I could see the two people on board, their eyes searching the dark waves. One guy hanging over the side, gun in hand, another at the wheel, one hand on the spotlamp. I pulled my pistol from my waistband with my injured hand, holding the barrel above the water, and waited for them to draw closer.
Thanks to the suppressor I’d fired three times before the guy at the wheel realised anything was happening. As the man hanging over the side collapsed backwards the skipper pushed the throttle to the stops, and the boat shot forward. Unfortunately for him it was too late.
I grabbed the handle at the front of the boat as it accelerated, bringing my right hand up and firing point-blank into the guy behind the wheel. He screamed, falling backwards out of sight. The boat was skimming now, jumping on the waves, crashing against my head. I threw my pistol into the boat and grabbed the ropes along the rigid inflatable sidewall, wincing as they bit into the cut on my palm, swinging myself up and over.
I rolled into the boat, onto my hands and knees, found the throttle and pulled it back. The boat slowed, still rolling heavily but not crashing through sheets of water now. The guy that’d been at the wheel was groaning in the back of the boat, I grabbed his tactical webbing vest, picked him up, dragged him over the side. The other guy was already dead, I threw him overboard too and looked at the lights of the yacht receding into the distance. I flexed my injured fingers, still bleeding, and picked up my gun from the water washing around in the bottom of the boat, its grip resting against the open wound on my palm. The boat’s previous occupants knew only too well that I could hold and fire it, but it was a toss-up whether I’d be more accurate with my injured right hand or working left.
The dashboard exploded in a shower of glass and plastic, the crack of a gunshot chased the bullet across the waves, followed by the sound of a jet ski approaching rapidly. I pushed the throttle forward and grabbed the wheel, swinging into the seat.
The jet ski was approaching from my left. I turned left, into him, narrowing the angle. A burst of light, he was firing at me. I turned the spotlamp onto the jet ski, it was Branko, one hand on the handlebars, the other gripping his Desert Eagle. It jumped in his hand again, I ducked as a bullet tore into the front of the boat.
I threw myself behind the console, letting the little boat surge forward on its own as I lay in the bloody water washing around. We flashed past each other, he swooped round to follow as I reached up, throttled back to slow down, turning to aim at the noise buzzing behind me. The jet ski jumped over the waves in my wake, racing towards me in a zigzag. I fired several times, but he was too far away and moving too erratically to get a decent shot. Gunshots replied as he flew past again, the side of the dinghy exploded in a rush of air. I was a much bigger, brighter, slower target. I shoved my gun into my pocket as water rushed around me.
The boat dug into the waves, petrol stung my eyes. Something had ruptured, either the engine or the tank, didn’t matter which because neither was good news. I climbed back into the seat behind the wheel. The prow of the little boat was dipping beneath the oncoming waves. The jet ski was turning for another pass. I pushed the throttle to its stop again, the prow picked up temporarily but was soon swamped. Behind me the outboard spluttered.
I pulled back the throttle and ducked off the seat just in time as the jet ski flashed past again, several more bullets punching into the rubber sides. The outboard coughed again, the boat lurched. It stank now, awash with petrol and steadily slipping beneath the waves.
As the jet ski started a wide turn, I jumped around the seat and opened the panel in its base. The second jet ski flashed across the beam of the spotlight in front, heading towards me. I spotted one of the goon’s pistols in the water in the bottom of the boat, grabbed it, racking the slide. I aimed forward, emptied the mag towards the approaching sound and threw it over the side. The jet ski accelerated, engine rising in pitch as it swooshed away into darkness, temporarily warded off. I crouched back down to the storage compartment, pulling everything out until I found what I was looking for in a waterproof box at the bottom. Flares.
I pushed the throttle forward again to coax the last dregs from the engine, popped the top off a flare and struck it. I waited for the buzz of the two jet skis to approach then grabbed a lifejacket from the compartment, dropping the flare as I jumped over the side.
I held myself under the water, felt the crump of the explosion above as the petrol ignited. I kicked away, staying under as long as possible before breaking the surface. The boat had carried on droning away from me, finally coming to a stop a good hundred metres away, flaming wreckage flapping about on the waves.
The jet skis buzzed around it, shining torches across the waves, floating in ever-widening circles as I kicked away into the night. After a couple of minutes, the flames died away as the wreckage slipped beneath the surface. Soon after, the jet skis retreated back towards their stricken mothership, itself now a dim, distant dot.
I slid my arms into the lifejacket and inflated it, lying back, thinking about the last time I’d been adrift alone at sea. There I’d not been far from land, caught in the pull of the currents. Here I was still miles out to sea, in December, with only a lifejacket. Worse, I was barely in the Channel – more like the North Atlantic. I was exhausted, could feel warm blood still seeping from wounds as my skin numbed. I reckoned I had maybe fifteen, twenty minutes until hypothermia claimed me. I couldn’t have swum back to the yacht even if I’d wanted to.
Chapter Sixty
English Channel
The Tiburon should at that precise moment have been circling back round in a wide arc. They’d have seen on the radar that the yacht was drifting, and thus my sabotage mission had been successful. Now it was time to complete their mission and pick me up.
Miller, Katanga, Doc, Nic and Marty. I trusted them to varying degrees, but I did know each of them would pull out the stops to get me back so I could transfer their bonuses – particularly now the yacht was no threat, and we were free to continue to Devon unmolested.
I reached into my leg pocket and pulled out the rugged little waterproof satphone. The screen lit up, I was glad I’d stuck it on charge earlier that afternoon. Two bars of signal out here on the open sea, thank God for technology. I cycled to a saved number and pressed call. Now I just hoped it’d be answered.
It was. Miller’s voice was music to my ears.
‘Wasn’t sure I’d be hearing from you.’
‘You doubted me?’ I said in between mouthfuls of seawater.
‘I never will again. What are your co-ordinates?’
I took the phone away from my ear and read the GPS numbers off the screen.
‘We’re five miles north-east of you.’ The line crackled, he mumbled in the background, I could picture him turning to Kat at the wheel to give him a bearing. ‘We’re putting on power now, maybe ten minutes or so.’
‘Less of the “or so”, or I’ll be dead when you get here.’
‘You’d better not be, you’re paying for the extra fuel.’
I ended the call to preserve the batteries, should I need it. I was reassured they were holding up their end of the bargain, for now at least, though I was acutely aware there was always the possibility of them double-crossing me.
Particularly the person who’d murdered Ringo in the hold of the ship.
Chapter Sixty-one
Tiburon
Nine minutes later I was back in my cabin, under a hot shower, with a pair of jeans begged from Nic and my last dry T-shirt laid on the bed, and my now hot and dry Converse still jammed up behind the heating pipes. Miller had put all speed on for Devon, which we’d decided was still a better option than the original destination of Poole, given the distinct possibility of an unfriendly welcoming committee in Dorset. As I dressed, I heard the speaker crackle in the passageway outside the door.
‘If you’re finished preening yourself, Blofeld, we’re less than thirty minutes out. That yacht hasn’t moved. You fucked them wicked good.’
; I caught myself in the mirror on the way out, two black eyes coming up nicely, though weirdly my nose looked straighter than it had yesterday. I grabbed my grubby hoody from the heating pipes and thought about small victories.
I looked out of the porthole in the passageway outside the cabin and dialled Holderness on the satphone. It was a brief conversation, all business. My abduction and subsequent diversion mission had been successful, if bloodier than originally anticipated. The big fish had landed at a British airbase nearly twenty-four hours ago, and apparently he hadn’t stopped singing. Arrests had already been made in the Netherlands, Belgium, and England. By next week, their paramilitary group would be extinct thanks to our altercation in the Alps a couple of nights ago and the activities of the last few hours. I gave Holderness the rough co-ordinates of the yacht for the Royal Navy coastal patrol that had been standing by to mop up. Branko in particular would make a nice prize. Holderness started ranting again about collateral damage. Apparently the French were upset – can’t think why – about what they perceived to be an MI6 operation on their soil without their knowledge. Sounded like the phrase ‘deniable asset’, which Holderness often used in reference to me, was doing some heavy lifting.
I red-buttoned his moaning and pushed the phone into my pocket. Not my problem, politics and aftermath was why he got paid the big bucks.
My hand stung, wounds leaving sticky marks on the handrail as I made my way upstairs to my second appointment with Doc in a day.
He tutted when I entered, he already had his gear laid out on the table. ‘Top off, Tyler.’ He nodded towards the bed. ‘I imagine as well as those new scrapes you’ve also undone the good work I did this morning?’
I threw my hoody on a chair and placed my phone and pistol on the desk. ‘When you say “I’ve” undone it…’ I winced as I pulled off my T-shirt, dropping it on the bed, then sat next to it.
‘Yes, never you, is it? If I remember correctly, you are almost forty years old. You really ought to take some responsibility for your actions.’
‘Responsibility! Remind me again why you were discharged from the Navy.’
He knelt in front of me and jabbed the wound with the handle of his scalpel. ‘This is infected.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘I followed the aftercare instructions.’
‘The significant contusions developing across ninety per cent of your torso suggest otherwise.’
‘I’m serious, Doc. Tell me again why you were discharged. Dishonourably.’
‘You know why, lie back.’ He poured something on the wound and proceeded to stitch me again.
‘Killed someone in a bar fight on shore leave in South Africa, right?’
His eyes twinkled. ‘Three people, not that there was any evidence.’
‘Members of the FZAA?’ He’d told me the story before, I knew they’d been heavies for a local white nationalist movement.
His frowned, eyes narrowing as the twinkling faded. ‘Stop talking, you’re pulling the wound.’
He worked in silence, I screwed my eyes shut as he jabbed the needle through me with vigour. When he’d finished, I sat up with a wince and held my right hand out.
‘I was thinking this might need a stitch?’
He exhaled loudly and reached for the iodine again, probing the slices on my palm and fingers. When he’d finished applying a dressing he held up my left hand.
‘This finger really should be rebroken and set,’ he said, flexing it painfully. ‘I can do it now if you…’
‘No thanks,’ I snatched my hand back.
He stood and walked over to his desk, pulling open a drawer. ‘Take two of these.’ He threw a box at me.
‘Morphine? Where was this earlier?’
‘I have a limited supply, and assumed – correctly as it now happens – that you’d be in greater need by the end of the day. Take two now and another couple later tonight.’
I tossed the box back to him. ‘You won’t blame me if I don’t take tablets from you.’
He caught the box, cocked his head, frowning.
I shuffled on the bed. ‘I know why you did it, and I know how. I just want to hear you say it.’
He moved quicker than his years suggested, snatching up my pistol and turning it on me in a flash.
‘You’re cleverer than you look, Tyler. Too clever.’
I shrugged. ‘Been told that before. Put the gun down, you’re not going to shoot me.’
‘Don’t count on it. When did you know it was me?’
‘In the dining room earlier. You said yourself there are far easier ways of killing someone.’
‘Then why didn’t you say anything? You could have avoided this.’ He waved the gun.
‘I thought we could keep it between ourselves.’ I shuffled to the edge of the bed, he flinched.
‘What gave me away?’ he asked.
‘It could only have been you. I got the exact time of death from the fitness tracker. No one could possibly have got down that hatch at that time without me knowing. So how was a knife pushed into his chest? It could only have been you when you went in to check the body, you’re the only other person that went in there.’
‘But he’d been dead for a couple of hours by the time we arrived, you said yourself, you have the time of death.’
‘Yeah, you stabbed a corpse that’d been cold since just after four a.m. A crime to cover up the real crime. What was it, cyanide?’
‘You smelled it?’
‘No, but his lips were flushed. I’ve seen it before on captured Tamil fighters in Sri Lanka. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but once I put two and two together and figured out it was the seasickness pill, it all followed. Clever, using that – knowing I’d happily see him alive when I sealed him in, tied to that chair, and the capsule would rupture in his stomach half an hour or so later when the gelatine broke down. Simple time-delayed poison. The knife was to throw me off, confuse the cause of death, make me think someone had broken in at any other time. In reality I’d been going to sleep in my bed while he was below me, tied to that chair suffering a heart attack.’
‘Yes, those three men in South Africa were FZAA.’ Doc took a step back, levelling the pistol. ‘I have spent my life fighting racism, nationalism, fascism, every -ism you can shake a stick at. We may be a band of pirates, as you so eloquently put it, but we do not tolerate the likes of these people. They are animals. Worse, rabid animals. They need to be put down.’
I nodded. ‘I didn’t exactly go over to that yacht to have drinks with them.’
‘Your friend from the Alps, if I hadn’t done what I did, I suppose he’d have cut a deal with the government? Nice and cosy, amnesty for information. All sins forgiven, a new name on his passport and a bag full of money. It makes me sick.’
‘Again, preaching to the vicar here, Doc.’
‘Then why? Why transport him back to Britain?’
‘I know it’s a cliché, but the greater good. His information could have brought the whole group down, and others. And believe me, once that information was used up, he’d have had an accident anyway.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d murdered a treacherous mercenary, and that the real target was right now being interrogated in a secluded location outside London.
‘Greater good,’ Doc muttered. ‘Well, I dare say the whole group has been brought down anyway now.’
‘Does Miller know?’
He shook his head. ‘No one. And I intend to keep it that way.’ He waved the gun again.
‘Like I said, you’re not going to shoot. And I’m good at keeping secrets.’
He stared at me for a few heartbeats. I thought he was about to pull the trigger. Instead he smiled and released the grip, letting the pistol spin round his finger.
I stood, wincing, and held my bandaged hand out for it.
‘I could have shot you.’
I pointed the gun towards the bed and squeezed the trigger. It clicked, I winked. ‘Might have even killed me if it’d been load
ed.’
He smiled again and sighed.
A knock came from the door, it opened. Marty poked her head in. ‘Combe Wyndham ahoy, they’re getting the crane ready.’ Her eyes dropped to the pistol in my hand. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Peachy.’ I slid out the empty magazine, replaced it with the half-full one in my pocket, pushed it into my waistband. ‘Let’s get off this stinking tub.’
Chapter Sixty-two
Combe Wyndham, South Devon
My car lurched as the straps pulled tight around it, buckling the aluminium front wings.
‘So, you gonna tell me why the car’s so special?’ asked Miller.
I shook my head, stepping out of the bridge onto the wing to look at the slipways of the boatyard at the head of the small inlet. The secluded tidal creek offered the twin benefits of shelter and deep water, but a third benefit was the north bank, a mostly empty car park that ran right up to a harbour wall which, thanks to the tide, was only a metre or so above the deck.
Combe Wyndham was clearly a summer village. A warehouse across the water had been converted into a restaurant but its windows were all dark, there was no one to watch us. The terraces of houses climbing the hill behind were all in darkness too, likely second homes and holiday lets. I could see most of the old boathouses flanking the creek had been converted into boutique shops, though for every couple of shiny units there was one with a worn wooden door that still housed or repaired boats – though probably mostly pleasure craft these days. In summer, the tiny street would vibrate with middle-class holidaymakers from first thing in the morning until well into the night, but the Breton stripes had long since departed, the incessant drag and slap of Havaianas on cobbles replaced by howling gales and fat rain. I doubted anyone visited Combe Wyndham in winter.
The crane whirred with Katanga at the controls, water cascading from the car as it rose above the deck. Below it stood Nic, directing with his arms.
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