‘Cute boy,’ the deckhand said, looking at Jalal. ‘How old is he?’
‘Eleven months,’ Malika said.
Jalal was the youngest of the children making the journey. The others were all able to walk; Ramla’s son was almost four.
‘Well, I hope he doesn’t get seasick. We’re expecting some rough weather in the next few hours.’
‘How long will it take to get there?’ Malika asked.
‘This boat will do twenty knots on a good day. We would normally expect to make Lampedusa in just over two days, but it will be closer to three with the storm sitting in our way.’
The young man showed them where they could find the toilet, which he referred to as the ‘head’, then made his way back upstairs as the huge diesels powered up and pushed the boat away from the coast. The ride was smooth as they headed out into deeper waters, but soon the room began to pitch as the growing waves pummelled the side of the craft.
‘I feel ill,’ Inas said, and disappeared in the direction of the head. She returned a short while later and collapsed on her bed.
‘I don’t think I can stand three days of this,’ Ramla said.
Malika felt much the same. At least they had a berth to hunker down in, unlike the other passengers, who were forced to sleep on the deck. Once the storm hit, those caught out in the open were in for a miserable ride.
‘Try to sleep,’ Malika said. ‘Hopefully we’ll be through the worst of it by the time morning comes.’
She tried to heed her own words, but after a couple of hours, sleep still evaded her. The boat was rolling heavily by this time, and she’d already been sick twice, the last time dry-heaving for close to five minutes. Thankfully, Jalal seemed to enjoy the rocking movement, and had dropped off shortly after the journey began.
The intensity of the storm increased as the night wore on, and a couple of times Malika was almost thrown from her bunk as the ship crested a wave and plunged into a trough. Eventually, fatigue forced her eyes closed, and when she woke she discovered that the storm had passed and the boat was once more on an even keel.
Malika prepared food for herself and a bottle and baby food for Jalal, and after visiting the head to clean up, she ventured upstairs into the pilot house, where she found the captain smoking. Judging by the full ashtray, it wasn’t his first of the day, and the smell, combined with the pervasive fish stink, was enough to set her stomach churning once more.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Eventually,’ Malika said. ‘Are we likely to go through that again?’
‘No, smooth sailing the rest of the way.’
Malika was grateful to hear it. It was her first time on board a boat, and she wasn’t yet enamoured of life on the high seas. She opened the hatch and walked out onto the deck, where she was greeted by blue sky and serene waters. The storm had cleared the air and taken with it much of the noxious odour that emanated from the deck. She soaked in the tranquil setting, and it was almost five minutes before something struck her as strange. She went back inside to ask the captain.
‘Where are the others?’ she asked.
‘Gone,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘I had orders to lose them on the journey.’
‘Then why bring them in the first place?’
The captain rubbed his thumb and index finger together. ‘To make it worthwhile.’
It at least answered one of the questions about the mission that had been bothering her. She’d been instructed to tell the authorities that their initial destination had been the Greek island of Crete, which was over 350 miles from their kick-off point at the refugee camp in Lebanon. She was to claim that engine trouble had seen them drift for days. At the time, she’d wondered how Karim would prevent the other passengers from contradicting her story, and now she knew.
She couldn’t help but feel a little sadness for those who had met a watery end, especially the children, but she had a job to do.
And if she did it properly, many deserving infidels would lose their lives.
At just before ten in the evening, the captain knocked on Malika’s cabin door and shouted that it was time to go.
She and her companions had suffered two days of boredom as the ship chugged its way across the Mediterranean, venturing on deck now and again when there were no other vessels on radar. It had given Malika more time to commit the latest information to memory, and the paper had been tossed overboard earlier that day. Now, the worst part of the journey was almost over, but they still had to make land. No easy task for five women with no experience on the open seas.
She gathered her meagre possessions and carried Jalal up the stairs and into the cooling darkness. A starry sky and sliver of moon offered scant illumination, but Malika could see lights on the horizon and guessed it was the south-west tip of Lampedusa, an island barely five miles long some 120 miles south of the Italian mainland.
The deckhand climbed down into the smaller boat that was tied up against the hull and motioned for Malika to pass Jalal down to him. She handed the boy over, then climbed down the rope ladder and took him back before settling down on the wooden seat. The other women followed, and the sailor jerked the outboard motor into life.
‘Just point it towards the lights and you should reach the shore within thirty minutes. It’s a rocky coastline, but the water will be flat by the time you reach it. Use this handle to steer, and twist this grip to go faster. Just remember to reduce speed as you near the rocks, otherwise you’ll hit too hard and you could capsize.’
Malika was sitting closest to the engine and took it upon herself to do the steering, and once their host had clambered back up the ladder and untied the ropes, she fed in a little fuel and eased away from the fishing vessel.
Despite the calmer seas, the small boat translated every tiny crest into a judder, and the vibration from the engine brought on a new wave of seasickness that Malika couldn’t shake off. Five minutes in, she heaved over the side.
As promised, they reached the shore within half an hour. Malika searched for a landing spot that wouldn’t require much climbing, and after ten minutes she saw a break in the rocks where sea met sand. She pointed the bow towards it and grounded the craft on the beach. In the darkness, she had difficulty finding the cut-off switch, so she left the engine running as she and her companions clambered onto the sand.
‘Where’s the reception centre?’ Ramla asked as she handed Jalal back to Malika.
‘I think it’s at the north end of the island. We should keep walking until we meet someone and ask for directions.’
After three days at sea, it took them a few minutes to get their land legs, each step trying to compensate for imaginary pitching and rolling. It took them just a couple of minutes to find a road that ran parallel to the airport, and after skirting the perimeter they saw a harbour off to their left, with dozens of fishing boats moored up for the night.
They followed the road until they came to residential streets. It was after eleven in the evening and few lights lit the surrounding buildings. The streets themselves were almost deserted, but Malika spotted a couple out for a walk and decided to try to enlist their help. She asked for directions, first in her native tongue, then again in English, but just got shrugged shoulders in reply.
Undeterred, she went in search of others, and heard the sound of voices laughing and speaking Arabic. She hurried around the corner and saw three young men, a strong odour of alcohol emanating from them. One of the men grinned and sauntered over to her, a good-looking young man whom Malika might have found attractive under different circumstances, but today she wanted nothing more than to know where the camp was. Any lascivious thoughts on his part ended when the other four women came into view.
‘We’re looking for the reception centre,’ Malika said.
‘It’s closed,’ the man said, his grin returning. ‘But you’re welcome to stay with me tonight.’
‘Thank you, but my sisters and I really need to get there as soon as possible.’
‘It’s a long journey,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind?’
Malika shook her head, then started walking. She could hear the other women following her, but didn’t want to look back in case it gave her suitor the wrong impression. At the junction, she slowed her pace and stole a backwards glance, relieved to see that the amorous young man had given up the chase.
His warning that the walk would be a long one was correct, though. It took almost three hours to reach their destination, and Malika was dismayed to see at least a hundred tents and other hastily erected shelters outside the wire fence that surrounded the sports hall that had been transformed into a reception centre. The plan called for them to be at the Italian border with France in four days’ time, but with this many people to process, they were unlikely to make that deadline.
They approached the tented village, where some people were still awake despite the hour. One man looked up at them, then threw his cigarette away in disgust and mumbled to himself as he retreated into his makeshift shelter. A few feet away, a couple in their forties huddled together under a blanket, a young child asleep on the mother’s lap.
‘Ignore him,’ the woman said. ‘He’s just angry that you’ve jumped ahead of him in the queue. I’m Anila.’
Malika gave her a puzzled look. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘They’re processing single mothers first,’ Anila said. ‘He’s a single male from Algeria, and has already been here for more than a month. The Italians are prioritising families over individuals.’
That eased Malika’s concerns a little. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘We arrived this morning – yesterday morning, I should say. We hope to make the flight out later today.’ Anila explained how things worked on the island. ‘Every day, two flights leave for the Italian mainland. They carry five hundred people between them, but twice that number arrive here each day. Orphans are dealt with first, followed by single mothers and then families. It protects the more vulnerable, but it means the camp is filling up with men who are not happy at being kept waiting. There have been many fights since we arrived, and one man was killed earlier this afternoon. This is not a good place to be right now.’
Malika agreed, but the news that she and her fellow travellers were likely to be on their way sooner rather than later was comforting. She thanked the couple and guided the four others towards the main gates, where they found a patch of grass. Malika dug out her blanket and settled down with Jalal for some much-needed sleep.
The hardest part of the journey was now behind them; once they reached the Italian mainland, they would be guided every inch of the way until they reached England. That would give her a few days to prepare herself for the most important part of the mission.
CHAPTER 12
Tuesday, 8 August 2017
Andrew Harvey was finishing an email when the internal messaging system flagged a new message from MI6. It was marked ‘urgent’, so he stopped what he was doing and clicked on the link. After reading for a couple of minutes, he called Farsi and Sarah to his desk.
‘It looks like Nabil Karim has got his hands on some chemical weapons,’ Harvey said, moving aside so that they could read the communication.
‘What’s X3?’ Sarah asked.
‘Very nasty stuff.’
They turned to see a short man in his fifties with military-cut hair who had just entered the office alongside Veronica Ellis.
‘This is Frank Dale from Porton Down,’ Ellis said. ‘I want you all in the conference room in two minutes.’
Harvey locked his station and grabbed his bottle of water, then walked to the room with his colleagues. Dale was already there, setting up a laptop and pairing it to the fifty-inch monitor on the wall.
Ellis stood at the head of the table. ‘As you’ll probably know by now, Nabil Karim has managed to get his hands on five phials of something called “X3”. Frank is going to explain what that means to us.’
She stood aside, and Dale started his presentation.
‘How many of you have seen a film called The Rock?’
‘Was that the one where American terrorists hold a load of people hostage on Alcatraz?’ Harvey asked.
‘Correct. They claim to have VX nerve agent and are prepared to fire it at San Francisco. If you remember the opening scene, one of them gets exposed to it and his face begins to peel off. Well, let me tell you, VX doesn’t do that. It kills through asphyxiation. X3, on the other hand, does exactly that, only more so. The Syrians developed it a few years ago.’
‘Weren’t they supposed to have destroyed their chemical weapons stockpiles in 2014?’ asked Farsi.
‘They were, but only the ones the UN inspectors knew about. The facility that was hit last week didn’t have the security you would associate with a weapons-storage site, presumably to keep it off the radar. The US satellites would have flagged it up as suspicious if it had been crawling with soldiers, but al-Assad’s decision to keep it low-key looks to have backfired. The identity of the person who reported it to the West is unknown, and al-Assad officially denies any knowledge, obviously, but through backchannels we’ve confirmed the quantity taken and the chemical make-up.’
‘So what exactly is X3?’ Sarah wanted to know.
‘It combines VX with mustard nitrogen,’ Dale said. ‘It causes almost instantaneous blistering of the skin and attacks the respiratory system. The usual antidotes that combat VX, atropine and pralidoxime, are not effective against this new agent as it not only causes damage to the skin, but also once it penetrates and reaches the blood vessels, it destroys them. Death occurs within an hour through internal bleeding. It is viscous, like motor oil, and can be delivered as an aerosol. The amount stolen, if dispersed in the air, would kill anyone within a two-mile range.’
‘If atropine doesn’t work, what does?’ Ellis asked.
‘Nothing,’ Dale said. ‘If this stuff gets loose, be somewhere else.’
For Harvey, it was the ultimate nightmare scenario. Nabil Karim had signalled his intention to bring the fight to British soil, and if his weapon of choice were X3, the outcome would be devastating. If released near a football stadium or a major music festival, the number of dead could reach 100,000.
What was of a greater concern was that they no longer had Hannibal to feed back details of how Karim planned to use the agent. It could already be in the country, or on its way.
‘Is there any way to detect it?’ he asked Dale. ‘Does it show up on airport scanners or would sniffer dogs be able to spot a person carrying it?’
‘It was stored in glass phials, so metal detectors wouldn’t be any good. And it’s odourless, so there would be nothing for the dogs to pick up on.’
‘Why store something so deadly in little glass tubes?’ Sarah asked. ‘That’s just inviting trouble.’
‘I’d normally agree, but we’ve been told they are made of toughened safety glass. You could drop a hammer on one and it wouldn’t even scratch the surface.’
‘You’ve mentioned aerosol dispersal,’ Harvey said. ‘Are there any other ways it could be deployed?’
‘Other agents have been used in warheads, but X3 was designed specifically to be an airborne threat. An explosion would send people scurrying away from the area anyway. In aerosol form, it could be released and no-one would know until it was too late.’
Dale fielded questions for another five minutes, after which he handed out photographs of phials similar to those that had been stolen. He also gave them his contact details at the government’s military science park.
The team headed back to their desks while Ellis showed Dale out of the building. In a couple of minutes, she came to Harvey’s station.
‘I need you to consider every possible way of getting X3 into the country,’ she said. ‘In order to stop Karim, we have to think like him.’
‘I’m already making a list, though I have a feeling it’ll mean stepping up security at every major port. Do you think Maynard will sign off on that?’
‘The PM wants to see us both later this afternoon. When he understands the seriousness of the situation, he’ll order Maynard to toe the line.’
As Ellis retreated to her office, Harvey finished his list and sent it to the team so that they could pick up their assigned duties. He then sent Sarah an internal message asking her to draw up a list of possible targets, starting with anything involving the PM, then the armed forces and, finally, upcoming public events likely to attract large crowds.
The task facing them was colossal, but the penalty for failure didn’t bear thinking about.
CHAPTER 13
Tuesday, 8 August 2017
Malika woke with a start as feet trampled past her head. She sat up and saw that a huge crowd had already gathered at the gates of the reception centre, and she checked her watch to see that it was just approaching six in the morning. The first rays of the sun were just breaching the horizon, the chill of the night already dissipating.
‘Wake up,’ she said, tapping Ramla on the arm. ‘We have to get in the queue.’
In truth, there wasn’t so much a queue as a throng, with the stronger ones starting to push their way to the front.
Malika stood and got her first real look at the camp. There were scores of shelters, some free-standing tents, others cobbled together from whatever the locals had provided. The ground was littered with empty bottles and food wrappers, as well as discarded clothes and soiled nappies. It was truly a desperate place, more like the aftermath of a tornado than the gates to sanctuary.
Malika gathered her things and picked up Jalal, then joined the ever-growing crowd. She asked a woman what time the gates opened and was told that she faced a three-hour wait. With time on her hands, she fed the child before snacking on the last of the dried fruit from her bag. She had some money and could have ventured to the local shops, but figured they could do without for a couple of hours. Best to keep her place in the line than have to rejoin at the back.
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