The Lucifer Network (48 page)

‘Jesus . . .'

Sam peered out from the shelter of the wall. From the upstairs window came the thunder of a grenade. As suddenly as the shooting had started, it came to an end. There was a gruff shout from inside the building.

‘Secure!'

Sam ran over to the translator and dropped to his knees.

‘Arthur . . .'

Harris didn't move.

‘Shit!' In the firelight he could see two wounds. The back of the head and the shoulder. ‘Willie!'

Phipps joined him, wiping off the Russian's brains with a fistful of dry grass. He bent to listen, to see if Harris was still breathing. Mouth to mouth would be impossible with the masks on.

‘Dressings,' he breathed. ‘Pouch on my belt.'

As Sam tugged at the Velcro flap, Phipps lifted Harris's hands from his head.

‘Bad?' Sam asked, peeling the wrapper from a dressing.

‘Can't tell. But anything to the head's bad.' He took the sterile wad and pressed it on the wound. ‘Rip his suit open at the shoulder while I tie this on. Got a knife?'

‘No.'

‘There's one strapped to my ankle.'

Sam found it and cut the blood-clogged, rubberised cloth away from Harris's shoulder. ‘Flesh wound,' he announced.

‘Then he may have been lucky. Know how to do it?'

‘Yes.' He opened another pack, and pressed the dressing on hard.

‘Have to get him to the surgeon,' Phipps mumbled.

They both looked up as one of the soldiers dropped down beside them.

‘The building's clear, boss.'

‘Who
was
that fucker?'

‘Some Croat with a name with no vowels in it. Found a driving licence in his pocket.'

‘How come you missed him?'

‘Hadn't cleared that far, boss. Simple as that. We'd checked downstairs first. We were on the way upstairs when he opened up. Sorry.'

Phipps slipped fingers under Harris's respirator to feel for the carotid pulse.

‘Still there,' he whispered.

Sam stared helplessly at the translator. That head wound needed a specialist. And they were a long way from any. He visualised a wife and kids for Harris. Elderly parents. The whole damn agony of grief.

Phipps stood up and detailed three of his men to get Harris to the jetty. ‘Take one of the boats back to the sub. Tell 'em the rest of us'll be out of here in twenty minutes.' Then he strode towards the house.

Sam followed a few paces behind, shaken that Harris had been hit – he'd told the man he'd watch his back. But he told himself not to dwell on it. There was still work to do.

The former monastery was L-shaped, a main block with a long extension at one side. As Sam stepped through the door he found a high-ceilinged hall running
from front to back, its floor taken up by refectory tables with benches for a couple of dozen people. One of the tables was stacked with supplies – drinking water in plastic bottles, boxes of tinned food. Another had been used for work. A laptop computer sat with its screen up and Sam recognised the bulky black box beside it as a satellite phone. He made a mental note to take the PC with him.

Willie Phipps was being briefed by one of his sergeants. Sam listened in.

‘Upstairs in the wing, two rooms used as bedrooms, three others empty. Downstairs two rooms are laboratories, three others are like cells. Bare beds and fixings in the walls with chains attached.'

‘What's in the labs?' Sam asked.

‘Loads of equipment. Test gear, incubators, cabinets. The usual. Haven't done a thorough check.'

‘Sounds a good place to start,' Phipps decided.

Sam strode with him into the wing. The two labs were very similar, although in the second the fridge had been emptied, its contents on the bonfire, he guessed. One of the lieutenant's men produced a camera and snapped off some flash shots. Then they closed the doors. This place needed to be looked at by scientists. He wished Julie were here. She'd have an idea what monstrous diseases they'd been experimenting with.

They walked further down the corridor peering into the bleak cells the sergeant had talked about. Sam ran upstairs to check the first floor, but there was nothing. Nothing whatsoever to link this place with Max Schenk, with Harry Jackman, or with the virus attacks in Brussels. They'd come too late. The Russians had covered their tracks. As he re-emerged into the hall, so did Willie Phipps.

‘We're off,' he announced. ‘All that shooting, someone's bound to take an interest soon.'

Sam zipped the computer into its case and tucked it under his arm, hoping against hope that its contents would reveal something. He looked round the long hall, staring into corners, looking for some last thing they might have overlooked.

‘Five more minutes,' he pleaded.

‘No chance. If we're not buttoned up inside the sub within half an hour she'll leave without us. And there's no way we're going to stay the night here waiting for the Croat police to turn up.'

They stepped out into the yard. The bonfire had collapsed into a heap of glowing ash. That's where his proof had been, Sam told himself, ruefully.

Phipps beckoned to Sam. ‘Come on. We're going back to the boat.'

At the far side of the yard amongst the scrub, marines were checking the ground with torches, picking up cartridge cases to eradicate evidence of their having been here.

Sam had a long last look round. Suddenly he spotted something. ‘Hang on a minute.'

‘I said come on!' Phipps was losing patience with this troublesome civilian. He grabbed for his arm.

But Sam began to run, down to the far end of the small courtyard where an outhouse nestled against the windbreak of a wall. The door hung half open, its bottom hinge broken. Black as pitch inside. He dug in his pocket for a torch. The beam lit up an old wheelbarrow, spades and a pickaxe. He heard feet sprinting across the stony ground. Phipps was coming for him. Then the flashlight beam lit on something shiny. At the back, half covered by fragments of ply. He reached for the wood and pulled it clear.

‘Oh boy . . .'

Containers. Five of them. Like small milk churns.
Metal-cased with handles. Necks with screw tops wide enough to suspend samples inside.

‘Harry Jackman,' he breathed. ‘You little devil. You gave yourself away . . .'

Sam felt the lieutenant's hands on his arm.

‘Come on, chum, for Pete's sake.'

‘Look!' Sam pointed gleefully at the storage flasks. ‘
Like
Ali
Baba,
' he whispered. ‘
Like
bloody
Ali
Baba
. . .'

‘What're you on about?'

‘It's how they got the viruses here, Willie. In liquid nitrogen.'

‘So?'

Sam bent down. Something written on a piece of the plywood had caught his eye. He snatched it up. Blocky, stencilled lettering sprayed on when the wood had still been a packing case.

‘Willie . . .'

‘Come on, for fuck's sake.'

‘But this is it, man. It's what I came for.'

Six simple words that told him everything he needed to know.

Property of the Government of Zambia.

THE EASTERLY SKY
was becoming uncomfortably bright as the hatches were sealed and the submarine slunk back to its deep water habitat. In the sick bay Arthur Harris had already been examined by the surgeon-lieutenant and pronounced not in immediate danger. The wound to his head was more superficial than it had looked to the amateur eyes of the Royal Marines lieutenant.

Sam sat in the wardroom at one end of the dining table. Next to him was Willie Phipps. The notebook computer salvaged from the old monastery was open in front of them, plugged into the submarine's mains supply. Sam pressed the power button. The drive purred into life and ‘Windows loading' appeared on the screen.

Phipps had borrowed another PC from the First Lieutenant and while waiting to see what emerged from the Russians' computer was preparing his mission report.

‘I'm going to have to tell it like it was, Sam,' he announced, apologetically. ‘There's no other way I can explain getting into a fire fight when the orders were to avoid one at all costs.'

‘Fine by me,' Sam rumbled. ‘If your general wants to file a complaint to Vauxhall Cross, then I think we can
handle that.' As far as he was concerned, the mission had achieved its goal.

The notebook computer from Palagra had a standard keyboard. He hadn't noticed it back at the monastery and had been fearing having to cope with a Cyrillic text. He opened Windows Explorer and ‘My Documents', then ran the cursor down the long list of files. Most were identified only by code letters. He double-clicked on the first to see what it contained. It loaded into Word. Three pages of scientific gobbledegook that appeared to be an analysis of a virus trial, something the brains at Porton Down would wet themselves over. What
he
needed, however, was something in plain language that showed a direct link between the laboratory and the rabies-like virus used on the two EU officials. And something that pointed to Max Schenk.

Suddenly he saw it. One complete word standing out from the acronyms on the file list.

VIENNA
.

He double-tapped. The file loaded in Internet Explorer. It was a download of a timetable, the schedule of flights between the Croatian coastal town of Split and the Austrian capital.

‘Brilliant! Bloody brilliant.'

‘What've you found?' Willie Phipps leaned over.

‘Something that could prove to be a crucial piece of the jigsaw,' Sam replied cryptically.

On the deck above, Commander Talbot was dog tired. He'd been in the control room for the best part of eight hours. The special forces men were their own masters, but he'd felt a responsibility for them. On board, they'd kept track of the operation by listening in to the marines' secure communications and had been intensely relieved to get them back on board without loss. Now the
submarine was thirty metres down, heading south at fifteen knots for the channel between the rocks that would lead them into safer depths and international waters. Talbot crossed from his command seat to the chart table.

‘Four-point-three miles to the one hundred metre contour, sir,' the navigator informed him. ‘About seventeen minutes.'

‘Thanks, Vasco.'

Beyond the hundred metre line the sea bed shelved away steeply. Once across the contour he would take the boat to sixty metres and, with the trawl-net danger passed, would push up the speed to eighteen knots. He stepped past the conning tower into the sound room. The waterfall screens showed thin herringbone traces of boats nearby.

‘There's two fishing vessels to port and one to starboard, sir,' Chief Smedley told him. ‘Small time, working the rocks. Nothing closer than fifteen cables.'

‘Any bio?'

‘A school of porpoises followed us when we dived, but they've given up and gone home.'

‘Let's hope they weren't working for the Croat Navy,' Talbot quipped.

‘They sang “Rule Britannia” when they left us, so I think we're in the clear, sir.'

Talbot smiled and returned to the control room. As he rounded the periscope housing he saw Lieutenant Commander Hayes appear at the top of the companionway with the SIS man. Hayes introduced him to Talbot and they shook hands. It was the first time they'd met. Personal contact with the special forces team on board had been left to the First Lieutenant.

‘Mr Packer has a request to make, sir.'

Talbot took quick stock of this man whose formerly
secret life had been so thoroughly ventilated by the UK press.

‘Better come into my cabin and tell me what's on your mind,' he said. ‘Officer of the watch, you have the submarine.'

‘I have the submarine, sir,' Styles responded.

Talbot told Sam to sit on the small settee that doubled as his bunk. Hayes left them to it.

‘What's your problem, Mr Packer?'

‘I've a very urgent need to speak to my controllers in London, Commander,' Sam explained.

‘Well at this point that's quite impossible, I'm afraid. We're still well inside Croatian waters.'

‘They were experimenting with smallpox on that island,' Sam stressed. ‘A new variant, for which there's no vaccine. Stocks may already have been shipped to Europe to be used for mass murder. If I delay passing on the information, hundreds may die who might otherwise have lived.'

Talbot gulped. ‘I appreciate your concern, but you must also appreciate mine.' He pulled a chart from the shelf above his desk and spread it out.

‘We're here,' he explained, jabbing a finger at it. ‘There are fishing boats in the area and there's a Croatian naval presence on Lastovo. If I stick a mast up to transmit, there's a serious risk of detection. So far as we know we've got away with being here. When that bloodbath on Palagra is discovered, there should be nothing to say that NATO forces were involved and I won't do anything to jeopardise that.' He said it with absolute firmness.

Sam nodded. He understood perfectly. No point in arguing.

‘So when's the soonest I can talk to London?'

‘We have a scheduled rendezvous with HMS
Suffolk
in three hours from now, in international waters close
to the Italian coast. If we crank the speed up, then once we're beyond the Croatian territorial limit I could come up to PD to transmit and still make the rendezvous on time. Five minutes long enough for you?'

‘It'll have to be. When d'you expect that to happen?'

‘In about an hour's time. It's the best I can do for you.'

Sam looked at his watch, which he'd left on Vienna time. 7.15 a.m. London an hour earlier.

‘Then let's just pray we're not too late, Commander.'