Timebomb (Paul Richter)

by James Barrington

  The Arab had been associated with Morschel for almost five years, but this was the biggest operation they’d undertaken together, and it had been, at least in part, at Kleber’s instigation. Kleber was the one who’d come up with the idea of a coordinated campaign, with almost simultaneous bombing attacks in Europe to be followed by what he’d described as a ‘main event’ in Britain – some kind of major attack, though at that stage Morschel himself had been unable to suggest a suitable target.

  When Morschel had relayed Kleber’s suggestion to bin Salalah, the Arab had embraced it eagerly. And, more crucially, he’d suddenly recalled something he’d heard at Sandhurst, something he’d found almost unbelievable at the time. He’d then done sufficient research to confirm that his recollection was correct, and within a couple of days he’d met again with Morschel and laid a detailed plan in front of him. The German had instantly grasped both its brilliance and its simplicity, and since then both men had simply refined it. If it worked as they hoped, it would prove even more destructive than 9/11 but would be infinitely easier to carry out, and also technically undemanding, because the target was essentially undefended.

  As to what he thought about the current situation, bin Salalah finally looked at Morschel directly and shook his head. ‘Remind me about this man Kleber,’ he said. ‘Where did he come from?’

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ Morschel said.

  ‘Humour me, Hans, and tell me again.’

  ‘He approached Stammheim through a sympathizer about three months ago. He had a plan to hit a bank in a small town in southern Germany and he claimed he knew exactly when there would be an unusually large quantity of cash in the building. We looked it over, decided we’d got nothing to lose by mounting a raid, so we hit it on the day he suggested. And he was right. The take was about four times what we would normally have expected from a bank of that size.’

  ‘So that gave him immediate credibility?’

  ‘Yes, obviously. When I met him, he told me he was ex-military He purportedly had a real grudge against the Americans because he claimed he’d lost a close relative in the invasion of Iraq, during a blue-on-blue incident.’

  And had he?’ Ahmed bin Salalah asked.

  ‘Maybe. The incident he told me about never really made the news, but a couple of my people checked what they could. The action was just as he’d described it, and one of the dead men was named “Kleber”, so it’s possible.’

  ‘Or he could have identified the dead man, realized that the incident would be shrouded in military secrecy, and so decided to call himself “Kleber”.’

  ‘That’s possible too.’

  Ahmed bin Salalah leant back in the chair and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘And what’s he done since that bank raid?’

  Almost nothing directly. He’s used his ex-military contacts to source weapons, ammunition and explosives whenever we’ve needed them, and he was also involved in the planning stages of the Stuttgart operation.’

  ‘And Onex? What did he do there?’

  ‘As you know, those men weren’t part of Stammheim. We’d just recruited them to carry out the operation and supplied them with weapons and other stuff. Kleber was acting as a kind of liaison officer, so he went down there in order to make sure they had everything they needed.’

  ‘Why did he go there in person?’

  ‘Because, thanks to Echelon, you can’t talk about that sort of thing on a telephone any more and because, if they needed other equipment, he’d be on the spot to sort it out.’

  ‘OK,’ Ahmed bin Salalah observed, ‘that all sounds perfectly reasonable, but now you’ve got doubts about him, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Morschel nodded. ‘Just because of what happened at Onex and then here last night.’

  ‘How much does he know about the London operation?’

  ‘Only that we’re planning a spectacular assault. Nothing more. I’ve had no reason to involve or consult him.’

  ‘Good,’ bin Salalah said, standing up. ‘Let’s keep it that way. And once we get to Britain, I’ll make sure we find out for sure what Kleber’s agenda really is.’

  Canterbury, Kent

  ‘What’s that?’ Dick Clark asked, as he passed Paul Mason’s desk.

  Mason glanced up at the sergeant. ‘It’s an Admiralty chart of the mouth of the Thames. I was looking at the shipping routes, just wondering if maybe Barney was close enough to have seen something illegal going on out there in the estuary.’

  ‘Like what? You back to thinking about smugglers again?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was just an idea.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clark said, ‘but nobody could use that section of the sea wall to come alongside, so even if he did see a boat landing a few tons of hashish or something, it would have to have been some distance away. And that still leaves one other question you’ve got to answer.’

  ‘I know. Who else was right there at the water’s edge, waiting to cut the old man’s throat? No, it really doesn’t make sense. Whatever Barney saw had to have happened very close to where he was killed.’

  Clark headed over to his own desk, and Mason began rolling up the chart ready to replace it in the cardboard tube it had arrived in. But as he did so a small symbol just off the north coast of Sheppey caught his eye.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ he murmured and paused to refer to the legend. A few seconds later he sat back with a puzzled expression on his face. ‘Dick,’ he called. ‘Come and take a look at this.’

  DS Clark wandered over without much enthusiasm, certain his superior was barking up the wrong tree. He himself still thought Barney had been the victim of some teenage prank that had gone much too far.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘This,’ Mason said, pointing at the chart. ‘There’s an area designated as a “permanent no-entry exclusion zone” right here, pretty close to where Barney died. What’s that mean?’

  Clark had a little more experience of charts than the detective inspector, and had been known to occasionally hire small craft from various boatyards in the area for the odd afternoon afloat.

  ‘It’s probably a wreck,’ he said, ‘or maybe a dangerous shoal or sandbank, something like that.’ He looked more closely at the chart. ‘Yes, here you are. It’s just a wreck, obviously a danger to navigation because of where it is, right in the mouth of the River Medway.’

  Mason stared at the chart for a few seconds. ‘But why is there an exclusion zone around it?’ he asked. ‘If you look over here’ – he pointed at another symbol on the chart – ‘and here, there are other sunken ships, and they’re just marked as wrecks. Why is this one ship given greater protection?’

  ‘Probably just because of where it is,’ Clark suggested. ‘If a ship hit that wreck and got stuck it would partially block the Medway, and that could cause havoc to local river traffic. That’s my guess, anyway.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Mason sounded unconvinced.

  ‘I don’t see what this has to do with Barney’ Clark commented. ‘He was killed in the early hours of the morning, when you certainly couldn’t even see as far as that wreck. And I personally still think he was killed by a bunch of drunken teenagers out looking for kicks.’

  Mason rolled up the chart and replaced it in the tube. ‘You might be right,’ he said, ‘but I still reckon the killing was a professional job. Not that it matters, I suppose, because I doubt if we’re ever going to solve it. But this whole case still bugs me. There’s nothing new in, I suppose?’ he asked hopefully. ‘Nothing else from forensics?’

  ‘No, absolutely nothing.’

  Mason slid the cardboard tube into the capacious bottom drawer of his desk. ‘Give the Sheerness DS a ring and see if the house-to-house generated anything else. If it didn’t, we’ll file this whole thing under “Pending” and let it gather dust for a while.’

  As Clark sat down and picked up the phone to ring Sheerness, Mason once more pulled out the Admiralty chart and looked again at the site of the wreck ma
rked within the exclusion zone, checking the distance between it and the spot beside The Moat where Barney had died. Then he replaced the chart in his drawer and input a search string into Google. The result surprised him, and he began hurriedly reading the text on some of the websites he’d found.

  After about ten minutes, he sat back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head, thinking deeply. There was, he thought, just a faint possibility that he might have found a link, but it was so tenuous that he certainly wasn’t yet prepared to suggest it to Richardson. The DCI was unlikely to be impressed by a purely hypothetical solution to a murder case. But he could certainly run it by Clark. And if the DS thought it had any merit, maybe they could both take it to Richardson.

  ‘Dick,’ Mason called out. ‘When you’ve finished doing that, come over here. There’s something I want you to take a look at.’

  Hammersmith, London

  ‘Right,’ Simpson said, as the Intelligence Director left the room. ‘Despite the ID’s reservations, I think you’ve established at least the possibility that the two terrorist cells in Onex and Stuttgart were linked in some way. What I’m not clear about is what we should do about it – or even if there’s anything we can do, bearing in mind that all the bad guys are now dead.’

  Richter shrugged. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see what the BGS techies find on the laptops and mobiles they pulled out of the safe house in Stuttgart. My guess is that there won’t be much of any use to us. These people were far too cautious to write anything down, either on paper or onto a laptop’s hard drive. The mobiles might be more of a help, but they’ve probably been using pay-as-you-go chips and dumping them once they’ve used up the initial credit.’

  ‘And it would take a miracle to find Schröder, obviously, as we don’t have a decent description or even a fingerprint. So what’s your recommendation?’

  Richter thought for a few moments. ‘This is probably an overreaction, but my own inclination is to accept the information that we’ve been fed by this man, such as it is. Both cells were apparently involved in preparations for a major terrorist attack in London, so let’s proceed on the assumption that something is being planned. We’ll need to bring Five and the plods into the loop, and start checking for any signs of activity over here.

  ‘That means all the usual stuff – increased surveillance at ports of entry, checking on known terrorists and sympathizers already here in Britain, that kind of thing – but if a big bang is imminent, that’s probably too late because it’s likely that the personnel and the materials they’ll be using are already here. But we also need to be alert for anything out of the ordinary that might give us a clue as to what their target might be.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anything, really. Large numbers of suspects gathered in particular locations, people watching significant buildings for no apparent reason, unusual orders for equipment or chemicals that could be used to make explosives, thefts of dynamite from quarries, all that sort of thing.’

  ‘But presumably this time we’re not looking for Arabs?’

  ‘We could be,’ Richter said, ‘because the world of terrorism isn’t that big, and different groups have been known to work together. It’s always possible that those two European cells were only involved in a supporting role, maybe just getting explosives into Britain or providing safe houses. The actual attack could be a major suicide bombing, and that almost certainly would involve Islamic terrorists. We need to look at everyone and everything.

  And we need to keep a particularly sharp eye out for Hans Morschel. If Wolff was right, he’s a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and if there is going to be a terror campaign here in Britain, Morschel is very likely to come over here personally to supervise it.’

  Canterbury, Kent

  ‘What do you think?’ Mason asked, as he finished explaining his theory.

  Clark rubbed a large hand over the slight stubble on his chin. ‘I don’t know. It does make sense, but it just seems a bit far-fetched. I mean, there must be easier ways of getting the stuff than doing that.’

  ‘Yes, but if this is happening, it would explain why Barney died.’ He paused briefly, then made up his mind. ‘I’m taking it to Richardson, see what he thinks.’

  A few moments later Mason knocked on DCI Richardson’s door, dutifully waited for the summons, then walked in.

  ‘Afternoon, Paul. What have you got?’

  ‘A possible explanation for what happened to Barney Holmes, sir,’ Mason said and he began unrolling the Admiralty chart. ‘I was looking at this, to check the positions of shipping lanes and then I noticed something.’ He laid the chart flat on the desk and pointed at the clearly designated exclusion zone.

  Richardson looked quizzical. Like Mason himself, he was no sailor.

  ‘What is it, exactly?’

  ‘It’s a permanent exclusion zone around the wreck of a ship named the Richard Montgomery, which sank during the Second World War. Most wrecks are just marked with buoys so that people can identify where they are, but it seems this wreck is rather special.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Let me explain what I found on the Internet.’ Mason rolled up the chart and opened a slim green folder containing several sheets of paper. ‘The Richard Montgomery was a Liberty ship built in 1943 in Jacksonville, Florida. In August 1944 she was loaded with over 7,000 tons of bombs, fuses and other munitions in Philadelphia and managed to get her cargo across the Atlantic safely.’

  ‘And was then sunk by German aircraft off Sheppey?’ Richardson suggested.

  Mason shook his head. ‘No, she was sunk by us – by a right catalogue of incompetence, in fact. Against the vociferous advice of his deputy, the King’s Harbour Master decided that the best mooring for this ship, which drew a minimum of thirty-one feet, and probably rather more considering its heavy cargo, would be off the north edge of Sheerness Middle Sand, even though it was known that the depth there at high water was a mere thirty feet. On the 20th of September the inevitable happened, and the vessel grounded.

  ‘The Liberty ships were very simply constructed, made up of welded steel sections that were then themselves welded together. This meant they could be built quickly: construction of each ship took an average of only about forty days from start to finish. It also meant they weren’t quite as strong as other designs but, as they only had a design life of five years, this didn’t matter. Because of the construction method used, once she’d grounded, the Richard Montgomery broke her back within a matter of days. Salvage operations were immediately started, and the contents of numbers four and five holds were removed, but once the hull split the other three holds were flooded and almost nothing else was recovered.’

  Richardson was gazing at Mason with an obvious question forming on his lips and, as the DI finally paused, he asked it. ‘So a Liberty ship sank off Sheppey sixty-odd years ago. So what? And what, exactly, has that got to do with the murder of an old tramp in Sheer-ness?’

  ‘The fact is that the wreck contains an absolute minimum of 1,400 tons of explosives, and maybe as much as 3,500 tons. That’s why there’s an exclusion zone around the site, to stop any other ships ploughing into the wreck and setting them off.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘No, though most of the submerged munitions contain TNT, and that’s basically unaffected by immersion in water. What worries me is that just off Sheerness is this huge repository of high-quality explosives. I wonder if what Barney saw that night was a group of divers going out to the wreck to recover a few of the smaller munitions so that they could extract the TNT from them. Maybe the Richard Montgomery is being used as a kind of explosives supermarket by a terrorist group, and they’re planning a bombing campaign here in Britain. If Barney was a witness to their activities, killing him might make good sense. It probably would have been the easiest option they had to keep him quiet.’

  ‘Can you actually prove any of this?’ Richardson asked.

  ‘About the Richard Montgomery,
yes. It’s well documented,’ Mason replied. ‘But everything else is pure conjecture. It just seems to me to make some sort of sense, that’s all.’

  Richardson nodded. ‘You might even be right but, whether you are or not, this gets passed up the line. Look, I’ve just received this.’

  He slid a single sheet of paper across the desk. The DI picked it up and read the three paragraphs it contained.

  ‘That watch order has a nationwide distribution,’ Richardson said, ‘and was issued by the Security Service this afternoon. MI5 specifically asks for any information about possible terrorist activity and I reckon what you’ve worked out so far just about meets that criterion. You’d better press your suit and polish your shoes, and I’ll make an appointment for you tomorrow morning at Thames House. You can go and tell the men at Spook Central what you’ve just told me.’

  Chapter Nine

  Friday

  Hammersmith, London

  Richter had just got back from a brief lunch in the pub round the corner – he didn’t drink alcohol but he did enjoy their food – when the direct phone buzzed from Simpson’s office.

  ‘Come up,’ the Director ordered curtly and rang off.

  When Richter reached the seventh floor, he found Simpson reading a report, with his feet up on the desk.

  ‘How’s the leg?’ he asked, as Richter sat down.

  ‘It’s stiff and sore. Walking’s not a real problem, but that’s maybe because I’m mainlining some tablets the German hospital gave me. When they run out I might find it a lot more difficult and I’ll probably need something stronger than aspirin to cope. But you didn’t drag me all the way up here for a medical report?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Simpson said. ‘I’ve just had something interesting in from Five. Does the name Richard Montgomery mean anything to you?’

  ‘The golfing idiot?’ Richter suggested.