December Ultimatum (21 page)

He poured more tea for himself from the vacuum flask into the yellow plastic beaker. The sea a mile and a half ahead was on fire from the oil that had poured from the
Okinawa’s
fractured fuel tanks. Black smoke, a mile wide, belched into the air five thousand feet up, and he watched his frigates manoeuvring close by the edge of the oil spraying foam under pressure to contain it. Others just behind them were picking up survivors: the living, the half-living, the dying and the dead. He nodded acknowledgement as an officer by his side updated the count. Eighty-two, from a ship that had carried over six hundred. And why? It made no sense.

He would wait another ten minutes until the centre channel had been cleared of burning oil and he would order his fleet forward, through the Straits of Hormuz and then turn due west at the end of the deep water channel into the Gulf for the final and most crucial phase of the operation. At coordinates 25 North—54 East, two thousand combat marines of the Soviet 12th Division would be airlifted by helicopter into the oilfields. They would be accompanied by Forger vertical take-off aircraft from both the
Minsk
and the
Ivan Rogov.
By 08h00 local time the men would be on the ground and in control, six hours behind the scheduled timing of the operation because of the
Okinawa.
But no matter, within two hours it would be done.

Commander Sergei Borgnev ordered his twenty-two warships forward and, gathering speed, ignored the bodies below them: men waving, men screaming, men covered in oil, men still on fire, men floating face down, men without faces, men without arms, all suddenly swept inwards by the surge, broken into little pieces by the power of the water and the scythe of the giant propellers.

But the forward frigates hadn’t gone more than a thousand yards when the alarms were sounded, and they broke from their tight formation and scattered left and right within the confines of the deep-water channel. Sonar on the forward tracking ships had detected massive underwater obstructions blocking the channel ahead. Quickly the sonar computerised the radio signals and translated them into picture outlines.

Commander Sergei Borgnev took the pictures and asked for more tea as he examined the sonar silhouettes of the two submerged but still floating hulks of the
Okinawa
.

Yellowbean 720 began its climb to twenty-nine thousand feet, twenty-two minutes after the first men of the Rapid Deployment Force had hit Saudi Arabian sand. The ground satellite station was now in direct contact with
US
Command in Adana in Turkey and Yellowbean’s pilot, Colonel James Pringle, heard the first transmission safely sent and quickly acknowledged.
‘THIS IS TWO. SNOWBALL FORCE RAPIDLY DEPLOYED AT THIS TIME. WE ARE ON THE GROUND AND SPREADING. REPEATING WE ARE SUCCESSFULLY DEPLOYED AT THIS TIME.’
And Adana had come back via the Indian Ocean satellite:
‘THAT’S HOW IT’S MEANT TO BE BULLY BOYS, THAT’S HOW IT’S MEANT TO BE. JUST KEEP IT MOVING OUT THERE.’
Colonel Pringle wondered, as he had done at other moments of American drama, why it was that distant anonymous controllers always used the language of the movies.

The forty-eight other aircraft of the Yellowbean formation had scrambled forty-five minutes earlier, just as soon as they had dropped their paratroop sticks, and headed south for refuelling and rest on Diego Garcia.

From that base in the Indian Ocean they would fly nonstop return to Adana, and then reform to their separate squadrons in Europe. Colonel Pringle took the paper cup of hot chocolate and the barbecue chicken legs in foil from his flight engineer. The
C-130
was climbing to cruising height on automatic and he turned in his seat and punched his co-pilot lightly on the shoulder. He knew, they all knew that things had gone so well they could still go wrong. That was the necessary caution of success. But soon they would be in international airspace and would casually exchange the time of day with the captains of Pan-Am and British Airways Boeings as they passed by. The original flight plan was to have taken Yellowbean 720 due south but Adana Control had warned of a flight of Soviet Antonovs on their way to Aden in the South Yemen from their base in the Caspian Sea. Colonel Pringle had been given an alternate that took him further east, towards the tip of Oman, within eighty miles of the Persian Gulf.

Over friendly Oman he would call Muscat Control and request permission to enter their airspace and clearance to thirty-three thousand feet for airway-routing south.

The morning was brilliant, and the desert five and a half miles below was so clear that Pringle could see the dunes and the ripples of sand which stretched for a thousand miles and regularly changed direction and shape overnight as the winds turned the desert around.

The engines changed tune as cruising height was reached. The flight engineer tapped Colonel Pringle on the shoulder.

‘There’s a helluva lot of smoke port side, Skipper.’ Colonel Pringle looked out through the left hand triangle of glass. Eighty miles away, maybe a little more, he could see the snake of water that he recognized from the map as the Strait of Hormuz. There were dots in it, a fleet though he couldn’t count the number of ships.

‘That’s a lotta smoke,’ he said back. ‘Sea’s on fire.’ Colonel Pringle pressed his mouthpiece closer to his lips, leaned forward and turned the radio frequency dials until he found Adana Control.

‘Hullo Snowball control. Snowball control. This is Yellowbean 720 . . . Yellowbean 720 calling Snowball control.’ ‘Come in Yellowbean, this is Snowball. Go ahead.’ Colonel Pringle continued, ‘We’re approaching sector yellow seven, repeat that’s yellow seven and we’re sighting a lotta smoke say eighty miles to the north east. Shall I take a look? Take some aerials? Over.’

There was a long pause, long enough for Colonel Pringle and his co-pilot to look at each other and wonder why.

‘Yellowbean 720. This is Snowball . . . Yellowbean 720. This is Snowball. Acknowledge.’

‘Yes Snowball, this is Yellowbean. Go ahead.’

‘Yellowbean you will continue south on your present heading. Repeat you are ordered to maintain your present heading. Under no circumstances will you see smoke. Repeat you will not see smoke. Move south. Acknowledge.’ ‘I’ve got you Snowball. I repeat affirmative. Got you loud and clear and proceeding south. Yellowbean out.’ Colonel Pringle leaned forward again and turned his radio back to Muscat control local frequency. He looked again through the small window down towards the Persian Gulf and the dots of ships and the enormous column of black smoke rising from the narrow channel.

He looked across to his co-pilot and then to his flight engineer and navigator behind him.

‘Well, first you see smoke and then you don’t. I thought it was there but if Snowball says it isn’t—well, boys, it isn’t.

He pulled the stick sharply to the right and the seventy- five-ton aircraft peeled away through the thin white wisps of altostratus cloud, and higher into the blue.

ULLSWATER

‘Shallow grave of snow’

The snow was falling thick now and Schneider knew her chances were good. Her one fear had been a clear night with a bright moon, a silent December night when the smallest sound would carry across the valley and the rippling of the stream over the stones down in the valley’s centre would sound only yards away, a white moon that would reflect the flight of a barn owl along the length of Martindale and alert trackers to her direction.

She had prepared sacking to tie over the horses’ hooves but as they had moved out from the cover and warmth of the enclosed tree-covered gulley the snow was already deep, and she had left the squares of sacking hanging on a bough. They would not be needed tonight.

The canister hung from the side of the packhorse, tied length-ways along its left flank. To help it keep its balance, she had filled a sack full of stones to even out the weight. The two animals knew the area well and although Schneider had memorized the mountain route, she found the horses pulling at their halters, as if they knew their destination and their purpose and were anxious to be finished with it.

Twenty minutes ago they passed three hundred feet above Martindale church, then moved under the waterfall and were now climbing the steep slope of Hallin Fell following the sheep tracks, centuries-old paths now covered in snow but still just visible. The lead horse snorted as it stumbled over a dead sheep but the falling snow caught the sound and held it.

Schneider could feel the strong downdraught coming from the tip of the Knab flowing towards Lake Ullswater, half a mile away. It was this current of air she would use to send the radioactive contamination down to the man she had come to kill. She marvelled at the planning—it was not hers, she knew, but now at its conclusion she was the most vital part. The Arab who had come to the house in Bonngasse, Bonn, just two nights ago, had brought with him the plan with only the Dublin rendezvous to be completed. He had handed her travel documents, the itinerary, the Irish contact, the payment of two hundred thousand Deutschmarks and the promise that the second Arab in Dublin would provide the final part of the plan and the weapon of assassination.

Schneider had shot the little Arab through the head just as she had been told to do, just as she assumed the Irish in Dublin had got rid of the second Arab and just as she assumed someone would try and get rid of her once the contract had been completed. But she would go sideways. She would not rendezvous at the place called Newcastle on the north-east English coast, she would not catch the ferry to Norway across the North Sea—almost certainly the planners intended to dump her into it. She would go southwest instead, go back to Dublin, to the young Irishman Kieran and stay in his rooms until it was safe to return to Bonn.

The wind stung her face and made her pull the balaclava helmet tighter over her head, leaving only a narrow slit for her eyes. Both horses were covered white and were beginning to stumble more now as the gusts of the blizzard wind caught them. But they knew each other well and the smaller mare behind tucked her head into the rump of the stronger, taller lead horse, and Schneider walked on the left of it, better protected, one hand clinging to the saddle. Slabs of snow, hardened almost to ice, had formed across her chest and stomach and were beginning to hamper her movement and her breathing, but she felt strong, certain of success. Another thirty minutes, no longer, and she would be nearing the top of the mountain, and within an hour she would be back to this same position on her way out of Martindale, moving through the night towards Glenridding and south to safety.

She pressed hard against the flank of the horse and could feel its muscles straining against the slope, digging its hooves hard into the snow, all the time pushing forward and upwards. How easily it was working. Fahd was protected by a security cordon that would stop a fly. Radar surveillance, sonic beams, searchlights, dogs, anti-personnel mines, electronically detonated mortars, machine-gun posts and a private army on a twenty-four hour watch. But all the King’s money and all the King’s men would not stop the invisible death that would soon be carried by the wind into every seam of life below. And no one would notice until they knew they were dying. It was the ultimate future weapon in the international terrorist armoury, and she would be the first to use it.

The lead horse stumbled again and Schneider kicked at another dead sheep, its stomach freshly torn open by a fox and filling with snow. She held on to the girth straps with both hands, but felt the slope easing and knew they were almost at the peak.

The British police chief and the army colonels in the Estate’s farmhouse had been almost casual in their briefing. They had sat there in the large kitchen by the log fire, drinking mugs of tea and eating chocolate biscuits, and as Franklin had left the warm room and gone out into the blizzard he thought he had heard one of the policemen complain about the effect the weather would have on spring lambing.

Franklin closed his eyes for a moment against the blast of the snow and thought of Tamworth, New Hampshire and family winter holidays there tobogganing and skiing on the slopes of the White Mountains above Lake Winnipesaukee. The thought of Bill, strong and new out of Harvard with his Master’s degree and the offer of a law partnership in Maine. Son Bill, bright and bronzed, the family’s second ego and the best part of Franklin’s marriage, slaloming to a gold medal in the winter sports and thirty immediate offers of marriage after the television interview that followed. Bill, who only a year later spent five days in a foxhole on the charred slopes of Khe San among the burnt and burst bodies of other young Marines, medevac’d out to Da Nang, never to see or hear or think again. Bill, who had sat in bed for the past ten years at the Veteran’s Sanatorium at St Albans, crying like a baby as the ward nurses rubbed cream into his bed-sores, but making no other sound. Growing older and fatter. A big blond empty balloon.

Snow had for ten years meant only sadness to Franklin and an ex-wife who had chosen him as the target for her sorrow. Snow always set off the memory in the same way. The same soft holidays on White Mountain and the same starched sheets on the same white bed where an only son sat staring with blue eyes seeing nothing ever again; no sun, no snow, no father, no hope.

But tonight snow meant something new and something appallingly different. Out there in the blizzard was an assassin who had come to kill not one man but a hundred years.

Everything had conspired to make Schneider’s job easier, guaranteeing her success. The sudden blizzard had grounded the helicopters, had confused the army patrols, had hampered ground radio communication, had slowed down the remaining civilian evacuation convoys out of the contamination area. And the radiographic metal detectors and the anti-contamination suits and helmets had not arrived because the helicopter bringing them, risking everything against the weather, had crashed into the side of a mountain fifty miles south, killing the crew and destroying everything. And then it was suddenly too late, and Franklin and the other nine men could wait no longer. A patrol in the lower valley had discovered the gulley where Schneider had waited. They had found strips of sacking and empty food tins and hoofmarks, and they had radioed that Schneider was on her way and closing in on the Howtown Estate.

The boffins at the Nuclear Research Establishment at Harwell had telephoned their conclusions on how Schneider would use the plutonium. It was a long shot, they said, but she would probably either roll the canister down the slopes of the mountain, expecting the buffeting to break open the lead covering, or she would explode it. The latter would almost certainly be her choice, because it was the most certain way. She would use a delay detonator, they said, to give her time to get out of the contaminated area. But not a long delay. She couldn’t risk its being discovered by the army patrols. Those who had given her the canister almost certainly knew the area around Howtown and would advise Schneider to place the canister on a slope of a mountain facing the King’s estate so that the downdraught off the mountain would carry the contamination downwards and fast. Such a method, they said, would also enable Schneider to get away before the warmer, lighter valley air distributed the radioactivity in all directions.

Ten men—Franklin plus two police local mountaineers and seven
SAS
Special Forces men who knew Ullswater and its mountains—were now spread evenly across the slopes moving up towards the peak. All of them realized that without their contamination suits and helmets they need only hear the explosion to know that the radioactivity had been released and even though they might walk back through the snow towards Howtown they would already be dying; they would be dead before they saw the lights of the estate.

Each man had to sweep a hundred yards each side of him and Franklin had taken the right flank on the slope nearest the lake. He had been climbing for nearly an hour now; not far above him was the mountain’s peak, and somewhere along its ridge was Schneider, her horses, her lead canister and her explosives. Like the rest, Franklin had been armed with a pistol, a single-action rifle and one hand-grenade. They were told, quite matter-of-factly, that under no circumstances was the grenade to be used against Schneider. It was for their personal use, should they reach her too late. Aim only for Schneider, they had been told, aim only for her and not until you are one hundred per cent certain of hitting only her. The lead canister must not be pierced.

The wind was pushing him sideways and it took most of his strength to stay upright. It was hard to move forward and he knew he couldn’t go for long if the blizzard continued. He stopped and dropped on one knee and breathed slowly and deeply. He was tiring faster than he’d expected. He’d never known such a wind. It blew you backwards and sideways at once and the snow was so thick he couldn’t see ten yards anywhere. It was absurd. And it was suicide. If he didn’t find her soon he would collapse and die buried. He had a radio, but no one would come looking for him now, even if he had the courage to call them. And if he found her she would almost certainly kill him first. She was fit. My God, he remembered how strong she was. And an expert shot. But most of all she would be coming down as he would be struggling up. Either way, he thought, he now had very little chance of ever going home.

Then he remembered yesterday and the blond Englishman who liked cold coffee and had told the tortured Kiernan he could have his trousers back. He remembered his words as he’d left Dublin. ‘You Americans have style. Wonderful style.’ It had made nonsense then. It made complete sense now. What was it he’d said to Cheaney in Cairo? ‘I’m no regular, let a professional do it.’ Cheaney must have laughed his balls off. They didn’t need him on the mountain. Why should they send an old man up a mountain in a blizzard, fifty-year-old paunchy Franklin, who hadn’t handled a gun in twenty years? Why send him if they didn’t expect him to come back? They sent him
knowing
he wouldn’t come back. He knew too much. It was King Fahd’s briefing. The Agency hadn’t expected that. No one had told the King’s men that Franklin was off their books. A newspaperman with so much in his head. A risk.

So they didn’t expect him to get Schneider. They hoped she would get him. Then the police and the Special Forces would get her and the canister. They reckoned he’d served a purpose. They’d strung him along, hoping he could be useful with the information he had and too scared to dump him in case he had more. And he hadn’t.

He pushed himself up off his knee with his rifle and braced himself against the force of the blizzard. The snow gave a little beneath him. He tried to use the rifle again to steady himself but it sank too deep and his weight shifted suddenly away from the slope and the wind caught him and threw him down. He slid on his side, and then somersaulted. Using the rifle as an anchor, one hand on the butt, one on the barrel, he slowed down enough to curl his leg around an alder sapling just above a frozen stream. He stopped in the middle of a cart track.

Blood trickled into his left eye. He tried to wipe it away but stopped. What was it? Not the wind. A sound, but not a human sound. A sheep? Possibly. He pulled the hood of his anorak back from his ears and cupped his hands. The wind carried it through the snow—it wasn’t a sheep. It was a horse. The whinny of a horse!

Schneider twisted the knife and quickly cut through the second hamstring, on the mare’s right hind leg. It slumped forward, blood spurting now from both the severed tendons, and from the jugular vein. Schneider pushed hard against the animal so that it fell on to its right side, away from the canister. The second horse leaned down and began to nudge the other, digging its nose into the snow under its head as if trying to lift it. But the dying eyes were wide open and unblinking and snow gradually began to cover them.

Schneider went down on her knees and began to unpack the canvas bag hanging across the horse’s belly. She pulled out a roll of wide adhesive tape, two slabs of plastic explosive and a small square metal time-delay detonator. Carefully she unwrapped the wax paper from the detonator and taped it to the explosive. She put both into her lap and stuck her fingers in her mouth to warm them before twisting the circuit wires together. Red to red, black to black. Then she wound up the detonator’s simple clockwork timing mechanism, ready to strap it to the canister. She heard, but turned too late—and Franklin’s first bullet went through her left shoulder, the force of it spinning her round.

‘Put it down, Anna.’ Franklin screamed it out above the wind and swirling snow. ‘Put it down a yard in front of you and lie back.’ He had crept to within twenty yards of her. She pulled off her goggles to see him better. Then she dropped the detonator into her lap and began pulling at her tunic buttons to get at her pistol. As Franklin saw the butt of it, he fired his second shot and the pistol spun away and buried itself. His second bullet had grazed the same shoulder, just above the first wound, and she fell backwards on to the belly of the dying mare, still clutching the detonator. Franklin stumbled through the snow shouting, ‘Drop it, Anna, drop it . . . it’s over, everybody’s gone . . . evacuated. The King’s gone . . . Anna, I’ll kill you.’