Zero Hour (2010) ns-13

by Andy McNab

  Finally, the US had to sit up and take notice. The UK would be standing shoulder to shoulder with them, and sharing blood. That blood, of course, was going to be mine if I fucked up. From swanky executive suites in Kensington to high-profile defectors larging it in Washington, the operation had now come down to Cody munching doughnuts in Nevada, and me sitting in a dingy hotel room checking my watch.

  In exactly fourteen minutes, a bright flash would light up the night in the distant desert, followed by the sound of thunder that would signal Armageddon.

  3

  I plugged the laptop into the wall socket, let it sort itself out, and unfurled the umbrella. I extended the handle, pulled off the small plastic knob at the end and lifted the cap beneath it to reveal a USB slot. I placed what was now a satellite dish on the floor by the open window.

  Six floors below me, giggly Brits headed back to the hotel against the hum of traffic. Long fluorescent tubes dangled outside a line of shops to show off the goods on display. Above me hung a huge blanket of stars. In the middle distance, between the stars and the city, lay the inky blackness where the desert took over. Out there somewhere, oblivious to what was on its way, was al-Kibar.

  The 200mm zoom lens was much heavier than the others. It housed a lithium battery that could power the device on its own or become an instant backup if the local grid cut out. I ran a lead from it into the USB slot in the top of the umbrella. Another USB wire ran from the camera to the laptop. Its screen was now displaying thumbnails of the hundreds of pictures I’d been taking to make my cover story stand up.

  I hit the blue circle icon to open the programme.

  ‘This is Cody Zero One. Ra’am are airborne - Ra’am are airborne. Acknowledge.’

  ‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. Ra’am airborne.’

  I checked my G-Shock: 23.26. I fired up my countdown display. GCHQ had pre-set it at eighteen minutes.

  The F-15s had taken off from Ramat David Air Base, just south of Haifa on the Mediterranean coast. It was also near Megiddo, which, according to Baltasar and the Book of Revelation, would be one of the sites of the final battle between good and evil. That seemed appropriate. The attack on al-Kibar was certainly going to be Biblical.

  Ten fast jets would take part in the initial attack, though only seven would be coming my way. For now all ten headed west, out into the Mediterranean. It was a decoy manoeuvre. Both the Turks and the Syrians would be tracking them. Everybody wants to know what the Israelis are up to 24/7 in this part of the world.

  The screen displayed an empty bar chart. The Tefalheads at GCHQ who’d put this together must have realized that I needed everything to be as simple as possible. I turned off the lights and picked up the umbrella so that the inside and the shaft pointed out of the window. I moved it up and down and side to side until the bar chart was about three-quarters full of green. It was the best I could do and all that was needed.

  I propped the umbrella on a chair and anchored it across the handle with my pillow.

  ‘This is Cody Zero One. Ra’am first wave ready to go active.’

  I adjusted the dish. ‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. I am seven-five, seventy-five per cent. Over.’

  ‘Roger that, James Zero Two. Seven-fiver. Good to go. Stand by.’

  Someone somewhere counted down Ra’am’s first wave on a radio. It was slow, guttural and very Israeli. ‘Five - four - three - two - one - go, go, go.’

  ‘This is Cody Zero One. Ra’am first wave active. Acknowledge.’

  ‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. I’m still seven-fiver.’

  Three of the ten F-15s had peeled off and headed east-north-east towards the Syrian border. They were going to attack the radar site at Tall al-Abuad with their Maverick missiles and 500-pounders. The moment that happened, the stakes would be raised. Every unit near the border would hear what was going on, and the Syrian military would start flapping big-time.

  All I could do now was listen as Cody gave the running commentary. I needed a picture in my head of what was happening. So did the other guy listening in. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, was taking personal responsibility for the Ra’am part of this attack. I was sure his surroundings were a little more comfortable than mine.

  ‘This is Cody Zero One. Ten seconds to contact.’

  I counted them down on my second-hand.

  ‘First attack - ordnance deployed. Contact, contact, contact. Second attack …’

  There was a pause.

  Cody was waiting for the Mavericks from the second wave to deploy as he watched the target on his screens. He’d be looking for the splashes all over the night-vision thermal imagery as bombs and missiles hit the radar installation.

  ‘Ordnance deployed. Contact, contact, contact. Third attack …’

  Another pause, shorter this time.

  ‘Weapons deployed.’ For Cody, it would have been like watching a video game. ‘Contact, contact, contact.’

  That was the radar defences fucked up.

  ‘Ra’am second wave now active … James Zero Two, acknowledge.’

  ‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. I still have seven-fiver.’

  The seven remaining F-15s were now screaming towards the Syrian border to break through the secure corridor that had been opened by the attack. From the moment they hit Syrian air space, it was exactly eighteen minutes to target.

  Cody couldn’t help himself now. There was excitement in his voice. ‘Ra’am second wave - now in the combat box. James Zero Two, all yours - acknowledge.’

  ‘Roger that, Cody Zero One.’

  I hit my countdown timer. My eyes were glued to the screen. I wasn’t sure what to do if the bar percentage dropped. Fuck about with the umbrella, I supposed.

  The F-15s would be virtually hugging the ground to avoid being illuminated. Now the border had been attacked, ground-to-air missile systems would be searching the sky. They wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on, but they’d know there had been an attack on their air defences, and that meant there was going to be an air incursion. But what type? Jets? Ground troops? A combination? There’d be nothing for them to latch onto just yet, but Ra’am couldn’t hug the desert for ever. They were going to have to gain height in excess of 8,000 feet in order to assume their attack profiles. That was where I came in: if I didn’t fuck up the Russian-made Tor-M1 and Pechora-A2 surface-to-air missiles that were protecting al-Kibar, they were going to fuck up Ra’am, and it really would be Armageddon.

  Everything fell silent. Cody, me, Ehud Olmert - we were all holding our breath. Even the noise outside was blocked as I kept my eyes glued to the screen and the bars fluctuated between 73 and 75.

  I checked the timer. Fourteen minutes fifteen seconds to go. I turned back to the screen. My laptop was linked by satellite to America’s Suter airborne-attack system. This package could feed enemy radar emitters with false targets, and even directly manipulate the Tor-M1 and Pechora-A2 sensors so they closed down completely. And that was what was happening now - or, at least, I hoped it was. I was directly attacking the microprocessors within the Syrian missile systems. It was easy enough. The chips had had kill switches programmed into them. When I hit the go button, I’d be sending a pre-programmed code to those chips, enabling Suter to override and tell the system what to do.

  Syria’s missile systems might have been built in Russia, but the chips inside them hadn’t. Russia had been in shit state for years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Bizarre as it seemed, they plugged the gap by buying microchips off-the-shelf from Taiwan and the West. Washington and London weren’t slow to catch on. As soon as they found out what was happening, they mobilized their Tefalheads. Microchips bound for Moscow and other unfriendly states were either reprogrammed or built from scratch with back doors or kill switches installed. Until they twigged, the West would be at liberty to disable whole weapons systems at will.

  It wasn’t the first time the Russians and their various mates had been at the sharp end of this particular conjuring trick. In 20
04, the CIA inserted a software Trojan horse into computing equipment bought from Canadian suppliers to control a trans-Siberian gas pipeline. A three-kiloton explosion tore the pipeline apart; the detonation was so large it was visible from outer space.

  The radar systems on the border were old Soviet-era kit and didn’t have the kill switches, so they had to be hammered the old-fashioned way. The Syrians also had the newer, state-of-the-art Russian Pantsyr-S1E missile systems, but luckily for us they wouldn’t be operational for a month. I guessed that was a reason we were pushing ahead with the attack.

  There was a distant rumble in the sky. It could only mean one thing. The F-15s’ engines were on full thrust to push them up from the sand. At 8,000 feet they’d acquire the target and scream down towards it at forty-five degrees. That was when they were at their most vulnerable. If I fucked up, they could be illuminated.

  I didn’t even bother looking out of the window. They were miles away in the darkness.

  I looked at the timer. Fifty-eight seconds until the first attack.

  There was a loud thump.

  Then another.

  I glanced at my watch as the door took another pounding. There was nowhere to run. I had to stay and make sure this shit worked.

  ‘Nick … ?’

  I gave a low groan. ‘I’m sleeping.’

  Cody sparked up in my earpieces. ‘First attack - ordnance deployed.’

  ‘Shorry … Nick …’ Her voice was slurred. It sounded like she had her face pressed against the door. ‘I was wondering … if you fancied a drink. Maybe I could bring a bottle up?’

  ‘Contact, contact, contact.’

  There was a distant flash of sheet lighting, then another, from the strip of darkness between the city and the stars. A few seconds later, the pressure waves from the first series of explosions rumbled over the rooftops.

  Cody continued his commentary as the next Ra’am rolled down into the target.

  ‘Nick? Did you hear that? What was that?’

  ‘Thunder … There’s a storm out there.’

  The screen still showed 73-75 per cent. There were more flashes and rumbles as the seven F-15s kicked away at the target.

  Cody gobbed off in my ear and the thunder continued to roll. I muted the BlackBerry. ‘Tell you what, Di, give me ten minutes and I’ll see you down at the bar.’

  She rattled on the door with both hands to mimic the explosions. ‘Better bring that umbrella of yours.’

  Another lightning bolt flashed on the horizon, then faded with her laughter as she headed back along the corridor.

  PART TWO

  1

  Tuesday, 9 March 2010

  12.50 hrs

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

  I leant against the triple-glazed floor-to-ceiling windows of my penthouse apartment and tried to look out over Docklands, but the stabbing pain in my head played havoc with my vision. It felt like I was swimming through a pool full of razorblades.

  The glass-and-steel monolith had had its final lick of paint the day Lehman Brothers had gone belly-up and the owner was no longer flashing the cash. ‘Their crunch is your lunch,’ the overly pushy estate agent told me, with a megawatt grin and flash of racing-car cufflinks. ‘If you’ve got cash on the hip, you can really clean up at times like this.’

  I’d been penniless through every other recession in living memory, so it seemed like a nice idea. And I’d loved everything about this place, from the dual-aspect reception room opening on to the roof terrace to the secure underground parking space; from the granite worktops to the limestone bath with integrated TV; from the private balcony and walk-in wardrobe that hadn’t yet been filled, to the guest bedroom with the cantilevered glass pod sticking out over the dock.

  It was like something out of a Bond film. The photochromic glass frontage darkened when the sun got too bright during the day, and the night-time views across to the Canary Wharf towers and the glistening river beneath were so fantastic I never closed the blinds.

  Before the headaches had begun I’d just sit there with a brew, mesmerized by the aircraft warning lights. If I needed a change of scenery I’d wander over to the other side of the apartment and gaze past Tower Bridge towards the mishmash of South London estates that used to be my manor. As a kid I’d looked back across the water and thought the disused ware-houses and crumbling tenements along this stretch were even worse than the shithole I called home, but Docklands was a very different story now. And so was what had been happening inside my head for over a week.

  ‘You OK, Nick?’

  Julian was sitting on one of my fancy leather armchairs, working his way through my supply of coffee capsules.

  I didn’t look round. ‘Yes, mate.’

  I wasn’t about to tell him the truth. I didn’t like people worrying about me. It made me uncomfortable. No one had given a fuck about me when I was a kid, and I’d got to prefer it that way.

  The forest of tower cranes standing over Millwall Dock was a blur, but the one with Christmas lights still draped across its boom was starting to come back into focus.

  ‘This isn’t good for you, stuck away up here, keeping your-self to yourself. You’re turning into a recluse. You’ve got to get back out into the real world, do the things you do best.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m worried about you.’

  I knew he wasn’t just concerned about my social life: he had a job for me. I’d tried to blank the pain instead of dealing with it these last few days; trying to stand there and take it until it gave up for a moment and went away. Maybe it was working. I’d always gone that route during my time as a deniable operator, and before that when I was in the Regiment. I’d done it as far back as I could remember.

  I’d taken whatever my stepdad had dished out and not given him the satisfaction of knowing I was about to cry. I’d just stepped up to the plate, taken the punishment and dared him to have another crack. Which he always did. Me not reacting the way he wanted had pissed him off big-time: the slaps had got harder, and so had I.

  So, no way was this shit going to get to me.

  I turned back to Jules. He was dressed immaculately as usual, in a crisp white shirt and black suit, shiny shoes, perfectly knotted fancy red tie. He looked more like a Calvin Klein model than the first black section head of the Security Service, MI5.

  We’d become quite good mates, as far as the mates thing went for me. He wasn’t coming over from his Edwardian apartment in Marylebone and banging on my door for brews the whole time, but he was a regular visitor, and always called first. Maybe that was why I liked him so much. Or maybe it was because he was the only mate I had left. Everyone else seemed to have got themselves royally fucked up or dead.

  ‘Listen, mate, I keep telling you I’m not interested. Why the fuck would I want to go and work again? Take a look at all this.’ I waved a hand around the apartment, then wiped it down the side of my face as if it was about to magic the pain away. ‘Waste of a morning, mate. I’m shitting money. I don’t need any of yours.’

  He put down his mug. ‘Ah, yes - your grandmother’s inheritance …’

  ‘She put it away for a rainy day - bless her.’

  Pinpricks of light still swam across my retina, but I could now see well enough to get the full benefit of his ironic expression. Julian knew exactly where the cash had come from.

  I took a seat beside one of the three glass coffee-tables scattered around the massive room.

  Op Sec triggered MI5’s answer to Catch-22: they could only tell you what the job was once you’d signed up for it - but you wouldn’t want to do that until you knew what you were letting yourself in for. Not even our friendship could change that.

  It was another of the reasons I liked him. He was one of the good guys, straight down the line. Truth, integrity, defence of the realm and all that shit: he radiated it.

  I realized I was a bit jealous. I might have the penthouse, the knockout view, the Porsche downstairs, but this lad had things money can’t buy.

/>   Jules leant forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘They want you back, Nick.’

  ‘After all those years of getting fucked over from both sides of the river, all of a sudden your lot can’t do without me?’ I laughed, and that made my head start hurting all over again.

  Jules shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Nick?’

  I managed to dredge up a smile from somewhere. ‘Never better, mate. Never better. Although that fucking “Chinese” we had the other night has given me the odd dodgy moment.’ I pointed a finger. ‘I blame you.’

  He leant back in his chair. ‘You should be thanking me. No wheat, no dairy, no toxins - Vietnamese is probably the healthiest food you’ve eaten in your life.’

  ‘But don’t you get bored eating that Ho Chi Minh shit all the time?’

  He smiled. ‘When I do I’ll go somewhere else. You still coming on Saturday?’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  Ten minutes later he headed for the lift and I made it to the toilet just in time to bulk up another gutful of coffee-flavoured bile.

  2

  Wednesday, 10 March

  11.34 hrs

  The wind gusted down Harley Street, throwing pellets of rain against the window. The nurse had disappeared fifteen minutes earlier, after announcing that Dr Kleinmann was just checking a few things. She’d done her best to look encouraging, but it wasn’t working.

  A dark blue Bentley coupe pulled up across the road. I’d spent a great morning test-driving a green one a couple of months ago, but decided it was just too wide for my parking space. An overweight driver leapt out with a multi-coloured golfing brolly and held it over a couple of equally large Arab women as he ushered them into the clinic opposite.

  The row of gracious old houses where grand families had once played charades by the fire and drunk to the health of Queen Victoria now hosted hundreds of offices and treatment rooms, turning over cash-paying patients seven days a week.