He had enough CB equipment, powered by a tiny generator, to spend his winter hours scanning the wavebands of the sheriff, the emergency services and the public utilities. That was how he heard the reports of a two-man aircrew down in the Wilderness and professional teams struggling towards the spot.
Lemuel Wilson was proud to call himself a concerned citizen. As so often, the authorities preferred the term ‘interfering busybody’. Hardly had the two airmen broadcast their plight, and the authorities had replied with their exact positions, than Lemuel Wilson had saddled up and ridden out. He intended to cross the southern half of the Wilderness to reach the Park and rescue Major Duval.
His band-scanning equipment was too cumbersome to bring along, so he never heard the two aviators were rescued anyway. But he did make human contact.
He did not see the man come at him. One second he was urging his horse through a deeper than usual snowdrift, the next a bank of snow came up to meet him. But the snow bank was a man in a silver space-age-material quilted two-piece.
There was nothing space age about the Bowie knife, invented around the time of the siege of the Alamo and still very efficient. One arm round his neck dragged him off his horse; as he crashed down the blade entered his rib cage from the back and sliced open his heart.
A thermal imager is fine for detecting body heat, but Lemuel Wilson’s corpse, dropped into a crevasse ten yards from where he died, lost its heat fast. By the time the AC-130 Spectre began its circling mission high above the Cascades thirty minutes later, Lemuel Wilson did not show up at all.
‘This is Spectre Echo Foxtrot, calling Team Alpha, do you read me, Alpha?’
‘Strength five,’ reported Captain Linnett. ‘We are twelve on skis down here; can you see us?’
‘Smile nicely and I’ll take your picture,’ said the infra-red operator four miles above them.
‘Comedy comes later,’ said Linnett. ‘About three miles due north of us is a fugitive. Single man, heading north on skis. Confirm?’
There was a pause, a long pause.
‘Negative. No such image,’ said the voice in the sky.
‘There must be,’ argued Linnett. ‘He is up ahead of us somewhere.’
The last of the maple and tamarack was well behind them. They emerged from the forest to a bare scree, always climbing north, and the snow fell straight on them without being filtered by branches. Way behind in the darkness stood Lake Mountain and Monument Peak. His men were looking like spectral figures, white zombies in a white landscape. If he was having trouble, so was the Afghan. There was only one explanation for the no-image scenario: the Afghan had taken shelter in a cave or snow hole. The overhang would mask the heat escape. So he was closing on the fugitive. The skis were running easily across the shoulder of the mountain and there was more forest up ahead.
The Spectre fixed Linnett’s position to the yard. Twelve miles to the Canadian border. Five hours to dawn or what passed for dawn in this land of snow, peaks, rocks and trees.
Linnett gave it another hour. The Spectre circled and watched but saw nothing to report.
‘Check again,’ asked Captain Linnett. He was beginning to think something had gone wrong. Had the Afghan died up here? Possible, and that would explain the absence of heat signature. Crouching in a cave? Possible too, but he would die in there or come out and run. And then . . .
Izmat Khan, urging the feisty but tired horse off the scree and into the forest, had actually lengthened his lead. The compass told him he was still going north, the angle of the horse beneath him that he was climbing.
‘I am scanning an arc subtending ninety degrees with you at the point,’ said the imager-operator. ‘Right up to the border. In that arc I can see eight animals. Four deer, two black bear that are very faint because they are hibernating in deep cover, what looks like a marauding mountain lion and a single moose ambling north. About four miles ahead of you.’
The surgeon’s arctic clothing was simply too good. The horse was sweating as it neared exhaustion and showed up clearly, but the man on top of it, leaning forward along its neck to urge it onwards, was so well muffled he blended with the animal.
‘Sir,’ said one of the engineer sergeants, ‘I’m from Minnesota.’
‘Save your problems for the chaplain,’ snapped Linnett.
‘What I mean, sir,’ said the snow-caked face beside him, ‘is that moose do not move up into the mountains in weather like this. They come down to the valley to forage for lichen. It cannot be a moose.’
Linnett called a halt. It was welcome. He stared at the falling snow ahead. He had not the faintest idea how the man had done it. Another isolated cabin, maybe, with an over-wintering idiot with a stable. Somehow the Afghan had got himself a horse and was riding away from him.
Four miles ahead, back in deep forest, Izmat Khan, who had ambushed Lemuel Wilson, was himself ambushed. The cougar was old, a bit slow for deer, but cunning and very hungry. It came down from a ledge between two trees, and the pony would have smelled it but for its own exhaustion.
The first the Afghan knew, something fast and tawny had hit the horse and it was going down sideways. The rider had time to grab Wilson’s rifle from the sleeve alongside the pommel and go backwards over the rump. He landed, turned, aimed and fired.
He had been lucky the mountain lion had gone for the horse and not himself, but he had lost his mount. The animal was still alive, but ripped around the head and shoulders by claws with 135 pounds of angry muscle behind them. It was not going to get up. He used a second bullet to finish its misery. The horse crumpled, lying half across the body of the cougar. It did not matter to the Afghan, but the torso and front legs of the cougar were under the horse.
He unhitched the snowshoes from behind the saddle, fitted them over his boots, shouldered the rifle, checked the compass and moved forward. A hundred yards from him was a large rock overhang. He paused under it for a brief respite from the snow. He did not know it, but it masked his heat-source.
‘Take out the moose,’ said Captain Linnett. ‘I think it’s a horse with the fugitive on it.’
The operator studied his image again.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I can see six legs. He’s paused for a rest. Next circuit, down he goes.’
The ‘destroy’ section of the Spectre’s role is provided by three systems. Heaviest is the M102 105-mm howitzer which is so powerful that to use it on a single human being would be a tad excessive.
Next down comes the 40-mm Bofors cannon, derived, long ago, from the Swedish anti-aircraft weapon, a fast repeater with enough muscle to rip buildings or tanks to fragments. The Spectre crew, told their target was a man on a horse, chose the Gau-12/U Gatling gun. This horror fires 1,800 rounds per minute and each round is a 25-mm (one-inch diameter) slug, a single one of which will pull a human body apart. So intense is the fire of the rotating five-barrel gun that if used on a football pitch for thirty seconds nothing much bigger than a dormouse will be left alive. And the mouse will die of shock.
The maximum altitude for the gun is twelve thousand feet so in the circling turn the Spectre dropped to ten thousand, locked on and fired for ten seconds, loosing off three hundred rounds at the body of the horse in the forest.
‘There’s nothing left,’ remarked the imager-operator. ‘Man and beast, both gone.’
‘Thank you, Echo Foxtrot,’ said Linnett. ‘We’ll take over now.’ The Spectre, mission accomplished, returned to McChord AFB.
The snow stopped, the skis hissed over the new powder, making the sort of progress that skis ought to make with a skilled athlete on them, and the Alpha team came across the remains of the horse. Few fragments were bigger than a man’s arm but they were definitely horse, not human. Except the bits with tawny fur.
Linnett spent ten minutes looking for pieces of arctic clothing, boots, femurs, skull, Bowie knife, beard or snowshoes.
The skis were lying there, but one was broken. That had been done by the falling horse. There was a she
epskin sleeve but no rifle. No snowshoes, no Afghan.
Two hours to dawn and it had become a race. One man on snowshoes, twelve on skis. All exhausted, all desperate. The Alpha team had their GPS positioning system. As the sky lightened fractionally in the east the team sergeant murmured: ‘Border half a mile.’
They arrived twenty minutes later on a bluff overlooking a valley running from their left to right. Below was a logging road that formed the Canadian border. Right across from them was another bluff with a cleared area containing a cluster of log cabins, a facility for Canadian lumberjacks when the timber concessions resumed after the snows.
Linnett crouched, steadied his forearms and studied the landscape through binoculars. Nothing moved. The light factor increased.
Unbidden, his snipers eased their weapons from the sleeves that had contained them throughout the mission, fixed their scopes, inserted one shell each and lay down to stare across the gulf through their telescopes.
By the norms of soldiering snipers are a strange breed. They never get near the men they kill, yet they see them with a clarity and an apparent proximity greater than anyone else today. With hand-to-hand combat almost extinct, most men die not by the hand of their enemy but by his computer. They are blown away by a missile fired a continent away or from somewhere under the sea. They are destroyed by a smart bomb loosed by an aircraft so high they neither see nor hear it. They die because someone fires a shell from two counties away. At the nearest, their killers, crouching behind a machine gun in a swooping helicopter, see them only as vague shapes, running, hiding, trying to fire back. But not as real humans.
That is how the sniper sees them. Lying in total silence, utterly immobile, he sees his target as a man with three days’ stubble, a man who stretches and yawns, who spoons beans out of a can, unzips his fly or simply stands and stares at a lens a mile away that he cannot see. And then he dies. Snipers are special – inside the head.
They also live in a private world. So total does the obsession with accuracy become that they lapse into a silence peopled only by the weights of projectile heads, the power of various powder loads, how much a bullet will wind-drift, how far it will drop over various distances, whether yet another tiny improvement can be made to the rifle.
Like all specialists they have their passions for rival pieces of equipment. Some snipers like a really tiny bullet like the M700 round out of the Remington .308, a slug so small that it has to be sheathed in a detachable sleeve to go down the barrel at all.
Others stay with the M21, the sniper version of the M14 standard combat rifle. Heaviest of all is the Barrett Light Fifty, a monster that sends a bullet like a human forefinger over a mile with enough speed times weight to cause a human body to explode.
Lying prone at Captain Linnett’s feet was his leading sniper, Master Sergeant Peter Bearpaw. He was a half-blood Santee Sioux with a Hispanic mother. He came from the slums of Detroit and the army was his life. He had high cheekbones and eyes that sloped like a wolf. And he was the best marksman in the Green Berets.
What he cradled as he squinted across the valley was the Cheyenne .408 by CheyTac of Idaho. It was a more recent development than the others, but over three thousand rounds on the range it had become his weapon of choice. It was a bolt-action rifle, which he appreciated because the total lock-down of a closed bolt give that tiny extra stability at the moment of detonation.
He had inserted the single slug, very long and slim, and he had burnished and buffed the nose tip to eradicate the tiniest vibration in flight. Along the top of the breech ran a Jim Leatherwood X24 scope sight.
‘I have him, Captain,’ he whispered.
The binoculars had missed the fugitive, but the scope sight had found him. Set among the cabins across the valley, encased on three sides by timber, with one single glass-panelled door, was a phone booth.
‘Tall, long shaggy hair, bushy black beard?’
‘Roger that.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘He is in a phone booth, sir.’
Izmat Khan had had little communication with his fellow inmates at Guantanamo, but one with whom he had spent many months in the same ‘solitary’ block had been a Jordanian who had fought in Bosnia in the mid-nineties before returning to become a trainer in the AQ camps. He was hardline.
As security slackened around the Christmas period, they found they could whisper from one cell to another. If you ever get out of here, the Jordanian told him, I have a friend. We were in the camps together. He is safe; he will help a True Believer. Mention my name.
There was a name. And a phone number. Izmat Khan did not know where it was. He was not quite sure of the complexities of Subscriber Trunk Dial, for which he actually had enough quarters, but, worse, he did not know the overseas dial code out of Canada. So he punched in a quarter and asked for the operator.
‘What number are you trying, caller?’ said the unseen Canadian telephonist. Slowly, in halting English, he pronounced the figures he had so painstakingly memorized.
‘That is a UK number,’ said the operator. ‘Are you using US quarters?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s acceptable. Put in eight of them and I will connect you. When you hear the pips put in more if you wish to continue the call.’
‘Have you acquired the target?’ asked Linnett.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Take the shot.’
‘He’s in Canada, sir.’
‘Take the shot, sergeant.’
Peter Bearpaw took a slow, calm breath, held it inside, and squeezed. The range was a still-air 2,100 yards on his range-meter, well over a mile.
Izmat Khan was pushing quarters into the slot. He was not looking up. The glass front of the booth disintegrated into pinpricks of perspex and the bullet took away the occiput from the rest of his head.
The operator was as patient as she could be. The man down in the logging camp had inserted only two quarters, then left the handset hanging and apparently left the booth. Finally she had no choice but to hang up on him and cancel the call.
Because of the sensitivity of the cross-border shot, no official report was ever made.
Captain Linnett reported to his commanding officer who told Marek Gumienny in Washington. Nothing more was heard.
The body was found in the thaw when the lumberjacks returned. The hanging phone was disconnected. The coroner could do little but record an open verdict. The man wore US clothing but in the border country that was not odd. He had no ID; no one recognized him locally.
Unofficially most people around the coroner’s office presumed the man had been the victim of a tragic stray shot from a deer hunter, another death from careless shooting or ricochet. He was buried in an unmarked grave.
Because no one south of the border wanted to make waves, it was never thought to ask what number the fugitive had asked for. Even to make the enquiry would give away the source of the shot. So it was not made.
In fact the number he wanted was that of a small apartment off-campus near Aston University in Birmingham. It was the home of Dr Ali Aziz al-Khattab, and the phone was on intercept by Britain’s MI5. All they were waiting for was enough evidence to justify a raid and arrest. They would get it a month later. But that morning the Afghan was trying to call the only man west of Suez who knew the name of the ghost ship.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After two weeks enthusiasm for the hunt for a seemingly non-existent ghost ship was starting to fade and the mood came from Washington.
How much time, trouble and treasure could be expended on a vague scrawl on a boarding card stuffed into a divebag on an island no one had ever heard of? Marek Gumienny had flown to London to confer with Steve Hill when the SIS expert in maritime terrorism, Sam Seymour, called up from the Ipswich HQ of Lloyd’s Register and made matters worse. He had changed his mind. Hill ordered him to London to explain.
‘With hindsight,’ said Seymour, ‘the option of Al-Qaeda seeking to use a huge blocking ship to c
lose down a vital sea highway to wreck global trade was always the likeliest option. But it was never the only one.’
‘What makes you think it was the wrong path to go?’ asked Marek Gumienny.
‘Because, sir, every single vessel in the world big enough to achieve that has been checked out. They are all safe. That leaves options two and three which are almost interchangeable but with different targets. I think we should now look at three: mass murder in a seashore city. Bin Laden’s public switch to economic targets could have been a hoax, or he has changed his mind.’
‘OK, Sam, convince me. Steve and I both have political masters demanding results or our heads. What kind of ship if not a blocking vessel?’
‘For threat number three we do not look at the ship so much as the cargo. It need not be large so long as it is absolutely deadly. Lloyd’s have a hazardous cargo division – obviously, it changes the premium.’
‘Ammunition ship?’ asked Hill. ‘Another Halifax wipe-out?’
‘According to the boffins, military ordnance simply does not explode like that any more. The modern stuff needs huge provocation to go off inside the hull. You’d get worse from an exploding firework factory, but it would not begin to deserve the word “spectacular” as in Nine/Eleven. The Bhopal chemical leak was far worse and that was dioxin, a deadly weedkiller.’
‘So, a tanker-truck driving dioxin into Park Avenue and completing the job with Semtex,’ suggested Hill.
‘But these chemicals are closely guarded inside their manufacturing and storage base,’ objected Gumienny. ‘How do they get the cargo with no one noticing?’
‘And we were specifically told a ship would be the carrier,’ said Seymour. ‘Any hijacking of such a cargo would create immediate retaliation.’
‘Except in some parts of the Third World that are virtually lawless,’ said Gumienny.
‘But these ultra-lethal toxins are not made in such places any more, not even for labour-cost savings, sir.’
‘So, we are back to a ship?’ said Hill. ‘Another exploding oil tanker?’