Just over half an hour later, with the deck crew still lashing down the third and final skiff using webbing straps and the ring bolts on the deck, the last of the mooring lines was released and the Muttrah eased slowly away from the concrete jetty. As soon as the ship moved clear, the engine and propeller revolutions increased as the ship headed almost due east, a manoeuvre necessary to clear the end of the breakwater, and then began a long turn onto a south-westerly heading to head directly towards the Gulf of Aden.
The newly arrived SEALs had deposited their bags in whatever spaces they could find and then assembled in the mess room where the officers and crew of the ship took their meals. Then they’d grabbed mugs of coffee or cans of soft drink – as an Omani vessel there was officially no alcohol on board, though possibly some of the officers might have had a bottle or two secreted away somewhere – found seats and waited for whatever briefing Richter and the others had managed to cobble together.
Richter stood at one end of the mess room, a laptop computer and his mobile phone on the dining table in front of him and looked at the nine new arrivals who stared back at him with expressions ranging from casual interest to complete indifference.
‘We might as well get started,’ he said, ‘so, first of all we need to find out who we all are. My name is Paul Richter and I work for a small intelligence organisation based in London. Our remit is to carry out deniable operations on behalf of the Secret Intelligence Service, probably better known to you as MI6.’
‘You sure don’t look much like James Bond,’ one of the soldiers sitting on the left-hand side of the mess said. ‘I mean, I didn’t see no Aston Martin back there in Salalah.’
Several of his colleagues chuckled, but their attention remained firmly focused on Richter.
‘I hate to break this to you,’ Richter said, ‘but James Bond doesn’t actually exist. And if it did exist he’d be completely bloody useless as a secret agent for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, that’s who I am. These two men—’ he indicated Moore and Masters ‘—work for your very own Central Intelligence Agency and they’ve been kind of seconded to this operation, mainly because they were in the right place at the wrong time. Or maybe the wrong place at the right time.’
The two Americans introduced themselves, and then one of the men in the front row of the seated SEALs stood up and stood beside Richter. He was wearing captain’s insignia on his camouflage clothing, his you-can’t-see-me suit, and on his left breast was a stitched tape bearing the name Moloch.
‘My name’s John Moloch,’ he said, ‘and I’m the officer in charge of this group.’ He pointed at one of the SEALs, gave his name and then quickly ran through the names of everybody else in the group. ‘The odd number,’ he went on, ‘is because we were pulled out of an exercise in Tanzania, and we had to leave quite a few people behind to sort out everything there prior to heading back to the States. That’s why there are only eight of us plus me, so I hope that’s a big enough force for whatever scheme you guys have got in mind. And what would be real helpful right now is if you told us what that scheme is.’
‘Briefly,’ Richter said, as Moloch resumed his seat, ‘we need to stop a ship that’s carrying an extremely powerful bioweapon destined for Israel.’
‘Let me stop you right there and take a guess,’ Moloch interrupted. ‘Are you talking about an Iranian vessel, because Iran and Israel seem to be pretty much natural enemies?’
‘Oddly enough,’ Richter replied, ‘the answer’s no, or probably not. We don’t actually know the nationality or the name of the ship we’re searching for, but because of the way the cargo was loaded we are almost certain it’s not Iranian. But the bioweapon is Iranian. You’re quite right about that.’
He briefly explained the sequence of events that had led to the surveillance by satellite of the building in Zahedan, and the corroborating evidence from the low-level Six asset at Khasab, and the deductions that had been made based upon this information. At the end of it, Moloch raised similar questions to those posed during the briefing at Hammersmith, and Richter supplied the same answers, together with the suggestion by Charles Vernon as to what the weapon might consist of, and the way that it was intended to be deployed. When he’d finished, Moloch had one more question. Exactly the same question, in fact, as had been asked by Richard Simpson back in London.
‘What the fuck is Zeolite?’
And Richter had an answer for him, as near verbatim what Charles Vernon had said as made no difference.
‘Zeolite is a hydrated aluminosilicate mineral that can be used for ion exchange and reversible dehydration. That’s the scientific stuff, but in practical, real-world terms Zeolite is used globally as a water softener. And that’s the point. We believe the Iranians have been really clever. They’ve mutated a particular kind of bacteria – our best guess is Anthrax, but it could be almost anything – so that it would only affect people who are genetically Jewish. This is an impressive piece of biochemical engineering. But the really clever bit isn’t the manufacture of the bioweapon itself, but the way they intended it to be deployed. They would have known from the first that the chances of a group of Iranian terrorists being able to get into Israel and introduce the agent into the water supply would be as near nil as makes no difference. Israel is too heavily policed and monitored and the people are frankly far too suspicious of strangers because of the way they live to make that even a remote possibility.
‘So what they decided to do was to get the Israelis to poison their own water supply themselves. That solved all the problems of getting access to a pumping station or a reservoir or a purification plant or anything of that sort, and at the same time would remove any direct or even an indirect link between Iran and the pandemic that would result in Israel. Israel has lots of sources of water, including the Sea of Galilee and salt water desalination plants which are becoming much more important. Trying to get any kind of contaminant into the Sea of Galilee would not only be spectacularly difficult, precisely because of where it is, but also would require an immense amount of whatever bioweapon they chose, just because the volume of water there is so enormous. The dilution factor would be huge.
‘The Iranian scientists and planners who came up with this scheme obviously knew all this, and what they’ve planned to do is bypass all that and introduce the bioweapon as close to the end of the supply chain as they could manage, at a water softening plant. Most water softening plants use Zeolite or another substance with similar properties. We haven’t had time to verify this for ourselves, but presumably the Iranians investigated exactly how the plants in Israel work and what chemicals and products they use and came up with Zeolite as the obvious carrier to get the weapon into the system. We assume that they created a shell company, or something of that sort and then arranged for their doctored Zeolite to be supplied to Israel.’
‘So what you’re really saying,’ Moloch stated, ‘is that Israel has actually bought and paid cash for a bioweapon that could take out maybe half of their population, before they’d even be able to find out what was actually causing the deaths.’
‘In a nutshell,’ Richter replied, ‘yes. And that’s what we’re here to stop.’
‘Where’s the target ship? You using satellite tracking or something?’
‘Yes. The Keyhole images showed the vessel being loaded at Khasab, and it’s been tracked by the same orbital vehicles ever since it left that port. Right now, it’s probably about one hundred or maybe 110 nautical miles ahead of us. I’ve already told London that we’ve sailed so that the eyes in the sky can track us as well and I should get an accurate distance measurement next time a bird comes within range. Your intelligence specialists have calculated the target’s average speed at just over ten knots, and according to the captain this ship normally cruises at twelve knots, but it can hit fourteen if necessary. So if we just plod along at twelve, and the target is one hundred miles in front of us, then we’ll be right alongside it in fifty hours.’
‘So the bottom line,’ Moloch said, ‘is that we can certainly catch up with this ship as long as we don’t have any mechanical problems, and obviously while both vessels are in the Red Sea. So it’s really more a matter of deciding exactly where we’re going to hit it, how we’re going to stop it, what we do with the crew, what we do with the ship, and what we do with the bioweapon. Have you figured any of that out yet?’
‘Not the details, no,’ Richter admitted, ‘but the broadbrush plan we’ve come up with is that we stage a collision with the other vessel to allow us to board her. That’s option one. Option two is we get fairly close and then make like Somali pirates and use those skiffs on the deck to get close to the target. There are boarding ladders and grapnels in the deck cargo that could be used to get on board, but that might be a lot messier. As far as the target ship is concerned, the ideal solution would be for it to sink with all hands to avoid leaving anybody around to ask any awkward questions. But the bioweapon has to be transferred to this ship and then taken back to Britain for it to be studied and analysed. And your people at Fort Detrick or the Centers for Disease Control will want to take a look at it as well.’
Moloch nodded.
‘I can see where you’re going with that,’ he said. ‘If the ship sinks, the real obvious assumption would be that its cargo went down with it, and there’d be no point in anyone trying to recover the wreckage. I mean, the Titanic it ain’t. You said it was just a small coaster, that kind of thing. Ships sink every day and it pretty much never makes the news. So the Iranians would just be waiting to hear that most of the population of Israel was dropping down dead, and would have no idea what had happened to their wonder weapon or why it wasn’t working.’
‘We have worked out a way of letting them know their plan had failed,’ Richter said, ‘but that’s another story.’
Right then he got a message on his mobile through the satellite communication system.
‘From the last satellite pass, we’re now 119 nautical miles behind the target, which is doing ten decimal three knots, and we’re now averaging twelve knots dead, so that’s pretty much within the parameters.’
‘Good. Okay. We’ll forget about how we’re going to stop it for the moment and look at where it’ll happen, because that’ll determine the speed we have to maintain to get to that point at the same time as the target ship.’
Richter pointed at the table in front of Masters.
‘We borrowed those charts of the Red Sea from the bridge. They should be good enough.’
‘Right,’ Moloch said. ‘Let’s get to it. We need a wide part of the Red Sea, no inhabited islands and deep water. Shouldn’t be that difficult to find.’