The team sergeant had used those hours to brief and rebrief his troops with the aid of a twelve-inch portable monitor, pointing and shouting over the full-force racket of the Chinook’s twin rotors. Ackerman had caught a glimpse of the drones’ live feed filmed from tens of thousands of feet in the air, and, realising that the pink cue ball dead centre was Lamayette himself, found herself smiling. Happy in the knowledge he was safe. Temporarily, at least, and still throwing monkey wrenches into everybody’s lives.
Then the signal came: Mission Go. And the helicopter started its rapid descent, bumping to the ground so heavily that Ackerman almost bit her cheek. She remembers counting sixteen soldiers sprinting down the ramp in pursuit of the five guards, who were themselves still running after Lamayette. Almost an episode of Tom and Jerry, with the dog hunting the cat, who is chasing the mouse.
The theory of tranquillising humans Ackerman understands. To have effective stopping power, you must know the weight of the victim, to create the right dose. Too much could be fatal, too little would have no effect. That’s why tranquillising is not recommended for law enforcement or basic home protection. Too many imponderables.
But in the case of Lamayette, they knew his weight. Three hundred and thirty-eight pounds, according to his last medical. She’d watched the two guys prepping their darts. Each needle looked about an inch long, attached to a coloured test tube with a feathery-looking flight stabiliser at the rear. They’d drawn the doses from what looked like a drip-bag stored in a grey-coloured icebox.
‘Is this stuff safe?’ she had asked of her sergeant from Iowa. Nodding in the direction of the airguns.
He’d smiled his reply. For what this guy’s done, his eyes said, I really could care less.
Shouting from outside draws Ackerman back to the present. With two American soldiers per cadaver, the first of the five body bags is carried on board, starkly framed by the interior of the ramp. It’s hard for Ackerman’s eyes to adjust from the brightness outside to the twilight in the rear of the Chinook. The dead body is lumped to the ground. The rest follow with cold military precision, quick-time, stacked three on the bottom and two on top. Right in front of her. The bags are unmarked, silver with black web carry-handles in the four corners, and two sets of strong zippers.
Jahanghir takes this public display of killing power the worst way possible. He seems crushed.
Ackerman tries to catch Jahanghir’s eye with a soothing look. ‘He’s going to be OK,’ she comforts. But he glances at her quickly, then back to the bags as if they are some manifestation of evil. There’s moisture in his eyes, a look of complete breakdown.
‘They haven’t come to kill him, Jahanghir . . .’
He waggles his hand at the dead bodies.
‘Do any of these bodies look big enough for Mr Bill? Where’s the big tummy?’ The cadavers might have been tall or short but to a man they must have had the same trim, wiry frame. Perfect for neat stacking.
She turns, noticing a change in the beat and urgency of the Chinook’s rotors. Thump-thump-thump. Faster and faster. And the helicopter hesitates, imperceptibly above the ground, dancing on the edge of flight. Commands that would have been shouted become hand signals, conveyed from the crew on board to those Green Berets manning the perimeter of the landing zone. Fists bump chests, then their heads. Fingers splay against shoulders.
Most, but not all, of the Green Berets reverse towards the ramp. Their M240s still menacing an unseen enemy. They fan out either side of the rear.
Against the shrieking roar of the turboshaft engines Bill Lamayette finally appears. Carried litter-style with a soldier at each corner, he is laid out on top of an unopened body bag looking blissfully happy as they hump up the ramp. His dishdasha riding up to his knees, his strong legs hanging either side.
A metal stent of some kind has been plugged into his mouth, to stop him choking or swallowing his tongue. But it looks like a bong that he’s sucking on . . . A fabulously wasted Roman senator being shuttled to yet another orgy.
The helicopter pitches nose forward and speeds off, the rear ramp slowly drawing shut. In the confusion of soldiers milling around, Ackerman moves carefully towards Lamayette. Kneeling beside him, she touches the side of his face, feeling for a pulse, before realising that, with the juddering of the airframe, it would mean nothing.
She looks up at the team sergeant, a Hispanic, with eyes as dark as night. His combat boots rest on Lamayette’s thick shoulder and he looks at her suspiciously.
She cups her hands. Shouts. ‘What happened to his phone?’
He mimes his reply. What. Phone?
Dipshit. ‘You traced him using the signal from his phone . . .’
More mime. Each word enunciated very clearly. With maximum sarcasm. ‘Oh. You. Mean. This. Phone . . .’ He reaches into his pocket, draws out two Ziploc evidence bags, and grins, like he just might be the cleverest man in the world.
One with a snapped-in-half SIM card, the other containing a very crushed and out-of-action mobile phone.
MI5 Headquarters
Thames House
Nothing more from Bill Lamayette. They chased the trail as far as GCHQ, the massive listening post outside Cheltenham. Spoke to the senior watch officer. ‘No signal, Ms Davane,’ the Somerset accent pronounced. ‘If there was a signal before, it’s very much gone now.’
Then, to compound Davane’s anxiety, the officer wants to talk some more. ‘Did you read this morning’s digest?’ The digest of electronic intelligence gleaned from the Echelon listening posts throughout the world.
Davane shakes her head. ‘Can this wait?’ What does this guy want to talk about now? ‘We’re a little bit busy at this end.’
‘Thought you’d want to know . . . those keywords your office asked us to insert into Dictionary . . .’
‘What keywords, what about them?’ Davane’s mind is completely elsewhere. Her office is always submitting fresh phrases for the Dictionary software program.
‘Operation Macchar . . . Qissa Khawani . . . just in the last five or six hours, from almost nothing to suddenly off the graph. A huge spike in traffic . . .’
Davane covers her mouth with her hand. The keywords had been Lamayette’s request from yesterday. His final gift, he had said. Her mind blanks. ‘Oh God . . . what the hell is happening here?’
*
It’s fifty-nine minutes since PK412 departed Manchester Airport for New York. The operations room knows this, plus the flight’s altitude and heading. On a full-sized screen everybody’s watching the radar track of the plane’s progress towards the vastness of the Atlantic. Watching, and waiting for the Boeing’s next radio transmission, for any hint of trouble. PK412 is using a SECAL cockpit radio system, meaning that any transmissions not relating to their flight are filtered out. That’s why MI5 is listening to dead air at the moment . . .
In a separate room, another team is handling arrangements for this afternoon’s scheduled PIA flight from Heathrow to New York, but still inbound from Karachi. A suitable somebody from the Department for Transport will tell their manager in London that this afternoon’s flight had best stay on the ground. Davane knows PIA has good people, who knew the drill and were keen to cooperate.
Working the phones between MI5 officers already dispatched to Heathrow and the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command is not something Sheila ‘Noppy’ Davane wants to be doing. Not now. A third team is handling that. Trouble is, it’s a public holiday. Britain’s security posture, which can’t help but relax every weekend, seems to be terminally asleep on public holidays. Government has never thought to give MI5 (a mere intelligence-gathering operation) the authority to do anything useful like scramble RAF interceptors. That can only come from a higher realm. In truth, though, at the moment, she has precious little hard evidence to offer. Everything hinges on Bill Lamayette, a man whose reputation is being trashed with great gusto by his own side. Hardly a compelling witness . . .
So, she had given that third team
very specific instructions: be as sharp as you need, rude even, just get the alarm raised. Get people by the phone so I can speak to them. Her gut is screaming that PK412 is the flight. The one.
The pulsing red square moves steadily north-west, slowly skimming across the top of Northern Ireland. The rest of the screen is a jumble of yellow dots and indices representing other transatlantic flights.
There are a dozen or so in the room with her, getting busy, thumbing through files, working the phones. In her own quiet pocket of contemplation Davane notes that the track puts the plane directly over Rathlin Island, a boot-shaped crag six miles off the Antrim coast, some fifteen miles from the southern tip of Scotland’s Mull peninsula. The local tourist board would have one believe that it was in a cave on Rathlin that Robert the Bruce was taught a valuable lesson by a plucky spider building his web. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again.
Her cheeks and neck go cold at the thought. Coincidence or fate? Robert the Bruce . . . what was it that Lamayette had asked about? Operation Mosquito, or Macchar in Urdu, as he had explained. Robert the Bruce and spiders. General Ali Mahmood Khan and mosquitoes?
Two secretaries huff their way into the room, flapping files of paperwork. Obviously dress-down day – one of them wears a pair of boot-cut jeans and a pink striped shirt that looks like pyjamas. Pyjama-girl lays out whatever she had been able to find on the subject of Qissa Khawani.
The other, in a pair of hiking boots and outdoorsy waterproof trousers, puts in front of Davane three separate bundles of information. First, the technical information relating to the actual flight, including fuel load sheets and cargo manifests. With this is a print-out of 412’s flight plan, starting with the waypoint known as SUNOT at which they enter Shanwick airspace, the eastern half of the North Atlantic Flight Information Region. There too are the five plots of the proposed track across the Atlantic up to their exit point at way station SCROD, a couple of hundred miles off the Canadian coast. Finally, there’s the route on to New York. Crossing the Canadian coastline near the Inuit settlement of Nain in Newfoundland, cutting down through north-eastern Canada, into New York State at a place called Hogansburg and on to John F. Kennedy International Airport.
A second stack of papers relates to the crew and passenger list. All relevant Passenger Name Records, including each person’s complete name, date of birth, citizenship, sex, passport number and country of issuance, residence, Green Card or alien registration, address while in the USA, religious and ethnic information (derived from choice of meal), affiliation to a particular group, data relating to place of residence or means of contacting an individual (email address, details of a friend, place of work) plus any relevant medical history. And perhaps most importantly, how their tickets were routed and purchased.
A last stack of information is plunked down by Davane’s side by Hiker-girl. Information relating to those passengers with US and/or UK visas, including all their biometric data with a wealth of financial information as icing.
A lot of paper to be sifted, with even more to come. And the exact same review has to be done for the second PIA flight due to leave Heathrow for New York later in the day.
Davane unclips her brooch, a design of amethysts studded with pearls, laid out in the shape of a salamander. She has a particular way of reading through documents. It’s the hasp she wants . . . using the point of the needle to work her way down the list of names.
Slow work. Steady work. Pricking the page once next to a name that intrigues, twice for something that alarms. Still no sign from her number-three operations team of any higher-ups being ready to talk to her.
Better to be doing something now than nothing. Slow work, she tells herself. Steady work.
Davane is halfway through her list:
LORRIMAN/BERYLMRS
LORRIMAN/RODNEYMR
MCANDREW/DAVIDMR
MCATEER/LUCYMS
MANSOOR/FAHIMDR
MANSOOR/SEETAMRS
MERRITT/TRISTESSEMS
MUHAMMAD/SAEEDDR
MUKHERJEE/ROHITMR
She has the tip of her brooch fastener raised by the name MERRITT/TRISTESSEMS, some distant connection swimming in the dark of her mind, picking irritatingly.
‘Shanwick Radio, Pakistan 412 position.’
The audio link bursts into life, connecting MI5 through to the flight controllers in Prestwick and their radio transmissions, which are relayed to transatlantic flights from transmitters near Shannon in Ireland (hence the portmanteau Shanwick).
Davane looks at the two photos in front of her. Captains Iqbal Hussain and Imtiyaz Jamal. Identical round-faced twins. Impossible to tell whose voice this is.
‘Pakistan 412, this is Shanwick Radio, pass your message.’ A dour, efficient Scottish reply.
‘Pakistan 412, passed SUNOT 1017 Zulu, FL360, Mach 0.84, estimate 58N 20W 1109 Zulu, 59N 30W next.’
Davane watches somebody translate the key information on to a whiteboard. The plane entered the Shanwick Flight Information Region at waypoint SUNOT four minutes ago. At 1017 Zulu or GMT, or 1117 British Summer Time. They’re flying at 36,000 feet at a speed of Mach 0.84 or 560 miles per hour. Next is waypoint longitude 58N 20W, which the pilots estimate they will hit at 1109 GMT. In fifty-two minutes. After that 59N 30W, right in the middle of the Atlantic, where PK412 will be handed over to controllers based at Gander in Newfoundland.
Shanwick confirms all the information by reading it back to the flight crew: ‘Pakistan 412, passed SUNOT 1017 Zulu, FL360, Mach 0.84, estimate 58N 20W 1109z, 59N 30W next.’
‘Correct read-back. Thank you.’
‘Shanwick Radio . . .’
Barring any disaster, this should be the last time they hear from the flight for almost an hour.
Davane reaches across her piles of papers for the phone. Taps a three-digit extension number. Answering is one of the engineers who’d been with her when they last spoke with Lamayette . . . in an audio suite facing a desk of expensive gadgetry.
The silver-haired MI5 veteran gently kneads the underside of her droopy chin. ‘You pick up anything unusual, any stress in the voice?’
The operations room hushes . . . everybody waiting on the answer. Davane nods her head. Listening.
The phone is put down and everybody in the room leans forward. Tense.
‘No stress.’ Davane looks around the knot of anxious faces. ‘If it’s happening on that plane, it hasn’t happened yet.’
On board PK412
At 36,000 feet
1124 UK time, 1624 Islamabad time, 0624 Washington time
Credit card swiped. Number punched in. Heartbeat raised . . . Zaafir, the man from Room 703, waits nervously in an empty first-class seat for the technical stuff to happen. For the phone signal to blip from the underbelly of the Boeing 777 to the nearest satellite, for his call to be channelled onwards.
He’s alone. Two passengers and Captain Harry Salahuddin are asleep. The woman, the one with the dark hair and serious cheekbones, is in the forward left toilet. Zaafir’s taken the precaution of drawing the blinds so he can work in relative obscurity. He’d instructed his stewardess colleague, a plump, moon-faced woman, that they would be delaying the drinks and meal service. She’d made a cow-like grunt of agreement, folded out one of the rear-facing seats, and is pushing at her cuticles with a cocktail stick.
It takes fourteen seconds but feels like hours. Then the ring tone . . . and Zaafir really feels his pulse race.
‘Hello . . .’
Zaafir whispers in Pashto. ‘It is me.’
‘Praise be to Allah.’
Almost inaudible. ‘Five minutes and it shall be done . . .’
‘Tell me, Zaafir, are there many infidels on the flight?’
‘Many infidels, yes,’ then Zaafir’s voice quavers, as he remembers row after row of eager, excited Pakistani faces to the rear of the plane. ‘Many believers too.’
The words that come back to him are a soothing balm. Delivered in Arabic with a hypno
tic beat: ‘Only Allah holds the knowledge of the unseen and does not reveal these mysteries to anyone, except those He selects as His messengers. He watches over them through guardians that advance before and shield them from behind that He may observe the proper delivery of His message. He is aware of all that they do and maintains a strict record of all things that exist.’
Not much one can say to that, and the airline steward knows it. God works in mysterious ways. Zaafir feels duly admonished, his skin hot with embarrassment. The best he can do is repeat: ‘Five minutes . . . and it shall be done.’
‘You are a blessed man, Zaafir . . .’ and the man on the other end of the phone sounds as if he wants to hang up, wants to be doing something else. Urgently. So his final words of counsel seem a little rushed. ‘Remember. Those admitted to Paradise shall experience true bliss. Never shall they know want, nor will they suffer old age.’ A rote.
Zaafir is about to ask a question, when he realises the phone link is already dead, and he has been sent on his way. Five minutes. Yes. I can do this. Five minutes. And the spirit flows through him, tingling his senses, strengthening every muscle and sinew in his body.
He is watching me, through guardians that advance before and will shield me from behind that He may observe the proper delivery of His message . . .
Of course Zaafir is an idiot, but he’s a faithful idiot, and where would we be without faithful idiots?
Four thousand five hundred miles away, in a dusty warehouse off M.A. Jinnah Road, Karachi, Hamza Khan, son of the general, closes his mobile phone. An anonymous pre-paid Motorola handset. He turns to eyeball the rows of young, expect ant faces lined up on either side of the three long tables, lit by a rackety collection of chipped and downright dangerous light fittings, hanging cobwebbed from the ceiling. The walls hum with energy, with the footfall of shoppers on the move, for the warehouse is on the ground floor and packed all around them, and three floors above, is a shopping plaza.
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