Abbas had been staring at the screen for what seemed like ten minutes, because what he was looking at simply didn’t make sense. According to the Krutaya computer, the Gibraltar weapon had already been detonated. But it obviously hadn’t been, Abbas knew, because if it had there was no way that he wouldn’t have known about it. The detonation of a nuclear weapon in a major population centre was something that simply couldn’t be kept secret.
Abbas opened a new window in his browser and typed ‘www.cnn.com’ into the address field. The CNN news site loaded almost immediately, and he scanned the headlines. Nothing, or rather nothing about Gibraltar. Despite what the Krutaya computer had reported, the Gibraltar weapon had obviously not exploded.
That meant, Abbas realized, that there were only two possibilities – either the weapon had misfired, which meant that the whole system, weapons and firing mechanism, might be faulty, or somebody, somehow, had managed to disable the weapon at Gibraltar before the detonation sequence had been completed. The successful test-firing of the weapon on the tundra had proved the system worked, so on balance the second possibility had to be the more likely. And that cast a whole new light on the lack of communication from Dmitri Trushenko.
With almost frantic haste, Abbas opened the word processor and began composing an email to Sadoun Khamil in Saudi Arabia.
47 Squadron Royal Air Force Special Forces Flight C–130 Hercules
The Hercules was virtually overhead Le Havre when the radio message was received from Mazout Radar. The SAS troops had been delayed for some time at the Rock because the aircraft had developed a minor fault in one of its generators, and it was evening before the aircraft captain had announced that they were ready to depart.
‘Say again, Mazout.’
‘Your operating authority has passed us a Class One mandatory diversion message. You are instructed to reroute immediately to Toulouse airport. Confirm you will comply, and advise when ready to turn.’
The Hercules captain’s voice was weary as he acknowledged the message. ‘Mazout, Charlie Whisky Three Seven. Ready to turn, and requesting initial navigation assistance.’ The crew were of course perfectly capable of plotting their own route to Toulouse, but it had been a long day and it looked as if it was a long way from being over.
‘Three Seven, roger. Turn left heading one seven five, and climb to and maintain Flight Level one nine zero.’
‘Roger, Mazout. Turning to one seven five and in the climb to level at one nine zero.’
As the aircraft’s left wing dropped and the turn commenced, the co-pilot picked up the public address microphone. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘we have no idea why, but we’ve been diverted to Toulouse, gateway to the Pyrenees. If we hear anything further, then I’ll let you know. Otherwise, expect to be on the ground in about ninety minutes.’
Colin Dekker had been dozing in his seat, but his eyes opened immediately the Hercules began to turn. He glanced up as the co-pilot’s announcement echoed round the cabin. ‘It’s Richter,’ he muttered, to nobody in particular. ‘Any money you like, Richter’s behind this.’
Buraydah, Saudi Arabia
Sadoun Khamil read the email from Hassan Abbas for about the tenth time. He knew the contents by heart, and in fact had acted upon them within minutes of decrypting the message, but until he got a reply from Pakistan, there was nothing else he could do. And he wasn’t expecting a reply soon. Arabs love to talk, and will endlessly debate even the most innocuous and mundane matters, and the request Khamil had made to the al-Qaeda leadership was neither innocuous nor mundane.
In his opinion, and in the opinion of his man on the spot, Hassan Abbas, the Russian operation had been discovered and its architect – Trushenko – either killed or captured. As far as he could see, the only option left to al-Qaeda was to immediately implement the final, and wholly secret, phase of the plan. That had been Khamil’s recommendation, and that was what he was now waiting for the al-Qaeda leadership to approve.
The problem, Khamil knew, was probably not the actual implementation of the plan, but the time-scale. The idea had been to allow the Russian operation – their Podstava – to run to its conclusion, with the ultimatum delivered to America and the West after the detonation of the weapon at Gibraltar. As far as the Russians were concerned, that would be the end of the matter. Faced with the weapons already positioned in the States, and the potent threat of the strategic-yield neutron bombs located throughout Western Europe, the Americans would have no option but to cooperate, to do whatever the Kremlin instructed.
That, Abbas had emphasized to Trushenko throughout the project, was what the Arabs wanted, was why they had been prepared to pay the millions of dollars that had been needed to fund Podstava. And Trushenko had believed him, had eagerly anticipated seeing an America cowed and humiliated by its impotence in the face of a brilliantly simple plot that at a stroke had negated all of America’s military might, a country that would become the laughing-stock of the world, a superpower gone senile.
Then, and only then, would the Arabic component of the plan be implemented, the action that Sadoun and Abbas had privately labelled El Sikkiyn or ‘the knife’. Then the Russians would learn why the Arabs had insisted, from the start, on having unrestricted access to the Krutaya computer, on having a backdoor code that couldn’t be blocked or changed.
The leaders of all the Arab nations would be informed that a fatwa had been issued by al-Qaeda against America, Russia and the West – against, in fact, the entire non-Arab world – and that a jihad was about to start. Sufficient details of Podstava would be leaked to the West to ensure that everyone knew about the Russian plan. That would be followed by the simultaneous detonation of all the weapons positioned in American cities, a cataclysmic Armageddon that would incinerate tens of millions of Americans and leave the country crippled for years, possibly for centuries.
The survivors would demand revenge, would force the American President, or whoever had survived in the administration, to respond in the only way possible to the obvious aggressor. A massive retaliatory thermonuclear attack on Russia would follow, as certainly as night follows day. Then what was left of the Russian nuclear arsenal would inevitably be launched against America and then, probably, most of the British and French nuclear weapons would be fired at Russia.
And at a single stroke, the two superpowers would effectively eliminate each other, leaving the way clear for a unified Arab nation to arise behind the banner of al-Qaeda and impose a new world order upon the shattered remnants of humanity. That was the plan which had been conceived by Hassan Abbas so long ago, and which offered what was probably the last great hope for the Arab states.
All Khamil could do was hope that the leaders of al-Qaeda would see sense, would stop talking and act, before it was too late.
Royal Air Force Northolt, West London
The five Royal Air Force officers looked up as Paul Richter opened the door and walked into the aircrew briefing room. Richter hadn’t slept or shaved for the better part of two days and was still wearing the jeans and shirt he’d pulled out of the cupboard in his office, augmented by his leather motorcycle jacket. ‘Yes? Who are you and what do you want?’ the squadron leader pilot snapped.
‘I’m Richter – your passenger.’
The RAF officer muttered something that sounded suspiciously like ‘Good God’ under his breath but gestured to a seat at the back of the room before turning back to the other officers and the en-route planning charts spread out in front of them. Four minutes later the squadron leader stood up, glanced at his watch and announced, ‘Briefing complete.’ Then he turned to Richter. ‘Ready, Mr Richter?’
Richter nodded, scrambled to his feet and followed the green-clad figure out of the room, across the tarmac outside and up the stairs into the cabin of the HS146. Richter was the only passenger so he chose the seat that offered the greatest legroom, sat down and strapped himself in. The co-pilot looked at him from the open door to the cockpit. ‘Anything you want?’ he asked.<
br />
‘Yes,’ Richter said, nodding. ‘I want to go to sleep. Wake me up if an engine catches fire or a wing falls off, but otherwise don’t call me until we’re short finals. Oh, you may get two-way with a Special Forces Flight Herky-bird out of Gibraltar that’s heading for the same place we are. If so, pass on my best wishes and say I’ll see them on the ground. I don’t want to talk to them.’ Two minutes later Richter was sound asleep.
American Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London
‘So what the hell does all that mean?’ John Westwood demanded.
Roger Abrahams had been called down to the Communications Suite fifteen minutes earlier, apparently to be briefed by the Secret Intelligence Service duty officer on a secure telephone link. In fact, he’d found himself talking with – or more accurately listening to – a man called Simpson, who’d declined to state his rank or department, but who had admitted that he was Paul Richter’s immediate superior.
‘It’s bad news,’ Abrahams replied. ‘The British managed to hack their way into the Russian mainframe controlling the satellite and the weapons and changed all the passwords, and that should really have been the end of it. Unfortunately, just when they thought all they had left to do was locate each nuke and send in a bunch of techies to take it to pieces, somebody else logged on to the system, using what appears to be a Yiddish user-name and calling from France.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Westwood muttered.
‘Exactly. According to this Simpson character, this new user – the name he’s using is “Dernowi”, which is close to the Yiddish for “The Prophet” – is using some kind of a backdoor code to gain access to the system, so there’s no way of locking him out.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Simpson has already couriered us a disk copy of all the weapon locations in the States, and I’ve had the file sent by secure email to Langley. Apart from that, there’s not a hell of a lot we can do. As soon as I got the message from Simpson I contacted Walter Hicks, and he’s probably on his way to see the President right now. Obviously all our assets over there will stay at their current state of readiness, not that that will help if this Dernowi decides to nuke us all to hell.’
‘So?’
‘So the Brits have sent a team into France to locate Dernowi and take him out. It’s the only way they can be certain of stopping an attack.’
Blagnac Airport, Toulouse, south-west France
The HS146 touched down smoothly just before eleven fifty, local time, and taxied off the runway to a parking area well away from the passenger terminal. With a sense of déjà vu, Richter looked across the hardstanding at the bulk of the C–130 Hercules with RAF markings standing a few yards away. Ross was waiting for him at the side door of a hangar. Richter greeted him briefly, then walked into the building. Colin Dekker was bent over a laptop computer which was hitched to a mobile telephone. ‘Colin,’ Richter said, ‘we’ve got to stop meeting like this.’
Dekker looked up and grinned at him. ‘Tell me about it. OK, your Mr Simpson has been busy while you’ve been poncing about over France in your executive jet. Where he got them from I’ve no idea, but there are three V6 Renault Espaces parked outside this hangar full of fuel and ready to go. They’re our transport. Then he kicked Lacomte and Lacomte kicked France Telecom into action, so we now know the exact address this Dernowi guy is using. I got that a few minutes ago by email from London. We also,’ Dekker added, ‘know Dernowi’s name, or at least the name he used when he applied for his landline telephone.’
‘Which is?’ Richter asked, as Dekker snapped the laptop closed and pulled out the data cable that linked it to the mobile phone.
‘Abdullah Mahmoud.’
‘An Arab. That makes a lot more sense. Anything known on him?’
Dekker shook his head. ‘Nothing yet, but we’ve got traces running through all the allied databases. It’s probably an alias, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.’
‘And where is he?’ Richter asked.
‘A charming little place called St Médard. Apparently, it’s a hamlet near a village called Manciet, on the N124 beyond Auch, and it’s about a hundred and ten clicks west of here on pretty average roads, according to the map, so we’d best get moving.’
Buraydah, Saudi Arabia
Sadoun Khamil had left his computer running, and the Internet connection open, but he’d left the room for a few minutes to instruct one of his men to prepare him some food and drink for what he anticipated would be a very long night. Three minutes after he’d walked out, his email client software emitted a soft double-tone that indicated receipt of an email, but it was another six minutes before he returned and checked the screen. Decrypting the message took a further four minutes, and then Khamil hunched forward and read the text with great care.
The response from Pakistan was all that he had dared hope. The al-Qaeda leaders had approved the immediate implementation of El Sikkiyn. The issue of the fatwa would follow, as would the leaked details of the Russian operation, but Khamil’s instructions were clear and unambiguous – he was to instruct Abbas to complete the final phase immediately.
For a few moments, Khamil did nothing but re-read the message to ensure that he had made no mistake. He considered sending Abbas a message in clear, or even telephoning him, but decided that he would follow the agreed procedure. He composed two short paragraphs to Abbas, added the text he had received from Pakistan, and encrypted the entire message. He pasted the apparently corrupted text into an existing email marketing message, chose a suitable route and pressed the send button.
He left the computer running and the door to the room open, so that he would hear if any further email messages arrived for him. Then he walked into the main room where four of his men were sitting cross-legged on the floor watching an Arabic-language broadcast on the television. He instructed them to switch on the satellite receiver and watch the American CNN station. That, he knew from past experience, would probably be the first channel to break the news. If, that is, there was enough remaining of CNN to make any kind of a broadcast after El Sikkiyn began.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Friday
Gascony
The roads were nothing like as bad as Colin Dekker had feared, and the three Renaults were able to hold their speed at well over one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour for most of the time. Richter claimed he was still half-asleep, which was not much of an exaggeration, so he navigated from the roadmap while Colin Dekker drove.
Like most of France after about seven in the evening, the villages that the convoy swept through appeared deserted, doors firmly closed, shutters secured, no lights showing. Léguevin, L’Isle-Jourdain, Gimont and Aubiet. Auch was different, simply because it was bigger, and they saw couples and small groups of people walking the streets. Then they were through the town and back on the empty country roads. St-Jean-Poutge, Vic-Fézensac and through Dému, and then an almost arrow-straight road to Manciet.
‘According to this map,’ Richter murmured, as Dekker pushed the speed up to just over one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, ‘this is an attractive country road with spectacular views to the south over the valley of the River Douze.’
‘Fascinating,’ Dekker replied. ‘More to the point, how far have we got to go?’
‘About six kilometres to Manciet, then another two up to St Médard. Eight clicks in total, which is just about five miles.’
Fifty-five minutes after driving out of Blagnac Airport, almost on the stroke of one, the three cars swept into the village of Manciet, headlights blazing, and immediately turned hard right onto the D931, north towards Eauze. St Médard lay two kilometres in front of them.
Le Moulin au Pouchon , St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France
Like Sadoun Khamil in Saudi Arabia, Hassan Abbas had left his computer switched on, waiting for the decision from al-Qaeda. Abbas received at least thirty emails every day, and eight times since he’d sent his message to Saudi Arabia he’d rushed back into the
rear bedroom when he’d heard the warning announcing the receipt of an email. He’d checked, and then deleted, them all.
The ninth message was different, not least because its apparent origin was Germany, and Abbas scanned it swiftly, looking for the tell-tale ‘corrupted’ section of text. He found it about halfway down, highlighted and copied it, then ran the decryption routine to unscramble it. The plain text appeared on the screen and Abbas leaned forward to read it, simultaneously pressing the ‘Print’ button which would send a copy of the text to the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet. He read Sadoun Khamil’s instructions, and the copy of the message from the al-Qaeda leadership, with increasing satisfaction. Then he read the whole email again, twice, just to be certain. ‘Allah be praised,’ he murmured, and stood up.
He removed the single sheet of paper from the printer and took it down the stairs and into the living room, where Jaafar Badri and Karim Ibrahim, two of his three bodyguards, were sitting watching a French game-show on the television. The fourth bodyguard – Saadi Fouad – was asleep upstairs.
‘My friends,’ Abbas said, his words ringing with the monumental significance of the announcement he was about to make, ‘tonight we will strike a blow at the infidels from which they will never recover. Our leaders have instructed me to implement El Sikkiyn immediately. Within hours, America and Russia will be smoking ruins. Allah be praised.’
Abbas smiled in satisfaction as his companions echoed his prayer, then turned back to the stairs and the task he was going to perform.
St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France
Le Moulin au Pouchon took some finding, not least because, as appeared to be common practice in France, most of the streets didn’t appear to have names and the houses lacked both names and numbers. Presumably the locals knew where they were going, and visitors just had to ask a local – easy enough at midday, but impossible after midnight.
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