by Andy McNab
Fatman tried to grab some duvet. 'What? What the fuck d'you want?'
But in all the excitement the duvet had long since left the bed and he ended up staring at me, naked as the day he was born.
'Shut the fuck up, dickhead!' I pointed the knife. Aggression with just a hint of insanity. They needed to think they were about to die, so anything else was a bonus.
The girl slunk deeper into the corner.
Fatman – pumped up on Vitamin V, sex, or just flapping so much he didn't really know what he was doing – tried to stand up. It wasn't a pretty sight. I lunged forward and punched him in the face. He fell back and hit his head on the wood panelling behind the bed. Blood trickled from his nose. It had to be over the top: I wanted to dominate the room from the word go.
Tears cascaded down her face – as they do when you think your nose is going to be fucked up. 'Please, just let me go . . .'
'Get on the bed.'
She crawled onto it and sat shivering next to Fatman.
Blood dribbled from between his fingers as he held them against his face. He put one hand up and stared at the results. Then he started to sob.
'Please, whatever it is you want, just take it, take it . . .'
The voice was estuary English – Kent, maybe, or Essex. I wondered how he'd made his money. Cars, perhaps. Swimming pools? I'd soon find out.
I put the tip of the knife to his throat and asked who had given him permission to speak, but he was in shock; I wasn't even sure he heard me.
'Listen, mate, if it's money you want, you can have it – all the money I've got, OK? OK, mate . . .?'
I applied some pressure with the knife; not enough to break the skin, but enough to get his attention. For a moment or two he stopped jabbering, long enough for me to ask if he had any weapons.
His eyes widened. 'No, mate, no weapons here. Honest. I swear. No, oh please, dear God, no . . . Look just take it all – anything you want . . .'
'Shut it.'
He fell silent again.
'The boat – how full are the tanks?'
'The boat? It's the boat you want . . .?' Relief flooded into his eyes. 'Take her, mate. Take her. Just let me go, OK? Please. She's half full. There's almost a thousand gallons of diesel in the tanks. Enough to get you well away from here. Only leave me, OK? Let me go. I got a wife, kids. Lovely girls. Fifteen and thirteen. Please. Let me see 'em grow up, eh? I'm begging you. Let me go and I won't tell anyone. The keys are under the dash. Just take the fucking thing . . .'
I prodded him again. Like a lab-monkey with an electrode up its arse, Fatman was beginning to associate pain with obedience.
'What's your name?'
'Gary.'
'Gary who?'
'Spratley. Gary Spratley.'
'Where are you from, Gary Spratley?'
'Barking.'
Barking, London. Noted for its world-class marinas and jet-set living. 'Who's this?' I nodded towards Candy Girl.
When she looked at me her eyes were as hard as the lacquer on her exquisitely manicured nails. 'My name's Electra.'
I might have guessed.
'What do you do, Gary?'
'I'm a yacht-broker.'
'Not your boat, then?'
'Mine? Fuck no. I'm handing it over to a client. A Russian. He was meant to be here to take delivery last week, but the bastard hasn't showed. I was looking after it till he turned up . . .'
Electra's kiln-hardened glaze just got harder. 'What? This isn't your boat? I'm wasting my time with a fucking salesman?'
I left them to it and opened the door of the en suite and took a peek inside. The porthole was about ten inches long and five inches wide. The only way off the boat was the way I'd got on.
Both their mobiles were on a shelf behind the bed. I grabbed them and shoved them in my pocket, then gestured with the knife.
Electra stood and let her hands fall from her perfectly enhanced breasts, eying me defiantly. I bundled her into the bathroom and told her if she made a sound, I'd be back to give her some fresh tattoos.
Gary, meantime, was coming with me.
'Please.' I thought he was going to start crying again. 'Wh-What are you going to do?'
He bent down to pick up his black Speedo-style underpants.
'You got an account or credit card for fuel?'
Gary's Adam's apple bobbed like a yo-yo. He looked like he was about to be sick again. 'Sure. Company card.'
He produced his wallet and I nodded. A platinum Amex. That would do nicely.
'Get dressed and clean your face up. Then you're going to fill up the boat.'
'Yeah, sure. Just don't hurt me, OK? Please.' He started hopping around on one leg, trying to get the Speedos on.
Spratley was an idiot who'd give me no trouble at all.
The girl, though, I wasn't so sure about.
68
Hurtling across the ocean at speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour was an unnerving experience when your entire view forward came courtesy of Jack Shit. The sea was like treacle beneath the gunmetal sky. We'd been pounding through it for almost seven hours. At least there was no wind to speak of, and the mild conditions were forecast to stay with us at least as far as our refuelling stop: the port of Cagliari in southern Sardinia.
Every available headlight and spotlight on the Predator was switched on and angled forward, but at the speeds we were travelling, we'd only have a split second's reaction time if anything appeared out of the gloom.
Lynn sat at the wheel, in the big leather seat in the helm station, staring past the wipers into the blackness. Other shipping didn't worry him – he seemed confident the radar would take care of whatever was out there – but the other crap – the odd tree carried into the Med, or the occasional container washed off the deck of a cargo ship – transformed him into Colonel Doom and Gloom.
Now we were travelling at speed and well away from the mainland, there seemed little point in keeping the two below trussed up. I'd locked Gary and Electra in separate guest cabins. It wasn't quite what they'd been used to, but now her sugar-daddy dream had gone to rat shit it looked like Electra would tear him apart.
I sat next to Lynn at the driver's station, staring into the blackness, aware that, for him, this was all moving at a pace he was desperately uncomfortable with – and that it wasn't going to get any easier.
Lynn finally broke the silence, asking me how I intended to 'put ashore' when we reached Libya.
I told him I needed a stretch of coastline as close as possible to Tripoli. This wasn't as tough as it sounded. The rule when coming ashore was to head for the lights and then veer a little to the left or the right. If we ended up on some endless, sandy beach miles from nowhere, great, no one was going to spot us – but we'd look like a right couple of dickheads in the morning, scratching our arses and wondering what to do next.
Better to come ashore as close to civilization as possible, get into the city and blend in as best we could in a country where foreigners were still eyed with suspicion.
Either way, I reckoned that was going to be the easy bit. 'You still confident about finding a man who'd presided over Libya's foreign intelligence operations, in a country that's still effectively a police state?'
Lynn continued to stare straight ahead, only glancing down from time to time to check our course on the GPS.
'I know him extremely well.'
'You'd better tell me what to expect.'
Mansour was a few years older than Lynn. 'Like me, he was a classicist – he graduated from Tripoli university then joined the army, passing out from the Tripoli military academy. He spent the next four years as an ordnance officer, working extensively with the Soviet weapons advisers who were crawling all over Libya by then, busy arming Gaddafi to the teeth.
'Mansour is from the Al-Waddan tribe, whose power base is some Godforsaken hole out in the desert, several hundred kilometres south of Tripoli. Tribe matters in Libya, and the Al-Waddan family wasn't part of the elite that helped hoi
st Gaddafi to power, as far as I know. But somehow Mansour managed to transcend all that.'
Lynn started fucking about with a couple of dials; I thought he was actually starting to enjoy himself.
'Mansour is highly intelligent and cultured – the fact that he has a classics degree should tell you everything you need to know. He has a natural flair for languages – speaks fluent English and is damn-near fluent in Russian and German too. This, and the fact that he didn't eat his peas with a knife, ensured that it wouldn't be long before he was recruited by military intelligence. But above all, the powers-that-be recognized that Mansour could blend in.'
'When did you first come across him?'
'I was posted to Libya in the mid-eighties, just before things went tits-up between London and Tripoli. The Colonel was well into his campaign to support what he called "liberation movements", the Provisionals amongst them. GCHQ provided us with some intelligence drawn from comms traffic between Tripoli and the Republic, but essentially we were in the dark.
'I was dispatched to Tripoli, ostensibly to carry out a review of our embassy's security, but with a brief to keep my eyes and ears open. We had some assets in-country. It was my job to collate everything they knew – put the whole int package together and advise on possible . . . outcomes. We knew that Libyan military intelligence was trying to muscle in on Gaddafi's foreign operations and that the army and the Jamahiriya Security Agency were locked in a power struggle for control of the operation.'
Some of this I remembered from the Bahiti job. The JSA was Libya's main intelligence agency; their version of the CIA. It was divided into 'internal' and 'external' security directorates – the former responsible for maintaining Gaddafi's iron grip on Libya's fickle tribal society, which owed him very little and had, on a number of occasions, risen up against him; the latter for Libya's operations on foreign soil, including its support of terrorist organizations like the Provisional IRA.
69
Lynn punched a few buttons on his hand-held GPS, then continued. 'What made Mansour interesting was his background. The JSA were pretty bloody amateurish on many levels – it was only really in the early eighties that they began to constitute a serious external threat to the West.
'Mansour was as independent-minded as they came in the Colonel's Libya, and well trained, having done stints with both the Stasi and the GRU during the seventies and eighties. From what we could make out, he was the architect of the Libyan army's attempt to muscle in on the Colonel's foreign operations – and was well equipped to do so thanks to his Soviet connections.'
I presumed that the JSA weren't overjoyed to have him on their patch. 'So, how did he get in on the act with PIRA?'
'Basically, he turned himself into a one-stop shop. He got things done. You can imagine, Nick, how the Libyan bureaucracy must have come close, on occasion, to driving even the Provisionals mad. But Mansour was Istikhbarat al-Askaria – military intelligence. He was Libyan army, and an ordnance officer to boot, and the Provos loved him. It meant they could cut out the middlemen and walk right into the store. Semtex? Not a problem. RPGs? By the truckload. SAM-7 shoulder-launched surface-to-air? Piece of cake.
'Furthermore, because of his links with the GRU, the Soviet army's military intelligence arm, he could arrange for all the training to take place in Libya. And then, one day, even he surpassed himself: he offered PIRA the complete package – weapons, training and the shipment.'
'And that's when you turned up?'
Lynn shook his head. 'Sadly, WPC Yvonne Fletcher was gunned down outside the Libyan People's Bureau in the middle of London and, in the ensuing fall-out, our embassy was shut down and our operation with it. After that, the picture started to go fuzzy again. We knew that the rivalry between the JSA and the Istikhbarat had intensified, but from the weapons that were pitching up on both sides of the Irish border, it was pretty bloody obvious to us that a shipment or two had got through.
'So in '87 we decided to put a stop to it. Well, get you to put a stop to it.' Lynn glanced at me. 'There were two big planned shipments to the Provisionals that year. The Eksund – a JSA-funded operation – was the first, and intercepted by the French. The next one was the Bahiti, handled by the Istikhbarat, Mansour's group.'
My mind drifted back to the night Lynn spoke about this nickname of his. He checked his watch. I checked mine. It was coming up to three o'clock.
I disappeared into the galley and made us a couple of strong, black coffees. Gary had had the boat stocked up for his client, and from Harrods Food Hall by the look of it. There was tinned caviar and Russian champagne on board, but, more importantly right now, ground Colombian coffee – the perfect antidote to the way I was feeling.
When the bitter black liquid started to get to work, I asked Lynn what I'd been dying to ask him from the beginning: why Leptis? What was it about that name?
70
Lynn was in full flow now. Maybe it reminded him of the old days.
'I'd read his file, seen photographs of him, knew his vices, and then, blow me, I went and ran straight into him. At some diplomatic do or other. It must have been a month before the Yvonne Fletcher shooting. What an impressive fellow he was, too. Think Omar Sharif . . .'
'Did he know who you were?'
Lynn shook his head. 'Unless, of course, we seriously underestimated the Libyan intelligence machine.'
'So what did you talk about?'
'He simply asked me who I was, what I was doing in Libya and how I liked his country. I told him I'd just visited Leptis Magna – the most majestic place I'd ever been to on God's earth. The only place I've got hopelessly lost – lost in the beauty of my surroundings. I knew, of course, that we shared a common enthusiasm – Classics; him at Tripoli, me at Cambridge – but I meant every word. Not unnaturally, that's what we spoke about for the rest of the evening: the Romans in Libya. But something about my enthusiasm for Leptis Magna tickled him. He christened me "Leptis". Never called me anything else.'
'That was it?'
'There was a bit more to it than that. He told me he was a great admirer of Septimus Severus. Severus was born in Leptis and went on to become emperor.'
The list of O-levels I'd never got close to was headed by Latin and Greek, but a little voice in my head told me that, ancient history or not, I should listen to every word of this – not just because Lynn was a real anorak when it came to this sort of stuff, and I could see how his passion for it bound him to Mansour, but because I knew there was a whole lot more to it than met the eye.
'So Leptis Magna is a ruin, basically – and you told him that it was the hottest thing you'd visited since you'd been in Libya?'
'My dear fellow, you have to understand that Leptis isn't any old ruin – it is the finest surviving example of a city of the ancient world, and by far the best preserved. When we were at Cambridge, my wife and I dreamed of visiting Leptis together, knowing full well that it was damn-near impossible to get near it.'
'Because by then Gaddafi had taken control?' Lynn's wife was at Cambridge with him. I made a mental note.
'Precisely. Gaddafi took over in '69 after executing a perfectly planned coup. He came to power on a particularly interesting ticket: a mix of Arab pan-nationalism and egalitarianism that saw almost all traces of Western influence in Libya washed away within the next few years. He chucked out the British and Americans, closed down their military bases, threw out the Jews and the Italians, nationalized all the banks and threatened to do the same with the foreign oil companies.
