James Deegan - John Carr

Quickly, he updated them, and listened to the response.

Then he said, ‘We can take the entire back off it if you want, sir, but the hostages could be in living quarters directly underneath the rear deck for all we know. Meanwhile, the target will be inside Moroccan territorial waters in five minutes, I say again five minutes . Please advise whether we are free to pursue into Moroccan airspace. If not, please advise course of action, over.’

Again, he listened.

Then he turned to Jorge Fernández.

‘Fucking hell, Jorge,’ he shouted. ‘What a balls-up. The Moroccans have pulled back their ships and HQ can’t get any sense out of Rabat – it looks like they’re swerving it, they don’t want the blood of the hostages on their hands. And now HQ are swerving it, too. We’re cleared into Moroccan airspace, but the decision as to what to do is ours. Wankers.’

As Fernandez shook his head and smiled wearily, the captain keyed his mike again.

‘León, we are…’ he said.

But that was as far as he got.

‘ What the…? ’ he said. ‘Stand by, please.’

The helicopter had banked violently right, and out of the open door Ramos could see why.

Below them, the Lucky Lady had turned sharply inland.

The pilot came on the net. ‘Looks like he’s heading towards Ceuta,’ he said. ‘What do we do?’

Ramos, toying with the St Christopher’s medallion round his neck, thought for ten seconds – a long time to think, at times like this.

Then he said, ‘In the next few minutes, they’re going to have to make a decision about where they go ashore. We’re going to follow until they disembark. Maybe we can get a clear shot then. Any reason why that’s a shit plan, Jorge?’

‘No. I mean, it’s not a great plan, boss, but we are where we are.’

‘Do we put down?’ said the pilot, over the radio.

‘Not unless I say. Get us within range, but watch out for fucking MANPADs, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Oh, I will, don’t you fucking worry about that.’

Below them, the yacht ploughed on.

Capitán Ramon Ramos looked ahead.

The boat was heading directly for El Chorillo beach.

Crowded with sunbathers.

It was still doing close to fifty knots, and showing no sign of slowing

And Ramos suddenly realised what was happening.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he shouted. ‘ Fuck! ’

29.

THE FIRST TWO to die were swimmers who were run over and dismembered when the final terrorist – a short, stocky Moroccan called Khaled Benchakroun – deliberately ploughed through a bunch of people in the water.

The next two were a pair of teenaged girls, who were smeared like strawberry jam on the sand as he drove the 190-tonne boat ashore and straight over the top of them.

Six more people were killed when Benchakroun jumped from the stranded, heeling yacht and shot indiscriminately at horrified holidaymakers on the very beach on which he had spent his teenaged summers, selling T-shirts and trinkets to identical tourists.

The eleventh person to die was Benchakroun himself, his head blown half off by Jorge Fernández from the hovering helicopter three hundred metres offshore.

Under Ramos’ instructions, the helicopter then landed a hundred metres from the Lucky Lady .

Half of his men were sent to clear away those few people who had not run off the beach, and the other half began to approach the yacht, to engage the remaining terrorists, whom they had every reason to believe were still aboard, and to free the hostages.

But as they got within ten metres of the boat, a twenty-kilogram ball of Semtex was ignited by a timed detonator, initiated by Benchakroun in his last act before leaving the vessel, and five marines were killed, Jorge Fernández and Ramon Ramos among them.

30.

BY NOW, JUSTIN Nicholls was alone in his office, on the fifth floor of the SIS HQ at Vauxhall, digesting the news from the explosion on the beach at Ceuta and casting his eye over casualty reports.

The numbers would change – they always did – but the best current estimate was eighty-nine Britons killed aboard the MS Windsor Castle , out of a total of 104 dead, and seventeen dead on the beach, out of a total of seventy-one.

It could have been worse, he supposed – but then, if you lost more than a hundred of your own and still found yourself looking on the bright side, that was a very bad day.

His phone buzzed, quietly.

It was his assistant, Hugo.

‘Alec Palmer from the Spanish desk, sir,’ he said.

‘Thanks, Hugo,’ said Nicholls.

He heard a click and said, ‘Alec?’

Palmer sounded breathless.

‘The three female hostages taken from Marbella, Justin?’ he said. ‘We’re pretty sure that one of them is the Prime Minister’s oldest daughter, Charlotte.’

Justin Nicholls was a very intelligent man, with a double first in mathematics from Cambridge and over two decades in the SIS behind him; it was rare that he was lost for words.

This was one of those times.

He and his wife were family friends of the PM, Penelope Morgan, and he’d seen Charlotte Morgan grow up from a shy teenager to a confident young woman in the early stages of what was sure to be a glittering career at the Bar.

He shuddered at the thought of her being taken by those evil people, and blown apart on some foreign shore…

‘Justin?’ said Alec Palmer.

‘Yes. Sorry. Christ. Charlotte ? When did you hear this? How?’

‘We’ve just put it together. She was on holiday with a group of friends. One couple had a row and went back to their hotel – luckily for them, as it turns out. That couple contacted the consulate an hour or so ago to say that their friends hadn’t returned, and that they couldn’t raise them on their phones. They’ve just identified the other three males in the temporary morgue in Marbella, but there’s no sign of the three females. We’ve had a look at their phones. Nothing since about 1 p.m., which was roughly when they went onto the beach. So we’re assuming…’

‘Shit,’ breathed Nicholls. ‘ Shit . Did she not have RaSP with her?’

RaSP was Royalty and Specialist Protection, the Met Police element charged with protecting the Prime Minister and her family, among others.

‘She’d turned them down, apparently. Said she wanted to “live her life”.’

Nicholls was silent for a moment.

Then he said, ‘They must have targeted her. The whole thing, this was what the Málaga distraction was all about. It was aimed at seizing her.’

‘It certainly looks that way,’ said Palmer.

‘Her boyfriend’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does Downing Street know?’

‘It hasn’t broken with the media yet. But…’

‘But she’ll have known Charlie was out there,’ said Nicholls. ‘So she’ll have tried to get in touch with her. And…’

‘That was what I was thinking,’ said Palmer.

Nicholls was silent for a moment.

Then he said, ‘I’ll have to break it to the PM. Can you get me the latest from Ceuta? Last thing I saw, the boat was spread over a couple of acres and they were looking for bodies.’

‘Will do.’

‘Do you have someone getting alongside the surviving couple? We want whatever they have ASAP.’

‘The Málaga officer’s on his way.’

‘Good. Thanks, Alec.’

Nicholls ended the call and dialled his assistant.

‘I’m just going to see the chief, Hugo,’ he said. ‘Can you get me a car, please? When I’m finished upstairs I’ll need to go over to Downing Street.’

31.

THE MI6 INTELLIGENCE officer arrived at the Puente Romano hotel, on the Bulevar Príncipe Alfonso von Hohenlohe, just as Justin Nicholls climbed into the car to take him to Downing Street.