had already marked several of these, starting with Andikithira and finishing with the Gavdos– Gavdopoula pair.
Privately, he put his money on three strong contenders: Paximada in Ormos Mesaras, south-west of Agia Galini; Chrysi and its much smaller companion Mikronissi lying to the south of Ierapetra, though this area lay some way outside his theoretical radius of fifty to sixty miles from Kandira; and finally the area extending between Gavdos and Gavdopoula. The outside bet would be the Koufonisi group located south of the Stenon Konfonisou at the eastern tip of Crete. That was too far for Aristides to reach in a day and still get back to Kandira, but it was still a possibility if the diver had spent one or two nights somewhere in the area.
With his target areas established, Richter had worked out a route that would allow the Merlin to check the chosen sites in the most logical order in terms of speed. With
If refuelling was necessary, they’d fly north, straight over the Cretan mainland and back to the
‘And we’re looking for what, exactly?’ Lieutenant Commander Michael (‘Mike’) O’Reilly was the 814 Naval Air Squadron Senior Observer – known inevitably as ‘Sobs’ – and he’d elected to fly this sortie when he’d heard the Merlin wouldn’t just be acting as an airborne taxi cab. They were in the Rotary Wing Briefing-Room on Two Deck, where the met officer had finished his spiel a few minutes earlier, and Richter had just outlined the route he intended the Merlin to take.
‘A wrecked aircraft on the seabed,’ Richter said. ‘Probably an executive jet of some sort – a Lear, Falcon, that sort of size – and it’s been at the bottom of the sea for a while, probably ten years or more. It was apparently shot down, so it’s almost certainly going to be severely damaged.’
‘Shot down – how do you know? Who by? And whose aircraft was it?’
‘That’s three questions,’ Richter replied, ‘and the three answers are: it was in the newspaper; no idea and no idea.’
‘In the newspaper?’ O’Reilly grinned broadly. ‘Is that where you spooks get the information you need? It’s hardly Echelon or Carnivore, is it?’
Echelon is a communications intercept programme operated jointly by the American National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, and with contributions from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. It routinely monitors all telephone calls, emails and fax transmissions originating or terminating within its operating area, searching for specific words and phrases. Carnivore is a broadly equivalent programme, but run on a much smaller scale and operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States.
Richter smiled back at him. ‘Sometimes open-source information proves just as valuable, Mike, and in this case I’ve no option but to rely on it because it’s all I’ve got. And you’re just a touch out of date anyway – the cutting-edge communications intercept programme now running is the National Reconnaissance Office’s Blue Crystal, not the National Security Agency’s Echelon.’
‘Blue Crystal? Never heard of it,’ O’Reilly replied.
‘I’m delighted to hear that,’ Richter said. ‘If you had, I’d have had to shoot you. Now, do you think you can find this bloody aircraft for me?’
‘Of course,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Finding needles in haystacks is our speciality. Let’s get going.’
‘He died of what?’ Inspector Lavat doubted the truth of what he’d just heard.
‘He drowned,’ Hardin repeated. ‘Aristides drowned in his own blood. The actual cause of death was respiratory failure as his lungs filled up with blood. This is a type of pulmonary oedema that’s often called Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome or ARDS. It’s the commonest cause of death in patients suffering from an attack by an arenavirus like Venezuelan Haemorrhagic Fever, Brazilian Sabia Virus or Lassa Fever.’
‘I’ve heard of Lassa Fever,’ Lavat said, ‘but not the other two. So Aristides died of something like Lassa Fever – is that what you’re saying?’
‘No, or at least not Lassa or any of the other known arenaviruses, because those all act quite slowly. The victim first complains of a headache and muscle pains, which gradually get worse, then he gets feverish and starts vomiting, has diarrhoea and begins bleeding from the gums. Occasionally those affected suffer haemorrhages in the whites of the eyes. Their blood pressure falls dramatically, they go into shock, and in the later stages they suffer convulsions and lapse into unconsciousness.
‘In the final stages many display a massive swelling of the head and neck and decerebrate rigidity – a condition that freezes the body into a contorted posture as the higher brain functions are lost. Some suffer from encephalopathy – that’s an inflammation of the brain – and those who do usually lapse into a coma with severe convulsions.’
‘I’m a little out of date,’ Dr Gravas said, ‘but I think I’ve read about some kind of treatment for Lassa Fever.’
‘Yes,’ Hardin said, ‘there is a treatment now, though it’s still somewhat experimental, and the drug – it’s called ribavirin – must be administered as early as possible after the diagnosis has been made if treatment is going to be successful.’
Gravas nodded slowly. ‘In this case,’ he said, ‘I doubt very much if ribavirin or anything else would have helped, given the sheer speed of the infection. In some ways,’ he added, ‘from what you’re saying it looks as if Aristides died from a hugely accelerated form of an arenavirus – what you might almost call a kind of “Galloping Lassa”?’
Despite himself, Hardin smiled. ‘That’s not a bad way of putting it, Dr Gravas. He did die of ARDS, and although a lot of the classic symptoms of Lassa were absent in Aristides’s case, and the kind of severe bleeding he presented is rare, we can call it that for the moment.’
The Spook Two callsign hadn’t been Richter’s idea, but Mike O’Reilly had thought it amusing enough to suggest using it for communications on a discrete frequency between helicopter and ship, and Wings had raised no objections. If they had to talk to Souda Bay or any outside controlling authority, they would instead use the aircraft’s side number.
The transit to Andikithira had taken only a few minutes in the Merlin flying at one hundred and forty knots and by ten-thirty local time the aircraft was in the hover just over a mile to the east of that tiny island. Andikithira is arguably the most isolated speck of land in the Aegean and is inhabited by a population of about fifty people living mostly in the port of Potamos at its northern end.
Potamos boasts one of almost everything: one policeman, one telephone, one doctor, one teacher and one monastery. But there’s no bank or post office, and the only way on or off the island is by a ship that stops there once a week on its journey to Crete from the much larger island of Kithira, lying a few miles to the north-west. Running water and toilets are either scarce or unavailable, depending on the time of year. There is a cafe and a restaurant, and about ten rooms available for tourists sufficiently determined to spend time there.
The island’s chief claim to fame is the celebrated ‘Andikithira Mechanism’, which was pulled from the sea just off the island in 1901 and is now on permanent display in the Greek National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The fragmentary remains of a highly complex object fabricated from bronze around two thousand years ago, it appears to have been designed as an astronomical clock, and is unique in that no equivalent device is known of until the time of the Renaissance. Hence it has been argued that this mechanism was the progenitor of all subsequent timepieces.
None of this, however, was of the slightest interest to Richter, or to any of the other men aboard the Merlin. All they were concerned about was locating the wrecked aircraft as soon as possible.
