James Barrington - Overkill

And at a single stroke, the two superpowers would effectively eliminate each other, leaving the way clear for a unified Arab nation to arise behind the banner of al-Qaeda and impose a new world order upon the shattered remnants of humanity. That was the plan which had been conceived by Hassan Abbas so long ago, and which offered what was probably the last great hope for the Arab states.

All Khamil could do was hope that the leaders of al-Qaeda would see sense, would stop talking and act, before it was too late.

Royal Air Force Northolt, West London

The five Royal Air Force officers looked up as Paul Richter opened the door and walked into the aircrew briefing room. Richter hadn’t slept or shaved for the better part of two days and was still wearing the jeans and shirt he’d pulled out of the cupboard in his office, augmented by his leather motorcycle jacket. ‘Yes? Who are you and what do you want?’ the squadron leader pilot snapped.

‘I’m Richter – your passenger.’

The RAF officer muttered something that sounded suspiciously like ‘Good God’ under his breath but gestured to a seat at the back of the room before turning back to the other officers and the en-route planning charts spread out in front of them. Four minutes later the squadron leader stood up, glanced at his watch and announced, ‘Briefing complete.’ Then he turned to Richter. ‘Ready, Mr Richter?’

Richter nodded, scrambled to his feet and followed the green-clad figure out of the room, across the tarmac outside and up the stairs into the cabin of the HS146. Richter was the only passenger so he chose the seat that offered the greatest legroom, sat down and strapped himself in. The co-pilot looked at him from the open door to the cockpit. ‘Anything you want?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Richter said, nodding. ‘I want to go to sleep. Wake me up if an engine catches fire or a wing falls off, but otherwise don’t call me until we’re short finals. Oh, you may get two-way with a Special Forces Flight Herky-bird out of Gibraltar that’s heading for the same place we are. If so, pass on my best wishes and say I’ll see them on the ground. I don’t want to talk to them.’ Two minutes later Richter was sound asleep.

American Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London

‘So what the hell does all that mean?’ John Westwood demanded.

Roger Abrahams had been called down to the Communications Suite fifteen minutes earlier, apparently to be briefed by the Secret Intelligence Service duty officer on a secure telephone link. In fact, he’d found himself talking with – or more accurately listening to – a man called Simpson, who’d declined to state his rank or department, but who had admitted that he was Paul Richter’s immediate superior.

‘It’s bad news,’ Abrahams replied. ‘The British managed to hack their way into the Russian mainframe controlling the satellite and the weapons and changed all the passwords, and that should really have been the end of it. Unfortunately, just when they thought all they had left to do was locate each nuke and send in a bunch of techies to take it to pieces, somebody else logged on to the system, using what appears to be a Yiddish user-name and calling from France.’

‘Oh, shit,’ Westwood muttered.

‘Exactly. According to this Simpson character, this new user – the name he’s using is “Dernowi”, which is close to the Yiddish for “The Prophet” – is using some kind of a backdoor code to gain access to the system, so there’s no way of locking him out.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘Simpson has already couriered us a disk copy of all the weapon locations in the States, and I’ve had the file sent by secure email to Langley. Apart from that, there’s not a hell of a lot we can do. As soon as I got the message from Simpson I contacted Walter Hicks, and he’s probably on his way to see the President right now. Obviously all our assets over there will stay at their current state of readiness, not that that will help if this Dernowi decides to nuke us all to hell.’

‘So?’

‘So the Brits have sent a team into France to locate Dernowi and take him out. It’s the only way they can be certain of stopping an attack.’

Blagnac Airport, Toulouse, south-west France

The HS146 touched down smoothly just before eleven fifty, local time, and taxied off the runway to a parking area well away from the passenger terminal. With a sense of déjà vu , Richter looked across the hardstanding at the bulk of the C–130 Hercules with RAF markings standing a few yards away. Ross was waiting for him at the side door of a hangar. Richter greeted him briefly, then walked into the building. Colin Dekker was bent over a laptop computer which was hitched to a mobile telephone. ‘Colin,’ Richter said, ‘we’ve got to stop meeting like this.’

Dekker looked up and grinned at him. ‘Tell me about it. OK, your Mr Simpson has been busy while you’ve been poncing about over France in your executive jet. Where he got them from I’ve no idea, but there are three V6 Renault Espaces parked outside this hangar full of fuel and ready to go. They’re our transport. Then he kicked Lacomte and Lacomte kicked France Telecom into action, so we now know the exact address this Dernowi guy is using. I got that a few minutes ago by email from London. We also,’ Dekker added, ‘know Dernowi’s name, or at least the name he used when he applied for his landline telephone.’

‘Which is?’ Richter asked, as Dekker snapped the laptop closed and pulled out the data cable that linked it to the mobile phone.

‘Abdullah Mahmoud.’

‘An Arab. That makes a lot more sense. Anything known on him?’

Dekker shook his head. ‘Nothing yet, but we’ve got traces running through all the allied databases. It’s probably an alias, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

‘And where is he?’ Richter asked.

‘A charming little place called St Médard. Apparently, it’s a hamlet near a village called Manciet, on the N124 beyond Auch, and it’s about a hundred and ten clicks west of here on pretty average roads, according to the map, so we’d best get moving.’

Buraydah, Saudi Arabia

Sadoun Khamil had left his computer running, and the Internet connection open, but he’d left the room for a few minutes to instruct one of his men to prepare him some food and drink for what he anticipated would be a very long night. Three minutes after he’d walked out, his email client software emitted a soft double-tone that indicated receipt of an email, but it was another six minutes before he returned and checked the screen. Decrypting the message took a further four minutes, and then Khamil hunched forward and read the text with great care.

The response from Pakistan was all that he had dared hope. The al-Qaeda leaders had approved the immediate implementation of El Sikkiyn . The issue of the fatwa would follow, as would the leaked details of the Russian operation, but Khamil’s instructions were clear and unambiguous – he was to instruct Abbas to complete the final phase immediately.

For a few moments, Khamil did nothing but re-read the message to ensure that he had made no mistake. He considered sending Abbas a message in clear, or even telephoning him, but decided that he would follow the agreed procedure. He composed two short paragraphs to Abbas, added the text he had received from Pakistan, and encrypted the entire message. He pasted the apparently corrupted text into an existing email marketing message, chose a suitable route and pressed the send button.

He left the computer running and the door to the room open, so that he would hear if any further email messages arrived for him. Then he walked into the main room where four of his men were sitting cross-legged on the floor watching an Arabic-language broadcast on the television. He instructed them to switch on the satellite receiver and watch the American CNN station. That, he knew from past experience, would probably be the first channel to break the news. If, that is, there was enough remaining of CNN to make any kind of a broadcast after El Sikkiyn began.