Colin Forbes - Year of the Golden Ape

^ Oil drums – symbolically enough – which had been brought to the house by truck, were placed at intervals across a vast lawn which ran away from the front of the house into the fields beyond. They were placed at intervals in two rows at right-angles to the house, each row one hundred and ten feet apart – the width of the ^ Challenger. ^ Earlier, Winter had paced out seven hundred and fifty feet from the steps of the house and he ended up with the tanker's bow in a field close to an old oak tree. Already several men were muttering about the size of the thing.

^ From the steps of the house a double row of posts was erected right out to the distant oak tree, and this marked out the catwalk. Other poles represented the derricks and the foremast; a circle of rope on the port bow located the helicopter landing point. Then Winter took the team to the roof of the house which was fifty feet above the ground. They were now standing on the bridge of the ^ Challenger, ^ staring towards the distant oak which was the bow of the ship.

^ 'It's bigger than I thought,' LeCat admitted, staring at the distant oak.

^ 'It is a steep drop to the main deck,' Armand Bazin, a younger member of the team commented with surprise as he gazed down over the edge of the parapet.

^ 'Steeper than you think,' Winter warned. 'We are fifty feet up and it's a sixty-foot drop from the island bridge of the ^ Challenger. ^ All of you go down now on to the lawn, walk along the main deck, get some idea of what it will be like. And look up at this roof -which is the bridge. It will be like looking up a cliff…'

^ They got ready to leave, but first Winter insisted on a huge cleaning-up operation. The oil drums were hidden inside a wood in the grounds. The sticks and poles which had represented catwalk and derricks and foremast were broken up and burned. Winter personally supervised a thorough scrubbing of the living-room floor to make sure that no traces were left of the chalk marks which had outlined the main deck. Furniture and carpets were put back as they had found them there.

^ The debris of meals and drinking sessions – cans and bottles -were buried in a deep hole inside the wood, and French cigarette butts also went into the hole. No one had been allowed to smoke outside the house. These precautions LeCat appreciated – he remembered the care he himself had insisted on when the house on Dusquesne Street in Vancouver had been abandoned, when all the rooms had been Hoovered. And this, of course, was something Winter knew nothing about, just as he never dreamt there was a nuclear device hidden aboard the ^ Pecheur.

^ Late on the afternoon of Tuesday January 14. Winter counted the sketches of the tanker prior to burning them. Tomorrow they would fly to Alaska.

^ Because Harper was out of town, Sullivan had to wait until Tuesday before he could phone the chairman of Harper Tankships at his London office in Leadenhall Street. Which meant that while Winter was packing up at Cosgrove Manor, Sullivan was still in Hamburg.

^ 'In a way I've got nothing,' Sullivan told Victor Harper, 'only the fact that a hired thug tried to kill me in a bar when I went round asking about your company. But it happened in Hamburg -as though there's something here they don't want me to find out. What connection has your firm got with Hamburg?'

^ 'Nothing that I can see might have any bearing on this situation.' Harper's precise voice sounded irritated. 'Is this whole business becoming rather a wild goose chase? And who is this friend you refer to so mysteriously – the one who told you this yarn about French terrorists?'

^ 'You've never had any connection with Hamburg at all?' Sullivan persisted.

^ 'Couple of 50,000-tonners – the ^ Challenger ^ first, then its twin, the ^ Chieftain. ^ Both of them at the Wilhelm Voss yard. Paul Hahnemann is the boss – good chap, typically German; he drives the place like a steam engine. Both delivered bang on time, of course. I don't see how he could help…'

^ 'Frankly, neither do I. Where are those ships now? In the Middle East?'

^ 'Neither of them. ^ Chieftain ^ is in dry-dock for repairs at Genoa, ^ Challenger ^ is on the Alaska-San Francisco run. Better come home, Larry. Call it a day…'

^ Sullivan put down the phone and yawned. He had made a night of it with Messmer before the Frenchman caught the morning train back to Paris. Paul Hahnemann wasn't going to tell him anything, so why hang about? Yawning again, he began packing his bag.

^ The telephone message travelled a devious route before it reached Gamal Tafak at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Damascus. Originating from Paris, the call was taken by a man in Athens who then phoned a number in Beirut. From there Ahmed Riad phoned the message to Damascus. Tafak was just about to have lunch when Riad called him from the Lebanese capital.

^ 'Excellency, KLM Flight 401 from Amsterdam to Paris has just been hi-jacked by terrorists. There is going to be trouble about this…'

^ 'The plane is carrying three senior Royal-Dutch Shell executives, Including a managing director…'

^ Tafak replaced the receiver. If anyone had been listening in to the call, which was unlikely but not impossible the way the American intelligence services were tapping phones all over the world these days, the conversation would have seemed innocent enough.

^ But the call told Tafak that the diversionary operation was under way. This had been Winter's idea, as was the timing. While LeCat set up listening posts to check on any loose security Winter had come up with a more imaginative plan. To mask the hi-jack of the ship, he had suggested a plane should be seized a few days before the real event, something to keep the newspapers busy, to divert anyone who might have heard a whisper of what was really going to happen.

^ The hi-jack had been organised by the serious-faced man sitting on Tafak's right at the recent secret meeting in the Syrian desert. The KLM plane would now be kept hopping about from airport to airport while the main operation was under way. It still seemed easy enough to hi-jack a plane; Tafak hoped it would prove equally easy to hi-jack a 50,000-ton oil tanker.

^ 'It did strike me that if someone wanted to sabotage one of Harper's tankers they might try and check the layout and structure of the tanker they were after. Can you tell me, Mr Hahnemann, has anyone asked to see blueprints of a Harper tanker recently?'

^ At the last moment before leaving Hamburg, Sullivan's natural obstinacy had made him stay. He had made an appointment to see Paul Hahnemann very late in the afternoon, so late that it was dark outside, too dark to see the falling snow. A letter of introduction from Victor Harper – 'to whom it may concern' – had got him inside the Wilhelm Voss shipyard. His Lloyd's of London identification had convinced the German he ought to see the Englishman. Hahnemann was a discreet man.

^ 'I find that a strange question,' the German said woodenly. 'You say you have heard vague rumours – about Harper. The shipping world lives on rumours. Surely you know that by now?'

^ 'I withdraw the question.' Sullivan smiled amiably. 'I've told you what I've been doing for the past week-coming up the Atlantic coast. Two nights ago someone tried to kill me in a Hamburg bar. That makes me think there is something – something in Hamburg I'm getting too close to.'

^ 'I don't see how I can help you,' the German replied. 'We have no one suspect here. We are very careful who we let inside this yard – you yourself had to produce proof of identity before you were allowed in.'

^ Sullivan was in a difficult position. He realised that Hahnemann was too shrewd by half, that he wanted some evidence, that there was no evidence to show him. Sullivan wasn't even sure what he was looking for himself.