First published in the UK by Blink Publishing
An imprint of Bonnier Books UK
80-81 Wimpole Street, London, WIG 9RE
Owned by Bonnier Books
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Hardback – 9781-7-88703-80-2
Trade Paperback – 978-1-788703-81-9
Ebook – 978-1-788703-83-3
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.
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Copyright © Matthew Ollerton, 2020
Matthew Ollerton has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
Blink Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
This book is dedicated to the men, women and children of Iraq who welcomed me with open arms. Thank you for your love and hospitality through the times depicted in this book. I pray that you see the sun at dusk and dawn and forgive those that took more than they deserved.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
Dad, we need to speak. It’s urgent.
But the text message had arrived at night, which was the wrong time for Alex Abbott. Night time was when the other guy was in charge. The drunk guy. And the drunk guy was way too busy for text messages. Reading them. Replying to them. Remembering them, even.
And so, by the time of the next afternoon, when finally Abbott had surfaced and was contemplating a black hole where yesterday should have been, it was too late.
He had tried the number, and in a voice that quavered with emotion and guilt, left a message, saying, ‘Nathan, it’s Dad, getting back to you. What is it, mate? What’s the problem?’
And, two days later, was still waiting for a reply.
CHAPTER 1
High above the municipality of Morelos in the state of Mexico, a Cessna drew a line across the clear blue sky. Inside, two skydivers clad in bright red jumpsuits made final adjustments to their rigs. Body cams were checked, goggles adjusted. Gloved hands went to helmets, checking the fit. Each turned so that the other could inspect their rig and examine the AAD, the automatic activation device designed to deploy a reserve chute should the main one fail.
All done.
A green light blinked on. The pilot gave them a thumbs-up over his shoulder. They were at the right altitude of sixteen thousand feet, bang over the drop zone. It was time.
‘Ready?’ asked Number One. His hand was on the activation button of the para door, but he waited for Number Two’s reply before he pressed it. These were the last words they’d speak to one another before reaching the ground; from now all communication would have to be via hand signals.
‘Ready,’ confirmed Number Two.
The door opened. The cabin filled with whistling air, buffeting them. With a nod to his companion, Number One sat with his legs dangling into space, gripping an overhead bar for support, and then jumped.
Number Two followed suit. Behind them the door slid shut and the Cessna began banking for the return journey, ready for more thrill seekers.
Seventy-five seconds to deployment. The divers sliced through the air, rolling and spinning, whooping and yelling. Next they spread themselves flat, turning towards one another, meeting with outstretched arms as they interlaced their fingers, each with one eye on the altimeter at their wrist and awash with adrenalin, weightless and free, feeling like gods.
Ten seconds to deployment. Opening altitude: two thousand feet. They broke apart, giving each other space. Now. Number One reached to a handle on the side of his rig and pulled, ready for the baby chute, which would in sequence drag out the main chute.
Counting, One thousand, two thousand, three thousand.
Check.
Nothing. No chute. He trusted in the AAD. Triggered by pressure, it would engage.
It had to engage.
It didn’t.
And instead of slowing to roughly 8 mph, Number One continued falling at 110 mph.
He had just under ten seconds to live.
He looked up. Above him the parachute of Number Two had deployed, a mushroom in the sky. Below him the ground rushed up. He no longer felt like a god. He had never felt more mortal, more fragile.
Not like this, he thought.
But that thought was his last.
CHAPTER 2
Whatever he was doing, wherever he was in the world, Alex Abbott had a rule: never wear anything you can’t run or fight in.
On his feet were the same boots he’d worn since basic training – boots that had seen him through Iraq and beyond. Tucked into the right one was his Gerber knife; while in the belt of his sand-coloured cargo pants, which were light, a concession to the Singapore humidity, was a Leatherman all-purpose tool, as well as a tourniquet – the sort with a plastic turning handle – and a vacuum-sealed medipack.
On top he wore a simple black T-shirt. At his wrist was his Omega service watch. He’d had that watch almost as long as the boots.
And right now – as in, at this very moment in time – he was willing to bet that he was the only one at his AA meeting armed with a Gerber knife. Yup. Concealed weapon here. There’s only one winner if it all kicks off at the tea urn.
They sat in a chair circle. A sparse early-morning meeting of five ex-pats – the British drunks of Singapore – still rubbing sleep from their eyes. It was only the second time he’d attended, but Abbott already knew that
the guy opposite would be hurrying off to his job as bank relationship manager and the woman next to him would begin a day of work as a marketing assistant for a dental firm. The other two he wasn’t sure about: a young guy who bore a passing resemblance to Rodney from Only Fools and Horses – he was the meeting leader – and a much older woman who looked suspiciously like she only came for the tea and misery. Where Rodney or the misery tourist would be going afterwards, Abbott had absolutely no idea. None of them would be spending their day doing what he was doing, that was for sure.
‘Have you had a drink today?’ he’d been asked on entry.
‘No.’
Ding! Truth.
‘What about last night?’
‘No.’
Bzzt! Lie.
The dental marketing assistant was talking about the time she threw a wine bottle at her husband but didn’t remember doing it the next morning. Hubby had threatened to leave if it happened again, and it did, but hubby still didn’t take off and she carried on boozing. Until one day he came good on his promise, by which time it was too late to save that particular relationship. She’d ended up taking a company promotion to the Far East, hoping to leave her problems behind, but her problems, being the tenacious sort, came along for the ride. Abbott knew the feeling. He was nodding along to the story, more to himself than anything, when gradually he became aware of the eyes of the meeting upon him.
Uh oh. He stopped nodding, feeling the weight of their expectation, heavy as an iron bar in a backpack. There was no pressure to share, he’d been told, the first time he came. Only there was, really.
He cleared his throat. Come on, Abbott. You served in Northern Ireland. You fought in the Gulf. In two bloody wars. You can’t be scared of talking to a few guilt-stricken ex-pats. But then found that his voice shook when he opened his mouth to say, ‘My name is Alex and I’m an alcoholic.’
It was the first time he’d ever said it. Oh, he was happy to hold his hands up to being a pisshead. But alcoholic? No. Quite a few people had said it to him, of course. His ex, Fiona, had said it a lot. As in, a lot. He couldn’t remember the first time, just that the insult was like one of those air-fresheners you hang in your car: bright and effective at first, gradually losing its power over time, until after a while you forgot it was even there. The insult seemed to recover its power the first time she used it around Nathan, but even then it soon got old.
Still, though, he’d never said it to himself. He’d never said, ‘Abbott, you are an alcoholic,’ so saying it now felt like …
Well, nothing, really. No revelation or great through-the-looking-glass moment. Just words. More blah blah in the room, except this time in the dulcet tones of a bloke from the Midlands. ‘Hello, Alex,’ they murmured back. And maybe they thought that his voice shook with the significance of the moment rather than a bout of stage fright. Either way, they looked at him with sympathetic, encouraging but curious eyes. He looked around the group and forced himself to think of them as saviours not vampires.
‘Um,’ he started, and then stopped, addressing Rodney instead. ‘What do I say, mate?’ he asked, knowing the answer. Just stalling for time.
‘Well, you can say anything you want to say, Alex,’ replied Rodney kindly. ‘Why don’t you tell the group a little bit about yourself? Why not explore your reasons for being here? Why do you drink, for example?’
Abbott opened his mouth, and for a moment it crossed his mind to talk about mates gunned down or torn apart by IEDs. Reprisal killings in Belfast. The Thai victims of child trafficking, their tongues cut out as a warning to others. Or maybe the women gang-raped in the Congo and then ‘sealed’ with molten plastic bottles, shunned by their own tribes as a result. Or the bodies in Iraq, their arms and legs hacked off and swapped over in a vile, grotesque parody of a human being.
So many corpses. All of them condemning him with sightless eyes.
Except, of course, he stopped himself, because at the end of the day he didn’t want to be a dick. It wasn’t a competition, like my shit is worse than your shit: I drink because life has vomited blood into my face, and you drink because you find it boring doing the housework. That’s not how it works. These guys didn’t deserve that. Even the possible misery tourist didn’t deserve that.
‘I was in the army,’ he managed instead. ‘I was in the army and I find it difficult to put away some of the things I’ve seen and dealt with, and the booze helps with that. Like the way I see it is if you have all this terrible stuff going on in your head and you could take a pill and make that stuff go away, then wouldn’t you take the pill? That’s how I feel about booze, I guess. It helps me take a holiday from myself.’
He spoke for a few minutes. Not nearly as much as he’d heard others speak, but long enough, being a man of few words – a man who found the world of touchy-feely group therapy a bit on the weird side, if he was honest with himself. When he’d finished, it was the misery tourist who spoke first. ‘Thank you, Alex,’ she said. ‘I have an observation, though, if I may?’ He nodded go ahead. ‘You do realise you just spoke about drink in the present tense?’
Oh yeah. So he had. Another thing – and this he thought about as the meeting broke up. When he’d done his ‘I’m Alex and I’m an alcoholic’ thing, the reason he hadn’t felt anything was because deep down he didn’t think it was the truth. Or, rather, he knew it was the truth, but he didn’t truly believe it. Wasn’t ready for it yet.
That was something he could have said, he realised later. He could have told them how he often felt outside of himself, watching this man called Alex Abbott slowly destroy himself with drink, waiting to see what would happen next.
Perhaps save that observation for next time, he thought.
If there was one.
CHAPTER 3
Singapore harbour. A horizon speckled with cruisers and yachts. They bobbed and rocked on water that twinkled in a fresh November sun, basking in what was a beautiful day at the tail end of the monsoon season. Later there would be showers, of course, although to call them showers was like calling Hurricane Isidore a light breeze. But for the time being it was calm and pleasant, not too hot, not too cold. A good day to be on the water.
This particular yacht was among the most lavish on the harbour. It belonged to a billionaire London bonds trader by the name of Travis Bryars, and it had dropped anchor yesterday. Having satisfied himself that it was there for the duration, Abbott had spent the afternoon touring the harbour for different angles of observation, eventually settling on a spur used for mooring smaller boats. He’d hired a cabin cruiser for the following day, one with a decent view of Bryars’s yacht – a good static position, as they used to say back in the day. And then, to congratulate himself on a day of abstinence and outstanding operational achievement, he’d decided to treat himself to a quick drink at the Big Smile Beach Club, two doors down from his building.
And that, of course, had ended … not badly, as such. After all, he’d woken up in his own bed, alone, unhurt and with nothing lost or stolen. But not ‘well’, either, unless your definition of ‘well’ was elastic enough to include a thumping headache, terrible self-loathing and the crushing knowledge that he had once again failed to get a single day of sobriety under his belt.
It was that kind of well that had prompted him to attend his second-ever AA meeting. Hey guys, me again. Remember? Army tats and stubble? I sat in silence and declined a Hobnob.
After the meeting, newly charged with not-wanting-to-drink zeal, he’d returned to the harbour where he’d clambered below decks, dropped his black holdall and set up a binoculars rest in front of a porthole. He upturned a fibreglass storage box and took a seat, screwed a set of Yukon Scout binoculars onto the rest, training them on the yacht, and prepared himself for a long wait.
The whole time he was doing all of that, he didn’t think about drinking. No sir. Didn’t even think about not-thinking about drinking. And he told himself that getting pissed didn’t matter because that was yesterday and today was t
he big one, and no way was he going to fuck it up.
So all morning he just sat with his hands in his lap – hands that felt useless, that he wished could reach for a drink – and watched Bryars’s yacht, the theme tune to Only Fools and Horses going round and round in his head, just like the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.
Sometime before midday was when things started happening on the yacht. The sound of thumping dance music made its way across the harbour, carried on a light but cooling breeze into the spur where he sat, squished and hot and uncomfortable, and very thirsty.
Pressing his eyes back to the binoculars, he saw figures appear on deck. A champagne bottle was raised, and he heard the pop of a cork. Abbott had no particular love for champagne, but suddenly it looked like the best drink in the world to him. A cheer went up and Abbott adjusted the binoculars to see a small fishing boat approach and two women disembark. Hookers. You could tell. It was the little tell-tale signs like ripped denim hot-pants worn over fishnets.
Something else, too. And Abbott felt his heart harden just a little more. His hatred intensified. The women were clearly underage. Probably trafficked.
Don’t think about it. Feelings to one side. Concentrate on the job at hand.
The women were welcomed on deck by three rowdy guys, while not far away stood two other men, watching.
He reached into the holdall, retrieved a wad of papers and checked mugshots. Of the two who stood apart, Travis Bryars was on the left. Smartly dressed, with the sun sparkling off a flute of champagne he held, he wore Ray-Ban aviators and his dark hair was brushed into a neat side parting, looking every inch the trust-fund-kid-turned-late-thirties billionaire that Abbott, thanks to a quick session on Google, knew he was.
Beside Bryars stood another equally smartly dressed guy who Abbott took to be a friend rather than staff. Meanwhile, the other three dudes were security, judging by their build and demeanour.
And boy were they living it up. Watching them manhandle the two women, Abbott got the impression that this was what you might call a staff fun day. Other companies went paintballing. This lot called in the whores and cracked open the bubbly. Talking of which, more champagne had appeared. The women held their flutes aloft as they danced, and if their intention was to look like every hip-hop music video ever filmed, then they were succeeding admirably.
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