The Blind Spy

ripped the night apart. “It was like a firing squad,” an SBS officer was quoted later as saying. “They were up against the white steel wall of the bridge, spotlights on them, in a row and hands over their faces. Some had their hands in the air. They were surrendering. They had no guns that we could see, there was no return of fire.”

After a minute of firing, one of the helicopters landed on a deck space cleared by the assault teams. Then all fell silent as the other choppers flew to stand off the ship and await instructions.

Above the silence came the groans of the wounded.

Two teams of four descended steps into the ship’s belly and began a section-to-section search. The captain was turfed out of bed and a few bemused crewmen were similarly awakened who hadn’t already heard the firing. All were brought to the deck, hands strapped in plastic cuffs behind them. It was a scratch crew, only five in all. The rest of the ship’s occupants—twelve in all—were on the deck and all but two were dead. As the SBS teams and their American and Russian counterparts stripped masks from the faces of the few who had managed to don them in time, and looked at the unmasked dead and wounded, there was a stunned silence, the occasional shout of a man’s name, curses and swearing that rose in anger and distress as the identities of the defenders who had put up no defence were revealed. In each case, faces were recognised by the British and the Americans as former colleagues in their own special forces, in one or two cases, friends. It was a massacre of their own. There were no Russians among the defenders. And it was noted later that none of the Russian spetsnaz present bothered to look at the faces of the dead and wounded.

The captain of the Pride of Corsica was interrogated in a chair on the deck while the teams searched the vessel and brought up five wooden crates from the hold. The captain repeated over and over that there was no cargo of a dangerous nature.

“Why the missile system? Why the helicopter?” The SBS interrogators were not sensitive in their methods. The captain was weeping, and repeating the same phrases over and over. The Russian special forces stood back and watched.

It was said by the captain and his crew that the bodyguards were a defence against pirates. But he didn’t know, none of them knew, why they were there, why any defence against pirates was needed.

Eventually the SBS got tired of asking the same questions and the Americans moved in, without getting any more from the stricken captain than that he was a Filipino with five children back in Mindanao; that his crew was a scratch collection of individuals from a shipping agency. They finally finished with roughing him up as the crates were opened carefully with jemmies.

Inside the crates were boxes and the boxes contained bubble wrap and the bubble wrap contained nothing. Nothing at all. The Pride of Corsica was void of incriminating material. All it contained after the assault were five crew members, the assault team, and ten dead colleagues of the British and American assault force. Two others were saved.

Later, at the enquiry at which Theo Lish was the principal defender, it was asked why British and American special forces teams had been induced by the Russians to kill their own kind—albeit former colleagues—and why nothing was found on the Pride of Corsica that pointed to a terrorist or any other plot. Lish was able to come up with no adequate answer. Burt Miller, called as a witness, explained that he’d informed the CIA head that he believed the Pride of Corsica had been a bluff all along, that he’d tried to warn Lish, in fact. Miller regretted the loss of life—and the tragic mistake made on the morning of May 1. But the central question to which Lish continued to flounder under questioning from the Senate Intelligence Committee, was why on Russian evidence alone the assault had been made at all.

35

ANNA SAT AT THE FAR END of a cave at the foot of the cliff on the north shore of the city. Below her feet, the seawater lapped sluggishly at the rock. Where the sea ended, where she sat in the darkness of the cave, was also the final resting place of the harbour’s detritus of oil and chemical waste, metal and plastic cans, polystyrene and fragments of wood and rope that created a six-inch scum on the lapping surface. The insignificant tides of the Black Sea never scoured the cave clean and the smell was one of vegetable and toxic rot and chemical and oil waste that over decades had stained the cave’s walls in a black, glistening film. Drop a match in here, she thought, and the whole place would go up in flames.

She and Larry had descended from the part of town on the north shore after dark and then he’d left her. She’d watched the light grow at the tunnel’s entrance as dawn rose across the heaving channel of the Sevastopolskaya Bukhta, listened to the horn of a ship that entered from the sea through the breakwaters of Sevastopol’s perfect natural harbour, saw its surface lines as it cut through the channel into port—though the cave’s low entrance obscured the superstructure—and listened to the tight chug of a fishing boat and the nerve-jangling cries of seagulls.

Now she fitted the Aqua-Lung with its debreathing apparatus that would eliminate bubbles rising to the surface as it recycled her own oxygen. She fixed the full mask over her face and ensured that the tight dry suit, which concealed a Russian GRU uniform, the Contender handgun, and two sticks of Semtex, was fastened into an airtight position. She checked her watch again. Then at midday exactly, she descended into the filthy slime of the cave’s waste, sank beneath it, and swam towards the entrance of the cave.

It was a swim of just over two kilometres—at an angle across the channel—until she could come ashore on the long naval quay inside the Russian fleet’s protected zone. Somewhere beneath the same waters where she swam she knew other divers were at work, Russian frogmen who had come to set off an explosion that would rend some unwanted fleet vessel apart and at the same time rend the uneasy peace between Russia and Ukraine that clung on in the Crimea.

The waters where she swam were dirty with industrial waste and visibility was low. That would be a help, if by some fluke she and they should cross paths.

All along the shores on the north and south of the Bukhta the fixed and passive sonars were now, she prayed, disabled.

She swam fast, looking at the compass on her arm from time to time. Accuracy at her landing point was crucial. There was a set of steps that descended from the nearest of the two quays she was heading for. They came down at a protected angle, which meant that anyone surfacing at the foot of them was visible from only one viewpoint and that was a kilometre away as the crow flies, on the north shore. Unless someone was actually standing on the quay above where the steps emerged, it was her best hope of remaining undetected.

She knew she’d entered the dockyards after fifteen minutes. It was a short distance from here to the end of the first of the quays that jutted out from the land into the deep water where big ships could dock. Then she reached the green slime of the quay wall and waited twenty feet beneath the surface while deciding whether to go left or right along the wall. She chose the left and was rewarded after twenty yards with the sight of stone steps that descended beneath the surface. She checked her watch. There was still forty minutes to go while the sonar remained inactive. She imagined that the frogmen would plant whatever device they were using and then get clear of the harbour and away. The explosion might not happen within the hour’s planned lapse in security. But it wouldn’t be long afterwards if it didn’t.

She came as close to the surface as she dared and, through the water, now lighter from the sun’s glare, tried to spot any movement on the quay that betrayed a human presence nearby. After five minutes during which she’d seen nothing move, no shape or outline apart from the quay’s wall, she came out on the bottom step above the surface. She took another quick look around, then stripped off the mask and Aqua-Lung, the dry suit and fins, and, weighted with the gas bottle, watched them sink slowly into the grey water. Then she stood and walked up the steps towards the top of the quay.

When she was halfway up she heard a deafening explosion and stopped in momentary shock. Then she saw a ball of flame that reached thirty feet into the air. She crouched down, feeling the Contender digging into her ribs. She saw now that the explosion had come from the main channel, to the north of the dockyards through which she’d swum only minutes earlier. The victim of the blast was an old Russian naval vessel, anchored outside the dockyards. It was just as they’d thought when she and Balthasar had sat on the high bluff above the city.

Now she ran up the remaining steps onto the top of the quay. It was a piece of luck that they’d exploded the