Питер Джеймс - Billionaire

Nasir Hoos knew that if anyone blocked the Strait of Hormuz, they would be turning off half the world’s oil supply. It was for that reason that the West poured all the aid into the Oman that it would accept. In return for the aid, the Oman policed the Strait. In eight years of gunboat patrol, Hoos had developed a policeman’s nose for what was right and wrong: for the lights of a friendly tanker, or a local fishing dhow; the occasional dark hulk of a Soviet sub coming up for a sniff of air. Some vessels smelt fine, others stank. Right now, he was standing in a fishing dhow; it had been at sea for several days. The stink of putrefying fish should have been overpowering, but there was no smell of fish at all.

‘Commander, Commander, come here!’ a voice shouted from the stern. He walked quickly down the boat. The Petty Officer was standing beside the open fish hatch. ‘Look down there,’ he said, shining his torch.

Hoos looked, and a cold prickle began to run the length of his back: the beam of the torch lit up one oval metal object after the next: the hatch was packed full of mines.

Three hours later they were berthed at the naval base on Goat Island, and the US bomb disposal experts were opening up the first mine. Hoos, some distance away, paced up and down the quay. Dawn was breaking now, but he did not feel tired. He saw one of the Americans climb out of the hatch, get off the boat, and walk up towards him. The American pulled a packet of Chesterfield cigarettes out of his pocket, and pulled a cigarette out of the pack.

‘Reckon you’ve got yourself a nice can of worms there, Commander.’

Hoos nodded.

The American lit the cigarette and blew the smoke out of his mouth; the breeze carried it away. ‘They’re not ordinary mines, Commander. Fact is, they’re the first I ever came across. I’ve heard about them — but never seen one before. He dragged hard on the cigarette, then pulled some tobacco strands off his tongue. He stared out towards the Gulf, and pursed his lips.

‘What precisely are they?’

‘I’ll tell you what they ain’t, Commander: they ain’t just your old Second World War surplus flogged off by some two-bit back-street arms dealer. Those are nuclear mines; they’re stuffed damned full of uranium. First damned nuke mines I ever saw.’

There was a long pause before the American continued. ‘Whole new breed, those, Commander; must be Russian-made. One of those would take a supertanker out, and you wouldn’t be able to find any bits left over big enough to cover the end of a matchstick.’

Hoos looked at the sky; it was going to be a fine, blistering-hot day. He looked out across the Strait at the shadow of Iran, at the red tip of the sun that was rising above it; he was filled with a deep sense of foreboding. After thirty years of waiting, he had a hideous feeling that the worst fears of the Western World might be coming true.

One of the first men outside Umm Al Amnah to learn of the discovery was General Isser Aaron Ephraim, head of the Mossad, Israel’s overseas secret intelligence service. He sat up with a start as one of the two telephones beside his bed in his Tel Aviv apartment began to ring, and answered it in a quiet voice so as not to wake his wife. It was Chaim Weiszman, Director of Israeli Military Intelligence; he explained what had happened. ‘This anything to do with you, Isser?’

‘No, Chaim.’ Ephraim thought hard for some moments. ‘Four sailors disappeared off Haifa last week — Monday, I think. Patrol boat vanished; no one’s found any wreckage or any bodies so far.’

‘The Prime Minister’s going crazy. Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is going to be to the Government if this gets out?’

‘I can imagine. It doesn’t make any sense, Chaim — I’m stunned. Who knows about this so far?’

‘So far, the Commander of the gunboat, the US military in the Oman, and ourselves. They need to find out fast if any other dhows have been out there dropping mines into the Strait. If there have been, then they have to stop all shipping, at once. But equally, if this is some weird hoax, they don’t want to cause a panic; once any shipping crews get word someone may have been dumping nuclear mines in their path, the Persian Gulf — and half the world’s oceans and ports — are going to be knee-deep in abandoned tankers.’

‘Four dead sailors and fifteen nuclear mines doesn’t sound like a hoax to me, Chaim,’ said Ephraim.

‘Nor to me. I think we’d better have an early start; meet me in my office at eight.’

‘Eight o’clock,’ agreed Ephraim. He replaced the receiver, sat up in his bed in the warm dark room, and thought for a long time. He had a sick feeling that ran from the pit of his stomach to the top of his throat, and a sweat began to break out over his body, increasing in intensity, until he felt he was engulfed in a flowing river. After a while it subsided and as it slowly dried, he began to feel very cold. He had a sense of apprehension deeper than he had ever felt before. All his life he had faced trouble; when it hadn’t come to him, he had gone to search it out and, if not always conquer it, at least somehow come to terms with it. Something in the night air carried vibrations of a new kind of trouble through him; his brain turned itself inside out trying to make sense of it, and failed. The General lapsed into an exhausted doze.

From the time Baenhaker’s Volvo had slewed into the deep ditch beside the motorway to the time the ambulance arrived, a mere thirty minutes had elapsed. During that time, the police had halted all traffic, put up accident warning signs, cleared glass and metal off the carriageway, re-started the traffic, and given Baenhaker, who appeared to have stopped breathing, the kiss of life.

‘Forget it, he’s a goner.’

Police Constable Harris looked up at the ambulanceman despairingly; it was the second bad smash he’d been to this morning. ‘He’s got a pulse!’

The ambulanceman took Baenhaker’s wrist; after a couple of moments he nodded, and the team went into action. Twice, during the process of separating the wreckage of Baenhaker from the wreckage of his car, his heart stopped. Twice, the team restarted it.

‘Don’t know why we’re bothering,’ said Jim Connelly, the ambulance driver. ‘There’s no way he’s going to make it through.’

The rest of the crew agreed with him. Probable fractured skull, femur and ribs, probable ruptured spleen, possible fractured spine, massive blood loss from internal haemorrhage, punctured lung and massive lacerations; and that was without looking too closely. But they kept on trying; less bits than were left of Baenhaker had been reassembled into perfectly acceptable human beings in the past; not often, perhaps, but enough times to make their efforts with every accident victim worthwhile. Eventually, they hoisted him into the ambulance and, with fluid pouring into his veins, pumping oxygen via a breathing machine and giving him a cardiac massage every time his pulse faded, raced him, with little optimism, to the West Middlesex Hospital.

Three years earlier, Alex Rocq had also been smashed to pieces, when his life had collapsed. Although his wounds had not required the surgeon’s knife, the scars that remained were deeper than any surgeon’s knife could have inflicted. The first disaster had been when his wife of less than two years had walked out, accusing him, not entirely inaccurately, of being more in love with his work than with her; the second disaster, within weeks of her leaving, was when the stockbroking firm, for which he had slaved for five years, and which had just made him their youngest-ever partner, went to the wall.

As the partners themselves were personally liable for the debts of the firm, Rocq lost everything he owned: his Paddington mews house, his car, and all his savings. He also lost his Membership of the London Stock Exchange, with little chance of regaining it for a long while, if ever.