Marine F SBS

by Robin James

  ‘I’m going to count to ten,’ shouted Arsenio. ‘If you’ve not vanished by the time I reach it, her finger comes off. Then you get another ten, and it’s another finger. And so on, until you get the message. One, two, three . . .’ He was counting quickly.

  ‘Why, you fucking bastard,’ muttered Bright. Hurriedly, as Arsenio reached seven, he made a hand signal to the Squid.

  It was with considerable relief that El Asesino watched the commandos disappear down into their conning towers, the hatches close and the subs dive. He would, he realized, have been forced to carry out his threat. It would only have been the one finger, of course. After that they would have gone, all right. But it would have been a particularly nasty thing to have inflicted on an innocent girl. A rather lovely innocent girl, at that.

  His eyes searched the rough surface of the sea. They were down there, of course. La Señorita Juanita would be a blip on their radar screens. They would follow them all the way in to Malpica harbour.

  He sighed. He would have to deal with that problem when they arrived. This kidnap business was proving to be far trickier than he had anticipated. Hantash had shot dead an Irish skipper and he himself had blown up what he now realized had been an SBS Patrol Gunboat.

  The entire world and his dog would be trying to track him down.

  14

  There was very little activity in Malpica harbour when La Señorita Juanita chugged in. As he watched the spreading furrows in the calm water behind her, looking for signs of the submersibles, Arsenio ordered Pomares not to put his ship in her customary place alongside the outer harbour wall, but to take her as near the town side of the harbour as possible and back her into the wall, keeping her engines running so that her helm stayed tight against the concrete.

  ‘We’re going into a port,’ said Corporal Tweedy over the radio to the following Squid. Above him, the hulls of moored boats were slipping by. Afternoon sunlight was penetrating the slightly murky waters to pick out the torpedo-shaped submersibles as, one in front of the other, they slid further into Malpica harbour. Arsenio’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘We can’t do anything down here,’ responded the pilot of the Squid. ‘We should surface.’

  In the hold of the drifter, Carolyn was in yet more trouble. The waves which had been smashing over the drifter had been throwing water constantly through the gash in the boat’s side, and Carolyn was up to her calves in it. The last of the tunny had been saved at almost their final gasp as the first inches of sea water splashed in, and they were swimming around her and knocking into her legs, though she could not see them because the hatch was closed fast. All this had not happened to her, she told herself; it was not happening. She was becoming convinced that she was going out of her mind.

  As the helm of La Señorita Juanita bumped into the harbour wall, some fifty metres from it the Shark and the Squid surfaced. Hantash and Springer were already hauling Carolyn from the hold and Kasar had leapt ashore. Arsenio was ready for the submersibles. He did not have a launcher, but he was certainly capable of hurling a grenade accurately over that distance. He pulled the pin and chucked one, then sent another after it for good measure. The first clanged against the hull of the Shark and bounced off, the second splashed into the water behind it, halfway between its tail and the Squid’s nose.

  The grenades went off within two seconds of one another. There were two water-muffled whumphs, followed by great fountains of water spurting five or six metres into the air. Inside the submersibles, the sound of pieces of shrapnel clanging against the hulls came at the same time as the shock waves racing through the water hit them. The subs were rocked so violently that Tweedy, who had been standing and opening the hatch above him, was flung sideways and knocked unconscious as his head hit a protruding metal gauge.

  Arsenio and the others, dragging Carolyn between them, had disembarked and were running from the harbour when the grenades went off. It was the hour of the siesta, and there were few people about, but those that were there stopped and stared in amazement at the four fisherman and the barefoot girl rushing from the harbour, whose waters were still hitting the walls in waves as a result of the two massive explosions. Then every one of them hurried into the harbour to see what had happened to disturb the peace of their normally uneventful town.

  As the frantic bobbing of the Shark eased off, Bright caught a glimpse through one of the three portholes of the fleeing men and their hostage, reaching the promenade, dashing across it and disappearing down a side-street. The only chance he had of catching them was to beach the submersible. As Tweedy, groaning, picked himself off the deck, half of his face coated in blood, Bright put the Shark on full thrust and shot towards the forefront of the harbour. The men in the Squid, getting the idea, went after them.

  The handful of onlookers had never seen anything like it. First, explosions, then great spouts of water. Armed fishermen dragging a girl along with them. A pair of strange-looking, small submarines shooting through the harbour, crunching on to its gently sloping, littered, muddy beach. Three men in trainers, denim shorts and T-shirts, armed with sub-machine-guns, clambering from the subs, leaping into the shallow water and rushing through it and up on to the promenade. A fourth, with a blood-soaked face, dragging himself groggily through a hatch.

  It had to be that a movie was being shot – except that there were no cameras, no director and no film crew.

  The SBS commandos, despite their speedy reaction, were too far behind Arsenio’s band to have much of a chance of catching them. The kidnappers had crammed Carolyn into the hired Panda – still standing outside the Pomares’ house – had piled in all around her and were away, Arsenio at the wheel, tearing through the streets of Malpica, by the time the first of the commandos turned the corner of the little row of fishermen’s cottages to see not a soul, or a moving car, in the road.

  Tweedy, meanwhile, had recovered sufficiently to carry out one, quite futile, operation. Spotting movement aboard La Señorita Juanita, carrying his sub-machine-gun at the ready, he cautiously crept up on the drifter to leap aboard and menace Pomares with death if he did not lie down flat on his deck with his arms above his head.

  Pomares understood not a word that the commando flung at him, but the gun spoke all languages. Swearing under his breath, the tough old fisherman did as Tweedy – already realizing that he was probably making a mistake – asked him.

  15

  ‘I need an operations centre. There’s a fully equipped SBS boat setting out from Portsmouth right now, but she won’t arrive for at least twenty-four hours.’ Major Fernandez, shirtless, his torso swathed in clean white bandages, was sipping coffee in the stateroom of the Mirabelle with Travers Bonnington as he spoke.

  ‘You need a hospital. My doctor’s got out as much of the shrapnel as he can. But you know damn well there might be pieces buried in deeper. You need an X-ray urgently. If there’s any more junk inside you it has to be got out before a bit of it floats into a vital organ.’ The American puffed his Havana. ‘And kills you,’ he added bluntly.

  ‘I’ll have to take a chance on that.’ Fernandez was stirring his already well-stirred coffee, a fierce expression on his granite face. ‘The priority right now is tracking down Arsenio. Nothing else matters. He wiped out the Gremlin and all aboard. He has the Home Secretary’s daughter with him. I’m going to get him.’

  ‘Easier said than done.’ Bonnington shrugged. ‘It’s your life, I guess.’ He stood. ‘OK – you need an operations room, you’ve got one. I keep in daily touch with the world’s stock markets. Take a look in here.’ He led Fernandez into an adjoining cabin. It was fully equipped with the latest in computer technology, including a modem and a laser image scanner, and there were two fax machines. A male secretary worked a ten-hour day in there. ‘It’s all at your disposal,’ said the American. ‘This is Gavin, he’ll help you in any way you want. How does it suit you?’

  Gavin was in his early thirties and good-looking in a male-model sort of way. When he smiled and said h
ello it was immediately obvious that he was gay. And therefore perhaps doubly efficient, thought Fernandez.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said the major. He looked all around and then back at Bonnington. ‘First-class,’ he commented. ‘All I could possibly want.’

  He hardly knew where to start. He was a highly trained fighting machine, a leader of men, most skilled in the tactics of warfare and specifically of anti-criminal operations on water. But at that moment there was a void to fill. His submersibles had taken off an hour and a half earlier after La Señorita Juanita and he did not have their damned contact numbers – that was something he left to his radio operator and the poor bastard was at the bottom of the sea.

  But there was the Wessex. Of course, the chopper that had lifted him here was still sitting on the deck.

  ‘Raise the helicopter pilot, would you please?’ he asked Gavin. ‘I’m going aloft.’

  ‘But you’re in no fit state to go running around, feller,’ said Bonnington. ‘You’ve lost a lot of blood.’

  ‘I’ve had a steak sandwich and half a bottle of Beaujolais. I’ll be OK.’

  Recalling that the drifter had been registered at Malpica, Fernandez found the town on the map. Calculating that it lay in more or less the direction that the boat had fled, as soon as he was in the helicopter he told the pilot to set off for the town.

  Fifteen minutes later, flying low, he spotted his two submersibles beached at Malpica harbour. And there she was, La Señorita Juanita. There was quite a crowd around her on the dockside. There were two Guardia Civil jeeps and an ambulance. His four commandos from the submersibles, he saw, were on board. Hopes rising, he told the pilot to put the Wessex down on the harbour wall across from the fishing boat, as bystanders moved hastily out of the down-draught.

  Fernandez had been brought up to speak Spanish and Greek – as well as English – at home, and now the first served him well, for there was utter confusion on board La Señorita Juanita. None of his men spoke Spanish, none of the Guardia Civil English. Corporal Bright was attempting the practically impossible job of explaining what he and his fellow commandos were doing there with their Sterling sub-machine-guns and their little submarines and why they had the locally well-known skipper Pepe Pomares lying flat on the deck of his boat. Meanwhile a number of people in the crowd – growing by the second as it seemed all the inhabitants of Malpica were pouring down to the harbour – were shouting and gesticulating wildly as they told the story in their different fashions to the police.

  The Guardia Civil also had their machine-guns, as well as sidearms, and all six of them were nervously fingering, though not pointing, the former. It was plain that they had no idea what to do, but when Fernandez clambered on board – the boat had been precariously made fast with a single rope – one of the sergeants was protesting that surely they should arrest these foreigners and cart them off to the local police station.

  Pomares was finally being allowed to his feet as Fernandez indentified himself. The SBS major towered over the policemen, his presence and manner commanding. They believed him immediately, and besides, there were the submarines, and now the helicopter, as evidence to back him up. Nevertheless, the sergeant pointed out, these people had no right charging around on Spanish soil with loaded sub-machine-guns, and subjecting the good Pepe Pomares to such violent treatment.

  Fernandez speedily sorted it all out by getting the fisherman to tell his story. Long before the major had filled in the gaps, the Spaniards realized exactly what had been going on. The entire province was on alert for any sign of the whereabouts of an important British young lady, and the countryside was being scoured, and subjected to roadblocks, by patrols of both the Guardia Civil and the Guardia Municipal. Spain’s Military Intelligence was involved, as were the Special Anti-Terrorist Brigade of the Judicial Police and the National Police’s Organized Crime Group. This was a kidnapping of major international importance which had been carried out just outside Spanish territorial waters, so that there was the strong possibility that the victim was even now on Spanish soil.

  Carolyn Parker-Reed was indeed on Spanish soil. Not much more than half an hour earlier she had been hustled off La Señorita Juanita, and rushed into the village. Perhaps she was still in the village. The members of the Guardia Civil were galvanized into action; not only, they had learned, was the important señorita from London not far away, but the poor wife of Pepe Pomares was being held prisoner somewhere too.

  At that moment, in the little, rented holiday house on the banks of the Río Allones, Señora Pomares, locked in a dark bedroom whose windows were heavily shuttered and door locked, was listening to the sounds of frenzied activity in the rest of the house. A car had arrived, and there were loud male voices and shouts. There was also a woman, but she hardly spoke.

  Carolyn Parker-Reed was slowly coming out of what had been a zombie-like state of shock. Unreality was – she was slowly coming to grips with the fact – reality after all. She had been abducted by the infamous Arsenio while swimming in the Bay of Biscay; she had been imprisoned in the stinking hold of a fishing boat; she had been attacked and almost raped by a brute with a German accent; she had been threatened with having her finger cut off, then made to make a tearful tape-recording for her father; she had had hundreds of huge, living fish thrown down on her; the boat had been holed above the water-line by another; there had been a gunshot; apparently some sort of police launch had ordered her captors to give in and there had been three massive explosions; they had headed off somewhere and been ordered to surrender by a man on one of two miniature submarines – as meanwhile the hold was slowly filling with water; she had been taken on deck and again threatened with having a finger hacked off; they had put into a harbour somewhere, where there had been two more explosions; she had been rushed off the boat, through some narrow streets and shoved into the back of a little car, crushed between two massive men, one of whom was the would-be rapist; and now she had been plonked into a chair and ordered not to move, while her captors were hurriedly changing clothes all around her.

  Arsenio’s brain was in top gear. The local countryside, he realized, would be crawling with police in next to no time. They did not have much of a start. Four men and a girl were number-one police priority to be hunted down. But now they were five, plus Carolyn – and there was not an inch of room for one more man in the Panda. They needed extra transport – urgently.

  The road on which the rented house was situated was little more than a bumpy track alongside the river, the only traffic to pass along it fishermen, botanists, a few adventurous holidaymakers – and that only occasionally.

  Pedro Castillo was proud of his twenty-year-old Harley-Davidson motor cycle. He kept it finely tuned, lavished loving attention on it, and cleaned it every week. He would never have brought it down this bumpy track at all had it not been for one simple fact. He had a new girlfriend and had wanted to take her somewhere romantic and out of the way during their extended lunch break from the garage in which he worked and from her mother’s haberdashery shop, in the little town of Villaverde, in order to press his sexual attentions on her.

  Pedro had failed on this day to achieve the coveted goal, but he had at least made progress and he was feeling fairly pleased with himself as, very slowly and carefully, he negotiated the bumps, ruts and potholes in the narrow lane while taking himself and his girl back to work.

  As he approached the kidnappers’ rented house, Arsenio came staggering and reeling down the path from the front door, both hands clutched to his heart. As Pedro’s bike was almost on him, he collapsed in the track in front of it, writhing and moaning. The young man stopped, dismounted and bent over the stricken figure, to find himself looking into the barrel of a Smith & Wesson 459 as another man, also bearing a handgun, ran out of the house.

  Within minutes, Pedro and his girlfriend were tightly bound hand and foot, and gagged, and locked up in the dark with Señora Pomares.

  Arsenio seldom went anywhere without being prepared for
almost any eventuality. Now, he needed to change his appearance, and he had the wherewithal in the house to do so; it was a very different-looking El Asesino, with a neat little grey moustache, grey sideboards and grey hair and wearing red-tinted glasses, who left the house shortly after. None of the men now had the appearance of fishermen. All five were neatly dressed in clean shirts and slacks.

  Arsenio got in the front of the Panda, with Carolyn, Hantash and Shannon in the back. Kasar and Springer donned the young couple’s crash helmets and climbed on the Harley. They set off first, heading south on a route that had been carefully planned earlier. Five minutes later, Arsenio left in the Panda. The plan was that they would stick to local roads – yellow on the map – for thirty kilometres until they hit the C545, when they would turn south-east towards Santiago de Compostela.

  Once they got off the riverside track they would travel – as would the Harley – at a steady ninety kilometres per hour, thus preserving the distance between them. The reason for this procedure was precise and clever: Arsenio was aware that whenever there was a police roadblock in Spain, a kilometre or so before it but on the other side of the road, there would be standing a member of the Guardia Civil, with a machine-gun, waiting to apprehend – and if need be shoot at – any vehicle foolish enough to turn around when it met the tailback leading to the roadblock. Springer had a radiophone with him. So did Arsenio. Should the bike encounter any such obstacle – as Arsenio was convinced it would – Springer would warn Arsenio over the radiophone and he would have plenty of time to turn around and take another route.

  In fact, they were lucky. There was only one roadblock, just after the town of Portomouro, and they were able to backtrack and follow fifteen kilometres of local road to Santiago de Compostela – where Arsenio was relieved to get stuck in the comfortable anonymity of traffic jams, and where he left the silently gloomy Carolyn in the car with Shannon and Springer to go off and buy her the pair of trainers and socks she was going to need for the night’s ordeal in front of both of them. He also purchased for her a long, dark wig, sunglasses, and green lipstick and eye shadow.