The Sergeant knew to look away, and, squinting into the penumbra at the very edge of his vision, off towards a black hulk which ran even in this catastrophe with barely any lights, he saw a speck which might have been a half-brilliant, half-mad teenager trying to save his mother.
The second bomb went off a moment later, over on the other side of the Fleet, and something bad must have happened because a ship started sounding its horn over and over, like a donkey screaming in a marsh. Dear God, he must have holed it. He can’t have done. There wasn’t enough stuff.
But perhaps there had been more from another source. No doubt Jack could lay his hands on the necessaries. And close on the heels of that: He can’t have meant to. In this weather, people would die. Rescue would be all but impossible and the captain would be under orders not to beach the vessel, not to expose the secrets it contained.
That was a score in itself, to drag the Fleet out from behind the curtain. And they were on stage now, for sure: the white pillars of flame would see to that. Kathy Hasp and her friends would be staring out of their hotel windows and calling their network bosses, letting them know that the Mancreu theatre was good for another impossible scene before it finally gave up. The plan was working and the story was alive. All it lacked was the big finish.
The night went bright again and the Sergeant was in the middle of a searchlight beam and someone was shouting. He couldn’t see but he recognised the tone, the demand for surrender. Yes, you prick, I came out here in this weather just to turn myself in to a bunch of confused wankers in the spook trade. He gunned the engine and lurched away. If they fired at him, they missed, and they couldn’t keep the beam on him in the swell.
He vanished, following the boy.
Elaine was a shadow against a background of night. Picked out occasionally by the desperate lights of the main Fleet, it skulked at the edge of the safe channel. Lester Ferris wondered whether that was for operational reasons, or whether whoever chose the station had been secretly ashamed that Britain, diminished now and unreconciled to the fact, should participate for power’s sake in the slow slaughter of a place it had claimed and cherished in its high imperial day. He wondered if it had been Africa herself, or if she had simply been handed the mess and told not to interfere; if Elaine looked the same in her office as it did tonight, a dark ghost rolling on dark water, Brighton House’s own bitter twin.
The crewmen were lowering a ladder. Whatever tactic the boy had used to gull them was working. It was a telescoping metal ladder with a motor, built into the structure of the ship so that it wouldn’t easily tear away. The upper reaches had a cage around them, a wide tunnel of metal, but the boy hadn’t got to that part yet and the sea was throwing the inflatable all over the place. It could end here, the Sergeant realised, and the boy must know that, must know this was an insane way to carry on.
The boy lunged, knapsack on his back, and the inflatable yawed away. He got both hands on the ladder, but his feet were still on the little dinghy and it was unguided so he might as well be hanging by his arms, and then he was, shoes trailing in the water, but he hauled himself up and went on, fast, as if this was nothing, as if it was just what he did. The Sergeant grinned as a sort of mad pride bloomed in him. The boy was doing a great thing. It was terrible and it was all kinds of wrong-headed and dangerous, but he was making it work. He was near as dammit leading the world around by the nose, and he was a genius and an action hero and everything he wanted to be. If it wasn’t going to cost him his life the Sergeant would be inclined to let him get on with it, but you had to draw a line in bringing up a young person, and this was definitely on the far side of it.
Then the small figure reached the deck and was hauled aboard. How long before he started doing whatever he proposed to do to create a death for himself that would resonate? And for that matter, how would he transmit it? In the end perhaps he didn’t need to, he could just incriminate the Fleet and let those left behind do the talking. Perhaps it could work if he just went off somewhere, to France, say, or Thailand, and bought a house. The Fleet vanished bodies all the time. But no: the full impact, the vileness, required a body. Or better, live footage. There would be a plan for that, too. If the Sergeant had been quick enough, he might have tackled this from that end, stopped the signal on shore and used that to leverage retreat. A parental stand-off.
Well, next time, eh?
Lester Ferris took the boat close as fast as he could, not wanting that ladder to retract before he was ready, then waited for the right moment, feeling the rhythm of the waves. The Elaine rose over him, then twisted away until it looked as if he might shortly be able to walk up it and get on board that way, then back – and he jumped.
His right hand hit the rung hard and he clenched the greasy metal, feeling the crosshatching grate under the rubber grip of his glove. He got one foot on the bottom rung, too, and then a perverse, sideways wave came in and nearly ripped him off in one go. He slammed against the side of the Elaine, fingers protesting as they carried his full weight, wet, with all that extra gear on his belt.
He wrenched himself back around and began to climb, felt the ladder tug under him, grind upwards. They were drawing it in. He hoped like hell it didn’t automatically stow itself in some sort of flatpack chest. He pumped with his legs, running from rung to rung. Up above, he heard the first flashbang go off and knew it had begun.
He reached the top and threw himself forward just as the ship lurched and he was flying again, always flying through the air in this outfit, always landing hard. This time there was no one underneath him and he rolled to save his ankles, slithered across a slick deck and kept moving, waiting each second for cries of alarm and the impact of shots. A man appeared in front of him and he used the taser, low and fast like a knife strike. He hadn’t even been aware of taking it from his belt. He glimpsed the man’s eyes, absurdly clear as they rolled up into his head, then pressed himself into an alcove in the metal supports of the bridge. There had been no gunfire since that first explosion. That might mean this was still containable. It might. He looked towards the prow.
And saw the boy.
The Elaine’s captain had turned on the main floods for the boy’s boarding and these were now doing duty as TV lights. The boy had brought his own camera, and it was sitting on a tripod with some sort of magnetic clamp which locked it to the deck. A short stubby aerial suggested it was broadcasting live, though whether it could get through the storm the Sergeant was unsure. But the boy would have thought of that, prepared for it. This was his big scene.
He was wearing ordinary clothes which made him look even more like a child than he usually did. Water flowed from his head down over his face, which was contorted in a desperate plea. In his off-hand, he held a radio remote for the camera which looked like every filmmaker’s standard prop for a terrorist, but his body hid it from the lens.
There were four crewmen on the deck, woozy from the flashbang, but that might or might not come across on grainy footage of a lightning storm. The boy was shouting at them, bending his knees like any angry child, compressing and then bouncing in his insistence: a school footballer disputing the ref’s decision with all his might. The Sergeant couldn’t hear what he was saying, and quite certainly nor could the crewmen in the aftermath of the flashbang, so the monologue must be for the camera. He said it again, and again, hand pointing, and finally the Sergeant saw his mouth full on and read the words on his lips: