The Beijing conspiracy

CHAPTER 16

C urtis O’Connor reached for the report on ‘The Netherlands: Dyke Vulnerability’ and began to read through it again, looking for anything he might have missed. Could the Dutch be one of the targets? O’Connor knew that the deployment of over a thousand Dutch troops to Iraq’s southern Muthanna province after Saddam Hussein had been toppled had infuriated some sections of the Arab world. He was also privy to the details of the resultant terrorist threats to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and the Dutch parliament, as well as the reports on the murder of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, whose criticism of Muslims had enraged the Islamists. Despite his contempt for the Secretary of Defense, O’Connor was a true professional who never let personal animosity cloud his judgement; he had already accepted that a failure of the Netherlands dyke systems would lead to nearly half the country being flooded. He reflected that the last time that happened had been in 1953, when a catastrophic North Sea storm surge had breached the dykes in over 500 places.

O’Connor leaned forward in his chair and took another look at the Maeslantkering, the engineering marvel that had been opened by Queen Beatrix in 1997. In the event of another storm surge like the one in 1953, two massive gates the size of the Eiffel Tower and weighing four times as much would be swung towards one another. The Nieuwe Waterweg – the new waterway canal connecting the port of Rotterdam with the North Sea – would be sealed off until the danger had passed. O’Connor rested his chin in the palm of his hand and thought again about the Secretary’s preoccupation with the Dutch and their windmills. It had obviously been some time since the Secretary had visited the low countries, he thought wryly. With the invention of diesel and electricity, the windmills that had kept the vast reclaimed polders dry since the thirteenth century had been replaced by sophisticated pumps. Curtis frowned. ‘Beneath Eternity where the windmill has been stolen.’ Was the Defense Secretary right for the wrong reasons, he wondered. Was it perhaps the role of the windmills that had been stolen? He shook his head in frustration. Between Osama bin Laden and his mad mullahs on one side, and the neocons on his side who saw every Muslim country as a potential threat, planet Earth had become a lot less safe.

The satellite imagery from the National Reconnaissance Office KeyHole and Lacrosse satellites, some of which were the size of a bus and orbited as high as 36,000 kilometres above Earth, was over four years old. Had one of these satellites been footprinted over Rotterdam just eighteen months earlier, O’Connor could have been provided with the images of three massive ocean-going tugs that he would come to realise were of extraordinary importance. With disaster upon disaster unfolding in the Middle East all of the KeyHole and Lacrosse satellites had much higher priorities over Iraq, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Hindu Kush and Iran, not to mention North Korea.

The Winston Churchill, the Montgomery, and the Wavell had each undergone extensive engine refits at one of the huge shipyards in the second busiest port in the world. Like three large ugly ducklings they left Rotterdam line astern, passing the old Verolme Botlek shipyard. This vast complex was a hive of activity as the welders and shipwrights worked on a huge oil rig in the widest graving dock in Europe. The tugs were heading towards the Maeslantkering. From there they would keep company through the English Channel before turning east through the Strait of Gibraltar, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and across the northern Indian Ocean to the teeming Pakistani port of Karachi. The Montgomery and the Wavell had been tasked with collecting and delivering missiles for the first and second warnings. The Winston Churchill had a mission of a different nature that would come into play if the third and final warning was necessary. She was tasked with visiting third world countries where regulations governing the disposal of old radiotherapy machines were less than stringent. al-Falid had not only been relentless in his sourcing of the obsolete machinery, he had also been aware of the tiniest of details, giving instructions that the tugboats were to be renamed with British names when they had been purchased. He calculated that the names might cause precious indecisiveness when the tugs appeared in the binoculars of any western port authorities who might be wondering what they were up to. A fourth ocean-going tug re-named the George Washington was undergoing a refit in Rotterdam. al-Falid had a different purpose in mind for her and then it would be the American authorities he would want to lull into a false sense of security.

Curtis O’Connor racked his brain trying to crack the secret meaning of the code. Across the Potomac in the Oval Office, the hawks in the Administration were about to try and convince President Harrison to elevate the war on terror to a frightening new level.