The Afghan (33 page)

The ‘destroy’ section of the Spectre’s role is provided by three systems. Heaviest is the M102 105-mm howitzer which is so powerful that to use it on a single human being would be a tad excessive.

Next down comes the 40-mm Bofors cannon, derived, long ago, from the Swedish anti-aircraft weapon, a fast repeater with enough muscle to rip buildings or tanks to fragments. The Spectre crew, told their target was a man on a horse, chose the Gau-12/U Gatling gun. This horror fires 1,800 rounds per minute and each round is a 25-mm (one-inch diameter) slug, a single one of which will pull a human body apart. So intense is the fire of the rotating five-barrel gun that if used on a football pitch for thirty seconds nothing much bigger than a dormouse will be left alive. And the mouse will die of shock.

The maximum altitude for the gun is twelve thousand feet so in the circling turn the Spectre dropped to ten thousand, locked on and fired for ten seconds, loosing off three hundred rounds at the body of the horse in the forest.

‘There’s nothing left,’ remarked the imager-operator. ‘Man and beast, both gone.’

‘Thank you, Echo Foxtrot,’ said Linnett. ‘We’ll take over now.’ The Spectre, mission accomplished, returned to McChord AFB.

The snow stopped, the skis hissed over the new powder, making the sort of progress that skis ought to make with a skilled athlete on them, and the Alpha team came across the remains of the horse. Few fragments were bigger than a man’s arm but they were definitely horse, not human. Except the bits with tawny fur.

Linnett spent ten minutes looking for pieces of arctic clothing, boots, femurs, skull, Bowie knife, beard or snowshoes.

The skis were lying there, but one was broken. That had been done by the falling horse. There was a sheepskin sleeve but no rifle. No snowshoes, no Afghan.

Two hours to dawn and it had become a race. One man on snowshoes, twelve on skis. All exhausted, all desperate. The Alpha team had their GPS positioning system. As the sky lightened fractionally in the east the team sergeant murmured: ‘Border half a mile.’

They arrived twenty minutes later on a bluff overlooking a valley running from their left to right. Below was a logging road that formed the Canadian border. Right across from them was another bluff with a cleared area containing a cluster of log cabins, a facility for Canadian lumberjacks when the timber concessions resumed after the snows.

Linnett crouched, steadied his forearms and studied the landscape through binoculars. Nothing moved. The light factor increased.

Unbidden, his snipers eased their weapons from the sleeves that had contained them throughout the mission, fixed their scopes, inserted one shell each and lay down to stare across the gulf through their telescopes.

By the norms of soldiering snipers are a strange breed. They never get near the men they kill, yet they see them with a clarity and an apparent proximity greater than anyone else today. With hand-to-hand combat almost extinct, most men die not by the hand of their enemy but by his computer. They are blown away by a missile fired a continent away or from somewhere under the sea. They are destroyed by a smart bomb loosed by an aircraft so high they neither see nor hear it. They die because someone fires a shell from two counties away. At the nearest, their killers, crouching behind a machine gun in a swooping helicopter, see them only as vague shapes, running, hiding, trying to fire back. But not as real humans.

That is how the sniper sees them. Lying in total silence, utterly immobile, he sees his target as a man with three days’ stubble, a man who stretches and yawns, who spoons beans out of a can, unzips his fly or simply stands and stares at a lens a mile away that he cannot see. And then he dies. Snipers are special – inside the head.

They also live in a private world. So total does the obsession with accuracy become that they lapse into a silence peopled only by the weights of projectile heads, the power of various powder loads, how much a bullet will wind-drift, how far it will drop over various distances, whether yet another tiny improvement can be made to the rifle.

Like all specialists they have their passions for rival pieces of equipment. Some snipers like a really tiny bullet like the M700 round out of the Remington .308, a slug so small that it has to be sheathed in a detachable sleeve to go down the barrel at all.

Others stay with the M21, the sniper version of the M14 standard combat rifle. Heaviest of all is the Barrett Light Fifty, a monster that sends a bullet like a human forefinger over a mile with enough speed times weight to cause a human body to explode.

Lying prone at Captain Linnett’s feet was his leading sniper, Master Sergeant Peter Bearpaw. He was a half-blood Santee Sioux with a Hispanic mother. He came from the slums of Detroit and the army was his life. He had high cheekbones and eyes that sloped like a wolf. And he was the best marksman in the Green Berets.

What he cradled as he squinted across the valley was the Cheyenne .408 by CheyTac of Idaho. It was a more recent development than the others, but over three thousand rounds on the range it had become his weapon of choice. It was a bolt-action rifle, which he appreciated because the total lock-down of a closed bolt give that tiny extra stability at the moment of detonation.

He had inserted the single slug, very long and slim, and he had burnished and buffed the nose tip to eradicate the tiniest vibration in flight. Along the top of the breech ran a Jim Leatherwood X24 scope sight.

‘I have him, Captain,’ he whispered.

The binoculars had missed the fugitive, but the scope sight had found him. Set among the cabins across the valley, encased on three sides by timber, with one single glass-panelled door, was a phone booth.

‘Tall, long shaggy hair, bushy black beard?’

‘Roger that.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘He is in a phone booth, sir.’

Izmat Khan had had little communication with his fellow inmates at Guantanamo, but one with whom he had spent many months in the same ‘solitary’ block had been a Jordanian who had fought in Bosnia in the mid-nineties before returning to become a trainer in the AQ camps. He was hardline.

As security slackened around the Christmas period, they found they could whisper from one cell to another. If you ever get out of here, the Jordanian told him, I have a friend. We were in the camps together. He is safe; he will help a True Believer. Mention my name.

There was a name. And a phone number. Izmat Khan did not know where it was. He was not quite sure of the complexities of Subscriber Trunk Dial, for which he actually had enough quarters, but, worse, he did not know the overseas dial code out of Canada. So he punched in a quarter and asked for the operator.

‘What number are you trying, caller?’ said the unseen Canadian telephonist. Slowly, in halting English, he pronounced the figures he had so painstakingly memorized.

‘That is a UK number,’ said the operator. ‘Are you using US quarters?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s acceptable. Put in eight of them and I will connect you. When you hear the pips put in more if you wish to continue the call.’

‘Have you acquired the target?’ asked Linnett.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Take the shot.’

‘He’s in Canada, sir.’

‘Take the shot, sergeant.’

Peter Bearpaw took a slow, calm breath, held it inside, and squeezed. The range was a still-air 2,100 yards on his range-meter, well over a mile.

Izmat Khan was pushing quarters into the slot. He was not looking up. The glass front of the booth disintegrated into pinpricks of perspex and the bullet took away the occiput from the rest of his head.

The operator was as patient as she could be. The man down in the logging camp had inserted only two quarters, then left the handset hanging and apparently left the booth. Finally she had no choice but to hang up on him and cancel the call.

Because of the sensitivity of the cross-border shot, no official report was ever made.

Captain Linnett reported to his commanding officer who told Marek Gumienny in Washington. Nothing more was heard.

The body was found in the thaw when the lumberjacks returned. The hanging phone was disconnected. The coroner could do little but record an open verdict. The man wore US clothing but in the border country that was not odd. He had no ID; no one recognized him locally.

Unofficially most people around the coroner’s office presumed the man had been the victim of a tragic stray shot from a deer hunter, another death from careless shooting or ricochet. He was buried in an unmarked grave.

Because no one south of the border wanted to make waves, it was never thought to ask what number the fugitive had asked for. Even to make the enquiry would give away the source of the shot. So it was not made.

In fact the number he wanted was that of a small apartment off-campus near Aston University in Birmingham. It was the home of Dr Ali Aziz al-Khattab, and the phone was on intercept by Britain’s MI5. All they were waiting for was enough evidence to justify a raid and arrest. They would get it a month later. But that morning the Afghan was trying to call the only man west of Suez who knew the name of the ghost ship.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

After two weeks enthusiasm for the hunt for a seemingly non-existent ghost ship was starting to fade and the mood came from Washington.

How much time, trouble and treasure could be expended on a vague scrawl on a boarding card stuffed into a divebag on an island no one had ever heard of? Marek Gumienny had flown to London to confer with Steve Hill when the SIS expert in maritime terrorism, Sam Seymour, called up from the Ipswich HQ of
Lloyd’s Register
and made matters worse. He had changed his mind. Hill ordered him to London to explain.

‘With hindsight,’ said Seymour, ‘the option of Al-Qaeda seeking to use a huge blocking ship to close down a vital sea highway to wreck global trade was always the likeliest option. But it was never the only one.’

‘What makes you think it was the wrong path to go?’ asked Marek Gumienny.

‘Because, sir, every single vessel in the world big enough to achieve that has been checked out. They are all safe. That leaves options two and three which are almost interchangeable but with different targets. I think we should now look at three: mass murder in a seashore city. Bin Laden’s public switch to economic targets could have been a hoax, or he has changed his mind.’

‘OK, Sam, convince me. Steve and I both have political masters demanding results or our heads. What kind of ship if not a blocking vessel?’

‘For threat number three we do not look at the ship so much as the cargo. It need not be large so long as it is absolutely deadly. Lloyd’s have a hazardous cargo division – obviously, it changes the premium.’

‘Ammunition ship?’ asked Hill. ‘Another Halifax wipe-out?’

‘According to the boffins, military ordnance simply does not explode like that any more. The modern stuff needs huge provocation to go off inside the hull. You’d get worse from an exploding firework factory, but it would not begin to deserve the word “spectacular” as in Nine/Eleven. The Bhopal chemical leak was far worse and that was dioxin, a deadly weedkiller.’

‘So, a tanker-truck driving dioxin into Park Avenue and completing the job with Semtex,’ suggested Hill.

‘But these chemicals are closely guarded inside their manufacturing and storage base,’ objected Gumienny. ‘How do they get the cargo with no one noticing?’

‘And we were specifically told a ship would be the carrier,’ said Seymour. ‘Any hijacking of such a cargo would create immediate retaliation.’

‘Except in some parts of the Third World that are virtually lawless,’ said Gumienny.

‘But these ultra-lethal toxins are not made in such places any more, not even for labour-cost savings, sir.’

‘So, we are back to a ship?’ said Hill. ‘Another exploding oil tanker?’

‘Crude oil does not explode,’ Seymour pointed out. ‘When the
Torrey Canyon
was ripped open southwest of the English coast it took phosphorus bombs to persuade the oil to ignite and burn off. A vented oil tanker will only cause eco-damage, not mass murder. But a quite small gas tanker could do it. Liquid gas, massively concentrated for transportation.’

‘Natural gas, liquid form?’ asked Gumienny. He was trying to think how many ports in the USA imported concentrates of gas for industrial power, and the number was becoming unsettling. But surely these docking facilities were miles from massed humanity?

‘Liquid natural gas, known as LNG, is hard to ignite,’ Seymour countered. ‘It is stored at minus two hundred and fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit in special double-hulled vessels. Even if you took one over, the stuff would have to leak into the atmosphere for hours before it became combustible. But according to the eggheads there is one that frightens the hell out of them. LPG. Liquid Petroleum Gas.

‘It is so awful that a quite small tanker, if torched within ten minutes of catastrophic rupture, would unleash the power of thirty Hiroshima bombs. It would be the biggest non-nuclear explosion on this planet.’

There was total silence in the room above the Thames. Steve Hill rose, strolled to the window and looked down at the river flowing past in the April sunshine.

‘In layman’s language, what have you come here to say, Sam?’

‘I think we have been looking for the wrong ship in the wrong ocean. Our only break is that this is a tiny and very specialist market. But the biggest importer of LPG is the USA. I know there is a mood in Washington that all this may be a wild-goose chase. I think we should go the last mile. The USA can check out every LPG tanker expected in her waters, and not just from the Far East. And stop them until boarded. From Lloyd’s I can check out every other LPG cargo worldwide; from any point in the compass.’

Marek Gumienny took the next flight back to Washington. He had conferences to attend and work to do. As he flew out of Heathrow the
Countess of Richmond
came round Cape Agulhas, South Africa, and entered the Atlantic.