De Payns was supposed to spend the next day in Paris tending to his five other IDs, and arranging for meetings with his contacts. At the second internet cafe he visited, he picked up an email message with Briffaut’s acronym and number, and once he was three hundred metres from the cafe he used a démarqué phone to call a service number. When he gave his own identifier, the woman on the other end told him he had an emergency meeting at the Bunker at midday.
When he arrived at Briffaut’s office, Marie Lafont was sitting on the visitors’ sofa while Briffaut finished a call on his landline. As he took a seat he saw his boss had taken off his tie, usually a sign that Dominic Briffaut was going into the field.
‘Anything more on that bioweapons rubbish?’ asked de Payns, as Lafont looked up from her phone.
‘We’re about to find out,’ she said.
Briffaut ended his call. ‘There’s a car waiting in the garage,’ he said, standing.
They drove in a silver Mercedes van, which had seats facing one another in the back and a soundproof barrier between the rear seats and the driver. The section heads’ vans were supposed to be SCIFs on wheels, but de Payns had never been convinced. They drove in a southerly direction, beyond the Périphérique, Briffaut briefing de Payns along the way about the Afghan national lying in the secure hospital of Villacoublay Air Base.
‘He was picked up by an RPIMa patrol in Kapisa Province,’ said Briffaut.
‘Kapisa?’ said Lafont. ‘We still have paras operating in Afghanistan?’
‘Logistics and humanitarian,’ said Briffaut, deadpan.
Lafont shook her head, tired of the same old shit. ‘Okay, so a French logistics unit discovers this guy and flies him to Paris. Why?’
‘Let’s find out,’ said Briffaut.
They veered off the N118 south onto the A86, and Villacoublay Air Base loomed to de Payns’ left. Having been cleared by the gate security, they drove to a large administration building, parked, and de Payns walked with Briffaut and Lafont to a rear tradesmen’s entrance. De Payns felt old emotions rising. He’d never been inside this building, controlled as it was by the French secret services. During his air force career he’d been billeted at a more modern operations centre further west on the base. He paused at the door, allowing Marie Lafont to enter in front of him, and looked into the sky, where two Mirages flew in a formation of leader and wingman. As he tried to make out their markings, he was transported to another time and place—11 September 2001. They were on dogfight exercises when the ground signal came through:
‘Marcou Hotel, Dijon.’
De Payns had responded, ‘Marcou Hotel.’
‘Marcou Hotel. Knock it off, knock it off. Report steady.’
‘Hotel steady,’ de Payns replied, curious about the command.
‘Hotel, ready for TOP TOD?’ asked Dijon Tower.
‘Hotel ready,’ said de Payns.
‘Hotel three-two-one TOP TOD.’
After switching to encrypted radio frequency, he heard, ‘Marcou Hotel, check?’
De Payns replied, ‘Hotel on freq.’
‘Copy. Hotel, RTB ASAP, clear speed and altitude.’
That’s when de Payns’ pulse had stepped up. RTB was ‘return to base’, and ‘clear speed and altitude’ meant ‘do whatever it takes, just get here as fast as possible’. In the controlled environment of the French Air Force, it was almost unheard of to be given clear speed and altitude.
‘Hotel copy,’ said de Payns. ‘Reason for the RTB ASAP?’
‘Will be specified on the ground.’
‘Hotel copy,’ said de Payns. ‘Heading to Dijon.’
Hitting speeds of over Mach 2 at any altitude that suited the pilot was a rarity and he recalled the adrenaline pumping as he was cleared for landing at Dijon and had to taxi into the ‘armed’ area before being pushed backwards into the bomb-proof hangars. Live air-to-air missiles were attached to the Mirage’s underwings while the single engine was still running. The pilots were required to remain in their seats. It wasn’t until de Payns’ mechanic climbed the mobile ladder to deactivate his ejector seat that de Payns got to ask what the hell was going on.
‘New York is under attack,’ said the mechanic, the stress visible on his face. ‘The World Trade Center is on fire. It’s World War Three.’
De Payns remembered sitting in the cockpit and hearing the news, thinking that not only was there no better place to be seated for the beginning of a world war than in a combat-armed Mirage at Dijon, but that this war wouldn’t be like the others and that intelligence would be the key to winning it.
The technicians reset the Mirages to activate the Magic II infrared guidance systems and MICA EM ‘fire-and-forget’ targeting systems which aided the twin 30mm cannons and the missiles. The radios were set to half quick and the switch from normal TOD comms to QOD—which changed frequency a thousand times per second—was locked in. The squadron was switched to a ‘two-minute posture’, which meant from the first scramble alert the pilots had to be wheels-up in at least two minutes—war footing. To achieve a two-minute posture the pilots had to remain seated in their planes at the end of the runway for hours, waiting for the scream of the scramble alert. Headings and orders would be given when the planes were in the air.
De Payns could still feel remnants of the stress and excitement surging through his body as he watched Lafont and Briffaut move into the building. He recalled the subsequent missions over Afghanistan and Iraq and the fatigue reignited inside him as if it had been sitting in his bones all these years. He shook it off and walked through the door, interested to see what Afghanistan had sent his way in his new career.
The intelligence section had its own hospital as well as its own prison, sleeping quarters and restaurant. The hospital looked 1970s American, down to the scalloped-glass partitions and the water-dispenser nooks along the linoleum-floored corridor. De Payns, Lafont and Briffaut followed a large male intelligence staffer to a private hospital room where Anthony Frasier stood over a bed, a white mask covering most of his face.
Frasier nodded at the staffer, who handed out face masks to the new arrivals and left the room.
‘They’re calling him Fazel’ said Frasier, pointing to a man lying in the bed. ‘Arrived an hour ago.’
They drew closer and de Payns observed ‘Fazel’. He looked to be around thirty, clean-shaven with cropped dark hair. He could have been from Iran, Pakistan or Afghanistan, and was connected to all sorts of tubes and machines. De Payns saw that a Middle Eastern man in his twenties was standing beside Frasier.
‘French military entered a village two days ago,’ said Frasier. ‘Thirty-seven people dead—the only one still alive was Fazel here. The unit’s medical officer attended some of the bodies and suspected some sort of agent had been used because of the extensive haemorrhaging. The unit evacuated the one survivor to hospital in Kabul, but he became steadily sicker and the medical officer suggested he be brought to France, where we might like to question him about his condition.’
‘Why did he survive?’ asked Briffaut, nodding at Fazel.
Frasier shrugged. ‘He’s been in a coma but we’re going to kick him out of that and we have a translator to help us. Our DO medical team is in the lab a few doors down, testing his blood.’
The translator standing beside Frasier nodded at the group as Frasier walked to the door and called in the doctor. ‘We’re ready,’ said Frasier.
The military doctor entered the room and walked to the patient, checked the vital signs on the monitors, then produced a large syringe.
‘Give it about two minutes,’ said the doctor to Frasier.
They waited as the patient opened his eyes, blinked several times and gradually focused on his surrounds. The doctor checked him with a torch in the eyes and then Frasier cleared his throat.
The doctor looked up. ‘All yours,’ he said, and he left the room.
Frasier turned to the translator. ‘Tell him we’re friendly, he’s in France and he is safe now.’
The translator rattled it off and Fazel shook his head as he responded.
The translator said, ‘He asks what happened to the village.’
‘The village? Doesn’t it have a name?’ asked Frasier.
The translator repeated the question, and Fazel responded in a rambling monologue. The translator nodded a lot and asked his own questions. ‘He says he was travelling to Kabul from the north, and he was dropped by a truck driver at a crossroads near the village. This is just east of the Nuristan Forest, near the Pakistani border. He walked into the village around four-thirty a.m. and used an old cistern to wash himself. He didn’t drink the water from the cistern because he had his own bottle. He was going to wait for the village to wake up and try to buy food, but after waiting for an hour he felt very sick. He’d washed his face with the cistern water and he assumed it was a bad supply. His sickness got worse and he vomited three times. He didn’t see it at first, because it was dark, but as dawn came he realised he’d vomited blood. He panicked and went into the village, but no one was around. He knocked on doors, no reply. He looked in a window and saw three people, including one child, lying on the floor in a circle of blood. He pushed the door open and went in, and found they were dead, bleeding from all orifices. He realised he might have the same illness and drank all his bottled water. By now he couldn’t walk very well, he had diarrhoea and it was blood. He checked other houses but everyone was dead. Massive blood loss from the mouth, nose and rectum. He was feeling weaker and unable to move and he must have passed out. He was woken by foreign soldiers at what he thought was around six-thirty or seven.’
‘What then?’ asked Frasier.
The translator asked and Fazel responded.
‘He says he remembers thinking that the soldiers weren’t American or Australian, so maybe they were French. He thought he was dying and then he woke up here, just now. He wonders what the date is. He thinks he’s lost some days?’
The intelligence section of Villacoublay had its own secure communications system and SCIFs, and the DGSE team adjourned to the serviced offices where the DO team was waiting. Frasier conferred with the lead scientist, took a sheaf of papers and returned to the group who were sitting around a meeting table.
‘It’s clostridium,’ said Frasier, shaking his head. ‘Now where have I heard that name recently?’
‘This is the bacterium the Russians think is being made at the MERC?’ asked Briffaut. ‘This is what it does to people?’
Frasier raised his hand slightly, as if asking people to slow down. ‘Clostridium can be naturally occurring, outside of bioweapons labs. We’ll do more tests and see exactly what we’re looking at.’
Frasier turned to de Payns. ‘I’m not asking you to cut corners on Alamut, but if there’s a fast way and a slow way, you’re to take the fast way, understand? I have a feeling time is not on our side.’