Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (47 page)

Inside the blue van, Keith Gammon had been listening to the exchange with mounting concern. He didn’t like being around uniforms. He certainly didn’t like the police, and the thought of what might have ensued if the officers had decided to search the back of the Primastar caused his hands to tremble. That wasn’t good, with what he was about to do. Peering out of the vehicle, he watched the mini-digger at work. They had already excavated the first metre.

By 14.35 the trench was finished. One of Ana María’s team of five jumped down into it to check it. It had been dug to meet exact specifications measured in advance: one and a half metres deep by two metres long by one metre wide. The man stood up and flashed a thumbs-up to Ana María. She walked over to the van and tapped on the window. Gammon wound it down.

‘Now it’s your turn,’ she told him.

The most delicate phase of the operation was about to begin.

It was now essential that neither the police nor anyone else came anywhere near the trench. Ana María had delegated one of the team to keep watch while the driver climbed back into the van. Carefully he repositioned it in two moves, shifting it just a couple of metres to the left so that now it covered the hole. Two of the team joined Gammon in the back. Together they pulled back the retractable floor, revealing a rectangular gap of much the
same dimensions as the trench. Next, they dragged the heavy coffin-shaped box from the back and positioned it over the hole. There were three handles on it, attached to ropes, and, under Gammon’s instruction, they each held on, bracing themselves with their legs apart as they took the weight and lowered the box into the trench.

When it was done, and they were satisfied that it was settled on the bottom, Gammon switched on the head torch on his hard hat and dropped through the open floor of the van, balancing himself on the edges of the ‘coffin’, then standing inside it, next to the heavy cylindrical canister. He was less than a metre away from 750 grams of radioactive caesium chloride. He called for someone to pass him his toolbag.

The cartel had not chosen Keith Gammon for his welding skills alone, although that was a vital part of the contract. His military experience in handling high-explosive charges and detonators had piqued their interest, the result of a casual conversation during prisoners’ association at Wandsworth. If they could source the explosives, they asked, could Gammon put together a viable device? He could, he had assured them. Now it was time to prove it, with the clock ticking and two uniformed police officers just a hundred metres away.

From a cellophane wrapper inside his toolbag he slowly withdrew a long lump of what looked like orange putty. It was 250 grams of Semtex 1A, sourced by the cartel from their underworld contacts in Eastern Europe the month before. Kneading it with his hands, he moulded it around the base of the canister, positioning it in such a way that, when it exploded, the force of the blast would split the canister in two and drive its toxic contents high into the air. Keith Gammon had some idea of what was in the canister. He had done basic NBC training – nuclear, biological and chemical – during his time in the Army, before it had been rebranded as CBRNE. But if someone had asked him about the properties of caesium chloride, its half-life, and how long it would take to remove from an area the size of Whitehall, he could not have told them. He was also unaware of what had become of the
two Colombian submariners who had fallen ill with acute radiation sickness after transporting the material in a tiny confined space across the English Channel in a storm.

Blocking everything else from his mind, Keith Gammon concentrated on inserting first the master detonator into the Semtex, then a second as back-up. He took hold of the wires trailing from the detonators and inserted them into the homemade switch device, an object about the size of a refillable cigarette lighter, which he had built and tested at the disused airfield.

‘Everything all right down there?’ called one of the men above, breaking Gammon’s concentration and almost causing him to drop the switch. ‘Ana María says can you get a move on.’

‘Ana María can sod off,’ said Gammon, under his breath, then added, louder, ‘It’s fine. Just five more minutes.’

He felt along the edge of the switch until he located two further wires leading out of it, the positive and the negative. He inserted the other ends into what would look to many people like a chef’s professional timer. It was a magnetic countdown timer but he had doctored it to Ana María’s specifications. She had been most precise about this. Instead of running to just twenty-four hours, this one could be set to go off at any time over the next five days.

The next bit always scared him, even now, all these years after leaving the Army. He checked his watch, calculated the number of hours and minutes remaining till the time she had chosen for the device to be detonated, then programmed it into the timer. Finally, and this was the true heart-in-mouth moment, he moved the switch to ‘on’. Nothing happened. He was still alive.

‘Coming up,’ he called. ‘You can fill it in now.’

Ana María had promised the police they would be off the parade ground within an hour, and they were. At 14.55 they drove to the edge of the square where they had entered it less than two hours earlier. She waved to the police patrol car and waited patiently for the retractable bollards to be lowered. At 15.01 the blue Nissan
Primastar van, with its distinctive logo and the yellow JCB mini-digger in tow drove off Horse Guards Parade and turned right, then right again, merging into the traffic on Trafalgar Square.

They were leaving behind something that had travelled more than twenty-two thousand kilometres across two oceans from the Pang Sang Un People’s Defence Unit on the outskirts of Pyongyang to the heart of London. They were leaving behind Nelson García’s gift to the people of Britain: his Palomita, his Little Dove. Ticking away unseen beneath the earth and gravel of Horse Guards Parade, a device was primed to send a cone-shaped plume of lethal radioactive debris high over Whitehall. The timing was important to all of them – to Ana María, to Suarez and, most of all, to García. He wanted this to be symbolic. He wanted what followed to be something that twisted the bayonet of pain in the conscience of a nation. You mess up my operations? You pay the price. That was his message to Britain.

The time of detonation had been chosen some weeks ago. It would take place the following Sunday, as the country was marking the most solemn moment in the national calendar. The moment when Big Ben would strike eleven times, and when broadcasters would remind Britons of a time long ago, in 1918, when ‘at the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month . . . the guns fell silent.’

DRIVING IN CONVOY
down a rutted road, swerving at potholes and touching the brakes each time some nocturnal forest animal scuttled in front of them, the pair of GMC Suburbans moved north through the night. Nelson García was seated in the rear vehicle, cushioned by the suspension and his own considerable bulk. Uncomfortable as the journey was, he felt buoyed up and elated. Everything was coming together nicely. The London plan was about to go into operation, and when it did, they could search for him all they liked but he would be a hard man to find: Suarez had seen to that.

There had never been a Panama plan, of course – that had always been a decoy, a red herring, something to set the staff gossiping. They had a chuckle about that now, him and Suarez, as they made their escape through the darkened back roads of Antioquia province. If they had known that a heavily armed, highly trained and extremely frustrated US Special Ops team was squatting in a forest layby just a few kilometres to the south, well, García would have laughed even louder.

Ninety minutes out from the old planter’s villa, the lead vehicle’s headlights lit up a gap in the trees where the forest thinned out, and García’s party swung off the road into a field. They had reached the airstrip. Beneath a canopy of camouflage netting, a Cessna 206 single-engine turboprop was being readied for departure, its three
fat rubber tyres glistening with rainwater, reflecting the beams of the torches. Bags were rapidly stowed in the back of the plane while the flight plan was checked but never filed. Someone handed García a Thermos of iced lemon juice as Suarez stood, his hands on his hips, keeping an eagle eye on proceedings.

‘Alfonso!’ García called to him, and waved him over. El Pobrecito liked to get people to come to him. ‘I know you think of everything,’ he said, ‘but indulge me, please. Reassure me one more time.
La Colección
is safe, is it not?’

Suarez tipped his head to one side and smiled, as if to say, Do you honestly think I’d let you down on something as important as that?

‘The Collection is safe, Patrón. They will be arriving in San Salvador any minute now. All the arrangements have been made.’

García reached out an arm and hugged him. ‘
Buen trabajo
,’ he told him. ‘Great work. I knew I could count on you. Because, you know, if anything happened to—’

‘Patrón!’ Suarez cut him short. ‘The Collection is all safe. Trust me on this.’

The Cessna 206, known sometimes as the Super Skywagon, has a cruising speed of just 280 kilometres per hour and only six seats, enough for the pilot to take García, Suarez, Vicente Morales and his favourite bodyguard, a bull-headed man known only as Animal. The last seat was piled with their effects, which included at least six hundred rounds of ammunition. The Cessna 206 was a small, discreet plane, especially when its fuselage and wings were painted a dull brown, as this one’s were. A perfect aircraft, in fact, for flying very low across a darkened South America when you didn’t want to be seen. Little wonder that the jungle valleys of Bolivia and of Peru’s Apurímac region were littered with craft that hadn’t made it.

After a lurching trundle across the field, the pilot made some final checks of his instruments, then opened the throttle and accelerated into the darkness. Squeezed behind him, García and Suarez locked hands as the Cessna became airborne, a silent
gesture of self-congratulation amid the rasping roar of the Continental engine. It was 01.45.

Levelling out at low altitude, the Cessna headed almost due east. This, like the Panama rumour, was also a deception. Twenty minutes into the flight the pilot veered sharp right, taking them on a dog-leg flightpath south. Beneath massing thunderclouds they flew just below radar cover for another three hours straight, at times the plane almost kissing the treetops.

‘
La selva amazónica!
’ shouted the pilot above the engine noise, pointing down to the darkness below. He turned in his seat to see his passengers’ reaction, but they were fast asleep. No one heard him announce that they had crossed into the vast region known as the Amazon Basin, where up to an hour’s flying time can pass with no sign of human life. They were still in Colombian airspace but drawing close to the borders of three countries.

Preparations on the ground to receive García’s flight had begun some months back. Once again, Suarez had sent people to see to that. Part of an old timber loggers’ access road had been cut in a dead straight line through the jungle. The cartel had had it upgraded and resurfaced. At half a kilometre long before it turned a bend, it was more than adequate to accommodate the 430-metre landing distance needed for a Cessna 206.

And down on the banks of the Rio San Miguel, where the muddy river tributary twisted and coiled its way through the jungle, there was a large tin-roofed ranch that looked no different from a hundred others scattered across the area. Built high enough to escape the Amazon’s rising floodwaters during the rainy season, it was comfortable but not luxurious. It was close to a national park, the Cuyabeno, so it was not unusual to see boats chugging up the river and dropping off visitors, mostly eco-tourists. It was true that the ranch had rather more communications equipment than was usual, but the large, rotating satellite dish and the plethora of aerials were artfully hidden at the back, out of sight of anyone coming up the river. It had one other key advantage. It was, in theory, beyond the reach of Colombia’s powerful counter-narcotics police: the ranch, ‘La Machana’, was across the border in Ecuador.

THE CONTRAST COULD
not have been greater between the upbeat, ebullient mood of García’s party as they soared off into the night in the Cessna and the despondency of Luke, Todd Miller and all the others in their team who were left behind. Their quarry had eluded them, their mission had failed, and Tradewind had dropped out of contact. All in all, reflected Luke, a truly crap day.

There was nothing for it but to return to the same Medellín airbase, Olaya Herrera, whence they had set out, and wait for further instructions from London, Tampa and Langley. The driver resumed his place while Luke and Todd Miller regarded each other in the dim green glow from the vehicle’s dashboard, both thinking the same thing. We’ve just flown 2,200 kilometres across the entire span of the Caribbean, mounted a complex, well-planned operation, done everything by the book, and still we’ve failed.

For Luke, the prospect of returning empty-handed from South America for a second time in as many months was utterly galling. After what he had gone through at the Chop House in Buenaventura he had had serious misgivings about venturing back to Colombia and poking the hornets’ nest that was García’s cartel. But he had put aside his own fears to get the job done and finish with El Pobrecito once and for all. That, plainly, hadn’t happened.

When his encrypted phone vibrated in his pocket and he saw it was a call from VX, he was half expecting to get his marching orders. Perhaps Fate was telling him to listen to Elise and take the investment job after all. No. He wasn’t ready for that.

He answered the call. There was a slight delay due to the encryption.

‘Luke?’ said a middle-aged voice, stern and authoritative.

He didn’t recognize it. He angled his body away from the others and cupped his hand to the mouthpiece. ‘Speaking. Who’s this?’