The Watchman

Seventeen

SIS officer Angela Pryce stared at the ceiling of the British Airways Boeing 777 and shivered in the blast of air-conditioning. She was impatient for take-off. With an eight-hour flight ahead of her to Nairobi, Kenya, she didn’t expect to sleep much. Somehow, leaving London’s cooler climate for the hotter atmosphere of Kenya’s coast north of Mombasa, where she had been told the temperature was currently topping 31˚C, didn’t have the attraction it should have done.

Beside her, in the aisle seat, Doug Tober already had his eyes closed and was breathing easily. If the former Special Forces sergeant had any doubts about what lay ahead of them, he wasn’t showing it. She hoped his calmness was real and not put on for her benefit. His role was purely close protection, although neither of them was under any illusions about how limited that might be where they were going.

The engines wound up and talk in the cabin began to fall away. A luggage locker fell open with a bang, and a stewardess rushed to close it. A child cried out somewhere near the rear, and across the aisle a very large woman in Kenyan national dress began to pray loudly, drawing responses from those eager to share in requests for a safe take-off and a safer landing.

Angela glanced through the rain-spotted window. The airport buildings looked distant and cold. It reminded her of being sent away to school as a girl, when part of her wanted to leap off the train and run home, while the other part couldn’t wait to see what lay ahead for the new term.

She shivered again. She was dressed in a lightweight jacket and skirt, and shoes suitable for all terrains. Since nobody had appeared too certain where she and Tober might end up, she had decided on basic, interchangeable clothes, with spare trousers in case she needed to observe a degree of conservatism for local sensibilities.

She closed her eyes and went over her briefing, trying to pick out potential highlights in the detail. It was no more comforting than listening to the engines winding up and waiting for the first thrust of power to punch her in the back. But it offered a useful distraction for a few minutes.

The briefing room in SIS headquarters at Vauxhall Cross had been busy with maps, schedules, photos and details of the mission ahead. Talk had been muted but firm, concentrating solely on the mission. Nobody, Colin Moresby, Operations Director 4, had stressed, was underestimating the potential difficulties that lay ahead. She would be to all intents and purposes alone, apart from Tober, and certainly once they left Mombasa, would be beyond any immediate assistance. But there was nothing they could do about that. Assurances had been given by the other side and that was all they could expect.

‘Any show of force on land or offshore,’ he had stressed, eyeing her carefully, ‘will be construed as aggression, according to Xasan. And they control the region closely enough to detect any intrusions.’ That meant no covert backup from units of Special Forces ready to crash in on demand if things got sticky. It was a sobering reminder of what she had undertaken.

She had nodded, aware that they were taking on trust the words of a man with a dubious, if virtually unknown history, who was known for working with the Somali pirates and effecting trade-offs of hostages for money. The knowledge that he had successfully closed more than one such deal, with the safe return of people and ships, was to some, a justifiable claim to credibility. To others it was like approaching a street-corner moneylender rather than a bank. But in the present circumstances, it was all they had.

‘We need those people back,’ Moresby had continued smoothly, ‘especially the UN personnel. If they get moved further north, they’ll be in the hands of extremists and beyond our help.’ He meant al-Qaeda, but nobody wanted to hear that name. ‘Once gone, I fear we’ll lose them until someone, somewhere, wants a substantial deal … or a huge publicity coup. We can’t let that happen.’

‘What are the chances,’ Angela had queried, ‘of them finding out that they’re holding two UN people?’

Moresby had looked at Bill Cousins, Controller Africa, to answer that question. ‘Higher than we’d like,’ Cousins replied. ‘Both of them have appeared on UN websites, and both have their photos on the internet if anybody cares to trawl through the archives or check out current photos of personnel in the field. We know al-Qaeda has access to IT personnel and equipment, so they could get lucky and identify them any day. We have to move quickly.’

‘We also know,’ Moresby added, ‘that they are increasingly trawling the net for details on all western hostages, to determine their status and value. If they identify any with position, family or the slightest degree of importance, the price goes up.’

The briefing had continued, going over the plans with great care.

She and Tober were to fly to Nairobi, where they would make contact with a man named Ashkir Xasan. He was the first step in a chain of contacts and agreements going back two weeks — probably longer. It would culminate, if all went well, in the eventual release of the hostages. Xasan would take Angela and Tober via Mombasa to a point on the Kenya-Somali border, where they would meet a group headed by a clan chief called Yusuf Musa. It probably wasn’t his real name any more than Xasan’s was his, but that was beside the point. Knowing a man’s real name in a game like hostage taking was usually the least of one’s worries.

‘Any queries, Miss Pryce?’ Moresby was looking at her, his eyes blank. She felt like standing up and saying, Yes, this whole bloody idea is insane and I don’t want to go because I’m terrified we’ll both end up dead. But she didn’t. She could do this. She’d been trained and could handle herself in crisis situations. And in doing so, would enhance her career prospects in SIS. All she had to do was what most field operatives hoped to accomplish every time they were sent out: get through it successfully and come back in one piece.

‘No, sir,’ she said, and wondered what Tom Vale would have thought. She also wondered why he hadn’t been in on the briefing. ‘No questions.’