Greaves had searched everywhere. They were gone and had left nothing behind. Not long ago, though. The cabin was still warmer than the outside, so an hour or two at most. He stared through the window. The nearest rig was a couple of miles away. He’d have to try there. First, though, he wanted to find clues, anything that would help him find out what Salamander was up to. Something about being here didn’t add up. It was the middle of nowhere. Anything he did here, who would care? Salamander could set off a nuke here, and Putin would just shrug.
He checked the computer left on board, but it had been wiped. Greaves had been trained in cybersecurity – offensive and defensive – and knew how to look for hidden files and how to mine for echoes of erased material. But Salamander or one of his men clearly knew the ropes as well. Next stop was the rubbish bin. Aside from a few disgusting mushy leftovers he couldn’t begin to identify, there was a single scrap of scrunched-up tissue paper. A napkin. Greaves picked it up like he was a CSI investigator, carefully set it down on the table, and began unfolding it. It had something on it, a doodle. Two infinity signs. Or two eights. Eighty-eight. Eighty-eight what? Minutes? Hours? He recalled – with a certain amount of dread – Salamander’s now legendary countdown from thirty-seven hours to his attempt to obliterate London. But Nadia had profiled him, as best you could someone like Salamander. She’d insisted it would be something different.
He searched the room. They’d been here for some time. Clearly not just Salamander, but others. And while Salamander was disciplined to the core, most people weren’t. They got bored, they made doodles, they left clues. His eyes settled on a stack of long rolls of paper in the corner of the room. He fetched one and laid it on the table, using unwashed cutlery and empty tin mugs to weight down its corners. A map of the region. The two platforms were clearly marked; the one he was standing on, and the other one. There were other oil fields farther out, owned by other companies. Nothing else. No clues. What the hell had he been expecting, a big fat red arrow with blood-soaked writing saying ‘Salamander will strike here’? This was an exploratory oil rig, of course there would be maps lying around.
Yet sometimes people left clues without realising it. What wasn’t he seeing? Numbers, it had to be about numbers. The only numbers were … He sat back. Could be longitude or latitude. But which? Which was more important? Latitude. The parallels. He gathered up the other three map rolls, and one by one laid them on top of the original. The last was large-scale. It showed the Arctic, as if looking down from space, the North Pole at the centre, at a latitude of ninety degrees. His finger traced the back to the eighty-eighth parallel. Eighty-eight degrees North. What the hell was there, aside from ice and polar bears?
He decided to make a cup of coffee. It was getting cold, but he didn’t turn on the heating, in case it sent a signal somewhere. So might switching on a kettle, but he doubted it and, frankly he needed a coffee, he practically lived off the stuff. Prick him, and mud-brown espresso would bubble out. There was only instant, but it was better than nothing, and he’d drunk a lot worse.
With a steaming mug in his hand, he focused again on the map. Who did Salamander hate? Well, the British government, for betraying him. Not forgetting the Russians and Chinese, same reason, though Hong Kong was different – they’d sheltered him and his family for decades. All three countries had royally screwed him over, and he blamed them for the death of his wife. He’d targeted the UK twice. Attacking the Chinese would result in blowback against the Hong Kong triads. Which left the Russians. Something tickled his brain, some bit of information about Russia and the Arctic. Oil and gas, the latter being Russia’s preferred economic weapon, its heavyweight bargaining chip and leverage over the rest of Europe. Russia had found oil and gas under the Arctic ice. Deep wells, billions of barrels of black gold, trillions of cubic feet of gas. If he recalled well, Russia had finally won its legal claim to drill there. Losing that field would give Putin a sore head.
He took a sip, then traced his finger around the curve of the eighty-eighth parallel, to the patch of disputed territories above Greenland. If there was an oil field there, there would be a platform like the one he was on right now. More like the other one a couple of klicks away. And … He hunted for the ‘so what?’ What was Salamander up to? The map showed depth contours. It was deep there, very deep. Something called the Lomonosov Ridge. A nice Russian name.
He drained his coffee. He could be barking up the wrong tree. But his gut told him he was on the right track. Which led him back to a more urgent question. What was Salamander doing here? And then it hit him. Salamander was methodical. He planned everything to the last detail. That meant testing, making sure whatever he was planning would work on the day. Salamander was here for a test run. And he’d brought Jake here for a reason. Not because Jake was MI6.
Because Jake was a diver.
Greaves quit the cabin, and then took a leak over the side, making sure the wind was behind him. Two unspoken rules when in the field. Eat when you can, piss when you can. Afterwards, he took out his binoculars and studied the other platform. It looked normal, people milling about here and there, the tall derrick lit up now that it was approaching dusk. He tracked downwards and saw a small boat near one of the platform’s legs. It didn’t belong there. He didn’t need time to think it over. He dashed straight to the ladder and descended.
On the way down, he considered his priorities. The technical jargon was mission parameters, the key ones being prime target, prioritisation, and acceptable collateral. They were what he called ‘suit words’ created by someone sitting behind a desk in a bland suit and tie, dreaming of promotion and the girl at the photocopier, praying for happy hour to hurry up and arrive. Greaves dumbed it all down. Don’t come home until the prime target is eliminated. Salamander was his prime target. Priorities: always play the numbers. Kill Salamander, save thousands, millions even. But what about Jake?
Acceptable collateral fell into a category he called the ‘too bads’. If Jake got caught in the crossfire, too bad. Jake would agree. Nadia might not. But even though she’d been the one who’d called him in, that was just another too bad. Maybe that was why Nadia had called him. Whereas she might blink, he wouldn’t.
He arrived at the boat, untied the forward and aft ropes, and started the engines. He scratched at the scar on his side, where Salamander had knifed him back in London’s sewers. He recalled how Salamander had despatched Jones, the inoffensive boffin who’d disarmed the nuke. And then there was Mallory, shot by one of Salamander’s men, and bloody lucky to be alive.
He shoved the lever forward and began punching the boat through the waves. Salamander was on the other platform, he was sure of it. He glanced down at his pistol, shotgun and semi-auto rifle. A shame he hadn’t brought grenades. Never mind. He focused.
Payback time.
***
Jake stood on a metal mesh floor, waves cruising a metre or so below, the splash and hiss of sea spray constant as the lead-grey mounds smacked into the giant steel legs of the oil rig. He gazed upwards to the underside of the main deck, wondering if any of the hundred or so men working there could see down below, and if they did, would they raise any alarm. Probably not. Although this cluster of oil rigs was owned by a global petroleum giant, the Russian mob ran the operation, so the workers kept their heads down and didn’t ask too many questions.
Back to the task. A deep dive. To take something to the bottom, attach it to a piece of machinery belonging to the rig, and leave it there. He stared at the rubber case before him, having already seen the electronic gadget inside. He didn’t know what it did. Nothing good, presumably. But Jake wanted Nadia’s name cleared. He wanted the full video released.
At least he wasn’t cold anymore, zipped-up in a seven-millimetre-thick neoprene dry suit. Salamander had remained in the boat, which pitched, rolled and yawed violently some twenty metres away. Jake could see his silhouette, standing on the tiny bridge, upright, never swaying, vertical as a plumb line despite the wild movements of the boat. As if he was independent of the environment.
Neat trick.
The two beefed-up guys were on the mesh with him, watching his every move. He’d christened one XL, the other XXL, though he hadn’t shared that with them. He turned back to the gear he would have to wear for the descent. State of the art. Commercial, definitely not military – too much attention to comfort. The backpack looked like it had been borrowed from an astronaut. Four tanks of different sizes, one each for oxygen, nitrogen, helium and argon, and a mishmash of smaller pipes and wires and electronic stuff he didn’t have a clue about except that they were there to balance three of the gases – oxygen, nitrogen and helium – according to depth, to avoid the three critical dangers of very deep diving: narcosis, oxygen poisoning and decompression sickness. The fourth gas, argon, was for his dry suit; helium was such a good heat conductor it would chill him to the bone down below. Which apparently was one hundred and thirty metres. His deepest dive to date was seventy-six, on air. With all this gear it should be a doddle.
Right.
One of the Russian heavies – XL – bellowed something, which in any language was unmistakable as hurry-the-fuck-up. Jake gave him a you want to take my place, you’re welcome look, and continued studying the equipment. He was searching for something. A failsafe for Salamander. A switch to shut everything down, which would kill Jake at even moderate depth. Likely it was coded into the dive computer, awaiting a signal. Which meant there had to be a receptor, a small antenna. He crouched down and picked up the computer tablet, attached to a sturdy flexible hose and protected by tough, transparent plastic. It showed the three gases in a histogram – three little grey columns, the helium one just a thin line, the nitrogen one three times higher than the oxygen column, and digital readouts below each column: zero, eighty-one, nineteen. There was space for instructions, and a touch-screen keypad he could call up if needed, though typing through gloves was going to make anything he wrote pretty dyslexic.
He nodded to XL, who grunted, and XXL joined him. It took both of them to heft the backpack onto Jake’s back. He shrugged into the harness. XL came around to the front to attach the straps but Jake waved him away. His gear, his life. He needed to lodge in his mind where all the straps were, just in case. Because when all else failed, you dumped your kit and bolted for the surface.
Jake worked his rubber boots into the open ends of the long black fins, as XL crouched at his feet and fixed the straps around Jake’s Achilles tendons. Jake shifted his feet a little to test them. Tight enough. If he lost a fin underwater with this monster box on his back, he’d be as useless as a wobbly toy.
Last was the helmet. This was the business. Heavy duty rubber hood with an integrated faceplate-style mask, toughened glass in a steel frame. It fit snug around his chin and neck. Sound became muffled, the slip-slops of the waves below cushioned to a soft shhh. XL made a sign, two fists together, then pulled apart. Jake nodded, and XXL tightened the straps around the back of Jake’s head until it was uncomfortable. The rubber would be compressed at the depth he was headed, and so would loosen. If water entered his mask, he couldn’t simply take it off to clear it. He’d drown. Tighter was better.
He put on his gloves and penguined towards the edge, XL shuffling out of the way. The water was a metre below, though the bigger waves occasionally breached the mesh, drenching the steel gauze in foam. He’d have to jump in between two waves, safer that way. A high entry dive, especially with all this weight on his back. At the edge, he had an afterthought. He turned around, facing the oversized men. He pointed to a diver’s knife next to a set of normal dive kit lying on the deck. They’d told him the spare gear was in case they had to rescue him. Don’t make me laugh. It was in case they hadn’t managed to kill him at depth, after he’d completed his mission. One of them would kit-up and finish the job. But Jake had one special rule for diving. He never dived without a knife.
XL followed his gaze, turned back to Jake, his lips moving with profanities Jake couldn’t care less about and couldn’t hear anyway, but it was clearly a ‘No.’ Jake folded his arms and waited. The two guys muttered to each other, XL shooing with his arm, telling Jake to get the fuck in the water. Jake stood fast. XXL strolled over and went to push him in, but Jake grabbed his wrist and leaned backwards. A calculated gamble, but XXL recoiled instinctively, not fancying a maybe-fatal dip into chilly waters. XXL backed off, stabilising Jake in the process, and picked up a spear gun Jake hadn’t seen before. Jake heard a loud crackle. XL pulled a walkie-talkie from his jacket and began talking fast, then listening, his head bowed, defeated as a kicked dog. He put the radio back inside his jacket and spoke to XXL, who tossed the spear gun to the deck and fetched the knife. He came over and fixed it to Jake’s right thigh.
Jake glanced once more towards Salamander, still ramrod straight despite the boat’s frenetic dance, then turned to face the sea below. This could be a mistake. No kidding. But he wanted to clear Nadia’s name. Even if she didn’t live long enough to appreciate it. Even if she was already … He stopped that train of thought in its tracks, and took several long breaths, oxygenating his lungs. This was probably a one-way dive. Never mind. He’d always wanted to be buried at sea. And one hundred and thirty metres … he could only imagine the faces of his dive buddies back in the Scillies. If he survived, he could brag his arse off down at Old Smithy’s Inn. He took a breath and a step into nothing, felt his centre of gravity pass the point of no return, and fell towards the place where he pretty much always preferred to be.
But he’d felt something brush against his leg as he’d jumped in. He surfaced briefly, and as he let air out of his stab jacket so he could sink, he spun around and gazed one last time up to the deck, and there was XXL, leaning over the side, grinning, holding Jake’s knife in the air, like a trophy.
Bastard.