He knew he could not complain about the treatment they were receiving. There would have been no point. The man Khalid, who had led the raiding party and seemed to be in charge, called their holding pen his ‘Guantanamo’, and like its Cuban counterpart this place was primitive: built of wooden posts with wire sheep fencing strung between them. Thank God for the fact that at one end of the pen there was a rough roof of plywood boards covered by tar paper, with a raised shelf under it for sitting and sleeping; this gave them some protection against the sun, which blazed for over ten hours a day, raising the temperature to 40 degrees Centigrade. They were let out each morning for an hour’s exercise in the middle of the compound, and by the time they returned to the pen were desperate for relief from the blistering heat and the wind – a dry scorching wind which blew all day, driving sand relentlessly into their mouths and eyes.
At least the nights were cool. Then Luckhurst would sit on his bit of the wooden platform, wrapped in one of the thin blankets which the guards had grudgingly distributed, staring out at the sky. Up there, he thought, among all those stars is a satellite looking at us. They know where we are. But they’re not going to intervene. We just have to wait for the ransom negotiations. Get on with it, he’d implore the unknown negotiators. Get us out of here.
The biggest frustration for him lay in not knowing what was going on. The hostages had no contact with any of the men in the camp except for the young boy, Taban, who brought them their food. Luckhurst smiled at the thought of the young Somali. Even in the bleakest circumstances the kindness of an individual could stand out, and he could tell Taban was a gentle soul adrift in a situation beyond his control. The boy reminded him of his own son, George, his youngest, who despite the utterly different worlds they inhabited, had the same kind of sweetness as this African youth. At first there had been no communication between the Captain and the Somali boy, but in time Luckhurst had found that his smattering of Arabic, Taban’s few words of English and a burgeoning use of sign language meant they could make their respective meanings clear.
One day, almost two weeks before, the boy had seemed very agitated. Luckhurst had gathered from him that new men had arrived in the camp, though he had not seen them himself. ‘Arab,’ Taban had said, lowering his voice and looking over his shoulder at the guards by the gate. ‘One . . . you.’ And he’d pointed at Luckhurst.
‘One like me? White?’ asked Luckhurst, pointing at his own face and hands.
Taban had shaken his head. ‘No white. English.’
An Englishman? But not white. Someone speaking English, perhaps. Could it be another hostage? But if so, why wasn’t he in the pen?
Over the next few evenings, intrigued by the idea of another Englishman living so close to him, Luckhurst had tried to learn more, but Taban was not forthcoming. Then, a week ago, when he’d brought the supper: ‘Men gone. English gone,’ he’d said, waving an arm towards the sea.
Now Luckhurst heard the clink of keys, and the sound of the door of the pen swinging open on its creaking hinges. Supper, he thought, visualising the guards letting Taban in with the food bowls. He wanted to learn more about the men who had gone to sea and not come back.
‘OK, Taban?’ asked Luckhurst now as the boy handed him his bowl of stew. Taban nodded but he looked scared.
Suddenly Khalid appeared behind him with a holstered pistol on his hip. This was new; Luckhurst hoped it didn’t mean things had taken a turn for the worse. But the man was grinning as he strode up to the Captain.
‘I have some news for you, Commander. Good news.’
‘Yes?’ This announcement had been made before, and had turned out merely to be that there was fruit with their dinner of stew.
‘Your owners have seen sense at last – the ransom has been paid. You are clearly worth a lot to them.’
Luckhurst knew better – it was the ship the owners wanted back, not the crew, but there was no point in telling Khalid that. ‘What happens next?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Next? We drive you to a collection point outside Mogadishu. A representative of your company will be there to collect you.’
It took only minutes for the Captain and his crew to get ready. They had nothing to pack. As they walked towards the dusty lorry, Luckhurst looked for Taban to say goodbye, but there was no sign of him. In the excitement of his release the Captain soon forgot about the boy.
Chapter 9
Geoffrey Fane was not a generous man and he did not waste his time doing favours. But in his long career in MI6 he had developed a nose for what could be important. And when, the previous day, a call had come into his office from an old colleague who wanted some informal advice, that nose had twitched. Instead of finding some excuse, he had agreed to meet the caller. Now he was sitting in a taxi, crawling along Oxford Street in mid-morning traffic, on his way to his old colleague’s office.
The caller was David Blakey, twenty years in MI6, rising to be Head of Station in Hong Kong at the time the colony was handed over to China. After Hong Kong, he had retired from MI6 and since then his and Fane’s paths only rarely crossed – an occasional sighting in the bar of the Travellers Club, once bumping into each other in the Burlington Arcade. When Blakey had called, Fane had remembered that after leaving MI6 his old colleague had taken a job as director of a large international charity. In fact, it was when Blakey had mentioned the charity’s name, UCSO, that he had sparked Fane’s interest. It was just a week since that name had come to his attention. A young man with British documentation had been arrested by the French Navy in the Indian Ocean. He was apparently one of a group of pirates trying to hijack a Greek cargo ship, which had been chartered by the charity UCSO to carry aid supplies to Mombasa.
The case had been handed to MI5 to pursue; Elizabeth Carlyle – or Liz as she preferred to call herself, thought Fane with a grimace – had gone to Paris to interview the prisoner. And now the head of that same charity had suddenly popped up, asking for advice and refusing to say on the telephone what it was that concerned him.
Although they had lost touch in recent years, Fane had once known Blakey well. They had been at the same Oxford college before going their separate ways. Blakey had spent a year or so doing research for a thesis he never finished, while Fane had worked as a trainee on the Middle East desk of an investment bank. Then, to their mutual surprise, they had met up again on the initial MI6 training course. Together they had filled and emptied dead letter boxes, practised brush contacts and covert agent meetings all over Hampshire; they’d been arrested by the local police, and had survived rough interrogations by the SAS. They had dozed through lectures by retired officers reliving the glories of their Cold War agent-running triumphs, and at the end of it all, both had passed with honours and been marked out as high fliers.
Their careers had run in parallel for a while, then gradually Fane had pulled away and by the time Blakey had retired, his old college friend was several ranks above him. But Fane had always respected Blakey and knew that he would not have rung unless there was something important to talk about.
Fane had called up the file on UCSO but had found it pretty uninformative. He was interested in all large international charities; they operated in trouble spots all over the world – places from which he needed information, but from which information was difficult to obtain. But most charities kept intelligence services at arm’s length; if they supped with them at all, they supped with a very long spoon, since they couldn’t afford to have their people suspected of being spies. So the file on UCSO was very thin. From what he could gather, it was mainly a co-ordinating and shipping organisation, not one with teams of aid workers in the field, so not on the face of it of particular interest to Fane. But if Blakey had something to say about the hijacking attempt, some information about the gangs of pirates operating out of Somalia, then Fane wanted to hear it.
Somalia was a worry. It wasn’t a country any more, not in any real sense. Rebel groups proliferated, fighting with each other or with any new gov
ernment that emerged. The native population kept its head down amidst the warring factions, and scraped a living by subsistence farming. Or fishing, though Somalia’s inability to patrol its own waters meant foreign fishing fleets had depleted the fish stocks to the point of disappearance. With no legitimate living to be made, small wonder many fishermen had turned to piracy.
All of which was worrying enough, but Fane knew that such chaos created just the sort of situation that attracted people even more sinister than pirates. Al Qaeda, under pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, was looking for safer bases from which to launch their attacks against the West. Yemen was already on their list – was Somalia following? Fane thought of the young boy sitting in a Paris jail cell, arrested helping hijack UCSO’s ship and carrying a British driving licence.
He paid off the taxi, still stuck in traffic, and walked north, leaving the hubbub of Oxford Street for the quieter byways of Fitzrovia. He passed the crumbling brick pile of the former Middlesex Hospital. Further along, dark brick mansion blocks lined the narrow street. It was not a part of the city he often visited. It was too full of students drinking on the pavements outside the pubs, and media and fashion types in their bright, flashy clothes. Fane, in his dark suit and polished leather shoes, didn’t fit in here; he felt uncomfortable.
There had been a time when he had been able to blend into surroundings many times more exotic than these. He had spent several years in Delhi where he’d met his agents in the bazaars around the Red Fort with barely a second thought, and he’d served in Moscow in the Cold War with the KGB hot on his heels every time he left the Embassy. He certainly hadn’t worn a three-piece suit in those days.
But this was London, and nowadays his heron-like figure was invariably clothed in a well-cut suit, and he was most at ease in Whitehall or walking through St James’s Square and turning left along Pall Mall for the Travellers Club.
To his surprise the address Blakey had given turned out to be a handsome modern building, six storeys of glass and steel set beyond a courtyard leading off the street. A directory on the wall behind the security desk showed the names of a dozen enterprises. One of these was UCSO.
Chapter 10
On the third floor Fane found Blakey waiting for him, looking little changed from when they had worked together.
‘Geoffrey. How very good to see you,’ Blakey said, offering his hand. ‘Let’s go into my office and I’ll tell you what it’s all about.’
They walked through a large, brightly lit open-plan floor where young people dressed in jeans and T-shirts sat working at computers or stood talking together. The atmosphere seemed busy and cheerful.
Blakey led the way into a small ante-room in one corner of the floor. ‘My PA’s off ill,’ he explained, as they passed the empty desk. He shut the door behind them and led Fane into his own office, a large room with a view over the little courtyard below. The walls were decorated with Chinese prints, and a carved African mask hung behind the large glass desk. Another door leading straight out to the open-plan area was already closed.
‘This is all very smart,’ said Fane as Blakey gestured to a leather armchair in front of his desk.
‘Yes. We’re lucky. The rent’s not too bad, actually,’ he said, sitting down. ‘We managed to negotiate a long lease when the building first opened. But it’s always a delicate balance,’ he added with a smile that seemed slightly defensive. ‘Too poor an appearance and you look amateurish; anything too smart, and people think you’re spending their donations on overheads.’
Then he got down to business. ‘Thanks for coming over so promptly, Geoffrey, and I hope I’m not wasting your time. But I really feel I need some advice and I couldn’t think of anyone better to give me it than you.’
Fane sat back in his chair, crossed one long leg over the other and watched and waited. Blakey had always had a certain charm, he reflected, which had served him well as an agent runner and no doubt helped a lot in the charity world. Fane had no objection to its being exercised on him. It would have no effect whatsoever on what he decided to do.
Blakey went on: ‘You’ll have to judge what it means for yourself – all I can say is, it worries me. I’m sure you know what we do in UCSO?’ Fane nodded. ‘Our cargoes are assembled and shipped by our office in Athens. In the last nine months two shipments we’ve made have been hijacked off the Somalian coast. The shipping line’s insurers and our own broker negotiated, and the ship’s crew were returned. Last week a third attempt was made, but fortunately this time it was foiled by the French Navy.’
Fane nodded. ‘Yes, I heard something about it,’ he said. ‘Dangerous sailing through those seas.’
‘Unfortunately, we haven’t got any choice. Kenya is our major destination. We use it as a safe base from which to supply the Congo, and Rwanda, and Burundi. Air cargo rates are prohibitively high, and any other route by sea would be out of the question.’
That checked out, thought Fane. The alternative would be to sail west the length of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibraltar, then down to the Cape, and up past Madagascar to Kenya. Four, maybe five times as long, and probably four or five times more expensive.
Blakey went on, ‘To make things worse, the two shipments that were hijacked were unusually valuable. As was the third.’
‘Valuable? What does that mean? And why should one aid shipment be more valuable than another?’
‘I mean the black-market value of the drugs and equipment on board was unusually high. And what’s more, the last two cargoes included a good deal of cash – for emergencies.’ He avoided Fane’s questioning look. ‘We’ve had half a dozen other shipments go right through the same shipping lanes unscathed, but none of them was worth nearly as much.’
‘Hmm,’ said Fane. ‘What are you saying? That you think the pirates know which ships to target?’
Blakey didn’t hesitate. ‘I’m beginning to think they must. It beggars belief that it’s simply coincidence that the three ships with the richest pickings were the only ones they’ve gone for.’
Fane uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. ‘What about the cash?’ he asked. ‘What sort of sums are we talking about?’
‘High thousands, not millions. In dollar bills usually, but this last time it was gold.’
‘I see what you’re getting at,’ said Fane. ‘But how could the pirates know what’s on board? Are the manifests published? Is there some way they could tell from the appearance of the ships?’ Fane’s maritime experience was confined to a day’s sailing with friends each year during Cowes Week.
Blakey shook his head. ‘We keep the detailed manifests in our Athens office. And for published accounts the cargo is described in broad terms as “aid supplies”; there’s no mention anywhere of the cash, and nothing to distinguish one of our shipments from another. No more than I could tell whether the wallet in your jacket held fifty pounds or five thousand.’
‘So therefore . . . ?’
Blakey shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘This is where it seems to be getting ridiculous. I’m almost embarrassed to say this, but I’m wondering if information about the cargoes could be getting to the pirates from inside UCSO.’
He looked straight at Fane, who said nothing for a moment. He was surprised; this was more interesting than he’d expected. His mind was working rapidly. If what Blakey was thinking was true and there was a thread leading from UCSO into a pirate group, it was a thread well worth tugging.
‘Let me be quite clear what you’re saying. You think there might be some connection between UCSO and Somalia.’
‘I know it sounds ridiculous when you put it like that. But, yes, that’s what I’m worried about. It’s not necessarily from here,’ said Blakey, waving his arm vaguely at the office outside. ‘The Athens office handles all the logistics, and leases the ships. The cargo is assembled and loaded in Greece as well.’
‘Who runs your Athens office?’
‘Chap named Berger. He’s American.’
‘Wh
at’s his background?’
‘A bit of this, a bit of that – journalism, import/export. He’s worked all over the world. It was his idea that there might be a leak.’
‘And the staff?’
Blakey shrugged. ‘Usual mix of local recruits – an accountant, secretaries – and a couple of people from other countries. Ten or eleven employees in all. Berger runs a tight operation; I’m sure he keeps a pretty sharp eye on what goes on.’
Even if he does, thought Fane, you’d need a professional to unravel something as sophisticated as the connection Blakey was proposing. He started to say, ‘I have a thought—’ when suddenly the door to the open-plan floor opened, and a voice said excitedly, ‘David, the bastards have done it again! I can’t believe those wretched people —’
The door was now fully open, revealing a woman standing in the doorway, clutching some papers. The look on her face showed she was as startled to find Fane sitting there as he was by her interruption. She was forty-ish, elegantly dressed in a smart, dark grey suit, sheer tights and shiny maroon high-heeled shoes. This was not Blakey’s PA, Fane concluded without much difficulty.
‘I’m so sorry, David,’ she said. ‘I thought you were alone.’
‘Let me introduce you. This is Geoffrey Fane,’ said Blakey. ‘An old friend.’
‘Katherine Ball,’ the woman said, offering her hand.
‘Katherine’s my deputy,’ said Blakey. ‘The place wouldn’t function without her. She’s got a desk in Athens too – I know they’d say the same about her.’
‘It’s kind of you to say so,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But I’m not sure it’s true.’ She had a deep smoky voice. ‘But don’t let me interrupt,’ she continued.
‘Anything urgent?’ asked Blakey.
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