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  Binning shook his head. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  The climb. Not a simple affair in calm conditions. In a storm a bad dream. Requiring a combination of iron strength and real skill. In a heavy swell the trick was knowing when to begin.

  ‘Dump your fins,’ Stratton said. ‘Wait until we’re at the peak, then climb as fast as you can.’

  ‘The line’s going to break,’ Jason called out.

  ‘Move your arse!’ Stratton urged Binning.

  As they rose up the next swell Binning unstrapped his fins, frantically wiggling them free, and at the same time struggled to grip the ladder. They went up as if they were on an escalator.

  ‘Grab high as you can! Now!’ Stratton shouted.

  The wave peaked and Binning reached for the highest rung he could. When the water dropped he dangled like a fish on a hook, his hands bearing the weight of his body, suit and equipment. He fought to get a foot on a lower rung to take some of the strain from his fingers.

  Some forty feet below him now, Stratton watched Binning cycling in the air. ‘Climb, Binning! Climb!’

  If Binning did not gain a few feet before the top of the next wave arrived it would punch him off. He climbed for all he was worth. The peak struck his legs hard but he hung on.

  ‘Go!’ Stratton urged.

  Binning focused his strength and as he closed on the span Stratton turned his attention to the others. ‘Disconnect together as I start my climb!’ he called out.

  ‘You ready?’ Jason shouted to Rowena.

  ‘Yes!’ she shouted.

  The fraying line, however, was a second ahead of them and as Jason unclipped his karabiner the line snapped and both of them shot away from the leg.

  Stratton was about to start his climb when he saw that Rowena wasn’t going to make it to the ladder. He slid down as the trough dropped away, grabbed hold of a lower rung and lunged in the direction of her track. Jason made the ladder and grabbed a firm hold on it that did not help matters. Rowena finned towards Stratton as hard as she could but as they stretched out their arms towards each other their fingers barely touched. She passed him by, staring at him, finning madly even though they knew it was hopeless.

  The line attached to Rowena suddenly went taut. She was yanked to a stop as Stratton lurched towards her, twisting the line that he had managed to grab with his free arm while holding on to the ladder with the other. Jason made a grab for the line and together they began to win the battle of hauling her in.

  ‘Swim!’ Stratton shouted as a heavy swell suddenly put her above them.

  Binning reached the top of the ladder and hauled himself over the span in time to see the drama below.

  Rowena grabbed Stratton’s arm and pulled herself along it to his harness where Jason helped to hold her.

  ‘Climb!’ Stratton ordered him. ‘It won’t hold three of us for long!’

  Jason ripped off his fins and as they went up the wall of water he grabbed the highest rung that he could reach. The swell moved on and when his foot found a rung too he climbed as quickly as he could.

  ‘Go!’ Stratton said urgently to Rowena before Jason had reached the top.

  She gritted her teeth, then took a deep breath before ducking below the water to remove her fins. Stratton kept hold of her as they rose up the next wave and at its peak she surfaced, grabbed a rung of the twisting ladder and began to climb. She was strong and nimble, which Stratton was thankful for. He hung on for dear life as the water fell away beneath him. With the next swell, he followed behind her to the top.

  Binning and Jason helped them onto the wide spar and when they were all secure the four of them remained seated for a moment to thank whatever gods might have helped to get them through the last hour.

  Rowena looked across at Stratton, her breathing laboured. ‘Thanks,’ she said. It seemed difficult for her to say it.

  He ignored her. There was no need for gratitude. It was what team members did for each other.

  ‘This might be an appropriate time to spare a thought for Smithy,’ Jason said.

  ‘I suggest you stay focused on your own lives,’ Stratton advised. ‘You may yet join your colleague.’

  The platform shuddered as the waves crashed relentlessly against the legs. Stratton eyed the upper structure that was a web of crisscrossing steel spars. Light filtered through grilles in the decking, creating shadows and dark spaces.

  ‘Where do you need to place your device?’ Stratton asked.

  ‘The higher the better,’ Binning replied. ‘Especially in this weather.’ He got to his feet and scanned the complex of black steel above as if looking for the ideal spot. ‘I see why they call them spider decks.’

  ‘How do we get up there?’ Jason asked.

  Stratton indicated the nearest leg. ‘From here on we’ll have to use the rungs. Not the best option but we don’t have the kit for anything else. I’ll lead. Beware of booby traps. Keep an eye out for taut wire or fishing nylon. If in doubt, don’t touch it. Let me know.’

  Stratton got to his feet and removed the bungee that secured the silenced SMG to his waist. He gave it a brief check and left it to hang from the strap across his back. He felt for the pistol in its holster at his thigh. Satisfied, he made his way across the spar to one of the vast legs and the rungs that led up into the gloom.

  ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ he said, looking back at them.

  Binning was right behind him.

  10

  Deacon sat in the control room in front of the explosive-tripped box that had contained Jordan’s letter of reference. The challenge to Deacon’s leadership had been an upset, despite his best efforts to reason a way through it. He knew what was behind it. It wasn’t so much that he had been challenged but by whom. A former SBS twat. Just because this happened to be an oil platform on the ocean, did that make him more qualified to run the operation than Deacon? Typical of the kind of decision civilians made. Just because Mackay knew more about how the SBS operated, that qualified him to be in charge, did it? Only a military specialist would know that the terrain made no difference. A specialist was a specialist on land or sea. The only difference was a little technique when it came to certain environments. The CEO of an envelope company doesn’t need to know all there is to know about envelopes in order to run it. By rights Jordan should have been hired simply as an adviser to Deacon.

  He felt like calling the emergency number on his sat phone and insisting on talking to someone in charge about it.They needed to be told that you don’t put an SBS bloke in charge of an SAS bloke. That sort of thing might go on these days but it hadn’t in his day, or at least not to him.

  Deacon picked up the sat phone to check for the number when the inner door opened and Jordan walked in, his coat and leggings soaked and dripping water. Deacon put the phone down with a frown. He put the box back in his bag.

  Jordan shuffled past the technician monitoring the control panels and hung his coat on a hook. He went over to the makings corner, put a tea bag in a mug, filled it with water from the permanent heater, added a couple of spoons of sugar and powdered milk and stirred it.

  He sat down at a desk, dumped the tea bag and took a sip of the hot, sweet liquid. It felt good as he warmed his hands around the mug. Jordan contemplated his situation. It had become something of a habit over the last few months, and more so since he’d taken on this task. The road to the Morpheus had been a strange one. He’d had bouts of guilt about his decisions but had managed to beat them off. He could do it easily enough. Whatever he could get out of his country, his government, he would. And he felt justified. They owed it to him, those wankers in the Ministry of Defence. His umpteen requests to stay in the SBS in any role other than as a storeman? Ignored. It hadn’t been much to ask. They’d done it for others in the past. He was an invalid but not useless. It was their decision to ignore that, and so he would prove it. Give the nobs a demonstration. If they wouldn’t let him stay on the team, then he would be against them. It sounded extreme at times but
he had to do it to believe in himself.

  The only problem that he had with this operation was the potential threat to the SBS lads themselves. They weren’t to blame for anything that the MoD had done to him. If it had been up to them, Jordan would have been able to stay in the service. He was reasonably confident he could work it so that none of them got hurt. As long as he could control Deacon and his apes. It had been one of his bargaining chips with the organisers. To his surprise they had accepted this reasoning without debate. They didn’t want anyone to get hurt either. This was a pure money-making task and had been planned in such a meticulous way that violence could pretty much be avoided.

  Jordan had practically given up on life after leaving the SBS, with little to show for the forty years he’d been on the earth apart from a terraced house in Dorchester. He’d paid off the mortgage with his meagre medical-discharge payment. The monthly pension was all right but it was just paying him to sit around until he died. He’d been feeling dead already. When his girlfriend of ten years left him soon after the discharge he pretty much stopped believing in anything. Who wanted a civilian cripple? She’d told him that the spark had gone out of his life. It was true enough, although he didn’t think that was exactly what she meant. He wasn’t special any more.

  When he received a call out of the blue to meet a man in a nearby pub to talk about a job that could not be discussed over the phone it was more intriguing than anything that had come Jordan’s way in years. There was a time when he would have punched the man across the floor for even suggesting a task that threatened members of his former unit. But time and experiences could change a person. Into something that they would never have believed possible. He even found himself offering suggestions on how to increase the value that the planners had already attached to him. Admittedly the offer of a million dollars placed in an offshore account had been a more than attractive incentive.

  They didn’t tell Jordan very much about the job, other than that it was a task on an oil platform and that it could involve working against the British security forces. The man gave him a letter containing a decryption code word and a few days later he received an e-mail with an encrypted file attached that the code word opened. The attachment contained details of the promised Cayman Island bank account with half a million US dollars in it and a proposed date for the next half-million to drop. After checking that the funds really did exist he became very excited, more about the prospect of spending a million dollars than about the task itself. But as the operation drew closer the excitement about the money turned into something else: concern. About what he had to do. About Deacon. About Deacon’s men. They were a threat to his control. He had the feeling right from the start that Deacon wasn’t comfortable being his subordinate. And now he could feel the man looking at him in a way that suggested the idea was eating at him.

  Deacon suddenly wondered if his own expression reflected his contempt for Jordan. He looked away. ‘Do we need this guy all night?’ Deacon asked, wanting to get rid of the technician.

  Jordan considered it, wondering what Deacon wanted. ‘I can monitor things for a while.’

  ‘Hey. You,’ Deacon said to the technician who looked at him fearfully. ‘I want you to go down to the cookhouse and take a break until I send for you. I’m going to let you go unescorted. But if you don’t turn up, if you try and hide, when I find you I’ll toss you overboard. Do you understand?’

  The man nodded quickly.

  ‘Good. Get going.’

  The man headed for the door.

  Deacon picked a radio off the desk and pressed a button in its side. ‘This is Deacon in the control room. Technician coming down to the cook ’ouse. Let me know when he arrives.’

  A moment later a squelch came from the phone, followed by a gruff foreign voice. ‘Understood.’

  Deacon put the radio down. He wondered again what more Jordan knew about the operation than he did, and how he might get the man to reveal any of it. Deacon’s orders had been quite specific. He was responsible for the team and the prisoners, none of whom were to be harmed if at all possible. Jordan now had charge of the operation itself and the final say over strategy and policy. But the man didn’t appear to be the chatty type. Yet he was an ex-serviceman and one thing ex-servicemen liked to do was talk about the years they’d spent as soldiers, Deacon reasoned, usually because civilian life was nearly always so dull and unamusing by comparison. He hoped that rule applied to Jordan. ‘How long you do in the SBS?’ he asked.

  The question didn’t particularly surprise Jordan. It was one ex-special forces guys always seemed to ask each other. A way of gauging their experience. Anyone who’d done less than eight years wasn’t considered rounded enough. They might have seen a lot of action but that wasn’t where the SF experience really lay. It was in the depth and variety of challenges. Jordan hadn’t given much thought to Deacon’s background, other than assuming the man was ex-service himself. It only then occurred to him the bloke would not have been hired without a suitable pedigree, such as SF. As they might be together for days he tried to be friendly. ‘Long enough,’ he said. ‘What’s your own background? ’

  Deacon’s instinct was to keep his identity secret but he couldn’t control his ego. Not with this individual. He wanted his top-dog status back. ‘SAS.’

  Jordan wondered if the man was lying. A lot of ex-servicemen in the civilian security business claimed to be former special forces. ‘Which squadron?’ he asked.

  ‘B.’

  ‘When did you get out?’

  Deacon suspected that Jordan was verifying his claim. It only added to his resentment. Surely it was obvious to another soldier that Deacon had to be SAS. He and Jordan had never met but they were men of the same era. Even a shaky boat could see that. It wasn’t unusual for the two services that they’d never crossed paths. Some guys had spent much of their careers cross-training between the SBS and SAS and some hardly at all. ‘Just before Afghanistan.’

  ‘You know Marvin Goodman?’

  ‘Marvellous was my sergeant major.’

  Jordan nodded, convinced. Deacon was former SAS all right. The man’s arrogance sealed it - he acted as if he’d been insulted by Jordan’s doubts. It didn’t matter that he’d answered the question correctly.

  ‘You get the leg on the job?’

  ‘Afghanistan.’ Jordan felt reluctant to discuss his service history.

  ‘I’ve been there but as a civvy.’ Deacon felt he had little in common with the other man. ‘Was it operational?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Something go wrong?’ It was a fair enough question to ask about an SF wound. The ops were so meticulously planned that if anyone got hurt it was worth hearing about.

  ‘Not as badly as it could’ve.’ Other than the official debrief, Jordan had told no one about the operation in any detail. Much like Stratton. He had refrained from discussing it with SBS members because it would only cause friction. Some believed it was Stratton’s fault and others felt that the incident was the price of war. He couldn’t discuss it with a civilian. They could never fully understand. But another SF operator might be able to put himself in his shoes. Apply his own experiences as well as his knowledge of the system. Jordan didn’t particularly trust the man in front of him but he had a sudden urge to tell him the story. Perhaps it was because he wanted to hear a qualified outsider’s view. An SAS guy might give an unbiased opinion. ‘It was one of those jobs that was wrong from the start.’

  ‘Why’d it go ahead?’

  ‘Same reason a lot of them do. Ego. On the ground as well as those up top. You know what the SBS and SAS hierarchies are like. Always competing against each other, point scoring, wanting to impress London. No offence but the regiment’s been falling behind a bit of late, what with Iraq dying down. And the SBS getting all the glory in Afghanistan. And the Yanks finally starting to share the lead in SF roles . . . maybe even take it from us in places.’

  This was all news to Deacon and it did not sit we
ll with him. He had no contact with current troopers or any of his old mates from the regiment yet he had strong opinions regarding special forces. All of them. As far as he was concerned the SAS were at the top of the SF tree with the SBS several branches down and the Yanks even lower. And it had always been that way. It was only to be expected - and typical - for an SBS operator to rubbish the SAS at any opportunity. He suddenly had a good reason to dislike the other man. ‘So what happened?’ Deacon asked.

  ‘The job went ahead - a hit on a Taliban encampment. We try not to arrest many these days. Ever since the media clowns and bleeding-heart liberals have been bleating on about the treatment of terrorists in prisons like Guantánamo, the only solution is to shoot them instead.’

  ‘I like that,’ Deacon said.

  ‘Too much had been left to chance on this one.’

  ‘I don’t see why it was allowed to go on.’

  ‘Sure you can. The SAS has had more cock-ups over the last twenty years than anyone.’

  ‘That’s because they’ve done nearly all the bloody work,’ Deacon said defensively, feeling his hackles rising.

  ‘That may be a part of it,’ Jordan said, unaware of the hurt and venom in Deacon’s reply. ‘But you’re missing the point. Many of those ops were damned before they started. It didn’t stop ’em from going ahead, though. It’s still about peer pressure and egos causing a lot of the problems.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Deacon asked, controlling his anger at the digs against his beloved former unit. His foul temper had grown worse over the years and once it turned physical he knew he was apt to lose control altogether. He had spent so long in lawless environments, where he had not been held to account for his actions, that he was no longer able to check himself. The oil platform was just such a place. The only law was that imposed by Deacon and his men, all answerable to him. The only chance of keeping him in check here was the risk of screwing up the task and losing the money.

  Jordan had no inkling of his colleague’s murderous intent and how his talk was eating away at the restraints on the man’s madness. To him it was just a conversation, albeit a contentious one, with a fellow ex-special forces operative who was under the illusion that he was the senior figure in charge of the operation. ‘As I’d expected, the hit didn’t go as planned and I had to go in and hot-extract the team with vehicles. It was a mess. We were only lightly armoured and we took a lot of fire.’