‘Well, get them there by the fastest possible route. You say they are on manoeuvre?’
‘Yessir.’
‘Do they have with them all they need to operate in the Pasayten Wilderness?’
‘Everything for sub-zero rough-terrain operating, General.’
‘Live ammunition?’
‘Yessir. This was for a simulated terrorist hunt in Rainer National Park.’
‘Well, it ain’t simulated any more, Lieutenant. Get the whole unit to Mazama sheriff’s office. Check with a CIA spook called Olsen. Stay in contact with Alpha at all times and report to me on progress.’
To save time Captain Linnett, apprised of some kind of emergency while he was descending Mount Rainer, asked for exfiltration by air. Fort Lewis had its own Chinook troop-carrier helicopter, which picked up the Alpha team from the empty visitor car park at the foot of the mountain thirty minutes later.
The Chinook took the team as far north as the snow clouds would allow and set them down on a small airfield west of Burlington. The truck had been heading there for an hour and they arrived almost at the same time.
From Burlington the Interstate 20 wound its bleak path along the Skagit River and into the Cascades. It is closed in winter to all but official and specially equipped traffic; the SF truck was equipped for every kind of terrain and a few not yet invented. But progress was slow. It took four hours until the exhausted driver crunched into the townlet of Mazama.
The CIA team was also exhausted, but at least their injured colleagues, doped with morphine, were in real ambulances heading south for a helicopter pick-up and a final transfer to Tacoma Memorial Hospital.
Olsen told Captain Linnett what he thought was enough. Linnett snapped that he was security cleared and insisted on more.
‘This fugitive, has he got arctic clothing and footwear?’
‘No. Hiking boots, warm trousers, a light quilted jacket.’
‘No skis, snowshoes? Is he armed?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘It’s dark already. Does he have night-vision goggles? Anything to help him move?’
‘No, certainly not. He was a prisoner in close confinement.’
‘He’s toast,’ said Linnett. ‘In these temperatures, ploughing through a metre of snow with no compass, going round in circles. We’ll get him.’
‘There is just one thing. He’s a mountain man. Born and raised in them.’
‘Round here?’
‘No. In the Tora Bora. He’s an Afghan.’
Linnett stared in dumb amazement. He had fought in the Tora Bora. He had been in the first Afghan invasion when Coalition Special Forces, American and British, ranged through the Spin Ghar looking for a runaway party of Saudi Arabs, one of them six feet four inches tall. And he had been back to take part in Operation Anaconda. That had not gone well either. Some good men had been lost on Anaconda. Linnett had a score to settle with Pashtun from the Tora Bora.
‘Saddle up,’ he shouted and the ODA climbed back in their truck. It would take them up the remainder of the track to Hart’s Pass. After that their transportation would go back three thousand years to the ski and the snowshoe.
As they left, the sheriff’s radio brought the news that both airmen had been found and brought out, very cold but alive. Both were in hospital in Seattle. The news was good but a bit too late for a man called Lemuel Wilson.
The Anglo-American investigators of merchant marine who had taken over Operation Crowbar were still concentrating on threat one, the idea that Al-Qaeda might be planning to close down a vital world highway in the form of a narrow strait.
In that contingency the size of the vessel was paramount. The cargo was immaterial, save only that venting oil would make the job of demolition divers almost impossible. Enquiries were flying across the world to identify every vessel on the seas of huge tonnage.
Clearly the bigger the ship, the fewer there would be of them, and most would belong to respectable and gigantic companies. The principal five hundred ultra-large and very large crude carriers, the ULCCs and VLCCs, known to the public as supertankers, were checked and found to be unattacked. Then the tonnages were lowered in modules of ten thousand tonnes fully loaded. When all vessels of fifty thousand tonnes and up were accounted for, the ‘strait blockage’ panic began to subside.
Lloyd’s Register is probably still the world’s most comprehensive archive and the Edzell team set up a direct line to Lloyd’s, which was constantly in use. On Lloyd’s advice, they concentrated on vessels flying flags of convenience and those registered in ‘dodgy’ ports or owned by suspect proprietors. Both Lloyd’s, and the Secret Intelligence Service’s Anti-Terrorist (Marine) desk joined with the American CIA and Coastguard in slapping a ‘no approach to coast’ label on over two hundred vessels without their captains or owners being aware of it. But still nothing showed up to set the storm cones flying in the breeze.
Captain Linnett knew his mountains and was aware that a man with no specialist footwear, trying to progress through snow over ground riddled with unseen trees, roots, cracks, ditches, gullies and streams, would be lucky to make a heartbreaking half a mile per hour across country.