Pandemic (44 page)

They now had, he realized, exactly two choices: they could quickly search the cabin and try to locate and defuse all the charges before they went off or they could get the hell out of there. It
wasn’t a difficult decision for him.

Richter whirled round and gestured upwards with his thumb. Crane nodded and the two men immediately swam out of the gaping hole in the front of the cabin and headed back along the thin cord
Crane had paid out towards the detached wing. With imminent death lurking in the dark waters behind them, they moved as quickly as they could.

They passed the Learjet’s wing, and began to swim even faster, following the cord towards the lead anchor and the rope that led to the buoy up on the surface. Crane spotted it first,
braked abruptly and began swimming upwards, his left hand grabbing and then encircling the rope. Richter was right behind him all the way.

In the wreckage of the Learjet, the four pencil detonators had been active for a little over two hours and forty minutes, so the remaining thickness of membrane separating the switches and
batteries from the sea water could now be measured only in microns. Making chemical-activated detonators has never been an exact science, because there are so many different circumstances that
cannot be factored in. The water depth and hence the pressure, the water temperature, and even the force used to snap the end of the pencil and initially arm the detonator: all could affect the
time elapsing before the device would explode. The fuses Stein had collected from Soúda Bay were of good quality, pretty much state of the art, but still they were going to blow some minutes
before the full three hours were up.

Richter and Crane deliberately slowed their pace as they ascended – going up to the surface too fast kills more divers than almost anything else because it doesn’t allow the absorbed
nitrogen in the blood to come out of solution gradually. Crane had arranged aqualung sets at twenty and then at ten feet below the surface, and Richter slowed himself even further as they
approached the lower of the two sets. But Crane waved him on, and they stopped together just ten feet below the surface, seizing hold of the buoy cable.

Crane started his stopwatch, then checked his dive watch. He then consulted a dive table printed on a plastic board attached to his weight belt and made some swift calculations, working out how
long they’d been submerged and at what depths. These two factors would determine the length of time they had to spend decompressing before they could surface safely. Once he’d arrived
at an answer, he did the whole check over again.

At this point Crane wrote ‘WHAT THAT?’ on the waterproof board and passed it across to Richter, who had just opened the air valve on one of the two aqualung sets attached to the buoy
cable and swapped mouthpieces.

Richter took the pencil and scribbled ‘BOMB’ in reply, then added ‘WHEN SURFACE?’ below it. Crane checked his stopwatch and wrote ‘6 MIN’. Richter wrote:
‘TOO LONG – GO UP IN 4’. The diving officer at first shook his head, but both he and Richter ascended as soon as four minutes had elapsed, clambered into the life raft and tore
off their masks.

‘You shouldn’t fuck around with decompression tables,’ Crane warned, adding ‘sir’ as a grudging afterthought. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘Not half as dangerous as getting your head blown off by fifty pounds of plastic,’ Richter retorted.

‘We were down at about one hundred feet for over thirty minutes,’ Crane said. ‘We should have decompressed for nine minutes at ten feet. I cut two minutes off that time, which
is dangerous enough, and you lopped another two minutes off that, meaning we surfaced four minutes too early.’

Richter grinned at him across the life raft. ‘
You
could have stayed down there,’ he said.

‘Not fucking likely,’ Crane replied. ‘What were those packages?’

‘They were modified demolition charges. Normally they’re made up of four half-pound sheets of C4 plastic explosive, so each one contains just under one kilo, but the ones down there
looked a lot bigger, maybe a couple of kilos or more. C4 is very efficient and you really don’t want to be around when it goes off.’

‘Are we safe here?’ Crane asked.

‘No idea,’ Richter replied. ‘It depends how much explosive’s actually been placed in that wreck. I spotted just two charges, but there could easily be others scattered in
the debris or under the fuselage. Where’s that fucking chopper?’

The Merlin had meanwhile landed on a stretch of flat ground at the south-east end of the island of Gavdopoúla, scattering a dozen goats in its descent, and Mike O’Reilly had since
been watching the life raft carefully through binoculars. As soon as he saw the divers surface, he turned and instructed the pilot to take-off. Seconds later the helicopter lifted into the air and
made straight for their position.

The Merlin had covered most of the distance towards the two men when the sea around them erupted and boiled.

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Westwood closed Hawkins’s file and picked up the paper on which he’d noted down the briefest possible summaries of the lives of the two dead former CIA agents.
In fact, he’d had to use three sheets of paper to get all the dates down, because of the long careers both men had enjoyed with the Company. He leaned back in his chair and began comparing
the two records, year by year.

Strangely enough, although both men had worked in the Operations Directorate, their paths didn’t seem to have crossed all that often. They’d attended two courses together, fairly
early in their careers, but as far as Westwood could see they had never worked together on a single operation of any sort. But if Hicks’s theory was correct, the record had to be wrong, or at
least incomplete, so Westwood studied the dates again.

Then he noticed something he hadn’t expected. In mid 1971 both men had taken sabbaticals, each being away from the Agency for just under twelve months. The dates of their absences were not
an exact match, but both started and ended within a week of each other. Westwood had been looking for operations, not vacations – and it was only when he compared the timelines side by side
that he saw the coincidence. Only perhaps it wasn’t just a coincidence.

He drummed his fingers on the desk impatiently. This wasn’t what he had been hoping to find, but it was something. Maybe they’d gone off on vacation together, hunting or the like,
and something had happened during that period, something that had, over thirty years later, sent a man after them with a gun. God, that was thin, but it was the only patch of ground Westwood had so
far uncovered, so he had no option but to start digging.

He picked up the internal telephone, dialled down to the Registry Archives and asked them to send up all the leave and sabbatical request records for the calendar years 1971 and 1972.

ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos, Eastern Mediterranean

The pilot of the Merlin instinctively hauled back on the collective and the control column, pulling the helicopter up into the air and away from the huge plume of spray
and water rising from the sea in front of him.

‘What the hell was that?’ O’Reilly demanded as the aircraft lurched violently.

‘An underwater explosion. It looked to me like a depth charge going off, just like in those old Second World War films.’

‘Fuck,’ O’Reilly muttered. ‘Can you see our two divers?’

‘Not yet,’ the pilot replied. ‘The water’s disturbed as hell. The life raft’s been holed on one side, and I can’t see anybody near it.’

The pilot tilted the nose of the Merlin downwards again and accelerated towards the partially submerged orange raft. He was still about fifty yards away when O’Reilly spotted a shape in
the water directly below them.

‘Back up,’ he ordered. ‘Body in the water – there’s someone down there. Aircrewman, ready with the winch.’

The pilot immediately swung the helicopter into a tight left-hand turn, scanning the surface below as the Merlin turned away from the focal patch of disturbed water and the swamped life raft.
‘Got it,’ he said, dropping the aircraft closer to the sea. ‘Right two o’clock at thirty yards.’

The side door of the helicopter had been left open throughout the flight, there being no other way of keeping the rear compartment at a reasonable temperature. O’Reilly was now hanging out
of it, looking down, and as the pilot’s position report echoed in his ears, he spotted the figure again. A black-clad body, no aqualung, no weight belt, floating limply and face down on the
surface of the sea.

O’Reilly didn’t hesitate. He took off his headset, unclipped his safety harness, then removed his boots and flying overalls. He put his safety harness on again, then pulled the loop
attached to the end of the winch cable over his shoulders and secured it under his armpits. ‘Lower me,’ he shouted to the aircrewman, then stepped out of the Merlin’s door to
dangle at the end of the cable.

The pilot didn’t even bother engaging the flight computer. He just drove the helicopter down towards the surface, coming to a hover about fifteen feet above the waves as O’Reilly
began to drop downwards, the winch cable paying out above his head. The Senior Observer entered the water about six feet away from the floating body, and with two swift strokes he was beside it.
The harness had two loops, one for the aircrewman himself, and a second for the person to be rescued. O’Reilly grabbed one arm of the body, swiftly looped the harness over its head and under
the other arm, then gave an urgent gesture to be raised.

Almost immediately, he felt the cable tighten as the winch took the strain. With a jerk he was lifted clear of the water, the body rising with him. But O’Reilly guessed they were wasting
their time. He had felt a total lack of movement in the body as he’d positioned the harness around it, so he was virtually certain that the man was dead.

The only thing he didn’t know for sure was whether he had his arms round David Crane or Paul Richter.

Chóra Sfakia, Crete

Stein wasn’t making too bad a job of nosing the boat into the harbour, though he didn’t have anything like the same level of skill as Elias. Krywald had almost
recovered from his nausea by the time they entered the harbour, though he still looked unwell as he stood in the bow, mooring rope in hand. Suddenly they heard a dull rumble somewhere out to sea
behind them.

Stein said nothing, concentrating on giving the boat just the right amount of reverse thrust to stop its forward motion. He switched off the engine as soon as Krywald had stepped safely onto the
jetty and looped the mooring rope over a bollard, then took up the stern mooring rope to finish securing the boat. Only then did Stein check his watch. ‘Two hours fifty-five minutes, as near
as makes no difference,’ he murmured. ‘I told you those were good detonators.’

‘Yup.’ Krywald stepped back into the boat and picked up the black case containing the steel one they’d retrieved what seemed like weeks ago from Nico Aristides’s
apartment in Kandíra. ‘OK, that’s pretty much the end of it as far as we’re concerned. Let’s find the car and then get the hell off this island.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

Tyler Hardin had attached a note with Inspector Lavat’s mobile phone number to the samples he had sent to the Irakleío forensic laboratory so that he could be
contacted as soon as any results were obtained. He was in conference with his team in one of the tents when Lavat entered, telephone in his hand. ‘For you, Mr Hardin,’ the inspector
announced.

The American took the phone and pressed it to his ear. ‘Hardin,’ he said shortly, and then he just listened for three minutes. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and added,
‘I’d like that in writing, please. Thank you again.’

Snapping the telephone closed he handed it back to Inspector Lavat. ‘Well, this case gets stranger by the minute. That was Irakleío. They’re still analysing the specimens but
they seem to have found something in the samples taken from Spiros Aristides’s house.’

‘A filovirus?’ Susan Kane inquired.

Hardin shook his head firmly. ‘Definitely not,’ he said. ‘They found what looked like spores of a completely unknown type, which is interesting enough, but when they added some
moisture to the sample, the spores burst open and released virus particles. Lots and lots of virus particles.’

‘Could they identify it?’ Kane asked.

‘That’s the interesting bit,’ Hardin said. ‘It appears to be of an unknown type, at least on examination using the electron microscope, but what it seems to resemble more
than anything is Bovine Leukaemia Virus.’

There was a brief silence as the CDC personnel absorbed this information.

‘That,’ Jerry Fisher said slowly, ‘makes no sense whatsoever. BLV only attacks cattle, and it’s really slow-acting. As far as I know there’s never been a case of
the virus having any effect whatsoever on a human being, and even if it did, it would probably cause a cancer gestating over a period of years. What it definitely couldn’t do is kill two
healthy men within twelve hours.’

‘They didn’t say that it
was
BLV,’ Hardin pointed out. ‘They just said it looked more like BLV than anything else they’ve got recorded in their database.
I’ve said it before: I think we’re dealing here with a brand-new virus, something that works like a filovirus or an arena-virus – a cross between Ebola and Lassa Fever, say
– but a hell of a lot faster. Dr Gravas’s tag of “Galloping Lassa” is actually pretty close to the mark.’

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

John Westwood hadn’t found anything yet, but what he had
not
found was concerning him.

His search through the Company vacation and sabbatical requests for 1971 and 1972 hadn’t helped, simply because neither Hawkins nor Richards had, according to the records, either submitted
a request for a sabbatical or taken one. That directly contradicted what their personnel records had stated, and suggested to Westwood that he was on the right track.

Both men, it now seemed clear, had been involved in some kind of covert operation starting in mid 1971. An operation so covert that all details of it had been expunged from their personnel files
and the bland ‘sabbatical’ reference substituted in its place.