The Eagle’s Talon

An Alex King thriller

A P Bateman

Copyright © 2024 by A P Bateman

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For my wonderful, supportive family.

Without which, this novel would have been finished so much sooner….

Also by A P Bateman

The Alex King Series

The Contract Man

Lies and Retribution

Shadows of Good Friday

The Five

Reaper

Stormbound

Breakout

From the Shadows

Rogue

The Asset

Last Man Standing

Hunter Killer

The Congo Contract

Dead Man Walking

Sovereign Power

Kingmaker

Untouchable

The Enemy

Die Trying

All the King’s Men

The Eagle’s Talon

The Rob Stone Series

The Ares Virus

The Town

The Island

Stone Cold

Standalone Novels

Hell’s Mouth

Unforgotten

Never Go Back

Novellas

The Perfect Murder?

Atonement

Chapter One

Northern Russia

There were kills that were easy, and there were kills that were difficult. And then there were the kills when they really made you feel it. Kills where the fight is in them until their last dying breath. Their last drop of blood. With every plunge of the knife, King felt the man give a little, but not much. He had lost count how many times the blade of the knife had driven all the way to the hilt, but still the man fought back. King was reeling from the man’s elbow crunching his eye socket, the swelling blurring his vision to the point that his left eye was almost closed over and he closed his eye purposely to maintain his equilibrium.

King needed to reassert himself – as if stabbing the man constantly wasn’t enough – and he adjusted his grip around the man’s throat, sliding his forearm back so that he could replace the crux of his elbow with his forearm, trapping the man’s windpipe and closing it tightly. Then he dug his foot into the back of the man’s knee and dragged him down to the ground, wrapping his legs around the man’s waist and locking his knees to keep the man pinned in place. He drove the knife again into the man’s side, then brought it to his throat, moved his forearm across the man’s face and caught hold of his hair. The man sensed the change in attack and hammered the back of his head into King’s face. King smarted at the blow, feeling his nose break and blood fill his throat, making him gag on the metallic taste. But he took the pain and discomfort, then when he got the blade to the man’s throat, he clamped his left hand on the back of the blade and pulled back with both hands using all his force, every ounce of strength, then finally slashing sideways and feeling the gush of blood release on his legs. The surge in blood made a hissing sound, both pressure and air behind it. The man struggled on for another ten seconds, then went limp, his weight sinking into King’s stomach until there was no more weight to come, no movement at all.

King pushed him aside and rolled away. Getting to his feet, he stared down at the body of the man who had given him the toughest fight of his life. Never had he come so close to being in the place where the man now lay. He looked at the knife, realising that the blade had snapped, the last third remaining in the man’s ribcage. That accounted for some of the problems in taking the man down, but training strength and ability on the man’s part had accounted for the time it had taken. King tossed the knife aside and picked up the man’s own. A double-edged dagger with a seven-inch blade and a six-inch handle of polished rosewood with brass studs. Not a modern military or tactical weapon, more like an heirloom from another century. Thirteen inches overall. Lucky thirteen. But not for its last owner. King sheathed the knife and picked up his pistol and the rifle, changing the magazine and making it ready. He was breathless and adrenalin was kicking in. He knew from bitter experience that he needed to keep moving before his muscles became fatigued and stiff. Adrenalin was a thrill for some, but it was also the body’s anaesthetic. The hormone epinephrine flooded the body to make pain and suffering more bearable.

King checked his watch. The plan had gone all to hell because a soldier had refused to die quickly. He had two minutes. It wasn’t enough to reach the men and get back to the helicopter. The mission was the mission. There would be no second chances, no survival and the objective would not be met if he took another step forward towards the gun battle now in full flow on the other side of the camp. He had two minutes to get to the objective, and just three minutes before Russia launched every military aircraft north of Moscow.

Chapter Two

Two weeks earlier, London

“Operation Eagle’s Talon?” Jack Luger asked incredulously, pausing to sip some of his black coffee. “Sounds a bit wordy…”

Ramsay stared at the black labrador at the young man’s feet. He wasn’t a fan of dogs, and certainly not in his office. “Operatsiya Orlinyy kogot’,” he replied. “It was named after some type of golden eagle that hunts wolves on the Russian Steppes.”

“Oh.”

“Not got a home for that mutt yet?” Ramsay frowned as Caroline slipped the dog a biscuit, then looked aghast when he realised that it was the last Jammie Dodger.

“Yes,” Luger replied. “My flat…”

“Could we all agree not to feed the mangy beast in here at least?”

“I’m not agreeing to anything of the sort,” Caroline replied. Dressed smartly in a knee-length skirt and suit jacket, her dark blonde hair was pulled back in a practical ponytail. It was her first day acting as Ramsay’s deputy and personal assistant, and she had thought she’d dress for the role. “He is gorgeous, Jack. Has anybody come forward yet?”

“No,” Luger replied. The dog had been the lone survivor of an airline tragedy, and the young intelligence officer hadn’t had the heart to take him to the animal shelter. “I figure he’s mine now. My neighbours love him, so they’re up for looking after him when I’m away. Nice old couple who don’t want fulltime dog ownership.”

“I don’t blame them,” Ramsay replied tersely.

Luger ignored the man’s foibles. He was the most idiosyncratic person that he’d every known. Which was probably putting it kindly. He looked back at Ramsay. “So, Operatsiya Orlinyy kogot’. Go on…”

“At the end of the last mission you all searched for Igor Reznikov. Thanks to the work the team did, King caught up with the man in Tuscany. I ordered King to kill him.” He paused. Ramsay was aware that ordering the assassination of a person would go with the job, but he had never done so before, and he did not do so on a whim. Igor Reznikov was a Russian GRU officer turned saboteur for Iron Fist, a terrorist group made up of agents from Russia, Iran, China, North Korea (DPRK) and Belarus. Five countries, each a finger of the hand that was Iron Fist. British intelligence knew that the organisation was simply the deniable clandestine service of these countries but could not equivocally prove it. Not until Igor Reznikov talked. “King hesitated just long enough for Reznikov to offer information. King being King, he ignored his orders, because the information was enough for King to bring the man back to Britain so that he could be questioned further. I’m glad that he did.”

“So, what is it?” Luger asked incredulously. “And what has it got to do with golden eagles and the Russian Steppes?”

“It’s an attack helicopter,” Ramsay replied.

“We have the best attack helicopters in the world,” Luger said dubiously. “The Apache Longbow.”

“This can fly higher, can reach three times the speed and has stealth capabilities. It also uses magnetic transference which essentially cuts the engines and uses opposing magnets to generate over ten times the power, which in physics terms, equates to three times the speed and twice the ceiling of even the pinnacle of attack helicopters. The Russian Hind, and the Apache to name just two. The Chinese have cutting edge helicopters, as do the Iranians with their IAIO Toufan.” Ramsay paused, his eyes focusing somewhere past Luger’s shoulder as he recounted from his photographic memory. “The magnetic transference cuts the exhaust gases and engine heat, thus enabling stealth capabilities… something helicopters have struggled to utilise to any serious effect.”

“How serious is the threat of our enemies having this attack aircraft?” asked Luger.

“Think of it as a modern take on the tank,” Caroline interjected. “Russia has shown with Ukraine that they want their empire back, and that takes war away from insurgency and guerilla tactics seen in Afghanistan, and back to European terrain. In the first Cold War, tanks and artillery were everything. Now, with the development of drones and missiles, tanks are sitting ducks. The war in Ukraine showed that drones bought off the internet and modified to carry a mortar round or grenade, and a simple release mechanism could take out Russia’s tanks and personnel in devastating numbers, and all while sitting in a bunker behind the lines. This aircraft, the Eagle’s Talon, is essentially a flying tank. Not only is it an attack helicopter, but it has room for six Spetsnaz commandos and their equipment. It will be armed with an array of missiles, cannons, rockets and bombs… Reznikov has even mentioned drone pods with AI interfaced technology. Pre-programmed for targets or tasks, these drones can be dropped and activate automatically. True fire and forget technology.” She paused. “Imagine a hundred or more drones being casually dropped and heat-seeking anyone wearing camouflage or carrying a weapon being targeted automatically? We’re talking swathes of troops cut down by exploding kamikaze drones dropped a mile or more away…”

“Terrifying…” Luger commented flatly. He had served in naval intelligence and was anything but a soldier, but the thought of such military technology was unthinkable. “How credible is this information?”

“Reznikov is being sweated in Scotland as we speak. The intel is fluid,” Caroline replied. The castle in the Scottish Highlands was where Ramsay’s organisation – a department of MI5 – conducted ‘enhanced’ interviews. This wasn’t Guantanamo Bay, with indefinite prisoners and waterboarding. This was question after question, sleep deprivation and analysing the answers. Torture only went so far and was unreliable. The analytical approach was always best. However, because of the nature of the Russian’s information and its time-critical importance, the staff had been ordered to ‘step it up’ a notch. “But he’s holding out on the location of the helicopter and the testing centre.”

“What about our allies? The Americans? They’re not shy in violating human rights.”

“The Americans have taken the approach that their hardware is the best there is,” said Ramsay. “So, it looks like it’s up to us to run with this, and have a closer look…”

“What about the rest of NATO?” Luger asked.

Ramsay scoffed. “If it isn’t us or the Yanks, then it’s nobody at all. Certainly, some of the NATO member states are getting better at putting their money in, but they don’t have the appetite to take on something like this. They’ll pay their dues and do what the collective of NATO tells them to do.” He paused. “They like the training, enjoy the UK, America and France making up for their shortfall, but fall short of the sabre rattling, much less the strike.”

“What about expert opinion on this helicopter?” he asked.

“Well, we do have one of the best helicopter pilots there is on our payroll…” Caroline mused.

“Craziest, perhaps… but the best?” Luger interjected.

“The very best,” Ramsay responded. “Anyway, he finds it quite incredible. He’s been flying helicopters long enough to doubt many of Reznikov’s claims. All he’s said is that he can play fast and loose with an aircraft’s capabilities, but nobody can bend the rules of physics. Not for long, or too frequently, at least.”

“He also added that if it exists, he needs to fly it,” Caroline smiled.

Jack Luger nodded. He had never minded flying, until he met Flymo. Nicknamed after the popular lawnmower brand that floated on a cushion of air, the ex-army pilot went by the moniker because nobody could hover lower. It only now occurred to him that he didn’t even know the man’s real name. “And the aviation designers and engineers?”

“I’ve put the claims to Leonardo… the new name for the company that made our AgustaWestland, along with RAF, Royal Navy and Army Air Corps pilots and engineers. All are dubious.” Ramsay paused. “The claims just don’t seem to make it into what is possible in conventional helicopters.”

“People probably said the same thing about jet engines in the nineteen-forties,” Luger observed. “But Germany flew them against our Hurricanes and Spitfires before the end of the war.”

“Indeed…” Ramsay nodded.

“So where do you want me?”

“I want you to meet the prisoner and get more out of him.”

Luger shrugged. “I’m not an interrogator by any means,” he replied.

“No, granted,” Ramsay replied. “But I had something else in mind…”

Chapter Three

Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose (HMS Seahawk), Cornwall

“You’re fucking joking, aren’t you?”

“It might give us an idea of how feasible this operation is.”

“You’re crazy…”

King continued driving past the entrance of the Royal Navy base, the two Royal Marines on guard duty outside the gates glancing their way, SA80 rifles shouldered, muzzles pointed at the ground. Beside them, two police officers with holstered pistols chatted to each other, but their eyes remained alert, earpieces keeping in contact with their control. Inside the gates two more Royal Marines stood beside a Land Rover still painted in desert camouflage from tours in Afghanistan. He checked the rear-view mirror as they climbed the hill beside the fence surrounding the one-thousand-five-hundred-acre naval base. The road looped around the base and was the route that led from the small Cornish town of Helston to The Lizard Peninsular.

“I used to live down this way,” King commented. “Well, near Falmouth. There’s a good pasty shop here.”

“You mean bakery,” Flymo replied, still uncomfortable at King’s suggestion.

“Not down here,” King grinned. “They call them pasty shops, but yes, they’re bakeries to you and me. It gives you an idea of what’s most important in Cornwall.”

“Never had one.”

“Never?”

“No. It’s like, meat and potatoes, right? In pastry?”

“Yeah.”

“Then no. English food with an English take on spices. Britain conquered half the world for the spice trade, then what do they use? Salt and pepper, and salt ain’t even a spice, man!” Flymo paused. “My grandparents came over from Jamaica on the HMT Empire Windrush in nineteen-forty-eight, I grew up with jerk pork, curried goat, saltfish and rice and peas. Even now, I eat all my food with hot sauce.”

“That’s because you don’t have a palate.” King shrugged. “And the meat and fish is rancid in the Caribbean, which is why you have to smother it in chilli to hide the fact it should have just been thrown in the bin to start with.”

“Whatever, man…” Flymo rolled his eyes. “Anyway, don’t change the subject. What you said is crazy! There ain’t no way, no how we can do that!”

“Then we’re finished before we even begin,” King said tersely.

“We have an appointment with the captain, who will then introduce us to the squadron commander of the Merlin Helicopter Force.” Flymo paused. “Can’t we just go in through the gate?”

King pulled the Jaguar XJR into a side road leading to a secluded cove and performed a U-turn. Their appointment was with Captain Ian Penrose, the base commander. RNAS Culdrose was home to the Royal Navy’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Helicopter Fleet. It is also a major training establishment for the Fleet Air Arm. The Merlin Mk2 was a sophisticated aircraft designed for hunting submarines. A medium lift aircraft, the Royal Navy version could be armed with Stingray torpedoes, depth charges and general-purpose cabin-mounted machineguns. A high beam meant that it could be used for fast-roping by special forces or fitted with a winch for rescue. Captain Penrose had been asked by the Admiralty to extend the two MI5 officers every courtesy, and all conversations with the helicopter wing would be subject to the Official Secrets Act.

“I don’t like this,” Flymo said as King accelerated out into the road and drove back the way they had come.

“We’ll just see how far we can get…”

“There are Royal Marines posted at the gates, and Navy and military police guards. Regular police on the outside. We don’t have a chance…”

“All we’re going to do is see how it could be done,” King replied.

“And how far will be too far?”

“The Russians will have regular army and Spetsnaz guarding this project. Perhaps even Wagner Group mercenaries to skirt around little issues like human rights and the Geneva Convention.” King pulled the Jaguar across the road and parked on the verge. “There,” he said, pointing to the apex of the corner, their line of sight clear of the front gate and the Royal Marine and police guards. “They are replacing the perimeter fence. Nine miles of it. On the outside, they are planting over ten-thousand trees. It’s an ongoing project. But look at those giant firs. A hundred feet high.”

“I see them,” Flymo replied.

“Have you had parachute training?”

“No,” Flymo replied. “I like to stay in the aircraft when I’m flying.”

King shrugged. “Okay. But you could jump, like, twenty feet if you had to?”

“No.”

“Well, you have to.” King opened the door. “There’s a branch that stops a few feet short of the fence, but it’s a sturdy-looking branch, and if we climb up the trunk using the chunky bark for hand and foot holds, then we can run out across that branch and jump.”

“You’re fucking crazy…”

“It’s soft earth and mud on landing.”

“How do you know?”

“Those trees are fifty or sixty years old. That’s a lot of pine needles falling every year. They mulch down to earth. Nobody is sending landscapers out to rake up pine needles.”

“Okay, but then what?”

“We see how far we can take it.”

“I’ve never flown a Merlin.”

“You’ve never flown a project aircraft like Eagle’s Talon. So, if you can’t get a glorified bus off the ground, then you have no chance with a Russian attack helicopter with controls in Russian Cyrillic and a whole host of abilities that no Western pilot has experienced.”

“Well, when you say it like that…”

King got out and closed his door, his eyes on the tree in question. The road was a through route with a forty-mile-per-hour limit, and vehicles were steady in either direction. He crossed the road between vehicles, hearing Flymo close his door and follow. “The secret is to keep your knees and ankles together, bend the knees upon impact, and roll.”

“Just like that…” Flymo commented sardonically. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, don’t break a leg.” King glanced both ways down the road and started up the tree on the fence side away from the road. He had good hand holds, but the bark was sharp. He dug the toes of his lightweight desert boots into the bark but found that he was using at least seventy percent upper body to make the climb. When he reached the first of the branches, progress was a little easier, but both his hands were bleeding, and his arms were shaking from the exertion. “I hope you’ve done a few pull-ups recently,” he called down.

Flymo tutted and started to climb. He was wiry and considerably lighter than King and made short work of the climb, but he was sure that stubbornness and pride had stopped the man from complaining about his bleeding and raw fingertips. “This is crazy…” he said as King stood, balancing on the thick bough. The drop certainly looked further than twenty feet to him, and he watched as King walked like a tight-rope artist, then sped up and leapt out over the fence. He landed heavily, but rolled out the impact, looking up at Flymo and beckoning him to follow. “I don’t like heights, man…”

“You’re a fucking pilot!” King hissed, not wanting to raise his voice. “How can a bloody pilot not like heights?”

Flymo didn’t respond. He stood unsteadily, teetered for a moment then lost his balance and started to topple. Only his legs saved him from falling short as he sprinted and half leapt, half dived off the branch towards the fence. He cleared the fence by an inch and landed in a crumpled heap on the earth, bounced once, then landed on his backside.

King winced and said, “You fucked that up, mate.” He paused, watching the man struggle stiffly to his feet. “Are you alright?”

“No.” Flymo stared at King. “We can’t do this!”

“Well, we’ve kind of got to, now,” King replied, already striding out across the patchy grass to a narrow access road. He caught hold of Flymo as the man drew near. “Keep walking,” he whispered. “Laugh at my joke…”

“You’re not that funny.”

King watched as two men jogged towards them. They wore Royal Navy PT vests and the cut of shorts that were fashionable when Kevin Keegan played at his prime. “… and the gravedigger says, well, I had to have somewhere to park my bike…” King glanced at Flymo and whispered, “That was the punchline!”

“Really? I thought it was going to be a whole joke. It wasn’t even funny!”

King sighed and shook his head despairingly, but the men had already jogged on past. “You’d better stick to flying.”

“And don’t go quitting your day job, either,” Flymo replied.

King veered off between office blocks and Flymo followed. Ahead of them, a series of hangars and asphalt strip looked promising. There were a few people around, but King slowed and said, “Walk beside me. Just look casual. But don’t look too casual.”

“What the hell does that look like?”

“I don’t know, just copy what I do…” King veered off towards two armed Royal Marines on patrol. There was nothing like meeting a threat head on to avoid looking out of place. King was fit and walked with confidence. His hair was buzzed to around half an inch. The two guards were young and both marines – the equivalent of a private in the army - King ignored them. You didn’t salute someone when you were out of uniform, and armed guards didn’t go around saluting either. King was old enough to be a high-ranking officer. When they had passed them, King headed towards one of the hangars and watched as a Merlin took off and flew low over the runway. “There we are, we’re in the right place.”

“We are definitely not in the right place, brother…”

“No doubt.”

“That’s the pilot briefing room over there,” said Flymo, nodding towards a single storey building with an antenna and all glass wall looking over the apron. There was aircrew inside seated at desks in a classroom. The backdrop to the building, beyond the apron was six Merlin helicopters in a line. A Land Rover was heading back from them towards a hangar, two men on board in camouflage trousers, olive-coloured combat shirts, and hi-vis vests. It was rather an ironic dress code. “That’s ground crew over there,” Flymo told King. “Looks like they’ve done the pre-flight checks, and as soon as the aircrew finish their briefing, they’ll be back over there with ground marshallers signalling with wands. Right now, they’ll be getting a brew on.”

“So, that’s our window,” King said decisively and walked confidently across the apron.

Flymo followed. He was too deep into it now. He was in a world of trouble. If he didn’t go ahead, then he would be caught trespassing on base with no idea how to explain his presence or intentions. If he followed through, then he was… he couldn’t even think of the outcome, but it wasn’t good. He watched as King reached the lay-up and started removing the rotor anchor lines and kicking out the wheel chucks. Flymo climbed through the open access and made his way through to the cockpit and dropped into the righthand seat. At over twenty-two metres long and almost seven metres in height, the fourteen-thousand kilo helicopter was the largest he had flown since his early Chinook days with the Army Air Corps. The operating systems were the same as the Lynx, Chinooks and Apache military craft that he had regularly flown, as well as the Dauphin Eurocopters that he had flown for the SAS, it was just that the operating systems were in different places. He kept it simple, though. Started the engines, built the revs and eased forwards on the wheels to taxi. Already, there were people watching, groundcrew scratching heads and hollering at one another. By the time Flymo had cleared the rest of the aircraft, building engine revs and rotor speed the entire time, a Land Rover was on its way across the apron.

King slid into the lefthand seat and buckled his harness and put on his headset. “Better get a move on, mate…” he said on the intercom.

The flight controls were familiar – second nature to such an experienced pilot – most of the operating systems being aimed at submarine hunting, enabling the Merlin Mk2 to track up to forty targets at once. Flymo chose a rolling take off because it gave them distance from the approaching aircrew as the three Rolls Royce engines built the RPMs required for the rotors to lift. The aircraft accelerated and as the turbo props kicked in, lifted and Flymo started a banking climb. Below them, he could see that it wasn’t just groundcrew racing to the lay-up, but Royal Marines and Military Police, all in a quandary. Rifles were aimed, but nobody fired at the two and a half million-pound aircraft.

“Now what?” Flymo asked, levelling out as they reached the coast. Below them, walls of powerful surf pounded at the cliffs and plumes of white sea spray reached a hundred feet before turning to mist around the spire of a church on the harbour front. Flymo banked the helicopter and flew back over the inland town of Helston, climbing all the time. “Better be getting this thing back…”

Both men flinched as the Hawk T1 jet performed a six-hundred-mile-per-hour fly past, just metres from their port side. “I reckon so,” King replied, staring after the aircraft as it rolled through a turn a mile away and came back towards them. “That’s a training craft, it won’t be armed…”

“That is, though…” Flymo said as the Puma helicopter pulled alongside, two Royal Marines manning a .50 machinegun out the open side, with the muzzle aiming straight at them.

“Better get on the blower and take this thing back,” said King.

Chapter Four

The Scottish Highlands

The road was barely any wider than the Range Rover. Pines grew on either side, right up to the side of the road and when the pines cleared, heather and bracken took their place. When they drove through clearings, distant peaks marked the horizon on every side, the road carving through the moorland and forest from east to west. After a sharp turn for no apparent reason, they drove over a humpbacked bridge and the castle loomed ahead. It wasn’t really a castle, but a grand manor house dating back to the eighteen hundreds, but it seemed like semantics to Jack Luger. The building was three storeys tall, close to eighty metres wide and hewn from solid, grey granite blocks a half-metre square. Luger remembered hearing somewhere that a metre square of granite weighed an imperial ton. Lifting half-ton blocks in the eighteen hundreds must have been an accomplishment. It looked like the sort of place that never got warm in the winter. Probably not even in the summer, for that matter.

“He won’t just talk to me,” said Luger.

“Just see that he does,” Big Dave replied.

“That’s easier said than done.”

Big Dave pulled the Range Rover up at the gates where two uniformed police officers stood guard each side of the gate equipped with Heckler & Koch G36c assault rifles. The two men were kitted out in body armour, tasers and pistols, as well as batons and cuffs. It was a lot of kit for a country house ten miles from the nearest cottage. Big Dave lowered the window and handed the officer his ID card. The guard checked it against his laminated list, then waved them through. Big Dave pulled up at the entrance and killed the engine. He got out silently, and Luger frowned as he opened his door. As Luger got out and walked around the vehicle, Big Dave said, “Sorry about this, sunshine…” and punched him in the face. Luger reeled back against the vehicle and the big Fijian caught hold of him and punched him again. Luger started to protest, but Big Dave drove a left into the man’s ribs, a right cross into his cheek, and followed with an elbow to his nose. Luger dropped onto the gravel. “Sorry, mate. Orders…”

Luger struggled onto his knees, heaving for breath, blood streaked across his forehead and streaming from his nose. Big Dave put a hand on his shoulder, but Luger drove a solid punch into the man’s crotch, and he howled as he doubled over, and caught an uppercut in the throat. “What the fuck?!” Luger raged.

Big Dave struggled to the Range Rover and propped himself up as he gasped from the dizzying, sickening ache at his testicles. “Ramsay wanted it to look realistic…”

Luger wobbled as he got to his feet. “And does it?” he asked, wiping blood from his mouth and nose.

Big Dave smashed his first into the man’s face and he dropped back to the ground, drifting into unconsciousness. “It does now…”

Chapter Five

Cornwall

“Oh, well done…” Ramsay said, his tone laced with sarcasm as he wheeled himself closer to the open steel door of the prison cell. He clapped slowly five or six times. “Bravo…”

“Can you get me out of here now?” asked King.

“I’ve a good mind to tell them to lock you up and throw away the bloody key!”

King glanced past Ramsay at Jim Kernow, who was trying to suppress a grin. Kernow was an ex-police officer who worked as Ramsay’s minder and driver. He had been injured during their last operation, and the scar at his throat still looked raw. He was lucky to be standing here. Either side of the two men, just over the threshold of the cell, stood two military police officers looking unimpressed. “I take it Captain Penrose doesn’t view our evaluation of his security protocols as a helpful, positive experience…”

“Our?!” Flymo shouted from the cell next door.

King shrugged. “Can we see the helicopter technicians and pilots now?”

Ramsay shook his head despairingly and wheeled himself backwards. He nodded to the two MPs, and they stood aside for King to follow. They paused at the neighbouring cell as one of the MPs unlocked Flymo’s cell door. King grinned at Flymo, who still didn’t look amused.

“He’s pretty pissed off,” Kernow whispered to King.

“Yeah, I was picking up on that,” King replied.

“He got chewed out by the PM, who had us flown down in the private jet.” Kernow explained. “But as soon as we disembarked it took off again, so read into that what you will. Where did you leave the Jag?”

“On the side of the road.”

“You left the Jag on the side of the road?”

“You sound as pissed off as he is,” King commented.

“Where are the keys?”

King shrugged. “Shit, I think I left them in the door pocket. I always seem to do that with keyless entry…”

“Great. Well, I hope it’s still there or we’ll be taking the train to Oxfordshire.”

“Oxfordshire?”

“RAF Benson. The Royal Navy are enraged and digging their heels in because of your stunt…” He paused and whispered, “Which I think was fucking hilarious. Ballsy, but hilarious… But the Admiralty are lobbying the Prime Minister, so Ramsay’s in the shit as much as you two are, to be fair.”

“Always,” replied King. “It’s only ever the depth that varies.”

“Well, the RAF will welcome you with open arms. Just don’t go testing their security protocols.”

“Good,” said King. “I like the RAF. They drink plenty of tea and aren’t stingy with the biscuits.”

They were escorted off base with little ceremony. Captain Penrose, who had levelled a barrage of verbal abuse at Ramsay upon his arrival, was nowhere to be seen, and six Royal Marines surrounded them, handing them over to the military police at the gate. Armed officers from Devon and Cornwall Police accepted them, and Ramsay wheeled himself somewhat irritably onto the road.

“Well, that was fairly humiliating,” he said.

“The car’s over there,” King said to Kernow, pointing down the road to the apex of a corner. “Flymo, go with Jim, would you?” He waited until the two men were out of earshot and said to Ramsay, “I’m not sorry. I tested whether it could be done, and it can be. But the Russians will shoot first. We caught these guys napping. Security was lax because we’re down in Cornwall and it’s the last thing anybody would expect. This project will be guarded like Fort Knox. And when we get to the chopper… if we do… the controls will be in Russian, and if it’s as cutting edge as we have been led to believe, then the controls may be entirely unfamiliar. Not just the operating systems, but the flying controls.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I don’t think it can be done.”

Ramsay watched the black Jaguar driving towards them and without looking at King said, “Then just see that it can be…”

Chapter Six

The Scottish Highlands

Luger dabbed his lips and nose with the cloth that Beatrice had given him and winced.

“That needs an icepack,” she told him. “I’ll get somebody to fetch you some ice and a flannel…”

“Sorry, luv. No can do,” said Big Dave. “Boss’s orders, he’s got to look like he’s had a good working over, and show Reznikov that it can happen here…”

“Well, you certainly gave him that, you big brute,” Beatrice commented flatly. Her tone was clipped, Home Counties. She was a robust, yet attractive woman of around thirty-five, who looked like hockey and horses had been in her life, and she probably excelled at both. “You could have killed him.”

Big Dave shrugged and sipped some more of his tea. “He’ll heal soon enough.”

“You know who your friends are in this game,” Luger commented.

“Damn right,” replied Big Dave with a grin. “I made sure you kept all your teeth.”

“Remind me to extend the same courtesy when this is over.”

“I don’t know, sunshine. That was a heavy-duty punch to the balls you gave me out there.” He paused, looking at Beatrice. “You’d better get him a fetching jumpsuit and get this started.” He stood up and patted Luger on the shoulder. “No hard feelings mate?”

Luger shrugged. “I suppose not.” He watched the big Fijian walk out of the room, heard his heavy footsteps on the polished wooden floor. The grand house had retained some of its original features, but there was a curious mix of new and old, the new being functional offices and recreation rooms. But not for the inmates. He looked back at Beatrice and said, “He’s right. We’d better get on with it.”

Without further delay Beatrice stood up from her chair and Luger followed. They walked down a corridor which he supposed would have once led to servant’s quarters or below stairs. The kitchen reminded Luger of a canteen kitchen. Functional, spacious and with two women in lab coats and blue food safety hairnets. Cooks, not chefs. The smell reminded him of his days at boarding school. Casserole and boiling vegetables. Basic, flavourless and yet, somehow appealing perhaps because of familiarity and association. In much the same way as yearning for the food that a parent or grandparent would once make, and although probably lacking in flavour and appearance, somehow all the more longed for than that of the food from the very best chefs. They stopped at the laundry and Beatrice pulled a medium, orange boiler suit off the shelf and handed it to him. “Strip naked and put that on,” she told him. “We don’t allow underwear or footwear of any kind.” Luger frowned and looked around for somewhere to change. There was nothing forthcoming from Beatrice, so he turned around and hastily striped and slipped on the boiler suit. “And the watch,” she said, holding out her hand. It hadn’t escaped his notice that she had not averted her gaze as he had been zipping up the suit.

Luger unfastened his Omega Seamaster and handed it to her. From now on he would be living without time and any idea of day or night. It had been explained to him that he would find it both confusing and unsettling. “How do I meet him?”

“We must be mindful of integration. At the moment there are only three other prisoners here. Igor Reznikov has his meals in population, but we have cameras and microphones on constantly. Ramsay wanted it that way, so you were probably part of his plan from the moment the man was delivered here by that rough-looking chap.”

“King?” Luger asked.

“He never said his name. But those eyes have seen some shit,” she replied. “Cold as the fucking Antarctic. Anyway, Reznikov hasn’t seen any fellow prisoners, so it’s quite possible that he thinks that he’s the only one here.” Beatrice paused. “He may go for it. He may talk to you, try to find out what you know. Or he might see it for what it is… a trap.” She smiled. “And then that pretty face of yours may have got rearranged for nothing…”

“At least you noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed,” she said, her voice quivering ever so slightly.

Luger said nothing. He checked his watch, then tutted when he stared at the tan-line where his watch had once been. “Well, let’s do this…”

Chapter Seven

Oxfordshire

Wing Commander Leslie Toksvig had put on a good show for them. Puma support helicopters and the leviathans that were the Chinooks, with their twin forward and aft rotors had flown in over RAF Benson both low and fast. However, it was nothing compared to the six Apache AH-64 gunships under Joint Helicopter Command, that flew in tight formation then climbed vertically and performed an inverted loop. The base was also home to the Thames Valley Air-Ambulance and the National Police Flying Service. Toksvig herself had a proud RAF history, with her grandfather being a Polish Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain and her father flying Harriers in the Falklands. Now in command of RAF Benson, she had flown sorties in a Tornado over Iraq.

Security was tight. Double fences, razor wire, RAF Regiment guards performing roaming patrols in their infantry uniforms, and RAF guards at the gate in their impeccable blues-grey. King watched as the Puma helicopters banked left and right, and the line of Chinooks headed over their heads, the downdraft blowing their hair and collars.

“We are home to the Joint Helicopter Command and are the premier frontline force for insurgency and defence. The Submarine hunters down in Cornwall don’t face air defence systems. They trundle along, their computers searching for targets, aided by AWACS flying at forty-thousand feet and drop their torpedoes. Our pilots go into the thick of it, dropping RAF Regiment forward observers, the army and special forces. They fly fast and low and routinely faced RPGs, anti-aircraft batteries and Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. Our door gunners have seen more than they should have, and our pilots are the best in the world…” She paused as Flymo scoffed, then appeared to think better of it. “Something you’d like to say?”

Flymo shrugged. “I was Army Air Corps. I was always sent to pick up troops in trouble, who had been abandoned because RAF pilots had reached their hours, or did not have the requisite fuel in reserve…”

“Rules and regulations are the very foundation of the RAF,” the Wing Commander said without detriment. “A helicopter and crew is a far more financial viability than troops on the ground. Pilots and aircrew cost ten-times what it costs to train eighteen-year-old soldiers, and each aircraft costs over two-million pounds, and ten times that in strategic commitment, and our power ranking within the UK armed forces, and NATO.”

King remained silent. He had needed extraction in the early days of Iraq and Afghanistan and had appreciated the Army Air Corps, and the US Marine Corps, who always went the extra mile for boots on the ground. He had found the RAF to be more distant, even aloof, and certainly less risk averse. “When can we meet with the pilots and technicians?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Toksvig replied, her tone clipped. “This was all rather last minute. By the time they land, shut-down and debrief, they will need a clear eight-hours before the next shift.”

“Interesting,” Ramsay said looking at King, then added, “It’s almost as if today was a complete waste of time…”

King shrugged, then looked back at the wing commander. “Can you put us up for the night?”

“No. There’s a rather nice pub in the village. The Fox and Hounds Inn. Good food, real ale and comfortable rooms. We will reconvene at zero-eight-hundred.”

“So, we got to see a flying display, but now don’t have the chance to speak collectively with your experts in the field, and get their opinions on an imminent threat to our security?” King stared at her. “You do realise that we are here for reasons of national security, and that your cooperation is vital, required, even.”

“We have rules for a reason,” she replied. “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name…”

“I didn’t throw it.”

“Tomorrow at eight o’clock will be acceptable,” Ramsay interjected. “Thank you, Wing Commander. Now, I need to return to London…”

“Corporal Crane will drive you off base,” she replied matter-of-factly, turned on her heel and headed towards the admin block.

The young corporal opened the door of the Land Rover Defender 130 and went to help Ramsay, but he snapped at him to get out of the way and after he had positioned the wheelchair, pulled himself into the passenger seat. For a man who had never exercised, Ramsay had trained his upper body since his assassination attempt and could lift himself independently. Jim Kernow had learned quickly that the man was embarrassed, almost frightened of help, and frightfully independent. It had been Ramsay’s coping mechanism with paralysis, and he surreptitiously attended physio four times a week.

The corporal dropped them at the gates and visitors carpark, and Jim brought the Jaguar over to them. Ramsay offered them a lift to the Fox & Hounds Inn and both King and Flymo hopped in the back while Jim folded Ramsay’s wheelchair and put it in the cavernous boot.

“Don’t steal another bloody helicopter,” Ramsay said irritably. “Just ask questions and listen. And don’t piss off Wing Commander Toksvig. These base commanders think they’re God and can’t wait to assert their power. It’s the culture of hurry up and wait. They don’t always get that matters are time-sensitive.”

“They get it,” King replied. “They just don’t like working with civilians.”

Ramsay ignored the comment. “Until we discover the exact location of Operation Eagle’s Talon, then we’re still in the dark. Northern Russia is the size of Western Europe, possibly larger. It’s a needle in a haystack scenario at best.”

“And what are we doing about that?”

“Jack is on that one.”

“Jack?”

“Yes.”

“He’s too soft,” said King.

“He’s a damned good agent,” Ramsay replied.

“No argument there.” King shrugged. “But he’s not right for this.”

“You’d use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.”

“But at least it cracks.”

“It’s no good roughing the man up, King. We need to know what he knows.”

“He won’t talk if you tickle him, either.”

“Jack will handle it,” Ramsay replied adamantly. He paused as Kernow pulled the Jaguar up in front of the pub. “This looks adequate,” he said. “Have a meal and two drinks on expenses, then hire a car and come back to the office when you’re done tomorrow.”

“Got it,” King said, opening his door.

Flymo got out and stood beside King as the Jaguar pulled away smoothly. “Don’t get us in the shit tomorrow,” he said.

“Wouldn’t think of it,” he replied, looking across the road at a smart-looking garage showroom full of gleaming classic cars. Above the spotless windows a sign advertised ‘classic car experiences’ in addition to sales and servicing. King smiled and turned to Flymo. “He did say, hire a car, didn’t he?”

Chapter Eight

Oslo, Norway

The game had been won in the first three moves. Fedor Sokolov watched the man across the table from him. He had been on the back foot ever since Sokolov’s opening. Nobody had played the Grünfeld Defence as an opening in an international chess tournament for decades. Named after Ernst Grünfeld, an Austrian chess player who, in 1922, defeated future world champion, Alexander Alekhine, with this opening. In typical hypermodern style, black invites white to attack the centre with their pawns (classical style). Black then seeks to aggressively counter-attack white’s centre with the d7-d5 push and their minor pieces. In the ensuing battle, Sokolov forced his opponent to demonstrate that the classical school of thinking, occupying the centre with his pawns was the best counter. Sokolov, meanwhile, sought to lead the man into his trap, attacking from the edges. Sokolov isolated the man’s king, and with a queen and two rooks in play, sacrificing a disproportionate amount, of important pieces, had boxed the man in. Move and countermove had led to a scrappy counter from his young opponent, but the man was in the death throes of inevitability. The young man had lost face, and to end a humiliating, prolonged defeat he knocked over his king and walked from the table without congratulating Sokolov, much to the crowd’s protest of hushed tones and grumbles.

Sokolov bowed to a standing ovation. It hadn’t been his favourite game of the tournament, but he was through to the final and he had been saving the best to last. He had demonstrated his knowledge of past greats and their opening gambits, so the smart money would be on him opening with The Queen’s Gambit, or The Rousseau Gambit because frankly, he had played a gambit in every round. However, he would make the chess world gasp with disbelief, and he hoped in pleasure, when he gave nothing, sacrificed nothing and lured his opponent in with nothing more than simplicity and defence. He had studied Melvin Kaplinsky, the twenty-year old from Seattle taking the chess world by storm, but the young man had a lot to learn. He was bold, ignored the great gambits and would have been studying them constantly to prepare for the great Sokolov, or Sokolov the Great, as his peers called him.

Outside the arena Sokolov signed a few programmes and photographs, and made his way into the terrace room bar, which had been roped off for the players and their entourage. Typically of the man, he ordered a double Grey Goose vodka and a carafe of water as he walked past the barman and took a corner table beside the closed window. Outside, mist had enveloped the surrounding buildings and the Akerselva River, and the wood-stained terrace was covered with a greasy sheen of water. A maintenance man was wrapped up in a windcheater and a hat and was scraping water off with a long-handled squeegee. He was fighting a losing battle, and already, Sokolov could have organised the man – the angle of the squeegee, the way he stepped in the water rather than scrape the excess water towards the gutters. Debris had clogged the narrow gutters, and if he had simply run the handle of the tool down the gutter first, then the water would have dispersed and his job would have been complete, rather than working in vain in the drizzle and cold.

The barman brought over the glass of vodka and the water and placed a small bowl of pistachios beside them. The glass had been chilled. Sokolov all but ignored him and poured a dash of water into the vodka. He had given up on asking for Russian brands, as most of the Western world was still foolishly sanctioning that great nation. The thought made him sneer at their stupidity. Nobody cared for Ukraine before they saw her on their televisions on the nightly news. A corrupt, filthy, bastard state that won the hearts and minds of the world by being the underdog, painted as such by the liberal dominated media agencies. And for what? Gas, coal and oil prices doubling? Timber and firewood trebling? Wheat and grain rising four-fold? He sipped the vodka – a passable brand – and almost found himself laughing at the blue and yellow flag-waving liberals who had never even heard of Ukraine before the President sent in the troops to reclaim what was Russia’s, and who now could not afford to feed their families or heat their homes and constantly asked one another in a perpetual state of ignorance why things were so expensive these days…

“That was far from a clean finish.”

Sokolov did not look up at his FSB controller as she stood behind him. He had seen the woman approaching in both the window and his own glass, smelled her heady, floral Christian Dior perfume. “It could have been better. A little more decisive.” Sokolov paused. “But it was humiliating for him to concede. We could have waltzed around the board for an hour of desperate procrastination until he surrendered his king. He knew he was beaten, and he took the easy way out. He will remember that loss for years. Whereas, I had all but forgotten that victory until you brought it up. I shall be sure to tell him how little it meant to me when we next meet.”

“The most painful reminder of a defeat is the ease with which the victory is won,” Katerina Baskakov mused.

“Who said that?”

“Me. Just now.”

“You play chess?”

“Of course,” she replied. “But I refer to the operation at hand, not your chess successes.”

“We should play sometime.”

“We should.”

“You are not scared?”

“Of a board game? No.”

“Interesting.”

“The operation…” She paused as the barman brought her a large pinot noir in an oversized glass. She enjoyed good wine. Russia had none of its own. Crimea and Ukraine had the best vineyards, followed by Georgia. Wine was first made in Georgia. Perhaps one day these countries would be back under the Russian flag. “The pieces are in play. So, what is the next move?”

Sokolov smiled, looking around the empty bar. The barman was stacking glasses and the man on the terrace had given up on his endeavours and left it to flood. He looked back at Katerina Baskakov and said, “The British have taken the bait. They have Igor Reznikov. He knows what to give them, and what to hold out with.”

“Nobody can hold out forever,” the FSB officer reminded him.

“He doesn’t have to hold out forever, just not divulge everything too soon as to be suspicious.” Sokolov paused, drinking half his vodka. “When the time is right, when enough time has passed and MI5 have taken the entire hook, and not just the bait, then he will give the last details.”

“Operatsiya Orlinyy kogot’ is more than just bait. It has cost almost five hundred billion rubles and will shape the way warfare is fought in the European theatre of operation. We cannot risk it at any cost.”

“It is the practice of sacrificing a valuable chess piece to watch your opponent fall. We are funnelling enemy agents into a trap. We will then have the upper hand. Politically and sociologically. Hostile agents killed in military action, sabotage and subversion on Russian soil. We can beat the drum so loudly that support for Ukraine will wane, if not stop altogether. We will take it to the brink, as we did in Cuba, and the world will never again doubt our strength or resolve. And we will rid ourselves of a constant enemy, that of Ramsay from MI5 and his band of pirates who strike and run with impunity at both ourselves and our allies.”

“You are risking a great deal, Fedor.” Katerina picked up her glass and studied the deep red liquid through the glass, catching the barman’s reflection as he watched them. Why had the young man taken so much interest in them? She leaned forwards and said in a low voice, “If this fails, then I do not have to tell you how displeased the President will be. These enemy agents cannot be allowed to succeed.”

Sokolov finished his vodka and looked at his handler with disdain. “I provide the means of the trap. It is up to you to guarantee the success of the project.”

Katerina Baskakov had already requested a full brigade of Spetsnaz – Russia’s elite special forces – to be dispatched to the area. The rest would be up to the base commander to decide how best to utilise his forces. They were risking more than she was comfortable with. More than anyone within the politburo should have been comfortable with. Russia may not be a communist state any longer, but the old politburo was the same. The same old men in Moscow, the same long tables in mahogany panelled rooms where policy was made with an all-powerful figurehead at the head of the table. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had. The people were placated with a taste of freedom and Western wealth, but they were still ruled with a big stick, and the FSB enforced control just as their KGB predecessors had.

Katerina sipped some more of her wine, noting in the reflection that the barman was still watching them. Spies were everywhere. You could never be too careful. She looked at Sokolov and said, “I will let you know when Igor Reznikov cracks…” She paused. “We are watching closely.”

“Five days.”

“What?”

“Five days,” Sokolov replied. “That’s when Igor Reznikov will offer the information.”

“How do you know?” Katerina stared at him incredulously.

“As I have always said, this is a game of chess, and in response to my previous moves, five days is what I have anticipated. And five days is what it will be.”

“Very well.” Katerina stood, looking down at the Russian chess champion. “I will be in touch.” She walked past the bar, where the young barman suddenly started to busy himself. She smiled at him, and he seemed flustered. “I’ll take a whiskey sour,” she said, perching herself delicately on the barstool, crossing her legs and showing a little thigh. “My meeting has concluded, and I want to celebrate. Join me for a drink?” She did not look at Sokolov as he walked past her and out of the players’ lounge.

“I’m not sure I should,” the young man shrugged. “Being on duty…”

“Oh, live a little!” she purred, her accent silky and alluring. “What time do you get off your shift?”

The young man blushed, but he checked his watch and said, “An hour.”

“Do you know someplace nice?” She reached out and touched his hand with her fingertip. “Somewhere not full of boring chess fans and geeks?”

He shrugged. “There’s a vodka bar in a quiet street near the river.”

“Sounds perfect,” she waited for the man to finish making her drink, then added, “Come on, just one drink with me.”

“Just one,” he conceded, pouring himself an aquavit with a lot of ice.

“What is that?” she asked.

“Aquavit, very popular in Norway. Like vodka but flavoured with herbs and spices. This one is caraway seed. We drink it at weddings.”

“Slow down, young man!” she smiled. “We’re just going out for drinks. For now…”

“Hurrarop,” he said, lifting his glass.

“Vashe zdoroviye!” she replied in Russian, lifting her glass. When they both sipped their drinks she said, “Say, could I have one of those?” The man smiled and turned his back, reaching for the top shelf and the bottle of aquavit. Katerina reached forwards and poured a vial of clear liquid into the man’s glass. When he poured her a glass, topped with ice and handed it to her, she raised her glass and said, “Hurrarop!” in her best attempt at a Norwegian accent.

“Vashe zdoroviye!” he mirrored her in Russian and took a large swig, the ice clattering against his teeth.

“That has quite a kick,” she said, raising her glass again. “Hurrarop!” she toasted and finished her drink. The young man finished his, too. He was already off-colour and starting to perspire when she slipped off the barstool and walked out. The 3ml of digitalis had been extracted by herself from foxgloves. The process called for several large bunches of the poisonous flower and had been painstakingly extracted under a complex process of boiling and evaporation. By now, the young man’s blood pressure would be off the charts, as would his heart rate and he would go into cardiac arrest before she reached the bottom of the stairs and hit the street. People would assume a heart attack, but they could resuscitate and hook him up to a defibrillator as much as they wanted – unless they had a shot of phenytoin, he wasn’t coming back. The FSB officer had caught the man observing them for a little too long. It might have been completely innocent, but with so much at stake, she simply couldn’t take the chance.

Chapter Nine

The Scottish Highlands

Luger winced as he attempted to eat a little of the minced beef, onions and gravy. Served with mashed neeps & tatties (turnips and potatoes), it reminded Luger of his boarding school days as much as the smell had promised. Fortunately, there wasn’t much chewing involved and the meal slid down, helped by the lukewarm water in a paper cup. The plate was made from paper as well, and the spoon was made from wood and barely up to the task. He winced as he picked up the tray and walked it, as he had been told, to the bin. He looked up as Igor Reznikov walked in, mirroring him in the orange boiler suit. Luger could see that the man was sleep-deprived, his features gaunt and pale, his eyes sunken and dull. He ignored the Russian, pouring himself another paper cup of water and taking up his seat once more with his back to the Russian.

Igor Reznikov stood at the canteen and one of the women who had looked like Luger’s many dinner ladies at boarding school slopped the mince, potatoes and turnip onto the paper plate. Behind the cook, a uniformed guard with a baton and handcuffs on his belt stared threateningly at the prisoner. Reznikov ignored Luger, and the guard for that matter, and took a seat. He ate unenthusiastically, sipping water from the paper cup. Luger finished his drink, binned the empty cup and walked out of the dining room and back to his cell. His first interaction was done. Engineered for the two men to meet.

Chapter Ten

Oxfordshire

“The type of figures and statistics that you’re talking about here are impossible.”

“Seconded…”

“I concur. No way.”

Wing Commander Toksvig nodded in agreement at the three pilots who had voiced their opinions in the row of twelve seats. In front of them, King and Flymo sat in front of the three Puma helicopters that were stripped down inside the hangar. “So, there you have it,” she said adamantly. “Stuff and nonsense.”

“The aircraft is reported to have mirror-finished panels that absorb a camera’s images and project it. Invisible to the naked eye at half a kilometre. And smart weapon systems. This cloaking device is mirrored camera projection technology.” He paused. “With respect to the talent in this building, none of you are scientists.”

“No, but we know everything there is to know about piloting helicopters,” a young Flight Lieutenant said somewhat vocally.

Unperturbed, King said, “It has all new missiles and cannons that are more advanced and ballistically capable of that of the A-10 Warthog. As you all know, as cannons go, that aircraft has the best in the business.”

“With all due respect, the weapons systems on our own aircraft can be upgraded,” Wing Commander Toksvig said.

“So, if this helicopter exists, who would be capable of flying it?” King asked.

“It won’t exist,” a flight-lieutenant replied tersely. “Simple physics. And that’s that.”

“Helicopters were once thought not to be able to perform a loop or victory roll,” said Flymo. “And then a guy somewhere did one, and suddenly half the helicopters in the military can.”

“Ok, Chickenhawk!” someone jeered.

“An interesting read,” Flymo replied seriously. “That same pilot who wrote that book came up with the idea of trimming landing zones with the main rotor, and then it became standard operating procedure in Vietnam.” He paused. “The principles and capabilities change along with development and the theatre of war.”

“Look…” King ventured. “This man is the best helicopter pilot I’ve ever seen…” There were jeers and profanities and King shrugged. He noticed that not one of the pilots was black. Flymo had come up through the army, and made it into the Army Air Corps. When he flew at his terminal rank, it had been that of sergeant. Today’s RAF flyers tended to be officers with university degrees. “He can see that some of the claims could be met, with the right pilot input and engineering…” The jeering continued and King trailed off, looking at the Wing Commander, who seemed pleased with the response from the men and women seated in front of her. King turned to her and said, “Are your helicopters equipped with air-to-air missiles?”

“The Apache systems can be, but not in peacetime flight training. Only on exercises or in times of war.”

“But the targeting system locks on for air combat training?”

“Of course. And guns and rockets.”

King nodded. “Then my pilot will challenge five of your best pilots and aircrew to a game of cat and mouse.”

“You can’t be serious?” she sneered incredulously.

The pilots and crew had quietened down as they watched the exchange, somewhat voyeuristically.

“If my pilot beats your pilots, then will you all agree to extend us the courtesy of working with us, and listening to what we have to say?”

Wing Commander Toksvig glanced at her flight personnel, then looked back at King. “You have yourself a deal,” she replied. “And when your pilot fails, then you can both clear off and stop wasting the RAF’s time on secret agent tosh, but only after you’ve put five hundred pounds behind the bar in the officers’ club…”

The jeers sounded again along with a stamping of feet. King thought it a display of privilege. Private schools, universities and officer training. He had never gelled with the like. He held out his hand. “Deal,” he said. “Now, show us to our aircraft…”

Chapter Eleven

The Scottish Highlands

Luger stripped and tossed his orange boiler suit into the laundry bin. He collected a towel and a clean suit, the guard watching him the entire time. Beatrice had instructed that the rest of the inmates remain in confinement, with only Luger and Igor Reznikov taken out for ablutions and food between interviews and confinement to their cells. The guards simply carried out the governor’s orders, and had no idea that Luger was a plant. Luger saw the Russian in the showers and hesitated in the doorway just long enough for the guard to shove him inside. He resisted again and caught a baton in the small of his back, sending him sprawling to his knees as both the other guard and Reznikov watched. Painful, but necessary to maintain the charade.

Luger clambered up and stepped into the shower spray, two showerheads down from Igor Reznikov. He let the cool spray ease his bruises, still cursing both Ramsay and Big Dave for the beating. He just hoped the big Fijian’s balls still ached. He soaped all over, washing his hair with the bar of soap as there was nothing else on offer. Reznikov stepped out and towelled himself dry. The water ran out on Luger, and he left the showers with soap still dripping off him, then ran a sink and cupped handfuls of cold water and finished rinsing, much to the amusement of the guards. He caught the Russian staring at him and said, “What the fuck are you looking at?” his tone gruff and at odds with his usual well-spoken English with no regional accent.

“Nothing…” Reznikov replied.

“Are you saying I’m nothing…?”

“No, I…”

Luger shook his head and scowled. “Forget it…” he used a large fold of paper towel and cold water on his black and blue and swollen eye.

“What happened to you?”

Luger glanced at the guards, but they were sharing a joke in the doorway of the shower block, apparently uninterested in the two prisoners. “Questioning…”

“I didn’t think they took it to physical levels,” Reznikov said, his tone sounding unconfident.

“Give it time…”

The Russian pulled on a clean orange jumpsuit and stood on the towel to dry his feet. “How long have you been here?”

“What’s it fucking to you?” Luger glared at him. “Are you a fucking plant?” he asked, walking towards him aggressively, as naked as the day he was born. “Is that it?” he raged. “You show up here without a single fucking bruise and start questioning me…!?” Igor Reznikov took a step backwards. “You’ll have to try harder than that, son!”

The guards bustled in and beat Luger several times with their batons, sending him sprawling to the wet floor where he curled into a ball and covered his head and face with his hands. Another guard rushed in and pulled the Russian out of the shower block and out into the corridor. Luger was manhandled naked past him, each guard expertly holding a twisted arm which forced him to dip his torso and head. The last thing Reznikov saw was him being thrown into his cell and the metal door slamming closed.

Luger picked himself off the hard concrete floor and stood unsteadily. The beating had left him feeling no worse than an afternoon on the rugby pitch in his schooldays, but the beating handed out to him from Big Dave had left everywhere feeling sore and tender. He wondered whether he had overplayed it, but the Russian had seemed genuinely taken aback at his response, and by accusing him of what he himself was actually doing, he hoped he had headed off the man having any such thoughts. He had never been one for profanity. It had been frowned upon by his parents and beaten out of him at boarding school. But he had served in the Royal Navy, so he wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet. He just never found a need for it. Luger was pragmatic. When the swearing and outbursts were over, the problem or situation still needed addressing, so he found the practice a waste of time. He was, though, utterly convinced that Reznikov had been taken in by his performance.

The door opened and Beatrice stood in the doorway. She was holding a folded orange boiler suit, and she was in no hurry to avert her eyes. Luger didn’t know why, but he did not shirk or give in to his vulnerability. He simply walked over to her and held out his hand for the suit. Beatrice eventually looked up at him, her face flushed and a little breathless as she spoke, “That was very good… the performance in the showers, that is…”

Luger stepped into the suit and shrugged as he zipped it up. “We need more time alone.”

“We do…?”

“Reznikov and me,” Luger said dismissively.

“Oh, of course…” she replied. “I’ll see that the guards know about you.”

“No, don’t. It all needs to look convincing.” He looked past her at the doorway. “How is his interrogation progressing?”

“We’ve worn him down, deprived him of sleep, but he’s holding out.”

“He’s got food and the freedom to walk around.” Luger paused. “It doesn’t seem all that tough in here.” He shrugged. “Despite the guards’ willingness to give me a beating…”

“Ramsay was adamant that he didn’t want another Guantanamo Bay up here.” Beatrice shrugged. “I have a Master’s in psychology. I know a thing or two about human behaviour, but there has to be some stick along with the carrot.”

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs,” Luger commented flatly.

“No,” she replied. “But I may have an idea…

Chapter Twelve

Oxfordshire

“You’ve over-sold me.”

“Bullshit.”

“I guess that’s praise?”

“You’ve always said that you’re the best,” King said as he climbed into his seat. “I just move the joystick around and the gun locks on, right?”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Flymo replied. “You spot for me, and I’ll do the rest.”

King shrugged as he wriggled into the seat, feeling too broad for the tiny cockpit. “Well, it’s time to shit or get off the pot now sunshine. If you really are the best, then you’re going to prove it in the next ten minutes…”

Flymo closed the hatch and buckled up. “Oh, I am the best,” he said confidently. “All these RAF boys fly to the rules of the command, and the rules dictated in the operating manual.”

King clipped in, already feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic. The flight suit was on the snug side, too. He had been concentrating on his upper body strength in recent months, taking the opportunity to do press-ups in periods of inactivity, sometimes up to five-hundred a day, and his chest and biceps were straining at the fabric. “And you threw away the rulebook?”

“Years ago. That’s why I never made it to officer.” He paused. “And because I had too much common sense…”

The engines fired and the rotor blades started to turn. Either side of them, the other Boeing AH-64 Apache gunships all simultaneously fired into life, rotor pitch climbing in a low whine, the turbo engines building in both revs and noise. Even with their headsets on, the noise was intense. Ahead of them, the runway stretched out into the distance. As was common procedure, a rolling start would be performed to save fuel.

“Visitors, this is tower control. Your five minutes start now…”

“Roger that…” Flymo responded.

King braced himself, but nothing happened. “Are we going?”

“Patience…” Flymo replied, but other than the crescendo of revs, the helicopter did not budge.

“Visitors, this is tower control. The rules of engagement state that you have a five-minute head start. The clock is ticking…”

Flymo eased out and crawled fifty-feet forwards, then held on the brakes.

“Visitors, this is tower control. Do you have a malfunction?”

Flymo did not respond. Instead, he eased on the collective and the aircraft left the ground in a hover but maintained just a foot of clearance. The display showed the aircraft’s attitude as utterly stable, despite the constant micro adjustments that Flymo was making with the stick, collective and pedals. Fixed to the display console a standard spirit level confirmed that the bubble was dead centre and unmoving. “Count us down, King,” Flymo said.

King checked his watch. Nothing fancy or technical, he had merely set the arrow of the bezel on the vintage Rolex to the minute hand when their five minutes had begun. “One minute forty,” King told him. There was no movement, no dip or lift in their height. Just a foot of air between the wheels and the tarmac. “One-minute…” King studied the weapons system in front of him. He touched the joystick and the 30mm chain gun moved with a sharp electrical whine.

“Leave that to me,” Flymo said. “We just need lock-on. Just spot for me…”

King shrugged. “Twenty-seconds…”

Flymo silently mouthed the seconds as he counted. At one second remaining, he stamped on the left pedal and the aircraft rotated one-hundred-and-eight degrees and the weapon system locked onto one of the aircraft. The Apache was equipped with the Arrowhead integrated targeting and night vision system developed by Lockheed Martin, using second-generation long-wave forward looking infrared sensors with three fields of view, a charge-coupled device TV camera, dual field-of-view, electronic zoom, target tracker and auto-boresight. The target helicopter was out of the game before the pilot even left the ground. Left and right of the targeted aircraft, the other helicopters shot towards them, taxiing forwards. Flymo was already climbing and as he flew over the technically stricken aircraft, they caught turbulence from the heat rising from where the five helicopters had sat with their engines heating. The aircraft rose erratically, but once they had cleared the disrupted air, Flymo dipped the nose and with all his limbs working at once, the helicopter spun, hanging vertically in the air. King reached out with both hands to brace, the blood surging in his ears and his stomach leaping as he stared at the ground a hundred feet below them. Just as rapidly as the nose had dipped, it levelled up and Flymo achieved another lock-on, the signal ringing in King’s ears. They were climbing now, every ounce of torque, every rev the engines could muster. Various alarms were sounding, but Flymo ignored them all. He had always reckoned on engineering tolerances of twenty percent leeway. Engineers liked to cover themselves that way, and the RAF would have trained its pilots to fly by the book. Flymo had tested the capabilities of what was recorded on paper and what he was willing to take the risk. He had flown the SAS and SBS on countless covert missions, and he had put aircraft through their paces in civilian life after the army. His work with King and the team had seen him use whatever helicopter available to hand, even customising them for the mission. Those missions by their very nature had pushed both pilot and craft beyond expected limits.

The starboard roll was so acute and under such speed that the fuselage creaked under protest. King shouted that there was an aircraft at eleven o’clock, five-hundred metres, but Flymo was already on it. He had the speed and the altitude and was gaining quickly. His sighting system was close to locking when the target aircraft banked hard to port and climbed. Instead of following the climb Flymo yanked the stick to starboard, rotated the tail with the right pedal and brought the nose high. The target aircraft flew belly up into his sights and target three was out of play. He instantly flew low and fast across the end of the runway and out into the Oxfordshire countryside. His radar was tracking the two helicopters behind him, and he was close to being painted with their targeting lasers when he banked and flew through the length of a deep valley with grass and wooded sides. At a bank of trees, Flymo spun the aircraft around and broke into a hover, increasing his height until the Arrowhead Targeting System periscope situated on top of the rotor’s central Jesus Mount took in the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view, with the blades and fuselage of the helicopter remaining out of sight.

The two remaining aircraft were less than a mile away, with less than a mile between them. Flymo switched from guns to missiles. The wing pods housed various missile systems including laser-guided Hellfire missiles designed to be deployed against enemy tanks and 70mm Hydra rockets for ground threats, but he would be selecting Stinger missiles for air-to-air combat, even though the pods were unarmed, the weapon selection made all the difference with the sighting system. The helmets they both wore were the key to the Apache’s capability. Known as the Integrated Helmet and Display Sighting System (IHADSS), the targeting system played out in front of their eyes. King noted that wherever he looked, the chain gun followed instantly.

Flymo sighted towards the aircraft to his right but left the sights marginally off target to avoid the enemy helicopter’s defence and countermeasure systems sounding the alarm. In one smooth motion, the Apache rose up above the trees and Flymo locked on and fired two Stingers. He dipped back down, bugged out sideways and accelerated back down the valley towards the base. As he reached the end of the valley, he was close to the maximum speed of one-hundred-and-ninety miles-per-hour, the British AgustaWestland WAH-64D version being assembled in Britain with Rolls Royce engines making it more power than the United States Boeing units. When Flymo cleared the valley, he flew directly underneath the remaining helicopter and deployed countermeasures in the form of flares, leaving phosphorus explosions behind him as he made back to Base.

“He’s on our tail, Flymo!” King shouted, turning in his seat but also seeing the same display in front of his eyes as Flymo could. The rapid motion and multiple sights to concentrate on made King feel sick to his stomach, compounded further by the sheer speed and aggressive banking that Flymo put the aircraft through.

“Tell me something I don’t know!” Flymo hollered back at him. An alarm sounded momentarily as the RAF pilot managed a partial lock-on. “Hang on!” The helicopter climbed rapidly, then in a flurry of limbs he worked the collective, stick and pedals and maintaining their height, the tail swung around, switching their view one-eighty and they started to dive and levelled flying straight towards the attacking helicopter. Flymo screamed, “Hell yeah!” and King let go a string of expletives. The RAF pilot banked right and Flymo flew straight on his path. “Chicken!” he screamed and laughed, then banked left and flew over the end of the base.

They were low now. Just skimming the grass to the side of the runway. King was turning in his seat, cursing the tightness of the jumpsuit and the harness. He tried to concentrate on the various images in his visor, one of them being the pursuing helicopter. The disorientation was simply too much, and he braced back in his seat, a passenger with nothing to add to the situation. The deceleration and change in direction felt like the worst of rollercoasters to King, and there was a blur as the ground came sideways at them, and then the hangar and before King could emit a silent scream, they were under the roof of the hangar with just two-feet of air between their wheels and the concrete. Flymo engaged guns and the 30mm chain gun whirled into life as they powered back out of the hangar, personnel scattering in all directions as the Apache hovered in the doorway and tools, chairs and tables blew to the edges of the building in the rotor wash. The final Apache WAH-64D flew across the runway, fifty feet from the ground and directly into Flymo’s sights. A simulated hundred-round burst coincided with the target lock-on tone, and Flymo calmly eased out of the hangar and returned to the lay-up at the start of the runway. The other five helicopters were either already landed, or descending vertically.

“That’s the shit, right there!” King unbuckled his harness as Flymo shut down the engines and rotors and kept on the controls to prevent the aircraft from tipping. “Five nil, on an away match!”

“I’m not sure it’s going to go down that well…” Flymo replied, watching the MPs arriving in Land Rover one-tens and one-thirties. The twenty-year-old vehicles were resplendent in highly polished blue with RAF roundels on the rear panels. “This looks quite official…”

Wing Commander Toksvig strode over from one of the Land Rovers then paused and turned to the MPs. She pointed to the rest of the helicopters and the MPs jogged over and headed off several pilots and flight crew who were looking far from pleased with how the ‘training exercise’ had gone. King clambered out with a little less agility than Flymo, who found the size of the cockpit and the exit second nature.

“You’re not skilled!” she yelled at Flymo. “You’re bloody certifiable!”

“But he bested your pilots,” King said measuredly. “So, by the terms of the bet, you owe us your time and attention. Not to mention your open-mindedness.”

“I’m having you escorted off the base forthwith,” she glowered at him.

“You agreed to listen,” said King. “We are faced with intelligence of a very real threat from a technological leap in aeronautic advancement. We need to know how viable the threat is, and how best to fly it…” Wing Commander Toksvig held up her hand, and uncharacteristically for King, he stopped mid-sentence. The woman’s natural air of authority had that effect on him, and he could see why she had attained such a senior rank in a male-dominated world.

“If the intelligence is correct, then we will have been left far behind,” she said, then turned to face Flymo. “And if there is a pilot who is capable of flying it, then I am already looking at him.”

The MPs settled down the pilots and Wing Commander Toksvig headed over to placate them. Meanwhile, two MPs drove both King and Flymo back to the building to change. They were then driven to the main entrance and taken through security.

“That went well,” Flymo commented flatly.

King opened the boot of the 1964 Jaguar E-Type series 1 coupe and tossed his bag inside. The car was finished in lustrous British racing green with biscuit leather interior, and glistening chrome accents. “If you think that went bad, then wait until we have to explain the hire car…”

“We?” Flymo threw his bag beside King’s and closed the boot lid. “You insisted on hiring this thing!”

Chapter Thirteen

London

The river was busy with tourist boats and dredgers. It was a spring tide, and the Thames Barrier was monitoring the high tide before closing to prevent flooding. The tidelines were high, and the waters seemed gentle, but the whirlpools were plenty as the oncoming tide fought over the river’s flow. The river mirrored Ramsay’s mood, as he sat close to the window, his back to his office desk as he watched the river.

“There’s no excuse, Alex,” said Caroline. “Two weeks into the job, and I have to deal with this?”

King said nothing as he sipped from his mug of tea. Mae, Ramsay’s personal assistant and a former MI5 operative, had brought in a tray with cups and saucers, but as usual, she had found a large mug for King and made his tea strong.

“You were meant to find out all you could from the Royal Navy,” said Ramsay. “I then had to come down to Cornwall to bail you both out… I mean, actually stealing an aircraft? What on earth were you thinking?”

“You want us to steal an aircraft from Northern Russia. The edge of Siberia. At the beginning of winter.” King paused. “A hostile nation and a hostile environment. A heavily guarded project, an aircraft that Flymo will likely have no affinity with, equipped with technology that the experts say doesn’t exist, and with the instruments in Russian Cyrillic. And you can’t see why I gave it a shot when I saw the opportunity?”

Ramsay shook his head. “And what the hell was all that about up in Oxfordshire?”

“Have the decency to turn around and face me, and you might get an answer…” said King.

“Alex!” Caroline exclaimed.

King said nothing, but eventually Ramsay spun around in his chair and wheeled himself over to his desk. “I got annoyed at how little respect their pilots and crew were giving Flymo. He was the only black face and the only one who didn’t go to some fancy pants university. He climbed the ranks, and they walked into their commission.” King paused. “And they couldn’t even dream of flying like he does.”

“Wing Commander Toksvig said that he was certifiable,” Caroline mused. “Having flown with him, I would agree.”

“But don’t you dare forget how many times he’s saved your skin with those same skills, and certifiable tendencies…” King said coldly.

“Alex…!” Caroline looked bemused. “I didn’t say that; I just meant that he pushes the envelope possibly a bit too much. One day, his luck will run out.”

“That goes for all of us,” King replied tersely.

Ramsay shook his head. “Alright. So, what’s done is done. I would send you both to Middle Wallop and the home of the Army Aviation Centre, but I imagine all you’ll achieve is alienating the Army Air Corps as well as the Royal Navy and the RAF and will have completed the set.”

King shrugged. He’d made his point and that would be an end to it. “Stirling Lines,” he said. “We’re going to need some support on this, and the Special Air Service are the obvious choice. We can use the Dauphins, perhaps borrow an Apache, and I know the SAS have a Russian Mil that was shipped back from Afghanistan,” he said of the Mil Mi-24 gunship, Russia’s enormous helicopter that could be armed with enough ordinance for a small army. The Mil-24 could carry troops as well as battle against tanks and enemy helicopters. “Flymo is going to need time on a Russian aircraft.”

“Agreed,” Ramsay replied. “They also have an Mi-twenty-eight, the two seat Russian gunship that is the direct competition to Apache.” He paused. “It was secretly purchased from the Ugandan Airforce in an MI6 operation using a UK farm machinery import-export firm.”

“Which is why we’ve already sent Flymo on ahead of you,” said Caroline.

“We?”

“Yes,” she replied, her stare as icy as his own. “He is enrolled in a crash course in Russian while he’s there, as well as flying multiple sorties a day. Like you suggested, in a Russian aircraft. You will join him, where you will hand pick a team and plan how to perform a reconnaissance of this project, and ultimately steal the Eagle’s Talon.” Caroline handed King an envelope. “Your orders are inside, but that envelope doesn’t leave the building.”

King stared at her as he put down his mug and took the envelope from her clasp. “Where are the others?”

“Closed cell,” Ramsay said matter-of-factly. “Need to know.”

“I need to know,” King replied tersely.

“You have your orders,” said Caroline.

King tossed the envelope onto Ramsay’s desk. “If I’m planning to steal a top secret, new-age piece of military hardware from a superpower, then I need to fucking know…” He stood up and walked to the door. “I’m going to Stirling Lines. Have an updated file waiting for me or get someone else to steal your damned chopper.” He opened the heavy oak door and left without looking back.

“Go after him,” Ramsay sighed heavily.

“But…”

“But we can’t do this without him…”

Caroline muttered a profanity under her breath and followed. Mae looked up from her desk but turned her attention back to her typing. She had been around long enough to know when to get involved and when to keep her counsel. Caroline took the stairs, passing the tech firm and accountants that occupied the ground floor. Ramsay had hidden his department in plain sight, occupying the top three floors of the converted Georgian mill. She caught up with King sitting astride his 900cc Triumph Scrambler.

“What the hell was all that about?” she asked, catching hold of his shoulder.

“I need to know,” he replied. “I need to know the exit strategy, who is doing what…”

“It’s about security. You should know that.”

King shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“Ramsay’s a brilliant strategist. You should have faith in him.”

“I do…”

Caroline sighed and hugged him. King felt her warmth, her breath on his neck. He smelled the faint aroma of roses on her perfume. It felt good and he hugged her back. “It was never going to be easy,” she said. “Me being your boss…”

King shoved her aside playfully. “I suppose not.”

“Is that what this behaviour was?”

“What behaviour?”

“Oh, I don’t know…utter petulance and recklessness! I mean, stealing a helicopter from a naval base, destroying our relationship with the RAF, and a few pilots’ egos on top.” She paused. “And come on… Neil told you to hire a car. He meant a KIA or a Vauxhall from Hertz for fifty quid, not a bloody vintage Jaguar E-Type for a thousand!”

King looked down the street. “I suppose I rebelled a bit,” he conceded.

“Is it out of your system now?” she chided. “Or do you need disciplining?” she said playfully.

“I’m going to Hereford,” he said.

“Ok. But don’t pull any of that crap up there. Those guys play rough.”

“So do I.” King started the motorcycle and slipped on his open-faced helmet. The machine rumbled steadily in a baritone note. “You and Ramsay should look at Igor Reznikov again.”

“Why?”

“What has Luger discovered?”

She looked pensive, then glanced over her shoulder before whispering, “Nothing yet.”

“The softly, softly thing is going to get us nowhere.”

“There is more than one way to skin a cat.”

“Well, that’s the saying. I’ve never skinned a cat. But I have skinned a few rabbits. And you either work from one end to the other and gently work the blade between the skin and the flesh, or you slice across the back, dig your fingers in with both hands and grab the skin, then rip it in two. One way is precision and time-consuming, and the other is violent and quick. But you still get the rabbit carcass in one piece. The pelt on the other hand, well that’s ruined. Reznikov is the skin, the pelt. The information is the rabbit carcass. But all we should care about is the information.”

“That’s quite a brutal image to go along with that metaphor…”

“I brought Reznikov in when I could have killed him. I thought it was the right thing to do… considering the bargaining chip he threw down. But the man is holding out the location for a reason. He has nothing else to bargain with.” King paused. “So, I think he is merely buying time.”

“That’s natural,” Caroline replied. “He’s buying time because he knows that he is valueless and vulnerable once we have what we want from him.”

“Perhaps,” said King. “Unless it’s for another reason entirely.”

“Like what?”

“To buy the project time. Which means one of two things. Either the project is almost complete and ready to deploy…”

Caroline nodded. “Or?”

“Or the Russians are setting a trap for us to walk into...”

Chapter Fourteen

Port of Tokyo, Japan

She was a feeder ship capable of carrying eight-hundred, twenty-foot shipping containers. Panamanian registered, she operated throughout the South China Seas, the Sea of Japan and Sea of Okhotsk. Powered by two MAN two-stroke low rpm diesels, each engine drove its own propeller. Each engine had eight cylinders with an 800 mm bore and the engines had been specifically designed to deliver their maximum efficiency at 73 rpm. Their combined power of 59,000 kw allowed the mid-sized container ship to cruise, fully loaded, at 16 knots. The engines worked day and night for weeks on end.

Big Dave stepped off the pilot boat and pulled himself up the rope ladder. The pilot pulled out a short distance and waited until he was over the guardrail, then powered back to port. The Rising Sun had been moored for three weeks following critical rudder and propeller repairs that had led to the company being unable to fulfil their shipping commitments and enter into receivership. The ship now belonged to Ramsay’s department purchased under a shell company. When they were finished with it, Mae was sure from the research that she had done, that a marine broker could turn a tidy profit and use the funds for future endeavours, putting their budget back in the black. The other primary reason that this ship had been chosen was because it had already filed a permit to sail the Northern Sea Route over the roof of the world, between Russia and the North Pole, and those permits had to be filed four months in advance of sailing.

The captain met Big Dave on the deck. He was a South African named Kurt Stellenbosch and in a rare case for the big Fijian, matched him for size in every way. Big Dave couldn’t help feeling a little vulnerable. It didn’t happen often. He wouldn’t choose to fight a man like King unless his life depended on it. There was something primal about the man, despite Big Dave having four inches on him in height and four stone in weight. He had come up against big men before, but many did not have the animalistic, predatory instinct about them that made them a threat. That killer instinct. But the South African looked like a tough guy to go along with his six-four, seventeen or eighteen stone frame. The man’s grip was strong, too. Big Dave met the man’s eye, and the South African smiled warmly which put him at ease.

“Mr Lomu, I presume…”

“Captain Stellenbosch.”

“Call me Kurt.”

Big Dave nodded. Asking a man the same size as him to call him Big Dave seemed somewhat ridiculous, so he just said, “Davinder or Lomu, but just drop the mister.”

“Your company has saved our skins,” said Kurt. “The key members of the crew have remained and are eager to get on with the job. Although it is most irregular to sail so far without a cargo. We are not going to make you money if we leave port without a load. Our freight commitment was scuppered the moment the accountants pulled the plug.”

“You can let my directors worry about that,” replied Big Dave.

The South African looked him in the eye and said, “There are companies that will jump at the chance of loading freight. With the sanctions on Russia in place, we would be guaranteed an easy ride with customs. We could earn the company some good operating capital.” He paused. “And an empty freighter only ever attracts unwanted interest…”

Big Dave was good at reading people, but he couldn’t read the South African. Did he suspect illicit activities? It wasn’t a conversation that he wanted right now. He nodded and said, “I’ll make a call. What type of freight do you suggest?”

Stellenbosch shrugged. “We’re in Japan, so tech would be the safe bet. Smartphones, tablets and laptops. If I make some calls, then one of the local distributers will likely bite our hands off for an under-the-radar load. There are plenty of Russian companies who will buy sight unseen. They have depots in most major port towns in the Arctic Ocean. The deal will be done before we leave, then we get a fee and all we have to do is get the freight there in the desired time window.” He paused. “It will also go a long way to stop arousing suspicion.”

“Nothing suspicious,” Big Dave told him. “My employers just want the ship in South Hampton for a refit and the Northern Sea Route saves thousands of miles and a lot of time.”

“Right…”

“Right,” Big Dave replied, shutting the man down. “I’ll take a look at my cabin now,” he said.

The South African smiled. “Well don’t get too excited. It isn’t much, but at least you’re not sharing.”

Big Dave followed the man through the corridors which had metal doors separating sections, with wheel locking mechanisms that operated eight locks keeping the doors watertight in the event of the hull being ruptured. There were fire extinguishers and fire axes in every corridor, although he wondered how effective a fire axe would be when everything seemed to be constructed from steel. He looked around the room when the captain left him alone. Stellenbosch had been right. It really wasn’t much. Eight by six feet and Lomu had to duck to stop his head from scraping the ceiling. Unlike the rest of the ship, which seemed to be on its hundredth coat of white metallic paint, the cabin had been clad in plywood with a thin, hard-wearing grey carpet. A single bed, thin mattress and a tiny chest of drawers provided all the creature comforts. It was going to be a long trip, and he wondered how people did this for weeks or months at a time.

Captain Stellenbosch had pointed out the toilets, showers and recreation room on their way down. The ‘rec room’ had a large-screen TV, comfortable but well-worn sofas and chairs and tables with piles of magazines stacked on them like a doctor’s waiting room. A bookshelf hosted several well-leafed paperbacks, and there was an old PlayStation plugged into the television. Big Dave had certainly seen worse recreation rooms. Meals were served next door in the dining room, and there were free vending machines for late night drinks and snacks.

The company’s receivership meant that many of the crew had jumped ship, but there were ten men in all. Stellenbosch, a first mate, bosun, two engineers, four deck crew and a chef. Five other crew members had filled various roles, so many of the positions would be overworked. Big Dave opened the map and spread it on the bed beside him. Two weeks was the goal. Typically skirting Northern Russia in the Arctic Ocean was forty-percent quicker than going through the Suez Canal, and this year it had been a warm start to the late summer/early autumn. That gave King two weeks to find and steal the Eagle’s Talon. All Big Dave could do was hope that it was enough and pray that they could get into Norwegian waters before the Russians caught up with them.

Chapter Fifteen

Stirling Lines, Herefordshire

King had been here a dozen times, perhaps even more. And yet he knew nobody, had no connections with the home of the world’s premier Special Forces. He had first stepped foot on the base over fifteen years ago when he was with MI6. His old mentor – the tough alcoholic Scotsman Peter Stewart – had sent King to train with the best. Not in CQB – close quarter battle - or survival skills, nor the anti-terrorism gymnastics of fast roping and explosive entry. Stewart and his instructors handled the combat and killing aspects of their trade. No, King was sent merely to stay sharp in the physical and mental selection process. He was taken to the limits and had completed every stage, but not in one long process that whittled out the soldiers not up to the task, but in and out in a week or two. The quiet, older recruit who was merely here one minute and gone the next. That had been years ago now, and he suspected that most of the NCOs and directing staff who viewed him with both suspicion and resentment were long gone. Pensioned off and running bars or campsites by now or plying their trade in the world’s hell-holes for a few hundred pounds a day with no pension plan, or airstrikes on the end of a radio.

King showed the pass on his phone to the guards on the gates and drove over to the admin block, which was still thankfully in the same place. There were plenty of personnel running in shorts and T-shirts along the footpaths. Once a candidate made it through selection and into ‘the regiment’ there were no more PT drills, each soldier being responsible for their own physical fitness. King parked his twenty-year-old Land Rover Defender in the spot for someone called Major J. Jones and left the keys in the ignition. If the major needed the parking space so badly, then he could shift the Defender himself. He took out his leather travel bag – scuffed and worn over the years, the bag having travelled almost as many miles as King had – and walked to the admin and reception block.

“Secret squirrel?” the woman said, barely looking up from her desk. King shrugged in reply. The army was always wary of intelligence officers, and the SAS were no different despite working with them more than most. “Sign in on the iPad, please.” She waited for King to check himself in then said. “Captain Ashcroft will see you in the office marked ‘D-Troop’ at the end of the corridor,” she told him. “Tea or coffee?”

“Tea, please,” King replied. “White, one sugar, thanks.” He didn’t wait for her to reply, nor did he feel that he should hang around for his beverage. She knew where he would be. He passed various offices and briefing rooms – some with doors open and people studying data and drinking tea and coffee, others with the doors shut and a red lightbulb illuminated above the door. These were need-to-know briefings and could be anything from procuring new equipment and studying test reports, or there could be men discussing the next deployment or operation. King found the room marked ‘D-Troop’ and he knocked loudly twice, then opened the door.

Captain Ashcroft was in his late twenties or early thirties and had the type of face that King found himself wanting to punch. A cocky grin, an easy smile and a propensity to raise an eyebrow. The eyebrow raised as King walked in, raised again when he told them he was their contact from MI5 and again, when he turned back to the men to feign mock astonishment. The man probably thought that he was supremely confident, but to King he exuded arrogance. King had seen the type before. He had cleared up the mess that these men made in the field, and he was tired of it. Ashcroft was the sort of officer that the enlisted men called a ‘Rupert’, and his old mentor had always used it in a derogatory way. Stewart had reached the rank of Captain in the Parachute Regiment, but he had done so by climbing the ranks from a seventeen-year-old private. That did not make an officer a ‘Rupert’, but university, trust funds and joining as a 2nd Lieutenant straight from Sandhurst did.

King nodded a greeting to Flymo, who was looking over the manual for the Dauphin Mk2 helicopter. Captain Ashcroft told him to take a seat.

“Now that everyone’s finally here…” he said, raising an eyebrow at King. “We will commence the briefing…”

The woman from the front desk appeared with King’s mug of tea. He had told her how he liked it, so it was a done deal. No tray with sugar or little jugs of milk. She handed it to King, who was still standing. “Thanks,” he said to her. He sipped some, slurping because it was boiling hot. “Great, thanks Captain.” He paused. “Is this my team?” he asked, looking at the eight men who were lounging in the chairs.

“My team,” Captain Ashcroft corrected him.

“Not so much,” said King. “This is an MI5 operation from the top down. I need an eight-man team. A sniper, a medic, a demolition specialist and two SAW operators. The other three swinging dicks will be with me in the raid. Shorts, longs, knives and grenades. In and out like a lizard’s tongue.”

“But…”

“No buts,” King interrupted him. “The man with the highest rank or longest service will be my two I/C.” He paused. “I don’t need an officer, so you can sit this one out and catch up on some paperwork, or whatever it is you do…”

The eight men tried to suppress their grins, but it was too late. Captain Ashcroft had seen them, and he had lost all face. His cheeks were flush, his hands trembling minutely. King felt a little sorry for him, but he had taken an SAS captain on a mission to Russia before, and it hadn’t ended well. King was going to be in command of this mission, and nobody was going to double-guess him.

“We’ll see,” said Captain Ashcroft.

King shrugged. “Well, unless you have an audience with the head of my department and the Prime Minister, then I wouldn’t bother wasting your time or anybody else’s.”

The captain stared at King, but commonsense got the best of him and he stormed out without looking back, the door slamming and echoing around the room. King waited until the man’s boot treads faded down the corridor. “I don’t know whether you men have volunteered or been ordered to be here, but this is likely to be your career mission,” he said, looking at each man in turn. “If it succeeds, then you’ll probably never get close to this again…”

“And if it fails?” a wiry-looking man in his early thirties asked bruskly.

“A battlefield death, if you’re lucky,” King replied. “Torture, interrogation and a painful death if you’re not.”

The man grinned. “Great. Just so as we’re clear on that.”

“Having second thoughts?” asked King.

“No.”

“We know Flymo well,” said a slim, unassuming-looking man sporting a coiffured moustache. King found the man impossible to age, but going from Flymo’s history in 658 Squadron – the elite pilots from the Army Air Corps who flew the toughest missions – he would have put him at thirty. “He says you’re the real deal. Been there, done that. Is that right?”

King shrugged. “I’ve seen some shit, and I’m still here,” he said. “But each operation is unique, and past successes don’t mean anything when the bullets start flying.”

“That’s good enough for me,” the man replied. “I’m Stan, this is Brian…” he pointed at the wiry man beside him. “Taff because he’s Scottish, Jock because he’s Welsh…” he pointed to two rough looking men sat beside the radiator.

“Jock is Scottish…” King said, then rolled his eyes. Nicknames were given; never taken. The two men would probably have hated being mixed up colloquially, but that’s just how it worked.

“Shorty and lofty…” a tiny man with blond hair said. “Want to guess which of us is which?”

“No, I think I’ve got it,” King replied. “He looked up as the door opened and Captain Ashcroft entered, followed by a man whose rank King did not recognise. “Oh, here we go…” King commented flatly. The men all stood to attention, a rare occurrence in the SAS where senior rank was seldom acknowledged.

“Are you King?” the man asked abruptly. King nodded but said nothing. Nothing was always better than something in these situations. “I’m Major-General LeBeouf, commander of the Special Air Service. Captain Ashcroft said that you aren’t playing nice in the sandpit. I’m here to tell you that you either get on or get off my base.” He paused, frowning at King. “I recognise you, don’t I?”

“I doubt it,” replied King. He wasn’t a soldier. Never had been. He didn’t jump and stand to attention for anyone.

“You came in and out of here for a while. Years ago. One of Peter Stewart’s lot, weren’t you?” King said nothing, but LeBeouf nodded sagely. “I was a Lieutenant-Colonel back then.”

“Did I piss you off, too?”

“No. But any colleague of Peter Stewart’s is alright in my book. He served here for years. Came through from the Paras, like most of the lads do. Kicked the shit out of me on my selection, then built me up. Twenty-five years ago, when I was a captain, and he was on the directing staff. I RTU’d for twelve years then was invited back as Lieutenant-Colonel to support the base commander.” He turned to Ashcroft and said, “Play nice, Captain. You may even learn a thing or two…”

Chapter Sixteen

Kanin Peninsula, Russia

Colonel Niko Zukovsky surveyed the killing ground. He had hoped that this day would come. To lure the British and MI5 into certain death. The man named King who had killed his brother and imprisoned their father, muddied their names in the presidio, called into question both their loyalty and integrity. Niko Zukovsky had been a captain in the GRU when his brother Dimitri had been killed on an operation alongside an ISIS terror cell in Britain. His father, Vladamir had been captured on the island of Mallorca by the same agent, taken by the Americans and snatched back by the British. Later, the MI5 agent had forced his father to accompany him on a mission on Russian soil. That mission had cost his father his life. Drawn back to Russia with equal measures of both stick and carrot, Niko did not need the FSB to tell him what had happened. He knew that his father had been executed when he was of no further use to them. The actions of that same MI5 agent had cast a shadow on their names. They had been acting for the greater good, and even though they were now viewed as traitors by the Russian president, the two men had been heroes to many within the government and intelligence agencies.

Niko Zukovsky watched the ‘bait’ of their operation hovering above the apron. The aircraft was a thing of beauty. Sleek, vast and entirely terrifying. The thundering rotor blades, capable of a unique trim and tilt function that enhanced its manoeuvrability also used torque vectoring and opposing magnetic force to enable silent running. Zukovsky had watched the incredible skill of the project pilots as they had tested the aircraft against the Russian Mil 24 and 28, the American Cobra and Apache gunships purchased from the Iraqis and Afghan Taliban, the Chinese Z-21 and the Iranian Toufan II, and all had been destroyed within seconds during battle simulation. Eagle’s Talon could fly faster and higher and had more manoeuvrability. It was quieter, and its advanced weapon sighting system could identify and prioritise a hundred targets at once. The newly designed 63mm cannons were more powerful than its rivals, and there were two of them. There were quad-mounted 8mm gatling guns with a range of just over one-thousand metres for close attack, and the weapon pods could hold 30% more rocket and missile ordinance than its nearest competition. No other aircraft was equipped with multiple AI drone pods, either. The concept was both impressive and terrifying. Zukovsky would never want to be on the wrong side of such a piece of technological military hardware. Its presence on the battlefield would be felt for decades to come. Once Russia had scored a political victory of Britain and its intelligence services, she would reign victorious over Ukraine. And then it would be Georgia’s turn. If they could not install a sympathetic and loyal government, then they would take her back by force and Eagle’s Talon would be the spearpoint of that operation. Drones had redefined the way war was fought. Simple and inexpensive hobby drones with release clamps and mortar shells dropped onto Russian soldiers or vehicles had wreaked havoc on Russia’s campaign, and with the Eagle’s Talon capable of dropping hundreds of AI programmed drones with integrated explosive charges, all targeting Ukrainian soldiers, they would reverse the advantage.

The GRU colonel studied the formation of the towers and the sandbagged machinegun posts on the ground. The armaments covered every arc of fire, every direction. Approaching the base would be suicidal, and yet, they would let them in to slaughter and capture and parade in front of the world’s media. He had deployed infrared scopes on the 12.7mm machineguns, and the Spetsnaz troops all carried the more technically advanced AK-203 assault rifle chambered in 7.62x39mm with optics mounted. The tough-looking men also carried their trademark folding entrenching tools, sharpened to a razor’s edge. They had trained to fight with them and could throw them as accurately as an axe. They were also armed with MP-443 9mm pistols and Stinger fighting knives with a 12g CO2 capsule housed in the handle and activated by a thumb button. The blade had a hole travelling through it from base to tip and the result upon activation was an explosive eruption inside the enemy’s body cavity. The knife had been designed to protect divers from sharks and could scramble and pulverise everything inside a human.

Close to the coastal fishing village of Shoyna, the base was as remote as it could get. The Kanin Peninsula in northern Nenets Autonomous Okrug, was a finger of land that slipped into the Arctic Ocean. Fishermen hauled Alaskan King Crab famously bought from the Americans by Joseph Stalin as an easily harvested and plentiful food source. The species had taken over the waters with no commercial fishing permitted by other countries and had spread across the Northern Sea Route and even into Norwegian waters. The town itself had a population of three-hundred and thirty and had been founded in the 1930s by fishing families who named the settlement after the Shoyna River, which cut a swathe through the Kanin Peninsula, with beautiful, yet frigid sandy beaches at the mouth of the river. Surrounding the base were two perimeter fences, and each was four metres high and separated by a three-metre gap filled with anti-personnel mines. At the four points of the compass, surface to air missile systems were fed information by four individual satellite receivers. Every Russian aircraft was fitted with a transponder that emitted an electronic pulse that warned the surface to air missile system to friend or foe. There was just one way in and out of the base, and that was accessed by a single road that cut a swathe through miles of pine forest. The barracks was situated near the gates with an admin block that harked back to sixties Soviet Union and a celebration of utilitarian concrete and steel. In the centre of the base were the six hangars that housed Operatsiya Orlinyy kogot’. Inside, engineers, test-pilots and technicians toiled day and night to get the project ready before the harsh winter hit Ukraine, to give them the best opportunity for success. Colonel Zukovsky had warned his superiors about the need to take every opportunity to guarantee success within the project, and rushing the deadline would only cause problems, and therefore increase the chance of failure on the battlefield. However, the FSB were running the operation for its political and intelligence angle. The chess genius working with them was a supreme strategist and he had been adamant that the British would not attempt sabotage in the middle of the winter months. It had to be now, and other assets were in play to make this happen. Zukovsky shook his head as he surveyed his base. He did not condone using something as important as the Eagle’s Talon as bait, but his men were ready, and the British would not succeed. He would guard the project with his life.

Chapter Seventeen

The Scottish Highlands

“What time is it?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Igor Reznikov shrugged and went back to his curry. Luger did the same. It was thin and mild and flavourless, and the chicken was stringy. The rice was undercooked and wet, but the place wasn’t looking for Tripadvisor ratings.

“Well, do you know what day it is at least?”

“No.” Luger tossed his fork onto the half-finished slop on the paper plate. “How long have you been here?”

“How the hell should I know,” Reznikov mimicked Luger’s answer.

Luger nodded, pursing a thin smile. “Touché …”

“Four days, I guess…”

“A fellow enemy of the state,” Luger said, then bit into his apple. “What was your crime?”

“Innocent,” the Russian replied thinly. “You?”

“Very much guilty, I suppose. What they would call far right insurrection.”

“You don’t look like an extremist,” Reznikov commented.

“The internet thinks differently. That and the fact I started a protest that started a riot, that caused millions in damages sort of backs up the claims. But we need to make a stand, all these bloody migrants, the dilution of civilisation, the crime, sharia law… it’s beyond the thin end of the wedge…” Luger paused, he’d been practising this. “Cultural enrichment, they call it. Bullshit. All I know is that if you let in the Third World, then you become the Third World…”

“When were these riots?”

“After the killings of those children at the school holiday popstar workshop. A few posts on socials, it gathered momentum. Did the job though…”

“I heard about that,” the Russian nodded. “The killer was thought to be Muslim, but it turned out that he wasn’t.”

“Still a bloody foreigner, though… no offence… but the angry mob storming a local mosque and other towns doing the same was a good result.” Luger paused. Even though he had rehearsed this, it simply did not sound right leaving his lips. “But it seems we don’t have the freedom of speech any longer. I was arrested, no solicitor, no phone call. Nobody even knows I’m here.”

“In my country, freedom of speech has never existed,” Igor Reznikov replied. He coughed, rubbing his chest as if he had indigestion, then said, “We have done without a great many things.”

“And what country is that?”

The man grinned churlishly. “Russia, of course.”

“So, why are you here?”

The Russian smiled. “How many days have I been here?”

“How should I know?”

“I’m almost offended that they should think I’m so stupid.” He swallowed, seeming to find it an effort, then took a sip of water from the paper cup.

“Who?”

“The fools at the Security Service.” Luger feigned ignorance, but inside he was trembling from nervous anticipation. The Russian stared at him and said, “I have been placed in stress positions, denied both sleep and silence, and yet I have been allowed access to the showers and the canteen. Then you turn up, beaten up and uninterested in me… it was too perfect, and too unrealistic at the same time…”

“It was worth a try,” Luger replied. “We’re in a sort of purgatory in this country where as a society we abhor violence and segregation, and yet we face changes and threats where these primitive attributes are still necessary. It’s a difficult balance.”

“So, who are you really?” he asked, then added, “I can read people, and you are not a right-wing bigot. I think you’re an asshole, but that’s another thing entirely…”

“My name is Jack Luger, and I’m one of the fools from the Security Service.”

“I thought so,” the Russian said, coughing again. There was a pallor to his complexion. A greyness that looked quite deathly. “But that beating looked real enough in the showers…”

“Trust me, it was…”

“Is this the society you talk about? One where you don’t beat an enemy of the state, but feel nothing at beating one of their own to maintain his cover?” Reznikov scoffed. “This would be unthinkable in my country. We think nothing of beating or killing our enemies.”

“No doubt.”

“It is what makes us the most formidable country in the world.”

Luger didn’t correct him. Like it or not, it was because of Russia’s actions that he was here. He often thought of Russia as a scorpion. Nobody stepped on a scorpion or handled it carelessly without getting stung. It was simply in a scorpion’s nature.

“So, where does that leave us?” Reznikov asked. He was even paler now, perspiring heavily and the cough was almost a constant.

Luger pushed his unfinished plate aside and said, “Well, I’ll get to eat with the staff tonight, or judging by this pile of crap…” He nodded at the insipid looking curry before him. “…perhaps the rather exquisite Michelin Star restaurant run by that famous television chef not twenty miles from here. I believe it has venison and pheasant on the menu as well as the last of the seasonal Atlantic salmon from the River Tweed. As for you, well you’ll either tell me what I want to know, or the groundsman will be digging your grave around the back of the castle tomorrow morning…”

“What?” Reznikov said indignantly. “You and your kind are too soft to make such idle threats…” He coughed a few more times and sipped more water. “This cough will kill me before you or your people do…”

Luger smiled as he placed the empty ampule on the table. “That used to contain arsenic,” he said matter-of-factly. “Right up until when I put it in your curry before coming in here. I gave you enough time to eat some before asking to join you…” Luger pulled another ampule out of his pocket and sat it upright on the table in front of him. “The coughing will give way to nausea and vomiting, and an unfortunate bout of extreme diarrhoea. This…” He touched the ampule and smiled. “… contains the antidote, known as Dimercaprol. Without this, you will literally cough, vomit and shit yourself to death, while undergoing the worst stomach cramps imaginable.” He paused. “That liver-spotting to the backs of your hands are lesions caused from the arsenic, and they will get progressively worse throughout the afternoon and into the evening…” Igor Reznikov stared at him, but his eyes barely focused. He went to say something but spun in his seat and vomited on the floor. Luger waited for the man to stop retching, then added, “It’s quite a simple antidote, really. The Dimercaprol is a chelating agent, a bowel cleanser, if you will. Unfortunately, without it, given the dose of arsenic you’ve ingested, you won’t see another sunrise. You can be certain of that.”

Reznikov sprawled across the table, swiping at the ampule, but his movements were both slow and clumsy, and Luger swiped the tiny bottle and sat back comfortably in his chair. The Russian rested where he was, and given the stench in the air, it was clear that he was suffering the humiliation of the diarrhoea stage. Reznikov barely raised his head from the table and said, “You bastards, all of you…” and then resignedly, he added, “What is it you want to know…?”

Chapter Eighteen

Wye Valley, Wales

The premise had been simple. Captain Ashcroft had questioned whether King could lead an SAS troop on an incursion into Russia with no military service and King had answered the question by rising to the veiled challenge. The men were all armed with airsoft equivalents of the M4 assault rifle and Glock 17 pistol. The 6mm plastic BBs were powered by 12g CO2 capsules and had a range of eighty feet for the pistols and up to one-hundred and twenty feet for the rifles. A sharp sting would let the person know that they had been shot, and it was a clean, quiet and more realistic experience than the traditional paintballing done by over-grown kids on stag weekends and team building days. In full camouflage and protective eyewear, King had sent the men into the forest and given them a twenty-minute head start. He was against the best of the best. Tier 1 special forces. He had run around the edge of the forest for the entire twenty minutes and headed into the centre, confident that the men would assume that he would enter the forest at the same entrance they had. The strategy had worked, and by the time he had regained his breath, steadied his nerves and started out through the woods, he had taken out the first four men stalking closely from behind them. It had only occurred to him that the forest had been used by the SAS before, when he stepped on the roof of a laying-up-place – a hide previously dug out and used in practice with a roof constructed from a criss-cross of sticks and bracken. King had dodged some gunfire but stood on the soldier’s barrel and emptied his pistol at the man’s head. He had been lucky a second time, the soldier firing from the treetops, but the wind deflected the tiny 6mm plastic balls just enough for King to take cover. He had managed to return fire, and the man had climbed down and stomped off towards the edge of the forest. The sixth man had taken a similar position, but King was used to the idea of a man being forty-feet high in the trees, and he made the man out by his black boots. There were few things that were truly black in nature with coal, charcoal and the Corvidae bird family (rooks, crows and ravens) being ninety-nine percent of it. Not size eleven lace-up military boots. King was seen at the same time, and whether they were both armed with 5.56mm high-velocity would make a difference would be debated, but with 6mm air-driven plastic balls, King got his rounds up the tree while the soldier had to work out his arc of fire, distance and allowance for windage. The soldier did not say anything, but he seemed to take it in good stead.

And that had left just Captain Ashcroft, but King already knew where he would find him. He checked his phone and opened the app. He had slipped the micro transponder into the man’s webbing as they had got out of the two Land Rovers. King had been confident that he could work his way through the men, but he never liked to give luck a fair run against him. This exercise had been all about putting the man in his place and gaining the men’s respect. King could see the signal from the transponder. Forty metres northwest of him. He did not have line of sight any further than twenty feet. It was a pine forest so there were no leaves degrading on the ground, no crunch underfoot because of dry weather or sludge from recent rainfall. Just a soft blanket of pine needles. However, there were plenty of dried sticks on the ground, and that could make a noise underfoot that would carry for a hundred metres. King doubted that the man would have his back towards the direction he had entered the forest. The captain would likely be on a four-year secondment, and from his tone and manner, King suspected that he would have come in from a more privileged regiment such as the guards or household calvary. The enlisted men would be in for as long as the SAS wanted them, and some would have been into their second decade with the regiment. This officer would be on a short tour, and that meant that he would not be as honed as the other men. He wouldn’t be as tough, either. However, the problem with the man was that he was going to be a thorn in King’s side. Even after the base commander had spoken to him, he had still questioned King’s right to be here. King recognised Ashcroft as man who could not relinquish his command, and a man who would always resent following a civilian into a military operation. King had seen it before, witnessed first-hand how an officer could foul an operation. He had been left high and dry in Russia before when the orders had changed, but there had been too much at stake for King to turn around and hike back to the extraction zone, and both he, Rashid and Flymo had pressed onwards. King’s old mentor Peter Stewart had once told him how he had taken the decision to topple an officer down the flight of metal steps and onto the deck of the ship as they had prepared to land at San Carlos Water rather than follow him onto the Falklands. He had thought the action of breaking the officer’s leg, not to mention his ego, had saved countless lives in that violent, bloody conflict. A war fought with the same blood and guts as the Normandy landings, outnumbered, on the other side of the globe and having suffered tragic loss of lives, and losing most of their equipment to the bottom of the South Atlantic Ocean before they could even put a boot on the shore.

King closed the gap to twenty metres. He checked the trees, and he looked for deformation in the forest floor. He noticed it in his periphery. Sometimes you could see more without looking directly. The mound was slight, indicating that Ashcroft had dug himself in, but the pine needles were a different shade to that of the surrounding forest floor. The ground had been disturbed. King wasn’t sure whether he could get to the SAS officer before the man could get a shot off at him, but it really didn’t matter. King would have at least got the attention of the men, and that’s what counted. Hopefully, he had gained their respect as well. Eight elite soldiers, all bested by a civilian. But those men had no idea what King had done for his country, no idea of the odds that had been stacked against him.

King took another step, and the mound shifted minutely. He darted right, then sprinted hard. Ashcroft rose up onto his knees and aimed his rifle, but King dodged left as a hail of white plastic balls sailed past him. He fired his own rifle from his hip, a string of 6mm BBs streaming out in front of him, curving slightly in the breeze. He adjusted his aim, and his BBs peppered Ashcroft’s chest moments before King felt several stings against his shoulder. He cannoned into the SAS officer to the sound of his protest, and as he locked his limbs around him, he clamped the man’s right arm and fell on it with all his weight, and all the strength he could muster. Ashcroft screamed an agonising wail and King disentangled himself and stood looking down at him. He had put a little too much into it and hadn’t expected a compound fracture. The humerus had broken out through the man’s bicep.

“I’ll get the medic,” King said, stooping to pick up Ashcroft’s rifle and his own.

“You bloody did that on purpose!” the man spat at him. “You bastard!”

“That’s right…”

“I’ll get you fired for this!”

“I don’t think so.” King dropped the rifles beside him, squatted on his haunches and stared at the man. “I’d better reset this,” he said. He whipped out his knife and sliced cleanly through the jacket, then dropped the knife, grabbed the man’s arm, twisted, pulled and pressed it back in place and through the screams, King heard the bones scrape together. He inspected the bloody mess, but the arm looked relatively normal to him. He took a clean, green flannel out of his pocket and pressed it on the open wound. He had found over the years that a flannel worked better for a multitude of uses in the field rather than a handkerchief. “Hold that in place and be thankful…” He picked up his knife and the rifles then started towards the edge of the forest but stopped after a few paces. Looking back, he said, “Because if you had got in my way in the field, then I would have put a bullet in the back of your head…”

Chapter Nineteen

London

“It’s near a small town… a village, really… called Shoyna,” said Luger as he tossed the black labrador a biscuit. The dog wolfed it down, then stared at him with such intensity that he thought the dog could give King a run for his money “On the Kanin Peninsula.”

“Never heard of it,” said Caroline. She was already searching on her phone. “Oh, right. Next stop, the North Pole…”

“As I expected,” said Ramsay pointedly. “Northern Russia is northern Russia, so the Northern Sea Route was the right play.” He typed into his laptop and sat back in his wheelchair as he studied the map. “The ship is already en route. Ten days with a light load.”

Luger sipped his strong, black coffee and winced as the hot liquid seeped into his split lip. “Oh, and thanks for that beating…”

“My pleasure,” Ramsay replied seriously. “Your cover needed to look authentic.”

“But you resorted to a different method to the long con,” Caroline said pointedly. “Tell me, was it really arsenic?”

Luger laughed. “Of course not. Ipecac and an embarrassingly strong laxative.”

“And the faintness and legions?” Caroline asked. “I hear it was very convincing.”

“When Reznikov was picked up, he carried a medical card in his wallet. He’s type AB-negative, which is an extremely rare blood group. Only one-percent of the population have it. When your blood group is that rare, then it makes sense to have that sort of information on your person. The card also stated that he had a serious shellfish allergy. Enough for him to have an EpiPen on him when King captured him. Some Thai fish sauce was added to the curry and once he divulged everything and was given the antidote, he was also given an epi-shot. The shellfish allergy causes the skin to become extremely blotchy.”

“Cunning,” Caroline smiled. She had thought of King’s earlier comment. There was always more than one way to skin a cat. King had said two ways. Well, perhaps there were three. “You did well, Jack.”

He shrugged and sipped his coffee, uncomfortable with praise. He always had been. As a distraction, he patted the dog on his head, but he was still staring at him in the hope of another biscuit. “The man running the project is a colonel in the GRU. Reznikov gave him up quite easily… once his mouth was running.”

“Good work,” said Ramsay in a rare moment of gratitude. “Did he give the name? Downstairs are raring to go with any intel we can give them.”

“Zukovsky,” he replied, taking a sip of his coffee. “Colonel Niko Zukovsky.”

Caroline shot Ramsay a look, then stared back at Luger. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. Why?”

“It can’t be…” Ramsay said quietly.

“Someone you know?” Luger asked.

“No,” Caroline replied. “But we have history with two Zukovskys. General Vladimir Zukovsky, who attempted to detonate an atomic device on UK soil…”

“What…?” Luger asked incredulously.

“Oh, yeah,” Caroline said firmly. “And his son, who was killed during the operation to stop them. His father escaped, but we caught up with him later and brought him back for interrogation, but he was snatched from us by the CIA… but that’s another story…”

“I’d certainly like to hear it sometime…” Luger said, shaking his head somewhat incredulously.

“Well, we’re not going to divulge classified information like a Women’s Institute tea and gossip knitting circle…” Ramsay said sternly.

Caroline shrugged. “Fair enough…” She paused. “But I’m concerned if there is a connection…”

“You and me both. And for a good many reasons.” Ramsay mulled it over for a moment, then turned to Luger. “You’re booked on a flight to Tokyo,” Ramsay told him. “There’s an open ticket for an internal flight to Nakashibetsu Airport on the north island of Hokkaido. From there you’ll have to make your way as quickly as possible to the port town of Nemuro on the Northwest peninsular.” He paused. “Waiting for you will be four commandos from the Special Boat Service with their equipment. You are to liaise with them and procure a boat to get out to the freighter that Lomo has secured for our purposes.”

“Right…”

“And you’ll need to scupper the boat…” Caroline added.

“When do I leave?”

“Immediately,” Ramsay replied.

Luger nodded. “Ok, I just have to see a man about a dog, first…”

Chapter Twenty

Herefordshire

The killing house at new Stirling Lines, the SAS base situated on the edge of the town of Credenhill, was the first of its kind. A series of reinforced concrete rooms inside a purpose-made building complete with stairwells, trap doors and dead-ends, the ‘killing house’ as it was known was where the SAS had honed its skills over the years. The SBS – the navy equivalent drawing from the soldiers of the Royal Marines used it for its CQB training, and in recent years police officers from SO19 worked with the SAS instructors to enhance their training. Live ammunition, stun grenades and explosive entry techniques were practised, and the mounts and fixings on the roof allowed for window breaching by abseiling and fast-roping. It had been reconstructed to allow a helicopter to land on its roof for extraction training and hostage rescue scenarios. The killing house could also be made completely dark by use of black-out shutters for training with night-vision aids and filled with smoke for respirator training. The newest edition since King had last been here was the ability to flood the rooms on the ground floor for tunnel and cave scenarios. The training in the SAS was constantly evolving, which was what had kept both the SAS and SBS at the top of the world’s special forces.

King watched the men clear the rooms from outside using the bank of CCTV monitors. He could already see who he would have with him on the raid, and who he would choose to take specific roles. Each man was highly trained in the other’s skills. They would all be qualified snipers, medics, SAW operators – or Squad Automatic Weapon (belt fed machineguns) - and radio and communications operators, but King had seen enough. It wasn’t anything that detracted from their skills – they were already the best of the best – but it was how some of them entered a room, or cleared it, or put their rounds on the targets. The targets had changed since King’s last visit, too. Gone were the frames and paper figure-11 targets to be replaced by realistic ballistic dummies that had been patched with plasters after each training session. King was looking primarily for ‘T’ shots. An imaginary one-inch-thick vertical line from the sternum to the bridge of the nose, and a horizontal line the same thickness from temple to temple. The line focused on the aorta, heart, spine and brain stem and a bullet inside that line always dropped a person for good, and it had always done alright by him. A raid took a lot of guts, but it also took brains. He wasn’t looking for the man who charged in thoughtlessly, and nor was he looking for a man who hung back until the danger was over. None of these soldiers fitted truly into either camp, they had learned from the best, but he had seen enough to know who would be by his side and who would be backing them up with sustained machinegun fire or a sniper’s bullet if it was needed.

The fallout from Captain Ashcroft’s ‘accident’ was yet to come. King thought it like a sea fog that held a mile offshore. It could descend upon him at any moment, but for now, the sky was still clear. King had suggested to the man that there would be less harm to his reputation if he played it down. Accidents happen. Everybody knew that. But being taken out of action because of your attitude might lead to problems down the road. Like sexual predators in the public eye – it only ever took one victim, one incident to make the headlines and the proverbial snowball started to gather momentum. Before he knew it, the young captain might have a whole queue forming behind King to voice their doubts about working with him.

After the killing house drills, they had concentrated on covert infiltration. This was a skill that snipers excelled in, and there wasn’t much the men didn’t know about that. King had requested that a platoon of men secure part of the base, with a Dauphine helicopter as the target. It was arranged for thirty soldiers from 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment to operate a patrol. The soldiers were equipped with their SA80 weapon system and blank ammunition, complete with yellow BFA (blank firing attachment) on the muzzle of the barrel. This allowed the weapon to fire on semi and fully automatic, otherwise with the lack of recoil the weapon would only fire single shots and require cocking each time.

They were compromised twice. Both times it had been Flymo who had been spotted. Even though he was being shadowed by King on the first occasion and by Lofty on the second, he had been spotted quickly. On the third attempt, King made it to the helicopter and the other eight men had not been spotted in their holding and covering fire positions, but Flymo had not taken part. So, the problem rested with a man trained to fly the helicopter that they were going to attempt to steal. He simply did not have the experience in camouflage and concealment, or soldiering techniques past basic infantry training, and he wasn’t going to learn what he needed to in a week. Not when the training was so multifaceted to cover as many scenarios. With three attempts in the bag, the paras were now too attuned to their surroundings, too ready for action that it was a pointless and futile exercise. A few of the SAS troopers mingled with them like rock stars, answering questions about the selection process and encouraging some of them to go for it on the next selection rotation. For most soldiers who failed selection it was mental toughness that saw them binned. Anyone could get fit, but to finish a twenty-mile speed march in the rain and wind and be told at the rendezvous point that they had to go back and do it again when the last two miles had felt impossible, that was something that most people could not condition themselves for. It was called the ‘sickener’ and the directing staff used it to sound effect. Just when a recruit thought they had given their all and that they had finished, another challenge arose, and then another, and another… King knew how this could be, how operations led to further challenges, often having to push beyond the limits that most people would think humanly possible.

“There is one thing we could try,” Taff wandered over to where King was nursing a tin cup of tea. The Scotsman with the Welsh nickname was chewing on a cold bacon roll that had been wrapped in foil and tossed into a bucket along with forty others and had accompanied the tea urn in the rear of the old Land Rover 130. “Russia has terrain similar to Dartmoor. The Bootnecks are running their sniper school down there at the moment. We could head down to Lympstone and wind them up a bit. Flymo could join and get the best training, and we could challenge them to some shenanigans on the moors.”

King pondered on this. The parachute regiment were an elite fighting force, but the Royal Marines sniper training course lasted thirteen weeks and the very best snipers taught every aspect of concealment. It might be too good an opportunity to miss. It would also give King some distance from the potential fallout from his ‘accident’ with Captain Ashcroft. He watched as the Scotsman wandered back to the makeshift canteen truck and nabbed himself another bacon roll, and was already formulating a plan for Northern Russia, and who would fill each role. Taff seemed a dead cert for second in command.

Chapter Twenty-One

London

“He was right. I don’t know how he does it, but he really can see life like a chess board.”

Katerina Baskakov stared at the man in the driver’s seat. She had slept with him once, but many years ago. She was married with a child now, and the feeling of temptation was high because her husband seemed to think that she was invisible, and she was not a maternal being. She had tried, but she was only too glad that her work took her overseas. She wondered whether he would be tempted to sleep with her again. They had been working in the United States helping overturn the presidential election. They had feared capture by the FBI, and they had posed as a married couple. The same motel room, eating together, and eventually sleeping together. But while Rurik had remained a field agent with the FSB, Katerina had been promoted twice. She had thought the career move to be better for family life, but she loathed the repressive and demanding nature of her family, and she would give anything to trade places with Rurik now. All she was here to do was liaise with her agent and give him his instructions. “Fedor Sokolov has his uses,” she agreed.

“He said five days, and it’s been five days.”

“Reznikov may have been broken. The Brits aren’t always as nice as they claim to be.” Katerina shrugged. “But five days is five days, and we can assume that Reznikov has done what he was told to do.”

“You’re holding the man’s wife and children. He didn’t exactly have a choice…” Rurik showed her the photograph on his tablet. “That man was sent to their secret prison. He has now returned and taken a flight to Tokyo.”

Katerina nodded as she studied the series of stills. Around six foot, slim, handsome. He exuded self-confidence. Did he look dangerous? Perhaps. There was certainly intelligence behind those eyes, and intelligence could be far more dangerous than strength and malevolence. “So, we can assume that they’ve gone for it. Japan is the last place they can start out from for the Northern Sea Route. We need someone to meet him at Tokyo airport and follow him.” She paused. “Just to confirm that they have a ship.”

“I have already organised this,” Rurik replied.

“You’re very good, Rurik. I had forgotten just how good…”

He smiled at her and said, “Meanwhile, I have forgotten nothing about you…” Rurik placed a hand on her thigh and felt her tremble with anticipation.

“I can’t…” she said with apprehension. “I’m married…”

Rurik did not remove his hand. “You’re not the marrying kind, Katerina. You know that; and I know that…”

He was right, and she did know it. She lived with the notion every single day. The thought of her oppressive apartment in Moscow and her husband and child descending upon her when she walked through the door. The expectation that she should care about his problems at work. Or that the childminder had let them down. Or that she should be excited because her daughter had drawn a crappy picture of a horse that looked like the offspring of a camel that had mated with a giraffe and been depicted in purple and orange, and that she would have to look at it every day when she opened the refrigerator and reached for the bottle of vodka to take the edge off the monotony… She took his hand and pressed it against her breast as she lunged between the seats and kissed him hard on the mouth. She breathed as hard as the kiss, not coming up for air until she did so with all the urgency of a skin-diver breaking the surface after a misjudged dive.

“You bring out the worst in me,” she said breathlessly. “And the best…”

Rurik smiled. “And me,” he agreed.

She sighed and said, “But back to business…”

He nodded in agreement and said, “There has been much activity. Caroline Darby appears to have been distanced from the team. She is always with Ramsay.”

“And this man?” she asked, looking back at the tablet. “The one who’s off to Japan.”

“Jack Luger. My contact got his name from the check-in desk.”

“Anything else on him?”

“Not yet.”

“The big black guy?”

“Davinder Lomu. They call him Big Dave. He flew to Tokyo a few days ago.” Rurik paused. “He’s Fijian, former British army. There is a gap in the dates, so we can assume he’s ex-special forces. Probably the SAS if he was in the army.”

“He’s big for special forces. British special forces, at least. Most of those guys are smaller, like triathletes.”

Rurik nodded. “Which means he would have excelled at everything to make up for his size. The British special forces like speed and endurance and big men don’t tend to have either.”

“The good looking Pakistani?”

“Ouch,” Rurik feigned hurt feelings, but he would have to admit that the man could be a male model. “No name, no service history and no idea where he is.”

“That’s not good. And the black pilot?”

“He was with The Wolf. I followed them to Cornwall, to RNAS Culdrose…”

“And?”

“And they stole a helicopter and got arrested…”

“They stole a helicopter?” she asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

Katerina laughed. “My god…”

“Ramsay and his driver arrived, got them out and drove to RAF Benson in Oxfordshire. I watched through a pair of field glasses, and it was quite a show. One Apache helicopter took on five helicopters and won…”

“Really…”

“I can only assume that it was the black guy.”

“They really are fools enough to try a steal this thing…” she mused. “We cannot afford to put the Eagle’s Talon up for bait and have them succeed.”

“Of course not. And Colonel Zukovsky will not allow that to happen.”

“We’d better hope not, or we’ll get a bullet in the back of the neck and a shallow grave in the forest…” They both contemplated the thought in silence. Katerina had heard it done, but Rurik knew more. He had been the one to pull the trigger and dig the hole. Several times. “And The Wolf?” They had given King the name because of his cold, glacier-blue eyes. Like the alpha wolf that stalked the forests of northern Russia. “Any news on him since the RAF base?”

“No. But he is in a relationship with Caroline Darby.”

“Still no name?”

“No.” Rurik paused. “No name, bank details or history. Yet.”

“He’s dangerous,” she said. “He’s shown up in places just before our operatives have been killed, as well as members of the brotherhood.”

Rurik nodded. The brotherhood, or Russian mafia had connections with the Russian intelligence services. Many brotherhood leaders were former intelligence officers and many operations of a shady or illegal nature had been sub-contracted out to them in the same way that the Wagner Group had undertaken military contracts in Ukraine and Chechnya. “Then he needs to be liquidated. Do you want me to do it?”

“Yes. But not until we see how far this goes. The win is to catch them in an offensive operation on Russian soil. That will give the president all the excuse he needs to demonstrate Russia’s power to the rest of the world, and particularly to NATO member states who encourage the growth of NATO on our borders.” She paused. “But if The Wolf makes it back to Britain, then I want you to give him a bullet.”

“And the cripple and the blonde?”

“Yes. But not until the rest of the team make a move on Orlinyy kogot’.” She paused, staring at the image of Luger on the screen. “I want the team destroyed and leaderless. The Blonde, The Cripple and The Wolf… I want you to be the last person they ever see…”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Northern Russia

“Ihave to say, it’s jolly good of you to come at such short notice. We were delighted with Keith Darkin’s résumé, so when he couldn’t make it, well…” Colin Henderson trailed off as if it had been the end of the world. “…but with your work on some of National Geographic’s spreads, last year’s RSPB magazine pieces and Cunliffe’s Definitive Guide to Seabirds was truly inspirational.”

Rashid nodded. The boat smelled of diesel and the British Arctic Survey ship had at least had a decent rec-room and central heating. Beside him on the open deck, the cases containing his photography equipment nestled beside the provisions that would keep the Arctic bird survey team warm and fed until the winter descended upon them, and their survey was put on hold. The ground was hard this far north, there were no trees for firewood, and they could not hope to survive the snow and ice, just a month or so away. Rashid had taken the identity of an award-winning wildlife photographer, with the man’s co-operation. Chris Santos was an Anglo-American of Mexican descent, who had switched sports photography for wildlife after struggling for work during the covid pandemic and various lockdowns. Walks along the South Downs and New Forest had secured him a new career amidst adversity. Santos had given Ramsay his cooperation, been paid handsomely for his troubles and put a pause on his social media. Never a seeker of celebrity, the photographer’s social media profile photos were images of his artwork, not headshots for a press release. Rashid had shaved off the chin of the goatee that he had been sporting lately and trimmed the moustache. Caroline and Mae had complimented him on his new look, Mae calling him ‘quite dashing’ and Caroline commenting that he had a resemblance of the actor Pedro Pascale. That had been the least of his worries. Rashid now had to try and pass himself off as a nature photographer. And an award-winning one, at that. He had done a photography course in the SAS, learning depth of field and exposure, and he knew a F-stop from a bus stop if it came to conversation, and had developed film from negative roll. The entire photographic industry had moved on dramatically from when he had been taught, and by the time he had left the regiment digital photography had replaced the traditional methods. He had used high-end surveillance equipment since joining MI5, but passing off as a professional photographer in front of naturalists, ornithologists and zoologists? He wasn’t so sure.

He looked up from the cases that contained the individual parts of his sniper rifle in hidden compartments. “It’s a pleasure to be here,” he replied.

“I must say, the discovery has changed everything we thought about over-grazing and the agricultural impact on Jankowski’s Bunting… have you ever seen one before?”

“Well, no. They were thought extinct, weren’t they?” Rashid replied, recalling the notes he had made from the books and magazines on the voyage around the north coast of Norway.

“Oh, well, yes. Here, at least. There are small numbers in the east of Russia and China, but all were thought to have disappeared throughout Mongolia and northern Russia. Three breeding pairs were observed in Mongolia a few years ago, but not a sign or sight of any of them since. Bloody big country, to be fair. Anyway, Jankowski’s Bunting, or the rufous-backed bunting, Emberiza jankowskii, is a species of bird in the family Emberizidae. They have been feared completely extinct in the arctic circle, until just a few short weeks ago when a pair were sighted and reported to the committee. I must say, the Russians have been good about visas et cetera, et cetera.” Henderson paused. “Tricky bit coming up…” Rashid followed the man’s stare from where he was seated on the tiller. There was a swirl of whitewater fifty metres across, and it gained momentum the closer he looked towards the centre. Rashid had never seen a whirlpool before, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted the first time to be this close, from a boat piloted by a man who did not seem to have a care in the world about anything other than ornithology. Henderson put some power on as they neared, and skimmed across the tail of the whirlpool, the boat heaving to port as it was caught in the vortex. Henderson adjusted the throttle, and the thirty-horsepower outboard engine howled as the boat pulled clear. “There’s more than a few fishermen who have met their fate down there,” he said pointedly.

Rashid breathed a sigh as they cleared the turbulent waters and glided towards shore on a slick calm surface. Ahead of them, the beaches reminded him of the west coast of France, or parts of the Gower Peninsular in Wales. Golden sand and steep dunes with sea grass. Henderson steered towards a jetty where a group of people in brightly coloured anoraks were gathered, along with two uniformed police officers who were smoking and stamping their feet against the cold.

“They need to check your passport and visa,” Henderson said. “There’s two bottles of Scotch in that top box, it wouldn’t go amiss to give them a bottle each. The Russians do like the wheels of the machine well and truly greased. I dare say we could have just slipped you in with the supplies, but they wouldn’t think twice about putting us all in a gulag for ten years a piece if they ever found out.”

Rashid smiled nervously. He was acting the role, but his fear was real. Inside the boxes the disassembled Accuracy International rifle AX50 chambered in .50 calibre would pose some interesting questions, that he would not be willing to stick around for.

Henderson docked the boat, and two young women took the lines while a large man with a bushy beard heaved the zoologist out of the boat, then jumped down and held out his hand for Rashid to shake. “I am Lars,” he said in an accent that Rashid assumed was Norwegian. Certainly Scandinavian.

“Chris,” Rashid replied. Job done; he’d remembered his cover. He smiled thinly, then lifted his cases out onto the dock.

Lars lifted out the supplies, and one of the women, a Norwegian biologist that Rashid later learned was called Lisle helped while Henderson returned with the two police officers. Like most Russian officials they looked like they despised Rashid’s presence and were bored by their duties. It was a look of indifference that even a Parisian forced to work on a public holiday would find difficult to replicate. Rashid took out the forged passport and Chris Santos’ visa. He smiled at the lead police officer, who ignored him and held out his hand expectantly for the documentation. Rashid complied.

“This is yours?” the other police officer asked, kicking the toe of his boot against one of the aluminium cases.

“Yes,” Rashid replied. Inside, his stomach was churning. His hand gripped tightly around the lock-knife in his pocket. He didn’t have a plan if the men found the rifle parts, but it may be as simple as neutralising both men and fleeing to Finland. “My camera equipment,” he added.

“Open.”

Rashid bent down and lifted off the catches with his left hand, each with a resounding ‘snap’. He stood back as the police officer peered down at the Leica SL2 digital camera with a selection of lenses secured in neat cut-outs in a block of foam. There were twenty-thousand pounds worth of photography equipment in the box, and the police officer rummaged through as though it was a box of junk at a car boot sale. “That’s very expensive,” said Rashid. “Please be careful…”

The police officer looked up at him as he opened the next case, flung open the lid and looked at the second camera and lenses. These were smaller and the camera was a Nikon, but no less expensive.

“Here you are, gentlemen!” Henderson held out the two bottles of Famous Grouse whisky. “A little present from duty free!” Rashid tried not to look down at the opened cases. False bottoms had been fitted, but he doubted that they would stand up to intense scrutiny. He watched as the two police offers each took the offering, and the more senior officer handed back his passport and visa. He said something to Henderson in Russian and the zoologist turned to Rashid and said, “You have two-weeks. Longer than that, and you are to present yourself to the authorities in Arkangel.”

Rashid smiled. “Great. I think two weeks will be more than enough time…”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Hokkaido, Japan

Jack Luger could not remember where he had heard the expression. An old spy novel, maybe. Once was happenstance, twice was coincidence, but three times was enemy action. He had seen the man at Tokyo Airport, and then again on the airplane to the smaller Nakashibetsu Airport on the north island of Hokkaido. Luger had thought the man quite forgettable, but for the way he swiped his fringe to the left, a stubborn parting that wanted to fall between his eyes. The man looked Slavic - his features well-worn into his face. He looked like he had experienced cold, and hunger and poverty over many years. That experience never truly left people, even in the better times, it seeped into their DNA. Coincidences happened, but three times was too many. Luger had taken the train to Nemuro, a port town on the northwest of the island. He had noticed the man when he had disembarked the train, and as Luger took a taxi to the port, he watched over his shoulder as the man flagged down an electric taxi and followed.

Luger checked his text messages, which had come through Caroline. She was now Ramsay’s number two and that meant that Ramsay was free to do what he did best – research and scour the internet and dark web and exploit the openings he had created in other intelligence agency firewalls. He was to meet the SBS contingent at the docks. He had served alongside Royal Marines and members of the SBS when he had worked in naval intelligence. He knew them to be a close-knit bunch that would be wary of letting him in, but he didn’t care. He was in charge, and they would answer to him.

Luger paid for the taxi and headed towards the harbour master’s office. He saw his contact leaning against the railing as he said he would. The man was average in every way, but he looked fit and mean. His brown hair was buzzed in a 5mm crew cut, and he was feeding the remains of what looked like a spring roll to some small seabirds in the water. He looked up as Luger drew near.

“I’ve got a tail,” Luger said quietly.

“And you brought him here?” the man asked incredulously.

To his annoyance, Luger realised that the seasoned soldier was quite right. He should have taken the man following him on a merry drive around Nemuro and tried to lose him. He shrugged and said, “I didn’t want to lose him; I wanted to question him.” He paused. “You and your boys can nab him, take him behind those shipping containers and rough him up a bit while I ask him some questions.”

“Rough him up a bit?” the man asked dubiously.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Tom, by the way,” he said sardonically.

“Jack.”

“Great. Well, now that’s out the way…” He took out his phone and spoke as he texted. “I take it you’re referring to the gaunt, washed-out bloke watching us from the carpark…”

“That’s him,” Luger replied without turning to look. He was annoyed with himself at having led the man right here.

“Righto,” Tom replied, then tossed the rest of the spring roll into the water. Tiny fish swarmed at the vegetables and miniscule pieces of chicken, and the seabirds took what was left along with some of the feeding fish.

Luger watched as Tom ambled over to the carpark giving the man a wide berth. As he drew parallel to him, still fifty paces away he turned his back on him as two men walked up behind the man and a third hung back. The man was hemmed in by the wall of the harbour to his right and Tom to his left. Luger and furthest-most SBS operative completed the triangle. By the time the man worked out what was happening, the two SBS men were upon him. It wasn’t violent, but it was frighteningly efficient. One man bent and grabbed the man’s ankles, and the other man got him in a half-Nelson – his neck and right arm locked inside the man’s bear grip. In one fluid move, the man was lifted off his feet and walked to the shipping containers as easily as if the two men had been moving a sofa. The other SBS operative closed in, with both Luger and Tom watching to see if they had been observed. Luger took a sweep of the port, and when he looked back, they had all disappeared and Tom followed them behind the containers. Luger crossed the roadway and carpark and made his way over to the shipping containers. The containers were lined up in neat rows with two-metres between each one and they were stacked blank end to blank end to maximise access. It was essentially a myriad of alleyways. The first alleyway was empty. Luger edged down the gap, checking both left and right, then saw a patch of blood and a trail. There were shoe treads in the blood, and he followed the trail, the prints fading with every step. As he rounded the corner, he saw Tom kneeling beside one of his men.

Luger shook his head. The man was dead. There was nothing that could be done. There was a stab wound in the centre of the man’s chest, and his throat had been sliced so cleanly and so deeply, that Luger could see the white of the man’s spine. Tom looked up at Luger and held up a hand.

“Go back!”

“No.”

Tom glared at him, then relented. “OK. But go back that way and take the next gap. I’ve got this one. And watch yourself!”

It made sense to Luger. Whatever had happened, it was better to split and approach a threat from two different directions. However, he was feeling naked without a weapon of some kind. He back-tracked and edged his way down the gap between the loading ends of the containers. He could see all the way down the next gap, so carried on and edged around the corner. A man was down twenty metres from him. Remembering his hazard awareness training, he remained rooted to the spot and checked the other direction and looked up at the top of the containers, which were stacked three-high. Nothing. He edged forwards, looking at the man who was leaning against the shipping container, his legs outstretched on the ground. He was clutching his abdomen and the left side of his neck. He looked up at Luger as he drew near, but his expression said it all. He was confused and scared and he wasn’t expecting to leave here in any other way than in a body bag on a gurney. Luger knelt beside him, and the man reached down by his leg and there was a metallic scraping sound as he held up an all-metal combat dagger. He pressed the handle into Luger’s hand, willing him to take it from him. This man’s last act was to give Luger a weapon to protect himself with. The thought sat heavily with Luger. Had he lost the man in the traffic, then this would not have happened. This was on him. When Luger looked back at the man, the glazed expression and impossibly dry eyes told him that he was gone. Luger stood up and studied the weapon. It had a blackened double-edged blade, but a thin sliver of silver told him that it had two razor-edged blades. He held it down by his side and edged forwards, his heart racing as the blood and adrenalin surged through his veins. He wanted nothing more than to plunge the knife into the killer’s heart.

Tom edged around one of the shipping containers and Luger’s heart almost stopped. He took a deep breath and nodded for the SBS operative to carry on while he took the next gap. He almost stepped into the pool of blood, and instantly looked all around him and up to the top of the containers. His training had hammered home about peripheral threats, after he had stumbled into a training scenario and walked right into an ambush. It had been a simple exercise at the Surrey country house and estate where MI5 took over for three weeks, three times a year for ‘team building’. It was, in fact, where intelligence officers were trained in field craft. For much of the year, the estate hosted sales courses and were booked up in the summer months for weddings. Nobody would ever have believed that the week before their wedding, the grounds had been full of trainee intelligence officers practising everything from covert surveillance drills to J-turns and other evasive driving techniques in a Ford Focus. Luger’s mistake had been in one of the grand rooms. One of the DS was holding a door handle, telling Luger that his next exercise was inside, then opened the door wide and shouted ‘go!’ Luger had seen the body on the ground, the mobile phone beside her. Having just completed two days of first aid training, he had rushed to the ‘body’ and started on the ABCs. There was a gunman behind the sofa and the 9mm blank cartridge going off in the room had all but deafened him. Surroundings and safety first. The first two things to check off the mental list in a live threat assessment. He would not make the same mistake again.

The blood trail was thick and there was a quantity on the sides of the containers, and as Luger rounded the edge of another shipping container, he already knew what he would see. He checked all around him, the knife held firmly in his right hand. Tom reappeared, and his face fell when he saw his man down. Luger approached cautiously. The man was covered in patches of blood, each patch dark in the centre where the blade had been plunged deeply. His neck had been slashed and as Luger drew near, he could see that the wounds to the neck were indeed stab wounds – one on each side of the throat. Straight through both carotid arteries.

“Jesus Christ…” Tom said quietly.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Luger asked, now watching the gaps for their enemy.

“No,” he replied humbly. “I mean, we’ve been taught it, but I’ve never seen anything like this…” His tone was off, monotone, almost devoid of any emotion. “You?”

Luger shook his head. “Get his ID,” he told him. “Anything that will identify him.”

“But…”

“Do it!” Luger snapped. “That goes for everyone. Nothing that can identify them.”

“We need to get this guy,” Tom protested, but he retrieved the dead man’s wallet and watch. The man hadn’t been wearing any dog tags, as was their brief. “Come with me and let’s see if we can find him…”

“No,” Luger replied. “He’s killed three elite soldiers. Something tells me that one more and an ex-naval officer isn’t going to cut it.”

“We need…”

“We need to finish the mission!”

“Right…” Tom stood up and together they worked their way back to the other two bodies. Tom took their wallets and personal effects. When they reached the carpark he asked, “What next?”

“I’ll make a call, and someone will claim the bodies. They’ll be taken care of respectfully. Now, go and fetch your equipment, and then help me find a boat.” He paused, glancing at his watch. “We don’t have much time.”

“But the mission is compromised. “We would be crazy to go ahead.”

Luger checked his watch, then took out his phone. “Just go and get your kit!” He watched Tom begrudgingly walk across the carpark to a row of cars, then turned his back on him and studied the boats as he waited for the call to be answered. There were more than enough suitable boats to choose from, but he was cutting it fine. The freighter would be steaming at an agreed twelve knots and was in the shipping lane twenty miles from shore. If they didn’t leave soon then they would probably run out of fuel before they could intercept her.

Caroline answered, her tone business-like. “Caroline, it’s Jack.”

“Identify, please…”

“Omega Six.”

“Have that.”

“We’ve been compromised. I picked up a tail at the airport. Three of the Poole lot are down,” he said, referring to the Special Boat Service’s base at Hamworthy barracks in Poole, Dorset. It never paid to speak too freely on an open line.

“Down, or out?”

“Out. For good.”

“Location?”

Luger told her and he explained where to find the bodies, and that he had lost the enemy agent. He then added, “It’s now or never to intercept…”

There was an audible ‘click’ and he realised that he had been muted while Caroline conferred with Ramsay. “Ok, Jack. Proceed.”

“What about the enemy?”

“If he’s in the wind, then he’s in the wind. Like you said, it’s now or never.”

“Understood.”

“Oh, and Jack…?”

“Yes?”

“Good luck…”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Dartmoor

It had been a long time since King had worn a ghillie suit and moved six inches every hour. He had forgotten how the mind went into a meditative state, consciously slowing both heartrate and breathing, making the simple movement of sliding your hand a few inches take ten minutes to complete. Despite the autumn air, the ghillie suit felt hot over his military fatigues, and the rifle and pack that he towed behind him on paracord snagged on gorse and thorns, while all around him, Dartmoor’s native ponies and cattle grazed oblivious to his presence. That was the true test of concealment – fooling nature. He had once rested in his LUP, or laying up place, in Afghanistan and a tiny bird had pitched on his rifle scope just inches from his eye. The bird had sounded its mating call as King had zeroed in on the Taliban commander and big-time opium producer in the valley below and had died from shock when King had squeezed the trigger of the .338 rifle and sent the Taliban commander to paradise.

To King’s right, Flymo was lying prone just fifty feet away with a pony grazing just a few metres in front of him. The animal was a mare, and as King watched, it lowered its haunches a few inches, stuck out its tail and urinated a heavy stream behind itself in a wonderful arc. The light glinted in the stream, a spectrum of colours forming like a glorious rainbow. There was no pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow, but there was a talented black pilot who had reached his limit.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he exclaimed, getting onto his knees and startling the horse, which took off mid-stream galloping across the moors. Nearby cattle and ponies shied and snorted and many bolted, the braver beasts tentatively eyeing him as he wiped the urine from his head and face.

“That’s a kill!” shouted one of the Royal Marine instructors. “End-ex! End-ex!” he shouted. He consulted his clipboard as the men slowly got to their feet, emerging almost magically from the landscape. “You, you and you…” He pointed at three marines. “I had you all half an hour ago. You started in marsh and attached pond grass to your ghillies, but you ended up in bracken on raised ground. So, no fucking pond grass. It’s a small detail, but an experienced observer… such as an enemy sniper… will be able to spot such anomalies. Richardson, you maintained perfect cover. Hayes, likewise.” He paused. “Super Army Soldiers… very good, but I spotted you…” He pointed at Shorty. “Back at the fallen tree. But I lost you again.” He glanced at King and said, “I didn’t spot you, but I spotted your pack. I lost it again when I spotted someone else.” King sighed, annoyed with himself. He looked at the Royal Marines and thought he had fifteen years on them. Hell, he had ten on the SAS troopers. “And then there’s the Water Boy!” All the men laughed as they looked at Flymo. “Beers are on you, tonight. It’s weak as horse’s piss, but I suppose you’re used to that now…” The men all laughed again, and the sergeant checked his watch then smacked his clipboard and said, “All right, back to the Landies and we’ll have a thorough debrief at seventeen hundred.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Kiya, Russia

There was one thing that scientists in their collective fields did effectively when on a study and that was drink. Colin Henderson was not shy in pouring his whisky, while Lars, the big Norwegian ornithologist and Lisle, the pretty zoologist were serious about their beer. Rashid was not a big drinker. He had rebelled against much of his Muslim faith, long ago picking out the parts that he knew he could stick to. Which really wasn’t a lot more than observing Ramadan, simply for his mother’s and aunt’s cooking and the feasts that they put on after dark. His army life had seen him getting drunk just to fit in, and he had soon discovered his passion for meaningless sexual liaisons and affairs. When he reached his thirties, he had all but given up drinking and he no longer looked for casual sex after losing Marnie – an analyst from GCHQ whom he had worked with on a mission. She had later joined MI5, and they had got together, but she had been brutally killed by a rogue agent. King had made a bad call, and the friendship had suffered between the two men. Since life had more or less returned to normal, he had found that his desires and pace had changed, feeling that he dishonoured her memory if he went from bed to bed, rather than find someone special to be with.

Collette and Mike were two undergraduates from the University of Bristol studying zoology who had signed on for the study in climate change and the effects on entomology. The Jankowski’s Bunting consumed seeds and insects, and the use of pesticides in agriculture was affecting many species of birds, with modern Russian agriculture favouring post sprouted seedlings being planted instead of seed drilling directly into the soil because it speeded up the harvest in the event of cold snaps in the spring or at the end of the summer. However, this had not happened in the past decade because of global warming and animal and environment groups were lobbying Russia to go back to direct seed drilling. To Rashid it all sounded like an incredibly boring study for two twenty-year-olds, but the rate at which they consumed vodka tonics could have been a biological behavioural study in itself. However, the advantage to sharing a camp with five scientists bordering on alcoholism was that at 5am when they were all huddled in their sleeping bags, wood and fire peat smouldering on the portable woodburning stoves taking the chill off the air inside the yurts, Rashid had been able to leave camp and take in his surroundings.

The small town of Shoyna was twenty miles to the north, but he would not head straight there. It was vital that he maintained his cover and in doing so, he would need photographs on the memory cards and detailed notes and sketches in his notebook, as well as marks on the map that he had been issued by Henderson had given him as he had been given the camp tour. The camp consisted of a prefab unit that was used as a study centre and office. There was intermittent Wi-Fi and tables with laptops and copious amounts of papers and notes strewn everywhere. A second prefab was the kitchen and recreation room, but judging from the meal last night the scientists favoured canned foods and dehydrated noodles, and a great deal of coffee. Had Rashid been in different company with a different agenda, then he would have been tempted to wander off with his rifle and come back with something worth eating. Two yurts had been assembled opposite each other – one for the men and the other for the two women - with a makeshift firepit between them consisting of a ring of rocks and the remnants of burned driftwood. It was in the light and warmth of the fire that the drinking had taken place, with Rashid pacing himself and spilling a few coffee mugs of whisky on the ground. He had needed his head clear to keep to his cover identity and move the conversation, apparently graciously, back to the others. He had been told that the Wi-Fi was poor, and he was glad that they could not delve too deeply into Santos’ background while he was here.

Rashid had one of the cameras with him, and a bag containing a few different lenses, and as he traipsed across the beach, he realised that he didn’t know a lapwing from a plover, or a cormorant from a duck for that matter. He settled into photographing some seabirds feeding on tiny fish in the shallows, then as he found a good marker in the form of a broken wind turbine from the nineteen thirties or forties and only the foundations remaining of a small cabin, he headed inland. Once he had crested the dunes, he was met with a series of ponds hosting thousands of wildfowl. Ducks and geese took to the wing in a cacophony of protest as he made his way down the grassy banks to the dunes. He snapped a few photographs and played back the stills, then decided that if he filmed the birds then he could pause the footage, screenshot an image and edit his work later. As the last of the wildfowl flew away, he filmed and when he played back, he was happy with the results. The camera was way more advanced than anything he had used before, and he reckoned that he could play around with the editing feature and pass himself off as a nature photographer, even if he didn’t have a clue what he was looking at. What would help consolidate his position and maintain his cover was the stock photos of rufous-backed buntings taken over the years in Mongolia and northern China. The photographs had been digitally altered and remastered by the technicians on the floor below Ramsay’s office and put to backgrounds of Arctic tundra and parts of northern Russia. All he had to do was open the file on his camera and screenshot each one to get a date, time and location stamp.

After he had worked his way around the flood ponds, he reached what he would have described as tundra. Short grass stunted by the wind and cold, with scrubby bushes and wispy birch and grey willow trees scattered lightly across the landscape. It was too cold for most species of trees here with the northernmost edge of the forests in the Arctic Circle known as the boreal, or taiga biome, being a hundred miles to the south. The boreal forests are made up of evergreen trees like spruce, pine and larch, and home to an abundance of wildlife such as caribou, moose, bears, weasels, lynx, foxes, wolves, deer, hares, chipmunks, shrews and bats. For centuries, the boreal forest had crept ever northwards by a few centimetres a year, but in the past few decades, that had increased by a steady growth rate of up to thirty-metres a year, and for the past five years had exceeded sixty metres on a rapid and steady path towards the northernmost reaches of land. Henderson and his team had put climate change high in their factors for the Jankowski’s Bunting demise, and along with modified agricultural methods causing a distinct loss of its two main food sources, the encroaching forest was bringing with it a whole host of predators that fed on small birds.

Rashid checked the map and used an old button compass to verify his heading. To the north he could see that the terrain went on for mile upon mile. Flat, bleak and with little cover. He already knew how he would get to Shoyna. He would simply take the boat and head up the coast. The craft would likely achieve fifteen to twenty knots, so he could cover the distance in a little under two and a half hours. However, he would moor up five miles short and hike in on foot to attune to his surroundings. Over the next few days, he would take the boat up the coast to familiarise himself with the coastline and terrain and find a suitable place to zero his rifle. The Accuracy International AX50 was an incredible piece of kit and although he had practised with it out to two-thousand metres, the Schmidt & Bender 5-25 x 56 PM II LP telescopic sight would not hold zero once it had been detached, as even marking the scope’s position with a marker pen would never see the optic set to its original position. At close to two-thousand metres, a single millimetre of misalignment could mean a miss by as much as two metres, and by the time he finished zeroing the rifle, he hoped to make clean shots at three-thousand metres. Only a handful of marksmen in the world could achieve such distance and such accuracy.

Rashid removed the memory card and inserted the bogus card. He scrolled through the photographs until he found images of the bird in a passable background. The tundra in front of him, looking like Dartmoor on a bleak winter’s day, was close enough to the background in some nice close-ups of the bunting. It was a rather plain and ugly little bird in his opinion, and he couldn’t see much difference between it and the thrushes that dominated the bird feeders in his parents’ garden. The fact that it should warrant a funded study, five scientists and a photographer as well as a ream of paperwork and red tape to enter Russia since Ukraine invasion had signalled sanctions from the West, was incomprehensible. But science was science and Rashid supposed that there would be groups of scientists evaluating different species of plants and animals all around the globe.

Rashid made his screen shots, saved them to the camera’s hard drive, then inserted the other memory card and saved the new photos into files. In doing so he had built upon his cover and had evidence of his work and credentials if the police checked up on him.

He made his way back to shore and headed back down the beach. It was 8am and he had been away from the camp for three hours. He rarely bothered with breakfast but was hungry for some reason. The north wind was cold, blowing straight down from the North Pole. But it was the freshest air imaginable and reminded him of a mission he was once on in Svalbard. Zero pollution, pure nectar. After a mile he saw two figures approaching. When they saw him, they picked up their pace, and after a few minutes he recognised them as Lars and Lisle. Lars was carrying something, and it was a few more minutes before Rashid realised that it was a rifle. He started to feel wary, and he clutched the folding lock knife in his pocket. When they drew near, he could see that the rifle was in fact a shotgun. A simple single barrel, single shot break-barrel shotgun with a hammer firing mechanism. Fastened to the stock was an elasticated shell holder with five, 12-bore cartridges poking out.

“Man, we’ve been worried about you!” Lars shouted.

“There are bears all around,” Lisle added. “Kamchatka brown bears, grizzly bears and even polar bears have been known to frequent the area.”

“Oh,” Rashid replied. He had honestly not given it any thought and felt somewhat foolish. “Well, I didn’t see any…”

Lars’ expression mellowed. “All’s well that ends well,” he said. “There are wolves, too. Just so you know.” He gestured at the shotgun. “We take this with us when we leave camp. It’s loaded with a bear round, which is non-lethal. And then we have two birdshot and three slugs if we need them. We don’t want to kill one unless it’s absolutely necessary. Come now, we have breakfast waiting. Toasted long-life bagels and scrambled eggs. After we have eaten, I will show you how to use the shotgun.”

“That would be great,” Rashid replied, but remembering his legend Chris Santos and the social media dive he had done on the man before he had frozen his accounts, he added, “But I took part in a clay pigeon shoot on a stag weekend and did pretty well, so perhaps just a refresher and a look at how that model works, and what the various cartridges do. I’m not really a gun guy…”

Chapter Twenty-Six

London

Caroline put down the phone and looked over at Ramsay. A desk had been moved in for her and sat adjacent to his own on the other side of the room. She had purposely turned it so that she did not have a distracting view over the Thames and the buildings on the opposite bank of the river.

“Igor Reznikov is dead,” she said heavily.

“How?”

“He used strips of bedding which he tore with his teeth. He lost teeth and damaged his gums in doing so, which shows that he was determined, and that it wasn’t either a cry for help or on a whim.” She paused. “It’s strange that he should take his own life so soon after giving us the information we needed.”

“Incredibly.”

“We certainly can’t verify or challenge his information now.”

“Which leads us to the question: was anything he told us true?”

“He couldn’t have killed himself as part of his orders, could he?”

“Suicide bombers do it all the time…” Ramsay wheeled himself from his desk to the alcove at the window. The entire nation was entering its third day of a weather phenomenon known as an ‘anticyclonic gloom’. A layer of moisture trapped within a high-pressure band, giving just a tenth of the expected light for the time of year. It was as though dawn never fully happened, and the forecast predicted three more days of the depressing blanket of grey. Watching the Thames with his back to her, the opposite bank barely visible, he said, “Get downstairs to do a full search and review of Igor Reznikov’s family.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to speak with them yourself?” Caroline asked, and when he wheeled himself around and stared at her she added, “It might do you good to talk to Charlotte…”

“But that wouldn’t do my marriage any good…”

“Point taken…”

“Besides, she has a new courtier…”

“Courtier! Bloody hell, Neil! What century are you living in?” Caroline chuckled. “Seriously?”

Ramsay nodded. “Oh, yes. No more cats and sudoku for Charlotte of an evening.”

“You sound jealous.”

“Enough of that,” he replied tiresomely. “I’m married, and I take my vows seriously.”

“Of course, I’m sorry. I was only jesting. I just thought it was nice, because she’s sort of a female version of you.”

“I know,” he replied. “But that ship has sailed. I married, and now she has a boyfriend.”

Caroline got up from her desk and headed for the door. “I’ll go down and see her.”

“Good. And no tea and gossip, like a couple of old women…”

“Of course not,” she said lightly. She preferred to be the sort of leader who asked her team personally to do something, rather than just bark orders down the phone. The fact that she took a couple of flights of stairs for a face-to-face meant so much more to the analysts that almost forgot what daylight looked like. As she caught hold of the doorhandle she turned and said, “The most important question about Reznikov’s death that we should consider is: if someone can inflict so much fear on a man to carry out extreme orders, then kill himself, then how prepared are we to face an enemy like that?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Thirty miles east of the Kuril Islands, Pacific Ocean

Luger was at the helm. He was comfortable in boats and had piloted several small vessels in his naval days. He was trained in navigation and boat handling and enjoyed the visceral boost of adrenalin that small boats gave him. It took him back to his youth when he sailed dinghies and used RIBs off Weymouth. The vessel that they had stolen was a thirty-foot ‘fast fisher’ powered by two, massive three-hundred-horsepower Suzuki outboard engines that were worth twice as much as the boat. He just hoped that the unfortunate owner was adequately insured.

Tom, by contrast, had not travelled well. He had brought up not only his spring roll, but practically the lining of his stomach. He claimed that it was food poisoning, but Luger suspected he was not a good sailor. He had seen sailors and Royal Marines confined to sick bay at the beginning of deployments at sea. It sometimes took a few days to get used to the constant motion. Luger had never been affected and enjoyed nothing more than seeing rough seas ahead on the bridge.

They had passed the point of no return. If they failed to find the freighter then they would not make it back to the Japanese mainland. The next stop would be Russia, and that simply wasn’t an option. Luger could no longer use his mobile phone, so was relying on a TACBE, or tactical beacon. The device sent a coded radio transmission to AWACS planes or tactical satellites and beamed his coordinates down to a device used by Big Dave. The twinned device then sent its coordinates back, where Luger would get a fix and adjust his course accordingly. When the ship finally loomed into view, Luger felt a flutter of relief in his chest. The fuel gauges were low and from the charts in front of him, the engines would never have made it to within ten miles of the nearest landmass.

Luger switched on the ship radio and tuned it to channel 11 as agreed. He announced his position and was thankful when he heard Big Dave’s unmistakeable timbre on the handset.

“Come in on our portside, we’ll drop the stepladder from the plimsoll line hatch.”

“Roger that…” Luger replied. He turned to Tom, who was hanging on to a grab-handle on the side of the helm. “Tom, ready the starboard line aft…” He glanced at the fuel gauge, which was now in the red, and pulled back on the twin throttles to conserve fuel and slow for the approach. Luger looked at Tom who was standing ready with the rope. “No, Tom, starboard! We’re tying up on their portside!” The SBS operative dropped the rope and headed for the other side of the boat and Luger tutted, “Aft, I’ve got forward!” Luger gathered the coil of rope with his right hand while Tom got to the rear of the boat and picked up the coil of rope. Luger cursed himself. The man had just lost three of his colleagues and had been adamant that the mission should be terminated. Luger had damned near shoved the guy in the boat.

They closed in on the freighter and Luger watched as the hatch, two metres above the plimsoll line opened and Big Dave appeared with a crew member. They hoisted out the rope ladder and two lines with buoys attached dropped down into the water from either side. This was going to be more difficult than Luger had anticipated as he had to attach both ropes to be pulled and cleated above. He explained to Tom what he wanted, and the man fished the buoy out with a boat hook and tied on his line. He walked up the starboard side and did the same with the forward line. Crew members pulled on both lines and the boat heaved-to squarely and into the hull of the freighter.

“We have to scupper the boat,” Luger said. “What have you got in the kit?”

Tom heaved the two bags across the deck and unzipped one of them to reveal Canadian-made C8 carbines and magazines. He unzipped the other bag and opened the lid of a green plastic case. “Grenades,” he replied, taking out two of them.

“That’ll do,” Luger said and switched off the engines. The waves rocked the boat, but the freighter rested stock-still, unaffected by the swell. Luger looked at Tom and said, “Wait until we’ve got the kit off, then do what you’ve got to do to sink this thing.”

Luger called up for a rope and Big Dave tossed out a line. The two kit bags were tied on and hauled up, and Big Dave reappeared in the hatch opening and Luger started to climb. It was unnerving, even if they were only travelling at just a few knots because a fall would soon leave him at the peril of the propellers.

“Your face healed up alright,” Big Dave said as he held out his hand to help him.

“How’s your balls?” Luger countered.

Big Dave shrugged. “Who’s this guy? I thought that there was a team coming…”

“We ran into some trouble.”

“Clearly.”

“I had a tail. Tom and his men collared him for questioning, but he killed all three and got away.”

“How the hell did he manage to do that?”

“With a knife,” Luger replied. “I’m not sure if it was his own or belonged to one of the team. It certainly wasn’t pretty…”

“I bet it wasn’t…” Big Dave ducked his head at the almighty explosion. “Fuck…!” he exclaimed.

The two men peered out over the edge of the hatch. The prow of the boat was underwater, and the twin engines were rising out of the water into the air. There was no sign of Tom as the boat upended and the water around it foamed and bubbled as it started to sink. One of the deck crew shouted above them, and they scanned the water, picking the man’s head out fifty metres away. Strangely, he had vital distance between himself and the propellers, and the freighter had sailed on past him. Luger could only assume that the man had been blown a considerable distance. Two lifebuoys hit the water, and he started to swim towards the nearest of them. Another two floats went out, both emitting clouds of red coloured smoke.

“He’s fucked this right up!” Big Dave seethed. “These freighters take up to two miles to stop at cruising speed. Even at this speed we’re probably looking at almost a mile…”

Luger turned to one of the deckhands and said, “Drop a lifeboat, now!”

“We can launch, but we can’t retract,” the deckhand shouted as he ran to the emergency button and thumped it. He jogged back to them and said, “If we use a life raft now, then we won’t have enough capacity for the rest of us if the ship runs into trouble…” He got onto his two-way radio. “Man overboard! Man Overboard! Eighty metres, portside stern!”

“Commencing starboard Anderson turn…” Captain Stellenbosch’s harsh and guttural South African voice echoed back on the handset.

Luger and Big Dave made their way to the stern and watched as the vessel started to commence a hard starboard turn. Tom was now a hundred metres behind and a hundred metres to their portside. The Anderson turn was one of many configurations depending on a ship’s course, speed and surroundings that the captain would take in the event of a man overboard. The Anderson turn was a hard, full-rudder turn of three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, putting the ship back on its original course and in this case because of the vessel’s size, speed and turning circle, would potentially see them approach Tom on their original course with enough time to make steering adjustments to sail past him on their portside. It was not without risk, but they still had a twenty-minute burn on the smoke flares and good visibility.

The deck crew prepared buoys and a harness and headed to the prow where they would attempt to get Tom to tie himself on and give them enough attempts before they sailed past him. Once attached, they would guide him to the plimsoll line hatch, where they would haul him from the deck, but where two crew members would bring him through and into the hull of the ship.

“How the hell did he mess this up?” Big Dave asked, looking off the stern at their wake, which was starting to form a letter ‘P’.

“No idea.”

“I mean, when you use hand grenades for something like that, you wedge them in place or tape them with duct tape and use paracord to pull the pin. He’s SBS, he should have been all over that…”

Luger nodded. He wasn’t experienced in such things, but the big Fijian’s observation seemed valid. “The man has just lost his team. Three of his mates sliced to pieces in the space of a few minutes.” He paused, standing on the portside and craning his neck to see as Captain Stellenbosch completed the Anderson turn. “I think the bloke needs a beer and a rest.”

Big Dave said nothing. He’d done enough tours of duty in conflict and war zones to know that you didn’t always get what you wanted, let alone needed. He broke away and climbed the open metal staircase to the bridge. At the top of the second flight a viewing platform jutted out for docking and he leaned casually on the railing as he tried to spot Tom in the water. The smoke was drifting lazily and starting to dissipate as the flares were burning out. At the prow one of the deck crew was spotting with binoculars and another was on the two-way radio giving the captain distances. Big Dave caught sight of Tom, who was waving frantically. The deck crew had seen him, so there was little he could do than be in the way. The crew would have performed countless practical and theoretical drills on a man overboard scenario, and the drill changed for every type of approach. The Williamson turn, was a hard sixty-degree turn, and then an opposite loop and the vessel approached the victim from the opposite direction. A Scharnow turn set a continuing direction and a loop to meet the victim on a two-hundred-and-forty-degree angle. This gave the vessel chance for another pass but was best reserved for ships with a tight turning circle. Although he had grown up on the ocean in Fiji, Big Dave knew little of these maritime procedures and decided that watching would be the best course of action. Jack Luger, by contrast, was an ex-Royal Navy officer and knew these procedures inside and out.

Tom was holding onto one of the lifebuoys for dear life but had not stroked to the second one to double his buoyancy, even though it was drifting along with him in the current a mere twenty metres away. The smoke buoys had burned out and drifted lazily nearby. Captain Stellenbosch had the right line. Their previous wake had long dispersed for a visual guide, but the coordinates were spot on, and Tom was ten metres from the ship’s line and as the ropes went out, he grabbed one successfully and held on tightly. One of the crew got a harness to him and he wrapped it around himself, and the deck crew hauled in the other lines and walked the rope down the side of the ship towards the hatch on the plimsoll line. Luger had joined in with the rescue and was waiting at the plimsoll line hatch. Once Tom was in the harness, it all happened quickly. The speed of the ship, the crew walking his rope down the deck, and then the line as it tightened and three men heaved, with Luger pulling at the front. Tom left the water, spun and dangled for a moment, then was a metre clear and scrabbling for the rope ladder. The sea temperature was little above 2.4c and as a consequence of being in the water for a full twenty minutes, Tom had no feeling in his hands or feet and could not use the ladder at all. The three men took the dead weight and heaved him all the way to the hatch, where Luger manhandled him through the hatch and the other two men wrapped him in silver survival blankets and draped a yellow sou’wester around his shoulders.

Captain Stellenbosch met them on the deck. He had the look of a parent who arrived back from a trip early to find a drunken party in mid swing. Teenagers having sex in the garden and front door hanging of its hinges. “What the hell was that with the boat?”

Big Dave dropped down the steps and closed in on the South African. The two men stared at each other. Luger thought it a rare thing for someone to look the Fijian in the eye, but the captain was damned near the same mass as well.

“You work for my company, captain,” said Big Dave. “And I know that your fee for this run was double what you normally make, so you should know enough not to ask questions.”

“I want to know exactly what I’m dealing with here,” the South African replied.

“Inside,” said Luger. “I want my man here to get warmed up and checked out by the ship’s medic.”

Stellenbosch led the way up the steps while the two crew members took Tom downstairs. He was shivering and stumbling as the two men held him around each shoulder. “That was a close thing,” said Captain Stellenbosch as they stepped into the bridge. “At two degrees Celsius exhaustion and unconsciousness kicks in between fifteen and thirty minutes.” He paused. “Survival expectancy is thirty to ninety minutes. He was in the water for twenty-seven minutes. We’re lucky he’s not going straight into a body bag. What the hell happened to the boat? My crew are saying that there was an explosion of some kind.”

Luger nodded. “Problem with the fuel line. It’s a shame, we could have towed it.”

“Not through the Northern Passage we couldn’t, the ice would crush it,” the captain replied dubiously. “And there was no fuel in the water. Confirmed by myself as we came back on the same heading.”

Luger shrugged. “Okay, Captain. Cards on the table. You and your crew have stumbled into a British intelligence operation…”

“Well, my fee just doubled again…” Stellenbosch kept his voice down so that the first officer at the helm could not hear. “What risk are we talking about?”

“Surveillance,” Luger replied.

“Just surveillance?”

“And a possible extraction…”

“And now my fee has just doubled again…”

“I’ll clear it.”

“Now. On the satphone.”

“And we’ll have your full cooperation?”

“It’s against the Russians, right?” he asked. Luger nodded. “I’m not a fan of the Russians,” he said somewhat distantly. “My wife’s from Ukraine. Her family were all killed. Her village flattened.”

Luger nodded. “So, we all ok?”

Stellenbosch grinned. “Yeah, we’re all ok…”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Northern Russia

The water was clear and shockingly cold. After motoring up the coast for over an hour, Rashid had found out how cold it was by taking off his boots and socks to hop overboard and pull the boat into the shallows. He had tied on the anchor rope to the forward cleat and walked the anchor far up the beach and secured it in the sand, dropping some heavy rocks on top of it for good measure. He had assembled the rifle in the boat and attached the scope before putting it in a gun slip and taking it along with the shotgun and a soft camera bag to shore.

His feet were burning from the cold. That bizarre contradiction to the senses that icy water could bring. He put on his socks without drying his feet because he knew that the moisture would heat quickly in the same way a wetsuit worked. With his boots fastened, he stamped his feet on the sand to get the blood flowing. At a guess he thought the water to be one degree at best.

After Lars and Lisle had warned him of the potential threat of bears, it seemed to Rashid that he had seen at least twenty on the voyage north. He did not know what species they were, but they were big and brown and watched him curiously as he passed them by on the beaches. Interestingly, Henderson had told him that because of man’s interaction with bears over the past hundred thousand years, European and Russian grizzly bears, despite being identical to their American and Canadian cousins, were four times less likely to attack humans. The Darwinism theory evident and observable by geographical and social design. On the North American continent, human interaction had been dramatically less with native Americans (the Clovis People) coming to the continent via the ice bridge over the Bering Strait thirteen-thousand years ago, and certainly existing in such small numbers that human interaction had little discernible effect on the species’ evolution. Despite this, Rashid estimated some of the larger bears to be six-hundred pounds and had they stood on their hind legs, at least ten foot tall, and he did not want to put Henderson’s theory on Darwinism to the test.

He had risen early again and taken both the shotgun and the boat. With the team’s only mode of transport with him he did not have to worry about anyone catching up with him. It was just him and the bears from now on. He found a suitable spot straight away. The terrain was flat, and the grass was short and dry. There were no bears as far as he could see, but he took the shotgun with him as he walked out across the tundra and set out the first of the sheets of A4 paper and secured it in place with two long tent pegs either side, clamping them firmly in place. He continued to pace out another hundred metres and repeated the process until he had four targets set out from one hundred to four hundred metres. He then paced out another two-hundred metres and placed a target made of four sheets of A4 taped together with black duct tape in a perfect cross. After he had repeated this out to twelve-hundred metres, he walked back to the edge of the beach and poured himself a hot cup of tea from a flask and perched on a rock as he warmed his hands on the cup. The silence was all-consuming, and he couldn’t remember having experienced such solitude before. Even the sea barely made a ripple on the coarse sand and there wasn’t even a discernible breeze to break the void. To Rashid, it was perfect. The ideal conditions to zero his rifle.

Laying prone on the dry ground, he extended the folding bipod and slipped the bolt into the rear of rifle and pressed the release button to ease it forwards. He then pulled the bolt back and it stopped against the rear lugs while he dropped one of the large .50 cartridges into the breech, then drove the bolt home. He inserted the soft earplugs into his ears, then unscrewed the caps on the sight turrets and sighted in on the first target one-hundred metres away. Taking a deep breath, he held the cross hairs on the centre of the page and breathed out steadily, taking up pressure on the two-stage trigger, then settling in for the final squeeze. The recoil buried into his shoulder as the rifle’s report echoed around him. When he resighted the reticule on the page, the bullet hole was more or less dead centre. That was a good start, but he adjusted the elevation turret and worked the bolt, dropping another round into the breech and driving it forwards with the bolt. Breath, pressure and final composure, and once again the weapon recoiled and when he put the reticule back on the paper, the bullet hole was half an inch above the first and exactly in the centre of the target. The rifle hadn’t been designed to be a hundred metre weapon, but Rashid always started his zero up close and worked backwards, making mental notes on where to place the sight reticule and after he had found his zero at the most likely distance for the mission, he would work his way back to the close targets and make his mental recordings. The reticule was far from a clear cross. There were ten smaller bars on all for lines for different distances and he may well have the centre of the cross on a six-hundred metre target but would use the lower vertical line for further away and the top vertical line for closer targets. The horizontal bars were solely for windage allowances. By the time he got to the larger targets set out over five-hundred metres, he had a perfect black cross to work on, and he put three rounds on the paper to form a group. Making minute adjustments to the sight turrets, he fired groups of three to form a solid opinion on what adjustments needed to be made.

Rashid got up and stretched before pouring another cup of tea from the flask. Three hundred metres down the beach a bear was splashing in the shallows. He had noticed sizeable flat fish – perhaps flounder – and large, reddish-brown crabs. There did not seem to be an abundance of wildlife on land other than the lapwing yet to fly south for winter, so he assumed the bears would spend most of their time on the beaches, or upstream of the many streams and rivers he had passed on the way up here. The fact that a bear the sort of size he had seen would probably need ninety pounds of food a day made Rashid wonder just how tempted one would be if it saw him out here on his own. It had to be a whole lot easier than hunting for fish and crabs at a couple of pounds each.

Rashid waited for the bear to approach, already formulating a plan for the bear rounds. He figured a hit with a beanbag should turn the beast away, but could he reload in time to follow up with buckshot? He might even need a third shot with the heavy-duty slug. He’d heard somewhere that a charging bear could cover ground more quickly than a racehorse. He doubted he would have time to get a second round off from the single shot weapon, let alone three. If only the combined intelligence of the scientists added up to enough common sense to realise that a single shot weapon was the least effective option in bear country. With that in mind, he rested the shotgun against a rock and picked up the rifle. Interestingly, the .50 calibre round would fire in the 12-bore shotgun, but possible only successfully once, and more likely would blow the weapon apart. The engineering tolerances were not high enough to enable it to be done in anything but a pinch. That said, the Russian-made Baikal shotgun was notoriously one of the toughest ever made. Taking careful aim, he sighted on the beast and made the mental calculations for three-hundred metres using the tiny crossbars on the crosshairs. He settled on the centre of the animal’s chest, then readjusted his aim at the pineapple-sized rock between its front paws. He squeezed the two-stage trigger smoothly and the rifle butt hammered against his shoulder and the gunshot echoed all around him. The rock splinted and the beast leapt in the air and took off across the beach and onto the tundra. Rashid smiled, the weapon and scope proving accurate beyond his expectations from a standing, unrested position. He watched the bear running in its awkward-looking, yet highly effective gait, then walked back to his firing position to zero the rifle out to a thousand metres and beyond.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

London

“Charlotte is here and wants a word…” Mae’s voice came over Ramsay’s intercom.

Ramsay looked somewhat pensive as he said, “Very well, Mae. Send her in.”

Caroline didn’t look up from her screen. She should never have told Ramsay that Charlotte and he were soulmates. It had been a mistake borne from good intentions, but most mistakes were exactly that. Both were genius-level analysts who had worked together in MI5 for eighteen years or more, Ramsay had married and had two children while Charlotte had always carried a flame for him. What had prompted Caroline’s interference was the uniqueness of their similarities. Both were sapiosexual – preferring intelligence to looks - and had common interests in puzzles, problem solving and programming. Now Caroline realised that she had made things awkward on Ramsay’s part and wished she had kept her counsel.

“I brought Jammie Dodgers,” Charlotte smiled warmly as she entered.

“And news, I hope,” Ramsay replied somewhat stiffly.

“Of course…” she said, unperturbed. She placed the dish on his desk, smiled at Caroline, then sat on one of the leather tub chairs at the coffee table reserved for more informal meetings. “Igor Reznikov’s family have disappeared,” she said heavily.

“I suspected as much…” Ramsay mused.

“Neil, you have to pull the operation!” Caroline exclaimed. “If the man planted information, be it content or timeline or location, then the team are at risk.”

“Obviously…”

“And if whomever is behind this took the agent’s family, and if he really did kill himself as part of his orders, to save their lives, then we have seriously underestimated the power and reach of our enemy…” Caroline shook her head. “The Russians know that we are coming for the Eagle’s Talon, and we’re going to play right into their hands!”

“Not necessarily.”

“How? It seems obvious to me.”

Charlotte turned towards her and said, “Just because the pieces are in play, it doesn’t mean the game has yet been decided.”

“Sorry, I’m not a chess person,” Caroline replied. “If indeed that was a metaphor for chess.”

“I have anticipated this,” Ramsay said matter-of-factly. He beckoned them over to his desk and turned his laptop around. On the screen was the image of a man in a car with a telephoto lens. Ramsay clicked through the images and eventually settled on another picture of him, but this time sitting beside a woman. “Here. Something from Jim Kernow…”

“Who are we looking at?” Caroline asked.

“I asked Jim to keep an eye on the place, so to speak. He’s rigged cameras in the vicinity of our building and has been carrying out surveillance.”

“On whom?”

“On anyone remotely interested in our building,” Ramsay replied. “And our employees…”

“And these two have shown an interest?” Caroline asked.

“Very much so.” Ramsay paused. “We couldn’t find anything on the man, but facial recognition from our databases have flagged her up.” He opened a folder and settled on an image of the woman. “Katerina Baskakov, FSB agent. She’s been off our radar because she has operated almost exclusively in the US, and then it was believed that she had taken a desk position, running her own agents and assets. However, she appears to have a new remit. I haven’t worked out whether she’s involved in Operation Eagle’s Talon, or whether this is something entirely different, but she has certainly taken an interest in this department and has commissioned an agent to watch us. With Baskakov working against us, then we have some serious opposition.”

“And who the hell is the opposition? Iron Fist, or the Russians?” Caroline asked incredulously. “Can we assume that she’s gone rogue, or is this a state-sanctioned interference?”

“Definitely the Russians. There’s too much involvement for it to be Iron Fist, and no involvement that we can be sure about from the other founding nations. Iran, China, North Korea, Belarus… not a peep from them.” Charlotte paused. “This is a trap for certain. Russia are seeking to claim enemy action against them, and in doing so Britain will have egg on her face, NATO will be incandescent, the European Union will distance themselves from us even further and the Americans will seek to clip our wings.”

“But one man’s trap is another man’s challenge,” Ramsay smiled.

“There are lives at stake, Neil,” Caroline reminded him.

“I am aware of that, Caroline. It’s all I ever think about.”

Caroline brooded for a moment as her internal monologue told her to take a breath and think more broadly. Her relationship with King and her brotherly friendship with Big Dave meant that she was only seeing the risks and not the potential. “Alright,” she said. “But have you two chess geniuses worked out your moves far enough ahead?”

“Chess…” Ramsay mused distractedly. He spun his laptop around and tapped quickly on the keys. Caroline had often thought that the man had the digit dexterity of a concert pianist when he was in front of a computer. “Here,” he said, and both Charlotte and Caroline seemed to decide in unison that they would get up and stand over him at his desk as he scrolled on the screen. “Fedor Sokolov,” he said. “He just won a major world tournament in Norway after an extended period of reclusiveness.”

“Tournament?” Caroline asked.

“Chess,” Charlotte replied without taking her eyes off the screen. “He’s a Russian grand master. However, he has been out of circulation for a while. Completely off the grid, and the Russians do give their stars some latitude when it comes to visas and movement.”

Caroline looked at the two of them, their eyes lighting up at the mention of chess. She wondered whether Charlotte’s new flame would be able to fulfil her intellectual needs and aspirations.

“Which is why I’m wondering why he’s come out of isolation now,” said Ramsay pointedly. “Charlotte, dig up everything you can on Fedor Sokolov and Katerina Baskakov. Look for a connection. Anything.” He paused. “From the outset this thing has felt like a protracted yet considered game of chess. Let’s see if we can find out who’s putting their players on the board.”

Chapter Thirty

The Bering Sea

“Imade a mistake. What happened back at port shook me. Those guys were my friends…”

Luger glanced at Big Dave, then looked back at Tom. “We can’t afford any more mistakes.”

Tom shrugged. “I’ll be okay. It will be okay…”

Luger nodded. There wasn’t much else for it. Tom had spent the remainder of the day in bed wrapped in silver survival blankets and bed sheets and had been given copious amounts of hot coffee. He had been lucky. The water temperature and shock meant that his life expectancy had been down to mere minutes when he had been rescued. He was now seated at the table in the recreation room in his freshly laundered clothing with a large plate scrambled eggs in front of him. Big Dave had a plate piled high with steak, chips and fried eggs and was working his way through his third slice of bread and butter, folding it to make chip butties. Luger, by contrast, nursed a large cup of strong black coffee. He never ate breakfast as a rule, preferring to feel hungry and alert throughout the day. His best decisions came when he felt less comfortable. He watched Tom eating hungrily, trying to imagine what it would be like to lose three members of his own team in a matter of as many minutes. Unthinkable. “We need to rethink and adapt the plan,” he said. “To make up for our… losses.”

Tom nodded. “I’d like to know when my men have been recovered,” he said. “If you don’t mind…?”

“Not at all,” Luger replied. “I’ll make some calls.”

“Where’s my team’s kit?”

“In the maintenance room,” replied Big Dave mid-mouthful. “We’ve commandeered it until further notice, or until it’s needed.”

“Great. I’ll check it out when I’m done here,” he said. “Are either of you two carrying?”

“No,” Luger replied. “Big Dave?”

The big Fijian shook his head as he took another mouthful of steak.

“No problem,” said Tom quietly. “There’s going to be plenty to go round…”

Luger finished his coffee and stood up. “I’ll see what I can find out about your team,” he said, giving the man a pat on the shoulder. “Sort out the weapons and kit when you’ve finished your breakfast.”

Chapter Thirty-One

London

Caroline balanced the two takeaway coffees, one on top of the other as she opened the van door. Inside, Jim Kernow smiled warmly and held out his hand to take one of the coffees off her.

“I got extra-large lattes,” she said. “Hope that’s okay?”

“Beautiful,” he replied.

Caroline tried not to stare at the large, thick raw-looking scar on his neck. It was a recent wound that still looked saw, the stitches recently removed. It reminded just her of how quickly an operation could go wrong, and how vulnerable people could be. He had been lucky to survive. “Sugar?” she asked, holding out two sachets. He nodded and took them from her gratefully. “How is it going?”

“I haven’t seen the woman who we now know to be Katerina Baskakov since she met with the man in the car. But he is still keeping headquarters under close surveillance, as you can see for yourself if you check that monitor.”

Caroline frowned as she studied the screen. Jim had fitted solar-powered wireless cameras and could monitor them from the equipment inside the van. In doing this he could watch the man without being seen and would be mobile if the man left the area. “Can we get a tracker on his vehicle?”

“We could try,” Jim replied. “Any ideas how?”

“Cyclist, maybe.”

“A crash?”

“A gentle nudge, perhaps?”

“A courier?”

“That seems the easiest option.” She sipped her coffee, then added, “Going too fast, gets it wrong and takes a tumble beside the car. Slip a magnetic tracker underneath and Bob’s your uncle.”

“Or Fanny’s your aunt. But one thing’s for sure; it can’t be any of us,” Jim commented matter-of-factly. “I wouldn’t make a believable cyclist, and he already knows everybody else’s face.”

Caroline took out her mobile phone and made a quick call and told the person what she wanted. It was a simple request and even though Ramsay and the team were operating in a separate department, the MI5 watchers were still at their disposal. The best surveillance operatives in the world, the watchers would make short work of Jim and Caroline’s plan. By the time she ended the call, she imagined that somebody was already suiting up in yellow Lycra and choosing a bicycle for the task. She had been told that it would happen within the hour, and she turned her attention to the screen and sipped her coffee as she waited.

“We’ll need a receiver paired with the device,” said Jim.

“The technology is moving quickly these days,” she replied. “They are going to text me a QR code, and we will have direct access to the portal where the tracker will digitally transmit to.”

“Oh…” Jim winced. “Fuck, I’m getting too old for this shit…”

“Tell me about it.”

“You’re kidding! You’re just a child compared to me!” He exclaimed. “Besides, I thought you were polishing a chair at a fancy desk these days. Sort of goes against all common sense to be back in the field.”

“I’m everywhere that I’m needed,” Caroline replied. “And you’re meant to be minding Ramsay and driving him.”

“Mission creep,” he shrugged. “I was just his driver at first, but I couldn’t keep saying no.”

“Me neither…” Caroline checked her phone at the sound of the text alert. “We’re on,” she said. She captured the code and clicked on the link. Signing in with her identity number, she added, “Nothing yet. Wait, what’s that on the screen?”

They watched as a man could be seen getting back to his feet from the gutter and struggling with his bicycle. He shouted something at the man in the vehicle and climbed back onto his mountain bike, then flipped the man his middle finger and pedalled off into the flow of traffic. The man got out of his vehicle and surveyed the bodywork, then climbed back inside and continued his vigil. Caroline opened the portal and the vehicle’s position was marked by a solid red dot on a Google Maps style background. She knew from experience that when the tracker moved it would flash, the frequency of which would increase along with the tracker’s speed.

“That was seamless,” Jim commented. “I wish we had those in the police force back in my day. I wish they would have allowed us to use them, too.”

“Police service these days, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Jim said heavily. “And when the name changed, that’s when it all went downhill…” He shook his head despondently. “Because when the name changed, the nanny state took over and we cared more about image and political correctness than results. We lost our footing on the thugs, the gangs, the children stabbing each other to death…”

Caroline couldn’t help noticing the trail off and tone of his voice when he talked about stabbing. It hadn’t been a teenaged gang stabbing like there seemed to be every day in the capital, but it had been so close to being fatal. He had been lucky to pull through, lucky that an accident and emergency nurse had been seated near him on the bus to give him critical first aid and pinch the artery. She wondered whether it was too soon for the man to have returned to work. Clearly there would be PTSD after such an horrific experience. “If you need to talk…” she said, but to her annoyance the words sounded empty to her. “There’s people who you can talk to, people who can help…”

Kernow shook his head. “It’s fine, not a problem.” Caroline picked up Kernow’s mobile and held the screen up to his face. “Hey!” he protested. “I hate it when my bloody kids do that!”

Caroline smiled as she sent the QR code and gave him access to the portal. “Here,” she said. “You now have access to the tracker. Ramsay is requisitioning two watchers from Thames House to give you a hand. When they get here, work out some shifts and go and get dinner and some sleep.”

Kernow nodded, looking relieved. The team had spread itself too thinly and help would be welcomed. “Where are you going?”

“Back to polishing that chair with my backside,” she grinned. “A senior leader’s work is never done…”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Nemuro, Japan

Away from his former home and first posting of Tokyo, Inspector Tatsu Suzuki had not seen a murder since arriving in Nemuro three years previously. Last year a quarrel between two fishermen had resulted in a stabbing, but the man had given himself up at the scene and the case had been closed before the next morning after his confession and full cooperation. So, it was reasonable to say that the thirty-six-year-old inspector, newly a father and married for just two years had thought that his life had taken a quiet turn as he approached middle-age away from the hustle and bustle of the nation’s capital and the Makuza organised crime wars, and thefts and violent muggings of the nighttime streets. Nemuro was a quiet town with a low crime rate and Tatsu Suzuki’s most recent case had been a series of bicycle thefts. He had been quite happy with that and had not once yearned for his days at Tokyo vice since stepping off the train at Nemuro.

Knife wounds were not uncommon in Japan. Firearms were extremely difficult to legally own and even more difficult to procure illegally on the streets. But Japan was home to the samurai sword and all its iterations, as well as a host of other edged weapons and the martial arts to use them most effectively. The Makuza prided itself on its slayings by bladed weapons, but even though the young inspector had seen more than his fair share of knife wounds, there was something about these killings that had been brutally efficient.

“Incisions between the ribs to both of the lungs…” said the young female pathologist through her face mask. “Liver, both kidneys stabbed with uncanny accuracy. See the dark blood on the right? That’s from the man’s liver.” She paused, standing back up and unzipping the protective suit a few inches at the collar. “I won’t be able to tell until he’s on the slab, but I suspect the organ has been sliced almost in two.”

“And yet the killer still sliced the man’s throat?”

“Yes. But by the time they did that, I imagine he was already in cardiac arrest…”

“I wonder if it was in attempt to silence the victim,” Suzuki mused, shaking his head. How had it been done? He visualised a faceless assassin with a dagger. Agile and brutally efficient with their movements. One, two, three – that was both lungs and the liver – grab the man’s hair and pull him forwards to bend him over - four, five – both kidneys severed – push the victim down – six – a slice across the throat as skilful as a sashimi chef slicing through the seams of different muscles on a side of tuna. “And the others?” he asked.

“More of the same,” she replied.

“And the type of weapon?”

“A gun…” She smirked as she stepped away and pulled off the face mask.

“I get it,” he rolled his eyes. “I meant… what sort of knife…”

“Sorry, I couldn’t resist,” she said somewhat lamely. “I would confidently suggest a dagger, judging from the puncture wounds. Diamond shaped incisions, which indicates a thick, double-edged blade. Razor sharp, too.”

“Length?”

“Seventeen to twenty centimetres.” She paused. “With a cross guard. There is bruising on some of the wounds, indicating that the cross guard stopped the blade from driving in any deeper.”

“Not a traditional Japanese blade,” Tatsu Suzuki commented. Most Japanese blades mirrored the Samurai sword, the classic tanto design. The diamond blade profile was more of a European design, starting in the Middle Ages.

“Interestingly, one of the bodies had the exact knife that I have just described. He wore it strapped to his right leg.” She paused. “I checked online and it’s a Fairburn and Sykes Commando dagger. Used by the British Royal Marine Commandos in the Second World War. The dagger is their emblem on their insignia. They are still issued with modern versions of them, but many old school marines seek out the original models and carry them.”

That fitted. Tatsu Suzuki had been briefed on the scene by the government representative and his commander. The British had been operating briefly on Japanese soil, with the Japanese government’s consent. He was here to investigate their murder, but he had also been briefed to claim the bodies and have them flown back to Britain after the pathologist had submitted her report. But how had these trained men been killed so swiftly? The killer would have had to be practically supernatural to beat the odds.

“Did all three men have one of these knives?” he asked.

“No, just two. But a third had an empty sheath.”

So, that was it. The killer took one of the weapons.

“As did the fourth,” she added.

“Fourth?” Suzuki asked, tempted to check his notes, but he wasn’t a man to make mistakes. “I was informed of just three bodies.”

The pathologist nodded. “Yes, but the uniformed police found a fourth body in the water. Weighed down by an anchor chain. He too, had an empty sheath strapped to his right leg,” she told him. “But no knife has yet been recovered from the water…”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Nordreisa, Northern Norway

Home for the next week was an old fishing hut on an uninhabited island north of Troms County. Like much of Norway, the island was rugged and cold. Huge rocks punctuated short, lush grass that looked as though it had been recently cut, but in reality, never grew high because of the cold and wind and salt. The sea was dark blue with hues of green within a mirrored surface. The tens of thousands of islands that gave Norway its ruggedness also gave the waters shelter and calm. Fifty miles to the west, the Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea met as one angry body of icy water and pummelled the rocky coastline, but with a hundred or more islands between, the inland waters around the island were calmer than the Mediterranean on its calmest of days. So calm, in fact, that King could see every cloud, every bird above mirrored perfectly on its surface.

King had taken a run for twenty-minutes at a fast pace. He always liked to be fit enough to get out of trouble faster than he got into it. After his run, he had climbed a high slope, and although not vertical, he had pulled and pushed himself up sections that worked his arms, legs and core almost to failure. The view at the summit was magnificent and he allowed himself some time to take in his surroundings while he rested, but still stretched out his muscles. The walk back down made his thighs burn, and when he reached the rocky beach, he lifted and piled rocks starting with smaller ones of around ten kilos and up to fifty kilos or more, rolling them end over end until his arms, stomach, legs and back burned. Stripping naked, he walked into the icy water up to his waist, then dived in and swam underwater until his lungs begged for air, and he broke the surface, spun onto his back and floated listening to the rapid, muted pulse thumping in his ears. He allowed himself to float for five minutes, the cold burning his skin but soothing his muscles, then he swam to shore and pulled on his clothes, his limbs tingling as he walked back along the beach towards the fishing hut around the next bend.

The aroma of coffee, eggs and toast greeted him, and he noted that Lofty was jogging back along the beach and Taff was drying himself off as he warmed by the fire. Each man was responsible for his own fitness and pride would not allow them to screw up the mission through not being fit enough. Jock was burning toast quite effectively as Brian fried a panful of eggs in dark yellow Norwegian butter over the embers of the fire. Two metal pots of coffee and tea were nestled in the embers and steaming from the spouts. King used a tatty cloth to pick up the teapot and pour himself some in an enamel cup. He splashed in the UHT milk from the carton and went without sugar because there wasn’t any.

Brian placed two fried eggs on a slice of toast, topped it off with another slice and handed it to King. “Egg banjo?” he asked.

King took it with a smile. The sandwich got its name in the armed forces because the first bite generally squirted egg yolk down your front and as you held the sandwich clear, pulled a shocked expression and picked at the yolk on your shirt, you looked like the guy in the film Deliverance playing Duelling Banjos. The eggs were fresh, and the toast wasn’t the worst he’d ever had, and the tea, although stewed warmed him wonderfully after the icy swim.

They had landed at Tromsø airport choosing to fly from Oslo rather than direct from Glasgow. That at least gave some anonymity as they left the domestic flight without the need to pass through passport control. The city was barely a small town, but what it lacked in cosmopolitan city life, it made up for by being wonderfully Norwegian. Brightly painted wooden houses with tall stained-glass windows. Chimneys smoked from roaring fires and the sun hung low in the sky, casting long shadows and a golden hue on the horizon. Cold, still waters surrounded the city and as they drove out to their island using a network of sophisticated and uniquely designed bridges, King thought the entire place to be beautiful and unlike any place he’d ever been. Picturesque did not do the place justice. The European Route E6 cut through the city, the one-thousand-nine-hundred-mile road started from the southern tip of Sweden and ended in the north of Norway on the Finnish border.

Flymo joined them for an egg sarnie and a hot brew, and he warmed himself by the fire. Although born and bred in south London, he always claimed that his Jamaican heritage left him feeling cold. Only the hottest of British summers comfortably warmed him. The rest of the time he wore plenty of layers of clothing. His flight training was over. Nobody could teach him more than he already knew, but he had been studying Russian Cyrillic and had started working out the key words that he would need in the cockpit of Eagle’s Talon, and what they would likely be. As a reference he had detailed photographs of the Mi Mil-24 Hind gunship’s cockpit which he had used to translate and familiarise the layout. He also concentrated on moving stealthily across the landscape with the team and working on his fitness levels. Brian had taken him under his wing, and as a keen distance runner, he had pushed Flymo to his limits. The plan was to wait on the island, do some physical training and acclimatisation and wait for their charter boat and captain to travel up from Bergen. The right captain had been found for a ‘no questions asked’ cash charter, but that captain could not be a local. Locals gossiped. But what’s more; they remembered anything out of the ordinary. This captain had been paid handsomely and had done some work in the Baltic Sea for British intelligence services before.

They had all the kit they needed but would be travelling light. SAWs – squad automatic weapons – were in the form of two FN Minimi light machineguns chambered in 7.62x51mm (NATO) for extra range and punch. The two men armed with these would use them as their primary weapons. The British Army Sharpshooter rifle also in 7.62mm NATO had been developed to address squad issues of long-range contacts in Afghanistan where soldiers found themselves frequently out-ranged by the Taliban with their 7.62x39mm Kalashnikovs. The Sharpshooter was the answer to this and Stan, who would be the team sniper had fitted the rifle with a Schmidt & Bender 3.9x51mm scope. With a fast rate of fire as well as pin-point accuracy, it would also act as his primary weapon and ammunition could be shared between the two SAW operators if necessary. King and the other five SAS soldiers would be armed with Heckler & Koch 416 rifles chambered in the smaller 5.56x45mm (NATO) round, and all the men including Flymo would carry a Glock 17, 9mm pistol. The weapons had all been tested at Stirling Lines, cleaned of fingerprints and DNA and packaged along with the shaped charges and hand grenades, ammunition, magazines and webbing pouches. They had also packed Gemini inflatable boats with silent running 20hp electric outboards. Their equipment would be transported by Royal Navy destroyer and rendezvous with the captain of their charter vessel in the North Sea.

Without their kit, King found it somewhat hilarious that when they practised different scenarios on their deserted island, they did so with ‘gun fingers’ and child-like machinegun noises. Ten men running around playing war like children of his generation used to. Flymo had caused a riot of laughter when he left his position and pretended to fly a helicopter with more playground sound effects. For some reason this more than anything else had left King wondering how impossible and futile this operation could be.

Chapter Thirty-Four

London

“He’s called Rurik. We are unsure whether it is his first or last name, or what nationality he is, although we suspect that he is a Russian national.”

“And that’s it?” Caroline asked somewhat irritably.

“We know that he has been associated with Katerina Baskakov in the past. Both times before diplomats were assassinated,” Charlotte said heavily. “They were also under surveillance in the US suspected of political interference before the elections two administrations ago. However, the FBI lost them.” She paused. “And the Norwegian police have confirmed that Baskakov was in Oslo at the recent chess tournament. She was observed on CCTV meeting with Fedor Sokolov in the hotel bar. I don’t know if it’s an unfortunate coincidence, but the barman died of a suspected heart attack, a postmortem will confirm. By all accounts he was a young, fit man who did triathlons and cross-country skiing, so not a front runner for a heart attack.”

Ramsay frowned. “So, a known assassin meets with a Russian FSB officer and then conducts a surveillance operation against us. A Russian chess grand master meets with that same FSB officer and a barman working at the time dies. And an enemy agent confesses all and then kills himself, and his family has been reported missing…”

“We can’t seriously go ahead with the operation, Neil,” said Caroline. “It’s blatantly a trap.” She paused, seemingly exasperated. “What about the killing of the SBS commandos in Japan? Jack and Big Dave have been affected by the killings… they risk not having enough men to complete their task, and no, we have no opportunity now to send replacements.”

“Caroline’s right,” Charlotte agreed. “There is something drastically wrong with the picture.”

“It’s an assassination attempt,” said Caroline. “We’re under surveillance from a known assassin. But why? Clearly to try and kill us! Alex and his team in northern Russia, at the hands of the Spetsnaz. Jack, Big Dave and their team in Japan by an enemy agent. The Russian’s are seeking to eliminate us all…”

Charlotte nodded. “I agree, it all looks like the pieces on the board are closing in…” She took out her mobile phone and frowned.

“What’s wrong,” asked Ramsay.

“An update from Inspector Tatsu Suzuki, the officer in charge of securing the crime scene in Japan…” She paused, the expression of confusion still on her face. “They’ve found another body. A fourth man, his ID has confirmed him as Tom Whitaker …”

Caroline frowned. “But if Tom Whitaker is dead, then who the hell has Jack met with in Japan?”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Nordreisa, Northern Norway

The boat was classed as a fishing vessel, but was quite unlike anything King had seen in Britain. Certainly not a UK trawler design. Classic Nordic with hints of New England whaler. To King, the vessel looked like a modern version of the boat used in the film Jaws. Anchored fifty metres from the stoney beach, the dead calm water reflected a perfect mirror’s image of the vessel and the cloudless, azure-blue sky above.

The boat’s captain was a tough looking Norwegian called Bjorn. King had been picturing a modern-day Viking, and he hadn’t been disappointed when the man had stepped out of the clinker built tender. Five-eight tall and almost as wide, the man was all beard and hair and muscle. Wearing ripped jeans and a red and black plaid shirt, his sleeves were rolled to the elbow, his forearms scarred and tanned. The man had hands like shovels and was missing the little finger on his left hand. On his belt hung a Scandinavian style fishing knife in a stained leather sheath. With him, his first mate and only crew member was a blonde Scandinavian model who could have swept back her hair and appeared on the cover of Vogue. She was dressed similarly to the captain of the vessel, but managed to look like a stylist had spent hours and a thousand pounds dressing her. King realised when he had shaken her hand that she was here on merit, not because of her physical attributes, as her callouses dug sharply into his own hand. It turned out that she was the man’s daughter and had been working on boats for ten years since she was sixteen. King was aware that the young woman was getting more than her fair share of admiring glances from the men, and he made certain to keep eye contact with her and show that he wasn’t surprised to preserve both his integrity as much as her own worth. Unlike the SAS troopers who were not used to working with women, King had spent his life in both MI6 and MI5 with female bosses, female operatives and gone up against ruthless female assassins who would tear through these tough men standing on the beach wondering what a young woman was doing here.

The woman rowed King to the boat while her father warmed by the fire and accepted a strong, black coffee. King felt uncomfortable with her rowing, but soon realised that he would have embarrassed himself, such was her skill with the oars. Once King had pulled himself up onto the deck, she had even refused his hand, pulling herself up easily.

“Your equipment is below deck,” she said.

King nodded. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Elspeth,” she replied. “And yours?”

“King.”

She made no comment and simply led the way down to the loading bay which King imagined would have once been full of netting, rope, fish crates and buoys, but now contained stacked boxes and crates. Directly above him, he could make out the frame and lid of a large loading hatch and had noticed the winch in the middle of the deck when he had boarded. When he looked round, Elspeth had gone. He got it. She had a job to do, and she didn’t want to see something that would make her job awkward. They had already rendezvoused with a Royal Navy frigate, and King knew from experience that the captain and his daughter would not have been allowed within a mile of the vessel. The Royal Marines would have taken powerful RIBs to them, likely armed and almost certainly looking mean. A quick and efficient delivery and away in silence. That would have already told the pair all they needed to know about what they had signed up for.

King looked around and found a crowbar and hammer in a box of loose tools and jemmied open the first of the boxes. Inside were hard, plastic rifle cases sealed with zip ties. King took out his Leatherman, whipped open the blade and sliced open the zip ties, to reveal three H&K 416 rifles that were well-oiled and wrapped in waxed paper. Two more revealed the two SAWs, the Sharpshooter rifle and the other assault rifles. The rest of the boxes contained STANAG magazines that fitted all NATO compatible rifles in 5.45x45mm, the Glock pistols and cardboard cartons ammunition. King went through everything, ignoring the Gemini inflatable boats and outboard motors – the SAS boys could do that when they were at sea – but he opened another case and found what he was looking for. The combination lock was the giveaway. All the other boxes were sealed with zip ties. King already knew the combination and rolled the three-digit code, then worked on the other lock. Opening the lid just enough to squeeze his fingers through – much like the release of a car bonnet – he found the release and squeezed until there was an audible click. He hadn’t realised until he had carefully opened the lid that he had been perspiring, but when he saw the two cannister charges, one either side of the locks, he felt it justified. He had been told that each cannister contained one kilogramme of PE4 plastic explosive, the reasoning for such a high volume of explosive – each one enough to bring down a four bedroomed two storey house constructed from concrete or brick, and cause serious fragmentation damage for a radius of seven-hundred metres – was that by no means was anyone ever to recover what was inside the case.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Bering Sea

Luger waited in the bridge for the call. Captain Stellenbosch had told him that a woman had called the satphone and would call back directly. He watched the sea ice ahead of them, thicker on both sides of the channel made by a constant flow of ships. The stern of which one could be seen three miles in the distance. Another three miles to their port there would be another channel for the shipping travelling from west to east. The ice between both lanes was broken from the continuous wake of the ships. The radar indicated another vessel four miles behind them, and another to their port, almost directly alongside them. The sonar and depth finder showed a depth of four-thousand metres beneath them. Luger glanced at the captain at the helm with the ludicrously tiny ship’s wheel in front of him, but the vessel would be running on computer input for most of the time. Ahead of the bridge, the deck spread out with the rectangle containers they had stacked with the ship’s crane leaving a space clear in the middle to accommodate the Eagle’s Talon. Theoretically the aircraft’s rotors would clear the sides, and the layers of tarpaulin and cargo netting that they would stretch over the top would hide the aircraft from view.

The satphone chimed and Captain Stellenbosch answered, then handed the phone to Luger.

“Jack, it’s Caroline…” she said curtly. Luger was about to greet her warmly, but she continued swiftly. “You have a big problem…”

“Go on…”

“There weren’t three SBS commandos killed at the port in Nemuro, there were four…”

“Four?” Luger frowned.

“Sergeant Tom Whitaker, team leader.”

“There’s some confusion here, Caroline. Tom is on the boat. He was the sole survivor. I was there when it all happened.”

“Jack, listen carefully. The man you know as Tom, is not who he says he is. Tom Whitaker’s body was weighed down by anchor chain and thrown into the harbour. His body has been identified by various tattoos, one being the name of his daughter and her date of birth, as well as the name of his wife and their wedding date.”

Luger’s mind raced as he replayed what had happened back at Nemuro port. He had met Tom, or whoever the hell he was at the pre-arranged rendezvous. Tom had then called in the team to snatch the agent. Or had texted. That made all the difference. But Tom followed the men into the rows of containers. So, if this wasn’t Tom, then he could have killed the three SBS commandos, perhaps helped by the enemy agent. They had been set up. The real Tom Whitaker had been killed first, perhaps even tortured for information on the operation. The enemy agent could have easily accessed Tom’s phone using facial recognition. Then there were ‘Tom’s’ mistakes or idiosyncrasies. For an SBS commando and former Royal Marine he had suffered terrible seasickness. Luger had put the man’s mistake in scuppering the speedboat with the grenades down to the emotion of losing his men, but it all made sense now. The man was certainly a killer, but he was no soldier. Luger could have kicked himself when he recalled the man’s confusion with the starboard aft line - an SBS operator would certainly know their way around a boat - and then when Luger had asked what the man had in his kit to destroy the boat, ‘Tom’ had replied, “I’ll check…” Luger had thought it odd at the time, but he had let it pass because he knew that individual members of a team had specific tasks and as team leader, Tom might not have been entirely sure what had made it from their wish list to being delivered to port from the Royal Navy frigate operating in the Sea of Japan. The Royal Marine contingent on the frigate would have packed what they had available.

“Are you there, Jack?”

Luger snapped out of his thoughts. “Yes…”

“Be careful, Jack. The police inspector in Nemuro said that the killer was highly efficient…”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Northern Russia

Rashid had buried the rifle after he had finished zeroing it. Secured in a full-length waterproof gun slip, with a spare magazine and various types of ammunition including armour piercing, soft-nosed expanding and incendiary. The weapon lay underneath a foot of earth with a grass turf on top. He had taken measurements from three landmarks, and was confident that he would easily find it when the time came.

Days at the camp blended into one. The scientists like to drink and talk about their various fields and the concentric circles that overlapped one another. Rashid had learned a great deal about the target of the project – the Jankowski’s Bunting – as well as the various arctic seabirds and fowl that inhabited the area. He felt he could talk freely about where best to find them, and ideas he had for capturing their images. The advantage of his cover was that he was assuming the identity of an award-winning nature photographer who had made their career in sports. The real Chris Santos had moved to photographing nature during the covid lockdowns, so was relatively unknown in the natural science community. Rashid felt that his cover was working, but the camp’s terrible phone signal and woeful Wi-Fi had helped him immeasurably. However, Rashid couldn’t lose the constant knot in his stomach from working undercover. He had only done so once before, on secondment to Special Branch from the SAS tasked with infiltrating the mosque and inner circle of a rogue imam who preached Islamic extremism. When his cover had been blown, he had been lucky to make it out alive. Then he had met King for the first time and had been thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire. He had vowed never to go undercover again, but here he was in northern Russia. The only plus side with this undercover assignment was that these scientists wouldn’t be queuing up to behead him if they saw through his act.

Rashid spent his time walking out across the tundra taking pictures and loading the pre-loaded images to memory cards and editing them for appraisal. He had managed to take the boat a few times, each time getting closer to the town of Shoyna, until he set out at four-am one morning and motored past the Shoyna river mouth. He moored on the deserted beach and strolled with his camera until he saw the base in the distance. Using the telephoto lens, he photographed the base from over three-thousand metres and walked parallel to it taking more photographs as he went. When he returned to camp, he spent hours zooming in on the images and making mental notes. The camp’s main security feature was its remoteness and the emptiness of the terrain. He had saved the images on a memory card, and as he had built the fire ahead of another nighttime of alcohol and chat under a star-filled night sky, he had second thoughts and having studied the images, he burned the memory card and watched it melt as the fire roared.

That evening the soldiers came. Colin Henderson did not hide his outrage, turning to Rashid and whispering that ‘you have to be tough with these people, they don’t understand anything else. It’s Darwinism in its purest form from the days of communism...’ Rashid could tell that Collette and Mike were in a world of fear. Soldiers, guns, military vehicles and the dour face of the officer was not what they had signed up for while studying for a three-year degree at university in the southwest of England. By contrast, Lars and Lisle stood defiantly beside the office. Norway shared a one-hundred and twenty-mile border with Russia, and they looked like they didn’t care one bit. They had grown up with Russia as their neighbour and had done their compulsory military service, Norway being the first NATO member state to introduce national service. Norway did not bow to Russian aggression, and had thirty-one other countries sworn to protect them, or fight with them if Russia got confused about the geography of its borders again.

After Henderson had spoken to the officer, he walked with him to Rashid and said, “This is Colonel Zukovsky. Someone was seen taking pictures near the military base this morning.” He paused, frowning at Rashid like he wanted to know why he was so far north of their sanctioned area, too. “Do you know anything about that?”

Rashid recognised the name. every fibre of his being wanted to scrutinise the man for a family resemblance, but he did not look directly at him as he shrugged for fear of giving himself away. “I was north of the river,” he replied. “But I didn’t take any photographs. There were no buntings there, no seabirds, either.”

“My men will search your equipment,” the colonel said, not asking permission. “Do you object?”

“Not at all,” Rashid replied amiably.

The search had started with a strip search, in which Rashid had stripped naked and allowed the soldiers to go through his clothes. Colonel Zukovsky suggested a body cavity search, to which Rashid told the man to go fuck himself, and promptly got dressed. The Russian officer was clearly in a position of power, but the scientific research budget had included a generous ‘grant administration fee’ and he did not want to be the man who made the research group pack up and go home. Nobody else suffered the humiliation of a strip search, but their quarters were gutted, and two studious-looking soldiers went through all the tech and laptops. Five hours later, Colonel Zukovsky and his men left the camp with a crate of whisky and a stark warning not to return north of the Shoyna river. Henderson and his team had lost an entire day and as much as Rashid feigned ignorance, he could tell he wasn’t popular with the group.

“Perhaps you should concentrate your efforts nearer to the camp, and not use the boat again, Chris,” Henderson had said, watching the military vehicles fade into the distance, swallowed by the gloom of the early dusk. “And maybe I should accompany you from now on…”

Rashid watched the man climb the steps to the office cabin, then tossed another piece of dried driftwood onto the fire, staring at the embers that had swallowed up the memory card. He knew he had done the right thing in burning it. A wave of nausea washed through him as he thought how different it could have been had they played back images of the camp as they had scanned through the hundreds of pictures of sea birds and the elusive Jankowski’s Bunting. But that nausea was nothing compared to the growing tightness in his stomach as he realised that his test had worked, but not in his favour. Three-thousand metres on a desolate moor-like terrain, dressed in a dark green ski jacket, making slow, deliberate movements and he had been spotted. This was going to be more difficult than he first thought. If not impossible.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The East Siberian Sea

Luger pulled the collar of his jacket tighter to keep out the icy wind as he stared at the body, then up at the gantry forty-feet above their heads. Like the rest of the ship the deck was constructed from steel. Luger had no idea how thick the steel was, but there was no flex. A fall here was as good as landing on solid concrete. The steel was inches thick and utterly unforgiving. A fall from forty feet would almost certainly end in death or serious injury, but there could be no misunderstanding the finality of the situation. The man lay twisted and broken; his brains spewed from his skull for them all to see.

Luger turned to Big Dave and said, “Where’s Tom?”

The big Fijian shrugged. “No idea,” he replied. “He was going to sort through the equipment.”

“He’s not who we think he is,” Luger replied, transfixed on the body on the deck. “The body of the SBS team leader, Tom Whitaker has been found back at port. The Japanese detective has made the identity from the records that Ramsay has supplied him with. His body had been wrapped in chains and dropped into the harbour. I don’t know who the man I brought here is, but it’s certainly not Sergeant Tom Whitaker. He’s an enemy agent, who as far as we know, was working in tandem with the man who followed me from the airport.”

“That would explain the nonsense with scuppering the boat,” Big Dave said matter-of-factly. “And his panic when he went overboard.”

“He’s no soldier, but he’s dangerous. What I saw back in Nemuro will stay with me forever…”

Captain Stellenbosch finished instructing the three men standing near the body and walked over to them both. “He didn’t just fall,” he said harshly. “He fell onto his back, there’s no doubt about that. But his face looks like he was punched. I don’t know anything about this sort of thing, but he has grazes on his knuckles. I drank enough beer and played enough rugby in my youth to know about fighting, and my man died as a result of a fight. He took a beating, but he gave one back, too.” He paused sullenly. “And then he was thrown over the gantry railing.”

“We need you to gather your men together,” Luger told him. “Quietly, we don’t want to spook him…”

“Who? Your man?” Stellenbosch asked curiously.

“How well do you know your crew?” Big Dave asked him.

The South African shrugged. “My first officer has been with me for three years. I trust him. The cook and the ship’s bosun have worked with me on and off for ten years. The rest are Filipino, Sri Lankan and East European. They were on my last run and stayed when others jumped ship when the company went tits up.” He paused. “You suspect one of them?”

“No,” Luger replied. “I might have, had I not received that satellite phone call…”

“We need to find him,” said Big Dave. “And we need to find the kit.” He turned to the captain and asked, “What weapons do you have on board, captain?”

“Nothing official, the shipping company insisted that we give in to hijackers demands and they would pay any ransom…” he chuckled. “And then they go bankrupt. Their word wouldn’t have meant shit. Anyway, I’m a South African, so I have some protection.”

“Which is?” Luger prompted him.

“I have a pistol in my quarters. A Sig Sauer nine-millimetre.”

“Okay,” said Luger. “I’ll come with you while you get it.”

Stellenbosch frowned. “Hey, it’s my gun, bro. If there’s a killer on board, then I’m going to be the one holding a fucking gun, eh?”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Luger replied.

“Well, I don’t need fucking babysitting from you…” Stellenbosch said coldly and headed up to the bridge.

“That went well,” Big Dave chided.

“We need that gun,” Luger replied. “So, seeing as you’re a giant too, then I’ll leave that up to you.”

Big Dave showed no concern in the matter. As far as he was concerned, in ten minutes, the captain would have a gun. And in ten minutes and ten seconds, he would not. “We need to find this guy.”

Luger pulled the commando dagger out from his belt, picturing the dying solider as he had pressed it into his hand. “Have you got a weapon?”

Big Dave nodded and held up both fists. “Yeah, these…”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Kanin Peninsula, Northern Russia

Colonel Niko Zukovsky stacked the kindling on top of the pile of empty cardboard toilet rolls and lit the edge of one. The tiny woodburning stove roared into life and he put on a couple of pieces of wood cut from cargo pallets and warmed his hands together near the flame. It was a godforsaken place where he had been sent, but there had been sufficient bait for him to graciously, and somewhat eagerly, accept the posting. A cold, barren peninsula – one of many – like a witch’s fingers dipping into the Arctic Ocean. Hundreds of miles from civilisation, where plants barely grew – not even trees to keep the men warm – where the wind could whip sand so hard at your face that your skin would bleed, where the snows came in October and would not leave until May, where the sea would freeze at the shore. But it was where the British pigs who killed his father and brother would meet their deaths at the hands of his men.

Zukovsky pulled the wooden chair nearer to the stove and kicked off his boots. Beside him on a small table along with a cloth and a tiny bottle of oil, a single glass and the gifted bottle of whisky rested within arm’s reach. He spread his toes towards the fire and picked up the bottle. The seal was intact, and he cracked it open as he twisted the cap and poured until the glass was half-full. Taking a sip, he unbuttoned his great coat and relished both the warmth from the fire, and the whisky as it burned its way down his throat. Normally a vodka drinker, he had to admit that the Scotch had quite the kick. He took another sip, this time tasting its depth rather than feeling its heat. It tasted better the second time, and with the third sip, tasted even better still. He put down the glass and unfastened his belt, taking out the Makarov pistol as he dropped the belt and holster to the floor. His father had given him the weapon when he had been commissioned. It had been his own sidearm. The metal scratched and worn, the mechanism was barely worn in. It was said that there were not enough enemies of the motherland for a Makarov to ever wear out, and as he released the magazine with its awkward - and by modern standards - unconventional butt lever, he smiled at the thought of taking some of those enemies off the list. He racked back the slide and caught the stubby little round and placed it on the table along with the magazine. He drained the glass of whisky and poured himself another. He did not want to admit that the Scotch was superior to vodka, but it was a close-run thing. The problem with vodka was that it was largely home distilled. He had known people go blind from a poorly distilled bottle. He had been taught as a youth to add garlic or pepper to his vodka to collect the impurities. His grandmother had also said that nobody who put garlic and pepper in their vodka got a cold. Zukovsky smiled as he thought about his family. They were all gone, now. He was the only Zukovsky left.

He oiled the cloth and started to clean the pistol, despite not having fired it in months. He was an officer, and he did not need to practise like his men. Despite seeing action in Syria and serving two tours in Ukraine, he commanded from the rear, as good officers should. He had last used the pistol on three international fighters in the Donbas. The orders had come from Moscow to execute the international prisoners as a deterrent to foreign adventurers. People fighting for their homeland was one thing, people fighting for money, adventure and misguided socio-ethical belief was quite another. These mercenaries would soon get the message when they found the executed bodies of their colleagues.

He watched the flames, the cabin warming and the whisky relaxing him as he wiped the oiled cloth over the frame of the pistol. The photographer had stripped naked as his men had rifled through his clothes and pockets. Zukovsky knew a seasoned soldier when he saw one. The man had cut a fine figure. Lean, muscled and fit. He had scars, too. Stab wounds and bullet wounds. He had a hard, dark patch on his left elbow, too. Worn and calloused. The sign of a sniper. The man certainly looked the type. Snipers were a different breed. They saw their targets in detail. Soldiers generally saw movement and shape and returned fire in a rush of adrenalin. Nine out of ten times they didn’t even know if they had killed a man, or whether their comrades had. But snipers? They saw the man’s eyes, the crosshairs on their forehead, the pink mist of a hit. When you found out that a man was a sniper, you just knew. Was he one of the MI5 devils who had killed his father and his brother? He took another sip of whisky, the warmth nestling in his chest cavity. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t hope to look the man in the eyes and squeeze the trigger. But a victory over the department responsible would be a win, and in capturing the enemy agents he would not only avenge his family but clear the cloud hanging over his career. His father and brother had run a rogue mission that would challenge the Russian leadership. His brother had been killed, but his father had been interned and held not only by MI5, but by the American CIA and NSA as well. Nobody knew whether Vladimir Zukovsky had divulged information, or indeed how much. Protocols had been changed, department heads fired or terminated, entire military bases restructured, and nuclear weapon silos decommissioned or moved and reconstructed. His father’s body had been found in the Republic of Karelia, a Russian state. Quite what he was doing there, nobody could be sure. But an enemy operation had taken place nearby and it was clear that if he hadn’t been working with an enemy agency, then nobody could agree on what other reason there would be for being there.

Zukovsky loaded the pistol and made it safe before placing it on the table beside him. the fire was burning out so he leaned forwards, the whisky numbing his senses as it should. He dropped two more pieces of wooden pallet on the stove, but kept the door open so he could continue to bask in its warmth. In a remote posting, isolated from his officers in his own cabin, with a bitterly cold wind funnelling through the joins in the walls and at the edges of the door, Zukovsky looked at the half-finished bottle of whisky and the pistol beside him. There was to be no failure in this operation, no second chances. If he did not capture the British agents for his masters in Moscow to use in their propaganda machine, then all he could look forward to was the warmth of another fire, the comfort of another bottle and the bite of a bullet from his father’s service pistol. There was no way out from this posting but for him to succeed and for the British to fail.

Chapter Forty

Norfolk

The watchers had put up a small surveillance drone and the footage was playing on the laptop that was balanced between the two seats. Jim Kernow was in the driver’s seat and Caroline was in the passenger seat, having parked her BMW behind the van.

“Holy shit…” she said quietly.

“That’s right,” Jim replied. “Probably buried for decades. Back in the Cold War.”

From a thousand feet, the camera lens in the drone was powerful enough to make it look as if they were peering over the man’s shoulder. Rurik had dug out the entrance to reveal a drain manhole cover. Once removed, he had climbed into the black void and returned ten minutes later with a Kalashnikov and a bundle of magazines. After disappearing again, he returned with a metal ammo box and a duffle bag. Rurik had then traipsed back a mile to the road and driven to an Airbnb property, which Kernow was now watching from three-hundred metres away hidden in a thick copse of willow trees.

Caroline took out her phone and dialled. Ramsay picked up on the second ring. “He’s armed and has intent,” she said.

“How can we be sure of intent?”

“He was watching our building!”

“Not enough.”

“Well, he has an assault rifle in his possession, that’s five-years in prison before we start…”

“I don’t want this man sentenced to five years. He’ll be out in two years with this government and our prison overcrowding.” Ramsay paused. “I want him in the act, in London and in the ground the moment he tries a damned thing…”

Chapter Forty-One

Luger trod as softly as he could on the metal steps down to the chambers. The series of cargo bays were all sealed off to prevent flooding in the event of the hull becoming damaged. When sealed with the airtight doors and locking system the air in each individual chamber was theoretically enough to maintain buoyancy in the event in a breach in the hull. These chambers had been designed to hold crude oil, but with the advent of larger and larger vessels, the chambers had been redesigned for cargo. In addition to the shipping containers on deck, the cargo chambers could hold an additional twenty-thousand tons of cargo giving the Panamax class vessel more balance and stability when heavily deck-laden.

The body of the man in front of him made him start, but he instantly recovered as his training kicked in. He checked his surroundings, a full three-sixty and above – scenes of the slayings in the port of Nemuro. Somewhere on this ship, a man responsible for the deaths of four Tier One special forces operators was lurking, waiting for his prey to come to him. Most likely armed with the same knife that had made killing so easy. Luger held the commando dagger firmly in his right hand, the blade pointing downwards, his arm close to him so that he was ready to lunge or slash at an attacker, yet did not offer his arm or the weapon as a focus for attack. His heartrate quickened, beads of perspiration at his brow despite the bitter cold. The East Siberian Sea was hovering around zero, and with no insulation the steel hull absorbed the cold as efficiently as champagne in an ice bucket. Condensation rolled down the walls of the container bay and had iced near the floor. Simple physics. Seawater froze at -1.8c and freshwater froze at 0c. The condensation caused by the temperature difference was turning to ice and would stay that way until they entered the North Sea off the west coast of Norway.

The sight of the body was a direct flashback to the horrors of Japan. Multiple puncture wounds and a single slash across the man’s throat. Brutally efficient. Luger shuddered, realising that if he continued through the compartments, he may well face the man and his knife. But more than that – the man’s skills with his knife. Luger had never fought with a knife before. He could have counted the number of fights he’d had on one hand. Training was a completely different entity. Sparing with boxing gloves or grappling in jujitsu on a rubber mat prepared you for an inevitability that no sane person ever wanted to realise. Luger did not check the body for signs of life. Sometimes there really was no point.

Luger took a few tentative paces, then froze when he heard a metallic sound ahead of him. The noise echoed through the corridors between the cargo bays. There was a series of heavy thuds of rushed footsteps, and then a scream that trailed off to a gargling sound. A heavy thud, and then some grunts. Luger started off towards the sound, his heart racing and his legs stiff as he forced himself to overcome fear and trepidation. Ahead of him were ballast tanks with warning signs on them. These would be flooded to adjust the vessel’s balance for deck loading. As freight was placed on the deck, the opposite ballast tanks would be pumped full of seawater, and the tanks directly under the load would be emptied to maintain the ship’s level. He could go no further, but the stairs to his right led up to the second deck. Luger took the stairs cautiously, but he froze near the top, his eyes on the thick pool of blood that ebbed and flowed with the listing of the ship. The blood had made it to the steps and started to cascade down the first tread and drip through the steel diamond-shaped mesh. He saw the feet first, then as he climbed higher, saw the crumpled form on the steel deck. Luger gripped the dagger more tightly, and despite his training, held the weapon out in front of him. His legs feeling leaden, his breathing rapid and his heart pounding. Another metallic sound, but this time it sounded closer. There was a rush of footsteps and then a gunshot that reverberated through the steel hull. The footsteps grew closer and before Luger could ready himself, the man darted out from between two loading bays and rushed towards him. Luger caught sight of the dagger in the man’s hand, a flash of dark steel, just the sharpened edge, a sliver of silver glinting in the shards of light cast from the openings ahead of him. Luger ducked and swiped and felt his knife drag briefly against something. He spun around as the man bolted past him, but as he started to give chase, he felt a stinging sensation in his side and warmth trickling down his leg. He dabbed the wound, then inspected his sticky fingers. Ahead of him, the trail of blood – a few drips every metre or so – told him that he’d struck his target, too. Luger started to run. He could see the trail, knew that the man would not be hiding someplace to ambush him. It was as clear as day. Momentarily, he glanced at the ground behind him, alarmed to see that he was leaving more blood behind him than his quarry. A few paces more, and he could see more blood. This time it appeared that the trail had a wide footprint. As if the man was bleeding from two wounds. Whoever had fired the gun must have clipped him. The wound bleeding more heavily the more the man exerted himself. It had taken time for the blood to reach the floor, but with two wounds and losing blood at this rate, Luger should have been able to afford to hang back and wait. As a bow hunter would wait for large deer to bleed out. The only trouble with that plan was the fact that Luger was losing just as much blood as his quarry.

A careless clatter of steel on the side of the hull and the man was almost upon him. Luger parried the man’s lunge, catching the man’s hand with his blade. Another lunge, another parry and Luger felt the cold steel on his forearm. The man slashed at his neck, but Luger treated the attack like a punch, blocking and exchanging a blow. Only, this blow was a stab, and the man took the blade to his shoulder. Recoiling backwards, they squared up to one another, both panting for breath.

“Just be a good boy and die…” the man snarled at him.

“You first…”

“You haven’t got a clue what’s going on here, have you…”

“Enlighten me.”

The man edged around, but Luger went in the opposite direction. Nobody had an advantage. “You’re losing a lot of blood…”

“So are you,” Luger replied, his eyes never leaving the man’s own. “I should have seen the bloody signs. An SBS commando who gets seasick? You didn’t even know port from bloody starboard. Jesus Christ, what an idiot I was! Whoever trained you didn’t show you how to remote detonate a hand grenade either. Who the hell are you?”

The man laughed, but the sneer never left his face. “That’s too complicated for you people to understand…”

“You’re working for the Russians?”

“I am Russian!” he snapped. “I’m the Russian version of you! Are game is our game, we do what we’re told for our country, to survive…”

Luger would never have believed it. The man spoke perfect English. With no colloquialisms or any hint of a regional accent. Just a generic English accent. Perhaps of nineteen-fifties cinema, if Luger had to place it. And that would be it. Instilled Russian perception of their enemy. A doctrine established in the fifties and developed, but never really mastered or evolved.

“Who was your accomplice at the port?” Luger shrugged. “One of us is going to die here, it’s not going to hurt telling me…”

“I killed your contact, Sergeant Tom Whitaker, before you got there,” the man sneered. “The rest was down to Jenko. He killed your team. I just got him out of your men’s grip, and he did the rest…”

“Jenko?”

“Bulgarian. Works for the FSB. People call him ‘The Blade’…”

“What people?”

“The wrong kind…”

Luger shook his head.“You know we’re coming for it,” Luger said, but he could already see the confused expression on the man’s face. “You don’t even know, do you…”

“I have my orders,” he replied. “To stop an enemy exfiltration from the motherland. To do what I need to do to stop your saboteurs from escaping.”

“You don’t know the target?”

The man lunged, quite unexpectedly. His movements were slower than before, the loss of blood taking its toll. Luger kicked instinctively, but his own movements were slow, too. The kick caught the edge of the man’s blade with his boot, but it was Luger’s wild slash that struck home. His blade dragged across the entire width of the man’s forehead, and he recoiled back a few paces, ready to adjust his approach and counter, but he almost knew what would happen ahead of it. Luger stared, the pure white line across the man’s forehead was nothing but exposed skull. The white started to turn pinkish, then red, then all at once, cascaded down the man’s forehead and into his eyes. A crimson waterfall six inches wide.

“No!” the man wailed. He was blinded by the blood as it stung his eyes, and he knew that he had lost any advantage that he may have possessed in terms of skill, experience and determination.

“Where are the weapons?” Luger asked, panting for breath.

“Overboard…” The man shook his head in despair. “Where I should be right now…”

“What?” Luger frowned.

“A suicide mission,” he panted. “My wife, my children. They have them, this was the only way to stop them from being murdered…”

“Tell me what you know,” said Luger. “I can help them…”

“But not me?” the man sneered, wiping the continuous stream of blood from his eyes.

“No,” Luger replied. He stepped nearer, the man not noticing as he wiped his face again.

“I suppose I deserve that. After what I’ve done.” He paused, his breaths shallow. He wiped the blood from his eyes, but it was a lost cause, the blood was flowing quite freely. “But I can’t tell you anything. They will kill them if I talk…”

Luger took a breath before lunging and plunging the blade into the centre of the man’s chest. The seven-inch blade sunk up to the cross guard. When Luger stepped back and withdrew the blade with him, a spurt of blood ran like a tap from the wound and the man wobbled before slumping to the deck. He thought of the dying man back at the port, pressing the knife into his hand. Whether it had been for protection or vengeance, Luger would never know. But he figured he had just fulfilled both. Or partly. Until he tracked down a Bulgarian agent called Jenko ‘The Blade’.

Heavy footsteps climbed the stairs behind him, and Luger turned to see Big Dave clutching a gaping wound to his bicep, the pistol hanging loosely in his hand, blood dripping down his arm.

“Well, this hasn’t gone well,” the big Fijian commented flatly.

“We’re still alive,” Luger replied.

“We have no team, and no weapons.” Big Dave nodded towards the body on the deck. “This prick threw them overboard. I saw him from the bridge. I took the pistol off the captain, but by the time I got to the deck he’d cut down another member of the crew and came at me from nowhere. I didn’t see the blade coming, but I got a round off and clipped his shoulder.”

“Jesus Christ…” Stellenbosch said from behind them. “You two need to get patched up, pronto.”

Luger nodded, staring at the body in front of him. “Get your medic to meet us in the sickbay.” He paused. “Then we’ll get this place cleared up and reconvene on the bridge.”

“You’re damn right we will,” the South African said sourly. “Right now, it doesn’t feel like any amount of money is worth this shit.”

Luger looked at him icily and said, “Well, you’ve been paid, and this is happening. So, tough shit and get over it…”

Chapter Forty-Two

The Barents Sea

It was a simple meal of boiled potatoes and baked cod. Elspeth had dropped some lines, caught two of the largest cod that King had ever seen, and cleaned and prepared them competently. A couple of the lads had mucked in peeling potatoes, doing dishes in the tiny sink while also doing their best not to ogle the young woman too much, but were failing badly. Elspeth had added butter, black pepper and dill to the cooked fish juices and thickened the sauce with heavy cream. It was such a simple dish, but tasted superb to King, as he sat in the galley eating the meal from a shallow bowl with a fork and spoon. Elspeth had told them that they only used bowls because of the pitch of the vessel. King noted, too, that a lip of wooden trim had been applied to the counter and table edges to keep dishes from sliding off. Despite the metre-and-a-half swells, he was feeling good and enjoying being on a boat once more. It reminded him of Caroline and their time together sailing the Mediterranean and East Atlantic. Most of that yacht had been spread on the ocean floor off the coast of Cadiz – but worse than that - it had turned out that the insurance wouldn’t cover limpet mines. King smiled at the thought of attempting the insurance claim. They had purchased another yacht, which still sat moored in the Canary Islands after having an engine refit. Perhaps they would sail again in her soon. King didn’t care about money, just as long as he had enough in the bank to get out of a country when he needed to and lay low for a while. When King had recently had a contract on his head, he had taken the assassin’s fee before the man had died, so he was financially comfortable for the foreseeable future. In fact, one day, he would be a rich man. All he had to do was get away with liberating a hundred stolen Kuwaiti gold bars off the bottom of an Alaskan fjord. Somewhat easier said than done.

When he had finished his meal, King made his way up the stairs and nodded an acknowledgment to the captain as he walked through the bridge and out onto the deck. The icy wind hit him, and he tightened his jacket collar before walking along the gunwale and onto the work deck. He found Stan and Brian sitting on the bosun’s locker drinking mugs of steaming tea.

“Alright, boss?” Stan greeted him. “Cold enough for you?”

King shrugged. “Going to get colder, I reckon.”

“I’ve never been this far north. You?” Brian asked gruffly.

“Svalbard,” King replied. Brian nodded but King got the distinct impression that the man had never heard of the place. “This is still pretty raw though.” King watched the surface of the water, dark and foreboding. The dark grey sky and the blackness of the water emphasised the whiteness of the foam as the waves crested and broke, and soon, King realised that some of that white was sea ice, hundreds of pieces no larger than a dinnerplate. “We’re entering the Barents Sea,” he said, his eyes on the larger chunks of shelf ice ahead of the prow. He involuntarily shivered partly because of the cold and partly because of the knowledge of what lay ahead.

Chapter Forty-Three

Port of Pavek, Siberia

“People live here?” Big Dave said quietly as the ship dropped anchor lines forward and aft.

“They used to mine uranium and tin here,” Captain Stellenbosch replied. “They used prisoners from the gulags. Twenty-five Celsius in the summer with the humid air thick with mosquitos, minus fifty Celsius in the winter. So cold that your tears freeze and if you spit, then by the time it hits the ground, it’s solid ice…” He paused. “They put vodka in babies’ milk here to stop it from freezing… they say that winter babies are easy because they are always drunk or sleeping…”

“I bet this is the sort of place where the people have played Russian roulette in the middle of winter…” Luger commented flatly.

“You can go ashore if you want to get laid,” Stellenbosch smirked. “Many women make extra money shagging the sailors stopping in port. A word of warning, though… God ran out of races up here, eh? So, he mixed up Mongolians with Inuits, threw in some white then decided all women should weigh no less than sixteen stone, then he smacked them in the face with a shovel for good measure…” he laughed, but trailed off, his joke passing through the bridge like tumbleweed as neither Luger nor Big Dave reacted. “We won’t go ashore though; they will off-load with a barge and crane. It’s only two containers after all.”

Luger was wishing that Big Dave had denied Stellenbosch’s offer of shipping a cargo, but he could see that it added legitimacy to their voyage. He just wanted to be in and out of port within a couple of hours. “What checks will custom officials make?” he asked.

“It’s difficult to know for sure,” he replied. “Of course, had I known that there would be a bloody bloodbath on board, I wouldn’t have suggested it or filed a port plan. But if we just sailed on by, then we could well have met with a Russian naval vessel further along the route, and those guys would search everything including up a barnacle’s asshole…”

Luger nodded and sipped his coffee as he watched the barge and a support boat approach. The town looked like hell on the ice. Portacabins and low, unpainted concrete structures with a desolate backdrop. The sky was grey, the water black, and the ice and snow on the shore was filthy from tyres tracks and diesel fumes.

Both Big Dave and Luger had been attended to by the ship’s first-aider. Antiseptic, several stitches each and some painkillers and antibiotics for any infection. They had been lucky in the fact that their wounds had been slashes, and not stab wounds, which had their own complications with internal damage. The man posing as Tom had been disposed of after Luger had taken some photographs of him for later possible identification. Some chain around the body’s ankles and an unceremonious burial at sea. Stellenbosch had commented that bodies tended not to float at these temperatures and besides, the seabed was heaving with Alaskan king crab purchased from America by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s to feed the country. Prolific breeding and a lack of other nations commercial fishing the area had led the creatures to thrive, and they had not only spread back to Alaska, but also to both Japan and Norway. The three Filipino deck crew who had been murdered had been afforded a little more dignity in death and Stellenbosch had them placed and covered in a shipping container. The captain had then recorded the man who had fallen as an accident, and the two men who had been stabbed as having killed each other in an argument. The same story was given to the crew and noted in the captain’s log. It was not an unusual event for crew at sea, especially on cold and remote routes such as this. The inside of the shipping container was barely above zero, which would preserve the bodies until they left Russian waters, and when Luger could speak to Ramsey and steer around any potential investigation.

Stellenbosch and his first officer oversaw the paperwork on deck, and the ship’s deck crew and the loading crew from the port argued about how it should be done, seemingly with no common language nor clear direction from either party.

“That guy is taking a great interest in us,” said Big Dave.

Luger followed the big Fijian’s stare to where a short, officious-looking man was looking directly at him from the deck. “Isn’t he just…”

“I haven’t seen him before, but then again, I’ve only been here a few times,” Stellenbosch commented.

“For the ladies…” Big Dave chided.

“Once, perhaps, but not twice,” the captain assured him. “I had horrendous flashbacks for months…”

Luger ignored the schoolboy banter and opened the door to the bridge, letting in the chill air. He stood on the open gangway and stared at the man. Their eyes locked for a moment and Luger beckoned for the man to come up.

“You’re crazy, man…” Stellenbosch said, stepping out onto the gantry and buttoning up his jacket. “Just ignore him and he may have gone away.”

“And he would have thought that we had something to hide,” Luger replied.

“And we don’t?”

“Show them dominance from the beginning,” said Luger. “He’s coming to us before he told us to come to him. Basic psychology.” He greeted the Russian when he reached the top of the stairs and said, “Jack Luger, the company’s representative. My company has purchased this ship as a working asset and we’re taking it to Southampton in England for a refit. How can I help you?”

“You have a small cargo for a ship of this size,” the man replied. “Why is that?”

“Are you with the port authority?”

“Something like that.”

“Customs?”

The man shrugged. “Security…”

Luger nodded. They were almost there. Luger wasn’t about to ask if the man reported to the FSB – that would escalate things too quickly. There wouldn’t be any going back after that. “I chose to take a cargo so that the men could get paid. The ship isn’t officially on my company’s books. These men deserve a wage and an airplane ticket home if the vessel is deemed an unviable asset. As it stands, the company owe them nothing.”

The man nodded. “The manifest states technology. It is not very specific.”

“Phones, tablets and laptops,” Luger replied.

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“And you, Captain, is there anything you want to add?” the Russian asked.

“Do you want a laptop? We seem to have a few extra to the numbers recorded in the cargo manifest.”

“No.”

“One of each?” Stellenbosch offered. “And a case of terrible Japanese whiskey?”

The man smiled. “That might work,” he replied sagely. “It’s cold up here, and not as many ships are using the port, because of our, er… foreign policy.”

“Hey, take two cases,” said the South African. “Like the Jewish father said at his son’s bris, it’s no skin off my nose…”

The Russian looked long and hard at him, then broke into a mirthless chuckle, and Stellenbosch led him back down the steps to the cargo bays. Luger stepped back into the warmth of the bridge and watched the two men crossing the deck below.

“Does he know?” asked Big Dave.

“Yes,” Luger replied.

“So, our cover is blown?”

“Absolutely. They’ve known since Japan. And they’ve known long enough to intercept the SBS contingent and have me followed by another agent.”

“What the hell are we going to do?” Big Dave shook his head as he paced angrily around the bridge. He was a man of action, a blunt instrument. Right now, he could do without the subterfuge and start breaking heads. “If they know about us, then they’ll know that we are operating on two fronts.”

Luger breathed out steadily, his eyes still on the Russian, who was choosing his tech bundle and working out how to carry it along with two cases of Japanese whiskey. “They know what we’re doing here. And we know that they know.”

“And they know that we know that they know.” Big Dave mused. “This is beginning to sound like a Monty Python sketch.”

“It is madness to continue,” Luger replied.

“Agreed.”

“And yet…”

Big Dave shrugged. “Well, we’re halfway across the roof of the world. Just as well go forward as to turn back, I suppose…”

“We need to speak to Ramsay,” Luger said decisively.

“It won’t be easy,” Big Dave commented. “We can’t even use GPS effectively up here because of the latitude, let alone find a satellite to piggyback a satphone signal.”

“Well, we’ll just have to keep trying…”

Chapter Forty-Four

Bäckehagen, Sweden

Sokolov poured himself a large Grey Goose vodka and added a drop of water to it. There were brands that he preferred to drink when at home in Russia, but here in Sweden where he spent most of his time between travelling to and from chess tournaments, the brand was perfectly acceptable and a world away from the more common vodkas associated in the Western world. The fire was raging and the fog outside the window made the warmth of the cabin more appreciable. He heard the car on the gravel outside and remained in his chair, the fire too obliging to leave. Sokolov enjoyed mental visualisation. The change in tone as the engine switched off, the sound of the door opening, feet upon the gravel, the solid ‘clunk’ of the door closing. He imagined it would be a Volvo from the quality sound, but this was Sweden and hire cars in his visitor’s middle budget would likely be their domestic brand. The footsteps upon the gravel – one person, light in stride and of weight – but who was he kidding? He had no other visitors scheduled today, so his exercise in deduction was little more than massaging his own ego. Even so, as the footsteps made it up the three wooden steps and onto the porch, he shouted, “Come in, Ms Baskakov…”

The heavy wooden door opened without hesitation, and Katerina Baskakov stood in the threshold unapologetically wearing a full-length coat of sable. It was open to reveal a tightly fitting satin blouse and a short leather skirt. A generous amount of tanned thigh showed to the tops of a matching pair of knee-high leather boots. Sokolov stared at her, losing the air of arrogance with which he had greeted her, his somewhat supercilious expression falling to leave his mouth agape. He caught himself, but not in time, as Katerina Baskakov smirked and stepped into the open living area.

“This is all rather quaint,” she said. “I’m surprised the FSB are running to lakeside cabins and an S-class Mercedes.”

“I am worth it,” he replied, his expression changing once more to arrogance.

“We shall see…”

“Help yourself to a drink,” he said coldly. “I’m nicely settled in, now.” He raised his glass, then took a sip.

Katerina crossed the room to the counter and poured herself a vodka, heaped in some ice from the crystal bowl and walked to the chair opposite Sokolov, taking off her coat and draping it over the back of the chair before sitting down. She smirked when she saw that she had the man’s attention once again. She was a good-looking woman in every way, and she knew it.

“I want you,” he said eventually.

“You can’t have me,” she replied, taking a sip of vodka.

“But you said…”

“I said, if the mission was a success,” she interrupted him. “If it is a success, and I can claim responsibility for this, then you can have whatever you want from me…”

He put his vodka down on the table beside him and leaned forwards, unbuttoning the third button down on her blouse. She looked at him, her full lips pursed, then slapped his hand aside. “When, and only when the mission is a success…”

He recoiled, sat back in his chair and picked up his glass. “Everything I predicted has been realised!”

“So far…” she said, sipping her drink and delicately licking her lips. She glanced at an identical table on the other side of his chair with an ornate lacquered chessboard, the beautifully carved ebony and ivory chess pieces in play. “You play against yourself?”

“Occasionally.”

“Strange.”

“It concentrates the mind.”

“Which one of your personalities wins?”

“Facetiousness does not become you, Katerina…”

“I will play you,” she said decisively.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Are you intimidated? Scared that a woman will beat you?”

“You have no chance. It would be like a kitten scratching at a wolf’s nose…”

Katerina Baskakov shrugged and sat back in her chair, taking another sip of her drink. “The British have a man in place near the camp. A forward observer…”

“A sniper,” he corrected her. “They have utilised a sniper on many operations. This will be no different.”

“I do not know whether the man is a sniper, but he was spotted with binoculars and camera equipment. A search showed nothing up, but it was intended only to bait them further.” She paused. “Assets have reported a ship en route. A medium-sized container ship. Our agents intercepted their strike team, so they have no military capabilities. And still they persist.”

“That is the British way,” he replied confidently. “They have been the underdog since the fall of the British Empire.”

“It did not fall,” she corrected him. “It was eroded, released over time. And those underdogs have not lost a war since the American War of Independence, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest lack of political will, the financial cost and fear of future trade had as much to do with that as anything on the battlefield.”

“I know about battles, and I know about war. There is a distinction between the two.” Sometimes a war can be won without the victor winning a single battle.”

“You know about battles on the the chessboard,” Katerina corrected him. “A simple boardgame.”

“Nonsense! Chess is nothing as simple as a game…”

Katerina shrugged. “If you say so.”

Sokolov looked indignant, but he wasn’t going to argue the finer points of chess with her. He wanted nothing more than to feel the warmth of her skin on his own, the taste of her on his tongue, the feel of her in his bed. She had promised him everything of her, if she could take credit for the operation’s success. “And in England?” he asked. “How are things progressing there?”

“Rurik has retrieved the weaponry from the cache.” She paused, studying the man in front of her. She had made the ‘love pact’ with him to sweeten the deal and appeal to the man’s fragile ego. He would be easier to handle that way. A little carrot to go with the stick. She supposed he wasn’t unattractive. A little severe looking, the hawk-like features of a true academic. “He will strike when he has an opportunity.”

“Any signs that they are aware of his presence?”

“No.”

“So, it is as I said it would be.”

“Yes.”

“The British will attack from Norway,” he said confidently.

“But they are en route from the east,” she frowned.

“The British favour the pincer attack,” he said confidently. “If you study their military successes, and their failures, you will see that it is the British mentality. Henry the Fifth, Wellington, Nelson, Montgomery… all had their successes and failures, but all were victorious after a pincer attack. To approach from two sides, to close the gap, snap the pincer closed like a giant crab.”

“We have spetsnaz soldiers imbedded along the Finnish and Norwegian borders,” she said. “We assumed they would insert a team by land…”

Sokolov finished his vodka and shook his head. “By sea…” He held his hands up like a pair of giant claws, then snapped them together. “Pincer movement. Mark my words…”

Chapter Forty-Five

Norfolk

Caroline opened the boot of the BMW and lifted the floor panel where once there would have been a spare wheel, but where manufacturers now put a can of foam and a cheap air compressor, at least giving the owner hope, if not a practical solution to a flat tyre. She lifted out a foam cutaway to reveal a Glock 19 pistol, a plastic clip-on holster, and two loaded fifteen round magazines. The compact 9mm wasn’t the prettiest of guns to enthusiasts, but it was about the best tool for the job. Easy to conceal, reliable, powerful enough for most situations, accurate and with its patented safe action, and lack of traditional safety catches, it was a foolproof option for high-stress situations. She pulled back the slide to check the chamber, then inserted a magazine, pulled the slide back further to disengage the slide lock, and chambered the first round. Pocketing the spare magazine, she clipped the holster into her waistband and tucked the weapon snugly in place before making her way to the van and climbing in alongside Jim Kernow.

As Ramsay’s driver and close protection officer, Jim Kernow had retained his diplomatic police credentials and carried an identical weapon to Caroline’s. Technically, Caroline had no authorisation to carry a weapon on UK soil, but there was a lot of things the team had done without the proper authorisation, and they operated on a single proviso – do what it takes and don’t get caught.

Rurik had not gone out since he had first arrived at the Airbnb. His vehicle was parked to the side of the property and the tracker was showing adequate charge for another two days. At six-pm, an hour after dusk, a sign-written estate car from a local Chinese restaurant pulled in and the driver carried in a large thermos bag while Rurik took out his wallet. After a couple of minutes, the driver left and drove away and Caroline and Kernow settled in for the wait.

After an hour of small talk and long silences Kernow yawned, stretched his arms into Caroline’s space and said, “Do you want to kip first?” He nodded at the rear of the van, where a few blankets were scattered on the rear seat. “A few hours each?”

“Sounds good,” she replied distractedly.

“What’s up?”

“Did that seem like a lot of food to you? I mean, when Alex and I get a takeaway, it’s usually in a single carrier bag, and by no means full. That thermos bag was large enough to get a meal for twenty in it.”

Kernow stared into the middle distance. “The restaurant just wants it delivered hot.”

“But surely they’d have smaller bags for the smaller orders?” She paused. “And with the jacket and baseball cap, can we be sure it was even the driver?”

“Oh, shit…” Kernow replied, reaching for the doorhandle.

Caroline got out and made her way stealthily down the side of the hedge, keeping to the trees. The leaf litter crunched underfoot, and a few leaves dropped from the branches, settling with a rustle on top of the fallen wind-blown drifts. Caroline drew her pistol, kept her outstretched index finger off the trigger, but immediately ready to fire. She reached the chalet, a solid structure of stone and cement with a slate roof that would have once been a stable block to the large farmhouse a hundred metres away. She heard Jim crunching on the dry leaves twenty metres from her, making his way down the other boundary. He too had his weapon ready. Caroline had wondered whether being stabbed in the throat and spine on their last operation would have affected both his courage and commitment, especially as in his late fifties he was considerably older than anybody else on the team. However, she needn’t have worried as the man was working his way confidently towards the window for a sneak and peak.

Caroline reached a window first and peered through. “Christ!” she exclaimed and headed for the front door. She tried the handle, and the door opened freely. The body lay on the floor in a pool of blood. Despite the carpet soaking much of it up, the blood had still spread out half a metre on all sides.

“Shit…” Kernow commented flatly, holstering his weapon.

“The delivery man…” she looked around and saw the Chinese banquet stacked in more than twenty boxes on the table of the open-plan living room and kitchen, the heady aroma of spices and soy sauce and sesame oil thick in the air. “And Rurik left with the thermos bag, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what was inside…”

“We need to call the police,” Jim told her.

“No. First we need to alert Neil on our way back to London, then we have to try and find Rurik and stop him.” She checked her watch then said, “Rurik has an hour on us, which means he’ll be in London in less than two hours…”

Chapter Forty-Six

Kanin Peninsula, Northern Russia

The sea was dead calm. A black, mirrored surface reflecting the void of darkness from both below and above. Only the stars dimly lit the clear, moonless sky. The time of the moon was no coincidence, everything had been considered in the planning stages of the operation. Everything except common sense and sanity.

It had been three-am when Rashid had taken the boat while the scientists had been sleeping off another drunken stupor. If he ever made it out of this, he would forever view scientists and their junior research assistants in a completely different light. Now just after five, with dawn still a few hours off, he had recovered the AX50 rifle and had moored the boat up a small creek past the wide river mouth. The creek was muddy with soft banks and tufts of long marsh grass, and after Rashid had covered it with a tarp and scattered armfuls of marsh grass over the top, it was difficult to spot from a hundred metres away, when he looked back and checked.

The ground near the shore was flat and hard and littered with the bony carcasses of salmon from where bears had fished them from the river mouth with razor sharp claws as the fish had entered the creek from the sea to spawn. The wind blew its icy chill directly from the frozen wilderness of the North Pole and had settled a sharp frost a few hundred metres from the shore. Rashid had packed a rolled-up white boiler suit, the type that forensic crime scene investigators used, which he would cover his green cargoes and green windcheater with if the frost thickened, or if he was met with a blanket of snow nearer his objective. The rifle itself had been lacquered in olive paint without a hint of black or stainless steel remaining anywhere, and the Schmidt & Bender scope had been sprayed a dark green to break up the shape of the weapon.

At around five kilometres from the base, Rashid got down onto his belly and unhitched his backpack. He used a length of paracord to fasten the pack to his belt in order to tow the pack a metre or so behind him, thus lowering his profile against the landscape. He used a stick of Camtech two-tone camouflage cream on his cheeks, nose and forehead, then rubbed it in with his fingers. Camouflage cream came in a variety of colours and was used accordingly with the colours of the environment. Being of Pakistani heritage, Rashid had natural colour, but the camouflage cream matched the tundra and broke his shape further. Successful camouflage and concealment required the five S’s. Shape, shine, silhouette, sound and shadow. Cover all of these and you were next to invisible.

Rashid estimated that the next two-thousand metres would take him fifteen hours on his belly, keeping his progress to no more than two metres per minute. That would be about slow enough to maintain steady movement, undetectable to the human eye at such a distance, while rapid enough to get where he had to be in time. He would then settle into a depression or culvert and take onboard some calories in the form of chocolate, beef jerky and some dried fruit and nut mix, and hydrate with from one of the three hot water bottles that he had stolen from camp. He had filled one with hot tea and sugar and the other with hot water, both of which now nestled against his spine to fend off the cold, while he had filled the third bottle with cold water and taped it to the rifle to hydrate as he went without having to compromise his stealth. Rashid started out, belly to the ground, the rifle cradled between his elbows as he moved simply driving the inside edges of his boots into the ground supported on his elbows, lifting his pelvis just enough to aid his progress. Slowly, steadily, he pulled himself along the ground every inch, every ounce of strength taking him closer to his objective.

Chapter Forty-Seven

England

The BMW had a turbo charged three litre straight six engine and put out over three-hundred horsepower. Caroline had used every one of those horses to propel her through Norfolk and Suffolk, triggering the flashes of endless speed cameras as she overtook dozens of vehicles. The speedometer saw one hundred and forty miles per hour on one straight, and rarely dropped below eighty. She had called Mae and although Caroline had declined her assertion for a police escort, Mae had put a call in to the Norfolk and Suffolk constabularies as well as the Greater London and the Metropolitan Police to cease and desist if Caroline’s vehicle was spotted by police officers. An unprecedented request, but one that carried the full weight of the anti-terrorism act under the authority of the Security Service.

Caroline answered the call on hands-free. “Yes?”

“Caroline, it’s Mae. I can’t find Neil.”

“You’ve tried his home, obviously…”

“Obviously.”

“No fix on his phone?”

“No.”

“Who was driving him?”

“No idea. I thought he was working late. When I checked on him to say goodbye before leaving, his office was empty.”

“No driver?”

“He uses Jim, and Jim’s not here. We’re spread too thinly…”

“Bloody hell!” Caroline snapped. “We have a security threat, and he’s taking taxis home?”

“Well, I suppose he thought the threat was in Norfolk, and he didn’t expect the man to give you the slip, much less have such a good lead on you…”

Bloody old crone! Caroline thought, but instantly regretted it. Mae was loyal and had a formidable brain. Caroline and Jim Kernow had messed up, and Mae was calling her on it. Caroline sighed. She was racing to avert disaster, and yet she had no idea where disaster would unfold. “What about Charlotte?” she asked.

“Charlotte?”

Caroline knew that she was breaking a confidence, but this was not the time to hold back. Any lead could help. “They’re close,” she said. “Charlotte is in love with Neil, but Neil doesn’t know it. He would never risk his marriage, but they both worked closely for years at Thames House, and they share a good friendship.”

“Friendship?” Mae said incredulously. “Neil doesn’t seem the type to have friends. I mean, he cares as we all do about our colleagues, but…”

“I know what you mean,” she conceded. “But Charlotte and Neil can talk about chess or puzzles or classical architecture for hours on end.”

“Would they go out for dinner?”

“I suppose.” Caroline tried to remember things about her boss. He had not always been so, and she had always had a tenuous relationship with him over the years at best. However, she had admired him for stepping into the role of director of their ‘department’, and in awe of how he had coped since his injury. What had he said over the years? What cuisine had he always gone for on their assignments. “Try Rules,” she said. “He did mention that he enjoys eating there. Steak and kidney pie, or steak and kidney pudding. That’s Neil all over, and he likes Covent Garden. Good wheelchair access and plenty of taxis on The Strand…”

“I’ll get a fix on Charlotte’s phone and take it from there.”

“Keep me in the loop…”

Jim Kernow had battled with pushing both physics and his somewhat considerable driving ability as he drove the van at high speed, but despite the vehicle’s weight and lack of low-down acceleration, he was still making good time. But not good enough. He pulled off at Birchanger Green services with the bare bones of a plan and headed for the filling station forecourt. There were eight fuel pumps and six of them were occupied. Two drivers were pumping fuel, and four were inside the service station either paying at the kiosk or using the facilities. Kernow didn’t have to study the cars for long to know what he needed to do. He parked the van, took out his laptop and the keys, and walked across the forecourt to the gleaming blue Aston Martin. The driver was easy to spot as he stepped out onto the forecourt. Confident, a coffee in one hand and the keys in the other. Kernow also noticed an expensive looking watch hanging from the man’s left wrist. The man viewed Kernow as another car enthusiast who had wandered over to compliment his taste in vehicles, or simply talk about the car. He nodded a hesitant greeting to Kernow as he drew near. Kernow handed him an embossed calling card with MI5’s coat of arms in the top left corner and the desk line, email address and PO Box number written in the bottom righthand corner. He took the card between two fingers as he struggled with his key bunch.

“I need your keys,” he said calmly, yet authoritatively, handing the man the keys to the van. The man reached for the keys out of reflex, and Kernow simply swapped them. “Take that van to get yourself home and call the number on the card…” Kernow was already in the driver’s seat and had started the engine in a cacophony of revving V8 engine and bellowing exhaust note. The man watched, mouth agape as he processed what was happening, still looking at the calling card as Kernow briefly struggled with the awkward handbrake beside the door sill, then roared across the forecourt with tyre squeal and an exhaust a full octave lower than upon start-up. Kernow had the Aston Martin up to a hundred-miles-per hour as he emerged from the slip road and onto the M11. To his surprise he was still only in third gear, and he changed up into fourth and the speedometer climbed past one-hundred and thirty. Above five-thousand-five-hundred on the rev-counter, the engine bellowed to a whole new level, visceral and purposeful with one mission – to headbutt the horizon. Kernow had never known a driving sensation like it, and he had to suppress a grin as he reminded himself of why he had just commandeered the vehicle, and what dangers lay ahead.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Northern Russia

The Gemini inflatable boats rode the lazy swells as they powered on course for the coast. The swells came from the north, but the sea ice a few miles to their port cut the choppiness and left the water with a clean surface, black and foreboding, thousands of feet of icy water below their hulls.

King and the men had watched the vessel turn lazily behind them. Returning to Norway and leaving them with no other option than to succeed. The enormity wasn’t lost on them, with Taff saying in his broad Scottish accent, “That’s it, boys. Win and live; lose and die…” It hadn’t been the most rousing speech King had ever heard, but it was the only one they got. The sobering directness of the man’s words, coupled with his accent had reminded King of his old mentor Peter Stewart before their countless missions, and he strangely took comfort in that because as bad as it had gotten on some of those missions, King had lived to tell the tale.

They had broken out the kit ten miles short of the drop-off location and divvied out the weapons and ammunition to the respective operators. A new one on King, Brian had unpacked eight triathlon wetsuits explaining that they would not only act as thermal insulation on land, but if they found themselves in the water, then they would likely survive the initial shock of cold water emersion, despite the fact that they had all had training in this and been taught to hold their breath and relax for the first five seconds. That was when people started to drown because they snatched a breath and fought to the surface when the body would naturally float back up just as long as there was some air left in the lungs. King often swam in cold water all year round to train himself for the eventuality, although these waters would be extremely hazardous indeed. King had never worn a triathlon wetsuit and was surprised at the freedom of movement that it afforded him. “That’s it though, lads,” Brian had said. “If you need a piss then it’s going to be with you for a while…” His comment had broken the tension as the men had all donned combat fatigues and arctic jackets. Kit and webbing was down to the men’s personal preferences and King had worn his pistol over his heart, rigging the holster in place to his jacket with Velcro straps. Because of the infiltration and exfiltration by water they had opted not to wear body armour in the case of submersion but wore inflatable life vests instead, but the pistol at least provided a barrier. He had heard of a pistol stopping a bullet before, so always thought it worth a go. King had chosen a bayonet over a knife because it would have dual uses and pocketed his Leatherman multitool for its blade and variety of uses. As King would be using a suppressor on the pistol and expected to use it, he took two spare magazines while some of the men opted to take another magazine for their primary weapon and treat the pistol for what it was – a last-ditch weapon to enable them to get their hands on a rifle.

King had thought of the inland waters as an estuary while planning the assault but could see now that they were between two headlands that it was more typical of a Norwegian fjord. The water here was calmer still, yet still equally as black and foreboding. He had once rendezvoused with a Royal Navy submarine in northern Russia to extract an asset, and the craft had no problems navigating the depth. He closed his eyes for a moment as he thought about that mission. It had been a failure. He had done his job, but something had happened onboard that submarine that had ended in disaster and the loss of everyone onboard. He had also lost a good friend that day and was only here today because of the man’s sacrifice.

There was no moon, and the scattered clouds periodically shielded half the sky from the light of the stars making conditions ideal. King thought the sky different here, larger than anywhere he had ever been. The kind of skies you got on the high sea, hundreds of miles from land in any direction. The cloud meant that there was just enough ambient light to see by but would enable them to remain next to invisible. The conditions would also make the PIR goggles highly effective when the time came to using infrared. King could see the beach, now. There were rock formations on the shore, and then he realised that they were moving. He adjusted the magnification on his goggles – something he rarely did because it made nearby visuals distorted – and watched the smooth rocks. “Seals,” he said. “Take us further south. If we disturb them, they’ll make a hell of a racket.” Taff steered them to starboard, and King opened his throat mic. “Lofty, seals on the shoreline, follow us to the south…” He turned around and checked that the other Gemini was with them. He hadn’t expected seals. Goats had been the problem in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much so, that when special forces messed up, it had been regular practice to cite a goatherder as having discovered them. Nobody was ever going to be forced to justify not having killed an eleven-year-old boy tending to his family’s herd of goats to avoid being discovered, so it had become a get-out-of-jail-free card.

The two point-men surveyed the beach and tundra beyond through the infrared sights of their Minimi SAWs, to give maximum firepower. Both weapons were belt fed from a two-hundred and fifty round box that was attached to the lefthand side of the weapon’s frame and were fitted with spring-loaded pull down bi-pods which rested on the rubber prow of the boats. As the hulls of the boats ground the rough sand, the men leapt out, four men charging up the beach and taking positions to cover one-hundred and eighty degrees, while King and Flymo helped Taff and Lofty pull the boats up the sand, turned them round for a quick getaway and secured them to the shore from the stern with the anchors. Brian covered over both boats with desert camouflage nets that had appeared to be a good match for the sand from the satellite imagery that they had studied back in Hereford.

They left the beach two-by two with ten-minutes between them. The distance allowed for a sufficient warning to the others in the case of detection and avoided them all being caught in the same salvo of gunfire or mortars should they come under attack. There were two goals. Get Flymo to the helicopter and attempt to steal it, or if that failed: destroy Eagle’s Talon. If the plan went to pieces, then they would attempt to escape to Finland or Norway by land, and they would do so singularly or in pairs to make it more difficult for their pursuers. As was typical in these missions, no man carried anything that could identify them. The SAS soldiers had left behind their military dog tags in Hereford, and each man carried with him twenty gold sovereigns worth approximately ten-thousand pounds. Gold knew no borders or boundaries and was always accepted as a bribe or payment.

King remained with Flymo. Together they made the ten-mile hike, stopping only briefly to take on water and snack on some dried beef jerky and fruit and nut mix. King had always used these foods as a staple for ‘hard routine’ – eating in the field without heating food or lighting a fire. When they made it to their position shortly before dawn, the two men carefully cut turfs out the ground then dug out the earth with entrenching tools, scattering the soil as far as they could to refrain from making piles of soil. Once they had a coffin shaped recess excavated, they used telescopic tent poles to lay in cross sections and draped a thermal blanket over them. Covering the blanket with the turfs was tricky, but King had performed this task many times before and soon had it done with a small entrance hole left for them to wriggle into. Sealing the entrance with their camouflaged bergens, they settled in and took turns to sleep and take watch through the gap between their bergens. The thermal blanket would keep them warm, while preventing heat from escaping and keep them invisible to aerial thermal imaging cameras. All they could do now, was wait for dark. Thankfully, that would be in around six hours due to their northerly position, the Arctic circle in this proximity getting less than six hours of daylight a day during autumn and winter.

King was wrenched out from his sleep by the reverberation of something otherworldly. The ground beneath them shook, and King grabbed the sides of the thermal blanket for fear of it being snatched away from the sensation of a change in air pressure.

“What the fuck?!” Flymo exclaimed, pulling at his bergen to get a closer look at the commotion.

King stopped him by grabbing the man’s wrist, waited for the sound to change direction, then eased the bergens apart. “Jesus Christ…” he trailed off, his stare transfixed.

The helicopter was hovering ten metres off the ground a hundred metres in front of them. Easily the size of a chinook, yet with far greater aerodynamics, and a squared-off stealth design it would have dwarfed the Apache gunships used by NATO military forces. The weapon systems were vast, with missile and rocket pods, two pods each cradling twin gatling guns and longer cannons that even from this distance looked to dwarf the common 30mm and 50mm used by various aircraft in the West. The gatling guns, four in all, and the two cannons all moved constantly and in different directions to one another. King felt his stomach tighten as he realised that a set of twin gatling guns seemed to be aiming directly at them. With just his assault rifle resting beside him, he knew that there was nothing he could do. How in God’s name could they even think about destroying this behemoth? If he fired at the cockpit – no doubt equipped with ballistic resistant glass – then they would be cut down in seconds. But if he did nothing… King could not think about leaving this world without a fight, and he shouldered the rifle and sighted on the base of the rotor blades.

“What the hell are you doing?” Flymo hissed at him. “We’ll be killed!”

“It looks like we’re going to die anyway…”

“But…”

Silence.

The eeriest silence King had ever known.

The reverberation ceased altogether and the only sound the two men could hear was the electric whine of the motors controlling the guns. The aircraft lifted, a strange electric pulse emitting every three seconds as it pirouetted and took off to the east. At three-hundred metres distant, the reverberation restarted, and the nose of the helicopter rose, then it climbed rapidly, becoming completely vertical at around a thousand feet, then climbed at a tremendous speed.

“That can’t be…” Flymo said quietly, his eyes never once leaving the aircraft. At around ten-thousand feet, the tail rotated one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and the helicopter dived vertically towards the ground. “It can’t do that…”

“It can,” said King. “So, get your head in the fucking game…” He stared at Flymo and said, “Put that ego of yours out of the equation. Can you fly that thing?”

Flymo stared as the great beast slowed suddenly and stopped, stock-still in a vertical hover, its nose just feet above the tundra. “Helicopters can’t hover like that…”

“This one can.”

Flymo shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it…”

“I know. That’s why we’re here.”

Flymo still did not look away from the spectacle. “This thing is a UFO with rotor blades. I don’t know if I can even…” He trailed off as the aircraft moved into a conventional hover, then once again, the tremendous noise died entirely, and the Eagle’s Talon flew silently into the distance just a few feet from the ground.

“If you can’t fly it, then let me know now. There’s eight men out there and if we change the plan to try and destroy it, then we’ll probably all stand a better chance of survival.” King paused. “But I’ve known plenty of pilots and I’ve been flown into, and out of, some of the worst places on earth, and there’s nobody I’d rather have fly me than you.”

Flymo sighed heavily, then said. “I’ll fly that thing. And I’ll fly it the fastest, loosest and best it’s ever been flown…”

Chapter Forty-Nine

London

It was nine-pm when Caroline entered the City of London from the A12. The darkness, the glow of vehicle taillights and a persistent light drizzle enveloped the city in a dull orange glow. She had been unable to contact Ramsay. The man used his phone incessantly and would always put it on charge in the vehicle when Jim Kernow drove him home, so without his minder here to drive him, it looked as though his phone was out of charge. However, Mae had a location on Charlotte’s phone, and she was indeed at Rules. Caroline had told her not to try and contact Charlotte because if the enemy was monitoring her phone as well as Ramsay’s then they would be able to intercept messages and calls and would either step up their attack or go to ground. Mae had wanted to send in the police, but Caroline had insisted that they could scare off Rurik if they made the wrong call. And that wrong call could be you risking Neil’s life just for you to try and catch an assassin… Mae had argued. The woman’s words had echoed in her head ever since she had left the M11 motorway and hit the streets. Had she made the wrong call? She couldn’t afford to doubt herself. She needed her head in the game, and she needed to beat the traffic to get to Covent Garden and the oldest restaurant in the United Kingdom.

Before she had been recruited to MI5 by Charles Forester, Caroline had served in the combined service unit 14 Intelligence Company during her army career. Her Mentor, Commander Rix, a former Royal Navy officer and one of the brightest minds she had ever known had insisted that when up against an enemy threat you should always ask yourself three questions. Why, when and how? As Caroline slowed her pace to the traffic’s pace, overtaking when she could to a cacophony of vehicle horns, she had thought about Commander Rix’s mantra. Why did the enemy want Ramsay dead? Well, that was obvious. The team had been a thorn in the side to the Russian intelligence and military machine as well as the mafia and organised crime networks behind the formerly named Iron Curtain, and the new threat posed by Iron Fist – five nations with one agenda: destroy the West by any means necessary. When would this happen? Ramsay had broken protocol and not used company transport, and if he had gone for dinner with Charlotte, then he had no security and a hit on the street would be difficult to counter. Caroline’s added anxiety in this scenario was the fact that she had told Ramsay how Charlotte felt about him. Her feeling of guilt was insurmountable. She doubted that he would have an affair – he was far too moral and loyal for that – but their friendship had clearly been taken to another level. Whether Ramsay had taken her out to dinner to tell her about boundaries, or something more, Caroline knew that she had been a catalyst for that. And that left the how. Caroline’s conscience was gnawing at her because she knew that by telling Ramsay about Charlotte’s feelings, she had created an opening for their enemy. She shook the thought from her mind. How? That was what she needed to concentrate on. Rurik had been seen retrieving an assault rifle from a Cold War weapons cache. However, that wasn’t ‘how’ in the correct context. The question in this case wasn’t: how was it going to happen? But: how had it come to this? How did their enemy know so much about their movements?

Caroline soon found herself on The Strand. The traffic was steady. The West End shows had all started and it would be another hour at least until it became a taxi gridlock. She passed The Savoy Hotel and overtook two slow-moving cars before powering into Covent Garden to the sound of a vehicle’s horn, and stares and shouts of protest from pedestrians on the pavement. She pulled into Maiden Lane packed with its restaurants and bars and parked with two wheels on the pavement. The smell of traditional British food met with the heady fusion of Asian spices and gourmet burgers and chips filled Caroline’s nostrils as she ran. This was a terrific food district, with one of The Ivy restaurants located on the corner of two streets. Even a Chinese takeaway had got in on the action. Caroline could not recall a Chinese takeaway being here on her last visit, but there was a sign written vehicle parked on the other side of the street outside the Gordon Ramsay’s gourmet burger bar... Caroline drew the Glock as she ran. Despite no steps into the restaurant, the Rules doorman dressed in a top hat and tails was helping a man in a wheelchair onto the kerb. Caroline could tell that Ramsay wasn’t impressed by the courtesy – he had become fiercely independent since his injury – and Charlotte was politely telling the man that they did not need assistance. They both looked Caroline’s way as she ran towards them.

The door of the sign written vehicle opened, and Rurik stepped onto the cobbles, the Kalashnikov AKS-74U in his hand. The weapon was a drastically shortened version of the ubiquitous assault rifle, designed for special forces soldiers, helicopter pilots and tank crews. Rurik raised the weapon at Ramsay but caught Caroline’s movement in his periphery and turned and fired a short burst at her. Caroline hit the ground, aiming her pistol as the volley of gunfire sailed past her and into her parked BMW. Rurik fired again, just as Caroline fired and both were hit by each other’s bullets. Rurik fell and Caroline arched on the pavement as a single bullet went through her right shoulder, sending her pistol clattering across the cobbles. Rurik struggled to his knees and turned the rifle on the doorway of Rules. Charlotte looked both stunned and confused, and Ramsay stared back at the man, completely expressionless as he raised the assault rifle and aimed. There was a burst of gunfire and a savaged muzzle flash from the weapon, then several short reports and muzzle flash further down the street. Rurik fell to the ground and rested still as Jim Kernow ran breathlessly to his body, his pistol still aimed at the threat as he kicked the rifle away with a clatter.

Caroline heard the sirens, saw the blue lights strobing down the street off the damp walls and wet cobbles. She heard Kernow say he was sorry and heard Ramsay mutter something about steak and kidney pie in a confused state, while a chef from one of the other neighbouring restaurants covered her with an apron and a coat was rolled into a cushion for her head. She heard talk of ambulances, and then a wail of emotion from Ramsay as he said that his best friend had died, and then she drifted off and heard nothing else at all.

Chapter Fifty

The Northern Sea Route

“It’s as cold as a witch’s tit, eh?”

Luger nodded as he stepped onto the bridge and checked his watch. “What’s our position?”

“Let me worry about that, bro,” Stellenbosch replied. “We’re bang-on. We have just entered the forty-kilometre window.”

“Speed?” Luger asked curtly.

“Seventeen knots.”

Luger did the mental arithmetic. Less than twenty-three minutes. He set the bezel on his Omega watch for twenty-two minutes. This was going to be close. He had just spoken with Mae, and she had not only informed him of the attempted attack on Ramsay, but the news of Charlotte’s death and that Caroline was undergoing extensive surgery. Luger did not know the dead analyst, but an attack on anybody in the service was something to take personally. There was no status yet on Caroline’s condition, but she had been shot with a high-velocity bullet at almost point-blank range and had suffered from hydrostatic shock due to the bullet’s velocity. The exit wound required painstaking surgery, and the shock had played havoc with her internal organs, as the body started to shut itself down. There would be a backlash for this, he would make sure of it, and he knew that the rest of the team would feel the same way. The news of Reznikov taking his own life had been troubling for different reasons. They had mounted an operation on one man’s information, and that man was now dead. Caroline had suspected that the man had taken his own life to save the lives of his wife and children. That was one hell of a position to be in, and Luger couldn’t help thinking that for an organisation to exert that much power on a person, then they were up against something quite formidable. Luger would edit the details for Big Dave, because he knew that the man was protective over Caroline, but his thoughts went to King and the man carrying on oblivious to the condition of his fiancée. There was no good way to tell him when he saw him, no good to come from letting the man know until they reached a friendly port, and he could race to her side.

Below him on the deck, Big Dave was rolling the tarpaulin with one of the deck crew. They had used the deck crane to shift the containers to the bare edge of the deck creating a rectangle with the inside clear for the Eagle’s Talon. Now that Luger studied the deck, he wondered whether it was going to be large enough, but they only had anecdotal evidence and since his call with Mae it had transpired that the source of the information was dead. Luger felt a twist in his gut. Should they have bailed on the plan with the loss of the SBS team? Undoubtedly. The men had been there to meet King and the SAS soldiers and provide back-up, covering fire, or simply tend to casualties. Now it was down to just the two of them, and Stellenbosch’s skeleton crew was now three men down. He just hoped that King was having better luck than the rest of the team were.

Chapter Fifty-One

Northern Russia

They had swept for landmines and marked them with tiny glow sticks that emitted a faint, green light that would not be visible from inside the base, but that you could not fail to miss as you walked through the minefield. King watched as Stan clipped the wires onto the fence. The device in his hand showed ten tiny red lights and when he clipped on the last wire, the lights turned to amber. Stan then clipped through the wire fence with wire-cutters and upon cutting the tenth strand, the amber lights switched to green. He peeled back the section of fence and clipped the device to the fence by a fixing on top of the unit. Stan’s trick with the fence had meant that the current could still travel through, despite the man-sized hole that had been cut through the mesh. On the other side of the base, Taff, Lofty and Brian had used an identical device and were planting explosive devices on the other five hangars. The charges each contained a kilo of plastic explosive and two compounds in glass vials that would be mixed when the timing switches were set. Once exposed to air the mixed compounds created a volatile chemical reaction that burned as fiercely as napalm.

There was no high ground, but King knew that two belt-fed light machineguns and two sniper rifles were covering them through thermal imaging scopes. Considering the odds they were up against, it wasn’t much, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. The men would be keeping them in their sights and covering their progress. The two snipers were cleared to engage. The suppressors on the rifles would not be heard within the camp, and the two men on the SAWs would only fire if things went ‘noisy’, as King had put it. If the time came, then they would have a lot more to worry about than a bit of noise.

Stan covered King and Flymo as they made for the hangar of the test helicopter. The helicopter that they had seen flying and refuelling earlier that day. King thought about the vibrating hum that the aircraft had made and when it had changed direction, the howl of the engines sounding otherworldly, supernatural, even. And then there was the silent running, the opposing magnets that could power the rotors to take the aircraft slowly and silently through the air. It was, as Flymo had said, a UFO with rotor blades. The sheer size of the aircraft had been overwhelming, the span of the rotors, the weapon systems making an Apache gunship look like a domestic sightseeing aircraft by comparison. He hoped that Big Dave and Luger had allowed enough room on the deck for this goliath. Hell, he just hoped they would be where they said they would be, otherwise they’d be getting very wet and very cold.

There were two guards in front of the hangar. Both smoking, both chatting and stamping their feet against the bitter cold. King held the silenced pistol, his heart pounding as he surveyed the scene. Two shots, two men down. In theory. The 9mm, even with the suppressor fitted, would make enough noise to worry about. The sound of the guards hitting the ground would make a considerable clatter with their kit and weapons slung over their shoulders. Timing would be everything. King could see headlights on the other side of the base. The mobile patrol went through the base on the hour, every hour. Two bored-looking conscripts in a UAZ. The vehicle looked like it had been designed by a five-year-old drawing a Willys Jeep, but who had then got bored and finished the rear end quickly. The vehicle was running on petrol because diesel froze at northern Russian temperatures, but it was running rich with the exhaust billowing smoke. The two soldiers were emitting their own smoke, too. Cheap cigarettes, pungent-smelling and distinctive of Russian taste.

King checked the dull luminous dials of his vintage Rolex. The other men would be through the fence and already starting to plant and set the explosive charges. He waited for the jeep to drive past, the driver acknowledging the two men with a lethargic wave. The vehicle trundled along the access road and the smoke that it had left behind started to clear on the breeze. King stepped out of the shadows and fired two shots and both men went down.

“Give me a hand,” he said to Flymo. He holstered the pistol and caught hold of one of the bodies by the ankle and pulled it into the lee of the hangar where it was swallowed up by the darkness.

Flymo struggled with the other body, then let go and gasped as the man’s ankle shook. “He’s not dead!” he hissed.

“He’s not getting any deader…” King snapped and grabbed the ankle and heaved the body on top of the other. “It’s just nerves, the muscles relaxing,” he explained. He could see that what had just transpired weighed heavily on the man, and he understood why. Flymo was a pilot, and pilots fired their cannons and dropped their bombs and rockets from a height. They never saw the whites of the eyes, the faces of the people they killed. It was a protracted, detached way of killing and if anything, although King understood the difference, he felt that at least his way felt more honest, more human. At least he could look someone in the eyes before killing them. If anything, that showed at least a modicum of respect. If he ever met someone better skilled than himself, then the outcome would be very different indeed. Man had been fighting and killing his fellow man for thousands of years armed equally and with only the mind, spirit and body giving a warrior the advantage over his enemy. Modern technology provided distance and an emotional detachment. King wondered whether killing in such a remote, detracted manner haunted a person at the end, or left one with a clear conscience on their deathbed.

King made his way back to the entrance of the hangar. The door was Cold War tech with a pushbutton keypad in Russian Cyrillic. King reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out an acetate overlay and peeled off the self-adhesive back, then rested it on top of the keypad. Next, he shone a small infrared pen torch on the screen. There were shouts and four gunshots in the direction of the other hangars, and King looked at Flymo, the man’s expression mirroring his own.

“Shit…”

“Shit…” King replied. “Here, get ready when I get this open…”

“Four shots, two guards down…” the voice came over their earpieces. “Movement and lights going on… You’d better hurry your arses up!”

“On it…” King said, his throat mic transmitting his reply.

King felt the tension rise within him, he could hear more shouts and another gunshot followed by a short burst and the distinctive rat-tat-tat of a Kalashnikov.

“We’ve lost the element of surprise!” Flymo exclaimed desperately.

“No shit…”

The overlay highlighted the keys used in the last twenty-four-hours. On the adhesive side a chemical reacted with protein. The keys were too small to be used wearing gloves and the proteins of saliva, snot, blood, urine or faeces – everything found in a bowl of peanuts on a bar counter – showed up like a litmus test. The chemical only worked with high concentrations of protein, usually no more than twenty-four-hours after use. King took out his phone, opened a downloaded app and hovered the camera over the acetate. The programme read the photograph in the same way a QR code linked to information or a website. The programme worked the variables, the existing codes found by MI6, MI5 and GCHQ linked to various Cold War projects, and as East and West entered another Cold (or not so cold) War in the twenty-first century, new and old codes alike could be scanned and either shortlisted or ruled out. That shortlisting took thousandths of a second to analyse and after a tense minute, King had two likely codes and one of eighty-percent probability to try. If these three did not work, then things were going to go downhill extremely quickly.

“Hurry the fuck up secret agent!” the voiced echoed in King’s ears. “We’re about to go noisy…”

King cursed, typed in the second Cyrillic code and the keypad buzzed and the terrific doors started to open slowly. “Get the engines started and take the bird outside,” said King. “Wait five minutes if you can, and if you can’t… good luck and I’ll hopefully see you back in London…” King did not wait for Flymo’s reply, but the man shouted something after him in protest. He hadn’t heard what the man had said, didn’t have the time or mood for sentimentality, and as the two 7.62mm SAWs opened fire on the base King shouted into his throat mic for everyone to hear. “You’ve got five minutes to the hangar, and six minutes to the second RV! I’m coming into the contact zone, look before you bloody shoot!”

Chapter Fifty-Two

There were kills that were easy, and there were kills that were difficult. And then there were the kills when they really made you feel it. Kills where the fight is in them until their last dying breath. Their last drop of blood. With every plunge of the knife, King felt the man give a little, but not much. He had lost count how many times the blade of the knife had driven all the way to the hilt, but still the man fought back. King was reeling from the man’s elbow crunching his eye socket, the swelling blurring his vision to the point that his left eye was almost closed over and he closed his eye purposely to maintain his equilibrium.

King needed to reassert himself – as if stabbing the man constantly wasn’t enough – and he adjusted his grip around the man’s throat, sliding his forearm back so that he could replace the crux of his elbow with his forearm, trapping the man’s windpipe and closing it tightly. Then he dug his foot into the back of the man’s knee and dragged him down to the ground, wrapping his legs around the man’s waist and locking his knees to keep the man pinned in place. He drove the knife again into the man’s side, then brought it to his throat, moved his forearm across the man’s face and caught hold of his hair. The man sensed the change in attack and hammered the back of his head into King’s face. King smarted at the blow, feeling his nose break and blood fill his throat, making him gag on the metallic taste. But he took the pain and discomfort, then when he got the blade to the man’s throat, he clamped his left hand on the back of the blade and pulled back with both hands using all his force, every ounce of strength, then finally slashing sideways and feeling the gush of blood release on his legs. The surge in blood made a hissing sound, both pressure and air behind it. The man struggled on for another ten seconds, then went limp, his weight sinking into King’s stomach until there was no more weight to come, no movement at all.

King pushed him aside and rolled away. Getting to his feet, he stared down at the body of the man who had given him the toughest fight of his life. Never had he come so close to being in the place where the man now lay. He looked at the knife, realising that the blade had snapped, the last third remaining in the man’s ribcage. That accounted for some of the problems in taking the man down, but training strength and ability on the man’s part had accounted for the time it had taken. King tossed the knife aside and picked up the man’s own. A double-edged dagger with a seven-inch blade and a six-inch handle of polished rosewood with brass studs. Not a modern military or tactical weapon, more like an heirloom from another century. Thirteen inches overall. Lucky thirteen. But not for its last owner. King sheathed the knife and picked up his pistol and the rifle, changing the magazine and making it ready. He was breathless and adrenalin was kicking in. He knew from bitter experience that he needed to keep moving before his muscles became fatigued and stiff. Adrenalin was a thrill for some, but it was also the body’s anaesthetic. The hormone epinephrine flooded the body to make pain and suffering more bearable.

King checked his watch. The plan had gone all to hell because a soldier had refused to die quickly. He had two minutes. It wasn’t enough to reach the men and get back to the helicopter. The mission was the mission. There would be no second chances, no survival and the objective would not be met if he took another step forward towards the gun battle now in full flow on the other side of the camp. He had two minutes to get to the objective, and just three minutes before Russia launched every military aircraft north of Moscow.

After leaving Flymo at the hangar, King had raced towards the sound of gunfire, only to run into a lone solider who had the same idea he had. There had been no time to engage with his rifle, the man taking him down in a rugby tackle to the ground. King had lost his rifle but kicked the soldier’s AK-74 out of his hands. Resorting to his pistol, the man had got his hands on King’s wrist, and they had fought for possession. The two men had been evenly matched for strength, but despite King’s combat experience, the man had known how to fight. Blow upon blow had been exchanged, and King had felt his eye-socket crack and his nose break from the man’s repeated blows with his elbow. King had managed to draw his bayonet, a split second before the soldier had drawn his own dagger, but King had plunged his blade into the man’s ribs and knocked the man’s dagger from his grip. From then on, it had been butchery, but the man was a fighter and had fought on until his dying breath. Now, as King trudged back to the hangar, he was verging on exhaustion and feeling the effects of an adrenalin spike like no other. It had been a near run thing, but King was still alive. For now.

Chapter Fifty-Three

King could hear the engines fire up. The reverberation hammered through him like the shockwave of an explosion. Behind him, the base was lit by muzzle flashes, but even the bursts of gunfire were all but drowned out by the Eagle’s Talon. King caught a muzzle flash to his left and dropped down to the ground as he engaged. He was faster to act than the two soldiers and cut them down with most of a magazine. He rolled onto his back, switched over magazines and tucked the used one with just a few rounds remaining into one of the pouches on his webbing to the right, keeping just full magazines in the pouches to the left to save making a critical mistake later. He was already low on full magazines, King rolled over and got back to his feet, racing towards the hangar. Behind him, the first of the charges detonated and night was turned into day as the incendiary tore through the hangar and engulfed one of the prototypes and fuel inside.

King caught sight of the leviathan as it wheeled from the hangar, the rotors spinning and a blue flame billowing from the jets at the base of the rotors. The engines and rotors made a whine rather than the noise associated with helicopters and King was almost struck still in awe, but a torrent of expletives and a cry of pain filled his earpiece and snapped him back into the chaos.

“Stan and Brian are down!” Taff’s harsh Scottish tone came on the net. “They’re out. No point going back.” The men knew that they did not have the manpower or support to bring bodies home. The likelihood of falling beside a dead comrade while trying to carry them was simply too high. “I’m on my way to the target. Couldn’t plant my device…”

“Get off the bloody net!” King snapped. He didn’t want the man’s life story. If the two men were down, then they were down. If he had failed his task, then he wasn’t going to get a ‘there, there’ over the network.

“Man down! Man down!” Jock screamed. “Hangar three!”

“Sit-rep!” King shouted.

“I’m hit. Making my way to the target!” Jock said matter-of-factly. “I’ve got Lofty… he’s hit, too…”

“Shit…” King muttered. He watched the Eagle’s Talon clear the hangar, then bolted back towards the chaos.

“King! I need you to help with the weapon systems!” Flymo’s voice came over the net. “I’m winding this thing up to go, with or without passengers!”

King cursed as he paused briefly to fire at two Russian soldiers setting up a PKM belt-fed machinegun. His bullets found their mark and both men slumped over the weapon. “Hangar two! On me! On me!” he shouted and changed magazines. He watched as Jock hobbled towards him, dragging Lofty by his webbing. King laid down thirty-rounds of covering fire, changed magazines and sprinted towards them. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and pulled on Lofty’s webbing strap. The man grunted and together they hauled him past the hangar. Jock fell and let go of Lofty and King cursed as he stumbled and dragged the man up and slung him over his shoulder. Jock wasn’t moving and King squatted and grabbed the man’s webbing and hauled, but he could tell a deadweight when he lifted one and left the Welshman behind. The downdraft of the helicopter felt like a hurricane as King stepped under the rotors and opened the cargo and personnel door. He bundled the casualty inside and turned as a second device detonated and blinded him with the flash.

“Exfil! Exfil!” Flymo shouted into his mic. “Cover support! Head for the RV!”

This was it, thought King. Flymo was preparing to take off and if they were going to succeed, then he needed to get onboard. He aimed at a cluster of men and fired off thirty rounds, then dropped the weapon and his webbing on the ground and climbed inside. He still had his pistol attached to his jacket by Velcro and the dead Russian’s dagger, and there was nothing in the webbing to identify the UK specifically, and the magazine he had just fired had been his last. A few rounds scattered among several used magazines wasn’t going to help him now.

Flymo brought the aircraft around in a hover. In front of him, he had adhered the laminate of Russian Cyrillic keywords to a space between the controls where a map was attached for emergency navigation. Ahead of them, vehicles and men gathered and watched, not wishing to fire upon the project, but caught in the confusion. Another hangar went up, illuminating the entire camp, and Flymo worked the guns, casting a short burst across the enemy from the gatling guns. It was over in a blur, the men cut down and the vehicles set ablaze. The guns whirred for the briefest of time, two seconds if that, and the death and destruction had been insurmountable. King realised that with every movement of Flymo’s flight helmet, all six guns moved in unison.

“Put on the helmet,” said Flymo. “There’s an override button on the side of the helmet. Pull down the sighting system over your right eye, and it’s over to you. Your control stick has the guns labelled on the selector. That’s cannons…” he said, pointing at пушка. “And that’s the gatling gun pods…” He pointed at the label marked: ротационный.

“Jesus wept…” King pressed the override and anything with barrels followed wherever he looked. The sight over his eye was difficult to place on objects, and there was a counter running down each side of the cross.

“The numbers are rounds remaining,” said Flymo as he increased power and lifted off the ground.

King could see that one counter was displayed in green and read 4127/5000 and the other counter that was displayed in red read 8478/10000. King flicked from one button to the other and the colours changed, indicating that he had switched from cannons to gatling guns. “How did you fire both at once?” he asked.

“I just told it to,” Flymo replied. “It’s voice-activated, but you have to talk to the system in Russian, directly into your mic.”

“Right…”

Flymo flew across the base keeping low and facing the other hangars. There was no sign of any of the SAS men. “I’m calling it…” he said gravely.

“Do it,” King replied. He gripped onto his seat, taking his hand off the fire control as the aircraft banked and lifted, seemingly in two directions at once. To King, it felt as if they were spinning, climbing and banking all at once, and then he realised that they were. He had to fight not to vomit as Flymo took control of the guns and fired on the vehicle-mounted heavy machineguns that were spewing tracer rounds towards them. Some of the bullets hit the fuselage with a sound like a sledgehammer upon concrete, but most of the bullets whizzed past them, lighting up the sky like lasers in a Sci-Fi movie. Flymo opened fire on various targets, simply looking at what he wanted to hit, and a few seconds later when he banked hard to their right and over the fence, King saw the bullet-count down to 3889/5000 and 6397/10000 respectively. King heard a ‘thud’ and looked behind him as Lofty slammed against the bulkhead. King found himself pushed back into his seat as the helicopter climbed and then swung around in a pirouette. Flymo operated a missile and a ‘whoosh’ of smoke clouded their view momentarily and the missile shot out and intercepted a surface to air missile and exploded directly in front of them. The concussive blast upset their stability and alarms and warning lights both sounded and flashed as Flymo fought with the controls. Another surface to air missile fired, but as it straightened in front of them, it exploded prematurely, again, the concussive blast throwing them sideways.

“That’s a deterrent in the missile guidance system!” Flymo shouted. “It can’t shoot down its own side!” He laughed raucously as he battled with the controls. “There must be a device onboard, a chip or something, so the Ruskies can’t get us with their own missiles!”

King thought Flymo to be utterly gleeful, but he didn’t understand how the man could hold a conversation while fighting to keep them in the air. King’s knuckles had turned white as he hung onto his seat. Flymo eventually got the aircraft under control, and then flew directly to the rendezvous, a few hundred metres directly north of the north-side fence. The four SAS soldiers waited, the two men on the SAWs laying down suppressive fire at the base. Tracer was impacting all around the four men, as the Russians fired back towards the muzzle flashes. Flymo turned, the weapon systems facing the base, and fired the guns again, but this time twenty rockets left the pod in a fog of smoke. The impacts each looked like a distant fireworks display as the rockets exploded randomly inside the base, some landing on the ground, others amongst groups of men or vehicles. The helicopter touched down and the four men clambered in. They had left the SAWs behind, the barrels glowing and the chambered rounds popping off from the heat as the breeches glowed red. The weapons hadn’t been designed to be used in such a way, short bursts prevented overheating, but both men had put well over a thousand rounds through them as they peppered the base with bullets after seeing the Eagle’s Talon take off.

As the men strapped in and got Lofty into a seat and buckled him up, they didn’t hide their shock or anger at having left their comrades behind. King knew how the men felt, but what was done was done. Every man knew that they had to be at the RV on time, and King had seen Jock go down, and heard over the net that Taff and Brian hadn’t made it. As far as he was concerned, it was unfortunate, but everyone was where they should be. Three down, five away. That was far better than King had ever thought possible.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Colonel Niko Zukovsky surveyed the scene. There were bodies strewn everywhere. The burning shells of vehicles littered the base. His career was finished. The bait had been taken. They had been shafted by the British and made to look like fools. Moscow would recall him, and the promises he had made would be thrown in his face at the tribunal. If he was lucky, he would get a bullet in the back of the neck as he walked down one of the many corridors on the ground floor of the Kremlin. A swift dispatch and an unmarked grave. But he could have his retribution now. He may be finished, but he was damned if he was going to go down without a fight. The two pilots had been summoned and the flames outside the undamaged hangar were being doused. As the doors opened to reveal prototype четыре, Zukovsky marvelled at the aircraft’s presence, its purposeful design and the incredible arsenal of weaponry. Still painted for sea trials in a tiger-stripe pattern of dark blue and white with a grey underside, the aircraft was equipped with the Phantom cannon in its underbelly turret. The eighty-millimetre machinegun had been developed to direct its fire just below the waterline on destroyers and frigates to affect ballast and sink them. As an air-to-air combat weapon system, it had yet to be tested, but Zukovsky was confident that if a single explosive-tipped round could take down a conventional helicopter, then against Eagle Talon’s Teflon coating and Kevlar-bonded subframe, he imagined no more than three or four would be required to affect structural integrity, and at six-hundred-rounds-per-minute, if one bullet hit, then so would five.

Zukovsky watched the flames retreat under the torrents of water from the hoses of the two tenders, the firefighters working frantically to get the fire under control. The pilots were already in the aircraft, but the spinning rotors started to fan the flames, and it wasn’t until a third tender arrived on the scene and unleashed its water cannon that the flames died altogether. The helicopter taxied out of the hangar, the pilot and weapons officer going through their pre-flight procedures as they cleared the area. The helicopter performed a rolling take off and its turbines whined and hummed before the jet engines cut in and the aircraft launched forwards at over twice the speed of a conventional helicopter gunship. There was no telling what would happen now, but the odds would be in the Russian pilot’s favour. His pilots had run countless drills, and the Eagle’s Talon was a difficult aircraft to master. Zukovsky watched the base burning, the hangars of the other three prototype aircraft burning fiercely and extinguishing their secrets. With both prototypes in the air, and no other aircraft in existence, he knew that he was finished, because there were only two outcomes to this. The Russian test pilot destroyed the only other prototype, or the British got away and got their hands on years of development. The third scenario, which he almost discounted immediately, was that the British shot down четыре in their escape. There was no point in dwelling on this, because he doubted there would be any survivable outcome for himself.

Zukovsky snapped out of his thoughts as a battered, open-topped UAZ pulled up in front of him erratically in a cloud of smoke billowing from the rattling exhaust. The irony was not lost on Zukovsky that they had just lost the most advanced helicopter the world would ever see, but the the Russian military could not afford to replace a fifty-year-old copy of an eighty-year-old Jeep. In the rear seat, one of the wounded British soldiers was slumped over, his hands bound in front of him. He could see that the man had not only been shot in the shoulder, but that he had received a beating, too. The soldier was dragged out by his jacket and made to stand in front of the colonel.

“We captured this man, Colonel, his two accomplices are both dead…” the Russian soldier turned and spat into the prisoner’s face.

Zukovsky smiled. A prisoner would be a valuable, no, an essential tool for the propaganda directorate. The FSB would have someone to parade in front of the world’s media. A face to splash across the front pages of newspapers around the world. Zukovsky had lost the Eagle’s Talon, but at least he now had somebody to pin the blame on. The soldier would be made to talk. Nobody could withstand the interrogators of the FSB and GRU. Nobody. If четыре could bring down prototype one, then all would not be lost. Zukovsky may even get out of this with a demotion and reprimand. The bullet to the back of the neck would eventually go to this bedraggled soul now standing in front of him, but not until he was bled dry of information and degraded into something sub-human. Zukovsky took a step towards the prisoner, his heart leaping as the bullet hit the man dead centre, directly over the sternum. The prisoner crumpled, dead before he even hit the ground. Zukovsky would later wonder if he had seen right through the prisoner for a moment, catching the flickering flames of the fires throughout the camp through the squash ball-sized hole in the man’s chest, or whether it had been his imagination. Like the soldiers around him, Zukovsky had hit the ground and sought out cover before the sniper could take a second shot.

Three-thousand, two-hundred metres to the south, Rashid was never going to take a second shot. He rolled the flap of turf over the rifle and backed out of the rain gulley. There was enough distortion of light from the fires inside the base to make thermal imaging ineffective in spotting him at this distance. Hunting for a sniper required specific protocols. You simply didn’t pop your head above the parapet for a peek and risk being shot, and anyone searching the tundra for a sniper wouldn’t see a thing with so much ambient light in their vicinity. In fact, Rashid was confident that he could get to the beach and the boat before anyone from the base could think about searching for him, and by the time anyone found his firing position, he would be long gone.

Rashid had hoped – prayed even – that he would not have to take a single shot because Ramsay’s orders had been precise. No member of the team was to be taken alive.

Chapter Fifty-Five

The tracer rounds tore past them, streaks of orange disappearing thousands of metres into the night. Flymo banked left and took the aircraft into a dive.

“What the hell?” King exclaimed, staring at the radar screen. “How…”

“Stealth,” Flymo replied. “One of the prototypes is in the air…”

“I thought we destroyed them all!”

“I guess not…”

King had seen the flames outside hangar three. In the chaos he supposed there hadn’t been time to confirm. “How the hell do we find it?”

Flymo heaved back on the stick with his right hand, his left hand on the collective and both feet working simultaneously. The aircraft pulled into a loop, but before he completed it, Flymo kicked on the right rudder and the helicopter rotated mid-turn and dropped into a vertical dive.

King suddenly caught sight of the leviathan in his sighting system and fired the gatling guns, but the stream of tracer went wide and with the motion of the aircraft, the two streams of bullets spiralled through the night sky. He had not used the weapon system’s lock-on – where it would keep the guns on target and fire automatically - because his Russian wasn’t quick enough, and his read of Cyrillic was almost non-existent. “Damn it!” he snapped.

Flymo found the afterburners and the jet engines propelled them forwards, and he banked hard and right as the pilot out maneuvered them and fired a missile, but the aircraft’s rapid flare deployment system fired a stream behind them, but the missile self-destructed when it read the signal from the Eagle’s Talon. “Looks like it’s an old-fashioned gunfight…”

King checked the bullet count. The gatling guns were showing 03901/10000 and the cannon 3889/5000. He flicked the select to cannons. The gatling guns fired so rapidly he reckoned he could empty them in four or five more bursts. He knew that Flymo could override his system so he didn’t want to run out of ammunition before Flymo could get some good shots off, but the man had his hands full with the Cyrillic translation and the controls, as well as his expectations of the aircraft. King couldn’t tell from the man’s demeanour – like the very best pilots, he was as cool as a cucumber under duress – but Flymo had been awestruck at the capabilities of the Eagle’s Talon.

The next stream of tracer rounds looked more like rockets as they streaked past. King felt himself heave against his harness as the aircraft dived vertically, then almost lost the contents of his stomach as the dive turned into an inverted loop. When he glanced across to the righthand seat, Flymo was beaming.

“You’re enjoying this?” he managed to say between breaths.

“Just testing this baby out, man…” He shook his head. “That shouldn’t have been possible… it’s not in a fighter… not even in a stunt plane…”

“Great! Now can you stop fucking about and take this guy out?”

“Working on it,” Flymo replied. “I don’t know what the hell that was back there, but if that gun gets a single bullet on us, I think it will be game over…” A flurry of arms and legs, and they banked so hard that the next salvo of tracer rounds went from zipping past them, to meeting them head on. A scattering of copper and lead caught the fuselage and plexiglass, and King watched the counter run down on the cannon. 3111/5000. King wasn’t sure if any of the rounds hit. “Shit!” Flymo climbed again, this time pulling a full loop. “We took some rounds from his gatling guns… We’re still in the game!”

“Glad to hear it…” King switched to gatling guns and said, “Right, stop fucking about and get me a clear target.”

“I’m trying,” Flymo replied quietly. “There’s no radar to find him.”

“Then how did he find us?”

“There must be a transponder onboard. They don’t want to lose their prototype, even by accident so we must be emitting a signal for them to see.”

King nodded. That made sense otherwise the other prototype would never have found them with their stealth technology. “Where would it be?”

“I’m guessing somewhere serviceable, as this is a prototype. It’s not like a hidden tracker on a supercar.” Flymo pulled hard on the controls as the sound of bullets hitting their tail echoed through the cockpit. “Shit! He’s using his cannons to get on target, then he’ll follow up with that bloody great gun…”

King ignored him. He couldn’t help what was happening, but he could try and find the transponder. “Where would a transponder be?”

“The main fuseboard. Near the radio, satellite and radar fuses.” He paused, the aircraft climbing abruptly. “Behind my seat would be my best guess…”

King tried to unbuckle his harness but found himself pressed into his seat by an unknown quantity of g-forces. He needed some straight and level flying, but that wasn’t going to happen. He released the buckle and pulled on the harness to get out of the snug-fitting seat, but was thrown hard in the opposite direction, slamming into the plexiglass as Flymo fired the guns and released a missile.

“Come on!” Flymo hollered as the missile shot out in front of them but self-destructed just fifty metres from the enemy aircraft. He switched to guns, but the bullets lit up the black sky as the enemy aircraft performed a loop and screamed away with blue flames roaring from the afterburners.

King could see the bullet count in his visor. 00901/10000 for the gatling guns and 3111/5000 for the cannon. Flymo switched to the cannon as King took off his helmet and hauled himself into the rear loading and personnel bay. The noise without his helmet was overbearing, and he could hear the machinegun fire as Flymo engaged the enemy once more. As he clambered into the loading bay, he could see blood and vomit on the floor, and it was clear that the men had been through passenger hell. There had been no opportunity to tend to Lofty during the white-knuckle ride, and it was clear by the way he was slumped in his seat, his left eye half-open, that the man was dead. King ignored them and lifted a latch behind Flymo’s seat, but at once was thrown backwards into the men who did their best to hold onto him, but as the aircraft entered a roll King felt himself forced into the ceiling as the aircraft went through negative g-force, and then as zero gravity was achieved, King floated in the cabin space. He reached for one of several grab-handles and hauled himself back to the circuit box and was at once pressed firmly into the floor. Struggling to read the Cyrillic letters he had to pull on the classroom-based lessons he had undergone while with MI6, but he found радио, Russian for radio, and figured that he was in the right section at least. Beneath was маяк and below that was радар, which he knew to be Russian for radar. With no great logic than маяк looking something to the word mark, as in ‘X marks the spot’ he figured it was close enough to beacon and pulled the old-fashioned looking fuse, that reminded him of the old Bakelite fuses that had been in the cottage he used to own down in Cornwall when he had first purchased it. He remembered the electrician poking around and shaking his head and two days and almost two-thousand pounds later, his fuse board had joined the twenty-first century.

King crawled back to his seat and buckled in. When he put his helmet back on, untangling the wires from his harness, he could hear Flymo shouting excitedly. “You’ve done it! We still can’t see him, but he can’t see us, either…”

“Where is he?”

“Directly below us…”

King looked down by his feet where the plexiglass gave the sensation of a viewing deck and saw the great leviathan a few hundred feet below them. He tightened his grip on the weapons control, then turned to Flymo. “What the fuck…?”

“My bad…” Flymo replied.

Gatling guns: 00009/10000. Cannon: 0079/5000.

“That’s no more than a fart in machinegun terms…” said King sombrely. “And this guy has the mother of all machineguns in his arsenal.” He watched as the aircraft below them pulled a hard turn to the east and Flymo mirrored the manoeuvre.

“I think I’ve activated the electronic camouflage cloaking system,” he said. “Only, I’m not entirely sure, and have no way of checking.”

The electronic camouflage cloaking system worked off an LCD polymer skin wrapped around the fuselage that played back the images taken by the cameras fixed all around the aircraft. It enabled the LCD polymer skin to play images of their surrounds, whether that was at low altitudes near forests or plains, or indeed the grey skies now surrounding them.

“What about the rockets?” asked King.

“They aren’t guided,” Flymo replied. “They’re just the type you unload on a convoy of vehicles or a hundred Taliban fighters getting too close in a firefight. When the first salvo inevitably misses them, then they’ll know exactly where we are.”

“The drone pods?”

“Wouldn’t know where to start,” Flymo replied. “I imagine they need programming, and I can’t work that shit out because I’ve been a bit busy…”

“This thing is EMP resistant, right?”

“Yes,” Flymo replied. A Faraday cage was built into the structure to prevent the electronics from being knocked out by EMP, or electromagnetic pulse in the event of a nuclear explosion. The Faraday cage was essentially a weave of copper wire integrated into the build. Not only did it protect against EMP, but it also helped protect aircraft from lightning strikes, and the disrupting shockwaves of anti-aircraft guns. “Why, what are you thinking?”

“Can you stay above him?”

“For now. Until he figures out what we’ve done with the transponder.”

“How fast can this thing go?”

“We’ve hit double the speed of any helicopter that I’ve ever known just in dogfighting alone. I reckon at least another hundred knots in a straight run.”

“Can you gain height and get ahead of him without him knowing?”

“Briefly. Say, another two hundred feet by two hundred feet. Any more than that, and he’ll see us, too.” He paused. “Unless I really have managed to activate the cloaking device.”

“That’ll do…” King unfastened his harness and staggered into the loading bay. He pulled a set of headphones out of the bulkhead and slipped them on, flicking the intercom switch. “Flymo, do you hear me?”

“Yes!”

“When I say go, I want you to do whatever you have to do to get as far away from here in the quickest time possible…”

“Wait, what? EMP? King, what the hell are you planning to do?”

King ignored him as he opened his pack and took out the graphite case. He dialled in the combination, unclipped the lid and reached inside for the release mechanism. The men watched as he carefully opened the lid, the two explosive cannisters still live, but bypassed for now. The cylinder looked like stainless steel, but King knew that it was tungsten. Inside was the smallest nuclear weapon ever made, the Russian’s answer to the W54 nuclear bomb that the US would launch from the Davy Crocket weapon system. A mortar that launched a one-megaton warhead with low fallout in the event of war with the Soviet Union across Europe should the Cold War become hot. The SS77 was lighter and just as effective and could be fired in tank shells, 120mm mortar shells or detonated by remote control of detonation cord. These weapons were from a time when the rationale didn’t translate to battlefield practicalities. However, when MI5 had come across three different versions of this weapon ten years previously, they had taken the opportunity to store them both for future operational scope, and propaganda. This was a Russian nuclear weapon, designed with radioactive material and components unique to the country, under the Soviet Union’s reign. And King was about to drop it in Russia over an area known for its military technological research.

King nodded for the two nearest men to open the personnel door, and they viewed him incredulously as they unbuckled their harnesses and unlocked the door. It took all their effort to get the door open against the rush of bitterly cold air. They only had a gap wide enough for King to push the cylinder through, and King armed the device, setting the timer for seven seconds. King eased the cylinder through the gap, and the wind rush almost ripped it from his hands as he pressed the button. He counted off two seconds, then let go and shouted, “Go! Go! Go!” into the intercom. “Everybody close your eyes!”

King was thrown into the rear seats as the aircraft shot forward under tremendous acceleration. He got one arm into the harness, counting down in his head. As he reached zero there was an intense whiteness that he could see through his tightly closed eyelids. For a moment, he saw the blood vessels in his eyelids, floaters in his eyes, and then the world went dark again, and they were hurled forwards by the tremendous shockwave almost a mile behind them. The other prototype, travelling two-hundred miles an hour slower had been inside the blast radius, its rotor blades blown from their fixings, the plexiglass melting as parts of the aircraft vapourised, the air sucked from the two pilots’ lungs, the skin melting from their bones in the intense heat. The ammunition for the great cannon fired off under the intense heat, lighting up the sky in a firework display like no other.

The Eagle’s Talon yawed and dipped as Flymo struggled to control it out of the shockwave. King had been thrown to the floor and scrambled back onto all fours as he climbed back into the cockpit.

“What the actual fuck…?” Flymo commented, now slowing the aircraft and climbing higher.

“A nuclear bomb,” King replied. “That ought to have done it…”

“No doubt.”

King checked his watch. “The homing beacon will be going live right about now,” he said. “North by northwest.”

Flymo nodded, flicked the VHF radio to the maritime emergency channel number 16 (156.8 MHz) and a slow ‘blip’ was vaguely audible. With every mile they travelled, every ten seconds or so, the tone grew louder. Flymo banked west and the tone speeded up. The half-light of dawn ushered the darkness aside as the sun edged ever closer to the horizon in the east. The expanse of water below them was grey and flecked with white sea ice. To the north, a solid sheet of white indicated the boundary of the Northern Sea Route. Two unsettled white lines of wake indicated the routes east and west and dotted in the wakes were tiny streaks of colour. The ‘blip’ became louder and faster, and as they descended, the colours in the gloom became identifiable as freighter vessels and oil tankers. Losing altitude to just two hundred feet, the beacon’s tone became incessantly loud and rapid, until a signal flashed on the deck of a red painted vessel with a vast deck filled with shipping containers.

“That’s the signal,” said King.

“Got it.”

King studied the shipping containers as Flymo flew alongside, the other vessels in the route at least a mile behind and in front of The Rising Sun. He could see the hulking figure of Big Dave on the deck, wrapped head to toe in Arctic clothing, but there were no signs of the SBS commandos that he had been told would be their back-up.

“This is going to be tight,” said Flymo.

King said nothing. If there was one thing that he knew the man could do, it was put a helicopter exactly where he wanted it. He pretended that he hadn’t heard, not wanting to add to the man’s anxiety. He watched as Flymo made constant micro adjustments with all four limbs, and his left fingers left the collective to flash across the switches of the instrument panel before taking back control of the collective. After the mesmerising manoeuvrability and awesome speed of the aircraft, the low-speed control and hover of the behemoth was otherworldly. Flymo flicked a switch, and the engines seemed to cut out so convincingly that King grabbed the grab-handles expecting to freefall to the deck. To King, who had ridden in countless military and civilian helicopters, it felt more akin to a hovercraft, or a modern electric car compared to an internal combustion engine and manual gearbox. The smoothness felt like moving two opposing magnets around a table, and then he remembered something about magnetic technology in Reznikov’s original statement when he caught up with him and came so close to putting a bullet in him.

The rotor blades cleared the shipping containers by mere inches, and the reverberation when they dipped below the top of the containers was at odds with the complete silence of the engines. Flymo shut everything down and breathed the heaviest sigh King had ever seen. The deck crew were already pulling tarpaulins over them, flooding the cockpit in darkness. Rope ladders dropped down and King unfastened his harness and clambered into the back. Lofty’s body was slumped in the seat, and the other four men were unbuckling, limbs shaking, complexions pale through what King could see through the smeared camouflage cream. King opened the personnel door and appreciated the firmness of the deck beneath his feet. However, King had been here before. The objective of a mission complete, but still far from over, far from safe.

Chapter Fifty-Six

King didn’t help the SAS soldiers take Lofty’s body to the container with the bodies of the crew. He thought it something that the men would want to do on their own. The four men were eating hot food and drinking coffee and tea in the rec room, while King, Flymo, Big Dave and Luger had gathered on the bridge with Stellenbosch at the helm.

Luger had told them about Japan and the enemy agent and the killing of the SBS commandos, and the attempt on Ramsay’s life. They were not out of danger yet, so he had agreed with Big Dave not to mention Caroline’s involvement, or the fact that she was laying wounded in hospital, fighting for her life, and they had not yet had an update from Mae.

King sipped his tea. Somehow, it seemed about the best a mug of tea he had ever tasted. But he’d thought that before, many times. He checked his watch, then looked at the screen to the right of the captain. The rugged, craggy headlands of the northwestern Russian coast full of bays and coves. Norway seemed tantalisingly close, and with it the safety of Norwegian waters and a NATO founder member state.

“Heads up, guys…” the South African captain said. “We’ve got a reception committee…”

Ahead of them, a submarine was breaking the surface, thousands of litres of water and pieces of sea ice cascading from the coning tower and deck. The vessel had broken the surface at an angle and at great speed, breaching the water like a whale and casting a wave that lifted the broken ice a hundred metres from its prow.

“Vessel The Rising Sun…” the radio crackled on the emergency shipping channel. “You are ordered by the navy of the Russian Federation to heave to and drop anchor for inspection…”

Stellenbosch picked up the handset and said, “On what grounds? We are in Norwegian waters…”

The reply came back curtly. “You are in Russian Federation waters for six more kilometres. Heave to and drop anchor, or we will take extreme measures…”

Stellenbosch looked at King. There was no formal hierarchy, and although Luger had led the operation as far as the South African was concerned, he could tell that King’s role was a pivotal one. “What now, boss?”

King stared at the submarine some thousand metres ahead of them. “This vessel can break ice, can’t it?”

“Yes. The prow is reinforced, but it’s not an icebreaker.”

“King… what are you thinking?” Luger asked dubiously.

“He’s thinking ram the son-of-a-bitch,” said Big Dave.

“But we’ll leave ourselves vulnerable to sinking…” Luger argued. “And in case you’ve forgotten, we’re in the bloody Arctic…”

“Full ahead, Captain,” said King. “Everything you’ve got…” King took the radio handset from him and switched to channel 22. He spoke briefly, then said, “Captain, order your men to abandon ship…”

“What the hell, King?” Luger protested.

Big Dave put a paw on Luger’s shoulder and said, “If we stop and they inspect the ship, then we’re as good as dead. If we don’t stop, then they’ll blow us out of the water…”

“But we’ll lose the helicopter!”

“But the Russians won’t have it, and that’s about as good as we could ever have hoped for,” said King. “This way buys us some time, perhaps even our lives…”

Stellenbosch had applied full engines and set the course to pass the submarine by a hundred metres. It would look like they were making a run for it and the submarine would most likely give another warning and then give them a burst of fire from their detachable deck guns to change their mind. King took the helm, standing at the ridiculously tiny ship’s wheel. He would give everyone enough time to get off the ship and take it from there. He had been shown the controls, but realistically he hadn’t thought that far ahead. The crew inflated the life rafts on the stern and handed out cold water emersion survival suits and started to abandon ship. King insisted upon everyone going and both Luger and Big Dave had reluctantly leapt off the stern, feet together, hands on opposite shoulders as they coffin-dived feet first into the icy water. The first men to the life rafts clambered in and helped his fellow man. King stood on the gantry and counted the orange suits in the water, when he looked back at the submarine, it was turning side on to maximise both deck guns, and the rounds started pinging off the hull. King darted inside the bridge. The bullets would soon penetrate the steel as the range decreased, but when the Russian commander saw that the freighter did not intend to stop, some of those bursts of fire would work their way up to the bridge. King wound on the comically small wheel – no larger than a side plate – and frowned as nothing happened. He had been told by Stellenbosch that the system was gradual, but this was ridiculous. He had the submarine’s position, and by turning the wheel, he should have had the heading directly on a crash-course with the vessel. He was about to turn the wheel again, when the prow started to come to, and the trail of machinegun fire started to slice through the shipping containers. King watched the muzzle flash rise, and he dived for the floor and the windows on the bridge shattered and glass was strewn over his back. He scrambled for the door, slicing his hands on the shards of glass, and cursed as he took the steps two or three at a time, 12.7mm bullets hitting and twisting the steel staircase above his head. With the bridge occupying the rear third of the vessel, he did not have far to run but as the prow tore into the submarine, he was thrown to the deck and slid to the port side as the freighter took on water. He needed to get clear of the ship and not fall into the water as the ship rolled, so he hauled himself up and ran hard to the stern, but the survival suit had slid down the deck. King could not afford to waste time, and he leapt out from the stern and dived, catching sight of one of the huge propellers leaving the water. The icy water burned at his face and hands, but the triathlon wetsuit underneath his clothing took the initial shock away from his body. The icy water crept up the sleeves and legs, down his neck, but within a minute his body heat started to warm the layer of water trapped between his skin and the neoprene, and he crawled through the water towards the nearest life raft. His boots and clothing were starting to wear him down, and he was glad of both Captain Stellenbosch and Big Dave, who reached down and between them yanked him out of the water like he weighed nothing at all. King rolled onto his back and surveyed the scene of carnage. The Rising Sun was sinking quickly, now with both propellers out of the water and the front third had broken and was sinking prow up. The rear two-thirds was heading for the depths and would get there soon. The submarine had broken in two and had rolled hull up. There were inflatable life rafts in the water and men were shouting for help and clambering into the life rafts. Flares had gone up and would be seen by freighters and tankers sailing the Northern Sea Route.

The fishing boat came to them from the coast. Bjorn at the helm and Elspeth on the foredeck holding a boat hook and readying herself to help the men aboard. When King had left them with the SAS soldiers, he had ordered them to hang back in a Fjord and wait for his call on a pre-arranged radio channel. Never one to follow orders blindly, King had been taught long ago to always have an escape route.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Sweden

There was a fresh blanket of snow and inside and the fire was burning fiercely. Sokolov had just made a lungi and cradled it in his hands as he watched the snow flurry outside the window. The coffee was fresh – he roasted and ground his own Java Arabica coffee beans, and the espresso machine had come from Milan where he had taken the chess world title four years ago. Sokolov liked to take time in the things he did, no matter how small the task. He sought out the best vodka and Scotch whisky from artisan distilleries, sourced his clothes from luxury brands or independent tailors and like his coffee, bought the best produce he could lay his hands on and took time to learn new recipes, or perfect the classic dishes. He took the same dedicated, methodical approach to everything in life, especially in his chess and mind training before events. Sokolov played computer-chess for two hours every morning, sometimes on the closed groups where all players were anonymous, and the prize fund could often reach six figures. He had to be careful not to become recognised and used several usernames. Other times he merely played against the computer software to test his resolve. Late morning to midday he would then take a coffee break to do several advanced-level crosswords or sudoku puzzles, then he would study the grand masters and practise the all-time great matches by reenacting in meticulous detail. He drank seven coffees throughout the day and did not eat until seven, when he would either eat a three or four-course meal at whatever Michelin starred restaurant he was near, or if at home in Russia, or here at his remote cabin in Sweden, he would cook with flair, perfecting his dishes, or even improving on the recipes of the very best chefs. Sokolov kept a spectacular wine cellar in his Swedish cabin, and he would drink a bottle of wine with his meal and finish his evening with a large glass of whisky or vodka, depending on his mood.

He disliked change, and he disliked visitors, but would make the exception for Katerina Baskakov as he watched her hired Volvo sweep into the driveway, the loose snow lifting like smoke before wafting back to the ground to settle. Her vehicle was a pearlescent white, but against the fresh snow, looked pale and dirty by comparison. He felt the sexual urge that he experienced each time he saw her. There was something so fundamentally ‘womanly’ about her, something he could not explain, despite his intellect. Her movements, her natural scent, the way perfume lingered on her skin or in the room long after she had left. She had shape to her figure, yet retained an elegant slimness, her teeth were naturally white – not fake like Hollywood actresses or social media harlots – just straight and white and true. Katerina Baskakov could wear makeup, or go natural, and he doubted people would notice, and certainly not to her detriment. He watched as she got out of the vehicle, and to his dissatisfaction, he saw that she was dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater, and although he could see her feminine curves through the hang of the sweater, he could not help feeling disappointed that she had forsaken the leather skirt, the knee-length boots and that wonderfully decadent sable coat.

Sokolov put down his coffee cup and walked to the door, opening it before Katerina could knock. He could see from her expression that she had been startled, but there was more to it than that – she seemed harassed. Her usual colouring had a pallor to it, her face ashen, her eye sockets dark. She hadn’t slept, and it was worn upon her face.

“Are you alright?” he asked, genuinely concerned.

“Vodka,” she said barging past him. Sokolov glanced at his Cartier watch, not to confirm the time, but to rationalise the need for hard liquor so early in the day. She caught his action and added, “Yes, this early. And make it a fucking double measure…”

Sokolov headed for the counter, poured a generous glass. Neat, no ice. That’s how a drink for this occasion should be taken. When someone ‘needed’ a drink, they didn’t need ice or mixers or paper straws. “Here,” he said, passing it to her.

Katerina downed the vodka in one and said, “Another…” He shrugged and poured another glass. “Have one yourself,” she told him, and he could see that it wasn’t a mere suggestion. It was an order.

Sokolov poured himself a glass and hesitated as if to toast, but he could see that this was not an occasion. This was something altogether more serious. He downed the glass, winced as it burned and loosened his head. “What is it?”

“Sit,” she said, and took the seat opposite his own worn leather winged back chair. She waited for him to take a seat, looking at the ornate chess set beside them. Sokolov had finished his game, and the pieces were lined up, waiting for a new game, like soldiers on an ancient battlefield awaiting the order to charge. She slid the table between them. “Play,” she said.

“To what end?”

“To the victor go the spoils.”

“And the spoils of this particular war are?”

“Life and death.”

“Meaning?”

“You failed, Fedor. Your entire plan failed…”

“Operatsiya Orlinyy kogot’?” he asked, unable to hide his bewilderment. “That’s impossible…”

“Not impossible! Quite possible!” she raged. “They stole it… they actually managed to steal it…” She paused, sinking the rest of her vodka. “And they stopped Rurik. Killed him like a fucking dog…”

“It can’t be…” he said quietly. “It just can’t be…”

“It is done,” she said quietly. “Now, play…”

“What good will it do?”

“Just to see,” she replied. “To see if I was wrong to recruit you. To see for myself…” She reached under her sweater and took out a tiny .25 Beretta pistol and rested it on the table at her end of the chessboard. “One game,” she said. “Life or death…”

“But Katerina…”

“Would you play to have me?”

Sokolov shrugged. “Of course.”

“You are confident that you would win?”

The grand master scoffed. “Of course!”

She patted the tiny pistol as she stared blankly at him. There was no emotion in her expression. Sokolov had never seen her like this. Never imagined she could look so vulnerable… no, not vulnerable, he thought… resigned to her fate, the fight knocked out of her. “If you win, you get to have me, and I’ll leave. You can take your chances with the corrections department,” she said blankly. “But if I win, then I’ll kill you and take my chances with the corrections department, or maybe run forever…”

“But Katerina…”

“Play!” she shouted.

Sokolov frowned, confused. If the Eagle’s Talon had really been stolen, if his plan to lure and capture the British agents had failed, then surely, he would get a bullet, anyway? But so would she. She would have to go to great lengths to clear her name. But this? How could she hope to win? He was the best talent in chess, the grand master who remained undefeated for seven years. Humouring her, Sokolov moved his pawn one place to f3. Katerina moved her pawn to e5, Sokolov responded with a pawn two places to g4. Katerina stared at him as she slid her queen to h4.

“Checkmate,” she said, still staring him in the eyes.

“Impossi…” he trailed off as he stared at the board. He could not move his king, and nor could he move a single piece into her queen’s path. “The fools’ mate…” he said quietly, shaking his head. “A child’s move!” he then raged. “We are not playing games in the nursery! I demand a rematch!”

Sokolov did not hear the discharge of the pistol, was not aware of the impact of the tiny .25 copper-coated hollow point bullet as it entered his skull directly between his eyes. He would never know that Katerina had rifled through his paperwork and his banking details long after his body had grown cold, or that she would flee the FSB and their ‘correction department’ using what money he had saved for when both his genius and notoriety had waned, and he was left alone and miserable. He had been checkmated. Taken in battle, and to the victor went the spoils.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

The Guardian Newspaper

With the current peace talks in Ukraine being the first real possibility of a lasting ceasefire on the road to peace, the United Nations, Security Council and NATO member states met in Basle, Switzerland yesterday to discuss Russia’s threat on the world stage. With its military forced into a protracted war in Ukraine, after what was supposed to be a modern-day blitzkrieg, Russia has only managed to hang on to the Donbas and Crimea, when its initial intention was for the country to fall within two weeks. Pulling on North Korean soldiers to fight and boost its numbers, is Russia’s military really a force to be reckoned with? After recent unsanctioned nuclear testing in Siberia, where it is thought that a low-yield weapon of mass destruction detonated prematurely during a helicopter test flight, and the unexplained sinking of one of their Borei class nuclear submarines in the Bering Sea, does Russia even have a valid military capability? Is Britain not just wasting its time and resources on a Russian military threat, when we should be addressing the economy and the fallout from both Brexit and the Covid Pandemic? With a likely peace in Ukraine, and so many resources that Europe desperately needs, are Russia even our enemy?

Neil Ramsay tossed the newspaper into the wastepaper basket beside his desk and said to himself, “Yes, they bloody well are…”

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Somerset

Despite the blue skies and high scudding white clouds, the churchyard was a cold and desolate place in late autumn. No leaves on the trees, no evergreens except for a row of well-established yew at the bottom of the graveyard that had once existed solely for bow making, and the archery tournaments that took place after church services five centuries ago. The churchyard looked out over Exmoor and there was snow on the hills and a hard frost on the ground. The sea was just about visible off Lynmouth, and the hazy coastline of Wales could be observed in the distance.

The service had been short. Charlotte had been survived by her parents and they had both sat solemnly throughout the service, neither expecting to outlive their child, and utterly hollowed-out by the experience. Ramsay had asked before leaving London if he could read something at the service but had been politely refused. A short eulogy read by Charlotte’s younger sister could have read for someone else, certainly not the Charlotte known at Thames House or the Georgian building on the quiet crescent near the embankment that was their new department. How long that situation remained was debatable.

King put an arm around Caroline and watched as Ramsay gave his condolences to Charlotte’s parents and her sister. The old couple went through the motions, but King could tell that they were not rude or direct enough to tell them all to leave, but the family resented their presence, which told him that they were being held to blame. It was impossible to deny. Being gunned down by a Kalashnikov by a Russian agent didn’t happen every day.

Caroline’s right arm was in a sling. Some bone had been chipped, there had been massive tissue trauma, but the surgeon had been skilled. A tiny round wound on top of her shoulder blade and three intersecting cuts that looked like three-inch slashes where the bullet had excited and been sewn back together. Forty external stitches and a great story for the grandkids one day.

After Bjorn and Elspeth had got the team back into Norwegian waters and into port, an RAF Hercules C130 had flown them to RAF Brize Norton where they had said a sombre goodbye to the SAS soldiers who had been flown by a Dauphine helicopter back to Hereford, while King, Big Dave and Luger had been picked up by Jim Kernow and driven back to London. Rashid had exfiltrated through Finland and Sweden converting his gold sovereigns into cash and hiring a vehicle to drive to Stockholm, and had arrived back in London on a commercial flight a week after taking the unfortunate, harrowing and regrettable shot on the tundra. The profit that Ramsay hoped to make out of the resale of The Rising Sun, that would further his department’s funds for clandestine operations wasn’t going to happen now that the ship was at the bottom of the Baring Sea, and filing an insurance claim was going to raise too many questions and give the Russian’s concrete evidence that they had been responsible for stealing the Eagle’s Talon. The area just shy of Norwegian waters was now awash with Russian naval vessels, but not before a Royal Navy submarine had levelled several torpedoes on wreckage of The Rising Sun to hide its secrets and prevent a Russian salvage operation standing any chances of recovering anything worthwhile. British and US submarines were now prevalent in the area to make matters difficult for Russia.

Jack Luger wondered over, followed by Big Dave, Rashid and Flymo. Jim Kernow remained hovering near Ramsay. Both Caroline and Ramsay owed the man their lives. He had arrived at Maiden Lane from the correct end, Caroline later realising that she had driven down a one-way street in the rush to get to Rules.

“I’ve done some digging,” said Caroline as the men gathered beside them. “Charlotte got played. A honey trap. Rurik sought her out, dated her and seduced her. Charlotte wasn’t the type to have boyfriends or partners. He simply swept her off her feet. He found out about the crescent building and Ramsay’s habits through her. I can’t find a link between the SBS commandoes being sent to Japan, and the agent who killed Sergeant Tom Whitaker and impersonating him, so must assume that Charlotte told Rurik what was happening, and the FSB reacted quickly by putting two agents in place. One of these, as Jack can testify, is Jenko ‘The Blade’, a Bulgarian asset of the FSB. The other is Katerina Baskakov, an FSB officer.”

“We’ll find them,” said Luger.

“You’re damned right we will…” Big Dave agreed.

“What did she gain from it all?” asked Rashid. “She wasn’t the type to sell out her country for cash.”

“I don’t think so, either. Not for a moment,” she replied adamantly.

“Sex, affection and attention,” Big Dave said heavily.

“Rurik knew what he was doing. Perhaps she tried to impress him, or maybe it was coaxed out of her.” Caroline paused, shaking her head. “MI6 had a problem with spinster types working in the offices getting seduced by Soviet spies in the fifties and sixties. The men were referred to as Ivans, and the Russians referred to the spinsters as Emilies. It would appear that they have resurrected the practice.” She paused, watching as Ramsay wheeled himself away from the family members. “She wasn’t a traitor. But she was loose lipped. The oldest damned trick in the book and it cost her her life, and almost cost Neil his.”

“And yours,” Big Dave said pointedly.

“I know…” she said quietly.

“She should have known better…” King said coldly. “Late-thirties, no partner, no kids and she’s now lying cold in the ground.” His words hung in the air, nobody knowing how to respond, or even if they should. King shrugged. “It’s a lesson, that’s all…”

“Does Ramsay know the details?” asked Luger. “I mean, the physical side…”

“No,” King replied. “And today isn’t the day for him to find out.”

“Agreed,” said Big Dave.

“So, what are we going to do?” asked Rashid.

“We’re going to go to the wake,” said King. “We’re going to eat cold sausage rolls and warm egg and cress sandwiches, and we’re going to drink to our fallen colleague, whether her family want us there or not. And then our deputy director here…” He placed a hand on Caroline’s good shoulder. “Is going to use all her influence to see that we get to exact some retribution.” King paused, his expression hard and his eyes cold. “Because there will be a backlash for these actions, I promise you all that…”

Author’s Note

Well, that’s it - you’ve just read my 30th novel! I started in 1999 when I was first published at the tender age of 28 and after a few wilderness years, finally got my shit together with The Ares Virus and The Contract Man in 2015 after gaining some life experience!

Thank you for reading my latest story - your support means everything because I get to keep doing what I love.

King’s next adventure is Backlash

A P Bateman