Year of the Golden Ape

6

^ 'When Sheikh Gamal Tafak came to Paris one year ago he demanded the release of a criminal, Jules LeCat, from the Sant ^ e ^ prison. I think it all began then, Larry…'

^ Francois Messmer, a member of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire – French counter-intelligence – stopped at the edge of the lake to light another Gauloise. The Aussen-Alster in Hamburg is the larger of two lakes in the centre of the city and here, in green parkland, you can talk without risk of being overheard.

^ On Monday January 13 it was cold in Hamburg. The savage winter, worse even than in the previous year – even nature seemed to be on the side of the sheikhs – had frozen the river Elbe and the lake they walked beside was a sheet of ice. Both men huddled in heavy overcoats and the wind from the north froze their faces.

^ 'Surely that was going beyond the limit – even for a sheikh,' Sullivan suggested. 'We have to stand up somewhere…'

^ 'You think so?' Messmer, a small, compact man in his fifties with a face like a monkey's, smiled cynically. 'I think this is a lesson the British still have to learn – that there is no limit where these golden apes are concerned. They have western civilisation by the throat and they intend to squeeze our throat until we are gasping for air – for oil. When total power is available the extremists move in for the kill – they have literally killed the King of Saudi Arabia and the President of Egypt. Tafak is a fanatic – he may well be replaced by an even greater fanatic. So, when he threatened to cut off more oil, our government gave way…'

^ 'Not officially. Officially LeCat, who was arrested in Marseilles for illegal activities, is still in the Sante – in solitary confinement. Which means no one ever sees him.' Messmer grinned sourly. 'It is rather like Dumas' man in the iron mask. Some poor devil is in solitary who is called LeCat – but from what I hear…' He shrugged.

^ They walked slowly across the snow along the lake shore. A seagull landed on the ice-bound lake and beyond the far shore the apartment blocks and hotels kept their distance. A few cyclists rode along the nearby highway. No cars – not with the fifty per cent oil cut in force.

^ 'I know nothing – he is only a name. No record, so no pictures, no fingerprints. He is like a ghost…'

^ 'Tell me about LeCat then. And any reference you have heard to Harper Tankships.'

^ 'I do not know that name. As to LeCat, there are rumours – that he has recruited a team of terrorists from his old OAS associates -the secret army organisation which revolted in Algeria, which was beaten. He had many men to choose from, of course – men in need of money who still dream of the old days when life was an adventure.' Messmer became caustic. 'He chose only from the elite – a special team of absolute bastards for this operation.'

^ 'None. No one knows anything. The word has gone out – LeCat is in the Sante. Forget him.' Messmer screwed up his monkey-like face to keep smoke out of his eyes. 'You see, my friend, everyone is embarrassed about what happened to LeCat, so they hope it will soon all be over. I have heard that the operation is vast and very expensive, that it is taking a huge sum of money to finance -who knows, maybe Arab money. They are the ones who can do these things now, not us.'

^ 'You're not saying that Paris – the French government – is behind this operation?' Sullivan asked carefully.

^ 'I don't think they know what's going to happen – I heard they put a shadow on LeCat and he shook it off. He would, of course. But they have not interfered with his efforts to recruit a team of terrible men. You know why I insisted on coming here to talk when you phoned me yesterday?'

^ 'My phone is tapped.' Messmer gave his wry smile again. 'In France it will soon be a distinction not to have your phone tapped. We are becoming a police state – and I am a policeman. I think they will make me retire soon. I was foolish enough to protest over the Tafak affair – I have been watched ever since. And that is why I came to Hamburg, Larry – I thought that someone ought to know what is happening, however little information I have given you.'

^ 'Thanks.' Sullivan looked round the view of the city. 'You know, Francois, I came all the way up the Atlantic coast asking questions and no one tried to warn me off – until I got here. I think there is something somewhere in Hamburg, but where, for God's sake?'

^ That is your problem. Tell your government we cannot all go on giving in to Arab power for ever. Although I fear they will, they will…'

^ 'It is not only the Arab allocation of oil, it is the money. We face a situation without precedent in history – and when an unprecedented situation arises which threatens to ruin the West financially, then we must consider unprecedented action…' ^ Minute of Prime Minister's comments at British Cabinet meeting the previous November.

^ On Monday January 13, Sullivan was walking along the shore of the Aussen-Alster as he talked with Francois Messmer. On the same morning Winter was at Cosgrove Manor, the house he had leased two months earlier during his flying visit to London. Twelve miles from King's Lynn, isolated inside its twenty acres of grounds, it suited his purpose perfectly. LeCat and the fifteen-man OAS terrorist team were with him. The final stage of the operation prior to action – training – was almost completed.

^ The plan of attack on the British oil tanker ^ Challenger ^ had been meticulously organised. From memory Winter had reproduced sketches of the blueprints he had seen in Paul Hahnemann's office of the ^ Challenger'?, ^ twin tanker ^ Chieftain. ^ Each of the terrorists had to study these sketches until he was thoroughly familiar with the tanker's layout. And Winter cross-examined each member of the team personally when they had studied the sketches, determined to make every man walk mentally over the vessel as though he were already on board.

^ 'The entrance to the coffer dam is through the hatch on the starboard side of the ship,' he pointed out to Andre Dupont during one of his briefing sessions.

^ 'No! It is on the port side! The helicopter landing point is on the starboard side…'

^ 'Which means you have just transposed everything on the main deck.' Winter unfolded his sketch and showed it to the Frenchman. 'Take the drawing away, start all over again, and make your own sketch …'

^ Winter had the main living-room, which was thirty-five feet long – roughly one-twentieth of the total length of the 50,000-ton tanker – cleared of all furniture and carpets. He had it well scrubbed and then with coloured chalks he reproduced a plan of the main deck. Again Winter trained each man individually, walking round the room with his student, drilling into him the position of the main features – catwalk, foremast, pipes, breakwater, helicopter landing point, loading derricks. It was the main deck he spent most time over – because this was where the helicopter would land.

^ Inevitably, men not accustomed to this kind of study became restless, so each evening he let them have a party with plenty to drink. Winter himself drank very little and he left LeCat, who consumed enormous quantities and still stayed on his feet, to look after the drinking sessions. And LeCat himself grew restless. 'Is all this necessary?' he demanded truculently one morning as they waited for the team to return from a daily run through the estate grounds. 'In the Mediterranean we just did a job…'

^ 'Not a job like this,' Winter said coldly. 'When they land on that tanker's deck they must feel they have been there before. Within five minutes of the helicopter landing we must control the ship – or we have failed. Tomorrow we must help them grasp the scale of the ship…'

^ Oil drums – symbolically enough – which had been brought to the house by truck, were placed at intervals across a vast lawn which ran away from the front of the house into the fields beyond. They were placed at intervals in two rows at right-angles to the house, each row one hundred and ten feet apart – the width of the ^ Challenger. ^ Earlier, Winter had paced out seven hundred and fifty feet from the steps of the house and he ended up with the tanker's bow in a field close to an old oak tree. Already several men were muttering about the size of the thing.

^ From the steps of the house a double row of posts was erected right out to the distant oak tree, and this marked out the catwalk. Other poles represented the derricks and the foremast; a circle of rope on the port bow located the helicopter landing point. Then Winter took the team to the roof of the house which was fifty feet above the ground. They were now standing on the bridge of the ^ Challenger, ^ staring towards the distant oak which was the bow of the ship.

^ 'It's bigger than I thought,' LeCat admitted, staring at the distant oak.

^ 'It is a steep drop to the main deck,' Armand Bazin, a younger member of the team commented with surprise as he gazed down over the edge of the parapet.

^ 'Steeper than you think,' Winter warned. 'We are fifty feet up and it's a sixty-foot drop from the island bridge of the ^ Challenger. ^ All of you go down now on to the lawn, walk along the main deck, get some idea of what it will be like. And look up at this roof -which is the bridge. It will be like looking up a cliff…'

^ They got ready to leave, but first Winter insisted on a huge cleaning-up operation. The oil drums were hidden inside a wood in the grounds. The sticks and poles which had represented catwalk and derricks and foremast were broken up and burned. Winter personally supervised a thorough scrubbing of the living-room floor to make sure that no traces were left of the chalk marks which had outlined the main deck. Furniture and carpets were put back as they had found them there.

^ The debris of meals and drinking sessions – cans and bottles -were buried in a deep hole inside the wood, and French cigarette butts also went into the hole. No one had been allowed to smoke outside the house. These precautions LeCat appreciated – he remembered the care he himself had insisted on when the house on Dusquesne Street in Vancouver had been abandoned, when all the rooms had been Hoovered. And this, of course, was something Winter knew nothing about, just as he never dreamt there was a nuclear device hidden aboard the ^ Pecheur.

^ Late on the afternoon of Tuesday January 14. Winter counted the sketches of the tanker prior to burning them. Tomorrow they would fly to Alaska.

^ Because Harper was out of town, Sullivan had to wait until Tuesday before he could phone the chairman of Harper Tankships at his London office in Leadenhall Street. Which meant that while Winter was packing up at Cosgrove Manor, Sullivan was still in Hamburg.

^ 'In a way I've got nothing,' Sullivan told Victor Harper, 'only the fact that a hired thug tried to kill me in a bar when I went round asking about your company. But it happened in Hamburg -as though there's something here they don't want me to find out. What connection has your firm got with Hamburg?'

^ 'Nothing that I can see might have any bearing on this situation.' Harper's precise voice sounded irritated. 'Is this whole business becoming rather a wild goose chase? And who is this friend you refer to so mysteriously – the one who told you this yarn about French terrorists?'

^ 'You've never had any connection with Hamburg at all?' Sullivan persisted.

^ 'Couple of 50,000-tonners – the ^ Challenger ^ first, then its twin, the ^ Chieftain. ^ Both of them at the Wilhelm Voss yard. Paul Hahnemann is the boss – good chap, typically German; he drives the place like a steam engine. Both delivered bang on time, of course. I don't see how he could help…'

^ 'Frankly, neither do I. Where are those ships now? In the Middle East?'

^ 'Neither of them. ^ Chieftain ^ is in dry-dock for repairs at Genoa, ^ Challenger ^ is on the Alaska-San Francisco run. Better come home, Larry. Call it a day…'

^ Sullivan put down the phone and yawned. He had made a night of it with Messmer before the Frenchman caught the morning train back to Paris. Paul Hahnemann wasn't going to tell him anything, so why hang about? Yawning again, he began packing his bag.

^ The telephone message travelled a devious route before it reached Gamal Tafak at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Damascus. Originating from Paris, the call was taken by a man in Athens who then phoned a number in Beirut. From there Ahmed Riad phoned the message to Damascus. Tafak was just about to have lunch when Riad called him from the Lebanese capital.

^ 'Excellency, KLM Flight 401 from Amsterdam to Paris has just been hi-jacked by terrorists. There is going to be trouble about this…'

^ 'The plane is carrying three senior Royal-Dutch Shell executives, Including a managing director…'

^ Tafak replaced the receiver. If anyone had been listening in to the call, which was unlikely but not impossible the way the American intelligence services were tapping phones all over the world these days, the conversation would have seemed innocent enough.

^ But the call told Tafak that the diversionary operation was under way. This had been Winter's idea, as was the timing. While LeCat set up listening posts to check on any loose security Winter had come up with a more imaginative plan. To mask the hi-jack of the ship, he had suggested a plane should be seized a few days before the real event, something to keep the newspapers busy, to divert anyone who might have heard a whisper of what was really going to happen.

^ The hi-jack had been organised by the serious-faced man sitting on Tafak's right at the recent secret meeting in the Syrian desert. The KLM plane would now be kept hopping about from airport to airport while the main operation was under way. It still seemed easy enough to hi-jack a plane; Tafak hoped it would prove equally easy to hi-jack a 50,000-ton oil tanker.

^ 'It did strike me that if someone wanted to sabotage one of Harper's tankers they might try and check the layout and structure of the tanker they were after. Can you tell me, Mr Hahnemann, has anyone asked to see blueprints of a Harper tanker recently?'

^ At the last moment before leaving Hamburg, Sullivan's natural obstinacy had made him stay. He had made an appointment to see Paul Hahnemann very late in the afternoon, so late that it was dark outside, too dark to see the falling snow. A letter of introduction from Victor Harper – 'to whom it may concern' – had got him inside the Wilhelm Voss shipyard. His Lloyd's of London identification had convinced the German he ought to see the Englishman. Hahnemann was a discreet man.

^ 'I find that a strange question,' the German said woodenly. 'You say you have heard vague rumours – about Harper. The shipping world lives on rumours. Surely you know that by now?'

^ 'I withdraw the question.' Sullivan smiled amiably. 'I've told you what I've been doing for the past week-coming up the Atlantic coast. Two nights ago someone tried to kill me in a Hamburg bar. That makes me think there is something – something in Hamburg I'm getting too close to.'

^ 'I don't see how I can help you,' the German replied. 'We have no one suspect here. We are very careful who we let inside this yard – you yourself had to produce proof of identity before you were allowed in.'

^ Sullivan was in a difficult position. He realised that Hahnemann was too shrewd by half, that he wanted some evidence, that there was no evidence to show him. Sullivan wasn't even sure what he was looking for himself.

^ There may be an Englishman in this business somewhere,' he suggested.

^ Sullivan heard himself saying this. God, how vague can you get? In another minute or two the German would start shuffling papers on his desk, maybe even look pointedly at his watch. It was hopeless.

^ 'Would you like some coffee?' Hahnemann ordered coffee over the intercom and then excused himself. He was gone for thirty minutes by Sullivan's watch and the Englishman wondered whether he was calling the police. When he came back into the office he was followed by an attractive girl carrying a tray with the coffee. 'I will pour it,' Hahnemann said. He waited until they were alone. 'I apologise for being so long, but I decided to phone Mr Harper in London. I hope you don't mind – documents can so easily be faked these days.'

^ 'A wise precaution.' Sullivan was puzzled. Why would Hahnemann take this trouble if he had nothing to say to him? The German took out a photograph which he placed face down on the desk, then he poured the coffee.

^ 'Mr Sullivan, I imagine you know most of the top shipping people in London?'

^ 'Most of them, yes – it's my job.' Sullivan carefully did not look at the concealed photograph as Hahnemann went back and sat down behind his desk.

^ Hahnemann turned up the photograph and pushed it over the desk. 'Is that man familiar? Specifically, is he Manders, Smeth-wick or Ross?'

^ 'Quite definitely not. Ross is a small, well-built man with a face like an amiable gargoyle. This time of the year, he's usually off on a cruise to the West Indies.'

^ 'That man called on me five days ago and passed himself off as Arnold Ross of Ross Tankers.'

^ Sullivan stared at the picture with fascination, the first picture which had ever been taken of Winter, except for passport purposes when the likeness changed as rapidly as the names. It showed a distinguished-looking man wearing a bowler hat and an expensive overcoat striding up a staircase. He appeared to be staring at the camera without seeing it.

^ Like a Guards officer, Sullivan thought. Trim moustache, erect bearing, a clipped look about the face. All the cliches. God, he even carried a tightly-rolled umbrella on his arm. The absolute personification of a European's idea of the City Englishman. And he existed – you could see him walking past the Bank of England each morning at 9.30. With nothing to go on, Sullivan had the strongest of hunches: this man was Winter.

^ Hahnemann looked embarrassed, then laughed. 'I am giving away my trade secrets. I have a fetish for security, I admit it. But we live in a dangerous world and one day someone who does not like my customers may try to sabotage a ship I am building. So everyone who conies into the building is secretly photographed. We have your own picture, Mr Sullivan. I hope I have not shocked you – Watergate and all that…'

^ 'Thank God you do use a hidden camera. You take just one shot?'

^ 'No, several…' Hahnemann took an envelope out of his breast pocket and spilled glossy prints on to the desk. 'I showed you the best, although this is more of a closeup.'

^ Winter was nearer the camera, probably just turning on to the staircase landing – his head was turned and showed in profile. He had a cold, very alert look. 'Who is this man?' Hahnemann asked.

^ 'I find it hard to believe – he was in my office, sitting where you are sitting.'

^ That's probably his secret,' Sullivan commented drily. 'He doesn't look the part. Before I leave Hamburg could I have three copies of the profile shot and the one you showed me first?'

^ 'No problem, as the Americans say.' He used the phone and told Sullivan they would be ready in thirty minutes. 'He spent ^ ^ the whole day poring over blueprints of the ^ Chieftain, ^ asking questions about her. He pretended he wanted a ship built to a similar specification.'

^ 'The ^ Chieftain! He ^ didn't take any interest in the twin ship you built for Harper, the ^ Challenger?'

^ 'None at all. I think I mentioned that vessel once and he wasn't interested.'

^ So now we know, Sullivan thought. The target ship was the ^ Chieftain, ^ lying up in dry-dock in Genoa, a perfect place for an act of sabotage, while the ship was immobile and helpless. He would fly back to London tomorrow and get Harper to have the security stepped up in Italy.

^ Heathrow Airport, London, Wednesday January 15. 12.15pm ^ Flight BA 601 took off for Montreal, Canada. Aboard the Boeing 707 travelled thirteen of the fifteen ex-OAS terrorists. Such a large group of Frenchmen was hardly likely to excite any interest since they were flying to a city where French is spoken on every street. When they reached Montreal in charge of Andre Dupont, they would stay there overnight; the following day they would catch another flight on to Vancouver, the Canadian city close to the port of Victoria where the trawler ^ Pecheur ^ was moored. Dupont would take them straight on board and there they would wait, confined to the ship until Winter arrived from Alaska.

^ Winter himself had watched them go into the final departure lounge at Terminal One, then he hurried to report for his own flight with LeCat and two other terrorists, Armand Bazin and Pierre Goussin.

^ 12.45pm ^ Flight BA 850 took off for Anchorage, Alaska.

^ Aboard the Boeing 707 travelled Winter and LeCat and the two Frenchmen. Ahead of them was a nine-hour flight by the polar route non-stop. They travelled separately, Winter and LeCat occupying separate seats as though they had no connection with each other, while in another part of the plane Bazin and Goussin travelled together, sitting side by side. They all held economy class tickets, although with the huge sums of money at his disposal Winter could easily have afforded first-class seats. Here he was reversing his normal procedure when staying at a hotel – stay at the best and the police will assume you are respectable. On a plane the passenger who is not noticed is the economy class man. While the other three men stayed awake eating, trying to read magazines, then eating again, Winter slept through most of the flight, only waking up when he was within half an hour of his destination.

^ 1.15pm ^ Flight BE 613 arrived from Hamburg. Among the first passengers to alight from the Trident was Sullivan.

^ Arriving at Heathrow airport, Sullivan phoned his flat in Batter-sea, and then wished he hadn't bothered. His charlady, Mrs Morrison, gave him a number to ring urgently, and he knew immediately it was Admiral George Lindsay Worth, RN, the man who had been responsible for his leaving naval intelligence. Worth was now with the Ministry of Defence. To get it over with, he phoned at once and Worth's secretary made an appointment for them to meet at the RAC Club in Pall Mall. At 3pm.

^ 'He said it was very urgent. You are to ask for Mr Worth. No mention of rank…'

^ Sullivan went straight to Pall Mall from the airport, swearing at himself all the way inside the cab; he was still being treated like a naval lieutenant. Why the hell hadn't he said no?

^ Worth, a crisp, compact man of sixty, was waiting for him in the members' lounge, a vast, empty-feeling room with tall windows at either end. It was cold; there seemed to be no heating at all in the place. Not that this was likely to worry an admiral who had faced hurricane-force winds in the north Atlantic as a matter of course. Worth was sitting against the wall in a dead man's chair, a huge, low arm-chair often occupied by members whose appearance suggested the immediate calling of an undertaker.

^ 'Prefer to sit over there?' Worth enquired, pointing to one of the tables. Thought you might…' He heaved himself up. 'How's Peggy? She's the latest girl friend, I take it?'

^ 'She is.' Sullivan wondered how Worth managed to throw him off balance each time they met. 'What's all this about? I just came in from Europe and I could do with some kip…'

^ Worth stared across the table, registering the note of independence. 'I know,' he said quietly. 'Asking a lot of questions, stirring things up all down the French coast.'

^ 'Coffee? No? Perhaps just as well – it's lukewarm, anyway. As to your question, it's my job to know things. I asked you here to request you to stop stirring things up.'

^ Admiral Worth smiled, at least his mouth performed a bleak grimace which Sullivan took to be his version of a smile. 'I can't answer questions, you should know that by now. All this is off the record, of course. Official Secrets Act and all that…'

^ 'You should have said that when I came in here, I think I'm going…'

^ 'Bear with me a few minutes longer,' Worth suggested. 'You haven't changed, I see. Harper Tankships, isn't it?'

^ 'You said it was your business to know things.' Sullivan was becoming angry, but his expression remained blank. 'If you'll give me a good reason I might consider it – dropping the whole thing. I said consider it.'

^ 'We heard the whisper too – about a hi-jack, or sabotage. It was a smokescreen – to cover something else our Arab friends had in mind. Buy the 4pm edition.'

^ 'Not a ship – another plane. KLM Flight 401 from Amsterdam to Paris. Beggars got on board at Schiphol. Something special about this job – there are three senior Royal-Dutch Shell chaps aboard, including a managing director.'

^ ^ whisper you were chasing was pure camouflage – it was this plane hi-jack they were covering. It's really another demonstration of Arab power, of course…'

^ 'It's become a way of life.' Worth reverted to his salty, commander-on-the-bridge language. 'They have us by the balls and they enjoy squeezing them. Can't do anything about it – the British government is resigned to an Arab condominium over the West for as far ahead as we can see.' He stared as Sullivan stood up. 'Can we rely on you?'

^ 'You didn't think you could when we last met. I'll have to think about it. Please excuse me, but as I told you, I'm straight off the aircraft…'

^ Sullivan was fuming as he left the club. Prior to meeting Worth he had decided to drop the whole thing – after warning Harper to tighten up on security round the ^ Chieftain ^ in Genoa, although at the back of his mind he still wasn't sure. Now, if he did drop it, it would look as though he were falling in with Worth's odd request. He was still fuming when he went on to see Victor Harper.

^ Admiral Worth's view of the British government's attitude was not entirely correct at the highest levels. In the previous September there had been an unexpected change of premiership when the previous prime minister resigned due to ill health.

^ The new man, who had risen to the rank of brigadier during the Second World War, immediately took a decision which went unreported in the British press. A large area of the west coast of Scotland was declared a prohibited military zone. It was rumoured locally that a new artillery range was being set up. The curious thing was that crofters on an offshore island heard no thump of artillery shells; instead they saw frequent practice parachute landings, some of the airdrops taking place from helicopters.

^ Another event which was also not reported was the prime minister's secret meeting with General Lance Villiers, Chief of General Staff. Villiers, reputed to be the most efficient and ruthless Chief of Staff for three decades, had only one eye – his left eye had been left behind in Korea in 1952. He wore a black eye-patch and moved in a curiously stiff manner, but he possessed one of the quickest brains in the United Kingdom. His earlier career had been spent with the airborne forces.

^ Sullivan met Harper in his office at five o'clock and they talked by candlelight while snow piled up in the street outside. The chairman of Harper Tankships, a restless, energetic man of fifty with thinning hair, immediately decided he would fly to Italy the following day to sort out the security of the tanker ^ Chieftain.

^ 'Of course,' Sullivan remarked at one stage, 'it just might not be the ^ Chieftain…'

^ 'Winter – if it was Winter in Hahnemann's office – made it a bit obvious the way he examined ^ Chieftain's ^ blueprints. And I have an idea this chap is clever – don't ask me why.'

^ 'Well, for one thing he's some kind of criminal – maybe adventurer would be the better word. And yet no one has any record on him. On my way here I phoned a chap I know at Scotland Yard and he'd never heard of him.' Sullivan leaned across the desk. 'No one's got him on record, for Pete's sake. You have to be clever to keep the slate as clean as that.'

^ It was agreed that Harper would still go to Genoa. It was also agreed that if Sullivan came up with something else while Harper was away, he could collect a cheque for more funds from Vivian Herries, Harper's secretary. At the end of a long day Sullivan went home.

^ It was probably his dislike of seeming to fall in with Admiral Worth's request to drop it which kept Sullivan going the following day. Refreshed by a good night's sleep, he checked every known source he could think of. Somewhere, someone must have heard of Winter.

^ He first tried a contact in Special Branch. The contact phoned him back later in the day. 'We've never heard of your chap, Winter. Doesn't ring any bells at all. Sorry…' He went back to Scotland Yard and his friend there, Chief Inspector Pemberton, told him he had been intrigued by Sullivan's enquiry. 'So, I checked further. Not a dicky bird. Drew a complete and total blank…'

^ Exasperated, Sullivan extended the net, began phoning outside the country. His call to the FBI in Washington was answered within an hour. 'Nothing in the States. In view of what's happening everywhere, I checked with one of the intelligence services. Nothing on a man called Winter. Have you tried Interpol?' Yes, Sullivan had tried Interpol. He phoned his good friend, Peter van der Byll of the South African police. The answer was negative. In the late afternoon he went back to see the one man he had missed when he visited Lloyd's of London before he had set out for Bordeaux.

^ 'It looks as though I'll be off this job for Harper Tankships,' he told MacGillivray. 'Bloody blank wall everywhere. It's beginning to annoy me.'

^ Jock MacGillivray was one of the backroom men concerned with the genera] administration of Lloyd's. When asked what he did, he was liable to reply, 'Help to keep the place going – or maybe it helps to keep me going. Never sure which.' He leaned back in his swivel chair and tossed a cigarette to Sullivan. 'So what's the problem?'

^ 'I missed you when I came here at the beginning of the year. As to the problem, no problem as far as I can see. I've checked with just about everybody and come up with sweet nothing.'

^ 'You haven't talked to me.' MacGillivray, freckled-faced and forty, grinned. The founthead of all wisdom.'

^ 'Nothing really…' MacGillivray was consulting his diary. 'Except for the chap who came in last Friday. He was doing a series of articles on the oil crisis for an American paper. He came in a couple of months ago, apparently, working on a previous series. He was asking about Harper's ship ^ Chieftain – ^ she's in dry dock at Genoa. Said he might go and have a look at her.'

^ ^ Hahnemann's staircase in front of MacGillivray who peered at it uncertainly.

^ 'Like this…' Sullivan showed him a profile print he had worked on the previous evening in his flat, eliminating Winter's moustache with white paint. 'I doubt if he'd be wearing the bowler this time…'

^ 'He wasn't,' MacGillivray said promptly. 'He had a tweedy thing on. That's him. Who is he?'

^ 'Yes. The ^ Challenger. ^ Was she exactly like the ^ Chieftain – ^ or was there any difference between the two vessels? I said they were twins and that was it, as far as I knew. Come to think of it, he asked quite a lot about that ship.'

^ 'How many crew she carried, whether she sailed with one or two wireless operators. What sort of man was the captain? I know Mackay, so I gave him a thumbnail portrait. I got the funny idea he knew most of these things already and he was just checking. That ship is on the milk run, you know – from Alaska to San Francisco and back.'

^ 'And that's a piece of history – a British tanker taking oil from one American port to another…'

^ 'Well, they did repeal the Jones Act of 1920 which said only Yank vessels could move cargo from one American port to another. They found they had a terrible shortage of tankers on the West Coast. What's the matter with Mr X?'

^ 'Probably everything.' Sullivan stood up, collected his two prints of Winter off the desk. 'I've got a lot to do in the next hour – collect some money, check with the airlines…'

^ Somewhere about this time Sheikh Gamal Tafak had his second secret meeting with the terrorist chiefs in the Syrian desert. Again he arrived in a motorcade of three cars, riding in the rear vehicle alongside his driver. The two cars in front, both of them black Mercedes like his own, also carried a driver and one passenger in the front seat. The waiting terrorist chiefs thought they understood the reason for this precaution: anyone lying in ambush and waiting to throw a bomb at Tafak could never be sure which car he was riding in. The real reason for the motorcade was more sinister.

^ Tafak detested dealing with these people, but these were the men he feared, whom he was anxious for the moment to keep on his side. One day it might be necessary to lose them; on that day the motorcade of three cars would contain other passengers, men with automatic weapons who would eliminate the terrorist chiefs. Meantime, let them get used to the arrival of the motorcade.

^ Anxious to get away, he explained what was going to happen in as few words as possible. He had told them before the plan was to create an outrage that would so appal the West that its press, radio stations and TV networks would scream with furious indignation at the Arabs. This, in its turn, would create an atmosphere in which Tafak could pressure all the Arab oil-producing states to stop the oil flow completely. Then they could launch the final attack against Israel while the West was immobilised. Everything depended on what happened aboard the British oil tanker once it bad been seized.

^ 'Winter, who knows nothing about the final outcome,' Tafak explained, Ms necessary for the hi-jack of the tanker. He is a better planner than LeCat -and being British he will know how to handle the British crew. Later, he will be withdrawn from the operation. LeCat will control the last stage.'

^ 'The negotiations between LeCat and the American authorities will break down. There will be a fatal misunderstanding – it will be reported that American marines attempted to storm the ship.'

^ Tafak stood up, ready to go. 'It has happened so many times in history. For the sake of the multitude – our brethren who yearn to return to Palestine – the few must die. The hostages – the British crew – will all be killed.'

^ Part two The hi-jack