The Afghan (30 page)

Transfer out of JFK would be by an air bridge of helicopters which would deposit their cargoes into a second totally sealed environment. From there they would simply stroll into the venue of the five-day conference and be enclosed in luxury and privacy. It was simple and flawless.

‘No one had ever thought of it before, but when you think about it, it’s brilliant,’ said one of the British diplomats. ‘Perhaps we should do it ourselves one day.’

‘The even better news,’ muttered an older and more experienced colleague, ‘is that after Gleneagles it won’t be our turn for ages. Let the others cope with the security headaches for a few years.’

Marek Gumienny was not long getting back to Steve Hill. He had been escorted by the Director of his own Agency to the White House, and had explained to the six principals the deductions that had followed the receipt of a bizarre message from the unheard-of island of Labuan.

‘They said much the same as before,’ Gumienny reported. ‘Whatever it is, wherever it is, find it and destroy it.’

‘The same with my government,’ said Steve Hill. ‘No holds barred, destroy on sight. And they want us to work together on this.’

‘No problem. But, Steve, my people are convinced the USA is likely to be the target, so our coastal protection takes precedence over everything else – Mideast, Asia, Europe. We have total priority on all our assets – satellites, warships, the lot. If we locate the ghost ship anywhere away from our shores, OK, we’ll divert assets to destroy it.’

The American Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, authorized the CIA to inform their British counterparts on an ‘eyes-only’ basis of the measures the States intended to take.

The defence strategy would be based on three stages: aerial surveillance, identification of vessel and ‘check-it-out’. Any unsatisfactory explanation, any unexplained diversion from course and track, would generate a physical intercept. Any resistance would entail destruction at sea.

To establish a sea territory, a line was drawn to create a complete circle of three hundred miles’ radius round the island of Labuan. From the northern curve of this circle a line was drawn right across the Pacific to Anchorage on the south coast of Alaska. A second was drawn from the southern arc of the Indonesian circle heading south-east across the Pacific to the coast of Ecuador.

The enclosed area was most of the Pacific Ocean. It included the entire western seaboard of Canada and the USA and Mexico down to Ecuador, including the Panama Canal.

There was no need to announce it yet, the White House had decided, but it was intended to monitor every ship in that triangle steaming east to the American coast. Anything leaving the triangle or heading to Asia would be left alone. The rest would be identified and checked out.

Thanks to years of pressure by a few bodies often dubbed cranky, there was one procedural ally. Major merchant-marine shipping lines had agreed to file destination plans, as airliners file flight plans, as a matter of routine. Seventy per cent of the vessels in the check-it-out zone would be on file and their owning companies could contact their captains. Under the new rules there was also an agreement that sea captains would always use a certain word, known only to their owners, if they were secure. Failure to use the agreed word could mean the captain was under duress.

It was seventy-two hours after the White House conference when the first KH-11 Keyhole satellite rolled on to its track in space and began to photograph the Indonesian circle. Its computers had been instructed to photograph, regardless of steaming direction, any merchant-marine vessel within a three-hundred-mile radius of Labuan Island. Computers obey instructions, so it did. As they began to photograph, the
Countess of Richmond
, heading due south through the Strait of Makassar, was 310 miles south of Labuan. It was not photographed.

From London the White House obsession with an attack from the Pacific was only half the picture. The warnings from the Edzell conference had been submitted in the UK and the USA to further scrutiny but the findings were broadly endorsed.

It took a long personal call on the hotline between Downing Street and the White House to conclude a concordat on the two most vital narrows east of Malta. The agreement provided that the Royal Navy, in partnership with the Egyptians, would monitor the southern end of the Suez Canal to intercept all ships save the very smallest coming up from Asia.

The US Navy’s warships in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean would patrol the Strait of Hormuz. Here the threat would only be from a huge vessel capable of sinking itself in the deep-water channel running down the centre of the Strait. The principal traffic here was supertankers, entering empty from the south, coming back low in the water and full of crude after loading at any of the score of sea islands scattered off Iran, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The good news for the Americans was that the owning companies of such vessels are relatively few altogether, and ready to cooperate to prevent a disaster for all of them. Landing a party of US Marines by Sea Stallion helicopter on the deck of a supertanker heading for the Strait but still three hundred miles short, and having a quick tour of the bridge, took very little time and did not slow the vessel at all.

As for threats two and three, every government in Europe with a major sea port was warned of the possible existence of a ghost ship under the command of terrorists. It was up to Denmark to protect Copenhagen; Sweden to look after Stockholm and Göteborg; Germany to watch out for anything entering Hamburg or Kiel; France was warned to defend Brest and Marseille. British navy aeroplanes out of Gibraltar started to patrol the narrows between the Pillars of Hercules, between the Rock and Morocco, to identify anything coming in from the Atlantic.

All the way over the Rockies Major Duval had put the Eagle through its paces and it had performed perfectly. Below him the weather had changed.

The cloudless blue skies of Arizona betrayed first a few wisps of mares’ tail cloud lines, which thickened as he left Nevada for Oregon. When he crossed the Columbia River into Washington the cloud below him was solid from treetop height to twenty thousand feet and moving down from the Canadian border to the north. At thirty thousand feet he was still in clear blue sky, but the descent would involve a long haul through dense vapour. Two hundred miles out he called McChord AFB and asked for a ground-controlled descent to landing.

McChord asked him to stay out to the east, turn inbound over Spokane and descend on instructions. The Eagle was in the left-hand turn towards McChord when what was about to become the USAF’s most expensive spanner slipped out of where it had lain jammed between two hydraulic lines in the starboard engine. When the Eagle levelled out, it fell into the blade of the turbofan.

The first result was a massive bang from somewhere deep in the guts of the starboard F-100 as the compressor blades, sharp as cleavers and spinning close to the speed of sound, began to shear off. Each sheared blade jammed among the rest. In both cockpits a blazing red light answered the yell from Nicky Johns of ‘What the fuck was that?’

In front of him Larry Duval was listening to something inside his head screaming: ‘Close it down.’

After years of flying Duval’s fingers were doing the job almost unbidden: flicking off one switch after another, fuel, electric circuits, hydraulic lines. But the starboard engine was blazing. The in-housing fire extinguishers operated automatically but were too late. The starboard F-100 was tearing itself to pieces in what is known as ‘catastrophic engine failure’.

Behind Duval, the wizzo was telling McChord, ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, starboard engine on fire—’

He was interrupted by another roar from behind him. Far from shutting down, fragments of the starboard engine had torn through the firewall and were attacking the port side. More red lights blazed. The second had caught fire also. With reduced fuel, which he had, and one functioning engine, Larry Duval could have made it down. But with both of its engines dead, a modern fighter does not glide like those of long ago; it plunges like a bullet.

Captain Johns would tell the inquiry later that his pilot’s voice remained calm and level. He had switched the radio to ‘transmit’ so that the air-traffic controller at McChord did not need to be informed; he was hearing it in real time.

‘I have lost both engines,’ said the major. ‘Stand by to eject.’

The wizzo looked one last time at his instruments. Height: twenty-four thousand feet. Diving; dive steepening. Outside the sun still shone but the cloud bank was seething towards them. He glanced around, over his shoulder. The Eagle was a torch, flaming from end to end. He heard the same calm voice up front.

‘Eject. Eject.’

Both men reached down for the handle beside the seat and pulled. That was all they needed to do. Modern ejector seats are so automated that even if the airman is unconscious they will do everything for him.

Neither Larry Duval nor Nicky Johns actually saw their plane die. With seconds to spare their bodies were hurled upwards through the shattering canopy and into the freezing stratosphere. The seat retained their legs and arms so they would not flail and snap off. The seat protected their faces from the blast that could push their cheekbones through the skull.

Both falling ejectors stabilized with tiny drogues and plunged towards the ground. In a second they were lost in the cloud bank. Even when they were able to see through their visors, the two aircrew could only watch the wet grey cloud rushing past them.

The seats sensed when they were near enough to the ground to release their charges from their ‘chutes’. The restraining straps just flicked open and the men, now separated by a mile from each other, fell out of the seats, which dropped into the landscape below.

The men’s parachutes were also automatic. They too deployed first with a small drogue to steady the falling men in the air, then with the main canopy. Each man felt the heaving jerk as a terminal velocity of 120 mph slowed to around fourteen.

They began to feel the intense cold through their light nylon flying suits and G-suits. They seemed to be in a weird wet, grey limbo between heaven and hell until they crashed into the topmost branches of pine and spruce.

In half darkness beneath the cloud base the major landed in a form of clearing, his fall cushioned by springy conifer branches lying flat on the ground. After several seconds dazed and winded, he released the main chute buckle at his midriff and stood up. Then he began to broadcast so the rescuers could get a fix on him.

Nicky Johns had also come down in trees, but not in a clearing; he was right in the thick of them. As he hit the branches he was drenched in the snow that fell off. He waited for the ‘hit’ of the ground, but it never came. Above him in the freezing gloom he could see that his canopy was caught in the trees. Below, he could make out the ground. Snow and pine needles, he thought, about fifteen feet down. He took a deep breath, hit the release buckle and fell.

With luck he would have landed and stood up. In fact he felt the left leg snap neatly at the shin as it slid between two stout branches under the snow. That told him that cold and shock would start to eat into his reserve without mercy. He too unhooked his transmitter and began to broadcast.

The Eagle had attempted to fly for a few seconds after its crew had left it. It turned its nose up, wallowed, tilted over, resumed its dive and, as it entered the cloud bank, simply blew up. The flames had reached the fuel tanks.

As it disintegrated both its engines tore themselves from their fixtures and fell away. Twenty thousand feet below, each engine, five tons of blazing metal roaring down at five hundred mph, hit the Cascades wilderness. One destroyed twenty trees. The other did more.

The CIA special ops officer who commanded the garrison on the Cabin took over two minutes to regain consciousness and pull himself off the floor of the chow room where he had been eating lunch. He was dazed and felt sick. He leaned against the wall of the log cabin amid the swirling dust and called names. He was answered by groans. Twenty minutes later he had made his inventory. The two men playing pool in the games room were dead. Three others were injured. The lucky ones had been those outside on a hiking break. They had been a hundred yards away when the meteorite, as they thought, hit the Cabin. When they had confirmed that of twelve CIA staffers two were dead, three needed emergency hospitalization, the two hikers were fine and the other five badly shaken, they checked on the prisoner.

They would later be accused of being slow on the uptake, but the inquiry found in the end that they were justified in looking out for themselves first. A glance through the peephole of the Afghan’s room revealed there was too much light in there. When they burst in, the door from the living area to the walled exercise court was open. The room itself, being of reinforced concrete, had survived intact.

The wall of the compound was not so lucky. Concrete or not, the falling F-100 jet engine had taken a five-foot chunk out of the wall before ricocheting into the garrison quarters. And the Afghan was gone.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

As the great American sea-trap closed around the Philippines, Borneo and eastern Indonesia, all the way across the Pacific to the US coast, the
Countess of Richmond
slipped out of the Flores Sea, through the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok, and into the Indian Ocean. Then she turned due west for Africa.

The distress call from the dying Eagle had been heard by at least three listeners. McChord AFB of course had it all on tape because they had actually been talking to the crew. The Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island, north of McChord, also kept a listening watch on Channel 16, and so did the US Coastguard unit up at Bellingham. Within seconds of the call they were in contact, to say they were standing by to triangulate on the positions of the downed aircrew.