It was a vow some of them had died for, and others had lived to regret.
They’d gone in hard and fast, spending the first few days discovering the girl’s kidnappers’ whereabouts, tracking them to a remote mountain stronghold, assessing the situation, making plans, then launching the rescue operation just seven days after entering the country.
They knew what they were doing. Conrad and two others formed a distraction, destroying a hidden arms dump a mile down the valley from the rogue troops’ base. The other three members of the platoon made their way into the stronghold, killed the guards, and extracted the girl.
She was brave and sweet, and frighteningly intelligent. She’d known that they were there to help her, and did everything she was told. She hadn’t started crying, shaking in fear and terror, until an hour later when they were away from the stronghold and heading back towards the border.
Their mistake had been radioing ahead.
The ambush took them by surprise. It happened a mile into Malaysia, in an area supposedly safe from border skirmishes between the troubled nations. Still alert, still cautious, they fought back, but in the crossfire two of the platoon were killed.
When the shooting died down and the ambushers disappeared as quickly as they had arrived, Jenny lay dead with a bullet in her head. Conrad had examined the wound and identified its cause as a sniper’s rifle. This was no accidental death in a heavy crossfire. It was an assassination.
He had lost a vital part of himself that day—trust in the country and government he worked for; and trust in himself. It was the first time he’d ever lost someone he’d been sent in to find. It was also why he chose his freelance missions with the utmost caution. Conrad didn’t take jobs where the odds were already stacked against him.
That had been his last mission as a soldier of the Special Air Service. The rest of his life had begun on that day, and almost eight years later he was still trying to decide how that new life would be built.
Looking out over the dock and contemplating the journey to come, he tried to assess these odds. Without knowing the specifics of the mission it was difficult. Yet he still felt that familiar frisson of excitement about this new undertaking. Cautious though he was, there was still that part of him that craved adventure, and this looked like it had the makings of an epic.
He guessed it was like Packard said—they did what they knew.
SIX
Randa felt his excitement building. This had been a long time coming, but now the expedition was underway. So much organisation, so many arrangements to be made—above board, and a few under the table—and now they were sailing.
Sailing for the island.
A chill went through him, and he looked around at the rec room filled with sweaty, uncomfortable men and women. The chill was nothing to do with the temperature. It was everything to do with this, history in the making.
Some who knew him would say that he’d been working towards this for five years, but in truth it was all his life. He had always felt the need to push boundaries, lift the veil of reality and generally accepted science, and look beneath. Beyond the veil lay wonders. He had always known that, and finding such wonders had been the driving force in his life ever since he could remember. As a boy he’d been the one with his nose in a book. While his friends were out on their bikes or exploring old mines in the Arizona hills, he was at home or the library, reading Jules Verne and Jack London and imagining his own, even wilder stories.
He’d never written them down. From a young age he’d sworn to himself that his own far-fetched tales would find their way onto the page only when they were known to be true. He enjoyed his flights of fancy, and they fuelled his desire to travel and discover. But reality was always his play space, science his mentor.
During World War Two he’d been posted to North Africa and then Italy. Even though he wasn’t the oldest in his unit he’d quickly attracted the nickname Prof. While the rest of the men enjoyed the local wine and women, Randa tracked down books about the blasted areas they passed through and consumed their histories, as if to discover what those places had been like before bullets, bombs and blood had changed their landscapes forever.
More accurately, he soaked up the local myths and legends. Always searching. Always seeking that kernel of truth that he knew existed in most tales. Occasionally he’d found a seed and nurtured it, but more often than not they were moved on from one battle to the next, and those ancient tales never germinated into something he could touch.
Then he was shipped to the Pacific and his whole world opened up. Hopping from island to island, seeing horrors and trying to save himself by filling his mind with unknown, impossible wonders, he’d sensed the vast scope of untold stories that endless ocean contained.
The gradual focus of his efforts had begun. He’d remained there after the war, travelling as much as he could and never settling down for more than a few months at a time. There had been women. Once or twice, he’d even fallen in love. It was his deeper love that always won through, and while he remembered the tears in their eyes when he left, he was already looking ahead to a wider, more fascinating world.
Slowly, surely, he’d begun to find it.
Perhaps this was the time when his life would begin to make real sense. He was going to record this journey, and when he returned he was going to commit his adventures to paper at last. Because those wild imaginings would be true, and he’d present the wide scale of his dreams to the world in a series of scientific papers that would shake history to its roots.
Randa smiled as he looked around the room. It was good to have ambition, and he’d never compromised on his own.
There were around thirty people in the room, and the place was filled with a low hubbub of curious and excited conversation. Many here already sensed that this was no ordinary voyage. At one end of the room, several display boards had been set up with sheets draped over the contents. That only added to the sense of expectation.
There were twelve people in the Landsat team, all of them sporting blue Landsat windbreakers. Randa knew that only a couple of these guys had been in the field before, and most of them exuded an almost childlike wide-eyed excitement. This was a true adventure for all of them, and he appreciated their enthusiasm. He saw in some of them how he’d been thirty years before.
Sat apart from everyone else were the Sky Devils crews. There were a dozen pilots, co-pilots, and support personnel, including Packard, the hard-faced colonel. Randa didn’t like him. He wasn’t sure if it was purely because he found the man intimidating and resented that, or for other reasons. Packard was a career military man, and Randa had the impression that he always looked down upon anyone not in uniform.
At the back of the room, alone, Conrad leaned against the wall and observed his fellow travellers. He was someone else who intimidated Randa a little—knowing his background, and some of the things he had done—but he couldn’t help liking the ex-SAS captain. He was quietly spoken most of the time, and unlike Packard he did not appear to look down on anyone out of uniform. It might have been because he considered everyone beneath him. Now, Conrad took in everyone and everything with a quiet intensity. He calmly flipped a lighter open and closed as he did so.
Randa had already decided that Conrad was a good man to have on their side.
Randa and the other six members of his team also sat apart, close to the front of the room. It gave the whole place a cliquey feel, but he hoped that might lessen over the course of their voyage. Nine days at sea together might help break down boundaries between disparate groups.