pick them up from a military base in Nevada. The truck carrying the missiles never showed up.?
Hou mean somebody nicked them??James gasped.
Drecisely,?John nodded. The only consolation is that we think we know who took them.?
Terrorists??James asked.
Ro; at least not directly. US intelligence thinks they were stolen on behalf of an illegal weapons dealer called Jane Oxford. These missiles are worth millions to the right buyer. We think she抣l be holding on to them until some terrorist group or tin-pot dictatorship is able to raise a very significant sum of money to buy them. Assuming wete right about this, Jane Oxforde greed will buy us time.?
Now much damage could one of these missiles do??James asked.
Theyte not big enough to pack an enormous explosive punch,?John explained. But you dont need it with a weapon this accurate. Imagine a terrorist pointing a Buddy missile out of a bedroom window in a London suburb and blasting Her Majesty out of bed at Buckingham Palace. Thate the kind of capability wete talking about here.?
is there anything you can do to defend against the missile once ite fired??
Rot a lot,?John said. The Americans are looking at protecting their president by fitting a rapid firing anti-missile Phalanx gun on to a flatbed truck. But youte talking about a weapon designed for use on ships, that rips off a thousand twenty-millimetre shells every minute. Ite not the kind of thing you want going off accidentally in the middle of a presidential motorcade.?
Cefinitely not,?James grinned. To where does CHERUB fit into getting these missiles back??
I decision was taken at cabinet level on both sides of the Atlantic not to release any information to the public about the stolen missiles, because of the panic it was likely to cause,?John said.
Dave interrupted. Ind because it would make a lot of politicians who claim to be winning the war on terrorism look dumb.?
The trouble is,?John continued, 憀aw enforcement and intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have been trying to track down Jane Oxford and other members of her organisation since the early 1980s. Theyte got no more reason to believe they can catch her now than at any other time in the last thirty years. However, the Americans have one highly unusual lead. Only someone your age would be able to pursue it.?
Cont the Americans have their own version of CHERUB??James asked.
John shook his head as he pulled a mission briefing out of his desk drawer and threw it into James?lap. Hout better read this.?
7. BRIEFING
**CLASSIFIED**
MISSION BRIEFING FOR JAMES ADAMS THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED WITH A RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION TAG. ANY ATTEMPT TO REMOVE IT FROM THE MISSION PREPARATION BUILDING WILL SET OFF AN ALARM DO
NOT
PHOTOCOPY OR MAKE NOTES
JANE OXFORD (FORMERLY JANE HAMMOND)
?EARLY YEARS
Jane Hammond was born on a United States Army base in Hampshire, England, in 1950. She was the daughter of Captain Marcus Hammond, a US Army logistics specialist and his wife Frances, a British citizen het met and married while based in the United Kingdom.
Jane spent her early years living at various military installations around the world. She was a bright girl with a rebellious streak. At fifteen, while living in Germany, Jane ran away with a nineteen-year-old private in the US Marines. They surrendered themselves to the Parisian police three weeks later, when they ran out of money.
By this time Janee father, Marcus Hammond, had risen to the rank of General and was close to retirement. He requested a final military posting near to his birthplace in California, believing that a return to the United States would help Jane settle down and gain qualifications to attend college.
General Hammond was posted to Oakland naval base in California. He was put in charge of the supply chain, shipping troops and equipment across the Pacific to the escalating war in Vietnam.
Jane, meanwhile, did not buckle down to her education as her father had hoped. She began to skip school regularly and hang out with a group of hippies. Photographs from this era show a grubby-looking girl with long braided hair, strings of beads around her neck and flared jeans with holes over the knees.
Jane became interested in anti-Vietnam war issues through a boyfriend called Fowler Wood. Twenty-year-old Fowler was a dropout from the nearby University of California and the chairman of a radical anti-Vietnam war protest group.
Fowler became fascinated with General Hammonde job. Het been searching for a non-violent way to blunt the American war effort and came up with the idea of sabotaging weapons passing through Oakland docks.