Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

‘We have to take that chance,’ the General said. ‘I’m not revealing the location of the memory stick. I don’t trust anyone but me with it.’ He frowned. ‘If the hit’s on the west coast, that buys us a bit more time.’ He didn’t sound optimistic.

‘Hang on,’ said Bethany. ‘How do we get from the plane to the boat?’

‘We freefall in,’ Danny said.

‘Onto the boat?’

‘No. Into the water.’

She gave him a slightly sick look.

‘Don’t worry about it. You did fine last time.’

‘It’s only the last inch that kills you,’ the General said with a grim smile. The old joke was received about as well as it had been when Danny had told it before they dropped into Jordan. ‘A long time since I did a freefall into the ocean,’ the General added.

‘We have a four-man Special Boat Service team on standby to freefall in with you,’ Forshaw said. ‘SBS headquarters in Poole are making a request to the Americans to allow a training drop in the vicinity of the frigate. Story is that it’s an anti-terrorist training exercise to recreate a similar scenario to the QE2 incident back in the seventies, when the Regiment dropped some guys in to the Atlantic to deal with a bomb scare on the ship. The aircraft has permission to land in the USA, refuel and take the four SBS guys back home. You’ll actually be seven, of course, but with three sets of tandem jumpers, it’ll look like four guys on the radar splash. If the Yanks want to make any enquiries, the four SBS guys will be on-site to answer their questions. They’ll tell them they dropped in solo. The frigate will have a RIB in the water to load you up. That’s a rigid inflatable boat,’ he added, for Bethany’s benefit. ‘Once you’ve docked, you can pose as Royal Navy, and you’ll be able to get off the naval station quickly.’

‘I thought you said it was home to the US Atlantic Fleet,’ Bethany said.

‘Right,’ said the General.

‘So won’t security be off the scale?’

‘Sure, if you want to get on to the base. Getting off’s much more straightforward.’

‘There’s going to be hundreds of crew members on that frigate that want to get straight off the base and into the nearest town to start drinking,’ Danny said. ‘Men and women. They’ll be bussing coachloads of them off site. We’ll be able to lose ourselves in among them.’

‘But there’ll be cameras, right?’

‘I’ll deal with that.’

‘Once you’re away from the naval station,’ Forshaw said, ‘you’ll have a vehicle waiting for you. Then it’s over to you.’

‘What’s the journey time from Norfolk to DC?’ Danny asked. He was working out timings in his head.

‘Three to four hours,’ the General said. They had reached the Land Rover. The driver had opened all the doors and was waiting behind the wheel to drive them off.

‘How long till the C-17 gets here?’

Forshaw didn’t immediately answer. He looked at the sky for a few seconds, then pointed to the west. Danny saw the lights of an aircraft in the distance. ‘That’s your ride,’ said Forshaw. ‘Let’s get going.’

They climbed into the Land Rover and drove across the tarmac.

It was midnight in Florida and Hamoud’s family were asleep. If he lay very still, he could hear his children breathing in the next room. Hamoud and Rabia had carried them, half asleep, back to the hotel from the nightly firework display at Magic Kingdom. They’d seemed to grow heavier the sleepier they became. Hamoud felt ashamed that he’d appeared to find it more difficult to carry Malick than Rabia did Melissa. He reminded himself that he was not, even now, back to his full strength, but it didn’t really help.

To cheer himself up, he thought back over their evening as he lay next to his sleeping wife. The wonder on the children’s faces as they walked through the park, absorbing the sights and the sounds. Their sweet patience as they stood in line for the rides, and their screams of excitement for the few minutes that each ride lasted. The way they craned their necks and widened their eyes during the firework display. The way they begged to be allowed to come back and see it again the following night.

The fireworks! Hamoud had never seen anything like it. It was astonishing to him that such an extravagant display could take place every night. He remembered reading somewhere that gun crime always increased in the vicinity of Walt Disney World during the firework display, because the sound of the fireworks masked the gunfire. He didn’t know if that was true or not, but he did know that somebody could have exploded a small bomb this evening and the sound would have been quite well camouflaged. The thought unnerved him. He pictured his family standing in that enormous, cooing crowd, eyes aloft, unable to defend themselves against an explosive device . . .

He shook his head against his pillow. He was not in control of his thoughts. Sometimes it was as if a person with a remote control was switching the channel in his head. Why would he want to imagine such catastrophes when they were almost certain not to happen? He was torturing himself, and he’d had quite enough of that from other people.

Hamoud was naked, but still very hot. He climbed out of bed – quietly, so that he didn’t wake Rabia – and put on the Mickey Mouse robe that he had found hanging in the wardrobe. He crept into the adjoining room and looked at his children. Moonlight was shining on them through the window and they looked very peaceful. He took his key card and tiptoed out into the corridor.

The lights were dim, but still brighter than the dark room, so he couldn’t see very well as he made his way to the ice machine. It buzzed noisily ten metres along the corridor. There was a tube that dispensed plastic cups. Hamoud took one and half filled it with ice. He was about to take it back to the room, where he would fill it with water from the bathroom tap, when he stopped. His eyes had grown used to the dim light now, and he saw a man standing at one end of the corridor. Was he of Middle Eastern ethnicity? He didn’t seem to be looking at Hamoud, or even to have noticed him. But it was strange. Even stranger when he turned and saw another brown-skinned man at the other end of the corridor. Why would they be standing there, as though guarding the place?

Hamoud felt an urge to be back under the covers next to his wife. He shuffled hurriedly back to his room, head down, clutching the plastic cup, avoiding eye contact with the man he was facing. He reached the door to his room and tapped the key card to the sensor. A red light turned green and he was about to open up when he glanced both ways along the corridor. The men were still there, still ignoring him, but he noticed something else. The room opposite, number 297, had a strip of light leaking out where the door met the floor. Two dark shadows interrupted it, the width of feet. Hamoud imagined somebody standing on the other side, listening. His spine froze, as cold as the ice in his cup. He hurried back into his room. He could sense Rabia sitting up in bed. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Ice,’ he said. ‘I was hot.’

He didn’t fill the cup with water. He climbed straight back into bed, still wearing the dressing gown.

They lay there, each of them aware that the other was wide awake, but neither of them wanting to break the silence.

Inside Room 297, a man stood listening.

He had brown skin. He wore a grey T-shirt and jeans. He heard the door of the room opposite open and close. Then a voice in his earpiece said: ‘Clear.’

He turned and walked back into the room and nodded at the other man sitting cross-legged on the floor.

He was a weird-looking guy. It wasn’t something you could easily put your finger on, but the man in the grey T-shirt had spent a long time with him, encouraging his crazy jihadist tendencies, and so he’d had plenty of time to work out that it was something to do with the shape of his face. It was unusually long and thin. When he’d had a beard, the face had seemed even longer and thinner. Like a cartoon character. It had worried the man in the grey T-shirt because the face was so distinctive. It was hard to go unnoticed in a crowd when you looked like that. Now, though, he had a smart new haircut and was clean shaven. He still looked a bit odd, but not totally peculiar. Without the face fungus, he at least wouldn’t turn heads. The only problem was the way he kept touching his chin, clearly not used to the unfamiliar absence of a beard. Read any of the counter-terrorism manuals and you’d learn that was a classic indicator. Tonight, however, nobody in the crowds would be observing the tics of the people around them. They’d be too busy looking at the sky.