Ultimatum, page 21
He was suddenly alert, as he detected sound and movement at the entrance to the alleyway. Something was turning into his street. Luke had already checked it for exits: there were none. He had gambled everything on Tannaz, throwing himself on her mercy. Now he was about to find out if he had made the worst decision of his life. If the vehicle was a van with blacked-out windows, he was definitely fucked.
The grey Peugeot Pars 405 made a horrendous noise as it drove down the alleyway towards him. There were a clanking and grinding as if the very engine itself were in pain. Luke breathed out. Whatever or whoever this was, it wasn’t police or security. As it drew closer Luke could see a crack across its windscreen and the engine seemed to be in some distress. He stepped out into its path and the car lurched to a stop. An arm reached across and wound down the window on the passenger side. A voice behind the wheel spoke with an American accent: ‘Jump in the back, my friend. I’m Farz.’ He hadn’t bothered to ask who Luke was – it must have been obvious: there couldn’t have been many other six-foot-tall Westerners hanging around an empty Tehran back-street at nine o’clock at night.
The driver twisted round and held out a hand. The face was young, open, and framed by a mop of shoulder-length hair. A faded red bandanna was wrapped around his forehead, pirate-style, and he was wearing ripped jeans and a faded beige top. The whole car reeked of the sweet, unmistakable smell of marijuana, and the dashboard was a jumble of old cassette tapes, some spewing out their brown ribbon contents.
Luke didn’t want to sound ungrateful but he had to ask: ‘Is this going to make it to Bandar Abbas?’
‘This?’ Farz gave the steering wheel an affectionate pat as he laboriously executed a three-point turn in the narrow alleyway. ‘Who knows? Guess we’ll find out. But you, my friend, need to keep your head down. There’s a blanket in the back there beside you. I heard it on the radio – there’s a lot of people looking for you right now.’
Chapter 55
Muharraq airport, Bahrain
IN A DISCREET corner of Bahrain’s Muharraq airport, out of sight of the main terminal, an RAF Sentinel surveillance plane took off over the shallow waters of the Gulf. Climbing up to cruising altitude, it positioned itself high above the seas that separate Iran from the UAE and Oman, then deployed its multimode lookdown radar to scan up to three hundred nautical miles into Iranian airspace. Onboard, sitting in a line strung out along the fuselage and facing their screens, the comms data analysts worked quietly and methodically. They had a single purpose: to exploit every last byte of intelligence from the data picked up by the listening station on Musandam. By hoovering up every call, every text message, every email associated with the number identified in Bandar Abbas, they were tasked with pinpointing the location of those holding the Foreign Secretary hostage.
Back at Vauxhall Cross, a ‘fusion cell’ had been set up on the ground floor. This joint team of comms data exploitation experts from MI6 and GCHQ had already matched up one phone number to the commander of an IRGC missile battery on Hormuz Island in the Gulf. Now whole conversations were opening up as numbers dropped into place for both ends of previously encrypted conversations. ‘Jog-back intelligence’ was being gleaned retroactively by revisiting earlier interceptions.
Trish Fryer, Middle East Controller, was directing the team. A veteran of countless clandestine operations, she had organized everyone into eight-hour shifts, working round the clock. She divided her own time between hovering next to those working up the data, giving them advice and suggestions, and writing the latest report to be presented at the next COBRA meeting. But something was niggling her. Something didn’t make sense.
‘We’re missing a piece of the puzzle here. A piece we need,’ she had told her team at the afternoon briefing. ‘We’ve only seen that one message from Zamani, then he’s gone dark on us. So what do we conclude from that?’ She scanned the rows of faces until a young analyst put up his hand.
‘That he knows he’s being monitored, ma’am?’
‘Yes,’ said Trish, slowly. ‘Possibly. Or … or …’ She was hoping someone would complete the sentence but they didn’t. ‘Or that he’s communicating by another means. So I want you to find it. I want to know where Karim Zamani is, what he’s doing and what he’s saying to whom. We need that piece of the jigsaw urgently.’ The team sat there expecting more but she was done.
‘Well, come on, get going,’ she said sharply. ‘That number’s not going to find itself. We’re facing a bloody ultimatum here in case you’d all forgotten!’
Chapter 56
Tehran
LED ZEPPELIN. SANTANA. Procul Harum. Luke felt as if he were trapped in a 1970s timewarp. Cramped and contorted in the narrow floor space behind the front seats of Farz’s battered old Peugeot, he realized this was the second time in two months he’d found himself in this position. He was listening to ‘Stairway To Heaven’ as they ground through the interminable night-time suburbs of Tehran. Head down under the blanket, he could see nothing of the world outside but he could hear Farz’s incessant rummaging for cassettes beneath the dashboard, then the occasional click of his lighter as he lit yet another cigarette. Cassettes? Who used those nowadays?
‘You like “Black Magic Woman”?’ asked Farz, from his seat up front.
‘What?’
‘Santana. “Black Magic Woman”. You like that song?’
Luke grunted noncommittally from his hiding place. He didn’t give a stuff what music Farz played as long as he managed to get him out of town. ‘Stay low, eat everything.’ That was what the instructors had told him, back on the Joint Services survival course all those years ago. And now look where he was: being driven across Iran in the back of a clapped-out boneshaker by some retro hippie. This was not a good situation.
Then he felt a gentle bump and the car stopped. So too did the music. The front door opened, and Luke tensed beneath his blanket as he heard voices. Jesus. Was this a checkpoint? A roadblock? A police barrier? Why hadn’t Farz warned him it was coming? Then came the rush of cold night air as the back door opened abruptly behind his head. He braced himself for the grab around the collar before they dragged him, prone and helpless, out of the back of the Peugeot and into an anonymous official vehicle.
It was just Farz, still smoking, still chilled.
‘Mechanic,’ he explained, in a hushed voice. ‘Engine’s bad. My friend will fix it.’
Luke remained where he was, concealed under the blanket, as the noises of tinkering and scraping came from beneath the bonnet. They seemed to go on for ever.
Back on the road and Farz had just put on a Bob Dylan album. ‘Che bahaal!’ he remarked. ‘How cool is this!’
‘Amazing,’ said Luke, from the back. ‘But where are we exactly?’
‘Eslamshahr. It’s a suburb. You know, normally, right, I’d take Persian Gulf Highway down to Bandar Abbas. But the Basij militia are running checkpoints everywhere now. I’ve got them all here on my screen.’ Farz picked up his phone and passed it back to Luke. Given the antiquity of Farz’s music system Luke was surprised to see it was a smartphone and there, dotted around a moving map, were half a dozen tiny icons of black beards.
‘It’s an app we use called Gershad,’ explained Farz. ‘It stands for Gasht-e-Ershad, the morality police. They’re using them for security checks on us now, given the situation.’
Luke handed back the phone. This was Iranian popular counter-surveillance in action. He was impressed.
‘So,’ continued Farz, shifting in his seat as he peered ahead down the road, ‘I’m gonna play it safe for both our sakes. We’re gonna take Route Sixty-five. Nobody uses that way. A lot of twists and turns, my friend, a lot of twists and bumps, so better hold on tight.’
Hold on tight? He couldn’t be wedged in any tighter if he tried.
It was another four hours before they stopped for a comfort break. Four hours in which he had dozed fitfully between prolonged bouts of thinking about Elise and her mother, Helen. He thought about calling her but didn’t think he could conduct a conversation all crunched up as he was on the floor of a car. The moment this mission was over, he decided, he would take some leave and spend as much time with both of them as he could.
When they stopped at a deserted roadside halt Luke could barely feel his legs. Something, he wasn’t even sure what, was digging into his ribs while his skull felt like it had been knocked repeatedly against a solid object, which it had in the form of the floor. Slowly, painfully, he extricated himself from his hiding place and stretched himself in the dark. A bitterly cold wind buffeted him in the face, whipping up unseen flurries of dust that swirled around his legs. ‘Where is this place?’ he called to Farz above the wind.
‘Mouteh. It’s a wildlife reserve. We used to come here as kids.’
From somewhere down in the darkened valley below came the bark of sleepless dogs. It was a desolate place. ‘But no one comes here now,’ Farz added, moving closer so he didn’t have to shout above the wind. ‘I’m gonna park over there by those trees so we can catch some sleep before it gets light.’ He pointed to a clump of pines lit up by the car’s headlights. ‘In the morning I’ll tell you about my brother Darius – he’s in jail. Tannaz tells me you can get him out?’
‘We can certainly try,’ Luke lied. He felt bad, deceiving the poor guy into thinking there was hope for his brother. Focus on the mission, he reminded himself. Whatever gets you down to Bandar Abbas and close to Zamani is what matters, remember that. The end justifies the means.
Luke had started to walk towards the trees when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. It was Elise, calling him while he was on a mission, which they had agreed was a no-no, except in emergencies.
‘’Lise,’ he answered warily, turning his back against the wind and shielding the phone with his hand. ‘Are you okay? How’s your mum doing?’
There was a long pause before she answered. ‘Luke … I have some news.’ Her voice sounded unfamiliar, strained and distant. Oh, God, he already knew what was coming.
‘Mum died.’ Another pause, and when she next spoke, he could hear the crack in her voice. ‘She passed away an hour ago. She was asking after you … Luke, I need you back here. Please, I’m begging you, finish whatever you’re doing and come home now. I mean it.’
Luke lifted his eyes to the sky and saw, for the first time, what a clear, starlit night it was. He could hear Farz parking beneath the trees, the wind scything through their boughs and grit skittering around his feet. What could he possibly tell Elise? That he was now a hunted man – on the run and unable to hop on a plane and fly back to her? That Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service had pinned its hopes on his being able to find a fanatical IRGC commander and his captive before it was too late? That he already had enough on his plate without this news? Of course he couldn’t. But Helen Mayhew, Elise’s mother, whom he’d come to think of as a surrogate parent, was dead. So stop being a selfish bastard, Carlton, and show some compassion. This must be Elise’s darkest hour. She’ll be going through hell right now. Get a grip and do the right thing.
‘Luke? Are you still there?’ Her voice was pleading, imploring.
‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
‘I’m so, so sorry, ’Lise, but I just can’t right now.’
Luke hung up and walked slowly towards the parked car beneath the trees. He felt empty inside, hollowed out, soulless. What had he become? Just what the hell had he turned into?
Chapter 57
Bandar Abbas, Iran
KARIM ZAMANI LOOKED at his watch for the third time in an hour: 06.30. He was on a tight schedule, the timings worked out with precision well in advance. After chairing the meeting of the Circle in Qom, he had headed straight for the military airport on the outskirts of town and caught an evening flight to the coast. Using his IRGC credentials, he had commandeered a Harbin Y-12 utility turboprop plane of the IRGC Air Force and flown down to Bandar Abbas. He had correctly assessed that, with Iran on full alert, it would not look out of place for someone in his position to go down to the Gulf coast to check on the nation’s maritime defences. He would report in at the local Revolutionary Guards base while his own commander, a white-haired veteran of the Iran–Iraq war, a man close to retirement, stayed in Tehran.
After some earlier unpleasant exchanges the older man had chosen to give Zamani a large degree of autonomy in how he carried out his duties. Those exchanges had not ended well for his commander, a pious man of little intellect, outwitted by the sheer venal cunning of a man twenty years his junior. Karim Zamani had known from an early age exactly how to play the system in post-revolutionary Iran.
So today, on the morning after Chaplin’s abduction, Karim Zamani had risen early from his bed in the officers’ quarters at the IRGC base. Out of the window, a hazy sun was lifting above the desert to the east, illuminating the tops of the buildings and waking the pigeons, which took off in formation. The events of the previous day in Isfahan had gone exactly to plan, but there was still much to do, much to supervise, and much that could go wrong.
He breakfasted alone, savouring the simplicity of the meal of flatbread, olives, honey and black tea. He dabbed his mouth with a napkin, then went outside to meet the local Revolutionary Guards Deputy Commander, Brigadier General Hamid Dariush. They headed straight to Shahid Bahonar naval base, the largest and most important of a dozen IRGC naval bases dotted around Iran’s Persian Gulf coast. In recent years the Revolutionary Guards Navy had effectively supplanted the conventional Iranian Navy, despised by hardliners as a relic from the time of the Shah and his Imperial Navy. All along Iran’s Gulf coast, IRGC Navy units had taken over, with their hard-to-intercept Seraj-1, Bavar-2 and Zolfaghar fast-attack craft, armed with heavy machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenades and Nasr-1 cruise missiles. The conventional Iranian Navy had been pushed southwards into the Gulf of Oman, but even there the IRGC Navy was starting to dominate. After all, the IRGC, as guardians of the Islamic Revolution, were the most trusted by the Supreme Leader. Hard lessons had been learned from the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88, and Iran had invested heavily in naval technology. Its latest attack boats, some of them reverse-engineered from Western designs, were capable of ‘swarming’ towards an enemy vessel in large numbers and at speeds of well over 65 knots. With the current tension in the Gulf, this was a scenario that kept the US Navy’s 5th Fleet Commanders awake at night. And brought a smile to the face of Karim Zamani.
At the Shahid Bahonar naval base the two officers drove past the accommodation blocks and onto the edge of the parade ground. There, beneath a fluttering white, green and red flag, Karim Zamani stood side by side with the Brigadier General as the senior officer addressed the morning parade. It was a rousing speech, with the country now practically on a war footing.
‘Our enemies may seek to harm us,’ he told them, ‘but we will match them blow for blow. We are working day and night for the security of the Islamic Republic. If we see even the smallest misstep from our enemies, our roaring missiles will fall on their heads. And we will find and punish the malicious spies who have sought to shame this great country with this treacherous and cowardly act of kidnapping!’
Impassive and silent behind aviator sunglasses, which concealed most of his face, Zamani listened and nodded his agreement.
‘But we must be prepared!’ the Brigadier General continued, his eyes blazing. ‘We must stay strong. And vigilant. Look to your defences. Seek out these counter-revolutionaries and foreign agents wherever they are. Do not drop your guard for one minute!’
There followed loud applause before Zamani excused himself to visit the bathroom. In the privacy of a locked cubicle, he checked his phone. There was a single cryptic text message and he knew exactly who it was from. Praise be to God, it said. Everything is in place.
Chapter 58
COBRA, Whitehall
‘ONCE WE CAN pinpoint the location of the hostage,’ declared Sir Jeremy Buckshaw, the Chief of Defence Staff, ‘there will be only two practical options available to us.’ He was addressing the Defence Secretary, a new and relatively untested addition to the Cabinet. ‘And if you’ll allow me, Secretary of State, I’ll outline them both now.’
It was the second COBRA meeting that day and diplomacy was being worked to the bone in the international effort to locate Geoffrey Chaplin. There was, however, a grim predictability about the situation and a consensus in the room that military rescue was looking increasingly likely.
‘Option one,’ continued Britain’s most senior serving military officer, ‘we parachute in a team from offshore. High altitude, high opening. It’s fast – we could theoretically launch within twenty-four hours – and the Americans would help us jam their radar.’ There were nods of agreement and optimistic murmurings from many of the civil servants round the table. However, the more experienced men and women in that room knew a ‘but’ was coming.
‘But the odds of success are not good,’ he continued. ‘I’d put them at less than fifty per cent. The Iranians would know something was up the moment their radar was jammed, and might even launch a pre-emptive missile strike on the US 5th Fleet in Bahrain, or our ships, or both. Then there’s the met piece to factor in.’
‘Excuse me?’ The Home Secretary had a well-known aversion to jargon.
‘Ah. My apologies. I was referring to the metereological state – the weather. It’s unpredictable at this time of year. We won’t have much of a window to get it right. So, no, I am not a fan of that option.’
Those round the table who had appeared to welcome the first option now looked rather foolish.
‘And that leaves option two. A covert insertion by SSN—’
‘I’m sorry?’ interrupted the Home Secretary again. ‘Did you say “a covert insertion by the SS”?’ He looked round the room for support in the face of yet more baffling military jargon.
