Marine I SBS

by David Monnery

  ‘The Azeris for one,’ Clarke said, ‘and they could try to take it out on BP. But basically they need the Western companies more than the companies need them, and if the worst comes to the worst we can probably use that fact to get a new government in Baku. The same goes for the Turks – as long as we can hold out the promise of EC membership they won’t kick up too much of a fuss. The Russians will probably fume, but they’re in too much of a mess to do anything, and nobody gives a damn what the ayatollahs think any more. I don’t think we have to worry too much about diplomatic repercussions.’

  ‘That makes a change,’ Hanson said. ‘And talking of Caspian waters – the SBS not only did a fine job in the Channel the other day, but they’re also responsible for the security of our own rigs in the North Sea. It seems like they’re tailor-made for this particular job.’

  ‘How would they get there?’ Clarke wondered out loud.

  ‘If memory serves, at least some of them have parachute training,’ Hanson told him.

  The PM nodded. ‘What exactly does this woman require from me before she’ll divulge the location?’ he asked.

  ‘She wants your word that no military action will be taken against this base,’ Hanson said. ‘She claims that she’s concerned about the possibility of nuclear pollution in the Caspian – she is an ecologist – but I assume she’s also worried about her boyfriend.’

  The PM smiled. ‘So she should be happy at the prospect of his being rescued,’ he said. ‘And of course I’ll see her and make any promises she wants. Where is she, by the way?’

  ‘In a hotel, under guard. Though as far as we can tell, no one knows she’s in London, or indeed that she knows anything.’

  ‘Send someone to talk to her,’ the PM told Hanson. ‘David Constantine would seem a good bet – she obviously likes scientific father-figures. And Martin,’ he went on, turning to Clarke, ‘get the SBS to work on a contingency plan.’

  The following morning Constantine found Raisa sitting at the window of her hotel room gazing out at the budding trees in Hyde Park. The TV was on with the sound turned down, which somehow accentuated the loneliness of the scene.

  She brightened visibly when she saw it was him, and he returned the smile. He had liked her from their first meeting four days before, but on asking himself why, Constantine had found it hard to come up with an answer. There was just something about her which was . . . ‘unspoilt’ was the word that came to mind, but it didn’t seem particularly adequate. There was an innocence and a stubbornness about her, qualities which Constantine associated with his own daughters in their mid-teens.

  She liked him too. He was English in the way that she had imagined Englishness – courteous, kindly, apparently honourable. His obvious tendency to introspection lent him a superficial resemblance to Shadmanov, but there was none of the latter’s underlying sadness. This man, she thought, has led an easy English life, with not much more to worry about than the health of his children and the condition of his roses.

  ‘Would you like to go for a walk in the park?’ he asked in English, and her eyes seemed to light up at the prospect.

  The two MI6 men trailed a few yards behind them as they walked slowly towards the Serpentine. ‘The Prime Minister would like to meet you,’ he told her, ‘and give you in person the assurance you asked for. But they need to know the exact location of the production facility.’

  ‘What they plan to do?’ she asked.

  Constantine assumed he was allowed to tell her. ‘They plan to send a team of soldiers to investigate, to find out exactly what is happening.’

  ‘They do not believe what I say?’

  ‘They believe it. And they believe that Iraq is involved. We have new proof of that, by the way – certain high-ranking Iraqis have been seen in Baku. But for the international community to act, we need to know exactly what is happening on that rig.’ He allowed a few seconds for that to sink in before adding, ‘And if it is possible this team will attempt to bring back your . . . Professor Shadmanov.’

  They walked along in silence as she thought this over. Think logically, she told herself – this man you are talking to may be a kind and honourable man, but that could be the very reason why he was chosen. If she were the leader of the British how would she see this? It would be best to bring Shadmanov out, certainly, since then he could tell the world what was happening. But if they could not do this – if Shadmanov refused to go with them, then it would be better for the British if he was dead than left to continue his work for the Iraqis . . .

  She suddenly remembered something else, that same something she had spent so much of the past two years trying to forget – his wife. He might choose to stay on her account, and then . . .

  And he spoke hardly any English at all, though there might be British soldiers who spoke Russian.

  ‘I will go with them,’ she said suddenly. It was the only way of continuing to exert any influence that she could think of, and she couldn’t simply hand over the responsibility for him, for the Caspian, for the future of her two peoples, to the British. No matter how honourable they might be, they couldn’t be expected to care for such things in the way that she did.

  ‘I don’t think that will be possible,’ Constantine was telling her.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  He looked uncomfortable. ‘This will be a military operation. You have no military training . . .’

  ‘I know the place. I know the Caspian. I know the language. And you say yourself that it is only a reconnaissance. I will be help, not problem.’

  He smiled in spite of himself. ‘I don’t know for certain,’ he said, ‘but I imagine these men will go in by parachute – you understand? – jumping from a plane into the sea.’

  She shrugged. ‘I know many Soviet boys who learn how to jump from plane – it cannot be so difficult.’

  He laughed, but she knew that he wasn’t laughing at her.

  ‘You will tell your Prime Minister that I go?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll tell him. But he may not think it’s such a good idea.’

  ‘Then I don’t tell the place.’

  ‘OK,’ he said equably. ‘Now let’s enjoy the rest of our walk.’

  They circumnavigated the Serpentine, stopped for a coffee and pastry at an outdoor café, and walked back to the Park Lane Hotel. He told her about his grown-up daughters and she told him about her work in Baku. When he was gone she felt even further from home than before.

  She sat by the window again, wondering at what had possessed her to demand a place in the British spy team. Her reasons had all seemed good ones, but jumping out of a plane . . .

  The hotel, as far as she was able to judge, was a luxurious one, but for her it was still essentially a prison. She didn’t know if anyone would physically prevent her from leaving, but her lack of money was just as effective a deterrent, and heaven only knew what the future held. Going with the soldiers would at least get her out of here, give her a chance to do something, to win some friends. She was going to need the latter, because at the moment she found it really hard to imagine a future for herself in any country but her own. All she knew was the Caspian, and such knowledge had no value elsewhere in the world.

  But she knew she couldn’t count on ever going home again. For the moment any interested party might assume she had simply stayed in Moscow, but, if they were not already, sooner or later the authorities would become suspicious, and would trace her movements, put two and two together. If it wasn’t already too late to go home it soon would be. And if she was seen in the company of foreign soldiers then the door would be shut for ever. And if she was caught, she realized with a shudder, the chances were that she would be executed.

  It seemed unreal, with the sun peeking through the English clouds. She left the window and turned on the TV to find horses racing each other beside a long white fence. Great clouds of breath were pouring from their mouths, and behind them the wet green grass faded into a misty distance.

  She coul
d no more live here than in the Russian far north, she realized. One way or another, she had to go home.

  In his office in Poole, Neil Colhoun was cradling the phone in his right shoulder and using both hands to unwrap his afternoon Kit-Kat. ‘There’s no hope of changing her mind then?’

  ‘According to Constantine she’s adamant,’ Martin Clarke told him.

  ‘What’s she like?’ Colhoun asked. He had a mental picture of a frumpy Russian girl with a headscarf which probably bore no relation to the reality.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘For a start, how old is she?’

  ‘Thirty-four. She’s about five foot six, not exactly thin but not plump either. She looks fit, but . . .’

  ‘Is she excitable? Emotional?’ Colhoun could imagine the look on his wife’s face if she’d heard him asking such questions.

  ‘I wouldn’t say so. I’ve only seen the video of her first interview but she seemed quite self-contained to me. But you’d probably be better off asking Constantine about her’ – Clarke grunted with what sounded like amusement – ‘though he may have become too besotted to give you an objective answer.’

  ‘She’s pretty, is she?’

  ‘In a dark sort of way,’ Clarke admitted grudgingly.

  Colhoun did as the minister had suggested, and found Constantine quite willing to discuss Raisa Karayeva’s character, personality and general suitability for such a mission. In general he agreed with Clarke, believing the woman unlikely to either give up or panic in adverse circumstances.

  ‘So why not?’ Colhoun asked himself once he’d hung up. If she wouldn’t be a liability she probably would be a help, above and beyond her ability to pinpoint the facility’s location. But whichever men he picked for this mission would need some convincing.

  He had already decided that Major Derek Galloway would be the guiding hand, the producer, so to speak, of this particular epic. He would deal with the chosen team on a day-to-day basis, get them ready, find them everything they thought they needed. But who would lead the team?

  Colhoun snapped the last Kit-Kat finger, popped half in his mouth and leant back in his chair. Who was he kidding? McClure had to be the leader. He’d conducted the Channel business with exemplary efficiency, even if, as now seemed certain, the enemy had been doing their best to make it easy for him and his men. The only question mark over the exercise had been McClure’s ruthless dispatch of the Russian, but military behaviour which seemed dangerously close to the limits of acceptability in home waters might well offer a team operating beyond the reach of outside assistance its best hope of collective survival.

  If he was the woman, Colhoun realized, he would be glad to have someone like McClure in charge. The only way anyone would get to her would be over his dead body.

  And if McClure went, Noonan should go. Then, if either of them was captured or killed, there would still be someone with enough knowledge of nuclear matters to evaluate the facility.

  The woman made a third, leaving one place to be filled. Marker’s team had arrived back from Hong Kong a few days before, and for a few moments Colhoun considered sending McClure and Noonan under Marker’s command. But he dismissed the idea – he had talked with Callum Marker only the previous day, and the man was obviously in the throes of a new love.

  Colhoun smiled to himself as he imagined the tabloid headlines – ‘SBS HERO RULED OUT BY ROMANCE’ – but the plain fact of the matter was, and experience had proved it a thousand times, men in Marker’s condition were permanently off balance. It affected different men different ways – some couldn’t keep their minds on the business at hand, some became too cautious, some acted as if they’d acquired immortality – but it affected all of them. The disease only lasted a few weeks, and its symptoms were often hard to spot, but when it came to performing the sort of jobs the SBS performed, anything less than one hundred per cent proficiency might well prove fatal, not only for the man himself but for his comrades too. Marker was out.

  Stuart Finn, on the other hand, seemed an ideal candidate. Marker had been full of praise for the way the young Londoner had handled himself in the South China Sea, and Colhoun could imagine that Finn and Noonan would get on well together. And between them they might well be strong enough to bring out the best in McClure.

  It seemed like a nice blend, Colhoun thought. He wrote down the names on a virgin sheet of paper, asked his adjutant to find and summon Derek Galloway, and rewarded himself with the last piece of Kit-Kat.

  Stuart Finn examined himself in the mirror, took out his comb and slicked his gelled hair even flatter, trying to see the resemblance to Ian Walker which the girl had noticed. Problem was, he could only remember seeing the Tottenham goalkeeper once or twice – he liked football but he wasn’t nuts about it – and there hadn’t been any reason to notice the lad’s face.

  He went back to the table his team was sharing, arriving just in time to add another pint to the order. He knew only two of the six – since his departure for the Far East a month earlier one couple had moved to London and two of the other women were off on a weekend break somewhere sunny. Their replacements included two Sun readers who knew everything there was to know about sport and royal gossip but nothing else, and the girl who thought he looked like Ian Walker. She had answered only two of the first fifteen questions, but in both cases she had been the only person at the table to know the answer. It was from such building blocks, Finn thought, that great pub-quiz teams were built.

  He was enjoying the evening, but there was also an air of unreality about it all. It was hard to believe that less than ten days had passed since he and the others had sailed the hijacked freighter out of Communist China with its cargo of political prisoners and smuggled babies. He could still smell the warm wind blowing across the Pearl estuary, even after eating two bags of spring-onion crisps.

  There was an ear-splitting screech from the microphone. ‘Youse ready?’ the familiar voice asked, eliciting the usual chorus of groans. ‘Well, ready or not. Question sixteen: who was Patricia Holm? That’s H-O-L-M. Patricia Holm.’

  His team-mates stared blankly at each other, and looking round Finn could see the same reaction at the other tables. Yes, he told himself, but he waited for the hubbub of discussion to slowly rise before leaning forward and telling the others the answer.

  ‘The Saint’s girlfriend.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know – the Saint books. Roger Moore played him on TV, even worse than he played James Bond. She was his girlfriend in at least half the books.’

  The team scribe dutifully wrote it down.

  ‘The interesting thing,’ Finn carried on, talking only to the girl, ‘is whether they ever had sex. It’s never mentioned, but she didn’t seem to live anywhere else, and they were always sitting round in their dressing-gowns together.’

  ‘That sounds conclusive,’ she agreed, grinning at him. She had a nice mouth full of small, even teeth, with an ever-so-slightly upturned upper lip. Very kissable. Finn had been introduced to her at the beginning of the evening, but realized he’d forgotten her name.

  He decided to wait; with any luck one of the others would use it.

  ‘Question seventeen,’ the voice boomed. ‘How many official Rolling Stones have there been since the release of their first record?’

  Finn and the girl counted them off on their fingers, and agreed on seven. ‘Always assuming the new bass player isn’t official,’ Finn added as a caveat. She turned to argue the point with another team member, offering Finn a brief view of a neck every bit as kissable as the mouth.

  ‘You’re in the Marines, aren’t you?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So’s my dad.’

  ‘Really?’ Finn murmured, his heart sinking. ‘What was your surname again – I missed it the first time.’

  ‘Colhoun,’ she told him.

  Finn took a large gulp of his beer.

  9

  Colhoun slept on a final decision, but over
breakfast the next morning he could think of no compelling reason to go back on his original resolve. Restraining the impulse to question his eighteen-year-old daughter about her hung-over expression – he could already see the look of exasperation, the eyes rolled towards the ceiling, if he tried – the SBS CO drove into Poole and summoned both Derek Galloway and Gary McClure to his office.

  McClure, midway through administering a Morse test to his SC3 class, half reluctantly passed the teacher’s baton to his best student, and made his way slowly towards the CO’s office. He was glad to be out of the wretched classroom, but was not looking forward to another bout of questioning from Colhoun concerning his actions aboard the Red Voyager.

  The CO welcomed him with a smile and an offer of tea, which was much more than he had expected, and the presence of Major Galloway offered further hopes that something new was brewing.

  ‘We’ve been given another job to do,’ Colhoun told him, and McClure had difficulty concealing the extent of his enthusiasm. ‘Another ship?’ he asked.

  ‘You should be so lucky,’ Colhoun said drily. He reached for the atlas beside him, opened it at the marked place, and placed it right way up in front of McClure. ‘The Caspian Sea,’ he said, tapping the appropriate spot with the teaspoon.

  ‘Christ,’ McClure murmured. The Caspian was a long way from anywhere he’d ever been. ‘What’s there?’ he asked.

  ‘An Iraqi nuclear production facility – or at least we think so.’ Colhoun filled in those parts of the background with which the other man was not already familiar, most notably the story which the woman had brought out of Azerbaijan.

  McClure listened patiently, hardly daring to believe his luck. This was going to be the biggest challenge of his life. ‘And the job we’ve been given?’ he prompted, once the CO had stopped talking.

  ‘Someone has to take a look, confirm or rebut our suspicions. If the answer’s yes, some proof would seem to be in order. If we can bring Shadmanov out that would fit the bill nicely – he has an international reputation and his testimony would be believed.’