Now the drone was moving slowly, no more than 100 m.p.h., south towards the Arabian Sea. In the far distance the flat landscape rose sharply to a high escarpment, but much closer – probably less than five miles away – a tall tower-like construction was visible in the flat desert.
Cottinger checked the sequence of instructions on his clipboard and looked at the digital clock on the wall. Ten seconds to go. He counted down, cleared his throat, and leaning slightly forward said, in the clearest tones he could muster: ‘Descend to five hundred feet. Target is ahead of you. Look for anti-air weapons, and take evasive action if you see them. Otherwise, proceed towards the target.’
He watched as the drone began to descend and the features of the drab terrain became distinct – he could see individual outcroppings of rock now. The tower was clearly visible: it must have been fifty feet high, though it looked taller, looming out of the flat sea of sandy gravel bed. It had been put up by a squad of US marines the month before.
‘How’s it going, Lieutenant?’
Cottinger turned to find Galsworthy standing behind his chair. ‘Okay, sir. We’ll be simulating firing in about two minutes.’
‘Okey-dokey,’ he said, and walked away. Galsworthy was pretty relaxed today, thought Cottinger, but then they’d now had days of these exercises without a hitch.
He noticed that the drone had speeded up slightly, and the tower was getting alarmingly big on the screen. It was a simple affair of steel piping, put up purely for the purposes of the exercise.
‘Reduce speed to eighty miles per hour.’
To his surprise the drone accelerated instead, surging to 150 m.p.h. according to his console. ‘Reduce speed to eighty miles per hour,’ Cottinger repeated, his voice rising. He looked at the altimeter dial on the console and saw the drone was also too low – it had descended to three hundred feet and falling. On the screen below the ground was whizzing past in a blur.
‘What’s the matter, Lieutenant?’ Colonel Galsworthy was suddenly back behind him.
Cottinger pointed to the screen. ‘It’s going way too fast.’
‘Well, tell it to slow down,’ Galsworthy said, sounding edgy.
‘I have, sir.’ He leaned forward towards the microphone on the panel at the front of his desk. ‘Reduce speed. Eighty miles per hour.’
By now the drone was flying at close to 200 m.p.h., and the tower loomed less than a mile away. Looking at the altimeter, Cottinger saw the drone was down to fifty feet; on the screen its nose looked to be level with the top of the tower.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Galsworthy exclaimed. ‘What is it doing?’
‘Ascend to five hundred feet,’ Cottinger shouted. Then, forgetting his carefully learned commands, ‘Get up, get up, get up!’ he shouted. He’d left his chair now and was standing up, staring at the monitor, sweat standing out on his brow as the drone hurtled towards the tower. Would it clear it? ‘Ascend to five hundred feet,’ he tried again, but there was no response.
He clenched both fists and waited tensely as the drone narrowed in on the tower. Closer and closer – he closed his eyes for a second. And then suddenly, as the screen filled with an image of steel piping tied together like metal latticework, his terminal screen went blank.
‘What the hell!’ shouted Galsworthy.
Cottinger ignored him and, grabbing his keyboard, typed in a series of commands. The terminal screen refreshed, and a satellite view of Oman filled the screen – nothing came from the drone. The satellite camera zoomed, gradually magnifying. A dark smear appeared in the centre of the screen and grew in size as the camera zeroed in. The smear was an ascending trail of wispy smoke and through it, as the magnification increased, Cottinger could glimpse a tangled mess of steel on the ground where seconds before the tower had stood. Nearby a fire was blazing; he could make out the skeletal remains of the drone burning on the desert floor.
Galsworthy cursed loudly. ‘What happened?’ he demanded.
Cottinger stared at the smouldering wreckage on his screen. He knew the drone was expected to take charge of itself one day, but this had come a lot earlier than expected.
‘Well, sir, how can I put it?’ he said at last. ‘It looks as if our drone just committed suicide.’
Chapter 41
This time Bokus called on Fane, who must have alerted Liz Carlyle as she was there when the American arrived, standing by the window, looking down at the Thames at high tide. Though Bokus hadn’t asked for her to be there, he was glad she was; he could get the bad news over in one fell swoop.
‘Thanks for seeing me,’ he said as they sat down in the corner, round a table which Fane claimed had belonged to his great-grandfather. Trust him to bring his family heirlooms to work, thought Bokus sourly. Fane’s office was much smaller than his at Grosvenor Square, yet there was something undeniably impressive about it. Its elegant furniture and expensive curtains seemed to say that you didn’t need an office the size of a tennis court to show your status. It made Bokus wonder grudgingly if there wasn’t something to the British liking for understatement.
‘You said it was important,’ said Fane, going straight to the point without the usual small talk.
Bokus was sweating, slightly nervous about the news he was about to break.
He took a deep breath. ‘Operation Clarity has had a bit of a setback and it’s been temporarily suspended.’
‘What setback?’ asked Liz Carlyle. ‘We’ve heard nothing.’
‘It was in Oman. That’s where they’ve been running trials on the new control system. We’ve lost one.’
‘Lost one?’ she asked incredulously.
Bokus nodded.
‘What happened?’ Fane said, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward in his chair.
‘Nobody knows for sure. It seems one minute the test drone was flying along just fine, being directed by the voice commands, then all of a sudden it went nose down into a target it was meant to photograph. Like a dog deciding to ignore its master’s voice.’ Bokus smiled weakly, but neither Liz nor Fane smiled back. ‘So it seems you two were right to think we have a problem.’
‘Are they sure it was external interference?’ asked Fane. ‘You know, Andy, these technological marvels are so beyond the ken of us mere mortals that we sometimes forget they can foul up in the same way people do. ‘‘To err is human’’ and all that sort of thing, but the worst mistakes in my view are technical.’
Bokus shook his head regretfully. ‘It would be nice to think so, but Langley’s told me there was unauthorised intervention in the commands sent to the drone. Don’t ask me for the technical detail, but they think the Air Force commands were somehow overlaid with contradictory ones. The drone didn’t know which set to believe, so it pretty much said “what the hell”, and looked for the nearest exit sign. It’s made them look back at another glitch which they’d previously put down to a technical malfunction.’
Fane asked, ‘Could this sabotage have come from some other source? I mean, how do you know it’s connected to Operation Clarity?’
‘Unfortunately, Clarity’s the only place it could have come from. To overlay the legitimate orders, the bogus ones would have to unravel their encryption, and then duplicate it themselves. To do that they’d have to go to the source of the encryption code. That’s your MOD project.’
‘Bugger,’ said Fane, and sat further forward in his chair, crossing his arms.
‘So we need to find this mole right away,’ said Liz. ‘Has Langley come back to you about Park Woo-jin?’
‘Yes,’ said Bokus, wondering if he should mention his source Ujin Wong. Better not, he decided. They’d met again briefly in a pub near Victoria, and Wong had told him he could find nothing at all suspicious about the programmer Park Woo-jin. ‘But I’m sure it’s not Park. They’ve gone through the original vetting, and checked with the Koreans as well. Both are certain he’s clean.’
‘Well, that’s obviously not true,’ said Liz, a split second before Fane angrily said, ‘Balls.’
>
‘What makes you so sure?’ asked Bokus crossly.
Liz snapped, ‘We’ve had surveillance on Park Woo-jin for the last ten days. He made a drop in St James’s Park on his way to work. It was crystal clear. Either your people aren’t looking hard enough, or the Koreans are pulling the wool.’
‘Meaning what exactly?’ asked Bokus. He was surprised by the news about Park Woo-jin. The Korean intelligence people were usually very good. They might have made a mistake the first time round, but if they’d had another look, when Ujin Wong asked for it, they should have spotted anything wrong with Park. What was going on?
‘Meaning Park Woo-jin is reporting back to Korean intelligence. That’s the only thing that makes sense.’
‘But why would he do that?’ asked Fane. He had picked up a pencil and was rocking it fast between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I mean, we all know our allies like to know what’s going on, even the genuinely friendly ones. But honestly, would the KCIA really go to the trouble of planting an agent in the project of two close allies? Think of the risk. And the information they might get couldn’t do them an iota of conceivable good, while,’ he continued, warming to his theme, ‘risking God knows what ructions with their largest benefactor if it were discovered.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense, I agree,’ said Bokus. ‘Unless,’ and he paused until he felt their eyes upon him, ‘Park is working for someone else. Like the Russians. Langley’s view is that this is a sabotage operation, and increasingly they feel Moscow is behind it. The people at State are talking about calling in the Russian Ambassador and making a formal protest.’
‘That would be ridiculous,’ said Liz. ‘What do they expect the Russians to say?’
‘Of course they’d just deny it,’ Fane chipped in. ‘So all that would do is raise the level of international tension quite unnecessarily.’
‘And anyway, how does Langley explain Bravado’s information, if the Russians are behind this?’ asked Liz.
‘They think it was some kind of double bluff. The theory back home is that Bravado didn’t want to go the whole road to betraying his country, so he wrapped the information up by saying the attack was being carried out by a third country.’
‘But what about Kubiak? Where does he fit in according to your theory? Did you do a trace with Langley?’
‘Yes. There’s a big file. They did have him in their sights in Delhi, same as your lot did. They did a background study then and apparently his father was a senior General in the Defence Department. So he had brilliant access, as well as the prospect of rising high in the KGB. Our Station had him surrounded with access agents, including the madam at the whorehouse. They were planning to offer a big salary but keep him in place. He’d be able to indulge his passions, knowing a golden handshake and easy retirement awaited him in the States.
‘But in the end they didn’t go ahead. Langley didn’t like his profile; our shrinks assessed him as borderline psychopathic. I think the feeling was he’d be too difficult to control. The madam told us a lot about his personal habits – one of them was that he was violent, almost casually so. Apparently he’d nearly killed one of her girls when she did something he didn’t like, or maybe she wouldn’t do something he did like. There was also an incident when we had him under surveillance, and he assaulted a taxi driver – beat him up really badly, then walked off as though nothing had happened. He was drunk at the time. It had to be hushed up by his Embassy – they paid off the driver before he could complain to the police.’
‘From what Bravado said, it sounds as though he hasn’t changed a lot,’ said Carlyle.
‘No, though his career doesn’t seem to have taken off as expected,’ Fane chipped in. ‘Head of Security in Switzerland isn’t where he would have hoped to end up. But at least he survived the changes at the end of the Cold War, probably with the help of his father. ‘
‘Well, that’s all very interesting.’ Liz was looking impatient. ‘But I still can’t believe there’s any Russian connection to Park Woo-jin. He’s obviously up to something, and I’m not at all sure Korean intelligence is telling us all they know. I think our best bet is to concentrate on the man who picked up Park Woo-jin’s drop. According to the hotel where he stays when he’s in London, his name is Dong Shin-soo, but so far we have no trace of him entering the country under that name. We don’t know where he is the rest of the time; we don’t even know for sure that he’s Korean.’
‘Okay,’ said Bokus, thinking that he was the one getting the worst news. He knew Fane and Carlyle weren’t happy to find out that the MOD leak was real – Bokus himself was dismayed by the discovery. But from what he was hearing now, the situation was even more complicated than he’d thought. He’d still put his money on the Russians being involved, though the evidence was going Korea’s way. Which not only meant that one of America’s staunchest allies was doing the dirty, it also meant his old pal Ujin Wong hadn’t been telling him the truth.
‘But don’t take your eye off Kubiak,’ he said, as a parting shot. ‘Take my word for it. The Russians are in this somewhere.’
Chapter 42
At first it seemed like just another routine surveillance job. Follow target codename Tonto from the MOD to his residence in Ealing. Same every night, thought Duff Wells. Leaves MOD dead on five, walks across St James’s Park, through Queen Anne’s Gate to the tube station, and takes the District line to Ealing Broadway. A short walk home. Job done.
This evening Duff Wells was covering the tube journey. Stephen Sachs had come in on the tube from Ealing with the target this morning, so this evening he’d just kept a weather eye on him from a distance as he crossed the park. He was probably still there, waiting for the ‘stand down’ from Wally Woods in the control room. Maureen Hayes had watched Tonto leave the MOD building in Whitehall and would get on the train at Westminster Station, in case Wells needed back-up. Not likely, he thought. This was one of the most predictable targets he’d had for a long time.
Meanwhile, out in Ealing, Marcus Washington was waiting in a white builder’s van a hundred yards down the street from the MOD house where Tonto was staying, just to make sure that he went home and stayed there. Unusually, Washington was on his own tonight, as an urgent operation in Tottenham had come in late in the afternoon, and Wally Woods had taken the risk that solo cover would be enough – it seemed more than likely Tonto would conform to his usual pattern and stay put for the evening.
Wells was standing at the front end of the carriage behind Tonto’s. He could see him, sitting comfortably reading the Evening Standard, ignoring a white-haired lady with a large bag who was standing in front of him. Wells had heard through his headphones that Hayes was safely on board the train, two carriages further back. Wells was thinking about his daughter’s birthday in two weeks’ time and whether they could afford to buy her the Smartphone she wanted. It wasn’t the cost of the phone itself that was the worry but the two-year contract you had to take out with the phone company. Then there was the problem of monitoring who she was texting and emailing, to say nothing of the wider world of the internet. And she was only thirteen.
Tonto stood up and Wells’s daughter was forgotten. Was Tonto offering his seat to the old lady? No, he was getting off at the next stop, Chiswick Park, three stops before his usual one. Wells sent a quick alert to Maureen Hayes and the control room and prepared to get off too. This was a bit more like it.
He stood on the platform watching Hayes walking briskly up the steps to the exit, in the midst of a few dozen commuters, followed a few yards behind by Tonto. Wells waited till they’d both gone through the exit barriers then followed on behind.
In Ealing Marcus Washington suddenly sat up behind the steering wheel of his van and turned on the ignition. With a squeal from his tyres, kicking up a little fountain of gravel, he accelerated out of his parking space. Unlike ordinary builder’s vans, his was equipped with a three-litre engine, but it didn’t do him much good in the local rush-hour traffic and it still took him fi
fteen minutes to get to Chiswick Park. There he saw Wells casually strolling down the pavement that ran along the north side of a little park. Responding to the voice in his ear, he drove straight past then, fifty yards further on, pulled over and sat, with engine running, waiting for his colleague to reach him.
‘What kept you, sunshine?’ asked Wells with a grin.
Woods and his team in the control room were receiving the pictures that Maureen Hayes was taking now as she strolled through the park. They showed the target sitting at one end of a bench, at the other a Far Eastern-looking man; they seemed to be talking.
Woods picked up his phone and dialled. ‘Peggy? I need you up here straight away. We’ve got choices to make.’
Two minutes later Peggy Kinsolving was standing next to him, listening to transmissions from the team on the ground.
Wells: ‘Tonto and the new arrival are still talking. It’s the same guy who picked up the drop in St James’s Park.’
Hayes: ‘I can see the car that brought the new target. It’s a minicab – got the sticker on the back window – looks as if it’s been told to wait. Here you go.’ And a photograph of a blue Peugeot saloon, its registration clearly visible, came up on the screen in the control room.
Woods turned to Peggy. ‘What do you want us to do? There’s not enough resource to take on both targets. Who shall we go with?’
Peggy thought for a split second then said, ‘Stick with the new target. Let’s try and house him. I’ll trace that minicab back to its firm and see what I can find out from them about their customer.’
‘OK,’ replied Woods. ‘We’ll do our best. But we’ve only got the one van on the job, so no guarantees.’
The Geneva Trap Page 18