They all nodded.
‘Are you prepared to carry on with this task with the understanding that some of us may not come back?’
They each nodded in turn as Jason looked at them, Rowena last. She made him wait.
‘Good,’ Jason said, straightening up. ‘I’ll take you to the equipment room,’ he said to Stratton who was waiting by the door.
The storeroom was packed with special-forces operational equipment: a rack of hanging dry-suits, fireproof undersuits, a box of harnesses, boots, leather gloves and so on. ‘You guys are well stocked,’ Stratton said.
Jackson, a head taller than Stratton, was beside him, attaching a flare to a diving-knife sheath with a thick rubber band. ‘We trial every piece of equipment we design for special forces and the other clandestine departments in the conditions in which we expect them to get used. That means having similar operational equipment.’ He took his dry-bag and left the room to get rigged.
Stratton searched along another shelf. ‘Do you have any karabiners? ’ he asked the figure in the next row. As he looked between the boxes he realised it was Rowena. She pushed a box towards him through the shelving, gave him a cold look and went out.
Stratton sat alone on a chair. He pulled off his boots, followed by his outer garments, and climbed into the one-piece under-suit. After putting on a pair of rubber-soled climbing boots he got to his feet, ready to go. He picked up the bag containing his dry-bag and harness and looked for somewhere to leave his civvies. He spotted an empty shelf at the top against the far wall.
As he reached up and shoved the bag onto the shelf he heard someone talking softly on the other side of a door. He was about to step away when he recognised Jason and Rowena’s voices. Something about the situation, maybe a defensive suspicion of this crowd, and also the lowered voices, stopped him from leaving. He moved so that he could see through the narrow opening. Rowena and Jason stood close to each other, unaware of Stratton’s presence.
Jason placed his hands on the young woman’s hips and wrapped them around her waist, pulling her against him. She rested her arms on his shoulders, her fingers entwined behind his head. Their lips came together and they kissed passionately, their hold on each other tightening.
It was the point beyond which Stratton felt uncomfortable.
He headed back to the theory room, where he bumped into Smithy.
‘Hi,’ Smithy said fumbling with the fingerprint analyser. ‘I’m excited to be coming along.’
Stratton doubted that very much.
As they went in they saw Binning and Jackson in fireproof suits, looking ready to go. Binning held up a rigid laptop-sized plastic box. ‘This is the G43 overlook device.’
‘How will we block the Chinook’s comms?’ Stratton asked, interested in the more immediate problem.
‘Same device,’ Binning said.
‘You can do that from here?’
‘No. Nothing can transmit from down here except through the secure cabling. It’s already active. Soon as we’re through the screens it’ll block all comms.’
Jason and Rowena walked into the room wearing firesuits and carrying kitbags. It didn’t surprise Stratton that Rowena’s suit fitted her shapely body very well. ‘What else are we taking apart from the G43?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ Jason replied. ‘We’ve taken your advice and gone for lightness.’
Stratton nodded. ‘Okay. Look after your kit. Make sure it works. In the middle of the North Sea in the dark when the chopper has left is not a good time to discover you have a leak.’
‘We’re ready,’ Jason assured him. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to the others, forgetting for a moment that Stratton was in charge.
As they walked, Binning came alongside Stratton. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’
Stratton glanced at the man he didn’t think he could ever warm to. It was more than Binning’s cocky, condescending attitude. The scientist had an underlying greyness, an indistinctness about him. Stratton couldn’t put his finger precisely on it but it was ever-present. ‘What?’
‘The story between you and this Mackay chap who’s on the platform. What is that?’
Jason overheard the question and glanced back as if he too was interested to know the answer. Stratton didn’t particularly want to talk about it, not with this lot. ‘It was just an operation in Afghanistan that didn’t go to plan.’
‘Rowena found a watered-down report on the incident,’ Jason said. ‘It implied that some bad decisions were made but did not lay blame. You were the team commander.’
Stratton suspected they were trying to wind him up.Yet a twinge of guilt rippled through him. ‘If you’re wondering whether or not it was my fault, the answer is yes, it was.’
‘You made a mistake?’ Binning asked.
‘I made a decision. There are always choices in any operation. Sometimes none of them are any good.’
Stratton had never explained the incident in detail to anyone, other than in the clinical post-operational report he had written. He was suddenly attracted to the notion of telling the MI16 lot about it. There was no harm in them knowing. He thought back to that dark and dangerous night. ‘It was in Helmand. We went into a village a few hours before sun-up to lift a guy, a warlord,’ he said. ‘He was a grower - heroin - and he’d kill anyone, coalition forces, locals, to protect his business. He paid off the Taliban, who also protected him.
‘We knew where he was. A small army, three fifty, four hundred men, surrounded the house. Our surveillance showed they weren’t very alert at night. Sentries slept at their posts. We went in on foot, walked right into the village. We took out anyone in our way . . . At the first sentry position half a dozen Taliban lay on the ground, sleeping. We killed them all. The next lot in our way were talking and smoking around a fire. We took them out, too. The silenced weapons we used weren’t really silent. You can’t hear the bullets coming out of the muzzles. But you can hear the machinery, the clatter of the working parts inside the weapon, pushing the next round into the breech before it fires. Click, click, click. That became our catchphrase for killing. Click-click.What are you doing tonight? Click-click. We did a lot of that over there.
‘We went in through the back door of one of those mud-walled houses, a bungalow filled with the smoke from kerosene lamps. They were sleeping on the floor. People all over the place. We divided up and shot every one of them simultaneously, except in the end room where the target lay. We gagged him and he woke up and we bound his arms. Our Afghan guide told him we would kill him if he tried to raise the alarm. He understood.’
They had stopped walking now, a few steps from the compound’s lift. Stratton had the scientists’ attention.
‘I went to the front door and looked out onto the street. We intended to walk on out of the village with this worlord. But men were up and walking about in every direction. We didn’t know why. Maybe they’d found bodies. A couple of men approached the house. We let them enter and then we killed them. Click, click, click. But we couldn’t do that all night. If one of them had managed to get off a round none of us would have got out of there alive. They would have hit us with everything they’d got, even if it meant killing their warlord. We could only carry so much ammunition and no one would have been able to get to us in time.