opened the door to the database room, closing it softly behind him. He turned on the light above the consul and heard the hum of the big corporate computer as it moved slickly into life. He tapped into the database for the section that dealt with the now-extinct Upholder-Class diesel-electric submarine, a program killed off by the government in the 1990s to the fury of the Royal Navy.
Only four of them had been built, at Vickers’s Cammell Laird yard in Birkenhead, 50 miles to the south. But they were excellent ships, highly efficient, as good, probably better, than the Russian Kilo-Class, and they were the only diesel-electric submarines the Royal Navy had built since the “O”-Class back in the 1960s. They were called
John Patel hooked up his Toshiba on the laplink system and hit the copy and start keys. The operation would take possibly four hours, but he would not have to monitor it. The Toshiba, with 4.3 gigabits on the hard drive, would silently absorb every last sentence and diagram of the thousands and thousands of details contained in the computerized library that represented the Upholder-Class submarine.
Every working part, every system, the propulsion, the weapons, the generators, the location of the switches, the valves, the torpedo tubes, and the air purifiers. The entire blueprint of these miraculous underwater warships would be copied, and it would take up almost the full capacity of the hard drive. It was the biggest request John Patel had ever received, and he wondered what on earth Iran’s Navy could want with such a mammoth collection of data.
But the note, delivered personally by his father, had contained an air of urgency, highlighted by the rare inclusion of the specific amount of money he would receive—$50,000, payable as usual to his numbered account in Geneva. John thanked Allah for the general weakness of Vickers’s security. For he planned to spend the night in the building rather than risk being searched if he left via the main gate around eleven o’clock. If he spent the night, hidden somewhere in the building, the chances of being discovered were virtually nonexistent. There was only one security guard on duty in the drawing-office building. And he was normally asleep or watching television. His name was Reg, and he was not vigilant. He usually took a walk around at ten-thirty, right after the evening news on ITV. It was not a long walk, however. Reg liked to be back in his little office for the late movie at ten-forty-five.
At nine o’clock John checked the computers, which were still running flawlessly, the little Toshiba siphoning off the priceless data from the database, turned out all of the lights, and locked the door. Then he slipped through the main floor and into his own office, which he also placed in total darkness. Finally, he sat behind his desk, looking out through the door and beyond to the unlighted corridor along which he expected to see Reg advance in ninety minutes.
It was a boring wait, but at 10:35 the lights went on in the outer corridor. John Patel softly closed his office door and positioned himself directly behind it. He could hear the security man opening and shutting doors swiftly, each one sounding a little closer. When he reached John’s office he opened the door and stepped inside, but he did not bother to turn on the light, and he certainly did not bother to look behind the door. He was gone inside ten seconds, and John heard him check the next office immediately.
Reg skipped the computer room altogether, but even had he entered he would not have tampered with a running program. His brief was to locate intruders, nothing else. And, anyway, the late movie tonight was an old 1997 comedy called
John Patel entered the computer room at eleven o’clock, disconnected his laptop, and switched off the main system. Then he retreated to his pitch-dark office, placed the Toshiba in his briefcase, locked it, and spread out on the floor behind his desk, guessing correctly that Reg was done for the night. At eight-fifteen the following morning, he opened his office door, switched on his desk light, and began work. No one would appear before nine. No one ever did at Vickers, not anymore.
That night he would leave on time with everyone else, and he looked forward to that. In the evening he and Lisa were driving over to his father’s Indian restaurant in Bradford, 80 miles away across the high Pennines in Yorkshire. That was always fun. But while he and his wife drove home, Ranji Patel would journey through the night, 175 miles south down the M1 motorway to London, taking the Toshiba laptop to the Iranian Embassy at 27 Prince’s Gate, Kensington, special delivery to the naval attache. Old friends would be up, waiting for him there in the small hours. And the little computer would be in the Iranian diplomatic bag on board Syrian Arab Airways’ morning flight from Heathrow to Tehran.
In two months there had been immense progress on two fronts. Commander Adnam had mastered the rudiments of the Farsi language, using every modern computerized technique. And the Iranian contractors had completed the foundation for the concrete dry dock. They also had in place the 30-foot-thick wall on its left-hand side facing the harbor. It towered 60 feet high. The wall on the other side was nearing completion, and the great steel girders of the roof were in place. Against the long left-side wall the 300-foot model room was already under cover, and teams of carpenters were hammering home the sidewalls.
Beneath the roof concealed by sheets of tarpaulin, a huge, full-scale, cylindrical model of a diesel-electric submarine was being created out of wood and grey plastic. Commander Ben Adnam spent several hours each day in there with Iran’s senior naval architects and submarine experts. The boat could have been a Russian Kilo, but it was not quite so big, and it contained many significant differences, particularly of internal layout. To the expert eye, it was several degrees more sophisticated.
Commander Adnam had been careful not to reveal the precise type and class of submarine they would use on the mission, other than to Admiral Badr. He had thus slightly irritated the Iranian Navy hierarchy by brushing aside their questions of when, how, and the Special Ops submarine was coming from? Will you require the new Kilo?
To every question, the commander answered the same. “I am not yet ready to reveal the whereabouts of the submarine we will use. But you may trust me implicitly. The entire plan depends on it — and at the correct time I will inform you how I propose to acquire it.”
“But Ben,” they had protested, “we must know how. Do you intend to rent one, borrow one, or even buy one? If so, from whom? We must be told the costs and who the provider might be. There may be great political ramifications.”
“Not yet,” the commander would reply curtly. “When the time comes I will, of course, present you with a detailed plan and report. At that time you will be free to accept or decline, as you wish. Bear in mind I do not anticipate your declining, because that would cost me $2,750,000, which I consider to be an unacceptable consequence.”
Out beyond the model room, work continued under the wilting rays of the sun by day and under lights at night. Security was phenomenal. It was impossible to reach the buildings without crossing a cordon of armed guards, placed 200 yards from the new dock. Miles of barbed wire protected all approaches to the site. Every worker wore a plastic identification badge. Every man on the site was photographed and fingerprinted, checked, and searched both incoming and outgoing. A simple sign on the main gate along the road to the base read:
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
INTRUDERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT.
Three drivers who had arrived without their badges had been incarcerated in the Navy jail for a week as suspected spies. Special patrol craft crisscrossed the waters of the inner harbor with unprecedented frequency. A frigate remained on permanent patrol outside the harbor entrance, ready to intercept and, if necessary, sink an unauthorized visitor.
By the year 2004, the Iranian Navy was 40,000 strong, 20,000 regular personnel, and a further 20,000 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, special forces loosely modeled on the U.S. Navy SEALs, or the British SAS. They managed some heavy practice during the war with Iraq, but had never achieved the sophistication of the Americans, and the British would probably have been amused by their efforts. Nonetheless, the young Iranian Naval commandos were tough, fit, and quite incredibly brave, believing as they did, that in the end they were fighting for Allah and that he would protect them and lead them to glory.
From the ranks of these men, Commander Adnam would handpick two hit men for his mission. The other
