Fuelling the Fire

by Roland Ladley

  But still, Sam gave it her best shot.

  Jane had been able to restrict the search to four HVTs for each analyst. As a result, Sam spent the morning focused on the Middle East, trying to match her four. And the afternoon on Ukraine, looking for Ivan, so to speak.

  Just as Sam was about to press “Send” on her “Alert” e-mail, concerning good-old Ivan, Jane came into the room. Sam, closest to the door, looked up and smiled at her.

  Before any pleasantries, Sam launched with her good news.

  “I’ve got Ivan. This image was taken on September twenty-fifth at Georgiyevka.” Sam pointed at the centre screen. “Clear as anything. And look here.” Sam was pointing at her left monitor.

  Jane peered over her shoulder and looked intently at both screens.

  “Spot on, Sam. Impressive stuff. Really well done. We’re getting close to building a Russian Army grouping among the rebels in this area. I’ll go back and look at the wiring diagram and let you know what we’re missing.” She stood up, placing her hands on the small of her back as she stretched.

  “How are you feeling?” Sam asked. Jane had picked up malaria in Sierra Leone, and it had taken some time to shift. As is the case with the disease, once you have it, it often resurfaces when you’re at a low ebb. And recently they’d all been uber-busy, with long hours and short breaks.

  “I’m fine, thanks, Sam. What about you? Are you sleeping?”

  Sam turned back to the screens. She and Jane had had many a frank conversation about Sam’s past and its impact on day-to-day life. She didn’t sleep well, and when she did, the images of the “incident” in Afghanistan often crept into her dreams. What surprised her, but seemingly not her psychiatrist, was that she was rarely affected by the terror of the drugging and arson in Sierra Leone. Three years ago in Kenema, without Jane’s and the Sierra Leonean Army’s intervention, both she and her UN sidekick Henry would have been toast. That must leave its mark, surely?

  But it was the other near-death experience, the earlier mortar attack in Camp Bastion, that wasn’t prepared to leave her alone. Clearly, the thing she had still not come to terms with was her military past, particularly the Afghanistan tour. The impact of the death of the man she loved, combined with her insides hanging out of a hole that shouldn’t have been there, were proving harder to shift.

  “I’m fine too, thanks, Jane. I’m still not sleeping all the way through, and, as you know, I do have a tendency to fall asleep at my desk with my nose pressing the ‘Space’ button.” Sam paused and sighed. “But it’s getting better day by day.” She looked back up at Jane and smiled.

  Jane suppressed a laugh. “Well, your output is first rate, so the odd rogue e-mail consisting of lines of zeds, courtesy of your nose, is something I’m currently prepared to live with.” Jane placed her hand gently on Sam’s shoulder.

  “Thanks, Jane. Means a lot . . .”

  Jane smiled and moved to her left, stopping beside Frank.

  “How’s it going, Frank?”

  15° 23' 45″ N, 44° 15' 37″ E, Northern Yemen

  Captain Tony James pressed the shutter button on the sand-coloured Leica S DSLR. There was no sound from the camera, the mechanical shutter beautifully silenced by Leica. He gently twisted the zoom lens, half pressed the shutter, checked the focus, and pressed again. He squinted at the LCD screen. It was shielded by a short plastic visor fitted at the SAS’s technical centre in Pontrilas, so that pictures could be viewed in direct sunlight. The 37.5-megapixel sensor coped exceptionally with the distances they worked at. Using a small laser rangefinder, he knew he was twelve hundred metres from the target. It presented no problems for this camera.

  The photo he had just taken was of an Arab-looking man dressed in a traditional floor-length white thawb. The top of his head and neck were covered in a red and white gingham keffiyeh, secured by a black rope around his scalp. On the streets of the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, the man would have looked like thousands of others and indistinguishable in the crowd. Here, now, on metaphorical celluloid, Tony could make out the man’s facial details. He could pick him out from a thousand others.

  He slid backward from the rocky outcrop so that he was out of the line of sight. Not that anyone would have picked him out at this distance. His observation post (OP) consisted of a desert-patterned waterproof poncho with a fifty-centimetre-square observation hole at one edge. He’d thrown it up on the night they’d arrived, two days ago. He’d erected one of these what felt like a thousand times before. He knew that, from any angle, the shape, silhouette, and colour of the OP blended in with the rock and the sand. Everything he wore and all his equipment was desert coloured. The greatest threat to being compromised was from the shadow thrown by the observation hole—they had a more colloquial term for it in the regiment—through which Tony had recently taken the photographs. Someone very clever at Pontrilas had developed a system consisting of a small bank of LED lights linked to a photovoltaic sensor that, depending on the outside ambient light, lit up the inside of the OP, nulling the shadow created by the “a-hole.”

  Tony scrolled through the photos. He counted thirty-two men at the makeshift camp. No women—no surprise there. In the past two days he had managed to snap all of them from at least three different angles. He had wirelessly transferred them to his Samsung tablet—also housed in a desert-coloured case—grouped the photos by individual, and annotated them with comments such as “weapons instructor”; “manager”; “chef”; “trainee.” He reckoned the camp was being run by no more than ten individuals. The remaining men were being trained for combat with Daesh (or Al-Qaeda—currently the camp had no designation) in Iraq or Syria. Or they were destined for truck, bus, boat, or train transit to western Europe. And maybe, ultimately, into the UK.

  The tablet was connected to an Iridium-style satellite phone—another Pontrilas special. He prepared the file package for upload to the cloud, using his two thumbs to swipe and tap as needed.

  His earpiece burst into voice.

  “Mike 20 Alpha, this is 21 Charlie.”

  Tony stopped what he was doing and found the pressel of his radio.

  “Send.” Radio procedure in the SRR was minimal.

  “I’ve just had a ping from the northwest. The indication is French.”

  Tony stopped himself from replying for a second. He closed his eyes; the sweat from the midmorning sun making them sting.

  “Roger. Any visual?”

  The soldier at the other end of the radio seemed to pause, as if he were using the break to look again.

  “I might have something. Too early to say, but we’ve just been pinged again.” A further pause. Tony assumed that Corporal Ted Groves was looking at his transponder.

  “Definitely French. About five clicks away. Their machine has acknowledged us. Direction of travel is northwest, so away from the target. All’s well. I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “Roger, out.” Tony closed the call.

  What the hell are the French doing here? His troop had been given an Op Box of two hundred square kilometres. They were the only troop of the SRR on the ground in northern Yemen, and although he had been briefed that the French Special Operations Command was also in Yemen, he had been told that the SRR Op Boxes had been predetermined not to be anywhere near where the French were working.

  Thank goodness for Terry the Transponder, Tony thought. Everything in the regiment had a nickname, and the “identification friend or foe” (IFF) was known as Terry. He wasn’t sure of how it had been agreed to, but all US, French, and UK special forces carried an IFF transponder to prevent blue-on-blue whenever they were working in the same country.

  He looked again at his tablet. He crooked his neck to get a view that didn’t include his unshaven, ugly mug as a reflection, while also stopping his head from raising the roof of the OP and spoiling the silhouette. The photos were ready. He added the text: “Just been pinged by FR SF heading northwest. Thought you should know.”

  He tapped “Send” and the l
ittle wheel icon spun round a few times in the top left of the tablet. It stopped as the centre of screen lit up: Sent.

  He reached for a handful of raisins, which he kept in a plastic bag off to his right, took a swig of water from a sand-coloured water bottle, and crawled back up into the OP position.

  He was just about to pick up his stabilised binos and focus back on the target area when he spotted a vehicle’s rising sand cloud coming down the only track into the valley. He put his binos down and watched the scene unfold.

  The vehicle was a black pickup, not uncommon in Yemen. After five minutes it pulled to a stop in the centre of the camp, with an ensuing billow of dust. The sound of gunfire continued to echo from the makeshift range up in the hillside to the left. There was no commotion; the truck was obviously expected. Two men got out of the truck, one from either side. At this distance, without binos, Tony couldn’t make out any details, but he could see straight away that the men were not wearing flowing Arab dress. He reached for his binos.

  He stared intently in the direction of the centre of the training camp. He blinked a couple of times.

  Bloody hell.

  He put his binos down and reached for his Leica.

  He steadied the camera on its small tripod, and then, for about three minutes, he snapped and snapped, altering the focus of the lens manually as he did.

  Eventually, after what appeared to be a round of greetings and casual chat, the two men, accompanied by three Arabs, walked into the central tent.

  Tony took another four photos of the truck and then slid back down into the OP.

  He scrolled through the images, chastising himself inwardly when a couple were out of focus.

  Well, I’ll be damned.

  There was no doubt about it. The training team had just been joined by a couple of very interesting characters. One was a white man, he guessed five eleven, slim built, and dressed in a nonmilitary khaki shirt and trousers. The second was a black man. About the same height, but slightly thicker, more “medium build.” He was dressed in lighter cotton trousers and a blue shirt. Both of the men openly wore holsters, and the black man carried a small holdall. Both Western? Possibly American?

  An insignificant, but nonetheless interesting, point was that as soon as the men got out of the car, the black man reached into the flatbed and opened what looked like a cooler. He took out a silver can, pulled the ring, and took a swig.

  He needed to get this back to RHQ as soon as possible.

  A Nondescript Office, Fourth Floor of No. 17, Third Avenue, New York

  Ned Donoghue took a bite out of his apple, some of the juice spraying onto the computer screen in front of him. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and let out a frustrated sigh as the screen mistook his hankie-wiping for instructions and started to alter data, throwing up new tabs.

  “Shit,” he said out loud. He reached forward to the bottom left of the screen, turned it off, and then finished his cleaning, chomping his apple between wipes.

  The other four screens, which almost circled him, updated away as stock markets from around the world went about their business of making and losing millions for traders in Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Mumbai, and elsewhere.

  He turned the central screen back on and, using his finger as a pointer, highlighted PetroBelarus, a fledgling oil company working in and around the Black Sea. Using Google, he electronically dug deeper, looking for news and comments, both official and that from everyday punters. Joe Ordinary sometimes had a better feel for where stock was heading. Nothing untoward came from the investigation, and he closed the tab down.

  He swung his chair a half turn to his left and took in the screen he had set up showing the trading values and vitals of the “big six” public-owned oil and gas companies: BP, Chevron, Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, and ConocoPhillips. These six, known as the Supermajors, dominated the world’s oil and gas supply, although they had recently been joined by two Chinese giants: CNPC and Sinopec. He had included these two on this screen, having first cleared his decision with Herbert, his paymaster.

  Looking to his right, the second static screen—also set up by him—listed the major environmental and nuclear energy companies. This list was a lot longer than that of the eight oil giants. It included a number of state-owned companies, like the French nuclear giant Areva. The French company was currently struggling with orders and cash flow. He followed all of their vitals, keeping track of share price, comments, and future ambitions.

  The two further “wing” screens had details of the emerging or fledgling companies, both oil and gas and environmental. In short, if he spun his chair around, he had, at his fingertips, the output and performance of all of the world’s energy companies split into two: oil and gas; environmental and nuclear. And he had a permanent window open on the central screen showing CNN running its usual commentary on the world at large.

  It had taken him about six weeks to get up to speed with the totality of all of the companies he needed to monitor. And an extra few days to set the screens up to display and follow the data he required. Now all Herbert asked him to do was write a daily e-mail report on how the “big eight”—the Supermajors and the two Chinese giants—were performing, in comparison to the others.

  Herbert was particularly interested in start-up oil companies, which was why he had just drilled down into PetroBelarus. Drilled down—no pun intended! He had used that expression a number of times in his reports, seeing the funny side of it. Although, as far as he could tell, it hadn’t tickled Herbert. The man seemingly lacked any humour.

  A sigh brought him back down to earth.

  Back to work.

  He would need to include details (or lack thereof) of the start-up PetroBelarus in tonight’s report.

  Every so often Herbert would e-mail him with a tasker asking him, for example, to predict the eventual fallout of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster or, more recently, the impact of the VW “cheat device” debacle on the future price of diesel. For these specific enquiries, he was normally given a couple of days, and the reports were to be “no longer than three pages.”

  He had met all of Herbert’s demands, and every so often, he received an electronic “well done” and often a “thanks.” What he never got was a visit. Or a phone call.

  Indeed, he had never met Herbert, or anyone else he might be working for. It was all very strange, at times, uncomfortably so.

  Ned had been recruited from the London Stock Exchange, where he had been working for Deutsche Bank, trading mostly oil stocks and their futures. One day, during a lull in trading, he’d received an e-mail from a chap named Herbert asking if he wanted to work in New York and “earn lots of money.” The e-mail was as simple as that. At first he thought it was a joke—is anyone called Herbert nowadays? And, what fool wouldn’t want to work in New York and earn lots of money?

  He had interrogated the e-mail address and drawn a blank, which, with his knowledge of the Internet and coding, made him sit up and take notice. Not many people could hide behind their e-mail addresses with him at the keyboard.

  Over the next week, once he had offered Herbert a personal e-mail address for correspondence, the digital exchange got more and more detailed. And more and more real. He knew he was onto something when $15,000 was deposited in his main bank account and a business-class flight ticket to New York pinged its way into his mailbox.

  So now here he was.

  Sitting pretty.

  He didn’t like to talk about his salary. Or his free accommodations: a beautiful, expansive flat on Fifth Avenue, which was as described in the e-mail Herbert had sent him. The office was also as agreed—it was out of the way, hidden among a number of small firms and apartments, but had all the technical firepower Ned needed. And his salary, paid monthly in advance, accumulated to $150,000 a year. Plus—wait for it—medical and six weeks of paid holiday. What was there not to like?

  It was, as he had told his mum on the phone after he had arrived in
New York, remarkable. He loved it. Although he did often wonder who Herbert really was and what he was doing with the analysis he was providing.

  On the rare occasion that he paused long enough to ask himself who Herbert was, he interrupted that train of thought by congratulating himself on no longer having to work in the intense, sweaty bull pit of the trading floor. And on being promoted to New York and earning a hefty six-figure sum, plus some extraordinary benefits.

  Herbert was his employer and a well-paying one. He wasn’t asking Ned to do anything nefarious, just research and report. So he didn’t wonder too deeply, mainly for fear that his current dream world would be shattered by a gate-crashing nightmare.

  Not wondering worked just fine for him.

  Chapter 2

  SIS Headquarters, Vauxhall, London

  Jane had got in early. There was a lot to do. The clear emergence of a Russian Army military structure collaborating in and among the Ukrainian rebels in Georgiyevka was something they all intuitively knew was happening, but, until now, they hadn’t had the evidence to back it up. Her analysts, particularly Sam Green, had managed to identify a command structure headed by a serving major from the Ninth Motor Rifle Brigade based in Moscow. They now knew he was accompanied by at least seven other officers and upward of thirty non-commissioned officers and men. Sam had found one particular image of an off-duty Russian Army sergeant in Ukraine with an antitank weapon shouldered, ready to fire. It had taken Jane almost three minutes to follow Sam’s image analysis on the screens. When she saw the match, it was as obvious as the nose on her face.

  She’s good, that girl.

  Jane heard Moscow’s argument that the Russian officers and soldiers in Ukraine were no longer serving in their own army; they had taken time off to go and defend their old homeland—sort of a busman’s holiday. However, GCHQ signals intelligence (SIGINT) analysts from Cheltenham had intercepted uncoded mobile traffic that linked central staff in Moscow with Russian officers on the front line in Ukraine. And, although it was hard to believe that the Russians would be so casual, NATO SIGINT teams—both on the ground and in the air—had intercepted military radio signals between the rebel headquarters in Ukraine and Russian military teams within territorial Russia close to the border. The VHF radio signals were encoded, and GCHQ was struggling to decipher the content. But, with military communications winging their way across the border, there was little hiding the fact that the Russian Army had eastern Ukrainian soil all over their Kirza Army boots.