December Ultimatum (15 page)

It was a force nine and gout in the skipper’s right foot that prevented it.

The
Pegasus
was a converted Scottish motor trawler operating out of Aberdeen on the West Scottish coast. Once a week it sailed from that port eighty miles out into the North Sea to the giant oil drilling rig
Constellation,
supplying the one hundred and five men working there with essentials like kippers and smoked bacon, cigarettes, bread, water and a regular assortment of expensive rig equipment to replace the worn and the faulty. And once a month the
Pegasus
would bring out a new shift of men and take the tired ones back for a fortnight’s shore leave.

But on this morning, the
Pegasus
had been held up in Aberdeen harbour because of the pain in the skipper’s foot, long diagnosed as gout, symptom of a high uric acid level in his blood, the result of sixty-two excessive years. He should have been at the wheel at three am, but the pain was such that when he had swallowed the last of his Brufen painkillers, he realized he could not sail without more. He would wait for his doctor’s surgery to open, get a new prescription and sail at nine. But in the meantime the wind turned around from south-west to north-east and the waves began hitting the breakwater twenty feet high. For three hours the
Pegasus,
deep in the water and full of supplies, rode the swell inside the protected harbour, tugging at her ropes, with her skipper—the painkillers having dissolved the pain—striding back and forth along the quay then looking at the sky and cursing the cussedness of Scottish weather. He did not know it but the north-easterly and his gout caused what was possibly the most fortunate delay in recent British history.

The
Pegasus
should have tied up at the rig at eleven that morning but instead she eventually came alongside at ten that night. It meant that the two men, hidden in the forward hold of the supply vessel, had either to abandon their attempt to blow up the rig or do what they could despite the late hour, and despite the tide that was now running from slack to ebb.

They knew that the one hour of slack tide had been crucial to their operation, so meticulously planned. Sitting there in the dark, sick with the sea’s buffeting and the smell of diesel oil, they talked in whispers. They could go back to Aberdeen and report to their superiors that the attack had had to be abandoned. Or they could do what they had come all this way to do, in spite of the tide and the odds against them.

They had come aboard in their black neoprene diving suits, carrying their compressed air-bottles, the previous evening while supplies were still being loaded into the
Pegasus’s
holds. They had taken it in turns to sleep during the night, but they had both heard the wind turn and felt the rise and swell of the water inside the harbour and they knew before they heard the skipper’s curses that it was going wrong and there was nothing they could do to change it.

Their own people would ask later why, knowing that the delay in the harbour made it impossible for the attack on the rig to succeed, the two went ahead with it? Why didn’t they abandon
Pegasus
and report back and wait for new orders? There was never to be an answer.

The rubber tyres on the supply boat’s sides prevented the teak boards from being splintered in the sea’s buffeting and after much manoeuvring the skipper got his lines securely tied to one of the rig’s tubular steel legs. The hatches were then opened and through the icy, stinging spray supplies were slowly hoisted to the main platform a hundred and twenty feet up, the rig’s floodlights making harsh daylight on
Pegasus’s
deck. All eyes were on the work, so no one saw the two divers emerge through the forward hatch and slip overboard, though had anyone seen them they would have been taken for maintenance divers going below to carry out any one of a hundred routine checks on the drilling gear. They carried across their chests toolpacks identical to those used by the rig’s diving engineers, and the same weighted orange coloured torches. But they did not carry tools in the chest packs. Neatly arranged inside them were seven pounds of plastic high explosive, two electro-magnets, nylon lines and detonators that could be activated by a radio signal sent from the radio transmitter carefully concealed between the timbers of the
Pegasus’s
forward hold.

Before they began their dive through the black sea, they tied a cord to the steel tow-ring at the base of the boat’s bow, a bright orange nylon cord that would guide them back up. Slowly they began their struggle down and, every few minutes, each man shone his torch at the depth gauge on his wrist. Only these occasional flashes through the blackness assured the other he was not alone. Still they carried on down, hoping the current would ease. At eighty feet they came together, facing each other, their torches alight so that the one could see the other. One passed his hand sideways across his throat in a cutting motion, but the other shook his head and pointed downwards indicating that they should dive deeper. There was a moment’s hesitation. Then the other nodded, the torch lights went out and the orange cord unwound further.

At one hundred and twenty feet beneath the hull of the
Pegasus,
they stopped diving, their torches came on again and they checked the depth gauges on their wrists. Their faces were only a yard apart and in the brilliant glare they saw each other’s eyes through their masks. They had hoped that at this depth the strength of the running tide would not prevent them doing what they had come to do, but they were still struggling to keep their position against the leg of the rig, twisting to stop their air bottles turning them upside down. They felt the vicious tug at their goggles and mouthpiece and they knew, even as they began to undo their chest packs, that they had failed.

Their target was one of the four huge legs that supported the rig above water and the series of underwater bearing supports that held the drill in position. Both men had been employed on oil rigs as construction divers, so they both knew exactly what could be sabotaged with a little explosive. It was impractical to blow the drill. Any malfunction in the drilling mechanism itself or any blow in the pipeline and the oil outlet on the seabed was immediately and completely sealed by what oil men call the ‘Christmas tree’. To blow the Christmas tree meant going down three hundred feet or more, and that could only be done in a diving bell. It was decided that the quickest and easiest sabotage was to collapse one of the legs at its weld seam, the weakest point, so the entire rig would topple into the sea. There was an even chance that as it went over it would pull the Christmas tree up with it, freeing the pressure of oil and spilling it out at the rate of a thousand gallons a minute. It had been estimated by the planners who had hired and trained the divers that it would take between eight and thirty hours to cap the well again, an operation delayed and hampered by the oil and the need to rescue the survivors who had gone overboard. In that time, they calculated, nearly ten million gallons of crude oil would have spilled into the North Sea with the tides and wind spreading it fast to the eastern Scottish coast, the Norwegian and Danish coasts and, with the wind constant from the North East, oil would enter the English Channel, the Thames Estuary, and touch the Normandy coast.

But
Pegasus
had been late, the divers had lost their one precious hour of slack water, and the tide was now running fast and quickly, sapping their strength. Yet they had come this far, had risked so much, and the reward promised was so great that, struggling in the darkness at a depth of one hundred and twenty feet, they decided to continue.

Holding on to the nylon line with one hand, they unzipped their chest packs, took out one of the two electromagnets and clamped it to the leg. On the magnet was an eyelet and, as one man held the other steady in the surge, he threaded half-inch thick nylon cord through it and through that he threaded the small round doughnut-shaped packs of explosive and the detonator rings. They struggled to keep their position as the sea surged this way and that, turning them and pulling them away from the steel leg. But the magnet was now clamped tight on to the steel and the divers used it to keep themselves steady. For another five minutes they slowly threaded the explosive doughnuts and the detonators on to the cord, every effort harder than the last, until fifteen had been secured.

Then, pulling the second magnet from his chest pack, the senior diver, took hold of the end of the cord and began to swim around the twenty-five foot circumference of the huge leg, so that the explosives were evenly spread around it. But at that moment, as he let go of the orange safety line, a current of sea pushed its way through the maze of steel struts and he was suddenly caught in its flow. Desperately he began clawing for the safety line but as the other watched in the flood of torchlight, he saw the black body tossed up and down and smashed against the steel, and he saw the man’s airpipe torn from the valve and a burst of bubbles shoot from the bottles. Then only the blackness, only the nylon cord carrying the doughnuts, shaking violently around him with the heavy electro-magnet on the end of it. Quickly he tugged in the orange safety line and began to pull himself up, forcing his flippers down in an effort to lever his tiring body away from the explosives, away from the heavy magnet that spun around him in the swirling current. But just as he felt he was free the cord and the explosives whipped around him like a dozen lassos, tying his arms tight against his body and then there was the sudden and terrifying thump on his back as the electromagnet clamped itself to his steel bottles.

The rig’s maintenance divers found him the following morning, his head torn off by the whiplash of the underwater current. He was trussed up like rolled mutton, the nylon cord wrapped tightly around him, secured at one end by one powerful electro-magnet to the steel leg and held by the second clamped to his bottles.

The headless torso, the explosive doughnuts and the detonators were brought to the surface, the body to be examined and its finger-prints taken, the detonators to be disarmed and the plastic to be taken away by a Royal Air Force helicopter to Kinross. By the time the
Pegasus
had arrived back in Aberdeen, eight police in uniform and three men in civilian clothes were waiting on the quayside. With apologies from the police Superintendent, the plain clothes men, led by a middle-aged man the other two referred to as Colonel, went into the boat’s holds. They stayed down there searching for forty minutes and when they reappeared, the Colonel was carrying what looked to the skipper like a small portable radio transmitter, though he had seen nothing quite like it before.

When they had left, with casual apologies, the skipper took the
Pegasus
around to the dry dock for inspection. The portside screw had been fouled up and he saw that it was bound in a bright orange nylon cord that someone, for some extraordinary reason unknown to him, had tied to the forward tow shackle on the underneath of the bow.

Nothing was made public concerning the
Constellation
rig or the headless diver, tied up in explosive, who had been found one hundred feet beneath it. Nor was much interest shown locally when the skipper told his story over his evening beer about the plain-clothes man called Colonel who had found a radio in
Pegasus’s
forward hold. And, as no organization claimed the diver’s torso, the incident was for ever to remain a secret.

Only in Dublin, Belfast and New York did the lack of radio and television news that morning confirm that the sabotage attempt had been a failure. The divers must be dead. They would have made contact otherwise. Shortly after midday a call from Dublin to the Irish Revolutionary Party offices in New York, relaying an eye-witness account from their agent in Aberdeen, confirmed that the
Pegasus
had returned undamaged but with a headless passenger.

It was the end of a plot to aggravate, in the most outrageously sensational way, the British oil dilemma and had been masterminded by sophisticated Irishmen in New York who would only have found need to advertise themselves had their attempt succeeded. As it hadn’t they were content to sip their dry Martinis high above Manhattan, just as ready to try something else, just as sensational another time.

That night the towns and cities of Britain experienced something they had forgotten existed. The Government not only suspended sales of fuel oil for domestic heating, but at the same time also suspended the Clean Air Acts which had banned the use of any but smokeless fuels in built-up areas. So that night people warmed themselves with coal and wood in open grates, and looked out of their windows on the first smogs for more than twenty years.

ULLSWATER

‘Two horses and a saddle’

Franklin sat in the front passenger seat of the Range Rover driven by the Chief Constable of Cumbria, the administrative county that encompasses the Lake District of northern England. They were travelling along the M6 motorway towards the Penrith turn off that would take them on to the road to Pooley Bridge and Howtown at the eastern end of Lake Ullswater, bordering King Fahd’s estate.

For an hour he had been listening to the news bulletins over the car radio, reporting the panic that was now sweeping the United States—the same panic that now threatened Britain and Europe. The British Government had reneged on its oil contracts with its North Sea oil embargo. In response, the French President closed French airports to British airliners, the West Germans had begun recalling short-term loans off British banks, and the Belgians were stoning the British Embassy at The Hague. Even an England v. Netherlands football match in Amsterdam was cancelled.

‘Your President’s waving the big stick,’ said the Chief Constable. He was a burly man who had outgrown his jacket and Franklin saw that his shirt-cuffs were frayed.

Franklin nodded back. ‘He reckons that’s just about the most threatening weapon in the Pentagon’s armoury,’ he said.

‘Will he invade?’

‘He can’t. We just don’t have the capacity. The Russians are already there, all around the Gulf. It would take America two weeks to set up a force big enough to land there and stay.’

‘Dangerous then, to issue such an ultimatum.’

‘Right.’

‘And frightening. You’re our leaders too, you know.’

‘You’re right,’ said Franklin. ‘It’s frightening.’

The Chief Constable looked into his driving mirror. The car in the police convoy behind him was flashing its headlamps.

‘They want us to speed up,’ he said.

He leaned across to thumb down a switch and Franklin could just make out the revolving blue light reflected on the car’s bonnet. There was a quick burst of siren and cars in front of them in the fast outside lane, travelling at the regulation seventy miles an hour, quickly moved left to let them pass by.

‘You’ve no doubts about Schneider?’ asked the Chief Constable.

‘She’s here.’

‘The canister too? It’s fantastic.’

‘That’s what Howard said.’

‘Howard?’

‘Someone I met. One of your people in Dublin.’ Franklin pulled out his cigarettes and the Chief Constable pushed in the lighter button on the dash, but shook his head as Franklin opened the packet to him.

‘It took him a day to make someone talk before he got to know about Schneider’s arrival and the canister. I think that one day delay could cost us a lot.’

‘Fahd is that important?’ asked the policemen.

‘Without him back on his throne, we’re apparently all in trouble.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know myself. It’s an Agency operation, that’s all I know, and it’s moving on a Presidential directive which means it’s big. For whatever reason they want Fahd back we’ve gotta believe it’s a good one.’

‘I believe you,’ said the Chief Constable. He paused. Then he said, as if he’d suddenly lost interest. ‘D’you know, I think it’s going to snow again!’

Franklin could see the mountains of the Lake District ahead, rolling black and white shapes, like sleeping dinosaurs. And touching them, sprawling over them, snow clouds, like dirty grey tablecloths, coming in from the north-east. He had never been this far north of this tiny island before and it struck him, watching the face of the countryside change as the sky changed above it, that there was possibly no other country he had ever visited where the weather could alter the character of the land and its people so rapidly. Britain and the British he had always been told were so constant. He found them both flimsy and volatile.

He saw the motorway sign and the convoy of police cars turned left towards the motorway junction. An army roadblock was ahead, three Scorpion light tanks and a Scout helicopter were parked on the grass verge. Identities were exchanged.

‘I’ve a message for a Mr Franklin, sir.’

‘I’m Franklin.’

The army captain leant forward closer to the car window. ‘It’s from one of our patrols, sir who’ve been scouting along Martindale, that’s on the south-west corner of the Lake, sir, about three miles down the valley. A farm’s been attacked . . . man and his wife shot dead.’

‘Is that all?’

‘No, sir. We’ve had orders from headquarters to let you know of anything to do with horses.’

‘Yes?’

‘Two seem to have been taken from the farm, sir. Two horses . . . and a saddle. Nothing else missing.’

The Chief Constable of Cumbria, already briefed by Franklin on the preposterous possibility and the sudden extraordinary relevance of horses, accelerated away down the winding road between the high hawthorn hedges lined with oaks towards Lake Ullswater.

She led the horses carefully through the tight gulley, wet from the small waterfall that splashed its way through the crevices and bounced off the boughs of alders, trees that had curled and spread over it forming a ceiling of leaves. The first horse tugged at its halter to drink from a small pool that had collected in the indent of a boulder and Schneider waited until it was satisfied. Then she pulled them further down into the shade and tied their halters to the root of a sapling giving them enough strap to eat.

She had made it just in time. Snow was beginning to fall, and the clouds were heavy. Within an hour it would be inches deep and every footstep, every hoof mark and rabbit’s paw, even the pattering of woodcock and pheasant, would be seen by a trained tracker. But she had left no tracks and in an hour’s time the snow would be a help. It would muffle sound and hamper the army patrols.

She held the map towards the late afternoon light and with her finger traced the line she had drawn on it above Martindale church through the stream and up the side of Hallin Fell following the sheep tracks, beyond Sandwick Village still climbing to the Knab. Her finger stopped with the tip of her nail touching a small black square overprinted Howtown. She planned to stand on the top of the mountain looking down to the small estate, certain to see the lights of the house a thousand feet below. And there, as the mountain sloped towards the edge of Ullswater, she would leave the horse with the lead canister strapped to it. There she would cut its hamstrings, there she would set the timing device of the detonator that would explode the soft lead and release the plutonium. And the mountain’s downdraught would take its death rapidly and inevitably to Howtown and the King.

She had given herself only fifteen minutes to ride the second horse away from the explosion, estimating that the wind off the mountain would be constant and that the flow of radioactivity would not begin to change direction until it had reached the warmer turbulent air of the valley. Even if the lower winds did begin to take it south, she would be ahead of it and outside the contamination area before it could reach her. If she was wrong she would die by her own devices. For this reason alone the small black pistol was in her breast pocket.

She folded the map and looked up towards the mountains a mile the other side of Martindale. Through the falling snow she could see figures three thousand yards away moving along the skyline, men with back-packs and rifles. And she knew the dead farmer and his wife had been found.