Ulm was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again there was no irony in his voice. ‘They’re talking about giving me a fucking medal, Tom. The Pathfinders deserve a lot more than that.’
‘I’m sorry, Elliot.’
‘Yeah, me too.’
He hesitated. ‘And the Sword?’
‘The Sword will make public the declaration he was to have made at the Shura. He is for peace, not armed struggle.’
‘But he and the Angels of Judgement take the rap for the whole thing…’
‘He gets what he wants. The Russian President gave his word.’
Girling’s face darkened. ‘His word?’
Ulm said: ‘If anyone fucks about, Tom, then everything I just said goes on the record. Until then, I’m prepared to give them a chance. Are you?’
‘It’s a hell of a story.’ He paused. ‘But what the fuck, we’ve all got to start somewhere…’
The nurse reappeared at the far end of the ward and began walking towards them.
‘Do you think they’d let me see him?’ Girling asked.
‘You’ll have to hurry. They’re shipping him out.’
‘Whereto?’
‘A hospital in Tunis. His presence aboard the Groves could be a little embarrassing when we dock in Naples.’
‘Then I’d better go.’
Girling held his hand out. ‘If you ever need a pilot…’
‘Fly low, fly slow, Tom.’
Girling smiled.
He made his way back up through the bowels of the ship to the hangar on deck two. From there, it was just a ride on an aircraft hoist to the open air. A sharp sea breeze whipped across the deck of the mini-carrier. It seemed as if every spare inch of deck space was packed with hardware: AV-8B jump-jets, CH-46 medium-lift helos, several MH-53E mine-sweeping choppers, and last but not least, their Pave Low, sitting it out alone, above the fan-tail.
At the other end of the ship, towards the bow, Girling could see an MH-53E warming up, the sun-light catching on its rotors as they started to turn. He quickened his step, heading for the cordon of armed Marines between the helicopter and the island, the conning tower from which the captain commanded his ship.
Twenty feet from the helo, a Marine lieutenant flagged him down. There was a special security restriction around the flight. Definitely no civilians allowed.
Girling turned just as the party of orderlies brought the Sword on deck. He was lying on a stretcher, but his head moved from side to side, his eyes sharp as they took in the details of the walk from the island to the helicopter.
Girling stopped and watched him go. The orderlies lifted the stretcher onto the ramp and it was then that their eyes met. The Sword raised his arm and the procession stopped. He said something to one of the orderlies, who looked briefly in Giriing’s direction before walking over to the cordon and talking to the Marine. The lieutenant listened, shrugged, then waved Girling over.
Before Girling knew it, he was under the swirling downdraught of the helicopter’s rotors. The stretcher was on the ramp, the orderlies standing slightly back. Girling knelt and the Sword reached out and touched his arm.
‘So you get to go home after all,’ Girling said.
‘Yes. There is much to do.’ His watery eyes twinkled. ‘And you, Tom Girling?’
Girling wrapped his fingers around the gnarled hand. ‘Me too.’
As Girling walked back to the island, he heard the helicopter lift off and turn south.
He did not look back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Cook has enjoyed an eclectic and varied career as an author, journalist, broadcaster and entrepreneur, all of it underpinned by his passion for aviation, history and technology.
Starting out as a cub-reporter for the trade publication Interavia in the mid-1980s, where he learned about the business of the international aerospace industry from the ground up, Nick subsequently joined the world renowned Jane’s Defence Weekly, initially as a reporter, rising quickly to become Aviation Editor, a position he held until 2001.
It was during his first years at Jane’s that Nick started to write books, his first novel, Angel, Archangel, being published in the UK and the US in 1989 to critical acclaim. Angel, Archangel was the culmination of Nick’s lifelong interest in combat aviation, and especially the aerial history of World War 2, and allowed him to indulge something that he was never able to do in the dry analysis of his day-job — combining story-telling with history in the formulation of the ‘what-if’ thriller.
Angel, Archangel is a classic what-if, postulating what British Intelligence might have done had the Soviets decided to push on to the English Channel against the Western Allies, instead of halting the Red Army’s advance at Berlin in May 1945. It tells the story of a maverick pilot, drafted by Britain’s spymasters to take out the architect of the Soviet assault plan in a daring bombing raid using an advanced Nazi jet bomber, the Arado 234 — the only aircraft capable of penetrating the Soviet defences.
In 1991, Nick followed up with his second novel, Aggressor, which was set in the turbulent world of the contemporary Middle East. In this, US and Russian special forces secretly combine to hunt down and kill a rogue fundamentalist Islamic spiritual leader who is linked to a series of terrorists outrages — many years before anyone had ever heard of Osama Bin Laden. With the post-Cold War 1990s a period of high demand at Jane’s, Nick throttled back on his book-writing career, ghost-writing a number of Sunday Times bestsellers whilst simultaneously delivering a series of exclusives for Jane’s, several of which — a second, secret hostage rescue mission in Iran and first-ever pictures of the near-mythical Soviet ‘Caspian Sea Monster’ — made headline news around the world.
In 2001, Cook’s first non-fiction title, The Hunt For Zero Point, was published, reaching number 3 in the Amazon General List and Number 1 in Amazon’s Non-Fiction charts. THFZP was the culmination of a decade’s investigation into a heretical notion — the idea that anti-gravity technology could have been buried under decades of secret development work — and allowed Nick to give readers, via a mass-market publication, a behind-the-scenes tour of the world of classified military development — a world that he had got to know well via his research and writing for Jane’s. THFZP also introduced readers to the all-too-real and mercurial war criminal, Hans Kammler, an SS general, long forgotten by history, who developed the Nazis’ most secret weapons technology and who disappeared off the face of the earth at the end of the war.
After writing, hosting and producing two documentaries about the classified world of aerospace and defence — Billion Dollar Secret and An Alien History of Planet Earth, for the Discovery/C5 and History/C4 channels respectively — Nick continued to work for Jane’s as its Senior Aerospace Consultant and penned a number of other top-selling ghost-written works.
In 2008, he used his knowledge of the global aerospace and defence industry’s science and technology base to set up Dynamixx, a consultancy dedicated to the formulation and implementation of strategies that transition A&D industry technologies to global challenges ‘beyond defence’ — starting with clean energy and the environment, but extending into natural disaster prevention and response and humanitarian relief. He is currently working with A&D companies, governments, banks, clean-tech organisations and venture capitalists to roll out plans that see A&D industry technology transitioned to these markets, providing technical solutions to challenges that are urgent but currently insoluble.