by Conrad Jones
“Christopher Walsh is related to me, hence the same surname,” she began. The Major’s face darkened and he looked at Chen who was responsible for bringing advisors to the taskforce table.
“I didn’t realise,” Chen said shocked. “It never crossed my mind because it is such a common surname.”
“He is a very distant relation. I am only aware of him because of our interest in science, chemistry especially. My parents used him as an example for me to emulate,” Helen interrupted. “What I do know about him is that he is, or was, always highly motivated by money.” She flipped through some textbooks that she had brought with her, looking for something specific.
“As you know I’m here because of my knowledge of blister agents, and their effects on the human condition,” she waffled as she rummaged through book after book. “Please bear with me a moment, I’m sure I can shine some light on the issue.”
“Perhaps you could give us some indication of your theory while you find what you’re looking for Miss Walsh,” the Major prompted her.
“Helen, please call me Helen. Christopher was often under a dark cloud at university, and then medical school,” she nodded vigorously to emphasise her point, although it wasn’t clear to anyone else in the room.
Tank rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and Grace threw him a scolding glance. Grace was empathetic to the dizzy young woman. Being thrust into the male dominated world of Special Forces and government agencies was a very daunting task.
“Do you mean that he was in trouble at university?” Grace tried to help her out.
“Oh my god yes, terrible, terrible trouble,” Helen became excited as she spoke. She had found the text that she was looking for. “Here it is.”
“Please share it with us before I explode with anticipation and excitement,” Tank folded his thick arms across his chest. Helen glanced at him and thought about telling him that he was rude, but the look in his eyes warned her off the idea.
“What kind of trouble?” Grace prompted her again.
“I’m sorry, I’m being vague aren’t I?”
“Almost nebulous,” Tank muttered under his breath, which drew another withering glance from Grace.
“He used his interest in chemicals and his superior knowledge to make money at every opportunity,” Helen smiled widely as if this snippet of information explained everything.
“Oh for god sake,” Tank hissed.
“Let me explain.”
“Explain please, before I lose the will to live.”
“Well, he started off innocently. He would make fireworks for the students on bonfire night, and sell them of course. Then he was suspended for distilling moonshine, which almost led to him being arrested. Later it became more serious, ecstasy tablets, LSD; he even produced a rough form of ketamine. Then there were rumours that he had been involved in making explosives to blow up a mosque, although he was released without charge.”
“I’m failing to see the link here,” Chen said.
“He never did anything for nothing, there was always money involved. That made me think about this article he published,” she held up a copy of the Lancet. It was a medical magazine which was read the world over. “He published this article about the use of sodium hypochlorite as a treatment for blister agent burns.”
There were several confused glances exchanged and the team struggled to grasp her point. Helen blushed again realising that she hadn’t been successful in communicating her point.
“He had experimented with normal household bleach as a base chemical to neutralise the use of sulphur mustard gas. The bleach counteracts the effects, restoring the ph balance. He took the research so far that he claimed to have developed a liquid treatment for blister agent burns.”
“You think that he is trying to sell his formula?” Grace clicked on.
“Yes, it makes perfect sense.”
“If a terrorist blister agent attack was carried out at an Olympic Games venue it would receive world-wide news coverage,” Tank clicked on to the idea too.
“Whoever had a formula to counteract the chemical could sell the formula to every government on the planet,” Chen said, catching up.
“Even the threat of its use would drive the price through the roof,” Helen Walsh looked relieved that her theory had finally been understood, and it appeared to have been accepted.
Tank sat back in his chair and smiled widely at Helen. She wasn’t sure if he was scarier when he smiled or when he didn’t.
Chapter Eleven
Liverpool Bay 2009
The Mersey Dock and Harbour Board was the owner of the River Mersey’s commercial facilities and also responsible for the maintenance of the Manchester Ship Canal. The ship canal connected middle England to the ocean and carried millions of tons of aggregate for use in industry. The Harbour Board was a going concern and collected the rents and licence fees which amounted to a substantial financial reward for running the port. Until 1973 they were also responsible for the safety of shipping in Liverpool Bay, which involved the manning and maintenance of four lightships. The lightships were anchored permanently off shore and had huge revolving reflectors and oil lamps, which warned approaching ships of dangerous shallows. The lightships were decommissioned over a period of decades and replaced one at a time by solar powered beacons, which were drilled into the seabed. One or two of them were used every now and again to service the beacons, which had made them obsolete. Two of the lightships were placed into maritime museums for posterity while another two were sold to private collectors and turned into tourist attractions.
Christopher Walsh bought one of them in a poor state of repair. She was a heavy metal boat painted a dull red colour to distinguish her from other shipping and to increase her visibility to other ships. She was over one hundred yards long and stood sixty feet above the water line. The light tower was positioned in the centre of the mid-ships above the bridge. Its previous owners had converted it into a floating coffee shop, which was anchored in the Albert Docks for a number of years, but Christopher had other ideas for her. Below decks were a series of small cabins and several larger watertight compartments, which had been perfect for his chemical experiments. The lightship never had a name, she was always ‘L 2’, which was painted in huge white figures on her stern. L2 had undergone comprehensive repairs at a dry dock near Seaforth, which was to the north of the city. The repair work had given him time to plan, but now that she was seaworthy and back in the water they were ready to put her back at sea for a short while. In the meantime, he could use the lightship to continue with his live research undetected by prying eyes.
Christopher was reading the weather reports for the Irish Sea when he heard a diesel engine outside on the dock. He put the forecasts down and headed for the bridge. It was dark outside but he could clearly see that his panel van had returned from its mission. The driver and his mate jumped down from their seats and headed to the back doors. He could hear their guttural accents drifting across the dock to him. Christopher Walsh was using eastern European immigrant muscle to do his dirty work. As long as they were paid well, and on time, they were very loyal. They were also ruthless in their pursuit of a task. There was a heavy padlock fitted to a clasp, and the driver struggled with a set of keys before opening it. His mate climbed inside the van and Christopher could hear him banging around in the back of it. The driver reached inside, hidden by the back doors and then both men appeared again carrying the body of a man. He could tell it was a man from the matted beard he wore. That was a nuisance because it meant that he would have to shave him.
“Good, another one,” Christopher Walsh said to himself, and he rubbed his hands together in glee. He turned and ran down the metal stairs to the lower decks, humming a tuneless song as he went. All the time he held tightly to the metal handrails, falling down these steps could be fatal. His footsteps echoed through the metal craft. At the bottom of the steps he reached a thick metal door. It had been designed to act as part of the superstructure when i
t was closed, and it was also watertight. In the centre of the door was a four inch thick piece of polished quartz, which acted as a window into the cabin beyond. Quartz was used by shipyards at the time the lightships were built because it could withstand far more pressure than glass. He looked through the quartz into the cabin.
The homeless man inside the cabin was once called Seth, but that was before he had been abducted from a park bench to be used in a scientific experiment. Seth was sat on a small bunk bed naked, although it was difficult to make out any distinguishing features because his body had become a mass of huge water filled blisters. His hands and feet looked like four yellow balloons, and the fingers and toes were virtually invisible, enveloped in bags of stinking puss. The skin on his chest and torso had become toad-like. There were blisters growing between blisters and the skin was stretched so thin that you could see the red layer of epidermis beneath it. His face looked like he had been attacked by a bear. There were deep rents in the flesh of his cheeks as if massive claws had sliced into him. The deep gashes were self inflicted and were a result of the terrible itching caused by the blister agent that Christopher Walsh had sprayed onto his flesh. The itching had been followed by an intense thirst. Seth had drunk two gallons of water in less than twenty minutes. The water intake had supplied the blisters with fluid, and now the slightest movement from the homeless man would cause his paper thin skin to burst. When the previous subjects that had been treated with the blister agent reached a similar condition their swollen blisters had burst, and then they had died soon afterward. Christopher had been fascinated by how much water they would drink once the thirst claimed them. He had even given some of them buckets of sea water instead of fresh water to see what would happen. The thirst that overwhelmed them was caused by blistering in the oesophagus and the victims couldn’t distinguish between them and had drunk the lot. The best experiment so far though had been when he placed two of them into one cabin together. They had literally torn each other to pieces to get the water. He couldn’t decide what he enjoyed watching the most, the thirst, or the itching. Watching them burst was fun too, although the smell when they removed the bodies was terrible. Seth would burst soon and then he could experiment with the new one that they had brought him. Two things were certain though, his serum to treat the burns didn’t work once the blisters appeared. The subject had to be treated with the counter measure before the blisters had formed, and the second conclusion that he had drawn was that the thirst was worse than the blisters.
Chapter Twelve
The Terrorist Task Force
“What information did we find at the scene of the shooting?” the Major asked.
“We have the body of Charles Barr, an ex-army veteran. He was last known to the police for being deported from the Congo where he had been fighting as a mercenary. He was allegedly involved in a diamond smuggling operation. They said he had committed atrocities, although there were never any charges made,” Chen answered. The picture of the dead man appeared on the screen followed by his regimental photograph, which had been taken many years earlier. “We have his mobile phone, which has several pictures of certain sea charts stored on it. The pictures were taken shortly before his death, and we connected them with Billy Wright’s memento collection.”
“How did he die?” Helen Walsh asked quietly as she looked at the image of the body. She was visibly shaken by the picture of the dead man with a bullet through his forehead.
“Tank shot him,” Chen answered.
“Oh,” she said looking at Tank in horror.
“Don’t concern yourself with that Helen please, Tank shoots lots of people,” Chen said matter of factly. Tank smiled behind his hand enjoying Chen’s sarcastic sense of humour. He really didn’t like the use of civilian experts, but he understood their value to the taskforce. What he couldn’t stand was their innocence and the way they judged with their eyes. They didn’t know the first thing about the type of monsters the taskforce had to eliminate for the good of society as a whole. The civilians wanted to live in a peaceful society where no one was shot through the head by the authorities, but unfortunately, the real world had a dark underside. That is where Tank and the taskforce lived and breathed.
“These are blow up images of the pictures that we took from the memory card in his telephone,” Chen carried on and the screen displayed a series of blue sea charts.
“They all look the same to me,” the Major said reaching inside his jacket pocket for his glasses.
“They are all the same, except for these three markings here, here and here,” Chen pointed to the marks.
“I asked Commander Wright if they were significant and he’s confirmed that they are the positions of three German spy boats which were torpedoed on the evening of December the fourteenth, nineteen forty three. The locations were given to the submarine commander at the time as top secret information by the Admiralty,” Grace added. The room remained silent as the implication of the Admiralty being responsible for torpedoing their own men sank in.
“So we could indeed be dealing with a chemical weapons dump at sea,” the Major conceded in a grave voice.
“We could be dealing with three,” Chen added.
“Christopher Walsh only needs to get to one of them,” Tank said. “We need to eliminate the deeper water sites and concentrate on the most accessible wreck. If he is going to retrieve shells then he will go for the most accessible load.”
“I would agree,” Chen concurred with Tank’s theory.
“Shouldn’t we be watching all three, just in case?” Helen Walsh asked. All eyes turned to her again. It appeared that she didn’t understand the protocol required from a visiting expert, which was shut up until someone asks you a question.
“We could use the Royal Air Force or we could ask the intelligence agencies to commission a predator spy drone. Failing that we could place an advert in the News of the World asking everyone to keep their eyes peeled for some blokes recovering chemical weapons from the sea. That would be chemical weapons that never existed. That would be chemical weapons which one of the country’s greatest leaders dumped in the ocean along with a few dozen sailors,” Tank had lost his patience with the newcomer.
“Although Agent Tankersley has the tact of gorilla with a machinegun, you must understand that we operate independently of any other organisation or agency until we know exactly what we are dealing with,” Grace tried to smooth it over. “We cannot trust the internal grapevine of any other military organisation not to leak this information to the press. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I’m sorry if I annoyed you Agent Tankersley,” Helen said curtly, blushing once more.
“Oh, he isn’t annoyed. You should see him when he’s really pissed off,” Chen joked. There were a few muffled giggles around the room but the look on the Major’s face soon quelled the mirth.
“If we could get back to business please ladies and gentleman. Who was the second man?” the Major steered the meeting back on track.
“We don’t know yet I’m afraid,” Chen said switching the screen image to the dead body of ponytail. His forehead had been mashed by the soft nosed bullet from Tank’s Glock. “He has tattoos which would place him from an Eastern European gang, but beyond that we have no matches of him on the DNA database or COTIS.”
Helen Walsh looked at the image on the screen and then looked at Tank. He caught her eye as she looked at him and she suddenly realised that he didn’t care what she thought. He was like a machine. Thank God he is on my side she thought, but she didn’t speak this time. She didn’t need to ask who had shot the man, because she already knew the answer.
“What about the mobile? Was there anything useful on that?” the Major asked.
“No. All of the call memory had been deleted. We are having the chip analysed to see if the tech boys can recover anything. We can assume that the charts which were stolen are the same as the ones in our possession, which means they have the details of the wreck sites,” Chen said.
“We need to agree what our priorities are for the next twenty four hours,” the Major said.
“We must allocate satellite time to Liverpool Bay. It is the only way we can monitor the area without arousing suspicion,” Tank spoke first. Everyone nodded in agreement, except Helen Walsh. She just looked at him warily and tried not to catch his eye.
“We have two potential satellites which cover that area but unfortunately that would give us a blind spot of ten hours every day,” Chen explained.
“There is no way a salvage operation could be carried out in that period of time, is there?” Grace asked.
“Not without the presence of alien shipping in the area. We can access the Harbour Board and their manifesto, and then cross check it with anything that sails into these vectors,” Chen replied.
“Okay, we are all agreed on that. What else would they need to recover the mustard gas shells?” Grace asked.