by Alex Dryden
It was said by the captain and his crew that the bodyguards were a defence against pirates. But he didn’t know, none of them knew, why they were there, why any defence against pirates was needed.
Eventually the SBS got tired of asking the same questions and the Americans moved in, without getting any more more from the stricken captain than that he was a Filipino with five children back in Mindanao; that his crew were a scratch collection of individuals from a shipping agency. They finally finished with roughing him up as the crates were opened carefully with jemmies.
Inside the crates were boxes and the boxes contained bubble wrap and the bubble wrap contained nothing. Nothing at all. The Pride of Corsica was void of incriminating material. All it contained after the assault were five crew, the assault team and ten dead colleagues of the British and American assault force. Two others were saved.
Later, at the inquiry at which Theo Lish was the principal defender, it was asked why British and American special forces teams had been induced by the Russians to kill their own kind – albeit former colleagues – and why nothing was found on the Pride of Corsica that pointed to a terrorist or any other plot. Lish was able to come up with no adequate answer. Burt Miller, called as a witness, explained that he’d informed the CIA head that he believed the Pride of Corsica had been a bluff all along; that he’d tried to warn Lish, in fact. Miller regretted the loss of life – and the tragic mistake made on the morning of 1 May. But the central question to which Lish continued to flounder under questioning from the Senate Intelligence Committee, was why on Russian evidence alone the assault had been made at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
ANNA SAT AT the far end of a cave at the foot of the cliff on the north shore of the city. Below her feet, the sea water lapped sluggishly at the rock. Where the sea ended, where she sat in the darkness of the cave, was also the final resting place of the harbour’s detritus of oil and chemical waste, metal and plastic cans, polystyrene and fragments of wood and rope that created a six-inch scum on the lapping surface. The insignificant tides of the Black Sea never scoured the cave clean and the smell was one of vegetable and toxic rot and chemical and oil waste that over decades had stained the cave’s walls in a black, glistening film. Drop a match in here, she thought, and the whole place would go up in flames.
She and Larry had descended from the part of town on the north shore after dark and then he’d left her. She’d watched the light grow at the tunnel’s entrance as dawn rose across the heaving channel of the Sevastopolskaya Bukhta, listened to the horn of a ship that entered from the sea through the breakwaters of Sevastopol’s perfect natural harbour, saw its surface lines as it cut through the channel into port – though the cave’s low entrance obscured the superstructure – and listened to the tight chug of a fishing boat and the nerve-jangling cries of seagulls.
Now she fitted the aqualung with its de-breathing apparatus that would eliminate bubbles rising to the surface as it recycled her own oxygen. She fixed the full mask over her face and ensured the tight dry suit that concealed a Russian GRU uniform, the Contender handgun and two sticks of Semtex, was fastened into an airtight position. She checked her watch again. Then at midday exactly, she descended into the filthy slime of the cave’s waste, sunk beneath it and swam towards the entrance of the cave.
It was a swim of just over two kilometres – at an angle across the channel – until she could come ashore on the long naval quay inside the Russian fleet’s protected zone. Somewhere beneath the same waters where she swam she knew other divers were at work, Russian frogmen who had come to set off an explosion that would rend some unwanted fleet vessel apart and at the same time rend the uneasy peace between Russia and Ukraine that clung on in the Crimea.
The waters where she swam were dirty with industrial waste and visibility was low. That would be a help, if by some fluke she and they should cross paths.
All along the shores on the north and south of the Bukhta the fixed and passive sonars were now, she prayed, disabled.
She swam fast, looking at the compass on her arm from time to time. Accuracy at her landing point was crucial. There were a set of steps that descended from the nearest of the two quays she was heading for. They came down at a protected angle which meant that anyone surfacing at the foot of them was visible from only one viewpoint and that was a kilometre away as the crow flies, on the north shore. Unless someone was actually standing on the quay above where the steps emerged, it was the best hope of remaining undetected.
From a ship, the narrow entrance to the dockyards within the main harbour, and to which she was heading, was signalled by a cathedral tower and a monument on the western side of the entrance and a chimney on the eastern side, as well as the usual array of navigational marks, the illuminated reds and greens and whites that gave a vessel its position. But beneath the surface all she could rely on was the compass. If she missed the steps it would be a question of feeling along the walls of the quay until she found them.
She swam strongly and knew she’d entered the dockyards after fifteen minutes. It was a short distance from here to the end of the first of the quays that jutted out from the land into the deep water where big ships could dock. Then she reached the green slime of the quay wall and waited twenty feet beneath the surface while deciding whether to go left or right along the wall. She chose the left and was rewarded after twenty yards with the sight of stone steps that descended beneath the surface. She checked her watch. There were still forty minutes to go while the sonar remained inactive. She imagined that the frogmen would plant whatever device they were using and then get clear of the harbour and away. The explosion might not happen within the hour’s planned lapse in security. But it wouldn’t be long afterwards if it didn’t.
She came as close to the surface as she dared and, through the water now lighter from the sun’s glare, tried to spot any movement on the quay that betrayed a human presence nearby. After five minutes when she’d seen nothing move, no shape or outline apart from the quay’s wall, she came out on the bottom step above the surface. She took another quick look around, then stripped off the mask and aqualung, the dry suit and fins and, weighted with the gas bottle, watched them sink slowly into the grey water. Then she stood and walked up the steps towards the top of the quay.
When she was halfway up she heard a deafening explosion and stopped in momentary shock. Then she saw a ball of flame that reached thirty feet into the air. She crouched down, feeling the Contender digging into her ribs. She saw now that the explosion had come from the main channel, to the north of the dockyards through which she’d swum only minutes earlier. The victim of the blast was an old Russian naval vessel, anchored outside the dockyards. It was just as they’d thought when she and Balthasar had sat on the high bluff above the city.
Now she ran up the remaining steps on to the top of the quay. It was a piece of luck that they’d exploded the vessel now. There would be pandemonium and, in the confusion, it would make her task more easy. Immediately, sirens tore through the low hum of the city and klaxons began to scream their message here, inside the Russian fleet’s highly protected zone.
She looked up along the quay towards the high steel gates that shut her in on the inside of the protected zone and unwanted visitors out. There she saw the train on its tracks that led along the quay and, at the end of the quay where the tracks ended, she saw the aircraft carrier Moskva, broadside on, its towering superstructure dead in line with the train tracks.
There were uniformed men running along the quay pointing at the stricken ship, shouting orders. She heard a man shout at her but she ran past and shouted an order in return. She kept running and was concealed in her speed by the desperate reactions of the few people left inside the protected zone. She reached the engine of the goods train and saw the twenty goods vans trailing behind it and carrying three hundred submarine batteries, most of which weighed half a ton each. With the weight of the train itself, there would be well over two hundred tons of weight.<
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She climbed into the cab. She heard shouting, but it wasn’t directed at her. Not yet. She started the engine of the train and released the brake. Slowly it ground into action and began to rumble along the quay the quarter of a mile before the quay ended at the Moskva. Once it had reached nearly thirty miles an hour, she jammed the accelerator into place, crossed to the other side of the cab and flung herself out on that side where there was no one. All the people on the quay were on the other side of the train, watching the aftermath of the explosion.
Anna rolled hard on the unyielding concrete and got to her feet. Beside her the twenty goods vans were gathering speed and she heard the engine roaring with the strain of reacting to the jammed accelerator. She ducked down and ran to the far side of the quay, away from the train and the burning ship. She wanted to be far from the train when the last of the vans passed her so that she and the train’s catastrophic run towards the Moskva were dissociated as far as possible. When the final van passed she saw that all the military personnel were now turned from the burning ship and watching in horror as the train reached forty, then fifty miles an hour and still kept adding speed.
She didn’t watch but kept moving at a fast walk now towards the steel gates that protected the quay from intruders. She heard the smash as the train broke through the concrete buffers at the end of the track and then the squeal of tortured metal as it swung itself clear of the tracks and on to the bare concrete of the quay. It must be going at seventy or eighty miles an hour now, she thought, and increasing all the time. When she did stop so that, like all the others now on the quay, she was looking at the impending disaster, what she saw was two hundred tons or more of roaring steel crash into the superstructure of the aircraft carrier Moskva and keep on going. The train was like a massive bullet, the thickened steel of the ship’s superstructure no match for its onslaught. It sheared the side of the superstructure away completely on the quayside and kept on boring into the ship until by the time it stopped half of the train was hanging into the harbour on the far side of the carrier and the engine finally exploded with the unrewarded effort of forward propulsion. The entire superstructure toppled and swayed and crashed over itself and on top of the train. Then a sheet of flame erupted from the bowels of the ship.
Anna turned away. She ran towards the steel gates, her right hand arming one of the Semtex tubes, her left waving the Contender. She hurled the explosive at the centre of the gates and rolled away to feel the flash of the explosion on her back and the searing pain of the heat that tore off the back of her uniform. She kept rolling behind a watch hut and gathered her breath. Then she leapt to her feet and ran through smoke and falling debris out of the protected zone. Behind her a ton of steel from one of the gates crashed to the ground and she was through.
The approaches to the gates were now a mass of troops and security personnel, military vehicles and fire trucks that raced towards the gates from the land side. She dodged in and out of them, losing herself in smoke and terrified humanity until she reached the embankment. There was the Ukrainian military ambulance, exactly where Taras had told her it would be. She ran towards it and stepped into the cab, discarding the jacket of her Russian GRU uniform and slipping on the jacket of a Ukrainian military medic. As she turned the ambulance she saw the aircraft carrier Moskva heave a huge sigh that released another wall of flame, then it keeled over to one side and rolled into ten metres of water.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
FROM A WINDOW of a house in the foothills behind the city, Laszlo watched the pyrotechnic disaster unfold in the harbour below. First a rust bucket of a ship exploding in the main lane of the harbour, then the train hurtling towards the Moskva and the carrier’s total destruction. In the moments before the train’s impact with the carrier he focused on the train itself as it began its apocalyptic race to mutual destruction and from the window of the engine’s cab he saw a figure hurl itself and land hard on the concrete quay. He saw the GRU cap roll away as the figure itself expertly went into a crouch and a roll to lessen the brutal impact. Then he saw the figure rise up, temporarily dazed and scraping her hair back under the cap and he knew it was her. His face twisted in fury and he shouted at Eric to get another set of binoculars from the table behind them and train it on the figure, running now, swerving along the quay towards the steel gates of the exit from the protected zone. Then Laszlo saw the explosion at the gates and furiously trained the binoculars on to the swirls of smoke billowing outside them to see in a patch of clearer vision, and still running through falling debris, the figure still there, and escaping.
When Eric had her in his sights, Laszlo told him to keep her there and to radio her movements. He unlocked a door into a back room, summoned Logan from the bed he was lying on and reading a newspaper, and half dragged him from the chair. Then he took a spare gun from his coat pocket and jammed it into Logan’s hands.
‘What’s happened?’ Logan said laconically. ‘A nuclear attack?’
‘This is your moment of glory, Logan,’ Laszlo snarled. ‘We have her. Follow me.’
The two men ran down the stairs to a Cherokee jeep outside. Claude started the engine, looked in surprise at the gun in Logan’s hand, checked with Laszlo for instructions, and revved the jeep through the gears as they hurtled down the hill.
‘To the harbour,’ Laszlo screamed at him.
His radio crackled and Eric’s voice came clear over the headpiece. ‘Follow it as far as you can,’ Laszlo shouted in return. ‘Then follow us.’
The jeep raced around two curves in the steeply falling street to see the embankment ahead.
‘It’s a Ukrainian military ambulance,’ Laszlo said, quieter now. ‘And it’s heading west.’
Once they were on to the embankment, Claude drove the jeep up on to pavements and on to the wrong side of the road, past oncoming military and fire vehicles until, at a distance of some four hundred yards, they saw the rear of the ambulance travelling at a steady speed towards the end of the harbour where the sea finally ended and abutted the city. It followed the curving road around towards the north side.
‘Bring the other car,’ Laszlo shouted into the radio to Eric again. ‘She’s going to the north side. Cut off the route from the top of the city if you have time. Keep your radio on.’
But by the time Eric had got the second car on to the road that descended at an angle above the embankment, the ambulance was round the corner of the harbour and heading at greater speed along the north side. Behind it, the jeep travelled fast enough to gain a little without alerting Anna to the fact that she was being followed.
Halfway around the north of the harbour, the ambulance took a sudden right turn, up a street that climbed away from the sea. The jeep followed and Laszlo radioed again to Eric, giving him the track of the ambulance.
The jeep was now two hundred yards away from the ambulance and Anna caught it in her mirror.
‘She must be heading for the military hospital,’ Logan said, bemused. ‘Why do you think it’s her? Why would she be driving an ambulance to the military hospital, for Chrissakes!’
‘Never mind why. It’s her. Eric saw her getting into it.’
‘Unless there are two ambulances,’ Logan replied.
But then, as the jeep began to gain again on the ambulance, he saw her hair free from the cap and knew it was her.
‘Load up,’ Laszlo said quietly. ‘But shoot to wound, to disable, not to kill. The Russians want her alive.’
Ahead of the jeep, the ambulance swung to the left up the incline of a hairpin bend and suddenly it was broadside on to the following jeep. Logan saw Anna level the barrel of the Contender on to the ledge of the door and fire. There was an ear-splitting crack in the jeep. The bullet made a neat hole in the windscreen, the jeep veered violently to the right across the road and bounced against an earth bank, ricocheting back and twisting on itself so that by the time it reached the bend it was facing in the opposite direction to that in which it needed to go, the rear tyres squealing a
gainst tarmac and the smell of rubber rising into the car. Claude screamed at the wheel. His left arm hung uselessly by his side and he was fighting the spinning steering wheel using only his right hand.
Laszlo grabbed the wheel and steadied it, the tail-spinning slowed, and Claude gunned the accelerator up the hill.
‘The bitch! The bitch shot me!’
Ahead of them the ambulance swung up and around another bend and in the rearview mirror Laszlo saw the black Toyota truck right behind them, Eric at the wheel, his face gripped with a stone rage.
‘Wrap this around his arm,’ Laszlo shouted at Logan in the back and handed him a white silk scarf.
‘Jesus!’ Claude bit his lip and the blood ceased pumping where the scarf tightened around his bicep. The jeep had fallen back after the encounter but now they were gaining again when they saw the grim façade of the military hospital on a rise in the hill above them.
In the ambulance Anna reloaded the Contender. Ahead of her she too saw the hospital and prayed that Larry and Taras and the others had made it. But still, when she was five hundred yards below the hospital, she knew the ambulance wasn’t going to make it. In the mirror, she saw the jeep and another car behind it gaining all the time. And from the windows of both cars she saw gun barrels levelled at the ambulance and she knew now that her only chance was to fight.
As she swung the ambulance sharply to the right she spun the wheel back until the vehicle screamed on its rear wheels and suddenly it was facing the way she had come up and the two cars slowed to a halt, one beside the other, blocking any route to her from above or to anyone coming up from below. She saw the doors swing open on both sides of the cars for some slim protection and a man from the second car dipped below the sill and ran into the cover of an earth bank. And then she saw Logan.