A Line in the Sand Read online

  A Line in the Sand by Gerald Seymour

  PRAISE FOR THE WAITING TIME:

  "One of the best plotters in the business." Time Out "Seymour is writing at the peak of his powers... in a class of his own." The Times "One of Britain's foremost pacy thriller writers." Sunday Express.

  Stunning... Seymour on top form." Mail on Sunday.

  Once a reporter for Independent Television News, Gerald Seymour has lived in the West Country for the last thirteen years. His previous bestsellers include Harry's Game, The Glory Boys, Red Fox, Field of Blood, The Journeyman Tailor, The Heart of Danger, Killing Ground and most recently The Waiting Time.

  Also by Gerald Seymour Harry's Game The Glory Boys Kingfisher Red Fox The Contract Archangel In Honour Bound Field of Blood A Song in the Morning At Close Quarters Home Run Condition Black The Journeyman Tailor The Fighting Man The Heart of Danger Killing Ground The Waiting Time

  GERALD SEYMOUR

  A Line in the Sand

  BANTAM PRESS

  LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

  To Harriet

  TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS LTD

  61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD

  15-25 Helles Avenue, Moorebank, NSW 21U TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS (NZ) LTD 3 William Pickering Drive, Albany, Auckland Published 1999 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd Copyright (c) Gerald Seymour 1999 The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance With sections; 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0593 044592 (eased) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic/mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Typeset mil 13pt Palatino by Phoenix Typesetting, Ilkley, West Yorkshire Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham pie, Chatham, Kent.

  Prologue.

  He knew it was the last time he would be there.

  He stepped through the double door of the administration building, held open for him, and the sinking afternoon sun blasted against his face. He blinked hard, momentarily blinded, and stopped disorientated in his tracks. He lowered the glasses from the crown of his head on to the bridge of his nose. They were all around him, crowded in the doorway, and they were his Wends -more than just the people he did business with, true friends.

  The car was waiting. The driver stood beside the rear door and smiled at him with respect. The technicians, engineers and managers pressed close to him to shake his hand, hold his arms and brush-kiss his cheeks. The women who worked at the computers and the design benches were behind the men and their eyes beneath their close-wrapped head scarves were lit with warmth, but they did not touch him or speak. The friendships had been nurtured over many years. When he had left the office of the project manager, three or four minutes before, he had started a stuttering progress down a shadowed, cool corridor, stopping by each door to make his farewells. He had been wished a good journey, a safe return home, and he had been told how welcome he would be when he came back the next time.

  He knew there would not be a next time.

  The sun, full and gold turning to scarlet, hit his face and pierced the protection of his darkened glasses. He grinned and responded to the friendship and trust that was shown him. He had betrayed their trust. The project manager took his arm, led him towards the car, murmured appreciation that he had fallen in with the change of schedule, and squeezed his arm in implicit thanks for the present of a Toshiba laptop. On each visit, three times a year, he brought many presents with him to the complex, and they had a sliding scale of value dependent on the position in the complex of his friends. He brought with him computer equipment and gold or sterling-silver ink pens, toilet soaps and packs of toothpaste. He had come, as always, five days before, his bags weighted with the gifts that cemented the friendship and bound the trust. The vomit was in his throat, and he swallowed hard. As their friend, each time he came, he was invited to restaurants to eat battered prawns or shrimps, or whitefish, and he was invited to their homes. It had taken years of visits to build the friendship and the trust that were a sham.

  The driver opened the door of the car. The project manager was flicking the buttons of a personal organizer, a secondary present from the previous visit, to confirm the date on which he would next return. He looked past the project manager at the straggling line by the double doors, all smiling and waving. He said it again, as he had said it many times in the last five days: it had been no problem for him to change his schedule and come a week earlier than originally planned. He wished them well. He did not know what would happen to them. It was the mark of their friendship, their trust, that they had left the cool air-conditioned offices and design rooms to stand in the ferocity of the sunlight to see him on his way, and he had betrayed them. He could not look into their faces or into the eyes of the project manager.

  Before he ducked down into the car, a last time, he raked the buildings, scarred by the sun and the salt carried from the sea by the winds, as if it were important that he should remember each final detail.

  What Gavin Hughes saw.. . The complex was a series of wire-fenced compounds. Above the wire-mesh fences around each compound were the silver- and rust-coloured coils of razor wire.

  At the gates to each compound were sandbagged sentry points that were covered with decaying canvas to give shade from the sun. The watch-towers at the corners of the compounds were built on weathered wood stilts, and the dipping sunlight caught the barrels of the machine-guns jutting above the parapets. Between the compounds were four anti-aircraft defence positions, two with multiple-barrel Qerlikon guns and two housing a cluster of squat ground-to-air missiles. If it had not been for the friendship and the trust, Gavin Hughes, who was a salesman in engineering machinery, would never have gained access to the complex... He saw the entrance tunnel to the building with the buried concrete walls and bomb-proof ceiling, and that was Project 193. He saw the dun-painted building, into which he had never been admitted, that housed Project 1478. He saw the building where the hot-die forge was installed, where heated metal for the warhead cone was compressed and then cooled for turning and grinding and milling, the home of Project 972. The buildings were spread out across the bright sand, scattered inside the complex perimeter that stretched three kilometres in length and two kilometres in width, and contained the lathes, mixers, presses and machine tools. He would be asked the day after, or the day after that at the latest, what he had seen, what was different from before.

  He dropped down into the back of the car and the driver closed the door behind him. He wound down the window and reached out to shake the project manager's hand, but still could not look into his eyes. He freed his hand and waved at the crowd by the double doors as the car pulled away.

  They drove past the three-storey dormitory block that was used by the Chinese. He had never met them; he had seen them from a distance; they worked on Project 193, where the lathes shaped the solid fuel charges.." and past the tennis courts, which were floodlit in the cooler evenings and had been built for the Russians, to whom he had never spoken. He had passed them in corridors but his friends had never made the introductions; they worked on Project 1478 where the machines he had supplied mixed the coating capable of withstanding the temperature of 3,000 degrees generated in the core of the missile tube.." and past the volleyball court scraped from the coarse sand and stone by the North Koreans and played on in the half-light of dawn.


  The driver slowed as they approached the main gate of the complex. Gavin Hughes was sweating and he loosened his tie. He twisted and looked through the rear window, back at the small group still standing by the main doors of the administration building, toy figures waving him on his way.

  Two guards came forward. When he had first come to the complex they had scowled and taken their time over studying his papers. Now they grinned and saluted, their automatic rifles slung casually on their shoulders. Three visits before he had brought one a Zippo liquid-fuel lighter with a Harley Davidson motif. On the last visit he had brought the other a carton of Marlboro cigarettes.

  This would be his final visit. He would never see these men again. It had been made plain, at the last briefing. In a discreet second-floor room of a Georgian house behind the line of gentlemen's clubs in Pall Mall, the satellite photographs of the complex had been mounted on a display-board. The images of the roofs of the buildings were pinpoint sharp and the entrances to the underground workshops, the tennis courts, even the volleyball area, and the positions of the anti-aircraft de fences

  This was Gavin Hughes's kingdom. He had access. He was a salesman for standard engineering machines and could tell them what they needed to know when the images failed them. At the last briefing, the night before he had flown, over the tired sandwiches and the stewed coffee, he had told them why his visit had been moved forward a week, what was happening at the complex on the days that he should have visited if the original schedule had been maintained. None of their satellites and high-optic lenses could provide them with that kernel of detail. The meeting had been suspended. For two hours he had been left in the room with only his controller, an un giving and aloof woman, younger than himself, for company. When the meeting had resumed, the senior man requested he repeat the ground covered earlier, why his visit had been put forward. In the second session two new men had been present. An American, perspiring in a suit of brown herringbone tweed, had sat behind him and to his right, and never spoken. A leather-faced Israeli, a Star of David in gold hanging in the chest hair under an open-necked shirt, had been equally silent.

  Afterwards, the controller had walked him back to his hotel, and warned her agent to go carefully on this visit, take no risks. Her last words, before they parted, reiterated what would be his fate and his death if he created suspicion.. . as if Gavin Hughes did not know.

  As the guards shouted their farewells, the barrier at the gate was lifted and the car powered away on the straight road through the dunes. It would be half an hour to the airport and then the feeder flight without formalities to the capital.

  If .. . if he made it through the security check, another car, another driver, would be waiting the next morning for him when he came off the flight at Heathrow, to ferry him to another briefing. If they knew the depth of his betrayal and were waiting for him at the final security check then they would hang Gavin Hughes, as his controller had told him, from the highest crane... He didn't know what would happen at this place in the next few hours or days, and hadn't an idea what his own future held.

  Chapter One.

  The harrier contorted to clean the clammy mud from underneath its wing feathers. It worked hard at the clinging dirt as if its primitive, wild mind demanded cleanliness before the start of the day's long flight north. The dawn sunshine glossed the rusted gold of the feathers. The bird worked at them with its vicious curved, sharpened beak, pecked at the mud, spat and coughed it down into the marsh water below the perch on a dead, stark tree. At first light it had hunted. It had dived on a brightly crested duck, the bone-stripped carcass of which was now wedged in a fork of the dead tree. The mud had speckled the underneath of the wings when it had fallen, stone fast, on to the unsuspecting prey.

  Abruptly, without warning, it flapped with a slow wing-beat away from the perch and abandoned its kill. It headed north, away from the hot wet wintering grounds of west Africa.

  It would fly all day, without rest, on an unerring course that retraced its first migratory route. As a killing bird, a predator, the harrier had no sense of threat or hazard.

  They had been right over the tent camp, bucking in the strength of the gale, before they had seen it. They had searched all morning for it, forced lower by the lessening visibility from the whipped-up sand. The pilot of the lead helicopter had been sweating, and he was supposed to be the best with many hours of desert flying experience, good enough in Desert Storm to have flown behind the lines into Iraq to supply the Special Forces. They had been down to a hundred feet where the wind was most treacherous and the wipers in front of him were clogged by grains of sand. Only a minute after he had rapped his gloved fist on the fuel gauge and muttered into their earphones that they had little time left, the Marine Corps major had spotted the camp, tapped the pilot's shoulder, and pointed down. The colonel of the National Guard had softly mouthed his thanks to his God.

  Duane Littelbaum had heard the excited voices on his headset and thought this might be a good game for kids, reckoning himself too old for this sort of serious shit. They had put down beside the tents. The two following helicopters, which were also flown by Americans, were talked in and disgorged the local National Guardsmen. The rotors lifted away two of the camp's seven tents, but the pilots had refused, no argument accepted, to cut their engines. They wanted out and soonest.

  As the thirty National Guardsmen corralled the camp, the rotors and the wind threw the fine grains in stinging clouds into their faces. The two tents had come to rest in bushes of low scrub thorn a hundred yards from the camp, but the bedding that had been with them, and the clothes, were still in loose flight, scudding over the sand. The pilots broke their huddle. They shouted into the ear of the Marine Corps major: the storm was not lifting, the gusting sand would infiltrate every aperture in the helicopters' engines, they should get the fuck out not negotiable -now. It was already clear to them, to the Saudi colonel, to the men of the Saudi Arabian National Guard and to Duane Littelbaum that the raid had failed.

  The man they sought had evaded them.

  Littelbaum felt it keenest. He stood in the centre of the camp, huddled against the wind and the blast of the rotors, the sand crusting on his face, and gazed around him. The information had been good. It had come from the interception of the signal of a digital mobile telephone. The antennae on the eastern coast had identified the position across the Gulf from which the call had been initiated, and the position in the Empty Quarter where it had been received. It should have led them to the man Duane Littelbauifl hunted.

  There was one prisoner. The man was heavy-set, jowled, and he lay on his stomach with his arms bound behind him at the wrist and his ankles tied sharply. He wore the clothes of a Bedouin tribesman, but his physique and stomach were too gross for him to have been from this group of camel herdsmen. Littelbaum knew the face of the prisoner from the files, knew he came from Riyadh, was a courier for the man he tracked.

  The tribesmen huddled on their haunches around a dead fire surrounded by scorched stones. The colonel yelled at them, kicked them and they keeled away from him. Twice he whipped them with the barrel of his pistol, but none cried out even when they bled. They were small men with twig-thin bodies, impassive in the face of his anger. They could be shown the blade of a sword or the barrel of a gun but they never talked.

  The camels were hobbled to pegs and kept their heads away from the force of the wind. Littelbaum thought the nameless, faceless man would have ridden on a camel into the blast of the driven sand. There would be no tracks and no chance of pursuit from the air. He knew only the man's reputation, which was why he sought him as if he were the Grail.

  The patience of the lead pilot was exhausted. He was gesticulating to the colonel, pointing at his watch, at his helicopter, and back into the eye of the storm. The colonel gave his orders. The prisoner was dragged, helpless, towards a fuselage hatch. Above the scream of the wind, Duane Littelbaum heard behind him the crash of gunfire then the camels screaming. Without thei
r animals the Bedouin would either starve or die of thirst or exposure in the wilderness of the Empty Quarter. It was a shit country, to which he was posted, with a shit little war, and he had failed to find his enemy.

  Perhaps it was because one of the emaciated tribesmen ducked to avoid the blow of a rifle butt, but for a brief second the dead embers of the fire were no longer protected against the wind. Littelbaum saw black shreds of paper lifting in the gusts between the charred wood. He scrambled through the Bedouin and the National Guardsmen, fell to his knees, whipping out the little plastic bags that were always in his hip pocket.

  Carefully, as he had been taught at the Academy at Quantico more than two decades ago, he slipped the scraps into the bags. As he squinted down, he fancied that there were still faint traces of arabic characters on the fragments.

  He was the last into the helicopter, holding his bags as if they were the relics of a saint. They lifted, and the camp in which he had placed such hope disappeared in the storm of driven sand.

  "No."

  "I appreciate that this is a difficult moment for you, but what I am telling you is based on information gathered within the last month."

  "No."

  "Of course, it's a difficult situation for you to absorb."

  "No."

  "Difficult, but inescapable. It's not a problem that can be ignored."

  "No."

  "They're serious people, Mr. Perry. You know it, we know it. Nothing has changed... For God's sake, you were in Iran as often as I'm in the supermarket. I cannot conceive that you are incredulous to what I'm saying. But this is not accountancy or commerce, where you would have the right to expect definitive statements. I can't give you detail. It is intelligence, the putting together of mosaic scraps of information, then analysing the little that presents itself. I am not at liberty to divulge the detail that provided the analysis.. . You have been there, you know those people... If they find you then they will seek to kill you."

  Geoff Markham stood by the door watching Fenton doing the talking and recognizing already that Fenton had made a right maggot of it. The man, Perry, had his back to them and was gazing out of the front window as the late winter rain lashed the glass panes. As the senior operative, Fenton ought to have made a better fist of it. He should have sat Perry down, gone to the sideboard, routed for a whisky bottle, poured generously and put the glass into Perry's hand. He should have communicated warmth and commitment and concern; instead, he had trampled with the finesse of a buffalo into Perry's home. Now it was fast going sour. And as it went sour, so Fenton's voice rose to a shrilling bark.