The Blind Spy (43 page)

They descended into the canyon along a pathless scree slope that finally brought them up above the camp and then followed the stream until they saw tents. But it was Larry who saw them first and who looked with alarm at the presence of Balthasar.

‘It’s OK, Larry,’ she said. ‘We’ll all work together until we get out of here. Where’s the
Cougar
?’

‘It’s to the west of the Crimea. About sixty miles away. Along this coast between here and Odessa.’

‘Good. Wake me in a couple of hours.’ She looked at Balthasar. ‘You can sleep where you wish,’ she said.

The invitation wasn’t lost on him or on Larry, who turned away in confusion and perhaps frustration.

‘I know,’ Balthasar stated.

Anna laughed. ‘Of course. Of course you know,’ she said.

Balthasar followed her into her tent.

After two hours, Larry called through the flap of the tent and she emerged first. Balthasar followed a while later. Lucy and Adam were making breakfast over a charcoal fire, reduced to ashes in order to limit the smoke. They ate in silence and then Anna laid out the plan.

‘This depends on Taras?’ Larry said and failed to conceal his deep scepticism.

‘It does,’ she replied impassively.

‘You trust him that much?’

‘I believe what he says about this, yes.’

‘Why?’

‘His interests coincide with ours. If he helps us, we help him. Don’t forget, he has to believe what I told him too. There’s a mutual gain.’

‘Well, OK,’ Larry said. ‘We don’t have nearly enough ammunition. Not for what you’re planning.’

‘I think plenty will become available,’ she replied.

A
T FIVE MINUTES past two on the morning of 1 May, when darkness was reaching its greatest intensity over the sea, the American frigate
Lafayette
was exactly fifty miles to the west of the
Pride of Corsica
and on a bearing of thirty-nine degrees. The engines were now idle and rubber boats were being lowered from stanchions on the deck into the calm waters. In each boat there were eight marine commandos and there were five boats in all. Four helicopters waited, with airborne commandos milling around them, waiting themselves for orders to board. They would leave when the boats were well on their way.

The majority of the boats were manned by British Special Boat Service teams and it was the British who had the command of the operation in a compromise between Moscow and Washington. One boat was under the individual control of Russian special forces and the other under American control, but the operation was planned by the British and all were agreed that the British should command the assault, from the sea and the air. At sixty knots – which it was agreed could be achieved in the calm waters – the boats would reach the
Pride of Corsica
in just under an hour. The helicopters’ departure was timed to be ten minutes before the boats reached the target vessel and the assault would come from the sea and air simultaneously. Three boats were to approach the starboard side of the target, drawing any fire in the priceless seconds before they boarded. The other two would remain out of sight and below radar and approach the port side as the choppers swooped in. The plan was to split the defenders’ attention three ways.

The boats began their rapid passage across the black waters, planing at speeds that sometimes went over the required sixty knots and sometimes under, but always maintained as close to the average they were aiming for as possible. When they judged they were within ten minutes of the strike, there would be a radio call to the
Lafayette
and the helicopters would leave.

The British teams were made up mainly of M Squadron members, the SBS maritime counter terrorism squadron, of whom the Black Group provided one officer and three men and there were two members of 14 Intelligence Unit, briefed on what to look for, assuming the assault was successful. They were all trained in multiple weapons use and hand-to-hand fighting at the highest level and were all practitioners of Brazilian ju-jitsu.

It was two days after the new moon, and the darkness and below-the-radar approach of the rubber boats enabled them to reach within two hundred yards of the
Pride of Corsica
before anyone on board the ship saw them. The boats swerved violently in see-saw motions over the remaining distance to avoid providing a steady target and as soon as they’d drawn aside – so far without a shot being fired – pulleyed abseil equipment was fired over the decks of the vessel and the first four-man team shot to the deck level. The other two boats attacked simultaneously from the port side and then the helicopters were heard and the deck was suddenly flooded with intense spotlights that blinded the defenders and left the attackers for the moment in shadow.

Lines fell from the helicopters and marines abseiled down in seconds. The defenders had drawn towards the bow of the ship, up towards the bridge, when the helicopter and boat teams opened an intense burst of fire that ripped the night apart. ‘It was like a firing squad,’ an SBS officer was quoted later as saying. ‘They were up against the white steel wall of the bridge, spotlights on them, in a row and hands over their faces. Some had their hands in the air. They were surrendering. They had no guns that we could see, there was no return of fire.’

After a minute of firing, one of the helicopters landed on a deck space cleared by the assault teams. Then all fell silent as the other choppers flew to stand off the ship and await instructions.

Above the silence came the groans of the wounded.

Two teams of four descended steps into the ship’s belly and began a section-to-section search. The captain was turfed out of bed and a few bemused crewmen were similarly awakened who hadn’t already heard the firing. All were brought to the deck, hands strapped in plastic cuffs behind them. It was a scratch crew, only five in all. The rest of the ship’s occupants – twelve in all – were on the deck and all but two were dead. As the SBS teams and their American and Russian counterparts stripped masks from the faces of the few who had managed to don them in time, and looked at the unmasked dead and wounded, there was a stunned silence, the occasional shout of a man’s name, curses and swearing that rose in anger and distress as the identities of the defenders who had put up no defence was revealed. In each case, faces were recognised by the British and the Americans as former colleagues in their own special forces, in one or two cases, friends. It was a massacre of their own. There were no Russians among the defenders. And it was noted later that none of the Russian
spetsnaz
present bothered to look at the faces of the dead and wounded.

The captain of the
Pride of Corsica
was interrogated in a chair on the deck while the teams searched the vessel and brought up five wooden crates from the hold. The captain repeated over and over that there was no cargo of a dangerous nature.

‘Why the missile system? Why the helicopter?’ The SBS interrogators were not sensitive in their methods. The captain was weeping, and repeating the same phrases over and over. The Russian special forces stood back and watched.

It was said by the captain and his crew that the bodyguards were a defence against pirates. But he didn’t know, none of them knew, why they were there, why any defence against pirates was needed.

Eventually the SBS got tired of asking the same questions and the Americans moved in, without getting any more more from the stricken captain than that he was a Filipino with five children back in Mindanao; that his crew were a scratch collection of individuals from a shipping agency. They finally finished with roughing him up as the crates were opened carefully with jemmies.

Inside the crates were boxes and the boxes contained bubble wrap and the bubble wrap contained nothing. Nothing at all. The
Pride of Corsica
was void of incriminating material. All it contained after the assault were five crew, the assault team and ten dead colleagues of the British and American assault force. Two others were saved.

Later, at the inquiry at which Theo Lish was the principal defender, it was asked why British and American special forces teams had been induced by the Russians to kill their own kind – albeit former colleagues – and why nothing was found on the
Pride of Corsica
that pointed to a terrorist or any other plot. Lish was able to come up with no adequate answer. Burt Miller, called as a witness, explained that he’d informed the CIA head that he believed the
Pride of Corsica
had been a bluff all along; that he’d tried to warn Lish, in fact. Miller regretted the loss of life – and the tragic mistake made on the morning of 1 May. But the central question to which Lish continued to flounder under questioning from the Senate Intelligence Committee, was why on Russian evidence alone the assault had been made at all.

A
NNA SAT AT the far end of a cave at the foot of the cliff on the north shore of the city. Below her feet, the sea water lapped sluggishly at the rock. Where the sea ended, where she sat in the darkness of the cave, was also the final resting place of the harbour’s detritus of oil and chemical waste, metal and plastic cans, polystyrene and fragments of wood and rope that created a six-inch scum on the lapping surface. The insignificant tides of the Black Sea never scoured the cave clean and the smell was one of vegetable and toxic rot and chemical and oil waste that over decades had stained the cave’s walls in a black, glistening film. Drop a match in here, she thought, and the whole place would go up in flames.

She and Larry had descended from the part of town on the north shore after dark and then he’d left her. She’d watched the light grow at the tunnel’s entrance as dawn rose across the heaving channel of the Sevastopolskaya Bukhta, listened to the horn of a ship that entered from the sea through the breakwaters of Sevastopol’s perfect natural harbour, saw its surface lines as it cut through the channel into port – though the cave’s low entrance obscured the superstructure – and listened to the tight chug of a fishing boat and the nerve-jangling cries of seagulls.

Now she fitted the aqualung with its de-breathing apparatus that would eliminate bubbles rising to the surface as it recycled her own oxygen. She fixed the full mask over her face and ensured the tight dry suit that concealed a Russian GRU uniform, the Contender handgun and two sticks of Semtex, was fastened into an airtight position. She checked her watch again. Then at midday exactly, she descended into the filthy slime of the cave’s waste, sunk beneath it and swam towards the entrance of the cave.

It was a swim of just over two kilometres – at an angle across the channel – until she could come ashore on the long naval quay inside the Russian fleet’s protected zone. Somewhere beneath the same waters where she swam she knew other divers were at work, Russian frogmen who had come to set off an explosion that would rend some unwanted fleet vessel apart and at the same time rend the uneasy peace between Russia and Ukraine that clung on in the Crimea.

The waters where she swam were dirty with industrial waste and visibility was low. That would be a help, if by some fluke she and they should cross paths.

All along the shores on the north and south of the Bukhta the fixed and passive sonars were now, she prayed, disabled.

She swam fast, looking at the compass on her arm from time to time. Accuracy at her landing point was crucial. There were a set of steps that descended from the nearest of the two quays she was heading for. They came down at a protected angle which meant that anyone surfacing at the foot of them was visible from only one viewpoint and that was a kilometre away as the crow flies, on the north shore. Unless someone was actually standing on the quay above where the steps emerged, it was the best hope of remaining undetected.

From a ship, the narrow entrance to the dockyards within the main harbour, and to which she was heading, was signalled by a cathedral tower and a monument on the western side of the entrance and a chimney on the eastern side, as well as the usual array of navigational marks, the illuminated reds and greens and whites that gave a vessel its position. But beneath the surface all she could rely on was the compass. If she missed the steps it would be a question of feeling along the walls of the quay until she found them.

She swam strongly and knew she’d entered the dockyards after fifteen minutes. It was a short distance from here to the end of the first of the quays that jutted out from the land into the deep water where big ships could dock. Then she reached the green slime of the quay wall and waited twenty feet beneath the surface while deciding whether to go left or right along the wall. She chose the left and was rewarded after twenty yards with the sight of stone steps that descended beneath the surface. She checked her watch. There were still forty minutes to go while the sonar remained inactive. She imagined that the frogmen would plant whatever device they were using and then get clear of the harbour and away. The explosion might not happen within the hour’s planned lapse in security. But it wouldn’t be long afterwards if it didn’t.

She came as close to the surface as she dared and, through the water now lighter from the sun’s glare, tried to spot any movement on the quay that betrayed a human presence nearby. After five minutes when she’d seen nothing move, no shape or outline apart from the quay’s wall, she came out on the bottom step above the surface. She took another quick look around, then stripped off the mask and aqualung, the dry suit and fins and, weighted with the gas bottle, watched them sink slowly into the grey water. Then she stood and walked up the steps towards the top of the quay.

When she was halfway up she heard a deafening explosion and stopped in momentary shock. Then she saw a ball of flame that reached thirty feet into the air. She crouched down, feeling the Contender digging into her ribs. She saw now that the explosion had come from the main channel, to the north of the dockyards through which she’d swum only minutes earlier. The victim of the blast was an old Russian naval vessel, anchored outside the dockyards. It was just as they’d thought when she and Balthasar had sat on the high bluff above the city.