Bolt Action (20 page)

MI5 Headquarters

Thames House

N
othing more from Bill Lamayette. They chased the trail as far as GCHQ, the massive listening post outside Cheltenham. Spoke to the senior watch officer. ‘No signal, Ms Davane,’ the Somerset accent pronounced. ‘If there was a signal before, it’s very much gone now.’

Then, to compound Davane’s anxiety, the officer wants to talk some more. ‘Did you read this morning’s digest?’ The digest of electronic intelligence gleaned from the Echelon listening posts throughout the world.

Davane shakes her head. ‘Can this wait?’
What does this guy want to talk about now?
‘We’re a little bit busy at this end.’

‘Thought you’d want to know . . . those keywords your office asked us to insert into Dictionary . . .’

‘What keywords, what about them?’ Davane’s mind is completely elsewhere. Her office is always submitting fresh phrases for the Dictionary software program.

‘Operation Macchar . . . Qissa Khawani . . . just in the last five or six hours, from almost nothing to suddenly off the graph. A huge spike in traffic . . .’

Davane covers her mouth with her hand. The keywords had been Lamayette’s request from yesterday. His final gift, he had said. Her mind blanks. ‘Oh God . . . what the hell is happening here?’

*

It’s fifty-nine minutes since PK412 departed Manchester Airport for New York. The operations room knows this, plus the flight’s altitude and heading. On a full-sized screen everybody’s watching the radar track of the plane’s progress towards the vastness of the Atlantic. Watching, and waiting for the Boeing’s next radio transmission, for any hint of trouble. PK412 is using a SECAL cockpit radio system, meaning that any transmissions not relating to their flight are filtered out. That’s why MI5 is listening to dead air at the moment . . .

In a separate room, another team is handling arrangements for this afternoon’s scheduled PIA flight from Heathrow to New York, but still inbound from Karachi. A suitable somebody from the Department for Transport will tell their manager in London that this afternoon’s flight had best stay on the ground. Davane knows PIA has good people, who knew the drill and were keen to cooperate.

Working the phones between MI5 officers already dispatched to Heathrow and the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command is not something Sheila ‘Noppy’ Davane wants to be doing. Not now. A third team is handling that. Trouble is, it’s a public holiday. Britain’s security posture, which can’t help but relax every weekend, seems to be terminally asleep on public holidays. Government has never thought to give MI5 (a mere intelligence-gathering operation) the authority to do anything useful like scramble RAF interceptors. That can only come from a higher realm. In truth, though, at the moment, she has precious little hard evidence to offer. Everything hinges on Bill Lamayette, a man whose reputation is being trashed with great gusto by his own side. Hardly a compelling witness . . .

So, she had given that third team very specific instructions: be as sharp as you need, rude even, just get the alarm raised. Get people by the phone so I can speak to them. Her gut is screaming that PK412 is
the
flight.
The
one.

The pulsing red square moves steadily north-west, slowly skimming across the top of Northern Ireland. The rest of the
screen is a jumble of yellow dots and indices representing other transatlantic flights.

There are a dozen or so in the room with her, getting busy, thumbing through files, working the phones. In her own quiet pocket of contemplation Davane notes that the track puts the plane directly over Rathlin Island, a boot-shaped crag six miles off the Antrim coast, some fifteen miles from the southern tip of Scotland’s Mull peninsula. The local tourist board would have one believe that it was in a cave on Rathlin that Robert the Bruce was taught a valuable lesson by a plucky spider building his web. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again.

Her cheeks and neck go cold at the thought. Coincidence or fate? Robert the Bruce . . . what was it that Lamayette had asked about? Operation Mosquito, or Macchar in Urdu, as he had explained. Robert the Bruce and spiders. General Ali Mahmood Khan and mosquitoes?

Two secretaries huff their way into the room, flapping files of paperwork. Obviously dress-down day – one of them wears a pair of boot-cut jeans and a pink striped shirt that looks like pyjamas. Pyjama-girl lays out whatever she had been able to find on the subject of
Qissa Khawani.

The other, in a pair of hiking boots and outdoorsy waterproof trousers, puts in front of Davane three separate bundles of information. First, the technical information relating to the actual flight, including fuel load sheets and cargo manifests. With this is a print-out of 412’s flight plan, starting with the waypoint known as SUNOT at which they enter Shanwick airspace, the eastern half of the North Atlantic Flight Information Region. There too are the five plots of the proposed track across the Atlantic up to their exit point at way station SCROD, a couple of hundred miles off the Canadian coast. Finally, there’s the route on to New York. Crossing the Canadian coastline near the Inuit settlement of Nain in Newfoundland, cutting down through north-eastern Canada, into New York State at a place called Hogansburg and on to John F. Kennedy International Airport.

A second stack of papers relates to the crew and passenger list. All relevant Passenger Name Records, including each person’s complete name, date of birth, citizenship, sex, passport number and country of issuance, residence, Green Card or alien registration, address while in the USA, religious and ethnic information (derived from choice of meal), affiliation to a particular group, data relating to place of residence or means of contacting an individual (email address, details of a friend, place of work) plus any relevant medical history. And perhaps most importantly, how their tickets were routed and purchased.

A last stack of information is plunked down by Davane’s side by Hiker-girl. Information relating to those passengers with US and/or UK visas, including all their biometric data with a wealth of financial information as icing.

A lot of paper to be sifted, with even more to come. And the exact same review has to be done for the second PIA flight due to leave Heathrow for New York later in the day.

Davane unclips her brooch, a design of amethysts studded with pearls, laid out in the shape of a salamander. She has a particular way of reading through documents. It’s the hasp she wants . . . using the point of the needle to work her way down the list of names.

Slow work. Steady work. Pricking the page once next to a name that intrigues, twice for something that alarms. Still no sign from her number-three operations team of any higher-ups being ready to talk to her.

Better to be doing something now than nothing. Slow work, she tells herself. Steady work.

Davane is halfway through her list:

LORRIMAN/BERYLMRS

LORRIMAN/RODNEYMR

MCANDREW/DAVIDMR

MCATEER/LUCYMS

MANSOOR/FAHIMDR

MANSOOR/SEETAMRS

MERRITT/TRISTESSEMS

MUHAMMAD/SAEEDDR

MUKHERJEE/ROHITMR

She has the tip of her brooch fastener raised by the name MERRITT/TRISTESSEMS, some distant connection swimming in the dark of her mind, picking irritatingly.

‘
Shanwick Radio, Pakistan 412 position.
’

The audio link bursts into life, connecting MI5 through to the flight controllers in Prestwick and their radio transmissions, which are relayed to transatlantic flights from transmitters near Shannon in Ireland (hence the portmanteau Shanwick).

Davane looks at the two photos in front of her. Captains Iqbal Hussain and Imtiyaz Jamal. Identical round-faced twins. Impossible to tell whose voice this is.

‘
Pakistan 412, this is Shanwick Radio, pass your message.
’ A dour, efficient Scottish reply.

‘
Pakistan 412, passed SUNOT 1017 Zulu, FL360, Mach 0.84, estimate 58N 20W 1109 Zulu, 59N 30W next.
’

Davane watches somebody translate the key information on to a whiteboard. The plane entered the Shanwick Flight Information Region at waypoint SUNOT four minutes ago. At 1017 Zulu or GMT, or 1117 British Summer Time. They’re flying at 36,000 feet at a speed of Mach 0.84 or 560 miles per hour. Next is waypoint longitude 58N 20W, which the pilots estimate they will hit at 1109 GMT. In fifty-two minutes. After that 59N 30W, right in the middle of the Atlantic, where PK412 will be handed over to controllers based at Gander in Newfoundland.

Shanwick confirms all the information by reading it back to the flight crew: ‘
Pakistan 412, passed SUNOT 1017 Zulu, FL360, Mach 0.84, estimate 58N 20W 1109z, 59N 30W next.
’

‘
Correct read-back. Thank you.
’

‘
Shanwick Radio . . .
’

Barring any disaster, this should be the last time they hear from the flight for almost an hour.

Davane reaches across her piles of papers for the phone. Taps a three-digit extension number. Answering is one of the engineers who’d been with her when they last spoke with Lamayette . . . in an audio suite facing a desk of expensive gadgetry.

The silver-haired MI5 veteran gently kneads the underside of her droopy chin. ‘You pick up anything unusual, any stress in the voice?’

The operations room hushes . . . everybody waiting on the answer. Davane nods her head. Listening.

The phone is put down and everybody in the room leans forward. Tense.

‘No stress.’ Davane looks around the knot of anxious faces. ‘If it’s happening on that plane, it hasn’t happened yet.’

On board PK412

At 36,000 feet

1124 UK time, 1624 Islamabad time, 0624 Washington time

C
redit card swiped. Number punched in. Heartbeat raised . . . Zaafir, the man from Room 703, waits nervously in an empty first-class seat for the technical stuff to happen. For the phone signal to blip from the underbelly of the Boeing 777 to the nearest satellite, for his call to be channelled onwards.

He’s alone. Two passengers and Captain Harry Salahuddin are asleep. The woman, the one with the dark hair and serious cheekbones, is in the forward left toilet. Zaafir’s taken the precaution of drawing the blinds so he can work in relative obscurity. He’d instructed his stewardess colleague, a plump, moon-faced woman, that they would be delaying the drinks and meal service. She’d made a cow-like grunt of agreement, folded out one of the rear-facing seats, and is pushing at her cuticles with a cocktail stick.

It takes fourteen seconds but feels like hours. Then the ring tone . . . and Zaafir really feels his pulse race.

‘
Hello . . .
’

Zaafir whispers in Pashto. ‘It is me.’

‘
Praise be to Allah.
’

Almost inaudible. ‘Five minutes and it shall be done . . .’

‘
Tell me, Zaafir, are there many infidels on the flight?
’

‘Many infidels, yes,’ then Zaafir’s voice quavers, as he remembers row after row of eager, excited Pakistani faces to the rear of the plane. ‘Many believers too.’

The words that come back to him are a soothing balm. Delivered in Arabic with a hypnotic beat: ‘
Only Allah holds the knowledge of the unseen and does not reveal these mysteries to anyone, except those He selects as His messengers. He watches over them through guardians that advance before and shield them from behind that He may observe the proper delivery of His message. He is aware of all that they do and maintains a strict record of all things that exist.
’

Not much one can say to that, and the airline steward knows it. God works in mysterious ways. Zaafir feels duly admonished, his skin hot with embarrassment. The best he can do is repeat: ‘Five minutes . . . and it shall be done.’

‘
You are a blessed man, Zaafir . . .
’ and the man on the other end of the phone sounds as if he wants to hang up, wants to be doing something else. Urgently. So his final words of counsel seem a little rushed. ‘
Remember. Those admitted to Paradise shall experience true bliss. Never shall they know want, nor will they suffer old age.
’ A rote.

Zaafir is about to ask a question, when he realises the phone link is already dead, and he has been sent on his way.
Five minutes.
Yes. I can do this.
Five minutes.
And the spirit flows through him, tingling his senses, strengthening every muscle and sinew in his body.

He is watching me, through guardians that advance before and will shield me from behind that He may observe the proper delivery of His message . . .

Of course Zaafir is an idiot, but he’s a faithful idiot, and where would we be without faithful idiots?

Four thousand five hundred miles away, in a dusty warehouse off M.A. Jinnah Road, Karachi, Hamza Khan, son of the general, closes his mobile phone. An anonymous pre-paid Motorola handset. He turns to eyeball the rows of young, expect ant faces lined up on either side of the three long tables, lit by a rackety collection of chipped and downright dangerous light fittings, hanging cobwebbed from the ceiling. The walls hum with energy, with the footfall of shoppers on the move,
for the warehouse is on the ground floor and packed all around them, and three floors above, is a shopping plaza.

These young militants, unthinking in the totality of their hatred, are drawn from the scurrying mass of the poor and half educated. Forty in total, packed tight by the warehouse’s towering boxes of crockery and children’s clothing and footwear. Each had ten Motorola handsets and three plastic drinking cups. In each cup fifteen different SIM cards. One thousand eight hundred SIM cards in total, each one programmed with 250 mobile phone numbers spanning the big networks of Ufone, Mobilink, Paktel, Waridtel, Telenor and Insta Phone. The subscribers’ phone numbers have been harvested from various content providers. Not from people who download the latest jokes, funny wallpapers or cricket scores, too secular. No, the 1,800 SIM cards are prepped with the contact details of believers, both fanatics and those teetering on the edge of fanaticism. Those who can’t be without the sound of their muezzin and download MP3 files of the
Azaan
, or call to prayer. Or the Islamic devotionals of singers like Muhammad Rashid Azam. Or those who subscribe to the many SMS services fanning the latest radical rage against Coca-Cola, Danish cartoonists or British oppressors in Afghanistan.

So. Forty sets of fingers to send text messages. Four hundred handsets, 1,800 SIM cards, each with its pre-programmed field of 250 mobile numbers. Almost half a million text messages a minute. Tens of millions of people to be touched by this fantastic evil with the speed of gods.

And the first message will read: ‘
Beware. 300 Muslim Innocents To Be Slaughtered By Infidel Warplanes. Pakistan Aircraft. Developing story. Please forward urgent.
’

Followed five minutes later by: ‘
Do You Know Anyone On PIA Boeing 777 To New York? To Be Shot Down Off Coast Four Hours From Now. Developing story. Please forward.
’

Next message: ‘
Confirmed. PIA Boeing 777. Flight No.
PK412. 300 Muslims To Be Killed. 90 Females. 44 Children. Please forward.
’

This to be tagged five minutes later by a well-known Koranic verse at the heart of the Islamic law of jihad:

‘
Murder of 300 Muslim Innocents. Koran 22: verses 39–40: Permission to take up arms is hereby given to those who are attacked because they have been oppressed – Allah indeed has power to grant them victory – those who have been unjustly driven from their homes, only because they said: “Our Lord is Allah”
.’

It’s all so intoxicating.

Like caged animals, the bright, shiny faces looking at Hamza Khan share a burning desire to get to work on this. To stoke the fire’s flames as big and as hot as they can. To bring Pakistan, the Middle East, the whole axis of Western imperialist power to their knees.

All they need is the signal. From their leader . . .

Hamza closes his eyes, rolls his bony shoulders again and again.
Here it comes, here it comes
, pulling up from the deep, a fiery religious frenzy. A species of mania.

He sweeps forward towards the nearest of the tables, his audience already rapt in their own delirium, and slowly raises his scrawny arms, his fingers trembling like talons, feeling for his father’s spirit, entreating it to enter him. And he thunders: ‘O you who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you.’

And on the word
harshness
, the first mobiles are lifted. The first text messages formed . . . and the first terrible sting of Operation Macchar is released.