by Robin James
There were only two lines, each of some thirty ships. The Gremlin crept among them, drawing – as Fernandez had anticipated – hollered insults and shouts of protest in four languages, one of which was Irish Gaelic. Every fisherman believed that here was a boat from one Ministry of Fisheries or another poking its unwelcome nose in.
Every fisherman except for the crew of La Señorita Juanita. For Arsenio, watchful as ever, had just been able to make out that the sleek-looking boat that now moved between them had first visited the Mirabelle. He had been expecting something like this – and he was ready for it. The kidnappers got down to some unaccustomed work.
The names, registration numbers and port of origin of each boat were being noted by the SBS men – not always an easy task since the sea was now quite heavy and the bows of the boats were dipping and rolling, much of the time immersed in waves. This obvious activity thoroughly convinced the fishermen that the stranger was a ministry boat, and the insults kept flying to be snatched away on the wind. Each name and number was checked out via computer links by the radio operator. It was going to be a lengthy task.
When, some half an hour after the job had begun, the Gremlin drew level with La Señorita Juanita, some twenty metres leeward of her, Arsenio and his men were busy winching the nets and clearing them of a plenteous haul of striped tunny. Arsenio shouted rich epithets across the rough intervening sea at them in Spanish, ‘Me cago en la leche de su puta madre’ – I shit in the milk of your whore of a mother – being one of the choicest. Pepe Pomares was at the wheel, staring blankly ahead, not daring – though he guessed that this was some sort of a police boat looking for the girl – to make the slightest sign of distress.
Down in the hold, Carolyn, having eaten a little half an hour before and then vomited it all up, was suffering a new torture. For there was only one place for freshly caught, living fish to be thrown when they were cleared from the nets: down with her. One by one the big, striped tunny, some of them larger than her thigh and weighing several kilos, were flung down through the open hatch – which she had been warned on pain of death not to try to climb up through – to thump and crash in front of her. They came thick and fast, for Arsenio and the other three were putting on a convincing act for the benefit of the Gremlin, aboard which Pomares’ registration was at that moment being checked through the competent Spanish authorities.
Fish were writhing and leaping around on the deck, in their death throes, more and more of them, every so often one of them reaching where Carolyn was cowering against a bulkhead, flopping pathetically over her bare feet. It was hot down there, but she was shivering at the grim sight. If she got out of her predicament alive, she had decided, she would never eat another fish again.
La Señorita Juanita checked out perfectly OK. Fernandez thought the crew were rather short-handed, but that was hardly of any importance – there were probably some sick men ashore.
The Gremlin moved on, cutting through waves that piled over her elegant prow and broke over the deck to pour back down over the sides.
Every drifter, as Fernandez had feared, was the genuine article. There was no criminal intruder in among them. The news from the submersibles was negative, too. No submarine lurked anywhere in the vicinity. But they were continuing to do a thorough radar scan of the seabed in the hope that a sub might be discovered. Of course, it would not be, the major brooded. They might just as well have stayed at Brest and made their very important arrest. It might well be too late to pull the drug smugglers in when he got back; that last assignment was so huge it was probably their last one for a while. And then they would most likely completely change tactics, making the crucial part of the SBS investigation worthless. Such is life, he thought. A bitch – then you die.
He ordered the Gremlin to about turn and head back through the fishing boats.
Trouble was brewing – trouble that Arsenio could never have anticipated. For the illegal length of Pomares’ nets – something of which Arsenio was blissfully unaware – had been spotted by a keen eye aboard a nearby Irish drifter.
‘Those bastards are overfishing,’ growled one of the crew. ‘Those Spanish buggers over to port. La Senoreeta Jewaneeta.’
The captain watched the activity aboard Pomares’ boat for a minute or so, eyes, as green as his country, steely. ‘Tis so much for the fookin’ ministry boat. Under their soddin’ noses and they don’t see a thing, they don’t.’
The Gremlin was now five hundred metres past them on its way back to the Mirabelle. As he had done on his passage through, the navigator was careful, when he had to cross nets, to pass right between the centre of two widely spaced floats, where his hull could not do any damage to the net.
The captain of the Irish boat, the Dancing Leprechaun, was a hard-drinking, hard-headed, quarrelsome man from Galway. When he got angry it seethed through him, uncontrollable.
‘Overfishin’, is it?’ he grumbled. ‘Oi’ll show the fookin’ bastards, so I will.’
Coaxing his engines to full throttle, he turned the boat’s nose towards the side of La Señorita Juanita and bore down on her. The Dancing Leprechaun hit Pomares’ boat plumb amidships, rising with a big wave just before the collision, crashing down into her with a rending, splintering racket, throwing over every man on both drifters, except those at the wheels.
In the hold of the Spanish boat, Carolyn went flying, to fall over and roll among the heap of dying fish, screaming dementedly.
Hantash, bleeding from a deep cut in his cheek where it had caught the ship’s rail as he was flung over, was first to his feet, swearing. The Irish boat, he saw, was backing off to have another go. He dragged his Czechoslovakian CZ75 9mm handgun from his shoulder holster and pointed it in two hands at the bridge of the Dancing Leprechaun.
‘Back off, you stupid bastards,’ he yelled, as the Irishman started his boat at them again.
‘Guns, is it? You wouldn’t dare, boyo,’ growled the captain, mainly to himself. He aimed the prow of his boat amidships again, at the point where La Señorita Juanita was badly splintered.
Dare, Hantash certainly would. Aiming carefully, he put a bullet through the Irishman’s temple. The captain was dead even before his boat rammed the Spanish drifter for the second time.
Daylight was seeping through into the hold, and with the second collision the gash in the side of the vessel opened wider. Carolyn’s nightmare was worsening – she had just managed to drag herself to her feet, with tunny flopping around her ankles, when she was knocked over again. She was hysterical, her screams intensified, and they were carried on the wind as far as the Gremlin.
A split second after the crunch of wood on wood reached his ears, Fernandez had assessed the situation behind him, and his craft was making a sweeping turn in the sea, buffeted badly by the waves as she did so. Quarrels between fishermen were hardly his business, but he was not about to sit tight and let one boat try to sink another. Then came the scream – unquestionably a woman’s scream. As the SBS boat straightened out and picked up speed, there was the sound of a gunshot, followed by another crunch – and the screaming got rapidly louder.
It was her – she was there aboard one of the two clashing boats, of that the major was certain. Fishermen did not take their womenfolk to sea. As the Gremlin closed in fast on La Señorita Juanita her 9mm Sterling machine-gun was sliding up from within the prow, coincidentally manned by the same SBS Sergeant Stride who had been on watch on the Thames the evening Arsenio had attacked the House of Lords. He was sitting on the little metal seat which was one of the gun’s accessories, rising with it, ready for action.
‘Jesus Christ!’ breathed Arsenio as the gunboat closed in on them. It was too late to stop the stupid bitch from screaming now. Hantash had overreacted, and there was a dead man at the helm of the Irish boat, which, rammed against La Señorita Juanita, was shoving her sideways. It was too late for anything – except for naked aggression.
‘Nobody moves,’ Fernandez called through his battery-operated loudhaile
r when the Gremlin was almost on the drifter and slowing down. ‘Freeze on board there.’ To emphasize his words, he ordered Stride to put a burst of the Sterling over the drifter’s bridge.
But somebody did move – and faster than the major could have dreamed in his worst nightmare. El Asesino was not giving up without a fight. Death was preferable to going back to jail. He had set out on this operation equipped for just such an emergency. In a bag close to the bridge he had a cluster of deadly weapons – 30mm hand-grenades. Dropping to his hands and knees on the deck, he crawled, beneath the protection of the high side of the boat, to the bag. With the Gremlin only metres away, he took three grenades from the bag, pulled the pins from all of them in quick succession, waited five seconds, rose up on his knees and, with Stride swinging the nose of the Sterling to get a bead on him, lobbed them one after the other on to the deck of the SBS boat.
Stride got his priorities right, but it failed to save him, or his ship. He left his post at the machine-gun to dive on a grenade which had fallen near him, intending to sling it over the side. It went off in his hand, blowing him to pieces. Fernandez was standing by the rail, waiting to board La Señorita Juanita. The power of the blast threw him overboard with several pieces of shrapnel embedded in his back – and so saved his life.
For, while grenade number two bounced off the keel of the Gremlin and went off harmlessly in the sea, number three went clean through an open hatch and fell into the engine room, where it exploded near the fuel tanks.
The pride and joy of the small fleet of SBS Patrol Gunboats went up like a bomb, with a great rumbling roar and a massive, all-engulfing belch of flame and black smoke, everyone aboard dying with her. Within seconds what was left of her was gone without a trace, sinking down, with the blasted bodies, to the bottom of the Bay of Biscay.
The blast of heat from the explosion, hotter than the hottest sirocco, scorched over La Señorita Juanita and was immediately tugged away in the wind.
‘Get out of here,’ Arsenio screamed to Pomares on the bridge. ‘Malpica as fast as she will go.’
With Pomares swinging the boat around and starting to bring her up to her maximum speed of twelve knots, Arsenio hacked through the main line of the net. To Pomares’ dismay, the two kilometres of his fishing net which had not been hauled in – one and a half kilometres of them illegal and the cause of the Irish skipper’s fury and the subsequent mayhem and destruction – were left behind.
On board the Mirabelle, Diana and the boys having long since departed, Travers Bonnington was reading a book by the side of his pool when the distant sound of a shot from the direction of the fishing boats alerted him to trouble. His binoculars were trained on the Gremlin at the moment she went up. Shaken, he ordered his crew to weigh anchor and take his yacht as quickly as possible to the scene.
Fernandez, blood seeping in several places through the back of his soaked shirt and slacks, was taken aboard the Dancing Leprechaun. In pain, not seriously injured but losing a great deal of blood, he gazed in profound shock at the place in the heavy sea where his craft had disappeared; there was nothing left of it but a big patch of black oil in the wave troughs. His beloved boat, its good Captain Douglas Derby, and its crew of highly trained Royal Marine commandos, had all vanished without trace, for ever. It was Arsenio, without a shadow of a doubt. He thought he remembered that face, even with the beard. Not for nothing was the man known as the Assassin.
The major’s vision was beginning to blur as his gaze fell on the fleeing Señorita Juanita. His last thought before he collapsed to the deck of the Irish drifter, on the point of passing out, was that he had got El Asesino once before, and would get him again. He would not rest until he had the bastard.
‘I can’t raise Gremlin,’ observed Corporal Tweedy, at the pilot’s console near the ocean floor in the submersible Shark. ‘Not a dicky-bird.’
‘Odd,’ said his companion, another corporal, John Bright. ‘Maybe we’ve gone on the blink?’
‘I’ll try and raise Squid.’ He was referring to the other specially adapted Vickers Pisces III submersible, scouring the seabed with them.
Tweedy had no trouble at all getting through to Squid on their Marconi Modular sub-to-sub system. Squid, hardly surprisingly, could not raise their mother ship either.
‘Something’s up,’ said Corporal Bright. ‘We’d better surface.’
‘Without orders?’
‘So how’re we gonna get orders, berk? We could stay down here waiting for them until we run out of oxygen.’
Meanwhile, as the Mirabelle closed in on the fleet of fishing boats, through his binoculars Bonnington saw that in the thick of them, in the region where the Gremlin had blown up, someone was waving a shirt. He told his captain to head for that boat. Neither of them paid much attention to the Spanish drifter which had passed them, heading south.
By the time Bonnington’s yacht reached the Dancing Leprechaun, one of the Irishmen had roughly patched up Fernandez, who was coming round. The American went aboard to find the skipper, a hole through his head, stretched out on the deck.
‘What the hell happened here?’ he asked.
Three men tried to gabble the story at once. Bonnington managed to shut two of them up, then got the information from the one who had seen to Fernandez’s wounds.
‘He’s got shrapnel embedded all over his back,’ said the Irishman as Fernandez pushed himself up with a groan.
‘Shrapnel?’ echoed Bonnington. ‘How’s that possible?’
‘Grenade,’ said the major weakly. ‘The son of a bitch lobbed grenades at us. One must have rolled down into the engine room for Gremlin to go up like that.’ He shook his head, utterly miserable. ‘Those poor, poor bastards. Their families. God.’
‘What son of a bitch?’ asked the American.
‘Arsenio. That terrorist character. It was him, I know it was, the evil bastard. I recognized him. I know him. It was me who arrested him after he bombed the House of Lords.’
Bonnington’s lean jaw dropped. ‘Christ, man! Then Carolyn’s on that boat.’ His grey eyes swept the sea. ‘Which one is it?’
‘It’s taken off. Most likely making a run for harbour. La Señorita Juanita, out of Malpica.’
‘Then we’ve gotta get after them. Carolyn’s on board.’
‘And what are you going to do when you catch them up? They’re armed and homicidal. I don’t know what other weapons they have with them – they may even have the capacity to hole your ship.’
‘Jesus.’
‘If you’ll get me aboard your yacht, I’ll see what help I can bring out here. But it’ll have to be fast or we’re going to lose them.’ He grimaced. ‘And I’ll need a doctor. Can your chopper fly one to me?’
‘I can do better than that. There’s a doctor aboard. I wasn’t taking the risk of being without one with the Princess of Wales and her kids as guests.’
As Fernandez was being assisted into the Mirabelle’s speedboat to cross the few metres of sea between the Irish boat and her, he spotted the submersibles Shark and Squid, on the surface, converging on them from two different directions, and being tossed around violently.
‘My little subs,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten about them. I’ll get the swine yet.’
‘They’ll have to take it easy. Don’t lose sight of the fact that they’ve got the daughter of the Home Secretary.’
‘You’re right. They’ll do whatever they can without risking her life.’
The submersibles were not designed to ride the surface of a rough sea. As they drew alongside the speedboat, Tweedy was the only man to appear through a hatch. Hanging on the curved metal conning tower of the Shark, on the concave top which served as a deck, the corporal was receiving a thorough soaking as he was informed what had happened and what their course of action was to be. The Shark was being tossed around like a twig in white water.
When Tweedy descended into the cramped interior of the submersible with its curved walls covered in gauges and dials, he was in
a grim mood indeed. Sixteen good men, friends and colleagues of his, had gone down with the Gremlin, and Tweedy was out for blood. When he passed the news on to Bright, and then radioed it to the Squid, three more men were out for revenge. The submersibles dived down into the calm beneath them, and set off after La Señorita Juanita.
Fifteen minutes later, Arsenio was presented with yet another totally unexpected and alarming development when, twenty metres on either side of him, travelling parallel and at exactly the same speed as the fishing boat, two little six-metre-long submarines popped to the surface. They were going with the waves now, bouncing up and down but not rolling. A man climbed up through a hatch on each of them. Men bearing Armalite rifles with M203 grenade launchers. One of them – Corporal Bright – also held a loudhailer.
‘You are under arrest,’ called Bright. ‘Throw your arms and ammunition over the side and accompany us to the nearest port.’
Arsenio stared coldly at him. You’ve got to be kidding, boy, he thought. ‘Get Carolyn up here,’ he calmly told Hantash.
‘Surrender, or we open fire,’ came Bright’s amplified voice.
Arsenio cupped his big hands. ‘We have a girl aboard,’ he shouted. ‘Our prisoner. The daughter of your Home Secretary. You must know about her, or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘Release her into our custody,’ said Bright.
‘Balls.’
Carolyn, weepy, appeared on deck. Hantash had her tightly gripped above the elbow. Being deliberately rough with her, he shoved her to the ship’s rail. ‘Either you vanish, or she gets hurt,’ menaced Arsenio.
‘You can’t win. You’ll shortly have more than us to cope with,’ replied Bright. ‘Give up now. Don’t be a fool.’
The SBS corporal watched, dismayed, as Felix Springer closed in on Carolyn, produced a knife, and seized the struggling girl’s right forearm just above the wrist. He forced it flat down on the top of the boat’s side, her hand hanging over its edge, over the water.