Ultimatum, page 25
With a large-scale map of the Gulf projected onto the wall behind him, Rear Admiral John Bleake was bringing his team up to speed. The briefing room was packed, naval officers mostly but also a scattering of Royal Marines, sporting the distinctive black-and-red dagger flash on their left shoulders. There was an almost palpable tension in the room as he addressed them.
‘Astute will stay deep outside the strait,’ he said, his voice calm but authoritative. Removing a laser pointer from a pocket, he aimed it at the map, circling a small patch of open sea with the green dot. ‘The pick-up point will be here.’ He indicated a patch of open sea marked ‘Gulf of Oman’, midway between the Omani port of Sohar and the Iranian naval base at Jask; the Navy referred to it as ‘the GOO’.
‘You’ll note that the GOO is deep in the centre, but the approach to the strait is a chokepoint. The merchant vessel that Astute will conceal herself under will have to reduce speed as she nears the strait. So Astute will be aiming to come up beneath her just … about … here.’ Bleake shone his laser on the map once more, indicating a point to the east of the Musandam peninsula, which jutted out into the sea.
‘Now, on to the type of ship in question. Tankers.’ He turned to his ops officer. The young man standing behind him handed him a sheet of A4 paper. It was a printout of all the merchant tankers currently on course for the Strait of Hormuz. Three had question marks beside them. One was circled in red. Bleake ran his eyes down it, then looked up and surveyed the room.
‘The Ocean Star,’ he told the assembled company. ‘That’s the one we’ve chosen. She’s a Suez-Max tanker, registered in Panama, two hundred and eighty-three metres from bow to stern, with a deadweight of a hundred and eight thousand tons.’ Several of those present were busy scribbling notes, the younger officers typing the details straight into iPads, which would remain securely locked away on the base.
‘Where is she right now, sir?’ asked a Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander in the second row.
‘Ops?’ The Rear Admiral turned again to the ops officer.
‘She’s currently in transit from Suez to the Arabian Gulf, heading up the Omani coast from Salalah,’ replied the younger man, a note of urgency in his voice as he addressed, first, the admiral, then the rest of the room. ‘She’s making her way up the coast of Oman, heading for Kharg Island to pick up a cargo of Iranian crude. That puts her inside Iranian territorial waters, which gets us round that little problem.’
‘Thank you, John.’ Admiral Bleake resumed his briefing, ‘Now. I know you’re all security-cleared up to Strap Level so I can tell you there’s another reason why we’ve selected the Ocean Star.’ He already had their full attention but now several officers leaned forward. ‘Like a lot of merchant vessels transiting the Somali Basin, these days, she’s got an armed protection team onboard. Nothing unusual in that. But the team leader happens to be a former Royal Marine. Let’s just say he’s being most cooperative.’ There were some knowing grins around the room.
‘Nice one,’ muttered someone at the back.
‘Right. That brings us to depth,’ continued Bleake. ‘I have to say that, given the shallow waters of the Gulf, this is going to be tight. Ocean Star has a twenty-one-metre draught, but she’s in ballast so that figure will be closer to nineteen metres. We need to factor in a twenty-metre safety margin for Astute – that’s twenty metres from the top of her fin up to Ocean Star’s keel. Excuse me.’ He stopped abruptly and whipped out a handkerchief, catching his sneeze just in time.
‘Our submarine,’ said Bleake, ‘is fifteen metres from fin to keel and then we need a twenty-metre gap beneath her to seabed. So, come on, the mathematicians among you, what does that give us as a minimum depth?’
‘Sixty-nine metres?’ called a thick-set bearded man in the front row.
‘Wrong!’ said Bleake, tapping his laser pointer impatiently against the palm of his hand. ‘Anyone? You’re supposed to be the brightest brains in the military!’
‘Seventy-four metres,’ said several officers at once.
‘Correct,’ replied the Admiral. He turned back to the chart on the wall. ‘And this is the stretch that’s going to keep us all awake at night.’ He indicated the left of the two parallel channels bending round the tip of the Musandam peninsula towards the Gulf. ‘Squeezing through that, at night, is going to take some serious cojones on the part of Astute’s captain. Fortunately I rode Ben Wallis pretty hard on his Perisher course, and if anyone’s up to the job, he is. Okay. Questions?’
A hand went up. ‘Timings, sir?’ asked a Royal Marine.
‘TBC. We’re just waiting for sign-off from the PM, then it’s all systems go. Hold on.’ The ops officer had coughed quietly to get his attention. Admiral Bleake held up his hand as he was passed a printed signal. It was from the MoD in Whitehall and he read it out to the room: ‘“Operation Shearwater approved. Proceed.” Ladies and gentlemen, we’re on. It’s time to prove you’re worth the expensive training Her Majesty’s given you.’
Chapter 68
Wahiba Sands, Oman
ON THE OTHER side of the Strait of Hormuz, and almost due south of Bandar Abbas, a light wind was blowing across the hard-packed desert sand as the last of the daylight ebbed away. In two lines, weighed down by their meticulously packed square-rig ’chutes, their eclectic mix of chosen personal weapons, and their customized equipment, the SBS assault team and the reserve troop filed out to the waiting C130 Hercules transport plane. The breeze ruffled the camouflage netting they were leaving behind and flung a tumble of dried vegetation across the sand, sending it spinning off across the desert floor into the gathering gloom of the Omani night. The operation was on.
A fraction over eight hundred kilometres to the west, inside the British naval base of HMS Juffair in Bahrain, Lieutenant Colonel Chip Nuttall took a swig from his can of lukewarm Diet Coke, adjusted his headset and settled in front of a monitor. As the Commanding Officer of the UK’s Special Boat Service and the man sending those troops into action, he knew he would be getting precious little sleep until the operation was over. Nuttall and his staff had already spent a fraught day juggling timings, grid references, pick-up points, wind speeds, moonstates, payloads, intercept updates and drone feeds. There were risks and contingencies to be planned for, and a framework agreed with HQ for the ‘go/no go’ criteria. At times the CO had felt like an old-fashioned telephone-exchange operator as he ended one call to his troop commander in the Wahiba Sands only to be patched through immediately to another at Northwood. Or Special Forces Headquarters. Or Poole. Or Portsmouth. As if it were not enough having to plan a complex air, sea and land insertion into hostile territory, he was having to spend much of his time appearing by video conference call in COBRA. The government’s crisis committee was being convened for hours on end, and Nuttall was summoned to the camera nearly every hour.
Pulled in every direction, he relied on the team around him. He had hand-picked the command team that had come out to Bahrain with him. Most of the men, but not all, had proved themselves on earlier covert operations, events that the British public would not hear about for another thirty years. In the brief moments when he wasn’t on the radio to Oman or on a conference call to the UK, Nuttall was receiving constant updates from his team on the wider political perspective. He needed to know if the Third World War was about to erupt around the operators he was sending in.
The most recent report they had handed him was unsettling. Persuading the White House to back off and let the UK resolve this in its own way had not been easy. There were certain political figures on the US National Security Council, the report read, who were itching to make this an ‘America First’ operation. It was time, some voices were saying, ‘to teach those ayatollahs a lesson’. Emotive expressions like ‘playing with fire’ and ‘payback time’ were being bandied about in the corridors of power at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC. There was an emerging school of thought doing the rounds in the US capital that, after successive defence cuts and underinvestment by the British government, the plucky little island that had produced Winston Churchill no longer had what it took to mount an operation so complex. It would be just a matter of time, they said, before Uncle Sam had to step in and show the Brits how to do it right.
Chip Nuttall read that last brief and filed it vertically – in the waste-bin beside his desk. He had no time for speculation: he dealt in facts. And he knew that none of this would be of any concern to the sixteen men now filing into the gaping underbelly of the C130 Hercules. As they trudged up the metal ramp, black swim fins attached to their belts, diver’s knives strapped to their calves, automatic carbines hanging vertically beside their right legs, he knew their minds were elsewhere. Some men’s thoughts would be turning to their families and whether they had put all their affairs in order, should the unthinkable happen and they did not return. All would be aware of the death of a US Navy SEAL commando on a Special Ops raid into Yemen in 2017. They would be trying hard not to think about it, but every man onboard that C130 understood that this mission might be his last.
Up front, in the relative comfort of the plane’s cockpit, the assault team Commander settled back in the jump seat, positioned just behind the pilot and co-pilot. Captain Chris Barkwell was only thirty-one, yet had considerable operational experience under his belt, with stints in Afghanistan, Iraq and a few of the more dangerous corners of West Africa. Kitted out with a headset and mic, he studied the laminated military map of Oman and its adjacent coast that was open across his knees.
As the flight crew made their final pre-flight checks, the co-pilot reached round behind him and passed Barkwell a plastic cup of orange juice. ‘We’ll be taking off into the wind to the south-east,’ he told him, speaking loudly into his mic as the noise level built up from the four Allison turboprop engines. ‘Wind speed here is nine knots but I’ll get you an update when we near the drop zone.’
‘Cheers.’ Barkwell drained the cup and crushed it into the trash box behind the co-pilot’s seat.
‘We’ll be skirting just east of the Saudi border, then passing Muscat on our right-hand side,’ the co-pilot added. ‘We should have comms with Astute once we’re airborne.’
‘That’d be a bonus!’ shouted Barkwell. The engines were almost at full thrust now. ‘I wasn’t planning on us dropping into an empty ocean.’
Behind him, facing each other along the length of the C130’s fuselage, the troopers were strapped into their canvas bucket seats, helmets and protective goggles on. Seemingly oblivious to the roar of the engines, they were checking and rechecking their kit, rehearsing the drills for a smooth exit from the plane. Some had their eyes shut, wide awake but offering a silent prayer, while others knocked gloved fists together, the final salute before a mission.
Darkness had settled over the rippling sands of the Wahiba desert when the C130 Hercules accelerated across the valley floor. This time there was no one to observe it as it lifted off into the night sky over Oman, climbing steeply before turning due north. As they crossed the edge of the Empty Quarter, the plane was briefly buffeted by a patch of clear-air turbulence, then the desert was behind them and they were crossing the Omani coastline. In the cockpit, Barkwell looked up from the map on his knees. The plane had already begun its descent in the dark.
When the red warning light came on, it was as if a jolt of electricity had passed through the plane. Ten minutes to the drop zone and the men began checking pockets, clips and fastenings, securing their weapons, attaching the static-line jump cords with snap hooks to the anchor-line cable that ran the length of the fuselage at head height. Each trooper then hooked his Bergen rucksack – with its thirty kilos of ammunition, rations, radio, batteries, field first-aid kit – to the front of his parachute harness. Each man wore round his neck what the Royal Navy called a ‘dongle and trongle’ – a life-saving device that emitted a traceable pulse of sound as soon as it hit the water.
In the C130’s interior the jumpmaster made his way down the line of waiting men, checking each individual, tugging on straps, giving shoulders an encouraging squeeze. Two minutes to go: the ramp of the great plane jawed open and the night air swirled in. The jumpmaster checked the last man and the message was passed down the line – each trooper tapping the man in front on the shoulder, giving the okay. The stick – those selected to make the jump – were ushered forward to the plane’s tailgate. The roar of the engines was deafening.
Then the light turned green, the jumpmaster yelled, ‘Go!’ and the troop piled out in a single plummeting stream. Barkwell had been the first to make the leap into darkness. The force of the slipstream slammed into him, easing off as his square-rig ’chute deployed. The rest of his team followed, guided down by the luminous green strip on the back of his helmet. They’d exited the aircraft at just under 250 metres above sea level, and moments later the warm waters of the Gulf of Oman seemed to be rushing up to meet them.
Fifteen metres over the water and their training kicked in. Each operator hit the quick-release catches on his harness to send his bergen, connected by just a simple nylon cord, into the water. Seconds later, they each executed a Capewell manoeuvre, releasing just one side of their harness so allowing the wind to drag the canopies off and away behind them. However hard and often they trained for this moment, the impact always came as a shock. Barkwell held his breath as he was briefly submerged beneath the waves. Resurfacing, he wrestled to put on the fins he’d worn strapped to his chest, then began to swim, dragging his pack behind him.
Ahead, he could just make out the silhouette of the rigid inflatable boat that had been launched from Astute, and was now homing in on the short-range pulses emitted from the dongles he and his team were wearing. And beyond the black inflatable, water pouring off her sides, was the massive 97-metre hull of the submarine. Treading water, the SBS officer watched as the sub’s recovery crew helped his troop onboard. Then it was his turn. Hands reached out to haul him from the sea, and minutes later, he and his men were safely inside the submarine. Above them, hatches were pulled shut and Astute began her descent beneath the waves. The first phase of Operation Shearwater was complete: the Royal Navy nuclear submarine could now continue its passage north-westwards, unseen and unnoticed among the myriad vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Chapter 69
Bandar Abbas, Iran
LUKE ROLLED OFF the bed and reached down for his shirt. He felt doubly dirty. He had never intended this to happen, but it had, and now he hated himself for what he had just done. How low can you go, Carlton? Elise has lost her mother, Britain’s lost her Foreign Secretary, and what are you doing? Writhing around naked in a windowless room in Bandar Abbas with a girl you’re supposed to be tapping for information. Nice going, arsehole, you’ve let everybody down.
Tannaz had her back to him. She was sitting on the edge of the bed without a stitch on, fixing her hair. He took a last look at the smooth contours of her back and those dimples in her caramel skin just above her perfect hips. Would he ever see her like this again? Absolutely not. This is never going to be repeated. When he spoke he hardly recognized his own voice. It was flat and formal, as if he were overcompensating for the intensity of what they had just shared. ‘Will you excuse me, Tannaz? I need to make a quick phone call. About your asylum request … Hey, is everything okay?’
She nodded, a hair-tie clamped between her teeth. ‘Yes, I will leave you in a moment. Farzad and Mort will be back soon. I will make tea.’
He waited for her to close the door, then took out his phone and coded in to Vauxhall Cross. He had managed to fire off a quick text to Angela earlier, to let her know he’d reached the outskirts of Bandar Abbas, but there had been no response. With everything kicking off, she’d have been caught up in endless Whitehall crisis meetings. He pressed the dial button and this time his boss answered immediately.
‘Thank God,’ Angela said, ‘I was about to call you. Just got out of a COBRA. It’s mayhem here.’
Somewhere in the background he could hear a printer whirring into life, the mundane machinery of office espionage, printing out some numbered and classified report. She waited until it stopped. ‘Are you somewhere safe?’
He detected a slight delay on the line as her words were rerouted through the VPN network, scrambled into binary ones and zeros as their encrypted conversation criss-crossed the globe. ‘For now, yes,’ he replied. ‘I need to keep my head down, though. Listen, I have some news.’
But her voice cut across his, the delay on the line throwing their conversation out of sync. ‘So here’s where we are,’ Angela said. ‘The Iranians are stalling on us. They won’t let in the hostage negotiators from the Met – that team hasn’t even left Heathrow and I doubt they ever will. So we’re taking matters into our own hands, if you catch my drift.’
Luke knew exactly what she meant. He could just picture the scene in North Camp, down at the SBS base in Poole, when the orders came through for the Special Forces standby squadron to prepare for action. The issuing of special-to-task kit from the stores, the drawing-out of weapons and ammo from the armoury, the loading of equipment onto trailers under tarpaulins, then the road move to the airfield at Brize Norton. ‘How close to that are we?’ he asked.
‘The team are already in-theatre,’ she replied. ‘You don’t need to know where. But there’s a problem. They can’t go in until we get the exact location of the hostage. And once we do they’ll need someone to guide them in to the target. That would be you, Luke. But only if you can get there in time …’
