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  The sailors on the bow hit the deck as it was sprayed with bullets. A second burst of gunfire rattled against the steel-plated bridge where Thibault was standing. He ducked, shouting, ‘Hole that boat!’

  The gunners swung their cannons round to point directly at the skiff and fired. A hole appeared above the little vessel’s waterline, and the skiff began rapidly to take on water. One of the pirates stood up and jumped overboard just before the skiff tilted sharply to one side, dumping the rest of the crew into the sea. Then it sank beneath the surface.

  What fools, thought Thibault, taking on an armed naval vessel. What did they think they were playing at?

  Two hours later he was none the wiser. Below deck, in the long low room that doubled as both mess and lounge for his crew, the prisoners sat ranged on two benches. They included the hapless pirate who had jumped for it from halfway up the side of the Aristides. It turned out he could hardly swim; he would have drowned if a crewman from the container ship had not thrown him a lifeline.

  Thibault had ordered his men to search the prisoners for weapons, but the three Kalashnikovs seemed to be the extent of their armoury – and they were now lying at the bottom of the ocean.

  The pirates were uncommunicative, merely shrugging when Thibault attempted to question them. From time to time they spoke to each other in short bursts of Arabic. Marceau, Algerian by origin and an Arabic speaker from childhood, spoke to them but they just ignored him. Though Arabic was one of Somalia’s national languages, these men were not Somali – their appearance was Middle Eastern rather than African. Thibault was puzzled; he’d expected them to be local pirates, operating from the Somalian coast.

  As he watched them, he noticed that one of the seven looked more Asian than Middle Eastern, and saw too that the other men didn’t include him in their muttered exchanges. He seemed to be younger than the others: average height, lean, with the scraggly beginnings of a beard that gave away his youth. His eyes wouldn’t stay still, searching anxiously around the room, and where the others looked coolly indifferent to their plight, he appeared terrified.

  ‘Marceau,’ said Thibault quietly. ‘The lad at the end there . . . the one with the blue shirt. I want him searched.’

  ‘We searched them all already,’ came the reply.

  ‘Yes, yes. Do it again – and a strip search this time. There’s something different about him.’

  Marceau gestured to two sailors, and together they approached the youth at the end of the bench. His eyes widened as they motioned him to get up, then led him through the bulkhead to the adjacent shower room. The other prisoners watched sullenly.

  Marceau was back a few minutes later.

  ‘Where’s the prisoner?’ asked Thibault.

  ‘Still in there,’ said Marceau with a shrug, gesturing to the shower room. ‘He’s not feeling well.’

  I bet, thought Thibault, knowing how brutal Marceau could be. He was about to chastise his second-in-command when Marceau held out a little square of plastic, about the size of a credit card. ‘We found this in the lining of his back pocket.’

  Thibault inspected the card. It was a driving licence, issued three years before and due to expire in another twenty-two. The photograph in one corner was of a young man, a boy really, clean-shaven and short-haired. But the eyes looked the same. His name, according to the licence, was Amir Khan.

  Pakistani, thought Thibault. Or with Pakistani parents, perhaps, since this was a British driving licence. It gave Khan’s address as 57 Farndon Street, Birmingham.

  Thibault shook his head in wonder. What on earth was a British national doing here, attempting to hijack a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean?

  Chapter 3

  It was 10.30 a.m. in Athens when the phone rang on Mitchell Berger’s desk. The call was from overseas; Berger listened to it with increasing agitation.

  ‘Are the crew all safe?’ he asked finally.

  He waited for the reply, then said, ‘When will they reach Mombasa? . . . All right – they’ve only lost a day. I’ll alert our people there.’

  Berger put down the phone, trying to gather his thoughts, looking down from the window of his second-storey office at the street below. It was the Greek version of an English suburban High Street, full of small shops and restaurants. Even in spring the sun outside would be scorching by mid-afternoon, so the locals shopped in the morning.

  Berger liked Athens, just as he liked virtually any part of the world – so long as it wasn’t the small South Dakota town where he’d grown up, a place of such stifling dullness that he liked to pretend he’d forgotten its name. Berger had fled it at the first opportunity, enlisting in the army on the day he turned seventeen. His four-year hitch had taken him to Germany, then Korea, and given him a taste for foreign countries. He’d also discovered he wasn’t as stupid as his alcoholic parents had always made out – when he’d left the army he’d gone to college on the GI Bill, and done well enough to go on and take a Masters in International Relations at Tufts University. Credentials enough for the career that had followed in the next three decades, working in four continents and a dozen countries.

  It had been an eventful thirty years – too eventful, perhaps, since there had been more than one occasion when Berger had feared for his life. Reaching fifty, unmarried and feeling rootless, he had been on the lookout for a change – this time to a more peaceful existence, nothing too nerve-racking. He had found it; a pleasant billet as head of the Athens office of a UK-based charity called UCSO, the United Charities’ Shipping Organisation. UCSO, as its name implied, was a co-ordinating charity. Its role was to receive requests for aid from NGOs working in the field, to liaise with donors all over Europe, and to arrange for the requested aid – food, equipment, spare parts, whatever it might be – to be assembled in Athens. There Mitchell Berger and his colleagues would make up the cargoes, book the ships and despatch the aid to wherever it was needed. Much of the focus of UCSO’s efforts was on crisis areas in Africa, though it had played an important role in the immediate relief operation after the 2004 tsunami. Unlike some other charities, UCSO prided itself on its efficiency rather than its public profile, and had an unsurpassed record in getting aid to wherever it was most needed.

  UCSO had two hubs. The key administrative and financial headquarters were in London, as were most of the seventy-odd staff. It was from there that strings were pulled, major donors were smooched and soothed, governments were pressured. Here in Athens fewer than a dozen staff sufficed for assembling and despatching the aid shipments, and that suited Berger. He was not interested in the diplomatic stuff or the administrative problems that came with running a large office.

  But it was the process of despatching the aid that had led to this morning’s phone call. An UCSO aid ship, bound for Mombasa on the first leg of an operation to transport aid inland to the Republic of the Congo, had been subject to a hijacking attempt. Thanks to providence, in the form of a French Navy patrol, the attempt had been foiled. But what was agitating Mitchell Berger, as he watched a black-clad woman on the street below haggling over a bag of oranges, was that this was not the first time pirates had struck. Twice before UCSO ships had been attacked, and both times the ships had been successfully hijacked.

  The first incident, a year or so before, had initially seemed to be a freakish one-off. It came during a flurry of hijackings of oil tankers off Somalia; these were the richest pickings for pirates, as the multinational oil companies which owned them were usually keen to settle quickly. From UCSO the pirates had originally demanded £1 million, but after apparently recognising that they weren’t dealing with wealthy owners on this occasion, they had eventually settled with the charity’s insurers for half that sum. However, when the ship was returned, the cargo, which had been unusually valuable, had gone.

  The second hijacking had come six months later. Again, the ship had been carrying high-value cargo – more than the normal quantity of drugs (morphine, anaesthetic, antibiotics), which would have fetched good m
oney in many markets. Also, lodged in the Captain’s safe, there had been $200,000 in cash, intended for the UCSO people on the ground to use to grease certain palms, and thus ensure that the cargo arrived at its intended destination. Unsavoury but necessary; UCSO was effective precisely because it didn’t let idealism get in the way of practicality.

  The ship had been recovered after a month, though this time the ransom demanded had stayed firmly fixed at £1 million. Again most of the cargo had been removed and the bank notes were no longer in the safe.

  And now there had been a third attempt. Thank God it had failed, thought Berger, since after the first two, the insurance companies had raised the premium for continued cover to a near-impossible level. UCSO’s donors wanted their money to go straight to helping desperate people in desperate straits, not towards paying premiums to insurance companies in glitzy City offices.

  Berger, still standing looking out of the window, was no longer noticing what was going on in the street outside. He was thinking instead about this third attack. Since the last hijacking, six other UCSO shipments had sailed unmolested through the waters off the Horn of Africa, despite an overall increase in the numbers of hijackings in the region. Why had the pirates targeted the Aristides? A Greek-registered merchant ship, which regularly sailed those waters, was surely a far less attractive target than a tanker.

  Berger wanted to believe it was pure chance that UCSO had been targeted three times, but his professional experience had taught him to be suspicious of apparent coincidence. Like the two other hijacked UCSO vessels, the Aristides had been carrying an exceptionally valuable cargo. The customary medical supplies were on board, in addition to food, clothing, tents and reconstruction equipment – all the staples of the charity’s aid programme. But also on board was some particularly expensive kit – the equivalent of half a dozen field hospitals – which would allow surgical procedures to be undertaken miles away from the nearest city, ranging from simple amputations to open heart surgery and the complex treatment of burns victims. In addition there were a dozen of the latest all-terrain vehicles, and again the Captain’s safe contained cash – this time gold coins enough to open most of the doors initially closed to the charity workers on the ground. All of this was easily saleable in a way that a cargo of oil was not.

  So the pirates would have struck lucky with the Aristides even if UCSO could not raise their ransom. But was it pure coincidence that all three ships that had been attacked were carrying such valuable disposable cargoes? Berger didn’t think so. Hadn’t Goldfinger remarked memorably to James Bond that meeting him once was happenstance, twice was coincidence, but their third encounter constituted enemy action?

  Lunchtime was approaching and down on the street the shoppers were beginning to head home, retreating from the mounting heat. In London it would be mid-morning, a good time to call. Berger picked up the receiver and dialled. A secretary answered.

  ‘Hello, Val,’ he said. ‘Is David there?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Berger. I’ll just put you through.’

  He waited patiently, thinking about the man to whom he was about to speak – David Blakey, head of UCSO and Berger’s boss.

  He liked Blakey, an ex-MI6 officer who had carried the professional habits of a lifetime into his new career, although by all accounts he had been around the block a bit. Blakey had the relaxed, confident style and old-fashioned manners which to Berger spoke of an English public school education. Some of his fellow Americans would regard Blakey with scorn – a typical Brit, they’d think, with extravagant, overdone courtesy overlying a snobbish conviction of superiority. But Berger had met other Englishmen cut from the same cloth and he knew better than to underestimate them. He had studied Blakey and observed how his charm and courtesy enabled him, apparently effortlessly, to extract donations from the wealthy – the female variety in particular.

  He’d seen too how in dealings with the City, the corporate world and government, another side of Blakey appeared: an analytical intelligence, a command of detail and a fierce determination to succeed. With his staff he was kind and considerate, happy for them to think (especially the younger ones) that they had worked out for themselves what in fact he had taught them, but he showed no tolerance whatsoever towards incompetence or laziness. Blakey’s reputation as a good boss had gone before him round the charity world so that UCSO, unlike many other similar organisations, was able to attract and keep staff of the highest quality.

  Blakey’s familiar voice came on the line. ‘Hello, Mitchell. How are things in Athens?’

  ‘Well, it’s getting hot here, but it’s hotter off the Horn of Africa.’

  ‘Have we got another problem?’

  ‘No, thank God, but not for lack of trying. The Aristides was almost boarded early this morning. Fortunately a French patrol boat intervened.’

  ‘Any casualties?’ Blakey’s voice remained calm, but Berger could sense the tension in his response.

  ‘None. Though I understand there was some shooting.’

  ‘The French have never been slow to pull the trigger,’ said Blakey with a laugh. Then, more seriously, ‘Sounds like a close call.’

  ‘It was.’ And Berger knew they were both thinking how close UCSO had come to disaster. ‘The thing is, David, this is not only the third attack by pirates, but also the third time they’ve picked an especially valuable cargo. Since the last hijacking we’ve had half a dozen shipments go through unmolested – and two of them were on the Aristides.’

  ‘Which would suggest they’re not targeting the ship in particular, but specific shipments on her?’

  ‘Exactly. I’m beginning to wonder if they know all about our cargoes.’ He paused, and the silence hung heavily between them.

  ‘How could they know that?’ asked Blakey.

  ‘I don’t know. Unless . . .’ said Berger, and stopped.

  Blakey filled in the dots. ‘That is pretty worrying.’

  ‘I know. But I thought I’d better raise it.’

  ‘Quite right.’ Blakey paused, then said, ‘ If information is getting out it needn’t come from Athens, you know – we get the manifests here.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Berger.

  There was a long sigh. ‘Pinning this down is going to be a problem – that’s if there is anything to pin down in the first place.’ Another pause then Blakey said, ‘Let me have a word with one of my old colleagues. He might be able to help – or least give us some pointers on how to get to the bottom of this quickly. I’d say speed is of the essence, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely. Though we haven’t got another shipment scheduled for the Horn until the end of next month.’

  ‘Good. That gives us some time. Let’s hope it’s enough.’

  Chapter 4

  Liz had been back in London less than a day when a call came in to her office from Isabelle Florian. A gang of pirates had been seized by the French Navy in the Indian Ocean, attempting to hijack a Greek merchant ship. One of them was carrying a British driving licence and, though he had said virtually nothing to his captors, did appear to be British. He had been taken to Djibouti by a French patrol boat and was being flown back to France. He should be arriving at La Santé prison in Paris within the hour. Isabelle enquired if Liz had an interest in questioning the prisoner? The details of his driving licence were being sent across by secure means as she spoke.

  By the time Liz had walked along the corridor to the open-plan office, Peggy Kinsolving, the desk oficer who worked with her, was already receiving from France a copy of a British driving licence issued to an Amir Khan, aged twenty-two, at a Birmingham address.

  Liz smiled at her young researcher. ‘Dogged’ just about summed up Peggy’s way of working. A librarian by training after her Oxford degree, she had an insatiable appetite for facts, however obscure, and could trace connections between them that other people couldn’t see. She stuck to the scent of a promising trail like a bloodhound, and sooner or later always came up with the goods.

 
‘Do you think the French have really caught a Brit among a gang of African pirates?’ said Peggy, pushing her glasses higher on her nose as she gazed at her computer screen. ‘I bet it’s just a stolen licence that’s found its way out there and that the guy turns out to be another Somali.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Liz. ‘Apparently the French Captain reported there was something odd about him – he wasn’t really one of the gang. He looked different, and the others didn’t talk to him. He seems to understand English, though he’s hardly said anything. Get on to the police in Birmingham and the Border Agency and see what you can find out.’

  And overnight Peggy had managed to assemble a few facts about Amir Khan. He was a British citizen, whose parents were first-generation Pakistani immigrants. This much the Border Agency had been able to report before their computer system went down, a not uncommon occurrence ever since it had been ‘upgraded’. But from the police Peggy had learned that Khan had attended various local authority schools in Birmingham, then Birmingham University – where he had been a student of engineering until he’d left for unexplained reasons in the middle of his third year. He had no criminal record and had never before come to the police’s attention; there was no previous trace of him in MI5’s files.

  So Liz was trying to keep an open mind, though she was curious about what mixture of motives, inducements, or grievances might have led young Khan, if indeed it was he, to the Indian Ocean, to enter the hijacking business that she had previously believed to be the preserve of Somalis. Some people talked about ‘globalisation’ in approving tones these days, but for Liz it was making her work infinitely more complex, and the challenges she faced were magnified by a world of instant communication and fast travel across international borders.