To the Death

“Sir,” said Chief Gowans, “the solution looks good, she’s still out to the east, maybe twenty miles, and still coming our way. She’s not cavitating, which means she’s making under nine knots.”

Back in the Kilo, Captain Abad’s team did not pick up the Cheyenne. He was now running close to the coast of Algiers, and he told himself for the umpteenth time on this journey that the stealth of the Kilo was always his ally. And he could, if necessary, vanish long before he was cornered. They kept running west-sou’west until dawn, making fifteen knots at periscope depth.

In Cheyenne’s ops room, the engine lines of the Kilo never vanished from the screens. But as her speed increased and the two boats closed to within ten miles of each other, the Americans altered course to one-nine-zero, steering almost due south to gain close contact. This was the most one-sided game of cat-and-mouse. Neither CO had orders to shoot, but the Americans essentially had the Kilo on toast.

1500 Saturday 7 July County Tipperary, Ireland

Shakira Rashood made a leisurely journey across Ireland, driving out of Dublin and heading south across County Kildare and then on down through County Loais. She brought with her an ordnance map that marked the Coolmore Stud close to the little village of Fethard. So far as she could see, the nearest sizable town was Cashel.

She was not planning to buy a racehorse, but like many Arabs she had an inbuilt affinity with the thoroughbred, and she knew that most of the world’s high-mettled racers traced their ancestry back to the desert sands of her forefathers. There was only one famous Arab horse of whom she had heard, and that was the Darley Arabian. And she wondered whether any of his descendants had ended up at Coolmore, which Michael O’Donnell had pronounced the greatest stud farm on earth.

She was not of course to know that every single flat-racing stallion on the Coolmore roster traced back to the Darley Arabian, through his direct descendant Eclipse. And she wished her husband had been with her, because he, somewhat surprisingly for a wanted terrorist hitman, was quite knowledgeable on the subject. General Rashood’s own father, Iranian-born but London-domiciled, was a horse breeder of some note, having very nearly won the Ascot Gold Cup a few years back.

Shakira and Ravi often walked through Damascus to pick up the English newspapers, and she was accustomed to seeing him turn to the racing pages for the results, cards, and reports. He frequently said he missed going racing in England with his father, and that one day, if he could ever return, he would like to own a couple of decent runners. They both knew this was a distinctly unlikely possibility, mass murderers being generally discouraged from attending British and Irish racecourses.

Shakira had, of course, never even seen a thoroughbred in action, but it was a curious piece of unfulfilled ambition. She liked racehorses, liked being told about them, although it had been impossible for her to display anything but the most profound ignorance in the presence of Michael O’Donnell.

And now she was in the heartland of the thoroughbred, County Tipperary, where the great ones had either been born, been trained, or ended their days as stallions and broodmares. She stopped at the newspaper shop in Cashel and bought a small local history of the thoroughbred industry in and around the town.

The names were strange to her, the Derby winners, Nijinsky, Sir Ivor, Roberto, The Minstrel, Galileo, the world-famous sires, Sadlers Wells, Caerleon, Be My Guest, Danehill, Giant’s Causeway. But the names rang with poetry, seeming to echo through the Golden Vale of Tipperary where she now stood.

Shakira signaled for her driver to park the car in a long drive in front of the hotel where her guidebook had suggested she stay. It was a grand pink-bricked eighteenth-century building, now converted into the Cashel Palace Hotel, a mecca for visiting horsemen from all over the world. There had been a mass exodus north from the town for Irish Derby weekend, and it was no trouble booking a single room for a few days. She just checked in, using a hitherto unused American Express card, issued to a British citizen, Margaret Adams. No one even asked to see her passport.

She took her suitcase up to her room, declining assistance from the doorman. She unpacked carefully, hung a few things in the gigantic old polished wardrobe, and stuffed her essentials into her regular leather handbag: forged passports, credit cards, wallet, several thousand euros in cash, her forged British driver’s license with Margaret’s address in Warwickshire, and her driving gloves.

She had one stop to make at the fishing tackle shop she had noticed in the main street. Shakira felt very vulnerable when she was unarmed, as she had been for several days, ever since she had left her principal weapon jutting out of Matt Barker’s chest.