Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (31 page)

‘It’s positive, five hundred and fifty millisiverts. He’s contaminated.’ His voice was rising. ‘We’re going to need to file a JSP392 straight away.’

A small group of hospital staff huddled in the car park, oblivious to the autumn chill as they watched the proceedings. The surgeon
commander was with them and when he heard the reading he swore quietly. Nurse Flores had noted the worry on his face and she moved close to him. ‘What are they doing? Who are these people?’ she asked. She was scared for the first time since she could remember.

‘They’re from the Defence Radiological Protection Service. They’ve come down from Alverstocke near Gosport – drove through the night as soon as we alerted them. Um . . .’ he looked Nurse Flores up and down as if noticing her for the first time ‘. . . I’m afraid you’re going to have to get checked over as well, you and the duty matron. We need to follow procedure here.’

‘Checking for what?’ But Nurse Flores already knew the answer.

‘Radioactive contamination. Our man here has received a potentially lethal dose of radiation poisoning. If I was a betting man, I would say his odds were not great.’

‘Oh, my Lord.’ Jovelyn Flores’ hands flew up to her face. Then she made the sign of the cross.

LATER THAT MORNING,
shortly before ten a.m., anyone walking along Whitehall might have noticed a number of figures converging on the entrance to the Cabinet Office. They would have seen them trot briskly up the three wide stone steps, push through the blue-framed glass doors, stencilled with the government’s coat of arms, and turn sharp right.

They gathered in a windowless conference room, an unusually large group this time, their numbers swollen by several technical experts rushed up to London. A COBRA crisis meeting had been convened at extremely short notice, chaired by the Home Secretary. Sid Khan sat beside him.

‘I’d like to thank you all for getting here so promptly,’ the Home Secretary began. Youthful and energetic in his movements, his jet-black hair glistening with a hint of product, Alan Reynolds had been in the job just two months. After a bruising row with the Police Federation about overtime pay in his first two weeks, he was still getting to grips with the unwieldy leviathan that is the Home Office. ‘As most of you know by now,’ he continued, ‘the Prime Minister has asked to me to chair this session because of the developments overnight in the West Country.’ He removed his spectacles, with their thin, scarlet frames, and folded them away in his top pocket. ‘A man has shown up at a hospital in Plymouth with symptoms of acute radiation poisoning.’ He let
those words sink in. Ten years had passed since the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko had died a slow and painful death in a London hospital from the same complaint.

‘We are still awaiting all the facts, but we are obviously taking this extremely seriously. It is absolutely imperative that we identify the source of that radiation, isolate it and secure it. The man in question is unconscious. I understand he’s very sick indeed and we can’t be sure that he’ll survive. Detectives from the Met’s SO15 are waiting to interview him – if he wakes up.’

Reynolds stopped and glanced down at the bare table, as if a sheet of notes lay there. ‘We need to move as fast as possible on this one, so the PM and I wanted you all to be fully briefed. To that end,’ he nodded at two men sitting halfway down the long table, ‘I have asked two of our Defence Radiological experts to come in today. Professor Lynton Macaulay and Dr Frederick Böhse. Over to you, gentlemen.’

The two scientists got to their feet but seemed unsure of where they should stand, so Reynolds gestured them to the far end of the table. Macaulay spoke first, buttoning up his suit jacket before he began. A senior figure at Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, he had a soft, soothing Scottish burr, which to those present seemed strangely at odds with the unpleasantness of the topic.

‘You will all have heard, no doubt, of the Brazil cobalt case back in 1987, yes?’ he began. There were some nods around the table but others looked blank. ‘And the one in Mexico in 2013?’ Even fewer nods this time. ‘And I wonder how many of you in this room have heard of the Polish cobalt-60 theft in 2015?’

Reynolds interrupted: ‘Let’s assume we’re not familiar with any of these, Professor. Please go on.’

Macaulay’s expression suggested he found it hard to comprehend that anyone could not know about them. ‘In early March 2015 twenty-two canisters, each containing pellets of radioactive cobalt-60, were stolen from a warehouse in a Polish town called Poznan´. Cobalt-60, along with strontium-90 and caesium-137, is a
radioactive isotope that, left unshielded, emits harmful gamma rays.’ There were worried looks of recognition around the table. Everyone had heard of gamma rays. ‘They can cause horrendous burns but they also pass right through human skin to attack the body’s cell walls. Put bluntly, you start to decay rapidly from the inside.’

‘Like Litvinenko?’ interrupted a young man from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Counter-proliferation Department.

‘Not quite,’ answered Macaulay. ‘Litvinenko died from alpha-emitting particles that he had ingested from drinking poisoned tea. It had been laced with polonium-210. Unlike gamma rays, alpha rays are very weak. They can’t penetrate our outer membranes, but once ingested they cause enormous damage. It took us quite a while to figure out what was wrong with him. It was his urine that gave it away in the end, positively brimming with radioactivity. By then it was too late and even the best care possible at University College Hospital couldn’t save him. When the poor man died he had so much radioactivity in his body they had to bury him in a lead-lined coffin.’

The Home Secretary interrupted again: ‘Sorry to have to move you along, Professor, but time is pressing.’

‘Of course,’ said Macaulay. ‘So, Poland. It was several days before the Polish authorities reported the theft to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the body that tries to keep tabs on all this stuff around the world. As long as the radioactive material is shielded with enough lead lining it can’t harm you. We call it a “pig container”. Please don’t ask me how it got that name.’

Several people exchanged glances.

‘Sorry, could you elaborate there?’ That was Laura Deane, deputy director of MI5, who had spent much of her career running agents inside extremist groups.

Macaulay took a moment to locate who had asked the question. ‘A pig container,’ he replied, peering straight at her, ‘is basically a thick metal cylinder, like a really heavy Thermos, with
handles. It has a hollow centre where the radioactive source is inserted. If anyone is stupid enough to go unscrewing the top of the pig and removing the source they’re likely to get a lethal dose of radiation in under five minutes.’

‘Just so we’re clear,’ said the Home Secretary, ‘is that what you believe has happened here? In Plymouth?’

Macaulay held up his hand authoritatively. He was definitely enjoying bringing his pet subject to this Whitehall audience. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is not a judgement for me to make. I’m going to let my colleague answer your question. I expect many of you have come across Dr Böhse’s work?’ he asked. ‘No? Well, Dr Frederick Böhse is the senior consultant at the Defence Radiological Protection Service, part of the government’s defence science labs. He was the author of the Omon Report last year. So, Doctor . . .’

The man who stood beside Macaulay at the far end of the table could not have looked more different from everyone else in the room. In contrast to the sombre business suits and uniforms arrayed around the table, Böhse wore a green tweed jacket with a loud yellow check and a flamboyant bow tie.

‘That’s a brave choice,’ murmured a man from the MoD to the policeman beside him.

From the front, Böhse appeared to be quite bald, but the moment he turned his head they could see that what hair he had left was tied into a neat little ponytail. Dr Frederick Böhse was no Whitehall clone.

‘And so,’ he began, as if finishing off an earlier sentence, ‘the reason we are all here today is that we believe that the man who presented himself to the hospital in Plymouth last night has received a potentially fatal dose of radiation from an unknown source that is emitting gamma rays.’ He spoke with just the faintest trace of a German accent, but it did not go unnoticed. ‘It is the job of my agency to find that source and secure it. We cannot do this alone, naturally, so this will be a combined effort.’

Reynolds prompted him: ‘Thank you, Doctor. And the RDD? Could you summarize what you told me on the phone?’

‘Ah, yes. An RDD.’ The scientist’s eyes shone with fervour as he scanned the faces in the room. ‘It stands for Radiological Dispersal Device. Short of an atomic bomb going off, an RDD is perhaps our worst nightmare. Some people call it a dirty bomb. Essentially, this device combines radioactive material with high explosive to scatter it over a wide area. In a city like London, it would make a whole district uninhabitable.’

‘Could you be more precise, Doctor?’ asked Reynolds. ‘What sort of timescale are we talking here?’

‘My department has done projections,’ replied Böhse, ‘and we estimate that if terrorists got their hands on enough material for a small- to medium-sized RDD and detonated it in, say, the centre of Birmingham, the entire business district would have to be evacuated.’

‘For how long?’ asked a woman from Public Health England.

‘It depends on the clean-up operation,’ answered Böhse, ‘but we are talking weeks. Whole city blocks could potentially be contaminated.’

‘Jesus . . .’ she breathed. ‘So how did we suddenly get from a sick man walking into A and E in Plymouth to talking about a dirty bomb going off in Birmingham?’

Reynolds cleared his throat and addressed the room: ‘It’s time we shared something with you so that we’re all on the same page. Some of you,’ he nodded towards the MI5 deputy director, ‘already know what you’re about to hear. But I think everyone needs to hear what Syed Khan of SIS has to say. Sid?’

When he stood up to address the room Khan chose his words carefully, weighing them up as he spoke. ‘As most of you are aware, we are already facing a national security threat in the form of an unknown weapon being sent, by sea we believe, to this country’s shores. My service has been working flat out on this for weeks now. We’ve just had a significant development.’ Even those in the room who knew what he was about to say were giving him their full attention. ‘And that was the discovery, just off the Cornish coast, of a miniature submarine. Intelligence is, as we all know, an imperfect science. We rarely get our hands on every
piece of the jigsaw. Instead, we try to make the connections between the pieces we do have.’

Khan stopped as the door opened and a civil servant came in and whispered something in the Home Secretary’s ear. Reynolds nodded, the man left and Khan resumed.

‘So we now have three pieces of the jigsaw.’ He held up three fingers for emphasis. ‘There’s the suspect ship, the MV
Maria Esposito
, which our Special Forces raided unsuccessfully two nights ago. We’re still holding her and her crew in Falmouth while the Navy goes over her with a fine-toothed comb. Then there’s the mini-sub that’s been found very close to where the ship was intercepted. A coincidence? We don’t think so. And now we have a man showing up in A&E with acute radiation sickness.’

Khan looked down at the Home Secretary, who nodded just once. Khan took a short breath, then delivered his
coup de grâce
. ‘As of this morning,’ he told the room, ‘it is our belief, with a high degree of certainty, that in the last forty-eight hours an RDD – a dirty bomb – has been brought ashore in this country.’

Reynolds stood up once more as Khan sat down. ‘So let me be clear on our priorities before I close this meeting. I want every possible resource deployed to locate this device, neutralize it and arrest the people involved. I want every precaution taken to protect the places we think they might try to set it off. In the meantime, we have no choice but to follow the recommendation of JTAC, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. I am raising the national terrorism threat level to Critical.’ Most of the people in the room had expected that, but some hadn’t and one man dropped his spectacle case on the table, causing it to spring shut with a loud snap. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.

‘In case anyone needs reminding what Critical means,’ said the Home Secretary, ‘it means an attack is expected imminently.’

As they filed out, grim-faced, it occurred to many of those attending the COBRA session that this was the moment things had changed. A line had been crossed.

THE CORNISH TOWN
of Falmouth, with its picturesque harbour and cobbled streets, is not a mainstream naval base like Portsmouth. But it is home to something just as vital to Britain’s defence industry. With one of the largest deep-water harbours in the world, Falmouth has the biggest ship-repair complex in the country. Sheltered from the Atlantic by the promontory of Pendennis Head, Falmouth docks are a confusing maze of engineering and electrical workshops, cranes, gantries and vast sheds. With three large docks and the capacity to take in vessels of up to 100,000 tons, the Port Authority had had little difficulty in accommodating an 8,000-ton freighter registered in Manila, even at short notice. The MV
Maria Esposito
was moored, under Royal Navy guard, at Dock No. 2. Floating beside her, hidden beneath a frayed grey tarpaulin and likewise under guard, lay a patchily dark-green vessel just six metres long. The salvaged mini-sub had been brought in to join her.

Luke had wasted no time in calling Commander Jorge Enriquez at the Colombian Embassy: he needed his expertise. The young naval attaché had cleared his engagements for the next day, and by the morning after the mini-sub’s discovery he was on the 09.25 Flybe scheduled flight from London Gatwick to Newquay. As Dr Böhse was briefing the COBRA crisis meeting in Whitehall, Luke was meeting Enriquez in the arrivals hall.

‘
Madre de Dios!
’ exclaimed Enriquez
.
‘You’ve been through it, my friend. I heard what those bastards did to you.’ He gave Luke a bear hug then held him at arm’s length to look him up and down. ‘Seems you lost weight too. I guess those narcos didn’t feed you too well!’ Luke shrugged, picked up Enriquez’s overnight bag and walked him to the waiting Land Rover. He had only the slightest of limps now, and the pain in his foot had almost disappeared.