A Loyal Spy
SIMON CONWAY
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Simon Conway 2010
The right of Simon Conway to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN 978-1-848-94726-9
Book ISBN 978-0-340-83966-9
Hodder and Stoughton
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London
NW1 3BH
Contents
An old friend back from the dead
The promise of Uncle Sam and the promise of God
Who’s been sleeping in my bed?
Greeks, diamondbacks, scorpions
The vulnerable city riff again
For Sarah
Thanks: Phil Robertson, Steve Russ, Juliet Bremner, Misha Glenny, Ahmed Siddiali, Samantha Bolton, Raza Shah Khan, Nick Sayers, David Corn, Rowan Somerville, Thomas Nash, Hedvig Boserup, Auden Witter, Chris Alexander, Wendell Steavenson, David Smith, Guy Willoughby, Dai Baker, Aslan Mintaev, Anne Clarke, Paddy Nicoll and Mark Urban.
‘Lodestone Oil foresees a thousand mile long oil pipeline that will extend south through Afghanistan to an export terminal that will be constructed on the Pakistan coast. The estimated cost of the project is $2.5 billion.
’
Hearing before the Committee
on International Relations,
United States House of
Representatives, 1996
‘We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here.’
Dick Cheney, Institute of
Petroleum autumn lunch,
1999
JONAH
‘The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”’
Henry Newbolt,
‘Vitaï Lampada’
July 2001
Jonah arrived in Freetown on a Saturday, the day of the weekly soccer match on the beach between amputees and polio victims from the nearby Médecins Sans Frontières camp. He met up with his contact in the reception of the Cockle Bay guest house, opposite the squalid shacks of salvaged timber and blue all-weather sheeting that constituted the camp. Dennis was wearing a Tupac Shakur T-shirt. So were most of the RUF fighters who had been hanging around in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, since the 1999 peace accords. They loved Tupac. He’d been dead for nearly three years, shot up in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, after watching the Tyson–Seldon fight, and that was how they all wanted it to end, in a blaze of booze, dollars and gunfire. Like Tupac, they wanted their ashes rolled up and smoked with weed.
It was a convincing disguise. Dennis wasn’t really an RUF fighter. He wasn’t even from Sierra Leone. He was from Shepherd’s Bush. He had Jamaican parents who’d come over to Britain on the
Empire Windrush
in 1948.
We’re all at it, Jonah thought: Poles build your new extension, Lithuanians sand your reclaimed wood floors, Nigerians clean your office, Indian doctors treat you when you are sick, Filipino nurses change your NHS bedlinen, Ghanaians drive your minicabs, and if you can afford it Hungarian nannies or Czech au pairs look after your kids. And some of us – usually second generation and sufficiently acclimatised – work for a cash-strapped branch of British military intelligence known only as the Department and do your dirtiest spying for you. And, it goes without saying, it’s a thankless task.
They walked over to watch the match. Jonah stood beside a limbless man who was smoking a cigarette perched between the wire twists of a coat hanger on the end of a stump.
It had been five years since President Kabbah had called on his citizens to join hands for the future of Sierra Leone. The RUF had responded by dumping sacks of amputated human hands on the steps of the presidential palace, embarking on a spree of amputations that left several thousand people without limbs.
‘Aziz Nassour and two others flew into Liberia last Friday,’ Dennis told him. ‘They were met by Liberian police and escorted straight past immigration and customs.’
Aziz Nassour was a Lebanese diamond broker on the UN Security Council watch list, whose presence in neighbouring Liberia was in contravention of Security Council Resolution 1343, which sought to end the illicit trade in conflict diamonds.
‘From the airfield they were driven straight to a known Hezbollah safe house owned by a Senegalese diamond trafficker named Ibrahim Bah.’
Ibrahim Bah was also on the UN watch list. And he had pedigree. Jonah assumed Bah was the reason that he’d been flown in. Bah had fought in Afghanistan with the mujahedin and in Lebanon with Hezbollah. He was also thought to have been involved in training Charles Taylor, Liberia’s despotic president, and Foday Sankoh, the psychotic leader of the RUF, when they were in Libya in the eighties.
‘The day after they arrived they met with an RUF general, known as General Mosquito, who is a middleman involved in smuggling diamonds out of Sierra Leone. They asked Mosquito to double production of diamonds from the mother lode for the next two months, and they are offering to pay over the odds for them.’
Somebody was looking to change large amounts of cash into easily transportable commodities and looking to do it quick.
‘Where’s this information coming from?’ Jonah asked.
‘Local informant.’
‘Reliable?’
Dennis shrugged his skinny shoulders. It was one of the Department’s mantras – the more you pay someone the more you can rely upon them to tell you what you want to hear. It was the same with torture. Neither was a reliable route to the truth.
‘Who are the two men with Nassour?’ Jonah asked.
‘The informant didn’t recognise any of the faces on the Hezbollah list.’
That summer most intelligence analysts imagined that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed and Lebanese-based terrorist network, posed the greatest threat to western interests. ‘Have the Americans been informed?’ Jonah asked.
Dennis shrugged again. ‘Couldn’t tell you …’
‘So where do I fit in?’
‘We believe they’ve crossed into RUF-held territory to take a look at diamond production. We need you to go up there and try to identify them.’
‘Alone?’
‘We have a contact up there who will host you.’
‘Who is he?’
‘A diamond broker by the name of Farouz – he’s a Lebanese Shiite from Barital in the Bekaa Valley. The family is up to its elbows in the counterfeiting business. The Metropolitan Police arrested his nephew in a London casino a couple of weeks back with a hundred thousand pounds of fake currency. Farouz has been offered a deal – cooperation with us will ensure that his nephew gets off on a technicality.’
‘So he knows that I’m a British spy?’
Dennis shrugged. ‘Believe me, he doesn’t want to know.’
‘What kind of back-up have I got?’
‘There’s an Increment team on stand-by in Ascension.’
The Increment was the executive arm of the General Support Branch – a group of specialists usually serving Special Forces, though in these days of recognised security organisations and private military companies you could never be sure – that provided the special operations capability for MI6. In Jonah’s experience they had a tendency to measure their success in terms of quantity of ammunition expended, and he was as likely to die in the crossfire as survive any future rescue attempt. It wasn’t exactly reassuring.
‘I’ve filled out a mop for you,’ said Dennis, meaning a UN Movement of Personnel (MOP) form. ‘You’re booked on a UN chopper tomorrow.’
‘Don’t tell me it’s got a Ukrainian crew?’
‘It’s got a Ukrainian crew. But don’t worry, the pilot never takes a drink before lunchtime.’
‘What time is the flight?’
‘Depends what time lunch finishes.’
‘Thanks, Dennis. You’re a bundle of laughs.’
There was a cheer as the amputees scored. Dennis shook his head sadly and said, ‘The wheels have fallen off this place.’
The man beside him was scratching at Jonah’s leg with his coat-hanger prosthetics. Jonah gave him a dollar. He had to tuck it directly into his pocket.
There was a battalion of Zambian peacekeepers stationed in Kenema, the capital of Sierra Leone’s Eastern Province, and Jonah rode up there on a resupply flight in the back of an Mi-8 helicopter with a fresh platoon of soldiers. They say the Mi-8, formerly mass produced in the Soviet Union, has a Jesus screw. A single threaded bolt that attaches the rotor to the frame. If for some reason the bolt should become unscrewed and the rotor’s blades unattached, then – in the absence of lift – you fall. Like a brick. In such circumstances all you can say, all you have time to say, is: ‘Jesus …’
