Elephants can't hide forever (4 page)

As the message hit Sally’s console, a red faced John Watson, Sally’s head of department had arrived having flown down the stairs at breakneck speed. He was immediately followed by
the director of the facility, Margaret Fortune The rest of the floor had become very quiet, every person working that day within proximity of Sally sensed something very, very special had come
in.

“Sally,” said Margaret quietly, “Lock your machine down, then come up to the bunker,” and then to the hushed room,: “That’s all the excitement for today,
ladies and gentlemen, but just let me remind you all, when you leave here tonight you are all bound by the official secrets act”.

Margaret led the way to the secure operations room, known as the bunker for it was insulated by four feet of concrete side to side and top to bottom; if a nuclear strike hit GCHQ the bunker
would survive, this however was not the reason it was so fortified. It had been designed for ultra top secret meetings, in the knowledge that no listening device could penetrate the walls. Sally
had only heard of this sanctum, and now she found herself sitting in the rather eerie half light of the bunker with two of the most powerful civil servants in the country.

Margaret booted up the computer that the message had been transferred to. As chief officer, she was more a politician than specialist, and so she gestured to John Watson.

“Open it up John, let’s get it deciphered and see what we’re dealing with,” she said as if it was a can of baked beans she was asking to be opened. John Watson had been
deciphering coded messages for twenty years and he was confident once he had opened this transmission he would have it cracked in no time.

After three hours of intense keyboard activity, John’s monitor sprang to life, displaying the information they had been waiting for. Simultaneously the huge screen in the corner showed
Margaret and Sally what John had unravelled. Covering the screen was what looked like a series of Arabic letters randomly scattered across the page.

“Can you read it?” Margaret asked Sally.

“Well,” said Sally, “I can read the letters, but in the Arabic alphabet letters can be used as numbers and as far as I can make out this text is a mixture of letters and
numbers.”

“Right” said Margaret, “first things first, how long to get this into English so we can start working it out?”

Sally had no idea but what she did know was that Margaret would not accept such a negative answer.

“Two hours” said Sally.

“One maximum” was Margaret’s reply.

Fifty eight minutes later, the three colleagues were looking at Sally’s handiwork. From the ebullient moment of the message’s arrival at GCHQ, to Sally’s translation now on the
screen before them, their mood had changed. They were looking, mesmerised, at a set of binary numbers interspersed with the odd random letter. This was a top secret covert message from a little
house in the lawless district of Afghanistan and didn’t make sense. John and Margaret, both seasoned professionals, sensed this may have a huge relevance in the war in Afghanistan; it was too
coincidental that the message had been intercepted by the drone only 50 klicks from the Tora Bora mountains. This may take them days to decipher, by which time the sender of the message from
Gandamak may have flown. John looked at Margaret, and for what seemed an eternity said nothing, thinking who in the world would be the best person to decipher this message, eventually one word left
his mouth: “Rusty” he whispered, and Margaret nodded.

Professor Duncan Campbell, actually known as Rusty, was sleeping the sleep of babies. Like all geniuses sleep came easily, and when it came it was deep and dreamless, and so it
must have been the tenth shrill of the phone that he finally released hold of his somnolent state and gruffly answered.

“This had better be good” he growled.

The reply came back: “Rusty, it’s Margaret Fortune, we have a situation, category one, we need you in your office in ninety minutes, I’m boarding a helo in five minutes for
Bletchley.”

No more could be said on an unsecured line but Rusty Campbell instantly knew if the head of GCHQ was boarding a helicopter at 3am to fly to Bletchley Park the shit had truly hit the fan.

“I’ll have the coffee on, Margaret” was his reply.

Bletchley Park is in fact a country estate, now surrounded by the city of Milton Keynes. It gained fame during the Second World War when it became the United Kingdom’s main decryption
establishment; the high level intelligence produced there was considered crucial to the war effort, and indeed the facility had been credited with shortening the war in Europe. Its most famous
achievement was to decrypt and break the German Enigma cipher machine, although those in the know would argue that more importantly, the breaking of the German FISH High Command teleprinter
ciphers, enabling the allied forces navy to plot and destroy the German U-boats, was the single main factor in the allied victory.

What was not public knowledge was the fact that the unit was still very much active; albeit certain parts of the building were now open to the public, there were areas strictly off limits where
the boffins still operated. Although the staff were massively reduced, the building contained the greatest mathematicians and polyglots the United Kingdom had ever reared.

Of these great academics, Professor Duncan Campbell was the best of the best; with his broad Scottish accent, and his unkempt flaming red hair and beard, he looked more likely to be found on the
fields of Bannockburn than at this top secret institution. Looks can be deceiving, and no more so than in the case of Rusty Campbell. Twenty years previously he had flown through Cambridge
achieving passes never before realised; his PHD on the ‘Relativity of Numbers During The Formation Of The Universe’ was considered a masterpiece, and changed the way astrophysicists
looked at time and space. Duncan became Professor of Pure Mathematics at the age of twenty nine, the youngest ever, and was expected to remain in the hallowed halls of Cambridge as a lector of
mathematics for the rest of his career. He even had his eye on the100k prize money to be awarded to the first mathematician who could identify the latest binary number.

MI5, however, had other ideas; they had watched his development from an early age, and shortly after his PHD was published made their move. After several top level meetings with the hierarchy of
the secret service, Professor Duncan “Rusty” Campbell joined the team of Crypto analysers at Bletchley Park, and settled into the world of secrecy and intrigue, far away from the
university life he had thought was his destiny.

And so here he sat on this cold December morning, at the ungodly hour of 4.30am, waiting for Margaret Fortune to arrive with what might be his greatest challenge. He couldn’t wait.

Just as the coffee percolator hit boiling point, Duncan heard the whack whack of the helicopter’s rotors, and walked out onto the frosted lawns of Bletchley Park. Margaret, rather ungainly
as is the way of unseasoned passengers, alighted the chopper and made her way to over to Rusty.

“Duncan, good to see you again,” she said through chattering lips.

“Likewise,” came the reply. “Let’s get you inside and warmed up.”

Once inside Duncan’s office, Margaret got straight to the point.

“Duncan, we have intercepted an encrypted message from Afghanistan. It may of course be nothing, but the region it came out of is too coincidental, and more importantly my instincts tell
me it’s something big.”

Duncan knew the pleasantries were over. “Right,” he said, “let’s take a look.”

Duncan had never failed to decipher a manuscript in his entire career, and as he gazed at the random letters and numbers before him his mind was working faster than the speed of light. At
exactly 8.45am, four hours after Duncan had opened the message, he had cracked it and the two people sat staring at the decrypted message, in deep thought at what it revealed. Eventually Margaret
opened her briefcase, pulled out a tiny piece of paper, flipped open her cell phone and punched in the numbers on the paper in front of her. After two rings the phone was answered.

“Tony Blair” came the reply

“Prime Minister,” said Margaret in as even a voice as she could muster. “This is Margaret Fortune speaking. We have today intercepted a message from inside Afghanistan. If it
is to be believed then we have the precise location of Osama Bin Laden.”

Prime Minister Blair sat alone in the war room of his official home, 10 Downing Street. Like Duncan Campbell, his minds was racing; if what he had been told was true, or even
the fact that his senior civil servant from GCHQ had alerted him to the possibility, that the most wanted man on earth had been found, he knew what he had to do. He should have informed his
counterpart in Washington, George Bush, but the Prime Minister was a politician and, having achieved the ultimate goal of First Office of the United Kingdom, a very clever politician. He knew the
British public, and worse still the British press, had lost confidence in his administration, and him personally, following the debacle of the Iraq invasion in the pursuit of non existent weapons
of mass destruction. The next general election was already all but lost, and if he was brutally honest with himself, he should fall on his sword sooner rather than later, and yet out of the blue
suddenly an early morning phone call had given him a lifeline, a very risky lifeline but nonetheless an opportunity to save himself and his Government. So Mr. Blair had not called POTUS, neither
had he called any members of the Strategic War Council; instead he arranged a very fast unmarked police car to bring Margaret Fortune from Bletchley to his office, and then made one call to the
Army Barracks in Hereford known as Stirling Lines, home of 22 Regiment Special Air Service, Britain’s top special forces cadre.

Major Sebastian Morley had been sitting at his desk when the call came in from the Prime Minister.

“Sebastian, something’s broken,” said Tony Blair “How fast can you get to London?”

Major Morley knew this meant half an hour ago. “One hour, sir” he replied, mentally computing where the nearest chopper was.

“Fine, straight to Downing Street please” came the reply.

Major Morley strode purposefully out of his office and could not conceal the wide grin he was sporting.

“Morning boss, what’s put that smile on your face?” asked his adjutant.

“PM’s summoned me,” said the Major and that put a smile on the face of his junior NCO. There’s nothing an SAS soldier likes more than trouble, and this, both men knew,
was going to be big trouble.

Margaret was the first to arrive at 10 Downing Street, and after the usual pleasantries which lasted considerably longer than those earlier in the day with Duncan, she got down to business. For
thirty minutes the PM said nothing, just listened as she talked and walked the PM through the day’s developments. He finally spoke,

“Thank you Margaret, you have covered the situation extremely thoroughly. I believe, the message you have intercepted is bonafide and that we have located our man.”

During Margaret’s delivery of the known facts, the Major had arrived from Hereford, been shown in, and had listened to her telling the PM how she had encrypted a message which implied
Osama Bin Laden was hidden up in a small Afghan village, and not the Tora Bora Mountains. He was sitting in the corner, half knowing and half hoping what would be coming next.

“Well Major, anything you need to know and your comments please” the PM inquired.

“No sir, I fully understand the situation,” came the reply. With that, the PM rose from his chair and paced the room for several moments, lost in thought but rapidly coming to a
decision. He turned and faced Margaret.

“Margaret, “he asked, the tenseness now etched on his face, “How many people are aware of this document?”

“Excluding the three of us sir, there are three others two at GCHQ and one at Bletchley,” replied Margaret.

“Can we guarantee their integrity in this matter?” asked the PM.

“Absolutely, PM, you have my personal commitment on the matter.” Margaret’s sincere if somewhat ominous reply convinced the PM of his course of action.

“In that case” he said looking directly at Major Sebastian Morley “Can your people get him out?”

“Yes, sir” was the answer.

“You have a one month window to extract the target, but be warned, Major, this has to be a Black Operation,” the PM stated. Major Morley was not in the least put off by the
PM’s last comment. Any untoward publicity if there was a foul up, or the press got wind of things, the PM and the British Government would deny all knowledge of the mission and also have the
Major’s balls as well as his pension.

“That concludes our meeting then” the PM stated,” Not of course that we’ve had a meeting” he remarked with that twinkle in his eye he usually saved for the
media.

As the Major was being discreetly shown the back door exit, he reached inside his combat jacket, pulled out his cell phone and rang a number of a council house on a rather unsavoury estate in
Gateshead.

“Hello,” Mike Tobin answered in a slightly slurred voice

“Nine, I need you back in Hereford six am tomorrow,” the Major ordered. “Sober” was his last word as he shut the phone down; just like Mike Tobin there was going to be no
sleep for him this coming night.

It is fair to say when life changing occurrences happen in people’s lives, not only do they arrive out of the blue, but everyone responds differently, most notably
victims of car accidents who start their day as they always have done yet can end it as different people. So it was to be in the case of Neil Shaw and Jim Wade. They were the two security guards to
whom the responsibility of guarding the bullion in the Brinks Mat warehouse fell upon.