Dirty Little Secret (41 page)

‘I read in a foreign magazine once about a place called Hoxton Square,’ Dhar said, looking at Mousavi, who was checking messages on his phone, unaware of the direction the conversation was taking. ‘There is a gallery there called White Cube. Many artists live in the area, in the surrounding houses, around the square. Their art is not to everyone’s liking. Sometimes they push the boundaries too far, lose sight of their target audience. They need to be stopped.’

‘I’ll tell them,’ Marchant said. He didn’t thank him, but Dhar saw gratitude in his eyes. Regret, too, for they both knew it was probably too late.

‘What are you talking about?’ Mousavi asked, putting away his phone. He seemed preoccupied.

‘Misguided artists who attack society,’ Dhar said, smiling at Marchant.

‘Come, now is not the time for banter, even between brothers. My colleagues in Bandar-Abbas have messaged to say the flagship is ready.’

‘We are done. I have thanked my brother for bringing us the Bladerunner,’ Dhar said, taking Marchant by the shoulders and kissing him on each cheek. ‘And, for the record, I do not believe he is an American spy.’

‘We shall see,’ Mousavi replied.

‘Good luck,’ Marchant said as the two half-brothers stood facing each other. Somewhere deep inside him, the flame began to flicker again. Dhar wondered if he had misjudged his brother, missed something in his bruised cerulean eyes, which suddenly looked different, more distant? But before he could challenge him, Marchant was being ushered out of the room by Mousavi and down the stairs, where a boat was waiting to take him to the mainland.

‘Marchant’s reached Bandar-Abbas,’ Fielding said, replacing his phone. Armstrong was standing in the window, unable to sit.

‘We’re out of time, Marcus, aren’t we?’ she said, her back still to him. She had invited herself over to Legoland, hoping, Fielding suspected, that it might somehow encourage Marchant to make contact quicker. Fielding hadn’t objected. It had been a difficult few hours for everyone as pressure mounted from the government and the media to find the second cell of terrorists.

‘He’ll call,’ he said, trying to sound confident. He wouldn’t tell Armstrong that Marchant had arrived in Iran as a prisoner rather than a hero, bound and blindfolded and under armed guard. She wasn’t listening anyway.

‘Every policeman in the country is on the streets, my own officers haven’t seen their families for weeks,’ she said. ‘We can’t do much more, can’t stop people living their lives, not in Britain. There are seventeen music festivals opening across the country this weekend. What should I have done? Shut them all down, told the organisers we’ve been unable to find the bombers but we think they might be about to blow up your main stage?’

‘You’ve done everything you can, Harriet.’

Fielding rarely felt sorry for others, but he pitied Armstrong now. It was the loneliest hour for any intelligence chief, when all ideas were spent and the clock was ticking down. And it was worse for Armstrong. The buck stopped with the Director General of MI5 when the terror was home-grown.

‘Have I?’ she asked.

Before he could answer, an incoming call flashed up on his comms panel. It was an Iranian number.

Marchant took out the first guard with a blow to the back of the head, catching him by surprise after he had called him into the medical room. The second guard put up more resistance. It wasn’t easy with his hands bound together, but Marchant used the metal cuffs to his advantage, wielding his wrists like a mace, just as he had done with the minder on the boat.

When both guards were finally lying still on the floor, he felt around in their pockets and found a metal key, a pair of electronic key cards and two mobile phones. The key fitted the handcuffs, and he released his wrists. Then he removed the guards’ handguns and slipped them into the waistband of his trousers.

He had waited twenty minutes before attacking them, long enough for Mousavi and Dhar to have left the oil platform for the mainland. His head was throbbing, still in pain from the beating he had taken earlier on the naval patrol boat. At least he had had time to think as he had been shut away below decks, a chance to stand back from the deal he had entered into with Dhar.

His priority remained getting the London address to Fielding, but after that he would do everything in his power to stop Dhar. He couldn’t stand by while an American supercarrier was attacked by a boat he had provided. He owed it to Lakshmi. She was right: he had been blackmailed. The operation to run Dhar was over. Marchant didn’t understand Lakshmi’s loyalty to America, but he no longer shared Dhar’s deep hatred of it either, regardless of what had been done to him in America’s name. He hoped his father would understand.

He pulled out one of the mobile phones and dialled Fielding’s direct line.

‘It’s dropped,’ Fielding said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Armstrong turned away, biting her lip.

Marchant cursed the phone. The signal strength was poor, and the call had not connected. He tried the other phone, but the signal was no better. He needed to ring again from somewhere else on the oil platform. After listening at the door, he locked it behind him with one of the electronic keys, and moved down the corridor towards the staircase. The only sound was a low-level hum that reverberated through the floors and walls of the platform. He assumed it came from the drilling rig. As far as he could tell, the platform was fully operational, despite its covert military role. During the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, oil platforms had been fitted with anti-aircraft guns, and there had been no secret about their strategic use.

He made his way down the staircase to the lower deck, where Dhar had spoken of a small indoor boatyard and a mock-up of the Bladerunner. There was still no phone signal. He pushed at an outside door and walked out onto a gantry where, incongruously, someone had planted flowers in a row of clay pots. The dash of colour – crimson red, blue – brightened up the industrial setting, gave him hope.

He checked the superstructure above and around him. No one was about. The entire living quarters seemed to be deserted. Then he looked out to sea, towards Bandar-Abbas. In the distance, a line of small fast-attack gunboats was heading out towards the Strait. Behind it was another line of boats, then another. The swarm was gathering.

He dialled Fielding’s number, and this time it began to ring.

‘Hoxton Square,’ Fielding said aloud, for Armstrong’s benefit. ‘Can you be more specific?’

‘That’s all he told me,’ Marchant said. ‘It might be an artist’s house, maybe a studio, but the cell’s somewhere in the square.’

Armstrong was already on the phone, dispatching CO19 and her own officers to Hackney. They would have to close the entire square. It would take time to search every house, and there was a danger the terrorists would try to escape.

‘You need to give the Americans a heads-up about something too,’ Marchant said. ‘A warning.’

‘I didn’t know you cared.’

‘The Revolutionary Guard’s navy is currently massing fast-attack boats in the Strait.’

‘They’ve been doing that for days. It’s part of an ongoing naval exercise.’

‘Not today. This time it’s for real.’

Marchant watched as wave after wave of boats surged out into the Strait, heading past Qeshm island in his direction. No wonder the oil platform was deserted. Everyone was at sea. He estimated there were about a hundred boats, maybe more. On the far horizon, towards Oman, he could make out the profiles of several warships, including the distinctive angled outline of the USS
Harry S.
Truman
. Was that the target?

An array of the world’s most sophisticated weapons stood between the swarm and the
Truman
, but it had never had to deal with more than a hundred hostile boats approaching at once. It would only need one to get through. Was Dhar in the Bladerunner?

Marchant went back inside. He needed to find the indoor boatyard that Dhar had mentioned, and try to get out into the Strait on the mocked-up Bladerunner. Dhar had apparently been on it with an instructor, so he knew it was seaworthy. He hoped it hadn’t been requisitioned for the swarm attack.

He headed down the corridor, trying to calculate where the boatyard might be. As he turned a corner, he heard voices approaching and slipped into an open doorway, one of his guns drawn. Two men in bright orange overalls walked past, chatting in Hindi. He waited until they had gone, then continued along the narrow corridor to a door at the far end. He looked through a glass panel, but inside was just a staff canteen, deserted except for a solitary oil worker.

There was only one place left to try. Turning right, he followed another corridor, surprised by the size of the living quarters. It was like being on a big ship: a maze of endless narrow walkways, metal staircases and portholes. Up ahead there was a heavy door with a wheel-lock that suggested tighter security. He held one of the electronic keys he had removed from the guards’ pockets against a panel on the wall, but nothing happened. He tried the other key, and this time there was a click. Turning the wheel, he swung the heavy door open. The place was deserted. It was just as Dhar had described: a small indoor working boatyard. In front of him was what he was looking for: a crude copy of the Bladerunner, suspended from a launch derrick like captured booty.

It took time to work out how to operate the big bay doors in the floor of the boatyard, but after twenty minutes he was at the wheel in the cockpit as the automatic derrick lowered the ersatz Bladerunner slowly towards the sea. There was no one to switch off the derrick, so his plan was to start up the engines once the boat was afloat and accelerate out of the two thick lifting straps.

As soon as he felt the water take the weight, he turned the ignition key. The engine failed to start. A moment later, he heard shouting above him. Armed guards were out on the gantry he had stood on earlier. More were peering down through the empty bay doors. He tried the key again, pulling out a gun from his trousers. This time the engine started, just as the guards above him began to shoot. He returned fire, roaring away from the oil rig into the Strait.

Dhar eased the throttle forward, taking the Bladerunner’s speed up to 30 knots as he passed the main entrance to the naval base at Bandar-Abbas. It was a calm day, the sea flatter than it had been all week. The base was on a natural promontory to the south-west of the city, and was shaped like a trident. There was a central channel with two docks forking off it.

The last assault boats had left the base ten minutes earlier. At Mousavi’s request, Dhar had stood on the eastern dock and watched them depart, acknowledging the cheering crews in their streaming bandanas. Dhar’s brief appearance was high-risk, but the base was secure and his presence seemed to give the crews heart. The air had filled with cries of ‘
Allahu akbar!
’, the mood defiant, incendiary, as Iranian flags were waved and American ones burnt. Every vessel in Bandar-Abbas seemed to be on the water, including an impromptu gathering of fishing boats that formed their own swarm, the men on board sounding horns and firing AK47s in the air.

The first boats to leave the base had been the unmanned Ya Mahdis. Even these had received a cheer, perhaps because no one expected to see the ghost boats again. Operated remotely, they formed the sacrificial front line of the swarm. Their purpose was to provoke the Americans into an engagement by not turning away from their warships. Once the first shots had been fired, their role was to keep drawing the fire of the Phalanx Gatling guns. Over-eager radars would lock on to the multiple contacts, expending all the Phalanx ammunition by the time Dhar finally arrived on the scene.

At least, that was the plan. Dhar wasn’t convinced. In his mind he was ready to die, and he had prepared himself accordingly, asking Mousavi for a copy of the Holy Qur’an to take on board. After the last boat had left the base, he had turned to it in the incongruous surrounds of the Bladerunner’s sleazy cockpit. Now, as he increased his speed to 50 knots and steered a course between the islands of Qeshm to starboard and Larak to port, he recalled verse 8:65 again:

Battle had already been joined on the horizon. He could see plumes of smoke, but it was impossible to tell if damage had been done to any American warships. He doubted it. The early phases would be a massacre. After the unmanned Ya Mahdis had come the Bavar 2 flying boats, looking like giant water boatmen as they had filed out of the naval base, with only their wings to stop them sinking. The fast-attack Seraj vessels had followed, 107mm rocket launchers bolted onto the tops of their cockpits, machine guns strapped to their decks. Then, finally, the more sophisticated Zolfaqar assault boats, named after the sword of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, in the belief that their missiles would bifurcate the infidel’s ships.

All Dhar could hope for was that Mousavi’s calculations were right, and that by the time the Bladerunner arrived on the scene the American warships’ guns would have fallen silent.
Inshallah
, it would then be up to him.
Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight in the way of the Shaitan
.

According to Mousavi, his two torpedoes had an 80 per cent kill probability at a range of four miles. Dhar had wanted to be on his own in the Bladerunner, but the launch mechanism for the torpedoes was complicated, and there hadn’t been enough time to train him. Mousavi had insisted he took an experienced operator, who was in the seat next to him. No one needed to know, Mousavi had said. The operator was a man of few words, which suited Dhar.

He wished the same could be said of Mousavi, who was gabbling away now on the encrypted ship-to-shore radio.