Rowse’s flight touched down just after lunch, with the time gained from flying west from Cyprus. McCready had preceded him by an hour, though Rowse did not know it. As he emerged from the airplane cabin into the jetway connecting to the terminal, a trim young woman in a British Airways uniform was holding up a sign saying, MR. ROWSE.
He identified himself.
“Ah, there’s a message for you at the Airport Information desk, just outside the customs hall,” she said.
He thanked her, puzzled, and walked on toward passport control. He had not told Nikki he was coming, wishing to surprise her. When he got to the information desk, the message said, “Scott’s. Eight P.M. Lobsters on me!”
He cursed. That meant he would not get home to Gloucestershire and Nikki until morning.
His car was in the long-term car park—no doubt, if he had not returned, the ever-efficient Firm would have had it removed and returned to his widow. He took the courtesy shuttle, retrieved his car, and checked into one of the airport hotels. It gave him time for a bath, a shave, sleep, and to change into a suit. Since he intended to drink a lot of fine wine if the Firm was paying, he decided to take a taxi to and from the West End of London.
First he rang Nikki. She was ecstatic, her voice shrill with a mixture of relief and delight. “Are you all right, darling?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“And is it over?”
“Yes, the research is finished, all bar a couple of extra details that I can sort out here in England. How have you been?”
“Oh, great. Everything’s great. Guess what happened?”
“Surprise me.”
“Two days after you left, a man came. Said he was furnishing a large company flat in London, looking for carpets and rugs. He bought the lot, all our stock. Paid cash. Sixteen thousand pounds. Darling, we’re flush!”
Rowse held the receiver and stared at the Degas print on the wall.
“This buyer, where was he from?”
“Mr. Da Costa? Portugal. Why?”
“Dark-haired, olive-skinned?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Arab, Rowse thought. Libyan. That meant that while Nikki was out in the barn where they kept the stock of carpets and rugs that they sold as a sideline, someone had been in the house and probably bugged the phone. Al-Mansour certainly liked to cover all the angles. Had he made a single ill-judged phone call to Nikki from Vienna or Malta or Cyprus, as he had been tempted to do, he would have blown away himself and the mission.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “I don’t care where he was from. If he paid cash, he’s wonderful.”
“When are you coming home?” she asked excitedly.
“Tomorrow morning. Be there about nine.”
He presented himself at the superb fish restaurant in Mount Street at ten past eight and was shown to where Sam McCready already sat at a corner table. McCready liked corner tables. That way, each diner could sit with his back to a wall, at right angles to each other. It was easier to converse that way than sitting side by side, yet each was able to see the restaurant. “Never take it in the back,” one of his training officers had told him years ago. The same man was later betrayed by George Blake and “took it” in a KGB interrogation cell. McCready had spent much of his life with his back to the wall.
Rowse ordered lobster and asked for it Newberg. McCready had his cold, with mayonnaise. Rowse waited until a glass of Meursault had been poured for each and the sommelier had departed before he mentioned the mysterious buyer of the rugs. McCready chewed on a mouthful of Benbecula lobster, swallowed, and said, “Damn. Did you phone Nikki from Cyprus anytime before I tapped the hotel phone?”
“Not at all,” said Rowse. “My first call was from the Post House Hotel, a few hours ago.”
“Good. Good and bad. Good that there were no inadvertent slipups. Bad that al-Mansour is going to such lengths.”
“He’s going a bloody sight farther than that,” said Rowse. “I can’t be sure, but I think there was a motorcycle, a Honda, both at the long-term car park when I got my car back, and at the Post House. Never saw it from the taxi into London, but the traffic was very thick.”
“Damn and blast!” said McCready with feeling. “I think you’re right. There’s a couple at the end of the bar who keep peering through the gap. And they’re looking at us. Don’t turn around—keep eating.”
“Man and woman, youngish?”
“Yes.”
“Recognize either?”
“I think so. The man, anyway. Turn your head and call the wine waiter. See if you can spot him. Lank hair, downturned moustache.”
Rowse turned to beckon the waiter. The couple were at the end of the bar, separated from the main dining area by a screen.
Rowse had once done intensive antiterrorist training. It had meant scouring hundreds of photographs, not only of the IRA. He turned back to McCready.
“Got him. A German lawyer. Ultraradical. Used to defend the Baader-Meinhof crowd, later became one of them.”
“Of course. Wolfgang Ruetter. And the woman?”
“No. But the Red Army Faction uses a lot of groupies. A new face. More watchers from al-Mansour?”
“Not this time. He’d use his own people, not German radicals. Sorry, Tom, I could kick myself. Since al-Mansour didn’t have a tail on you in Cyprus, and since I was so busy ensuring that you passed all of the Libyan’s tests, I momentarily took my eye off that bloody paranoid psycho Mahoney. If those two at the bar are Red Army Faction, they’ll be on an errand from him. I thought there’d be no heat on you once you got back here. I’m afraid I was wrong.”
“So what do we do?” asked Rowse.
“They’ve already seen us together. If that gets out, the operation’s finished, and so are you.”
“Couldn’t you be my agent, my publisher?”
McCready shook his head. “Won’t work,” he said. “If I leave by the back door, it’ll be all they need. If I go by the front like a normal diner, it’s short odds I’ll be photographed. Somewhere in Eastern Europe that photo will be identified. Keep talking naturally, but listen. Here’s what I want you to do.”
During the coffee, Rowse summoned the waiter and asked for directions to the men’s room. It was staffed, as McCready knew it would be. The tip he gave the attendant was more than generous—it was outrageous.
“Just for a phone call? You got it, guv’nor.”
The call to the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, a personal call to a friend of McCready’s, was placed while McCready was signing the slip for his credit card. The woman had left the restaurant as soon as he called for the bill.
When Rowse and McCready emerged under the illuminated portico, the woman was half-hidden in the alley beside the poultry shop just down the street. Her camera lens picked up McCready’s face, and she ran off two quick shots. There was no flash; the portico lights were enough. McCready caught the movement, but he gave no sign.
The pair walked slowly to McCready’s parked Jaguar. Ruetter emerged from the restaurant and crossed to his motorcycle. He took his helmet from the pannier and put it on, visor down. The woman left the alley and straddled the machine behind him.
“They’ve got what they want,” said McCready. “They may peel off anytime. Let’s just hope their curiosity keeps them there for a short while.”
McCready’s car phone trilled. On the other end was his friend in the Special Branch.
McCready filled him in. “Terrorists, probably armed. Battersea Park, near the Pagoda.” He replaced the receiver and glanced in his mirror. “Two hundred yards—still with us.”
Apart from the tension, it was an uneventful drive to the sprawl of Battersea Park, which was normally closed and locked at sundown. As they approached the Pagoda, McCready glanced up and down the road. Nothing. Not surprising—the park had been reopened by Rowse’s telephone call.
“Diplomatic protection drill—remember it?”
“Yep,” said Rowse, and reached for the handbrake.
“Go.”
Rowse yanked hard on the brake as McCready pulled the Jaguar into a savage turn. The rear end of the car slid around, tires screaming in protest. In two seconds, the sedan turned around and was heading the other way. McCready drove straight at the oncoming single headlight of the motorcycle. Two unmarked parked cars nearby put on their headlights, and their engines came to life.
Ruetter swerved to avoid the Jaguar and succeeded. The powerful Honda veered off the road, over the curb, and onto the parkland. It almost missed the bench, but not quite. Rowse, in the passenger seat, caught a glimpse of the motorcycle somersaulting over, its passengers spilling onto the grass. The other cars drew up and decanted three men.
Ruetter was winded but unharmed. He sat up and reached under his jacket.
“Armed police. Freeze,” said a voice beside him. Ruetter turned and looked into the barrel of a service-issue Webley .38. The face above it was smiling. Ruetter had seen the film Dirty Harry and decided not to make anyone’s day. He withdrew his hand. The Special Branch sergeant stood back, the Webley pointed double-handed at the German’s forehead. A colleague removed the Walther P38 Parabellum from inside the motorcycle jacket.
The woman was unconscious. A large man in a light gray coat walked from one of the cars toward McCready. Commander Benson, Special Branch.
“What have you got, Sam?” he asked.
“Red Army Faction. Armed, dangerous.”
“The woman is not armed,” said Ruetter clearly, in English. “This is an outrage.”
The Special Branch Commander took a small handgun from his pocket, walked over to the woman, pressed the automatic into her right hand, then dropped it in a plastic bag.
“She is now,” he said mildly.
“I protest!” said Ruetter. “This is in flagrant breach of our civil rights.”
“How true,” said the Commander sadly. “What do you want, Sam?”
“They have my picture, they know my name. And they saw me with him.” He jerked his head at Rowse. “If that gets out, there’ll be an awful lot of grief on the streets of London. I need them held incommunicado. No trace, no appearances. They must be badly hurt after that crash—a secure hospital, perhaps?”
“Isolation ward, I shouldn’t wonder. What with the poor darlings being in a coma and no papers on them, it’ll take me weeks even to identify them.”
“My name is Wolfgang Ruetter,” said the German. “I am a lawyer from Frankfurt and I demand to see my ambassador.”
“Funny how deaf you can get in middle age,” complained the Commander. “Into the car with them, lads. As soon as I can identify them, of course, I’ll bring them to court. But it could take a long time. Keep in touch, Sam.”
In Britain, as a rule, even when an armed and identified member of a terrorist group is arrested, he or she cannot be held without a court appearance for longer than seven days, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. But all rules occasionally have their exceptions, even in a democracy.
The two unmarked police cars drove away. McCready and Rowse climbed into the Jaguar. They had to get out of the park so it could be locked up again.
“When this is over,” asked Rowse, “will they come for me or Nikki?”
“They’ve never done that yet,” said McCready. “Hakim al-Mansour is a pro. Like me, he accepts that in our game, you win some and you lose some. He’ll shrug and get on with his next operation. Mahoney is trickier, I know, but for twenty years the IRA has targeted only their own informers and holders of high office. I’m convinced he’ll go back to Ireland to make his peace with the IRA Army Council. They, at least, will warn him off personal vengeance missions. So hang on in there for just a few more days. It’ll be okay after that.”
Rowse drove back to Gloucestershire the following morning to take up the reins of his life again and await the promised contact from Hakim al-Mansour. As he saw it, when he received the information concerning the docking of the arms ship, he would pass the tip to McCready. The SIS would trace the ship backward from that, identify it in the Mediterranean, and pick it up in the Eastern Atlantic or in the English Channel, with Mahoney and his team on board. It was as simple as that.
The contact came seven days later. A black Porsche crept into the courtyard of Rowse’s home, and a young man climbed out. He looked around at the green grass and beds of flowers in the late May sunshine. He was dark-haired and saturnine, and he came from a drier, harsher land.
“Tom,” called Nikki. “Someone to see you.”
Rowse came around from the rear garden. He let no trace of expression mask the polite inquiry on his face, but he recognized the man: It was the tail who had followed him from Tripoli to Valletta, then seen him off on the flight to Cyprus two weeks earlier.
“Yes?” he said.
“Mr. Rowse?”
“Yes.”
“I have a message from Mr. Aziz.” His English was reasonable but careful, too careful to be fluent. He recited his message as he had learned it.
“Your cargo will arrive at Bremerhaven. Three crates, all marked as office machinery. Your normal signature will secure release. Bay Zero Nine, Warehouse Neuberg. Rossmannstrasse. You must remove them within twenty-four hours of their arrival date, otherwise they will disappear. Is that clear?”
Rowse repeated the exact address, fixing it in his mind. The young man climbed back into his car.
“One thing. When? Which day?”
“Ah, yes. The twenty-fourth. They arrive at noon of the twenty-fourth.”
He drove away, leaving Rowse with his mouth open. Minutes later he was racing to the village to use the public phone, having ensured he was still clean of a tail. His own phone was still tapped, the experts had confirmed, and it would have to stay that way for a while longer.
“What the hell can they mean, the twenty-fourth?” raged McCready for the tenth time. “That’s in three days! Three bloody days!”
“Mahoney’s still in place?” asked Rowse. He had just driven up to London at McCready’s insistence, and they were meeting at one of the Firm’s safe houses, an apartment in Chelsea. It was still not safe to bring Rowse to Century House—officially, he was persona non grata there.
“Yes, still propping up the bar at the Apollonia, still surrounded by his team, still waiting for a word from al-Mansour, still surrounded by my watchers.”
McCready had already worked out that there were only two choices. Either the Libyans were lying about the twenty-fourth—another test for Rowse, to see if the police would raid the Neuberg warehouse. In which case al-Mansour would have time to divert his ship somewhere else. Or else he, McCready, had been duped—Mahoney and his team were decoys and probably did not know it themselves.
Of one thing he was certain: No ship could get from Cyprus to Bremerhaven via Tripoli or Sirte in three days. While Rowse was motoring to London, McCready had consulted his friend at Dibben Place, Colchester, home of Lloyds Shipping Intelligence. The man was adamant. First, it would take one day to sail from, say, Paphos to Tripoli or Sirte. Allow another day for loading, more likely a night. Two days to Gibraltar, and four or five more to northern Germany. Seven days minimum, more likely eight.
So either it was a test for Rowse, or the arms ship was already at sea. According to the man from Lloyds, to dock at Bremerhaven on the twenty-fourth, it would now be somewhere west of Lisbon, heading north to clear Finisterre.
Checks were being made by Lloyds as to the names of ships expected in Bremerhaven on the twenty-fourth with a Mediterranean port of departure. The phone rang. It was the Lloyds expert on a patch-through to the Chelsea safe house.
“There aren’t any,” he said. “Nothing from the Mediterranean is expected on the twenty-fourth. You must have been misinformed.”
With a vengeance, thought McCready. In Hakim al-Mansour, he had come up against a master of the game.
He turned to Rowse.
“Apart from Mahoney and his crew, was there anyone in that hotel who even smelted of IRA?”
Rowse shook his head.
“I’m afraid it’s back to the photograph albums,” said McCready. “Go through them over and over again. If there’s any face—anything at all—that you spotted in your time in Tripoli, Malta, or Cyprus, let me know. I’ll leave you with them. I have some errands to run.”
McCready did not even consult Century House about asking for American help. Time was too short to go through channels. He went to see the CIA Station Head in Grosvenor Square, Bill Carver.
“Well, Sam, I don’t know. Diverting a satellite isn’t that easy. Can’t you use a Nimrod?”
Royal Air Force Nimrods can take high-definition pictures of ships at sea, but they tend to fly so low that they are seen themselves. Without added altitude, they have to make many passes to cover a large area of ocean.
McCready considered long and hard. If he knew the consignment had gotten through and was firmly in the hands of the IRA, he would have wasted no time alerting the CIA to the threat to their ambassador in London, as reported by the Libyan doctor in Qaddafi’s tent.
But for weeks his concern had been just to stop the arms shipment from getting through to the final destination. Now, needing CIA help, he produced his bombshell—he told Carver of the threat.
Carver came out of his chair as if jet-propelled. “Jesus H. Christ, Sam!” he exploded. Both men knew that apart from the catastrophe of a U.S. ambassador being slaughtered on British soil, Charles and Carol Price had proved the most popular American emissaries in decades. Mrs. Thatcher would not easily forgive an organization that allowed anything to happen to Charlie Price.
“You’ll get your fucking satellite,” said Carver. “But next time you damned well better tell me earlier than this.”
It was almost midnight before Rowse went wearily back to Album One, the old days. He was sitting with a photo expert brought over from Century House. A projector and screen had been installed so that photographs could be thrown onto the screen and alterations made to the faces.
Just before one o’clock, Rowse paused.
“This one,” he said. “Can you put it on the screen?”
The face filled almost one wall.
“Don’t be daft,” said McCready. “He’s been out of it for years. A has-been, over the hill.”
The face stared back, tired eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, iron-gray hair over the creased brow.
“Lose the glasses,” Rowse said to the photo expert. “Give him brown contact lenses.”
The technician made adjustments. The glasses vanished, and the eyes went from blue to brown.
“How old is this photo?”
“About ten years,” said the technician.
“Age him ten years. Thin the hair, more lines, dewlaps under the chin.”
The technician did as he was told. The man looked about seventy now.
“Turn the hair jet black. Hair dye.”
The thin gray hair turned deep black. Rowse whistled.
“Sitting alone in the corner of the terrace,” he said, “at the Apollonia. Talking to no one, keeping himself to himself.”
“Stephen Johnson was Chief of Staff of the IRA—the old IRA—twenty years ago,” said McCready. “Quit the whole organization ten years ago, after a blazing row with the new generation over policy. He’s now sixty-five. Sells agricultural machinery in County Clare, for heaven’s sake.”
Rowse grinned. “Used to be an ace, had a row, quit in disgust, known to be out in the cold, untouchable by those inside the Establishment—remind you of anyone you know?”
“Sometimes, young Master Rowse, you can even be halfway smart,” admitted McCready.
He called up a friend in the Irish police, the Garda Siochana. Officially, contacts between the Irish Garda and their British counterparts in the fight against terrorism are supposed to be formal but at arm’s length. In fact, between professionals, those contacts are often warmer and closer than some of the more hardline politicians would wish.
This time it was a man in the Irish Special Branch, awakened at his home in Ranelagh, who came up trumps around the breakfast hour.
“He’s on holiday,” said McCready. “According to the local Garda, he’s taken up golf and departs occasionally for a golfing holiday, usually in Spain.”
“Southern Spain?”
“Possibly. Why?”
“Remember the Gibraltar affair?”
They both remembered it all too well. Three IRA killers, planning to plant a huge bomb in Gibraltar, had been “taken out” by an SAS team—prematurely but permanently. The terrorists had arrived on the Rock as tourists from the Costa del Sol and the Spanish police and counterintelligence force had been extremely helpful.
“There was always rumored to be a fourth in the party, one who stayed in Spain,” recalled Rowse. “And the Marbella area is stiff with golf courses.”
“The bugger,” breathed McCready. “The old bugger. He’s gone active again.”
In the middle of the morning, McCready took a call from Bill Carver, and they went over to the American Embassy. Carver received them in the main hall, signed them in, and took them to his office in the basement, where he too had a room all set up for viewing photographs.
The satellite had done its job well, rolling gently high in space over the eastern Atlantic, pointing its Long Tom cameras downward to cover a strip of water from the Portuguese, Spanish, and French coasts to more than one hundred miles out into the ocean in a single pass.
Acting on a suggestion from his Lloyds contact, McCready had asked for a study of a rectangle of water from Lisbon north to the Bay of Biscay. The continuous welter of photographs that had poured back to the receiving station of the National Reconnaissance Office outside Washington had been broken down into individual snaps of every ship afloat in that rectangle.
“The bird photographed everything bigger than a floating Coke can,” remarked Carver proudly. “You want to start?”
There were more than a hundred and twenty ships in that rectangle of water. Nearly half were fishing vessels. McCready discounted them, though he might wish to return to them later. Bremerhaven had a port for fishing vessels, too, but they would be of German registry, and a stranger showing up to unload not fish but general cargo would look odd. He concentrated on the freighters and a few large and luxurious private yachts, also ignoring the four passenger liners. His reduced list numbered fifty-three.
One by one, he asked that the small slivers of metal on the great expanse of water be blown up until each filled the screen. Detail by detail, the men in the room examined them. Some were heading the wrong way. Those heading north for the English Channel numbered thirty-one.
At half-past two, McCready called a halt.
“That man,” he said to Bill Carver’s technician, “the one standing on the wing of the bridge. Can you come in closer?”
“You got it,” said the American.
The freighter had been photographed off Finisterre just before sundown on the previous day. A crewman was busying himself with a routine task on the foredeck, while another man stood on the wing of the bridge looking at him. As McCready and Rowse watched, the ship grew bigger and bigger on the screen, and still the definition held. The fore-peak and stern of the vessel disappeared offscreen and the figure of the man standing alone grew larger.
“How high is that bird?” asked Rowse.
“Hundred and ten miles,” said the technician.
“Boy, that’s some technology,” said Rowse.
“Pick up a license plate, clearly readable,” said the American proudly.
There were more than twenty frames of that particular freighter. When the man on the bridge-wing filled most of the wall, Rowse asked for all of them to be screened with the same magnification. As the images flashed, the man seemed to move, like one of those stick figures in a Victorian biograph.
The figure turned from looking at the seaman and stared out to sea. Then he removed his peaked cap to run a hand through his thin hair. Perhaps a seabird called above him. Whatever, he raised his face.
“Freeze,” called Rowse. “Closer.”
The technician magnified the face until finally it began to blur.
“Bingo,” McCready whispered over Rowse’s shoulder. “That’s him. Johnson.”
The tired old eyes beneath the thin jet-black hair stared out at them from the screen. The old man from the corner of the Apollonia dining terrace. The has-been.
“The name of the ship,” said McCready. “We need the name of the ship.”
It was on her bow, and the satellite, as she dropped over the horizon to the north, had still been filming. A single, low-angle shot caught the words beside the anchor: Regina IV. McCready reached for the phone and called his man at Lloyds Shipping Intelligence.
“Can’t be,” said the man when he called back thirty minutes later. “Regina IV is over ten thousand tons, and she’s off the coast of Venezuela. You must have got it wrong.”
“No mistake,” said McCready. “She’s about two thousand tons, and she’s steaming north, by now off Bordeaux.”
“Hang about,” said the cheerful voice from Colchester. “Is she up to something naughty?”
“Almost certainly,” said McCready.
“I’ll call you back,” said the Lloyds man. He did, almost an hour later. McCready had spent most of that time on the telephone to some people based at Poole, in Dorset.
“Regina,” said the man from Lloyds, “is a very common name. Like Stella Marts. That’s why they have letters or Roman numerals after the name. To distinguish one from another. It happens there’s a Regina VI registered at Limassol, now believed to be berthed at Paphos. About two thousand tons. German skipper, Greek Cypriot crew. New owners—a shell company registered in Luxembourg.”
“The Libyan government,” thought McCready. It would be a simple ruse. Leave the Mediterranean as the Regina VI; out in the Atlantic, paint out the single numeral after the V and paint another in before it. Skilled hands could alter the ship’s papers to match. The agents would book the thoroughly reputable Regina IV into Bremerhaven with a cargo of office machinery and general cargo from Canada, and who would know that the real Regina IV was off Venezuela?
At dawn of the third day, Captain Holst stared out of the forward windows of his bridge at the slowly lightening sea. There was no mistaking the flare that had burst into the sky straight ahead of him, hung for a moment, then fluttered back to the water. Maroon. A distress flare. Peering through the half-light, he could make out something else a mile or two ahead of him: the yellow fluttering of a flame. He ordered his engine room to make half-speed, lifted a handset, and called one of his passengers in his bunk below. The man joined him less than a minute later.
Captain Holst pointed silently through the windshield. On the calm water ahead of them, a forty-foot motor fishing vessel rolled drunkenly. She had clearly suffered an explosion in her engine area; a black smudge of smoke drifted up from below her deck, mingling with a flicker of orange flame. Her topsides were scorched and blackened.
“Where are we?” asked Stephen Johnson.
“In the North Sea, between Yorkshire and the Dutch coast,” said Holst.
Johnson took the Captain’s binoculars and focused on the small fishing boat ahead. Fair Maid, Whitby, could be made out on her bow.
“We have to stop and give them help,” Holst said in English. “It is the law of the sea.”
He did not know what his own vessel was carrying, and he did not want to know. His employers had given him their orders and an extremely extravagant bonus. His crew had also been taken care of financially. The crated olives from Cyprus had come onboard at Paphos and were totally legitimate. During the two-day stopover in Sirte, on the coast of Libya, part of the cargo had been removed and then returned. It looked the same. He knew there must be illicit cargo in there somewhere, but he could not spot it and did not want to try.
The proof that his cargo was extremely dangerous lay in the six passengers—two were from Cyprus, and four more were from Sirte. And the changing of the numerals as soon as he had passed the Pillars of Hercules. In twelve hours, he expected to be rid of them all. He would sail back through the North Sea, convert again to the Regina VI at sea, and return calmly to his home port of Limassol, a much richer man.
Then he would retire. The years of running strange cargoes of men and crates into West Africa, the bizarre orders now coming to him from his new Luxembourg-based owners—all would be a thing of the past. He would retire at fifty with his savings enough for him and his Greek wife, Maria, to open their little restaurant in the Greek islands and live out their days in peace.
Johnson looked dubious. “We can’t stop,” he said.
“We have to.”
The light was getting better. They saw a figure, scorched and blackened, emerge from the wheelhouse of the fishing vessel, stagger to the forward deck, make a pain-wracked attempt to wave, then fall forward onto his face.
Another IRA officer came up behind Holst. He felt the muzzle of a gun in his ribs.
“Sail on by,” said a flat voice.
Holst did not ignore the gun, but he looked at Johnson. “If we do, and they are rescued by another ship, as they will be sooner or later, they will report us. We will be stopped and asked why we did that.”
Johnson nodded.
“Then ram them,” said the one with the gun. “We don’t stop.”
“We can give first aid and call up the Dutch coast guard,” said Holst. “No one comes aboard. When the Dutch cutter appears, we continue. They will wave their thanks and think no more of it. It will cost us thirty minutes.”
Johnson was persuaded. He nodded. “Put up your gun,” he said.
Holst moved his speed control to “full astern,” and the Regina slowed rapidly. Giving an order in Greek to his helmsman, he left the bridge and went down to the waist before moving up to the foredeck. He looked down at the approaching fishing vessel, then waved a hand to the helmsman. The engines went to “midships,” and the momentum of the Regina carried her slowly up to the stricken fisherman.
“Ahoy, Fair Maid!” called Holst, peering down as the fishing boat came under the bow. They saw the fallen man on the foredeck try to stir, then faint again. The Fair Maid bobbed along the side of the larger Regina until she came to the Regina’s waist, where the deck rail was lower. Holst walked down his ship and shouted an order in Greek for one of his crew to throw a line aboard the Fair Maid.
There was no need. As the fisherman slid past the waist of the Regina, the man on the foredeck came to, jumped up with remarkable agility for one so badly burned, seized a grappling hook beside him, and hurled it over the rail of the Regina, securing it fast to a cleat on the Fair Maid’s bow. A second man ran out of the fishing boat’s cabin and did the same at the stern. The Fair Maid stopped drifting.
Four more men ran from the cabin, vaulted to the roof, and jumped straight over the rail of the Regina. It happened so fast and with such coordination that Captain Holst had only time to shout, “Was zum Teufel ist denn das?”
The men were all dressed alike: black one-piece overalls, cleated rubber boots, and black woolen caps. Their faces were blackened, too, but not by soot. A very hard hand took Captain Holst in the solar plexus, and he went down on his knees. He would later say that he had never seen the men of the SBS, the Special Boat Squadron, the seaborne equivalent of the Special Air Service, in action before, and he never wished to again.
By now, there were four Cypriot crewmen on the main deck. One of the men in black shouted a single order to them, in Greek, and they obeyed. They went flat onto the deck, face down, and stayed there. Not so the four IRA members, who came pouring out of the side door of the superstructure. They all had handguns.
Two had the sense to see quickly that a handgun is a poor bargain when faced with a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine carbine. They threw their hands up and tossed their pistols to the deck. Two tried to use their guns. One was lucky: He took the brief burst in the legs and survived to spend his life in a wheelchair. The fourth was not so lucky and collected four bullets in the chest.
There were now six black-clad men swarming over the deck area of the Regina. The third to come aboard had been Tom Rowse. He ran for the companionway that led upward to the bridge. As he reached the wing, Stephen Johnson emerged from the interior. Seeing Rowse, he threw his hands in the air.
“Don’t shoot, Sass-man. It’s over!” he shouted.
Rowse stood aside and jerked the barrel of his machine pistol toward the staircase.
“Down,” he said.
The old IRA man began to descend to the main deck. There was a movement behind Rowse, someone in the door of the wheelhouse. He sensed the movement, half turned, and caught the crash of the handgun. The bullet plucked at the shoulder of his cloth overall. There was no time to pause or shout. He fired as they had taught him, the quick double-burst, then another, loosing two pairs of nine-millimeter slugs in less than half a second.
He had an image of the figure in the doorway that had taken four bullets in the chest, being thrown back into the doorjamb, cannoning forward again—the wild swing of the corn-blond hair. Then she had been on the steel deck, quite dead, a thin trickle of blood seeping from the mouth he had kissed.
“Well, well,” said a voice at his elbow. “Monica Browne. With an ‘e.’ ”
Rowse turned. “You bastard,” he said slowly. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“Not knew. Suspected,” McCready said gently. In civilian clothes, he had come at a more sedate pace out of the fishing vessel when the shooting was over.
“We had to check her out, you see, Tom, after she made contact with you. She is—was—indeed Monica Browne, but Dublin-born and bred. Her first marriage, at twenty, took her to Kentucky for eight years. After the divorce, she married Major Eric Browne, much older but rich. Through his alcoholic haze, he no doubt had not a whit of suspicion of his young wife’s fanatical devotion to the IRA. And yes, she did run a stud farm, but not at Ashford, Kent, England. It was at Ashford, County Wicklow, Ireland.”
The team spent two hours tidying up. Captain Holst proved keen to cooperate. He admitted there had been an open-sea transfer of crates, to a fishing boat off Finisterre. He gave the name, and McCready passed it to London for the Spanish authorities. With speed, they would intercept the arms for the ETA while still on board the trawler—a way for the SIS to say thank you for the Spanish help over the Gibraltar affair.
Captain Holst also agreed that he had been just within British territorial waters when the boarding took place. After that, it would be a matter for the lawyers, so long as Britain had jurisdiction. McCready did not want the IRA men removed to Belgium and promptly liberated, like Father Ryan.
The two bodies were brought to the main deck and laid side by side, covered in sheets from the cabins below. With the aid of the Greek-Cypriot crewmen, the covers were taken from the holds, and the cargo searched. The commandos of the SBS team did that. After two hours, the lieutenant who commanded them reported to McCready.
“Nothing, sir.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“A lot of olives, sir.”
“Nothing but olives?”
“Some crates marked office machinery.”
“Containing?”
“Office machinery, sir. And the three stallions. They’re pretty upset, sir.”
“Bugger the horses—so am I,” said McCready grimly. “Show me.”
He and Rowse followed the officer below. The lieutenant gave them a tour of the ship’s four holds. In one, copying machines and typewriters from Japan were visible through the sides of their smashed crates. In the second and third holds, tins of Cypriot olives spilled from broken boxes. No crate or carton had been left untouched. The fourth hold contained three substantial horse boxes. In each of them a stallion whinnied and shied in fear.
There was a feeling in McCready’s stomach, that awful feeling that comes with knowing you have been duped, have taken the wrong course of action, and that there will be the devil to pay. If all he could come up with was a cargo of olives and typewriters, London would nail his hide to a barn door.
A young SBS man was standing with the horses in their hold. He seemed to know about animals; he was talking to them quietly, calming them down.
“Sir?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“Why are they being shipped?”
“Oh. They’re Arabs. Thoroughbreds, destined for a stud farm,” said Rowse.
“No, they’re not,” said the young commando. “They’re riding-school hacks. Stallions, but hacks.”
Between the inner and outer walls of the specially constructed transport boxes, there was a good foot of space. With crowbars they hacked at the planks of the first loose box. As the shattered timber fell away, the search was over. The watching men saw piled blocks of Semtex-H, serried ranks of RPG-7 rocket launchers, and rows of shoulder-borne surface-to-air missiles. The other horse boxes yielded heavy machine guns, ammunition, grenades, mines, and mortars.
“I think,” said McCready, “we can call in the Navy now.”
They left the hold and went back to the warm morning sunshine of the main deck. The Navy would take over the Regina and bring her to Harwich. There she would be formally seized and her crew and passengers arrested.
The Fair Maid had been pumped out to repair her wallowing list. The special-effects smoke grenades that had given her the appearance of being on fire had long been thrown into the sea.
For the IRA man with the shattered knee, the bleeding had been stopped by a rough but skillful tourniquet applied by the commandos. He now sat ashen-faced with his back against a bulkhead and waited for the naval surgeon-commander, who would come with the frigate, now only half a mile off the beam. The other two had been handcuffed to a stanchion farther down the deck, and McCready had the key to the cuffs.
Captain Holst and his crew had descended without demur into one of the holds—not the one containing the weaponry—and sat among the olives until the Navy men could drop them a ladder.
Stephen Johnson had been locked in his cabin belowdecks.
When they were ready, the five SBS men vaulted onto the cabin roof of the Fair Maid, then disappeared below. Her engine started. Two of the commandos reappeared and cast her loose. The lieutenant waved a last farewell to McCready, still on the Regina, and the fishing boat chugged away. These were the secret warriors; they had done their job, and there was no need for them to wait around.
Tom Rowse sat down, shoulders hunched, on the coaming of one of the holds, next to the supine body of Monica Browne. On the other side of the Regina’s deck, the frigate eased alongside, threw graplines, and sent the first of the boarding party across. They conferred with McCready.
A puff of wind blew a corner of the sheet away from the face beneath it. Rowse stared down at the beautiful face, so calm in death. The breeze blew a frond of corn-blond hair across the forehead. He reached down to push it back. Someone sat down beside him, and an arm came round his shoulders.
“It’s over, Tom. You weren’t to know. You weren’t to blame. She knew what she was doing.”
“If I’d known she was here, I wouldn’t have killed her,” said Rowse, dully.
“Then she’d have killed you. She was that kind of person.”
Two seamen unlocked the IRA men and led them toward the frigate. Two orderlies under the supervision of a surgeon lifted the wounded one onto a stretcher and carried him away.
“What happens now?” asked Rowse.
McCready stared at the sea and the sky and sighed. “Now, Tom, the lawyers take over. The lawyers always take over, reducing all of life and death, passion, greed, courage, lust, and glory to the desiccated vernacular of their trade.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I will go back to Century House and start again. And go back each night to my small flat and listen to my music and eat my baked beans. And you will go back to Nikki, my friend, and hold her very tight, and write your books and forget all this. Hamburg, Vienna, Malta, Tripoli, Cyprus—forget it. It’s all over.”
Stephen Johnson was led past. He paused to look down at the two Englishmen. His accent was as thick as the heather of the west coast.
“Our day will come,” he said. It was the slogan of the Provisional IRA.
McCready looked up and shook his head. “No, Mr. Johnson, your day has long gone.”
Two orderlies loaded the body of the dead IRA man onto a stretcher and removed it.
“Why did she do it, Sam? Why the hell did she do it?” asked Rowse.
McCready leaned forward and drew the sheet back over the face of Monica Browne. The orderlies returned to take her away.
“Because she believed, Tom. In the wrong thing, of course. But she believed.”
He rose, pulling Rowse up with him.
“Come on, lad, we’re going home. Let it be, Tom. Let it be. She’s gone the way she wanted, by her own wish. Now she’s just another casualty of war. Like you, Tom. Like all of us.”
Thursday, when the hearing began for its fourth day, was the day that Timothy Edwards had determined would be its last. Before Denis Gaunt could begin, Edwards decided to preempt him.
Edwards had become aware that his two colleagues behind the table, the Controllers for Domestic Operations and Western Hemisphere, had indicated a softening of their attitudes and were prepared to make an exception in the case of Sam McCready and retain him by some ruse or other. After the close of the Wednesday hearing, his two colleagues had taken Edwards to a quiet corner of the Century House bar and made their feelings more than plain, proposing that somehow the old Deceiver be retained within the Service.
That was emphatically not in Edwards’s scenario. Unlike the others, he knew that the decision to make a class action out of the case for the early retirement of the Deceiver stemmed from the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, a man who one day would sit in conclave with four others and decide the identity of the next Chief of the SIS. It would be foolish to antagonize such a man.
“Denis, we have all listened with the greatest interest to your recall of Sam’s many services, and we are all mightily impressed. The fact is, however, that we now have to face the challenge of the nineties, a period when certain—how shall I put it?—active measures, riding roughshod over agreed procedures, will have no place. Must I remind you of the brouhaha occasioned by Sam’s chosen course of action in the Caribbean last winter?”
“Not in the slightest, Timothy,” said Gaunt. “I had in mind to recall the episode myself, as my last instance of Sam’s continuing value to the Service.”
“Then please do so,” invited Edwards, relieved that this was the last plea he would have to listen to before proceeding to his unavoidable judgment. Besides, he reasoned, this episode would surely sway his two colleagues to the view that McCready’s actions had been more those of a cowboy than of a local representative of her Gracious Majesty. It was all very well for the juniors to give Sam a round of applause when he walked into the Hole in the Wall bar on his return, just before the New Year, but it was he, Edwards, who had had to interrupt his festivities to smooth the ruffled feathers of Scotland Yard, the Home Office, and the outraged Foreign Office, an interlude he still recalled with intense exasperation.
Denis Gaunt reluctantly crossed the room to the desk of the Records clerk and took the proffered folder. Despite what he had said, the Caribbean affair was the one he would most have liked to avoid. Deep though his admiration for his desk chief ran, he knew that Sam had really taken the bit between his teeth on that one.
He recalled only too well the memoranda that had rained on Century House early in the New Year, and the lengthy one-on-one meeting with the Chief to which McCready had been summoned in mid-January.
The new Chief had taken over the Service only a fortnight earlier, and his New Year present had been to have details of Sam’s Caribbean exploits land on his desk. Fortunately, Sir Mark and the Deceiver went back a long way, and after the official fireworks the Chief had, apparently, produced a six-pack of McCready’s favorite ale for a New Year toast and a promise—no more rule-bending.
Six months later, for reasons McCready could only guess at, the Chief had been much less accessible to him.
Gaunt assumed, wrongly, that Sir Mark had bided his time and waited until the summer to ease McCready out. He had no idea from how high a level the order had really come.
McCready knew. He did not need to be told, had no requirement of proof. But he knew the Chief. Like a good commanding officer, Sir Mark would tell you to your face if you were out of line, chew you off if he felt you deserved it, even fire you if things were that bad. But he would do it personally. Otherwise, he would fight like a tiger for his own people against the outsiders. So this business had come from higher up, and the Chief himself had been overruled.
As Denis Gaunt returned to his own side of the room with the file, Timothy Edwards caught McCready’s eye and smiled.
You really are a bloody menace, Sam, he thought. Brilliantly talented, but you just don’t fit anymore. Such a pity, really. If only you’d smarten yourself up and abide by the rules, there could be a place for you. But not now. Not now that you have really upset people like Robert Inglis. It will be a different world in the nineties—my world, a world for people like me. In three years, maybe four, I shall have the Chief’s desk, and there will be no place for people like you anyway. Might as well go now, Sam, old boy. We’ll have a whole new officer group by then—bright young staffers who do what they’re told, abide by the rules, and do not upset people.
Sam McCready smiled back.
You really are a prize asshole, Timothy, he thought. You really think the gathering of intelligence is about committee meetings and computer print-outs and kissing Langley’s butt. All right, it’s good, the American signals-intelligence, and their electronic intelligence. The best in the world—they have the technology with their satellites and listening devices. But it can be fooled, Timothy, old boy.
There’s a thing called maskirovka, which you have hardly heard of. It’s Russian, Timothy, and it means the art of building phony airfields, hangars, bridges—entire tank divisions—out of tinplate and plywood, and it can fool the American Big Birds. So sometimes you simply have to go in on the ground, put an agent deep inside the citadel, recruit a malcontent, employ a defector-in-place. Timothy, you’d never have made a field man, with all your club ties and your aristocratic wife. The KGB would have had your balls for cocktail olives in two weeks flat.
Gaunt was beginning his last defense, trying to justify what had happened in the Caribbean, trying not to lose the sympathy of the two Controllers who last night had appeared willing to change their minds and recommend a reprieve. McCready stared out of the window.
Things were changing, all right, but not the way Timothy Edwards thought. The world, in the aftermath of the Cold War, was going quietly crazy—the noise would come later.
In Russia, the bumper harvest was still ungathered for lack of equipment, and by the autumn it would be rotting in the sidings for lack of rolling stock. Famine would come in December, maybe January, driving Gorbachev back into the arms of the KGB and the High Command, and they would exact their price for his heresy of this summer of 1990. The year 1991 would be no fun at all.
The Middle East was a powder keg, and the best-informed agency in the region, the Israeli Mossad, was being treated like a pariah by Washington, and Timothy Edwards was taking his cue from there. McCready sighed. The hell with them all. Perhaps a fishing boat in Devon was the answer after all.
“It all really began,” said Gaunt, opening the file in front of him, “in early December, on a small island in the northern Caribbean.”
McCready was jerked back to the realities of Century House. Ah yes, the Caribbean, he thought—the bloody Caribbean.