It never ceased to amaze Diego how filthy people could be. To a certain extent he had become desensitized to it, but he could never quite understand how such a short journey could result in so much mess. The ferry journey lasted barely three hours, but in that time the two thousand passengers never failed to turn the beautiful, sparkling clean ship into a bombsite.
After working for three years on the same boat, Diego had managed to get himself a decent area. It was in a relatively tidy area near the jewellery boutique, mercilessly separate from both restaurants and toilets. Toilets were always the worst on sea voyages, and Diego was almost ecstatic when he’d been transferred to Section 1a.
But now he’d have to go through it again, and he wasn’t pleased by the prospect. The toilets in Section 1b were invariably clogged up and overflowing. It wasn’t going to be a pleasant job, and so Diego made the decision to get it out of the way first.
Entering the bathroom, the smell was the same as always — repugnant. He scanned the room quickly and was agreeably surprised to see that there was only one pool of vomit on the floor. The place was filthy underfoot, but at least it just seemed to be general dirt and slush from the hundreds of pairs of boots, shoes and trainers that would have trawled through the place over the last few hours.
The locked cubicle door to his right caught his attention next. Strange, he thought. All the passengers should have returned to their vehicles by now. He approached the door and knocked on the wooden front. There was no reply.
He bent down, careful not to get too close to the floor even with his gloves on, and saw a pair of legs, trousers pulled round the ankles. He thought back, and remembered that such a sight wasn’t actually all that strange — a lot of passengers would get so drunk that they’d fall asleep on the toilet, and have to be woken by the clean-up crews. Some would need medical assistance.
He sighed, and banged on the door louder. He really didn’t want to have to go in there if he could possibly help it. It was never nice to have to drag a sleepy, uncooperative drunk out of a cubicle. There was still no answer, and so he banged again on the door, shouting this time for good measure. Still nothing.
He rolled his eyes up to the sky and muttered a curse under his breath as he pulled a small coin out of his overall pocket. Inserting the coin edgewise into the screw-head on the outside of the lock, he twisted it clockwise. The action caused the lock to unbolt, and he pushed the door open.
His eyes went wide, and his breath caught in his throat as he became frozen to the spot. He had never seen this before, that was for sure.
27
The cold air hit Cole in the face with a solid blow, and it took him a few moments to regain his senses. He peered out at the French coastline, the dim landscape lit up intermittently by the bright lights of the port city.
From his precarious position, balanced on the top of the massive anchor chain that had only minutes before dropped with a deafening crash through the ship’s large hawse hole into the sea below, he concentrated on regaining his night vision.
Eventually, he was able to make things out clearly. The huge chain stretched down some forty feet below him to the dark waters of the French Channel. It was on a blind-side from the main port buildings, and Cole thought the area of coastline to the West of the massive port complex was probably about a half mile away.
He picked his time carefully, waiting for the boat to slow its rocking enough until he could manoeuvre out of the hawse hole all the way onto the chain. The bare metal was freezing, but at the same time slick and slippery with oil and seaweed.
The last time he’d climbed such a chain, at least he’d had good equipment for the job, including rubberized gloves. Right now, he had nothing more than strips of cloth wrapped tightly around his hands to protect them against frostbite. It would have been easier just to dive in from a height, but Cole knew that there might be people watching from up on deck. A big white splash against an otherwise dark sea might just attract the wrong kind of attention.
And so slowly, laboriously, Cole lowered himself down the colossal anchor chain, gigantic link by gigantic link. It took five agonizing minutes, but as he finally slipped into the near freezing water where the chain met the sea, he was confident that he had done so completely unobserved.
28
Cole pulled himself onto the shores of mainland France just as the first rays of dawn started to cast their dreary light over the muggy bank.
Getting cold and wet was starting to become too much of a habit, Cole decided as he stretched out his freezing and exhausted body. The respite was short-lived; he knew he had to get moving, and find some more dry clothes.
But, he thought with some satisfaction as he made his way up the slope towards a nearby block of buildings, he was safe, at least for now.
29
Nothing was ever perfect, Hansard considered as he put the phone down. The meetings this morning had gone well; things were being downplayed now between Russia and China, which was exactly how he wanted it for now. He didn’t want President Danko’s anger to subside completely, but nor did he want any sort of physical confrontation to erupt. For the time being at least, the requisite balance was being kept perfectly.
In fact, things had been going altogether too well, which was why he wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that Cole had escaped the net yet again. How lucky could one man be? wondered Hansard, although he knew that it wasn’t luck. The simple fact was that Mark Cole was one of the best there was. He was certainly the best that Hansard himself had ever worked with personally.
Hansard sat at the big desk in his office, staring at the mass of paperwork spread out in front of him, reports and case files that all seemed to need his immediate attention, and felt the pulse throb in his temple. He sighed, and pulled a bottle from the veneered drinks cabinet next to him, pouring himself a stiff measure. As he sank back into his upholstered leather chair and poured half of the rich, hot liquid down his throat, his mind started to drift back many years, to his first meeting with Mark Cole.
It was early during the second Iraq war, in 2003. Hansard had been Head of the DIA’s Department X at the time, having transferred to military intelligence from the US Navy back in 1984. The Navy had been his parent unit in the same way as it had been for his father, and his grandfather before him, but circumstance had conspired against the third generation.
Hansard was the product of a wealthy family, and came from old money, but that family had always taken the protection of the nation seriously. His father had been killed in action in the Gulf of Suez in 1956. Charles Hansard had only been eight years old at the time, but by 1971 he had passed out of Harvard Law School and then the Annapolis Naval Academy as an Ensign, keen to honour the memory of his heroic father.
He had an early taste of intelligence work when he had been seconded as the Naval attaché to the Pentagon in 1980, and he had witnessed the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw first hand. President Carter’s attempt to resolve the Iran hostage crisis had resulted in a catalogue of errors and the unnecessary loss of many lives.
Hansard had realized three things that day. The first was that America had at its disposal some of the best special forces operators in the world. The second was that there was a very poor link between the intelligence services and the military, and this simple error was the primary reason for the operation’s failure. The third thing he had realized was that he could do better — he could see how links needed to be forged between the intelligence and military communities, and started to make plans and report his findings up the chain of command.