Villamor Airbase, Manila
VILLAMOR AIRBASE HAD had plenty of high-profile visitors in recent years, from the US Secretary of State to a mass delivery of Chinese Sinovax vaccines to a contingent of US Marines offloading emergency aid in the aftermath of a destructive typhoon. Today’s arrival was rather lower profile.
In the darkened hours before dawn the unmarked RAF Airbus A400M taxied slowly past the reinforced-concrete aircraft shelters and the blue-and-white-painted Officers’ Club, coming to a halt in a discreet corner of this Philippines Air Force base. It was shared, as so often happens around the world, with the civilian facility of Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Unseen by all but a handful of security men from the President’s office, the eight men of the Special Boat Service disembarked the aircraft and walked quickly into the hangar. They were large men, moving with a loose, easy gait despite the weapons sacks in their hands and the kitbags slung over their shoulders.
It had taken some frantic, last-minute diplomacy to get clearance from Manila for this deployment. The Philippines government had often been nervous of doing anything that might upset its giant Chinese neighbour. But recent clashes between the two countries’ navies over a disputed reef in the South China Sea, known as the Second Thomas Shoal, had led to a hardening of attitudes in Manila. Within hours of that meeting in the Travellers Club between the Chief and the Foreign Secretary, frantic cables were winging their way back and forth between King Charles Street in Whitehall and the British Embassy on Manila’s Upper McKinley Road. With some delicate diplomacy, agreement was reached after a solemn written undertaking was given by London that any action launched by the SBS unit from Philippines soil would be solely against organized criminal networks and not against a sovereign government in the region.
They were not long on the ground. Waiting on the tarmac just outside a hangar, the Royal Navy Merlin Mk 4 helicopter already had its rotors turning, ready to ferry the assault team out to sea. There, the ageing Type 23 frigate HMS Sutherland had slipped her moorings in Manila Bay and was now heading towards a point in the South China Sea midway between the coasts of Taiwan and the Philippines. The transfer time at Villamor airbase was tight. Just twenty minutes to get the whole squad and their kit off the plane from Oman, into the base facility for a quick ‘comfort break’ and to pick up some rations, then filing up the grey-painted back ramp into the gaping maw of the waiting chopper. Minutes later the pilot had the cyclic building to full pitch and they were lifting off northward, then angling left to follow the route of the C-4 highway, lit by streetlamps below, flying over the district of Pasay and out over the dark waves of Manila Bay.
MI6’s Manila station chief and her deputy had been busy while the SBS team was inbound from Oman. Working in tandem with Defence Intelligence and Fleet Command, they had delved deeper into the ship suspected of holding Hannah Slade. It turned out there were at least four vessels around the globe going by the name MV Ulysses Maiden, mostly medium-sized bulk carriers, registered in Vietnam, Malaysia, Palau and Panama. But it was quickly apparent that the vessel now in transit from Macau to Taipei was up to no good. Every ocean-going ship was supposed to carry a tracker, a VHF broadcast transponder known as Automatic Identification System, or AIS, that revealed to the world exactly where the vessel was on the map. If a ship had its AIS switched off, it could mean only one of two things: either the system had broken down, which was rare, or more likely, that it was doing something secret, illegal or dangerous. Or all three.
The last message the Officer Commanding of the SBS detachment received on his phone, just before they all filed onto the Merlin, informed him that Ulysses Maiden had indeed switched off her AIS beacon. The suspicions already growing in Whitehall, PJHQ and Manila were now confirmed.