Maximum Security

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Do you know David Moss?’ John Jones asked.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ James said nervously, as he reached out and shook Dave’s hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, David.’

  ‘Call me Dave,’ Dave smiled.

  James felt like a tit. Who introduced themselves to someone like Dave Moss by saying Pleased to meet you? It was the kind of thing you’d say to an old granny at a funeral.

  ‘David is highly regarded amongst the mission preparation staff,’ John Jones explained, ‘and we’re looking for two good agents to work alongside him on one of the most important missions CHERUB has ever undertaken.’

  James couldn’t stop himself from grinning. ‘I knew it was big,’ he stuttered. ‘I mean … Everyone knows Dave’s reputation. You’re not going to send him on some piddly little mission.’

  ‘You’ve not done badly yourself, James,’ Dave said reassuringly. ‘I’ve read your personnel file. You’ve only been on two missions, but what you lack in quantity you more than make up for in quality.’

  ‘Cheers,’ James grinned. The compliment made him feel a little more relaxed in the company of the campus hero. ‘So what’s this mission about?’

  Dave looked at John Jones. ‘Can I show him now, boss?’

  John nodded. ‘I’ll just make it clear to James before you do: whether or not you choose to accept this mission, everything you hear from now on must stay within these walls.’

  James nodded. ‘Of course, same as always.’

  Dave reached down the arm of the sofa and picked up a fat aluminium tube with a shoulder stock and trigger hanging underneath it.

  ‘Do you know what one of these is?’

  ‘It looks like a missile,’ James said.

  ‘Got it in one,’ Dave said. ‘You rest it on your shoulder and aim it at a tank, helicopter, whatever. You get one shot, then you throw the launch module away. This one is the latest model. The missile has a solid-fuel rocket engine with a ten-kilometre range and more brainpower than a roomful of nerds.’

  John went into detail. ‘Around the time you were born, James, the Americans used Tomahawk cruise missiles in the first Gulf War. Until then, everyone dropped unguided bombs out of aeroplanes five kilometres up in the sky and crossed their fingers. You’d count yourself lucky if one bomb out of twenty hit the spot, and unlucky if you happened to live anywhere near a target. Then the Tomahawk missile came along. Suddenly, you could sit in a control room five hundred kilometres from a war zone and send off a missile accurate enough to smack the target on the nose ninety-nine times out of a hundred. This kind of accuracy gave the Americans a big tactical advantage, but it didn’t come cheap: every Tomahawk cost half a million dollars. They were spending two billion dollars on missiles every day the Gulf War lasted and even the Yanks don’t have that sort of cash to throw around.’

  Dave passed the missile across to James for a look.

  ‘So,’ John continued, ‘the big challenge for the boffins wasn’t to make precision-guided missiles bigger, or to give them longer range, or more accuracy. The challenge was to make them cheap. The weapon you’re holding in your hand is the result of fifteen years’ development. Its official acronym is PGSLM: Precision Guided Shoulder Launched Missile, but everyone calls it a Buddy missile. It’s built using off-the-shelf components, like those you might find inside computers, or in-car navigation systems. You can program in targeting data using any laptop computer or handheld device capable of running an internet browser, or you can download live data on a moving target such as a car or ship, via a satellite link. Then, all you have to do is move within ten kilometres of your target, either on the ground or from a helicopter. You point the dangerous end at the sky, press the trigger and the missile weaves its merry way to the target.’

  James admiringly turned the metal tube over in his hands. ‘So how much does this cost?’ he asked.

  ‘That one’s a mock-up,’ John said. ‘But the real deal comes in at under fifteen thousand dollars a shot. Of course, the Americans will only sell this kind of technology to their closest allies.’

  ‘Safe,’ James said, as he pulled on the trigger and made a ka-pow noise. ‘I’ll start saving up.’

  John smiled. ‘As a matter of fact, James, we’re hoping you’ll be able to get your hands on some real ones.’

  ‘I thought the Americans were our allies. Won’t they sell them to us?’

  John smiled uneasily. ‘The manufacturers gave the British army thirty-five pre-production samples for field trials. A little under three weeks ago, we sent a Royal Air Force freighter aircraft to pick them up from a military base in Nevada. The truck carrying the missiles never showed up.’

  ‘You mean somebody nicked them?’ James gasped.

  ‘Precisely,’ John nodded. ‘The only consolation is that we think we know who took them.’

  ‘Terrorists?’ James asked.

  ‘No; at least not directly. US intelligence thinks they were stolen on behalf of an illegal weapons dealer called Jane Oxford. These missiles are worth millions to the right buyer. We think she’ll be holding on to them until some terrorist group or tin-pot dictatorship is able to raise a very significant sum of money to buy them. Assuming we’re right about this, Jane Oxford’s greed will buy us time.’

  ‘How much damage could one of these missiles do?’ James asked.

  ‘They’re not big enough to pack an enormous explosive punch,’ John explained. ‘But you don’t need it with a weapon this accurate. Imagine a terrorist pointing a Buddy missile out of a bedroom window in a London suburb and blasting Her Majesty out of bed at Buckingham Palace. That’s the kind of capability we’re talking about here.’

  ‘Is there anything you can do to defend against the missile once it’s fired?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ John said. ‘The Americans are looking at protecting their president by fitting a rapid firing anti-missile Phalanx gun on to a flatbed truck. But you’re talking about a weapon designed for use on ships, that rips off a thousand twenty-millimetre shells every minute. It’s not the kind of thing you want going off accidentally in the middle of a presidential motorcade.’

  ‘Definitely not,’ James grinned. ‘So where does CHERUB fit into getting these missiles back?’

  ‘A decision was taken at cabinet level on both sides of the Atlantic not to release any information to the public about the stolen missiles, because of the panic it was likely to cause,’ John said.

  Dave interrupted. ‘And because it would make a lot of politicians who claim to be winning the war on terrorism look dumb.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ John continued, ‘law enforcement and intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have been trying to track down Jane Oxford and other members of her organisation since the early 1980s. They’ve got no more reason to believe they can catch her now than at any other time in the last thirty years. However, the Americans have one highly unusual lead. Only someone your age would be able to pursue it.’

  ‘Don’t the Americans have their own version of CHERUB?’ James asked.

  John shook his head as he pulled a mission briefing out of his desk drawer and threw it into James’ lap. ‘You’d better read this.’

  7. BRIEFING

  **CLASSIFIED**

  MISSION BRIEFING FOR JAMES ADAMS THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED WITH A RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION TAG. ANY ATTEMPT TO REMOVE IT FROM THE MISSION PREPARATION BUILDING WILL SET OFF AN ALARM DO NOT PHOTOCOPY OR MAKE NOTES

  JANE OXFORD (FORMERLY JANE HAMMOND) – EARLY YEARS

  Jane Hammond was born on a United States Army base in Hampshire, England, in 1950. She was the daughter of Captain Marcus Hammond, a US Army logistics specialist and his wife Frances, a British citizen he’d met and married while based in the United Kingdom.

  Jane spent her early years living at various military installations around the world. She was a bright girl with a rebellious streak. At fifteen, while living in Germany, Jane ran away with a nineteen-year-old private in the US Marines. They surr
endered themselves to the Parisian police three weeks later, when they ran out of money.

  By this time Jane’s father, Marcus Hammond, had risen to the rank of General and was close to retirement. He requested a final military posting near to his birthplace in California, believing that a return to the United States would help Jane settle down and gain qualifications to attend college.

  General Hammond was posted to Oakland naval base in California. He was put in charge of the supply chain, shipping troops and equipment across the Pacific to the escalating war in Vietnam.

  Jane, meanwhile, did not buckle down to her education as her father had hoped. She began to skip school regularly and hang out with a group of hippies. Photographs from this era show a grubby-looking girl with long braided hair, strings of beads around her neck and flared jeans with holes over the knees.

  Jane became interested in anti-Vietnam war issues through a boyfriend called Fowler Wood. Twenty-year-old Fowler was a dropout from the nearby University of California and the chairman of a radical anti-Vietnam war protest group.

  Fowler became fascinated with General Hammond’s job. He’d been searching for a non-violent way to blunt the American war effort and came up with the idea of sabotaging weapons passing through Oakland docks. Jane began digging into the papers her father brought home each night. She even broke into his office and took blank security passes for the wharves where the goods were being loaded on to ships.

  Jane learned about a regular shipment of assault rifles. Fowler and his anti-war movement colleagues hatched a plan. It involved using stolen security passes to bring a truckload of caustic lime into the docks. The protestors planned to break open the weapon crates and shovel powdered lime over the guns. By the time the guns arrived in Vietnam, the lime would have corroded the metal, making them useless.

  Two nights before the raid was set to take place, Fowler’s peace group took a vote and decided that the guerrilla action was too risky. Or as Jane put it, ‘The little wimps chickened out.’ She immediately broke up with Fowler. She stole his car and her mother’s chequebook and headed south, paying her way towards Mexico with bad cheques.

  JANE HAMMOND MEETS KURT OXFORD

  Jane got as far as San Diego, which borders on to the Mexican town of Tijuana. She found a room in a cheap motel and began scouring the local bars, looking for someone who could sell her the fake passport and driver’s licence she needed to cross the border. Instead, she found Kurt Oxford.

  Kurt was a mountainous twenty-eight-year-old outlaw biker, complete with beard, tattoos and a prison record for violent behaviour and armed robbery. He’d co-founded a motorcycle club called the Brigands. At the time it was the second largest motorcycle gang in California and a bitter rival of the internationally famous Hell’s Angels. Jane took up the offer of a room in Kurt’s house, which also served as a clubhouse for the Brigands.

  The Brigands were suspected of paying for their lifestyle by smuggling drugs across the border from Mexico and Kurt’s house was under twenty-four-hour police surveillance. Archived photographs show Jane making a rapid transformation from hippy to leather- and denim-clad biker. Police didn’t bother enquiring as to who Jane was or where she had come from, because of the notoriously low status of women within the biker subculture (according to the rule book of the Brigand Motorcycle Club, women were not allowed to join the gang as full members, ride motorcycles except as pillion passengers, engage in any criminal activity, or speak at official club meetings except to offer food or drink to the men).

  Kurt became excited when he heard Jane’s story about the stolen security passes and the cases of guns at Oakland navy base, but he was no peace protestor. His plan was to steal two truckloads of guns and sell them on the black market to a drug dealing acquaintance in Mexico, who would in turn sell the weapons on to rebel and terrorist groups in Africa and South America.

  Jane had attended dozens of anti-war demonstrations while living in Oakland. Despite this, she readily agreed to Kurt’s gun-smuggling plan. Criminal psychologists have described Jane’s behaviour as a textbook example of an extreme thrill seeker: a person with few moral scruples, who finds everyday life boring and constantly craves dangerous relationships and activities.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF KURT & JANE OXFORD

  Kurt Oxford and Jane Hammond robbed the docks at Oakland navy base on three separate occasions, earning themselves over $25,000 (equivalent to $145,000 at today’s prices). Jane did some research and realised that every military supply depot in the United States used identical, easy-to-fake, security paperwork. Over the next two years, Kurt and Jane staged over eighty robberies on United States military facilities.

  Jane had stolen reference books from her father that showed where different kinds of military supplies were stored. She would place an order over the phone, pretending to be the assistant of a senior officer in the logistics corps. The next day, a clean-shaven Kurt would arrive at the supply depot in an army surplus truck, wearing uniform and carrying a set of authentic-looking paperwork that Jane had typed up in her motel room the night before. The truck would be loaded up and Kurt would drive out laden with weapons. The Mexican arms dealer would then ship the load to South America.

  The beauty of this scheme was that the robberies went unnoticed; at least to begin with. With a quarter of a million troops on duty in Vietnam, thousands of US military trucks were moving weapons and ammunition around the country. The paper-based stock control system made keeping an up-to-date tally on every movement impossible. Even when someone checked the paperwork and noticed that a truckload of guns had vanished, it would be several months after the event and everyone would assume it was a clerical error rather than a robbery.

  By 1968, Kurt and Jane were earning over $20,000 (2005 equivalent – $110,000) a month from their illegal weapons business. With over half a million dollars stashed in overseas bank accounts, they had started flying first class and staying in five-star hotels. They also stopped doing robberies themselves and began relying on members of the Brigands motorcycle gang to do their dirty work.

  On 26 December 1968, Kurt Oxford and Jane Hammond landed in Las Vegas and booked a suite at the Desert Inn resort and casino. Kurt purchased a two-carat diamond ring and the next morning, he took his eighteen-year-old girlfriend on a limousine ride to a wedding chapel. After the ceremony, Kurt and Jane changed into swimwear, got drunk at the poolside and began losing heavily at a floating blackjack table.

  Kurt took offence when another blackjack player called him a fool. Kurt punched the man out and ended up being hauled into a back room by casino security. He was taken to the local police station, where the Las Vegas police ran a routine check. They found that Kurt had skipped bail on a Nevada assault charge five years earlier, following a fight between rival motorcycle gangs in Reno.

  Less than six hours after getting married, Kurt was locked up in Las Vegas county jail, facing a three- to five-year sentence. Jane pledged to stand by her husband, but was then shocked to discover that her husband had violated his California parole and that police there wanted to question him about an unsolved murder.

  Kurt Oxford was extradited to California. On 24 January 1969, five days before his trial for murder was due to begin, Kurt became involved in a fight in the prison exercise yard. A guard fired a warning shot, but the fight continued and Kurt received a shotgun blast in his chest. He died of his wounds in the prison hospital eleven days later.

  Jane Oxford – International Arms Dealer

  By the time she turned nineteen, Jane Oxford had run away from her family, amassed a half-million-dollar fortune (equivalent to $2.6 million today), got married and seen her husband die in prison. Jane had no police record, apart from a missing persons report filed by her father in Oakland. Fearing a public scandal, General Hammond had honoured the bad cheques and compensated Fowler Wood for his stolen car.

  Some people might have quit while they were ahead, but Jane Oxford spent the 1970s transforming herself from a thief into a
big-time black-market weapons dealer. The business of stealing from the US military thrived. When the army launched an investigation into the large amount of missing equipment and tightened up security, Jane developed more sophisticated techniques for relieving the US military of its weapons. Every American base had its share of bored, broke and homesick servicemen who were willing to turn a blind eye, or drive a truck off-base in return for a car, or enough cash to put down a deposit on a home.

  The next step in developing the business was for Jane to bypass her Mexican connection and deal directly with people who wanted to buy the stolen weapons. She travelled the world using a variety of aliases and disguises, making contacts with terrorist groups, drug tsars, local warlords and dictators. Jane brokered deals to sell weapons from all over the world, but most of her profits continued to stem from her unique web of corrupt contacts within the US military.

  THE GHOST

  In 1982, a retired member of the Brigands bike gang called Michael Smith was arrested at the gates of an army base in Kentucky, after attempting to pass a security check with a truckload of mortars. Smith had lost the paperwork given to him by an associate of Jane Oxford and stupidly tried to carry out the robbery using crudely altered paperwork from a previous raid.

  Smith had been involved in dozens of military supply thefts over the preceding decade. He offered to give the US military police information on Jane Oxford and her organisation, in return for a light prison sentence. Smith was stunned by the answer the US military police gave him: not only was nobody looking for Jane Oxford, they’d never even heard of her.

  Following Michael Smith’s tip-off, Jane Oxford went from being an unknown to a spot on the FBI’s most wanted list. The FBI, CIA and US military police set up a two-hundred-person taskforce to bring Jane Oxford to justice. The trouble was, almost nothing was known about her.