Under Fire: (A Dan Taylor thriller)

by Amphlett, Rachel

  Dan groggily lifted his head, his ears ringing, his rifle still in his hand. He lifted a section of plasterboard off his body, rolled over and heaved himself to his feet. He peered out through the doorway, blinked, and edged carefully into the passageway, his rifle raised, Mitch following.

  Dan glanced up the staircase, the topmost treads hanging precariously from the landing above. ‘Team Two! You up there?’ he called through his throat microphone then coughed as plaster dust hit the back of his throat.

  A muffled retort echoed through the static, before a voice crackled in his ear.

  ‘Was that you making all that noise, Taylor?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he spluttered. ‘You’re going to have to find another exit. Stairs are on fire. Move fast.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  Dan looked over his shoulder at Mitch. ‘You okay?’

  Mitch nodded, glanced at his shoulders and calmly dusted plaster dust from them. ‘Yeah – go.’

  Dan pulled Grant from the floor, the man covering his mouth and nose with his hands. He pushed him after Mitch, who grabbed the engineer by the shoulder and started to drag him from the burning building.

  Glancing up at the ceiling through his blackened mask, Dan shook his head and began to force his way through the smoke-filled hallway towards the open front door. Daylight began to break through the fog around him, while the flames were getting hotter, closer, the house beginning to fall apart around them.

  ‘Team Two – are you out? Are you out?’ he shouted.

  ‘Affirmative – we’re making our way through an upstairs window.’

  ‘See you on the outside,’ said Dan, and began to run after the shadows of Mitch and Grant.

  As he stepped out of the building, Dan noticed the morning sun beginning to crest the horizon. He walked carefully across the snow-covered terrain, pulled off his gas mask and helmet and breathed deeply, his exhaled air steaming in front of him.

  Mitch had taken Grant to the medical team which had parked a dark coloured van next to the farm house.

  Antonia sat next to Grant on the tailgate of the van. The door was open, and she crouched down, her hand on the engineer’s knee as she gently spoke to him and handed him a bottle of water. She turned at the sound of Dan’s boots on the snow, smiled and patted Grant on the knee before standing up and walking over to meet Dan.

  ‘Okay?’ asked Dan.

  She nodded. As she drew closer, her smile faded and she kept her voice low. ‘We need to take him with us,’ she said. ‘He’s the only one who can protect the plant if the submarine attacks before we find it and destroy it.’

  Dan lifted his chin in the direction of the van. ‘Do you think he can hold it together for a bit longer?’

  Antonia shrugged. She glanced at the van, then back at Dan.

  ‘He’s going to have to. There’s no other way.’

  Chapter 42

  As he watched through the bullet-proof reflective glass of the medical treatment room, Dan drummed his fingers on the narrow aluminium window sill. The doctors dressed Grant’s wounds, ran tests and spoke to their patient in calm, even voices. Machinery whirred and beeped, monitoring his heart rate, breathing and blood pressure as the medical team worked to repair his body.

  He turned at the sound of footsteps echoing along the corridor behind him and saw David approaching, a frown creasing his brow.

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  Dan shrugged. ‘Hard to tell. The lead doctor told me to expect their report within the next half an hour, so we’ll have a better idea then.’

  David glanced round Dan’s shoulder to see one of the doctors insert a needle into Grant’s arm. ‘What are they giving him?’

  ‘Something to help with the amnesia and any breathing difficulties he’ll be suffering after the drugs the kidnappers used.’

  ‘Let’s hope his programming skills haven’t been affected by the last few days.’

  ‘I know. I’m more concerned about those than getting the kidnapping details out of him.’ Dan paused, and then turned away from the viewing window. ‘While we’re waiting for the doctors to patch him up and give us the all clear to start working with him, I want to go down to Kent – speak to the guys at the gas plant and find out what I can on the ground before we turn up with the whole team.’

  David nodded. ‘I agree. Find out what the likely targets there could be and what their emergency procedures are. Take Antonia with you – if she can talk with one of the engineers at the facility she might be able to understand exactly what Grant’s software was designed to do – just in case he takes a turn for the worse. You’ve got two hours.’

  ‘Copy that,’ said Dan, and hurried from the medical rooms.

  ***

  Dan slewed the car onto a pot-holed private road and held a steady speed down the narrow lane. The wheels churned up the loose surface, splattering the side of the car with mud and sending small stones rattling under the wheel arches.

  As the road curved slowly to the left, a guard hut and high wire fencing came into view. Two guards cowered in the doorway, trying their best to shelter from the cold downpour of sleet assaulting the north Kent coast.

  ‘I think you should move to Qatar, instead of asking me to move here,’ said Antonia, her eyes following the rivulets of water cascading down the car’s windscreen.

  Dan grinned and slowed the car to a halt, lowered the window and held up their security clearances to the guard who hurried from the hut holding his windcheater over his head. The wind whipped at his hood as he bent down to inspect the identification. Satisfied, he nodded to Dan and straightened up.

  ‘Go through the gates and follow the road round to the right,’ he shouted over the rain. ‘The Ops Manager’s office is the second building on the left.’

  Dan held up his hand in acknowledgement and raised the window while the guard jogged back to the hut and armed the gate controls. Dan eased off the brake as the gates smoothly slid open on tracks, and slowly guided the car through the gap.

  He drove the car as close as he could to the administration building and killed the engine. Reaching down to unclip his seatbelt, he craned his neck to try and see through the office’s window and whether anyone was going to let them in – or watch them drown on the threshold. He hoped the guard at the gate had phoned ahead.

  After a few seconds, a figure appeared at the window and raised its hand.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Dan, and swung open the car door. ‘Let’s make a run for it.’

  He screwed up his eyes against the sleet that hit him in the face as he climbed from the car, Antonia on his heels. A strong breeze blew in from the sea, stinging his skin. He jogged up the three steps to the brick office building, and the door opened immediately.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ urged a man. ‘Quickly – otherwise we’ll lose all the heat out of the building.’

  Dan and Antonia stepped over the threshold and moved to one side, dripping puddles on a well-worn parquet floor as the door slammed shut behind them.

  The man chuckled. ‘Welcome to the Isle of Grain – what do you think of our weather?’

  Dan grinned. ‘It’s bloody awful.’

  The man held out his hands. ‘Give me your coats. I’ll hang them here.’

  They shrugged their jackets off and handed them over. The man turned, hooked them over one of several pegs screwed into the plaster wall and turned back to them with his hand outstretched.

  ‘Ted Harris.’

  Dan shook his hand and introduced Antonia.

  Harris guided them to a small office to one side of the corridor, its window facing the car park, and pointed to two chairs in front of his desk.

  ‘Sit yourself down there. You said on the phone you were in a hurry, so where do you want to begin?’ he said.

  ‘Can you give us a run-down of how the facility works?’ asked Dan. ‘I mean, I know LNG tankers offload gas here, but what’s the process?’

  ‘Well for a start, we’re a regasification and stora
ge plant,’ began Harris, ‘which means we unload the gas in its liquid form off a ship, and then gradually heat it up so it turns back into gas. We run a few processes to get rid of any impurities, then store it. Eventually it’ll get pumped into the National Grid Transmission System and can be sent anywhere around the country.’

  He stood up and walked over to an enlarged aerial photograph of the facility hanging on the wall, lifted it off its hook and set it down on his desk. Dan and Antonia leaned forward in their seats to have a closer look.

  ‘Here we’ve got a Q-Max tanker offloading gas from Qatar,’ explained Harris. ‘There are three loading arms and a vapour return arm which link the ship to the jetty and pump the liquid gas into pipes leading from the jetty to the regasification plant.’ He tapped his finger on the photograph and began tracing the line of pipework which snaked across the landscape.

  ‘The pipeline is about two miles long, and rests on concrete sleepers,’ he said. ‘We use four compressors at the end of that which the gas passes through before it’s superheated to warm it from minus one hundred and sixty degrees Celsius to plus five degrees.’

  ‘Is that when you pipe it into the storage tanks?’ asked Dan, pointing to four large cylindrical objects located on the perimeter of the picture.

  Harris nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. Each one holds one hundred and ninety thousand cubic metres of gas.’

  ‘How much of the process is managed by your SCADA system?’ asked Antonia.

  Harris frowned. ‘All of it. The compressors, the pumps drawing gas off the ships, the valves through the pipework – everything.’

  Dan folded his arms across his chest and paced the room as his mind worked. ‘So, if any attack happens, the software Grant has designed can be used to shut off the gas flow through the plant to limit the damage?’

  Harris nodded. ‘It’s like a switch – just in data code, rather than a physical switch. We can programme it to turn off the gas in different areas.’

  ‘And Grant Swift wrote this?’ asked Antonia.

  Harris nodded. ‘He’s the lead controls engineer on the project. Our organisation employed him as a consultant. He started here a couple of months ago – he’s been analysing our systems, looking for weak points and ways to implement his programme. We were only a few weeks away from the start of testing.’

  ‘What about design drawings?’ asked Dan.

  Harris shook his head. ‘Grant owns the background intellectual property. The organisation only owns the intellectual property for the completed system as built for this LNG plant.’

  ‘Would it be possible for us to have a copy of the design for the final system – the ones you do own the copyright for?’ asked Antonia, and then turned to Dan. ‘I’d like to study them – as a back-up plan.’

  He nodded. He understood what she was saying. If Grant didn’t recover in time to prevent the submarine attack, they might have to organise a team of designers to try to reverse-engineer the schematics to try and work out the data code for the patch.

  ‘Sure.’ Harris removed a data stick from the top drawer of his desk. Inserting it into his computer, he hit a series of keys then tapped his fingers on the surface of the keyboard while the information downloaded.

  Dan leaned across to Antonia. ‘Do you think reverse-engineering this thing is possible?’ he murmured.

  She cast a glance at Harris who was removing the data stick from his computer. ‘I’ll get a better idea if it’s possible once I see what’s on that stick,’ she said. ‘At the moment, we can’t rule out anything.’

  She smiled and took the data stick from Harris. ‘Thank you. I’ll call you if I need anything clarified.’

  Harris nodded. ‘You do that,’ he smiled. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, and looked out the window. ‘That weather is easing up a bit. Let’s see if I can rustle up some protective gear for you both and I’ll persuade the captain of the tanker which has just unloaded to let me show you around.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dan and Antonia in unison.

  Harris grinned. ‘Might as well make the most of it – you’re never going to get the chance to do this again.’

  ***

  Dan reached up and ran his hand round the smooth surface of the tank. He sniffed the air, paranoid that if he suddenly moved the whole ship would disintegrate in a fire ball.

  Harris laughed at him. ‘You won’t be able to smell it, lad.’

  Dan smiled sheepishly. ‘I guessed as much, but it seemed the right thing to do.’

  Harris laughed and slapped him on the back. ‘Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.’ He walked around the tank and pointed along the ship’s deck. ‘There are five of these tanks on this ship. When it’s full, there’ll be about forty-eight million litres of liquefied gas spread between the five tanks.’

  ‘How much energy is that?’ asked Antonia, peering up at the tanks which towered above them.

  ‘Equivalent to about fifty atomic bombs,’ said Harris. ‘Though the industry has never had a major accident.’

  Yet , thought Dan. He turned to Harris. ‘So how do you transport it to make sure it won’t explode?’

  Harris leaned against one of the railings on the deck and gestured over the top of the five tanks, the top of them belying their bulk beneath the deck surface.

  ‘Once the gas is extracted from its source, it’s chilled to minus one hundred and sixty degrees Celsius,’ he explained. ‘That stops the problem of any gas igniting at air temperature. We fill the hull with noxious gas – nitrogen – before the liquefied gas is pumped into the tanks. It can’t catch fire in that state.’

  Dan frowned. ‘How come no-one is allowed to have electronic devices near the tanks when this thing is full?’

  Harris turned to him. ‘Because there’s still a small risk of vapour. We’ve got alarms to tell us if noxious air is escaping or there’s a leak in one of the tanks, but it’s all about lessening our risk of an accident. The whole ship could go up if anything caused a spark near one of these things.’

  ‘But if it’s empty now, why not just send it on its way on Tuesday without any gas in it?’ said Dan. ‘Let them attack an empty ship.’

  Harris turned and contemplated the shipyard activity below. He leaned on the newly painted railing, the smell of the fresh blue coat stinging his nostrils. He looked sideways at Dan and seemed to steel himself before he spoke.

  Harris turned and pointed across the length of the ship. ‘They won’t attack this ship, sonny.’

  Dan frowned. ‘They won’t?’

  ‘No – this one’s a baby. They’ll want to attack its big sister.’

  ‘Big sister?’ Dan felt his jaw slacken as he took in the enormity of the vessel, and then looked along the length of the jetty. He looked back at Harris. ‘Where is it?’

  Harris looked Dan in the eye. ‘It’s the one which left Ras Laffan the morning of the attack.’

  ‘You call this one a baby? Exactly how big is its ‘big sister’?’

  ‘Four hundred metres long, six storage tanks, with an energy equivalent to seventy atomic bombs.’

  Dan felt his heart lurch in his chest and looked at Antonia. ‘Oh shit.’

  Chapter 43

  Dan knocked and entered the room.

  The Vice-Admiral stopped speaking as Dan appeared, his arms crossed in defiance, his face red.

  David stood up. ‘Dan, glad you could join us,’ he said.

  Dan shook hands with him. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  David gestured to the other people in the room. The Secretary of State for Defence’s representative sat at the head of a beech oval conference table, while the Vice-Admiral remained pacing by the coffee machine, evidently trying to maintain his cool.

  ‘In case the rescue mission fails, we were discussing a back-up plan,’ explained David. He put his hands in the air. ‘Unfortunately, it would seem we have no back-up.’ He sat down in a chair facing the Vice-Admiral.

  Dan walked round the table and glanced out
the window at the river traffic, then turned to face the room. ‘What’s the problem?’

  The Vice-Admiral sighed. ‘Two destroyers are escorting the Q-Max tanker, which left Ras Laffan the morning of the attack, through the Atlantic as a precaution – they’ll follow it up to the point it docks in the UK. The rest of the fleet are currently in the middle of a major exercise with the French and Americans in the South Atlantic,’ he said. ‘Unknown to the British public, our remaining assets, namely an Astute class submarine and two frigates are unavailable for defending the country at this time. ’

  ‘Wow,’ said Dan. ‘That’s bad timing.’

  ‘Heads will roll,’ growled the Vice-Admiral.

  ‘Where exactly are the two frigates and the submarine?’ asked Dan.

  ‘The submarine is having a refit which is running four weeks late, one frigate is off the coast of Somalia on a reconnaissance mission, and I can’t tell you where the other frigate is, because that’d open another can of worms.’

  Dan turned and looked out the window, letting the voices wash over him. He shivered, the cold from the bulletproof glass casting a chill which wasn’t improved by the room’s poor heating system. He watched a tourist boat battle a headwind and an incoming tide up the muddy waters of the River Thames, its passengers braving the elements to take photographs of the Tower of London on the opposite bank. His gaze shifted and a smile began to play across his lips as he watched a traffic helicopter hovering above the busy cityscape.

  He turned to face the others, his heart racing as he fought to keep his voice calm. ‘Gentlemen, I think I’ve found the solution to our water-based problem,’ he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder and grinning.

  ***