Billionaire

2

The gunboat cut through the ink-black water of the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. The water was flat now, with just a slight swell; the storm that had raged for the past two days had finally died at dusk.

The commander of the gunboat, Nasir Hoos, stood beside the pilot on the bridge and looked at his watch. It was 1.30 a.m. At 5.00 the sun would appear and within an hour, the sea would become a glorious cobalt blue. But right now it was darker than the oil in the supertankers they were out here to protect: an average of three supertankers an hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, churned down through the Strait and turned right for the Western World. There was one now; he could see its lights. It was about five miles off, and coming across behind them.

The radar operator looked up from the screen. ‘I’m picking up something three miles to starboard, coming this way very slowly.’

Hoos nodded. Probably a fishing dhow; the night seas were sprinkled with them, badly lit and badly sailed. He looked out of the window, squinting his eyes to cut out the cabin light. ‘Three miles did you say, Hamoud?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can’t see anything. Probably a damned dhow without lights. Better take a look.’ He turned to the pilot. ‘Starboard thirty.’

‘Starboard thirty, Sir,’ the pilot repeated, turning the wheel. ‘Thirty of the starboard wheel on, Sir.’

The fast boat swung round quickly. Hoos waited a few moments and then gave the command to straighten out: ‘Steady.’

‘Steady, Sir. Course zero five degrees.’

‘Steer zero five.’

Hoos took his night-vision field-glasses and went out onto the deck; he put the glasses to his eyes and stared ahead, but could see nothing. The warm breeze gently whipped his face. He waited for five minutes, then raised his field-glasses again. He could make out the shape of a dhow, a fairly large one, about two miles dead ahead, and carrying no lights.

‘Gun posts,’ commanded Hoos. He never took chances on night patrol. The boat had four gun posts — twin MG machine guns mounted fore and aft, and twenty-millimetre cannon also fore and aft. ‘Slow ahead. Search lights,’ he said, after another eight minutes.

Five hundred yards of ocean in front of them erupted into a bright glare under the beams of the eight halogen search lights. Seconds later, the dark hull of the dhow rocked into the centre like an eerie stage prop in a pantomime. The forward guns swivelled and trained on the dhow and, with its speed cut to five knots, the gunboat cautiously began to circle the dhow in a large arc.

Hoos switched on the loud-hailer. ‘This is the Sultan of Oman’s Navy. Come up on deck and identify yourselves.’ The voice cracked out over the water; the dhow remained silent. As they closed in, they saw that the sail was in tatters and the mast was broken and tilting crazily; there was no sign of any movement. As they came around the stern of the dhow, they saw two figures slumped on the rear deck. ‘This is the Sultan of Oman’s Navy. You are in territorial waters of Oman. Anyone who is below deck is to come up immediately and identify himself.’

The silence persisted. ‘Take her alongside,’ said Hoos. ‘Stand by to board.’

The pilot brought the gunboat beam-to-beam with the dhow, and six naval ratings and a Petty Officer jumped aboard. Two secured the two vessels together and the other five went below, Webley revolvers drawn. After a few minutes, the Petty Officer came back up on deck and addressed Hoos, who remained standing on the gunboat.

‘Two below, Sir, two on deck; all dead. They are all in the uniform of the Israeli Navy, Sir.’

‘What?’

‘They’re Israeli sailors, Sir.’

Israeli sailors? Hoos felt a cold shiver run through him. What, he wondered, were Israeli sailors doing on a fishing dhow in the middle of the Persian Gulf? Something was wrong here, very wrong indeed. Piracy in the Gulf was not uncommon; boats with murdered crews he had seen before, several times. But this was different. He jumped onto the dhow, examined each dead sailor carefully, and then looked all around the deck and the squalid cabin area. There was no sign of violence, only the remains of an unfinished meal on four plates — an extremely nasty-looking dried-up stew.

‘Food poisoning?’ said Hoos.

‘Could be,’ said the Petty Officer. ‘Looks like it. I’m no expert on corpses, but I’d say they’ve been dead for a good day or so.’

‘Where’s this boat registered?’ said Hoos.

‘There’s a sea-worthiness certificate and fishing licence in the cabin — issued in Umm Al Amnah.’

‘Umm Al Amnah?’ said Hoos, with surprise. ‘They’ve drifted one hell of a way to be down here.’

‘Storm probably blew them down.’

‘Umm Al Amnah,’ repeated Hoos, to himself. ‘Search the boat from top to bottom; turn it inside out.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

Hoos began to walk around the boat, carefully, slowly, methodically; he felt uneasy. Umm Al Amnah had been a province within one of the Trucial states which comprised the United Arab Emirates; although, many years before the formation of the UAE, it had been a state in its own right. Umm Al Amnah was ruled by an eccentric despot, Sheik Hyyad bin Bakkrah al Quozzohok, who had been at loggerheads with the Government of the United Arab Emirates ever since their formation, in 1971. It was Quozzohok’s view that the United Arab Emirates had been formed for the sole purpose of squeezing Umm Al Amnah into oblivion, and he wasn’t having any of it. Anti-British, anti-American, anti-Israeli and apparently pro-Libya, his tiny province of one thousand, five hundred square miles and a population of seventeen thousand had been a continuing embarrassment to the United Arab Emirates. When, finally, in a bloodless military coup in 1975, he had declared Umm Al Amnah’s independence, he found he met with no resistance from the UAE at all and — if anything — a hint of relief.

The Western World, however, viewed Amnah’s independence less happily: over half of the West’s entire oil supply had to pass down the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz. With an unstable Iran, and a Russian-occupied Afghanistan controlling one whole side of the Gulf, the West needed all the friends it could get down the other side. Oman, which occupied the land one side of the narrow Strait of Hormuz, was openly friendly to the West, allowing both British and US forces to maintain bases in the country. The United Arab Emirates, which covered the area of coast on one side of the Gulf that ran up to the narrow Strait of Hormuz, was also friendly with the West, if less openly. Umm Al Amnah occupied forty miles of that coast within the UAE.

Nasir Hoos knew that if anyone blocked the Strait of Hormuz, they would be turning off half the world’s oil supply. It was for that reason that the West poured all the aid into the Oman that it would accept. In return for the aid, the Oman policed the Strait. In eight years of gunboat patrol, Hoos had developed a policeman’s nose for what was right and wrong: for the lights of a friendly tanker, or a local fishing dhow; the occasional dark hulk of a Soviet sub coming up for a sniff of air. Some vessels smelt fine, others stank. Right now, he was standing in a fishing dhow; it had been at sea for several days. The stink of putrefying fish should have been overpowering, but there was no smell of fish at all.

‘Commander, Commander, come here!’ a voice shouted from the stern. He walked quickly down the boat. The Petty Officer was standing beside the open fish hatch. ‘Look down there,’ he said, shining his torch.

Hoos looked, and a cold prickle began to run the length of his back: the beam of the torch lit up one oval metal object after the next: the hatch was packed full of mines.

Three hours later they were berthed at the naval base on Goat Island, and the US bomb disposal experts were opening up the first mine. Hoos, some distance away, paced up and down the quay. Dawn was breaking now, but he did not feel tired. He saw one of the Americans climb out of the hatch, get off the boat, and walk up towards him. The American pulled a packet of Chesterfield cigarettes out of his pocket, and pulled a cigarette out of the pack.

‘Reckon you’ve got yourself a nice can of worms there, Commander.’

Hoos nodded.

The American lit the cigarette and blew the smoke out of his mouth; the breeze carried it away. ‘They’re not ordinary mines, Commander. Fact is, they’re the first I ever came across. I’ve heard about them — but never seen one before. He dragged hard on the cigarette, then pulled some tobacco strands off his tongue. He stared out towards the Gulf, and pursed his lips.

‘What precisely are they?’

‘I’ll tell you what they ain’t, Commander: they ain’t just your old Second World War surplus flogged off by some two-bit back-street arms dealer. Those are nuclear mines; they’re stuffed damned full of uranium. First damned nuke mines I ever saw.’

There was a long pause before the American continued. ‘Whole new breed, those, Commander; must be Russian-made. One of those would take a supertanker out, and you wouldn’t be able to find any bits left over big enough to cover the end of a matchstick.’

Hoos looked at the sky; it was going to be a fine, blistering-hot day. He looked out across the Strait at the shadow of Iran, at the red tip of the sun that was rising above it; he was filled with a deep sense of foreboding. After thirty years of waiting, he had a hideous feeling that the worst fears of the Western World might be coming true.

One of the first men outside Umm Al Amnah to learn of the discovery was General Isser Aaron Ephraim, head of the Mossad, Israel’s overseas secret intelligence service. He sat up with a start as one of the two telephones beside his bed in his Tel Aviv apartment began to ring, and answered it in a quiet voice so as not to wake his wife. It was Chaim Weiszman, Director of Israeli Military Intelligence; he explained what had happened. ‘This anything to do with you, Isser?’

‘No, Chaim.’ Ephraim thought hard for some moments. ‘Four sailors disappeared off Haifa last week — Monday, I think. Patrol boat vanished; no one’s found any wreckage or any bodies so far.’

‘The Prime Minister’s going crazy. Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is going to be to the Government if this gets out?’

‘I can imagine. It doesn’t make any sense, Chaim — I’m stunned. Who knows about this so far?’

‘So far, the Commander of the gunboat, the US military in the Oman, and ourselves. They need to find out fast if any other dhows have been out there dropping mines into the Strait. If there have been, then they have to stop all shipping, at once. But equally, if this is some weird hoax, they don’t want to cause a panic; once any shipping crews get word someone may have been dumping nuclear mines in their path, the Persian Gulf — and half the world’s oceans and ports — are going to be knee-deep in abandoned tankers.’

‘Four dead sailors and fifteen nuclear mines doesn’t sound like a hoax to me, Chaim,’ said Ephraim.

‘Nor to me. I think we’d better have an early start; meet me in my office at eight.’

‘Eight o’clock,’ agreed Ephraim. He replaced the receiver, sat up in his bed in the warm dark room, and thought for a long time. He had a sick feeling that ran from the pit of his stomach to the top of his throat, and a sweat began to break out over his body, increasing in intensity, until he felt he was engulfed in a flowing river. After a while it subsided and as it slowly dried, he began to feel very cold. He had a sense of apprehension deeper than he had ever felt before. All his life he had faced trouble; when it hadn’t come to him, he had gone to search it out and, if not always conquer it, at least somehow come to terms with it. Something in the night air carried vibrations of a new kind of trouble through him; his brain turned itself inside out trying to make sense of it, and failed. The General lapsed into an exhausted doze.