by Damien Lewis
The second problem, Gus explained, was getting the right stamps on the bars. After a gold bar was cast, the manufacturer’s logo and serial number were stamped onto it using a steel punch. Smithy’s ‘replica’ bars should be no different. If Smithy could provide accurate images of the manufacturer’s marks to the Chinese, then the whole job could be wrapped up at the factory. That last bit might be illegal, Gus added, so officially he could have nothing to do with that.
Gus advised Smithy to come back to him and place an order ‘if the film’s producers – ha! ha! – get the budget sorted.’ Once Gus put their order through to the Chinese, they could knock out that sort of shipment over a long weekend. He would need fifty per cent of his facilitator’s fee up front, Gus added, the rest on delivery.
By the time Smithy had signed off communications with Gus it was well into the early hours of Wednesday morning. Alone in the office, Smithy leaned back his chair and considered what he’d discovered. Five hundred thousand dollars seemed like one hell of a lot for a false shipment of gold. But that’s what The Project was there for, Smithy reasoned, to help bankroll the mission.
It was odd, but the obscure metal that Goldenboy Gus had advised him to use sounded somehow familiar. Tungsten. Tungsten: where had he heard that name before? Smithy went into Kilbride’s poky office kitchen to make himself a coffee. As he stirred in the milk he was hit by a blinding flash of inspiration. An image came into his mind – a memory from his early days in the military – of a tungsten projectile, a weapon they had used with awesome effect against an entrenched enemy position. Smithy felt a surge of excitement. If he was right he might just have cracked it. He might just have figured out how they were going to hit the enemy harder than ever they could have imagined.
With a pounding heart Smithy hurried back to his computer. He pulled up the Google search engine and punched in the words: ‘Oerlikon 25mm gun projectile’. A picture of a sleek 25mm round appeared on screen, next to an image of an Oerlikon heavy machine gun. I was right, I was fucking right, Smithy thought. The tip of the 25mm round used in that gun was manufactured from tungsten, as were scores of other armour-piercing and bunker-busting bombs. Tungsten was immensely heavy and immensely hard, with a ridiculously high melting point. And its capacity for causing lethal destruction was almost unlimited …
After just a few hours’ sleep Smithy was up early, double-checking his research. He resisted the temptation to share it with the others, Kilbride included. This plan was his baby, his beautiful idea, and he couldn’t wait to see their reaction when he presented it to them that evening.
At 7 p.m. the men gathered on the patio with a case of cold Kilimanjaro beers. Each briefed the others on what he’d achieved over the past three days. Bill Berger was particularly proud of his newest discovery on the weapons front. The US military had recently developed a Masterkey weapons system, consisting of the Diemaco variant of the M16 assault rifle with a Remington 870 Modular Combat Shotgun mounted under the barrel. The end result was a dual 5.56mm assault rifle with an underslung pump-action automatic shotgun. Half a dozen Masterkey systems were at the top of the shopping list to be presented to Nick Coles.
For his part, Boerke had hit upon an ingenious delivery system to get their weapons in country. The US military had just developed a new Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), code-named the CQ-10A Snow Goose, one designed purely for clandestine cargo deliveries. It consisted of a propeller-driven cargo unit slung beneath a paragliding-type chute. The Snow Goose would be released from a mother aircraft, navigate its way to the drop zone and deliver the weapons. Boerke wanted two Snow Goose drops scheduled: one to deliver a weapons package to the dhow crew at sea, the other to make a weapons drop to the A Team somewhere in the remote Lebanese mountains.
Kilbride spoke next, and outlined the means to deliver the decoy gold to the Lebanon. It would be packed into a standard shipping container at its place of origin, and shipped to the Lebanon as ‘brewing equipment’. Kilbride had already gone about setting up a London-registered company, Lebanon Wineries Ltd, which would import the shipment into the Lebanon. Shipping containers were sealed and labelled at their port of export, and fewer than one in a hundred were searched upon arrival at the Port of Beirut.
A local truck driver would be hired to deliver the shipping container to its destination. Kilbride had located a farm with a couple of old barns at Wadi Jehannam, not far from the mountainous border with Syria. Lebanon Wineries was in the process of purchasing the farm, ostensibly to set up a new vineyard. Lebanon did produce some fine wines and it was a growth industry, so the cover was totally feasible. Upon arrival at the farm the shipping container would be unloaded into one of the barns, and the barn doors would be sealed shut. And there it would sit, until Kilbride and his men came to ‘retrieve’ it some several weeks later.
But try as he might, Kilbride had been unable to crack the enigma of how to destroy the Black Assassins. The answer had to lie in the decoy mission somehow, but he couldn’t for the life of him work out what it was. It would come to him, Kilbride assured the others. He just needed more time, that was all.
Smithy was the last to deliver his update. He talked through his dealings with Goldenboy Gus, explaining how tungsten was the perfect metal for the decoy gold, as it had a density more or less exactly the same as gold. He explained how they could get the decoy shipment made up in China, no questions asked. As tungsten had such a high melting point, it wasn’t possible to cast the fake bullion. Instead, you’d start with a rectangular slab of machined tungsten, and cast that into a bar mould by coating it in a thin layer of lead, which has the same softness and feel as gold. Finally, you’d electroplate the whole thing in real gold, and bingo – you’d have your perfect fake bullion.
‘Now this ’ere’s the really clever bit,’ Smithy announced. He whipped out a large book and plonked it down on the table, underlining its title with his stubby index finger. ‘The Industry Catalogue of Gold Bars Worldwide,’ he read, haltingly. ‘Not the most sexy of covers, is it? But believe it or not, this book has a picture of every sort of gold bar that’s ever been made. Awesome. It even gives you the exact sizes and stuff, and shows you the makers’ stamps. It’s like a DIY forgers’ guide … It cost me five hundred dollars, plus the courier fee to get it here – so it’s the most expensive book I ever purchased. Not that I’ve got a big library, mind, except for the porn. Still, I reckon it was more than bloody worth it, don’t you?’
The men stared at the book in amazement as Smithy flicked through from one glossy picture to the next. He paused at a photo of a gold bar displaying a winged-staff logo, entwined with two cobras.
‘See,’ he announced. ‘That’s the one, ain’t it? Awesome.’
Boerke nodded. ‘The Schöne Edelmetaal London Good Delivery Bar. You can’t mistake it.’
‘Right, cost,’ Smithy continued. ‘To get seventeen and a half tons made up costs a cool half a million. Sounds a lot, don’t it? But not when I tell you how we can use seventeen and a half tons of this stuff to blast the Black Arseholes into that Paradise they’re all so bloody keen to reach …’
Kilbride glanced up from the book and stared at Smithy, his mouth agape. ‘Hold on a minute. You mean to say you’ve bloody cracked it? Without breathing a bloody word to anyone, least of all me? I’ve been tearing my bloody hair out …’
Smithy held up a hand to silence him. ‘If you’ll just let me continue … Now, tungsten is so bloody hard and so dense that it’s used to tip armour-piercing rounds and bunker-busting bombs. Put it together with some high explosives and it’s nasty, lethal. Take a look at these.’ Smithy handed around some printouts from the internet. ‘See those Oerlikon twenty-five-millimetre rounds – they’re tungsten-tipped. See those combat-shotgun pellets – they’re solid tungsten. And those BLU-122 bunker-busting bombs – they’re sheathed in the bloody stuff.’
‘Okay, buddy, we’re impressed,’ Bill Berger growled. ‘So what’s the secret? We beat the Black Assholes over
the head with the tungsten bars, is that it?’
Smithy grinned. ‘Close. Think what the Black Arseholes are going to do with that shipping container, once they’ve “captured” it off of us lot. They’re going to head for the hills as fast as they can. In fact, sure as arseholes is arseholes, they’ll make for their camp in the Syrian mountains. When they get there, they’ll have taken seventeen and a half tons of rock-solid, hard-as-fuck tungsten right into the very midst of their camp. And guess what happens next …’
Smithy paused for dramatic effect. No one uttered a word. He knew that his plan was brilliant, and their speechlessness confirmed it for him.
Smithy rubbed his hands together excitedly. ‘Imagine we’ve packed the centre of that tungsten shipment with a bloody great charge of RDX high explosives. And imagine there’s a tracking device and a remote-controlled detonator in there too. We’ll have just delivered the most awesome weapon ever into the heart of the enemy camp. When the tracking device tells us it’s there and we hit the detonate, the RDX is going to blow fifteen hundred bars of tungsten into a hundred thousand shrapnel fragments. Boom! It’s like a bloody great big nail-bomb. End of bloody story, as Moynihan would say.’
Smithy sat back and eyed the three of them. There was a stunned silence.
Boerke shook his head in amazement. ‘Beautiful, man. Absolutely fucking beautiful.’
‘I love you, Smithy, I love you,’ Bill Berger muttered. ‘You got the biggest bunker-buster the world has ever known, buddy, and the Black Assholes are gonna be history.’
‘It’s the ultimate Trojan Horse,’ Kilbride announced in amazement. ‘You bastard, Smithy. I’ve been killing myself and you bloody well knew the answer all along.’
More beers were cracked open and the men drank toast after toast to Smithy’s ‘bloody great big nail-bomb’. Once The Project heard about the Tungsten Bomb they would green-light the mission in a flash. They’d be fools not to. Smithy’s plan was brilliant, and totally beautiful.
It was 2.30 a.m. by the time Smithy remembered his date. He had got so carried away that he’d totally forgotten Janey. With a flash of panic he punched her number into his mobile phone. It rang and rang, but there was no answer. He cursed himself for being so stupid. It was the one big downer of an otherwise perfect evening.
The men retired to bed knowing that the mission was now one hundred per cent doable. Kilbride paused in his living room and placed a CD on the stereo. As he sat back and enjoyed the music he cracked open a last cold beer and drank a final toast to Smithy’s bloody great big nail-bomb.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BEFORE HE WAS even fully awake Kilbride knew what had woken him. A low, throaty growl was coming from the direction of the bedroom window. It was barely audible and certainly not enough to rouse a man under normal circumstances: but this was far from normal and Kilbride knew it for what it was – an urgent warning. His dog Sally had been through the Defence Animal Training Centre in Leicestershire before spending the next four years on active duty with the SAS. Sally didn’t growl at nothing. They had an intruder outside their window.
The hairs on the back of Kilbride’s neck had gone up, and he could sense the imminent threat. He forced himself to remain where he was and breathed deeply as the adrenalin flooded into his veins. His instincts were screaming a warning at him that the unknown prowler was a danger to him and his family. He could feel his heart pounding, his blood throbbing in his temples. It was one thing to have spent thirty-odd years on the front lines of various wars: it was quite another to have his family menaced in this way.
Sally’s growling changed imperceptibly, rising to a slightly higher pitch. She would know instinctively that her master was awake now, and she was signalling to him that the prowler was coming closer. Kilbride chanced a quick glance at the window. All he could see was Sally’s squat, powerful form silhouetted against the faint glow of moonlight, her head and body immobile and one hundred per cent focused outside. The growl became a low snarl, and Kilbride guessed that the figure was at the half-open window now, peering in.
He felt his wife shifting beside him slightly. Don’t bloody wake up now, lover, he willed her. Stay sleeping. Stay still. Be cool. Whoever they are, wait for them to leave.
Any man who tried to come through that window would be a fool, Kilbride told himself. Sally would go for the groin area, dragging her victim screaming to the floor in a rictus of agony and terror. And then she would hold him in the vice-like grip of her jaws until ordered to do otherwise. The thought comforted him somewhat. But then he remembered that his two sons were alone and unprotected in the bedroom next door. For an instant Kilbride almost lost it and bolted for their room. But he held himself in check. Sally was hugely protective over the kids, and she would immediately know if the enemy had refocused their attention onto their bedroom.
There was the sharp crack of a breaking twig, clearly audible through the open window, and Sally’s snarl lessened. The intruder was withdrawing. It appeared to have been a surveillance mission only. Kilbride knew that Sally would be using her acute powers of hearing to track the intruder’s progress. Her growl died to a faint, throaty murmur, which meant that the enemy had to be retreating further into the forest.
Kilbride gave it another minute, then rolled away from his bed. Keeping low in the room he grabbed a black T-shirt and a pair of olive combat trousers off the bedside chair. Then he reached under the bed frame and ripped aside a length of gaffer tape. The squat black form of a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun fell into his open hand. It had a short ten-inch barrel, an eight-round magazine and a pistol-grip butt, making it a compact and devastating weapon at close range. The shotgun had been Kilbride’s weapon of choice in the Malayan rainforests, along with ‘Bones’, a black Labrador war dog. Over the months spent fighting in the jungle, Bones and he had become inseparable, even sleeping together in the same basher.
As Kilbride went to open the bedroom door he gave a faint, barely audible whistle. Sally broke off her lonely vigil by the window and was immediately at his heel. Kilbride slipped out the beachside entrance of the house. He paused for a second at the door of Berger’s hut, and then thought better of it. He had always preferred to operate alone when on a manhunt with his war dog. It made the instinctive bond between man and beast more intense, rendered the chase and the final dance of combat more mutually binding. Kilbride skirted around the property and came to a stop at the open bedroom window.
He was now standing where the enemy had stood some ten minutes before. He crouched down and traced the outline of a footprint in the soft earth. From the curved ripple-like imprint he could tell that the intruder had been wearing jungle boots. It was no African villager, then – as if he’d needed any confirmation. He squatted on his haunches and waited, letting the silence of the night-dark forest sink into him. As he did so, his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Faint slivers of moonlight filtered down through the leaves, weaving a patchwork of silver on the forest floor.
He placed his arms around Sally’s thick, muscular neck, and whispered reassurances in her ear. She knew she was on the hunt now, and it was a long time since she had last been so. Kilbride had had her for five wholly peaceful years, and he wondered if she might have got rusty. For an instant he wondered the same about himself, but quickly forced such thoughts to the back of his mind. He grabbed some of the damp earth and smeared it around the exposed skin of his face and neck until it took on a similar hue to the forest shadows. For a second or two he fingered the cold steel of the shotgun, then rose to his feet.
‘Let’s go,’ he whispered.
Sally took the lead, her head bent low and shifting from side to side as she tracked the scent of the enemy. A short distance from The Homestead she stopped and gently pawed the earth. Kilbride bent to inspect her discovery and saw that two further sets of boot prints had joined the first. Two men had waited here while the third had gone ahead to peer through Kilbride’s window. There were three enemy, at least, probably a fourth ba
ck at their base or vehicle.
With his fingers Kilbride traced two rectangular imprints where the men had rested their weapons, butt downwards, on the forest floor. As he did so his hand caught on something soft and man-made. He raised it to his face. It was a fragment of cellophane. They had unwrapped a set of batteries here, which meant that they might well be using night-vision goggles. Either way it had been a sloppy operation, at least by SAS standards. They had left all the signs for him to follow.
Kilbride now knew that he was up against three or more men armed with rifles, and possibly using night vision. Even with Sally to assist him, that was a considerable force to be up against. For a second he considered going back to fetch the others, but the lone hunter in him prevailed. He would track the intruders to their lair and then return to fetch his men. Kilbride rose to his feet, Sally rising with him. Silently as a pair of shadows, man and dog flitted through the baobab forest, climbing inland and upwards as they did so.
Five minutes later Kilbride knew where the enemy were holed up. Their path through the forest led to a nearby kopje, a tumbled outcrop of giant boulders the highest of which rose above the treetops. He had reckoned he’d find them here: it was the only place from where they could keep watch on The Homestead. But even from the top of the boulder pile they would see precious little, due to the density of the forest. The enemy had tried to obscure the last few yards of their route into the rocks by using a tree branch to brush away their footprints. But it was too little and too late: Kilbride had their location nailed. Whoever they were, he was astounded by their lack of jungle craft.
Sally led him to the very edge of the kopje. Here their path passed between two towering baobab trees. Kilbride was amazed to see that the enemy had marked their route with a blaze, a strip of white trunk glowing faintly in the moonlight. But as he went to step through the opening Sally froze, Kilbride freezing with her. His sixth sense was kicking in big time, warning him that one wrong step would finish him. During the years spent fighting in Malaya and Borneo Kilbride had learned to trust the instinctive animal powers of his sixth sense absolutely. It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. Sally dropped to her stomach, her muzzle on her paws. Kilbride dropped alongside her, the Remington held before him. He could read the dog’s every move and this one signalled extreme danger.