Cobra 405

by Damien Lewis

  For an instant Kilbride, Moynihan and Smithy exchanged startled glances. Then there were smiles all round: why the hell hadn’t any of them thought of that before?

  ‘Sure, that’s what I intended all along,’ Moynihan announced as he clapped his arm around Smithy’s shoulders. ‘I was just testing you … It’s third time lucky, so it is: stand back, while I blast my way into the feckin’ vault!’

  It was approaching midnight on Cyprus, a time of day that Knotts-Lane favoured. He could enjoy the quiet of the ops tent and the peace it afforded him to challenge himself on the chessboard. He had just started his third game of the evening: white versus black and himself as the only possible winner. Ernie Jones, the radio operator, was the only other person present, hunched over the comms equipment in the rear. Over the years, Ernie and Knotts-Lane had developed a familiarity that was based upon many largely silent hours spent in each other’s company.

  As he considered his next move on behalf of black, Knotts-Lane pricked up his ears. There was the distinctive beep-beep-beep of an incoming message. A couple of minutes later Ernie had it decoded.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he snorted. ‘Kilbride … He’s a crafty bastard, or a mad one – depends which way you look at it.’ He turned to Knotts-Lane, handing him the hand-scribbled message. ‘Take a butcher’s at that.’

  Knotts-Lane grabbed the paper excitedly. He flicked his gaze across the message and whistled to himself in amazement.

  He glanced up at the radio operator. ‘Some radio malfunction … Kilbride put a bullet through it with his M16, no doubt.’

  ‘More ’n likely. Shit’s going to hit the fan good ’n’ proper, especially when the bloody Major sees it.’

  ‘Want me to run it across to the SSM?’

  Ernie nodded. ‘You do that. Rather you than me. The SSM’s got a nasty habit of shooting the bloody messenger.’

  Knotts-Lane glanced at his chessboard and made the next move: black rook to J4, to finish off the opposing side’s king. Checkmate, he reckoned, in only six moves. Knotts-Lane preferred it when black won, and most evenings he tried gently to engineer a black victory. He jumped to his feet and strode out of the ops tent. He wondered how it was that Kilbride couldn’t have come up with a better excuse. A radio malfunction was so obvious, so predictable. It was pretty brainless, really. It must have been Bill Berger’s influence, Knotts-Lane reasoned. The dumb American Vietnam vet was dragging Kilbride down to his own level.

  As he made his way through the camp, Knotts-Lane scratched at the scar on his cheek. He remembered Kilbride’s caution that he should go and see the medic about it. Well, Kilbride ought to spend a little more time worrying about his own problems, Knotts-Lane reasoned. The Major was gunning for him anyway. With a stunt like this one – a radio malfunction – Kilbride was really in the shit. If he wasn’t careful he could even get himself booted out of The Regiment.

  Knotts-Lane gave a thin smile. He was going to get a real kick out of delivering this message.

  There was a sudden crack like a thunderbolt, and Moynihan’s cutting charges blasted into the wall to one side of the massive steel door. As the concrete burst asunder, a man-sized hole was opened up into the bank’s subterranean interior. In the deathly silence that followed, Moynihan glanced at Smithy and Kilbride and then back at the breached wall.

  ‘End of story?’ Kilbride quipped.

  Moynihan crossed himself. ‘Never mind end of feckin’ story – it’s a feckin’ miracle, it is.’

  Kilbride shone his torch through the jagged-edged dust-filled opening. He could almost sense the glint of gold in there as the finger of light played among the coal-black shadows. The torch beam glinted on the dull metal surface of a safe, and to one side of it Kilbride could just make out a wall stacked with safety-deposit boxes. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch: it was 11.45 p.m. They had made it into the vault some fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.

  ‘Who’s first?’ he asked.

  Smithy nodded in Moynihan’s direction. ‘Got to be the mad bloody Irishman. None of us would be setting foot in there if it wasn’t for him.’

  Moynihan shrugged. He placed a foot through the opening. As he disappeared into the gloom, he turned back to Smithy. ‘Sure, pass me the lamp, will you? There seems to be a problem with the feckin’ lighting in here.’

  The vault of the Imperial Bank of Beirut was of a simple rectangular construction, about fifty feet long by thirty wide. Along two of the walls there were banks of metal safety-deposit boxes arranged on shelves from the floor to the ceiling, and the third wall was dominated by the entrance hole that the SAS men had blasted. But backed up against the fourth wall were three iron safes, and it was these that drew the men’s attention.

  Moynihan strolled across to the first and gave it a quick once-over. ‘Sure, after the feckin’ door this’ll be like child’s play.’ He turned to Kilbride. ‘Shall I blow the feckin’ three of them together, shall I, all in one go?’

  Kilbride shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  Moynihan grabbed three ready-made PE4 charges from his pack and gaffer-taped one onto each of the safes. He strung the three charges together with a length of detonation wire, and then they all retreated into the corridor once more. Moynihan hit the detonator switch for a fourth time, and another, slightly smaller blast rocked the basement of the Imperial Bank of Beirut. Once the smoke and debris had cleared a little, Moynihan knelt before the first safe, fiddled with the broken lock and in seconds he was able to swing the door open wide.

  His heart beating with anticipation, Kilbride peered inside. The shelves were stacked with grey hardboard containers, each about the size and shape of a shoebox and sealed with two thin strips of metal. He reached inside and pulled one out, and as it came free of the shelf he all but dropped it. It was massively, inconceivably heavy. He glanced across at the others and smiled. They gathered around excitedly as he pulled out his knife and sliced through the metal retaining straps. He levered up the lid and threw it to one side. Two beautiful golden bars stared up at him, glinting in the light of his torch beam.

  Kilbride reached in and picked one up. It was wonderfully cold and smooth and so heavy. But the thing that struck him most was the maker’s mark stamped into the middle of each of the bars. Kilbride stared at it in disbelief, then felt around in his pocket for his SAS winged-dagger cap badge. It was bad tradecraft, but he always carried it with him, even on a deniable operation like this one. He’d had the same cap badge ever since his first combat mission, in Malaysia, and it was his lucky talisman. He held it up against the golden bar. The maker’s stamp showed a metal staff pointing downwards, set over a pair of wings at the top. It and the SAS cap badge were almost identical.

  As Kilbride stared at the maker’s stamp, he noticed that twined around the staff were two snakes, their heads pointing upwards towards the wings. And each had the unmistakable flattened hood of a cobra. Kilbride felt a shiver run up his spine. Cobra gold. That was their chosen mission code name. First a stamp remarkably similar to their own SAS cap badge; now the two cobras. Somehow it felt as if the gold had been sitting here, just waiting for them.

  Kilbride scrutinised the rest of the bar. Next to the maker’s stamp was their name: Schone Edelmetaal BV of the Netherlands. Above that was what looked like a serial number: COBRA 405. Kilbride checked the other bar: it was stamped with a sequential number – COBRA 405. The golden bars were sisters, and they must have come one after the other off the company’s Dutch production line. Below the maker’s stamp was the number 400.095. That, he guessed, had to be the weight of the bar: four hundred ounces (as near as damn it), or 12.5 kilogrammes. Below that again were the words ‘9999 Fine Gold’, which signified that it was 99.99 per cent pure gold – as if he’d needed to be told.

  Kilbride shook himself out of his reverie and turned to the others. ‘Right, it’s time to load up. Smithy, get everyone in here but Boerke, McKierran and Berger. Tell them to keep their bloody eyes peeled: last thing we want is to be
busted by the militia while we’re removing this little lot.’

  Smithy nodded, and disappeared out the doorway blasted in the vault’s back wall.

  Kilbride turned to the others. ‘We’re in luck: it all appears to be boxed. Two bars per box, twenty-five kilos per box, one box per man. Moynihan, Emile – time to get busy.’

  As the men began ferrying the gold out of the bank and into the waiting truck, Kilbride went to inspect the other safes. Each one was stacked in a similar fashion to the first. Kilbride stepped away from the three safes and took in the wider scene. The loading was going well, and he reckoned they’d have all seven hundred bars on the truck within two hours. They should be ready to hit the road well ahead of schedule. But something was eating him, and he couldn’t work out what it was.

  He sat back against the wall and took a minute to think things over. As he gazed at the three safes with their doors hanging open, he suddenly realised what it was. Surely there was too much gold? He studied the first safe and did some quick mental arithmetic, working out how many boxes each shelf held. He then multiplied that by two to reach the total number of bars stored there. He came up with the figure of 714 bars – the exact number of 12.5-kilo bars that equated to fifty million dollars.

  Kilbride shook his head and did the sums again, and came up with the same answer. But if there was fifty million dollars’ worth of gold bullion in that one safe alone, then each of the other two safes had to hold a similar amount. In which case, he was looking at a cool one hundred and fifty million dollars across the three of them. The MI6 officers had assured him that there was fifty million in bullion in the vault, and no more. Their intel was some of the best, they had boasted. How could they have got it so badly wrong?

  Kilbride ran his hand across the stubble of his jawline. However much he tried he just couldn’t seem to get his head around this discovery. He glanced across at the first safe: pretty soon the lads would have all the gold from that one stacked onto the truck, which meant that the Bedford would be a couple of tons overweight already. At present rates of loading, and as no one was counting the bars going in, they’d just keep going until all the gold was on board. But by then the truck would be more than twenty tons overweight, which meant that it wouldn’t be able to move one inch up Rue Riad al Sohl before it broke its back.

  Kilbride called Smithy over. He needed to get everyone together for a heads-up, he explained. Everyone, including the three men on guard. It was past midnight and quiet as death in the Green Line. So to hell with the risk – he needed to speak to them all. A couple of minutes later Kilbride stood in front of all nine of the men, eyeing them in the dim light of the bank vault. At his feet there was an open box, showing two of the golden bars.

  ‘Right – d’you want the good news or the bad news?’ he announced. ‘There’s no way to go about saying this without blowing your minds, so here goes … The good news is that there’s twenty-one hundred gold bars in this vault. That’s three times what we were expecting. Total value: one hundred and fifty million dollars. I repeat: one hundred and fifty million dollars.’

  The men stared at Kilbride in a stunned silence. It struck him then that the situation would have been hugely comical, were it not for the very real dilemma with which this presented them.

  ‘Now for the bad news: twenty-one hundred bars weigh in at twenty-six tons, give or take a few kilos. That’s pretty much three times what the Bedford can carry. I’m as dumbfounded as you lot are. But I’ve done my sums and checked and double-checked: each safe holds seven hundred bars, that’s twenty-one hundred in all. Total weight: roughly twenty-six tons. Total value: one hundred and fifty million dollars … So the question is – what the fuck do we do with it all?’

  ‘Well, we can’t bloody leave it here,’ Smithy blurted out. ‘I mean, one hundred and fifty million – that’s a bloody fortune.’

  ‘Fifty million; a hundred million; it’s all a fortune,’ Nightly snapped. ‘But it’s worth fuck all to us if we get nobbled while we’re nicking it.’

  Boerke picked up one of the golden bars COBRA 405. ‘Listen, have you seen the stamps, the winged staff …’ He had a feverish look on his face, as his gaze flicked from one man to the next. ‘Take a very careful look. Now, have you ever seen anything more like our own cap badge?’ He locked stares with Kilbride. ‘It is like it was made for us, man. Made for us. We cannot leave one bar behind.’

  Kilbride glanced from Boerke to Bill Berger. ‘Plus the two cobras, climbing up the staff. Cobra Gold.’

  Bill Berger reached out, took the bar from Boerke and stared at it for a second. ‘I gotta admit, it’s kinda weird. But even if it had our goddamn names stamped on it, we still got us a problem. I know you reckon they build them Bedfords strong, but twenty-six fuckin’ tons? That’s three journeys to carry that lot, no matter which way you look at it.’

  Smithy glared at the big American. ‘So you’re for bloody leaving it behind, are you?’

  Bill Berger snorted. ‘Over my dead body! Just we gotta think how we get it outta here, that’s all.’

  ‘Let’s try and simplify this,’ said Kilbride. ‘As I see it, there’s only two possible options. First, we stick to the plan: we load seven hundred bars onto the truck and we’re out of here tonight. Let’s say we’re fully loaded by two a.m. We’ll be back at the safe house an hour later, loaded onto the boats by five-thirty a.m., which still gives us an hour’s darkness to get out of the city. So, it’s easily doable. By sunup tomorrow we’d be safely away, and each be five million dollars better off. That’s option one, and it makes one hell of a lot of sense …’

  Kilbride studied the faces of his men in the eerie light of the bank vault. None of them were giving much away.

  ‘Option two: we go for all twenty-one hundred bars,’ he continued. ‘That means three trips across the city, three trips by boat up and down the Beirut River, three trips back and forth to the Palm Islands. That’s three times as much risk of being discovered and hit by one of the militias.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’d try for one trip tonight, two tomorrow – which means loading and unloading the truck twice tomorrow night. We should be able to manage it, but it’s one hell of a lot of risk for an extra hundred million …’

  Kilbride shrugged before finishing the statement. ‘For an extra hundred million dollars.’

  ‘What d’you reckon, boss?’ Smithy asked.

  ‘It’s not up to me … But if you’re asking would I go for the sensible option or the insane one – I’d go for the insane one, every time. I’d go for the one hundred and fifty million …’

  ‘Yeah, and you’d get us all fucking killed,’ Nightly muttered.

  ‘No one’s getting anyone killed,’ Kilbride said evenly. ‘That’s why I called a Chinese parliament – so we could all make the decision. And don’t forget, everyone here’s a volunteer. You go getting yourself killed, you’ll only have yourself to blame.’

  ‘You’re a big boy, Nightly,’ Boerke added. ‘Act like one, man. Take some responsibility. One hundred and fifty million dollars in gold …’

  ‘It’s still no use if you’re fucking dead,’ Nightly retorted. ‘All the money in the world won’t stop a bullet to the head.’

  Kilbride took the gold bar from Bill Berger, placed it back in the box and shut the lid. ‘The clock’s ticking,’ he announced. ‘So if no one’s got a better suggestion let’s go to a vote. All those in favour of Plan B, the totally fucking insane one, raise their hands.’

  Six hands shot into the air: those of Kilbride, Smithy, Berger, Moynihan, McKierran and Boerke. After a second’s delay, Ward and Johno followed suit.

  ‘Emile?’ Kilbride queried.

  ‘I am permitted to vote?’

  ‘’Course you fucking are,’ said Smithy. ‘It’s a Chinese.’

  Emile raised his hand. ‘Then, of course, I too am one of the insane ones.’

  ‘It’s your fucking funeral,’ Nightly muttered, keeping his hand stubbornly by his side. “Don’t sa
y I didn’t warn—’

  ‘Right, it’s decided,’ said Kilbride, ignoring Nightly’s remark. ‘Get that truck loaded with as much as she can carry, ’cause the more we take out tonight the less we have to do tomorrow.’

  Boerke reached down and picked up the box of gold bars at his feet. As he did so, he had a look of wild elation on his normally stony features. He turned and carried it out of the vault. Behind him, lying beside one of the safes and completely forgotten, was his Rubik’s Cube.

  One very sweaty hour later the men had finished loading the vehicles with nine tons of bullion, give or take few bars. The gold made a tiny heap in the rear of the truck, and none of the men could quite believe it weighed so much, or that it was of such immense value. Smithy had had the bright idea of loading up the two Toyota Land Cruisers, and each of those had been packed full of a ton of bullion, or some eighty bars each.

  At 1.45 a.m. the convoy of vehicles rolled out of Rue Riad al-Solh. In the back of each one man was posing as wounded: Johno and Ward in the two Toyotas, and Berger in the Bedford. Each man had stripped down to his underclothes and wrapped himself in the bank security guards’ discarded bandages. Johno and Ward each had an M16 hidden beneath their stretcher, whilst Berger was cradling the big GPMG under his hospital blanket. But all any curious militia member would see if he inspected the rear of the vehicles was an apparently badly wounded patient, swathed in dirty, bloodstained bandages. Even the smell – stale blood and iodine – was entirely convincing.

  Kilbride had left Boerke, McKierran and a sullen Nightly to keep watch over the bank. Under Emile’s guidance he retraced their route through the Green Line. The vehicle convoy reached the checkpoint without incident. Kilbride was so hyped up that he almost failed to notice the girl with the brown eyes above her mask. She asked Emile how their journey had fared, and he told her that all had gone well despite the renewed outbreak of fighting. They had picked up some wounded on the way, and they were in a hurry to get them to a hospital on the eastern side of the city. Sensing the urgency – if not the essence – of their mission, the brown-eyed girl let them through, saving a very special smile for Doctor Luke Kilbride.