The Deceiver (47 page)

At dawn of the third day, Captain Holst stared out of the forward windows of his bridge at the slowly lightening sea. There was no mistaking the flare that had burst into the sky straight ahead of him, hung for a moment, then fluttered back to the water. Maroon. A distress flare. Peering through the half-light, he could make out something else a mile or two ahead of him: the yellow fluttering of a flame. He ordered his engine room to make half-speed, lifted a handset, and called one of his passengers in his bunk below. The man joined him less than a minute later.

Captain Holst pointed silently through the windshield. On the calm water ahead of them, a forty-foot motor fishing vessel rolled drunkenly. She had clearly suffered an explosion in her engine area; a black smudge of smoke drifted up from below her deck, mingling with a flicker of orange flame. Her topsides were scorched and blackened.

“Where are we?” asked Stephen Johnson.

“In the North Sea, between Yorkshire and the Dutch coast,” said Holst.

Johnson took the Captain’s binoculars and focused on the small fishing boat ahead.
Fair Maid, Whitby
, could be made out on her bow.

“We have to stop and give them help,” Holst said in English. “It is the law of the sea.”

He did not know what his own vessel was carrying, and he did not want to know. His employers had given him their orders and an extremely extravagant bonus. His crew had also been taken care of financially. The crated olives from Cyprus had come onboard at Paphos and were totally legitimate. During the two-day stopover in Sirte, on the coast of Libya, part of the cargo had been removed and then returned. It looked the same. He knew there must be illicit cargo in there somewhere, but he could not spot it and did not want to try.

The proof that his cargo was extremely dangerous lay in the six passengers—two were from Cyprus, and four more were from Sirte. And the changing of the numerals as soon as he had passed the Pillars of Hercules. In twelve hours, he expected to be rid of them all. He would sail back through the North Sea, convert again to the
Regina VI
at sea, and return calmly to his home port of Limassol, a much richer man.

Then he would retire. The years of running strange cargoes of men and crates into West Africa, the bizarre orders now coming to him from his new Luxembourg-based owners—all would be a thing of the past. He would retire at fifty with his savings enough for him and his Greek wife, Maria, to open their little restaurant in the Greek islands and live out their days in peace.

Johnson looked dubious. “We can’t stop,” he said.

“We have to.”

The light was getting better. They saw a figure, scorched and blackened, emerge from the wheelhouse of the fishing vessel, stagger to the forward deck, make a pain-wracked attempt to wave, then fall forward onto his face.

Another IRA officer came up behind Holst. He felt the muzzle of a gun in his ribs.

“Sail on by,” said a flat voice.

Holst did not ignore the gun, but he looked at Johnson. “If we do, and they are rescued by another ship, as they will be sooner or later, they will report us. We will be stopped and asked why we did that.”

Johnson nodded.

“Then ram them,” said the one with the gun. “We don’t stop.”

“We can give first aid and call up the Dutch coast guard,” said Holst. “No one comes aboard. When the Dutch cutter appears, we continue. They will wave their thanks and think no more of it. It will cost us thirty minutes.”

Johnson was persuaded. He nodded. “Put up your gun,” he said.

Holst moved his speed control to “full astern,” and the
Regina
slowed rapidly. Giving an order in Greek to his helmsman, he left the bridge and went down to the waist before moving up to the foredeck. He looked down at the approaching fishing vessel, then waved a hand to the helmsman. The engines went to “midships,” and the momentum of the
Regina
carried her slowly up to the stricken fisherman.

“Ahoy,
Fair Maid
!” called Holst, peering down as the fishing boat came under the bow. They saw the fallen man on the foredeck try to stir, then faint again. The
Fair Maid
bobbed along the side of the larger
Regina
until she came to the
Regina’s
waist, where the deck rail was lower. Holst walked down his ship and shouted an order in Greek for one of his crew to throw a line aboard the
Fair Maid.

There was no need. As the fisherman slid past the waist of the
Regina
, the man on the foredeck came to, jumped up with remarkable agility for one so badly burned, seized a grappling hook beside him, and hurled it over the rail of the
Regina
, securing it fast to a cleat on the
Fair Maid’s
bow. A second man ran out of the fishing boat’s cabin and did the same at the stern. The
Fair Maid
stopped drifting.

Four more men ran from the cabin, vaulted to the roof, and jumped straight over the rail of the
Regina
. It happened so fast and with such coordination that Captain Holst had only time to shout, “
Was zum Teufel ist denn das
?”

The men were all dressed alike: black one-piece overalls, cleated rubber boots, and black woolen caps. Their faces were blackened, too, but not by soot. A very hard hand took Captain Holst in the solar plexus, and he went down on his knees. He would later say that he had never seen the men of the SBS, the Special Boat Squadron, the seaborne equivalent of the Special Air Service, in action before, and he never wished to again.

By now, there were four Cypriot crewmen on the main deck. One of the men in black shouted a single order to them, in Greek, and they obeyed. They went flat onto the deck, face down, and stayed there. Not so the four IRA members, who came pouring out of the side door of the superstructure. They all had handguns.

Two had the sense to see quickly that a handgun is a poor bargain when faced with a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine carbine. They threw their hands up and tossed their pistols to the deck. Two tried to use their guns. One was lucky: He took the brief burst in the legs and survived to spend his life in a wheelchair. The fourth was not so lucky and collected four bullets in the chest.

There were now six black-clad men swarming over the deck area of the
Regina
. The third to come aboard had been Tom Rowse. He ran for the companionway that led upward to the bridge. As he reached the wing, Stephen Johnson emerged from the interior. Seeing Rowse, he threw his hands in the air.

“Don’t shoot, Sass-man. It’s over!” he shouted.

Rowse stood aside and jerked the barrel of his machine pistol toward the staircase.

“Down,” he said.

The old IRA man began to descend to the main deck. There was a movement behind Rowse, someone in the door of the wheelhouse. He sensed the movement, half turned, and caught the crash of the handgun. The bullet plucked at the shoulder of his cloth overall. There was no time to pause or shout. He fired as they had taught him, the quick double-burst, then another, loosing two pairs of nine-millimeter slugs in less than half a second.

He had an image of the figure in the doorway that had taken four bullets in the chest, being thrown back into the doorjamb, cannoning forward again—the wild swing of the corn-blond hair. Then she had been on the steel deck, quite dead, a thin trickle of blood seeping from the mouth he had kissed.

“Well, well,” said a voice at his elbow. “Monica Browne. With an ‘e.’ ”

Rowse turned. “You bastard,” he said slowly. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“Not knew. Suspected,” McCready said gently. In civilian clothes, he had come at a more sedate pace out of the fishing vessel when the shooting was over.

“We had to check her out, you see, Tom, after she made contact with you. She is—was—indeed Monica Browne, but Dublin-born and bred. Her first marriage, at twenty, took her to Kentucky for eight years. After the divorce, she married Major Eric Browne, much older but rich. Through his alcoholic haze, he no doubt had not a whit of suspicion of his young wife’s fanatical devotion to the IRA. And yes, she did run a stud farm, but not at Ashford, Kent, England. It was at Ashford, County Wicklow, Ireland.”

The team spent two hours tidying up. Captain Holst proved keen to cooperate. He admitted there had been an open-sea transfer of crates, to a fishing boat off Finisterre. He gave the name, and McCready passed it to London for the Spanish authorities. With speed, they would intercept the arms for the ETA while still on board the trawler—a way for the SIS to say thank you for the Spanish help over the Gibraltar affair.

Captain Holst also agreed that he had been just within British territorial waters when the boarding took place. After that, it would be a matter for the lawyers, so long as Britain had jurisdiction. McCready did not want the IRA men removed to Belgium and promptly liberated, like Father Ryan.

The two bodies were brought to the main deck and laid side by side, covered in sheets from the cabins below. With the aid of the Greek-Cypriot crewmen, the covers were taken from the holds, and the cargo searched. The commandos of the SBS team did that. After two hours, the lieutenant who commanded them reported to McCready.

“Nothing, sir.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“A lot of olives, sir.”

“Nothing but olives?”

“Some crates marked office machinery.”

“Containing?”

“Office machinery, sir. And the three stallions. They’re pretty upset, sir.”

“Bugger the horses—so am I,” said McCready grimly. “Show me.”

He and Rowse followed the officer below. The lieutenant gave them a tour of the ship’s four holds. In one, copying machines and typewriters from Japan were visible through the sides of their smashed crates. In the second and third holds, tins of Cypriot olives spilled from broken boxes. No crate or carton had been left untouched. The fourth hold contained three substantial horse boxes. In each of them a stallion whinnied and shied in fear.

There was a feeling in McCready’s stomach, that awful feeling that comes with knowing you have been duped, have taken the wrong course of action, and that there will be the devil to pay. If all he could come up with was a cargo of olives and typewriters, London would nail his hide to a barn door.

A young SBS man was standing with the horses in their hold. He seemed to know about animals; he was talking to them quietly, calming them down.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Why are they being shipped?”

“Oh. They’re Arabs. Thoroughbreds, destined for a stud farm,” said Rowse.

“No, they’re not,” said the young commando. “They’re riding-school hacks. Stallions, but hacks.”

Between the inner and outer walls of the specially constructed transport boxes, there was a good foot of space. With crowbars they hacked at the planks of the first loose box. As the shattered timber fell away, the search was over. The watching men saw piled blocks of Semtex-H, serried ranks of RPG-7 rocket launchers, and rows of shoulder-borne surface-to-air missiles. The other horse boxes yielded heavy machine guns, ammunition, grenades, mines, and mortars.

“I think,” said McCready, “we can call in the Navy now.”

They left the hold and went back to the warm morning sunshine of the main deck. The Navy would take over the
Regina
and bring her to Harwich. There she would be formally seized and her crew and passengers arrested.

The
Fair Maid
had been pumped out to repair her wallowing list. The special-effects smoke grenades that had given her the appearance of being on fire had long been thrown into the sea.

For the IRA man with the shattered knee, the bleeding had been stopped by a rough but skillful tourniquet applied by the commandos. He now sat ashen-faced with his back against a bulkhead and waited for the naval surgeon-commander, who would come with the frigate, now only half a mile off the beam. The other two had been handcuffed to a stanchion farther down the deck, and McCready had the key to the cuffs.

Captain Holst and his crew had descended without demur into one of the holds—not the one containing the weaponry—and sat among the olives until the Navy men could drop them a ladder.

Stephen Johnson had been locked in his cabin belowdecks.

When they were ready, the five SBS men vaulted onto the cabin roof of the
Fair Maid
, then disappeared below. Her engine started. Two of the commandos reappeared and cast her loose. The lieutenant waved a last farewell to McCready, still on the
Regi
na
, and the fishing boat chugged away. These were the secret warriors; they had done their job, and there was no need for them to wait around.

Tom Rowse sat down, shoulders hunched, on the coaming of one of the holds, next to the supine body of Monica Browne. On the other side of the
Regina’s
deck, the frigate eased alongside, threw graplines, and sent the first of the boarding party across. They conferred with McCready.

A puff of wind blew a corner of the sheet away from the face beneath it. Rowse stared down at the beautiful face, so calm in death. The breeze blew a frond of corn-blond hair across the forehead. He reached down to push it back. Someone sat down beside him, and an arm came round his shoulders.

“It’s over, Tom. You weren’t to know. You weren’t to blame. She knew what she was doing.”

“If I’d known she was here, I wouldn’t have killed her,” said Rowse, dully.

“Then she’d have killed you. She was that kind of person.”

Two seamen unlocked the IRA men and led them toward the frigate. Two orderlies under the supervision of a surgeon lifted the wounded one onto a stretcher and carried him away.

“What happens now?” asked Rowse.

McCready stared at the sea and the sky and sighed. “Now, Tom, the lawyers take over. The lawyers always take over, reducing all of life and death, passion, greed, courage, lust, and glory to the desiccated vernacular of their trade.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I will go back to Century House and start again. And go back each night to my small flat and listen to my music and eat my baked beans. And you will go back to Nikki, my friend, and hold her very tight, and write your books and forget all this. Hamburg, Vienna, Malta, Tripoli, Cyprus—forget it. It’s all over.”