Fuelling the Fire

by Roland Ladley

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016

  A Kindle Scout selection

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  For my wonderful helpers: Mikki, Sally, Nicky, Annie W, Annie B, and, of course, Claire.

  Thank you for your encouragement and enthusiasm.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Prologue

  Cock-Up

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Conspiracy

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Conflagration

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Morality is doing what is right, regardless of what you are told.

  Religion is doing what you are told, regardless of what is right.

  H. L. Mencken

  Prologue

  Air-Traffic Control (ATC), Aeropuerto Internacional Ezeiza, Buenos Aires

  3 June 2002

  It may have been midwinter, but it was hot in the ATC room. Dario Giménez looked up over his main screen and around the office. There were fifteen controllers crammed in a space smaller than his lounge. Elbow room was in short supply, and their Latin temperament didn’t help the atmosphere. He reckoned it was probably a lot calmer in a European equivalent. And cooler.

  Each desk was equipped with two computer monitors. The bigger screen, which most of the controllers kept central, graphically displayed the aircraft in the sky. His and Fernandez’s next door were primarily focused on routes heading northeast toward Europe. A smaller screen to his right glowed like a radioactive green and black bus timetable. Details of every flight in the air within three hundred kilometres were listed, each designated with a set of flight initials of two letters and three numbers. Other information included destination and arrival airports, departure and arrival times, airspeed, direction of travel, and height above sea level. If he wanted, he could have interrogated any of more than two hundred flights that were in the airspace above and around Buenos Aires.

  Twelve of the flights on his green and black screen were underlined and highlighted in bold. They were his aircraft, the ones arriving and leaving from Ezeiza International that his supervisor had allocated to him for today. A few more in italics, but not bold, came and went when they were within five kilometres of his designated aircraft. Italics meant caution.

  All of the pertinent information was displayed on his big screen as an electronic map. Against a dark-blue background, the red aircraft were his. The others were yellow. His job was to keep all the colours apart—well apart.

  Dario couldn’t stop his heart from leaping into his mouth when two planes got close. Anything within five hundred feet was classified as a “near miss” and would be subject to an external investigation. He mustn’t panic, though. Being on top of each other on the electronic map might look like a disaster, but it would almost certainly mean that one aircraft was well above the other in altitude, even though in two dimensions it looked like a train wreck. For peace of mind, whenever two aircraft appeared to get close to each other, Dario always triple-checked elevations and bearings. He hadn’t got it wrong so far.

  He made a sign of the cross and exhaled deeply. Just thinking about it was enough to ask for divine intervention.

  “Hello, EZE, this is BA244. We’re now one hundred miles out from you. Any further instructions?” The air-band radio crackled in Dario’s headset and jolted him. He was drifting off. He’d had a tough night. His young daughter, who was teething, had kept him and his wife awake. He’d eventually got some sleep but not enough to see him safely through a straight eight hours behind the ATC desk. The temperature in the room didn’t help.

  They really must get the air-conditioning sorted.

  He did need to talk to his wife about the division of responsibility at night. The problem was, she was a theatre nurse, and he ensured the safety of five-hundred-seater aircraft. They both needed their sleep.

  He had a quick glance at both his screens.

  “Hello, BA244, I copy. No change to plan. Aim to adopt holding pattern, but it’s likely that you will have a straight run in. Runway, Alpha, heading in from the north. Over.”

  “BA244. Copy. What’s the weather like on the ground?”

  Dario half stood and looked over three desks to the long glass window in front of him. “EZE, still clear here.” He glanced across at the toolbar at the bottom of the green screen. “It’s holding at twenty degrees. Over.”

  “BA244, copy. Speak soon. Out.”

  The crackling stopped. He prided himself on both his English and his radio procedure. Everything he said to pilots was recorded in case of an incident. Often his supervisor would listen in on conversations, or playback tape, to check that his staff were doing their job effectively. He’d always been complimented on the way he used the radio and his manner with his pilots. He tried his best.

  Dario had a quick scan of the main monitor. He checked that his aircraft’s vitals were as they should be by putting a finger on each and cross-checking with the green and black screen. He finished the round of all twelve within thirty seconds.

  That’s all OK, then.

  He reached for a cup of cooling coffee that one of the off-going staff had made for him about twenty minutes ago. It was lukewarm, but strong. Good, he needed that. He checked his watch. Three and a half hours to go before the end of his shift. He’d talk to Maria tonight about who gets up for the baby. They would definitely talk about it. Definitely.

  Dario leaned back on his chair with his hands behind his head. He yawned, closing his eyes as he did.

  “Hello, EZE, this is KM959. We’ll be out of radar range in fifteen minutes and then we’ll switch to HF radio. Over.” Dario looked up at the screen. It was the Dutch flight that had left Buenos Aires just under an hour ago, heading for Amsterdam. If he remembered correctly it was an Airbus A330, around 230 passengers. It flew daily to and from both capitals. The Dutch pilots were efficient and never gave him any problems. They spoke good English, were polite, and, thankfully, did as they were told—unlike some nationalities he could mention, including his own.

  “EZE, copy. Give us one last call before you’re out of range and I’ll let LIS know you’re on your way.” Lisbon, Portugal, would be the next ATC to get a ping on its radar from the plane’s transponder. But not for a good four or five hours.

  Dario waited for a response, his mind already drifting as the tiredness began to take hold again. He shook his head, hoping to wake himself up. It worked a little.

  Crackle. Crackle. “Roger . . .” Then the pilot’s voice changed markedly as he spat out across the air, “Bokkerful! YAA!”

  And then nothing. Silence.

  Dario was awake now. Wide awake. He stared at the screen, not focusing. He tried to make sense of what he had just
heard. It was Dutch, or gibberish. Or something else. The tone was sharp, fearful.

  He immediately pressed the transmit button.

  “Hello, KM959, this is EZE, over?” It was a question more than a statement, his voice rising uneasily at the end of the short sentence.

  A loud, unwelcome emptiness was the response.

  He tried again. “Hello, KM959, this is EZE, over!”

  Still nothing.

  He looked at his main screen. The red letters KM959, which when he checked a few seconds ago were bright, strong, and cheerful, were flashing. The plane’s transponder was no longer communicating with the tower.

  Dario tried again, but something deep inside him already knew that he would get no response from the Dutch Airbus.

  “Hello, KM959, this is EZE, over?”

  “Hello, KM959, this is EZE, over!” His voice was more fretful the second time round, his finger pressing far too hard on the transmit button.

  Nothing.

  Protocol in the tower now was to phone his supervisor. He stopped himself before reaching for the handset. The heat and dampness that he felt just minutes earlier had turned to cold. The sweat still ran down him, but now it left a sensation like getting out of a warm shower into a cold room. His heart was pounding and his mouth was dry.

  “Fuck,” he said under his breath. Dario always swore in English. It always sounded so much more purposeful.

  He picked up the phone and pressed the button that would link him straight to his supervisor. This would be a call he’d always hoped he would never have to make.

  Cock-Up

  Chapter 1

  Headquarters, Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Vauxhall, London

  Present Day

  “Gotcha.” Sam smiled, a smile that she reserved for moments of personal triumph. She looked again at the screen to her left and then back to the one in front of her. Both were forty-inch high-definition monitors having pixel resolutions that were lost on her. What she did know was that there were no cameras out there that could take a photo with a higher resolution than her screens could manage. In the last three years, digital photography, image enhancing, recognition software, and the screens to manipulate the whole caboodle had come on massively. She wouldn’t admit it in public, but the whole technology thing excited her.

  Just under five years ago, as a military analyst, she had spent most of her time in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. She studied and compared digital photographs of men, vehicles, and locations—some taken from the air, some from reconnaissance patrols, and the odd one or two from spies and informants. At the time she felt that, while it was hardly Mission Impossible, they were truly in the digital age.

  Now, today, here in the bowels of Vauxhall Cross—or, to those in the know, Babylon—they really could pick out car number plates from keyhole satellite images and recognise faces taken by a handheld camera over a kilometre away. It wasn’t just the quality of the cameras; the software that automatically enhanced images was exceptional. Using her fingers on the touchscreen to enlarge or even rotate an image up to twenty degrees—with the software filling in any gaps—nine times out of ten times she could get a very clear picture of a face. The latest technology had made her job so much easier.

  The software was making its own choices when it came to sharpening pixelated images and, doubtless, sometimes it cocked things up: a Roman nose instead of a Jewish one; a Ford rather than a Fiat. But she was trained to recognise Doris’s foibles—her mum’s first name and the pet name for the Dell tower that sat under her desk. She would caveat any match with the code word “ENHANCED” if she felt there was a chance that Doris was overcompensating for an original lack of clarity.

  She rocked back on her chair and put her hands behind her head. She looked at the left screen. There, now enlarged to a twenty-centimetre square, was Captain Ivan Droganov. The picture had been illicitly taken at a recent Arms and Weapons show in Moscow. The image had an accompanying date at the bottom right of the screen: 15-Dec-14. He was wearing a military uniform and stood among a number of Russian officers on the Rostec stand—selling drones, probably to Syria and Yemen.

  On the middle screen was a photo of a civilian, or what appeared to be one. Dressed in jeans, a grey hoodie, Asics sneakers, but shouldering an AK-47 assault rifle, the face was clearly that of the same Ivan Droganov. Sam leaned forward and, using a small swiping movement, turned the civilian Ivan’s face from left to right and then back again. She glanced across at her left screen. She did the same thing.

  “Yup,” she said to no one in particular, “they’re both Captain Ivan, for sure.”

  Sam hadn’t been able to stop herself from thinking out loud. She didn’t know whether it was therapeutic or not. All she knew was that at times of intense concentration, her thoughts often tumbled out of her mouth before she had a chance to stop them. While irritating to those around her, it was a release that she couldn’t stop, and she hadn’t really bothered trying. It seemed to help keep potential suitors away, which was a good thing. A love life was the last thing she needed right now.

  She noted the date of the middle photo: 12-Sep-15. Then the location: Georgiyevka. Right on the border between government and rebel forces in Ukraine.

  Sam swivelled her chair to the right and, looking at her third screen, opened up the secure database. She needed to log the two photos electronically, plus all of the accompanying information. And then she would drop an “Alert” e-mail to her boss, Jane, to let her know that she had made a match. Ivan was the third that week.

  As she typed, her mind wandered. She’d only been operational with SIS for three months. Her training had taken four, and she had shadowed John, a fellow analyst, for a month before she had been given her own desk. She was now almost independent. There were five photo analysts in the team with responsibility for Europe, the Middle East, and Near Africa. It was where the action was; there was no doubt about that.

  Between the five of them there was a continuously enlarging pool of photos and videos collected from every “open” source available: newsreel, papers and magazines, conflict tourists who posted photos on their blogs and on social media, and any other Internet source you could think of. Naturally, there were images taken by government-deployed and SIS-run sources and informants. They called these “closed” source material. Sam was surprised that more of their people weren’t working in these major war zones. Military sources’ input varied. Nearly all of the photos were posted by Special Forces (SF), and most of them were taken by the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR). They also received a few photos from agencies of allied countries. All of these images were classified as “closed” source.

  In Ukraine, their job was to identify serving Russian military officers and soldiers working among the pro-Russian rebels. It was, as was nearly always the case with image analysis, a painstaking job.

  She was with a good team. Discovering that Jane was her boss was a surprising, but welcome, revelation when Sam was finally allocated a desk. She and Jane had gotten to know each other in Sierra Leone during the Ebola “incident.” Jane’s quick thinking had saved Sam from a grisly death in a burning building. They had remained in contact while Sam deliberated about joining SIS. Since Sam had accepted the post, she felt that Jane had kept a watchful eye on her—in a positive way, more mother hen than domineering schoolmistress.

  What Sam loved about working for Jane was her clear direction. They didn’t waste time picking any old Russian officer and searching the Ukraine database for matches. Jane had identified Captain Ivan Droganov yesterday. He was born and bred in Eastern Ukraine, an obvious choice for the Russians to dispatch to assist the rebels.

  And Sam had found him. In Moscow, wearing a Russian Army uniform; in Ukraine, wearing a hoodie and fighting for the rebels.

  Gotcha!

  The Middle East work was the same, but different. Here the five of them were looking for Daesh—the new-to-the-West brand name for the so-called Islamic State. Or Al-Qaeda-trained
operatives. Or other known Islamic extremists, who were making their way into the UK via the refugee deluge.

  In the Cold War they would have been called “sleepers”—a bit before her time, but she remembered the expression from watching an early spy movie. The difference between the Middle East and the Russian/Ukraine work was that the former had a lesser number of leads; there were fewer original photos to compare the migrating mass with. Identifying the correct Middle Eastern or North African fundamentalist in Syria, Yemen, or Afghanistan wasn’t as easy as glancing at the latest Moscow May Day parade and picking out a soldier.

  The sure way was to get up close and personal to a Daesh or an Al-Qaeda training camp and photograph the trainees. But, she imagined, if the SAS had eyes on a confirmed terrorist training camp, surely the immediate action was to call in airstrikes or lob over a cruise missile. She wasn’t sure if they were still launching cruise missiles from USS Enormous, but the image did flash in front of her eyes. However, that obviously didn’t always happen, as they often received a number of mug shots taken in the desert with a long lens, for which the five analysts were very grateful.

  They also got some good-quality images taken at close range. She assumed these were from informants or payrolled local police in cases where the individual had a known record. Rather them than me.

  The bank of photos of high-value targets (HVTs) was close to a thousand. Her job was to see if she could track any of them, via the many conduits now open from the Middle East and North Africa, moving into the UK.

  Until about ten weeks ago, this had been a question of comparing a couple hundred images with a couple hundred more. But since the summer and the tsunami of refugees pouring across the many European borders, it was no longer a target-rich environment. Add to this the need to put disguises on the original photos, as many of those coming out of training camps adopt physical aliases, and it was really now a case of finding a pin in a field of haystacks.