Fuelling the Fire

by Roland Ladley

  But pictures don’t lie, even in this case, when they had been taken at a distance of over a thousand metres across the Yemeni desert.

  He had agreed with Jane that “hiding” the images from her staff—more accurately, from Sam Green—was the right one. She would probably need to be told at some point. Indeed, Sam’s forensic ability to interpret images and situations would doubtless be key in helping work out what was happening. But, just now, he needed to speak to Langley and find out just what was going on.

  His phone rang. It was his PA, Claire.

  “I have the deputy director, sir.’

  “Thanks, Claire, put him through.” He checked his watch. It was 11.30 here, 6.30 in the United States. Early doors for the East Coast, but that was their choice.

  “Hi, Linden, it’s David here. So good of you to take my call this early.” David liked the CIA’s new deputy. More importantly, he trusted him. Unlike his predecessor—who had since moved on and was now, according to what he had heard, a non exec of a huge Christian charity based somewhere in the Midwest. David still thought he’d had something to do with the whole Sam Green/Ebola incident. It frustrated him that they been unable to get to the bottom of his potential involvement before he left his post.

  “Hi, David. Just got in. How can I help?” The accent was one of those mellow East Coast ones, laced with a touch of Irish.

  “I’m about to send you three images taken by our SF in Yemen yesterday. It’s a Daesh training camp. Well, we’re pretty sure it’s Daesh rather than Al-Qaeda, but we’ve yet to confirm which side this particular shooting match is batting for.” David closed his eyes as he recognised his mixing of metaphors. He wondered if Linden was keeping count.

  “The reason why I’m phoning now . . . hang on”—he paused for a second as he pressed the “Return” key—“I’ve just sent an e-mail with the photos. In the middle of the camp, bold as brass, are our two old friends Kurt Manning and Ralph Bell. Or should I say, your friends.”

  The line, which had a slight delay due to the distance that was further exacerbated by the encryption, paused for longer than the technology needed. David waited.

  “You’ve got to be kidding? Wait while I get the e-mail.”

  David looked up from his own screen and across the room at the antique Vienna-styled wall clock that hung above the red leather sofa. It was too old to have a second hand, but as he waited, David was sure he saw the minute hand rush forward a tiny bit.

  A countdown to retirement.

  The thought warmed him. This time next year he would be tending his roses, dealing with blackfly and slugs as opposed to, well, the human varieties of the same. He didn’t want to rush these last four months because there was a lot to do, including announcing his successor. But he couldn’t look at the lovely clock without letting his mind wander just a touch. He hoped he had made enough of the right noises so that the organisation felt inclined to give him the wooden beauty as a retirement present. Might he need to hint harder?

  “Gee whiz . . .”—does anyone say that anymore?—“. . . it is them. I’ll be pickled in hen’s juice!” The deputy director blew out hard on the other end of the line. “How did they get there? And what are they doing?”

  These were good questions, along with about fifty others that David could think of.

  “We’ve still got a team on the ground hoping to take more photos and establish what they’re up to. But I hope you could look to your own resources and help us establish what’s what. I don’t need to remind you that until just two and a half years ago, Kurt Manning was a Level 3 CIA operative with access to US/UK Eyes Only information, do I?” He didn’t, he knew that. It was a cheap trick. But two ex-CIA men, possibly right-wing Christian fundamentalists, were alive and kicking. And currently very much alive and kicking in a terrorist training camp in Yemen. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Have you got available assets that could take this camp out? Strike now whilst you have eyes on?” The deputy director asked.

  It was good to be talking to a DD who wanted to deal with these hoods, rather than deny their existence.

  “No, sorry. Too far south at the moment. Have you?” David knew he could ask the Saudis, who would oblige. But he also knew that by the time they got Downing Street clearance, and then approached the Saudis, their team would be very vulnerable. As a workable alternative, he was confident that the SRR team could provide forward air control (FAC) with laser designation for a US airstrike. But he would need to check before committing.

  “I’ll get in touch with the Pentagon now. Your people could provide the FAC piece?”

  “Should be able to, but it will take me an hour or so to check that. Shall we talk again, say, at seven thirty your time?”

  “That’s fine, David. Speak in about an hour.”

  The phone went dead. Which was timely, as he needed the loo.

  He popped out the door and said to Claire, “Get Hereford on the line, please. And ask Jane to come back and see me. Oh, and a coffee. I’m off to the loo.”

  “Too much information,” Claire said, reaching for the phone.

  On a Wednesday, it was Sam’s turn to cull the new daily “open” source images that had been deposited on the cloud—the ones that Mervin had thought worthy of their attention. Mervin was the SIS’s temperamental image-processing computer that trawled all public networks, social media, and even e-mails, searching for images that might be of use for the SIS analysts. The five of them in the office did a day each. Her day was Wednesday.

  Sam used her biggest screen and threw up twenty-four images at a time. She quickly trawled through all of them, selecting those of no relevance. With a single “Delete,” she removed over 90 per cent. She kept around twenty that looked like they could be useful. Currently the richest vein of photos was from TV and newspaper shots at Calais, France, and on the Greek island of Lesbos. She paid particular attention to these.

  Once finished, she decided to have a look at the images that had been placed in the cloud from their “closed” sources. Sam had the highest regard for the soldiers, spies, agents, and informants who took photos of likely HVTs in often extremely dangerous locations. She knew that she had a pretty deep well of personal courage—actually, it was more a complete disregard for her own safety, which wasn’t quite the same thing. However, she wasn’t convinced she’d be able to hold the camera steady whilst snapping away at some of these lunatics.

  She opened a file: “SRR/NYemen/15.23.45.N.44.15.37E/031015.” It would be the very latest from the SRR team in Yemen. Brave men operating at the very edges of the sane world.

  Sam skimmed the photos. It was of cursory interest only, as her job was to pinpoint current movement on HVTs from the Middle East to the UK. None of those in the camp would be moving anytime soon—the images from Lesbos and Calais would be far more revealing. The SRR photos offered no recognisable faces and nothing that seemed untoward: a terrorist training camp in the desert preparing men from a number of nations to engage with and kill Westerners.

  She stopped and pulled her head back so she could take in the whole screen. She studied the numbering of the photos and picked out an anomaly. Photos SRR1245 to 1270 were missing. That would be twenty-five photos not in the series. Nobody was allowed to remove images taken by “closed” sources from the cloud. And all photos had to be assigned a designated, ascending number from a predetermined list.

  Photos just didn’t go missing—where are they?

  She searched for the images using the “Ctrl-F” feature, but nothing surfaced. This is very odd. Very odd indeed. She would talk to Jane when she next saw her.

  Chapter 3

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

  Having finished his daily apple, Ned decided that he’d had his fill of fibre and vitamin C. Now it was Jelly Baby time. He struggled to get them in New York. The closest they had was Jellie Bellies, which weren’t the same thing at all—they were jellybeans with a hard coa
ting. No, they wouldn’t do. He needed teddy-bear-shaped jellies with a soft, sugared coating. The ones where you could bite off the heads, then the bodies, and finally finish with the legs. It was satisfying on both a confectionery and a sort of sado-animalistic level. It did not, of course, reflect his personality. Not at all. No, he just liked the taste of the sweets. And he had to eat them in a particular way.

  He ate close to a pack a day. They were sent to New York by his mum, all the way from Cleethorpes. A Red Cross parcel of sorts. Yum-yum.

  Overnight he had received the latest tasker from Herbert. He wanted a technical résumé of the new Tesla Home Battery, the one that stored excess solar energy from domestic solar panels and then regurgitated the power when the sun went to bed. And he wanted a prognosis of where this might be heading.

  Tesla’s boss, billionaire Elon Musk, was moving on from building all-electric cars and had surprised the whole world by announcing a gigafactory somewhere in Nevada that would build tens of thousands of these batteries to sell around the world. It was, considering Ned’s responsibility, a new entrant into his power and energy portfolio. He could see why Herbert would be interested.

  He’d spent about six hours gathering information from all different sources, including Tesla’s website, which, as he’d expected, was more marketing hype than encyclopaedic fact. However, there were plenty of other commentaries: some positive, “sold out this year due to crazy demand”; some negative, “another rich kid’s toy.”

  What amused Ned was that Tesla’s main press conference was delayed for an hour due to power failure. A marketing whoopsie, as the whole thing had been powered by a bank of Elon Musk’s batteries. Bless them.

  Ned had established that a single Tesla Powerwall—to give it its proper name—which looked like a space-age flattened fridge stuck on a garage wall, held only about one of his own British pound’s worth of electricity. So over a year, a householder could probably save about £300. And with the hardware coming in at well over £2,000, the payback would take a helluva long time.

  Ned stopped surfing for a moment and jotted down a draft title for his paper for Herbert: “Tesla Powerwall—The Toyota Prius of Domestic Electricity. Looks good, costs a lot. And not the answer.”

  He congratulated himself on that and reached for another Jelly Baby. A yellow one. Mmm.

  He was about to search for information on the solar irradiance—a big new word for him—in the UK, when the small screen showing CNN caught his eye. He turned up the sound.

  There was a report about the anniversary of the 1979 US nuclear accident on the Pennsylvanian coast. The report expanded on the incident, which was assumed to have started with a fire just outside one of the reactors. This was further compounded by a failure of an operator to open a coolant-relief valve. The operator said at the time that the valve had been stuck. As a result, there was a partial meltdown of one of the cores and a release of radioactive gases and iodine. Nobody died.

  Except the nuclear power industry.

  Ned was waiting for the punchline from CNN. So far it was interesting but not illuminating.

  The male reporter handed over to his female counterpart.

  “Thirty-six years after the event, one man has come forward and claimed that he had been paid to fix the valve so it wouldn’t open. Apparently . . .”—the woman emphasised the word with unreserved glee—“. . . at seventy years young and suffering from leukaemia, he couldn’t live with himself. So he has decided to speak now.”

  And the fire was also started on purpose? Ned thought it was the obvious supplementary. Arson, a stuck valve, and a nuclear power station. The perfect storm.

  He lost the man’s name in the noise, but what interested him from the CNN report—after all, power supply was now his business—was that, after the incident, the nuclear industry went into meltdown. Another pun. He loved it. Up until 1979, the reporter quoted, nuclear power plants were being constructed at around one a year. Post-1979 that number declined, with fifty-one planned reactors cancelled in the United States between 1980 and 1984. That was not an insignificant number.

  This is big news. Somebody, somewhere, would have profited from this disaster.

  Assuming the bloke who had come forward wasn’t a crackpot, which—after just four months of temporary US citizenship—was a big assumption, he could sense the lawyers in Wall Street sharpening their Montblanc propelling pencils.

  Ned reached for another Jelly Baby, but the bag was empty.

  “Shit.” There was nothing more depressing than an empty bag of his favourite sweets.

  The depression was short-lived. He pulled open the top drawer of his desk and picked out a new bag.

  “Come to Daddy.”

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

  Tony James had just begun to shake off the cold of the desert night. The sun had crept above the horizon, and he was focused back in on the terrorist camp, binos in one hand and his Leica S, with its zoom lens, just off to one side.

  If you’d never been in the desert it was difficult to understand how cold the nights could be. The days were blisteringly, searingly hot. The nights had wide-open skies that sucked out the heat. The sand and rock lamely gave up their residual warmth to the voracious emptiness. Temperatures would often drop to below freezing. The differential between highs and lows could be debilitating.

  His team of four, of which he was the observer and the others his wingmen, gathered together at dusk in the centre of the patrol base. His OP was high on a rocky outcrop, just off the pinnacle overlooking the valley below: twelve o’clock. During the day, his team members took the other three cardinal times: three, six, and nine; near enough was good enough. They had sighted themselves within three hundred metres of a central point, which was low down in a bowl, hidden from every direction. There, they had set up a makeshift camp under a couple of desert-patterned ponchos. Unmanned during the day, it was home at night: food, drink, their “maggots” (sleeping bags), battery charging via a small series of solar panels, team briefing and other essential equipment. They slept on rotation in threes, with the fourth on lookout with night-vision goggles.

  During the day, all four of them were self-sufficient. In a crisis they could all go their separate ways and, via a set of predetermined RVs, end up back at the Hub with Colour Sergeant Jock Mills. Jock and his men were about seventy clicks to the south. In a significant crisis they had the wherewithal to make their way as a team of four back to the Saudi border, about two hundred clicks to the north. Should it be necessary, the other half of his troop was on standby in Saudi. They could be flown in by a pair of SF Merlin helicopters and effect a “hot” extraction. Possibly. He knew that what they were doing was on the very edge of international law, and probably on the wrong side of it. Launching the Merlins was a decision that would be taken at the very highest level. By which time they would probably all be out of ammunition and wearing orange jumpsuits.

  Or dead.

  He had the greatest confidence in his team of four—actually, his whole troop. This time around he had decided to take the Observation Team and leave Jock at the Hub with the insertion and backup group. His deputy, a very experienced ex-para sergeant major, was waiting with the final three teams by the Merlins in Saudi. If they had any sense, they were probably topping up their tans.

  The camp below him was beginning to come to life. His stabilised binos picked out three men in Arab clothing, wandering about. He checked for the black pickup the two non-Arabs had turned up in yesterday. He scanned left and right, up and down. Nothing. Well, almost nothing. Just behind one of the larger tents there was evidence of a white bonnet of a vehicle. He was sure that had been there before the two Westerners had arrived. He’d need to check the images on his table.

  If the black vehicle had gone, then maybe so had the two men. And they had disappeared between ten last night and six this morning.

  I wonder where they are?

  That would be a so-and-so. But at leas
t it would mean that their work was done and they could extract. Possibly soon? In daylight—back to the Hub? He’d need to think that through carefully.

  He slid off the ridge and fished out his tablet from his bergen. He wanted to check for the white pickup. He was sure he had photographed it before.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  Shots, high-velocity rounds, rang out to his left.

  Crack! Crack! Crack! Thump! Thump! Thump! The gap between the two sounds told Tony that they were fired about two hundred metres away. The crack of the round was overhead, the thump—the origins of the shot—to his right.

  “21 Charlie, contact, wait out.” A quick radio report. High-pitched; a gallop of words. From his nine o’clock. Ted Groves.

  Multiple cracks and then a volley of thumps. This time seemingly from every direction. Nothing landing near him. As far as he could tell.

  He tried to fathom where the rounds were coming from as he threw his camera and binos into the top of his bergen and reached for his SCAR-H rifle, releasing the safety catch as he did so. He turned expertly around under the cover of his poncho and gingerly stuck his head out of the entrance where his feet had been seconds before.

  Crack! Thump! Crack! Thump!

  “21 Charlie this is 20 Alpha—update, over!” Tony was on the radio. He needed to know what was happening with Ted. From where he was, he couldn’t see anything.

  “21 Alpha . . .”—heavy breathing from Trooper Sandy Jarman at six o’clock—“moving . . . up . . . toward . . . 21 Charlie now.”

  “’Roger.” Tony paused momentarily.

  Then back on the radio. “21 Bravo and Charlie?” A question.

  What the bloody hell is happening with you pair? Nothing from either of them. The sand and rocks echoing silence.

  Then more shots and a piercing cry off to his right. Nine o’clock—Ted Groves again. He’s been hit?