Brute Force ns-11

by Andy McNab

  When I said as much to Lynn he just smiled. 'It's all in the lap of the gods, Nick. Why worry about what we can't change?'

  Ahead of us lay a grey, businesslike harbour. A few fishing boats mingled with some of the rich boys' toys we'd seen in Italy. Maybe I was seeing Cagliari in the wrong light or through the wrong lens – blurred by the single hour's sleep I'd managed to grab during the night – but if I'd come here on a Club 18-30, I'd have asked for my money back.

  I left Lynn to guide the Predator towards the filling station and went below to check on Gary and Electra.

  I found her lying on the bunk in her bra and panties. She stretched like a cat and purred at me. 'Where are we?'

  She knelt on the bunk and squinted outside.

  I don't suppose Cagliari had ever loomed large on her list of Mediterranean must-see venues – unless, of course, its millionaire count was more substantial than first impressions suggested. A bouquet of unpleasant smells wafted in through the port hole. She shut it and lay back down on the bed.

  'We'll be refuelling for an hour or so, then we'll be on our way again.' I turned to go.

  'Hey, don't go . . .' She was getting more catlike by the minute. I guess that wherever you threw her, she'd land on her feet. 'Let me talk to you for a moment . . .'

  I paused by the door and turned to face her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her thighs spread a little further than would be considered ladylike down at the Rose and Crown, let alone the Swiss finishing school her parents had probably sent her to. I could see she was thinking hard, preparing her words carefully.

  'Listen. I don't know who you are and I don't really care. Whatever you want, it has nothing to do with me. Take the boat, do what you want to that arsehole. He's nothing to me. Just let me off here and I promise I won't say anything to anybody.' She let her thighs wander another inch or two apart. 'Deal?'

  'Why should I trust you?'

  'Because I'm good to people I like. Really good . . .'

  'Big day out, I'm sure.' I turned back towards the door.

  'I know some pretty powerful people.'

  'Yeah? What are you doing with a big fat cunt like Gary then?'

  The doe-eyed look vanished. The look she gave me now was meant to kill.

  I switched off the light and closed the door.

  I dragged Gary blinking into the galley and told him he could have a coffee and some toast for breakfast if he promised to be a good boy and help us out.

  He nodded meekly. 'Sure. 'Course, mate. Anything. What do you want me to do?'

  'Get ready with that credit card.'

  As soon as he got dressed, I told him to get on deck, and, at the appropriate moment, help us to tie up alongside the refuelling station. I reminded him that I would be with him every step of the way and that I was still carrying a twelve-inch kitchen knife.

  73

  An hour later, we were hurtling southeast across the grey waters of the Med. Lynn had been monitoring Sky News on the Predator's flatscreen. They didn't say precisely when the Foreign Secretary was due to land, and they probably didn't know; it wasn't a full-blown state visit. But I knew the place would have been put on high alert: Gaddafi wouldn't want his admission to the Good Lads' Club to be screwed up.

  Lynn had also had his calculator out. Judging by our timings over the previous leg, he reckoned that if we throttled back to twenty knots we'd be able to conserve enough diesel to enter Libyan waters with fuel to spare. Barring unforeseen incidents, it would take us another fourteen hours; we'd be in position, ready to deploy the tender and go ashore, shortly before midnight.

  Along the way, we'd need to find somewhere to dump our two companions. Looking at the charts, we had a number of choices.

  The island of Pantelleria was around 200 miles away as the crow flew. There was also Cap Bon, a deserted peninsula on the east coast of Tunisia. Or the west coast of Sicily.

  But Lampedusa got my vote.

  The tiny Italian island was famous for the moment when, in a fit of serious pique, Gaddafi had lobbed a Scud at it. The fact that nobody in NATO noticed until some hill farmers rang in to say that their goats had been spontaneously kebabed told me that by the time Gary and Electra found their way to whatever civilization existed there, we'd be long gone – and they'd be none the wiser about our destination.

  Gary had already let it be known with a nudge and a wink that everything was cool by him. So was the fact that we were making our way towards the Adriatic, epicentre of drug-smuggling operations in the Med. He liked a bit of coke himself, he told me, and, since the boat wasn't his, good luck to us.

  He reminded me about his wife and kids back in Barking and promised he wouldn't give us any trouble. I told him I'd bear that in mind.

  With Gary stowed safely below deck, I ordered Lynn to get his head down. Given that it was daylight and I could navigate my way around a handheld GPS, I reassured him I could handle the boat.

  'Just got to steer it, yeah?'

  Five hours into the second leg, the sun came out. We passed a few tankers steaming between Tunis and Sicily, but otherwise the sea was calm and empty. From the driver's seat, I gazed past the bow of the Predator towards the North African coastline. The last time I had been in these waters had been in 2001, less than two months after 9/11.

  I'd come ashore on the Algerian coast with two Egyptian nationals, deniable operators like me, to bring back the head of a forty-eight-year-old Algerian, Adel Kader Zeralda, owner of a chain of supermarkets and a domestic fuel company based in Oran. Why he needed to die, I didn't have a clue. It was a reasonable bet that with over 350 Algerian Al-Qaeda extremists operating around the globe Zeralda was up to his neck in it, but I wasn't going to lie awake worrying about that. All I cared about was carrying out the job correctly and on time. My American employers insisted I brought back his head. They were going to show it to some of his relatives to encourage a bit of entente cordiale.

  The trick this time was much the same, to get in and get out, and fast. If we could track down Mansour without being grabbed ourselves, put the links in place between the Bahiti, the bomb-maker and Leptis, we'd know who was trying to drop us, and why.

  We were still around fifteen miles from Lampedusa when, with darkness falling, we motored into a fog-bank. Our strobe navigation lights cast weird reflections off the mist and on the black surface of the water as the fog became progressively thicker. Lynn throttled back. The charts showed rocks on the run-in to the island. We couldn't take any chances.

  We were both peering through the windshield when a beeping noise sparked up from the dashboard.

  I looked at Lynn. 'What is it?'

  'Proximity warning. Radar's tagged something. It's picking up a return off the port bow.' He stared at the radar screen for a second or two. 'To be absolutely honest, Nick, I don't really know what it is.'

  'How far away is it?'

  'Less than a mile. And closing.'

  74

  It was a fishing boat, but like nothing you'd find in Grimsby.

  It looked as if she'd been built at the tail end of the nineteenth century – a hulk of a vessel, as big as the Predator, but streaked with rust and grime and with thick black smoke belching from a battered stack. As we drew closer, a breeze parted the mist and we got our first half-decent view of it. She had a bit of a list, about fifteen degrees to starboard, but that wasn't too surprising – there were around 150 people leaning over the rail, staring at us.

  She was only a couple of hundred metres away, but in the diminishing light it was difficult – even through the binos – to make out the faded writing on her bow. The clues to her origin and purpose were a green flag, riddled with holes, that was flying from her stern mast and the people hanging off her side: I'd seen pictures of survivors from Belsen and Auschwitz who looked better fed.

  Lynn chopped the throttles and we stopped dead in the water. He took the binos off me and raised them to his eyes.

  The families looked like a meeting of the
African Union. Sub- Saharan black faces, fine features and curly hair of the eastern Somalians and Arab North Africans. They had one thing in common: they were fucked and desperate.

  'She's called the Marhaban. It means "Welcome".' He studied her a while longer and sighed.

  I was about to tell him to open up the throttles and carry on heading south, when an image filtered into my mind of the champagne and caviar sitting in the fridge below decks.

  I told Lynn to bring us as close as he could to the vessel, then shot downstairs and unlocked Gary's cabin. When he saw me, the fear reappeared in his eyes. He gulped. 'Yeah, mate. What?'

  'There's a migrant ship. You ever seen one of them before?'

  Gary shook his head.

  'I'm letting you go, Gary.'

  He nodded pathetically and walked over to pump my hand. 'Thank you, thank you . . .'

  I stopped him in his tracks. 'Shut the fuck up and listen. This bit is important, because it might just stop you from winding up dead. Tell your friend Electra to wipe off her make-up, cover her hair and put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. If there's nothing in the wardrobe, lend her something of yours. Water – you'll be taking as much bottled stuff as there is on the Predator. Food too. And the First Aid kit and any other medicines. Tell them that Electra's a nurse and that she can treat some of their kids. You got all that?'

  Yes, he said earnestly, he'd got it.

  'One more thing, Gary. I'm giving you our GPS and the charts. They're not going to harm you if you look like you're in charge.'

  'What are they going to do to us?' The words frying pan and fire must have been bouncing around inside Gary's skull.

  'We're around fifty miles from Malta, and a hundred from Sicily. Help whoever's driving that thing, Gary, and you'll have done your good deed for the day.'

  Fifteen minutes later, we were on our way again. I watched from the back deck as the Marhaban slipped into the darkness. Lynn blipped the throttles and we accelerated away. It was now approaching six o'clock. Above us, the stars shone brightly out of a cold black sky. We had 2000 litres of diesel left, easily enough, if we maintained a steady speed of twenty knots, to get us where we wanted to be: twelve miles off the Libyan coast, with eyes-on the bright lights of Tripoli, sometime around 2300 hours.

  75

  The weather started to turn just as the lights of the Libyan capital pulled into view. Flashes of lightning lit up the sky over the coast, where the wind blowing in from the Sahara mixed with the chill air that had dogged us since Sardinia. We prepared to ride out the gathering swell.

  While Lynn slept, I grabbed the Google Earth maps that he had downloaded when we were in Italy.

  The downloads basically gave us two options for coming ashore. The first was on what looked like a deserted stretch of coast close to a suburb called Janzur. Tripoli, like most North African capitals, was a vast urban sprawl, bursting at the seams. The satellite imagery showed houses and industrial facilities extending ten to fifteen kilometres along a coastal ribbon east and west of the city centre – the old Medina – where Lynn told me our boy liked to disappear every morning for his regular shisha session.

  Janzur was around thirteen kilometres west. The photograph depicted a rocky headland dotted with small, sandy inlets, where we could easily come ashore without being noticed. There were no houses nearby. The coastal road, less than a kilometre away, led into Umar Al-Mukhtar Street, the artery that fed traffic towards the Medina.

  But what then? Lynn and I would be forced into walking the road, conspicuous as fuck, as we tried to thumb a lift; or I'd have to nick a car. But as Arab cities never really slept, the chances of getting away with that were minimal.

  Our other option was to tear the arse right out of it and come ashore in a densely populated, residential area.

  I'd spotted a promontory on the satellite map around three kilometres west of the city. Three features identified it. The first was a small harbour dotted with boats. The resolution of the imagery wasn't good enough to tell me what they were, but they were probably fishing vessels of the Marhaban variety. The second was a large, T-shaped building with a car park at the front and a swimming pool on its roof; and, last but not least, a 400–500-metre stretch of beach, just west of the harbour and the building.

  Lynn emerged from below as the first drops of rain started to hit the windshield. He made us both a brew and came and sat down beside me.

  I showed him the Google map. 'See this? A stretch of deserted beach. And just here' – I pointed to the T-shaped building – 'is a hotel.' At least I assumed it was, judging by the pool on the roof. I looked at him. 'You recognize the place?'

  Lynn studied the picture. 'I know the area. There used to be a little seafood restaurant nearby. It served the best prawns in Tripoli. But the hotel is new.'

  Twenty years ago, Libya was a closed society. Since the Lockerbie settlement, however, tourism was on the increase. There were a lot more white faces moving about the country but every one of them had to be accompanied by a 'guide' – tourist-board-speak for policeman.

  Whereas there had only been a handful of border crossings in Lynn's day, there were many more now. I hoped that we'd find one that would pay a lot more attention to a fistful of dollars than a compromised passport and no visa.

  Egypt, Tunisia, Niger, Algeria, Chad or the Sudan. I didn't fancy Niger, Chad or the Sudan much – and taking my chances again in Algeria, home of the headless Adel Kader Zeralda, didn't thrill me either. That left either Egypt or Tunisia, both tourist hotspots, so great cover once we were across the border. And with Lynn's knowledge of ancient history, we could always say we were on a tour of North African archaeological sites.

  But first we had to find Mansour.

  My plan was to wait until the worst of the weather had passed then take to the tender. It was around twelve miles to the coast. All being well, we'd reach the beach shortly before five. There was a cliff between the beach and the hotel, but the satellite overlays on the map showed what looked like a number of paths leading to the top. Once we'd disposed of the dinghy, we'd make our way to the hotel and grab a taxi to the Medina.

  Lynn wasn't too keen but knew he had to do it.

  'We have to appear as if we belong. It's a psych-job. It all starts and ends up here.' I tapped the side of my head. 'You have to convince yourself that you have a reason for being on those streets. If you convince yourself, you'll convince others. Humans – like animals – sense strength and weakness. If we seem in the least bit uncomfortable, they'll pick up on it.'

  'I know what the manual says, Nick.' The fact that the boot was on the other foot and I was calling the shots still rankled with Lynn, but I didn't give a shit. This was no time for pride or hurt feelings.

  'We've switched manuals here. In London, our primary objective was to lie low.' I studied his eyes to see if he was taking all this in. To be honest, it was pretty hard to tell.

  'There won't be CCTV in Tripoli; at least, none to speak of. We'll need to take precautions all the same, conduct all the usual streetcraft. But we'll have to do it in a way that doesn't alert the man on the street. Third-party awareness is going to be a very big deal. We're going to be noticed everywhere we go. The colour of our skin, our clothes, everything about us will attract attention, because – there's no getting away from this – we're different. We just have to make a virtue of it; finding Mansour will give us a sense of purpose – it'll make it look like we belong.'

  Lynn was clutching his brew, staring into the steam rising from the cup.

  'Any of this making any sense?'

  He nodded. 'Yes, of course. It'll make it look like we belong.' He even managed to sound like me.

  I got to my feet. 'The alternative is just to turn the boat around. Go back to Italy. Stay tucked up in that nice, cosy apartment of yours while they track you down and then you're dead without ever knowing what the fuck this was all about.'

  He shook his head. 'You're right. I'm sorry, Nick. I really shoul
d have told you. I'm—' He stopped. 'I've been living on my own so long I'm not really used to explaining myself.'

  Something in the way he said it made me stop. I knew then that this was about his wife.

  'You never separated or divorced, did you? What happened to her?'

  76

  He rubbed his eyes. When he looked up, they were red-rimmed and raw. Lynn stared long and hard at me. There was no anger, no resentment any more; just that increasingly familiar resignation. 'She's dead.'

  He sat back in the big leather chair. The rain was falling harder. Rivulets ran down the Predator's windshield. 'You never did remarry, did you, Nick? At least, you'd successfully managed to avoid tying any more knots last time I checked your file.'