‘Absolutely not,’ said Treadwell firmly. ‘Every F1 car would grind to a halt every time a local taxi firm radioed its base, or someone in a nearby town ordered a pizza. Our radio nets are protected using specialized frequency ranges and electronic filters. Any disturbance you’ve found,’ he said pointing at the data sheet in front of Straker, ‘would not have been enough to affect the EMS.’
Straker nodded his acceptance of Treadwell’s answer, but somewhat half-heartedly, as he continued to peer closely at the graph. ‘You know, there is definitely interference in that carrier wave — over and above the trauma — at the key moment. It’s faint. But it is there,’ and he spun the page round to show the engineers. ‘Can we, at least, see if there were any other examples of radio interference like that at any other time today?’
Backhouse responded readily to the request. The pages, just produced, were split up and divvied out.
After several minutes thumbing through the printouts, each person in turn declared not. ‘It appears, then, that the only interference we experienced all day was at 1.36.52.09,’ Backhouse concluded.
‘It cannot, then, be a coincidence,’ declared Straker. ‘It means that there was an unidentified radio transmission, of some kind, at the very moment the fuel injection system shut down and the car lost control.’
Sabatino said. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘That the disruption of your fuel system might have been triggered by a radio signal. If we could track down that unknown transmission — and find its source — we might find the cause of the intervention.’
‘This is good, isn’t it?’ said Sabatino. ‘You can do that — you did that, finding the guy using a radio in Monaco.’
‘I did, but that was knowing the threat we faced in advance. Here, in Spa, we had no idea we’d be facing anything like this, so, obviously, we haven’t deployed the relevant surveillance kit.’
‘So you can’t catch these people?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘How do you do it, then?’ she asked.
‘We’ll have to look for other clues.’
Sabatino pulled a face, indicating a lack of belief. ‘Like what?’
Straker leant forward. ‘Have we got a map of the circuit?’
Backhouse looked a little nonplussed by the apparent non sequitur. After consultation with another screen or two, and the whirring of a printer, a map was produced on a sheet of A3. Straker pored over it, looking at the topography around Les Combes.
‘Something to help with our process of elimination,’ Straker explained, ‘is that all radio signals need line-of-sight to work. Unless they’re rebroadcast — picked up and sent on through another transceiver — radio signals don’t bend; they can’t change direction or go round corners. They also don’t work over a hill or well through buildings. That’s helpful, here, in narrowing our search down, as there’s chunky topography around Les Combes. It means that our unknown radio signal could not have come from the pit lane or paddock — there’s far too much real estate in between. Not only that, the interference in the carrier wave is very faint — I’d say it could only have come from a low-power, local transmission.’ Straker ran his finger round the contours; then, picking up a highlighter pen, he traced out a pink line across the map which ended up taking on the shape of a kidney. ‘Because of the undulating ground, such a weak radio signal could only have come from somewhere within this boundary,’ he said. ‘The area does include plenty of woodland, up on the hillside above the track. Perfectly possible for someone to have secreted themselves and activated it from up there.’
‘How big is the kit needed to do something like this?’ asked Sabatino.
‘For that weak a signal, not huge. Easily fit in a rucksack.’
‘So it could even have come from someone among the spectators?’
‘How many spectators would there have been inside this area?’
‘Quite a few,’ said Treadwell, ‘on the outside of the Kemmel Straight before Les Combes, along here,’ and pointed to the relevant section of the map with his finger.
‘I’ll check with Spa security and ask for their CCTV footage,’ said Straker. ‘Did we record any footage of the spectators on that bank, either from an on-board shot or from the main broadcaster?’
‘We’ll have a look,’ said Treadwell.
‘In the meantime,’ said Straker looking at the faces around the table, ‘we need to think this through. Could this kind of incident happen again? Will it happen again? Are we vulnerable to another attack in the race tomorrow?’
Sabatino’s expression hardly faltered at the suggestions. ‘Whoever did this is still out there. It has to be a possibility.’
Straker nodded. ‘What do you normally do when you have a safety issue like this?’
Sabatino smiled lasciviously. ‘We’re all virgins, on this one, Colonel.’
Treadwell answered in clear Australian: ‘We’d probably go to the Race Director.’
‘Would you expect him to deal with it, or would he take it higher within the FIA?’
‘Definitely higher.’
‘But with our level of proof,’ added Backhouse, ‘if it did go any higher, it wouldn’t help us much. You heard San Marino’s response to the radio jamming in Monaco?’
‘We’ve got to try — somehow — to corroborate our assertions, then. Okay,’ said Straker, looking at his watch. ‘It’s three-thirty. Let’s pull together any footage we have of that part of the circuit to suss out the lie of spectators near that corner. While you’re getting on with that, I’ll go and talk to my friend about the woodland area around Les Combes.’
Maurice Beauregard, the circuit’s head of security, was troubled to hear of another possible sabotage incident, and immediately came up trumps. In double-quick time he recruited a sizeable search party of police sniffer dogs from two local stations. A dozen or so Belgian Malinois were soon deployed across the hillsides to scour the wooded areas Straker was concerned about — hoping to find spoor to indicate the earlier presence of or even the position used by a concealed radio operator.
Although buoyed by such substantial help to his investigation, Straker couldn’t add much more once the search had started, so accepted a lift back to the security manager’s office.
There, he asked Beauregard whether he was prepared to download all the circuit’s CCTV recordings onto DVDs. Having seen Sabatino’s high-speed incident, the security man was ready to help. He told Straker he would have them delivered round the moment they were ready.
Straker returned to the Ptarmigan headquarters truck. ‘I’ve got the area around Les Combes being searched by police sniffer dogs,’ he reported to the team.
Sabatino looked genuinely impressed.
‘How have we got on with pulling together the footage around the corner — that we recorded?’ he asked.
‘Pretty well.’
‘Let’s start with that.’
Backhouse fired up a laptop to view what they had. ‘This one,’ he explained, ‘is on-board with Remy — looking forward, approaching Les Combes.’ As they played it, they were badly distracted from scanning the spectators — having to relive the horror of those fearful moments and seeing something of what Sabatino must have experienced as the picture violently swung about.
‘How the hell did you hold that together?’ said Treadwell. ‘Also, it was really lucky you didn’t hit that car alongside.’
‘Hang on,’ said Sabatino hitting the pause button. ‘That’s right. There was a car alongside, coasting home on the inside of the racing line.’