Their Scottish CO was sitting in his famous tattered leather chair, notes and charts spread liberally across the desk in front of him. ‘We’ve been given a job to do,’ Colhoun told the four men. ‘And I’ve provisionally selected you four to do it. It may be that once you’ve considered all the possibilities and done some draft planning you’ll come to the conclusion that more bodies are needed. If so, we’ll bring more in.’
He looked round the semicircle of faces in front of him, noting the nervous excitement of three, the hungry look in the eyes of the fourth.
‘The job,’ he went on, disentangling a map of Europe from the other papers and turning it round for his audience. ‘Two days ago a Russian ship, the Red Voyager, sailed from St Petersburg here’ – he pointed it out, knowing from long experience how many of his men were geographically illiterate. ‘By now it should be somewhere around here, about ten miles south of Copenhagen. The ship is headed for Latakia in Syria with a cargo of agricultural machinery. It’s also, according to information received, carrying about sixty pounds of enriched uranium for Saddam Hussein.’
‘Christ,’ Noonan said out loud.
Colhoun smiled at him. ‘And according to the latest estimate it should be forty miles away from here at around 01.30 hours on Tuesday. Which is when you will board her, locate the uranium and bring it away with you.’
A slight smile was creasing McClure’s lips. ‘Do we have any other information about the ship?’ he asked in his soft voice.
‘The normal crew complement is twenty-six – six officers, five deck crew, ten in the engine room, five in the galley. As far as we know they’re all Russian. We have no idea how many of them are armed, or how many of them know about the uranium. We do know which hold the stuff’s in, and what the markings on the crate are.’
McClure raised an eyebrow. ‘How come?’ he asked.
Colhoun explained about the tip-off. ‘There’s a possibility? that it’s just a hoax, but I’m afraid there’s only one way of finding out for certain.’
To Noonan’s astonishment, McClure actually grinned.
‘The ship will be passing through the Øresund in a couple of hours,’ Colhoun went on, ‘and the Danes have promised to take some pictures for us.’
‘Should give us an idea of the lighting,’ McClure murmured, as if he was talking to himself.
‘You have three days to plan and prepare. First thing in the morning, I want the four of you to start considering your options. I’m probably teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, but it seemed to me there are three separate questions to answer: how you’re going to get on to the ship, how you plan to spend your time on board, and how you intend to get home with the booty. I should add at this point that our political masters would prefer that you manage all this without alerting the Russian crew, but I doubt if that will be possible, and I told them as much. However, it’s important you don’t leave any evidence behind – it won’t be hard for them to work out who their visitors were, but we want proving it to be another matter.’
‘Understood,’ McClure said.
‘The RAF will keep track of the ship for us once it’s in the North Sea. OK, I think that’s all for now. Any questions?’
The two SC3s looked at each other; McClure shook his head. The four men filed out. ‘Canteen at eight,’ McClure told the others with what might even have been a smile, and strode off without waiting for a reply.
Noonan asked the other two if they fancied a drink.
‘Does a fox shit in the woods?’ Davies asked him.
It was only ten o’clock. McClure left the base and headed for the centre of town on foot, his mind mulling over this sudden change in his circumstances. The fucking nuclear course had been worth it after all. He would be seeing some real action, going up against real enemies.
He found he was heading for Annie’s flat without having really intended to. Since that night in the pub he’d stayed away – he felt too ashamed of the way he’d lost control. And he hadn’t really wanted to be reminded of it either, though lately just about anything seemed to get him going. Sometimes he felt like he had been born with this vast pool of anger somewhere in his brain, and all anyone had to do was tap into it.
But he had a job now, and it was always better on a job. The rage seemed to evaporate somehow, and he felt completely in control of himself, the job in hand, everything.
Annie’s light was still on. He rang the bell and listened to her descend the stairs. When she saw it was him her face darkened for an instant, but then she must have seen something in his eyes because she smiled. ‘Come in, lover,’ she said.
6
Looking back on the days which followed Arif Akhundov’s fatal encounter with the unidentified car, Raisa Karayeva found it easy to retrace her path through a series of emotional reactions. The first of these, which grasped at her heart and then sat like lead in her stomach, had been simple fear.
The police, the newspapers, all those around her – everyone thought it had been an accident. Witnesses had seen the professor step out in front of the speeding car; the driver’s failure to stop had certainly been callous, but the collision itself had not been his fault. Even Aida accepted this version of events, preferring to see Tamarlan’s vanishing trick and Akhundov’s accident as coincidental, though she did concede that his friend’s disappearance might have upset the professor enough to make him careless. According to his colleagues and secretary he had been absent-minded at the best of times.
Raisa had been planning to tell her friend about the conversation with Akhundov and the deductions she had herself made, but after his death the sudden rush of fear – for herself, for Aida too – compelled her silence. One whole day went by, and then another. She tried to work at the office, tried to relax at home, but the terrifying expectation of a knock on either door only gradually faded.
By the evening of the third day she was at least ready to hope again. Perhaps they had not found the letter, or perhaps there were too many Raisas in Baku to make an investigation worthwhile. On reflection, she found it hard to believe that the letter had not been vetted before it was sent, but then who was she to second-guess the KGB, or whatever it was they called themselves these days?
Whoever they were, they had apparently not discovered that Tamarlan was having an extramarital affair before they took him away. It was ironic, she thought, that the secrecy which she had so resented seemed to have been her salvation.
As the fear receded, curiosity filled the emotional space it left behind. Where exactly had they taken him? What were they doing out there? Finding an answer to the first question was not so difficult – at the institute she had access to all the available information concerning activities taking place around, on or under the surface of the Caspian Sea. After two days of intermittent research she had ruled out all the facilities at the end of the artificial isthmus, and thus narrowed the search to the huge twin rig – Aliyev A and Aliyev B – which lay just beyond it. The two interconnected structures, built in the last years of the Soviet Union, had been intended as a test-site for deep-drilling equipment, but there was no record of their being used as such during the past few years.
The twin rig was certainly large enough to house a scientific project, and seclusion could be almost guaranteed. It would be hard to escape from.
On the Friday after Akhundov’s death she manufactured an excuse to join one of the Institute’s regular water-sampling trips, and went to see for herself. The twin rig was still there. In daylight, several kilometres away, it was impossible to detect movement or light, but she felt sure enough of her conclusions.
Having satisfied herself on that score, the second question took precedence. What were they doing out there? A small part of Raisa was still hoping that Tamarlan had been taken for his non-military skills, but with such levels of security it was hard to escape the conclusion that the military were involved, and that her lover’s old work had come back to claim him.
But what could they be doing
? She found it hard to believe that the Azeri government would allow the Russians to develop new nuclear weapons in Azeri waters, and even harder to imagine the same government starting its own nuclear weapons programme. She supposed the raw materials could be had for a price – maybe from the Ukraine or Kazakhstan – but what would be the point? What possible use could Azerbaijan have for nuclear weapons?
Fate conspired to tell her that very day. Shopping for vegetables in the Sharg Bazary market, she witnessed an argument and near brawl between two women. One, a refugee from Nagorno-Karabakh, had been trying to jump the queue, and when challenged launched a string of abuse at her accusers. Had they no generosity towards their fellow-countrymen? When their turn came to be raped and their husbands killed and their homes burnt maybe they would learn. If they couldn’t treat their own people better than this then they deserved the coming Armenian invasion.
Raisa expected her fellow-shoppers to treat this outburst with the laughter it deserved, but they didn’t. In fact they seemed shamed, and the woman was almost hustled to the front of the queue.
Back at the flat she turned on the TV to the same subject – someone was obviously trying to tell her something. There was footage from the front – a burnt-out Armenian tank, a shot-down Armenian plane, both surrounded by smiling Azeri soldiers – and interviews with the survivors of another Armenian massacre in occupied Azerbaijan.
She turned off the TV and poured herself a drink. She knew all this, so why did it come as a surprise? When it came down to it, she realized, she had assumed that none of it really mattered. It was hard on those involved, but all this crazy flag-waving was just an aberration, a sort of school’s-out hysteria to follow the Soviet break-up. It would all blow over.
But it hadn’t. Armenians had been fighting Azeris for seven years now, and there was no prospect of a lasting peace. It was she who was the aberration, not the flag-wavers. She was a child of mixed parentage, someone who had always felt that the official Soviet distaste for nationalism made perfect sense. Her work as an environmentalist had only strengthened this feeling – nature, and the need to protect it, certainly knew no boundaries. She had kept her eyes firmly on the east, on the multinational problems of the Caspian, while the rest of her countrymen and women had their gaze locked on the West, and the potentially genocidal feud with Armenia.
They would understand the need for an Azeri bomb. Parts of their country were already occupied, and what was there to stop a continuing Armenian advance? The Azeris were a peaceful race, a race of farmers, not infidel mountain warriors. The more sophisticated could even argue that Azerbaijan’s maintenance of the economic blockade would eventually give the Armenians no choice but to attack.
She felt a shiver race up her spine, and took a gulp from her glass.
Tamarlan would feel no better about this than she did, and he – she was now sure – had been dragooned into helping. There was no way he would have volunteered for such work, for he was as little moved by nationalism and power politics as she was. Working for the Soviet Union was one thing, but building nuclear weapons for use in a war over who owned a few desolate mountains . . . What would there be left but desolation?
And now that she knew of his past work, she thought she could understand the inner sadness which had occasionally seeped to the surface, the rueful asides which had previously seemed inexplicable. Knowing that he had been dragged back into it made her sad, and angry too. How dare they steal people! It was no less than a modern form of slavery. And how dare they put her sea at risk by placing a nuclear facility at its heart!
She had to do something, tell someone.
But whom? And how? There was no point in raising the matter here in Azerbaijan, and an international phone call would probably seal her fate. If she was serious about this, she would have to get out of the country.
The rigid inflatable Fast Patrol Craft bobbed in the Channel swell, its twin 700hp outboard motors idling in neutral. Over the past few months considerable ingenuity had been applied by the technical branch to muffling the sound of these motors, and though the work had been done principally with 3rd Raiding Division’s Hong Kong anti-smuggling duties in mind, McClure’s team was now sharing the benefits. The FPC’s approach was unlikely to be heard above the engines and passage of the target ship, and on this particular night it was no more likely to be seen. Mist had been cloaking the Channel since shortly after nightfall, and the succeeding hours of darkness had been filled with the doleful horns of passing ships. These were visible, if at all, as nothing more than moving constellations of fuzzy lights.
Fate had apparently decided to favour the SBS team, but the four men in the FPC were taking nothing for granted. The radar operators on the frigate HMS Gloucester were tracking the target ship’s approach, and as the fixes grew steadily nearer, the three subordinate members of McClure’s team could each feel the butterflies dancing in their stomachs and the adrenalin coursing through their veins.
McClure himself felt perfectly calm. He always did at such times, when action was imminent. He thought of it as the stillness before the storm, and relished the moment – it was really the only time in his life when he felt able to simply be. For those few hours, or even minutes, the world seemed a different place. The colours were brighter, sounds sharper. It seemed ridiculous on such a misty night, but everything was so clear.
Sitting beside McClure, Paul Noonan was more conscious of his own nerves than the team leader’s lack of them. The minutes seemed to be dragging by, and yet he knew that when the moment came, and the freighter loomed through the fog, everything would happen at breakneck speed. He could feel the excitement of the two men in front of him, and could vividly remember his own baptism of fire three years before. For what seemed like hours of waiting the thought ‘please don’t make a complete fool of yourself’ had carved a rut in his brain.
He hadn’t, and he doubted whether Appleton or Davies would either, but he could almost hear them praying.
McClure was receiving on the radio. ‘Over and out,’ he said softly. ‘She should be on top of us any minute now,’ he told the others.
Appleton’s hand tightened on the FPC’s wheel and eight eyes strained to pierce the darkness and the mist.
A minute went by, and another, but no engine noise carried across the rolling water, no dark shape swam into view. ‘Where the fuck is she?’ McClure muttered, and at that moment Noonan heard the distant hum of a ship in motion.
‘I can hear her,’ he said.
They all could, but a visual sighting was something else, and already the sound seemed to be fading.
‘Take us south-south-east,’ McClure told Appleton, ‘at twenty knots.’
Appleton obliged, and the sound of the FPC’s engines, even with their new muffling, immediately drowned out the noise of the other ship’s passage. Noonan was just beginning to fear that the mist had proved more of a foe than a friend when a dim light appeared almost dead ahead. For a moment it seemed to be floating wraith-like in mid-air, and then a ship’s bow materialized out of the mist, shadowy at first but then increasingly substantial, the prow sharpening as they drew closer.
In his mind’s eye each of the four men could visualize the rest of the ship. They had carefully studied the photographs flown in from Copenhagen two days before, and made a trip to Southampton to look over an almost identical ship. About a hundred and fifty of these SD14 cargo vessels had been built since the mid-1960s; they were about 140 metres in length, with the superstructure set three-quarters aft and the two large twin derricks occupying the foredeck. Their top speed was fourteen knots. The one now looming above them had been built at the Sunderland yards of Austin & Pickersgill in 1969, and picked up cheap by the Soviets when the original buyer failed to make the initial payment.
They could see the ship’s name now, stencilled in a lighter colour on the black hull, but the superstructure a hundred metres further back was only a dim shape in the mist. There was no way that anyone on the bridge could
see them, and there was no sign of life on the foredeck.
Appleton angled the FPC in slowly towards the starboard bow, adjusting his speed to keep pace with the other ship, and Noonan had a mental picture of a cowboy positioning his speeding horse to leap aboard a runaway stagecoach. The Russian ship was actually moving slower than they had expected – it couldn’t be doing much more than eight knots at this moment, which should make boarding it that much easier.
The wall of the hull now rose above them, and McClure was standing up, the rope curled in his hand like a lasso. He wheeled his arm twice and sent the grappling-hook soaring up and over the starboard rail. There was a muffled clang as it caught. McClure tugged to make sure and then started up the rope hand over hand, his Heckler & Koch MP5SD sub-machine-gun hanging loosely across his shoulder and back. The other three watched his indistinct figure scramble across the rail, and then a few seconds later a tug on the rope announced the all-clear.
Noonan followed him up, thinking as he did so that he didn’t envy Appleton’s job of keeping the FPC in position for however long it took to find and move the crate containing the uranium. Not that Noonan himself fancied having anything much to do with the crate, since the course he had just finished in the nuclear aspects of possible terrorist situations had hardly been comforting. As far as he could tell the availability of the deadly stuff in the old Soviet states was only matched by the carelessness with which they seemed to treat it. Noonan was half expecting to find the whole ship already irradiated by a wodge of plutonium that someone had casually stuffed in a plastic bag.
Once over the rail he tugged on the rope for Davies, knelt down on the deck and checked the liquid crystal display on the Geiger counter. The background radiation was negligible. Either the sanctions-breakers had been suitably careful with their illicit cargo or the SBS team was on a wild-goose chase.
Marine I SBS Page 5