Divide and Conquer

SIX

The white Cessna U206F flew low over the dark Caspian Sea, its single engine roaring loudly. Its only occupants were a Russian pilot and the man seated beside him, an Englishman of average build and average appearance.

This trip had started out off the coast of Baku. After taking off, the seaplane had headed northeast and had traveled nearly two hundred miles in the past ninety minutes. It had been a smooth, quiet ride. Neither the pilot nor his passenger spoke a word the entire time. Though forty-one-year-old Maurice Charles spoke Russian — along with nine other languages — he did not know the pilot well and did not trust even those people he did know well. That was one reason he’d managed to survive as a mercenary for nearly twenty years.

When they finally arrived, all the pilot said was, “Below, four o’clock.”

Charles looked out his window. His pale blue eyes fixed on the target. It was a beautiful thing. Tall, brightly lit, majestic.

And alone.

The semisubmersible offshore oil drilling platform stood approximately 150 feet above the water and was surrounded by sea. There was a helipad on the north side of the platform, a 200-foot-tall derrick beside it on the northwest side, and a network of tanks, cranes, antennae, and other equipment in the oil processing area.

The rig was like a lady standing on a deserted avenue under a streetlamp late at night by the Mersey back home. Charles could do what he wanted with it. And he would.

Charles picked up a camera that was sitting in his lap. He popped the button on the tan leather carrying case and removed the top. The camera was the same thirty-five-millimeter reflex that he had used in his first assignment, back in Beirut in April 1983. He began snapping pictures. A second camera, the one he had taken from the CIA operative on the beach, lay on the floor of the cabin between his feet along with the man’s backpack. There might be names or numbers in there that would prove useful. Just like the operative himself would be useful, which was why Charles had left him alive.

The airplane circled the oil platform twice, once at 600 feet and once at 300 feet. Charles exposed three rolls of film, then indicated to the pilot that it was all right to leave. The seaplane swung back to its cruising altitude of 2000 feet and headed to Baku. There, Charles would rejoin the crew of the Rachel, which by now would have removed the white banner with the fake name. They had ferried him to the plane and would be his partners in the next part of the undertaking.

But that would only be the start. His employers in America had very specific goals, and the team Charles had put together were experts in achieving those goals:

turning neighbor against neighbor, nation against nation, through acts of terrorism and assassination. Before they were finished, the region would be awash in fire and blood from around the world.

And though he had already made a lot of money in the terrorist game, he had spent a lot of that wealth buying weapons, passports, transportation, anonymity. With this job, he would be richer than he had ever dared to imagine. And he had a fertile imagination.

When he was growing up in Liverpool, Charles had often dreamed about wealth and how he might obtain it. He thought about it when he swept the train station where his father sold tickets. He thought about it when he slept with his two brothers and grandfather in the living room of their one-bedroom flat, a flat that always smelled of perspiration and trash from the adjoining alley. He thought about it when he helped his father coach the local men’s football team. The elder Charles knew how to communicate, how to strategize, how to win. He was a natural leader. But Maurice’s father, his family, his working-class people were held down by the upper class. They were not permitted to go to the better schools, even if they could have afforded them. They weren’t allowed to work in the upper levels of banking, of communications, of politics. They had funny, common accents and brawny shoulders and weather-beaten faces and weren’t taken seriously.

Charles grew up feeling bad that the only outlet, the only joy his father had was football. Charles also idolized the Beatles because they had made it out — the same reason, ironically, his father and so many of his contemporaries hated “those young punks.” Charles realized that he could not escape poverty musically because he had no talent for that and it had already been done. He had to get out his way, make a mark that was uniquely his own. How could he have known that he would find his hidden skills by joining the Royal Marines, 29 Commando Regiment, Royal Artillery, and learning to work with explosives? By discovering the pleasure and genius involved in tearing things down?

It was a glorious feeling to put events like this in motion. It was the creation of art: living, breathing, powerful, bleeding, changing, utterly unforgettable art. There was nothing else like it in the world, the aesthetics of destruction. And what was most rewarding was that the CIA had inadvertently helped him by sending that man to watch for him. The agency would conclude that it couldn’t be the Harpooner who had attacked their man. No one had ever survived an encounter with the Harpooner.

Charles settled comfortably into his seat as the Cessna left the lights of the rig behind.

That was the beauty about being an artist, he told himself.

It gave him the right and privilege to surprise.