Le Moulin au Pouchon
Hassan Abbas was taking his time, relishing the moment. He accessed the weapon control module and chose the ‘Total’ option, which would allow all the weapons on American soil to be detonated simultaneously. Then he took out a small black leather-covered book from his pocket and, in response to the automated prompts from the Krutaya mainframe, began carefully inputting the two twelve-digit authorization codes that were required to activate each weapon in turn. Detonation would not take place until all two hundred and three nuclear weapons had been enabled.
Richter had left his mobile phone switched on, but with the ringer silent and the phone set to vibrate when a call was received. As Ross and Dekker regrouped their men and prepared to advance further up the lane, he felt the tremor in his pocket, pulled the phone out and pressed the button to answer the call. ‘Richter.’
‘You’d better be quick,’ Baker said, his voice high and panicky. ‘That bastard Dernowi’s on the system again and he’s just accessed the Weapon Control module.’
‘Can’t you change the authorization codes – you know, the same as you did with Trushenko?’
‘No. He’s got a higher access level then me. The moment I did anything like that he’d know I was an intruder. He’d simply delete Modin as a user, kick me off the system and then get on with detonating the weapons. It’s better if I don’t do anything. At least that way I can see what he’s doing.’
‘And what is he doing?’
‘He’s chosen simultaneous detonation. He’s going to trigger all the American weapons at the same time.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Richter said. ‘OK – stay on the line.’ He looked round and gestured urgently to Ross and Dekker. ‘Dernowi’s on the system again,’ he said, ‘and he’s going to fire all the American weapons simultaneously. We have to act immediately. Are you sure this is the right road?’
Dekker nodded, his face visibly pale in the dim moonlight. ‘If the France Telecom directions are right, yes.’
‘Right,’ Richter said. ‘We can’t do this with kid gloves, not now, so we have to risk alerting these fucking Arabs.’ He pointed a few yards up the road at a telegraph pole and shone his torch at the cross-trees at the top of it. ‘Those cables are probably the ones carrying Dernowi’s transmissions. Shoot them off it.’
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ Ross asked.
‘Damn right I am,’ Richter said. ‘Do it now.’
Dekker gestured to a trooper who walked up, aimed his silenced Hockler at the top of the telegraph pole and squeezed the trigger. The weapon made a popping sound, alarmingly loud in the darkness, and wood splinters flew from the cross-trees. One cable fell, then a second, and the third and fourth together. Another trooper ran over, used his torch to locate the cables in the hedgerow, then severed each of them with his knife.
‘You still there, Baker?’ Richter snapped.
‘Yes.’
‘OK. We’ve just cut some telephone cables. Is Dernowi still on-line?’
There was a pause that seemed to last minutes as Baker looked at the computer screen in London. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘The connection’s been dropped.’
Richter breathed again. ‘Good. We’re definitely in the right place,’ he said. ‘Baker, is Simpson still there?’
‘Yes,’ Baker replied shortly. ‘I think everyone still in the building is here in the Computer Suite.’
‘OK, just as a precaution, get Simpson to contact Lacomte and tell him to disable all the mobile phone cells in this area, as soon as possible.’ Richter grabbed the map Dekker had been using. ‘That’s within, say, a fifty kilometre radius of Mont de Marsan, and for at least the next two hours. This bastard may have a mobile phone as well as a landline.’
‘It’ll take time,’ Baker replied.
‘I know, so best you get started. Disconnect now, but call me immediately there’s any other sign of Dernowi.’
Le Moulin au Pouchon
Like Dmitri Trushenko had done in the Crimea, Hassan Abbas looked at the screen of the computer with considerable irritation. The double-computer icon in the Taskbar at the bottom right of the screen had abruptly vanished, taking his connection to the Krutaya mainframe with it. The sudden disconnection didn’t surprise him because he had experienced similar problems in the past with France Telecom, and he knew perfectly well that line failures were by no means unusual in rural France.
He instructed the computer to re-dial his Wanadoo Internet access number, and watched as the Dial-Up Networking dialog box appeared in the centre of the screen. He pressed the ‘Connect’ button, and the system reported ‘Status: Dialing’. Seconds later the status message read ‘Disconnecting’. Abbas clicked on ‘Details’ and read the brief message ‘There was no dial-tone’. Something was wrong, he realized, with a sudden chill. Losing the connection to Krutaya was one thing, but losing the line completely was quite another. He grabbed the telephone beside the computer and pressed it to his ear. Silence. He depressed the receiver rest a couple of times, with no result.
Abbas was no fool. He got up, walked swiftly to the top of the stairs and shouted down. ‘Arm yourselves. The house may be attacked imminently.’ He walked into the main bedroom and paused beside the bed only long enough to shake Fouad awake, then moved swiftly over to the shuttered windows. He opened the window, then carefully eased one shutter open and peered out into the darkness, eyes and ears attuned for the slightest unusual sight or sound. Nothing, apart from the usual faint noises of the night.
Abbas pulled the shutter closed again and walked across the landing. Downstairs he could sense the tension, could hear his men murmuring quietly, and the metallic sounds as they checked and cocked their weapons.
‘Lights out,’ he called, ‘and prepare.’ Then he turned and walked back into the rear bedroom. He grabbed the leather Samsonite case containing the laptop computer and mobile phone, opened it and quickly checked that everything was there. Then he snapped the case closed, walked out of the bedroom, locked the door behind him and pocketed the key.
‘That must be it,’ Dekker muttered. ‘Yes,’ he added, swivelling his night glasses to the postbox standing by the roadside. The letters on the box were hand-painted, faded and weathered, and partially obscured by a bush, but he could just make out the last part of the name ‘
They had followed the twisting road that climbed up out of the village to the north-east and were now the better part of a mile outside St Medard. In front of them, clearly visible in the faint moonlight, was a square white house sitting in a small garden just off the road on the outside of a right-hand bend. The walls were white-washed and looked as if they were solid stone and thick. The front door looked old and heavy, and Ross had been right about the windows – they were small and square and, predictably, tightly shuttered.
But there were some signs of life inside the property. Faint vertical and horizontal lines of light showed behind and through two of the shuttered windows on the ground floor on the left-hand side of the front door, but even as they looked the light was extinguished.
‘Anyone here think they’ve just gone to bed?’ Dekker asked.
‘Not a chance,’ Richter snapped. ‘They’ve just lost the connection to the Russian mainframe and by now they’ll also know that the landline has been cut. No doubt Dernowi or whoever’s in charge has told the bodyguards to expect an attack. That, anyway, is the way I read it. They’re certainly awake, and they’ll be alert.’
‘Right,’ Ross said. ‘Mr Beatty is probably right, but even if he’s wrong we still have to assume that they know we’re out here. Normally we’d wait and try to ascertain exactly how many of them there are inside, and where
