DREAM PALADIN COPYRIGHT

First Edition: May 2025

Titles by Tom Quiller

THE COLD SECERTS SERIES

Captain Sam Tilson Books

A MOCKERY OF HONOUR
The never-published novella of Sam Tilson's first ever mission as an MI5 officer
CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE COPY

HEAVEN'S FIRST LAW

THE VILEST CONCEITS

ANGER OF THE WISE

NO GOOD BY STEALTH

ANCESTOR OF SORROW

IN SHADE OF MOONLIGHT

A MONSTER SO FEARED
(Coming August 2025)

THE NORSE KRIMOLOGY STRAND

Detective Frida Skardet Books

BAPTISM OF ICE

WINTER OF LOVE
(Coming October 2025)

PRAISE FOR TOM QUILLER

AMAZON REVIEWS

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A great read and some awesome plot twists.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Loved this fast pace read. It would make a great movie.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Good pace, sensible explanations and excellent twists.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Quiller brings the characters to life brilliantly and the dialogue sings!

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Really enjoyed the pace and story telling - Tom can obviously write and I’m looking forward to the next ones..

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Every now and again the writing is elevated to near poetry. Love it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Really good, fast paced story line with great characters and plenty to keep me turning the pages.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Fast moving plot, believable characters and a wealth of detail about the inner workings of MI5 .

Epigraph

***

“What beck’ning ghost, along the moon-light shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”

– Alexander Pope

Dedication

For Clare

Contents

PROLOGUE

1. CHAPTER 1

2. CHAPTER 2

3. CHAPTER 3

4. CHAPTER 4

5. CHAPTER 5

6. CHAPTER 6

7. CHAPTER 7

8. CHAPTER 8

9. CHAPTER 9

10. CHAPTER 10

11. CHAPTER 11

12. CHAPTER 12

13. CHAPTER 13

14. CHAPTER 14

15. CHAPTER 15

16. CHAPTER 16

17. CHAPTER 17

18. CHAPTER 18

19. CHAPTER 19

20. CHAPTER 20

21. CHAPTER 21

22. CHAPTER 22

23. CHAPTER 23

24. CHAPTER 24

25. CHAPTER 25

26. CHAPTER 26

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

The warship cut through the dark waters of the Gulf of Suez, her bow unzipping the gentle waters with determined purpose. Once known as HMS Nith, this River-class frigate had been constructed in 1942 by Henry Robb Ltd. in Leith, Scotland. Designed for convoy escort duties during World War II, she displaced 1,370 tons and measured 91.3 meters, with a beam of 11.7 meters. Her armament included two 4-inch (102 mm) dual-purpose gun turrets and several anti-aircraft weapons. In 1948, she was sold to Egypt and rechristened the Domiat, serving as a symbol of the burgeoning Egyptian Navy’s aspirations.

Around the vessel, the night was clear, the sky a canvas of inky blue adorned with a scattering of stars. A crescent moon hung low, casting a silvery path across the dark sea. The air was cool, a light breeze carrying the faint scent of salt and distant lands.

The captain, Bikbashi Ahmed El-Sayed, stood on the bridge, his silhouette framed by the dim glow of the instrument panels. A seasoned officer in his late forties, El-Sayed had a chiselled face marked by years of service under the relentless sun. His deep-set eyes, often described as hawk-like, scanned the horizon with unwavering focus. Less than an hour ago, he had received urgent orders from naval command to depart the Port of Adabiya immediately, following the arrival of a special cargo, and make for the Indian Ocean to await further instructions.

The captain had ordered the crew to prepare for immediate departure and they had done so in good time and order. As soon as Lieutenant Omar Rahman – the ship’s second officer – approached and saluted crisply, delivering the message that the cargo was aboard, the gangplank was pulled up; the ship slipped her moorings and headed for the open waters of the Gulf.

As the Domiat increased speed, her engines hummed with a rhythmic cadence, propelling her southward through the Gulf. Weather reports were clear, and the sky was a canvas of inky blue, dotted with stars that shimmered like distant fireflies in the tropical night. The moon hung low, casting a creamy sheen across the gently undulating waves. The air was thick with the scent of salt and the anticipation that the entire ship’s complement felt intensely.

Unbeknownst to most of the crew, the so-called “cargo” was not mere supplies or munitions, but a man – an operative carrying documents of immense geopolitical significance.

He had been shown to the captain’s quarters and could do precious little but sit there and wait until the commanding officer arrived. Once they had navigated the Gulf of Suez and made it to the relatively more open waters of the Red Sea itself.

The cabin, though compact by the standards of larger warships, was the most spacious and well-appointed room on the frigate. It was located off the main deck, near the bridge, allowing Captain Ahmed El-Sayed quick access to command in moments of urgency.

Its decor was a fusion of British naval tradition and Egyptian naval adaptation. While many areas had been refitted since being transferred to Egypt, some remnants of her Royal Naval past remained. The bulkheads were painted a pale shade of off-white, giving the room a stark yet clean appearance. The flooring was a mixture of worn wooden planks—a rarity on modern warships—and utilitarian navy-grey linoleum, a reminder of the ship’s dual heritage.

Against the aft bulkhead, beneath a small rectangular porthole, stood the captain’s desk, a solid mahogany relic from the ship’s former British officers. Its surface was scratched and worn, marked by years of paperwork, plotting, and decision-making. The edges were dented, the brass fittings tarnished from exposure to the humid Red Sea air. A fountain pen sat in a leather holder alongside a metal compass and a folded map of the Red Sea. Beneath the desk were a pair of narrow metal lockers for the storage of papers.

To the left of the desk, a small bookshelf was fastened to the bulkhead, holding a worn copy of the Quran, a British Admiralty manual on convoy tactics, and several volumes on navigation and maritime law. A photograph of El-Sayed’s family rested near the books, the silver frame slightly tarnished, the faces within faded from years at sea. The air inside the cabin was thick with the scent of man, perspiration and the faintest trace of tobacco—El-Sayed was not a habitual smoker, but he had been known to light the odd cigarette during moments of deep contemplation.

Two miles to the south, HMS Newfoundland was making headway towards the Egyptian ship’s position. The Crown Colony-class light cruiser had been on high alert since the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in July. This action led to a crisis that had escalated rapidly, leading to the formulation of ‘Operation Musketeer’, the Anglo-French plan to seize control of the canal.

The British government had declared a maritime exclusion zone around the canal, aiming to prevent any Egyptian naval assets from threatening Allied operations. Any vessel attempting to breach this zone was subject to interception. The Domiat was identified as one such vessel attempting to escape the exclusion zone. At least, that would be the official line.

In the operations room of the Newfoundland, the duty officer received a coded message from the Admiralty. The message, marked “Top Secret”, detailed the movements of the Domiat and issued explicit orders: Intercept and neutralise the Egyptian frigate attempting to breach the exclusion zone. Issue a warning to surrender before engaging.

Captain J. G. Hamilton, commanding officer of the Newfoundland, convened an immediate briefing with his senior officers.

“Gentlemen,” Hamilton began, “we have received direct orders from the Admiralty.” He handed the decoded message to his executive officer, Commander Harris.

Harris read the message aloud, the weight of the words settling over the room.

“Our objective is clear,” the captain continued. “We are to intercept the enemy vessel and prevent her from escaping the exclusion zone.”

All the officers exchanged glances, understanding the gravity of the mission. They then went to their posts with Hamilton headed to the bridge.

The message from the Admiralty had arrived coded and terse, relayed through fleet command with the cold efficiency of wartime communications. An Egyptian naval vessel had been reported leaving port under suspicious circumstances and with all haste.

Intelligence suggested she might be attempting to lay mines or interfere with Allied shipping routes south of the exclusion zone. This may or may not have been true.

On the bridge of the Newfoundland, officers clustered around the radar console, its soft green glow painting their faces in ghostly hues, straining to see any sign of the reported enemy vessel.

The green radar sweep showed a solitary contact, moving slowly as if trying to seem innocuous. The captain studied the blip for a moment longer, then tapped it with his finger.

“That one looks fishy,” he said quietly. Around him, the bridge crew straightened, the weight of the moment settling over them. The Newfoundland, accompanied by the HMS Diana, a Daring-class destroyer, adjusted course to intercept the Egyptian frigate. The sea was calm, the night sky clear, providing optimal conditions for the operation.

As they closed the distance, the Newfoundland’s communication officer attempted to establish contact with the enemy.

“Egyptian warship, Egyptian warship, this is HMS Newfoundland, Royal Navy warship F99. You are ordered to heave to immediately and stop engines. Prepare to be boarded. Acknowledge. Over.”

There was no response.

Hamilton ordered a second transmission.

“Egyptian warship, this is HMS Newfoundland. Stop or I will fire.”

The Domiat acknowledged, but her actions betrayed her intent. She altered course, turning toward the Newfoundland, as if to ram the British warship. On the horizon, beneath the moonlight, Hamilton and his bridge officers could see movement — the Egyptian crew running across their deck, racing to man their guns.

The Domiat was not complying. Instead, as the British warship’s final order echoed across the waves, the Egyptian frigate’s forward gun battery elevated, traversed slowly, and without warning, spat fire and steel toward the Newfoundland, illuminating the balmy night with abrupt flashes.

The report of the Domiat’s main gun reverberated across the Gulf. The shell whistled through the night air before striking the water less than fifty yards off Newfoundland’s port quarter. Another shot followed, closer this time, sending a geyser of white spray skyward. Shrapnel peppered the cruiser’s superstructure, and fragments scored a jagged line across the deck plating near the port-side hangar. One Royal Marine suffered a deep laceration to his thigh; another seaman on deck was thrown hard against a bulkhead, breaking his collarbone.

The Domiat’s guns had spoken. There would be no surrender.

On the bridge of HMS Newfoundland, Captain Hamilton’s face hardened. There was no further hesitation. The Domiat had fired first, sealing her fate. The tension was palpable.

Harris spoke quietly, his voice a low thread of steel. “We’re within firing range, sir.”

The captain nodded. “Load forward batteries. Ready main armament.”

The gunnery officer relayed the order, and the massive 6-inch guns of the Newfoundland swivelled in perfect precision.

The officer hesitated. Drills were one thing, but this was real. People’s lives on that target. A midshipman shifted nervously.

The transmitting station’s voice came, raw and unfiltered: “Pull the fucking trigger!”

Newfoundland’s nine guns answered in thunderous unison. The first salvo struck home with brutal accuracy, shells tearing through the Domiat’s superstructure and igniting explosions that lit the night like lightning over the water.

The Newfoundland and Diana closed in, their guns blazing. The Egyptian vessel’s ultimate act of defiance was answered with overwhelming force. What followed was less a battle and more an execution — the inevitable punishment for the frigate’s final stand, led by a captain who perhaps knew he had no chance, yet chose not to surrender. Maybe because of the cargo he carried.

On the Domiat, the operative heard the first shot whistle across the bows of the ship and was on his feet in a flash. He knew at that moment his mission was compromised. His papers could not fall into enemy hands. He had to secure them for later retrieval and get the hell off this ship.

Suddenly, a shockwave ran through the ship, followed by the distant thud of an explosion. The Domiat had come under attack. Emergency klaxons blared, and the once-ordered environment descended into chaos.

He ran to the door and opened it to come face to face with a lanky Egyptian Able Seaman. The rating stared at him in horror and then demanded who he was and what he was doing. In the fog of war, this sailor had decided that a foreign looking individual exiting the captain’s cabin was more likely to be hostile than not. He grabbed the stranger and the two men tumbled back into the captain’s cabin.

The operative tried to explain in Arabic what was going on, but the junior seaman was not listening. He didn’t have time for this. As he collided with the captain’s desk, his hand found itself grabbing the pen that stood in its holder, and he quickly brought it up to attack. The sailor deflected the initial blow, gouging a wound in the operative’s forearm. Angrily, he turned back to his gangly attacker and, knocking aside his second attempt to block the pen, jabbed it into the man’s neck, driving it in with all his might until he felt it strike bone.

The sailor’s eyes widened in surprise as a flow of blood dribbled down onto his navy tunic. He collapsed to the floor, dead, and the operative wasted no time in stripping him of his uniform. He hurriedly put on the bequeathed clothing. It was all slightly oversized. The sleeves extended a touch too long, the collar chafed against his neck, and there was a small wet patch where the sailor’s blood had stained the fabric.

Navigating the narrow, dimly lit corridors below deck, he struggled to maintain the façade of being a member of the crew. The Domiat’s layout was a labyrinth to him, each passageway indistinguishable from the next. The scent of oil and metal filled the air, mingling with the distant hum of machinery.

His heart raced as he fumbled through the passageways, disoriented and panicked. He collided with Petty Officer Hassan, a stout man with a stern expression.

“Watch where you’re going!” Hassan barked, then paused, noticing the man’s unfamiliar face. “Who are you? I don’t recognise you.”

Thinking quickly, the operative replied, “Able Seaman Bassam Zakarian. New transfer, sir. Assigned just before departure.”

Hassan’s eyes narrowed, but with a ship under siege, there was no time for interrogation. “Get to your station!”

Zakarian didn’t wait for any further interaction and took off down the companion way until he found the first ladder and started to climb. Above deck, the scene was one of pandemonium. The night was illuminated by the eerie glow of flares, casting flickering shadows across the deck. The Domiat’s guns fired into the darkness, their reports deafening. In the distance, the silhouettes of two vessels loomed—the HMS Newfoundland and the HMS Diana.

HMS Newfoundland had a displacement of 9,000 tons and measured 169 meters; considerably larger than the Domiat. She’d been commissioned at the same time as the vessel she was now firing upon, and had seen extensive action during World War II, including operations in the Mediterranean and Pacific theatres. Her main armament comprised nine 6-inch (152 mm) guns capable of delivering devastating broadsides. Which was exactly what they were doing now.

HMS Diana was a Daring-class destroyer, commissioned in the early 1950s. She measured 121.6 meters long and – displacing 2,800 tons – she was among the most advanced destroyers of her time. Her armament included six 4.5-inch (114 mm) dual-purpose guns, designed for both anti-ship and anti-aircraft roles.

As the Domiat exchanged fire with the British vessels, it became abundantly clear that she was outmatched. The Newfoundland’s salvos found their mark, striking the Egyptian frigate’s superstructure and igniting fires. The Diana manoeuvred with precision, her guns adding to the onslaught.

Above deck, the Domiat’s world was already on fire. A shell from HMS Newfoundland’s main battery had struck immediately behind the bridge, sending a geyser of twisted metal and flame into the sky. Sparks rained like embers from a dying star, hissing as they met the cold seawater. The ship rocked violently under the impact, and Zakarian grabbed onto a bulkhead to steady himself.

He stumbled onto the deck, eyes squinting against the thick smoke curling into the night air. The acrid stench of burning oil mixed with the briny tang of the sea, an assault on the senses. His ears rang from the concussive force of the bombardment, but he could still make out the distant thunderous roar of Newfoundland’s guns as they cycled another salvo into the breach.

A second shell struck amidships. The explosion tore through the deck plating, sending bodies sprawling like rag dolls. A fireball erupted, turning the night sky from deep indigo to hellish orange. The Domiat’s crew, disciplined but outmatched, scrambled to return fire. Her twin 4-inch guns barked into the void, their glowing tracers streaking towards the British ships.

But it was hopeless.

Their shots went wide, splashing uselessly into the rolling sea. The British vessels, larger and equipped with superior fire-control systems, adjusted their bearings with deadly precision. HMS Diana, running parallel in the darkness, pivoted slightly and let loose a full volley from her 4.5-inch guns.

The shells ripped through the Domiat’s stern. A section of the deck buckled inward, and secondary explosions flared as stored ammunition ignited. The once-proud frigate now resembled a wounded beast, her insides torn open and burning.

The crew fought desperately. Men hauled fire hoses, some attempting to patch ruptured bulkheads, while others manned the guns, firing wildly, hoping to score a hit. A group of seamen wrestled with a jammed anti-aircraft gun, their hands slick with sweat and oil.

Zakarian, still gripping the railing, saw the silhouettes of the British warships looming on the horizon, their forms ghostly and menacing against the smoke and flares. They were like predators circling a dying prey, biding their time before delivering the final blow. The darkness of the Red Sea only amplified their menace. They were unseen until they chose to reveal themselves, and by then, it was too late.

The next barrage came with merciless efficiency. Three direct hits tore through the Domiat’s forward section, reducing the bridge to little more than twisted steel. Captain Ahmed El-Sayed, who had refused to leave his post, died in a burst of flame and shattered glass. His last order was a desperate plea for the crew to abandon ship, but it was lost in the cacophony of war.

Zakarian staggered back, his hands instinctively clutching at the ill-fitting uniform. He didn’t belong here. He was not a crewman, not one of them.

Another sailor ran past, his uniform blackened with soot, face smeared with grime and blood, eyes wild with panic.

“Get to the lifeboats!” he screamed, barely stopping before grabbing Zakarian by the arm and pulling him along.

He turned back, grimacing in fear. “I’m Omar Darwish. Who are you?”

The deck beneath them tilted sharply, the frigate beginning to list. Seawater flooded through the ruptured hull, meeting fire in a battle of elements.

Zakarian quickly shouted his name above the noise of twisting steel and sea water smashing into the ship

Steam rose in furious hisses as flames were momentarily drowned, only to be reignited seconds later as fuel spilled from shattered tanks.

The Domiat was dying.

From the bridge of HMS Newfoundland, Captain Hamilton observed the destruction through his binoculars. The Egyptian frigate, once a mere blip on radar, was now a burning carcass on the water, her stern nearly submerged, bow jutting high as she succumbed to the inevitable pull of the sea.

“Cease fire,” Hamilton ordered. His voice was calm, almost detached. The ship was finished. No need to waste another shell.

A pause. Then, a quieter question to his XO. “Survivors?”

The answer came after a beat of silence. “Some, sir. A few in the water.”

“Lower the boats,” he commanded. “Pick them up.”

Now the Domiat was gone. The time was 1.30am on the 1 November 1956. The fire that had once raged across her decks now hissed and sputtered as it met the sea, disappearing beneath the waves. The last remnants of the ship—a jagged shard of the stern, a few wooden crates bobbing on the dark water—drifted aimlessly in the tide.

Something close to silence had been restored to the night, broken only by the hum of British ships repositioning and the muted, exhausted cries of survivors, desperate for rescue.

The operative was among them, simply another man in the water. He and Omar had made it to the lifeboat only for the launching mechanism to fail and the boat to capsize, leaving them and a few others drifting in the water. The sea was cold despite the heat of the battle. His limbs ached; his lungs burned with each laboured breath. He didn’t know how far he had swum before exhaustion forced him to grasp onto an overturned piece of wreckage. It was only when he saw the searchlights cutting through the night that the full weight of his situation pressed upon him.

The British were looking for survivors, their searchlights sweeping across the sea, illuminating bodies, some alive, some not. The glow caught the shimmer of oil slicks spreading across the surface, rainbow-coloured spectres of destruction.

Aboard the ship’s launch, a party of Royal Marines, their Sterling submachine guns slung across their chests, kept watch as sailors hauled survivors from the water. The sea had stripped away much of the wreckage, leaving only men—soaked, shivering, some clutching life preservers, others barely conscious.

Petty Officer Hassan was one of the first to be pulled aboard, his dark eyes glancing around the British vessel warily. Others followed, dragged from the waves, helped aboard with rough efficiency.

Then came Zakarian.

He felt powerful hands grab him beneath the arms, yanking him onto the deck of the Newfoundland with a force that sent his head spinning. His vision blurred from the salt and exhaustion, but the first thing he registered was the cold steel of a boot pressing down lightly on his shoulder. A Royal Marine, his face expressionless, looked down at him with unreadable eyes before removing his foot.

The operative coughed violently, his body expelling seawater as he struggled upright. His limbs trembled. Around him, men hunched against the bulkhead, wrapped in rough navy-issue blankets, their faces pale beneath flickering deck lights. Some had burns on their hands, their uniforms torn and scorched. Others simply sat staring at nothing, their minds still trapped in the moment their ship was torn apart.

The Royal Marines stood over them, weapons ready. It was not an act of cruelty, it was protocol. Egyptian sailors had been at war with the British mere minutes ago. Now, they were POWs and would be treated as such. Fairly, but with that extra level of security.

Zakarian kept his head down, shivering, trying not to draw attention to himself. His mind raced. He needed an ally.

A shadow loomed beside him. “You alive?”

He turned his head. Omar, the seaman who had dragged him to the lifeboat, was now sitting beside him, rubbing his arms to generate warmth.

“Yes,” he croaked. His voice was hoarse, his accent thick.

The man gave him a long look, as if deciding something. Finaly, he nodded and spoke again.

“Bassam, right? You were on the deck when the bridge was hit. You were trying to help.”

It wasn’t a question.

Zakarian hesitated. He inclined his head. Yes.

That was all the man needed. He turned slightly toward one of the British officers, taking a count of the survivors, and gestured toward the operative. “Him? He was with me,” he said, voice firm.

The officer barely glanced up from his list. “Right. Sit tight. You’ll be moved with the others.”

Zakarian exhaled slowly.

With Captain El-Sayed dead, there would be no one to challenge his presence among the crew. If anyone thought to ask, he’d be a simple Egyptian sailor, lucky enough to be dragged aboard instead of left to drown.

Of the 104 men aboard the Domiat, 69 survived. They would be taken to Djibouti, where they were to be transferred into French custody. What happened to them next would be decided not by sailors, but by diplomats.

And Zakarian?

He sat in silence, surrounded by men who had lost their ship, men who stared blankly at nothing, their breath dissipating in the warm night air.

He could feel the eyes of the Royal Marines on him, standing like statues beneath the glow of the overhead lamps.

But he was safe. For now.

But the Domiat had taken the secrets of which he’d been custodian to the bottom of the sea.

CHAPTER 1

The gently rolling ocean stretched out under a cloudless sky, its waters shimmering with a clarity that seemed almost otherworldly. Its surface was a mesmerising palette of blues, shifting from the pale turquoise near the shore to deeper sapphire hues as the distance to the inky seabed increased. This gradient not only painted a stunning picture but also hinted at the gentle slope of the seabed, which descended gradually due to the gulf’s relatively shallow nature, with depths averaging around 40 meters and seldom exceeding 70 meters.

In the distance, the arid landscape of the Sinai Peninsula rose starkly against the horizon. The rugged terrain was characterised by barren mountains and rocky plateaus, their earthy tones contrasting sharply with the vivid blues of the gulf. Closer to the shoreline, sparse vegetation clung to life, dotting the sandy expanses with touches of green. The air was warm, carrying with it the faint scent of salt and the promise of adventure beneath the waves.

The yacht was at anchor, still and silent on the mirrored surface of the Gulf. Her hull was a very dark naval grey bordering on black and cast twisted reflections on the waves lapping against it. It was relatively unadorned, built for work rather than show. Forty-eight metres of steel and purpose, she had started life as an offshore supply vessel built by the Damen Shipyards Group – based in the Netherlands – and used for the hauling of gear and supplies in the roughest North Sea weather and sea conditions.

Now, refitted by Mace’s company in Rotterdam, she was something else entirely — a private recovery and dive platform bristling with capability. A sprawling aft deck housed twin 6.5 metre Rigid Inflatable Boats (RIBs) stencilled with the strange word Blackfrog and mounted in custom launch cradles. These sat alongside a powerful deck crane capable of hoisting tonnes of recovered artefacts from the deep. Reinforced dive racks lined the port side, with stage cylinders secured and tagged, compressors humming below deck in their sealed casings. The folding dive platform at the stern sat just above the waterline, already rigged for the day’s descent.

Inside, the ship was a mix of practicality and quiet sophistication. The gas blending station, protected behind reinforced glass, could produce custom trimix, nitrox, and helitrox blends with pinpoint precision. A compact four-person hyperbaric chamber was installed for’ward, next to a small medical bay outfitted for both minor injury and trauma care.

The ship’s nav suite boasted high-resolution side-scan sonar and a deployable ROV – Remotely Operated Vehicle, an unmanned, tethered, submersible vehicle controlled from the surface. Atop the vessel, her encrypted satellite link — a subtle nod to its owner’s involvement in some off-the-books covert operations — allowed secure data transmissions from anywhere on the globe.

This was the MV Cockleshell – a ship of muscle and steel, stripped of pretension, with a displacement of 680 tonnes. She was designed to go wherever required and was the property of Blackfrog Maritime Operations, the company of former SBS operative and now self-professed ‘privateer’, Luke Mace.

She sat almost fourteen nautical miles off the western coast, the rugged heights of the Sinai Peninsula visible as a faint ochre smear on the horizon. On this calm day, the sky arched vast and pale, and the water below was a smooth expanse of shifting cobalt and deep sapphire. There were no reefs here, no shallow shoals; only a flat, featureless seabed that stretched into the depths — and the wreck they had come to find.

Above deck, there was no chatter. Only the quiet hiss of air from cylinders being checked, the clink of metal on metal, and the heavy silence that precedes moments when divers know they are about to step off into another world.

Sam Tilson stood on the aft deck of the Cockleshell, the sun warming his face, arms resting lightly on the rail, and for a moment the weight of his career seemed to slip from his shoulders. He loved this environment. His skin was bronzed from years outdoors, his frame honed and powerful in the quiet way of men who were not weight-lifting gym bunnies, but men built for endurance and combat. The old scars on his forearms told stories he rarely shared, and beneath the dive vest, muscle coiled in functional lines.

He wore his sun-bleached brown hair short, with a straight, serious jaw and piercingly pale blue eyes that missed nothing. Faint creases at the corners of his eyes spoke of squinting into too many horizons. Desert, ocean, tundra..

His Type 1 diabetes was managed with the precision of everything else in his life; a new insulin pump discreetly clipped under his waistband, checked and calibrated with the same care he gave to weapons or dive gear.

He grinned across at Luke Mace, the old friend who could still make him smile in the midst of chaos. They’d first met in the punishing selection gauntlet of 42 Commando, bonded over blisters, exhaustion, and black humour, and pushed each other all the way into the Special Boat Service. Afghanistan, the Gulf—names and operations burned into muscle memory. He’d seen things go wrong. He’d seen lives unravel. But here, on this deck, with Mace checking kit beside him and the Gulf of Suez spread out like hammered glass, he felt that old flicker of purpose. The kind that never really left, even when the job tried to burn it out of you.

Mace was wiry rather than broad, with a lean, coiled build like a man who moved fast and hit hard without wasting energy. He had been nicknamed “Panther” by some but only Tilson used that as an affectionate callback these days.

He was shorter than Tilson by a few inches and carried himself with the loose precision of someone trained to vanish into shadows and slip through locked doors. Dark hair, brown eyes, and the kind of sharp jaw that could charm or threaten depending on the lighting. Where Tilson was muscle and momentum, Mace was reflex and mischief, sinew, nerves, and strategy. You could tell by the way he stood still: not idle, more coiled for the moment to strike. He wore his signature five o’clock shadow like it had been standard issue, and there was usually a flicker of mischief behind his grin. It was the sort that came immediately before or immediately after something dangerous.

As the yacht gently rocked on the calm waters, the divers prepared their gear, the anticipation of the dive mingling with the serene beauty of their surroundings. The faint scent of salt mixed with engine oil, ropes creaked softly in their cleats, and the faint drone of a distant outboard echoed across the water.

For a moment, it could have been a holiday: the kind of morning reserved for the well-heeled few who sought out wreck dives for sport. The yacht itself could have belonged to an exclusive private club. Every piece of equipment was gleaming, meticulously stowed, the deck immaculate, the lines coiled perfectly. But this was no weekend adventure. Tilson grinned to himself. Far from it.

The mission was also a million miles away from their most recent dive in the confines of the cold, fresh-water tunnel beneath the Walchensee Power Plant in Bavaria — a suffocating voyage of rusted steel and ancient concrete where every metre forward had felt like a battle against darkness, pressure, and the weight of history itself. He turned his face to the sun, letting its warmth flow through him.

Mace glanced up from checking his gear and smirked.

“Soaking up the rays, are we, Sammy-boy? Thought you were a pasty paper-pusher now. You can take the bloke out of the Bootnecks, but you can never take the Bootneck out the bloke! Even if you slap a desk job on him.”

Tilson smiled and turned to face his former comrade. “We do the paperwork so you can still play with all these toys, mate.”

The men and women aboard were professionals — divers in peak physical condition, their bodies honed by routine, diet, and necessity. Quiet competence marked every movement: checks of hoses, pressure gauges, rebreather cells. No one spoke unnecessarily. Every man and woman had been trained for dives like this: deep, cold, dark, and demanding.

Mace gathered them under the shade of the starboard awning, the hum of compressors filling the background. He crossed his arms, glancing around at his team — and then at Tilson.

“Alright,” Mace began, his voice carrying easily across the deck. “Introductions.”

He gestured to the first figure beside him. “This is Josée Tremblay, originally from Montreal. Wreck penetration specialist, deep trimix certified, CCR instructor. She’s forgotten more about decompression stops than most divers ever learn. Don’t let the calm face fool you — she’s steel.”

Josée gave a polite nod, a faint smile tugging at the thin scar on her jawline. A reminder of a shark encounter while treasure-hunting in Belize.

She looked younger than her 35 years, with cool blue eyes that gave little away and shoulder-length blonde hair tucked neatly behind her ears. Tilson took in the details with quiet interest. Her skin was unusually pale. Not the pallor of illness, but of someone who’d spent more of her life beneath the surface than above it. She didn’t radiate toughness, but it was there, settled beneath the quiet like ballast. Tilson had met a lot of divers who claimed nerves of steel. Josée was the real deal.

Mace moved on. “Alexa Drakou. Greek, in case the name didn’t give it away. Six-foot-two of rescue diver and standby muscle. If anything goes south, she’s the one you want pulling you out. She could haul up a bloody great white, let alone man.”

She was toned and muscular. Tall, athletic, and striking in presence. Her long, dark hair and confident posture give her a natural gravitas. She exuded an effortless beauty that contrasted with her physical prowess. A cross between a pentathlete and Wonder Woman.

Alexa’s lips twitched into a smile, and she draped a sisterly arm around Josée’s shoulder. “We charge extra for sharks, right, koukla?”

There was a ripple of laughter. The two were clearly the best of friends. Tilson wondered. If perhaps Alexa had even saved the smaller woman that day in Belize?

Mace continued.

“Roy Kavanagh, though nobody calls him that. Paddy’s ex-Royal Navy EOD. Short, ginger, explosive — and the only man I know who can sunburn in a fucking cave.”

Paddy grinned, his freckled face already pink despite the factor fifty. “Comes with the territory, boss.”

Mace turned to the last member of his own team. “Karim Belhadi, Algerian-born, French-trained. Former BP rig diver, structural integrity specialist. He’s the newest Blackfrog in the pond, but he’s got good instincts.”

Karim inclined his head respectfully. He had the easy stillness of a man used to pressure. He was broad across the chest, his movements slow but deliberate, like someone who never wasted effort. Today, he wore a loose blue djellaba, embroidered at the collar and cuffs in a delicate thread work that caught the light when he moved, the traditional cut making him look even more grounded, more at ease in his own skin. A soft pillbox-style cap rested neatly on his head, patterned in matching blues and golds. His skin was deep-toned and smooth, his beard closely kept, and there was a quiet precision in the way he carried himself that Tilson recognised from offshore men — divers who’d worked the rigs, fought the bends, and come out wiser for it. His eyes were dark and warm but cautious, always watching, always absorbing.

Mace glanced back at Tilson, a small grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “And in case you’re wondering who our mysterious guest is. This is Sam. Former fellow swimmer-canoeist, and an old mate. He’s the reason we’re here. You don’t need his bloody CV … All you need to know is, I’d trust him with my life.”

A soft chuckle came from the back of the deck, and a stunning Asian stepped forward — tall, lean, her dark hair tied back in a no-nonsense braid, eyes bright with intelligence and something more playful beneath. Tilson caught his breath.

This was Maya Suresh — Blackfrog’s tech director and, if he was honest with himself, the most dangerous distraction he’d ever encountered. Tall and poised, with deep brown eyes that missed nothing, she carried herself with the composed confidence of someone who had once briefed ministers and outsmarted foreign intelligence agencies. Her long black hair was tied back in a sleek braid, and even in a yellow bikini and fishnet wrap — she radiated elegance and quiet authority.

“After all, Sam doesn’t need a résumé,” she said lightly, her voice carrying the faintest trace of precise vowels that hinted at old corridors in Whitehall. “He’s trouble enough without his ego being… stroked.”

Tilson met her gaze, the ghost of a grin tugging at his mouth. “Nice to see you too, Maya. Still running the show?”

She shrugged. “I keep the toys working… And the boys in line.”

Mace cut in with a grin. “Hands off, Sammy-boy. Company property, remember?” He paused long enough for effect, then added with a roll of his eyes, “Like that’s ever stopped you before…”

Maya only laughed, shaking her head, her eyes lingering on Tilson for half a second too long.

Sam could only grin as she ducked back below decks. They had history, all right. The sort best left unspoken with a team watching.

Mace’s expression sobered. “OK. Focus. We’ve all got roles to play down there. No mistakes. No heroes. Follow protocols, trust your buddy, and if something feels wrong, call it.” He paused, letting the weight of his words settle. “We’re professionals. If we need to abort, we abort. That wreck has waited sixty years; it’ll wait another day if it has to.”

He clapped his hands once. “Right. Final checks in ten. Let’s get wet.”

Tilson and Mace helped each other into their gear with the easy rhythm of men who’d done it countless times before — in freezing lochs, sunburned training beaches, and war zones alike. No words were needed. Mace checked the seals on Tilson’s drysuit cuffs, gave a small nod, and tilted his head so Tilson could cinch the shoulder straps on his harness.

He tugged the thick neoprene neck seal into place, feeling the snug pressure against his skin as Mace helped with the heavy-duty zip. Even here, beneath a blazing subtropical sky, the dive would be a cold one. At forty-six metres, the water lost its warmth quickly — a steady gradient that turned inviting blue into steel grey, with temperatures dropping to single digits in the deeper layers. Decompression stops could stretch to thirty minutes or more, hovering in place with nothing but helium-rich gas in your lungs and a flickering guideline beneath you. The cold seeped in, slow and relentless, dulling thought and tightening muscles. The drysuit wasn’t a convenience; it was survival. Cold water made you slow. Slow divers made mistakes. Mistakes didn’t come home.

Mace clipped on his twin-set valves, the hiss of released air momentarily loud in the heavy stillness. He adjusted Tilson’s manifold without needing to ask, and Tilson double-checked his bailout tank, fingers running the old pattern: valve, hose, pressure gauge. Trust. Verify. Trust again.

Mace gave him a heavier-than-necessary slap on the shoulder. “Still fits, Sammy-boy. And we couldn’t ask for better weather,” he said with a smirk, shielding his eyes as he looked across the calm water.

Tilson smiled as he cinched Mace’s harness tight. “Almost feels like cheating.”

They exchanged a look that didn’t need translating. They had shared years together — 42 Commando, then selection, then the tight brotherhood of the “Squadron”, where trust was earned in cold water and fire. Mace had been beside him in some of the darkest corners of the world, and the trust between them needed no words.

Then Mace handed him his fins, and together they turned toward the dive deck — where the sea waited, calm and bottomless.

Tilson adjusted his wrist slate and took a breath.

Mace leaned against the gunwale, watching the crew finish their final checks. “Still think we’re going to find something worth all this cloak and dagger?”

Tilson took a long breath, tasting the salt air. “We don’t spend this kind of money for trip down memory lane.” He looked down at the deck, where the twin DPVs were secured. “There’s something about this wreck they want to know, and they’ve sent us to find it.”

Sam double-checked his wrist-mounted Shearwater computer, watching the numbers steady. He glanced at Mace, who gave him a nod.

“Let’s see what’s down there.”

They entered the water cleanly, the warm water seeping through the high-tech insulation of their drysuits. The world became still, the yacht’s hull sliding away above them, the shimmering sunlit surface receding into blurred, dappled gold.

CHAPTER 2

On the bridge of the Cockleshell, its skipper, Ian Calder, sat with one hand resting lightly on the polished wooden rail, his eyes steady on the radar repeater. Sixty years old, silver-haired and barrel-chested, he carried the quiet authority of a man who’d spent three decades in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the latter of that as Chief Officer aboard replenishment ships and aviation support vessels, dancing station-keeping manoeuvres with Royal Navy task groups in waters far less forgiving than these. His hands were thick-knuckled and sun-browned, the kind of hands that had once hauled line and now tapped sonar screens with the confidence of instinct. On his left wrist, he wore a battered CWC Royal Navy diver’s watch, the black bezel dulled with salt and time, its NATO strap bleached at the edges. It looked like it had been issued to him in the 90s and never taken off.

He wore a checked shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow, the fabric slightly faded from salt and sun, and a battered dive watch that hadn’t left his wrist in years. His face was tanned, lined but open, with the permanent squint of a man used to judging the horizon in hard light. Behind the quiet humour in his smile was something flinty and unshakeable. His voice still held the soft lilt of Tyneside worn smooth by years afloat, but undeniably Geordie.

This modified Damen Offshore Support Vessel’s bridge was everything he valued: functional, uncluttered, built for control. Panoramic windows framed the shimmering horizon, slanting outward to cut glare and spray. Before him, the consoles hummed with radar returns, AIS overlays, engine readouts, and dynamic positioning systems or DP — technology that hadn’t existed in his early career, but which he’d mastered with the same calm competence that had seen him through everything from Monsoon storms to pirate threats not too far from where his boat lay now.

The DP console hummed beneath his fingertips, ready to hold the vessel steady over the dive site if the wind stiffened or the currents shifted. To starboard, the ROV station sat dark but on standby. At the rear bulkhead, a chart table bore folded Admiralty sheets pinned beneath heavy brass dividers, with a battered leather notebook — Calder’s constant companion — resting neatly beside them.

To his left, Shola Leandre stood watch.

He had the stillness of someone used to reading the sea before it spoke. In his early twenties, lean and clean-featured, he had a warm brown complexion and dark, watchful eyes that didn’t miss much. His jaw was neatly lined with close-cut stubble, the kind that made him look older in silence and younger when he smiled.

He wore his close-cropped hair tight to his scalp, practical and neat, like everything else about him. A South Shields lad, he’d grown up aboard his father’s old trawler, learning tide and engine by touch, crawling into cold bilges before he could swim. It made him precise, instinctive, good under pressure — and fiercely loyal, especially when it counted. You could see the North Sea in the way he moved: careful, constant, and quietly unforgiving.

He was also blessed with the same cursed loyalty to Newcastle United that Calder had carried his entire lifetime.

“Two tankers holding course, skipper. One container ship five miles out, bearing steady. No changes on traffic.”

Calder nodded, his eyes still on the plot. “Aye. More reliable than the Toon’s defence last Saturday, eh?”

Shola’s lips quirked into a grin. “Don’t remind me.”

Calder allowed himself the smallest of smiles. The lad was good — sharp on the instruments, quick with a quiet joke, and didn’t flap under pressure. He’d do.

His gaze shifted down to the surface of the Gulf. The last diver had long since slipped beneath. Down there, men he trusted were moving through cold darkness, threading wreckage that hadn’t seen daylight in six decades. Up here, his job was to make sure they all came back.

“Maintain channel sixteen watch, Shola,” Calder said softly. “And keep the engines warm. If one of those bastards so much as twitches off course, I want us moving before they know we’re there.”

Shola’s response was crisp. “Right you are. Already logged.”

The Cockleshell’s First Officer had spent a lifetime standing on bridges like this — balancing responsibility, caution. Mace maintained a tight crew. Professional. Capable. Loyal. And jobs like this demanded that exacting standard.

Meanwhile, the diver’s descent was slow, controlled. Each diver wore a Kirby Morgan M-48 Mod 1 full-face mask, the matte-black silicone seal fitting snugly beneath their hoods, with wide polycarbonate visors offering clear peripheral vision. The integrated comms unit sat comfortably along the right jawline, a small transmitter blinking softly, paired with bone-conduction speakers that allowed them to hear one another and the topside bridge crew through the water — crisp, clear voices carried in the silence like distant whispers.

Tilson gave his push-to-talk switch a gentle tap. “Comms check, channel one.”

Mace’s voice came back, steady and calm. “Five by five, Sammy-boy.”

The DPVs thrummed quietly in their hands, guiding them downward into the fading light, their prop wash sending gentle spirals of silver bubbles rising toward the hull of the Cockleshell, now far above, where the surface was a bright sheet of indigo. But – metre by metre – the world darkened. At twenty metres, the warmth of the sun was already distant. At thirty metres, the light remained surprisingly strong — a pale, hazy glow filtering down from the surface, dancing in soft ripples across the descending team. The water was crystal clear, the sandy seabed far below already a suggestion of brightness in the distance. Torch beams were switched on not for necessity, but for focus — slicing shafts of clean white light through water that glimmered in shades of pale turquoise and green, slowly deepening but never entirely losing clarity.

On Tilson’s left, Josée Tremblay drifted with perfect balance, moving like a ballet dancer through the water. Her twin tanks gleamed dully beneath the shifting light, and the small scar along her jaw — a puckered white line from that close call with a reef shark off Belize — caught the faint glint of Tilson’s torch. Her eyes were sharp, scanning ahead, fingers lightly resting on the valve handles at her chest. She had the quiet, unfussy confidence of someone who had done this a hundred times and would do it a hundred more.

Above and to his right, Alexa Drakou hovered like a shadow carved from muscle and patience, her sheer presence reassuring. Six feet of solid Greek determination, her black drysuit clinging to powerful shoulders and thighs. She was their rock, their failsafe — the one who would haul a diver out of a collapsed passageway or, Tilson suspected, fend off panic with a single steely glance.

Paddy Kavanagh was below them and slightly ahead, laying out the guideline with practiced flicks of his wrist, the reel spinning steadily in his hand. He glanced back often, eyes flicking between the line, his gauges, and the team. His short frame was compact but powerful, and the pale splash of freckles on his cheeks was already flushed pink from exertion. Tilson knew better than to read anything into that. Paddy was Navy through and through — the man you wanted on your six when things turned tight.

Off to the far side, Karim Belhadi matched them with deliberate, careful movements. The big Algerian carried himself with the calm precision of a man who’d spent years on deepwater rigs, descending daily into black water with welding torches and cutting equipment. He didn’t overcorrect, didn’t fidget. His buoyancy was perfect, his movements minimal. New to Blackfrog or not, he’d clearly earned his place.

The water thickened as they passed forty metres. The sun above was no more than a vague suggestion; torch beams became lifelines, slicing through suspended silt. The silence was absolute, broken only by the soft rasp of inhalations and the crackle of distant shrimp in the background.

At fifty metres, it began.

First came shadows. Faint, massive shapes resolving out of the blue-grey gloom, pale outlines against the endless creamy void of the seabed. The wreck of the Domiat rose from the sand like the skeleton of some forgotten leviathan, resting on her starboard side in eternal slumber. Her hull, once sleek, was now encrusted with thick fans of coral, soft sponges, and swaying tendrils of anemones. The great guns, their barrels blackened and rusting, pointed out into the nothingness of the deep.

They circled slowly, the team fanning out into a loose formation. Tilson’s torch traced the jagged tear where shells had peeled steel apart like foil. The port-side anti-aircraft gun still stood proud, rusted but defiant, its barrels crusted with barnacles, pointing blindly into black water. Schools of small fusiliers flashed silver and yellow as they darted in and out of the twisted superstructure. Large potato cod hovered nearby, unafraid — large, blunt-faced guardians of the wreck, watching the intruders with alien curiosity.

Mace led the way along the deck, his torch beam catching the collapsed railings and the faint outline of a twisted davit. A shattered mast lay half-buried in the sand, ropes draped limply like seaweed. The bridge structure loomed ahead, its windows long gone, leaving black sockets staring into nothingness.

Josée and Karim worked methodically, scanning for signs of instability, pausing at intervals to check structure integrity. Paddy and Alexa maintained their protective arcs, always watchful.

Tilson’s breath slowed, his body relaxing into that familiar, reverent stillness. There was a strange peace down here — not silent but filled with the steady rhythm of breathing through regulators, bubbles crackling and hissing upward, and the gentle hum of DPVs or the faint pop of distant marine life. It was like a clockmaker’s workshop , precise, measured sounds, feint ticks, ordered and rhythmic.

Mace hovered above the hull, torch beam cutting into darkness. He gave the hand signal, index finger thrust forward, and followed it up over comms with a calm order.

“Team, prepare to enter. Proceed on me. Watch your buoyancy, no silt-outs.”

One by one, the team acknowledged with quick comm clicks or thumbs-up signals. Mace adjusted his line reel, then slipped forward.

As they neared the torn hull, the torch beams caught movement. Slow, heavy shadows circling around the ragged opening.

Groupers. Enormous ones.

Thick-bodied, blunt-headed giants, each one as long as a grown man’s arm, hovering weightless with the effortless patience of apex predators. Their mottled skin shifted between greys and browns, fading perfectly into the rusted steel and soft corals that encrusted the wreck.

They hung there, totally unfazed by the divers, barely moving, eyes dark and ancient, unblinking. It was as if they had taken up eternal residence, sentinels of the sunken warship. As Tilson drifted closer, one turned its massive head toward him, dark eye slow, deliberate, unreadable. It didn’t bolt. It didn’t yield. It simply watched, a silent question – or maybe a challenge – hanging between them.

Mace’s voice crackled softly in their ears.

“Looks like we’ve got company.”

“Guardians at the gate,” Tilson replied, moving past the huge fish.

One by one, the Groupers peeled away, vanishing slowly into the shadows of the wreck, allowing the team to drop toward a gaping wound in the hull, a rent in the port-side plating, jagged steel edges curled back like torn parchment. The seabed below was dusted with silt, small artifacts half-buried: a broken lamp, a brass valve wheel, a warped hatch handle.

Inside the Domiat, the world narrowed further and became darker. Rusted ladders hung at impossible angles. Pipes snaked through the shadows, their surfaces crusted with oysters and soft growth. Every flick of a fin sent a fine cloud of rust and silt curling into the beam.

Tilson felt his heartbeat slow, his mind clearing. This was what they came for — the silence, the history, and the answers buried in steel and shadow.

Mace led them along the shattered deck, his torch beam slicing through murk and dancing over rusted fixtures: a twisted davit here, the remains of a compass binnacle there, all slowly being consumed by the sea. Josée and Karim trailed behind, checking structure integrity as they went, while Paddy and Alexa maintained a protective arc, their roles clear even in silence.

They followed the corridor for’ward, past debris and sediment, careful to avoid stirring the fine silt that clung to every surface. The darkness was almost total here, and it took all Tilson’s focus to control his breathing, to keep calm in this oppressive place. His training came back to him with relative ease and soon the dark confines felt as a familiar as his duvet.

As they entered what would have been the captain’s cabin, it was Tilson who spotted the macabre shape first. His torch froze on a partially collapsed bulkhead. Underneath, partly buried in the sand and rusting metal, lay the unmistakable remains of a human body.

They approached cautiously. The skeleton was still partially clothed, shreds of a white vest clinging to its frame. The bones had been stripped clean by time and the sea, but the posture told its own story, the arms curled in toward the chest, as though in pain or defence. A wedding band glinted on the left hand.

Tilson’s eyes caught on something else. There was damage to the neck — not the jagged tear of shrapnel, nor the blunt break of falling debris. It was small, precise: a narrow puncture wound in the cervical vertebrae. The mark of a blade, perhaps? It looked small, so maybe a stiletto?

He swallowed hard, the weight of the discovery sinking in. This man had been murdered before the ship went down.

Mace turned, his voice low and steady through the comms. “Not shrapnel,” he said. “Someone stuck him.”

Tilson murmured in agreement, feeling a strange chill despite the temperature regulation in his suit. He couldn’t stop himself from wondering who this man had been. What secrets he’d died protecting, or hiding, or discovering?

“Document everything,” Tilson said.

Mace was already positioning the 3D scanner, slowly panning the beam across the body and surrounding wreckage. The data streamed up to the yacht above to ensure its safety.

A sudden flicker on Tilson’s wrist display caught his eye. The weather topside was shifting. A storm front had appeared on the periphery of the forecast, moving faster than expected.

“We need to surface,” he said.

“Affirmative.” Mace finished his scan and nodded.

Tilson was about to leave the

They made their way back through the torn corridors, passing twisted beams and dark corners where shadows lurked, unchanging. Outside the wreck, the visibility had begun to close in, the water thickening as currents shifted.

As there leaving the cabin, Tilson’s beam happened to pick out another object, jutting from the silt. At first, he thought it was simply a narrow pipe broken in the destruction, but as he descended to the deck, he saw it was a pen. An old, expensive looking one with a green body and cap. Its nib seemed to be gold, but it was difficult to tell as its entirety was covered in a rusty veneer. Gold does not rust. Tilson gave a grim smile.

“Think I’ve found the shank.”

Mace was outside but manoeuvred himself around to take a look at what Tilson was holding.

“He was stabbed with a pen?”

“Let’s bag it and get it up top. I want to see if this is blood.”

“Look like it,” Mace replied. He held out a sealable plastic bag and Tilson popped the offending implement inside.

They began their ascent slowly, staging their decompression stops with machine-like precision. At twelve metres, Tilson paused, exhaling long and slow, watching the bubbles spiral up toward the shimmering, agitated surface. He felt the weight of something beginning, not ending. Indeed, they had not had time to look further for their objective. However. the past had been well and truly disturbed now. And he knew — instinctively, deeply — that it would none of this would stay buried for much longer.

CHAPTER 3

The storm had begun to make itself known even before they reached the ladder. The sea, glassy and bright that morning, had darkened to a pewter sheen. The first drops of rain pattered on the aft deck as the crew emerged from the water — six black-clad figures shedding their alien grace and becoming human again.

Shola and Calder worked in tandem, steady hands and quick efficiency, helping each diver onto the platform. The engines thrummed beneath the deck, ready to pivot toward shelter at a moment’s notice.

The team moved swiftly through their post-dive routine. Rebreathers were stripped, tanks secured, and drysuits peeled off with practiced movements. Joseé, still methodical, checked and double-checked the data cards from her mask HUD before stepping under the freshwater deck shower. Saltwater streamed down her, pink scar at her jawline vivid against damp skin. Alexa followed, water sluicing over her muscular frame, her calm broken only by a playful shove at Paddy, who rolled his eyes and muttered something about “bloody Amazons.”

Karim, quiet and self-contained, sat on the bench for a moment, staring out at the darkening horizon, before heading below. The rain had gone from a whisper to a steady percussion on the teak deck, and the faint smell of ozone carried on the rising wind.

The operations room was a steel and carbon-fibre cocoon midships and it became their refuge. Screens flickered to life; live feed recordings, sonar overlays, and the rotating 3D holographic model of the Domiat hovered above the central table. Outside the large port windows, rivulets of rain streaked the glass, the aft deck now slick with water.

Mace was last to arrive, towelling his hair, expression grim. He glanced around the group. “Good work. Debrief in twenty.”

The team filtered out, leaving Tilson and Mace alone in the hum of electronics and the occasional groan of the yacht’s hull flexing against the swell.

Mace sat heavily, rubbing his face. “You’re thinking the same thing I am, aren’t you?”

Tilson nodded. “We both know Anne didn’t persuade the DG of MI5 didn’t bankroll this jaunt just because of archival curiosity. The sealed orders from the Admiralty? They weren’t standard. They specifically instructed the Newfoundland to board the Domiat. And if not possible, to sink her with extreme prejudice!”

Mace exhaled slowly. “Because of what she was carrying.”

“A Soviet agent,” Tilson confirmed. “And most likely documents. But the files didn’t name the agent, and they didn’t say why he or she was aboard an Egyptian frigate.”

Mace stared out the rain-streaked window. “And now we’ve found a body. Neck punctured like a black-ops execution.”

Tilson’s voice was quiet. “Somebody silenced that person right before the Newfoundland opened fire.”

Mace tapped the rotating wreck schematic. “We missed the aft section.”

“Exactly,” Tilson said. “That sealed compartment near the stern… if anything was stashed on board, it could well be there.”

Mace nodded once. “We go back when the weather clears.”

Tilson clapped him on the shoulder. “Count on it.”

He left Mace in thought and made his way down the corridor, past the hum of the engineering bay, to the yacht’s tech centre.

Maya sat at the central console, reviewing sonar maps and structural integrity readouts, her hair damp and skin glowing faintly in the soft light of the screens. She didn’t turn as he entered, but gestured him forward with one finger.

Beside her, Sophie Hargreaves, Blackfrog’s newest medic, sat with a tablet in hand, running post-dive physiological data on each team member.

She was in her early twenties with a fresh face that wore its freckles proudly, unbothered by makeup or artifice. Her skin was warm, sun kissed. Wavy blonde hair spilled past her shoulders in loose waves, dark at the roots with copper highlights catching the light, held back from her face with a fabric headband that looked both practical and chosen. She had a small silver hoop in one nostril, the kind that suggested confidence, not rebellion, and eyes that watched more than they spoke. There was something about her—open, almost disarming. Like someone who’d be quick to smile at a joke but quicker still to vanish if things got too personal. Clean-cut. Professional. Too polished, perhaps.

“Karim’s nitrogen loading was textbook,” Sophie commented softly, scrolling through biometric logs. “Paddy’s heart rate spiked slightly during ascent but nothing outside tolerance.”

Maya nodded distractedly.

Sophie’s brow furrowed as she reached Alexa’s data file. “Her stress markers were elevated… and lactate levels higher than expected for someone of her conditioning.”

Maya glanced up. “Anything to worry about?”

Sophie hesitated long enough for Tilson to notice, before pasting on a professional smile. “Could be nothing. Fatigue. Perhaps dehydration.”

Maya frowned. “Alexa’s usually rock steady.”

“I’ll review her baseline later,” Sophie said smoothly. She stood up, nodding to Tilson. “But I’ll leave you to it.”

As she left, sliding the door across behind her, Tilson moved closer to Maya.

“Who’s that?”

“Sophie. She’s new. Seems like a competent medic. Why? You after a younger model?”

Tilson’s brow furrowed.

“I’m kidding,” she said with a soft laugh. “Anyway, I was just about to find you,” she murmured.

Tilson leaned on the edge of the console, studying the 3D model of the captain’s cabin aboard the Domiat.

Maya pointed. “There appear to be sealable compartments.”

“Hidey-holes?”

Maya nodded. “Perfect size for a waterproof document case. I’d bet on it.”

She finally looked up at him, her eyes warm despite the tension in the room.

Tilson grinned faintly. “You always were the smartest in the room.”

She smiled at him. “And it takes a clever man to know that…”

Before he could respond, she returned to the schematics, all business. Her finger hovered over the scan’s highlighted sections. “See? Here … and here.” She zoomed in on two rectangular voids concealed one behind the cabin bulkhead and a second under the desk. “Additions, not part of the original Royal Navy design. Possibly added during her Egyptian refit.”

“Perfect size for document caches.”

Maya nodded. “If the Soviets placed an agent aboard, he would have had orders to keep those items with him at all times.”

“Unless he was compromised. So, he hid them. And, given the fact he killed someone down there, it makes sense he hid his stash there, too.”

“There is another option, of course,” Maya said, gazing at Tilson. “The body is the agent.”

Before Tilson could respond, the hatch slid open again with a soft hiss, and Mace stepped in, with a glass of whisky in his hand. His expression was grim, but there was a flicker of excitement in his eyes.

“I thought I’d find you two here,” he said, glancing at the holographic display. “Anything?”

Maya pointed to the compartments. “Hidden spaces in the captain’s cabin. Likely added during Egyptian modifications.”

Mace gave a low whistle. “So, the poor Egyptian bastard didn’t just have a Soviet spook aboard, he even provided a cubbyhole for his spy stuff.”

“Maybe without realising he had,” Maya added.

Tilson changed the subject.

“That girl,” he started, jerking a thumb to the hatch.

“Sophie?” Maya asked. “Are you becoming smitten?”

“No,” Tilson replied. “Quite the opposite.”

Something in the young Brit’s voice was maybe too perfect, the posh accent that sounded too polished. And that tiny pause before dismissing Alexa’s biometrics … both had stirred a flicker of unease in his gut.

Mace rubbed the back of his neck. “She’s bright … but green as spring wheat. She’s an oppo of my cousin, Bryony. She talked me into giving Sophie a shot after a Search and Rescue placement fell through.” He gave a half-smile. “I only met her when she joined us out here. She seemed eager.”

Tilson nodded, satisfied for now.

“Back to the job in hand, Sammy-boy?”

Tilson exhaled slowly, his frustration building once more. “We need to get back down there.”

Mace grimaced. “Not happening, I’m afraid. That’s what I came to tell you. Shola’s been monitoring the weather models. The front’s stalled. We’ve got two days of heavy seas, minimum. We’re making for Ras Shukheir. Should be tucked in there in under two hours.”

“Bollocks. We were this close.” Tilson swore, pacing. He turned, holding his right hand up, fingers indicating a tiny measurement. “Two more hours on that wreck and we’d have answers.”

Mace placed a hand on his shoulder. “I get it, mate. But the Gulf’s about to get ugly. We’d be risking lives.” He glanced at Maya, then back at Tilson. “What will you do?”

“I need to head back to London. Report what we’ve found in person.”

“OK,” Mace said. “We’ll stand by for redeployment as soon as the weather breaks.”

Tilson nodded reluctantly. Mace gave them both a look — something between regret and promise — and left the cabin.

The silence stretched for a moment.

Tilson moved to leave, but Maya’s hand reached out, warm against his wrist. He paused, glancing down at her fingers that now curled lightly around his.

“It’ll take us a couple of hours to make port,” she said softly. “There’s nothing more you can do tonight.”

Her dark eyes held his, steady and calm, but with a flicker of something more. Understanding. Good memories. The hint of more to come.

Outside, the wind howled, and the rain lashed the portholes in sheets.

Tilson exhaled, the weight of frustration and unanswered questions still heavy on his shoulders. But as he looked down at her hand, still resting on his, something in her touch softened the sharp edges.

Maya stood slowly, her fingers trailing down his wrist before slipping into his hand. “Come on,” she said gently, her voice low, almost lost beneath the distant rumble of thunder.

He let her lead him through the softly swaying passageways of the Cockleshell, past sealed hatches and darkened cabins. The muted glow of emergency lighting painted soft amber highlights on her cheekbones, her braid swaying against the back of her neck. The yacht’s gentle roll beneath their feet was a lullaby rhythm gently rising and falling. Both were experienced sailors, and the movement would not distract them.

At her cabin door, she paused, glanced up at him and, for a heartbeat, neither of them moved. Then she keyed the lock open with a soft beep, pulled him gently inside, and closed the door on the outside world.

She tugged his hand, leading him back inside to her cabin. The door clicked softly shut behind them. For a moment, they stood in silence, the low hum of the storm outside cocooning them in their own world.

You’re still trouble. Mace’s earlier words echoed in his mind. And perhaps he was right. But at that moment, he didn’t care.

Maya slowly undid the buttons of her blouse, her movements deliberate. Tilson’s breath caught as the fabric slipped from her shoulders, revealing a prettily patterned bra beneath. Her skin was a smooth, deep brown, her physique healthy but not too toned. Her body was lithe, elegant. Tilson felt himself harden.

“You going to stand there, or…?” she murmured, stepping toward him.

He closed the distance in a stride, hands at her waist, then up her back, feeling the warmth of her skin. He kissed her slowly, tasting salt and heat, their lips meeting with a hunger that had waited too long.

Her hands worked at his shirt, tugging it free, palms sliding over the taut muscles of his chest. He caught her gaze, dark and smouldering, before they fell back onto the bed, tangled in a flurry of limbs and whispered laughter.

“You never could resist a lost cause,” she teased breathlessly, running her nails down his back.

“And you never could resist me,” he murmured into her ear, making her shiver.

“Never …”

They continued to undress each other slowly, deliberately, every touch reigniting old sparks. Her skin was silk beneath his fingers, her scent intoxicating. He ran his hand down her neck, along her collarbone, over the swell of her breasts with the touch of a butterfly. Her breath hitched as he took his time, exploring her curves, reacquainting himself with every line.

Outside, thunder rumbled in the distance, but inside, there was only warmth and closeness — two souls rediscovering each other in the most intimate way.

“You’re still impossible,” she whispered.

“Always,” he replied huskily, kissing her deeply, before pausing to look into her eyes. “But you still put up with me.”

She smiled. “Always.”

He pressed soft kisses along the line of her jaw, before moving lower to her throat, feeling her pulse quicken beneath his lips. He traced the delicate hollow of her collarbone with the tip of his tongue, making her shiver. His mouth moved down, brushing over the swell of her breasts, his hands cupping them gently as he drew one nipple between his lips, teasing until she gasped and twisted toward him, her breath hitching, her hands tangled in his hair, urging him on.

His hands explored the gentle curve of her waist, the smooth flatness of her belly, and the subtle dip of her hipbones. Every soft breath and whispered sigh pulled them deeper together, charting each other’s bodies all over again and remembering why they could never quite forget.

She writhed beneath his touch, biting her lip, her legs parting to invite him in, breathless with anticipation. He traced slow circles over the soft skin of her inner thigh, deliberately delaying, making her ache for more. His index and forefinger found her warmth, gliding down to open and close over her wet folds with feather-light pressure that made her shiver and whisper his name.

He excited her gently, stroking rhythmically, the subtle tremors of pleasure building in her body. Her hands moved down his abdomen to grasp him with both hands. Now it was his time to shiver at her touch.

Her hips lifted instinctively to meet his hand, her breath now ragged, small gasps escaping with each delicate pass of his fingers. He slipped his fingers inside her, her body trembling on the edge, warm and ready. She clutched at his back, nails pressing into his skin, her body silently begging him to take her fully.

He propped himself up on his arms and entered her fully, her body trembling on the edge. She clutched at his back, nails pressing into his skin, her breath catching with every slow thrust. He took his time, drawing back almost completely before moving into her again, deeper. She arched beneath him, her soft moans rising in pitch with every movement.

Her hands roamed over his shoulders, gripping, pulling him closer, their bodies pressed together, slick with heat and need. Her legs wrapped around his waist, anchoring him to her, urging him on. Their rhythm perfectly synchronised with the rise and fall of the boat.

He felt her begin to tremble, her breathing quick and shallow, her body tensing and then releasing in waves. She cried out softly, her head tilting back, lips parted, eyes fluttering shut as her climax rolled through her, shuddering and intense. Tilson held back just long enough for her tremors crescendo, before letting himself go, driving into her with increasing urgency until the pressure built to breaking point.

Lightning strobed through the porthole, illuminating their entwined bodies for a heartbeat before darkness returned, followed by a rolling crash of thunder that seemed to shake the yacht itself. He groaned her name into the hollow of her neck, his relief overwhelming, his body taut and trembling, their shared pleasure cresting in perfect sync.

They clung to each other in the aftermath, skin damp with exertion and sea air. Their heartbeats slowly fell into the same gentle pattern, the storm outside forgotten. Simply two bodies still entwined, holding on to one another as if the world beyond the cabin no longer mattered. Slowly, her breathing evened out, her head nestled in the curve of his shoulder. He pressed a soft kiss to her temple, the warmth of her skin grounding him more than anything had in years. For a few precious hours, there were no secrets, no missions, no unanswered questions — only peace, and the gentle sound of rain against the porthole.

Maya let out a soft laugh, her fingers lazily tracing circles across his chest.

“Sam,” she murmured, resting her chin on his shoulder. “That was …” She laughed gently. “You haven’t lost your touch.”

Tilson chuckled, still catching his breath. “I was worried I might be out of practice.”

She nudged him playfully. “Never.”

He kissed her forehead gently.

She smiled, nestling closer, her leg draped over his, her arm across his stomach. The storm continued to murmur beyond the hull, but here it was warm, safe, still now after their own tempest.

Maya sighed contentedly. “Make the most of my hospitality as long as you like.”

“I wish I could stay longer,” he whispered, tightening his arm around her.

Her hand moved to rest over his heart. “But London – duty – calls?” she asked.

He nodded, eyes already heavy, the weight of the coming debrief and unanswered questions pressing at the edge of his mind.

“Always …”

For now, though, there was only her warm body beside him, her sweet scent, and the soft rhythm of her heart against his skin.

“Stay with me. Just for tonight,” she whispered.

He closed his eyes as she nuzzled him, letting himself drift. He knew that soon he’d be back in London, facing cold offices, sharp questions, and old secrets once more. But tonight, in this cabin on the rolling sea, he was simply Sam, holding Maya close, and for a little while, he could let the weight of secrets and operations and missions drift away with the tide. Outside, the storm slowly receded in importance, the yacht riding the swell toward safe harbour. And in the quiet warmth of her arms, Sam Tilson finally allowed himself to sleep.

CHAPTER 4

The spring rain was still spitting when Tilson stepped out of the cab on Millbank, his bag slung over one shoulder, the weight of unanswered questions heavier still. He’d asked the driver to pull up at the Pizza Express that sat at the foot of Millbank Tower, as if he were going for a lunchtime meeting there. London’s late March was grey, heavy, and impatient, as if the city itself was holding its breath. Thames House loomed ahead of him; the headquarters of MI5, standing as a formidable neoclassical structure adjacent to Lambeth Bridge just down the road from the Houses of Parliament.

Constructed between 1929 and 1930, its imposing façade of Portland stone was adorned with sculptures by Charles Sargeant Jagger, including figures of St. George and Britannia, symbolising protection and national pride. The building’s thick stone walls and traditional architecture exuded an air of resilience, befitting its role in national security.

Tilson slipped into Thorney Street and through the discreet back door. Aston sat in his usual post by the rear entrance of Thames House, his easy smile as much a part of the building as the stone archway above. His uniform was the standard MI5 security dress: a crisp navy-blue blazer with silver piping on the epaulettes, pressed trousers to match, a pale blue shirt underneath and a dark navy tie just so. The MI5 insignia patch sat neatly on his left breast pocket, and his polished black shoes gleamed in the soft light from the frosted security panels.

He was in his early sixties now, his skin dark and smooth except for a few fine lines around his eyes that deepened whenever he smiled — which was often. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short and neat, and his deep brown eyes carried a warmth that belied the steely vigilance required for the job.

“Morning, Cap’n!” he greeted Tilson, his West Indian lilt rich and comforting.

Aston always addressed him that way. He’d worked security here since before most of the ICE unit had even joined, knew every face, every clearance code, and every whisper of protocol. But there was kindness in his presence. For those like Tilson — constantly balancing secrets and danger — Aston’s steady warmth was a welcome reminder of solid ground. “Back from yuh likkle ‘oliday, eh? Livin’ nice!”

Tilson smiled. “Something like that.”

“Well, now time fi get back to di real ting, huh?”

“Yes, Sir!”

Tilson gave him a casual salute and walked briskly to the stairs.

He made his way up them swiftly, climbing to the fourth floor, where the Inconclusive Covert Enquiries unit had its suite of offices. They blended a modern functionality with the quiet tension that always seemed to hover in places where secrets were traded daily.

Inside, the warmth and stale air of MI5 corridors welcomed him like an old overcoat. Tilson pushed through the heavy security door on the fourth floor of Thames House, the familiar click-clunk of the locking mechanism behind him like a seal closing on another world. He inhaled, the air inside carrying a subtle scent of old paper, polished wood, and institutional coffee. The ICE offices never changed.

The corridor led into the main office, a large open-plan room that was both functional and faded. It had high ceilings with ornate plasterwork long painted over, and thick stone-framed windows looking out from the back of the building to the brutalist hotel opposite. The walls were thick, soundproof, a reminder that these rooms had held secrets for nearly a century.

Lucy Harper looked up first. Her fiery red hair was pulled back into a high, no-nonsense ponytail, a scattering of freckles across pale skin giving her a deceptively youthful air. She wore black skinny jeans, a sharp tailored blazer over a graphic tee that read There’s Always a Formula, and scuffed Doc Martens. Her desk was immaculately organised — files aligned with geometric precision, a well-loved leather notebook open beside a sleek laptop. She gave him a quick, approving smile.“Hello, Sam,” she said, her tone and eyes both warm. “How was Egypt?”

“Lucy.” He returned the nod, grateful for her steadiness. “Hot!” His mind flickered to Maya lying on her bed the morning he left, asking him to come back soon.

Behind Lucy was Dapo Adenjani, lounging in his chair, one leg propped on the side of his desk. He wore a dark navy crew-neck sweater over a crisp white t-shirt, the sleeves of the sweater pushed up to reveal strong forearms. Well-fitted chinos in army green and polished brown leather boots completed the look — comfortable, functional, but still smart. His watch was a sturdy black G-Shock. All nods to his military past in the Grenadier Guards.

Adenjani gave Tilson a wide grin, the warmth in his eyes unmistakable. They’d bled together once or twice. That bond never frayed.

“Morning, boss,” he said.

“Hey, Dapo.”

Across the room, Neve O’Hara was half-sitting, half-sprawled on the floor by the far window, dark makeup artfully smudged, black jeans and a Joy Division T-shirt, laptop balanced on her knees. He nodded to her and the nineteen-year-old flicked her eyes up and gave him a crooked smile before returning to whatever code she was hammering out. The glow of the screen illuminated the multiple silver rings on her fingers.

Camille DeSouza bustled in from the archive side room, her bottle-blonde hair tied up with a colourful silk scarf, her patterned blouse clashing wonderfully with a tartan skirt. She had a file clutched in one hand and a takeaway coffee in the other. She beamed at him.

“Alright, sweetheart,” she teased, before leaning in and kissing him on both cheeks. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

Tilson gave her a smile. She was always so cheeky and fun.

“Anne’s waiting for you,” she added, jerking her thumb towards the back office.

He could hear his head of department in the background coming from her private office.

He crossed the room and knocked lightly.

“Enter.”

Anne Barnard’s office was smaller but dignified, the desk polished and clear apart from a single antique brass lamp and an open file. She sat in her wheelchair, perfectly composed, hair elegantly silver, a silk scarf around her neck adding a splash of colour. Her eyes were sharp as ever.

“Captain Tilson,” she said, that old warmth beneath the brisk exterior. “Good to have you back – even for a few days. We’ve got everyone gathered.”

She turned her wheelchair with a soft whir and led him out through a connecting door into the meeting room.

It was his favourite room in the ICE suite, lines of oak shelving giving it an old-school air. An incongruous flatscreen hanging on one of the long walls. At the centre, an oval table polished to a shine. Heavy curtains framed the tall windows, which overlooked the same view as the office – other buildings less than 10 metres away. It had the quiet gravity of a room where important things were decided.

There were two new people in the room. One he already knew, one a complete stranger.

Louise Canterbury looked up as he entered. She caught his eye and grinned.

She had helped him previously with some old RAF files. She was based at Kew, but he’d asked for her help on the mission to Germany to uncover an old wunderwaffe a few months previously. Anne had turned down his request then, but she’d obviously been as impressed with her as he was, although undoubtedly for different reasons. There was no awkwardness in her expression. She’d made it clear she was no booty call after they’d slept together. They’d had their fun, and she’d never been one for complications. She wore her usual practical but stylish attire: a navy dress with a subtle pattern, a grey jacket over it, and reading glasses perched on her head.

Anne propelled herself to the head of the table.

“Introductions,” she said. “Doctor Canterbury, you already know from the National Archives Office.”

“Hello, you,” Louise said, her smile broadening. There was a warm twinkle in her eye.

“And this is Eleanor Allerton, formerly of this parish.” She meant she’d been MI5 in the past.

Eleanor looked every inch the formidable archivist: light blonde hair cropped short into a bob, blunt fringe, strong Yorkshire features with a slight permanent squint of disapproval behind her chestnut framed glasses. She must have been 85 if she was day, her face etched with lines of experience, especially round the eyes when she smiled. Which is what happened when she looked up at Tilson. She wore a fuchsia pink striped blouse, dark trousers, and a large amber brooch pinned to her chest. Her presence radiated no-nonsense authority.

“Ah,” she said in a light Yorkshire accent. “So, you’re the lad who’s stirring up a bloody hornet’s nest.”

Tilson grinned and took a seat. “That’s me, Eleanor.”

She frowned. “Calle me ‘Ellie’ for Christ’s sake.”

Camille slipped in beside her former mentor, pulling out a slim digital archive reader. “Sam seems to love wasps.”

Neve padded in last, laptop under one arm, plonking herself on the arm of a chair, cross-legged.

“First, to bring you all up to speed,” Tilson said, activating the flatscreen to show an Admiralty map of the Gulf of Suez. “We successfully located the wreck of the Domiat at approximately twenty-seven degrees, fifty-eight minutes north; thirty-three degrees, twelve minutes east — sitting in fifty-three metres of water just off the main TSS. Traffic Separation Scheme. Previously, the wreck was not well documented. We’ll be going back down on the next weather window.”

Anne nodded. “Good work, Sam. I’m glad your recommendation of Captain Mace and his company worked out well.”

“Blackfrog are the best in the business.” Tilson replied. “So, what’s been going on here to merit the extra help?”

“While you’ve been sunning yourself in 26-degree sunshine, we’ve been digging further into the Admiralty documents that sent you to Egypt in the first place.” Louise gazed up at him playfully.

“We’ve found some promising leads in the sealed archives,” Anne continued. “But the real breakthrough has been Camille’s suggestion to bring in her former mentor.”

“Yeah,” Camille chimed in. “Ellie’s got something a bit tasty for us.”

Ellie’s eyes twinkled. “Aye. I remembered a codename cropping up. Lucky Break. Used to hear whispers of him back when I were a junior clerk, filing intercept transcripts at Curzon Street.”

She was referring to Leconfield House, located at the corner of South Audley Street and Curzon Street in Mayfair, London. The building had been MI5 headquarters back then and had picked up the nickname of ‘Curzon Street’. It was even used at the time as a shorthand in government circles for the Security Service.

“Mid-1950s. Rumours said he was a source for MI6. Had the ear of someone very close to Nasser.”

“Nasser?” This from Neve. Of course, she’d never heard of him.

“Egyptian President at the time. He was nicely tucked up with the Soviets,” Ellie replied. “Supposedly this person close to Nasser was an MI6 source. A double agent. Not a soul knew who he really was, though.”

Camille looked up. “I’ll cross-check that now.” Her fingers flew over the tablet.

“No need to crosscheck, poppet, I’m tellin’ you,” Ellie said, eyes half-closed as if searching through the card index in her head. “And if memory serves, around that same time, there was a flurry of covert cables between London and Cairo. All flagged ‘K-5 eyes only’.”

Camille gasped softly. “She’s right.” She rotated the tablet so they could all see. “Internal memo, K Section. Dated March 1956. Refers to ‘Lucky Break’ and expresses concern that his intelligence may be dubious. Possibly even fabricated by Station C, Cairo.”

Ellie tapped the table. “Aye. That’s ’im.”

Louise leaned in. “What do we know about what happened to Lucky Break?

Ellie shrugged. “Disappeared. Like he never existed. Which fitted the old Our Man in Havana schtick.”

Tilson wracked his brain. Some old movie about a Walter Mitty type character spying for the British in Cuba.

“But…” she continued, “if he was compromised, he’d’ve been nabbed out o’ there, sharpish — or silenced.”

Tilson nodded, conscious of the weight of history pressing on his shoulders. “And if the Soviets wanted him out of the way … the wreck might still hold whatever they were trying to hide.”

Anne’s gaze settled on Tilson. “This lines up with your discovery. That body on the Domiat may well have been Lucky Break. Or his cleaner.”

“Why would he be on an Egyptian ship, though?” Tilson asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“He may have been a prisoner.” Neve mused.

“Or a double agent,” Ellie said. “The whole place was buzzin’ with ’em in Fifties and Sixties.”

“And we can establish all this from a memo?” Tilson asked.

Ellie smiled faintly. “Don’t underestimate old paper trails, lad. They tell you more than people realise.”

Tilson leaned back, glancing around the room. These women, each of them brilliant in their own right. Like the Duke of Wellington, he was glad his team were on his side. He could sense the familiar excitement and apprehension in his chest. The puzzle pieces were starting to connect.

“Interesting thing is, this stinks of cleanup,” Ellie said. “Not bureaucracy. Purpose.”

“I agree,” Anne said, clasping her hands together on the table.

Neve spoke up without looking up from her screen. “I’m trying to cross-reference mentions of ‘Lucky Break’ in US signals intelligence archives from the period. But most of it’s scrubbed. CIA flagged it back in the fifties as unreliable.”

“Or deliberately poisoned,” Tilson said.

Ellie nodded approvingly. “Aye. That’s exactly what it looks like to me, Sam. We were being fed bloody rubbish, and we decided to base our entire defence strategy on it.” She pointed a stubby finger at the old manila folder in front of her. “There are twenty-five separate dispatches from Cairo in late ’55. All signed off by the same handler. None of the source identities have ever been confirmed.”

Anne leaned forward. “At the time, and since, the intel that Lucky Break was providing to MI6 and thus to the Prime Minister, Eden, was … dubious.”

“Too neat,” Ellie added. “All saying exactly what Eden wanted to hear. All things that he could use to justify Britain going to war. And persuade the French to go along with this scheme to involve the Israelis, too.”

Tilson nodded. He was trying to recall the military history lessons taught as part of the Intermediate Command Courses he took at CTCRM Lympstone prior to his promotion to captain.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 was, at its heart, a clash of imperial legacy, rising nationalism, and Cold War brinkmanship. In July of that year, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stunned the world by nationalising the Suez Canal, the vital waterway that for nearly a century had been controlled by European powers.

Britain and France, who held large stakes in the canal company, not solely saw the loss of a strategic asset but a humiliation on the world stage. The canal was the lifeblood of British oil supplies and shipping routes to the empire’s far reaches, still crucial, even though at that point it was in decline.

Behind closed doors, Britain and France began plotting to take the canal back. But direct intervention would draw international outrage, particularly from the United States and the Soviet Union, both of whom were watching the Middle East with keen interest.

So, a secret plan was born. Israel, a young nation at odds with Egypt, was invited by the old colonial powers to invade the Sinai Peninsula and seize control of the canal. This would give the British and French the perfect excuse to legitimately intervene under the guise of separating the warring parties and “protecting” the canal. In reality, they would be seizing it for themselves.

The plan was codenamed Operation Musketeer, and the conspiracy took shape in secret meetings in Sèvres, outside Paris. Israel would strike first, giving Britain and France the pretext they needed. But the gamble backfired. The United States, furious at being left out of the loop, applied massive economic pressure on Britain first not to invade, and then, when it did, to end the conflict and withdraw. The Soviet Union issued threats of its own, going so far as to hint at missile strikes on London and Paris. Under this combined pressure, Britain and France were forced into a humiliating climbdown.

Egypt’s Nasser emerged as a hero of Arab nationalism, the British Empire’s decline was laid bare for all to see, and Anglo-French influence in the Middle East was shattered. For MI5 and especially MI6, the source of much intelligence that led to the invasion, the Suez debacle was a moment of reckoning, with whispers of double agents, botched plans, and clandestine meetings happening without other parties’ knowledge. It was a clusterfuck.

Lucy cut in. “But like Sam said, the question is, why did this guy end up on the Domiat?”

Anne’s voice was thoughtful. “Because he was running?”

“Or captured,” Tilson said. “That would explain the murder.”

“Or he was being extracted.” Camille.

“Or he was defecting, chuck. Lots of that going on ‘n’ all,” Ellie added, looking around the table.

Louise tapped her pen. “That neck wound … silenced. Before the Newfoundland even opened fire.”

The room fell into contemplation for a moment. Outside, the rain pattered against the windows, seeming to echo the gunfire of old mistakes. “He must find out who was killed. That will tell us a lot.”

“We’ve got a blood sample from the victim,” Tilson said. “It’s being sent for analysis. But there are no medical records of that kind for the Domiat’s crew. I suppose it might help us rule out future suspects.”

Ellie exhaled. “I’ll tell you something else. The signatures on those old authorisations, the push to pursue the Domiat with ‘extreme prejudice’? Those orders were signed off by someone who knew damn well what was on board. And wanted no loose ends.”

Anne’s face was unreadable. “Find me whoever that signature belongs to.”

Camille glanced up. “I’m working on it.”

Ellie nodded approvingly at her. “Good lass.”

Tilson pushed his chair back. “I need to get back down there.”

Anne’s eyes softened a little. “You will. But not until the weather clears. And not until we know a little more about what we’re really looking for.”

Ellie folded her arms. “And maybe… who else still wants it buried?”

Tilson exhaled. His heart was already halfway back to the Red Sea.

But here, in the quiet, rain-slicked heart of London, the ghosts were just as loud.

CHAPTER 5

At anchor off Ras Ghareb, the Cockleshell sat steady on a gentle swell. The sky to the east was bleeding from indigo into muted apricot, the first light silhouetting the low sprawl of the port.From this distance, the place looked almost deserted. A tangle of stunted cranes and corrugated iron sheds crouched along the shoreline, their edges softened by morning haze. The lights of workboats flickered near the breakwaters, while a larger tanker sat motionless farther south, waiting its turn for passage through the congested canal lanes towards the Suez Canal itself.

The storm had passed the previous night, leaving behind slick streets and puddles reflecting the orange glow of streetlamps still burning along the harbour road.

The first grey hints of dawn were softening the horizon when Mace had emerged from his cabin. His hair was mussed, his eyes still gritty with sleep, but the scent of strong, tar-black coffee in the galley had been too good to resist. He clutched the chipped Blackfrog Maritime mug in both hands, stepping out onto the deck as the sun began to lift from the horizon in molten gold and pink streaks.The Red Sea was calm this morning, deceptively so. Mace stood for a moment, sipping slowly, the heat of the mug seeping into his palms, watching the port slowly come alive — fishermen tending to their nets with quiet efficiency, low voices carrying in Arabic from the quay, the occasional clang of metal on metal as fuel drums were shifted and secured. From somewhere along the shoreline came the faint clang of halyards against metal masts, mingled with the rhythmic cries of gulls wheeling overhead.

He breathed deep, tasting salt, and the faint iron tang of rust, undercut by the sharp bite of warm engine oil drifting from the workboats. The lighthouse beam had faded now, replaced by the rising sun’s steady glow. He turned his head at a soft splash alongside.

The smell of the port drifted faintly across the water overland by a smoky undertone of early morning market fires lighting further inland. Closer to shore, the minarets of Ras Ghareb’s two small mosques pierced the skyline, pale and graceful against the ochre glow.

And there, standing proudly at the headland, was the lighthouse. No romantic, white-washed tower, but an iron skeleton of pure function, built in 1879 by Gustave Eiffel. It was almost a proto form of his later tower in Paris. Riveted plates, darkened by years of sandstorms and salt spray, glistened with dew. The lantern housing, encased in steel framing, still pulsed a steady white light every ten seconds – a heartbeat from another century, warning vessels of the treacherous shallows and shifting sandbanks of the Gulf’s approaches.

Below, the port’s working face was a tangle of rusting bollards, concrete slabs chipped and worn, oil drums stacked two and three high, and pallets of equipment abandoned beside cracked tarmac. A couple of stray dogs nosed around the refuse, tails low, ears twitching. The distant hum of a diesel generator added a steady undertone to the sounds of water and gulls.

Ras Ghareb is a hub for oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Suez, and to the north of their moorings was a small heliport facility that serviced offshore oil platforms mainly. These helicopters were typically Bell 212s, the civilian version of the military UH-1N ‘Twin Huey,’ or sometimes Eurocopter AS365 Dauphins, robust, proven aircraft used globally for offshore personnel transport.

These flights run regularly, ferrying engineers, drill crews, and maintenance teams between Ras Ghareb and the many oil installations scattered across the Gulf. The heliport itself is simple but functional: a small cluster of hangars, fuel tanks, a tarmac apron with marked landing pads, and a control building manned by Egyptian aviation staff.

The constant thrum of rotor blades was part of the normal daily soundscape near the docks. Another reminder that this was a working town, driven by oil.

Mace had given most of the crew a night ashore with only himself, Maya, Calder and the new girl Sophies remaining on board in case of medical emergency.

The remaining team members had headed for the Shell Sea Hotel, a squat, functional two-storey block of sun-faded stone and ‘dusky desert rose’ painted brickwork, its walls banded in warm tones of ochre and muted cream that looked almost yellow in the early sunlight. It stood back from the waterfront behind a low wall and a dusty car park.

It had been built with practicality in mind rather than beauty, everything functional and slightly outdated, its simple lines softened only by the scattering of bougainvillaea and the faded awnings that shaded the terrace. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz, but he was sure they’d been grateful for the R&R, even though he’d made it clear: back aboard by 07:00, lines up by 08:00.

Mace glanced down at his wrist. The weight of the DLC-coated Rolex Sea-Dweller Deepsea 116660 was familiar and reassuring. Its matte black casing gave it the air of a military watch, although it was pure luxury, really. The hands moved with perfect precision; luminous markers clear even in the half-light. 06:57. Right on cue. He allowed himself a small grin — the sort of punctuality he drilled into his team, and they rarely disappointed.

He lifted his gaze, and there they were: figures appearing along the breakwater, carrying duffels, hair tousled from the breeze, faces still flushed from a night ashore but moving with purpose. Mace took another sip of coffee, the bitter warmth steadying him as the crew approached.

Joseé Tremblay led the group, her overnight bag slung across one shoulder, moving with that effortless grace honed by years in the water. Her scar caught the rising sun’s glow like a faint slash of silver along her jawline.

Paddy Kavanagh followed, short and compact, the faint pink tinge on his freckled face betraying either the early sun or a long night of local arak. He carried a small canvas bag, which clinked faintly with each step.

Karim Belhadi came next, dark glasses shielding his eyes, shoulders square, walking like a man used to the steady roll of an oil rig beneath his boots.

At the rear, Alexa Drakou towered beside Shola Leandre, her powerful frame relaxed, muscles visible even beneath her windbreaker. She threw her head back and laughed at something Shola said, her rich contralto carrying faintly over the water. Shola’s easy stride made him look older than his twenty-one years, but Mace caught a hint of weariness in the lad’s eyes as they boarded.

Each one offered a brief nod or murmured a greeting as they climbed aboard and disappeared below to stow bags and prep gear.

Mace’s smile in reply was fond but tinged with the weight of responsibility. Ports like Ras Ghareb could be friendly enough — but every night ashore left echoes, whispers, and the chance of loose ends. He drained the last of his coffee, the lingering bitterness sharp on his tongue.

The sun continued its slow rise over the Red Sea, burnishing the water with sheets of gold. Out beyond the harbour, an oil tanker sat at anchor, its superstructure hazy against the horizon, engines silent.

He set his mug down carefully, tapped the rail with his knuckles, and muttered, “Let’s hope that’s the only thing watching us.”

He turned toward the bridge. Inside, Calder was already bent over the chart table, a pencil tucked behind one ear.

“Morning, Skipper,” Calder said without looking up, Geordie accent lilting as ever. “We’re green across the board. Standing by for your word.”

Mace nodded, feeling the familiar prickle at the back of his neck.

“Let’s get everyone assembled.”

The day was beginning.

The sea might’ve looked calm, but it hadn’t started that way. As the team came aboard, a stiff chop from the northeast had thrown off the swell patterns, slamming unpredictably into the hull. Wind over current. Calder had spotted it first — whitecaps scattering offshore, the kind of fractured surface that turned clean entries into chaotic splashes and made equipment handling a gamble.

Mace had spent the better part of an hour going back and forth with Maya and Paddy over the data. Wave intervals, wind speed, barometric pressure, current disruptions. Everything pointed to a midday lull, but not enough to guarantee safe descent before that time.

“We hold,” he’d told the team over a lunch of spaghetti carbonara. “We’re not risking a multi-level dive in this soup. If anyone’s got a problem with that, take it up with the God of the Sea!”

“Thought you were the god of the sea,” Shola quipped.

All eyes turned to Mace to see how he’d handle this cheek.

“You know what, Shola?” Mace said with a grin. You are absolutely fucking correct. As far as you’re concerned, I am the god of the sea. Now pass me that bloody trident. I’ve lost my fork!”

Afterwards, they’d used the extra time to double-check the gear. Joseé re-ran her checklist like a pilot on edge. Paddy fussed with oxygen partials. Sophie lingered on deck, watching the horizon with unreadable calm, her clipboard cradled like a nurse waiting on a bad diagnosis.

By mid afternoon, the weather had settled, an eerie stillness after the earlier churn. But the delay had left its mark: nerves raw, routines disrupted, and the whole team running half a beat behind. By now, they’d had confirmation that Tilson was on a flight from London, but he’d okayed the dive to go ahead without him.

Mace stood at the head of the dive deck, clipboard in hand, the full sunlight glinting off the steel railings and the sea flat as glass beyond the stern. The others stood around him in various states of readiness, the scent of neoprene tinging the scent of the sea.

“With Sammy-boy still in the air,” Mace began, voice dry as ever, “we’ll need to tweak the dive assignments.”

He glanced around the deck. “I’ll take lead with Joseé on primary entry. Karim, you’re with Alexa. And Shola, you’re with Paddy. You’re secondary in, on standby for backup or recovery.”

He paused a beat, letting it settle. “Now, I know Shola’s the youngest here, but don’t let that fool you. He’s been rigged up since he was knee-high to the proverbial grasshopper, and I’ve seen him handle rougher kit than some veterans.”

Shola, standing tall in his drysuit with a cautious grin, shifted slightly under the attention.

“Bright lad,” Mace went on. “Green as a Bootneck beret, maybe, but steady. He listens. And he’s fast in the water.”

He looked over at Paddy. “You’re his cover. Don’t let him showboat.”

Paddy gave a curt nod, gum already rolling in his cheek.

Mace clicked his pen and glanced down at his notes. “Same protocols. Same signals. We keep it clean. Eyes on the Domiat in twenty. Let’s move.”

They each donned his or her diving apparatus and walked off the end of the dive platform, breaking their fall into the water by slightly spreading their legs and letting their flippers provide enough surface area to slow their splashdown.

The sea was calm; deceptively so. Below, the water loomed black and patient; the Domiat waiting in her grave. Mace gave a final nod and dropped beneath the surface, Joseé dipping down after him, her sleek form cutting through the water like a blade. Alexa and Karim followed, paired off and descending with slow, measured fin strokes, scanning the fading light for the looming silhouette of the wreck. Shola and Paddy brought up the rear. The youngest and the shortest, moving in near-perfect sync as they dipped past the safety line and into the gloom of teal and azure.

Sunlight filtered weakly down through the upper thermocline, before becoming redundant, replaced by the familiar cold pressure of depth. Their torches swept long beams through the murk, catching flickers of silt, occasional fish, the glint of a corroded hull plate. Twenty minutes in, they were circling the Domiat’s starboard side. It was a rust-slick expanse of buckled steel and coral overgrowth. She’d shifted slightly from the storm, nose settled deeper into the sediment. Faint trails of air still bled from broken seams, rising like tiny ghosts to the surface.

They’d descended quickly, using DPVs to streamline the drop through the clear water, but now they had reached the wreck’s depth just shy of fifty-three metres, everything slowed. They took their time with safety, stabilising in teams, checking their gear, running final comms tests, and surveying the perimeter of the Domiat without venturing too close.

The storm had passed, but it had churned up more than surface swell. Structural integrity was a real concern. Karim and Alexa had dived the previous evening alongside Sophie to assess visible damage and reported the hull mostly stable, though Sophie had spotted that the sandbanks on the port side had visibly shifted. Mace now hovered outside the main breach with Joseé, watching the interplay of light and silt as they waited for final go-ahead. The wreck might have rested here for decades, but it wasn’t sleeping easy.

Mace kept a close watch on his HUD readout. “All teams confirm status,” he said into comms.

“Karim and I are in position,” Alexa replied. “Midship access frame is stable but creaking more than yesterday.”

“Secondary hull tension normal,” came Paddy’s voice. “No strong indications of imminent collapse.”

Joseé’s tone was cool, calm. “Entry hatch secured. Visibility good and holding.”

They continued their slow orbit, moving closer to the wreck’s primary breach — the blast-damaged section of hull that had split open like a gut wound near the engine room. Mace and Joseé were first through, weaving past collapsed bulkheads and torn wiring. Silt danced lazily along the floor, stirred by their passage, but not yet a problem.

Suddenly, Joseé’s voice came through. “O₂ efficiency on my HUD just dropped three points.”

Mace paused. “Lag spike?”

“Possibly. Could be pressure calibration.”

He opened his comm to the surface. “Surface, we’ve got a low-level efficiency dip on Diver 2. Please confirm sensor read.”

Maya came on comms, clipped and controlled. “Reading the same. Sophie?”

“Could be transient,” Sophie answered smoothly. “Depth spike can do that.” A pause. “Yes. There we go. She’s compensating fine. Nothing critical.”

Mace hesitated only a moment more, then gave a nod Joseé couldn’t see but would understand. “Copy that. Continuing.”

Inside, the wreck groaned.

Above them in the operations room, Maya leaned forward, eyes glued to the screen. She didn’t like anomalies. Didn’t trust them. Sophie stood behind her, arms folded, gaze on the diagnostics readout. Calm. Too calm.

“Run the trace again,” she ordered.

“Already did.” Sophie’s tone hinted at annoyance. “It’s steady now. Could’ve been a brief glitch.”

Maya said nothing, but she tapped the scrubber data again — watched it ripple. Still, it had stabilised.

Deep below, Mace and Joseé moved into the crew corridor, their torch beams throwing long shadows on rusted lockers and peeling Arabic signage. A battered radio set floated in the dark, cables trailing like tentacles. Joseé drifted past it, sleek and poised, every movement precise.

Then, without warning, a thunderous, bone-deep rumble cascaded through the Domiat’s hull, a shuddering complaint from steel that had been dead for seven decades.

Mace’s breath caught. It wasn’t the usual creak of tired steel under pressure. This was structural. The bloody wreck itself was moving. Then he saw it. A rivetted seam yawning slightly open, releasing decades of rust and silt in a single exhalation. The murk erupted like a thundercloud, billowing outward in a choking wave of sediment and memory.

Visibility dropped in an instant. Light beams cut into brown soup. Shadows dissolved. Joseé’s silhouette vanished ahead of him.

Mace’s thoughts sharpened, heartbeat spiking, senses taut. That wasn’t natural.

Had something exploded? Old ordnance in the ship’s magazine? It hadn’t sounded that big, though. Not enough concussion.

His hand instinctively braced against the inner bulkhead. Now he could really feel it: the judder in the rusted beams, the ancient bolts straining in their panels.

A CO₂ popper? A low-yield binary? Jesus.

He tried to shake it off. Could’ve been corrosion giving way. Could’ve. But his instincts didn’t like it.

He tapped his comm, keeping his voice even. “Joseé, status. Do you copy?”

No answer. Simply the hiss of interference, the soft crackle of confusion.

The Domiat had shifted slightly, enough to throw everything into disarray. But under fifty metres of Red Sea, “slightly” could kill.

“Everyone! Status,” he snapped.

“Karim here. We’re good. Visibility dropped.”

“Joseé?” He tried again. No response.

“Joseé, do you copy?”

Then: “I’m here. Got pushed into a bulkhead. Bit shaken. No injury. Trying to orient.”

“Hold position. No movement until we stabilise.”

Then came Paddy’s voice, tight and confused: “Shola’s gone … he’s … he’s not with me!”

Mace’s gut went cold. “Say again.”

“I was on point. Turned to check spacing, and he was just … gone.”

“Shola?” Mace spoke tersely into his comms. “Shola! Respond.”

Static.

“Paddy, status and depth?”

There was a strangled breath on the radio and then silence.

“Paddy?” Mace was becoming agitated now.

Alexa’s voice cut in, strained. “I see him. He’s drifting.”

On the surface, Maya’s console lit up in angry red.

“Paddy’s vitals are dropping. Flatlining.” Her voice rose. “Scrubbers aren’t functioning. What the hell?”

“I’ll check system calibration – ” Sophie started, but Maya wasn’t waiting. She pushed Sophie aside and took full control of the panel, bypassing the diagnostic delay.

Paddy’s heart rate was spiking and crashing. Finally, it flatlined.

“Abort the dive!” Maya barked. “Abort now!”

Mace grabbed Joseé by the harness, hauling her bodily through the corridor as she gasped through comms, her breathing laboured.

“My O₂’s going! I can’t – ”

“Stay with me!” Mace yelled.

Above them, Alexa was hauling Paddy up, but his body limp, arms trailing, eyes wide behind his mask.

The visibility was close to zero down there now. Silt and debris like smoke in the deep. Then Joseé’s vitals began to drop too.

“She’s not responding,” Maya said. “Get her up. Now.”

The DPV Shola had taken had failed to ping back on the surface grid. Mace swore. “What about Shola?”

“Get Joseé to the surface!” Maya shouted.

Alexa screamed over the channel, “Paddy’s dead!”

Mace powered upward, Joseé heavy in his grip, her limbs twitching. Alarms flared in his ear. Somewhere below, in the deep and the dark, something moved.

CHAPTER 6

They surfaced into a sky that looked like it was bleeding.

The sun, low and molten, bled crimson and gold across the horizon, staining the sea in hues that flickered between beauty and dread. The water, still glossy from the heat of day, reflected the light in long streaks of orange fire. For a moment, the line between sea and sky dissolved, the divers emerging into a half-dream followed by the pain and panic, sharp and real.

Alexa came up first, kicking hard, her mask askew, arms wrapped around Paddy’s body. He floated limply in her grip, arms trailing, his weight dragging her down with every breath. Her voice, when it came, was a rasping cry not of fear, but raw urgency.

“Man down! Help me!”

From the deck of the Cockleshell, Calder had already spotted them. He was shouting sharp Geordie commands as the recovery crew moved fast, ropes lowered, winches spooled into motion. Alexa swam grimly toward the ladder, dragging Paddy with the fierce strength of someone who had nothing left but willpower. Mace and Calder reached down together and hoisted Paddy first, his body rolling limp on the metal deck like a landed fish.

His face was blue. His lips tinged grey. His eyes half-lidded behind the mask.

Alexa clambered up next, collapsing on hands and knees beside him, soaking the deck beneath her. She stripped off her gloves with shaking fingers, pressed two to his neck. She said nothing, staring at him hopelessly. Her chest rose and fell, too fast, too shallow. She didn’t weep. She didn’t curse.

Next came Mace, rising from the water like a beast from a myth, one arm wrapped around Joseé’s shoulders, keeping her upright as they bobbed against the ladder. Her head lolled back. Blood smeared the regulator seal. Her face was pale, lips parted. Every breath came in a ragged gasp through clenched teeth.

Sophie was already crouched near the med station, med bag open, gloved and moving with smooth economy. She had the oxygen mask in hand before Mace had even cleared the top rung.

“Lay her here. Carefully! On her side.” She pulled Joseé into the recovery position, checked her pupils, attached the mask, and thumbed the regulator open. The hiss of pure O₂ filled the air. “She’s ‘shocky’. Could have bruised lungs. But she’s breathing.”

Maya appeared behind her, wide-eyed, drenched in a sheen of sweat despite the dusk breeze.

“Where’s Shola?” she asked.

No one answered.

Paddy’s chest remained still. Sophie placed two fingers to his neck, pressed, then moved to his wrist, her face impassive. Mace turned away, dragging one hand down his face, water dripping from his sleeve. Calder gently pulled a foil blanket over Paddy’s torso. The air was suddenly too quiet.

Down in the water, there were no more bubbles. No more divers.

Only the rising hum of insects from the shoreline, the hiss of the wind, and the groan of mooring cables stretching against the evening tide.

“Where the hell is he?” Maya asked again, quieter this time.

The silence was broken by the unmistakable slap of a hand against the ladder. A figure hauled himself into view over the rail, dripping, breathing hard, mask half off. It was Shola.

He flung the mask aside, face set in stone, dark eyes flashing. His voice came sharp and raw.

“You left me.”

No one moved. Alexa stared. Calder blinked, astonished. Even Mace took a step forward, as if to be sure the young man standing before him wasn’t a hallucination brought on by stress and seawater.

“I could hear you all shouting down there,” Shola went on. “Comms were dead. I was trying to respond, trying to signal. Nothing. I was yelling into my mask. Then I saw your torches vanish. Everyone was gone.”

He stood there, chest rising and falling, wetsuit clinging to him like a second skin, his buoyancy vest half-deflated and dripping. He looked like a ghost surfacing from his own grave.

Mace took a step closer. “Christ, lad. We thought we’d lost you.”

“I nearly lost myself,” Shola muttered, glancing at the bundle of silver foil that covered Paddy’s form. “But I didn’t panic. I made for the fallback ascent point. You weren’t there. So I surfaced blind.”

Maya stepped forward, gently resting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. You’re safe now.”

“No,” he snapped. “I’m not. Something went wrong down there. And I want to know what.”

No one argued.

“I’ve got to report this to the authorities,” Mace said in a monotone.

Maya stepped forward as he retreated. “Ian, can I speak with you a moment?”

Calder inclined his head, eyes narrowing. Maya stepped through the open hatch at the rear of the dive platform and led him to the ops room.

Entering, she flicked a switch, and the fluorescents stuttered to life, flooding the space with hard white light. Calder trailed after her, face still lined with salt and tension.

“Be quick, eh?” Calder said. “I’ve got to help Mace with the reports.”

“This won’t take a second,” Maya replied, already sliding into the operator’s seat. “I’m not buying Shola’s story, I’m afraid.”

Her fingers danced across the console. Data began to scroll: depth profiles, comms traces, scrubber logs. The blue interface glowed across her features.

“There,” she murmured. “Six-minute drop in Shola’s comms. Not muted. Not signal loss. Just … dropped. Mid-channel.”

“And this,” Calder pointed at a different graph. “Scrubber spike on Joseé. Almost a full CO₂ cycle off.”

“I already checked those,” said Sophie’s voice from behind them, calm and even. “Voltage surge. Maybe a desync glitch. We ran the diagnostics.”

Maya didn’t turn around. “No. You ran a diagnostic. You skipped the sub-loop cache.”

Sophie let out a faint exhale. “Same difference, no?”

“No,” Maya said, quieter now. “It isn’t.”

A pause followed, thick with static.

“Wasn’t it a trimix setup anyway?” Sophie added. “The decay rate on Joseé’s readout looked helium-weighted.”

Maya paused. Not visibly. Not noticeably. But she held her breath.

“Nitrox,” she said evenly. “Standard blend. No helium at that depth, Soph.

Sophie nodded. She’d made a mistake.

“I’d better get back to my patient…” she murmured, turning and slipping away without another word.

Calder looked at Maya, his voice a low mutter: “Fucking hell, like.”

Then he, too, departed, leaving Maya to her investigations.

On the Bridge, Mace was standing at the comms panel when Calder got there. His arms were crossed, his fatigues still damp. He was bent forward slightly so he could speak into the mic of the satellite phone, patched through to the British consular liaison in Cairo and the regional port authority. His voice was steady, but the muscle in his cheek kept twitching.

“We’ve had a fatality. One diver dead. One injured. One unaccounted for during the dive, but since returned. We suspect equipment failure, possibly structural collapse of the wreck site. Over.”

“Do you require assistance, Cockleshell? Over.” This from the coastguard at Ras Ghareb.

Mace paused, looking over at Calder. “Negative. We don’t require immediate assistance. But we’ll expect investigators on-site by morning. Possible Medevac. And a coroner. Over.”

Calder nodded slowly, before stepping forward. His boots thudded softly across the deck, still slick from saltwater and spilt adrenaline. He placed a gnarled hand on the former Royal Marine’s shoulder as the skipper completed his report and cut communications.

Below, Maya sat motionless, the hum of the equipment around her now loud in the absence of human voices. On the monitor, lines of data continued their ceaseless crawl — pressure curves, oxygen levels, timestamps flicking over like seconds on a stopwatch. Somewhere, in the mess of telemetry, were answers. Or at least patterns. Something to explain what had happened in the dark.

She exhaled slowly, resting her fingers on the edge of the console. Paddy’s vitals had dropped so fast. Too fast. Joseé’s scrubber values had stuttered out of rhythm like a skipped heartbeat, just long enough to be lethal if it had gone unchecked. The logs didn’t lie, but someone had made them harder to read. Or tried to.

She bookmarked the anomalies, encrypted the trace files, and closed the lid of the console gently, as if afraid to wake something sleeping beneath the surface.

Back on deck, the silence was reverent now. The air had cooled, the dying sun casting long shadows across the deck plating. The wind had dropped, leaving only the soft slap of water against the hull and the slow creak of tensioned mooring lines. It was the kind of quiet that didn’t feel like peace. More like the strange calm before the tornado.

Inside the main cabin, the team had gathered at Mace’s call. The mess room smelled of drying neoprene, salt, and the faint bite of iodine from medical supplies. Joseé had been sedated and transferred to the medical bunk, now monitored by Sophie in calm, professional silence. Alexa sat at the far end of the table, arms folded tightly across her chest, eyes fixed on a scratch in the tabletop. Karim leaned back, head against the bulkhead, expression unreadable behind mirrored sunglasses he hadn’t yet removed. Shola stood inside the doorway, a towel draped over his shoulders, drying slowly in the cool air, his jaw still clenched.

Mace stood at the head of the table, arms braced wide, knuckles pale against the worn teak.

“No one speaks outside this crew,” he said. His voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.

“Not to the locals. Not to the embassy. Not to your bloody aunt on WhatsApp. You say nothing. Not until we understand what happened down there.”

His gaze flicked from face to face, measuring the temperature of the room.

“We lost one of our own. That means an investigation. Internal and External. I’ll be pulling the full dive logs, every suit check, every breath you took down there. And if I find so much as a whisper of negligence –” He stopped, unable to continue and shook his head.

Alexa’s expression didn’t flicker. Shola stared at the floor.

Mace straightened. “We head back to Ras Ghareb as soon as possible. We’ve informed the port authorities there and the consulate. They’ll be here in the morning. Until then – no calls. No comms. No heroics.”

He let it settle.

Alexa stood and left without a word. Karim gave a silent nod and slipped into the passageway. Shola lingered for a moment, then followed, towel trailing behind him. The door sighed shut.

Mace stayed a moment longer, shoulders visibly heavier. He reached for a mug someone had abandoned near the sink, filled it from the tap, and drank like a man who had never tasted water. He left it on the counter without rinsing it, before walking out.

Maya remained alone for a moment in the dim light, the silence now absolute.

She pushed open the outer hatch and stepped onto the deck. The air had cooled further, the sharp edge of salt softened by diesel and the faintest waft of warm bread from a galley vent somewhere. She leaned on the rail, eyes scanning the horizon. Out toward the west, the lights of Ras Ghareb blinked into life, scattered and uneven, like stars glimpsed through sand.

Then she heard it, faintly at first. A low growl. Mechanical. Drawing closer.

She turned.

“Mace,” she called. “You hear that?”

He was already stepping out onto the aft platform, head cocked. Calder appeared behind him, wiping his hands on a rag.

“That’s a motor launch,” Calder said.

“They said morning,” Mace muttered, looking at his watch.

“Aye,” Calder said.

Mace darted to a locker secured with a padlock and quickly jammed a key from his pocket into the mechanism, twisting it off and opening the door. Inside were two handheld automatic Glock 17s, and a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun, along with ammunition and mags for both.

The sound of the boat approaching grew louder, an engine pushing against tide and time. Moments later, the white cone of a spotlight swept across the water, picking out the hull of the Cockleshell like a target. The launch came fast, twin outboards kicking up a neat V of spray.

Mace stepped forward, tense but calm, one hand on a loaded Glock held out of sight, the other resting on the rail.

The boat pulled alongside with professional ease. Then came the voice; it was tired, dry, utterly familiar.

“Permission to come aboard!”

Calder blinked.

“Tilson,” Mace said, letting the weapon loosen in his grip.

They moved to the side rail as the launch bumped gently against the hull. A figure climbed the ladder, dusty shirt, duffel bag over one shoulder, hair tousled from the sea wind. Sam Tilson swung onto the deck like a man returning to familiar ground after too long away.

He stopped. Looked around.

The silence struck him first. Then the faces. Pale, hollow-eyed, drawn tight with something he hadn’t been there to witness.

He scanned them. Saw the foil-wrapped body lying still on the far side of the deck. Joseé’s gear hanging abandoned near the dive lockers. Alexa in the shadows, her jaw set like granite. Finally, the Glock.

He looked at Mace. “What the fuck’s happened?”

Mace exhaled. His voice was low. Brittle. “Utter shitshow, Sam.” A pause. “The wreck shifted. Equipment failure. Comms blackout … We’ve lost Paddy. Joseé’s still unconscious. And Shola … well, let’s just say there are questions.”

Tilson didn’t speak. He just stood there as the light shifted around him, the sky darkening into full night, the scent of salt and oil descending on them like a shroud.

CHAPTER 7

The ship’s mess was dim, lit by a single overhead bulb that flickered now and then, casting soft pulses of yellow onto the faded vinyl seating and scratched plastic tabletop. Mugs were stacked on the counter beside an open tin of instant coffee. A crust of salt lined the floor near the hatch, where the sea had come in hours earlier, carried on boots and wetsuits. The air smelled of iodine, sour sweat, and wet neoprene.

Mace sat at the small table beneath the light, a notepad open before him, pen resting idle beside a half-finished mug of black coffee. His hair was still damp, greying stubble bristling along his jaw. He looked hollowed out — the kind of exhaustion that didn’t fade with rest. His left boot tapped faintly beneath the table, the only sign of life as he stared into the notepad, as if willing it to write itself.

Tilson stepped through the doorway, ducking his head slightly out of habit. He’d showered, changed into a clean polo and cargo trousers, but he still carried the taut energy of someone too wired to sleep. He glanced around — saw Maya curled in the corner banquette with her laptop open, light from the screen playing across her tired face. She wore a hoodie now, sleeves pushed up, legs drawn beneath her like a child. Her eyes were fixed on a line of scrolling telemetry. She didn’t look up.

Mace did.

He didn’t say anything. Just reached for his mug, sipped, then grimaced at the cold.

Tilson crossed the galley slowly, easing down onto the bench opposite. A moment passed before he spoke.

“Tell me about the dive.”

Mace didn’t respond immediately. His eyes went back to the notepad. The pen twitched in his fingers, tapping once. He sighed.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything odd,” Tilson said. “Before it all went to hell.”

Mace leaned back, jaw tightening. He looked at the ceiling, exhaled through his nose. For a second, he seemed to debate saying nothing. Then he decided to break his silence.

“There was a drop in Joseé’s oxygen efficiency,” he said at last. “Brief. Two or three points. I flagged it.”

Tilson watched him, eyes narrowed.

“And?”

“Sophie said it was a transient spike. Pressure-related. Minor tank imbalance. Maya didn’t like it. But Sophie talked us down.”

He glanced over his shoulder at Maya, whose fingers had stilled on the keyboard.

“You regret that?” Tilson asked.

“Every minute,” Mace replied. His voice was hoarse. “But I’ve reviewed the feed three times. It looked minor. Marginal. If I’d called off the dive, I’d have been accused of over caution. If I’d gone ahead without asking… maybe I’d be drinking alone right now.”

Tilson said nothing. The silence stretched, filled only by the low hum of the deck fans.

Mace rubbed a hand across his face, the motion weary. “There was one more thing.”

He turned slightly in his seat and pointed toward the small porthole window above the sink, now a square of black.

“There was a tanker. Big bastard. Sitting off the lanes. No flag. Anchored there the night before the dive. Still there next morning.”

Tilson’s brow furrowed. He leaned toward the glass, peering out into the dark.

Gone.

Convenient.

He said nothing, instead turning back toward Mace, his expression unreadable.

A soft sound broke the stillness. The gentle closing of a laptop lid. Maya stood, stretching slowly, her hoodie riding up to reveal the edge of a pale scar along her waist. She looked at them both, eyes rimmed with exhaustion.

“I think I’m done,” she said, voice low. “With the logs, anyway.”

Tilson gave her a small nod. “You should sleep.”

She hesitated. She looked at him. Pleading.

Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak immediately.

“I –” she started, then faltered.

Mace rose quietly, collecting his mug and notepad. He gave Tilson a look. Not quite knowing, not quite unreadable, and slipped out, leaving them alone.

Maya moved around the table slowly, arms folded, suddenly awkward. She wasn’t wearing her usual shield of sarcasm or precision. What was it? Weariness? And something softer beneath.

“No funny stuff,” she said, not quite looking at him. “I just… don’t want to be alone tonight.”

Tilson stood, eyes searching hers.

“Of course.”

She nodded once, not a thank you, but something close. She stepped past him, her shoulder brushing his lightly.

Tilson watched her go, and followed, his footsteps silent on the worn deck plating as the lights of the Cockleshell flickered gently in the dark.

Only four hours later, dawn broke slowly across Ras Ghareb, washing the horizon in the faintest pink before bleeding into gold. A heat haze was already forming over the shallows, making the oil drums and jetty cranes shimmer like half-forgotten memories. The Cockleshell lay quietly at anchor, her decks slick with drying salt, her crew subdued.

The silence was broken by the low rumble of a fast-approaching patrol boat.

The vessel carved a clean wake through the brownish shallows south of the port. Eighty-five feet of sleek, angular hull in unbroken grey. All-welded aluminium, bristling with authority. Twin waterjets churned beneath the stern, sending up twin fans of spray. Tilson watched from the deck as it cut a line across the Gulf like a blade through silk.

It was a Swiftships 26-metre Fast Patrol Craft, or FPC, standard issue for the Egyptian Coast Guard, but not often deployed up here unless something had gone seriously wrong. She was a lean, lethal thing, designed for interdiction and offshore interception. She looked fast at anchor. Cruising, she could hit thirty knots. Four watertight compartments were sealed behind reinforced bulkheads.

In recent months, vessels like this had taken on a new kind of urgency. With Houthi attacks escalating in the southern Red Sea and threatening commercial traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal, Egypt had quietly bolstered its coastal patrols. The Swiftships FPC, with its speed, agility, and ability to project force quickly along the littoral zone, was ideally suited to intercept suspicious skiffs or provide armed escort to vulnerable merchant ships. Armed with .50 calibre mounts M2 Browning HMGs or locally licensed equivalents and crewed by sailors trained in rapid interdiction, it was pure deterrent in motion; fast enough to respond, small enough to go unnoticed until it was already too close.

“No name stencilled on the hull. A number – P-211,” Mace reported.

As she pulled alongside, a boarding team made ready, a dozen in total, armed and alert but not hostile. A uniformed officer stood near the prow of the oncoming vessel, desert brown fatigues, sidearm at the hip, posture straight-backed and controlled.

The launch pulled alongside with precision. Mooring lines were thrown and caught, and within moments, a tall, lean man with olive skin and mirrored sunglasses was climbing aboard.

The man stepped from his boat onto the Cockleshell with a crisp precision that said he didn’t need to raise his voice to be obeyed.

“Lieutenant Basim Ghali,” he announced. “Egyptian Coastguard, Port Authority liaison.”

Ghali was tall and wiry, his sandy uniform sharp as a scalpel. His face was long, with high cheekbones and a hawk-like nose that gave him the air of a man who judged before he spoke. A thin, pencil moustache rode his upper lip. Not flamboyant, but meticulous. Behind the mirrored sunglasses, his eyes remained unreadable. He moved like a man used to giving orders from the edge of a boat, with salt in his lungs and his Beretta 92FS M9 9mm Parabellum never more than a handsbreadth away.

His arrival shifted the mood on deck. Tension, already tight as a bowstring, coiled tighter still. No one spoke unless asked. Even Mace’s usual irreverence dulled.

“Luke Mace. Owner of this vessel.” He offered a curt nod, his expression blank.

Ghali didn’t shake hands. He removed his sunglasses slowly, revealing eyes that had seen too much and trusted too little.

“We received your report regarding the diving incident,” Ghali said. “One confirmed fatality. One injured. One … temporarily unaccounted for?”

Mace hesitated.

“Shola returned,” he said quietly. “We thought we’d lost him. But he made it back.”

Ghali made a note in a small leather-bound book. “Then we will require a revised casualty statement. The body?”

“Below. Packed and ready for transfer. Calder, here, will accompany.”

The bluff Geordie bobbed his head.

“Very good,” the Egyptian replied.

The exchange was smooth, respectful. Efficient. But Ghali’s eyes never stopped scanning — the deck, the faces, the tension hanging in the air like an overstrung line.

“Can I see all crew on deck. Please?

Mace turned to Maya. “Can you get the late risers up here, now?”

She descended to the medical cabin to check on Joseé, who was still unconscious under sedation — but the second bunk was empty. No Sophie. And her kit was gone. Her clipboard. Her drybag. The locker where she’d kept her jump gear was open, empty.

She moved swiftly to the cabin Shola had occupied alone. Equally as vacant. No duffel. No personal effects.

Maya returned to the bridge.

“They’re gone,” she said. “Sophie and Shola. Both of them.”

“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“I mean they’re not aboard.”

Mace’s voice went hard and quiet. “Check the launch logs.”

Maya was already typing. The console pinged.

“Launch Two. Undocked at 03:18. No nav lights. No recorded comms ping.”

“Stealth launch,” Tilson said grimly.

Ghali’s head turned sharply. “Are you telling me two crew members vanished from your vessel during the night without authorisation?”

“They took a launch,” Maya said over the radio. “Didn’t log the departure.”

“They had no reason to,” Mace muttered. “They weren’t under investigation.”

Ghali’s lips pressed into a thin line. “We will notify the local police immediately. This now qualifies as a criminal investigation.”

He emerged from the bridge after reviewing the launch logs with Maya and Calder and stepped out onto the deck, the breeze lifting the edges of his desert fatigues, clipboard still tucked beneath one arm. His expression remained unreadable; calm yet threaded with steel.

Mace followed him to where Tilson had taken up position near the forward rail, watching the horizon bleed into soft pink and gold. The first tankers of the morning were already moving, one northbound, another easing south their hulls half-lost in haze.

“We need to bring this vessel into port,” Ghali said, voice firm.

Mace turned slightly. “We were planning to hold here until your investigation team came aboard.”

“That’s no longer advisable,” Ghali said. “Not with two crew missing, one injured, and a body on ice. You’ve already attracted attention. The last thing we need is another incident offshore. Especially in these waters.”

He gestured toward the open sea. “The lanes are tightening. Too many eyes. Too much traffic.”

There was a pause. Then he added, more quietly, “We’ll escort you in.”

Tilson glanced over. “Escort?”

Ghali met his gaze. “Standard procedure. When there’s a chance someone might run.”

He didn’t smile. Didn’t blink. Just let the words settle.

Mace exhaled. “Understood. We’ll prepare for departure.”

Below, Maya was returning to the med-bay. She stepped quietly into the cabin, pulling the door to behind her with a soft click. The hum of the life-support unit was steady, a mechanical heartbeat in the stillness. Pale light filtered through the narrow porthole, casting a faint amber glow over the cabin.

Joseé lay curled slightly on her side, wrapped in thermal blankets, her face bruised and slack, lips parted beneath the oxygen mask. The skin around her eyes was mottled with burst capillaries, blood vessels pushed to breaking point, but she was breathing. Slow. Shallow. Regular.

Maya approached without a word, checking the vitals on the portable monitor. Oxygen saturation stable, heart rate low but even. She reached out, adjusting the mask slightly, and brushed a damp strand of hair back from Joseé’s forehead. The diver’s skin was cool to the touch, clammy beneath the sheen of sweat.

For a long moment, Maya stood there, hand resting gently on the edge of the bunk. Watching her. She’d known plenty of divers to bounce back from close calls. But this didn’t feel like that. This felt … different. It wasn’t the physical trauma, it was whatever had twisted beneath it. Whoever had caused it. How could Sophie have abandoned her like this?

“I’ve got you,” she murmured to her friend.

Then she straightened, double-checked the IV, and made her way back to the hatch, jaw set.

Moments later Maya was back on deck. As she made her way back to the dive deck, she spotted something reflecting the sun near the stern rail. She crouched to retrieve it. It was an iPhone. The screen was cracked, the case slick with condensation. She pocketed it quickly and rejoined the others. “We need to think about Joseé,” she announced.

Everyone looked at her.

“She’s sedated. And Sophie was her assigned medic. She needs medical attention. Urgently.”

Ghali turned to one of his officers and spoke quickly in Arabic. The man nodded and relayed the message on a handheld.

“We’ll airlift her to Hurghada General. They’re the closest facility with a trauma wing and recompression chamber,” Ghali said. “The hospital is on alert for offshore casualties. We can have her airborne within the hour.”

“We’ve got oxygen and stabilisation,” Mace said quietly. “But she needs a real trauma team.”

Ghali snorted as if put out. “Second medical evac in two days,” he muttered. “Private callout, yesterday morning. Contract job. Some crewmen on a tanker south of here. Heatstroke, apparently.”

Tilson looked up sharply. “Which tanker?”

Ghali shrugged. “Didn’t catch the name. Something big. No flag.”

Mace glanced at Tilson.

Tilson’s jaw clenched slightly. The same one that was anchored nearby until recently. Interesting.

“The medical team will meet you at the Ras Ghareb heliport,” Ghali continued. “Air ambulance is inbound from Hurghada. Your crew member will be stabilised onshore, then lifted directly.”

“And the local police?” Tilson asked.

“They’ll be waiting,” Ghali replied. “So will the coroner. The remaining crew will be confined to the boat until further notice.”

“What about me?” Tilson left his position and approached the Egyptian officer.

“I understand you arrived late last night,” Ghali said. “Via private charter from Cairo.”

“Correct.”

“You were not present at the time of the dive?”

“I was in the air.”

“And after?”

Tilson glanced toward Maya. “I spent the night with Ms Suresh.”

Ghali was unmoved. “You are not under formal restriction, Mr Tilson. But I recommend you remain in Ras Ghareb for the duration of the investigation.”

Tilson nodded. “And if I need to leave?”

“You will inform the port authority and the police.”

There was a pause. Long enough to let something unsaid pass between them.

“I’m here under the protection of the British government,” Tilson said quietly. “If that becomes relevant, I’ll escalate through the embassy.”

Ghali gave a slow nod. It seemed respectful, but the man’s expression told a different story. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said tersely.

He gave a single, crisp nod and turned back toward the gangway. Moments later, the coast guard launch peeled away, looping in a wide arc to hold position off their port quarter. It was a silent shadow with twin Browning barrels pointed nowhere and everywhere at once.

Mace watched them go. “Bloody charming,” he muttered. “Escort. Jesus!”

“I found something,” Maya said when the coast guard had gone. She showed them the iPhone, scotching it on to show a standard lock screen. “It’s Sophie’s,” she said, holding it up. “Shola’s had a ship he served on as the lock screen. This doesn’t.”

“No point trying the location service for her, then,” Tilson commented drily.

“And he probably dropped his ‘n’ all,” Mace added.

Tilson didn’t answer. He stared after the patrol boat, jaw tight.

“Do you think the tanker was the same one?” Maya asked. Clever.

“It’s a possibility,” Tilson said. “Any way we can find out on the down low?”

“We can give it a go, Sammy-boy,” Mace added. “Where you off to?”

“I’m going ashore,” Tilson said finally. “Shell Sea Hotel. Maybe someone there knows something or saw Shola behaving suspiciously while you lot were ashore.”

CHAPTER 8

The morning heat was rising fast over Ras Ghareb. By the time the air ambulance came skimming over the coast, the Cockleshell had been turned into something between a hospital ward and a crime scene. The Egyptian coastguard cutter remained parked close offshore, its twin waterjets ticking softly in the current, two armed sailors silhouetted against the bow.

A deep thrum built in the sky, low and rhythmic, the sound of spinning blades carried on rising thermals. Moments later, the AgustaWestland AW139 appeared above the refinery silos, banking slightly before dropping into a long approach over the harbour. Its paintwork was sun-faded white with blue medical crosses on each flank, the undercarriage speckled with desert grit. The pilot brought it in steady, angling for the concrete helipad near the harbour master’s building, a flat grey slab ringed with frayed yellow tape and the scorch marks of too many hot landings.

On the Cockleshell, Maya stood by the port rail, watching the rotorcraft descend. Her arms were folded tightly, knuckles white. Below deck, Mace and Alexa had lifted Joseé carefully onto a stretcher, securing her with padded webbing. She was still unconscious, her face pale, the oxygen mask misting with every slow breath. Her wetsuit had been cut away, replaced with dry blankets. Her skin was blotched with deep bruises, the kind that came from impact or pressure far below the surface.

Ghali had made the arrangements fast. Efficient. A small paramedic team appeared minutes after touchdown, pushing a gurney across the jetty at a trot, ducking against the downdraft. A woman in olive scrubs took one look at Joseé’s vitals and barked orders in Arabic. Within three minutes, the French Canadian was strapped in and hoisted aboard.

As they loaded her, Ghali turned to Mace.

“She’ll go to Hurghada General. Twenty-eight minutes by air. We’ll have a trauma consultant waiting.”

Mace nodded, jaw tight. “Thanks.”

The paramedics climbed in, the door slammed, and the chopper rose with a howl of throttled power. Joseé vanished into the brightening sky.

Tilson stood aft, watching it disappear. He didn’t say a word.

Half an hour later, it was Paddy’s turn.

The zipped black body bag was carried with solemn precision. Calder walked beside it, jaw clenched, eyes forward, his Royal Navy shoulder tattoo still visible beneath his rolled sleeve. He didn’t speak, but gripped the side of the stretcher as if holding on to more than a body. As the launch departed slowly this time, no one watched. It felt like a private thing.

The deck was emptier without them.

By late morning, the heat was clawing its way into even the deepest shadows. Diesel fumes mingled with the dry tang of seaweed and old fuel. Mace was with Ghali and a couple of police officers below decks, preparing statements. Maya had shut herself in the ops room, headphones on, working through the logs with the ferocity of someone trying not to think.

Tilson stood by the gangway, adjusting the cuff of his shirt.

He wore a tailored Arc’teryx LEAF Assault Shirt AR in khaki tan, the sleeves rolled neatly below the elbow, vented panels running under the arms. His trousers were Triple Aught Design Vandal RS in light grey, built for mobility and long wear. On his feet, a pair of Lowa Zephyr GTX Mid TF boots in desert sand, laced tight and already showing the scuffs of the last few days. Around his wrist, his trusty Omega Seamaster GMT 300 Co-Axial. His sunglasses were black frameless Maui Jim Ho’okipa that turned the harsh white light of Ras Ghareb into soft amber. He disembarked with nothing more than a light daypack slung over one shoulder, gait unhurried. No one tried to stop him.

The harbour was quiet and still, if you didn’t count the heat. It shimmered around the cranes and fuel tanks, warping the outlines of distant fishing boats like mirages. A few workers moved in the shadows of the warehouses, shirts unbuttoned, eyes tracking him in the way small-town people always tracked strangers who walked like they didn’t belong.

Tilson followed the curve of the road past the customs station, turning onto a side path marked only by sun-bleached Arabic and a faded painted arrow. It wasn’t far to the Shell Sea Hotel, maybe twelve minutes on foot, but the sun seemed like it was trying to peel the skin off his back.

He moved at a measured pace, not too slow, not too fast. He didn’t glance behind him more than once.

He felt them before he saw them.

Two men, perhaps three, shadowing the dusty curve of the coastal road beyond the gas station where the tarmac cracked and the sea wind carried fine grit like flour through the air. Dressed in loose-fitting black garments, deliberately nondescript. Almost tactical. Tunics cut long to mid-thigh, trousers baggy but belted, the kind of clothing designed for airflow and concealment. Urban desert-wear. Modern Bedouin with edge.

Not a word passed between them.

Tilson angled slightly as he passed a row of shuttered market stalls, catching the shape of them reflected in the curve of a parked motorbike mirror. The older one moved with weight, thick-chested, maybe forty-five, with a heavy gait and something hard slung beneath the hem of his tunic. A pistol, probably. Not holstered; jammed into the waistband. It smacked of amateurism.

The second was younger. Twitchier. Lighter on his feet, but less disciplined. He walked with the crouch-shouldered caution of a man who wanted to be invisible but didn’t know how.

Neither of them was Egyptian police. No epaulettes. No sidearm protocols. Besides, a small police station like Ras Ghareb could hardly afford three officers to follow him. And they were too quiet. Too independent. Must be private muscle. Probably freelance. Possibly local.

Tilson didn’t turn his head. He kept moving past the half-built petrol station where rusted drums spilled into the sand and the coastal road narrowed into cracked concrete. He adjusted his sunglasses and slipped a hand casually into his pocket, feeling for the ceramic blade taped behind his notepad.

Tilson didn’t break stride. Didn’t glance behind.

The Shell Sea Hotel stood just off the coast road, a salmon-hued slab of concrete and heat-baked tile that looked like it had been airlifted out of a more hopeful era. Two storeys high and stretched wide like a government dormitory, it wore its faded grandeur with the reluctant pride of a retired General. Dignified, but sun-wrinkled, and past its prime. The paintwork, once a crisp sand-and-cream contrast, had dulled to soft terracotta. Cracks flaked the facade like dry mud. Above the entrance, the faded red sign curved over the portico like a weary salute: the name was written in capital letters, all slightly uneven, the gold trim long since scorched to bronze.

Tilson crossed the empty forecourt, past a wilting hedge of tamarisk and low plastic bollards bleached grey from the relentless sun. The scent of diesel and warm sand clung to the breeze. A pair of cats lounged in the shade beneath a dusty Corolla. Neither moved.

The steps leading up to the hotel’s twin glass doors were chipped and uneven, worn smooth in the centre from years of oil boots and workmen’s shoes. The decorative pillar out front, shaped vaguely like a seashell, had been painted several times over, each new coat applied without removing the old. It peeled now like parchment.

Tilson adjusted his sunglasses and glanced back over his shoulder. The two men still lingered near the road. They hadn’t followed him through the twin wrought iron gates. One pretended to check his phone. The other squinted at a distant billboard. Neither had spoken since he’d left the coast road. Still watching.

The former SBS man gave them a smile to let them know he knew they were there and pushed open one of the oversized doors that gave onto the reception.

Inside, the heat clung like plastic wrap. A ceiling fan wobbled above the narrow area, slicing the air without conviction. The front desk sat like a battlefield relic, battered wood, a smudged glass top, mismatched ledgers, and a plastic tray with an old kettle and a basket of instant coffee sachets.

The walls had been painted deep red, now dulled with dust. Fake flowers sat in vases that were probably original to the oil boom of the 90s. Behind the desk, a square of pigeonholes displayed a handful of keys on plastic tags, some wrapped in tape. A TV played quietly in the corner, muted Arabic news from Al Jazeera. An English translation scrolled across the screen beneath the images. Now, a weather report. Hot. Possible sandstorms. What a surprise.

Tilson stepped up to the desk. No one was there.

He waited, eyes scanning the room. To the right, a low doorway opened into a lounge area, lit by wall sconces and cooled by a wall aircon unit that buzzed like a dying mosquito. A set of hard wooden armchairs upholstered in once gaudy fake tartan were clustered around a Formica table, all now faded and covered in a film of salt and time. A red-and-cream rug curled at the edges, refusing to lie flat.

The hotel smelled of old fabric and floor polish. Somewhere, someone had cooked with garlic and hadn’t bothered to wash up. The floorboards creaked as he shifted his weight. Then came the sound of footsteps, the soft clop-clup of backless sandals, and a short man in a white polo appeared from the side door, rubbing his eyes. The receptionist.

“Yes, Sir?”

“As-salamu alaykum,” Tilson offered.

The response should have been Wa alaykum as-salam. But no.

“Ah. You are … British?” the man asked, voice polite but distracted.

Tilson offered a nod, tone neutral. “I believe some of my team were in here a few nights ago.”

The man blinked. “You are with the ship people? The divers?”

“That’s right.”

The receptionist nodded slowly, thoughtful now. “Yes. Yes, they were here. Five of them. Er, three men, two women. They came. Drank. Ate. They stayed the night. Separate rooms.”

Tilson folded his arms. “Did they cause any trouble?”

“No, no trouble, basha. They drank a little in the bar. Laughed loud. Went to their rooms.”

“You remember what they looked like?”

“Some, yes.” He scratched at his eyebrow. “There was a big woman. Tall, like soldier.”

Alexa.

“And an older man with freckles. Very loud.”

Paddy for sure.

“The Sudani was quiet. Sat at the back.”

Shola.

‘Sudani’ was sometimes used colloquially and imprecisely to refer to darker-skinned Africans. It’s not inherently offensive, but context matters. Tilson didn’t think he meant any harm, but corrected him nonetheless.

“He’s from South Shields,” he said. “Not Sub-Saharan Africa.”

The receptionist inclined his head.

“Anything else?”

The man hesitated. “There was another woman. Not with the group when they arrive. She come later.”

Tilson’s hackles rose. “Later?”

“After midnight. End of my shift. I saw her come in from garden.”

“Describe her.”

The man shrugged. “Younger than other woman. Pretty. Blonde hair. She wears a blue top. Tight jeans. Not Egyptian.”

Sophie.

“She met man in the garden,” the receptionist added. “They stood near gate. He wears an old-style suit. White shirt. Big stomach. Smokes a lot. They didn’t stay long together. She looked… not comfortable. He left on foot, I think. She started to go, then that quiet man, the Sudani. He came out.”

Tilson’s voice was low now. “Did they speak?”

“Yes. I think he surprised to see her? They talked. It got… loud. Not shouting, but sharp. He pointed at her phone. She walked away first. He stood there after she left. Then went to bed. The rest of went up maybe twenty minutes after. I no see her again.”

“How did she leave?”

“Maybe taxi? She walked off in the dark.”

“What did you make of it?”

The man raised his palms. “It wasn’t my business. I think a fight? Maybe they were lovers. This happens, yes?”

Tilson didn’t answer. His mind was already racing, pulling together fragments—the dropped iPhone, the comms blackout, the sabotage on the dive.

Sophie hadn’t just snuck ashore.

She’d met someone.

And Shola was involved somehow.

He nodded once to the receptionist and stepped away from the desk, heart heavy with the shape of what had begun that night. By morning, they were both missing.

“Bar open?” Tilson asked.

The man pointed past the lounge to a small corridor. “There. Not many guests now, basha.”

“Lucky me,” Tilson murmured.

He moved through the corridor, past flickering strip lights and a warped poster for the 2008 African Cup of Nations. The air grew thicker with each step, the faint reek of engine oil drifting in through the open windows from a garage bay somewhere out the back.

Before he reached the bar, his iPhone buzzed. He took it from his pocket and checked the message. It was from Maya.

Tanker was the Zophiel. Suezmax size. Built 2022. Owned and operated by Cobalt Wave out of Monrovia. Liberian flag. M x

Cobalt Wave. Tilson vaguely recalled the name when his team had been looking at shipping companies during their investigation into extraordinary rendition to Nigeria. Not linked to that, but one of the big boys in the business – like Euronav but not as big. No one was bigger than them. Maybe more of a Frontline. That was a Norwegian-controlled shipping and oil conglomerate founded by billionaire John Fredriksen, “the world’s richest tanker owner”.

He moved on, pausing on the threshold, blinking once.

The bar was long and narrow, barely lit, the kind of place that felt more like a ship’s galley than a drinking hole. A few tall stools stood at odd angles around a tiled counter. A sticky rack of spirits glinted faintly behind a scratched Perspex panel. There were a few tables in alcoves — old laminate ones with cigarette burn marks, each accompanied by a single, threadbare chair. The sun painted bars of light across the floor, but the salt build-up made the view look like it was underwater.

The bartender wore a stained uniform of black and white. He sat on a stool chain-smoking Cleopatra Golds. His eyes followed Tilson as he made his way down the bar, but he never moved to serve him. Too much effort. After all, the bar was devoid of customers. Except one woman.

She sat near the far end of the room, a glass of something amber in front of her. Her hair was long, blonde, loosely pinned back, with strands spilling over her shoulder. She wore a soft, pale shirt and salmon-pink shorts cinched with a brown belt. A patterned scarf, bright red and white, was wrapped loosely around her neck and over her head, a desert nod to modesty, perhaps. Or camouflage. Her legs were tanned and lithe.

Even seated, she looked composed. A natural stillness, as if she’d chosen the bar for its vantage point not its drinks menu. Which was almost undoubtedly true.

Tilson stopped mid-step. The aircon buzz went silent in his ears. He knew her.

Kira Kostina.

Former honey trap. Former lover. FSB agent for Mother Russia.

The last time he’d seen her, she left him for dead in the tony Norwegian port of Flåm. But since then, she had actually helped him, albeit over the phone, with some former Stasi records the Russians had. She was fickle, dangerous, beautiful, and now turning to look at him.

Her eyes didn’t move. But she smiled softly. “You took your time.”

CHAPTER 9

“Kira.” He kept his tone flat, but the name still caught in his throat like a fishhook. “Didn’t expect to see you in this part of the world.”

Her smile became warmer, her mouth cheekily upturned. “No? Did you expect to be followed, though?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he sat down opposite her, gestured to the lazy bartender, and one the man had lumbered over, ordered a Sakara beer. The Egyptian lager came warm, predictably, but he took a sip anyway.

“Who are they?” he asked. “Your lot?”

Tilson looked at the warm beer. Kira cocked her head. “If ‘my lot’ were following you, Sam, you wouldn’t see them. Or me.”

“Cute.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyes tired. “You denying, or boasting?”

Her voice dropped. “Your underwater efforts have attracted attention. The wrong sort. I’m here to smooth tensions. Not raise them.”

“So you didn’t have anything to do with the sabotage?”

“I didn’t blow your dive, Sam, I didn’t kill your man, and I didn’t have anything to do with your medic going missing.”

“That’s funny,” he said, eyes still on his beer. “Because it smells like a Russian op. Obfuscation. Sabotage. Internal fracture.”

Kira reached forward and placed a cool and delicate hand on his. “Believe me, Sam, this is not FSB.”“GRU?” She squeezed his hand now, shaking her head. “Nor them. You can be sure that there was no intervention by us.”

He looked up at her. “Then tell me what I should be sure of, Kira. Because I’ve got one man dead, one woman vanishing without trace, and the wreck we’re meant to be mapping fucking collapses under us. I’m not feeling very reassured.”

She stared at him for a long moment before leaning in, almost whispering. “I’ll tell you why I’m here. You’re in danger, Sam. Your whole team. That wreck is more than a Cold War museum. It’s a graveyard.”

“That warning is pure 20/20 hindsight.” He removed his hand from hers.

“Some people don’t want it disturbed.”

“Who?” he said.

Kira gave a slow blink, as if considering. “Powerful people.”

“Kira,” he said, holding her gaze. “If you’re not here to stop me, what are you here for?”

Her eyes softened for a second. “To warn you. You’re not the only one chasing ghosts.”

A silence stretched between them, thin as wire. The fan above them creaked with each rotation, stirring little more than stale smoke and the faint scent of lemon polish and sweat. In the far corner, the barman had vanished again, either to smoke, or sleep. The place seemed less like a functioning hotel bar and more like a holding pen for the things time forgot.

Tilson took another pull from the beer, though it had gone entirely warm now. The bitterness sat low in his throat, not unpleasant. Familiar.

“You’re not exactly the patron saint of fair warnings,” he said finally.

Kira smiled sympathetically. “No. But I thought I owed you one.”

He raised an eyebrow. “One?”

Her expression shifted, not quite a smirk, not quite regret. “Don’t push your luck, Captain.”

He leaned back on the chair, his boots resting wide, posture loose. But his eyes were still tight, still watching her like she might vanish again. Like she always did.

“Not FSB,” he said. “Not GRU. Not even one of your charming private-sector cut-outs?”

“No.”

“Then who?” he asked facetiously. “CIA? DGSE? Opus Dei? The Avengers?”

Kira shook her head, smiling at his facetiousness. “No flags. That’s the problem. It’s murkier than usual. What you disturbed down there, Sam. It’s not historical. It’s personal for some people. And they have the means to make a mess.”

He gave a slow, thoughtful nod. The owners of a shipping company would be loaded. Well capable of undertaking a mission like this. “I am guessing you can’t tell me more?”

She nodded. “But it’s scary, Sam. Very scary.”

“I know you don’t scare easy, Kira.”

She nodded again, biting her lip. “But I’m scared now. For you.”

She looked down briefly, before met his eyes.

“You were always the one who thought you could dive deep for the truth,” she said, voice softening. “Cut through the noise. Find the clean answer.”

“Still beats playing both sides.”

“Is that what you think I do?”

He looked at her. “I think you hover above the murk, Kira. Just far enough away to stay clean, but never enough to lose sight of what’s in the darkness.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “That’s more poetic than I expect from you.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

She tilted her head, studied him. “They’ll be bolder now. They’ve brought your investigation to a close. They’ll want you gone. Permanently.”

Tilson bobbed his head. “I expect so. But they don’t know me.”

Kira moistened her lips. “Not like I do.”

Tilson felt a frisson of desire. He wanted to kiss those lips again.

“And what are you going to do with that info?” he asked playfully.

She stood and bent down to kiss his cheek.

“I’ve got to walk away, Sam,” she whispered as she did so. “Sorry.”

There was genuine regret behind her words. Whether for having to leave him without all the intelligence she held, or because she had to leave him. Period.

He stood as well, looking at her. “Thank you.”

They were too close for the space between them to feel neutral, the air suddenly heavy with tension. He noted the shirt clinging to her breasts, her throat delicate and smooth, her eyes piercing. His heartbeat quickened at what hadn’t been said. What wouldn’t be said.

“Be careful,” she murmured.

He breathed a half a laugh, letting the moment go. “That doesn’t work on me.”

Kira stepped past him but turned at the door. “At least I tried.”

Then she was gone, folding into the shadows of the hallway like mist into smoke.

Tilson lingered a moment longer, staring at the door. He gave her time to get away and made his way out of the hotel.

Behind him, the bar resumed its long silence. Ahead, his pursuers were waiting.

The afternoon sun hung high over Ras Ghareb, casting a relentless glare that bleached the colour from the buildings and turned the asphalt into a shimmering mirage. The air was thick with heat, each breath like an inhalation from an oven. Shadows clung tightly to the sides of structures, offering little respite from the oppressive warmth.

Tilson turned left at the corner of the building, stepping out of the narrow shadow of the hotel and into the blinding brightness of Al Menaa main street beyond. He didn’t change pace. Didn’t look back. Walked like a man with somewhere to be and time to get there. Across the street was what he thought was an abandoned petrol station with weeds breaking through the concrete forecourt. Then a rickety Mercedes pulled in started to fill up.

Tilson crossed the four-lane main road and doubled back a few metres before turning left past a dusty car park and down a wide road with an amazingly green football pitch to one side. His tails kept pace, but were hanging back, perhaps under the delusion that he hadn’t spotted them. Ahead, the heat radiated off the road surface, creating a wavering distortion that made the distant houses and shops appear to dance.

He took another turn, this time to the right, past a group of thirsty-looking palms and some shuttered hardware shops. He emerged onto a strange roundabout road layout and as there was no traffic, walked right across it towards the grand building of the Ras Ghareb post office. It was closed.

Behind him, the three men were emerging from the small side road he’s just traversed. Tilson watched their reflections in the glass front of a restaurant. The leader, a bulky man, told his two comrades to spread out. This was evident by his flapping hands and how one started crossing the roundabout while the other two waited.

A sudden gust of wind blew down the street, mixing the scent of salt from the nearby Red Sea with the dry, dusty air, creating a pungent aroma that clung to the nostrils. The hot wind also stirred the fine sand in the desert to the west of town, sending it swirling into the air before settling back down in a thin layer over everything. Tilson moved on, crossing the Kanat Al Sweis boulevard. This was the busiest road he’d seen so far. The few locals braving the heat moved languidly, their actions slow and deliberate, as if conserving energy in the oppressive climate.

Tilson’s shirt clung to his back, soaked with sweat, and his boots scuffed against the uneven pavement as he navigated the bleached concrete and sand of the pavement. The sun’s rays reflected off the windows of the buildings, creating blinding flashes that forced him to squint. Despite the heat, he remained alert, senses attuned despite the clumsy way in which he was being followed.

Ras Ghareb seemed to hold its breath, the usual sounds of activity muted by the sweltering heat. Only the strained hum of an air conditioning unit or the occasional honk of a car horn broke the silence. Tilson continued down the street, each step bringing him closer to the confrontation he knew was inevitable. But this would be on his terms.

The sky above him was a featureless dome, flat and bone-pale, as if colour itself had been bleached away. Tilson walked on, sweat crawling down his spine beneath his shirt. It was the kind of heat that silenced even the dogs and sent smart people inside to lie beneath fans. But Tilson had work to do. His appetite for cool air would have to wait.

He moved with calm purpose, outwardly unbothered, scanning with peripheral vision alone. He marked the positions of the shadows, the lean of a parked truck that might conceal another tail or provide him with a hiding place.

Behind him, the faint crunch of footsteps tracked him still, faint yet patient, confident in the belief that they hadn’t been made. He didn’t hurry, didn’t break the rhythm. His pace was natural.

A few blocks back up the street, he spied an opportunity: a slim side alley entrance, almost obscured by a hand-painted sign for a mobile repair shop. The passage widened out after the entrance, shadowed, thick with the smell of sun-warmed bins and old grease. A rusted fridge lay collapsed on its side, halfway down. Tilson marked it. There was a corner to the left, a secondary wall to funnel from the right. He calculated the turn angles without breaking stride.

He passed it by.

Two lefts. That’s all it would take. He veered casually onto the next road. This took him back onto the main route of Al Menaa, the heat radiating harder here, buildings lower, closer to the ground. Somewhere, a pair of teenagers were arguing in Arabic over the hiss of a nearby air conditioning unit; their voices flattened against the stucco walls.

Tilson turned again, second left, down an unnamed cul-de-sac and broke into a run, shoulders looser, legs lengthening in quiet confidence as he traced a path that would put him back at the far end of the alley, upstream of the men behind him, by the phone shop sign.

He was already breathing harder, but as he slowed down to a walk when he reached fridge, he quickly caught his breath. The alley had swallowed him whole. And despite the stench, it was cooler here. Close walls rose on either side, peeled paint and grime-streaked pipework. A child’s sandal lay abandoned beside a broken satellite dish. There was no sound save the occasional tick of cooling metal.

He pressed himself back into the shadow of a stack of crates beside an old industrial door and waited, drawing in each breath slowly through his nose. He flexed his fingers. Let his muscles settle. His pulse had slowed to baseline before the first man came past.

Young. Late twenties. The spring in his step gave him away. Eager, overconfident, more runner than soldier. He passed without checking the sides, his head low, focused on catching up with his target, who has turned a corner several metres in front of him. He clearly had no idea that his target was now watching his head from behind.

The former SBS man let him go.

The second came next. He was oldest, broadest, much heavier on his feet. He wiped his brow with the inside of his elbow as he passed, muttering in rapid, breathless Arabic. Frustration, not fear. He wasn’t the brain. He was the blunt object. Tilson watched him vanish from his narrow field of vision, let the echo of his footsteps fade before shifting position slightly, slow and silent as a cat circling for the kill.

And then came the third.

Sharper-dressed. Slower. More attentive. He didn’t move like someone following orders. He moved like someone auditing the performance of the men who did. Trim beard, collared shirt, belt sitting evenly on a flat stomach. He was an Arabic J D Vance. Tilson saw the subtle shift of his weight as he walked—ready to pivot or sprint if needed. He was the one that mattered.

Tilson let Vance get absolutely level with the alleyway before striking. One hand snaked forward, fingers locking around the back of the man’s neck, the other jamming between his shoulder blades as he hauled him backwards into the darkness like a fisherman pulling in a writhing catch. The man let out a strangled grunt, arms flailing once, but Tilson already had the leverage. He slammed the man into the brick wall with a dull thud, using the momentum to knock the breath from him.

His comrades would have no idea that their leader had been taken. They would have been too far ahead and realising that Tilson had made a run for it. He had moments before they either came back or found the other end of the alley.

Vance struggled. Strong. Sharp. Fast. One hand went low to the hip or belt. Tilson couldn’t see what he was reaching for, but he felt the shift in weight and jammed his forearm into the man’s throat, cutting the movement short. They wrestled for balance. Vance’s leg kicked out behind, trying to catch Tilson off-centre, but he adjusted his stance accordingly. Drove his weight through the man’s chest and pressed harder. The man choked but twisted. Something flashed at his waistband.

That’s when it escalated.

Had he seen a weapon, or was it a feint? Either way, the MI5 man didn’t wait to find out. He slammed Vance back again, this time into a pile of old crates. They gave way with a crack and sent them both tumbling into the rear of the alley. The bearded man grabbed something and thrust upward in desperation. Tilson caught the glint of a blade, but twisted sideways at the last second, and the man’s own weight did the work for him, driving the blade into his own throat.

There was a crunch. A short, rattling breath. Then nothing.

Vance didn’t move again.

Sam rolled off him, panting now, sweat stinging his eyes. His hand went to the body’s side, instinctively checking for further weapons. Some chewing gum and a packet of cigarettes. Then he felt it. A smartphone.

Tilson had just tucked it into the inside pocket of his shirt when he heard the fast, unguarded rhythm of boots on hot concrete coming from the direction in which he’d entered the alley. The same route he’d used to outflank them.

Of course. They weren’t amateurs. And now they were closing in. The echoes hit the alley walls a moment before the men themselves did: two silhouettes backlit by the distant street, one lean and low-slung, the other heavier, broader-shouldered, his movements stiff with purpose.

Tilson didn’t wait. He moved fast, stepping over the still body of the man he’d taken the phone from, boot heels crunching grit. The alley was tight here, boxed in by corrugated fencing and mismatched walls of faded bricks and breeze blocks. To his right, the broken refrigerator leaned open like a discarded coffin, stinking of rust and long-evaporated freon. Crates and a splintered pallet leaned against the opposite wall. Not much cover. And he couldn’t run until he had a decent chance of getting away unscathed.

The first man shouted something in Arabic. It was urgent, aggressive, and not meant for Tilson’s benefit. The second raised a pistol.

Tilson dropped low, a reflex, lying as close to the metal fridge as possible. The shot cracked like a whip and slammed into the side of the fridge with a shriek of torn metal. He felt the impact in his chest. Not the bullet, but the nearness of it. He twisted hard and rolled behind the open door of the appliance, yanking it shut with him as he moved. It wasn’t a shield, not truly, but it was solid steel, old and full of dead weight.

A second shot rang out and punched the fridge door again. This time, the metal held, but barely. Tilson heard the round thump inside, dull and final. He saw the indentation of the impact.

He didn’t stay still.

With the narrow lane and the fridge as a screen, he charged sideways, shoving the rusted hulk hard with both hands. It screeched across the alley, toppling over on its side, and pinned the leaner man against the wall, eliciting a bark of pain. The heavier man had a wide, fat face with large brown eyes, a lopsided mouth and a nose that had been badly broken and even more badly repaired. He looked like Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars. He now ducked away, raising his weapon for a clearer shot.

Tilson reached him first.

He threw his weight into a shoulder charge that knocked Jabba back into the crates. They tumbled together, wood splintering underfoot. The gun clattered away across the concrete, spinning somewhere into shadow. They grappled—short, savage movements, not clean, not rehearsed. The man smelled of old tobacco and sweat. His fists were strong and the size of hams, but imprecise. Tilson blocked and countered as best he could, trying to use the man’s size against him.

In the chaos, just for a second, Jabba’s hands reached out, settling on Tilson’s hips. Did he want to dance, or something? Tilson took the opportunity of his assailant’s lowered guard to land a punch to his throat. Jabba recoiled, wheezing.

Tilson drew his fist back and punched at the man’s temple. Hard. Enough to drop him.

The narrow mouth of the alley shimmered with heat and movement now. Others approaching. Or maybe the first man, freed from the weight of the fridge, coming around.

Tilson pivoted, ignoring the smarting in his shoulder, and kicked aside the crate debris. He spotted a back door to a shop with the obligatory fly screen of multicoloured plastic strips. Beyond it, a dark, cool retail unit of some kind.

He leapt through the curtain of coloured plastic, the alley’s heat and noise sealing off behind him like a door closing due t the cold fan above the doorway. He landed silently and took in his surroundings. Inside, it was cool and dusty, the scent of cardamom and plastic-wrapped biscuits thick in the air. The shop owner was asleep by his till. Tilson crept quietly to the front door and opened it gently. He slipped through and closed it behind him, just loud enough to wake the owner.

There was shouting behind him as his pursuers entered the shop and the owner objected to the interruption. Tilson didn’t hesitate. He broke into a run, fast enough to put some distance between him and the local boys, but not an all-out sprint.

He turned down Ahmed Shawqi and crossed the road, entering another, wider alley that brought him to a mosque. Checking that no prayers or services were being made, he ducked through its grey, painted wrought-iron gates and kicked his shoes off in the porch, before taking refuge on a stone bench the lined the back wall of the simple building. His shirt was dark with sweat, his breathing deep and ragged. He recovered in a matter of seconds. And that’s when he realised he’d brought a gun into the religious structure. He frowned and reached for the Glock 17, but it wasn’t there. His weapon was gone.

But in his pocket, pressed against his ribs, the phone he had taken from the Vance lookalike buzzed once, soft yet urgent.

He pulled it free.

The screen was already lit.

Tonight. 10pm. Road marker 17. Come alone.

CHAPTER 10

Tilson walked with deliberate pace through the lower town, the sun now curling westward, taking the sharp edge off the heat. The streets were quieter still, shadows lengthening, the town slipping into that strange pause between blistering day and dry dusk. The white paint on the buildings had turned honeyed, and the Red Sea glinted between gaps in the rooftops like a steel blade.

He’d looped inland on foot, past the grey concrete hulk of the municipal building and the long row of shops that served the working districts: tyre repair, mobile top-up, plumbing parts, Pepsi in glass bottles stacked in the shade. No rental desks. No kiosks. Just the local way of doing things.

The garage sat on the southern fringe of Ras Ghareb, nestled beside a low rise of gravel and flyblown scrub, its sign sun-bleached to illegibility and hanging at a tilt. It sprawled across two open bays and a yard scattered with the skeletal remains of half-repaired vehicles: a burned-out Peugeot 405, a pickup missing its bed, and the decapitated front end of a Suzuki microbus stacked on concrete blocks. In one corner, a rusting shipping container leaned against the boundary wall, its padlock snapped and dangling like a tongue.

Tilson stepped inside through a gap in the wire mesh gate. The air was thick with the reek of oil, scorched rubber, and the sweet acidity of spilled battery acid. A battered industrial fan churned dust in lazy circles, and a transistor radio crackled in the back, the voice of a pop star from Cairo mangled by static.

A pair of mechanics were working beneath the lifted chassis of a Land Cruiser, arguing in Arabic over something that sounded like a camshaft. Another was welding something near the far wall, the blue flash of his torch lighting up the space like desert lightning. There were no uniforms. Just vests, flip-flops, and grease-caked hands. But the system ran like a hive. This was a local operation. Family-run. Efficient in the way of places that can’t afford inefficiency.

An older man looked up from a wheeled stool near the main office, wiping his hands on a rag as he stood. Silver hair, three-day stubble, thick arms that still bore the tension of work long after retirement. A gold tooth caught the light when he smiled.

“You need a car?” silver-hair said in Arabic-accented English.

Tilson nodded. “Twenty-four hours. Cash.”

The old man sized him up. His eyes flicked from Tilson’s boots to his shirt—sweat-darkened, travel-wrinkled—and lingered for half a second at his waist, where the Glock was now conspicuously absent.

“Cash?” He sounded suspicious.

Tilson produced a small roll of hundred-dollar bills from his back pocket. The old man smiled for the first time. Then he called out to the main floor. A younger man—maybe his son—appeared from beneath a hatchback with a socket wrench in hand. Silver-hair barked a few words in Arabic, and the younger man vanished into the back. When he returned a minute later, he was behind the wheel of a battered Toyota Hilux; a double cab, older model, maybe 2000? It was sand-dusted and sun-bleached, the colour halfway between beige and forgotten. But it was a reliable 4x4 SUV and it would do perfectly.

“Good car,” the old man said, gesturing. “Engine fine. Tyres okay. Brakes….” He shrugged.

The pickup idled with a dry diesel cough. Its body was scabbed with old paint repairs, the bumper cable-tied at one end, a dangling side mirror flapping gently as it vibrated. Tilson popped the door and climbed in. The seat groaned beneath him, the upholstery sun-cracked and stitched in places with string. The air inside smelled of motor oil, cigarettes, and cumin.

“Brakes OK, though?” Tilson asked.

“Mostly.”

“Aircon?”

The old man snorted. “You are in Egypt. Drive faster.”

Tilson smirked faintly and stepped out again. He pulled the door shut with a metallic creak, then glanced toward the corner of the garage where a rack of tools and miscellaneous equipment was arranged like a black-market buffet.

“You need anything else?” he asked quickly, eager to maximise on this gift from the gods. “I have tyres, petrol, fan belts.” He paused for a moment and then leant in through the window “AK-47, maybe. Huh?”

Tilson saw it nestled on the shelf, partially obscured by a drop cloth and a coil of fan belt, the unmistakable stock of a Kalashnikov.

“Let me see it.”

Silver-hair stepped over to the shelf and came back, removing the magazine from the rifle and ejecting a bullet from the chamber, which he caught deftly in his other hand. Now safe, he passed it to Tilson.

The rifle was worn, scratched to hell, and smelled of Cosmoline corrosion inhibitor and sweat. But it was clean. Maintained. The kind of weapon passed between men who understood how to keep it functional, not pristine. He checked the safety. Chamber clean.

“How much?”

The old man thought for a moment, then named a number. It was fair.

“And the car?”

Silver-hair added the two together. The total was what the kids refer to as ‘spenny’ for what it was, but Tilson haggled him down to something a bit more reasonable. The old man threw in a full tank of diesel, two magazines of ammo for the AK. And a grimy blue towel to wrap the weapon in.

Then they shook hands.

Tilson peeled notes from the roll in his pocket and handed them over without a word.

Tilson slid the weapon under the back seat of the Hilux. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but it wouldn’t draw immediate attention either. Not in this part of Egypt.

“You go outside town?” the man asked, almost casually.

“Just a short drive.”

The old man nodded. “Good. Keep AK-47 close. Huh?” He laughed at his own joke.

Tilson started the engine, and it caught with a rattle and a whine. He let it idle for a moment, adjusted the cracked mirror, and eased the pickup into gear. The gate squealed open as the younger mechanic held it for him. The sun had dropped to the lip of the hills now, flooding the town with a hellishly red light.

***

Tilson left the sodium haze of Ras Ghareb behind as the Hilux climbed out of the town’s low basin and onto the coastal highway, the road unspooling ahead in a narrow ribbon of black between flat, moon-silvered scrubland.

The heat hadn’t yet lifted—desert warmth lingered even after sunset, a dry, baked pressure that seeped through the vents and prickled his skin. With the windows cracked, the wind slid in hot and full of dust, carrying with it the faint stink of engine oil, salt, and the ghost of something chemical from a refinery somewhere further north.

Darkness here was a living thing—thick and total. As clouds overhead cleared, the stars came out in force, hard and sharp in the sea deep blue sky, a canopy of impossible brilliance and volume. Without the veil of streetlamps or city air, the constellations burned with mythic clarity. Orion hung low over the horizon, and the faint haze of the Milky Way spooled out overhead like spilled talcum powder. Tilson drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting lightly on the AK under the seat, his eyes flicking to the mirrors every few minutes. Nothing behind him but darkness, open country, and the sense of something inevitable drawing closer. The hum of tyres on coarse asphalt was the only sound. No music. No chatter. Just the old diesel grinding its way toward something unknowable in the night.

The turnoff came without warning, a break in the guardrail and a sun-warped sign half-swallowed by sand. Its black stencil reading “17”, barely legible in the headlights’ glare. Tilson slowed the Hilux and turned off the main road, tyres crunching over gravel and sunbaked debris. The beam from his headlamps swept across the low remains of a perimeter fence, little more than leaning posts and ragged wire, then lit up a crumbling concrete blockhouse beside a rusted gate that hung askew. Beyond it, the ground dipped slightly into a shallow basin where the plant had once stood—if you could still call it that. Now it was a graveyard of obsolete industry: cement mixers seized into silence, wheelbarrows tipped on their sides like fallen insects, and lengths of pipe coiled like dead snakes in the dust.

Tilson coasted forward, engine growling low, easing the truck between the gateposts. The beam of his lights jittered over broken ground, cracks spidering across what had once been poured foundation, now dry and mottled with desert greenery.

In the distance, the half-shell of a silo loomed like a fallen temple, its skin flaking into sheets and its catwalk sagging with rust. Rebar jutted from the base like teeth. A cracked office unit squatted off to one side, its door hanging open, fluttering slightly in the evening breeze. It might once have held blueprints, clipboards, a kettle on a coil. Now it held only silence.

He pulled up near the edge of the yard, killed the lights, and sat in the dark for a moment. Let the stillness settle around him.

The quiet out here was different. Not the tired hush of a sleeping town, but a bigger, deeper silence—the kind that made your ears strain and your thoughts echo. The kind that told you no one was coming to help.

Tilson stepped out into the cooling air, boots crunching gravel. The breeze had teeth now—light, but insistent—and it brought with it the dry odour of scorched cement and rusted wire. He left the door ajar and rested his hand lightly on the Hilux’s roof, scanning the wide, dark basin. Nothing, besides the ruined machinery and the slow, eerie sway of the desert weeds reclaiming them.

Above, the stars had gathered. Great drifts of them spilled across the sky, more than seemed possible, spattered across the void in brilliant disorder. The Milky Way hung like a river of cold fire, and the longer he looked, the more it revealed itself. Tilson tilted his head back, arms loose at his sides, and traced familiar forms: Cassiopeia’s broken ‘W’. The clean line of Orion’s Belt, low now in the season; Polaris marking north with its quiet confidence. Mars, a distinctive red pinprick.

He remembered lying on the roof of a coastal ops hut during SBS training, somewhere in northwest Scotland – Achiltibuie, maybe? – watching the stars wheel overhead while an instructor with a voice like whisky on gravel pointed them out with a torch. “This,” the man had said, “is your map when there is no map. This is how you get home when the kit fails, or the sea hungrily accepts your dropped compass. Look up. Always look up.”

Tilson hadn’t thought about that night in years. The But now, standing alone with the stars and the wreckage, it came back like muscle memory. He certainly didn’t need a bloody compass to know he was walking into something carefully arranged.

He jerked his head around as he heard the hum of tyres in the distance. Headlights, distant but closing, playing on the same black asphalt he had passed over minutes before. The twin beams rose and fell with the terrain. No rush, no attempt to sneak. A black or dark blue Mercedes SUV, wide and confident, rolling straight into the trap it had laid.

Tilson didn’t move. He waited. One hand on the cool metal of the truck door. The AK was still inside. He wanted to see how this meeting went before he grabbed an assault rifle. He grinned as he thought to himself that there would be many an SBS instructor who would have thought him crazy to think this way. But he was a spy now. An intelligence officer.

The Mercedes crested the rise and rolled down into the basin, tyres crackling over loose rock. It stopped a few car lengths away and idled, lights still on. The front passenger door opened first. Then the rear. Two men stepped out—familiar now, silhouettes he’d earned bruises from. The blunt one. Jabba. And the wiry one.

Then came the third.

Different build. Similar to the man who had, in effect, killed himself with a blade in that alley earlier. Trim. Sharp. Late fifties, maybe. Not a killer. Not a soldier. He was wearing a white shirt under a tan vest and loose-fitting trousers. A gold watch glinted on his left wrist. Walked like he didn’t belong in sand but had decided to humour it. He carried himself like a man who wanted you to know he was just important enough to command respect. The sort that delivered a message and turned on his heel. An intermediary.

The man, inhaling the dry, cement-laced air. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted—lower, more confidential. “You’re wondering why I’m talking. Why I’m even here. Well, let’s say… I was instructed to coordinate the response.”

“Response to what?” Tilson asked.

“To your little misadventure. The wreck was meant to stay exactly where it was. Sealed. Quiet. The Domiat was a ghost in a watery grave. Forgotten. A relic of a conflict so ambiguous it doesn’t even get called a war. Who cares about the 1950s now, Mr Tilson? Who cares about Suez? Nasser? The ships sunk in a crisis no one teaches?”

He took a few steps closer, gesturing vaguely toward the broken silo, the ruin around them. “You do. Or your bosses do. That’s why you were sent. You weren’t supposed to make it a story. But you did.”

Tilson’s brow creased. “So, they sent you?”

The man smiled. “To clean up. To coordinate. Your dive? Sabotaged, obviously. We got a man inside.”

Tilson tensed, heart pacing faster. “Shola?”

“Or, was it a woman?” His grin was that of an evil Cheshire Cat, illuminated by the starlight.

“The Cockleshell has been impounded. The police will have its crew tied up in paperwork for days. Weeks! You’ll see.”

“And what does that accomplish?”

“No more dives for a while, eh? So we can get down there ourselves and retrieve what you failed to.”

The man’s grin deepened, turned colder. “Loose ends. All dealt with. That’s what I do, Mr Tilson.”

A pause.

He tilted his head slightly, as if ticking off boxes in his head.

“All done now. Except one. You.”

Tilson blinked. “One?”

The man gave a mildly annoyed nod. “Yes.”

Tilson’s lips curled in something like amusement. “I count two.”

The intermediary turned, puzzled—but too late.

Jabba was already there. Close. Too close. A step behind him with that heavy, oafish stillness that had fooled so many into thinking he was just a fat man.

The intermediary opened his mouth, perhaps to argue, perhaps to plead.

Tilson didn’t hear the words. Only the sound of his own Glock going off, once. A sharp, heavy retort that echoed around the former cement plant and punched Mr Vance off his feet. He crumpled sideways in a cloud of chalk-dry dust, his head turned at an unnatural angle, one leg twitching like a broken insect.

Tilson flinched, ducking low behind the skeletal frame of an old cement mixer, his instincts flaring for the follow-up shot. But it never came.

Instead, the big man’s footsteps crunched closer.

Jabba’s bulk filled Tilson’s peripheral vision. He stood above the corpse, rolled it gently with his foot, and dropped something beside the body.

The Glock. Tilson’s Glock.

Jabba caught Tilson’s eye and gave a fat, contented smirk.

“No need kill you, basha,” he said, his term of respect dripping with sarcasm. “Illegal gun. Mixed up in one death. Now you kill another. Police take good care of you …”

The wiry one appeared again at Jabba’s shoulder, ghostlike. They turned as one and strolled calmly back to the SUV, steps deliberate. Tilson could hear the doors open, then shut with polite finality.

“What?” Tilson muttered aloud, confusion surging like a tide.

He stepped forward from cover, the desert air scraping at his throat. The Glock lay in the sand beside the fallen man, the barrel half-buried, blood already soaking into the grit around it.

He grabbed it, and aimed at the Merc as it started moving.

Click.

Tilson turned the gun over and checked the chamber. Empty. Of course.

The Merc reversed once, nosed around and pulled away, tyres cutting wide arcs in the sandy dirt before finding their line. They didn’t head back to town.

They headed deeper into the desert. No beams. Its black shape receded without haste, its rear lights kept deliberately dark. It didn’t rush. It didn’t need to. It simply vanished, swallowed by the rising dunes and the deeper dark beyond them, like a predator returning to its den.

Tilson stepped forward, the sand crunching beneath his boots, the stillness returning as if the violence had never happened. The air was dry and taut, each breath rough in his throat.

The SUV was gone. The darkness beyond the plant swallowed it whole. He stared after it for a moment longer, jaw clenched, the useless gun still in his hand. There was no sound now. No wind. Not even the breath of distant tyres. Just the ruined stillness of the desert, the echo of his own heartbeat in his ears.

Then came the sirens.

At first, they were little more than a faint modulation in the wind, a distant rising wail, high and hollow. Then sharper. Closer. Red and blue lights cut across the far ridge, flickering through the remains of the perimeter fencing and painting the cement husks in strokes of blood and bruise. A police cruiser rolled steadily down the rise, tyres scuffing dust, headlights full and unforgiving.

Tilson didn’t move.

He turned slowly in place, surveying the tableau in which he now stood.

The intermediary lay slumped by the old cement mixer, head twisted toward the stars, his blood already congealing into the cracks in the ground.

Tilson stood still, the useless Glock heavy in his hand. It was perfect. A man executed with a single shot. The weapon that fired it: his own. Ballistics would match the rifling on the slug to the barrel of his Glock exactly, and the firing pin would have left a signature imprint on the cartridge like a thumbprint in soft wax. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t pulled the trigger himself—he knew how the system worked.

He’d handed them everything: motive, opportunity, and the murder weapon. All it needed was a photo of the corpse, a lab tech with a microscope, and a police report written by someone keen to close a case. In twenty-four hours, the story would be clear: Tilson had come here, armed and angry, and executed a man in the desert who he thought had killed his friend. Clean. Open and shut. And the men who’d arranged it? Already vanished into the dunes, their tracks lifted by the wind.

The Hilux sat idle nearby, quiet, complicit.

Half buried in the dust beside the body, beyond the spatter of blood, was a spent casing. Brass, still faintly gleaming in the light of the oncoming cruiser. Not far from where Jabba had fired. They’d been in such a hurry to get out, so smug in their choreography, that they hadn’t swept the scene properly. Maybe not so clean and perfect after all.

Tilson crouched, plucked the cartridge from the sand, and palmed it without pause. Still warm. Still marked. Maybe with ejector scars. Possibly even clean enough to confuse the timeline. He didn’t waste another second. He ran at full sprint back across the gravel, boots hammering the cracked foundation slabs. Tilson jumped into the driver’s seat and gunned the Hilux into gear, the old Toyota complaining at such treatment.

Then, instead of following the Mercedes down the road away from Ras Ghareb and the coast, he swung the vehicle in an arc. The Hilux accelerated towards the mound of sand that marked the perimeter of the compound and sped over the lip and up the nearby dune. It was tough going, but the Toyota crested the ridge and dipped down behind it in a few seconds, leaving the lights of the police cruiser and the banshee screech of its siren behind. He drove along the valley between two dunes. According to the stars, he was heading roughly northeast, back towards the town. The scenic route. Tilson allowed himself a grim smile. The intermediary had given him a few clues he needed to follow up on. Not least of which was the fact that his team hadn’t found the key evidence in the Domiat’s wreck. The real operation was now beginning.

CHAPTER 11

The Hilux growled beneath him as Tilson threaded it between the dunes, tyres carving low furrows through the pale sand. The police lights had long vanished in his rear-view mirror, and the sirens were only a memory now, faint as the sea. He’d circled back inland, keeping low and slow, reading the contours of the terrain, looking the at GPS on his phone for rough guidance amongst the Sieff dunes.

He was halfway across the basin when his phone buzzed, making him jump. A single bar of signal blinked back to life as he crested a rise, enough to let a message crawl through.

Shola’s Life360 pinged. Briefly. Looks like someone just turned the phone back on. Petroleum Transfer Station 41. Disused. Only appears on old logistics charts. We’re still on the boat. Contact when u can. Mace.

Tilson slowed, thumbed open the app Mace had suggested they all sign up to, and zoomed in on the little circle with the initials SL inside it and an even smaller triangle pointing off the circle to a location that was indeed unmarked. It looked like scrubland close to the coast, a few kilometres inland from the Gulf, near nothing in particular. No power lines. No active wells. The kind of place that had been useful once, then left to die in the sand. No one seemed to bother dismantling anything around here.

He pulled the Hilux over and reached beneath the dash for the multi-charger that had come with the truck. One cable ran to his own phone, steady and full. He clicked another into the burner he’d picked up the former Mr Vance. It was almost dead, but Tilson wanted to keep a second phone, as a backup.

He sat for a moment, watching the screen.

No one just wanders into a place like that. Either Shola was waiting there, or he was there under duress. The latter made more sense as his phone had obviously been off and was now on again.

He set the Hilux in motion again; the tyres finding their grip in the firmer sand. The route curved around a dried-out arroyo, one of the dry river or stream beds that cross-crossed the region, temporarily filling with water after heavy rain. He cut across a faint ridge where long-dead scrub clung to the soil like a sun-faded memory. A vulture circled overhead. The dashboard clock read 05:42.

He said nothing. Simply driving, one eye on the horizon, the other on the slanting gold light as it began to break across the spine of the desert. By the time the outline of the station came into view, the sun was beginning to climb in earnest, drenching the low, squat structures scattered across a shallow depression in the land, their forms softened by distance and haze. Even at a distance, Tilson could see they were concrete shells, mostly. One larger building stood at the centre, blocky and pale, its edges eaten away by years of sand and sun. Behind it, a rusted pipe scaffold ran like a broken spine towards a skeletal gantry, long-disused and half-swallowed by the desert.

He killed the headlights a few hundred metres out and eased the Hilux onto the leeward side of a low berm, angling it behind a collapsed fencepost and the bent remains of a sand-buried oil drum. The engine ticked in the silence as he shut it off. Heat rose from the bonnet, blurring the air. No sound but the faint sizzle of metal and the hush of sand moving against sand.

Tilson stepped out carefully, closing the door with a note of finality. He paused, letting his eyes adjust. There were no birds. No buzz of insects. Just stillness. The sort of quiet that arrived when everything living had already decided not to stay.

He crossed the hard-packed ground on foot, boots crunching softly, one hand resting near the butt of the Glock 17 tucked into the side of his trousers. He moved in a slow arc around the perimeter, checking corners, doorways, anything that might hold movement. A battered sign in Arabic warned of industrial hazards and chemical exposure. The edges of the lettering had blistered away long ago.

The main building loomed ahead, featureless but for a loading bay and a single access door hanging open, not wide, but enough. He paused again, listening. Nothing.

The wind caught in the carcass of the broken facility, lifting fine dust across the exposed concrete like breath across bone and making an eerie singing sound. No roof remained, only the naked struts of iron girders overhead, their corrosion flaking off in sunburnt curls. Once, this had been a living station, diesel throbbing in transfer pumps, men shouting across gantries, eighteen -wheel tankers nosing up to feed or be fed. Now it was emptiness arranged in industrial shapes.

Tilson stepped through the open frame of what had once been a doorway, the hinges long gone, the cement around them split and crumbling. The floor beneath was cracked and pitted, laced with wind-blown sand and the brittle veins of old oil that had seeped up and set hard like pitch. A blackened, desiccated lizard skeleton curled in one corner, undisturbed by anything but time.

There was no one to hear the MI5 man, but still Tilson moved carefully. The silence demanded it. It was not the absence of noise that made it oppressive, but the suggestion that this place had once been loud. And then one day it wasn’t. Like all abandoned buildings, it held the allure of being haunted, but for Tilson, that was the human consciousness marking the absence of people they knew had once thrived there.

To his left, a section of exposed pipework arced out of the ground, rising like the broken rib of a buried dinosaur. Birds had once nested there, judging by the matted twigs fused with tar and sun-bleached rags. Not now. Even scavengers avoided the place. The few shrubs that survived at the edges were colourless and stiff, as though they’d forgotten how to grow.

Tilson had been in desolate and remote places many times, but he wondered if this didn’t win first prize in that particular unbeautiful contest.

He checked the phone again.

The signal blinked, jumped, disappeared, then returned. But not where he was. Somewhere further off. The marker hovered to the east, outside the visible perimeter of the depot. Still vague, still uncertain. He adjusted the map scale and saw that it floated on a grey void. No structure, no road, no path. Just terrain.

He swept the site, anyway, clearing each ruin in turn.

An open bay littered with twisted rebar. A control shed with its roof half collapsed, the remaining half hanging like torn parchment. Inside, a clock still hung on the wall, its hands frozen at 02:47. The desk beneath it was overturned, any papers fossilised and turned to dust a long time ago. A tin cup sat upright on a coil of cable, coated in dust. Tilson stood on the threshold for a moment, taking in the scene, before moving on.

In the shadow of the collapsed scaffolding, he passed what might have been a wash-down station, little more than a patch of discoloured concrete with four iron nozzles bolted to a rusted frame. The air smelled faintly of ash and rubber. No footprints. No drag marks. No cigarette butts or other recent debris. Whatever had happened to Shola hadn’t happened here.

He left the main compound behind and began angling downslope toward the shimmer of the sea in the distance. The ground flattened slightly before falling away again, and it was there, half-hidden by a line of eroded earth berms, that he saw it.

A small, square structure crouched low against the landscape.

It was painted the same colour as the sand around it, or maybe just stained that way by time. There were no windows. Just a single narrow door, firmly shut. A rusted ladder was bolted to one side, leading to the flat roof, which bore a single corroded vent and the bleached shell of what might have been a wind gauge. A narrow spill channel ran away from it toward the dried edge of a seasonal wadi.

Tilson stopped and studied the place from a distance.

This had not been part of the main station. It was too far, too forgotten, too well hidden behind the natural fall of the land. A service outbuilding. A pressure pump house. Built to be accessed rarely. Visited only by those who needed to know it existed.

And now the only signal from Shola’s phone was coming from inside it. Tilson quietly extracted the Glock from his waistband and tried the door. It moved as if recently oiled.

The interior was cooler being out of the sun, but it was airless, the heat trapped in the concrete walls like breath held too long. A beam of light from the broken roof cut through the gloom, catching particles in the air. The ground floor was indeed small, but there was another ladder leading down to multiple lower levels.

He stepped inside, letting the door fall almost shut behind him, cutting off the outside world until only a wedge of sandy light remained. The interior smelled of rust and dust, but beneath that, something else, fainter, but unmistakable. The high, sour note of decay.

The floor was poured concrete, cracked in places where plants had forced their way up and later died. The walls bore the faint suggestion of once-white paint, now flaking in long vertical sheets like old bark. A fly twitched in the beam of sunlight, its wing catching a glint as it rolled in place. The first sign of life and not a positive one.

Tilson shinned down the ladder. As he reached the next level, he moved even more cautiously, scanning slowly. No furniture. No recent tools. Merely a few crates, stacked and rotted, one of them collapsed under its own weight.

He checked the phone again. The signal blinked. Stronger now. Close.

His eyes adjusted.

To the right, a maintenance pit yawned beneath a long-disused pump platform, its edges rimmed with corrosion. A patch of dark staining spread beneath it, irregular and sunken into the concrete. The reek grew sharper near the far wall.

That’s when he saw the tarp.

Folded roughly, half-tucked behind a set of valve housings near the rear of the hut. Pale blue and sun worn. The corner was weighted with a length of pipe and something else. A stone, perhaps, or a coil of wire. Tilson approached in silence. The flies lifted and settled again as he moved. There was no sound but his own breathing, held tight in his throat.

He crouched.

The tarp was thin, commercial cargo sheeting, the kind used to wrap machinery or cover pallets in open transport. One corner had been torn and knotted back together. He slipped his fingers under the edge and lifted slowly, letting the air beneath escape with a faint crackle.

There was a boot.

Desert tan, scuffed, the laces frayed and the sole nearly smooth. The ankle lay at an unnatural angle.

He lifted further. The odour hit him hard now, richer, sharper. It was Shola.

The Geordie was curled inward, his knees half-drawn to his chest, one hand beneath him as if he’d fallen asleep and forgotten to move. His eyes were closed. The mouth slightly open. Blood had matted his hair and dried in a halo beneath his head, but the skin was dry and slack, pulled back from the bones making him look like someone halfway to another world.

Tilson didn’t move. Not for a while.

He crouched there, one knee down, one hand braced against the floor, letting the weight of it settle. There was no sign of a struggle. No drag marks through the sand. No footprints in the dust. If this was where Shola had died, at least it hadn’t been in panic. It had been in calculation. Someone had brought him here, not to dump him, but to delay discovery. A hiding place, not a grave. The work of someone with enough time to conceal a body, but not enough guilt to bury it properly.

The scenario was becoming clear to Tilson now. He looked again at the head, brushing gently through the stiff, blood-clotted curly hair at the back of the skull. There it was. A swelling above the chignon, that bony prominence located at the back of the skull, where its base meets the spine. It had been half-hidden under the matting. A single blow, likely with something blunt and hard. Not enough to kill him outright.

Shola must have seen Sophie at the hotel meeting in the garden. He’d intervened. Confronted her. A warning? A threat? Sophie calming him, maybe offering something in return. A bribe? A sexual favour? Perhaps he had his own secrets he didn’t want to come out? Either way, she’d have known how to press the right buttons. After the second dive that she had sabotaged, Sophie had tried to leave the Cockleshell, taking one of the two 6.5-metre RIBs during the night without authorisation. That was just after 3am. And Shola must have caught her. She hadn’t expected that. They’d argued again. She’d lashed out. The struggle — short, sudden. He’d gone down hard. She dropped her phone.

Maybe she’d thought he was dead, but she couldn’t leave the body there and she couldn’t just dump it in the sea to float close to the ship. So, she’d brought it with her on the boat. Someone must have been waiting to help her. Sophie was a fit young woman, but there’s no way she could carry the hulking figure of Shoa all the way from the beach to here, about two kilometres. They’d dragged the body to the nearest structure with a door and covered him. But that wasn’t the end.

Shola must have come round. Long enough to pull the tarp. To turn his phone on and try to send a signal. But the blow to the head, the heat, the dehydration, the blood loss… it had all caught up with him. And he’d died alone in the dark, hours, maybe minutes, short of rescue.

Tilson cursed. If he’d been faster … If the people following him hadn’t fucked about. The rage came quietly but forcefully, and all the more dangerous for it.

He rocked on his haunches, swallowed, blinked once, and reached into his pocket for the iPhone. He took one photograph. Then another. Then one of the tarp, the valve housing, the shack, the door., the ladder. This was a crime scene, and he wanted it documented in case they could ever bring Sophie and her accomplices to justice.

He climbed the ladder and pushed the door open, escaping the increasing stench of fetid death. He made his way back to the Hilux with determined steps, letting the anger drive him. Whoever did this would pay. Tilson opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat, legs sticking out from the vehicle, allowing the mild desert breeze to evaporate the sweat in the shade of the vehicle.

As he rested, he looked more closely at the images he had taken. The most interesting was the one with the tarp. He hadn’t noticed in the gloom of the pumping station, but there was a logo stencilled on the material. The logo formed a distinctive white square with a blue “C” and “W” in a stylistic wave shape. It was the logo of a shipping company.

Cobalt Wave.

.

CHAPTER 12

The road north was little more than a suggestion at first — two faint tyre tracks cutting across the desert, veering between shallow ridges of sandstone and long banks of sand that caught the wind like cloth. The Hilux rode it well, engine steady, the suspension taking the worst of the terrain without complaint. Tilson drove with both windows down, letting the morning heat roll through the cab, drying the sweat that clung to the back of his shirt. He hadn’t spoken aloud in hours.

The landscape blurred past, always the same but in a random repeating pattern. Scrub, gravel, dunes, then the wide reach of the Gulf glittering faintly to his right, never far off. Here and there, he passed the ruins of old watchtowers, or the remains of pump installations that had long since stopped producing anything but decay.

A pair of camels chewed lazily at the roadside trash outside a checkpoint that had been abandoned by its military occupants years ago. Lucky for him. The animals looked up from their meal as if they might try to check his ID, but after a hard stare returned to their meagre repast. The only sign of life beyond that was a faded signpost marking the edge of the Zafarana wind corridor, its blades distant and stilled.

The town itself came and went on his left. He passed a clutch of concrete buildings, a few communications masts, and a long arc of turbines. There was another checkpoint beyond the main road junction in town. This one was manned by more than dromedaries. The kind where one bored conscript sat smoking while the other dozed under a corrugated lean-to. Tilson had given it a wide berth.

He knew better than to roll through somewhere like that without a clean ID, a good excuse, and a sense of who was on shift. Customs men doubled as informants in these parts, and every army post was a web of overlapping favours, bribes, and bored ambition. All it would take was one bright-eyed lieutenant wanting to impress his CO, and he’d be in a cell by sundown.

Tilson hadn’t expected the phone signal to spike, but when the phone lit up just past a bend in the road, he pulled off onto a patch of packed gravel and killed the engine. No one in sight. Power pylons in the distance standing like frozen giants and the sea behind him, thin and sharp as a blade.

He scrolled to the last message from Maya and hit the call button.

It rang once. Again. On the third ring, it connected.

“Sam? Are you OK?”

Tilson blinked. “I’m good. Shola’s dead.” There was a silence. His bedside manner could do with some work. “Where’s Mace?”

“Dealing with port authorisations. And this isn’t a secure line, so make it fast.”

“I need a fix on the Zophiel. I’m hoping it headed north?”

A pause. The sound of a keyboard tapping. “AIS shows her south of Ain Sokhna, anchored just off the platform corridor. She’ll probably be in port proper by tonight.”

“Good.” He looked at the thin line of blue sea on the horizon. “Anything on that medical chopper from the tanker the other night?“Nothing. It was a private charter, so I can’t Google it!” She laughed.

“Figured as much.”

Maya exhaled softly. “Be careful, Sam. I mean it.”

“I always am.”

“You never are. That’s why I’m saying it.”

He ended the call before she could say anything else.

Ain Sokhna, its name drawn from the Arabic for “hot spring,” lay south of Suez, where the jagged rise of Mount Ataka met the flat blue stretch of the Red Sea. Once known only for its sulphur springs that were said to soothe aching joints and draw pilgrims from Cairo, the town had transformed over the previous two decades into one of Egypt’s most strategically vital industrial zones. Here, the desert gave way to cranes, cargo, and chemical silos.

At the heart of Ain Sokhna was a vast, modern port operated by DP World under the banner of the Suez Canal Economic Zone. The terminals sprawled out into the sea on deep-water berths designed to handle Suezmax vessels; the transporters, container ships, and bulk carriers that slip in with barely a whisper and leave equally surreptitiously. Oil and gas tankers anchor at reinforced piers, their belly-loads destined for European markets or through the Suez Canal, less than a couple of hours’ sail to the north.

Tilson knew that such a port would not open to the public. Security at Ain Sokhna would be tight. Unflinchingly so. Its proximity to the Suez Canal made it a high-value target, and the steady flow of oil and gas through its terminals only served to deepen the paranoia. Uniformed port police would patrol the entry gates with military precision, while surveillance cameras tracked every movement across the berths and cargo lanes.

Nothing and no one would get in without paperwork. Every crew member signing on or off a vessel did so through an official crewing agent. Names had to match manifests. IDs were scanned and cross-checked against ISPS compliance databases. Maybe even fingerprints, barcodes and retinal scans, although he bloody well hoped not.

For the unauthorised, there was no second chance. The docks were closed to drifters and dreamers. Steel fencing ringed the perimeter, broken only by checkpoints where guards questioned even the familiar. If you didn’t belong, you were turned back or, worse, detained.

North of this industrial behemoth, Ain Sokhna wore a different face. Resorts dotted the shoreline, their manicured lawns fronting the same sea that ferried crude oil and chemicals past their infinity pools. Tourists from Cairo descend on weekends, drawn by clean beaches and the promise of escape. They came by the fast, modern highway that cut east from the capital, or by chartered coach, or even aircraft. All of which were designed to shield the loading cranes that loom farther down the coast from easily offended eyes.

Interestingly, for Tilson, the Chinese investment seemed set on turning Ain Sokhna into a keystone of Africa’s emerging logistics chain. It was not just a port anymore. It was a conduit between continents, between wealth and survival, between the old Egypt and something newer, harder, and far less forgiving. Tilson grinned to himself. It was a lion’s den of a place. Into which he would saunter and try to get aboard a ship at the centre of this security.

It was a journey that only took under an hour and was actually quite pleasant. The Toyota’s aircon was not up to any job, let alone the one for which it has been designed, so Tison had rolled down all the windows for maximum ventilation. The sun beat down and Tison got a sense he was back in the Gulf, driving one of the modern Pink Panther Land Rovers in the Iraqi desert.

Halfway to his destination, small holiday villages and complexes with names like “El Haya Resort”, “Cancun Sokhna Villas” and “Laguna Bay” sprung up like mushrooms. The last one before he hit town was the “Sokhna Portrait”. Once he reached that, he knew the State Police Station was close by up ahead. He took a very long detour to bypass this place and ended up on the Ain El Sokhna road, narrowly avoiding the final toll booths before reaching the port itself, which approached in stages.

First came the wide access roads lined with weather-blistered signs and concrete dividers painted in alternating stripes of black and yellow. Then came the trucks, long hauliers parked nose-to-tail, their drivers sleeping behind dusty windscreens or playing cards under makeshift canvas shelters. There were no horns or engines, simply the steady thump of compressors and the occasional clank of chains being adjusted.

Tilson turned off the main flow and slipped into the edge zone. This neighbourhood of side streets, cafés, and supply shops was close to the port without officially being part of it. This was where the crewmen waited between berths, where unserviceable containers were broken down for scrap, and where things changed hands under the table and in dark alleyways. A smell hung in the air that never quite faded. Boiled meat, sweat, and seawater thickened with oil.

He parked the Hilux beside a tyre wall and, leaving his bag of possessions including his binos, his expensive sunglasses and the Glock in the trunk. The one thing he kept was the Omega Seamaster GMT 300 Co-Axial, which he placed in his pocket. Somehow, he reasoned without irony, a diver’s watch might be useful in a port facility.

He crossed the street on foot, keeping his head low and his pace measured. A truckload of gas cylinders passed behind him, the steel clinking together like wind chimes dragged through sand. Beside him, cheap hotels and crew dorms lined the route, modest washing drying on short, makeshift lines.

He chose one at random that had several overalls hung up and gently moving in the wind outside. Tilson paid the teenage boy behind the table in what passed as a foyer and went straight to the room he had been assigned. He immediately left, slipped outside, casually removed one of the boiler suits from the line, A faded emerald green number. He quickly returned to his room to change. All in under a minute.

Afterwards, with the Omega transferred to an inner pocket, he left once more, this time never to return and made his way deeper into the city borough where cafés were waking up for the midday shift, plastic chairs being set out in the shade, televisions playing muted football highlights from a league no one followed. Cats moved underfoot. A man in an orange jumpsuit washed his armpits in a puddle beside a barrel.

Most of the workers here were Egyptian, Sudanese, Somali, or Filipino. They wore faded overalls from shipping lines that didn’t match the port of Ain Sokhna at all. So, his green boiler suit fitted right in. He was tanned so could pass for Greek possibly, and the several days of beard growth made him look more like a native, but it was a poor disguise given his sun-bleached hair. A quick shopping trip in an Aladdin’s cave of convenience store goods equipped him with a cream coloured Kufi cap and a pair of black plastic sunglasses. Both coming in under $5.

More suitably disguised, Tilson walked down the street before pausing outside a narrow shopfront. The glass was scratched and opaque with years of sun and nicotine, but the sign above it was new — ID Photos. Stamps. Notary Services. Translations. He didn’t go in. Not yet. These were the clean fronts. What he needed was always found two blocks further back, where a walkway ran down toward the dry dock fencing and the half-stripped hull of a coastal cutter rusted in the open air.

He walked on. A boy carrying a tray of mint tea called out an offer, but Tilson shook his head. The boy didn’t press. The regulars here didn’t talk much, and no one asked what kind of paper you were looking for unless you were looking to be cheated or watched.

The alley he wanted was behind a hardware shack and a prayer rug vendor, wide enough for one man to pass comfortably. Tilson stepped into the shadow and let his eyes adjust. A line of light came from the rear, where the wall had collapsed and someone had laid corrugated tin across the gap. Two men sat on crates near the back. One older, thin, with square glasses and skin like folded paper. The other younger, in a security guard’s jacket that didn’t match the climate.

Tilson didn’t speak until he was close enough not to be overheard. His Arabic was rusty, but passable.

“I need a card,” he said. “Nothing new. Just visuals. Seafarer’s ID.”

The younger man leaned forward, studying him. “You got a name you want?”

Tilson shook his head. “A blank. I’ll fill it.”

“Sit.”

As Tilson pulled up a third crate to the table. The older man reached into a tin cashbox and drew out a small stack, fanned like playing cards. Liberian, Filipino, Marshall Islands. All the same weight, all laminated, all carrying the same quiet promise of plausibility.

Tilson pointed to one that had no port seal and no embedded QR code. “That one.”

“Five hundred US.”

Tilson shook his head. Too much. He handed over two crisp hundreds and five twenties. The man looked at him and Tilson stared back, unflinching. He waited while the older man tucked the money away and handed him the card in a manila envelope with a plastic pouch and a stub pencil.

“No receipt,” the man said.

“I’m not a tourist,” Tilson replied and got up.

He walked out into the heat again and turned toward the far end of the port wall, where the security fencing ended at a dry canal bed and a line of stacked steel containers cast their own strange shadows across the sand.

The Zophiel was docked beyond. That meant it would be leaving soon.

Time was running short.

Beyond the security gates and blast walls of the main terminal, the port throbbed with the heavy breath of industry. Containers clanked onto flatbeds in slow procession. Fuel tankers loomed like bloated leviathans at anchor, their hulls scorched matte with years of weather and neglect. A Turkish-flagged bulk carrier lay tethered to a concrete quay, its crew shirtless and lean, their voices rising in Arabic, Greek, and Tagalog, the shared language of men who worked oceans but belonged nowhere.

Outside the gates, life was raw and immediate. Tilson moved back through the fringe zone, the liminal space between official access and the unofficial underworld. Concrete shopfronts sagged under faded signage, advertising SIM cards, currency exchange, and last-minute crewing contracts. A low-slung café buzzed with flies and arguments, plastic chairs grinding on uneven tile. Men lingered there: Sudanese rig workers, Egyptian runners, a wiry Ukrainian missing two fingers. All watched each other. All smelled of sweat and suspicion.

Tilson adjusted the collar of his overalls, and the stitched name tag of an unknown sailor itched against his skin. He gestured to a man passing by with an old face and one gold tooth. “Busses?” he asked in Arabic.

He gestured vaguely towards a side street and passed on his way. The crowds got thicker as he approached the road. The busses were easy to spot. He felt foolish having asked the old man. They sat in a line along the dust-slicked back edge of the contractor compound — white minibuses with bent bumpers and tinted windows, idling gently as the midday heat built against their flanks. Each had a laminated sign stuck to the inside of the windscreen, held in place with cracked tape. Some bore the names of ships, others had numbers or acronyms that meant nothing to outsiders.

Tilson strolled past all of them and circled back, following the second line of vehicles on the other side. He paused under the broken awning of a juice stand that hadn’t stocked fruit in years. A port runner emerged from the shade of a nearby building, clipboard in hand, voice sharp as he shouted names in a distinct mix of Arabic and Tagalog. One by one, men moved from the shade to the buses, clutching plastic bags, hard hats, rolled-up mats. A few smoked, heads low, eyes narrowed.

Finally, the one Tilson had been waiting for.

ZOPHIEL – Crew Rotation – ENGINE ROOM.

It was written in marker on a torn sheet of white card, taped inside the third bus from the end. A name, nothing more. But it was enough.

He moved casually now, in the open, crossing toward the bus with a half-empty water bottle in hand and the envelope containing the ID tucked into the inside pocket of his overalls. No one stopped him. The port runner was on the phone, one arm raised, back turned. The gate guards weren’t looking this way. The rest of the men climbing aboard barely registered his presence. He nodded to one – a Filipino kid no older than twenty – and the kid nodded back. That was all.

Inside, the bus stank of oil and sweat. The vinyl seats were cracked, their stuffing poking through in grey curls. Tilson took a spot near the middle and settled in without speaking. His ID stayed in his pocket. No one asked for it. They all assumed the vetting had already happened elsewhere.

The engine coughed once, caught, and they rolled forward in a plume of dust.

Outside the window, the docklands moved past in rusted angles and scorched concrete. Tilson counted the checkpoints. Two at the outer fence, one at the gate where armed port police lounged in sun-faded berets. The driver didn’t stop. He waved his clipboard and the guard waved back. It was all about posture. Act like you belong, and most people never ask the first question.

Inside the bus, no one spoke. The men stared ahead or at their feet. One muttered into a cracked mobile in a language Tilson didn’t recognise. Another tapped his thumb against his thigh in a steady, anxious rhythm.

They passed rows of fuel tanks, cranes in silhouette, a heap of twisted wire mesh stacked ten metres high. The ship came into view, grey and vast, her bulk dwarfing the pier and the loading hoppers beside her. ZOPHIEL, in white block capitals, stood clean across her bow. Her gangway was down.

The bus stopped. A man in a high-vis vest stood waiting at the foot of the gangway, checking names on a printed manifest.

One by one, the men disembarked. No words. Just IDs held out, ticked off, passed through.

Tilson reached into his pocket and produced the card.

The man glanced at it, squinted, looked at the name on the list.

He hesitated a beat too long. Tilson remained calm and still.

Mr high-vis ticked the box, handed the card back, and waved him on.

Tilson stepped onto the gangway and climbed slowly, boots echoing on the steel. The air changed. The noise of the port dulled behind him. Ahead, the ship opened up into catwalks, valves, pipes, stairwells. Now the proper work of infiltration could begin.

CHAPTER 13

The interior of the Zophiel was cooler than the deck, but only just. The air carried the filtered tang of industrial life: grease, coolant, disinfectant, and the metallic ghost of ozone from the power relays. Tilson followed the others down a brightly lit corridor beneath rows of overhead pipework. The floor was a deep red non-slip resin, clean and newly buffed, the sort that showed every scuff like a reprimand. The bulkheads were cream, the metal stair rails white, and everything smelt like regulation.

The light changed the deeper they went. Not dim, but surgical. Cool-white LEDs mounted in sealed ceiling fixtures, casting no shadows. The deck plating underfoot was high-gloss red, thick with epoxy grip, bordered with warning lines and hatch markings. Walls were light cream, interrupted by conduit trays and access panels tagged in three languages. Pipes ran in orderly lattices overhead, bright yellow for fuel, blue for freshwater, red for suppression foam. Every colour-coded line secured in braced intervals, each labelled and bearing a barcode.

This wasn’t some rust-streaked hulk. The Zophiel was new, or close to it. Purpose-built, computer-monitored, designed for efficient movement and easy oversight. The air was filtered, ventilated, and cold despite the heat of the machinery. Tilson passed a fan unit humming against one bulkhead and caught his own reflection in a pressure gauge. He didn’t look like he belonged.

The wipers peeled off in small knots, assigned by a squat, tired-looking man in a DP World boiler suit with a hi-vis stripe down one sleeve and a clipboard in the other. He wore wraparound glasses that had once been mirrored but were now dulled with salt. His voice was flat and unhurried as he handed out instructions in English laced with Arabic shorthand.

“Number four bilge. You. Second scrub pump locker. You, you and you! Fan ducts.”

A Sudanese kid gave a small nod and vanished down a stairwell. The Filipino who’d nodded at Tilson on the bus was handed a nitrile-gloved finger in the direction of a hose station.

“Wiper duty. Lower deck. Starboard service corridor. Follow the blue rail.”

This was aimed at Tilson, without eye contact. Simply a tick on a list and a vague wave.

Tilson nodded and merged into the flow, one hand loose at his side, the forged Liberian ID still warm in his pocket. He passed a locker room, the door propped open with a mop bucket and moved through a hatch into the main machinery access corridor. Pipes arched above him in tight bundles, clearly labelled by function and pressure: water, fuel, vapour return. Air hissed from a vent as he passed, and somewhere behind a bulkhead, an auxiliary pump clanked into rhythm.

It was bright, ordered, and quiet in a way that felt sterile. Modern tankers didn’t rattle and groan. They whispered. The power here didn’t throb. It thinned the air and made the hairs on your arms rise without knowing why.

At the next ladder, he hesitated. The handrails were freshly painted; edges marked in hazard yellow. No one around. He climbed up.

Here, the corridors were narrower. Less traffic. He passed a dry store, the inventory listed in a plastic sleeve beside the door. Then a data relay room: racks of servers, cable arrays, blinking diagnostics. He looked in. Nothing useful. Nothing human.

He passed a head. Clean, chemical-smelling, fluorescent light humming. The galley across from it had cooled, trays stacked in a sanitising sink, a note on the whiteboard about pork substitutes. Someone had left a mug on a counter with a tea bag in it. The only thing out of place.

The corridor narrowed as Tilson moved deeper into the ship, the ceilings lower, the lighting harsher. Everything was sealed steel and fluorescent hum, the kind of modern, ordered labyrinth that gave no clues and no second chances. Pipes ran tight along the ceiling, fastened in perfect alignment, their colour-coded bands wrapped with barcodes and ID numbers. Electrical panels were labelled in three languages. Warning stickers glared from behind clear Perspex: ISOLATE BEFORE ENTRY, HIGH PRESSURE LINE, FIRE ZONE — DO NOT BLOCK.

He passed a fire station with a neatly coiled hose and two sealed canisters. The deck was dark red underfoot, rubberised and flawless. At the end of the passage, a catwalk curved around a multi-deck chamber, open to the vertical. Tilson glanced down: four decks below, a centrifugal separator thrummed with machine precision, surrounded by polished railing and battery-lit control panels. There were no voices. Solely the deep mechanical rhythm of the ship’s internal organs working in concert.

Tilson veered off, following a side corridor marked for the bridge relay access, a maintenance route unused except by officers and electricians. The walls narrowed again. Sweat gathered at the base of his spine. The tang of the machinery faded, replaced by filtered air and the faint, almost antiseptic scent of something scrubbed too often.

Finally, he reached the door.

Clean, square, modern. White paint, matte and recent. No rust. A brass nameplate read “COMMUNICATIONS” in embossed stencil. No handle. But a keypad to the left, slick with the faint sheen of hand oil. Tilson stepped in close. No camera. That was something. He tried the keypad.

Coded. Of course.

He looked around. No one to see him. A junction box sat to the right of the frame, its casing slightly warped. He pulled his multi-tool from the inner fold of his boiler suit and popped the latch. Wires. Cleanly bundled. One feed ran to the power cut-off. He followed it with his eyes, leaned in close, and jabbed the tool hard into the bundle and twisted.

The door buzzed. A relay clicked inside. He caught it by instinct and pushed.

The comms room opened like a vault.

Inside: sterile. Two mounted screens, dark but blinking network activity in the corners. A secured rack server in a cage at the rear. A wall of clipped printouts in a foreign language — Russian? Greek? Something Cyrillic that he couldn’t read. He moved quickly. His eyes scanned for anything handwritten. Loose pages. Call logs. Messages. There was a keypad beside one screen, the keys glossy from use. He tapped it. The interface lit up first in Korean, before switching to English.

Nothing recent. The last logged communication was a standard berthing call for Ain Sokhna. The medevac wasn’t here. No record of the chopper. Not even a despatch window. It must have been cleared from the system. Maybe placed on an external drive?

Tilson scanned the screen a second time. Nothing. He doublechecked the desk. Still nothing. No notepad, no scribbled comms log, no sticky note with an airframe call-sign. He checked the floor. No scuff marks. No thrown paperwork. Even the trash was empty, the liner fresh. A sealed system, wiped by someone who knew what they were erasing.

Dead end. He cursed and turned back toward the door. Slid the bolt. Stepped into the corridor, quiet as a summer breeze.

And then the voice.

“Hey! No need to be in there, Salim! Radio officer already gave me the flash drive for Mr Fakkuk.”

The tone was casual. Assumptive. As if addressing a familiar shape from behind.

Tilson froze before eventually having to turn, slowly.

The man stood maybe five metres away. Compact frame, belly forward, a mariner’s gait even on dry steel. Dark, almost coal-black skin. An incongruous, blue-trimmed baseball cap. ZOPHIEL stitched above the brow in white thread alongside a Cobalt Wave logo. A clipboard under one arm. His eyes were calm. But cold.

When he saw Tilson’s face the friendliness drained. His eyes sharpened.

“You’re not Salim.”

Tilson said nothing.

“Who the hell are you?”

There was no shout. No panic. Only that cold pause before a man requested urgent assistance.

Tilson quickly made up some bullshit. He raised his chin slightly. “Electrics, boss. Routing check from the panel bay.”

“No one from Electrics was cleared for this deck.”

A pause.

The man didn’t move, and the silence grew to uncomfortable proportions. He scratched the hair beneath his baseball cap. “Stay put.”

He started calling in the incident on a radio worn on his lapel. Tilson didn’t blink. He didn’t smile. And he certainly wasn’t staying put.

He turned and ran.

The interior of the Zophiel swallowed him, the bowels of the ship closing in fast — a humid, humming labyrinth of bulkheads and corridors laid out like the veins of a beast. This gave him the perfect maze of passageways and gangways into which he could escape.

Tilson descended past the service lockers and hose cabinets, his boots clanging softly on epoxy-painted treads. The walls here were smooth-surfaced steel, powder-coated in pale off-white for easier cleaning and better light bounce. Safety rails were banded in reflective yellow. Nothing was left raw or rusted. This was a ship built for twenty-five years of service, and it showed.

The temperature climbed once more as he moved deeper. The engine room loomed ahead, six decks down, its ceiling rising nearly four storeys in a single open shaft. A Wärtsilä 7RT-flex82 engine, its size dwarfing any man, sat at the heart of the chamber, a gleaming row of cylinder heads fitted with individual turbochargers and jacket cooling lines snaking up into the rafters. The scent was unmistakable: warm oil, lubricants, old sweat, and the cooked tang of bearing grease.

Walkways of red-grated steel crisscrossed the chamber, flanked by insulated piping thick as tree trunks. Electrical conduit ran in disciplined bundles along every wall. LED strips buzzed overhead, throwing sharp shadows down into the main well where maintenance crews toiled.

Tilson didn’t stop. He ran across a walkway and unexpectedly came face to face with a short, wide-hipped man in dark green coveralls, similar to his own. The barrel-like man stepped forward and smiled. Maybe the clothing signified a shared posting. Tison had no idea. He simply smiled back

“You! Wiper duty!” Barrel said. “Number four ballast access, port side. Go.”

He pointed a grease-stained finger. Tilson nodded and moved. The ballast tank. That gave him an idea.

He followed the direction that Barrel had pointed, passing a bank of flow meters and a water treatment panel glowing faintly green behind a sheet of scratched plexi. The path veered to the port side and down another grated stairwell, narrower now, the ship’s movement more pronounced. There was a dampness here. Not exactly wet, but cool and settled, as if the air had lost interest in circulating.

The sign above the watertight door read: BT-4P — BALLAST CONTROL — PORT MID. Below it, in smaller print: Do Not Enter When Pump Cycle Is Active. And finally: Tank Capacity: 3,850 m³

Tilson tried the latch. It wasn’t locked, but it was stiff from disuse. He managed to prise it open with some effort and squeezed himself inside.

A rectangular shell of painted steel awaited him, nine metres across at its widest point, stretching twenty metres long and plunging six metres down. A catwalk ran the length of the tank wall, bolted under the overhead pipes and bracing frames. Beneath it, the ballast tank yawned open. A basin now empty, save for the thin sheen of water that glimmered in the weld seams and pooled around the drain sumps at the far end.

He moved quickly, boots clanging on the steel rungs as he dropped down from the access ladder. The metal was actually cold. He rested his palm on the bulkhead, cooled his brow and the back of his neck before moving on. He slipped behind a beam that flanked the inlet manifold and crouched in the shadows where the control cables were run in a tight loop to a shut-off valve. A perfect hiding place.

The air was damp, metallic, and still. Far off, through the hull itself, he could hear the low pulse of pumps or compressors, too far way to be localised. Above him, nothing. Silence reigned.

He drew his knees up and listened.

Footsteps. Faint. Getting closer.

A voice echoing through the ducted corridor: English, agitated. Not the Sudanese. Not shouting at him to surrender. Worse.

“Filling port four mid. 3,800 cube. One pass, stand by vent line.”

This was a concise, professional, instruction from an engineer. Short, coded, and based around location and volume. Tilson broke it down mentally. “Port four mid” was the specific ballast tank. The one he was standing in. “3,800 cube” was the tank’s expected fill volume. Enough water to drown a person in minutes. “Stand by vent line”: Alerts another crewman to monitor or open the air vent to prevent vacuum pressure as water enters. The one that really got him was “One pass”. It indicated that the tank would be in one controlled pumping sequence, a single, continuous cycle.

Tilson’s throat tightened. He pressed back against the wall of the tank, his hand brushing the condensation that streaked its surface. He pulled his legs in tighter, his boots now slick with moisture. The air seemed denser. Heavy. A shift in the atmosphere. A low mechanical whine began overhead.

He looked up.

The intake valves. The system was activating.

Somewhere above him, a pump switched on with a muted growl. He recognised the noise — a ballast fill. The tank was about to take water.

Tilson scrambled silently along the sump rim, trying not to splash, and ducked beneath the narrow overhang of a structural brace. There was no way out that way. He wiped his hands and eyes. The valve nearest him gave a groan. A hiss followed by a surge.

A rush of dark water gushed from the intake ports, sheeting down the tank wall in a frothing wave. Within seconds, it was ankle-deep. Tilson gasped at the temperature. It was like taking to an icy plunge pool after a sauna. The ballast water was pumped directly from the sea into the tanks via large sea chest inlets located low in the hull. Even in the Gulf of Suez, where surface temperatures can be 24–30°C, the water a few metres below can be much cooler, especially once in a steel tank because it conducts and holds the temperature. The environment of the dark, damp, and uninsulated tank amplifying the chill.

By now, the level was shin deep. As Tilson stood stock still, getting control of his breathing, the air pressure dropped slightly as the ship’s ballast management adjusted, levelling the load. The LED emergency strips above flickered once as the compartment took on weight.

Another surge filled the tank further. The water was up to his waist now, and cold. Not the refreshing kind, but the mechanical chill of a system that had never been warm. His boots were losing grip on the sump floor.

He scanned the walls.

There. Mid-height. A maintenance step. A recessed panel with a bolt-on handhold above it. Tilson kicked off from the floor, treading water gently towards the rung to conserve energy and keep his breathing calm. He grabbed the handhold and hauled himself up, finding a perch in the strut just as the water slapped against the base of the valve manifold.

From up here, he could see the surface rising in dark swells. The tank was filling too fast. Someone had activated an auto-level.

He steadied himself. Waited.

The water crept higher still, reaching his neck now, the surface brushing his jawline like the slow rising of a tide intent on swallowing everything in its path. Tilson angled his body, spine tight to the wall, the metal slick and cold against his soaked boiler suit. Now he pulled the Omega from the inside pocket and attached it to his wrist, closing the stainless-steel clasp. Overhead, the tank ceiling arched gently, a curved steel dome with enough irregularity to catch air and hold it in a shallow crescent where the water had not quite reached yet,

He turned his head, slowly and deliberately, keeping his balance with a palm pressed flat against the bulkhead behind him. His face found the narrowing gap. His mouth met it first.

He breathed in through clenched teeth, careful to create the smallest aperture, to prevent even a droplet of water breaking the boundary and flooding his lungs. His lips barely moved. His nose hovered above the line where liquid shimmered and glassed against the ceiling. He remained in that posture, kissing the crescent shaped pocket like a lover.

He inhaled. Not deeply. There was no space for that. But enough. Another breath. And another. Shallow and precise. Like sucking life through a straw.

He let his eyes close for a moment. Not out of panic, not to retreat, but to focus. To centre himself. He let his thoughts align to the space he occupied: the chill on his skin, the slow slosh of water shifting around his ribs, the silence deepening with every breath he stole. There were no echoes here now but the creak of strained steel and the slow, relentless rise of the ballast.

When he opened his eyes, he looked up again, scanning the ceiling with what little light remained. The welds traced lines across the panel seams like veins, darkened with condensation. He found one that jutted slightly, a raised edge he could anchor to. He lifted his hand and felt it, fingers grazing over the metal, memorising its shape.

He had no idea how long he had before the cycle ended — or if it would. For all he knew, the tank was set to full capacity, a figure that hovered somewhere near four thousand cubic metres. If the pump had been instructed to fill it completely, there would be no margin, no miracle space. The last gasp of air was his.

He pressed himself higher into the curve of the ceiling, lips parting a second time, drawing in another shallow breath. This one tasted like rusted keys and engine oil. He swallowed it anyway. He would need every scrap.

Then, as the water closed over his brow, Tilson let go of the steel and dipped beneath the surface.

No splash. No resistance. Just a quiet descent into dark.

CHAPTER 14

The silence was instant and absolute. No hiss of air, no engine thrum. Instead, the compressive hush of a sealed steel tomb. The water swallowed everything: heat, noise, direction. Even up and down became negotiable. The liquid pressed against his eardrums, flattened the hairs on his arms. Salt stung the scrape on his knuckles, his lip. His heart slowed.

The Omega Seamaster GMT 300 Co-Axial on his wrist showed twenty-three seconds since his last breath. He flicked his wrist once, confirming the luminous hands still burned a faint green. He’d need to keep an eye on the time. For here he had no instructor with a stopwatch on the side, no underwater platform to sit on, no half-glimpsed shadow ready to grab him if he blacked out. No teammates to keep him going. And this was certainly no solo pool test. No, this was him. On his own. The water. And steel. He’d done all this before, but each time was different, each one a challenge.

He began to move, not swimming but gliding through the water, conserving every contraction, every flicker of motion. Legs wide, feet slow, body long and low like a crocodile sweeping the mud. He dragged one hand along the ribbed floor, feeling each groove. The other mapped the wall beside him.

He knew the layout. Or at least, the theory of it. Ballast tanks weren’t built for comfort. They were angular, braced, and often brutal, with bulkhead intersections, diagonal stiffeners, and sloped sumps to help with drainage. The surface of the steel beneath his fingers was pocked and pitted in places, slick with microbial residue. In others, it was a sharp-edged, protective coating slightly worn away.

Somewhere, there would be an access hatch. A “manhole”. A crawl duct for the engineers to inspect for corrosion. Not the main hatch he had come in by that did not have a way to open from the inside. Thank fuck for Health & Safety.

He worked in tight spirals, tightening the search, checking each new seam. One bolt. Then another. A weld line. A triple-flanged elbow joint that jutted from the floor. A feeder pipe, not an escape. His body skimmed past, his hand bouncing gently across the surface. He kept his breathing reflex suppressed with an old trick: tongue pressed flat against the roof of his mouth, jaw relaxed, throat tight. The panic reflex couldn’t trigger what the mind had already mastered.

At SBS Selection, they’d spent hours blindfolded in water tanks. Weighted down. Told to find objects by feel. Told to wait. No count. No mercy. Just breath control and the voice inside saying firmly, not yet or you have plenty of air. Visualising the amount in his lungs always helped Tison then, and that was what he was doing now. He’d watched men quit, not because they ran out of air, but because they ran out of belief.

He glanced at the Omega’s dial once more. Two minutes. In his mind’s eye, Tilson saw his lungs still with plenty of air in them. But this is where the ache started. The blood shifted. Limbs got heavier, brain lighter. Muscles screamed in rebellion. A growing whisper in his chest. Not a shout yet — that would come. He ignored it. Not yet.

Then he felt something.

A raised section. A circular lip. Tilson’s hand tracked around it, feeling the edge, the mild oval distortion of a cam lock. It wasn’t flush. Not sealed from this side.

He rotated his position, kicked once, and found a support bar with his boot. His legs pushed, arms bracing, and he twisted the handwheel with slow, deliberate turns. The water pushed against his chest now, the pressure rising. The hatch began to move. Not wide; a hair’s breadth at first. A bubble. A creak.

He didn’t waste time with elation. Just angled upward, fingers first, body following like a snake through a break in the soil. His shoulder caught — he rotated. His clothing snagged — he jerked. The hatch gave way, and he slid through into blackness again, colder now, but with a trace of something else.

Movement. A current. Air.

His lungs were crying out now. Hard. The diaphragm began to spasm. He bit it back. The watch face swam into view again. Approaching four minutes. Not yet.

A ladder rung struck his shoulder. He grabbed it, pulled. Counted. Rung. Rung. Rung. Seventeen steps. Finally, a grille.

His boot hit it and shoved with everything he had left in reserve.

The panel opened.

And Tilson broke the surface like a man reborn. Gasping as quietly as he could, his lungs seeming to open wide enough to swallow the entire atmosphere. The air may have been sour, thick, unmoving. But it tasted sweet to him. Lovely, pungent oxygen and nitrogen. He inhaled once, twice, pulling it deep into his lungs, letting it flood every aching corner of his chest and legs. Important not to hyperventilate.

He let his body float against the mesh floor for a second, heartbeat pounding. The Omega ticked on, no longer the difference between life and death. He had been maintaining his Type 1 diabetes well for a few years now, but high blood sugar levels over time can damage blood vessels and nerves in the lungs, potentially leading to reduced lung function. This made it harder to function with little air. But he’d done it. As he had always believed he could.

He stared straight up. Above him, there was no ceiling. Just low metal framing and red emergency lighting that tinted everything like it was a level of hell. He was in a void space — an inspection crawl inside the hull, forward of the engine room. He could smell the ship again now. Oil, ammonia, cable insulation.

Slowly, gently, he pushed himself up and leaned his back against the wall. His breathing was normal now. Then, moving quickly but silently, he unlatched the crawlspace grate and pulled himself into the narrow compartment beyond. He was soaked through. The sleeves of his boiler suit clung to his arms like a second skin. His Lowa Zephyr GTX Mid TF boots dragged as he moved, so he paused to take them off. He strung them around his neck with their laces. He wrung out his socks and stuffed them inside the Zephyrs.

His skin was cold, lips pale. He rubbed his legs and arms through the boilersuit, trying to squeeze out as much excess water as possible. But really, it was like wearing something straight from the washing machine. He smiled. At least his mind was sharp.

He padded through the void space, climbing a narrow ladder that led to a maintenance shaft marked with red arrows and instructions written in both Korean and English. That opened onto a catwalk between auxiliary tanks. From here, he could hear footfalls above, rapid, heavy, urgent.

They knew he was missing.

But they didn’t know where he was. And that’s how he liked it.

He slinked along the catwalk, ducked through a pressure hatch, and emerged near the aft funnel ducting. A staircase ran up to the starboard deck. A crewman moved above. Tilson waited, silent. When the man had gone. Tilson took the stairs two at a time., his bare feet making no sound. At the top, he crouched low and opened the bulkhead door.

He emerged into bright sunlight, which hit him like a slap. White-hot. Blinding.

The deck of the Zophiel stretched out around him: pale anti-slip panels glowing under the sun, handrails searing to the touch. Cargo cranes stood motionless, and thick fuel hoses snaked into their loading gantries. The sea sparkled to the west. A yellow-legged Gull screamed overhead. A typical resident of these waters, Tilson knew. Common around the Red Sea coast, especially near ports, where they fed and nested. They were noisy, aggressive, and territorial. Like humans, really.

Tilson blinked away his sudden philosophical thought and darted across the deck to find a suitable hiding and resting space. He moved quickly and lightly. Not only because he didn’t want to attract attention, but also because the deck was bloody hot. You probably could have cooked the proverbial egg on the metal plating.

The only advantage to this was that his wet footprints disappeared like a phantom’s – evaporating almost as soon as he made them.

He dropped low again as another member of the Zophiel crew moved across the deck. He was working, not searching, so maybe they’d given up. No damage done, return to normal pre-departure operations.

Tilson angled his run towards the centreline, the imaginary longitudinal line that runs from bow to stern, perfectly down the middle of the vessel. It divides the ship into port and starboard halves. What wasn’t imaginary was the main pipeline catwalk that followed that line on steel supports. The fuel lines here were thick as a man’s thigh, painted in faded reds and yellows, and ran the length of the deck like arteries laid bare.

Their metal housing cast a long shadow beneath the grated walkway above — not deep, but enough for Tilson to find respite. He slipped under, hands on the warm deck, knees tucked close, and found a patch where the steel was no longer blisteringly hot. The pipes above had soaked most of the morning sun, and the shade here gave relief. Valves protruded from flanges at shoulder height, and the gantry above framed a narrow strip of sky.

He crouched, resting on the heel of one foot and the side of the other, letting the hot sting bleed out of his soles. Around him, the air shimmered with rising heat, but the space between the pipelines and the shadowed deck felt almost temperate. He stripped off his boilersuit and let that dry in the sunlight, an arm’s length away, along with his boots and socks. Dressed only in his underwear, he looked like he should have been at one of the holiday villas he’d passed, lounging on a reclining bed. If only.

Tilson kept his head low, breathing shallow, every muscle tuned to sound. He’d wait for the best moment and steal ashore to find the mysterious Mr Fakkuk.

The hours dragged. Tilson remained motionless beneath the manifold catwalk, the pipeline above casting a sliver of shade that tracked across his bare legs as the sun arced toward the west. Sweat gathered along his spine and soaked the waistband of his shorts. Flies buzzed and departed. Somewhere, a pneumatic tool hissed, fell silent. A door clanged open and shut. Nothing too close.

He lay still, eyes narrowed against the glare, dozing when he could, watching the play of light on the cranes and the heat haze that shimmered above the gantries when he couldn’t. His boots and suit were dry now, warm to the touch. As the sun began to dip, he dressed slowly, deliberately, listening between each movement.

When the klaxon for the end of day shift sounded its short, shrill, and tinny sound, he knew the changeover was coming. With it came noise, movement, distraction.

He checked the time. 17:31. Sunset, or near enough. The heat was ebbing, but the shadows were deepening. It was time.

Tilson slipped from his hiding place like a shadow dislodged from the bulkhead. The deck was quieter now, golden with late sun and streaked with the long shadows of cranes and boom arms. He moved low, keeping beneath the lip of the pipeline catwalk, until he reached the aft mooring point. The hawser stretched from a recessed winch drum to the starboard bollard below — a thick synthetic fibre line, white-streaked and oil-slicked, as thick as his thigh. It hummed faintly with tension.

He crouched, tested it with a flat palm. It was solid. He shifted his weight to the rail, swung one leg over, then the other, and let himself straddle the mooring line like a tightrope walker from a forgotten war. He began inching along the fibre, bare feet gripping, forearms braced, core engaged. Every muscle live.

This wasn’t new.

The Special Boat Service had done this for decades. Almost a century, in fact. Commando boardings in pitch-black waters, approaching hostile vessels or oil rigs under moonlight, inching up ropes in full gear, knives sheathed against thigh holsters and armed with sub-machine guns – sometimes suppressed.

Tilson had trained in those very techniques: caving ladder ascents in sea swell, helicopter rope insertions onto pitching decks, black-and-white grainy training videos still whispering the feats of Operation Frankton, when Royal Marines had paddled folding kayaks into Bordeaux Harbour in 1942 and clambered onto German shipping to plant limpet mines. More recent actions in the Gulf of Aden, stopping pirates or intercepting suspicious tankers flagged with questionable intent. The rope was always the same. A lifeline and a risk.

But this time, it ran down. Not up. Which meant gravity was both friend and potential foe. So, Tilson moved slowly, every shift deliberate, arms and legs wrapped around the hawser like ivy on stone. The rope vibrated beneath him with the faint hum of shipboard systems and the echo of the wind catching the tensioned line.

He was halfway down when a sudden cough below stopped him cold. A scrape of boots on concrete. Then the flare and hiss of a lighter. Tilson froze. Muscles locked, spine coiled.

A dock worker, probably bored, possibly done for the day, stood just metres from the bollard, his back to the ship. He lit a Cleopatra cigarette, one of the most popular brands in Egypt, and named accordingly. They were dirt cheap. Less than a dollar a packet He cupped the flame with both hands, drawing twice, exhaling a tight jet of smoke that curled into the air above him. Tilson held his breath. The stench of the fumes confirmed the harsh taste.

Smoking on a working quay that handles oil was about as illegal as it got, but it was hardly ever enforced it. Not after dark. Not here.

Tilson held still, breath shallow. The fibres of the hawser bit into his forearms. A rivulet of sweat rolled along his brow and dangled from the tip of his nose, threatening to drop.

The man smoked in silence, oblivious. After a minute, he leaned back and let his gaze wander across the hull, but not up. Then he unzipped and urinated into the water, muttering something under his breath.

Eventually, the man zipped up and ambled off, boots echoing across the dock toward a pool of harsh yellow sodium light.

Tilson waited one full minute before he resumed his descent, boots finding the braid in the hawser, arms tight around the cable. The last drop was a half-metre fall, the former Commando landing lightly in the shadow of a shipping pallet stacked high with oil drums and wrapped in salt-pitted plastic. He crouched, scanning.

No shout. No echo. Just the soft clink of metal and the sigh of a distant winch.

Tilson moved fast, crouched low, weaving between the stacked cargo. A compact tower of crates offered some cover, the corners bracketed in rusted steel, their stencils faded and unreadable. He slipped in behind them. Close enough to the hull to smell the brine baked into the paintwork. Far enough from the floodlights to remain in shadow.

A ventilation unit rattled somewhere above, kicking a warm breath into the evening air. Tilson pressed his back to the crate and listened. Feet on gravel. Voices behind steel. He turned his head slightly, scanning the dark geometry of the quay. A rusting bollard, chained-off drums, the silent scissor-lift beneath its tarp.

Beyond an Isuzu FVR 34Q Diesel Tanker refuelling the ship was a slope of shipping pallets leaned like dominoes, heavy with steel spools and hydraulic line. Tilson ran quietly toward them, keeping low, his boots barely whispering over the grit.

He ducked behind the last row of dense boxes, half-wrapped in black plastic and stooped still. This was perhaps too close to the ship, but the shadows here were deep and clean. He could see the gangway from the corner of his eye, and the mooring line overhead still trembled faintly with the ship’s gentle sway.

And soon after the car arrived.

It rolled up slowly, tyres crunching across the dock’s sun-split gravel, the headlights off, engine idling low. A black Toyota Land Cruiser. The newer shape, squat and broad across the shoulders, desert-spec with reinforced bumpers and a slimline snorkel hugging the passenger side pillar. About $200,000 of car. Someone rich owned this.

The body was matte-wrapped, dull in the sodium lights, but the grille still gleamed with chrome. Civilian plates. Civilian windows. But the glass was too dark and the wheels too clean. This wasn’t a contractor’s ride. It was the kind of vehicle you only drove if you wanted people to know you were important, but not quite know who you were.

The driver’s door opened, and a man stepped out. Tilson could only see him from the knees up: dark trousers, polished shoes, a long-sleeved white shirt despite the heat, the sleeves neatly rolled. His posture was straight-backed, his movement unhurried. His bulk was big and heavy. He didn’t look around. Didn’t pause. He left his door open and walked toward the gangway like a man with business and no reason to explain it. At the foot of the ramp, the Sudanese crewman who’d caught Tilson outside the comms room stood waiting, a small black flash drive in his hand.

“Mr Fakkuk,” the Sudanese said. “Everything you requested.”

He passed it over without ceremony.

Fakkuk took it with a brief nod and turned back toward the vehicle. His face caught the light from the cargo tower enough for Tilson to see it: the slope of the nose, the lopsided grin, the broken bridge flattened long ago in a fight or a fall. Jabba. Fakkuk was Jabba.

CHAPTER 15

Jabba placed the flash drive in the chest pocket of his shirt, patting it annoyingly. The Sudanese officer lingered a moment after passing over the flash drive, his hands clasped behind his back like a schoolboy waiting for dismissal. He looked tired, but not nervous. Perhaps not used to such a transaction. He gestured loosely toward the darkened shed beside the bollards.

“Your journey was long, sir. Perhaps you’d like tea before you go?”

Jabba turned slightly, one hand already resting on the open door of the Land Cruiser. Tilson couldn’t stop thinking of Mr Fakkuk as ‘Jabba’ His broad frame caught the last sweep of light from the dockyard arc lamps, casting a long, hunched shadow across the cracked concrete.

That was the moment.

Tilson moved, quick and low, dashing from the crates like a shadow thrown across the deck. He crossed the open space in six strides, the rubber soles of his boots silent against the roughened gravel. His breath stayed low in his chest, heart thudding.

“No,” he heard Jabba say, but there was hesitation in his inflection. His voice was gravel low, tinged with that half-swallowed drawl Tilson had heard once before in a much darker place.

“They’ll want the drive tonight,” he said, flicking the edge of the flash stick against his thumbnail.

The hatch at the back of the Land Cruiser wasn’t locked. He gripped the edge and eased it open, as if in slow motion. It rose with a whisper of hydraulics. Allowing it to give him just 12 inches of access. Tilson slid inside in one motion, reaching out to press the button recessed in the wall of the door to close the door once again.

The boot of the 300 Series Land Cruiser was cavernous, lined in hard-wearing, rubberised plastic designed to take punishment, scuffed from whatever Jabba had filled it with in the past. Tilson hated to think what that might be.

The floor was flat and broad, with flush-mounted tie-down hooks in each corner and a shallow storage compartment hidden beneath a lift-up panel. The sidewalls carried minor abrasions with faint marks, and there was a new car factory smell still lingering beneath the heavier notes of dust and diesel. Overhead, the interior trim was a dull grey felt, pocked with fingerprints and smeared where something had once leaked.

There was no third row of seats in this configuration. They had either removed or never installed. This left a wide, uninterrupted space behind the second row. The light that filtered through the tinted rear window cast the space in a muted blue tone. It was a cargo bay that felt less like the back of a family SUV and more like the kit stow of a field vehicle. It was efficient, and ready to be repurposed for whatever its owner needed. In the far right corner, a heavy tarpaulin sat, neatly folded.

Beyond the front of the car, Fakkuk was speaking again.

“No delays this time.”

Tilson heard him turn and walk without haste towards the vehicle. His hand reached out for the tarp. He had to hide. He hesitated, frozen, as he saw the logo stencilled across it. Cobalt Wave. He stared at the curve of the “C” looping into the “W”, their stylised waves folding into one another in clean Helvetica white. The same logo that had covered Shola’s body.

The Land Cruiser’s taillights glowed dim as the driver’s door clicked shut, drenching the logo in red. Tilson tried to ignore the visual trick that made it look like blood. He quietly rolled onto his side, teeth gritted, and pulled the tarp across his body, burying himself beneath the synthetic shroud. He blinked, swallowed hard, and kept still.

The Land Cruiser jolted once as Jabba slipped it into gear, then rolled forward, slow and easy; no haste in his departure. The tyres crunched over the dock’s gravel margin and climbed onto the paved service road.

From the rear of the vehicle, cocooned in silence and darkness, Tilson listened to the sounds of escape: the low hum of the engine, the squeak of the suspension over uneven tarmac, the tick of cooling metal under strain. He couldn’t see the port vanishing behind him, but he could feel it. Every metre took him farther from the Zophiel, from the scene of the crime, from the camera eyes and security records that despite being generated in real time might still be catching up.

Every metre closer to answers.

The key thing was that he was in the car. And it was certainly better than hanging out on the deck of an oil tanker in African heat. And he was following the man with the drive. He would discover where the files said the helicopter was going all those days ago. Find out what other connections Cobalt Wave had to the Domiat and the death of his two teammates. A fully formed plan would come later. For now, he simply held on. Hidden beneath the logo of the company he was about to tear apart to find the truth.

The Land Cruiser slowed as it reached the first checkpoint, a tall mesh gate flanked by two concrete booths painted in sun-faded blue. A figure stepped forward from the shadow of the barrier, torch angled low. Tilson heard the footsteps crunch across dusty tarmac, then circle slowly around the back of the vehicle. His breath froze. He shifted his weight imperceptibly beneath the tarpaulin, hand curled into a fist beneath his ribs.

The guard’s boots stopped just inches from the rear bumper. Tilson imagined them: standard-issue black leather, worn soft and dusty at the seams, laces frayed where they’d been double-knotted too many times. The soles squeaked faintly against the concrete, a lazy shuffle more than a patrol step. Tilson didn’t dare breathe. His chest tightened. Every muscle clenched. The tarp scratched against his skin like static, holding him in place.

Suddenly, the boot was bathed in intense light as the guard shone a torch through the rear windshield. Tilson’s heart lurched. His hand curled tighter into a fist beneath the tarp. If the guard lifted the back, he’d be screwed. But the beam passed across the tarp and then vanished. The clink of a torch handle hitting a belt clip followed. Then came the sound of a breath, close and nasal, and a low cough muffled by the man’s own throat.

A voice called out from the gate booth in Arabic. Something casual, a half-laughed sentence and a question. The man outside laughed too, then walked off without opening the back. Just like that. Tilson lay motionless, sweat collecting in the hollow of his throat. It was over. For now. But the silence that followed felt deafening.

“Yalla, yalla,” came a voice. The second guard. “He’s good.”

A final tap on the rear quarter panel, then the car moved forward, slow again.

The second checkpoint was a different beast entirely. Less makeshift, more permanent. A boom barrier angled across the tarmac, flanked by a booth of reinforced glass, inside which a uniformed man sat behind a console.

The emblem of the Suez Port Authority was stencilled on the panel beside him. A circular crest, faded at the edges from sun exposure and salt air, had at its centre a stylised profile of a cargo vessel viewed from the bow, angular and blocky, rising from a couple of pale-blue waves that curved like enamel bands beneath it. Behind the ship, a sunrise radiated golden rays upward, symbolising trade, power, and renewal — though the paint had long dulled to ochre and brass. The entire image was enclosed by a laurel wreath picked out in dark green, suggestive of sovereignty and state legitimacy. Across the bottom, in both Arabic and English, ran the name:هيئة ميناء السويس – Suez Port Authorityin a serif typeface that seemed borrowed from older government signs, stamped rather than printed.

The whole emblem was fixed behind reinforced glass, laminated and slightly scratched — not ceremonial, but official in a way that demanded respect without needing to announce it.

The official looked up as the Land Cruiser rolled to a halt, his face obscured by dust-specked glass and the yellow glow of an overhead sodium lamp. He leaned forward, clearly expecting credentials, or at least conversation.

Tilson felt the vehicle pause with a gentle bounce. From within his cocoon in the boot, he heard Jabba shift in his seat and put the window down with a quiet hum. He didn’t speak immediately. Just let the silence hang. Then, a few words in Arabic. Smooth. Unhurried. Nothing overt. The rhythm was what mattered, not the meaning. The voice of a man accustomed to compliance.

Tilson didn’t catch the specifics — something about a delivery, a late transfer, maybe. But the tone was what mattered: calm, assertive, informal in the way that suggested familiarity without needing permission.

For a beat too long, nothing happened. Tilson could feel the scrutiny radiating in from outside. A brief exchange passed between the officer and someone on a handheld radio. A terse confirmation, low and indecipherable. Then the clunk of the boom barrier lifting, slow and deliberate.

The guard in the booth nodded once and Tilson felt the Land Cruiser edge forward again, tyres rolling into the deeper dark beyond the perimeter. This wasn’t a man being waved through. This was a man who didn’t need or expect to be stopped. Tilson knew what that sort of access meant. These officials didn’t know his name. They didn’t need to. All they needed to know was who he worked for. That was worse. Bigger, badder. More insidious.

The last of the floodlights disappeared behind them, swallowed by the curve of the road as the SUV climbed out of the port zone and merged with the open road.

They were clear. He checked his watch. The luminous dial showed just before 7pm.

The Toyota picked up speed, the purr of its V8 engine smoothing out as they left the gravel road and joined a paved carriageway. Tilson mapped the turns in his head. The car had been facing north beside the Zophiel. Then, after the checkpoints, they’d headed west, out of the Ain Sokhna port itself.

They turned right then, headed north. And just kept going. The Land Cruiser gained significant speed at this point and Tilson reckoned they were heading to Suez itself, along the imaginatively named Suez-Ain Sokhna Road, which was basically a coastal highway.

There was the occasional horn in the distance. Every now and again, the Doppler effect of club music changing in pitch; shifting upward and then downward again as they passed what he supposed were yet more holiday villages and hotels on the beach.

He couldn’t see the landscape, but he could hear it. Wind shear against the wing mirrors. The occasional rattle of a sign overhead. At one point, the sound of the sea vanished, swallowed by concrete walls. An underpass. Urban encroachment. They were approaching civilisation. And Tilson still had no real plan. If he waited until the car reached its destination, he risked there being more people to deal with. He could attack now. But at speed? If Jabba swerved or panicked, they’d crash. They’d both be killed. And even if Tilson lived through it, the flash drive might not. No, the option of taking out Jabba mid-drive was crazy.

His train of thought meandered, returning to his current predicament. And… shit! He shifted slowly, pressing a knuckle to his waistband.

The insulin pump was still clipped in place. No alert. No buzz. But he could feel the pressure building in his system. It had been days since he last changed the reservoir — back on the Cockleshell, before the dive that changed everything. Now the supply would be low. Critically low. He needed basal coverage, and the adrenaline didn’t help.

He adjusted the tube slightly, checking the seal. Still intact. Still delivering. For now. But he’d need insulin soon. He had no phone. No weapon. No backup. Just the Omega marking slow passage of time.

Tilson shifted again, carefully pulling the tarp back from his chest. His bare arms caught the cooler air. He rolled onto one side, eyes fixed on the seam where the rear seats met. There was a gap. A hand’s width. Just enough.

Tilson could see the silhouette of Jabba’s bulk behind the wheel, one hand resting casually at twelve o’clock. The other tapping the gear stick. Relaxed. In control. Horrible music playing. The urban build up would serve as Tilson’s distraction.

He waited for a bump. A roundabout. Anything to mask the creak any movement might make. Then, the car turned. He slid one foot forward. Then an elbow. Then he pushed himself onto his stomach. Quiet. Steady.

Tilson laid flat in the back, head to one side, body braced. One breath. Then another. He would strike when the vehicle paused. If he could get an arm around Jabba’s neck, he could end it clean in about nine seconds. No sound. Not much resistance given he was in a seat belt and a confined space. A sleeper hold, maybe a full rear naked choke taught at Poole. A variation of the carotid hold. If Jabba fought back, there was always the eyes.

The traffic sounds shifted again. Slower now. Narrower. A side street. Then the brakes whispered, a soft hydraulic drawl as the Land Cruiser bled off speed and came to a complete halt. The vehicle settled on its haunches with the poise of something accustomed to heavy loads, its suspension dipping just enough to mark the stop.

Tilson risked a look over the top of the back seats. It was a traffic light. Red and steady, throwing a faint glow across the interior of the car. It bathed Jabba in a soft crimson wash, and for a moment, Tilson could see the sweat beading beneath the collar of his white shirt, like tiny rubies. Jabba let his shoulders ease against the leather of his seat as he stretched after the hour-long drive.

The city around them was more or less deserted here. To their right was a large area of scrubland marked by the obligatory pipelines in the near distance. To the left was a Petroleum Processing Plant, its forecourt packed with tankers. At least twenty of them, all dormant, awaiting the next shipment.

Tilson focussed, letting the distant hollow bark of a dog fad away. Below the distraction, there was only the sound of the Toyota idling and the two men’s breathing. Tilson’s steady, still and near silent; Jabba’s relaxed and slightly laboured. The air smelt of warm vinyl, petrol residue, and the faint acrid tang sweat.

Tilson adjusted his position slightly, keeping his movements deliberate. He slid one boot forward against the groove between floor and seatback, finding leverage. Then the other. His hands found the tie-down anchor by instinct. He’d marked it earlier. His pulse ticked in his throat, controlled as he moved.

Tilson shifted his weight forward, inch by inch. The seat creaked once, quietly. His knees rose, slow and sure, pressing against the back of the second row. His fingertips brushed the seatbelt anchor. Then the headrest.

He visualised the choke. Not a full rear naked, he’d decided he didn’t have enough room to do it cleanly. Instead, he’d go for a hybrid hold, like the Squadron used during vehicular actions: forearm across the trachea, heel of the palm on the crown. Using the seatbelt to lock the neck down with a twist. And leaving one arm free if anything went wrong. Fast. Quiet.

Another sound. A motorbike passed through the intersection, weaving through the shadows. Then silence again. No cross traffic. Just the long hush of an Egyptian street. The light suddenly turned green. Jabba moved slightly, lifting one hand to adjust the rear-view mirror.

Tilson made his move.

And in that moment, their eyes met.

CHAPTER 16

Tilson was halfway across the back seat. His body was low and coiled, knees tucked under him, hands already moving. The vehicle exploded with sudden activity and ferocious movement. Jabba twisted. Fast. One hand darting down. The other going for the cigarette lighter.

Tilson lunged forward, the seat giving under his knees, both hands reaching. One arm extended to the seatbelt while the other came up for the choke. Jabba slammed his shoulder backward, catching Tilson in the chest with the chair. The former Royal Marine ignored this and managed to get the grip he needed to twist the restraint, choking Jabba. But then the lighter came up and stabbed, red hot, into Tilson’s hand.

Pain. Bright and sharp. He roared, lost the grip, fell sideways against the door before lunging again. Jabba’s reflexes were faster than his bulk suggested. His torso twisted hard, the seatbelt snapping taut across his chest as he threw one arm back blindly. His elbow bounced off Tilson’s shoulder, jolting the lunge off course. The confined space turned precision into chaos.

Tilson’s ribs bounced off the interior trim with a thud. With a flicker of movement from the front seat, Jabba’s hand fumbled to release his safety belt. Tilson leapt forward. He reached for the pocket in Jabba’s shirt with both hands. He needed that flash drive at all costs. His fingers caught on the fabric, gripping, pulling.

There was a sudden metallic pop. Jabba had the cigarette lighter again. The red coil flared, and before Tilson could twist away, it plunged into the soft flesh beneath his armpit. The pain was exquisite. Sharp, dry, visceral. His whole side flared.

The roar stayed in his throat. Years of discipline kept it from rising.

Tilson jerked backward, his knee catching the gearstick as he moved forward. With one hand he smashed Jabba’s wrist into the steering wheel repeatedly, finally dislodging the lighter. Then, with his free hand, he snatched at the handle of his door. But it didn’t give. Central locking.

“You going somewhere?” Fakkuk drawled.

Suddenly, he floored the accelerator, and the Land Cruiser jerked forward, forcing Tilson back in the rear passenger seat. Jabba smiled as their eyes met once more in the rearview mirror, and he wrenched the wheel to the right to send his assailant sprawling across the seat.

Tilson’s arm clamped over the seatback for support and his fingers brushes against the tarpaulin. He dragged the material up and over. As the Toyota started to gain speed down the empty street, Tilson was forced to do the unthinkable. In one deft movement, he swept the tarp over the headrest and Jabba’s face simultaneously, blinding him.

Tilson cinched the tarp tight, twisting it with both fists like a garrote, yanking it down across Jabba’s nose and mouth. The reaction was instant. The big man’s head jerked back hard, shoulders tensing as his breathing cut off. Tilson leaned in, putting his full bodyweight behind the choke, his forearms locked, boots braced against the floor well for purchase. It wasn’t a clean hold. Not the surgical application he’d ideally be aiming for, but you know what? It was working. Jabba thrashed, one hand flailing for the wheel, the other batting at the air, clawing blindly. The vehicle swerved once, tyres clipping the kerb, then found the road again in a lurch.

Then Jabba did something Tilson didn’t expect.

He let go of the wheel.

The Land Cruiser veered sharply left and ploughed nose-first into a bank of sand-filled construction cones. It was no more than a glancing blow. Plastic gave way, and sand exploded across the bonnet, but the jolt was enough. Tilson lost his balance. His left shoulder slammed into the window pillar, head snapping sideways. He bit his tongue. The tarp slipped. Jabba’s hand found the edge.

Snarling now, the big man hooked his fingers underneath and ripped the fabric away with brute force, the motion tearing a seam as it peeled past his ear. One eye was bloodshot. The other wide with fury. Tilson didn’t wait. His palm landed on the window control. He slammed his thumb down. The glass began to drop.

Jabba lunged sideways, his seatbelt locking. His arm stretched across the console, fingers clawing for Tilson’s shoulder. Tilson ignored him. He shoved himself toward the half-open gap, legs first, torso following, knees knocking the gearstick. His boots hit the door frame. He twisted his hips, got an elbow out.

The Toyota rolled another metre forward. Tilson squeezed himself through the window and fell out in a tangle of limbs and bootlaces. His shoulder took the landing, and he rolled once, hard against the asphalt, as if from a parachute drop. The pain from his burns flared again. The whole right side of his torso felt like it had been peeled open.

As his boots hit the pavement, his hand instinctively went to his chest, checking the inside of his boilersuit where the USB was tucked. He allowed himself a tight smile at where the Land Cruiser had hit a wall. Got it, you bastard.

He didn’t wait to hear Jabba’s response. He was already moving, sprinting down the side street, boots slapping against cracked asphalt, the glow of the taillights shrinking behind him with every step.

He vaulted over a short crash barrier, boots skimming the edge of a gutter. The street was starting to come to life in the post rush-hour exodus of people hitting the town. A few taxis idling down the block and even a group of men on the pavement.

But Jabba was not to be deterred.

The rev of the engine came a second later — loud, sudden, full of rage. Tilson heard the gear shift crunch into drive. The Cruiser’s tyres shrieked as they peeled away from the kerb, rubber clawing the tarmac. He didn’t look back. He ducked into the shadow between two buildings, breathing hard, moving at a sprint that was calculated rather than panicked. He could hear the vehicle behind him — the deep diesel growl of the Toyota’s V6 climbing as Jabba floored it.

A beam of headlights swung across the alley mouth behind him. Tilson veered left into a narrower cut-through. He hurdled a rusted pipe, ducked under a washing line strung with a single damp sheet, and emerged into a wider service road behind a row of shuttered businesses. The memory stick jabbed against his ribs with every step, tucked inside his shirt like a second heartbeat. Ahead, a chain-link fence gleamed, backlit by sodium floodlights. He didn’t stop.

The Land Cruiser hit the corner behind him with a snarl. Jabba had eyes now — he could see Tilson’s silhouette in the gap. The Toyota didn’t slow. It barrelled onto the same service road, tyres hammering the cracks in the concrete, suspension lurching. Tilson could feel the rumble in his soles, even as he ran. The engine roared, too close now, echoing off the tight walls.

Tilson dropped a shoulder and slid between a skip and a pallet stack, diving into a low arch beneath an old loading dock. The vehicle couldn’t follow, but Jabba didn’t brake. The Cruiser ploughed past the turnoff, then screeched to a halt a few dozen metres ahead. Tilson watched from the shadows as red brake lights lit up the back alley. Then the reverse lights. Another screech of brakes and the driver’s door opened.

Jabba came out fast, not even shutting the door. He was furious now, shirt torn at the pocket, lip bleeding, his breath thick with rage. He scanned the street like a predator, shoulders hunched, weight on the balls of his feet. Tilson ducked lower. Concrete dust scraped his knuckles.

The air under the loading dock was thick with old oil and rats. He listened to Jabba’s boots on the pavement, slow and deliberate. The man wasn’t guessing. He was hunting.

Then came the voice, low and hoarse and carried on the desert wind. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, habibi.” The boots stopped. Turned. “But I promise — you’re going to learn.”

The footsteps grew louder. Tilson waited, crouched like an animal under the dock’s concrete lip. He could see Jabba’s shadow on the wall now, growing longer with every step. One more metre and the angle would reveal him. Too close.

Tilson moved.

He surged upward in one fluid motion, bursting from the gap like a sprung trap, shoulder slamming into Jabba’s ribs. The big man grunted and staggered but recovered fast. He caught Tilson’s arm as it pulled back for a strike, twisting it with a vicious snap. Tilson countered, jabbing a knee up into Jabba’s groin, but the angle was wrong. It bounced off the man’s belly instead.

They grappled hard, wrestling, boots scraping, hands locked in brutal, close quarter combat. Jabba fought like a brawler. Wild swings, elbows, brute force. Tilson moved like water, redirecting energy, trying to get space. But there wasn’t much to work with. They crashed into a stack of wooden pallets, knocking them sideways in a domino clatter.

Jabba grinned. “That all you got?”

Tilson didn’t answer. He twisted, ducked low, and grabbed the edge of a chained dolly cart, rusted but heavy. He yanked it sideways just as Jabba lunged again. The big man tripped, chest first, into the pallet stack. Tilson planted a boot into his back and shoved, hard.

The pallets toppled.

A whole corner of the alley collapsed with a rumble. Wooden frames, plastic drums, and a cracked masonry lintel fell from a derelict scaffold above. It all came down on top of Jabba in a dusty avalanche. A cloud of grit swallowed him, the weight of it enough to flatten a lesser man. Tilson didn’t wait to confirm the kill.

He staggered backward, chest heaving, wiping blood from his temple. A faint groan issued from beneath the wreckage. Not dead. Not finished. Not yet. But unable to give chase now.

“Next time, habibi,” Tilson spat, backing away, making sure he still had the memory stick. Satisfied that he did, he turned and ran into the night.

Tilson soon found a place to gather his thoughts. He crouched in the lee of a rusted drainpipe behind a shuttered tyre shop, one arm pressed to his ribs, the other still clutching the memory stick. Every time he moved quickly, the cauterised burn cracked and blood from the lighter attack soaked through the armpit of his boiler suit, tacky and sharp smelling. Every breath was hot glass. His lungs ached. His pulse was high. Yes, he was alive. But he needed to rest up, heal as fast as he could, and get his hands on some bloody insulin. The pump on his belt had been blinking for hours now — warning light red, battery low, reserve almost empty. Without a refill, he’d be in ketoacidosis within a day.

He walked through the quieter area of the docks to the more gaudy and lively section of town that encompassed the more sordid part of the port. These were narrow streets that veined the older quarter, where the sodium lights hung low and flickered against dust-smudged neon signage.

Suez, like many other Egyptian port cities – hell, like any port city from Portsmouth to Capetown, Shanghai to Caracas – had an underbelly that includes gambling, drugs, and prostitution, even though all are illegal under Egyptian law.

He passed a café fronted by plastic chairs and chipped tables, its doorway draped with a curtain of glass beads. Inside, the clack of dominoes gave way to murmurs over cards and a haze of smoke that wasn’t just tobacco. A man in a pale blue galabiya leaned in, grinning too wide for someone losing. Tilson paused just long enough to glimpse a second room through the back, this one a place for cards and possibly harder drugs. An old man with a bizarre set of whiter than white teeth saw him looking and snatched a curtain across the frame. Good point. Not his concern. He had other things to do.

Farther down, a boarded shopfront had been reopened offering various massages. Tilson passed the doorway, a sign promising aphrodisiacs and “traditional virility cures”. The smell of cardamom and incense hung in the air. It called itself a “marital harmony treatment centre”. Tilson couldn’t help but smile. The red light leaking from the slats told a different story. It was undoubtedly a brothel.

Sitting on the low edge of a tiled step, a woman in her mid-thirties looked up from her phone and took his smile as a statement of intent and stepped away from the wall as he approached. She was dressed in a tiny piece of gold cloth that she’d wrapped around her emaciated body with a length of gold twine. Tilson couldn’t imagine she had any other clothing on. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk as she came close.

“Hey, handsome,” she said in lightly accented English. “You need something strong, yes? Good for nerves?”

She smiled. Not the bashful kind. The professional kind. Before he could refuse, she pressed on.

“I work inside sometimes. Private service. Full body care,” she said, tapping one lacquered nail against the edge of her sunglasses. “Good discount for handsome men.”

She didn’t block his path or touch him. That would’ve been too bold.

“You look tired,” she purred softly. “I can help with that.”

Tilson smiled at her and pulled out his trouser pockets in an incomplete impersonation of an elephant. He was showing her he had no money.

She shrugged. “Insha’Allah,” she flashed him her best smile. “Next time, habibi.” Tilson smiled back. “Habibi” used in its proper sense “my dear” rather than the potentially passive-aggressive English usage of “mate”.

As Tilson turned away, he sensed something and turned back. A man in cheap mirrored shades and a leather jacket, despite the heat and the time of night, came strutting across the road.

He gestured sharply as he approached, his arm cutting through the air in a theatrical, exaggerated swipe — part frustration, part performance. Then, as he reached her, his hand shot forward and clamped around her wrist, fingers tightening with just enough pressure to show who was in charge. Then he started shouting right in her face.

The woman flinched as if she knew where this would lead. Her pimp postured and dragged a hand through his hair that was gelled into sharp, immobile ridges. As if exasperated and didn’t know what to do with her.

The girl gave a tight laugh, trying to play it off, her eyes flicking sideways to gauge if anyone was watching. But he didn’t laugh back. His jaw was locked, his teeth bared in a rictus more than a smile.

“Don’t waste time, you hear me? You think men like that can entertain women like you?”

Tilson stepped forward. Not far, just enough. The pimp turned at the motion, eyes behind his shades flicking up and down at Tilson’s soaked clothes and scuffed boots.

“Emshi ya ibn el kalb, ya ghalban!” he spat. Fuck off, you dirty little man. Charming.

The girl glanced at Tilson, not pleading, not ashamed. Just… tired. Tilson gave a small nod. No challenge. Sorry, his eyes said. The man scoffed and paraded past Tilson, giving him an evil look. He had no idea who he was dealing with. It made him sick to do it, but the former SBS man bowed his head. “Sorry, effendi.”

CHAPTER 17

Afew metres down the road, a young street vendor was hawking his wares. Slim, aproned, his tray balanced with honey-glazed fritters and powdered date crescents. He had a nice smile and an easy manner. The pimp stopped the kid and bought a selection of the sweet treats, paying from a roll of banknotes he pulled from inside his leather jacket. A mix of Egyptian pounds and US dollars. That would do nicely.

The 80s-hangover flesh-peddler moved on, chewing with his mouth open, eying up any women he didn’t already control. Tilson followed at a discreet distance.

The pimp’s shoulders were loose, cocky. These were his streets. A small empire, four blocks square. Now and then, he paused to lean in close to one of the women scattered along the fringes of the district. One was Egyptian, in heels too high for the broken pavement. Another Filipina, eyes downcast, chain-smoking. Both gave him the same nod. Business was slow. He reached a third woman, maybe Mediterranean, her black hair dyed peroxide blonde, a red dress spray-painted across her chest. She didn’t look happy, but passed him her night’s takings all the same. He walked away, grinning.

The street grew more neon-lit and chaotic as it approached a junction. Motorbikes wove through idling cars, steam rose from food carts, music blared from a broken speaker outside a hookah bar. It was here he cut away again, into a side alley. Narrow. Quiet. Graffiti-tagged walls. A string of coloured bulbs hung over a doorway. Tilson paused at the corner.

The pimp was already halfway down the passage, heading toward another woman. She lounged outside a darkened doorway with a beaded curtain across it. Fair-skinned, wide-eyed, wrapped in a cheap leopard-print dress that hung open in the right places. Eastern European maybe, hard to place. Possibly trafficked. She didn’t speak to the man, just stepped toward him.

He pulled her tight, kissed her hard. She let it happen, wordless, as his hands moved down and hers entwined around his neck. Then he spun her around, shoved her against the wall, and hauled up the leopard print dress. His trousers fell halfway down his thighs. He started to thrust, mechanical, unfeeling.

Tilson didn’t hesitate. He stepped out of the shadows like a predator moving on instinct. The pimp turned his head too late. Tilson caught him by the collar and slammed it forward. His forehead struck the wall with a crunch. He crumpled, stunned but still conscious.

Tilson was cold and efficient. He knelt, reached inside the man’s jacket, and pulled the roll of cash. The woman scrambled to fix her clothes, stepping back into the shadowed doorway. She looked at Tilson once, not shocked, not grateful. Just wary.

He disappeared back into the main street without breaking stride. Brick walls, half beige, half blue in the Egyptian way, lined his route. A stray dog stared from beneath a wheel arch. He needed a phone. Food. Rest. Somewhere to vanish. The first was easiest. This part of town had dozens of phone shops, selling everything from cables and Bluetooth speaker to protective covers and earbud rip-offs. Even a few early-model iPhones in cracked display cabinets.

He turned left at the next intersection and crossed the street under the flicker of a failing LED panel advertising. A few doors down, a mobile kiosk still had its lights on. It was the kind of shop that sold goodness knows what under the counter and SIM cards above it. Fluorescent strips buzzed inside.

Tilson pushed the door open. The man behind the counter was mid-forties, balding, with a thick moustache and nicotine-stained fingers.

He didn’t look up from his stool until Tilson placed some of the cash roll gently on the cracked glass. He took a casual drag on his cigarette as he regarded his latest customer and his money. Just a couple of folded hundreds and a few Egyptian notes on top. Enough to buy quiet.

“Phone,” Tilson said, gesturing to the display. “Something cheap. Something that works.”

The shopkeeper nodded slowly. No questions. He understood. He opened a drawer and came up with a Huawei Y5, two years old, still boxed. Tilson shook his head. The man sighed quietly and showed him another. It was small, half the size of his palm, probably an Itel A18 or something close, built for prepaid plans and burner users. Ideal. The screen was matte, the bezel thick, but it came loaded with the basics. The vendor slid in a SIM and a 5GB data card with the same efficiency as a bartender topping off a glass. Tilson powered it up while still at the counter. The GPS location read: Port Suez, Corniche District. That put him east of the main refineries and only a kilometre from the docks. He pocketed the phone and left without a word.

Half a mile away, he turned the corner and skirted a knot of motorbikes, their riders smoking Cleopatra Golds and comparing phones. A billboard overhead advertised an expired chain hotel, peeling at the edges. Beyond that, a pharmacy, or something claiming to be one. The sign still glowed green, though half the letters were out, and the door had a bell that didn’t ring when he pushed it. Inside, a boy barely old enough to shave looked up from the game he was playing on his phone.

Just shelves stacked with dusty vitamins, expired eye drops, and if you knew how to ask boxes of prescription and over-the-counter drugs like paracetamol, ibuprofen, antihistamines, antacids, and cough syrups. There was also a cabinet of common prescription drugs: antibiotics, insulin pens, anti-hypertensives alongside syringes, needles and glucose testing strips. No machine to put them in, though.

Under the now watchful eye of the boy at the counter, Tilson extracted the folded wad of notes from the inside breast pocket of his boiler suit and peeled off enough Egyptian pounds to cover what he needed and laid them silently on the counter.

Then he pointed, holding up fingers with the other hand.

Three disposable insulin pen packs, Humalog Mix, prefilled, blue-capped. Not ideal, but compatible. Beside it, a pack of BD Ultra-Fine pen needles, the kind that snapped on with a quarter-turn and could be used, carefully, to refill his Dana RS reservoir. It would take time and patience, but he’d done worse. He added a box of alcohol wipes, and glucose tablets in a battered tin. Then he gestured for a smorgasbord of painkillers, some antiseptic, anaesthetic cream, Vaseline, and Melolin patches and gauze for the burns.

The boy bagged it all wordlessly in a crinkled plastic bag that bore the branding of Seoudi, a larger supermarket chain. The youth gave Tilson a brief glance, a bored look at the sweat-streaked foreigner, and then returned to building castles and fighting goblins.

Tilson thanked him with a single nod and pushed back out into the street, the heat swallowing him again. The bag rustled faintly as he turned the next corner, ducked into a small arcade where an old Coca-Cola fridge buzzed, showing it was working. He selected a Diet Coke and paid the extortionate amount the stall holder wanted for the drink. The bag rustled faintly as he turned toward the glow of a neon sign that read “Internet Café” in flickering blue and white. It was tucked between a print shop and a clothes shop.

The café had three working terminals and a ceiling fan that groaned more than it spun. Tilson made a swift appraisal of the shop and then took the last booth to the far right, looking out at the street. Then he plugged in the USB drive and selected it on the desktop File Explorer.

A folder appeared instantly.

Flight No: CW-HC122Aircraft Reg.: SU-HKPAircraft Type: Sikorski S-92Operator: Cobalt Wave LogisticsDate: 14 May 2025Arrival: Private Helipad – El Tor Compound – 14:25 EET

Permit Ref: CW/EX-0119

Purpose: Medical Evacuation Flight Plan: Filed (VFR – Visual)Crew: 2Passengers: 2Passenger Manifest: VANDEBERG, O; RABINOVICH, V

Landing Zone:Location: Private Facility – South El Tor

Grid Ref: 29°59′16″N 33°36′32″E

There were other files such as transit notes, satellite relay timestamps, and a short voice memo labelled “Despatch-Confirm.wav.” Tilson played it.

A staccato voice, female, in Arabic: “Confirmed for offload and medivac. Clearance level Blue. Escort Alpha-Three on standby.”

He hit print and then wiped the memory stuck and made sure there were no echoes on the PC or the flash drive itself. Then he disconnected the device, folded the thin printout with the roll of money, and left the café without looking back.

Less than half an hour later, after a swift visit to the next door clothing retailer, and having ensured he couldn’t possibly have been followed, Tison was checking into a hotel. The Al-Khamsin was five storeys of concrete and shadow just off the Suez Canal Authority compound wall. The night clerk didn’t blink at his lack of passport or his bloodied sleeve. He just passed a ledger and a key. A lot of dollars got him Room 3B and no curiosity from the concierge.

His palace for the night was narrow, almost cell-like, with two mismatched single beds pushed together under a peeling map of Egypt and a ceiling fan that clicked once every revolution, like a metronome trying to keep the sweat from forming. One wall was a sickly yellow, painted over water damage that hadn’t fully dried before the next season’s humidity had set in. The bedside table had a missing drawer, and the only light came from a sagging wall sconce that buzzed when turned on, casting everything in a jaundiced glow, almost like being beneath the canopy of a rain forest.

There was no ensuite. A tiled cubicle shower sat at the end of the corridor, shared between rooms, its door secured only by a hook-and-loop catch that had lost the fight with time and friction. Tilson peeled the boilersuit from his limbs and three it into the small bin in the far corners. Then he padded down the hall in his towel, feet raw against the cracked linoleum, and waited behind an oil-streaked man who left the stall fogged and unrepentantly wet.

The shower stank faintly of bleach and mildew. Tilson ignored both and stepped inside, bracing himself beneath a half-clogged spout that alternated between boiling and glacial. It hit the grazes on his arms like a dare. He scrubbed the dried sweat, diesel grime, and alley dust from his skin, and stood a long time with his forehead against the tile. He was exhausted.

Back in Room 3B, with the fan whispering above and the door triple-bolted, Tilson spread his haul across the bed like a medic laying out triage on a field cot. The plastic Seoudi bag crinkled as he emptied it. Then he worked slowly, methodically, unpacking it like ritual. Each item mattered. Each would keep him functional.

He sat on the edge of the bed, inspecting the burns on his hand on side with a soldier’s detachment.

The worst was under his left arm, just below the ribs. A blistered oval where Jabba had driven the cigarette lighter into him during the fight in the back of the car. The skin was angry and weeping, the edges puckered where heat had sunk in fast.

Tilson cleaned around it first, antiseptic fizzing in the silence, then dabbed a fingertip into the small tin of Vaseline he’d added to the bag. The petroleum jelly slicked over the burn, sealing it with a sheen that bought him time and mobility. He layered on a Melolin patch, then gauze, taping it snug across his ribs. The back of his left hand came next — ridged and peeling from the first attack. More Vaseline, more dressing. By the time he was done, he looked like a man stitched together with pharmacy tape, but with a couple of co-codamol on board, the pain had dulled, and he could move without sucking air through his teeth. That was enough. For now.

Next was his neglected insulin. His hands shook only once when lining up the pen needle to refill the reservoir of the Dana RS pump. He paused, exhaled, steadied. Patience. The burn under his left arm, tugged at the dressing as he worked. He winced. His wrapped hand made the task harder. But he’d done worse. He rechecked the glucometer. The screen flickered but held. Readout: 83. Closer to safe than it had any right to be.

Tilson flicked one of the glucose tabs into his mouth, chalky sweetness clinging to his tongue. Then he wiped down the needle again and clicked the insulin pen back into its cap. Everything went back in the bag, which he placed on the second bed’s mattress. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, then lay back across the worn bedspread, staring up at the fan. It circled like a vulture clicking. Tilson moved slowly and reached up to place some Vaseline on the rotor’s mechanism., The click was silenced. For the first time in days, he could relax.

CHAPTER 18

Tilson had woken in the early hours. A few hours’ sleep had restored him almost complexly. He rose and visited the bathroom before slipping on his new clothes from the fashion retailer in the port. A pair of knockoff Levi’s, a cotton faux Ralph Lauren polo that was a size too big, and a pair of imitation Adidas sneakers that felt too light, like stage props pretending to be useful. But they fit.

Then he lifted the phone from its charger and dialled, waiting through two rings before he heard the familiar voice, rough and dry at the edges.

“Who is this?”

“We secure?”

“Sammy-boy!” Mace knew his vice instantly. “Where the fuck have you been?”

A flicker of something passed through Tilson at the sound. Not comfort exactly — just something solid.

“Macey.” His voice was low. “You alright?”

“Still confined aboard. Still breathing. Still dealing with the mess you left me. And of course we’re secure!”

Tilson smiled faintly at the ceiling. “Sounds about right.”

“You?” Mace asked.

“Still alive. Still breathing. Missing some dignity and a few square inches of skin, but I’ll manage.”

“And wanted for murder.”

“Yeah.”

“Always makes things easier, I find, when conducting a covert op. Dickhead.”

“Piss off.”

There was a pause. Then Mace’s voice shifted, just slightly. “Good news, though. She’s awake.”

“Joseé?”

“Came to this morning. Maya’s been allowed up to Hurghada General. Still in rough shape, but she’s stable. Talking. Asking questions. First thing out of her mouth was ‘Did we get the saboteur?’”

A breath escaped Tilson’s chest that he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. Relief came quiet, like cool air in the back of a hot room.

“I’m working on it. I located the flight log for that helo the coastguard mentioned. From the tanker. Landed at a private pad south of El Tor.”

“Right.” Mace let it sit for a second. Then, brisk again: “Talk to me. What do you need?”

“First up, I need you to contact the British Embassy in Cairo. Quietly. Speak to Head of Station. I need a fresh ID set. Passport, driver’s license, bank cards. Fast. Clean.”

“Where?”

“I’ll collect when I go to Cairo for my flight to Sharm. Everything else can be delivered to me ASAP, care of the Honorary Consulate in the diplomatic bag. I’ll fly down tomorrow.”

“OK. Big ask, mate.”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Fair.” Mace grinned. Tilson could hear it in his voice. “I’ll see what I can do. Anything else while I’m pulling miracles?”

“Second, I need a vehicle. SUV. Tough, diesel, modded for rough terrain. No electronics I can’t rip out with a penknife.”

“A civvy Pink Panther?”

“Exactly.”

“You going off road?”

“Definitely.”

“Is that it? Need any other kit?”

Tilson laughed. “Oh yes,” he said with his own grin. “I’m only just getting started.”

***

The Nile AIR flight out of Cairo was packed, dense with the kind of tired energy that clings to regional hops. Tilson had boarded last, back row, aisle seat assigned without eye contact by the airline clerk, and found himself elbow-to-elbow with a man who smelled of patchouli and vegetables. Beside him in the window seat was a woman in a pink hoodie scrolling through TikToks at full brightness.

The cabin was humid despite the A/C. The safety card in the seatback was frayed. Overhead, the bins were crammed with striped soft bags, wrapped in layers of duct tape like they’d done this trip a dozen times.

Russian chatter mixed with Arabic and American English. A child two rows ahead was kicking the seat of an older woman in front. Most of the passengers were tourists. A few Gulf nationals further forward.

After an hour in the air, the Airbus A320 started its descent just after midday. From the sky, Sharm el-Sheikh looked scrubbed and bleached, an oasis of resorts and half-built dreams stitched into the sand at the edge of the Sinai Peninsula. The descent over the Red Sea had been smooth, but Tilson was on edge. His ribs itched where gauze chafed against bruised skin. And despite additional painkillers, the burns were really smarting now.

He moved like a man with purpose but no time to waste. Through immigration, low profile. No questions. The passport in his hand was new—fresh from the Honorary Consulate—and carried the name Mark Shaw. Born in Cambridge, occupation: geotechnical surveyor. It had just enough detail to withstand a bored border guard and not a second more.

He cleared customs with nothing but a black duffel bag and a hard, unreadable face. Outside, a blast of dry air hit him square in the chest, heat rising off the tarmac in visible sheets. Among the drivers there to pick up passengers, there were no signs with his alias on them, no hired driver in a pressed uniform. Just the sun, the road, and a line of battered taxis baking in the heat.

But his new ride was there, as well.

It sat at the edge of the short-term parking, squat and muscular, matte olive with sand-coated tyres and tinted windows. No plate on the front. Tilson approached it, sizing the vehicle up. Mace had done well. There was a folded envelope under the wiper. Inside: a single ignition key and a note.

Closest I could get to military spec. Try not to flip it this time. Hydrophobic gel in the boot - M.

He allowed himself the barest twitch of a grin. The Nissan Patrol was a beast, an old-school model that had likely seen service as a support vehicle for PMC convoys or geological teams deep in the interior. It had bullbars, reinforced chassis, auxiliary fuel tanks, and a snorkel that could breathe through a monsoon.

He climbed in, dumped the bag on the passenger seat, and took a moment to scan the interior. Basic but brutal. Manual gearbox. Dash-mounted GPS cradle. No built-in nav system. No Bluetooth. Good.

It smelled faintly of sun-baked vinyl and dates.

Tilson backed the Patrol out of the lot and swung left toward the edge of town. The traffic around the airport was its usual mix of exhausted tourists, honking minibuses, and delivery bikes weaving like sharks.

The Honorary British Consulate had been an operational office in Sharm to help with tourist concerns between the hours of 8am and 3.30pm. It had officially closed a year ago, but it was still here, close to the new Sharm El Sheikh City Council buildings.

It was only the size and shape of a terraced house and stood apart from the other buildings around it. There was no signage and no uniformed presence. There was, however, a discreet, solid-looking gate and half a dozen security cameras.

Tilson had been buzzed into an airlock type arrangement and then, once the outer door had closed, the inner one opened. He showed his passport. A nod. The man behind the glass made a call.

A few minutes later, a woman in a tan linen suit emerged from a frosted glass door marked Authorised Access Only. Her heels clicked softly against the marble laminate as she approached. Mid-forties maybe, with sun-dried hair scraped into a tight twist and a face that looked like it had once smiled often but had since been instructed not to. There was a clipboard in one hand and a fine chain at her neck that caught the light as she moved. Everything about her was diplomatic neutral: muted jewellery, polite posture, desert tones.

She offered him a cool, professional nod.

“Mr Shaw?”

Tilson inclined his head once, keeping his voice flat. “That’s right.”

She handed him a thin tablet, already on the signature screen, then gestured to a shallow crate on a rolling cart just behind her, pale grey, reinforced at the edges, industrial rather than polished. Beside it sat a zippered matte case, the kind used for discreet transport of sensitive items: gunmetal black, stitched nylon, unlabelled.

“These arrived under diplomatic seal late last night,” she said. “Both need clearance codes. You’re to sign here and here.” Her accent was somewhere between Cheltenham and Rodean, with the vowels flattened by too many years in briefing rooms. She wore no ID badge

He signed where indicated. She watched only long enough to confirm the strokes. Then she turned without another word, heels fading into the hush of the hallway.

Tilson unzipped the soft case first. Inside, foam cut to fit: a brand-new Glock 19 Gen5, compact frame, two magazines, and a threaded barrel. There was also a folded holster, minimalist and sweat-resistant. No engraving, no serial, nothing that would get it flagged as UK issue It wasn’t just off-book. It was off-ledger. Someone in Cairo had understood the assignment.

The crate was heavier. Like a bag of flour. He didn’t open it yet; he just ran a hand along the edge. There was weight to it, and purpose. He grinned as he picked it up, took it out to the waiting Nissan, and placed it on the passenger seat.

Instead, he punched the coordinates into the GPS cradle and double-checked his own mental map.

He was going north.

The Nissan came to life with a deep-throated diesel growl. Tilson gave it a second to settle, watching the engine temperature rise on the analogue dial as he adjusted the rearview and checked the mirrors. The seat creaked as he leaned back. Sand-streaked, heat-hardened upholstery. No fancy leather trim here. This thing was built to survive impact and desert storms, not city traffic or valet parking.

Before he put it in gear and pulled away from the kerb, he pulled out the phone and thumbed through the minimal apps. He pulled up the browser and typed in “Rabinovich, V”.

It took longer than expected. The signal may have been weak, less coverage, or the crap phone. He couldn’t decide. But the name came up on Wikipedia.

Vladimir Rabinovich (born 9 March 1995) is a British-Russian business executive and the eldest son of commodities magnate Mikhail Rabinovich.

A graduate of the London School of Economics and the HEC Paris Executive MBA, he holds senior positions within Cobalt Wave Ltd, a shipping and oil firm under the Rabinovich portfolio. He is often described by international observers as his grandfather’s chosen successor.

Little is publicly known about his operational activities, but his presence has been confirmed at several closed-door conferences and security summits across Europe and the Gulf states. He is unmarried, has no children, but competes in the Formula 1 Powerboat World Championship as one f the drivers for the team sponsored by Cobalt Wave. He also holds a black belt in Kyokushin Karate.

Tilson raised an eyebrow. Kyokushin. No pads, no mercy. The kind of martial art that broke ribs before it taught humility. Beside the brief bio was an image and a caption: Vladimir Rabinovich at the Eurasian Trade Forum (2023).

He was wearing a slightly lighter-than-navy single breasted tailored jacket. He was smiling faintly beneath eyes that didn’t match the expression. Blonde, square-jawed, with the unmistakable gleam of someone who expects the world to bend to his will. Maybe it was the look he was going for, but the manic glint in the eyes shouted “sociopath”. There was nothing cold about the man’s smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

Tilson now knew who he was up against. There was one burning question, however. This man’s father, Mikhail, hadn’t even been born when the Suez Crisis took place. So why was he so interested in the Domiat? And that prompted another question. This was clearly who Kira was trying to warn him about. But why couldn’t she touch him?

Filing these questions for the moment, he quickly typed in the second name from the helicopter passenger manifest: Vanderberg, O.

Olga Vanderberg, full name highlighted in a thumbnail preview from Wikipedia. He tapped it open.

Olga Vanderberg (born 14 February 2005) is a British medical student and the daughter of New York-based socialite and environmental activist Tatiana Rabinovich Vanderberg...

Tilson scanned the entry quickly. Institut Le Rosey. King’s College London. Gaia Red Foundation. She moved in rarefied circles, cloaked in philanthropy and designer labels. She was Vladimir’s niece, a part of the close-knit Rabinovich clan.

Her picture was tiny on the screen of the small phone, so he couldn’t really get a good look at her. Olga Vanderberg pictured attending the Fondation Cartier Gala, Paris (2024), the caption read.

He expanded the image.

The woman in the frame wore a champagne silk gown, hair a natural rich auburn red, wide lips curled in a practiced smile. Her skin glowed under the lights, and her eyes sparkled. Sure the hair was different. Styled and a different colour. But the bone structure, the mouth. All familiar.

The hair was auburn here, and she was made up, but the face smiling in the flash of pap photography was the same one he’d seen in a dive mask, in briefing sessions, even over morning coffee on the Cockleshell. Wide, unguarded, confident.

This young Russian socialite was undoubtedly the woman he knew as Sophie Hargreaves.

CHAPTER 19

He leaned in closer to the screen. No doubt now. The woman captured beneath the flashbulbs in Paris — auburn hair, champagne silk, that unconsciously confident smile — was the same person who had joined them under a false name. Sophie Hargreaves. The same woman who had laughed on the dive deck, who had stood over the briefing table. And vanished the moment everything fell apart.

She’d lied from the start.

Tilson sat back in the driver’s seat, the heat of the cabin folding in around him. The SUV idled, engine ticking like a simmering threat beneath his boots. His jaw clenched. He set the phone down on the centre console, harder than needed, and shifted into gear with a snap of the wrist.

The tyres bit into the tarmac, aggressive and certain, the suspension rocking as he accelerated out of the consulate’s shaded compound. The air con had long since given up, probably disconnected on purpose, but a dash-mounted rotary fan spat warm air into his face as he turned onto the main road.

The sun was blinding. Even with the visors down, it drilled through the windscreen, bouncing off sun-bleached stone walls and the chrome signage of half-built shopping centres. He weaved through a glut of honking taxis, airport shuttles, and rusting mopeds, the SUV jostling over patched tarmac and curb-broken turnings.

To his left, the Gulf of Suez shimmered like hammered steel, brilliant blue against the scorched earth of the shoreline. The sun struck the water in blinding shards, turning the gentle swell into a mosaic of liquid light. The road hugged the coast in a thin ribbon of baked tarmac and dust — not quite finished, not quite forgotten. It rose and fell with the rock beneath it, always leaning slightly seaward, as though it, too, was ready to tumble into the deep.

Farther out, a scattering of fishing boats bobbed motionless, white hulls trimmed in peeling red, their nets slack in the water like flags at rest. Some looked abandoned. Others were barely maintained, their engines gutted, paint sun-faded to powder. A lone heron picked through a trash pile on the low-tide flats, indifferent to the silence. And beyond that, the horizon blurred into haze, where the Red Sea narrowed to meet the Suez Canal, gateway to empire, conflict, and commerce since the Ottomans first looked east with hungry eyes.

The Sinai Peninsula, Tilson knew, had never been truly at peace. These rocks, these roads, had seen pharaohs, prophets, warlords and peacekeepers in dusty rotation. The ancient caravan routes that once ferried incense and lapis through this land now bore tourists, tankers, and convoys with tinted windows. British troops had marched through here during the Great War. Israeli and Egyptian forces had fought over it like dogs over a bone. Even now, the scars were visible: bunkers overgrown, machine-gun nests half-swallowed by sand, and signposts twisted by decades of desert wind.

The road passed a rusted sign half-swallowed by sand, in Hebrew and Arabic, both long since scoured to nothing. Tilson let his eyes follow the curve of the coast inland, toward the high ridges that defined the western edge of the Sinai. It was here, in 1956, that Israeli paratroopers had come through under Operation Kadesh, part of the tri-pronged Suez Crisis that reshaped this entire region. French Mirage jets, British warships, IDF tanks all trying to force Nasser’s hand and keep the canal in “Western” hands. It was a war started in whispers and waged in misinformation. That same crisis that had brought him here in the first place. That supposedly simple act of war. A British warship sinking an Egyptian frigate with secrets in its hull. The Domiat. The real beginning of this mess.

Tilson gripped the wheel tighter, his bandaged hand twinging as the wrap pulled against the skin. He felt it now, not just anger but shame. Paddy was dead. Shola likewise. Josee had regained consciousness. But would she make a full recovery? He was supposed to know better. Spot the tells. Hear the gaps in a cover story. Read faces. And so was Mace. They’d let their guard slip, just enough, and Olga had walked straight through it like it was an open door. He made a mental note to check what had happened to the real Sophie Hargreaves, although he didn’t hold out much hope.

The SUV growled as it crested a rise on the coastal highway, the asphalt shimmering under the late afternoon sun. A tattered billboard, its colours dulled by salt and sand, advertised a resort that likely never opened. Beyond, the land sloped gently down to a stretch of raw coastline—sand and scrub tumbling toward the Gulf of Suez, where the water glistened in an impossible shade of blue. A few tourists lingered, snapping photos beside camels adorned with string-covered saddles, their laughter carried away by the desert breeze.

Tilson didn’t slow. The road, known locally as the El Tor–Sharm El Sheikh Road, would soon arc due north, deeper into the unspoken spaces of Sinai. His destination lay ahead: a compound marked by shadows and coordinates, nestled near El Tor—the capital of South Sinai Governorate. At the end of this journey, if the intelligence was right, awaited the oligarch’s family at the core of all this.

He pressed harder on the accelerator. The engine responded with a roar, and the first real wind in days slammed through the cracked window, whipping hot air against his neck. The sun hung low in the sky, casting elongated shadows across the desert landscape. He checked the dashboard clock: 17:45. He’d reach the outskirts of El Tor before dusk.

As he approached the city, Tilson veered off the main road, navigating a series of unmarked tracks that led into the hills overlooking the compound. He parked the SUV in the deep shade of a rocky outcrop. The Nissan’s dull grey-green colour blended with that of the surrounding terrain.

He left the vehicle, taking some binos from the box on the passenger seat. Using the phone to track the GPS location, Tilson walked steadily up the rock-strewn hill until he neared the top. Before his head crested the ridge, he lay on his stomach and leopard crawled the last few metres until he was overlooking the area of land between him and the sea.

From this vantage point, he could observe the terrain without being seen. He lifted the pair of Pyser SGI 8x42RMs to his eyes. They were the latest kit issued to the Royal Marines, sandy rubber housing warm to the touch. Field-tested. Good in jungle, better in the desert. Specifically designed for the UK armed forces, offering a balance between magnification and field of view.

Below him was the Rabinovich desert retreat grew before him in the lifeless sand him like something from a fairytale. It was called Pavlovsk. Of course it was. The same name as an old Romanov palace near St. Petersburg, a monument to control and paranoia dressed up as elegance.

The compound rose out of the dust like in the delirium of empire. It was too clean, too green, too precise to belong in the harsh geography that surrounded it. A long sweep of white stucco buildings shimmered in the heat haze, low and wide, their façades Mediterranean in style, but edged with the brutal functionality of military planning.

Red roof tiles glowed under the sun. The walls were cream, almost glowing. And beyond them, the absurdly lush gardens unfurled like a mirage of manicured lawns, carefully tended flower beds, bougainvillea spilling over trellises in rich purples and pinks. Tilson goggled at the gardens, almost obscene in their beauty, and in their defiance of the desert.

A broad green lawn unfurled from the main villa like a carpet laid for kings, trimmed to golf-course perfection and lined with imported cedar and jacaranda trees, their canopies engineered to spill cool shade across polished walkways.

But it was the water that struck Tilson most. A moat, narrow but deep judging by the dark blue of its surface, encircled the core of the compound in a winding arc, its still surface glinting blue in the sun like a wound stitched with glass. It wasn’t decorative. Not only. Lotus flowers bloomed in its corners. Real, huge, Koi fish, fat and expensive, drifted beneath the surface in listless, extended circles, awaiting their next meal.

In a land where irrigation was rationed and wells ran dry, Rabinovich had carved his own aquifer and poured it into a private Eden. Palm fronds rustled beside white benches. Everything was damp where it shouldn’t be. Tilson inhaled, getting the full impact of the jasmine on the breeze.

But beyond that veil of paradise, the truth was laid bare.

A security fence encircled the inner perimeter, topped with modern surveillance arrays and coil after coil of concertina wire. Concrete barracks stood behind it, their flat roofs hung with camouflage netting. A guard tower overlooked the southern approach, its shade cast long over a gravel access road that led through a checkpoint manned by armed personnel in unmarked fatigues. Not uniforms – not proper ones – but the kind favoured by private contractors and black-budget militias. Men without insignia.

Tilson adjusted the focus ring on the Pyser binoculars, the ridged grip now familiar beneath his fingers. To the west, just beyond a razor-wire-topped wall, a helipad baked in the sun in a carved-out flat of scorched gravel. The paint was faded but visible: white rings, directional arrows, one of them bearing the Cobalt Wave logo in chipped navy.

He expected to see a Sikorsky S-92, the helicopter model that had been used to airlift Rabinovich and his treacherous niece from the Zophiel. Instead, there were two sleek, black Bell 429s, rotors locked, doors shut, dust haloed around the skids. They sat side by side beneath a tensile awning. The paint on their fuselage gleamed with fresh matte lacquer, and no tail numbers were visible. Like the people operating them, these weren’t military in any official sense, but they certainly had the look of it. This and the hum of readiness. He saw the fuel drums stacked near a concrete bunker and the armed figure pacing in slow loops beside a wind monitor. This wasn’t a home. It was a command post with views.

A vehicle garage, half sunk into the earth, flanked the northern edge of the complex. Its reinforced shutter doors stood open, revealing a row of desert-modified Toyota Land Cruiser 4x4s and a pair of armoured personnel carriers with slatted armour bolted to their sides. Nearby, diesel drums and refuelling lines stood in a neat arc. The smell of kerosene and power steering fluid lingered in the air.

There were few people in sight. A gardener tending a hedge. A man in sunglasses and an open-collar shirt speaking quietly into a comms mic. Two guards shifting their weight in the shadow of the eastern wall. The whole place pulsed with the quiet menace of wealth and intent. This wasn’t a military base. It wasn’t a palace. It was something in between. A sanctuary, perhaps, for the Rabinovich family, who had grown tired of choosing between the two.

He tracked the outer perimeter, then lowered the binoculars and let his eyes follow the ridgelines, estimating angles, exposure, and wind. If he was going in, it would be from the west, across a stretch of broken ground that offered just enough cover: dry wadi beds, low thorn brush, chalky berms that broke up a thermal image. No cameras faced that direction, anyway. As far as he could tell. No patrols out that far. Just desert.

He would do it just how the originals had done it. David Stirling’s lot, hitting Luftwaffe strips in Libya with nothing but wire-cutters and a shit tonne of explosives. No one watched the sand. Not properly. Not out here.

He’d go in at night. Strip down the gear. Keep it light. Just the Glock, a pair of folding, high-tensile 24-inch bolt cutters for the fence, and a spare mag. Black wrap for the face and a hooded overshirt the same colour as desert shadow. The rest stayed in the Nissan. He memorised the sentry rotation. Two men, one at the front gate, the other roaming. Neither of them left the inner perimeter. Complacency. Always a great friend on an infiltration operation.

He waited until the sky bled out, all that desert heat bleeding into purple, then black. The Gulf vanished, swallowed by night, and the air cooled just enough for the sweat to stop pooling in his collarbones. Usually, the myriad of starts would have come out, but the sky was cloudy. Grey bulks glided across the sky like so many languid whales. Good. Darkness. Another dependable companion.

He crossed the first kilometre at a slow crouch, keeping his silhouette broken, pausing behind every rise. Wadi beds turned to pebbled flatland, then soft ridges where the ground had cracked into brittle flakes. He moved like he’d been trained: not silent, but quiet in the way predators are. No wasted motion. Every step calculated for weight, angle, and visibility.

The outer fence came into view just before midnight. No lights. Just a long black line dividing scrubland from consequence. He moved low and fast, unspooling a coil of wire from his belt. The cutters were matte black, new, and oiled. He found a junction where the ground dipped and a service conduit hugged the base of the fence. He slid in like smoke, severed three links, and pulled the section back just wide enough to slip through.

Inside was another world. Crushed gravel paths. Pruned trees. Security bollards. Money poured into a mould of fool’s gold. But not enough to stop someone like him. He moved along the edge of a high retaining wall, half-crouched, head on a swivel. A flicker of movement caught his eye—a golf cart, electric, zipping past one of the villa blocks. Two men inside. Lanyards. Not armed. Not properly.

He climbed a maintenance ladder bolted to the rear of a service block and flattened out on the roof, heart rate steady. From this angle, he had eyes on the main residence: a wide, angular building of glass and sandstone, all the lines too clean to be local. Floodlights lit the entryway, but the interior lighting was low. Controlled. Displayed like a gallery.

Then he saw the inhabitants.

First, Rabinovich. Not the old man, but the grandson. Vladimir. Blonde, broad-shouldered, wearing a white shirt too crisp for this part of the world. He was talking to someone just out of view, gesturing with a crystal tumbler in his hand, laughing.

The second figure stepped into the light. Olga Vanderberg. Or Sophie. Or whatever name she was wearing this week. Hair tied back now, no makeup, but unmistakably the same face from the gala photo. She stood close to her uncle, a champagne flute in hand. Her posture casual, but her attention was fixed. Focused. Like she was still on a mission.

Tilson didn’t breathe.

Then the door opened behind them and a woman stepped into the light.

He shook his head. Not again.

Kira.

For a heartbeat, he couldn’t move. She was wearing a black trouser suit, her hair bundled up under a black “US Navy” baseball cap. Casual. Not bound. Not escorted. Free. She spoke to Vlad, nodded once, then leaned in and said something to Olga. The younger woman laughed. The three of them stood in a triangle of affluence and power. A conspiracy?

Tilson lowered the binoculars slowly. Everything in him stayed still.

If this was a trap, it had been laid with style.

CHAPTER 20

Tilson had moved under cover of darkness, using the rising wind to mask both sound and motion. After confirming the guards’ patrol patterns hadn’t changed, he descended from the ridge, retraced his route around the southern escarpment, and looped wide across the flatter terrain beyond the irrigation trench. The Nissan was still where he’d left it, blanketed by dusk and camo netting beneath a broken overhang of shale and scrub. No tracks led to it. No disturbance in the dust.

He unlocked the driver’s door, opened it just wide enough to slip in, and sat for a moment with the key resting in his hand. No rush. No mistakes. He breathed once, turned it, and let the engine rumble to life. Lights off. He switched to low gear, eased it forward until the tyres found the hardpack, and rolled the vehicle downhill at walking speed with the door slightly open to listen for distant movement.

Two klicks later, he pulled it into position: a shallow depression in the lee of a rise, not visible from the compound but within a hundred metres of where he planned to watch from. He blanketed the Patrol again, camo netting stretched taut between bent rebar and a slant of rock. Then he scattered handfuls of dust across the bonnet and wheel arches. The finish was too clean otherwise. It had to look like it belonged.

Then the Observation Post.

High enough for a view, low enough not to silhouette. He used a microspade to carve out a prone hide just below the crest of a ridge facing east. Rolled out a low-profile mat. Scrim netting pinned with tent pegs and weighed with stone. He hollowed a shelf in the dirt for his elbows, another for the binos. The pack of glucose tablets, the torch. He’d asked for the Darkbeam Red Light Torch, a flashlight that offered a focused red beam, was rechargeable, and designed for tactical situations, providing a balance between functionality and portability.

He laid out the Pysers, adjusted the focus, and dialled in the terrain. Over the next few hours, he tracked sentries, guard swaps, interior lighting patterns, and delivery schedules. He timed the golf carts. Noted who smoked, who talked, who watched. How they held and carried their weapons. The house changed as the sun fell, glass going black, interior rooms falling dark in a slow progression like a stage manager switching off the theatre lights.

Then, when he was sure no one had seen the 4x4, and no one had seen him, he settled in with his cheek against the mat and the compound spread out below, waiting for the pattern to break. But he was restless. He rose again, silently, and adjusted the netting one last time, checked the lines of sight, before sinking prone to the shallow shelf once more. The sand here was very fine, dry, granular, and deceptive in colour. The desert had tricks, but he’d learned quite a few of them by now. Especially after Sa’dah.

He remembered the stench of scorched rubber and sweet meat in the Yemeni wadi. The Squadron had pushed north with a mixed column of UAE light infantry and Yemeni irregulars. Half the kids they were “training” hadn’t seen eighteen. Some hadn’t seen twelve. They’d taken fire from the ridge, then lost a man to a mine on the fall-back path. Tilson had been the one to carry the torso back to the CASEVAC LZ. Two hours in 41-degree heat. Flies arrived faster than the helo.

The OP they built that night had been desperate, barely more than a fabric blind and a rock pile with a spotting scope. But it had worked. Four hours later, Tilson had watched a target step into a lantern-lit courtyard, watched the man kiss his wife goodnight, then walked two klicks east and called in the fire mission. He never found out if the woman survived. He never asked. That was the reality.

This mission – this ridge – was easier. Cleaner. Safer, for now. But the gut feeling was the same. The low thrum behind the eyes, that quiet churn of threat, anticipation, and responsibility. No one else to call it in. No overwatch. No spotter. No long gun waiting to clean up. Just him, a pair of binos, and a feeling of unease.

The house began to stir just after dawn, long shadows stretching across the manicured lawn as the first soft lights came on inside. Curtains shifted. A staff member in a tan uniform stepped out to sweep dust from the marble steps. The koi in the moat moved in lazy spirals. A golf cart rattled into view, carrying crates of fruit and soft cheeses in a refrigerated compartment toward the rear terrace where a breakfast spread was already being laid out. A white linen tablecloth, polished cutlery, the works.

Kira appeared fifteen minutes later, dressed in a dark halter neck blouse, a pair of grey, three-quarter-length cargo shorts and robust, cream-coloured trainers. Possibly Merrell Antoras, the preferred shoe of the off-duty US personnel.

Her sun-lightened blonde hair was loose, tumbling down to her tanned shoulders. She carried herself with the same alert poise as always. Alert, scanning her surroundings in a way that mimicked ease but betrayed an edge. She took her place at the end of the long breakfast table, beside a man who looked like a logistics officer in civilian clothing: neat beard, tablet in hand, soft hands. Not a threat. Not directly. A server poured juice. She didn’t touch it.

Tilson clocked the body language instantly. Something wasn’t right. Her shoulders were too square. Her hands stayed visible. Then he saw why. She was no longer moving freely. She may still have been a guest of Vlad and Olga, but now she was flanked by two men in tactical gear. Not smart-casual lanyard types that he’d seen in the house before. These were handlers: ex-military, shaved heads, Oakley shades, the kind of build that came from gym racks and carb-loading. They stood close, too close, with that over-corrected stillness that wasn’t protection. It was control.

Kira got up from the table and paced the length of the terrace in short, tight increments like a caged cat. She was seething about something. Tilson wondered if the FSB had finally snapped and sent her onto rap the Russian oligarch’s knuckles and he hadn’t taken his punishment well. Whatever the reason, the trust she’d built was slipping.

Tilson narrowed the view with the Pyser glass, letting the image resolve. The guards wore Crye Precision combat trousers, sand-tan, faded at the knees. Their boots were Salomon Quest 4Ds, the private contractor’s footwear of choice, good grip, rugged, and half the weight of standard-issue British kit. Their body armour wasn’t heavy. Just enough to stop a 9mm slug at centre mass. Light rigs. Radio ear clips. Sidearms holstered, but no long guns in view. Not yet.

Tilson shifted his weight under the scrim netting. Sweat crept down his spine, sticky and slow. The sun was still climbing, but the humidity had kicked up. Storm pressure building out to the north-west. He scanned again, this time across the motor court. A group of personnel stood smoking in the shade of a steel-framed carport. Two wore tactical polos, arms crossed. One had a bullpup rifle slung low, almost certainly a Steyr AUG, ex-IDF surplus, popular with Gulf contractors.

The vehicle lineup was a private army’s dream. Three matte-black Toyota Land Cruiser LC79s, retrofitted with roof-mounted lightbars, snorkels, and double-spare rear racks. A Ford Raptor in desert camo, decked out with cage rails and a rear-mounted minigun mount. Empty. Again, for now. Finally, a squat, angular IAG Guardian APCs, modified with slat armour, crew hatches, and sensor domes. Iraqi warzone kit. Serious muscle.

The Nissan Patrol he’d stolen earlier looked like a pizza delivery truck in comparison.

He shifted his attention back to the villa, just as Vladimir Rabinovich emerged. He swaggered, still playing the heir apparent. Tailored shirt, tactical beard, mirrored shades. The man moved like a movie star on a set he controlled.

Kira’s posture snapped. She barked something across the space in loud, sharp Russian. The nearest guard was a bald man with big ears that protruded from his skull like the handles of a vase. He moved forward between her and Rabinovich. She pushed him. Hard. Too hard. He reacted, his hand snatching at her upper arm and twisting. The second man moved in, gripping her wrist, spinning her around.

Tilson’s stomach clenched.

But she had this. Of course she did.

As Big Ears twisted her arm, she pivoted into the movement, dropping her weight and slamming her elbow into his ribs. He staggered, stunned. Just enough for her to rip free.

The second guard was a handsome, swarthy-looking guy. Could have been a Bollywood star. He went for a shoulder clamp, textbook stuff. Kira let him come. She stepped into the reach, turned her hips, and brought the edge of her forearm hard into his trachea. The man stumbled back, gagging, hands to his throat, blinking in disbelief.

A third guard, wiry with coal-black skin, came out from the French windows. He didn’t hesitate. He went low, arms wide for a wrap-up, but Kira twisted again, spinning him down her arm as if he was a yo-yo. Then she drove her elbow into the base of his skull, just below the occipital ridge. His legs buckled. He landed face-down in the gravel, twitching.

Kira removed the Caracal F Emirati-made 9mm pistol from his belt holster. These were rare outside the Gulf, but standard issue for UAE-trained militia. Someone in logistics had a regional contract, Tilson thought. Or was laundering inventory.

Big Ears was lunging again, half-blind with rage. The FSB beauty caught him with a boot to the thigh and a jab to the temple that sent him reeling, comically, into a garden chair. He collapsed backwards over the armrest in a tangle of limbs and wrought iron. In under ten seconds, she’d dropped them all.

She stood there, chest heaving, the purloined Caracal aimed at Rabinovich.

The tension was dissipated by a shadow across the French windows. A second later, Olga stepped through, unhurried, a compact pistol already raised in both hands. Her heels clicked once on the stone. She was immaculate. Ivory blouse, Ray-Ban Nina sunglasses, and a two-handed grip on what looked like a Makarov clone, low-profile and burnished. The pose wasn’t theatrical. It was learned. Practised. Her arms were locked, muzzle steady, as she aimed directly at Kira.

The whole tableau had shifted.

It wasn’t a conversation anymore. It was a reckoning. Tilson didn’t wait to see what happened next.

He was up and moving in seconds, boots crunching down the ridge. He dropped through the scrub, fast but controlled, keeping his centre of gravity low. At the base of the slope, he peeled the camo net from the Patrol, threw it into the footwell, and slid into the seat.

On the terrace, Vlad shook his head, smiling. He started circling Kira as Olga covered him. More men arrived, their own weapons drawn.

Tilson twisted the key in the Nissan. The diesel coughed to life. The dashboard buzzed. Tyres chewed gravel.

He didn’t aim for the gate. Too obvious. Too slow. He took the west break, where he’d clipped the cable access routing. The bullbar was built for this. Custom-welded plate, steel-core teeth.

The Patrol hit the fence at 60 kph.

Metal screamed. Concertina wire snagged, snapped, and flared backward like a whip. Dust exploded.

On the terrace, heads turned. Vlad staggered back, gun half-raised. The guards shouted. One went for his comms. Kira was frowning at this unexpected but welcome interruption in what surely have been her execution.

Tilson kept the accelerator pinned. Full throttle. Eyes on Kira. The SUV took the short flight of steps that led up from the lawn and swerved onto the smooth stone flagstones. A couple of men opened fire, but their aim was skittish, and the Nissan’s erratic behaviour meant they had difficulty finding their marks.

Kira could see it was him, now, her eyes wide; a suppressed but relieved grin visible beneath the focus.

Tilson drove straight for the table, sending everything on it flying and causing everyone to duck to avoid a melon to the face. The car clipped Big Ears. A hip check with 2.4 tonnes of steel. The man folded like a tent. Tilson slewed the Nissan, and it skidded sideways, the passenger door swinging open. Kira half-fell in. Slammed it shut with her elbow.

“You took your time,” she gasped.

He smiled at the call back but accelerated hard.

“Get your seatbelt on.”

As Kira snapped the safety restraint in place, Tilson sent the vehicle soaring off the terrace, flying in mid-air for the briefest of seconds and then slamming back to earth hard.

“Going out the way I came in,” he said.

He spun the wheel this way and that, fishtailing away from the house, punching through the gardens with the sort of disregard that turned manicured lawn into speedway track. Flamingos scattered from a koi pond as if summoned by a dream. Tilson blinked away the surreal sight.

Gunfire chased them as they hit the perimeter track.

“They’re mounting up,” Kira said, glancing back.

“How many?”

“Two SUVs. The Raptors. And …. Shit! One of the chopper’s spooling.”

Ahead, the desert stretched before them like a painting. But not just a sea of sand. A wall of it. Whipped by a fearsome storm. The one he’d felt earlier. A thick, beige and grey curtain, rolling down from the mountains.

“We can’t actually go into a sandstorm,” Kira said, tightening her grip on the handle. “That’s crazy!”

The Nissan jolted forward in a burst of speed as Tilson shifted to top gear. He smiled.

“Tovarishch,” he said, “I’m Royal Marines. Beach assaults, you know? Sand is kinda my thing.”

CHAPTER 21

Before they passed into the front of the storm, Tilson had quickly set things up for driving in those conditions. He switched the air circulation to internal only, sealing the vents so no grit could get sucked into the cabin. The Patrol’s snorkel was already fixed for high dust load, its top facing rearward in a blunt curve to reduce direct intake. He checked the filters anyway. All good.

The previous morning he’d applied Mace’s present of hydrophobic windshield treatment to the glass surfaces on the exterior of the vehicle. Although designed to deal with excess water, it was also excellent at repelling fine particles such as dust or sand. It also meant the wipers, front and rear, worked more efficiently. Any advantage of visibility would be an asset.

He ran a gloved hand along the door seals and rechecked the latches, ensured the windows were totally sealed and locked in the up position. Dash indicators stable. Everything that could be done, was done. After this, it would be them versus the desert.

Then it hit.

The sandstorm didn’t arrive. It descended. Like a curse. Like a judgement. It rolled over the desert on a wall of heat and static, not so much moving as consuming. The wind came first. It was dry and sour, heavy with electricity. Then the light began to die. Stolen by the strange ochre blandness of it all. The sky turned from pale blue and grey to a dull copper. Shadows vanished. And then the sand came. Not gentle, not drifting. Like a machine used for destroying rock. Fine as flour but edged like ground glass, it got everywhere and it sliced and bit and burned. Essentially it turned the air into a weapon.

The sound was unlike anything else. Not roaring, but shrieking. Millions of grains clawing across surfaces at 70 kilometres an hour. Any voices were lost. Hell, it drowned out the largest of engines. So people had no chance. The sound assaulted your ears and ate to your brain. No matter which way you turned your head, or what you covered it with, that banshee shriek was still there.

It also stole the shape of things. A convoy could vanish ten metres ahead. Men went deaf. Blind. Disoriented. Mad, even. Maps meant nothing. GPS signals worked, but they were pointless. It was like trying to navigate a void. It wasn’t the fact that were was nothing out there, or that you couldn’t drive from A to B. It was the fact there was a lot out there, but it was all invisible. Plus, there were no landmarks by which to navigate. The fact was, if you did leave A, it was very unlikely you’d ever reach B, let alone see it.

Unless you happened to know that your former muckers in the Royal Marines Commandos had been issued with new helmets a year ago that dealt with exactly this problem.

The helmet was standard RM issue now, third-generation VTP-COMBAT with a modified visor overlay and integrated pressure-seal rig. Originally developed for recce teams and urban breaching, it had found its way into vehicle command kits after too many ambushes in poor light. Externally it looked simple. A dull-surface composite shell, low-profile mounts, no flash bone dome. But inside, it was a different world. The heads-up display ran on a silent pulse-map, stitching together LIDAR and GPS dead-reckoning, cross-referenced against stored terrain profiles. It could even generate 3D images of the terrain as you drive. The thermal feed overlaid all enemy movement as pale red ghosts. There was even a vibrotactile compass node in the collar, tapping against his skin to indicate heading.

In a sandstorm, it made the difference between hunting and being hunted. Visibility was less than half a metre – if that. The wind had turned air into noise and direction into hazard. But Tilson could see. The visor filtered out particulate wash, rendered terrain contours in real-time, and tagged heat sources even through grit and debris. He could count their vehicles. Track their tyre friction. Read the way they were drifting off-centre, trying to brake too late or turn too wide. The others were reacting.

He was navigating. The desert might have blinded them, but it had handed him the high ground. Beside him Kira stared at him open mouthed as they sped through the void, sand whipping against the windshield.

Using the 3D mapping, Tilson steered the Nissan towards a narrow defile carved from amber-red sandstone. Its walls rose sharply on both sides like the ribs of some long-dead creature, almost closing in above them. The sun was long gone, blotted out by broiling storm and scudding grit. Through the helmet’s filtered optics, the scene was crisp and layered with contour mapping. Tilson watched the lead vehicle make its move and was surprised by its speed.

Then he realised. It wasn’t one it the Land Cruisers, or the Raptor. This was a dune buggy. A matte green Can-Am Maverick R, caked in fine dust, its open-frame chassis humming with vibration. Two men sat inside, one driving, the other standing to brace behind a swivel mount that hadn’t been fitted with anything yet. Their goggles glinted, but they were blind in the storm. He could see that in the way their steering lagged behind terrain response. They were guessing.

The buggy veered left, trying to outflank the Patrol along the inside line. Tilson let it happen for a second. Then he tapped the brakes and threw the wheel to the right. The Nissan kicked outward, tyres gouging deep ruts into the shale, the rear end swinging wide in a tight arc. Dust exploded from the ground as the Patrol’s profile suddenly changed. The buggy driver reacted, but too late. His Can-Am’s front wheels struck a patch of crumbling scree, lost traction, and twisted off the summit. Its suspension jolted. The whole vehicle lifted slightly off its axis.

It tipped alarmingly and then the wind – gusting at just below 90 mph – took it and flipped it like a toy. The rollover was violent. The buggy took to the sky and landed with a sickening crunch, striking a protruding rock. This sent it airborne once more before it finally came to earth against a curved boulder the size of an elephant. The impact folded the cage inward, smashing the roof into the cabin space. A wheel separated from the axle and bounced end over end, landing far down the track with a final, pathetic bounce. For a moment, nothing moved but the dust. The canopy of grit folded over it like a burial shroud. No survivors.

Kira looked at Tilson, a grim smile on her lips. In his peripheral vision, he saw her hold up her right hand, fingers extended. Five left.

Two Land Cruisers remained on Tilson’s flanks. One up high, the other low, both pushing faster now as the terrain narrowed. He could see them clearly through the helmet’s HUD, each glowing with thermal signature, the suspension heat-blooming from constant correction. The one to the left kept elevation, moving with cautious aggression, sticking close to the ridgeline. The other was more reckless, dipping into troughs and weaving through outcrops, engine heat flickering like a furnace. They were trying to bracket him. Box him in. They had no idea how exposed they were.

He slowed slightly. Let the Patrol drift right. Not enough to fall behind, just enough to suggest indecision. The high vehicle bit. Its driver eased off the ridge, nose-first, trying to force him down into the flats. At the same moment, the lower Toyota accelerated, hoping to snap the trap shut. Their radios were tight, their timing decent. But the landscape was an unknown to either of them. The two lines they followed were not parallel. They were gently, invisibly, converging.

Tilson opened the throttle for two seconds, enough to make it look like a final escape attempt. Then he hit the brakes hard and dropped into a dry gulley that vanished beneath a stone lip. No dust trail. No silhouette. He was gone from their view in less than a second. The sandstorm swallowed the Patrol behind him. The only thing left in his wake was silence.

The Land Cruisers kept coming. One rolled down the ridge at an angle that would have worked on open ground. The other launched up from the basin floor, the driver over-correcting into unknowable terrain. Both met at the curve’s natural throat. Their drivers and passengers were blind. Their wheels slipped. The high vehicle glanced off a rock, spun sideways, and slammed its bullbar into the lower Land Cruiser’s rising hood. This would usually have elicited a sound like some giant’s nails drawn down a huge blackboard. But in the storm, it was like being in a silent movie. Nothing could be heard.

The impact launched the second Toyota onto two wheels. It stayed there for the length of a breath, wobbling, before crashing sideways into a standing boulder. The first rolled into it again, crushing its own fender and blowing a rear tyre. For a moment, both engines screamed. Then something sparked, and the whole wreck coughed smoke and dropped still.

Tilson watched from cover. The HUD blinked. Two threat icons vanished. He tapped the throttle and edged forward again, dust closing behind him like curtains.

Kira tapped his shoulder. He glanced at her. She slowly and deliberately lowered two fingers on her hand. Down to three.

They were deep into it now. At least ten miles north-northeast of Rabinovich’s Pavlovsk Palace by his last reckoning, somewhere between the eroded foothills and the bare-bone highlands that cupped the inland edge of the Gulf.

According to the map they’d crossed a four carriage highway some time back but he hadn’t even registered a change in terrain. He shook his head imperceptibly. Knowing the terrain was everything. Feeling it through the steering wheel, through the tyres. It was key. How could he have been so stupid?

Now there was just wind-carved terrain and sand in every imaginable texture. The HUD gave a pulse every thirty seconds, a faint green arc confirming his direction. They had pushed far past the range at which any other pursuer would have given up. But these guys were paid to succeed. To get results. They didn’t go the extra mile for King and Country. No sense of loyalty or honour fuelled their chase. Currency did. And it didn’t even have to be theirs.

The angular IAG Guardian APC was still on them, riding high and heavy on its oversized suspension, its snorkel screaming as the engine pushed through soft ground. Its hull was clad in armour. There was no way he could make this one crash.

He spotted that the crew hatches sat open for airflow. Maybe that was a weakness? But Tilson knew they could be sealed in seconds. A pair of sensor domes turned lazily on their mounts, scanning for heat or movement, but in this weather they were little more than spinning guesswork. That kind of kit worked well in alleyways and on open ground in nice weather. Out here, in the noise and static of a desert storm, they just gave the enemy something else to shoot at. It was built to survive IEDs and heavy fire.

Tilson checked the HUD again, saw the heat wash spiking from the axles. The armoured car was gaining, but not fast. Just steady. Relentless. A DShK – a Soviet-designed heavy machine gun known colloquially as a Dushka – sat on the roof, sweeping left and right, hunting for targets through the dust. The gunner was half-blind in the storm but he kept shooting controlled bursts blindly into the tempest.

Ahead, the terrain dipped. A shallow basin curved through the sandstone, filled with what looked like ordinary desert crust. Flat, pale, unmoving. But something was off. The thermal readout dropped to almost nothing. No signature. No texture. Just a smear of cold on the HUD. It looked like a shadow, but the sun had been blocked out as soon as the storm had started. Tilson kept the Patrol straight and eased off the throttle, letting the tyres whisper across the surface. The steering softened. The feedback dulled. Kira gave him a concerned look, shrugging. What’s going on?

Tilson hesitated. It felt wrong. Then he remembered.

Fech fech.

Powder-fine sediment, formed when ancient flash floods pooled and baked the ground into talc. From a distance, it looked solid. Up close, it had the give of memory foam and the pull of wet cement.

Tilson had seen it first in Djibouti, where a UN truck had sunk to the axles on what looked like a flat plain. Later in Yemen, a technical carrying a heavy gun mount had vanished nose-first into the stuff like it had driven into a lake. No warning. No forgiveness. The name came from local Arabic slang, a kind of onomatopoeia for the choking sound it made when it clogged your throat.

He edged left, testing the crust. The Nissan weighed just shy of three tonnes. Just light enough, low enough. The tyres held. The weight distribution kept it on the surface. He inched the 4x4 forward, trying to make the vehicle appear casual in its movements. If the APC behind him could see anything and noticed his speed, they might get suspicious, and this was, really, his one chance.

He held the line for another twenty metres, then drifted right again, back onto firmer ground. The basin stretched behind him now, just wide enough for a big vehicle to make the wrong decision.

And that’s what the Guardian did

Its driver committed fully, no hesitation. The front wheels rolled across the basin’s edge, then sank as if the desert had opened its mouth. The vehicle lurched like a horse caught in a quagmire. Back wheels dug in, spun, kicked up more powder. The engine roared, tried to pull free. But there was no purchase. Only drag. The whole machine tilted forward. The gunner dropped below the turret line, yelling something no one could hear. Then the rear went too. The Guardian settled into the ground like a six-wheel Titanic. Tilson didn’t flinch. Just tapped the throttle, watched the red icon on the HUD blink twice, then vanish.

Kira nodded. He’d done well. She held up two fingers in a V for Victory sign. Now the last two.

CHAPTER 22

Before Tilson could even smile in response, the world turned upside down. It was another Can-Am R. This time equipped with a Trail Front Bumper. It was a streak of battered black metal and blind luck. The Maverick slammed into the Patrol’s rear quarter, jerking the chassis sideways. The force wasn’t catastrophic, but it was enough. Its left side dropped. The Patrol lurched and tilted, wheels slipping into soft crust.

Alarms blinked red on the HUD. Weight displacement. Surface instability. Fech fech.

The vehicle wasn’t gone, but it was stuck. Sinking, fast.

Kira cursed. Tilson was already yanking the crate behind the seats open. “Storm kit!” he yelled, gesturing to the back of the car.

Tilson reached for two rolled shemagh scarves and wrapped one across his mouth and nose. Also known as a keffiyeh or ghutrah, these cotton, or cotton-blend cloths were traditional Middle Eastern attire. They were worn around the head and neck for protection against sun, wind, and sand. Military personnel had adopted them in desert environments and been wearing the items ever since Lawrence of Arabia “went native”.

Kira was pulling on a pair of Revision Desert Locust goggles, locking the strap down over her ears, tightening the seal. She passed him a set. They moved like they’d done this before. Different nation states, similar training. No words now. They were useless anyway. Just hand signals and muscle memory. His last act was to pass her the Glock 19.

Tilson threw open the rear door and dropped into the blast. The storm struck him like a wall. Grit hit his jacket like static, the wind trying to tear the goggles off his face. Crouching low, using the back of the Nissan as a shield, he edged round to the back of the 4x4 and found the winch housing. He flipped it open. The cable inside was coiled and dry.

Kira had exited the Patrol from the passenger door and moved to cover, trying to locate the dune buggy. Her scarf fluttered like a flag caught in a current. She heard the muted sound of gunfire to her left and tried to look. Nothing. Judging purely from the indistinct crack of the weapon’s discharge, she sent two of her own rounds back in response. Quick, deliberate.

Tilson slotted the cable into the anchor pin on the exposed rock face. The hook clanged once, then held. He thumbed the spool. The winch groaned, tensioning fast. The Nissan Patrol shifted once and then juddered to a halt. Was it enough? Only one way to find out.

Another enemy round slapped into a flank panel just feet from Tilson’s head. He ignored it.

Kira, meanwhile, ducked from cover, adjusted, and returned fire with calm efficiency. Her second shot dropped resulted in a short yell close by. She closed in on the scream and found the vehicle at rest, one man wrestling with the mounted Dushka heavy machine gun. She shot him twice and checked the rest of the seats. Just the guard she’d hit earlier, unconscious, his neck bleeding from the nasty gunshot wound.

Tilson heard two more indistinct shots as he climbed back into the SUV and turned the ignition key again. He rammed it into gear and gently pressed on the accelerator. Over-revving would only serve to bury the car deeper in the fine sand.

The Patrol began to crawl forward.

One wheel caught on the solid edge of the fech fech. Then another. The winch did its job. The vehicle surged forward, shrugging off the powder crust like a beast dragging itself from a trap.

Kira suddenly dived into the passenger seat and slammed the door. Her face was streaked with sand, her lips cracked, but her eyes were steady.

He held up the diver’s signal for “OK?” and she nodded, blinking. Then she held up her hand once more and pushed the penultimate finger down with her other hand. One left.

The sandstorm had swallowed the rest of Rabinovich’s forces, but the helicopter was still hunting.

Tilson saw its thermal ghost flicker across the HUD. A sleek ovoid form cutting slow circles above the ridge. The Bell 429, matte black, both rotor booms humming, was hugging just high enough to stay out of the worst of the grit but low enough to try for line of sight.

It wasn’t built for combat really. It was a civilian, light twin-rotor helo, made for medevac and VIP transport. But like most kit in Rabinovich’s private arsenal, this one had been retrofitted. A military avionics sensor pod was housed under the nose. It had reinforced landing skids, and a door-gunner rig where the medical stretchers used to go. It had no armour to speak of, but it was fast, quiet when it needed to be, and good at staying in the air just long enough to ruin your day. Especially if the pilot knew what he was doing. Which, it seemed, he did. Plus, this crew knew the one thing they couldn’t do. Enter the storm. The way they were flying made that clear.

Even from this distance, the helicopter’s lights were just about visible. That meant to the storm was dying. Two thin cones of white flickered through the airborne sand like searchlights in fog. They scanned the storm edge in long sweeps, barely touching the ground. The Bell could hover, but only above the turbulence. Drop into this and it’d be torn apart like a gazelle by lions. The rotor wash would kick up even more grit, overloading the intake filters and fouling the rotors. One wrong move and they would lose lift, or worse, shear a blade. A bird like that relied on air pressure, clean lines, and a clear horizon. None of that existed here.

But the men on board did not need to descend. They had time, and they had thermal imaging cameras. They could follow the engine signature of the Nissan Patrol from the edge of the storm, tracking it through the heat trail left by its chassis and exhaust. Then, when the vehicle emerged from the storm, they would pounce. It wasn’t about speed anymore. It was patience. A slow kill. Tilson knew the tactic and was well aware the storm was dissipating.

He and Kira needed to disappear.

He scanned the terrain ahead and found the only viable option. A hollow in the rock. Natural basin, about ten metres deep and shaped like a horseshoe. Steep sides. Narrow opening. No clean exit. But it had one thing he needed. A thermal shadow.

He steered the Nissan toward it. Not fast. Just steady. Letting the vehicle drop into the basin. As they descended, the HUD shifted. The terrain map bent and curled, showing the walls rising around them. Then the heat signature from the vehicle began to smear. The ambient temperature inside the bowl was cooler, the surrounding rock retaining less heat than the open desert. A dead zone.

Thermal cameras couldn’t see into dead zones.

They relied on contrast. Hot against cold. Movement against ambient. But inside this hollow, the Patrol’s heat signature would vanish. Temporarily. Thirty seconds, maybe forty. Just enough.

Tilson brought the vehicle to a gentle halt and killed the engine. He turned to Kira. Her eyes were already on him. Her face was dry, her skin raw from windburn.

He reached behind the seat and pulled the box forward. His last bit of kit. He’d asked for it in case he needed to enter a tall building. A grapple launcher. REBS-VX Tactical Launcher that used compressed-gas propulsion and fired a carbon-steel barbed head with magnetic coupling and tension latch and a dual-purpose mounting ring. The projectile head was designed to clip-lock with external winch lines, allowing quick rigging to tow points, rooftop anchor loops. Thirty metres of reach. It wasn’t made for combat. But with the Patrol’s winch, and a bit of luck, it would do the job.

Tilson opened the rear door and stepped into the basin.

The wind hit him in the chest like a gleeful bully. Grit scoured his jacket. The noise of the storm assaulted his mind. But he stayed focussed. The sky above was a churning cauldron of sulphurous yellow, swirling under pressure. The chopper lights were still there. One beam passed across the ridge just above. They were close.

He moved behind the Patrol, crouched low, and loaded the grapnel launcher.

Then he waited.

The Bell came overhead, hovering just beyond the lip of the basin. Not visible by eye, but the HUD lit up. Close enough. Thermals flared. The outline of the tail rotor and the engine block stood out like coals in mist.

He raised the launcher, took aim at the body, and fired.

The cable snapped away, arcing up through the storm. It vanished almost instantly into the cloud. Then the winch pinged. Solid contact. The barbs had locked onto the stabiliser strut near the tail boom. Tilson braced. Slid the winch cable through the rear housing. Clipped it to the Nissan’s anchor point. Then he climbed back inside and hit the switch.

The winch groaned. Tension spooled in fast. The cable went rigid, slicing through the air.

The Bell 429 shifted in place. They knew something was wrong. It tried to climb further way. Too late.

The tension cracked the rear of the chopper into a twist. The tail swung out, causing a loss of power and control. This made the winch’s job easier, winding in the helo like a practiced angler landing a fish.

The chopper jerked mid-air. For a moment it held, engines roaring, tail kicking sideways against the resistance. But then the inevitable happened. The turbines started to cough. A change in rhythm. The sand was getting in. Fine particles clogging the intakes, fouling the compressors. The rotor speed dipped. Not by much, but enough. Enough to matter.

By now, the storm was abating and both Tilson and Kira could see through the windscreen what was happening. The helicopter veered wildly to its starboard side, dropped a metre, caught itself, then dropped again. The tail yawed against the tension from the line, fighting to stay aligned, but the winch kept pulling. Then one rotor clipped a rock outcrop as if kissing the ground goodnight. The whole airframe bucked violently, sending the nose angling to the ground. Any lift that remained in the rotors died at that moment. The fuselage struck the side of the natural basin hard, snapping one of the skids from its belly.

The body skipped once, then ground itself to stillness in a spray of shattered blades and grit. The helicopter folded like a tin can under pressure. One engine bloomed into a fireball. The tail snapped clean off. One blade whipped free and hurtled towards the Nissan. It embedded itself into the sand mere feet from the front of the 4x4.

The next moment was silent.

They sat for a second. Just breathing.

Then Kira turned to Tilson.

“Did you just kill a helicopter with a tow cable?” she asked.

He nodded once. Still watching the crash site for any signs of life.

“You are crazy.”

He sat back in the driver’s seat and shut off the reel.

“Crazy is just another word for genius.”

Kira snorted. “Right, Einstein, and how did you work that out? Using the formula E=Mc fucked?”

Tilson didn’t respond immediately. Just put the Patrol back into gear, eyes still on the rim of the basin. As they pulled back onto the now clear surface of the desert, they could see the sea shimmering in the distance.

“The odd part is that’s not the weirdest thing I’ve done this week,” he said at last. “I was in the ballast tank of an oil tanker a couple of days ago.”

She looked at him again, this time with something between admiration and apprehension.

“You really scare me sometimes.”

He looked at her, smiling sweetly. “It’s nice to be on the other end of that for once.”

She laughed.

Tilson drew the Nissan to a halt atop an escarpment.

A fishing village unfolded below. A small cluster of low, white buildings and a dozen boats bobbing in the shelter of a tiny port or pulled high onto the shore. No roads, just tracks worn into the dust by years of foot traffic and weather.

Beyond that, the Red Sea, pale and still

Kira leaned forward, elbows on her knees, admiring the simple beauty before her.

“Gorgeous,” she murmured.

Tilson also looked out over the village, one hand still resting on the wheel.

“Thanks,” he said. “You’re pretty good looking yourself.”

CHAPTER 23

The wind softened as they left the storm behind. Not by much, but enough to hear the crunch of gravel beneath the Patrol’s tyres as it coasted down from the escarpment. The desert gave way to rough terrain patched with scrub and salt-stung bramble. Farther ahead, the blue sheen of the Red Sea grew clearer, trembling behind a veil of haze.

The fishing village looked like it had been built one room at a time, with no blueprint but need. Low-slung houses with blistered whitewash leaned against one another like men waiting for a bus. Sheets of corrugated iron served as roofing, and half the doors looked borrowed from other buildings entirely. A few children stared at the vehicle as it rolled past. One pointed. None ran.

A narrow track wound toward the centre of the village — if there was a centre. Tilson followed it slowly, letting the engine settle to a steady hum. A small group of men sat beneath a tattered awning playing cards on an oil drum. One of them looked up and tilted his head toward a squat building with faded green shutters and the scent of mint thick in the air.

“This looks like the place,” Tilson said, cutting the engine.

They climbed out, dust falling from their clothes in silent clouds. Kira pulled off her goggles, her hair snapping loose from its makeshift knot. The heat was different here — softer, humid, brushed with salt. The storm still rumbled far behind them, but here, it was as if the world had exhaled.

The café was barely more than a converted home. A veranda of warped wood and old cushions, walls the colour of tea-stained linen, and a hand-painted sign above the door in Arabic. Inside, the ceiling was low and the room dim, but it smelled of strong coffee, fresh bread, and something stewing in a pot.

A woman in her sixties moved behind the counter with the stillness of someone used to watching everything. Her headscarf was floral, hands broad and scarred from years of kitchen work. She said nothing, but gestured to a corner table beside the window.

Mint tea arrived in small, sweating glasses. Tilson took a sip and sat back, letting the flavour clean the back of his throat. It was sharp and earthy, with a sweetness that lingered on his tongue.

No one spoke to them. No one asked why they were there. Which suited him fine.

The sun was beginning to dip now, pulling long shadows across the floorboards. Out through the window, the sea flashed silver in the slanted light, and gulls circled in silence overhead.

“Tell me about Rabinovich,” Tilson said.

Kira waited until the tea was nearly gone and the edge of tension had dulled.

Then she leaned forward, elbows on the table, and spoke in a low voice.

“There are three generations at play here. The junior Rabinovich – Vladimir – you’ve seen. Blond. Psychotic. Then here’s his father, Mikhail. He is sensible. No trouble.”

“And the third?”

“The grandfather. He’s 90, but still in charge. Mostly. His grandson is now taking over.”

She sipped the tea. “Rabinovich isn’t just a powerful man. He’s a dangerous one. Not because of what he does, but because of what he was.”

Tilson tilted his glass, watching the last of the mint leaves swirl. “Go on.”

She scanned the room once, habit more than fear. “He was a Soviet asset. A field operator at first. Then something else. Recruited young. Moulded by the KGB In post-war Russia and handed assignments through an internal channel that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“A double agent?” Tilson asked, eyebrows raised.

Kira shook her head. “Not quite. He played one side against another, but he always reported back to the motherland. When the Soviet system collapsed, he took what he knew and buried it in gold. That’s how he survived the transition. Not just survived. Prospered. While the others fell to coups and bullets, he rose. Built companies. Built a family. Wiped the slate.”

“My team came with the name ‘Lucky Break’. Was that him?”

Kira hesitated. Tilson;s mind went back to Ellie Allerton at MI5 headquarters in London.

Rumours said he was a source for MI6. Had the ear of someone very close to Nasser … A double agent. Not a soul knew who he really was, though …

“Yes.”

Tilson nodded.

What do we know about what happened to Lucky Break?

Disappeared. Like he never existed.

“So there’s nothing that links Lucky Break to Rabinovich?”

“Nothing. And that’s how he wanted it to stay.”

“But then we came along.”

Kira nodded. I was sent to warn him not to interfere.

Tilson leaned back, his expression unreadable. “If that ever got out…”

Kira nodded. “His assets would be frozen. Every legitimate deal he’s ever touched would be questioned. Every international partnership would collapse. He’d be finished. The Rabinovich name would become poison. His children would lose everything, the wealth, the holdings, the reputations. The empire would crumble.”

Tilson let out a long breath, the weight of it settling over him. “And all it would take is the right piece of evidence. Something in a sealed compartment. On a sunken warship.”

She met his gaze, her voice steady. “That’s why we need to get to the Domiat before his family does.”

Kira turned her glass slowly between her fingers. Her voice was calm, but there was an edge beneath it now. “We’re going to ruin him.”

Tilson smiled. “We?”

“He crossed a line, Sam. Pointing a gun at me in that compound? He knew who I was. What I represent. And he didn’t care.”

“He was showing off,” Tilson said. “To Olga. Making sure they knew he could still pull a trigger.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m still FSB.” She looked up at him. “He threatened an officer of the Russian Federation on foreign soil. When I report that formally, he’ll be on every blacklist from Moscow to Murmansk. It doesn’t matter how many yachts he owns or who his lawyers are.”

“You know his yacht collection is bigger than most navies?” Tilson met her unamused stare and switched to serious. “So report him.”

A beat passed. Kira’s mouth twitched. “Not yet.”

That surprised him. “Why not?”

“Because we need him exposed properly. Not as some oligarch gone rogue, but as the man who manipulated the entire Suez crisis from the shadows and has been laundering influence ever since.”

Tilson let that settle. Then nodded. “So we continue the MI5 mission. Get the evidence. We bring up what’s on that wreck. And we make sure it’s loud enough no one can ignore it.”

Kira exhaled. Her posture eased slightly. “That’s the plan. But just so we’re clear, if the grandson comes after me again, there won’t be any diplomatic channels left.”

Tilson raised his eyebrows. She meant business.

***

The wind off the sea was gentler now, warm and briny, tugging at the fabric awning above the café like a child seeking attention. Tilson stepped out first, pulling the scarf from his neck, his face still scraped raw from the sandblast. Kira followed, a little slower, eyes scanning the village like a second sweep.

They passed the children again. They didn’t run or wave. Just watched. Eyes black as olives, still and unreadable. A donkey brayed somewhere to the east. Someone was frying onions in goat fat.

Tilson approached the group of men still playing cards outside the building nearest the shoreline. They looked up, slower this time. Older men, mostly, weather-creased, greyed at the beard, cigarette paper-thin in build. One of them had the white eyes of someone who had worked too long under the sun without glasses. Cataracts, probably.

He raised a hand, then pointed toward the sea. “Wreck diving,” he said, enunciating. “Old shipwreck. Old diver?”

The men looked at one another. Then one grunted. “Hassan,” he said. “Up the hill.”

Tilson frowned. “Hassan? That’s it?”

The man tapped his temple, shrugged. “He knows.”

That was enough.

They followed a stone path behind the main cluster of buildings, toward a sloping terrace that overlooked the shallows. Chickens scattered across their path. Kira stepped aside as a woman emptied a basin of soapy water onto the dust. The windows were all shuttered. A fishing net hung from a power line like a captured ghost.

At the end of the path stood a flat-roofed house with faded blue trim and a bougainvillea that had devoured the wall. A small brass bell hung above the door. Kira reached for it, but the door opened before her fingers could touch it.

An old man stood there. Tall, surprisingly so, with a stooped back and arms like driftwood. His skin was the colour of cinnamon bark, and his pale, amber eyes squinted at them as if reading something behind their foreheads.

“Hassan?” Tilson asked.

The man nodded once.

“We were told you used to dive.”

Another nod. “A long time ago.”

“We’re looking for something. Something deep. Not far from the coast.”

Hassan leaned on the doorframe, silent. Then, after a moment, he stepped aside, beckoning them in. “Come.”

The interior smelled of rust and salt. Not decay exactly, but metal aged by time and sea. The walls were covered in fishing knives, bent copper hooks, even a whaling spear. On a shelf beside a shuttered window sat a strange object — domed, ridged, heavy. It took Tilson a second to realise what it was.

A helmet. Brass. Circular front viewport. Beside it, a full-body canvas and rubber ensemble hung from an old fishmonger’s hook

The diving suit was a relic. The surface was mottled with salt bloom and the faint green of oxidised copper. At the shoulders and chest, heavy brass fittings caught what little light crept in, dulled to a matte sheen from decades of exposure. The boots were monstrous — thick-soled and lead-weighted, with leather straps that had long since stiffened into curls. A corrugated air hose, still coiled like a sleeping serpent, trailed down from the helmet mount to an old hand-cranked pump tucked beneath the workbench.

Tilson stepped forward, reading the lines in the helmet’s design. It was classic “Standard Dress” — a hard-hat rig with weighted boots and an air hose that likely hadn’t been used since the Cold War. The Unicorn, he thought. Captain Haddock would have wet himself.

The helmet itself was a Mark V-style globe, copper-brassed, porthole-eyed, its viewing lens thick and fogged. Circular grills vented either side like gills, and the neck ring bore the faint embossing of a European manufacturer.

These suits were made not for speed or finesse, but for pure, deadweight steadfastness; the ability to walk the ocean floor like a man made of stone. They had been standard issue for military and salvage divers from the 1910s through the postwar era and phased out in most navies by the 1980s. They were still beloved by traditionalists, wreckers, and the occasional romantic madman. But no one would ever use one now, Tison thought, unless they were crazy …

Then he saw the boots. They were monsters. Each one weighed close to fifteen kilograms, cast in solid lead with ribbed soles and wide leather uppers strapped down with tarnished brass buckles. In open water, a diver wearing a suit like this needed every kilo just to stay anchored against the drag of the air hose and the pull of the sea. They weren’t meant for swimming. They were made for walking on the seabed. Or in a wreck. But it’d be slow progress. Inch by inch, with the measured pace of someone moving through lava with sweaty gelignite strapped to his back.

Tilson ran a hand along the side of one and felt the pitted texture of age and use, each scar a dive, a depth, a memory. The cheekplate was cold, even in this heat. There was something ghostly about it. A suit built for a different era, a different man. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t fit him like a glove. It was like if you jumped out of a Hercules with a parachute designed by Leonardo DaVinci.

He could almost imagine it descending into the black water, air hissing through valves, each step echoing through pressure and time. It was beautiful. And terrifying. He grinned. Exactly what they needed.

“You ever go deep?” Tilson asked.

“Deep enough,” Hassan said. “Fifty, sixty meters? The wrecks don’t move. But the sea does. That’s the trick.”

Kira exchanged a look with Tilson. “Will you take us?”

The old man didn’t answer right away. Then he nodded, just once. “At first light. When the tide turns. Before the heat rises.”

***

They left Hassan’s house with the sun sliding low behind the ridgeline, a warm wind brushing in from the sea. The path back to the café twisted between garden walls and shuttered doorways, the sand beneath their boots still soft from the earlier storm. For a few minutes, neither spoke. The silence was easy now. Their arms swung in a natural rhythm, shoulder to shoulder. Then, without warning, both of them reached at once. A shared flicker of motion. Not dramatic, not even deliberate. Their hands touched, one brushing lightly against the other. Her fingers slid against palm. Tilson curled his hand reflexively, just enough to hold hers without clamping onto it.

It felt ridiculous. Surreal. Like something out of a film they’d never admit watching. But neither let go. Instead, Kira looked sideways at him.

“What is it with you and storms?” she asked.

He squinted trying to catch her meaning.

“First a white out in Norway, now a sandstorm in Egypt.”

He looked at her now and nodded. “Right.”

Kira smiled at this but said nothing else. Their eyes were locked. Two pairs of blue eyes, each searching the other and finding agreement there. Yes.

They reached the café just as the first of the string lights blinked to life above the veranda, their glow a soft amber against the growing dusk. Inside, the air was warm and filled with the scent of mint, lemon, and fried fish. The old woman from earlier nodded at them, already expecting their return.

She led them upstairs to a narrow room at the top of the house. The roof access was through a door next to the bed. This consisted of a mattress laid out over a faded rug, two cotton pillows, and a window cracked to let in the sea breeze. A ceramic bowl of water sat on a low stool beside a tin lamp.

Kira peeled off her scarf and tossed it onto the chair. Tilson shrugged out of his jacket and laid it neatly across the foot of the bed. Neither spoke. Neither needed to.

They pulled up the two mismatched chairs and washed in silence, taking turns with the bowl. Sand clung to their skin in fine patches, settling in the corners of their mouths, under fingernails, along the lines of their throats. It was the kind of sand that never left entirely, even when the water ran clear.

Tilson removed his shirt and bent forward, cupping water to his chest, scrubbing gently at the sweat and grit. Then Kira stepped in behind him without a word. She picked up the cloth, dipped it again, and ran it slowly between his shoulders. The water trailed down his spine, warm and gritty. Her hand followed. Careful and precise, until it reached the dressing taped under his arm.

She peeled it back with a quiet sharpness of breath. The burn had done some healing, but the skin was still puckered. Red. Angry. A circular welt from the lighter, and a deeper wound where the flame had caught flesh.

“Nasty,” she breathed.

“Cigarette Lighter. One of Rabinovich’s thugs.”

“I should have noticed it sooner.”

Tilson tuned slowly to look at her.

“You had other things to deal with,” he said.

She didn’t reply. Just dipped the cloth again and started carefully dabbing at his neck and chest. Her touch was gentle. Then he reached down and Kira let him take the cloth. She raised her arms wordlessly, letting the halter-neck top slip over her head as he pulled it off, revealing the gentle swell of her breasts beneath her bra. He began to trace the same path with the water, collarbone to shoulder, shoulder to back, rinsing the salt and wind from her skin.

That’s when he saw it. A puckered scar just below her ribs on the right side. Small, but clean. Not a graze. Not shrapnel. A precise wound.

“Knife?” he asked softly.

She glanced down, following his eyes. Her hair caught the light as she moved, a golden spill across his skin.

“Yes. Kyrgyzstan. Didn’t go deep. Just enough to remind me I was human.”

Her breath caught slightly when he kissed the scar, but she didn’t pull away. As his lips moved higher over the curve of her stomach, then to the soft skin between her ribs and breasts. Her hands came up and gently cupped the back of his head, fingers threading through his hair.

He rose to meet her mouth.

The kiss was unhurried. Not urgent, but deep. A quiet confirmation of everything they’d survived, and everything they hadn’t said aloud. She tasted of sea air and mint, and her skin was still warm from the day’s heat. When his hands found the clasp of her bra, she didn’t flinch. She let it fall like a weight she no longer needed to carry anymore.

She kissed just his stomach, then again at the base of his throat. Then she gazed into his eyes. This look was far more intense than the one they had exchanged in the street. She slowly reached down and undid the buttons on his trousers, reaching for what was already growing inside. He gasped as he felt her nails against his manhood.

She bit her lip and then stood, allowing him to peel back her shorts revealing her underwear. He returned the favour and let his fingers slip inside the cotton of her panties. She gave a low moan of pleasure as he explored deeper into her.

Tilson stood now and made their way toward the bed with the slow, wordless coordination of people who understand what’s happening.

He grabbed the thin mattress and lifted it through the slatted doors, out into air which was still humid, and placed it on the flat roof of the balcony.

She allowed him to lay her back and then she pulled him down to her, losing the last items of clothing as they did so.

It wasn’t frantic. It was steady. Their bodies moved in careful synchrony, familiar yet exploratory. His touch was firm, hers fearless, fingertips grazing hips, inner thighs, the line of a jaw. She wrapped her legs around his waist with instinct more than intention. He paused only once, eyes locked on hers, checking for the silent yes. She gave it without hesitation.

And when he entered her, it felt not like claiming, but like returning, two paths converging after years of divergent travel. Her breath caught against his cheek. He murmured something unintelligible but soft. She answered in a language older than speech.

They moved together under the open sky.

Above them, the stars had come alive. Not cold points, but as constellations writ huge. The Milky Way poured across the heavens in a river of pearl and fire, mirroring the Red Sea below, its arc stretching from horizon to horizon in a silence that demanded respect.

Kira looked up once as Tilson’s body pressed into hers, and her breath caught not just from him, but from the heavens above. It felt impossible that such chaos could hold such symmetry. That something as old as starlight could feel mirrored in the slow, anchoring rhythm of two bodies moving in the dark. But it did.

Their skin was damp, warm against the night breeze. The sea murmured softly close by, the gentle waves washing on the beach and receding in its own rhythm

Her moans were quiet but certain, his breathing ragged at the edges. Each touch was deliberate, exploratory without hesitation, confident without demand. Her fingertips trailed his ribs. He kissed the hollow of her throat. Their lovemaking slowed and deepened, breath and pulse synchronised not just to each other, but to the pulse of the world, the stars.

When release came, it did so in a series of body quakes, and cries of ecstasy followed by long, breathless sighs and a shared stillness that neither tried to break. Kira pressed her forehead to his. Tilson’s hand slid into her hair. Their bodies stilled, but the connection remained — a magnetic hum, deep and grounding.They kissed. Long but soft.

Afterwards, they lay side by side beneath the stars and the temperature dropped a degree or two, Tilson retrieved a shemagh from their room and covered Kira with it. She thanks him and he snuck back into bed with her. He breathed in deeply and then slowly out. He was exhausted for sure but he was content. He went to ask her how she felt, but she was asleep. Instead, h nestled his head it her hair. No need for anything but the weight of skin on skin, the cool sweep of night air across their shoulders, and the sound of waves below.

CHAPTER 24

The light came early and soft, bleeding through the cracked shutters with a quiet insistence. Sea air drifted through the room, cool and salted. Tilson stirred first. His arm was draped across Kira’s waist, the shemagh still tucked over her bare shoulders. He exhaled once, deeply, as if to anchor the moment. He gently nudged her shoulder.

“Time to go,” he said. Then he sat up and reached for his shirt.

When they got downstairs, the café was already awake. The old woman handed them warm bread wrapped in wax paper and a pair of hard-boiled eggs without comment.

Outside the village, where the land gave way to a crescent of stony beach, Hassan stood beside his skiff, a weathered wooden boat moored at the edge of the inlet, its Yamaha outboard tilted clear of the tide. Oars were strapped across the gunnel, and salt had carved deep into the grain of its planks.

The village still slept, but the sea was stirring. Low tide. A hush before the heat. The water stretched out flat and pale, holding the first blush of morning in its mirrored skin. Far out toward the east, a small cluster of gulls circled something just beneath the surface.

Hassan said little as he worked. He had already loaded the standard diving gear into the boat. The canvas suit was folded neatly beside the weighted boots and the globe-like helmet polished to a near golden sheen.

The gear laid out beside the suit looked like something salvaged from a naval museum, but everything was there, complete, functional, and lovingly maintained. Most prominent was the hand-cranked air pump, a squat, cast-iron device with twin pistons and a pressure gauge with a cracked face. A pair of reinforced canvas hoses, thick as a man’s wrist, extended from the outlet ports like veins ready to carry breath. The nozzles were brass, dulled with time but sealed tight. One hose ran to the diver’s helmet intake, the other was a backup, looped neatly and hung on a rusted hook.

Beside it sat a coiled length of lifeline rope, woven hemp treated with wax to resist fraying and seawater rot. It would be tied to a harness at the diver’s chest, offering both a tether and a communication tool.

“Three tugs: up. One: down. Two: stop,” Hassan explained. “Simple.”

Next to it was the harness rig itself that consisted of wide canvas webbing with leather bracing across the back and waist, all fixed with tarnished buckles and D-rings worn to a smooth polish.

Stacked beside the boots were the lead weights: squat rectangular ingots with leather straps for the diver’s waist and back. Each one weighed over five kilograms, enough to help counter the suit’s buoyancy and anchor the wearer to the seabed. With the boots factored in, a diver in full kit carried more than 80 kilograms of additional weight. Once submerged, it became manageable. But otherwise it slow, uncomfortable and laboured.

Finally, the signal torch and knife, essential tools for any deep dive. The torch was an ancient waterproof lantern, pressurised and battery-fed, its glass scratched but intact. The knife was heavy, flat-bladed, kept in a battered leather sheath. Not for fighting. For cutting nets. For slicing rope. For the emergencies you never wanted but always had to prepare for. Everything smelled faintly of salt, brass, and the slow memory of the sea.

The skiff rose and dipped gently with the morning swell as it nosed north up the coast towards the site of the wreck. When it got close, Tison pointed out the-orange inflatable marker bobbing where the Domiat’s ghost waited beneath. The skiff pulled alongside.

The water was clear here, impossibly blue, but Tilson felt the gravity of what lay below like a pressure on the chest. This was where it had all gone wrong. Where Olga had made her move. Where Paddy had died. He reached out, steadied the buoy with one hand, and watched it sway.

“Dive now,” Hassan said.

Tilson nodded.

Kira helped him prep. They laid out the weights, checked the old valves, secured the hose coupling to the ancient hand pump. No backup. No redundancy. If anything went wrong down there, there would be no SCUBA regulator to fall back on. Just a line to the surface and a prayer it wouldn’t snag.

“You sure this thing’s going to hold?” Kira asked, tapping the side of the helmet.

Tilson nodded, lips dry.

Hassan gave a single grunt, then gestured to the hand pump. “I’ll work this. You,” he said, nodding to Kira, “lookout and watch hose. Anything strange? Pull!”

With slow, ritualistic precision, Tilson began to dress. Canvas and rubber pulled tight over his arms and legs. The weighted belt cinched low around his hips. The lead-soled boots strapped down hard, making each movement heavy and deliberate. Then the helmet lowered into place with a resonant clunk. His world narrowed.

The inside of the helmet was warm already, his breath fogging the glass briefly until the airflow started. Hassan cranked the pump with steady, practiced hands. Kira held the hose, unspooling it gently, her face unreadable.

Tilson gave the OK signal and stepped backward off the boat into the water, the weighted boots anchoring him with a suddenness that stole his breath. The sea closed over his shoulders, and the outside world faded to a dull hum. Inside the helmet, the hiss of air was steady, rhythmic, like a living thing. His breath echoed back at him. In. Out. Measured. Controlled.

The water was colder than expected. Not icy, but dense, pressing against him like a second skin. Visibility was good, at least for now. Ten metres, maybe twelve. Sunlight shafted down in thick columns, catching particles of silt that shimmered like stars in the deep.

He descended in stages. First five metres, then ten. The hose trailed above him in a gentle curve. He kept his hands slightly out from his sides for balance, adjusting the angle of his feet as the boots sought out the downward slope of the seabed. Step by step, he moved like something carved from iron.

Below, the wreck emerged from the bluey darkness, different from how he’d last glimpsed her, shifted by the seismic charges Olga had set.

Tilson’s boots touched metal.

A low, reverberating clang echoed through his chest as he stepped onto the deck plating. He moved forward slowly, aware of every shift in gravity, every tether of the hose behind him. He passed rusted bollards, a toppled liferaft cradle, the warped remains of an aft deck gun whose barrel had fused with its mount.

Schools of glassfish darted around him, silver slivers vanishing into shadows. A lionfish hovered motionless beside a torn railing, its fins wide as a fan, as if guarding the past. Tilson followed the route Mace had taken, along a shattered deck past broken davits before heading down to a passageway that led for’ward, past yet more debris. The darkness was almost total here, and Tilson was very glad of his old lantern torch. He also had a nagging feeling of double claustrophobia. The narrow space of the classic warship and the antique diving suite. At least they belonged tighter, he thought.

As he re-entered the captain’s cabin, the remains of a human body bobbed towards him. The one he’d discovered beneath the collapsed bulkhead, now released.

If the 3D scans from the Cockleshell were right, the compartment would be just by the desk. Tilson steadied himself beside it, brushing away the fine layer of silt that had drifted across its warped surface. The compartment wasn’t obvious at first. But there was a subtle line in the panelling, low on the portside bulkhead where a drawer might have once been.

He ran his gloved fingers along the seam until he found a recessed latch, corroded but intact. One hard pull. It creaked open with a reluctant groan, and inside, cushioned in a metal cradle, was a black waterproof case, rubber-gasketed, double-clasped, and stamped faintly with a faded naval seal.

The moment felt unreal. All the deaths, all the sabotage, all the storms and lies had led to this. He reached in, locked both hands around it, and pulled it free. It was heavier than expected. Sealed tight. And intact. He allowed himself a flicker of triumph behind the visor. Got you.

Tilson backed slowly out of the captain’s cabin, the black waterproof case clutched in one arm. He was free and clear.

Movement flickered in the periphery of his vision. Silt disturbed. A shape passing through the outer corridor.

Fuck. Famous last words.

He ducked into the shadow of another doorway, helmet turning. His air hose trailed behind him, a snake’s tail in still water. Too visible. A real giveaway.

He reached down and ran his hand along the tether line, then coiled it against the wall, hoping to disguise the way it pulled into the wreck. Maybe they hadn’t seen him. Maybe …

A flicker of motion. Another shape.

This time closer. Coming right down the passage. Tilson knew it was only seconds now.

He eased behind the frame of a collapsed bulkhead, crouching low. He slipped the waterproof case beneath a shattered locker and drew the diver’s knife from his belt sheath. It was a stubby, oxidised tool with a wide, flat blade. Not ideal. But it was what he had.

Then, silence.

And just like that, his air stopped.

No warning. No pressure loss. Just absence. The steady hiss vanished. The pressure in his suit dipped. His ears popped, then his vision swam. The glass fogged instantly. He clamped his mouth shut, forcing himself calm.

It made sense that if there were divers in the water down here, then above him, they must have found the skiff. Found Hassan. Found Kira.

He dropped to one knee. Panic tried to claw its way up his spine, but he pinned it with training. There had to be minutes left. Maybe two. Maybe less, with this pressure. That was all. Another exercise in breath control.

But then he saw the diver again, a blur moving fast through the corridor, flippers angled like rudders. Sleek black suit. Full mask. Twin tanks. Streamlined. Efficient.

Tilson hunkered lower, holding the knife tight in his left hand. Waiting. But he couldn’t fight in this gear. Not properly. His old suit was too bulky. Too slow.

His helmet was beginning to fog again. Darkness encroached at the edges of his vision.

And then he saw above him, caught in the exposed frame of a winch crane just outside the cabin wall, a section of collapsed fishing net dangled like seaweed. Part of it looped around a rusted hook-arm, maybe once used for cargo, maybe lifeboats. It hung loose, swinging in the current.

Tilson moved fast, hauling himself toward it. Each movement of muscle in this bulky monstrosity made his lungs scream in protect. He jammed the knife into the tension cable holding the arm to the hull. Twice. Three times. Steel screeched. The blade bit. A fourth hack.

Snap.

The tension line parted and the hook-arm dropped violently, jerking sideways on its axle. It swung down like a guillotine.

The oncoming diver never saw it.

The heavy iron bar caught him across the back of the head, shattering his skull and causing a flower of blood to rise from the wound. His arms flailed as his body twisted sideways and crumpled against the decking.

Tilson dropped the knife and pushed through the water toward the dying man. Every motion now was deliberate. He grabbed the harness and dragged the diver back into the rear compartment where he’d stashed the document case.

There, in near darkness, Tilson worked fast. He unclamped the helmet and prepared to lift it free. Then he cut the older suit’s hose coupling with the last of the knife’s edge. His lungs screamed. His brain was already whispering alarm bells. At last, he lifted the dead weight over his head and let it fall to the deck in slow motion.

Then he tore at the attacker’s gear, grabbed the mouthpiece and gasped at the compressed air as it flooded his mouth. Sharp. Cold. Life. The world rushed back. His heartbeat departed his eardrums and his vision cleared in bursts.

Quickly, he unfastened the shoulder clips, rolling the limp form of the other diver onto its back.

Tilson pried off the twin tanks, Then he yanked the rest of the suit off the man’s body and stripped himself of the old rubber and brass gear piece by piece, fumbling at the weighted boots, dragging the thick canvas back down his legs, before slipping into the sleeker modern gear. He clipped the harness, double-checked the tank seals, rolled his shoulders.

Fastest kit change of his life. And it wasn’t over.

He grabbed the document case from beneath the locker and tied it to his thigh with the salvage rope from the old diving harness. Tight enough not to drift. Loose enough to jettison if needed.

Then he turned, kicked off the wreck, and began to ascend.

The sea felt different now. Darker above. He rose, a silent shape in the water, a ghost with a mission. The sealed case pulled on his leg, seemingly reluctant for the secrets it had been holding onto for almost 80 years to resurface.

Tilson broke through the waves with a gasp that felt like it had been waiting an hour to escape. The world above was blinding. Sunlight slammed against his eyes after the velvet dimness of the deep, and he blinked furiously against the sudden clarity. His lungs shuddered. His arms burned. He lifted his mask, and the smell hit him. Acrid. Oily. Wrong.

He turned in the water, scanning for the skiff. It didn’t take long to find.

The little boat was listing heavily, a crooked silhouette against the bright sky, and smoke curled up from the stern in slow, black plumes. A pocket of flame hissed along the gunwale, licking at what remained of the outboard engine. The fire wasn’t raging, not yet, but it was eating its way forward, towards the hose coils, the crates, the pump. The smell of scorched rubber and salt-laced timber filled the air like a punch to the chest.

He swam toward it. The firelight rippled on the surface, streaking the water with flickers of orange and grey. He reached the hull, caught the edge with one hand, and hauled himself up over the lip in a single, brutal motion.

Hassan lay slumped along the port side, one arm caught in the ropes. His throat had been opened, a single, precise line across the windpipe. No struggle. No panic. Just pain and silence.

Tilson knelt beside him for a moment, one hand resting gently on the old man’s shoulder, as if that could make any of it make sense. He gently closed the man’s eyes. A cliché, but Tilson didn’t know any other way to honour the man. His throat was dry. His thoughts scattered. The flames crackled at his back.

He moved quickly, grabbing the bucket tied to the rail and using it to hurl seawater over the flames. Again. Again. Steam billowed. Embers spat. He could smother the worst of it, but the outboard was done for, blackened, blistered, warped beyond recognition. The skiff, what remained of it, was dead in the water.

He looked up. What about Kira?

Far out to sea, just on the edge of visibility, a sleek white shape cut through the horizon. It was low, fast, and beautiful. Like a bloody shark. It rode the water with the confidence of something that had never known danger, just purpose. A luxury yacht, throttling away from the coast with a trail of wake breaking behind it like a wound opening across the sea. His eyes followed it for a long moment. He didn’t need binoculars to know whose it was.

She was gone. Taken. Again.

Tilson sat down hard on the bench, soaked and shaking. Saltwater pooled in his boots. The sun bore down like judgement. He stared at the smouldering wreckage around him, at the rope-stained deck, the blood-slick rail, the crumpled figure of the man who had helped them without question. The case thudded gently against his thigh, still tethered. Still sealed. The prize they had come for. He felt no triumph.

The skiff rocked gently with the swell, drifting farther from shore with every breath of wind. He leaned back against the shattered console, eyes closed, already calculating the odds. No engine. No paddle. No direction. No time. Nada.

Then something buzzed. Tilson’s brows furrowed. What? He moved around the boat, trying to locate the source. Then he found his pants from that morning. He had two phones in there. His new one and the burner he’d taken from Jabba.

It was the latter. The cheap plastic felt alien in his hands. But it was still working. Somehow still connected. He swiped the screen.

One message. Just nine words.

I get the documents. You get Kira.

Sunrise. 27°54′N 33°36′E.

CHAPTER 25

The Cockleshell sliced through the black water at full throttle. Under a moonless sky, her matte-black hull was nearly invisible. She had not been designed for stealth, but years of field modifications had brought her close. Her exhaust was foam-baffled to muffle its vibration. Her panels were treated with radar-absorbing coatings. Thermal dampeners disguised her signature from overhead scans. Every system was quiet. Every surface had a purpose. She moved like a predator. Her lights dark. Her engines running low and steady. The only sound was the rhythm of her hull against swell.

Tilson stood amidships, encased in a black drysuit. Both he and Mace had checked his gear, checked twice, and then checked again. A suppressed Glock was strapped to one thigh. A combat knife rode the other. Various bits of kit concealed in pouches.

Below deck, Maya had secured the waterproof document case in a steel locker. That part of the mission was done. This wasn’t about intelligence anymore. It was about extraction. It was about finishing what had been started.

Ahead, the Rabinovich yacht loomed, rendered ghostly on thermal cameras. It was the MV Caelus, a 162.5-metre superyacht once registered in the Cayman Islands, now sailing dark under no flag, no AIS transponder, and no name on her stern. Built by Blohm and Voss in Hamburg and launched in 2012, she was built during the final years of showpiece oligarchy when yachts were status symbols first, and security assets second.

Originally a flagship of soft power, Caelus was bloody huge. She had hosted deals that moved continents: oil agreements inked on her teak decks, EU lobbyists seduced in her lower salon, and Russian ministers wooed beneath her bespoke $200,000 Swarovski chandeliers. But she had evolved. Despite a price tag of a cool billion dollars, the Caelus was no longer a vessel of excess, she had become a floating fortress. The ostentation remained in place, but now it shared space with something colder. Purposeful. Paranoid.

She bore the trademarks of that evolution. Comms jammers replaced the helipad elevators, her bridge was reinforced with bulletproof shielding, and a short-range UAV dome spun quietly above the upper deck. The rumoured missile detection suite was never officially confirmed, but the rotating domes bristling with sensors told their own story.

Belowdecks, her mini-sub hangar had been converted into a fast-launch bay, housing a pair of militarised RHIBs. Beasts, much bigger than the RIB Tilson had at his disposal on the Cockleshell.

These were a brace of HDT Storm SRTV-850s, each just shy of ten metres long and built like a knife. Their deep-V hulls were composite-reinforced aluminium collars wrapped in Kevlar-coated Hypalon, giving them the muscle to slice through surf or shrug off shrapnel. Twin 300-horsepower outboards bristled at the stern, and forward-mounted pedestals were set up for M2 Browning .50 cal machine guns with shock-mitigation allowing for smoother recoil and minimal vibrations.

The cinema room became a security ops centre, and her bulletproof master suite, once a bragging point for Rabinovich’s inner circle, now functioned as a secure panic room with reinforced oxygen flow and independent power.

She now lay at anchor almost eight nautical miles southwest of El Tor, riding low in the water.

Maya hunched over the infrared screens, taking all this in. The display glowed with the ghostly heat signatures of red and white figures moving along a steel deck. She tapped a small mic clipped to her vest.

“Sam, I make six thermal hits on deck. Engine’s hot. Crew armed. No movement below.”

Her voice came through his comms, clear and low. She was calm. Focused. Then her tone shifted.

“We’ve got a slight issue. Movement from Hurghada confirmed,” Maya said, eyes flicking over the thermal readout and a second monitor showing a string of ship ID pings. “Intercepted transponder scrubs suggest two naval interceptors, no AIS suppression. Confirmed via the MOD liaison net. Egyptian Navy’s on their way. Don’t think they liked us leaving Ras Ghareb without permission.”

“ETA?” Mace’s voice crackled over the radio.

“Thirty. Maybe thirty-five minutes. Maybe less if they push hard. They’re the new Cyclone-class patrol boats acquired from Uncle Sam.”

“I knew we shouldn’t have skipped port without a farewell kiss for Lieutenant Ghali,” Mace quipped.

On deck he turned to Tilson. “But anything for you, Sammy-boy.”

Tilson grinned. As usual, Macey had put his neck on the line, with Maya and the boat’s skipper, Ian Calder. Leaving a mooring when told to stay by government officials wasn’t the fastest way to prove innocence. He hoped they knew he appreciated it. Deeply.

Maya continued, her tone half business, half gallows humour.

“Just FYI, these babies are packing.” She read from a list she’d pulled up online. “Two times 25mm chain guns, five .50 calibre machine guns, a pair of forty-mil grenade launchers … And, ooh, look at this! Stinger missiles.”

“Nice,” Tilson commented. “Distance to target?”

“Three klicks,” Maya replied. “You’ve got maybe half an hour to get on board and locate the FSB asset before you become a show trial on Al Jazeera.”

He nodded once, eyes locked on the faint silhouette rising in the black ahead. The yacht was massive. She loomed like a citadel, all clean lines and shadowed decks, with the kind of profile that usually signalled wealth. This one signalled trouble.

The Cockleshell drifted to a halt, its hull whispering over the water like someone being shushed. Then all was calm. A black ship on the black ocean. A shadow of intent.

Mace appeared beside him and handed Tilson the radio suppressor puck and checked the RIB’s rigging one last time. “We’ll hold position as long as we can, but once Alexandria’s finest start painting this thing with searchlights …”

“Understood,” Tilson said. “Don’t hang around, Macey. Get clear now, while you’ve got a good head start.”

Mace frowned. “And leave you on a hostile boat full of armed lunatics?”

“I’m an armed lunatic,” Tilson said. “And, you promised to obey orders, remember?”

“I remember telling you to stop acting like this is still Kandahar,” Mace replied. “Besides, since when did you outrank me?”

Tilson smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “Neither of us wears uniforms anymore, Luke.”

“It’s still the same old job, though,” he replied, and then punched Tilson on the arm. “And don’t tell me because you’re Box 500 that you call the shots. This is my ship.”

His comrade nodded and moved to the side of the Cockleshell.

He slipped over the side and into the Rigid Inflatable Boat without another word. The smaller craft peeled away, running low and fast, bow brushing the surface. The yacht grew closer with each passing second. Its lights seemed minimal, just a few security LEDs along the side rail and the faint flicker of bridge illumination. No flag. No ID. No name on the stern.

Calder sidled up beside Mace.

“You eavesdropping?”

“Never,” Calder replied. “But just to make one thing clear …”

“Yes?”

“This is my ship.”

***

The RIB touched the yacht’s hull without a sound. Above, the MV Caelus loomed like a ghostly fortress on the sea, her flanks polished smooth and white, broken only by sensor pods, sealed hatches, and flush lines that gave nothing away.

Tilson braced a hand against the side and reached up. The boarding hook gripped fast on the recessed ladder housing just above the waterline. He checked his gear one last time. The Heckler & Koch MP5 hung tight under one arm, safety on, stock collapsed. Suppressed Glock on his thigh. Combat knife slung down his calf. His drysuit clung damply to his frame, neoprene flexing with every move.

He climbed in silence, each step a slow pull, each reach calculated. Above him, the hull bulged outward slightly. This was a false belly where crew cabins or storage pods might be located. He ignored them and kept going. He then reached a maintenance rail and rolled onto it, pressing flat as a shadow. For a moment, he lay still. Listening. Feeling the engine idling through the decking. They were obviously hoping for a swift getaway when this was over. Tilson lifted an eyebrow. We’ll have to see about that.

Aft of him, the yacht’s stern helipad gleamed faintly under residual heat. Maya had spotted six heat signatures from the drone feed. He needed to take care of them.

Tilson moved like mist on a lake, across the deck and up the port-side steps, bypassing the aft entry hatch, where two guards stood. These guys weren’t bored. They were wired. One smoked, but his eyes swept the darkness with methodical cadence, fingers never far from his weapon sling. The other shifted weight from foot to foot, posture stiff, like a man waiting for the drop.

The yacht’s silence wasn’t the natural cadence of night, it was calculated. No chatter. No lights. Just readiness. For him.

Tilson crouched behind the rail, watching. These men were ex-military or high-tier private. He could see it in their stance — too still, too deliberate. They were expecting something from the sea. Him. Of course they did. But not yet. This meant their focus was external. Eyes on the sea. Not the shadows within.

He reached a service panel near the dining deck, popped it with the multitool, and crawled into the maintenance crawlspace beneath the salon’s floorboards. The world became piping, darkness, faint echoes. He moved like a memory, boots silent, breath measured. Then a stomping of boots above. One of the guards was pacing.

Tilson froze. Listened. Waited for the steps to pass.

Then he rose through a hatch and entered the salon. More teak flooring. Leather trim. A bar with three empty glasses and a crystal decanter still half full. There were no family photos, no signs of personality. Just money. And detachment.

A door swung open. A man entered, backlit by the corridor. Thick neck, open shirt, eyes already sweeping the room. Still built like a charging bull. Unbelievable. Fucking Jabba.

Tilson moved before he thought. MP5 up. Two rounds, tight grouping. Jabba’s weapon dropped, not from a hit, but from surprise. He dived sideways into cover behind a bar stool, knocking it over with a thud. His shoulder struck the minibar and glass shattered.

Tilson flung himself to the left, firing another burst. The rounds stitched the wall behind Jabba, who now roared and returned fire with a compact bullpup rifle. Wood splintered near Tilson’s shoulder. He ducked and rolled, slinging the MP5 and drawing his Glock as he moved.

Jabba charged.

They collided like animals in a bear pit, Tilson’s shoulder slamming into the other man’s gut. But Jabba was ready this time. He hooked a massive arm around Tilson’s neck and dragged him sideways into the wet bar. Bottles cracked. A shelf fell. Tilson twisted, brought the Glock up and fired once into Jabba’s side.

The round hit. But Jabba grunted, barely slowing. Body armour.

Tilson slammed his boot into Jabba’s knee. He felt the joint pop, cartilage giving way with a sharp, wet crack. The man buckled. Tilson broke free, rolled low, and came up firing two rounds from the Glock, tight and fast. One clipped Jabba across the neck, tearing through the sling strap of his rifle. The other grazed his shoulder, spinning him sideways.

Jabba stumbled, crashing into the edge of the glass counter. The impact shattered it in a spray of crystal, his weight slamming down on the splintered surface. He gave a guttural yell that was part rage and part shock. Then he staggered backward toward the open doors that led to the starboard deck.

Tilson moved in, gun raised, but before he could fire again, Jabba’s boot caught a slick of his own blood on the teak. He slipped. His flailing arm grabbed nothing but air.

Then he was gone.

He toppled through the open doors with a crash of limbs and weaponry, hitting the rail with his back and flipping over. A heavy splash echoed into the night.

The silence that followed lasted less than a second.

A siren erupted, sharp and shrieking, pulsing through the corridors in a thudding rhythm. Emergency strobes lit red along the ceiling. Footsteps. Shouted commands. Boots pounding down metal stairs. The yacht was awake now. They knew he was aboard. Fucking Jabba!

Tilson stepped back into the shadows of the salon, breathing hard. The MP5 swung at his chest. The Glock was still warm in his hand. He checked the mag. He was out.

He snapped a fresh one into place just as voices cut through the wailing alarm. Close, and getting closer.

He pressed his back to the cold marble wall, heart hammering. This was no longer a stealth operation. It was a firefight.

He assumed Kira was being kept below decks and finding her was now the urgent priority. Before they shot her, knowing that the bargaining ship they thought they held was now useless. He returned to the bar and exited through the doors Jabba had used to enter. Just beyond them was a companionway leading down.

A man wearing a Cobalt Wave security uniform burst through a door to his right, carrying a Glock 17, the sidearm raised with trembling urgency. His uniform was company issue, a fitted navy-blue polo shirt with the silver Cobalt Wave logo stitched over the heart, dark grey cargo trousers tucked into polished boots, and a lightweight utility vest with minimal loadout. No helmet. No body armour. Just a radio clipped to his shoulder and a name tag that flashed as he moved. Corporate. Under-trained. Out of his depth.

Tilson reacted on instinct, bringing up the knife from its sheath in a fluid movement, stabbing and twisting, that left the man gutted like a fish. Tilson didn’t spare him a glance, but did take the magazine from his sidearm. Glock 17 magazines fit perfectly into the Glock 19.

He took the steps down three at a time, landing in a passageway that was awash in red strobe light, flashing at intervals like a monstrous heartbeat. Sirens still howled, their pitch bouncing off the marble and glass. Tilson moved fast, low and deliberate, each footfall chosen, each corner checked. He swept the hallway with the MP5, muzzle steady, breath controlled.

Two guards emerged ahead in black fatigues with earpieces and rifles raised. They were tense, too keyed up to check their corners. Tilson didn’t hesitate. Four shots, four impacts. One dropped in a tangle of limbs. The second crumpled against a wall, the breath knocked from him before he hit the floor.

He stepped over them without breaking stride.

He knew where she’d be. High-security. Minimal exposure. The VIP quarters, where the walls were thicker, the locks more serious. He passed a dining lounge with Baccarat crystal still clinking from the yacht’s vibration. Then a gallery lined with gilded frames and silent cameras.

He reached a bulkhead door with a biometric panel glowing red.

Locked.

A voice behind it. Muffled. Desperate.

Kira.

He stepped back. Raised the MP5. Three rounds, tight spread. The lock shattered. He kicked the handle down with the heel of his boot and shoved the door open.

She was there, bound to a chair with chafed wrists and gagged with white silk. Her eyes snapped to him, wide, furious, relieved all at once.

“Kira,” he breathed.

She couldn’t speak, but she didn’t need to. Her whole body slumped in recognition. Tilson crossed the room in two strides, knife already out. He cut the bindings first, then peeled the gag away.

“You took your time,” she rasped.

He smiled. “Nice.”

Kira flexed her fingers, then grabbed his wrist.

“Vlad and Olga. They were here. Up in the bridge tower.”

He nodded once. “Can you walk?”

She was already on her feet. “Try and stop me.”

From below, the fire alarm now mingled with a deeper, vibrating sound. The thud of helicopter blades, distant but getting closer.

“You bring a cavalry?” she asked, grabbing a pistol from the fallen guard outside the door.

He shook his head. “Just me.”

Kira chambered a round. “That’ll do.”

They moved. Together. Toward the final reckoning.

CHAPTER 26

The corridor beyond the VIP quarters was thick with tension. Tilson and Kira moved together in practiced tandem, each step measured, each breath a calculation. The red strobes still pulsed in irregular rhythms along the ceiling, bathing everything in surreal flashes of warning light. Gunmetal and glossed teak shimmered around them like the deck of a ghost ship. The yacht had grown quieter, but that quiet wasn’t safety—it was anticipation.

They reached a junction where the corridor split around the central spiral staircase. Tilson raised his fist and Kira halted. He leaned around the corner, eyes narrowing. Ahead, a door stood ajar. Beyond it, movement. Shadows. Then the glint of a weapon.

Shots erupted from both flanks.

A team of tactical guards flooded the hall, emerging from concealed access doors like an ambush team trained for just this contingency. Muzzle flashes strobed white against red. Tilson ducked left, Kira rolled right, both opening fire in crisp, controlled bursts. Brass scattered across the floor. Screams tore through the chaos, drowned almost immediately by another volley.

The guards were well-drilled, moving with precision, working in pairs. But they weren’t expecting resistance this fierce. Tilson dropped one with two chest shots and pivoted to cover Kira. She had taken out another and wounded a third, who scrambled behind a marble bench only to be silenced by a round through the cheek as he exposed himself.

Smoke grenades rolled in from somewhere beyond the corridor.

The air thickened. Visibility dropped. Heat bloomed in the confined space. Kira crouched low beside him, rifle tight to her shoulder.

“How many left?” she shouted.

“Three. Maybe four,” he replied, voice tight.

They pressed forward through the fog, every footstep a hazard. The ship groaned beneath them, the sound of its engine pulse and stabiliser hum beneath the deck plates. One of the tactical guards lunged from behind a bulkhead with a suppressed submachine gun. Tilson reacted instantly, smashing the MP5 into his chest and firing twice. The man went down.

Two more charged, shouting orders in Belarusian accents. Kira dropped to one knee and fired without hesitation. One fell. The other flinched, too slow, and caught a shot in the throat.

Then silence.

The smoke curled lazily now, broken only by the blinking lights and the faint hiss of fire suppression vents overhead. Blood smeared the polished floor. Spent casings rattled to a stop.

Kira stepped over the last body. “That’s all of them.”

“No,” Tilson said. “It isn’t.”

Smoke hung low in the corridor, thick and acrid, curling from the shattered remains of the grenades. Somewhere aft, an alarm was still wailing, one of the yacht’s many redundant security systems refusing to die. Fire suppression foam glistened on the walls. A guard coughed and collapsed beside a dining console, his weapon slipping from nerveless fingers. Another groaned, dragging himself down a companionway until a single round from Kira’s sidearm ended it.

They were almost at the bridge tower.

Tilson led, sweeping doorways with the MP5, posture compact, every sense lit. Kira followed close, her sidearm steady, eyes as cold and sharp as arctic glass. Neither of them spoke now. Not since the last fire team had fallen. This was beyond tactics. This was retribution. And closure.

As they ascended the final spiral stair, Tilson caught movement. He pulled Kira behind a bulkhead just as three more hostiles opened fire from the far end of the upper observation deck. The rounds cracked past, ricocheting off the steel railing. One hit close enough to spray splinters across Tilson’s arm. He grimaced and dropped low, returning fire in disciplined bursts. Two of the men went down, centre-mass hits. The third ducked and tried to run but Kira pivoted and put two into his back before he made it more than five paces.

More smoke drifted in, this time from a fire burning in a side galley. The heat from it stung their eyes. Tilson blinked against it and checked his corners. They were clear. Or so he thought.

A shadow moved near the bridge console. Then Vladimir Rabinovich himself emerged, stepping into the chaos like the scene had been choreographed for him. With his left hand, he reached out and dragged Kira back by her shoulder, fast and brutal. In his right he held a custom pistol.

It was a AF2011-A1, a brutal double-barrelled beast forged in matte black steel, its twin muzzles glinting like black diamonds in the dim light. The grips were inlaid with polished obsidian and bore the Rabinovich crest in engraved silver, a flourish of vanity atop an instrument of violence so typical of the man.

It was overbuilt, baroque, and lethal, designed to fire two .45 rounds with every trigger pull. Not just a weapon. A statement. Power with no apology. And it was aimed at Kira’s temple. She froze.

Tilson turned, weapon raised.

He couldn’t get a shot. Kira was acting as Rabinovich’s human shield.

“Drop your weapon, Mr Tilson,” he ordered, his voice calm but coiled with hatred. “Or she dies.”

Then another movement, fast and unexpected. Olga stepped into view from the smoke, bent over, coughing, pistol in hand but held low. Tilson didn’t hesitate. He grabbed her, twisted her arm, and jammed his Glock under her jaw. Her gun went flying across the bridge like a frisbee.

The tableau froze.

The only thing to indicate time passing were the wisps of smoke that curled between them. A deck light flickered above like a faulty star. The sea felt close, heaving beyond the bridge glass. Rabinovich still had Kira. Tilson had Olga.

It was a perfect, awful symmetry.

“Let’s keep this simple, Vlad,” Tilson said. “Like your message. You get Olga. I get Kira.”

Rabinovich’s face barely moved, but his eyes tightened. He cocked his head like a man tasting something unpleasant. “You think we have a ‘Mexican Standoff’ here?” He laughed quietly. “My niece means nothing to me,” he said. “Shoot her.”

Olga twisted in Tilson’s grip. “You bastard,” she spat. “You miserable little zhopа.” Her voice cracked with fury. “You think this empire’s yours? You think killing me wins you respect? You’re nothing but a cockroach with a fat wallet.”

She kept talking, shouting now, eyes wide, disbelief etched into every word. “I cleaned up your messes. Went undercover. All to protect grandfather. And you. I held the family together while you were out seducing ministers and playing gangster. You don’t get to –”

Tilson shoved Olga forward, hard, mid-tirade, straight into Rabinovich’s line of fire. The oligarch flinched, stepping back, gun arm wavering, his instincts telling him to catch his niece, despite his bravado. The distraction broke Rabinovich’s focus for a half-second.

Kira kicked back, high, and hit a kneecap. Then she ducked away as his grip loosened.

Tilson didn’t miss.

He shot the man twice. One in the chest, one in the head. The first hit knocked him backward, the second dropped him. His weapon went skittering. Rabinovich fell, hitting the command console hard. Even Tilson winced. It was done.

But Olga wasn’t finished.

She snatched the fallen AF2011 from the deck and turned it toward Tilson, teeth bared, lips drawn in a snarl of fury and betrayal. Her finger found the trigger.

Kira had moved while the men clashed. She’d darted out wide under cover of smoke and confusion, her eyes scanning the ruined bridge. When Olga raised her weapon, Kira didn’t reach for a gun. She reached for the floor. Her fingers closed around a long shard of shattered safety glass. It was curved, almost like a scimitar, the remains of a control panel, thick and razor-edged. She rose in a single motion and drove the shard up beneath the young woman’s ribs.

Olga froze.

Then the force of the strike lifted her onto her toes. Olga gasped, eyes going wide, gun slipping from her grasp, unimportant. Kira twisted once, clean and efficient, then let her fall like a marionette with cut strings. Her eyes remained open.

Smoke hissed against the glass.

No one moved for a long breath.

Tilson lowered his weapon and stepped across to Kira. Her hands were shaking, but her face was set, expression unreadable. He didn’t speak. Just placed a hand on her shoulder.

She looked down at the bodies, a sneer on her face.

Then she turned to Tilson, jaw tight.

“Let’s scuttle this gin palace,” she said.

Tilson nodded. “Yeah. That’d be a real tonic.”

***

The hotel glittered above the Nile like a mirage carved into sandstone and honey. Officially, it was the Gilded Lily Aswan, a flagship location of the Gilded Lily luxury chain, but no one called it that here. Locals and longtime guests knew it by its nickname, a nod to the blush-coloured granite of the river’s western banks and the way the hotel caught the light at dusk. The name had settled like perfume. The Cataract Rose. Elegant. Elusive. Enduring.

It stood above the river with the confidence of a place that had once entertained kings. The Aga Khan had dined on its terrace. Churchill had sketched drafts of his memoirs on the upper balcony. More than one oil baron had chartered the entire east wing for a winter mistress. Movie stars had posed in its gardens, and their photographs hung discreetly in an alcove off the main lobby; black and white glimpses of another century’s version of wealth. These days, its clientele was quieter. Affluent couples, diplomatic shadows, heiresses between husbands. People who required privacy but preferred it wrapped in starched linen and copper lanterns.

The air smelled of sun-warmed jasmine and expensive scents. Gardeners trimmed bougainvillaea with surgical care. A pair of staff in golden cream jackets passed by with a tray and fresh hibiscus tea, their steps silent on polished stone. Far below, feluccas bobbed like lazy commas on the water’s surface, their sails half-lowered in the late-morning heat. The Nile shimmered with that particular blue that didn’t exist anywhere else. Ancient, wide, forgiving.

The lobby had been rebuilt in the fifties, then restored with deference rather than revision. Marble veins ran like old hieroglyphs through the flooring. The colonnades were pale and thick and cool to the touch. A central fountain sang gently beneath a dome of rose-coloured glass. The lift was modern, but the attendants still wore gloves. Every detail was a performance of effortlessness.

Outside, heat layered the landscape in silk. But on the high terrace suite, a breeze lifted the edge of a canvas umbrella, flicking sunlight across the breakfast table where two people sat in the aftermath of battle.

Tilson sat in a linen shirt the colour of poached salmon, the sleeves rolled to just below his elbows, collar open just enough to hint at the sun-marked skin of his collarbone. His posture was relaxed, but his eyes were sharp as ever, behind the sunglasses resting low on the bridge of his nose. A faint scrape along one cheek had darkened to a healing line, a metaphor for the rest of him. Slow;ly recovering from an ordeal in the desert.

Across from him, Kira sat cross-legged in the chair, wearing a loose white blouse knotted at the waist and soft grey cotton shorts, her legs bare and sun-kissed. Her effortless blonde hair was damp from the shower, swept into a loose twist, and her nails tapped gently on the handle of a delicate porcelain teacup. She had that peculiar feline stillness. Languid, unreadable, quietly pleased with herself. She had slept well. Afterwards.

Between them, the table was set in quiet extravagance. Mint tea steamed in a hand-hammered silver teapot, flanked by green-cut glasses still cool with condensation. A za’atar croissant, a fig-stuffed ma’amoul, and a ramekin of shakshuka that still bubbled faintly had been placed before the Russian.

Tilson’s side was leaner, but no less elegant. The coffee was single-origin Ethiopian, rich and earthy, pressed in a polished cafetiere beside warm milk and sugar crystals. He had already poured some into a bone-China cup. A trio of European cheeses fanned beside labneh yoghurt drizzled with olive oil and za’atar. A pair of boiled eggs sat halved and seasoned. Between them, a folded cloth cradled wholemeal flatbread, and a tiny glass of rosewater flickered in the sun.

“I’m not sure this place was designed for the likes of us,” Kira murmured, lifting her cup to her lips.

Tilson didn’t smile, but there was amusement in the set of his jaw. “Speak for yourself.”

“I meant the survivors of yacht-based international incidents.”

Kira’s sunglasses were Persol 714SMs, that caught the light when she turned her head, the tortoiseshell sheen brushing her cheekbones in a flash of copper. She could fold them into a palm when needed, but now she was peering over the top of them, fixing Tilson with a cheeky glare.

“Oh,” he said, nodding. “You mean two people who just sank a billion-dollar 'gin palace'?”

She snorted and turned her attention to the pastries He reached for the newspaper beside his plate, its Arabic headline sweeping across the top in bold crimson:

RUSSIAN OLIGARCH YACHT LOST TO FIRE – HOUTHI CONNECTION SUSPECTED

A smaller photo beneath showed a blurred silhouette of a helicopter leaving the sea, smoke rising behind it like a pulled curtain.

“They’re blaming the Houthis,” he said. “Classic misdirection. And no one’s asking where the crew went.”

Kira raised an eyebrow. “Or the passengers.”

Tilson lowered the paper slightly. “Did you see that Rabinovich senior died last night? Heart attack. Word is it was brought on by the news of Vlad and Olga.”

She exhaled softly. “That makes for a neat closure. The last of the rotten apples ousted.”

Tilson nodded. “Mikhail gets to legitimise his business without the ties to the past or his psychotic son.”

For a moment, they both looked out at the river.

Kira reached across the table without ceremony and broke off a piece of flatbread. She chewed thoughtfully, then looked up at him. “How long before you get recalled?”

“I haven’t even told them everything yet.”

“You won’t.”

“No,” he agreed. “Not everything.”

The breeze lifted her hair slightly, brushing it across one cheek. She tucked it back with a casual grace, then looked at him again, properly this time. Something unreadable flickered in her eyes. Antipathy, perhaps. Or something gentler, worn and buried.

Last night hadn’t been about comfort. It hadn’t been about seduction, either. It had been a moment taken, as if their bodies knew the storm had passed, and something in them had wanted to mark it. The survival, the proximity, the strangeness of still being alive.

There had been kisses, slow and clumsy at first. A silence neither had felt the need to break. Clothes shed like a truce. No declarations. Just skin and breath and heat, and the rising certainty that no one else in the world would understand what they had just come through.

This morning, Kira didn’t pretend it was anything else. But she didn’t dismiss it as meaningless, either.

She reached for her glass and glanced sideways, her voice soft. “The Cockleshell?”

Tilson nodded, wiping his mouth with the linen napkin. “Clear of the zone. Mace and Maya are safe. Navy was diverted once the wreckage was confirmed. I think our government will square everything with the Egyptians.”

Kira exhaled through her nose and gave a slow nod. “Good.” She didn’t say more. She didn’t need to. They had survived. But not untouched. The sea had taken what it always did: blood, wreckage, secrets, and swallowed them whole.

“And you?” he asked. He reached cross the table and took her hand.

“The state is pleased. We avoided embarrassment.” She took her hand rom is and lifted her arms in a gesture encompassing The Gilded Lily. “Hence the reward.”

He smiled faintly. “What next?”

“You know I can’t tell you that, Captain Tilson.”

He nodded. Had she misunderstood his meaning on purpose? Or had she answered both his questions simultaneously? “How long does this ‘reward’ last?”

“Two more days.”

“Good.” He stoked her arms gently with the tips of his fingers, her skin turning to gooseflesh under his touch. She shivered.

“What’s good about it?” she asked languidly, looking over the top of her Persols once more. Playful again.

“I’m not sure I can take you for as long as that!”

Kira swiped at him with the newspaper, biting her lip in mock outrage. Tilson leapt out of the way and darted towards the safety of the bedroom beyond the cream curtains.

Kira rose from her seat and advanced on him.

“I am not sure you’ve taken me for very much time at all.”

She parted the curtain gently and slipped inside, leaving the mundanity of their breakfast forgotten.

Somewhere deep in the hotel, a harpist was playing Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel accompanied by a cellist. Its low and beautifully melancholy notes drifted upwards to the pale blue sky.

Beyond the flowing curtain that rippled in the breeze, two people laughed, happy in the moment.

THE END

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Quiller

Tom Quiller is a contemporary British thriller writer, best known for his gripping espionage and adventure novels that blend meticulous research with heart-pounding action. A lifelong fan of high-stakes storytelling, Quiller’s writing takes cues from classic British thrillers while embracing the sharp pacing and cinematic intensity of modern espionage fiction.

Quiller’s bestselling Sam Tilson series – starting with Heaven's First Law (2024) - introduces readers to a former Special Boat Service operative turned MI5 agent, whose missions take him deep into the world of covert intelligence, international conspiracies, and shadowy betrayals. Praised for its authentic detail and relentless pacing, the series has earned comparisons to the works of Mick Herron, Jack Slater, and Simon Gervais, making Quiller a standout voice in modern espionage fiction.

A keen student of military history and intelligence operations, Quiller’s novels reflect a deep understanding of special forces tactics, tradecraft, and geopolitical intrigue. This same passion for action and adventure extends beyond his own work—Quiller has been instrumental in reviving forgotten classics of the thriller genre, introducing a new generation of readers to the pulse-pounding exploits of characters like Bulldog Drummond, Richard Hannay, and Jim Maitland.

Whether crafting his own high-stakes thrillers or curating classic adventure fiction, Tom Quiller remains dedicated to the art of storytelling—where courage, cunning, and danger collide in a battle for survival.

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