Sword of Allah (35 page)

The US Blackhawk, cleared through Thai airspace, landed Warrant Officer Tom Wilkes and Lance Corporal Gary Ellis on a remote hilltop just inside the northern Thai border with Myanmar. Monroe had wanted to ‘tag along’, but Wilkes had vetoed it. Their partnership in Israel was a temporary one and Wilkes was no longer seconded to the CIA. This particular leg of the mission required stealth, something that seemed to go against the American’s grain. Commander Niven had shrugged when Monroe had complained. ‘Sorry, but the call is Warrant Officer Wilkes’s,’ he’d said. Monroe was pissed about it but Wilkes was sure the friendship would survive.

Wilkes and Ellis crossed into Myanmar just after sunset, when the air had cooled appreciably and smelled of rain and composting humus, of decay and regeneration.
They made good time to the planned observation point twenty-five klicks inside Myanmar, because most of it’d been spent on the back of an elephant, the animal’s swaying flanks rustling the grasses and leaves with a slow four/four beat.

‘American, American,’ the old elephant handler had said when Wilkes and Ellis bailed him up a handful of klicks into their trek. After his initial surprise at seeing two heavily armed soldiers from the West, the man had smiled with a mouth full of glistening black teeth and said, ‘Rocky, Rocky,’ and jabbed and hooked at the air. American? Well, it was close enough so Wilkes let it pass and, besides, he’d be paying with US dollars, the universal lubricant. He brought out a fistful of greenbacks and struck a deal on the spot.

There was not much to do on the elephant and it gave Wilkes time to reflect. Despite everything going on, his mind kept wandering back to Annabelle. He still couldn’t understand how they’d managed to hit the wall so hard. They’d talked a couple of times on the phone but the conversations had been strained. She’d moved to Sydney and, as usual, he was somewhere he couldn’t reveal. The fact that Belle was in Sydney was good, and bad. Townsville wasn’t under threat but, probably irrationally, he felt better about her being further away from Darwin.

Wilkes and Ellis arrived within two kilometres of the observation hill with time to spare. Their handler readily accepted an additional cash bonus, and somehow Wilkes managed to convey that there’d be more to come if he could keep the pachyderm’s motor running and take them back to the border before sunrise.

The night swallowed the elephant as it turned noisily, snorting through its trunk, and headed back down the trail, the handler waving at the soldiers and tapping the beast’s ears with a stick. Wilkes and Ellis both verified the time. The moon would rise above the hills at 0446, so there were plenty of hours of complete darkness to use as cover as they completed their tasks. Wilkes heard a coughing sound carried on the faint breeze. ‘Tiger,’ he said just above a whisper.

‘I know,’ said Ellis, who had a brief flash of himself hanging helplessly from the mouth of a large cat as it trotted proudly off to its cubs, and he shuddered. Eating a bullet was one thing, becoming an animal’s dinner was something else entirely, and he gave the pistol grip of his silenced M4 an involuntary squeeze to reassure himself.

Wilkes picked up on Ellis’s nervousness. ‘It’d be more scared of you than you are of it,’ he said.

‘I doubt it, boss,’ said Ellis smiling, his teeth almost fluorescent against his painted, camouflaged skin. He adjusted the NVG’s harness over his head, tightening it, and switched on the unit’s remote light source. One eye filled with green daylight, the jungle trail ahead now clearly illuminated and defined.

‘Let’s move,’ said Wilkes.

Ellis nodded.

They made their way cautiously to the ridgeline, listening for human sounds. The hills were densely covered in vegetation. They climbed the face of a lone hill too steep and rocky for the jungle to get a footing. Once climbed, the vantage point offered a clear line of sight across the valley. Wilkes breathed in the still night air and considered the changing role of Special Forces. Spotting for laser-guided
munitions had become their raison d’être. In World War II, a commando had had to physically attach explosives to the target, set the fuse and, once the thing had gone off, try to get as far away as possible before the enemy found him and fried his arse. It hadn’t changed much in Wilkes’s father’s day, a lance corporal in the SAS in Vietnam. Those men set the benchmark. They were masters of stealth, bushcraft and evasion. They had to be. Just as in World War II, they had to snuggle up to the target, blow it up and then vamoose through territory the enemy knew intimately.

The laser had changed all that. It created a hot spot that could be projected on a target up to four kilometres away. The explosive charge, instead of being affixed by a soldier, was dropped from an aircraft. A sensor in the nose of the bomb locked onto the hot spot and, in the majority of cases, bingo, scratched the target. The soldier still had to hightail it out after the damage was done because the laser had to paint the target right up until the ordnance did the job, but at least he had a head start. That was Gulf War I technology.

The ground-based laser target designator, and other systems like it, advanced the game even further. Satellites orbiting miles overhead were now in the loop, guiding the explosives package to the target. This allowed the user to slip in and out quietly, and be back in the Jason recliner rocker watching telly when things went boom.

‘Boss?’

‘Sorry, mate. Daydreaming,’ said Wilkes.

Ellis took up a position on an overhang above and behind Wilkes and kept his senses honed, a round up the spout of his M4. Wilkes removed the GLTD from his pack and mated it with the tripod. He switched the power on
and adjusted the legs of the tripod until the digital readout confirmed that the system was level. The GLTD illuminated the field of view in the familiar bright green of light enhancement. Wilkes centred the green dot on the intended target and confirmed the fact with the touch of a pad. This activated the device’s sensitive laser, which measured and recorded the target’s elevation, latitude and longitude to within fractions of seconds. He touched another pad, saving the information for later transmission. Finally, he used the GLTD to take an infrared image of the target, also for transmission. Wilkes signalled to Ellis that he was done, and then quickly dismantled and repacked the GLTD. Wilkes climbed up to Ellis and gave the signal to move. ‘The place is deserted,’ said Ellis.

‘Local festival,’ Wilkes said.

‘I hope for their sake they don’t return to work early.’

They quietly retraced their steps down the ridge and crossed the valley, where Wilkes made two more recordings on the GLTD.

An hour later, they were back on top of the elephant heading south, parting the jungle like a blunt-nosed barge through water, the musty smell of the animal’s hide mingling with the tang of sweat-soaked leather and the handler’s body odour.

Yet another four-way videoconference was underway between Skye Reinhardt and her bureau chief, that
ambitious bitch Ferallo in Australia, and the D-G himself in Langley. So far, all they’d done was confiscate her passport, but Skye knew it was just the beginning. The CIA was considering what to do with her, and it was not an organisation known for its understanding and sympathy towards employees with questionable allegiances.

‘Sir,’ she said, addressing the video image transmitted from Langley, Virginia, ‘as soon as Jeff confessed to me what he was up to, I came forward. Till then, I had nothing but suspicions.’

‘But you saw him with two known terrorists – you said you recognised them – so it was more than just suspicions,’ said Ferallo. ‘And what did you talk about for the two and a half months that you were seeing him?’

Reinhardt was getting tired of the same questions over and over, and she was especially tired of Ferallo. Maybe a frank admission would get the woman off her back. ‘Who talked? Mostly, we fucked,’ she said.

‘So what you’re saying is that you put your sex drive ahead of your country,’ Ferallo countered coolly.

‘Okay, let’s go over what he told you, Ms Reinhardt,’ said the D-G, scowling impatiently, the interplay between Ferallo and Reinhardt clearly giving him the shits. ‘I’ll just remind you that you have not been charged. Whether we do so or not depends on your cooperation.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Skye meekly.

‘Now, again please, Ms Reinhardt, tell us what you know about Jeff Kalas.’

Skye sucked in a breath and tried not to let it sound like exasperation. ‘We met at a hotel, the Manila Diamond. I recognised the two men he was sitting with. They left, and
I decided to, well, get to know Jeff. Why? Because I’m CIA and I was Johnny on the spot.’

Ferallo rolled her eyes. Intelligence work was not a place for romantics looking for adventure. How the hell did the psychs let this girl through? she wondered.

‘We quickly settled into a relationship. He often flew to Manila and we’d go out. I always tried to steer the conversation round to his job, what he did to earn all the cash he was continually splashing about. All he’d say was that he was
in money
, as in finance,’ Reinhardt said, using her fingers to indicate that this was a quote. ‘I swear that’s all he said until last week. Then it all came out. He told me he’d left his wife, wanted to live with me, and that he worked for two men who made a lot of money in Australia. And he admitted that he thought it was probably by selling drugs. He was helping them get that money out of the country. He’d buy diamonds legally – uncut ones from Western Australia, like the one I’ve handed over to you,’ she said, raising her eyebrows to indicate her bureau chief sitting next to her. ‘Jeff told me it was a short-term operation. He hoped to export close to two hundred million dollars’ worth of these diamonds within three months and that would be the end of it. He said the job was around half done. The whole operation was possible, he said, because by the time the tax department in Australia woke up to themselves, both the money and Jeff would be offshore and gone for good.’

The Manila bureau chief, Gia Ferallo and the head of the CIA in Langley all nodded. At the fifth or six telling, Reinhardt’s story hadn’t changed one iota.

Diamonds to the value of five million dollars had been
recovered from Kalas, who’d caved in to questioning even before real pressure had been applied. The scam was sweet and simple. He bought a shelf company, opened a bank account and immediately started depositing large amounts of cash and withdrawing similarly large amounts through company cheques made out to reputable diamond wholesalers. As the deposited amounts were over ten thousand dollars – well over, in fact – by law the bank would have to report these transactions to the Australian Tax Office. The ATO, in turn, would query them as a matter of protocol when Kalas’s company lodged its first quarterly Business Activity Statement. Only that statement would never be made. The penny would drop eventually at the ATO that something was seriously wrong. But by then the horse, known as Jeff Kalas, would have bolted.

In Manila, Kalas simply deposited the majority of the diamonds in a safety deposit box registered to one General Trip, golden triangle drug lord. Kalas then traded his diamonds, roughly twelve percent of the total, exchanging them for US dollars, which he deposited in a First Lucerne account. The D-G shook his head at the greed that motivated some people. The fact was, and the D-G was mindful of this, they would never have caught the criminal if it wasn’t for this Reinhardt woman. Ferallo knew that, and so did the Manila office. And because of her, they had their only hard lead to Duat. For the moment, the D-G had no idea what to do with her, except to ask her to go over her story again.

‘Pig one, behind Jaguar on short final line-up,’ instructed the tower.

Lieutenant Pete Crawford ran his eye along the eight temperature gauges monitoring the Pratt and Whitney TF33-P-3/103 turbofans, and found them to be in the green. He glanced up as the Royal Air Force Jaguar’s main gear kissed the threshold markers, flashing through their landing lights. Crawford then followed it down the threekilometre runway until it disappeared into the night. Diego Garcia was a British possession but they shared it with the Americans. The Brits were fair pilots and everyone got on well enough. They loved their ‘pints’, as they called them. Hell, aside from the odd pint, there wasn’t much else to do on the tiny island, unless you liked to fish, which Crawford didn’t.

‘Okay, Pete, let’s get this show on the road,’ said Colonel Zeke Chapman, the aircraft’s commander sitting on his left, bringing Crawford out of his daydream.

‘Roger that, sir,’ said Crawford.

The two men eased the throttle levers between them forward and the engine note rose to a shriek. The B-52 moved off the holding marks and swung onto the runway.

‘Pig one. Lining up behind the Jaguar,’ said Crawford.

‘Pig one, you are cleared for takeoff.’

‘Pig one,’ said Crawford automatically, repeating the aircraft’s callsign, confirming that the clearance was received.

Crawford and Chapman pushed the throttles forward to the stops, harnessing the turbofans’ full one hundred and
thirty-six thousand pounds of thrust. The Big Ugly Fat Fucker, or BUFF as the type was affectionately known, quickly gathered speed, its massive tyres thumping into the runway’s section joints, slowly at first and then faster as it roared along, eating up the broken centre line. There was a full load of fuel aboard but the bomb bays were empty. The digits on the air speed indicator climbed rapidly, all-up weight around one hundred and fifty thousand kilograms and well within the aircraft’s maximum for takeoff.

‘Rotate,’ said Chapman when one hundred and forty-five knots was indicated on the multifunction glass screen.

Crawford pulled back on the wheel and the aircraft’s nose rose off the pavement. The air speed continued to climb as the main gear left the earth and the colonel pulled up on the lever, retracting it. ‘Flaps, twenty-five,’ Crawford said. This was the perfect training flight. ‘Flaps, ten,’ he said, retracting them further. A seven-and-a-half-hour turnaround with a delivery in the middle.

‘Pig one, turning left,’ said the colonel to the tower as they climbed through a thousand feet. He nodded at Crawford who put the aircraft into a gentle thirty-five degree turn. Standard departure procedure. They’d fly down the runway’s dead side for ten miles, gaining altitude, then set a course for the north-east.

‘Flaps zero,’ said Crawford. The long actuating screws whined until a gentle bump transmitted through the airframe signified that the flaps were seated snugly at their stops; a warning light on the instrument panel winked off and confirmed the fact.

‘Like spreading peanut butter, Pete,’ said the electronic warfare officer, a captain, sitting behind them.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Crawford over his shoulder as he again verified fuel pressures and engine temps. All normal. He then cycled through the various modes displayed by the cockpit screens, mentally ticking off the information presented. As the aircraft climbed through ten thousand feet, a bright orange rind appeared, marking the edge of the world, a band of fire in the sea. They were flying at an oblique angle towards the sun, at a ground speed of six hundred and fifty miles an hour. It would rise above the edge of the world within minutes – much sooner than if they were back on DG. Crawford was happy to be sitting between night and day with a long flight ahead of him. As a matter of interest, he called up the weapons stores on the interface shared with the radar navigator sitting on the lower deck. The display revealed that the stores were empty except for three joint stand-off weapons – JSOWs – occupying external pods under the wings.

‘Heading one-four-three climbing to flight level threefive zero,’ said the voice of the navigator in his ’phones.

‘Do it manual, son,’ the colonel said to Crawford. ‘Feel what it’s like to fondle a forty-year-old mistress.’

Crawford kept the BUFF’s flight management computer out of the loop and flew the aircraft onto the navigator’s course, marvelling again at what a sweet old girl the B-52 was.