The Alexandria Connection (43 page)

‘T
his is Sheldon Crowley,’ O’Connor said, flicking up an image of the silver-haired industrialist. The French Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, or GIGN team, had commandeered one of the small office complexes away from the main terminal of the small provincial airfield. It had not escaped O’Connor’s attention that the airport was also favoured by Crowley. Two of EVRAN’s Gulfstream G550s, their stylised volcano logos prominent on their fuselage, were parked well away from any other aircraft.

‘He’s wanted in the United States on suspicion of high treason, and if possible, we want to take him alive. He may have up to three hostages with him,’ O’Connor said, flashing up photos of Aleta, Professor Badawi and Rachel Bannister, in turn, before switching to a photograph of Khan.

‘This is Lieutenant General Farid Khan, ex-head of the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence agency, whom we suspect of coordinating the recent attacks on Chicago, London, Sydney and Melbourne, and on the Strait of Hormuz. We suspect he is also in the villa, and we have evidence that both he and Crowley are involved in dealing in stolen art and ancient artifacts.’ O’Connor didn’t elaborate. The Tutankhamun mask and the falcon pendant were, for the moment, in a need-to-know compartment. The press would soon enough cover this operation, without turning it into a media circus.

‘The villa is located in the mountains above the town of Sartène,’ O’Connor continued. ‘The only entrance by road is well guarded, and there may be guards in the surrounds. For that reason, we’re opting for combined air assault on to the top-storey balcony, here,’ he said, flicking up the latest satellite imagery. The stone fortress-like villa was perched high on a rocky outcrop, with each corner reinforced with an external stone turret. The only thing that appeared to remove it from the fifteenth century was the mass of aerials and dishes on the highest portion of the moss-covered roof.

‘GIGN, call sign Hopi One Three, will be in the lead helicopter, and the US SEAL team, call sign Hopi One Four, will follow in the second chopper. GIGN will clear the top floor, and once that’s secure, we will clear the lower floors, but that may change, depending on what we find. You can leave that to Capitaine Durand and me. Should the opposition get tiresome, we’ll be supported by a Eurocopter Tigre attack helicopter which will keep the guards on the gate pinned down until we can deal with them, and we’ll use the captured villa as a base. H hour is 6.30 p.m. tonight. Any questions?’

Two of the Korengal team exchanged glances and raised their eyebrows. Things were never dull around O’Connor.

The two AS 532 Cougars lifted off just before dusk, the GIGN team in the lead helo, followed by the Tigre. O’Connor looked around his crew, and he felt a surge of pride to once again be with the old team. CPO Kennedy, PO Estrada and the rest, their faces blackened, were sitting calmly on the floor. The best of the best, O’Connor mused.

They climbed quickly toward the rugged mountains to the north, the pilots’ visors reflecting the soft glow of the instrument panels. Down on the Mediterranean coast to the south, the lights of communes like Bonifacio flickered in the night.

G
eneral Khan’s driver slowed at the heavily fortified entrance to Crowley’s villa in the mountains above Sartène.

The guard, dressed in black, with an earpiece in his ear and armed with an Uzi submachine gun of the type favoured by the Israelis, peered into the black Mercedes.

‘Could I see your passport?’

The guard handed back Khan’s passport and stepped back. ‘Mr Crowley is expecting you,’ he said, opening the heavy wrought iron gates.

From his seat in the second chopper, O’Connor’s gaze was fixed on the lead Cougar as it approached the top-floor patio. Suddenly there was a burst of gunfire from the guardhouse. The four-bladed twin-engined Tigre attack helicopter immediately dived from its station above the assaulting Cougars. The gunner fired four withering bursts of 30-millimetre cannon fire, temporarily silencing the guardhouse, but the damage was done. Smoke was pouring from one engine and the lead Cougar lurched offline, the pilot forced to put it down hard on the lawns in front of the château. The French counter-terrorist forces fanned out, and were immediately engaged by guards further down the drive.

Crowley, his own weapon drawn, withdrew from the patio, just before the Tigre attack helicopter raked it with fire in preparation for O’Connor and his SEAL team’s assault. His mind racing, Crowley made for the rooms where Badawi and Aleta were being held.

‘Get moving!’ he ordered, forcing the pair out into the stone passage and across to his office. With one eye on his hostages, he punched in the codes to the subterranean vault.

‘Put your hands on top of your heads! Down the stairs!’ He locked the door behind him and followed, still trying to form a plan.

‘Hold it there!’ Crowley walked past them, waving his gun menacingly. He punched in the final code, flicked the override switch for the computers and turned on the lights. ‘In there!’

‘
Mon Dieu!
’ Aleta held her hand to her mouth. There, among the priceless artwork, in a case of its own, was the mask of Tutankhamun.

‘Sit at that desk over there, both of you, and if you so much as move a muscle, you’ll get a bullet through the head!’

Crowley sat at another desk as a plan began to form in his mind.

The rappelling ropes fell like long black snakes on to the patio, and O’Connor and CPO Kennedy, followed by the rest of the team, dropped to the cobblestones.

‘We’ll clear it room by room,’ O’Connor ordered.

‘Christ . . . that might take a while. Look at the size of this fucking place,’ Estrada muttered.

A burst of fire came from inside the villa and O’Connor returned the compliment. Ruger, badly wounded, tumbled from the position he’d taken up in the ceiling on some heavy wooden beams. The team found Khan, cowering in a corner, and he was immediately handcuffed and arrested.

Down by the guardhouse, Capitaine Durand was putting in a final assault.

The SEALs did what they’d so often done when clearing houses in hostile towns and villages in Iraq and Afghanistan. Room by room, floor by floor, they cleared Crowley’s stronghold, finding nothing other than terrified catering staff. It wasn’t until they cleared the north tower that they found Rachel Bannister, tied and bound in a stone-walled room.

‘So where’s Crowley likely to be holed up?’ O’Connor asked Rachel, after he’d listened impatiently to her story. O’Connor was desperate to find Aleta, but he maintained an outward calm.

‘There’s a vault,’ Rachel said, eyes wide, and she led O’Connor and Kennedy to Crowley’s office.

‘Stand back . . . fire on!’ O’Connor shouted.

He and his team took cover as they blew the locks on the heavy vault door. When the smoke cleared, they cautiously descended the stone steps, only to be confronted by a second steel door.

‘Fire on!’ O’Connor and Kennedy retreated back along the stone passage. M14s at the ready, they waited for the smoke to clear. O’Connor steadied himself. Crowley was standing at the door with a gun to Aleta’s head.

‘Back up the corridor, or the bitch gets it!’ Crowley growled.

O’Connor and Kennedy retreated back to Crowley’s office. Crowley and Aleta emerged, the archaeologist white as a sheet with Crowley’s gun to her head.

‘Now here’s how we’re going to play it,’ Crowley snarled. ‘Your helicopter is going to take me and the bitch back to Figari Sud-Corse. The pilots are to land beside the EVRAN Gulfstreams. One false move by the French police or anyone else, and she gets it.’

Crowley had failed to notice Rachel, who’d been standing in his office, behind the vault door. With her life in ruins, she had nothing to lose. She picked up a massive iron paperweight and brought it down with all the force of a woman scorned, fracturing Crowley’s skull.

O
’Connor and Aleta watched President McGovern make his announcement on television, watched by hundreds of millions around the world.

The president left out the gruesome details – there was enough chaos on the markets without disclosing that counter-terrorist forces in New York had foiled an attempted attack on the Indian Point nuclear reactor, and that British forces had been similarly successful in preventing an attack on the Hinckley Point reactor in Somerset. Nor did he mention that the police in Montana had matched the tyre tracks near Abigail Roxburgh’s Lolo homestead to a hire car from Missoula. Ruger had made the cardinal mistake of not wearing gloves throughout. His prints had not been hard to match. Instead, President McGovern stuck to his core message.

‘As you all know, Governor Davis has resigned his presidential candidacy, just twenty-four hours before the people of this great nation are due to go to the polls. That has no precedent in our history, and many people have been calling for me to postpone the election. Even if I had the power to do that, I wouldn’t. Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest presidents ever to grace this White House, and when he was faced with a similar situation, albeit as a result of the Civil War, he had this to say: “We cannot have a free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone, a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered us.”

‘Although the circumstances are different, the message of the great statesman is just as pertinent today. We will never let terrorists and traitors conquer the very foundations on which this nation has been built.’

O’Connor and Aleta stood at the balustrade of Crowley’s villa, looking down on the lights of Sartène, twinkling through the mists.

‘So Crowley
was
Pharos,’ Aleta mused.

‘He was always at short odds,’ said O’Connor, ‘but with a powerful group like that, you could never be sure. They were all power mad. But none of them could have succeeded without the rest . . . I shudder to think what might have happened if they had.’

‘Will they arrest them all?’

‘Hard to say, but Crowley and Khan are going to spend the rest of their lives in gaol. I heard from McNamara that we got the terrorist ringleaders in Afghanistan with a drone strike out of Creech on a little village called Laniyal.’ O’Connor allowed himself a grim smile at the memory of the blazing firefight in the Korengal Valley.

‘And how about Hailey . . . what a landslide! But what a job in front of her.’

‘I suspect now that the panic is subsiding, the clean-up of the Cobalt 60 in London, Chicago and Melbourne won’t take as long as the media thinks. The stock markets are already starting to climb, although the reactor spill in Sydney’s on a par with Fukishima . . . it will be quite a while before that city returns to anything like normal.’

‘I think Hailey will do a great job,’ said Aleta. ‘Now we can actually
do
something about getting this global warming under control. To President Campbell,’ she said, raising her glass to O’Connor’s.

‘Crowley has quite a good cellar,’ O’Connor said, savouring the Clos des Goisses, 1988.

‘Had,’ Aleta said, moulding her body into his.