The crew were a polyglot bunch from all over the world, who liked to view Captain Luckhurst as typically English. So he had played to the stereotype, adopting a stiff upper lip and a ready smile, keeping his own worries about their safety strictly to himself. It wouldn’t have done to let them know how alarmed he’d been when they’d been taken off the ship at gun point, ferried ashore, and herded into this cattle pen.
He knew he could not complain about the treatment they were receiving. There would have been no point. The man Khalid, who had led the raiding party and seemed to be in charge, called their holding pen his ‘Guantanamo’, and like its Cuban counterpart this place was primitive: built of wooden posts with wire sheep fencing strung between them. Thank God for the fact that at one end of the pen there was a rough roof of plywood boards covered by tar paper, with a raised shelf under it for sitting and sleeping; this gave them some protection against the sun, which blazed for over ten hours a day, raising the temperature to 40 degrees Centigrade. They were let out each morning for an hour’s exercise in the middle of the compound, and by the time they returned to the pen were desperate for relief from the blistering heat and the wind – a dry scorching wind which blew all day, driving sand relentlessly into their mouths and eyes.
At least the nights were cool. Then Luckhurst would sit on his bit of the wooden platform, wrapped in one of the thin blankets which the guards had grudgingly distributed, staring out at the sky. Up there, he thought, among all those stars is a satellite looking at us. They know where we are. But they’re not going to intervene. We just have to wait for the ransom negotiations. Get on with it, he’d implore the unknown negotiators. Get us out of here.
The biggest frustration for him lay in not knowing what was going on. The hostages had no contact with any of the men in the camp except for the young boy, Taban, who brought them their food. Luckhurst smiled at the thought of the young Somali. Even in the bleakest circumstances the kindness of an individual could stand out, and he could tell Taban was a gentle soul adrift in a situation beyond his control. The boy reminded him of his own son, George, his youngest, who despite the utterly different worlds they inhabited, had the same kind of sweetness as this African youth. At first there had been no communication between the Captain and the Somali boy, but in time Luckhurst had found that his smattering of Arabic, Taban’s few words of English and a burgeoning use of sign language meant they could make their respective meanings clear.
One day, almost two weeks before, the boy had seemed very agitated. Luckhurst had gathered from him that new men had arrived in the camp, though he had not seen them himself. ‘Arab,’ Taban had said, lowering his voice and looking over his shoulder at the guards by the gate. ‘One… you.’ And he’d pointed at Luckhurst.
‘One like me? White?’ asked Luckhurst, pointing at his own face and hands.
Taban had shaken his head. ‘No white. English.’
An Englishman? But not white. Someone speaking English, perhaps. Could it be another hostage? But if so, why wasn’t he in the pen?
Over the next few evenings, intrigued by the idea of another Englishman living so close to him, Luckhurst had tried to learn more, but Taban was not forthcoming. Then, a week ago, when he’d brought the supper: ‘Men gone. English gone,’ he’d said, waving an arm towards the sea.
Now Luckhurst heard the clink of keys, and the sound of the door of the pen swinging open on its creaking hinges. Supper, he thought, visualising the guards letting Taban in with the food bowls. He wanted to learn more about the men who had gone to sea and not come back.
‘OK, Taban?’ asked Luckhurst now as the boy handed him his bowl of stew. Taban nodded but he looked scared.
Suddenly Khalid appeared behind him with a holstered pistol on his hip. This was new; Luckhurst hoped it didn’t mean things had taken a turn for the worse. But the man was grinning as he strode up to the Captain.
‘I have some news for you, Commander. Good news.’
‘Yes?’ This announcement had been made before, and had turned out merely to be that there was fruit with their dinner of stew.
‘Your owners have seen sense at last – the ransom has been paid. You are clearly worth a lot to them.’
Luckhurst knew better – it was the ship the owners wanted back, not the crew, but there was no point in telling Khalid that. ‘What happens next?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Next? We drive you to a collection point outside Mogadishu. A representative of your company will be there to collect you.’
It took only minutes for the Captain and his crew to get ready. They had nothing to pack. As they walked towards the dusty lorry, Luckhurst looked for Taban to say goodbye, but there was no sign of him. In the excitement of his release the Captain soon forgot about the boy.
Chapter 9
Geoffrey Fane was not a generous man and he did not waste his time doing favours. But in his long career in MI6 he had developed a nose for what could be important. And when, the previous day, a call had come into his office from an old colleague who wanted some informal advice, that nose had twitched. Instead of finding some excuse, he had agreed to meet the caller. Now he was sitting in a taxi, crawling along Oxford Street in mid-morning traffic, on his way to his old colleague’s office.
The caller was David Blakey, twenty years in MI6, rising to be Head of Station in Hong Kong at the time the colony was handed over to China. After Hong Kong, he had retired from MI6 and since then his and Fane’s paths only rarely crossed – an occasional sighting in the bar of the Travellers Club, once bumping into each other in the Burlington Arcade. When Blakey had called, Fane had remembered that after leaving MI6 his old colleague had taken a job as director of a large international charity. In fact, it was when Blakey had mentioned the charity’s name, UCSO, that he had sparked Fane’s interest. It was just a week since that name had come to his attention. A young man with British documentation had been arrested by the French Navy in the Indian Ocean. He was apparently one of a group of pirates trying to hijack a Greek cargo ship, which had been chartered by the charity UCSO to carry aid supplies to Mombasa.
The case had been handed to MI5 to pursue; Elizabeth Carlyle – or Liz as she preferred to call herself, thought Fane with a grimace – had gone to Paris to interview the prisoner. And now the head of that same charity had suddenly popped up, asking for advice and refusing to say on the telephone what it was that concerned him.
Although they had lost touch in recent years, Fane had once known Blakey well. They had been at the same Oxford college before going their separate ways. Blakey had spent a year or so doing research for a thesis he never finished, while Fane had worked as a trainee on the Middle East desk of an investment bank. Then, to their mutual surprise, they had met up again on the initial MI6 training course. Together they had filled and emptied dead letter boxes, practised brush contacts and covert agent meetings all over Hampshire; they’d been arrested by the local police, and had survived rough interrogations by the SAS. They had dozed through lectures by retired officers reliving the glories of their Cold War agent-running triumphs, and at the end of it all, both had passed with honours and been marked out as high fliers.
Their careers had run in parallel for a while, then gradually Fane had pulled away and by the time Blakey had retired, his old college friend was several ranks above him. But Fane had always respected Blakey and knew that he would not have rung unless there was something important to talk about.
Fane had called up the file on UCSO but had found it pretty uninformative. He was interested in all large international charities; they operated in trouble spots all over the world – places from which he needed information, but from which information was difficult to obtain. But most charities kept intelligence services at arm’s length; if they supped with them at all, they supped with a very long spoon, since they couldn’t afford to have their people suspected of being spies. So the file on UCSO was very thin. From what he could gather, it was mainly a co-ordinating and shipping organisation, not one with teams of aid workers in the field, so not on the face of it of particular interest to Fane. But if Blakey had something to say about the hijacking attempt, some information about the gangs of pirates operating out of Somalia, then Fane wanted to hear it.