James Barrington - Overkill

‘What nationality?’ Abrahams asked.

‘British, sir, definitely.’

‘OK,’ Abrahams said. ‘Make sure the tape’s running and put him through.’

There was a click and a brief silence. ‘Hullo,’ Abrahams said.

‘Good morning, Roger,’ the familiar voice said, and Abrahams could detect the urgency behind the casual drawl. ‘I presume you’re taping this, so I won’t bother repeating myself.’ The voice paused, then spoke three words. ‘Anatidae. Ten ten.’

The line went dead, but Abrahams had completely understood what the caller meant. He looked at his watch, then pressed the speed-dial code for the motor pool’s number. ‘This is Abrahams. I need a car, now.’

Le Moulin au Pouchon , St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

‘Excellent,’ Hassan Abbas murmured, reading the decrypted email message from Dmitri Trushenko for the third time.

In fact, there had been two messages from the Russian. The first had simply confirmed that he had reached his secure location but did not, of course, reveal where that location was. When Abbas had read that, he’d heaved a sigh of relief. Obviously the comparatively long silence from the Russian had been caused by nothing more sinister than Trushenko’s journey from his apartment in Moscow to wherever he had chosen to hide whilst the final stages of Podstava were played out. Abbas suspected privately that Trushenko might even have left the Confederation of Independent States, maybe gone to Greece or Turkey. But it didn’t matter where he was, as long as the Russian authorities couldn’t find him.

The second message contained the specifics of the positioning of the last two weapons. The Russian coaster was exactly on schedule for its planned arrival in Gibraltar, and the convoy carrying the London device should, according to the latest mobile telephone message from the escort, arrive in Germany that morning. Unless something totally unforeseen occurred, both weapons would be positioned precisely on time.

Abbas rubbed his hands together, opened up his word processor and began preparing the text of the message he would sent to Sadoun Khamil in Saudi Arabia.

French Ministry of the Interior, rue des Saussaies, Paris

The colonel sat straighter in his chair. ‘What, exactly, is red mercury?’

‘Red mercury was the substance that frightened Sam Cohen most. It’s a mercury compound which has been subjected to massive irradiation in a nuclear reactor, and which when exploded creates tremendous heat and pressure. Exactly the same kind of heat and pressure that’s needed to trigger a fusion weapon. So you no longer need access to weapons-grade plutonium, or any plutonium at all, in fact. And red mercury is cheap, especially by comparison with the cost of plutonium.’

‘And?’ Lacomte asked.

‘And the Russians have been making it and selling it on the black market for years, although all sales stopped about four years ago. One of their biggest customers was Iraq, which is enough to make most people lose some sleep straight away.’

Lacomte looked puzzled. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Mr Beatty, but I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with us. Why are you here? What, exactly, is the nature of any threat to us in Western Europe?’

Richter nodded. ‘I’ll explain that in a moment. That’s the end of the history lesson. Last week a USAF SR–71A Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft was pulled out of retirement at Beale Air Force Base in the States and made a totally illegal over-flight of a section of territory in north-west Russia. We believe that the Blackbird encountered opposition fighters during its flight and had to take evasive action. Precisely what happened we don’t know, but certainly it suffered battle damage and there was virtually no fuel left in its tanks when the aircraft landed at an Air Force base in Scotland. The Americans were very reluctant to explain the aircraft’s mission, but we finally discovered that the Blackbird had been sent to photograph a hill that wasn’t there any more.’

Tony Herron still looked puzzled, and the DST men looked totally confused. ‘Hill? What hill, Mr Beatty?’ one asked.

‘Just a hill,’ Richter said, ‘deep in the Tundra. Let me explain. The Americans were puzzled, because the hill had been destroyed by a nuclear detonation of an unusual sort. The Blackbird flew to photograph the hole where the hill had been, but its principal mission was to take radiation measurements of the area. After that they had to sit down and think it out.’ Richter poured water into a glass and resumed the story. ‘We got involved after a man called Newman disappeared from the British Embassy in Moscow. He had apparently been killed in a road accident, but when we examined the body it was immediately apparent that it wasn’t Newman’s. That was significant enough, but when added to the fact that Newman was the SIS Head of Station in Moscow, it became obvious that something was going on. We surmised that he had been snatched by the SVR for terminal questioning.

‘We checked our files, and found that Newman’s deputy had acted as a translator, and had accompanied a party of Western businessmen on a tour in northwestern Russia, a tour which took them to within a mere hundred miles or so of the site of the hill. Then a CIA source advised us that the radiation analysis didn’t make sense. The Blackbird flew a fairly short time after the explosion, but the aircraft detectors registered no significant radiation.

‘Finally, there was the short and turbulent history of the neutron bomb, the evidence that the Russians demonstrably weren’t decommissioning their arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the fact that black-market sales of red mercury by Russia stopped about four years ago. We put all that lot together, and we came up with a theory.’

The Gold Room, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

The Joint Chiefs had left the Emergency Conference Room as soon as Walter Hicks and General Rogers had completed the briefing. Despite its name, the ECR was not designed for conferences, only for briefings, and the Joint Chiefs had immediately moved into the so-called ‘Gold Room’ conference suite, also on the third floor of the Pentagon.

The Secretary of Defense had not been present at the Kentucky Rose briefing, because he had been closeted in the White House Situation Room with the President, but by mid-morning he, too, was in the Gold Room. After a lengthy telephone conversation between the Secretary of Defense and the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff elected to upgrade the alert status of the US forces immediately to DEFCON THREE.

Because of the time zone differences between Moscow and the east coast of America – eight hours – and because source RAVEN had specified the eleventh of the month as the actual date of implementation, the Joint Chiefs also instituted a formal countdown. It began at 0600 Eastern Standard Time on the ninth, and assumed that implementation of the assault would take place at midnight Moscow time – sixteen hundred EST – on the eleventh. That was designated H-Hour, and it was exactly thirty-four hours away. The clock was running.

Regents Park, London

The black Mercedes surged away from the traffic lights, drove rapidly down Park Road and stopped with a squeal of tyres at the western end of Hanover Gardens.

‘Wait, please,’ Abrahams said to the driver, and strode off briskly through Hanover Gardens towards Regents Park. He was a few metres from the second footbridge when he saw the slim figure beside The Holme. Piers Taylor wasn’t feeding the ducks. He was pacing up and down beside the Boating Lake and when Westwood stepped off the footbridge he strode forward to meet him.