Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

  Then they had turned off the M20 towards the Cheriton terminal and the prospect of the very action he feared forced his body and his senses to switch gears. The sweat on his body dried, his shirt freed itself from his back and he felt calm and confident.

  The Cheriton terminal covers 150 hectares and is designed like an enormous horseshoe with the Tunnel entrance and exit at the ends of the shoe’s arms. The whole vast complex is designed to speed traffic through, so both French and British Customs work under the same roof. Once through the security checks at the British end, there are no further checks at all at the other side.

  Dai Choi led his three cars into the toll booths. Each driver paid the fare and then joined the queue for the Customs and security checks. It was here, Dai Choi knew, that all the research and the dry runs would either pay off or result in their arrest.

  When the plan had first been discussed, he had realized that it relied heavily on the fact that all security checks at any airport or port depend on three things: technology, intelligence and luck. He believed their plan took care of the technology; that the British had no advance warning of their plans. And luck? Well, they would just have to wait and see.

  The tolls looked just like an Autobahn toll in Germany and Dai Choi led his little convoy towards one of the lanes with a green light suspended above it. He suspected that here the cars might be photographed and the licence numbers checked with a central computer against lists of stolen or suspect vehicles. If so, the checks would reveal nothing as the registration plates all came from identical vehicles owned by Triad front companies in England.

  Through the tolls, the vehicles swung round to the left and followed the signs towards immigration and Customs.

  From the outset, Dai Choi had debated how to bring fifteen Chinese people into the Tunnel. So many foreign names with the same ethnic background would be certain to set the alarm bells ringing. He had winnowed it down by recruiting the most European-looking of the Triad members so that only the car with himself, Michael Leung and two others had people who were categorically from the Far East.

  This solution was facilitated by the hoard of 750 blank British passports White Lotus had bought in 1991. In that year, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office’s passport printing office in Manchester had printed 3,000 blank passports to test the new maroon European design. The final 1,000 had been so near perfect as to be almost indistinguishable from the real thing. They should have been destroyed, but they had come on the market and fallen to the highest bidder. White Lotus saw the passports as a useful investment for when 1997 loomed larger and the price of such a document would ensure a handsome profit. Dai Choi had the passports finished in Hong Kong by their own forgers and each of his men had British rather than Chinese names.

  The result of the compromise between perfect people and those who would pass the immigration checks was a group that was a mix of experienced talent and enthusiastic recent recruits. He and Leung led the fifteen. The best of the rest was the diminutive Kang Sheng, the Sherpa driver, who was travelling under the name of Henry Wallis. He was British born and had a Caucasian mother. He looked English but had been brought up in the Chinese community and was perfectly assimilated into his father’s culture. Like many small people, he had the aggression of a man twice his size and all the insecurities of the half-breed.

  Kang Sheng had become one of White Lotus’s most effective enforcers. He was ruthless and calm in a crisis and Dai Choi was confident in his abilities to help hold the team together. Much of the rehearsals had been organized by Kang Sheng, who had whipped the group into some sort of coherent shape in the past few weeks. What still worried Dai Choi was how these people would react when the killing started.

  Dai Choi handed his passport to the immigration official who flicked through it and passed it back. There was no entering of numbers into a central computer, no check beyond the most cursory. He was British, he was one of millions going on holiday or business to Europe. No one had the time or inclination to question such people.

  Dai Choi moved slowly off and watched in his mirror as the other vehicles came through the checks.

  When the idea of a tunnel had first been considered, the head of G Branch of the Security Service — at the time Stella Rimington — met with Yves Bonnet, her equivalent in France’s Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST). At that first meeting in her Curzon Street office overlooking Shepherd Market, the two had agreed on the parameters of the threat. The most likely attackers were terrorists and at the time the obvious suspects were the Red Army Faction in Germany, Action Directe in France and the IRA in Britain. Attacks by Middle East fanatics were also possible. Since then the RAF had given up and AD had been destroyed but the principles of defence against terrorist attack remained.

  Following that meeting, the British had set up a committee which seemed to involve just about every branch of government with an interest in either intelligence or security. The Ministry of Defence sent along people from DIS and the Intelligence Corps so that they could give their views about the IRA threat and securing the Tunnel in time of war; the SAS turned up because they loved the idea of breaking into the Tunnel past all the security that everyone else would put in place; SIS sent someone because they always liked to be present at a party to show that they were serious players at home and abroad; the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Department of the Environment all attended to make sure their views were expressed; and finally the owners and Group 4, the security company hired by Eurotunnel, sent their own people.

  It is a function of such a group to look at the worst possible scenarios. They had come up with a series of apocalyptic visions which had frightened even the authors of the reports. Civil servants, and in particular intelligence agents, tend to look at the worst case anyway and then make recommendations based on that.

  In 1989, when MI5 had produced its preliminary report, it recommended that all cars and trucks be passed through three different machines to examine them for drugs, weapons and explosives; that every passenger should pass through a dual metal detector and explosives-sniffing machine; and that there should be random searches of both vehicles and passengers. Eurotunnel had gone off and done their sums and were shocked to discover that such checks would cut by fifteen per cent the number of trains that would run every hour, would cost an extra 300 million pounds to install and run each year and would reduce freight and passenger income by twenty-five per cent.

  The ensuing fight between the absolutists in the Security Service and the compromisers in Eurotunnel was memorable even by the standards of government bureaucracy. But the Department of Trade had lined up with the commercial side and the result was a half-assed deal that pleased nobody.

  The argument took over a year and the contract for the security system was not actually awarded until the beginning of 1992 when Eurotunnel secretly agreed to purchase a new system called Condor, which had just been developed by British Aerospace at their Systems and Equipment division at Filton near Bristol.

  Condor includes a Thermal Neutron Activation System which “fires” neutrons to react with the nitrogen in explosives and produce a gamma radiation that can be sensed by detectors. This is very effective for freight and baggage but cannot be used on food or people as it is banned under the Radiation of Food Act. Therefore passengers and cars are not screened by this system, unless there is some specific intelligence suggesting a real threat.

  A second tier of the Condor defence is a Vapour and Particulate Detector. This “sniffs” an area and gives a visual or audio alarm when target molecules such as those found in explosives or drugs are detected. This works well on specific targets but is not effective for mass searches — rather like an expert wine taster, the sniffer needs to have a clear palate to work perfectly — but the VPD is used for random searches.

  There are also sniffer dogs and hand-held detection devices. But the basic defence is the Falcon II X-Ray system which fires X-rays at the vehicles. Different objects and mat
erials absorb varying amounts of the rays and the computer is able to compare each piece of information with its databank and decide which object might be a gun, which a harmless fuel pipe and which a tiny piece of plastic explosive. It was this machine that Dave Leppard was operating that morning.

  Like everyone else on site, Dave hated the Monday morning shift. There was always a rush of people trying to get the first train; they were impatient to reach the first business meeting on time or excited about their holiday. Either way, he could fee! the resentment flowing in his direction at every second of delay.

  Dave was a security operator not because he wanted a career in the business, but because it was where people like him just seemed to end up. He had been in the Household Cavalry and had signed on for what he reckoned would be a life term. Then the Berlin Wall came down, Communism fell apart and the government started cutting defence like there was no tomorrow, which there very probably wasn’t for people like Dave. The Cavalry had been chopped in half and asked for volunteers to leave early. Well, this is just the start, he’d thought to himself. Better get out now before civvy street is flooded with people like me.

  He hadn’t much to offer the outside world except a clean record, a good recommendation from his CO and an ability to follow orders. He was six feet three inches tall and broad-shouldered, which had made him the marker for the rest of the platoon on the parade ground.

  It also made him an ideal candidate for security work and so he’d signed up with the Tunnel. It was sod’s law that they’d put him behind a computer rather than out in the fresh air frightening people.

  At first he’d found the systems fascinating, but now that had evolved into the boredom of routine. In over a year of inspections, he’d never discovered anything, with the single exception of the time the SAS had tried to break through security with Semtex hidden in picnic hampers. It was a childish effort that had not been repeated.

  As usual, he was sitting at his console inside the security area and had processed six cars before Dai Choi’s Granada came into the view of the camera in the waiting area. Dai Choi and the other passengers exited to go through the X-ray doors to one side while the car moved forward on a continuous conveyor belt.

  There were four screens facing Dave. The top two relayed an outside image of the vehicle. The bottom screen to the right displayed a colour image of the X-ray results. As the Granada came into full frame, the X-rays painted the car and within a nanosecond the computer had brought up on the left-hand screen a two-dimensional computer image of the car’s design as it left the factory. As the rays flowed back over the car again, the computer defined different areas that varied from the factory blueprint, automatically discarding such commonplace items as radio aerials or cassette players.

  On the right-hand screen, the computer was sifting through the contents of the car, bringing in front of Dave a flowing waterfall of orange and reds of different densities that told him here was paper, here a suitcase, here clothing. A flick of the rollerball under his right hand and he could home in on any item.

  The machine was not designed to detect the shape of the carefully moulded explosive that had replaced the floor matting and window seals. The density of Demex explosives was so similar to rubber that the computer was unable to discriminate. Only if Dave had been suspicious would a lengthy refinement have produced some minor anomalies.

  As the Granada passed through, the Sherpa van came into the frame. Dave laughed to himself. This was the tenth time in two weeks. Same van. Same time and same place. The first time it had come through, every alarm bell in the place had started ringing. The van looked innocent enough from the outside but inside there was enough lead to start a bullet factory. He had ordered the van out of the line and they had bombarded it with all the machines and then searched it thoroughly. All they had found was roll after roll of microfilm and computer tapes.

  He remembered the driver because he had been so small and so angry. Furious at missing his train, he couldn’t seem to understand that lead containers could cause a problem, even if you were with a company called Security Archives that had offices in Brussels, Paris and London.

  The driver had explained that he was driving south to the Massif Central where the copies of financial records from the City of London would be buried in secure vaults deep in the limestone cliffs. The film was transported in lead boxes precisely because X-rays and any other bombardment could damage the material.

  That first time, he had been made to unload every film and every tape before driving on to the shuttle. The second time, the Customs people had given a cursory look in the back, and now he was a familiar figure, his little head peering over the steering wheel.

  Dave watched the waterfall cascade down his screen, the purples and bright greens indicating the solid lead containers. This time no alarm bells rang and he pressed the button to stop the X-rays and move the vehicle through.

  The Volkswagen Kamper, with its two-battery system, was already in the computer’s database and so no alarm was raised as it passed through the scanner.

  On his first course as a trainee, Dave had been taught that in his new business there were a few certainties. One was that a gun would always be picked up by the scanners, provided it wasn’t dismantled or the shape hidden behind metal screens. The second was that every single explosive charge requires a detonator and every single detonator, big or small, modem or old, has embedded within it a tiny T-shaped object known as an Azide tube. This is made out of lead and produces a completely distinctive image. All security scanning systems are programmed to watch for this shape made out of lead and will automatically sound an alarm if it is detected.

  As Dave looked at the profile of the Kamper, the computer sorted through all the original specification and displayed on his screen a bag of tools, clothing and suitcases.

  The second battery in the VW had been completely dismantled and the lead plates extracted. Two lead plates had been made, between which were sandwiched the detonators, each measuring only two mm across. The plates had been sandwiched back together and a thin line of lead placed on top. When the X-rays bombarded the battery, all they saw was a battery.

  As he watched in his rear-view mirror, Dai Choi saw the Volkswagen emerge from the security check and he breathed a small sigh of relief. They were all through and the forty-eight detonators had passed undetected. Now to the real danger zone.

  More confident, he drove around a short one-way system and on to the platform. Each train had an engine at either end and twelve wagons, eight with two decks for cars and four with one deck for light vans. Dai Choi’s team had learned that arrival just after eight-thirty a.m. for the nine o’clock train would ensure that they would be close to the front of the queue with all the vehicles going in the front two coaches.

  Dai Choi drove directly from the platform into the shuttle wagon, pulling his Granada in behind a green Rover 416 GSi with what appeared to be a husband and wife and their small daughter inside. He steepled his fingers on the steering wheel and for a moment allowed his forehead to drop forward and rest. He came back to the upright position and shook himself, preparing physically and mentally for the next step.

  Two hundred feet ahead of him, Harry Ritchie was going through the final checks in his cab. Until today, he had loved this space. Looking around now at the digital dials, the telephone, the computer terminal and the instruments that could tell him everything from the temperature in the Tunnel to the distance travelled to the nearest one-hundredth of a mile, Ritchie saw each one as a threat. Each tiny slug of information would spell out not the progress to journey’s end, but the inexorable march to disaster.

  He could still see the pain on Becky’s face. Unwanted, the image of the blood spurting from her severed fingers had flashed before his eyes a hundred times since that awful moment when his life had been tom to pieces. Even his nostrils seemed full of the smell of her blood. But the instant he remembered most vividly was when the Chinese had drawn out his knife; that awf
ul noise, somewhere between a hiss and a sigh, as the blade parted from its leather sheath, would be with him for ever.

  Since he had staggered from the house to the car he had moved like an automaton. He had driven to work, gone to his locker and changed into his driver’s uniform. At that hour of the morning there was never much time for banter. Nobody had noticed that Harry Ritchie, the happiest driver of them all, seemed rather down. Nobody had said the kind words that might have unlocked the door to the agonies he was feeling.

  Instead, here he was waiting for the Off. He looked to his left and read the words “5 mins to start”. Automatically his hands began to run over the checks, eyes and brain registering the power settings, his left hand gripping the dead man’s handle, in fact a horizontal circle which he rotated to make the connection between the power supply and the drive train. His feet moved to the pedals, left for acceleration, right for brake. A final glance around and then the computer cleared and the one word “Start” flashed up.

  In fact, Ritchie had little to do. The signalling centre hidden in the heart of the Cheriton complex controls which trains move where and when. A train is scheduled to leave from either side of the Channel every 2.5 minutes and so several trains were always in the Tunnel at any one time. Sensors tell the computers in the signalling centre that the correct gap is being maintained between trains and can warn the drivers to slow down or speed up.

  There was no jolt, just a gentle increase in power that had the train moving out of the station smoothly and almost in silence. There were no side windows in the cab so that Ritchie would not be disorientated by the Tunnel lights flashing by. Instead he had a small window to the front, a narrow vision of the Tunnel ahead. It appeared first as a small black hole between two long grey wafers. Then within seconds the wafers became the concrete side walls and the black hole widened to the yawning mouth of the Tunnel itself. In another moment, Ritchie was swallowed up with a slight lurch as the train broke through the buffer of air at the Tunnel mouth.