The Saudi closed his eyes and blocked out the inane chatter. Twenty thousand dead, he thought, killed by the forces of nature. Twenty thousand dead and for nothing.
It had been his decision to go for Phuket and he was sure it had been right. He had considered attacking the Khao San Road, Bangkok’s backpacker centre, during Thai New Year, but had decided that the rich tourists of Phuket would be a more high-profile target.
He took a deep breath. What was done was done. It was time to move on. He already had his people in place for the next operation, and it dwarfed what he had planned for Phuket. Now he had to focus all his energy on what was to come. First Sydney. Then London. Both cities were about to discover what it was like to feel the wrath of Allah.
It was a smuggler’s night, thick clouds scudding across the sky with only glimpses of a thin sliver of moon. The sea was rougher than the captain would have liked but the schedule had been fixed and he had already banked the advance payment. Ten thousand euros. Another ten thousand on delivery. Pretty good money for one night’s work.
The stretch of water they were crossing was the busiest in the world, criss-crossed by thousands of craft every day. The captain knew it well, and that the odds on their boat being stopped were next to none. Neither the French government nor the British had the resources to check even a fraction of the boats that sailed between Britain and the Continent. The captain’s name was Bernard Pepper – ‘Bernie’ to his aged mother, ‘Skipper’ to those who sailed with him, ‘Chilli’ to his friends. He was a big man, his cheeks mottled with broken veins from his years at sea, beard greying, wiry hair all but covered with a black wool hat.
There were two other men on the bridge. Tony Corke was in his thirties and, like Pepper, was wearing a dark blue pea coat, jeans and work boots. The third member of the crew was in his forties with a bullet-shaped shaven head and a British bulldog tattoo on his right forearm. His name was Andy Mosley and he’d done seven years in the Royal Navy, latterly as a communications specialist. Now he sat at a metal desk, monitoring the regular radio traffic on a receiver that was tuned to military and government frequencies. He was also watching a radar screen that showed all the traffic in their vicinity.
Corke took a stainless-steel hip flask from the back pocket of his jeans and sipped. The neat Jameson’s whiskey slipped down his throat and spread a warming glow across his chest. He held it out to the captain.
Pepper scowled at the flask. ‘What is it?’
‘Whiskey.’
‘Scotch or Irish?’
‘Since when have you been so fussy?’ Corke started to put it back into his pocket.
Pepper let go of the wheel with his left hand and gripped Corke’s shoulder with thick fingers. ‘I didn’t say I didn’t want it. I just wanted to know its heritage,’ he growled.
Corke handed him the flask. Pepper took two big gulps, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and gave it back. ‘That’s about all the Irish are good for,’ he said. ‘Guinness and Jameson’s.’
‘What about Joyce, Wilde, Shaw, Swift?’
‘What?’ Pepper belched, and Corke caught a whiff of garlic. They’d had lunch at a small cafe near Calais and Pepper had wolfed down two plates of calamari.
‘Irish literary giants,’ said Corke. ‘Then there’s the Irish poets. William Butler Yeats. Seamus Heaney. And the music – U2, the Corrs. Film directors like Sheridan and Jordan. Not bad for a population of three million.’ He offered the flask to Mosley, who shook his head.
‘Wouldn’t have put you down as a Paddy-lover,’ said Pepper. ‘You said you were from Bristol.’
‘Used to holiday in Galway when I was a kid,’ said Corke. ‘That’s where I learned to sail.’
‘You can’t trust the Micks,’ said Pepper. ‘They’ll steal the enamel from your teeth.’
‘That’s what you said about the Armenians,’ said Corke.
‘They’re as bad as the Micks,’ said Pepper.
‘Let’s face it, you hate pretty much everyone.’
Pepper laughed harshly. ‘I met a Russian guy once and liked him. And you’re okay, Tony, for a sheep-shagger.’
‘I thought that was the Welsh.’
‘Bristol’s in Wales, innit?’
Corke shook his head. ‘I give up,’ he said. He unwrapped a stick of gum and popped it into his mouth.
‘Why don’t you check on the cargo?’ said Pepper. He swung the wheel hard to the left, keeping the prow into the waves. ‘Looks like we’re going to beat the weather.’
Corke nodded. The forecast had been for squalls and showers but the rain had held off and with any luck it would stay that way until they reached the Northumberland coast. Not that heavy weather would make much of an impression on the sixty-five-foot trawler: it had been built to fish out in the Atlantic and was practically unsinkable. Its huge diesel engine would power the vessel through any weather and it was equipped with state-of-the-art navigation systems. Plus a few other tricks, courtesy of Andy Mosley.
Corke shoved his hip flask into his back pocket and pushed open the door that led to the deck. Spray flecked his face and he licked his lips, tasting salt. He swayed as he walked, trying to match his gait to the movement of the boat. He wasn’t wearing a life-jacket. They were for wimps, said Pepper, and Pepper was the captain. Corke knelt down and pushed open the wooden hatch, the entrance to the hold where fishermen would store their catch, packed in ice.
Anxious faces gazed up at him, men, women and children: a catch far more profitable than fish. There were thirty-four in the hold and each was paying several thousand euros to be delivered safe and sound to Britain. Pepper and the men he worked for didn’t care where the immigrants were from, how old they were, or why they wanted to get into the United Kingdom. All they cared about was that they had the money to pay for their passage. There were two girls among them who couldn’t have been more than eight, and Pepper had told Corke they were charged the same rate as the adults. ‘A body’s a body,’ the captain had said.
‘Everybody okay?’ Corke shouted down.
A few men nodded fearfully. They were all wrapped up against the cold in thick jackets and scarves, and the children were swathed in blankets that a woman had brought on board.
‘We need more water,’ said a middle-aged Oriental woman. She was probably Chinese, thought Corke. She was with her husband, teenage son and half a dozen nylon duffel bags, the first to complain when Pepper had told them there weren’t any life-jackets. ‘This is a trawler, not the QE bloody Two,’ Pepper had shouted, adding that she could like it or lump it but she wouldn’t get a refund if she stayed behind. She had glared at him and muttered something in her own language, but she and her family had climbed on.
‘I’ll get you some,’ said Corke.
‘And one of the women over there is sick,’ she said.
Corke peered down to where she was pointing. Two women in headscarves were squatting against the bulkhead. The younger of them was coughing while the other had an arm round her and was dabbing at her head with a cloth. ‘Are you okay there?’ asked Corke.
‘They don’t speak English,’ said the Chinese woman, scornfully. ‘Why are they going to England if they cannot speak the language?’
Corke swung himself through the hatch and felt for the metal ladder. His boots found the rungs and he lowered himself into the belly of the boat. The stench of fish was almost overpowering and he had to fight to stop himself throwing up. He went over to the two women and knelt down beside the sick one. He felt her forehead with the back of his hand. It was hot and her skin was wet with sweat.
‘Do you know what’s wrong with her?’ Corke asked her companion.
She said something in a language he couldn’t understand and shrugged.
‘She is seasick,’ said a man in the shadows.
Corke beckoned him closer. He was in his thirties, olive-skinned with pockmarked cheeks and a thick moustache. An Afghan, maybe, or Iranian. ‘She’s your wife?’ Corke asked.