He didn’t have a great deal of choice, Graham realized. He stood mutely aside as Williams reached the top of the ladder and scrambled aboard. Willerbey and Donnelly were still in the water, frantically paddling their boards towards the side of the ship. Another member of the crew produced a coil of rope and threw them a tow-line, which Willerbey grabbed gratefully.
‘You don’t look too happy, Sarge,’ Williams observed, noting the worried expression on Graham’s face.
‘I’m bloody well not. I think we’re in some sort of trouble here, and I don’t know what it is.’
Williams took a closer look at the crew members, and got the general picture. He fell silent as Willerbey and Donnelly were hauled aboard and the ship’s four powerful diesel engines fired up to full power. After executing a tight circle in the water, the vessel headed off in the direction it had come from, quickly building up to full speed again.
‘Please, follow me,’ the young sailor said politely, showing the SBS men towards the interior of the vessel. ‘As I said, everything will be explained.’
They were shown into a comfortable but sparsely furnished cabin. The sailor stood guard on the inside of the door, cradling his Uzi in an efficient but unthreatening grip. An adjoining door opened suddenly, and Selina Tsigarides stepped in to join them. She was dressed in a camouflage combat uniform, and was also toting an Uzi.
The Marines gaped at her in total incomprehension. Selina merely smiled. ‘Please relax, all of you,’ she urged. ‘You are aboard a vessel of the Israeli Navy and you are all perfectly safe.’
Graham found his voice at last. ‘Relax?’ he said gruffly. ‘We’ve got half the bloody Russian fleet after us, we’re aboard a ship we’re not supposed to be aboard – and you tell us to relax.’
Selina nodded. ‘Yes, Sergeant Graham. That’s exactly what I want you to do. This is a Saar-class fast-attack craft, easily capable of a 1000-mile sustained run at a top speed of thirty knots. There is absolutely nothing in that Russian convoy which can touch us. We’ll be docking in Haifa before you know it – where, incidentally, you will all be reunited with one of your colleages, John Crewes.’
‘John’s alive?’ Willerbey blurted out.
‘Alive and perfectly unharmed,’ Selina assured him. ‘In fact, we’ve been treating him like a king, partly to make up for having to kidnap him in the first place. It wasn’t something we actually planned, you understand, but his nocturnal training session gave us rather a good opportunity to place one of our own homing beacons inside the tubing of his rig, and we had to seize it. Obviously, we couldn’t let him go afterwards, so we took him with us.’
Graham’s head was spinning as he tried to make sense of it all. ‘You bugged our rigs?’ he asked incredulously.
Selina nodded calmly. ‘Of course. How do you think we were able to find you so easily?’
‘Then this whole caper was planned from the start?’ Graham said. ‘Any chance of you telling us why?’
The girl shrugged. ‘I see no reason why not. We have every intention of being completely open with your government, and cooperating in every way possible.’ Selina paused for a moment. ‘As you may have already worked out for yourselves, I am an undercover agent for the Israeli Secret Service. When a whisper about Operation Windswept first came to us via one of our London operatives, we knew that we had to put our own cover operation into place.’
‘Why?’ Willerbey asked, still not understanding.
‘I should have thought that was quite obvious,’ Selina shot back. ‘It is our country which is in the direct firing line of those missiles, after all. We weren’t at all sure that we could fully trust the British government to share their knowledge of this new guidance system with us, so we decided to get hold of it ourselves. British scientists and military personnel will of course be perfectly welcome to come and join in every stage of the dismantling and decoding operation. We are more than willing to pool all our knowledge.’
At last it all began to make sense. ‘So we’ve been bloody hijacked?’ Graham said darkly, feeling a vague sense of outrage.
Selina flashed him a sardonic smile. ‘Rather strong language, Sergeant, coming from someone who has just carried out an act of piracy on the high seas.’
She did have a point, Graham conceded. He fell silent, allowing the girl to continue.
‘So, using my cover as a liaison officer for the Greek military, I penetrated your operation and kept tabs on the mission while we formulated our own backup plans,’ she explained. ‘The rest you know, and everything seems to have worked out rather well. Both our governments get exactly what they want, and the Russians will be too embarrassed to do a thing about it.’
Graham was silent for a long time after Selina finished. Despite a smouldering resentment at having been outsmarted at his own game, he couldn’t help feeling a grudging sense of admiration for the way it had been accomplished. And the Israelis had pulled their arses out of the fire, after all.
‘There’s just one thing I don’t quite understand,’ he said. ‘Your people are not exactly amateurs at this sort of thing. If you knew about the Russian shipment as well, why didn’t you simply plan your own hijacking operation?’
The compliment went a long way towards restoring Graham’s sense of proportion. He was unable to keep a warm smile of pride from creeping over his face. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said.
Selina nodded. ‘Indeed you shall. In fact we brought several bottles of champagne and brandy along expressly for that purpose. It’s a long way to Haifa, gentlemen. I think if you start now, you have a more than reasonable chance of getting quite religiously pissed before we get there.’
OTHER AVAILABLE TITLES IN THIS SERIES
MARINE A SBS: Terrorism on the North Sea
MARINE B SBS: The Aegean Campaign
MARINE C SBS: The Florida Run
MARINE E SBS: The Hong Kong Gambit
MARINE F SBS: Royal Target
MARINE G SBS: China Seas
MARINE H SBS: The Burma Offensive
MARINE I SBS: Escape From Azerbaijan
MARINE J SBS: The East African Mission
MARINE K SBS: Gold Rush
MARINE L SBS: Raiders From The Sea
OTHER TITLES IN SERIES FROM 22 BOOKS
SOLDIER A SAS: Behind Iraqi Lines
SOLDIER B SAS: Heroes of the South Atlantic
SOLDIER C SAS: Secret War in Arabia
SOLDIER D SAS: The Colombian Cocaine War
SOLDIER E SAS: Sniper Fire in Belfast
SOLDIER F SAS: Guerrillas in the Jungle
SOLDIER G SAS: The Desert Raiders
SOLDIER H SAS: The Headhunters of Borneo
SOLDIER I SAS: Eighteen Years in the Elite Force
SOLDIER J SAS: Counter-insurgency in Aden
SOLDIER K SAS: Mission to Argentina
SOLDIER L SAS: The Embassy Siege
SOLDIER M SAS: Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan
SOLDIER N SAS: The Gambian Bluff
SOLDIER O SAS: The Bosnian Inferno
SOLDIER P SAS: Night Fighters in France
SOLDIER Q SAS: Kidnap the Emperor!
SOLDIER R SAS: Death on Gibraltar
SOLDIER S SAS: The Samarkand Hijack
SOLDIER T SAS: War on the Streets
SOLDIER U SAS: Bandit Country
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 1 Valin’s Raiders
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 2 The Korean Contract
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 3 The Vatican Assignment
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 4 Operation Nicaragua
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 5 Action in the Arctic
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 6 The Khmer Hit
SOLDIER OF FORTUN
E 7: Blue on Blue
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 8 Target the Death-dealer
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 9 The Berlin Alternative
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Osprey Publishing Ltd
First published in Great Britain in 1995 by 22 Books, Invicta House, Sir Thomas Longley Road, Rochester, Kent
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