Jacob Redman put all other thoughts from his head as he set his jaw and his course. With nothing around him but darkness, it was impossible to sense how quickly he was moving. A fair rate, he deduced, from the sound of the wind screaming in the sails and the tilt of the boat. Occasionally there was a gust; whenever that happened, Jacob spilled some wind by letting out the mainsheet a little until the gust had passed. He kept half an eye on the GPS unit. Slowly the little green dot grew closer to the northern shoreline.
He kept a careful track of time, knowing how easy it was to lose a sense of such things at sea. 02.00 passed.
03.00.
04.00.
And then the sky started glowing with a faint pink light. Morning. And with it, in the distance, the sight that Jacob had been waiting for.
Land.
The wind was behind him now, urging him onwards. The tiredness that he felt from being awake for nearly twenty-four hours fell away as Jacob looked carefully towards the shore, his eyes searching for unpopulated areas and deserted stretches of beach. Only when he was a couple of hundred metres out did he see a likely target. He adjusted his course and started tacking towards it.
His body was aching with cold and tiredness. Exhaustion. It took all his effort, as he approached this rocky inlet, to lean forward and pull the centreboard, first halfway and then, when he was only a few metres out, fully up. The boat wobbled precariously; Jacob braced himself just as she slammed on to the pebble-strewn shore. The wind was still screaming in the full sails; he crawled to the centre of the boat and tugged the halyard down, bringing the sail with it.
All of a sudden the noise stopped. He was surrounded by an almost silence. Just the lapping of the waves and the calling of a seagull. Without giving himself a moment to rest, however, he grabbed the weapons bag and his rucksack, then climbed out of the boat.
And for the first time in six long years, Jacob Redman stepped out on to English soil.
TWENTY-TWO
May 23. 07.45 hrs. Mac was at home. At home, and glad that his wife Rebecca had let him back after his recent misdemeanours. Not before time. The atmosphere back at base was horrible. Porteus’s departure had caused a weird air of mistrust among the men. Moreover, word of how Sam had been asked to stay behind with the men from the Firm had got around. It didn’t take the guys a great deal of head scratching to work out that the two events were related and, as everyone knew, Mac was Sam’s closest mate in the Regiment. They went way back. He could barely show his face without someone trying to pump him for information. Truth was, Sam had gone off the radar. Mac had tried to call him any number of times; he’d even gone round to his flat. He felt half-worried, half-angry. There was no doubt about it: Sam Redman had some explaining to do.
Back home, nobody knew anything of this, and so it was that he found himself at the breakfast table of the unim-posing two-up two-down in Hereford, listening to the chink of his kids’ spoons against their cereal bowls, while nursing a cup of coffee and a hangover. Rebecca, sitting in her dressing gown with her long hair mussed, cast him an occasional kittenish look. Amazing what a night of drunken passion could do. He smiled at her.
‘Are you back for ever now, Dad?’ asked Jess, his nine-year-old daughter.
Mac smiled at her. Not for the first time he felt a pang of guilt about his less than perfect parenting skills. ‘’Course I am, love,’ he said.
‘Except for when you go away to kill baddies,’ Huck butted in, his mouth still half full of Weetabix. Huck was seven, and although he knew nothing of the SAS, the fact that his dad was a soldier with lots of guns had caught his imagination. ‘How many baddies did you kill last time, Dad? Loads, I bet.’
‘Huck!’ Rebecca admonished him. ‘Stop asking your father silly questions and eat your breakfast. You’re going to be late for school.’
‘You’re not even dressed,’ Jess observed sulkily.
Rebecca opened her mouth to deliver another reprimand, but Mac gave her a subtle shake of the head. ‘I’ll take them,’ he said.
‘Yeah!’ Huck cried. He jumped down from the table and rushed to find his school things.
It was just gone eight-thirty when the kids were ready. Mac pulled on his jacket, kissed Rebecca on the cheek and led them outside. It was a ten-minute walk and he hoped the fresh air would clear his head.
He didn’t even make it out of the front garden before he stopped.
The figure standing on the other side of the street, leaning against a lamppost, looked like a ghost. Mac’s sharp eyes saw that his face was cut up; his eyes were haunted.
‘Sam,’ he said under his breath.
Sam said nothing. He didn’t even move. He just continued to stare.
‘Come on, Dad!’ Huck shouted. He was out of the gate now, his schoolbag slung over his shoulder. Jess was kicking her heels.
Mac looked over at Sam. ‘Wait there.’ He mouthed the words silently and pointed a finger to emphasise what he was saying. ‘Wait there!’
Sam nodded.
The walk to school was a brisk one. Huck talked nine to the dozen, but barely received a response from his dad – just a ruffling of the hair at the school gates, and a kiss on the cheek for a slightly embarrassed Jess. They sloped off into the playground and Mac ran back home. As he turned on to his street, however, and looked over at the lamppost, he saw that Sam was no longer there.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said under his breath.
‘Language, language.’ A voice from behind.
Mac spun round. Sam, right behind him.
‘Jesus, Sam. What happened to your face?’ Close up he could see just how bad it was. The skin was sliced and splintered, all the way from the top of his forehead to the bottom of his neck. A couple of the larger cuts had been closed up with steri-tape, but the treatment had a distinctly homemade feel about it. Sam touched his fingers to his face; as he did so, Mac noticed that his wrists were also deeply cut.
‘Head-butted a windscreen,’ Sam said. ‘Long story.’
‘You’d better come back to mine,’ Mac replied. ‘Becky’s good at this stuff. She can patch you up a bit better.’
Sam shook his head. ‘Let’s walk.’
They headed to a nearby park. Mums with kids played at the swings, but the two men took a seat on a park bench at a good distance from them. Sam looked like something from a horror movie, after all. They sat in silence for a moment. Mac deduced that Sam would speak when he was ready.
‘Jacob was there,’ he said finally. ‘In Kazakhstan. I warned him off.’
Mac took a deep breath and nodded. It wasn’t a total surprise, but it took a certain effort to dampen down his anger with his old friend. ‘That what you told the Firm?’ he asked.
Sam shook his head.
‘They believe you?’
‘No. Listen, Mac. All sort of shit’s gone down since then. I need to know I can trust you to keep it to yourself.’
‘Fucking hell, mate. Everyone’s asking questions.’
‘Can I trust you?’
Mac closed his eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘Course you can.’
Sam gazed into the middle distance and then he started to speak – quickly, as if the words were painful for him. Mac listened in rapt attention as his story unfolded: Porteus’s letter, the red-light runners, seeing J. Then Sam described his interview with the Firm – how Bland had called his bluff about going out to rescue Jacob and how Sam had denied everything. He told Mac about the laptop, Dolohov, escaping from the SBS. And, finally, the meet.
‘When is it?’
‘Tomorrow night. Piccadilly Circus. The Firm will be there, Mac. Dolohov knew the time and place. And they’re hardly going to give J. the benefit of the doubt.’