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  I was only half a metre below the upper hatch now.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Tyler! Get out of there!’ King shouted.

  I clung to the ladder, panting hard, and threw up again. He reached down to help me up but I batted his hand away, sucking in long lungfuls of air.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Well I’m not here for the good of my health, am I?’ I gripped the rungs harder to stop my hands shaking. That face, those arms, reaching for me… without my tablets, this was going to be a long journey.

  ‘Katanga says the bilge pumps were taken offline.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘They missed it when they were doing their sea checks, I dunno. Seb’s tried switching off the ballast pumps to stop the water but he says the valve’s stuck.’

  ‘No wonder we’re sinking.’ I moved up a rung, resting my forehead against the cold metal.

  The ladder trembled, I could hear King speaking to Katanga on the radio. I held on tighter and breathed deeply. I didn’t need the drugs, I just needed to chill, I was letting things get to me again. Sleep, that’s all I needed.

  ‘The bilge pumps have just kicked in,’ said King. ‘He says even if the ballast valve’s stuck open, the pumps should keep up.’

  The walkie-talkie crackled again. ‘I don’t know what you have done,’ said Katanga, ‘but the gauge is showing aft peak tank is full all of a sudden.’

  ‘Katanga says…’

  ‘Yeah, I heard.’ I looked down into the black water. ‘And I owe you a new torch.’

  ‘Oh man, really?’ he stood above me, looking down. ‘I’ve had that for years, not a scratch, and soon as I lend it you, boom, it’s gone.’

  ‘It’s still down there if you wanna go get it.’

  What I was more worried about was when I’d dropped the torch, I’d dropped the material that had jammed up the end of the tank’s depth gauge.

  I climbed up into the access space, King helped me shuffle across the floor then slammed the cover shut, kicking the lock across. Hopefully he’d locked my nightmares down there.

  ‘Someone didn’t want us to get far,’ I said, shivering.

  ‘You always were paranoid. Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  I grabbed my jacket, pulled my knees in, and sat back against the hull, feeling the crashing waves through my spine. The auto bilge pumps being offline, the cover into the ballast tank being left open, the valve on the ballast inlet pipe sticking open. And someone jamming up the gauge that measured the depth of water in the tank, so that no one would notice any of those things until it was too late.

  Whatever ghoul haunted these dimly lit passageways, it had an uncanny ability to interact with the physical world. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it’d already taken a dislike to me.

  Chapter Nine

  Tiburon

  King and I returned via the external stairs, opening the door at the same time as someone entered the bridge via the internal staircase. A short, rounded man with white hair escaping down onto his shoulders, leaving the top of his head empty to reflect the multi-coloured lights of the instrument panel. He closed the door behind him and turned, smiling.

  The doctor was a welcome sight in more ways than one, another friendly face I’d known since I’d first used Miller’s taxi service. I’d learned his real name once, but it was such a long time ago, and I’d been so drunk, that considering everyone else called him ‘Doc’ I didn’t see any need to worry myself about it.

  ‘My boy, my boy, come here.’ He put a bag and a glass down on the desk then clasped my cheeks. He looked into my eyes for a few moments then pulled away, looked me up and down, and frowned. ‘Soaking wet… You’ll be dead of hypothermia before we reach England.’

  I pushed my hair up from my face, threw my dripping jacket on the table, and reached for Miller’s rum. ‘All good, Katanga?’ I asked.

  He gave a thumbs up without turning. What I’d just done was apparently an everyday occurrence to these bandits. ‘She’s coming up again at the stern.’

  It certainly wasn’t an everyday occurrence to me. I unscrewed the bottle and took a gulp for my nerves, then a second to replace the rum I’d thrown up in the tank.

  ‘Come here, come here,’ Doc said, snatching the bottle from me and leading me to the chair.

  ‘I think he’s in worse shape.’ I pointed to King.

  Doc looked at King, at his hands on his head. ‘Feeling a bit Moby Dick, are we? I have some seasickness tablets below.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ King said.

  ‘Mr King, I’ll remind you of the time you managed to contract malaria twenty-four hours after setting foot in Cambodia.’ He looked over his glasses at the ex-para and cocked his head. ‘Or your week of explosive evacuations in the Philippines. I’ll fetch the tablets.’

  King leapt up and ran for the door, a blast of sleety rain filled the bridge and then all I could see was a shadow leaning over the railings.

  Katanga laughed and gave the horn a blast, Doc tutted.

  King came back in, closing the door behind him but sticking close to it, back of his hand to his mouth.

  ‘Now then,’ said Doc, unfolding a pair of glasses, ‘let’s see why you require my services this time.’

  I lifted my T-shirt to show him the wound. He took a cloth from his bag, and after rubbing at my ribs for a while, provoking more blood to spill out, he declared it a scratch.

  ‘Really, you action men never learn. Two stitches, three at best.’

  He should know, he’d originally stitched me up on a rolling ship in the eastern Med after a jolly fifteen years ago in Lebanon, and he’d had plenty more to do on me after that over the years. I looked past him at his glass sliding across the desk, almost empty but the brown ring halfway up told me why Miller had had difficulty rousing him. It wouldn’t have been Doc’s first glass, either. Fortunately his skills never seemed to be affected, he’d always done a decent job – though now I was getting on a bit I imagined I could feel his old stitches ripping across my kidney whenever I stretched.

  ‘The Tylers were always injury magnets,’ said King, still facing the ceiling with his eyes closed.

  Doc reached for the rum bottle hanging under the chart table and poured an inch into the glass. He looked up at me, made a cheers motion and downed it.

  ‘That’s nasty,’ said Katanga, I turned to see him looking at my side. He held something out in his hand. ‘For the pain,’ he waggled it.

  King opened an eye, intercepting the joint Katanga was offering and pointing the twisted end at me. ‘Didn’t Tyler tell you? He’s invincible.’ He took a lighter from Katanga and sparked it up, blowing smoke upwards, it rolled around the ceiling. ‘Made a deal with the Devil deep in the jungles of Colombia.’ He smiled at Katanga, passing the joint to me.

  Doc put the glass down, rummaging in his bag. ‘And came out doing the Devil’s work.’

  I took a blast of the joint, Doc frowned, leaning in close to the wound, motioning for me to hold up my T-shirt.

  Pain lit up behind my eyes, I shouted and pulled back, dropping the joint, fresh blood spilled across my jeans.

  ‘Christ, Doc, what the hell?!’

  King disappeared out the door onto the bridge wing again.

  Doc held up a long steel spatula and a pair of tweezers. ‘If I’d told you I needed to do that, you would have flinched.’

  ‘A little warning would have been polite.’ I picked up the joint, took another hit, closing my eyes. The pain died back. I took another long drag, holding the smoke down for a few seconds, then blew out and opened my eyes.

  Doc wiped a tiny, congealed blob on the cloth and cleaned the end of the tweezers. He reached out and grabbed my T-shirt, jabbing his finger through the hole. ‘Material had been pushed into the wound. It has to come out before I can sew it.’

  ‘You got any morphine in that bag?’

  ‘Mr Tyler, if I had morphine, I would not
have had to take you by surprise.’ He leaned round me and looked at Katanga. ‘I wonder if he whinges this much under enemy fire?’

  I passed the joint to Katanga before he could reply. ‘Just gimme a minute, okay?’

  No lights from other ships were visible in the darkness outside now, and the clearview windows were spinning overtime to battle the sleet coming in horizontally. King came back into the wheelhouse, dripping with sleet and sea spray.

  Katanga swung his legs off the console. ‘Turnin’ now, friends.’

  I looked outside, the sky in front was now lit in front with jagged fingers of lightning. After a couple of seconds I felt the difference too, a shift in the movement of the ship, rolling port to starboard more, pitching fore and aft less.

  ‘Due west?’ asked King.

  ‘Oui, nothing in front of us now until North America.’ He grabbed the radio handset. ‘Sébastien, how’s those engines looking?’

  There was a pause and then, ‘Port side still good,’ the radio crackled back. ‘Starboard engine’s still running cool.’

  ‘And how’s that ballast?’

  ‘We’re half on three and four, aft peak full. We’ll take a look at that valve when the bilges have emptied.’

  ‘Lemme know about that starboard engine.’ He hung the handset back.

  I looked at the nav unit next to the table, the longitude and latitude, and then down at the chart. It showed us to be about five miles north of the Île de Ré’s western tip, still seemingly sheltered by the great overhang of Brittany, but heading straight out into the Atlantic, into the deep water of the Bay of Biscay.

  ‘Say that steering wheel got stuck; how far ’til we hit land?’ King asked.

  Katanga grinned. ‘Two and a half thousand miles, give or take. Five days’ sailing, but don’t worry, we only have fuel for two.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope you don’t forget to turn north,’ said King. ‘I don’t want to be floating around the Atlantic for a week.’

  ‘I don’t have enough seasickness tablets, for a start,’ said Doc.

  ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t be floating around that long,’ said Katanga.

  ‘How so?’ I asked, taking another drag on the joint.

  He laughed and went back to Mario. ‘We’d be eating you and your friends long before then.’

  Doc was looking at me impatiently. I didn’t blame him – he was trying to help me, after all.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Do your worst.’

  ‘Not here, we need to clean and dress this wound properly, my boy. Come downstairs.’

  I looked out of the streaked windows at the blackness writhing off into the distance, the flashes of lightning getting closer, then nodded at King. ‘Stay here, keep an eye on my car.’

  ‘Your car?’ he crossed to the window, cupping his hands against the glass, looking from it to me and back again. ‘What the heck?’

  Chapter Ten

  Château des Aigles

  Twelve days previously

  The German woman dropped a map on the coffee table and sat next to me on the sofa, pulling her long blonde hair up into a ponytail. She usually wore her hair down, when she tied it up it revealed a long scar. Glowing in the firelight, it ran all the way from her hair to her glass eye, then down her cheek to disappear under her T-shirt. She gave me a brief smile and picked up a steaming mug. She was comfortable here, in more ways than one.

  The chalet I’d commandeered was a couple of miles further up the mountain from the target, an open-plan place, all golden wood and rough stone fireplaces with itchy blankets scattered over every chair. Huge windows looked down the valley to the village below with its multi-coloured lights twinkling against the snow, dark peaks rising all around us.

  I spread the map out on the table, taking a swig of beer and putting the bottle on the corner to hold it open.

  The woman put her mug on the floor and sat back. ‘It cannot be done,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Not like this.’

  The Scottish man leaned against the fireplace. ‘That’s the problem with Germans, no imagination.’ He flicked a lighter and sucked through a joint.

  She scowled. ‘If I say it cannot be done, it cannot be done.’

  The tip of the joint burned brightly, he pocketed the lighter and blew smoke up into the thick wooden beams. ‘There’s always a way.’

  ‘The problem is here.’ She leaned forward, wafted the smoke away from her, and ran a finger over the map. ‘The access road for the electricity substation runs close enough to the target, but on this ridge we’re exposed. They’ll see us coming easily.’

  ‘So we drive without headlights,’ I said.

  ‘I learned to drive in the Allgäu mountains, trust me: this is not a road to drive blind.’

  ‘Is it a depth perception issue or are you just scared?’ the Scot said with a wink. He passed the joint to me. ‘I don’t mind driving if…’

  She shook her head, pulling out the hair tie and brushing it back down over one side of her face. ‘Do you think it’s clever to smoke that shit, am I the only professional here?’

  ‘We could pull this job asleep,’ I said. ‘Enjoy the downtime before things get serious.’

  ‘I do not want downtime, I want to be prepared. We cannot approach by this road, we are backlit here and here,’ she pointed at the map, ‘by the lights from the village.’

  I smiled, blew smoke at the windows, passed the joint back to the man. ‘We’re convinced, okay?’

  She was the best driver I knew, and had taught me plenty. The woman who’d recently outpaced me on the Nordschleife, me in my Audi and her in a diesel Golf. I stood and stretched, picking up my beer and walking to the glass wall looking down the valley. Lights twinkled far below, we could be in an airliner above a city at night. The chalet stood alone at the dead end of a winding Alpine road, secluded, no one else around but for an identical rental chalet a short distance further down, which was currently empty. We had the mountain to ourselves.

  I took a sip of beer, leaning my forehead against the glass. One of the lights down there represented the house, the mark, the target.

  ‘We’ll drop in from above,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck yes,’ said the Scot.

  In the reflection of the glass he nodded and grinned behind me, pressing play on the stereo. The Beatles came on. ‘A Day in the Life’. Christ, what I wouldn’t give to sit and read a newspaper over breakfast, no marks, no targets, my only worry getting out of bed late and catching a bus to work.

  The door opened with a whirl of snow, a swaddled figure entered and put down a bag. He slammed the door behind him, stamping his feet.

  ‘Sorted?’ I asked, turning to lean against the glass.

  ‘No problem.’ The newcomer pulled down his hood and started biting a glove off.

  The woman said something rapidly in German, I caught the word saukalt – pig-cold – and something about saving a cow from the ice.

  She smiled at my puzzled face. ‘It is a saying, like what you think. It means, like, to pull something from disaster.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I said with a smile, turning to the newcomer. ‘That’s why I hired him.’

  The man was nodding as he took off his coat, still stamping snow off his boots and clapping his hands together. He’d lived in Sweden nearly two decades, since the day after he’d deserted Saddam’s Republican Guard – and been snowboarding almost as long – but he’d never really acclimatised.

  ‘It may be why you hired me,’ he said. ‘But these radios are beautiful.’ He blew on his hands.

  ‘They better have been worth it, we already have decent comms.’

  He opened the bag and took out a tiny earpiece. ‘Russian undercover forces.’

  The Scot put his joint in the corner of his mouth and took one from him. ‘We need to talk about callsigns for the comms. I’m claiming Wolf.’

  John Lennon had just started singing about Blackburn’s many holes. I grinned, pointing my bottle of beer at each of th
e team in turn, the German woman, the Iraqi guy, the Scottish guy. ‘Lennon, McCartney, Ringo.’ I pointed at myself. ‘Harrison.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ said McCartney, the Iraqi. ‘Shouldn’t you be Lennon?’

  ‘George Harrison’s the nicest one.’ I winked.

  ‘I like it,’ said Ringo, the Scot.

  ‘So I’m Lennon?’ The German woman tutted, shaking her head. ‘Let’s hope I don’t end up the same.’

  McCartney smiled. ‘Let’s hope I live long enough to get knighted by your queen.’

  ‘Peace and love,’ said Ringo. ‘Peace and love.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Tiburon

  The ship was pitching and rolling more noticeably, a nausea-inducing motion that started on the port bow, slowly lifting the ship all the way to starboard side at the stern, then dropping it down and rolling it back. I’ve never suffered from seasickness but the thought of it worried me, a psychosomatic vicious circle that ended up making me feel wretched anyway. It also worried me because I had King and the others in mind – I needed them on their feet and not ill, at the mercy of this crew of pirates.

  Doc had done a sterling job under the constantly shifting circumstances, taking me to his cabin to sterilise and dress the wound properly. Some of the best stitches I’ve had, not surprising when you consider he’s an ex-Royal Navy medic who’d joined up way back around the time the Tiburon was laid down. That he’d been dishonourably discharged before I’d left school was inconsequent, since it hadn’t been for his stitching ability. He was quick and thorough, but I was still thankful for the joint that Katanga had insisted I take with me.

  He’d rechecked other wounds, too, a recent scar down my ribs that was healing pretty well considering I’d been snowboarding with it for the last couple of weeks, and a broken finger that was destined to be crooked for the rest of my life – however long that might be. Finally, with several tuts and a shake of his head, he’d discharged me from his care.