Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (28 page)

The man had started speaking again. ‘So where do we go from here, Jiménez?’ he was saying. ‘Because, you see, we can have you arrested, right here and now, on suspicion of links to international organized crime. We can hand you over to the Colombian Embassy, who will have you on a plane to Bogotá by tomorrow. You think I’m bluffing?’

Jiménez stared blankly back at him, giving nothing away. Inside his head, he was seriously worried. This man was building up to making some kind of impossible demand from him, he could feel it, and now they had that photograph, his options were not looking good.

‘Let me tell you,’ continued the tall man with the missing finger, ‘my people in Bogotá have done their research. You’re looking at a long stretch in one of your country’s worst prisons. By the time you get out, your bank accounts will have been frozen, your family will have fallen into poverty, your wife will have left you for someone who can take care of her, and your children will have grown up forgetting what you look like. You’ll be an old man and they won’t even know you. Sound good?’

It was quite a speech, and the tall man sat back in his chair, arms folded, considering him. Jiménez felt like spitting in his
face and was half tempted to do so. Instead he stared at the table in silence. He was waiting to hear the alternative and, sure enough, here it came.

‘So here’s what I can offer you,’ said the blond man. ‘My Service – my organization – can make all of that go away. No need for arrests or charges. La Modelo has quite enough prisoners already. But, in return, you have to help me.’

Jiménez looked up into the man’s eyes and saw ruthlessness. They were ice cold, like the snow on the windswept summit of Pico Simón Bolívar back home.

The man leaned forward and spoke into his face. ‘Señor Jiménez . . . Capitán Jiménez . . . You need to tell me what this ship has hidden on it. What is it you’re carrying that’s so secret it made you switch off your AIS beacon? We need to know where to find it and you need to tell us now.’

Hector Jiménez held Luke’s gaze, his face now set hard in an attitude of defiance. His mind was made up. If he betrayed the cartel he would end up a hunted man all his life. It wouldn’t matter where he fetched up, Miami, Madrid, San José, they would find him eventually. Take the rap now and he and his family would be well looked after. Even in prison they would take care of them. The cartel looked after its own, everyone knew that. And if they found the right judge, well, he might even be out in a year.

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ said Jiménez, and stuck out his jaw.

‘
NOTHING, BOSS. SHE’S
clean. We’ve searched her top to bottom.’ A grim-faced Major Loames was up on the bridge speaking into the high-frequency radio. Raising his voice above the noise of the pitching, rolling Atlantic outside, his call had gone through to Task Group Headquarters at the SBS base in Poole, Dorset. He was speaking directly to the commanding officer.

‘As far as we can see,’ added Loames, ‘she’s carrying nothing but tractor parts and empty beer cans. The HAZMAT guys have been all over her with the Geiger counters and the readings are normal. We’re taking her into port for a closer look. We’ll need to get the Fleet divers to check out her hull. That bit we couldn’t do in this sea state.’

In the ops room at Poole, the SBS commanding officer swore, turned to his regimental sergeant major and shook his head. Now it was his turn to have a difficult conversation, this time with Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood. There, in a windowless room, they put him on speakerphone as they stood around the table waiting for the word. It was a heavyweight audience gathered there that night: the director of Special Forces, a Royal Navy captain from Fleet Intelligence and Britain’s Joint Force commander, a four-star general whose command included all Special Forces and Joint Operations. This was not the news anyone was hoping to hear. Level by level, it worked its way up
the chain of command, prompting sighs of disappointment and tired heads resting on hands, until finally a secure cell phone was handed to the Prime Minister at Chequers. His response was far from charitable. They had drawn a blank. This maritime counter-terrorism operation had failed.

Onboard the MV
Maria Esposito
Loames turned to Luke with an expression as black as thunder. ‘Looks like Fleet fed us dodgy intel. Or was it your spooks? Doesn’t really matter now, does it? We’re stuck with this rust bucket all the way to Falmouth.’ Capitán Jiménez had been placed under guard in a room down below while the second mate, released from his handcuffs but still closely watched, was now steering the vessel to port. There, a crew from the harbourmaster’s office would come out to meet them and take over the helm.

Luke felt about as low as he possibly could. He was deflated, weary and angry, all at the same time. And his foot was throbbing. It wasn’t just the massive let-down of an intercept that had turned up nothing. That he could live with. No, it was the growing possibility that this whole Colombian venture, right from the first awkward boardroom meeting in Vauxhall Cross, might be about to culminate in failure. Failure for him, failure for the Service, and potentially a nightmare for Britain, if the device, the weapon, whatever it was, ever went off. And what about Elise? All these days away, unable to tell her what he was doing, where he was going, her worrying if he was safe. Which he clearly wasn’t. And yet, for some reason he could not figure out, he was holding off calling her. Perhaps it was because he preferred to have no distractions while he was on this job. And that reminded him: he’d better have a conversation with Khan, get it over with.

He sat in the ship’s radio room, being patched through to Sid Khan’s secure mobile. He braced himself to hear a gloomy run-through of damage-limitation measures coupled with some fairly dire predictions. Instead, he heard Khan’s voice, animated, combative and strangely upbeat.

‘Here’s the thing, Luke,’ he began, almost as if he were taking
him into his confidence. ‘We just don’t accept the result. That ship is carrying something: our analysis team is absolutely positive on that score. They’ve backtracked her routing across the Atlantic and, frankly, its erratic and evasive. Oh, and NSA picked up a signal she put out soon after she came through the Panama Canal.’

‘What did it say?’ asked Luke.

‘It was a single word, and that’s unusual in itself – doesn’t exactly fit the pattern of normal commercial maritime comms. It was “Benicio”. Any thoughts on that?’

It was just a name, nothing more, and Luke could think only of the actor, Benicio del Toro, which didn’t really help. ‘Sorry. Doesn’t ring any bells.’

‘Anyway, moving on,’ said Khan. ‘What did you get out of the skipper? How did he react to that photo of him with García?’

‘It seemed to take the wind out of his sails. That was impressive research.’

Khan gave a quiet chuckle. ‘Research?’ he repeated. ‘More like Photoshopping!’

Nice one! There had never been a photo of García with the ship’s captain.

‘Whatever,’ said Luke. ‘He’s holding out, obviously decided where his loyalties lie. How long can we keep him when we get to Falmouth?’

‘Forty-eight hours,’ said Khan. ‘Then he’ll be handed over to his embassy. But the Navy divers will have been all over the ship by then. So, with any luck, Captain Jiménez might change his tune.’

A Colombian drug cartel miniature submarine is not built for rough seas. Unable to dive to any great depth, fundamentally unstable in the water, it is intended for calm equatorial waters, like mangrove inlets and balmy tropical reefs. Certainly not the English Channel in a Force 5 wind, gusting to Force 7. Buffeted and battered by the Cornish waves, the two submariners were battling to keep the craft on course. They were a very long way from home and partially disoriented by the past few weeks at sea, cooped up aboard the MV
Maria Esposito
as the ship ploughed
eastwards across the Atlantic, followed by that last-minute emergency exit from the hull. That was surely not the way it was supposed to be. They hadn’t trained for it and it was a miracle, they agreed, that nothing had gone wrong with the launch.

‘
Ay! Mama!
’ wailed the pilot in front as another giant wave rolled over them, causing him to hit his head on the welded steel bulkhead. ‘How much further in this shit can?’ he called, to the man seated behind him. They were just below the waves, close enough to the surface to feel the effects of the storm yet unable to see anything with the naked eye. In the bare, barren interior of the mini-sub the navigator sat behind him, his knees squashed practically up to his chin, struggling to keep a grip on his charts as the sub rolled and dipped in the surf.

‘Just keep going on the same heading,’ he replied, rather unconvincingly.

‘You don’t know, do you?’ retorted the pilot. ‘
Imbecil.
If you get us lost in this, I swear I will kill you.’ The weeks of enforced idleness aboard the
Maria Esposito
, as she made her way from Panama to the English Channel, had done nothing to improve their relationship. There were only so many games of Parqués, the Colombian board game – the navigator had brought it with him – that two people could play before they felt like killing each other.

But right now, as they made their tortuous way through the dark and turbulent seas off the south coast of Cornwall towards the designated landing site, both submariners were thinking the same thing.
This is madness and it is quite possible that we may not make it.
Since the rendezvous off the coast of Panama they had done precious little maintenance on the mini-sub, largely because it had been hidden in the false hold at the bottom of the
Maria Esposito
. But they were paying for it now, as rivulets of sea water streamed alarmingly down the walls of the interior. The bilge pump had packed up.

They had argued against the decision to launch in this weather, both men telling Capitán Jiménez it was insane to put to sea in a jerry-built mini-sub in a gale. But he had shown them the signal
and the terse order from the cartel, then practically pushed them off his ship into the Atlantic. What the two men didn’t know was that he had had good reason to follow orders. Within twenty minutes of the launch from the
Maria Esposito
he’d had the SBS fast-roping down onto the deck. When they had put those handcuffs on him and the tall Englishman had led him off to the radio room to offer that absurd deal, Jiménez had known what none of those
cabrones
knew: a miniature submarine containing something extremely dangerous was less than five kilometres away, heading for the darkened Cornish coast, and they had missed it by minutes.

‘
ONE MORE FOR
the road, Jack?’ The barmaid leaned across and tapped old Jack Hammill’s arm. He seemed to have gone to sleep where he sat.

‘Dreckley,’ he replied, using the Cornish equivalent of ‘Soon, but not just yet’.

‘Wozza madder withee?’ she continued. ‘You used to be the life and soul, you did. Now look at yers.’

‘I’m getting old, that’s what,’ said the retired policeman, and shuffled off to answer the call of nature. Occupied. ‘Bugger that,’ he muttered, pushed open the door of the Halzephron Inn and tottered out into the night. The wind came barrelling in off the Atlantic waves below and caught him full in the face. For a moment he stood there, rocking gently, then walked on down the hill to find a bush.

‘That’s odd,’ he muttered to himself, as he fumbled with his zip in the dark. He could swear lights were flashing dimly down on Gunwalloe Cove. Who would want to be out on Porthleven Sands on this kind of a night? Probably some young surfers, stoned out of their minds, he reckoned, camping in the storm for a dare. Stupid bloody grockles. Might check up on them in the morning. Jack had hung up his uniform years ago but in his heart he had never stopped being a copper.

For the five men working in the dark in the bleak, windswept cove, it was lucky that nobody other than Jack Hammill noticed them. When he toddled back into the bar, a few tell-tale dark splashes showing on his trousers, nobody paid him too much attention. Even if he had got within earshot of the men, Jack would not have understood a word they were saying, because they were talking in low, hoarse whispers, speaking the language of the red-brick Colombian
barrios.
The cartel’s men were working against the clock to bring something ashore in secret. They knew that everything, even the lives of their families in Colombia, depended on their getting the job done and disappearing before anyone saw them.

FROM THE NARROW
shingle beach of Gunwalloe Cove, an unpaved road just wide enough to let a vehicle pass leads up the hill between wind-blasted bushes and dry-stone walls. The van made its way, in the darkness before dawn, up onto the flat, rolling heath, past the gorse and along winding lanes slick with rain. The man in the driving seat gripped the wheel, his knuckles white, staring dead ahead as his lights illuminated the uneven road. Beside him sat a man with a gleaming gold tooth, his clothes cleaner than those of the others in the vehicle. Only his boots bore the marks of the beach where he had stood for over an hour giving orders, cajoling, cursing and, eventually, congratulating, once the cargo was finally hoisted into the vehicle.

It was just before the junction with the A3083 that they saw the Military Police patrol vehicle. It was parked discreetly beside the road, close to the rusting barbed-wire coils that ringed the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose. It was already too late to avoid it.

‘
Cuidado!
Watch out!’ shouted Gold Tooth, as the driver, unsure of what to do, swerved to one side, then braked hard. Immediately the patrol car’s flashing lights went on.

‘Pull over,’ hissed Gold Tooth. ‘I’ll speak, not you.’

The RMP Land Rover drew up behind them. A man in uniform got out and walked up to the window on the driver’s side. His red armband bore the thick black letters ‘MP’, he wore a
pistol at his side and in his hand was a heavy standard-issue right-angled torch. He shone it straight at the face of the driver, then peered beyond him into the interior of the van. Several sleepy figures looked back at him, shielding their eyes from the intense beam of white light.