, terns and other species wintering on this east Atlantic flyway rose into the air. There were four of us including Stephenson and myself. We came ashore in one of the Land Rovers, leaving the remainder of the team on board to await Stephenson’s return.

  Now we headed south to the rendezvous point just north of the Banc d’Arguin National Park. Here the mudflats border the desert and the jeep made heavy going of the terrain until we reached harder, drier land. We drove on as dawn broke across the vast, empty expanse of the Sahara. And after an hour or so we came across Conway’s SBS team in their Jackals.

  ‘You found the ship alright then.’ We’d already radioed him.

  ‘Yeah, but nothing on board. No trucks, no crew. Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ said Conway. ‘What was it Amber quoted at us? “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” Let’s get after them.’

  Stephenson and his two colleagues headed back to rejoin their comrades on the LCVP before returning to Buttress. Our aim now was to intercept the three trucks that had come ashore some hours ahead of us. They had landed on the peninsula so would have had to drive north on the N2, a surfaced road that went up to the head of the gulf before heading east then south in a loop. We reckoned the trucks would turn off this road at some point on its southward leg and head further east, deep into the interior of the Sahara. This was based on intel reporting the location of an old French Foreign Legion fort around which the RAF’s Reaper UAV had spotted a group of Bedouins with their camels who had just set up a camp there and were carrying arms. The fort had been abandoned for years so this activity made it a site of interest. We would head for it and the Reaper, flying high above the desert, would feed images directly back to Conway in the Jackal. I sat up alongside him and we set off.

  The eight-ton Jackal is an ungainly looking vehicle inside and out, painted in camouflage colours and carrying grenade launchers and a heavy machine gun bolted onto a gun turret. It was protected by steel armour plating against mine and ballistic attack. Conway had given me a sermon on its merits as he had on all the rest of his kit: ‘Designed to fill a gap between the Land Rover and the slower tanks and heavy vehicles. We wanted something that could carry men, provisions and weapons over rough terrain, quickly: top speed eighty mph. Had to be well protected and well armed of course. And importantly for us, it has a range of five-hundred miles.’

  They came with closed cabs or open – ours were open. I was told, and soon it was confirmed, that the suspension was a work of genius. At upwards of half a million sterling each, it needed to be pretty capable.

  We headed east into the white glare of the sun as it rose higher from the horizon. Despite the terrain the Jackal glided smoothly along on its magic suspension. We passed no humans or other motor vehicles, only the odd group of moth-eaten camels scratching around in the sand for sprigs of thorn bush. The contrast between this desolate but striking landscape and the lush, decaying jungle of Kazunda was acute.

  After an hour we crossed the north–south N2 road, again seeing no traffic, and continued east. This was bandit country. Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and other terrorist groups were known to operate here. After another hour we’d covered a further fifty miles and Conway stopped, the other three vehicles pulling up alongside us. The cool of the desert night had long since dissipated and now we were stationary, without the breeze from our headway, the heat struck like a blast furnace. We gathered around Conway who, reassuringly, was using a map and compass in addition to his GPS unit and the downlink device hooking us up to the Reaper out of sight in the sky above us. He pointed his finger at a spot on the map. ‘We’re here, forty-six miles east of the N2.’ He pointed to another spot. ‘The Reaper’s telling us the gold trucks are here. It’s identified them as three 6 by 6 Mercedes Zetros off-roaders, each with a ten-ton payload capacity. They’re travelling at around our speed – forty to fifty miles an hour. That’s faster than we expected. Projecting their direction of travel we reckon they’re headed for this point here.’ Again he pointed, this time to a symbol, a small tower. ‘This is the abandoned French Foreign Legion fort, one of the last Saharan forts built to control tribal unrest in the area back in the 1930s. Rectangular layout with two towers, one in the north-west corner and another in the south-east. And a blockhouse. It also played a key role in the ethnic conflicts that occurred here in the seventies and eighties. There are still potentially hostile tribesmen in the region, mostly from the Regueibat tribe – normally friendly and hospitable, not always though and it’s probably them that the Reaper spotted setting up camp there. Oh, and there’s the remains of an airstrip. Hasn’t been used since the eighties but I don’t think that’ll be a problem. The Hercs are used to these sorts of condition.’

  The irony linking the two forts struck me: this remote, abandoned spot in the desert where I was heading and Black Reef where I’d come from; both failed bastions of colonial rule.

  It was clear from where he’d indicated on the map that the trucks were ahead of us but not by far. ‘That’s not necessarily a bad thing,’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll reach the fort no more than an hour after them. It’ll be well after dark by then. We’ve still got another eight hours of driving.’

  We set off again. The sun was high in the sky now and the light blinding, even with the windproof desert sunglasses we’d been issued. There was no horizon. The sky was the same hazy white as the sand. Mirage lakes would appear then disappear moments before we reached them.

  We were travelling faster now. Conway wanted to time our arrival at the fort after the Zetros had arrived but before they’d unloaded the gold and left. It was our best guess that the trucks would have to be carrying forklifts and that the gold would be stowed on pallets. Assuming a load capacity of around eighteen hundred kilograms each and, that according to best-guess intelligence reports we’d received the Poseidon Pioneer had loaded between twenty-two and twenty-five tons of gold, then there would be between twelve and fifteen pallets to shift. Although we could only guess at the distance the forklifts
would have to travel from truck to blockhouse, if that’s where they were planning to store the hoard, it wasn’t going to take long – maybe as little as two or three hours to have the gold safely stored with whatever security systems they were planning to set up there.

  Conway was saying: ‘Could be this gang of tribesmen or the national military, but I bet they’ll have some permanent human presence there to guard something of this value. And I’d be surprised if they don’t rig up some kind of booby trap too. What do you reckon that lot’s worth?’

  ‘Well over a billion dollars,’ I said, ‘maybe a billion and a half.’

  He whistled. As we pushed on we continued going over the job and how it was likely to unfold once we reached the fort. What we hadn’t planned for was the sandstorm.

  It was late afternoon when the sky began to darken prematurely. The sun was well behind us now, a dull red orb in the west. With little warning, five or six miles ahead appeared a billowing brown cloud, a swirling mass of sand towering hundreds of feet into the sky. It stretched far across the desert and lay directly in our path like a vertical sandstone cliff. As we got closer we changed from sunglasses to goggles and pulled our Shemagh scarfs up over mouth and nose.

  ‘These things can travel at twenty-five miles an hour and we’re doing fifty so keep your hair on!’ shouted Conway. The other three Jackals spread out and switched on their lights. Then we were in it.

  At first it was a disorientating churn of brown, but then as the storm closed around us it went completely dark. We slowed down and with headlights on beam, crawled forward.