‘Ha! They come,’ Ibrahim whispered excitedly but not without some relief.
Shadows moved towards them on the other side of the pipes and the team leader looked around the corner and gave Abed a solid thumbs up indicating all his men were with him.
Abed gave the signal and the two groups moved off in opposite directions,Abed’s team heading around to the starboard side of the superstructure while the other went to port.
He paused at the corner of the superstructure, checking once more that it was clear, before making his way to the main deck entrance that faced starboard. His men gathered in a line against the bulkhead while he studied the heavy steel entrance door which was closed. The door was evenly surrounded by six dogs - heavy clips - all in the unlocked position except one, the centre dog opposite the hinges. He carefully pulled the lever down, unlocking it, and jerked the heavy door open just enough to look inside. The entrance was a weather-lock, a small chamber with another door a few feet away, but that was fully open and the broad corridor beyond was brightly lit, immaculately clean and empty. This was the first real indication that the ship was at security level one, its lowest level, and the security officer was expecting nothing in the way of danger.
Abed checked his watch. It was 2 a.m. He expected the task to be complete and the teams heading back to the boats by 3 a.m.
‘Allah is great,’ Ibrahim said to Abed as a way of wishing them luck. ‘And so is Jesus too,’ he added as an afterthought, remembering Abed was a Christian.
Abed checked the faces of his men who crouched watching him, waiting anxiously for the word.
Abed opened the door fully, stepped inside, stood in the weather-lock and looked down the corridor to the door at the far end some thirty metres away. It opened and the leader of the other team stepped inside to face him.
Abed then did something the men were not expecting: he stood for what seemed a long time in the doorway as if locked in a trance. Ibrahim at first thought Abed had heard or seen something, but there was nothing.
‘Abed?’ Ibrahim whispered. ‘What is it . . .Abed?’
Abed did not respond. Ibrahim stepped through the door, reached out and took Abed’s shoulder. ‘Abed,’ he said again.
Abed turned to look Ibrahim in the eyes. For a moment, Ibrahim thought he saw fear in his face. He had always believed Abed did not know the meaning of the word and was suddenly filled with concern. His own orders, privately conveyed from the sheiks, was that if anything happened to Abed, he was to take charge of the mission, and if any member of the team had a change of heart, for whatever reason, he was to be instantly killed. They had never said as much but that would include Abed.
Ibrahim’s hand tightened on his scimitar and slowly started to draw it from its scabbard. But whatever was going through Abed’s mind seemed to pass and he lowered his eyes and faced the corridor again.
He drew his scimitar, adjusted his grip around the haft and stepped from the darkness of the weather-lock into the brightness of the ship, followed by Ibrahim and the others.
Chapter 2
Stratton stood in the arched entrance of a grand Elizabethan country house set in ten acres of manicured gardens, looking down on to a spacious, groomed lawn where a hundred well-heeled guests were enjoying an official morning garden party: VIPs, the titled, ambassadors, statesmen and ministers of various levels. He had arrived with his four-man team at dawn to carry out preliminary security checks, search the grounds and scan the extra staff, caterers and valets as they arrived.The guests had started trickling in around 10 a.m. and an hour later everyone of importance had arrived.
It was a fresh, sunny day and Stratton was dressed in a smart jacket and tie, his dark hair shorter than it had been in many years, and he was bored as hell. This was not his usual employment by a long shot but he knew why he was here. His bosses in the Special Boat Service thought they knew, but they did not. The mandarins in Whitehall, far above his superiors at the SBS headquarters in Poole, had retired him, thrown him out and back into ‘normal life’, a relative term for life in Special Forces could never be described as normal. It was not a punishment though, far from it. In their eyes, they had done him a favour.
Bodyguard work was the most boring job for anyone, let alone an SF operative. It meant long hours hanging around doing nothing but watching and waiting, in cars, restaurants and always at the whim of those they looked after. It was true that a lot of Special Forces work was also spent waiting and watching but, for Stratton at least, bodyguard work had some features that qualified it as the most loathsome of assignments in his business. He hated working for civilians, and the work felt like nothing more than glorified servitude.
Civilians and soldiers mixed like oil and water in their working modes: there was no mystery about being a civilian since all soldiers had been one, but few civilians could truly understand the life of a soldier. There was an even bigger chasm between civvies and Special Forces; a civilian might scratch the surface of understanding life in SF by reading every book available on the subject, but they could never begin to fathom the mentality of an operative. There were civilian parallels - sportsmen, firemen and police armed-response teams for instance - which touched on aspects such as the team ethos, but the lifestyles and working conditions did not begin to compare with those who fought side by side in a war and weathered the dangers of operating alone on undercover operations. The job created bonds for life.
Within this microcosm, Stratton was an anomaly; he was highly respected for similar reasons to those of civilians who respected SF: they did not know what he did. He was a regular SF operative, but he was also a favoured agent for military intelligence and had often been called upon to carry out assignments independent of his parent unit, the SBS.
His unusual relationship with MI5 and MI6 began in Northern Ireland many years before while working against the IRA. Like many others, he had first been noticed as an intelligence gatherer with the Northern Ireland undercover detachments. It became evident to his masters in London that his Special Forces combat skills, intelligence and aptitude for working alone made him a versatile tool that could be utilised to a far greater degree. Before long he was brought into the inner sanctum of military intelligence and exposed to the more deadly undercover front-line fight, beyond the awareness of most senior military officers and ministers, let alone the general public. Even his own bosses in the SBS did not know where he went or what he did when the request came to ‘borrow’ Stratton.
Initially, Stratton had embraced this new side of specialist military work. It suited him perfectly. He preferred to work alone and revelled in the dangers and high degree of autonomy. He never questioned the assignments at first even though there were occasions when his conscience warned him he was moving into a darkness in which he might one day lose his way. His first assassination had been justified as far as he was concerned, as indeed they all appeared to be at the time, but he gradually began to feel like an executioner, an image he did not like. His work was not all killing though, and he felt he could control his conscience with some practice. But Stratton was living in denial which came at a price, one he was not aware he was paying until greatly in debt. Like a cancer creeping through his body, Stratton realised something ugly was happening to him when it was almost too late. In a few short years he was no longer the young man who had enthusiastically joined the military in search of excitement and adventure. The hubris was gone. He was weathered and dented and the shine had disappeared from his eyes.