*
The climb back to the deck above was hard going, but Marc forced himself on, putting one foot in front of the other, ignoring the distant shouts of angry men and the sporadic chugs of gunfire.
The ruggedised laptop was still where it had fallen, and Marc experienced a brief surge of elation. He hobbled to it, dropping clumsily to the deck to look over the portable computer. More than anything, he wanted to boot it up at that moment and start rooting around inside the device. What Marc held in his hands was the last possible chance to find and neutralise the rogue Exile device, and he couldn’t risk any mistakes. Can’t do this here, he thought, have to get back to Rubicon. They’ll have what I need . . .
The gunfire was getting closer. Soon, Ramaas’s men were going to figure out that their bandit king was dead, and then there would be no telling what would happen next – but for a foreigner, an enemy of their pirate nation, there would be no good outcome.
The whole stack of the rig was between him and the helipad on the top of the platform, and if he went up he would be walking right into the gunmen. Lucy could be up there, said a voice in the back of his mind. You want to leave her a second time?
He shook off the traitorous thought. She will understand. The job is the first priority. Marc grabbed the laptop and limped away, back down the stairwell toward the floating dock, and he hated himself a little more with every step he took.
By the time he reached the boat dock, the sun had risen high enough to throw the drilling rig’s shadow across the platform. There were bodies down here too, and from what he could tell a disagreement had broken out between some of the pirates that had ended badly for all of them. A few of the smaller vessels had already been scuttled, skiffs and rigid inflatable boats half-swamped by the rise and fall of the waves, and in other places Marc saw where mooring lines had been cut by those desperate to escape.
There was a low-slung black inflatable at the far end of the dock and Marc started toward it, but he had only taken a step when he saw that the boat was already manned. A cluster of armed men in tactical gear turned toward him and raised their rifles. Marc held up his hand, still clutching the laptop, trying to project a non-threatening air.
He heard them speaking Russian as they approached, and the distinctive digital camouflage pattern of their uniforms and the marine-variant Vityaz-SN submachine guns they carried confirmed it. These men were Russian Navy commandoes.
The closest one barked an order at him and then repeated it in thickly accented English. ‘Identify yourself!’
‘My name is Marc Dane. I’m a British citizen,’ he replied.
‘Civilian?’
‘More or less.’ There seemed little sense in lying about it. He and Lucy had deliberately inserted into Somalia with no identity documents of any kind on them, real or otherwise. ‘I was brought here against my will.’ Another commando circled behind Marc while a third tore the laptop from his hand, drawing a shout from him. ‘Hey! Be careful with that! It’s important –’
The commando who had spoken before silenced him with a throat-cutting gesture and muttered into his throat mike. After a brief conversation, he gave orders to the others and they moved back toward their boat. The commando’s SMG never wavered from its aim at Marc’s chest, and his pulse quickened.
‘You come with us,’ the commando said finally. ‘Move!’
‘Spaciba,’ Marc managed. He couldn’t afford to let the laptop out of his sight, not now, not after everything that had happened.
The Russian RIB raced away from the floating dock at full throttle and Marc sat low in the boat’s gunwale, looking back toward the drilling rig as they left it behind at a rate of high knots. He saw a Mi-8 cargo helicopter perform a shaky take-off from the helipad and rattle away overhead in the direction of the distant coastline, but all he could see of the Combine Osprey was a thick pillar of black smoke where the V-22 had been. It appeared the VTOL had been torched, and Marc wondered if Saito was still on the rig, or if he had perished in Ramaas’s killing room.
He turned away, scanning the horizon for signs of a ship, and a low black shape close to the wave tops revealed itself as the sail of a Kalina-class diesel-electric submarine. Marc knew the vessel well. In his earlier career, before his time in MI6, Marc had crewed helicopters for the British Fleet Air Arm, trained to seek and destroy subs like the Kalina for the Royal Navy. He had never expected to see one this close, however.
The RIB pulled into a hard turn and slid in alongside the sub. Crewmen on deck hauled Marc and the commandoes back on board, then dragged the boat up with them onto the dorsal hull.
‘So I guess you need a lift?’ said a familiar voice. Lucy pushed her way past the deck crew and came to Marc, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘You okay?’
‘I fell off a thing,’ he told her, with feeling. ‘And I hit another thing.’ Marc leaned in and pointed at the commando who had taken the laptop. ‘I got the machine.’
‘Ramaas?’
‘Dead and gone,’ he said. Admitting it felt like a minor victory. ‘But we are not out of the woods yet.’
The Russian woman from the rig was coming up behind Lucy. ‘Get below. Captain’s orders.’
They descended through the hatch and into the cramped confines of the sub’s upper deck. Marc experienced a brief, odd sense of nostalgia at being on board a naval vessel, but then he shuttered it away. As familiar as it was, this was not friendly territory.
‘So, introductions.’ Lucy nodded toward the woman. ‘Rada Simonova of the GRU, Marc Dane. He’s my . . . consultant.’
Simonova looked Marc up and down. ‘You’re working with him? Not your usual type.’
‘I’ve got hidden talents,’ Marc retorted. ‘I want that laptop back, you get me? Or else we’re all in the shit.’
‘We are all, already, very much in the shit,’ Simonova replied coldly. ‘That laptop is now the property of the Russian Federation.’
‘And what are you going to do with it?’ Marc pressed. They moved down the sub’s central walkway, making space as the deck crew came scrambling back inside in rapid order. ‘By the time you’ve shipped it back to Moscow for the GRU’s cyber-division to pick over, the suitcase nuke your government insists does not exist will have blown up a major city!’
Lucy was nodding. ‘Yeah. And I reckon I know where he’s going to hit . . .’
Overhead, the hatches were sealed shut and Marc felt a shudder through the deck as the sub’s engines turned over. An alert klaxon sounded and a rough voice called out a warning over the intercom.
‘What’s going on?’ said Lucy.
Marc didn’t speak Russian, but he had served with the Navy long enough to know what a ship going to battle stations looked like. He glared at Simonova. ‘You’re going to torpedo the drilling rig.’
‘Da.’ As she said the word, a low thud of pressure rumbled down the length of the sub from the bow once, twice, three times. ‘Ramaas’s pirate haven will be a bad memory.’
Marc became aware of the commandoes advancing toward them, their weapons in their hands. ‘Don’t do this,’ he told Simonova. ‘You lock us up, we can’t help you.’
‘You will assist us with our enquiries,’ she replied. ‘When we make port.’
‘Rada.’ Lucy looked the other woman in the eye. ‘As one operator to another, listen to me. You’re making the wrong call.’
Simonova shot a look at her watch. ‘You have no idea where the weapon is. Only guesses. I need facts.’
Marc held out his hand and played the last card he had. ‘Then give me the laptop! I can dig out the location. And we can end this so that everyone walks away clean.’
‘He’s pretty damn good,’ Lucy added.
The Russian’s icy expression thawed, and she snapped her fingers, summoning the man carrying the portable computer. ‘You understand, if you fail in this, the blame . . . all of it . . . will be made to fall on your heads?’
‘Yeah.’ Marc took the laptop and
turned it over in his hands. ‘How fast can you get us back to Europe?’
Through the hull, there was a distant snarl of detonations, shattering concrete and crashing steel.
TWENTY-FOUR
The VW Transporter rocked on its shocks as it rolled over cobbles, heading northward along a narrow avenue. The van’s battered exterior made it look like one more commercial vehicle on the city’s busy noonday streets, but the cargo it carried was anything but ordinary.
Marc sat on a narrow bench welded to the VW’s interior, with his back to the driver and his shoulders hunched forward over the laptop. The computer had been his constant companion for the last fifteen hours, and bit by bit in that time he had tamed the stolen machine and made it his own.
Little Jonas had layered it with a dozen levels of encryption – in the process of suborning his computer Marc had learned the name of the skinny hacker Ramaas recruited to run his tech – but he hadn’t been quite as good as he thought he was.
There was a lot of material in the device’s hard drive, and more floating around out there on remote servers in Nigeria that appeared to be the off-site dump for all of the pirate warlord’s less relevant data. A complete analysis of the intelligence gleaned from the laptop would take a digital forensics team months to sift through. But if Ramaas had been on the mark about his promises, there were only a few hours left on the clock to deal with the immediate threat of the nuclear device.
Marc looked up as he sensed Lucy leaning closer. She sat across from him, between Simonova and one of the unsmiling GRU operatives who had met them at the airstrip on their arrival in Italy. Four more Russian agents were squeezed into the back of the VW, all of them making their final preparations for the task at hand.
‘Level with me,’ said Lucy. ‘How big a roll of the dice are we making here?’
He eyed her. ‘I didn’t just pluck this from the air, Lucy.’ His reply came out terser than he wanted, and he frowned. ‘Sorry.’
Lack of sleep was making him irritable, and the drugs that he had been administered back on board the submarine were wearing off. A morose navy medic had poked and prodded them both, before prescribing injections of painkillers and stay-awakes. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now Marc was beginning to regret it. If they made it to sunset, he was going to crash hard and sleep for a week.
‘This is the target,’ he concluded, for what felt like the hundredth time that day.
*
In the wake of the Calypso XV drilling rig’s destruction, the sub that had been sent to recover Simonova’s team sailed south to Tanzania, and a few hours later they had been put ashore on an empty stretch of beach to be met by yet more grim-faced men. During the short voyage, as the GRU agent won over her commanders with a plan to recapture the Exile device, Marc was hard at work on breaking down the firewalls on Jonas’s machine. The kid showed talent, that was clear – but ultimately Ramaas had put his trust in a script kiddie whose programming skills talked a better game than they played. Cracking the basic levels of encoding was easy enough for someone trained in data intrusion, but it wasn’t until Simonova provided him with a portable satellite router that Marc was able to get online and truly start to dive deep.
An Aeroflot cargo plane had picked them up at Nyerere International in Dar es Salaam and then it was a straight run up toward Europe. Lucy slept as much as she could, but Marc was too wired to take anything more than broken fragments of rest. When he was away from the computer, he was still thinking about it, mulling over the digital barriers that were keeping him from getting into the heart of the machine.
Marc kept a private cloud server from which he could download a set of intrusion tools from anywhere in the world, and he had used them to unpick the firewalls as the jet flew high over the Sahara and across the Mediterranean.
Reaching out into the pirate digital network, he found that parts of it were dead and unresponsive, either by design or thanks to the cobbled-together structure Jonas had put in place. Marc located a half-dozen bank accounts tied to clan-affiliated hawala brokers in the States that had gone dark in the last day or so; when he told Lucy that, she grinned and spun him a story about poisoned virtual dollars, a greedy uncle who drove a cab in New York and the way she had sneaked aboard the derelict drilling rig. But the network corroborated his analysis. A swell of money had moved into Europe over the last few days, dozens of anonymous payments covering transport, food, accommodation. All the logistics you would need to mount a covert operation.
The Russians kept Marc and Lucy on a short lead, and there was never a moment when one of Simonova’s men was out of sight. But this was his playground, and he knew how to manipulate it to his advantage. Under cover of his work on Jonas’s machine, he got around the monitoring software built into the Russian satellite router and threw out a message to one of Rubicon’s dead-drop email servers. There was little he could do other than tell Solomon’s people that he and Lucy were still alive.
That, and warn them that the city of Naples had less than a day to live.
*
‘Explain it again,’ ordered Simonova.
‘Why?’ Marc scowled at her. ‘You think I’m hiding something from you, that’s why you keep asking the same questions?’ He gestured at the city passing by around them. ‘We’re here now. You’re way past time for any doubts.’
‘Indulge me,’ said the Russian.
‘Fine.’ He gave a reluctant nod, and patted the laptop. ‘Ramaas used voice-over-Internet protocol for his communications, digital sat phones rather than cellular ones. It’s harder to track unless you know exactly where to look for it. I found a series of calls from Jonas sent through a dark web server over an anonymity network . . .’ He paused. ‘Stop me if I’m using too many technical words.’ Simonova’s jaw hardened and she indicated for him to continue. ‘Okay. So Jonas wasn’t as smart as advertised. Long story short, I tracked the messages back to an Internet café here in Naples.’
The Russian looked at a digital tablet in her hand, where a map was displayed. ‘On the Via Tarsia, da. We are five minutes away.’
‘Right. And that’s where we’re going to find Ramaas’s local contact.’
‘If he is there. None of what you say confirms that the device is in this city,’ she added. ‘But you still insisted that we come here.’
He spun the laptop around so Simonova could see a data window on the screen. ‘You’re looking at transit data for a cargo ship called the MS Valerio Luna. It docked in Naples yesterday. It sailed here from Split, in Croatia. That’s where Ramaas acquired the weapon.’
‘You’re sure of this?’
Marc nodded grimly. ‘I was there, I’m bloody positive.’ At first it had been gut instinct, but hard-won experience had taught Marc to listen to that base, animal sense.
‘The Valerio was one of the probable vectors we looked at after Ramaas escaped Eastern Europe,’ said Lucy. ‘Damn, but he was a slick son-of-a-bitch. All that crap with the videos from New York, Beijing and Moscow, the case he had on the rig . . . Fakes, all of them. He tracked down Jalsa Sood in Dubai and gave him the Exile blueprints so the Baker could build him a smokescreen . . .’
‘And all along, the real nuclear device never left Europe.’ Marc tapped the screen. ‘While every major global counter-terror agency was on a tear trying to run down blind leads, the bomb was on a slow boat to Naples.’ His lip curled. ‘This is his revenge. Ramaas coerced his connections in shipping to do the job for him.’
‘A Somalian bandit warlord who believes he is on a holy crusade takes it into his head to plant a stolen nuclear weapon in Italy’s second largest city.’ Simonova laid it out in cold, emotionless terms. ‘A very specific objective.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Lucy. ‘From a man with a very specific grudge.’
‘Ramaas blamed the rest of the developed world for Somalia’s ills – and for his personal burdens too,’ said Marc. ‘But beneath all that, his real hate was reserved for men who live he
re. The Camorra.’ The warlord had targeted the home of Italy’s most notorious organised crime group.
‘He wants to wipe them out like a Somalian clan would deal with one of their rivals back home,’ Lucy went on. ‘It’s just the scale that’s changed. For years the Camorra and their Mafiosi pals took money to sail ships full of radioactive waste and toxic materials into African waters and scuttle them. All that poison is in Somalia’s water table now. It’s ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Increases in birth defects, cancer rates . . .’
Marc nodded again. ‘And the Combine made it happen. They brokered the deals, they took their nice fat percentage, yeah? Ramaas wants his payback for all that, even if he takes it from beyond the grave.’ He paused as the van negotiated a sharp corner. ‘Clear enough?’
Simonova eyed him. ‘So you understand. I do not care about one man’s holy mission, or revenge, or whatever it was Ramaas believed he was doing. I do not care about this city and the people in it, criminals or not. What matters to me is Russia. I will not see my country take the blame for his actions.’ The consequences of a Russian-made nuclear device exploding in a European city, the same city where the United States Navy headquartered their Sixth Fleet, would be grave indeed.
‘Maybe your bosses should’ve dismantled all the devices like they said they would.’ Marc’s reply was blunt. ‘Then we wouldn’t even be here.’
Simonova ignored the barb. ‘So, Dane. If you are not right about this intelligence, if we fail here today because of an error you have made . . . That is something I will care about a great deal.’
*
The light from the work lamps illuminated the inclined walls of the artificial cavern, and Zayd looked up into the shadows where the ceiling vanished into darkness twenty metres above their heads.
The other men were uninterested in the place, content to sit on discarded oil drums and smoke their noxious European cigarettes, talking or playing dice. None of them were known to him; all were locals from the immigrant community who had performed minor services for the clan in the past, ex-soldiers and former bandits. That was fine with Zayd. He didn’t want to speak with anyone. His mind was fully and completely on the mission.
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