James Barrington - Overkill

Unlike the crossing at Waidhaus, getting over the German/French border had been a mere formality. All four vehicles had been ordered to stop, probably because of their Moscow plates and because they were quite obviously travelling together, but all the French Customs officers and gendarmes had done was inspect their passports. They hadn’t even bothered asking what the lorry was carrying or why twelve Russian diplomats were driving together across Europe.

The border crossing had been easy, but getting through Strasbourg had been a nightmare. As far as Modin had been able to discover, a water main had burst just to the west of the border by the Rhine. They had reached the end of the traffic queue whilst still on the autoroute and approaching Kehl, and by that time they had little choice. They couldn’t turn round on the autoroute, and the only two junctions they could have taken off it wouldn’t have helped. The one to the south ran down to Lahr and Offenburg, and the northerly turning would have taken them through Rheinau and on to Rastatt, but neither offered any crossings of the Rhine or of the border. They had had no option but to carry on through Strasbourg.

The city was in a state of chaos. The gendarmes had been doing their best, but Strasbourg was virtually grid-locked and all traffic was subject to diversions. Local traffic was being allowed through the centre, but all vehicles in transit had been forced to head south out of eastern Strasbourg on minor roads, through Plobsheim and Erstein, before being allowed to join the N83. From the junction to the west of Erstein, traffic had been flowing freely in both directions. Modin had hoped there would be no further problems around Strasbourg, but once they had joined the autoroute A35 past Illkirch-Graffenstaden, traffic had again come to a virtual standstill because of vehicles leaving the autoroute to get into the centre of the city.

‘At last,’ Bykov said, as the limousine accelerated away. The Mercedes was the last vehicle in the convoy, then heading north up the autoroute A4, taking the loop past Brumath and Hochfelden rather than the more direct, but much busier, road to Saverne.

‘Chaos,’ Modin agreed. ‘Total chaos. We have probably lost two or three hours. Order the convoy to increase speed. Aim for one hundred and ten kilometres an hour. We must make that ferry tonight.’

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

Hassan Abbas read the decrypted text from the email he had just received from Dmitri Trushenko and grunted in satisfaction. The Anton Kirov , Trushenko reported, had arrived safely at Gibraltar without apparently arousing any suspicion, and the weapon would be removed from the vessel within two days. The crate containing the device would be burnt and carefully broken and then removed from the dockyard along with the damaged fuel pump, associated fuel lines and other fire-damaged equipment from the Anton Kirov’s engine room, probably in a skip. It would then be delivered to a small warehouse in Gibraltar already hired by a local SVR agent. Meanwhile, the convoy carrying the London weapon was about to cross the German-French border, and delivery of the device to London should occur on schedule.

Abbas thought carefully before relaying the new information to Sadoun Khamil, and his message, when he had composed it, was much longer than usual. As well as the purely factual data provided by Trushenko, Abbas also included a proposal that he had discussed previously with Khamil but without reaching a decision. There was, Abbas reasoned, no reason to wait any longer. The Gibraltar device could now be detonated at any time and, though the positioning of the London weapon was crucial to the Russian operation, it made very little difference to the hidden agenda formulated by al-Qaeda. Therefore, Abbas concluded, there was no reason why they shouldn’t initiate the detonation sequences immediately.

He pressed ‘Send’ and checked to make sure the message was successfully transmitted. Then he shut down the computer, shut and locked the bedroom door and walked down the stairs to prepare a meal. It would, he knew, be at least two hours before Khamil would reply.

French Ministry of the Interior, rue des Saussaies, Paris

Dekker took out a pen and prepared to write.

‘French Customs stopped the lorry and the escorting cars, purely for a routine documents check,’ Lacomte said. ‘There are two young men in the cab of the lorry, which is, as we guessed, an articulated unit. There are three escorting cars, all Mercedes and all, in the opinion of the Strasbourg Gendarmes, armoured.’

‘Personnel?’ Colin Dekker asked.

‘The two saloons each contain a driver and three passengers, all young men, all with diplomatic passports.’

‘Those will be the Spetsnaz escort,’ Richter said. ‘What about the third car?’

‘The third,’ replied Lacomte, ‘is a long-wheel-base Mercedes limousine, containing a driver and escort in front of the partition and two passengers behind it. The Gendarmes report that one is a gentlemen of about sixty, and the other a man of about forty-five to fifty years old. As with the others, all four are carrying Russian diplomatic passports.’

‘Do we have an ID on that car – a registration number?’ Richter asked.

Lacomte looked back at the sheet of paper. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but you can easily identify it – the two saloons are light blue in colour, but the limousine is black.’

‘What are you thinking?’ Colin Dekker asked.

‘Those two passengers obviously aren’t Spetsnaz ,’ Richter said. ‘My guess is that they’re ranking SVR or GRU officers, along for the ride and to see the device positioned correctly. Those two, I really would like to talk to.’

‘I’m sure we can arrange that,’ said Dekker.

With the strength of the opposition known, Lacomte turned to the assault plan. Immobilization of the truck would be carried out as suggested by Trooper Jones, using plastic explosive. The Mercedes saloons were a different problem. There was no point in immobilizing them and it would, in fact, suit their purposes very well if they drove off at the first sign of trouble, but nobody seriously expected that to happen.

‘The thing about an armoured car,’ said Colin Dekker, reflectively, ‘is that in most cases it’s designed only to protect the occupants against their attackers. What isn’t generally realized is that it also protects the attackers from the occupants.’ He glanced round at a number of puzzled faces. ‘What I mean is, if the Spetsnaz troopers want to shoot at us, they’ll have to wind down a window, and if they do that the vehicle is no longer secure. I understand that your speciality,’ he said, turning to Erulin, ‘is accurate shot placement.’

‘Yes,’ Erulin nodded. ‘All our personnel have to score a minimum of ninety-three per cent on a two-hundred-metre range.’

‘And at, say, twenty to thirty metres?’

Erulin smiled somewhat grudgingly. ‘I would personally discharge any GIGN NCO who failed to achieve a perfect result.’

‘OK,’ said Colin Dekker. ‘So what I suggest is this. We bow to the wishes of the French Minister of the Interior, and my team hits the convoy. There are only four of us, and four vehicles to be attended to. Under normal circumstances, those would not be unreasonable odds, but these are not normal circumstances. I’m worried about crossfire, and about opposition personnel getting out of their vehicles on our blind side. We also don’t know what order the vehicles will be in. My guess would be Mercedes saloon, truck, limousine, second saloon, but that might not be the case if they sense trouble. They’ll certainly be linked by radio, and they might send both saloons ahead and let the limo drop back. It’s still all rather vague.