A Loyal Spy (43 page)

The first of two roundabouts signposted the port and the second, on the far side of a brackish stretch of canal, signposted the town centre and a supermarket; circling back, she followed the sign for the port and performed an abrupt U-turn as soon as the checkpoint with its uniformed guard came into view. She fed back into the traffic and crossed the canal again, heading for the town centre this time, passing the railway station and after it a police station, then turning left on to the High Street.

She drove slowly down a narrow one-way street that was festooned with multicoloured bunting, past a Victorian clock tower and rows of shops selling knick-knacks and seaside souvenirs, and emerged confusingly, at the end of it, back at the second roundabout and the green-tinged canal. This time she headed for the broad expanse of the supermarket car park. Cautiously, she drove the length of it.

At one end, hidden behind the supermarket, there was a run-down mall, with an amusement arcade, a boarded-up nightclub and a sunken playground in a stretch of grass. Young women, who looked as if they were barely out of school, were standing beside pushchairs on the grass. At the other end of the car park there was a recycling point and an old man in shorts throwing bottles from a cardboard box, one after another, into a green skip, the glass smashing in staccato accompaniment to the raucous cry of gulls. Beyond the row of skips there was a steep incline covered in brambles and the concrete sea wall. She parked alongside the stairway leading up to the wall. It was plastered with warning signs. She hadn’t been this close to the sea since leaving Barra on the ferry, and the contrast couldn’t have been greater. She glanced at the print-out of the tidal gauge and the ship’s diagram. This was it, all she had, a print-out of the Sheerness tidal gauge and a set of coordinates for a point just offshore. If there was nothing here then she was out of possible leads.

She got out of the car, locked it and climbed the cement steps. On the top of the wall, she stood for a moment staring out to sea. From where she was standing, she could see the mouth of the Thames, a large town on the far side of the estuary and the North Sea. The water was gunmetal grey and still for as far as the eye could see. There were several large ships in the shipping channel. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened to the lapping of the waves on the shingle beach and the gulls. She opened them again. A row of dark wooden groynes stretched along the beach in both directions. To the right there were exposed mussel beds and to the left a jumble of concrete pillboxes that might have dated back to the Second or even the First World War, and, dividing the beach from the port, a moat filled with dark green algae.

She jumped down off the wall and trudged along the shingle beach towards the jetty where the tidal gauge was located. There were several men sitting in folding chairs at intervals along the shoreline, with their fishing rods on cradles beside them. Lying next to a large bald-headed man in an Arsenal shirt was a brown-and-white Staffordshire bull terrier on a leash, which raised its snout as she passed.

The beach ended abruptly with a jumble of rocks, barbed-wire fencing and signs saying
KEEP OUT
. If she wanted to reach the jetty she was going to have to hire a boat or swim. She turned around and trudged back along the beach. As she did so a small tugboat passed the end of the jetty and she watched it strike out perpendicular to the beach. It took a moment or two to understand what she was looking at. She felt her mouth go dry. It was there staring her in the face. A mile and a half offshore with warning buoys at four corners: the tops of the three masts poking out of the water, a glimpse of the deck.

The Liberty ship.

The three-masted freighter pinned to Jonah’s collage by persons unseen.

It was a wreck. There in plain view, in the shipping lane.

She sat down on the beach and watched as the tugboat weighed anchor beside the forward mast. It was too far off to see what it was up to. She looked around, searching for inspiration. The man with the Staffie wasn’t that far away. She took a couple of fifties out of her handbag and palmed them. She undid one of the buttons of her shirt and scooped her breasts together in her Top Shop bra. Ready. She reflected that there was a time when she wouldn’t have bothered with the money.

The Staffie climbed to its feet warily as she approached. It was stocky and muscular, with a broad, wedge-shaped head and large round eyes. She squatted and held out her hand for it to sniff. The bald-headed man in the soccer shirt blinked and squinted suspiciously at her before his gaze was drawn, as intended, to her cleavage.

She withdrew the first fifty-pound note from the sleeve of her coat with a magician’s flourish. She held it up in plain view tucked between two fingers. The man licked his lips and looked from the note to Miranda’s cleavage and back again. Miranda leaned forward, ruffling the dog’s neck, and smiled encouragingly.

‘The boat out there. What can you tell me about it?’

‘That’s the
Goney
,’ the man said, ‘she’s the port tug.’

‘And the wreck?’

‘The
Montgomery
,’ he answered.

‘What are they doing out there?’

After a moment’s pause, the man smiled slyly. She held out the fifty and before she could pull it away he had grabbed her hand and was stroking her fingers.

‘They’re diving on the wreck,’ he told her. ‘They do it every year or so.’

He let go of her and swiftly pocketed the fifty.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Check the hull.’

‘And if I want to speak to the crew?’

The man’s eyes became smaller and shinier. ‘What have you got for me?’ he asked.

She produced the other fifty-pound note from her sleeve and held it up for him to see. ‘Just money.’

He looked disappointed.

‘They drink at the Albion in Blue Town,’ he told her.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘You look familiar,’ he said. ‘Are you on the television?’

‘I’m a TV reporter,’ she told him. ‘I’m doing a story.’

‘I don’t watch the news,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Of course you don’t.’

‘If you want to know about the
Montgomery
you should speak to the Swampie,’ he told her.

She looked in the direction that he was pointing with his plump finger. The shape of a man in a large overcoat was huddled against the nearest groyne. There was a brief flash of light on glass. A pair of binoculars.

‘He’s been watching her for years. When he’s not wandering the marsh he’s here. They reckon his father was on her for salvage when she broke up.’

‘Thank you.’ She stood up. The dog sat and stared up at her, cocking its triangular head to one side. ‘Hope you find a fish.’

She started trudging across the shingle towards the groyne, intent on getting a look through the binoculars.

‘Hello,’ she called out. The man lowered the binoculars and stared fearfully at her. His face was filthy and his hair formed a wispy halo around his head.

When she stepped closer to him and was about to talk to him, she found that he stank terribly of piss, enough to make her eyes smart. Up close it was as if his face was peppered with shot. There were shiny black marks in the pores of his skin. Miranda felt queasy. Across the beach the man with the Staffie was laughing.

‘She come out of Hog Island with her holds full, bound for Cherbourg,’ the Swampie muttered, his eyes darting this way and that, ‘beached on a reach of shoal they come off her like rats scrambling scrambling over themselves to get ashore the sound of her back breaking on the middle sand like gunshot the bombs will blow they said she’ll blow, she’ll BLOW …’

‘When did this happen?’ Miranda asked, after a pause.

He wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘Sunday morning,’ he mumbled, ‘twentieth of August 1944.’

‘Can I look?’ Miranda asked.

The Swampie clutched the binoculars tighter.

‘I heard ’em,’ he said, and a sly expression came over him, ‘talking like spittin’ I was listening at the window of a cottage by Bedlam’s Bottom or Ladies Hole can’t remember which minding my business.’ He looked scared suddenly. ‘He’s not nice he’s a Paki dark dark face in the darkness took my hand twisted it crying crying I said I ain’t seen nothing I ain’t heard nothing.’ He looked sly again. ‘But I did she’s already rigged to blow forward and aft.’

The Swampie turned his back on her and raised the binoculars to his eyes and continued muttering unintelligibly to himself.

She sat at a keyboard in an Internet café on the High Street and stared at the Google home page with its letterbox slot. She tapped Montgomery + Sheerness in. One million eight hundred and ten thousand results. Fifth down the list was a link to Wikipedia. She clicked on it:

The
SS Richard Montgomery
was an American Liberty ship built during World War II, one of the 2,710 used to carry cargo during the war. The Montgomery was wrecked off the Thames Estuary in 1944 with around 6,000 tons of ammunition on board, which continue to be a hazard to the area …

She swore softly under her breath and looked around suddenly in case anyone was watching. There were only a couple of other people in the café and neither of them seemed interested in her. She turned back to the monitor and continued reading.

… The ship was built in 1943 by the St Johns River Shipbuilding Company
… given the official ship number 243756, and named after General Richard Montgomery, an Irish-American soldier who was killed during the American Revolutionary War.

In August 1944, on what was to be its final voyage, the ship left Hog Island, Philadelphia, where it had been loaded with 6,127 tons of munitions.

It travelled from the Delaware river to the Thames Estuary, then anchored while awaiting the formation of a convoy to travel to ­Cherbourg, France, which had already fallen to the Allies …

… When it arrived off Southend, it came under the authority of the Thames naval control at HMS Leigh
… The harbourmaster, responsible for all shipping movements in the estuary, ordered the Montgomery to a berth off the north edge of Sheerness Middle Sands. On 20 August 1944 it dragged anchor and ran aground on a sandbank around 250m from the Medway Approach Channel, in a depth of 24 ft (7.3m) of water. The ship broke its back on sandbanks near the Isle of Sheppey, about 1.5 miles (2.5km) from Sheerness …

… Due to the presence of the large quantity of unexploded ordnance, the ship is monitored by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. In 1973 it became the first wreck designated as dangerous under Section 2 of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 and there is an exclusion zone around it monitored visually and by radar
…

… According to a BBC news report in 1970 it was determined that if the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery exploded, it would throw a 1,000-foot (300m) wide column of water and debris nearly 10,000 feet (3,000m) in the air …

It was a bomb.

A bomb that it turned out had been sitting, right under people’s noses, at the mouth of the Thames Estuary for sixty years. A ship packed with aircraft bombs intended for Allied forces in Europe – an open invitation to mass destruction. It beggared belief.

It was obvious what the divers were up to out at the wreck. It was no different to using any piece of ordnance – artillery shells or mortars, for instance – to build an improvised explosive device. No different to doing it on land. You just had to pack enough plastic explosives in enough bomb fuse-wells to initiate the main charge, link it all up to a ring main with detonating cord, attach detonators and then blow it – the sympathetic detonation wave would be enough to set the whole lot off simultaneously; do it on a high tide during a storm surge and the result would be a tsunami, a wave big enough to overwhelm the Barrier and flood London. It wouldn’t matter what defences were put in place.

The high tide was tomorrow night, 12 September, just when the storm was expected to strike. They were going to blow up the ship tomorrow night, Monday night – four years and one day after 9/11.

She paid for her time online and left the shop. As she stepped out on to the street, she saw that the Swampie was sitting in a doorway opposite. He pointed an accusatory finger at her.

‘Cunt!’ he shouted.

She turned away from him and strode through the small seaside town. She should not panic. She had to stay cool and calm, rational, for only that way could she negotiate her way out of this nightmare.

She should call Mikulski. She had his card. It was in her bag.

He answered on the second ring.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Sheerness. I found the ship. The Liberty ship. It’s called the
Montgomery
. It’s a wreck full of unexploded bombs. It’s just sitting there in the Thames Estuary, in full view in the shipping lane. They’re going to blow it up!’

There was silence at the other end of the line.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘There’s a team of divers working on it right now, preparing it for detonation. They must be nearly finished. There are no police here. There’s nothing to stop them. Do you understand me? Mikulski? Are you there?’

There was a pause.

‘You should walk away,’ Mikulski told her. ‘You’ve done what you can, so leave the rest to us.’

‘Us? Who’s that?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

She cut the connection. She continued walking. She threw the phone in a bin in disgust. The American didn’t care about whether or not terrorists were trying to flood London, whether or not they were trying to frame her for it, she saw that now. When she had told him that she was not responsible for Monteith’s death he had simply said
that’s not really what I’m here about.
Clearly, all Mikulski cared about was tracking down Jonah and charging him with the murder of some long-dead CIA agent.

No one was going to stop this if she didn’t, she saw that now.

She must go to the police.

She had to. She had to warn them. If she went into a local police station, where there were witnesses, where there was no armed response unit or Counter-Terrorism Command, there was some chance they might listen to her. She might be given the chance to warn them. They might investigate. She headed towards the blue lamp of the police station on Millennium Way.