Nobody responded.
‘Right. Then we need to get to work.’
‘Doing what, specifically?’ the Intelligence Director asked.
‘I would have thought that was quite obvious,’ Simpson snapped. ‘We have to get someone out there, find that ship and grab whatever is in those drums. They must not be allowed to reach their destination.’
‘What about the crew?’
‘If they get in the way, they become surplus to requirements. They’re expendable. Right, Richter, you’re the one who opened this particular can of worms, so you can get yourself out there and sort it out.’
‘I’ll need help. Probably a lot of help.’
‘Obviously. We’ll call the roll and see if there are any Grey Funnel Line ships out there that you can use as a platform. Or maybe the US Navy could help.’
‘I’ll check our current force disposition through Langley,’ William Bennett said immediately. ‘I don’t think we have any task forces in the area the moment, but because of the situation in Yemen we’re bound to have at least a frigate or something in the region. I’ll get back to you on that.’
‘So that just leaves us with one question to be answered,’ Simpson said, switching his glance back to Charles Vernon. ‘What the fuck is Zeolite?’
Chapter 51
Porton Down, Wiltshire
Thursday
William Poulson had told Margaret that he would be working on a sensitive classified report and that he was not to be disturbed if at all possible. She was very good as an insulator and buffer, which was exactly what he wanted. Not, as it happened, to give him the peace and quiet he needed to compile a report of any kind, but because he needed to make a phone call.
It was a call that he wouldn’t be making through the landlines that connected Porton Down to the rest of the world, nor even on either his official or his private mobile, because this was a call that must never be traced to him. Instead, at the bottom of his briefcase he had a cheap Nokia with a pre-paid SIM card installed – a ‘burner’ in the language of the trade – that was completely anonymous and that he would be destroying as soon as the entire distasteful business had been concluded.
He turned the key in his office door to provide a final level of privacy, then opened his briefcase, took out the Nokia and dialled a mobile number that he had memorised. His call was answered almost immediately.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s me,’ Poulson said. ‘Is it done?’
‘Not quite.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘It means what I said: not quite. There’s still one out there I can’t find.’
‘Who?’
‘Former sergeant Jonny Johnson. He isn’t dead, because I’ve checked, but he’s dropped right off the radar. I had his previous address, but it looks to me as if somebody altered his contact details because I have no idea where he is. And there’s something else you need to know.’
‘What?’ Poulson’s voice betrayed the stress he was feeling.
‘He was the one injured in combat, so he didn’t suffer the secondary effects. That means he won’t die of natural causes, or from what happened during the trial.’
‘Then you’ve got to find him. Use whatever methods you have to, but find him. Find him and finish this, or I’ll finish you.’
Poulson pressed the power button on the Nokia and tossed it back into his briefcase.
For several minutes after he’d ended the call he just sat at his desk, his head in his hands, contemplating the very real possibility of his entire career, everything he’d worked so hard for over so many years, unravelling.
And all because of something that should never have happened.
Chapter 52
Oasis Club, Salalah, Oman
Friday
Britain has always enjoyed cordial relations with the Sultanate of Oman and at various times British troops have been instrumental in quelling uprisings and maintaining stability in the sultanate. For a period, there was even a Royal Air Force airfield at Salalah, and members of the SAS and other British special forces are still frequent visitors to Oman, where they work with the Omani armed forces and train in the deserts of the interior.
So when the urgent request from the British Foreign and Colonial Office was received in Oman, the rapid and positive reply really came as no surprise, which was just as well bearing in mind that Richter, Richard Moore and TJ Masters were already in the air in a North American registered Gulfstream G4, a Company aircraft, out of Northolt and bound direct for Salalah Airport, before the Omani government had even had time to respond.
Obviously, a team of only three men, even a well-armed team of three men – in the bags that accompanied them in the Gulfstream were sanitised Glock 17 semiautomatic pistols and Heckler & Koch MP5 assault rifles, weapons without serial numbers, and a substantial quantity of ammunition – would be unable to take over even a small ship. But they were only the advance party, because the Americans were also coming along to play.
DEVGRU is an abbreviation for Development Group, itself a part of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the NSWDG. That is part of a different acronym, JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. Most people have never heard of any of this, but they will almost certainly have heard of SEAL Team Six. Officially that unit ceased to exist back in 1987 but, in reality, it simply morphed into what is now known as DEVGRU, or by insiders as Task Force Blue, with almost no functional changes. Whilst still in the air, the secure communication facilities on board the Gulfstream had confirmed that part of one troop of DEVGRU’s Gold assault squadron was also inbound to Salalah and would be ‘fully equipped’.
‘I presume that means they’ll be carrying a lot more weaponry than we have on this aircraft,’ Richter said.
‘Yup,’ Masters replied. ‘They’ll be loaded for bear. They’ll have everything from personal weapons through assault rifles and grenades up to RPGs and maybe plastic explosive as well.’
‘Good. I think on this caper the more stuff we have that goes bang, the better.’
The Oasis Club at Salalah is an expat hangout that’s popular with any Brits or other Europeans who find themselves living or working in the town. It offers exactly the kind of facilities most people would expect from that kind of place in that kind of region: a large air-conditioned room, a well-stocked bar, a decent bar menu, fast Wi-Fi and a biggish swimming pool. It wasn’t perhaps ideal as a briefing or conference facility, but that wasn’t why the three men were there. Although in the half an hour since they’d arrived by taxi from the local airport they had spent most of their time talking about the mission. The delay was the time they’d taken to put themselves outside three large beef burgers and fries, washed down with an ice-cold Coke – for Richter – and beers for Moore and Masters.
What they were actually doing there was waiting for the arrival of the ship that had also helpfully been provided by the Omani Government, and which was then en route between Muscat and Port Salalah. It was probably not an ideal vessel for the task at hand, but it was the only one in the vicinity under direct Omani control that was close enough to Salalah to stop there and still carry out the intercept within the operational timescale Simpson and the Intelligence Director and their team had put together back at Hammersmith. And it wasn’t a military vessel, but a small civilian cargo ship.
That had been a deliberate choice to allow flexibility of action. If a frigate or some other warship had been used, any contact between it and the so-far-unidentified vessel carrying the bioweapon could legitimately have been considered an act of war, and the target ship would almost certainly have time to send out a distress message before the crew could be subdued and captured. And that would be messy and would cause all sorts of both immediate and long-term problems.
What Simpson had in mind, and what Richter had agreed with, was to stage some kind of a maritime accident as the vessel headed up the Red Sea, and for that a civilian vessel was essentia
l. Then any distress message transmitted not only wouldn’t matter but could become a part of the plan.
The three men were sitting around a table near the back wall of the bar and well away from anybody else. In fact, there were few people in there because the Club did most of its business in the late afternoon and evening. They couldn’t do much in the way of planning, because until they saw the ship and the equipment that it had and got some idea of its performance – which would probably be modest, bearing in mind what it was – they had no idea exactly how they were going to carry out the interception.
‘This is going to be bloody tight,’ Richter said, looking at a map of the area that had been sent out to his mobile phone from the American Embassy via Hammersmith, and which showed the position of the target vessel about half an hour earlier. It was roughly three hundred nautical miles east of Mukalla in the Yemen, heading west-south-west towards Aden and the choke point at the southern end of the Red Sea. That meant it had already passed due south of Salalah, and also meant that they would be playing catch-up from the moment their vessel arrived.
‘If we don’t have a big enough speed differential,’ Moore said, ‘we might have to revert to Plan B, which I haven’t actually worked out yet. But what I was thinking of was maybe forgetting this ship if we can’t catch up with the target and flying up to Port Said or Alexandria or somewhere and then doing the intercept in the eastern Mediterranean with a different vessel. I know that’s leaving it real late and cutting it real fine, but that might be our only option.’
‘I hope it doesn’t have to come to that,’ Richter replied, still staring at the map.
Masters’s mobile phone rang at that moment. He answered it and held a largely monosyllabic conversation with whoever was at the other end. He glanced at his watch as he ended the call.
‘That was a heads up on the SEALs. They’re about twenty minutes from touchdown at Salalah.’
Richter glanced at his own watch.
‘That’s not long enough—’ he began, then nodded his realisation. ‘They obviously haven’t come from the States,’ he went on, ‘so where were they?’
‘They’ve flown up from Dar es Salaam,’ Masters said. ‘They were on exercise down in Tanzania. That’s why we didn’t get a chance to pick the number of men we wanted. We had to have that bunch of SEALs because there was nobody else close enough to get here in time.’
About ten minutes later the telephone behind the bar rang and one of the men working there answered it. As soon as he put the phone down, he walked across the bar to their table.
‘You’re the spooks, right?’ he asked, glancing at each of them.
They had introduced themselves when they walked into the Oasis Club, but had just said they were visiting Salalah for a short time and then ordered their food and drinks. But obviously in the fairly small community at that end of Oman, word had got around fairly quickly.
‘We’ve been calling ourselves visiting businessmen,’ Richter said, ‘but we’ve got to the point where we answer to almost anything. Anyway, who wants to know?’
‘Not me,’ the barman said quickly. ‘I’ve just come over to pass a message. Apparently your transport’s arrived, whatever that means, and there’ll be a taxi outside the club any minute now.’
‘Thanks,’ Masters said, and they all stood up.
They had nothing to pay, because Richter had handed over enough American dollars to cover the cost of their meal when they’d placed the orders. He hadn’t bothered getting any Omani rials because they were only staging through Oman and hadn’t anticipated spending much while they were there. And in any case, the greenback was the currency of choice throughout most of the Middle East.
They picked up their bags and walked out of the Club, the muggy heat hitting them like a warm damp blanket, and walked over to a probably three-year-old Mercedes saloon that had just pulled in and parked close to the main door.
‘You men going to the ship?’ the driver asked in workable English.
Richter nodded and they climbed into the vehicle after placing their bags in the boot, the icy air conditioning very welcome even after such a short exposure to the heat of the midday sun in Oman.
It was less than a ten-minute drive down the hill from the Club and in through the dockyard gates, where the driver simply waved at the guard in his booth and barely even slowed down. At the end of the jetty was a small freighter with the name Muttrah painted on both sides of the bow. It didn’t look that old and appeared to be in good condition. More important, from Richter’s point of view, was the presence of two deck cranes, one at either end of the main deck. That had been a no-go option: at least one crane had been absolutely essential if the rough plan that they had concocted was to have even a chance of success.
The taxi driver asked for ten dollars but Richter gave him twenty and stepped out of the vehicle. They picked up their bags to walk the short distance to the gangway that ran between the accommodation section in the stern and the concrete jetty, but even before they reached it they heard the sound of a big diesel engine behind them and turned to look.
An articulated lorry stopped a few feet away with a hiss from its air brakes followed by silence a few seconds later as the driver switched off the engine. The trailer it was pulling was open-sided and the most obvious things it was carrying were three wooden skiffs, probably about fifteen or twenty feet long, each with a powerful-looking outboard engine mounted on the stern transom. On one side of the lorry was a long irregularly-shaped bundle wrapped in plastic and secured by webbing straps, together with another cubical package wrapped and secured in the same manner.
As they stood and watched, the driver began loosening the straps and preparing the cargo to be lifted, whilst on board the ship the aft crane rotated on its pedestal to swing out over the quayside as the operator on board lowered the hook and its attached slings towards the lorry.
‘That’s good timing,’ Moore said, and the three men continued heading towards the gangway.
A merchant seaman who was standing near the shipboard end of the gangway, possibly posted there as a guard, asked in broken English to see their passports, and then pointed them at the steel door that led into the accommodation section and indicated that they should climb all the way up to the bridge to ‘go see captin’.
When they got there, Richter tapped on the locked door which was opened a few moments later by another crewman. Stepping onto the bridge he saw that the navigation and radar equipment was of recent manufacture and better than he’d expected, with full colour screens for the display of charts and information.
The captain was standing outside on the bridge wing, looking forward at the loading operation taking place on the deck below, but when he saw the three men he stepped back inside and walked over to them.
Like the other two crewmen they had already seen, the captain was wearing Western-style clothes, because traditional Arab dress – what’s commonly called a jellaba though it has other names in different countries – would be both inappropriate and potentially dangerous when working on board a ship. The captain’s choice of apparel was a mixture of casual and formal: he was wearing a pair of slightly faded blue jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt with captain’s gold stripes in the epaulettes. He was slim, a little under six feet in height, with typical Middle Eastern complexion, his face dominated by a large and somewhat bulbous nose, under which a small bristly moustache appeared almost invisible.
‘Which one of you is Mr Richter?’ he asked.
Richter took a half pace forward, reached into his jacket and pulled out his passport, but the captain waved him away.
‘I’m sure you are who you say you are,’ he said. ‘The orders I have been given are most specific, but at the same time somewhat short on detail.’ There was clearly nothing wrong with the Omani captain’s command of the English language. ‘I have been told to place this vessel and my crew at your disposal but the orders neglected to say exactly why. I have also been told that another
group of men will be joining my vessel here in Salalah, and that we are to set sail the moment they, and the extra cargo that is presently being loaded, are on board. Can you tell me our destination so that my navigating officer can start to prepare a route? And, if possible, what we are supposed to do when we get there?’
Richter shook his head.
‘I can’t give you a destination as such,’ he said, ‘because I don’t know exactly where we’re going. But from here we’ll be sailing to the southern end of the Red Sea and then heading north for Suez. How far up the Red Sea we’ll get I don’t know, because we’ve been tasked with following and then stopping another ship, and where that takes place will depend upon a lot of different factors, including the other shipping we’ll encounter, the speed of the target vessel and the maximum speed this ship can achieve.’
The captain didn’t look particularly surprised at what Richter had just said.
‘I guessed it might be something like that, in view of my orders. Which ship is the target? What’s its name?’
‘We don’t know, yet, but we know where it is because it’s being tracked by satellite surveillance, and we also know its probable destination is in the eastern Mediterranean.’
The captain nodded.
‘You don’t really seem to know a great deal, Mr Richter,’ he said, ‘but that’s your business and your problem, not mine. No doubt things will become clearer in time. My name is Karim Zebari, and you can call me Karim or just captain, if that’s easier.’
‘Good. My name is Paul, and these two are Richard Moore and TJ Masters.’
They shook hands all round.
‘And those, perhaps,’ Zebari said, pointing through the bridge windows at the jetty where a grey-painted single decker coach had just come to a stop, ‘are our additional passengers. This is not a big ship,’ he went on, ‘and it’s a working vessel, so the accommodation space is very limited. You and the other men will have to bunk down in whatever space you can find, probably in the mess.’
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