The terrorist cell from Lille was exposed, rather surprisingly, not by the legions of police and military who were swarming across northern France, but by a marine mechanic who’d been called in to investigate—at double-time wages—a forty-six-foot Bertram cabin cruiser that had begun taking on water in the storm.
The boat lay moored in the municipal basin along the Chenal de Gravelines, just west of Dunkirk, and the alarm had been raised by the owner of a neighboring yacht who’d ventured to the piers at the height of the maelstrom to check on his own boat. The man wasn’t much of a sailor in his own right, so when he saw the problem he did what he always did—he called Viktor Foulon.
Foulon was at his kitchen table, settling down behind a bowl of hot cereal, when his mobile phone trilled. His first inclination was to ignore the call, but at a glance he saw who it was. He sighed and picked up.
“Monsieur Dumas, what can I do for you on this lovely day?”
“Viktor, you must come to the harbor at once!”
Viktor looked out the window. He saw pelting rain and a black sky. “Is there a problem with Cassandra?” he asked. Cassandra was Dumas’ old eighty-five-foot Feadship, which without Foulon’s regular attentions would no longer be afloat. He nearly made a living off the old barge, which had decayed to the point that it was more a floating cocktail patio than a seagoing vessel. Which was fine with Foulon, since Dumas had more money than sense.
“No, it is not my boat,” said Dumas. “The Bertram next to her is listing badly. I think she may go down.”
Foulon knew the boat, but had never met her owner. “Do you know whose boat it is?” he asked.
“I can’t recall his name, but he’s one of those financial managers from Paris—I had a martini with him once on Cassandra.”
A financial manager, thought Foulon. A possibility. A gust of wind caused his roof to creak. “All right,” he said despairingly, “I’ll come have a look.”
“Very well. If you need me I’ll be at the café on the quay.” Dumas rang off.
Café on the quay. Foulon cursed and let his breakfast go cold on the table.
Suspecting a faulty bilge pump, he retrieved his toolbox, then donned his heavy slicker for the walk to the harbor. The wind had been howling all night, and rain was still sheeting up and down the coast. If it had been anyone but Cassandra’s owner, his longtime financial anchor, Foulon would have told them to go to hell.
Arriving at the dockmaster’s office ten minutes later, he was more wet than dry, and the hair under his loose hood was tousled, like that of a child whose favorite aunt had rubbed his head. He explained to the man on duty, old Bernard, that there might be an emergency. Foulon was given a key to the vessel without question. Back out in the rain, he headed up Pier 3 to the deep-water slips at the end and found the boat in question. She was named Formidable, but at that moment she was hardly living up to it—standing by her transom, Foulon saw a list to port that must have exceeded ten degrees. He also noticed that her bilge pumps were working furiously, steady streams of water spewing from fittings above the waterline. Not good.
As he stepped onto her off-kilter deck, the next thing he noticed was that he didn’t need the key—the sliding door to the main salon was already wide open. Foulon came under shelter, and with the driving rain no longer pounding his oilskin, he pulled back his hood. As soon as he did, he registered what sounded like a hushed argument inside the cabin. The tone was sharp, but the language made no sense to him. He walked into the main salon to find three dark-skinned men who looked more surprised than he was.
Foulon blinked away the rain, and right away saw a number of peculiarities. On the settee nearby was a big suitcase, its flap hanging open, full of what looked like white clay. On the dining table he saw snarls of wiring and colored tape and batteries. The three men were all on their knees, and between them was what could only be described as a small crater. The floor of the boat had been breached, and a jagged meter-wide hole was edged in soot—undoubtedly the reason Formidable was sinking. Then Foulon saw the most disturbing sight: on the floor just beyond the hole, what was left of a fourth man, his body ripped to shreds in a pool of blood.
“Merde! What the devil is going on here?” Foulon demanded.
To anyone who did not know Foulon, what happened in the next twenty seconds might have seemed chaotic and unexpected. In fact, it was an outburst thirty years in the making. Viktor Foulon’s true talent had nothing to do with either bilge pumps or wrenches. Having spent eight years in the French Foreign Legion, he had killed more men than he cared to remember in the darkened jungles of Congo and Ivory Coast. After leaving the service, he’d earned a solid reputation as a brawler in the watering holes of Gravelines, and as any local policeman would attest, Foulon was a volatile handful when he was drunk. What most did not realize was that he was far more dangerous when sober.
It did not harm the ex-legionnaire’s prospects that he stood six feet five inches tall, or that his 260 pounds were cut from a template that might have patterned the marine diesels he worked on. The three men facing him were altogether different. In terms of size they were neither slight nor stalwart, simply the other ninety percent, and while Foulon couldn’t know it, none of them had any combat experience. Ironically, it was the only one with any kind of training—two months in a jihadist camp in southern Libya—who made the first mistake. The smallest of the three, he lunged toward a shelf.
Foulon’s eyes reached the shelf before the man’s hands, and he instantly recognized the dull-black machine pistol. As he realized that he too needed a weapon, and probably in a hurry, it occurred to Foulon that he was already holding one.
He swung his toolbox in a giant arc. It was a professional-grade item, red and rectangular, built of high-tensile steel. Inside were fifty pounds of hammers and wrenches and bolts. The box picked up speed through 180 degrees of rotation, and arrived, catastrophically, at the skull of the man fumbling with the safety on his machine pistol. Foulon immediately reversed the motion, stepped forward, and began waylaying everything in his path like a wrecking ball gone amok.
Shelves shattered and light fixtures exploded. Men screamed and blood splattered walls. A set of cabinet doors disintegrated, and the rack of radios inside was pulverized, sparks spraying outward like a miniature fireworks display. After seven or eight great swipes—Foulon wasn’t counting—he stopped and evaluated the situation. Panting like a winded bull, he saw one man on the floor with a crushed skull, certainly dead. Another was out cold, and the third lay moaning and incoherent—he had a very crooked arm, and had ended up sprawled across the already-dead fourth man. Gray smoke curled through the cabin in an acrid cloud of burning insulation.
Foulon dropped his dented toolbox and ran up the pier to the dockmaster’s office. “We need the police!” he shouted as he burst through the door.
A surprised Bernard actually chuckled. “You’re joking, right?” He pointed across the channel. On the opposite wharf Foulon saw six police cars and two military vehicles.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked.
Bernard’s eyes fell to Foulon’s heaving chest, and he said, “Maybe you should tell me.”
Foulon looked down and saw that his shirt was covered in blood—as far as he knew, not his own. He explained what had just happened.
With forty years on the docks, Bernard was not the excitable type, yet by the time Foulon finished his story the dockmaster’s face had gone ashen. “Were they Middle Eastern?” he asked.
It was Foulon’s turn to be taken aback. “How did you know that?”
“Because four thousand policemen have been scouring the north of France for them. Haven’t you seen the news?”
Foulon said he had not. He rarely watched television, and never in the morning. He vaguely remembered seeing something about terrorists on the muted television at the bar last night, but he hadn’t really paid attention. Bertrand filled him in.
As Foulon listened, he felt a bit of relief. He’d long been on a first-name basis with the harbor police, thanks to a string of minor indiscretions. Now he was sure he’d killed at least one man. But he hadn’t been drinking, and if the four men on Formidable had been up to no good, he might be all right. So Foulon got a favorable version of things straight in his head, and he told Bernard again to make the phone call. He waited nervously for the police to arrive.
He need not have worried. By that evening’s news cycle, Viktor Foulon, ex-legionnaire, marine mechanic, and saloon wrecker of some repute, would be recognized far and wide as a hero of the French Republic.
* * *
The news from the coast reached Élysée Palace within minutes of the police arriving on scene.
“We’ve found them!” announced the national police liaison. “The four men from Lille have been stopped in their tracks—they were trying to steal a pleasure boat in Gravelines.”
The president of France, a steaming espresso in front of him, had just found his way back to the command center. “Who caught them—national or local gendarmes?”
“Actually,” said the liaison, “it seems they encountered a local man. He’s a marine mechanic, and apparently an ex-legionnaire. He took matters into his own hands. Two of the four are dead, and one is unconscious.”
The presidential brow furrowed, and he seemed about to say something, but then only cocked his head to encourage the liaison to continue.
“Explosive disposal teams are working the scene. They estimate they’re dealing with over a hundred kilograms of TATP along with the associated hardware. Apparently an initiator charge went off prematurely and blew a hole in the bottom of the boat. It began to sink, which is presumably why someone called in the mechanic.”
The army chief of staff snorted in exasperation. “Incredible! We are dealing with imbeciles!”
“Perhaps,” said the president. “But committed imbeciles have harmed us far too often. The important thing is that the plot has been interrupted.”
The liaison said, “We found a map on the boat that suggests they were targeting a cruise ship in Le Havre. We’ve long been worried about that kind of thing. Should we stand down our search in the north? Our forces are stretched very thin at the moment.”
“Do we have information on any other possible strikes?”
“No, Mr. President. We of course will remain watchful, and continue to monitor communications out of Syria. But this episode exhausts our current intelligence—we know of no other cells that have been activated.”
The president considered it, then looked around the room, and said, “Where the hell has Baland gone?”
The intelligence chief said, “I believe he returned to DGSI to check on things there.”
The president shrugged and took a sip of his espresso. “Very well,” he said. “Stand down your search.”