The next day, towards the end of the afternoon, CNN began to report a serious fire in Port Sudan, the unimaginatively named major port in Sudan. Ships in the Red Sea had first reported the fire, said CNN. They broadcast a crackly radio interview with the captain of an oil tanker who had decided to stand offshore while he tried to find out whether it was safe to enter the harbour. There was a huge cloud of blue-grey smoke, he said.
Virtually all Sudan’s oil was exported from Port Sudan. Most of it arrived through a thousand-mile pipeline that was majority-owned and operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation. The Chinese had also built a refinery, and they were in the process of creating a new multi-billion-dollar tanker dock.
The CNN report was followed by a government announcement that the fire service expected to have the blaze under control shortly, which meant it was out of control, and that a full investigation would be carried out, which meant they had no idea what had caused it. Tamara had a dark suspicion in the back of her mind that she did not yet voice to anyone.
She began to monitor the jihadi websites, the ones that celebrated beheadings and kidnappings. On her first sweep they were all quiet.
She called Colonel Marcus and asked: ‘Do you have any satellite of Port Sudan just before the fire?’
‘Probably,’ said Susan. ‘There’s never much cloud over that part of the globe. What time frame?’
‘CNN reported it around four thirty, and there was already a pall of smoke . . .’
‘Three thirty or earlier, then. I’ll take a look. What do you suspect?’
‘I don’t really know. Something.’
‘Fair enough.’
Tamara called Tab at the French embassy. ‘What do you know about the fire at Port Sudan?’
‘Only what’s on TV,’ he said. ‘I love you too, by the way.’
She stifled a giggle. In a lowered voice she said: ‘Knock it off. I’m in an open-plan office.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I told you last night what I’m afraid of.’
‘You mean the revenge theory.’
‘Yes.’
‘You think this could be it?’
‘I do.’
‘There’ll be trouble.’
‘You bet your sweet ass.’ She hung up.
No one but Tamara was worried about this, and, around five o’clock, people started to drift away from their desks.
Soon afterwards the government in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, added to their original announcement, saying that some twenty people had been rescued from the fire, including four Chinese engineers who had been working on the construction of the new dock. Some Chinese women and children, the families of the engineers, had also been rescued. CNN explained that the dock was being built with Chinese expertise as well as money, and that something like a hundred Chinese engineers were involved in the project. Tamara wondered about the people who had not been rescued.
Still there was no suggestion of sabotage, and Tamara was beginning to hope that this would turn out to be a genuine accident, with no political implications.
She scanned the web again, and this time she stopped at a site operated by a group calling itself Salafi Jihadi Sudan. She had not heard of them before. The group condemned the backsliding government of Sudan, especially as symbolized by the corrupt Chinese-led tanker dock project. It congratulated heroic SJS fighters for bringing off today’s attack.
Tamara called Susan, who said: ‘It was my fucking drone – the one that went missing.’
‘Shit.’
‘It dropped bombs on the refinery and the half-built new dock, then crashed.’
‘Chinese engineers were building that dock.’
‘They struck at thirteen twenty-one.’
‘An American drone has killed Chinese engineers. There’s going to be hell to pay.’
Tamara hung up then sent Dexter the link to the SJS site. She sent the same to Tab.
Then she sat back and thought: What will the Chinese do now?
CHAPTER 24
Chang Kai’s phone was ringing but, to his intense frustration, he could not find the instrument. He woke up and realized he had been dreaming, but his phone was still ringing. He found it on the bedside table. The caller was Fan Yimu, the overnight manager at the Guoanbu office. He said: ‘I’m sorry to wake you in the middle of the night, sir.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Kai. ‘North Korea has blown up.’
‘No, nothing like that.’
Kai was relieved. The rebels and the regime had been stalemated for ten days, and he was hoping the situation would somehow get resolved without civil war. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said.
Ting snuggled up to him without opening her eyes. He put his arm around her and stroked her hair. ‘So what has happened?’ he said to Fan.
‘Approximately one hundred Chinese people have been killed by a drone in the city of Port Sudan.’
‘Where we’re building a tanker dock for billions of dollars, as I recall.’
‘Just so. Chinese engineers are working on the project. The dead are mostly men, but with a small number of women, plus children who belonged to the engineers’ families.’
‘Who did this? Who sent the drone?’
‘Sir, the news has just come in and I thought it best to inform you before making further inquiries.’
‘Send a car for me.’
‘I already have. Monk should be outside your building any minute now.’
‘Well done. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’ Kai hung up.
Ting mumbled: ‘Would you like a quick one?’
‘Go back to sleep, my darling.’
Kai washed quickly and dressed in a suit and a white shirt. He put a tie in one pocket and his electric shaver in the other. Looking out of the window, he saw a silver Geely compact sedan waiting at the kerb with its headlights on. He picked up his overcoat and went out.
The air was frosty and there was a cold wind. He got into the car and started shaving while Monk drove. He called Fan and told him to summon some key people: his secretary, Peng Yawen; Yang Yong, a specialist in interpreting surveillance photographs; Zhou Meiling, a young woman expert on the Internet; and Shi Xiang, Arabic-speaking head of the North Africa desk. Each of them would call in support staff.
He wondered who could be responsible for the attack on Port Sudan.
The Americans were automatically prime suspects. They were threatened by China’s drive to forge trading links across the world, what was called the Belt and Road Initiative; and they realized that China wanted control of Africa’s oil and other natural resources. But would they deliberately murder a hundred Chinese people?
The Saudis had drones, sold to them by the US, and they were only two hundred kilometres from Port Sudan across the Red Sea; but the Saudis and the Sudanese were allies. It could have been an accident, but that seemed unlikely. Drones had direction-finding computers. This had been targeted.
That left terrorists. But which ones?
It was now his job to find out, and President Chen would want answers in the morning.
He reached Guoanbu headquarters. Some of his team were already there and others arrived in the next few minutes. He told them to gather in the conference room. He had acquired the coffee habit recently, like millions of Chinese people, and he got a cup and carried it with him.
On one of the screens around the walls of the room, the Al Jazeera news channel was showing live footage of the fire in Port Sudan, apparently taken from a ship. Night had now fallen in East Africa, but the flames illuminated the smoke cloud.
Kai sat at the head of the table. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got,’ he began. ‘I assume that some of the engineers are Guoanbu assets?’ Every overseas venture was kept under close observation by Kai’s agents.
Shi Xiang answered him. ‘Two of them, but one was killed by the bombing.’ Shi, head of the North Africa desk, was a middle-aged man with a grey moustache. He had married an African girl, years ago during his first posting overseas, and they had a daughter now at university. ‘I have a report from the surviving agent, Tan Yuxuan. The dead include ninety-seven men and four women, all of whom were on the dock when the drone struck. It was the heat of the day, when people take a long break in that part of the world, and they were all inside an air-conditioned hut, eating lunch or resting.’