Brute Force (2 page)

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Version 1.0

PART ONE

1

Tripoli docks
October 1987

I sat well back in my seat and listened as Colonel Gaddafi's latest day-long rant burst from the radio like an Arab Fidel Castro on speed. I pictured a big mike blocking his craggy features as he denounced Reagan, Thatcher and all things Western, so all you could see was a mad mop of black curly hair and angry flecks of spit flying in every direction.

I was in the passenger seat of an old box-like Russian jeep. Africa was littered with the things, bare metal showing through the green paint where thousands of boots and hands had worn it away.

I was sweating big-time, and it had nothing to do with the weather. This might be North Africa, but it was October. It was cold. The leaking was to do with the wetsuit I had on over my clothes. Apart from my sweatshirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers, I was totally sterile: no money, no weapon. I wasn't going to need any, not even a watch. Time wasn't going to matter on this job. I had to react to events as they happened, not when the little hand hit five. I would give my cover documents to Lynn at the very last minute.

Sitting back in the seat and completely still – that's the secret of not being seen. The jeep looked just like any one of the ten-year-old American pimp-mobiles we were parked alongside: empty. I had my binos up, eyes on target. My main area of focus was the pair of big holes at the arse end of the ship from which six-inch-thick ropes snaked towards the quayside.

The life of the docks continued around us. The quay was jammed with boats unloading TVs and white goods to feed Libya's consumer boom. This was an oil country and then some. Arabs from all over, brown and black, made up the labour force. The overseers were all ex-pats. The air was filled with German, French, British and American accents. So much for the sanctions against what the White House called the mad dog of the Middle East. All the old imperialists had their noses in the trough. Everyone was helping themselves to the huge salaries offered by this former Italian colony.

The driver was listening intently, hands resting on the enormous black steel steering wheel. 'What's he on about?' I didn't even bother looking over at him.

He powered down the small transistor. 'The whole world is going down the gurgler, as per usual.' The voice was softly spoken, the accent cut-glass.

Although the British embassy had long since closed – along with everybody else's – as part of their sanctions against the Colonel for his habit of sponsoring global terrorism, everybody, Brits included, had left a couple of spooks behind. Colonel Lynn was one of them. Gaddafi remained one of the biggest threats to world peace, and his black-leather-jacketed heavies tended to come to the UK and murder anyone speaking out against the regime, so we needed people with their ear to the ground.

Lynn wasn't a field operator. He was our man in Havana – only in Tripoli. In his late thirties, of average build, he looked and spoke like a history teacher – but his fresh-from-the-shower smell screamed officer, and his aura marked him out as a high flier. He spoke the language and knew the players. He'd probably been born here; for all I knew, his dad had been ambassador or something. Colonel Lynn – I never had found out what his first name was – ate, drank and breathed the place. He was what the Firm called an Arabist.

He was all right, I supposed – just not the sort of guy I'd phone up and ask out for a brew and a sticky bun. A bit too keen for me; a bit too full of devotion to the cause. He probably kept a picture of the Queen under his pillow. And he was also just a bit too keen to tell me how to do my job. He didn't like people like me. There was just a hint now and again of disgust at what people like me got up to. Even though he was part of it, he was from the hands-clean side of the fence and everyone on my side was not much more than a necessary evil.

'Don't forget to confirm the cargo before anything else.'

'OK. What if it isn't there?'

'It is.'

'So why check it?'

'Because I need you to tell me when you get back that you physically saw it.'

The target ship was parked up between two Libyan navy patrol boats in the military section the other side of the harbour. I deliberately didn't say 'moored' because it got a rise out of Lynn. He knew about boaty stuff. I didn't know many of the technical terms and I didn't need to learn them. That was the navy's job. As far as I was concerned it was parked up, and that was fine.

Lynn had a small sailing boat of his own in a marina about fifteen Ks away. I'd spent the last four days living in it while he briefed me. The sitting and eating area downstairs was full of pictures of him and his wife in the creeks of north Norfolk. Nelson country, he called it.

I'd fucked up; by showing a spark of polite interest in a shot of the two of them standing outside their local, the Hero, I had opened the door to a serious history lesson, beginning with how the great man had been born a few miles up the road from their home.

The Egyptian-registered
Bahiti
could carry up to 150 tonnes of cargo. When the chairman's wife smashed a bottle of Cairo's fizziest against its side, all the bodywork was probably a gleaming white. Twenty or so years of saltwater and neglect had streaked it with rust. A crane was mounted at the bow for loading and unloading. The rest of the topside was flat, apart from the bridge tower at the back end. It looked like a miniature oil-tanker.

Lynn had his binos up too as forklifts hummed around us, laden with yet more crates and what looked like a consignment of dustbin lids. A group of dockers leant against walls smoking, waiting for the next job to come along or some German to bollock them for being Arabs.

'You see the man on the gangplank now?'

I nodded.

'Black leather jacket? Papers in his hand?'

'Yeah, I've got him.'

'That's Mansour.'

I knew plenty about Mansour from Lynn's briefing. He was in his forties and worked for Libyan intelligence. He was medium height and stocky, with brushed-back hair and a very neat moustache.

'He calls me Leptis.'

'Leptis?'

'Just a name he gave me.'

'You two mates?'

'Hardly.' He dropped his binos for a moment and turned to me. 'Need-to-know, Nick – and you don't need to.'

He was right. I didn't need to know – I didn't even want to. All this spookery was way beyond my pay scale.

'You sure that's him? He looks fatter than in the pictures.'

'Absolutely certain. He's over-indulged the falafels, that's all. A sign of privilege. He's overpaid.'

Mansour pointed and shouted, and generally seemed to take over the show as he walked up the gangplank. Two bodies emerged from the hold, headed for Mansour and started talking.

'Stand by – that's Two Cells.'

Lynn confirmed. 'Yes, that's Lesser.'

2

Benjamin Lesser – it didn't sound quite hard-core or Republican enough to belong to PIRA's top bomb-maker. I'd only just got over the Nelson history lesson when Lynn embarked on a lengthy explanation of the origins of the name. It boiled down to the fact that Benjamin was a Celtic name as well as an Eastern European one. It meant favourite son. Benjamin was also a Catholic saint, which qualified it for a place in
The
PIRA
Book of Baby Names.
In the year 424 he was tortured by the king of Persia for preaching. Reeds were thrust under his nails and into all the tenderest parts of his body. After this torture had been repeated several times, a barbed stake was shoved up his arse as a show-stopper. PIRA still did much the same thing to its victims fifteen hundred years later, so the history lesson wasn't a total waste of time.

I'd nicknamed Ben Two Cells. It suited me to think of him as stupid. It cheered me up.

'I suppose need-to-know means you can't tell me who the woman is?'

'I don't know her, actually.' Lynn took a couple of seconds to check out the hauntingly beautiful, dark-skinned face. 'Probably one of Mansour's people checking the cargo.'

Two Cells' dark brown wavy hair was a bit longer than it had been in the briefing pictures, down to his shoulders and centre-parted, but it was definitely him. He towered over the Libyan, and probably everybody else aboard. He was at least six four, and built to build. I expected a bomb-maker's hands to be like a pianist's, but Benny Boy's were the size of shovels.

'Remember, you've got to make it look like an accident. And the ship must be preserved at all costs for the Spanish to capture.'

'Yep, I've got it.'

He'd told me enough times over the last few days. This had to be the best-briefed job I'd ever been on. But all the briefing in the world wasn't going to help me drop Two Cells without it looking like exactly what it was. I might be able to channel him into the killing ground, but if anything went wrong I'd have to contend with a good eighteen stone of seriously unsaintly Two Cells throwing one of those super-sized fists at me. If it made contact, I'd be over the side.

Mansour and the woman made their way back to the quay and disappeared into the maze of warehouses as Two Cells went onto the ship and started chatting with the skipper.

Liam Brian Duff was a lot more than a sailor boy. He'd been caught up in the events of Bloody Sunday, and joined the IRA the very next day. He was just sixteen. The following year, he was caught trying to bomb a government building.

Sentenced to six years, he shared cells in the Maze prison with some major league Republican icons. By the time he was released, Duff was quite the rising star. He came back onto British radar when he was arrested by the French police five or six years ago. He'd been travelling with a false passport on his return from a Hezbollah training camp in Lebanon – evidence of his role in fostering the international ties the IRA and Sinn Fein were building with the Middle East, and most particularly with Gaddafi's Libya.

I kept my binos trained on the ship as Duff checked the crane was lowering the boxes into the hold correctly. Then Lynn gunned the engine and I put them in the foot well as he drove us out of the port and along the coast road.

'Take a different route. We don't want to get stuck at another checkpoint.'

Lynn nodded.

We'd had a close shave on the way to the docks. Gaddafi's boys had set up a checkpoint where there hadn't been one on our dry run a few hours earlier. Our papers were good and our cover story had held – we were Dutch oil-workers in transit, a couple of guys making an honest dollar in Colonel G's workers' paradise. After scrutinizing the papers and turning them round a few times, the sentry had waved us on our way, but I wasn't in a hurry to risk an action replay. We had far bigger things to worry about.

3

He parked on a rocky headland about a K from the port. The rocks glistened in the light from the docks, and so did the plastic bottles and general crap spread across the beach. It looked more like a landfill site than a holiday destination. Perhaps that was why Club 18-30 had given it a miss this year.

'Everything in place? Any questions?'

'Yep – and no.' I clambered out of the jeep, leaving my cover docs on the seat. I grabbed the re-breather and fins from the back, and checked the karabiner was still hooked into the netting of the rope sack. All the gear I was going to use to get on board was inside.

Without ceremony, Lynn was gone. He didn't want to be in the vicinity if I got lifted.

I started to sort myself out on top of the landfill. I got the rebreather on my back. It was a commercial system, the sort underwater photographers use when they don't want to frighten the fish. A normal scuba tank is noisy and streams bubbles; re-breather apparatus prevents both by reusing the air you exhale.

One of the small tanks on my back was pure oxygen; the other was normal air. The plastic tub between them was filled with soda lime. As I breathed out, the exhaled air was piped into the tub. The soda lime retained the carbon dioxide but let oxygen through, along with a little top-up from the oxygen bottle. It was ingenious, but that didn't mean I liked using it. If I'd wanted to fuck about underwater I'd have joined the navy.

I attached my navigation aid, a 12cm luminous ball compass mounted on a hard plastic sheet. It hooked onto the re-breather harness and dangled down my chest, a bit like a map case.

Fins in one hand, the sack in the other, I waded into the sea. It was freezing. The mask covered my face. I tightened the straps, dipped my head underwater and took a few breaths to make sure there was a tight seal.