Predator: A Crossbow Novel (Hector Cross Book 3)

“Yes, and it’s all good!”

“No, really it’s not. You know how Papa hurt you? Well, that was nothing, nothing at all next to the damage da Cunha could do.”

“All right, all right, I get it,” said Yevgenia, sounding like a sulky teenager.

Nastiya seized her opportunity to change the subject. “Good, now I have something else I wanted to talk to you about. I was thinking that maybe you could come to stay with me in London for a few days. I’d love you to meet Paddy and some of the people I work with. We have to go to Africa soon, but before then, maybe?”

“Yes please! I haven’t been to London for ages and I have so many friends who live there.”

“Good, then it’s settled. Now all we have to do is agree on the date . . .”

Aram Bendick was hot, sweaty and jet-lagged, and his temper, abrasive at the best of times, was verging on the volcanic. He’d got on a Gulfstream G500 in New York City that flew to Cape Verde—whatever the hell that might be—for a refuel. “Just a precaution,” the pilot said. “We could get where we are going on a single tank, but only just.”

“So where the hell are we going?” Bendick asked and the pilot just smiled and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not at liberty to divulge that information.”

Bendick would never have got on the plane at all, and certainly not without his usual six-man bodyguard, every man of them ex-Mossad, if it hadn’t been for the second tranche of $50 million that Juan Tumbo had placed in an escrow account with the words: “If you don’t get back to New York within seventy-two hours of your take-off, that money gets sent to your lawyers. You can tell ’em what to do with it. Even if your plane lands just one minute after that time, you still get the money.”

The first fifty million had arrived in his fund, exactly as Tumbo had promised. The second was checked out by his lawyers and they were satisfied it was legit. Bendick figured he had a lot of enemies, but none of them were crazy enough to throw away a hundred mill just so they could kill him. So he got on the plane at three in the afternoon, worked all the way to Cape Verde, then ate dinner at the start of the second leg, watched a movie and finally crashed for three or four hours. He was woken just before they landed at a two-bit excuse for an airport some place where no one had heard of air-conditioning and the immigration officials made the obstructive jerks on the desks at JFK look as smooth and charming as George freakin’ Clooney.

The clocks told him it was eight in the morning, but it was already hot and humid and it was a blessed relief to discover that the Range Rover waiting for him outside the terminal had air-conditioning and comfortable seats to soothe him. Bendick would have grabbed some much-needed shut-eye, but the road was so full of potholes it was like trying to sleep on top of a bouncy castle. So he forced his weary, bloodshot eyes to stay open and looked out at a giant slum, where all the buildings looked like they should have been condemned decades ago and the streets were filled with people carrying possessions and merchandise on their heads and milling around like they had nothing better to do with themselves. What in God’s name, Bendick wondered, would make a man who could spend tens of millions just to get a one-to-one meeting live in a dump like this? As to where the dump was, he figured it had to be Africa, just from the fact that just about everyone he could see was black, and the city was built on the sea, because they’d flown in over the water to land. Beyond that he knew squat.

The Range Range drove uphill through the outskirts of the city before arriving at a black wrought-iron gateway, reinforced with painted steel panels behind the ironwork, set into a high concrete wall. There were two armed guards on the gates, but they recognized the car as it approached and had the gates open right away, so that Bendick could be driven right on through. Within the compound he discovered an entirely new world of sprinklers playing over lush green lawns and uniformed gardeners tending to the dazzling flowerbeds. As the car pulled up outside the entrance to a grand, colonial-type mansion white-gloved servants hurried to open the passenger door, greet Bendick with a smile and lead him to a cool, airy suite of rooms, where heavy shutters kept the heat of the sun at bay while a ceiling fan provided a cooling breeze. An hour later, once he’d showered, changed and finished a light breakfast, perfectly prepared to his exact specifications and eaten on a shaded balcony overlooking the gardens, Aram Bendick was ready to meet his host.

He was led downstairs, back across the entrance hall and into a private study. A black man was sitting behind a desk at the far side of the room from the door. He had a beard and short, tightly curled hair, both streaked with gray, and although he looked broad-shouldered and imposing when he was sitting down, it was only when the man got to his feet that Bendick appreciated the sheer scale of him. The man was a mountain on legs.

“I’m Juan Tumbo,” he said in an African-American voice that seemed to rumble up from the bowels of the earth, taking Bendick’s hand in a bone-crushing grip. “Good of you to come’n see me, ’Ram—hope you don’t mind me calling you that, now that we’re business associates. They lookin’ after you here? The place is only a rental, servants come with the building.”

“They looked after me fine, Mr. Tumbo, and if my wife was here she’d say the house was quaint, but that city out there’s gotta be the shittiest, most godforsaken dump I ever saw,” Bendick began. “Makes East Harlem look like Monte frickin’ Carlo, you know what I’m saying? And, excuse me for asking, but where the hell am I anyway?”

Tumbo smiled, entirely untroubled by Bendick’s aggressive, abusive style. “Cabinda City, capital of the great state of Cabinda. And yeah, the city’s ’bout as bad as you say, but come on over here to the window—see the ocean out there? Underneath that water they got some of the richest oil and gas deposits in the world: billions of barrels of it.” Tumbo smiled. “Tens of billions, in fact.”

“So, what, you dragged me halfway across the world because you want me to invest in some kind of oil project?” Bendick sneered. “Screw you, I got a million others I could choose from.”

Tumbo moved closer to Bendick, looming over him. “You want to mouth off, trying to impress me with what a big swinging dick you got, or you want to make some serious coin? I don’t want you to invest in an oil project, I want you to invest against it. I mean, you know how to make money on a stock that’s going down, right?”

Now Bendick was a little more interested. “Yeah, and I got a fifty-thousand-square-foot mansion in East Hampton, a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot yacht, a gazillion acres in Montana and a three-floor, sixteen-room apartment on Fifth Avenue to prove it. What’s the play?”

“The play is, I got a bone to pick with a dude name of Hector Cross. This motherfucker killed the one person in the world I ever truly cared for, fed him to the crocodiles. Fed him alive.”

“You’re shitting me,” said Bendick, at the same time thinking, Is this brick shithouse telling me he’s a goddamn fairy?

“No, that’s the literal truth,” said Tumbo. His voice had lost its calm, well-spoken tone and taken on a harsher, cruder note. “Cross turned my man into breakfast for a pair of frickin’ purses with teeth. Now, I’m not happy ’bout that. Fact I want to kill the son of a bitch. But, see, the more I think about it, the more I ask myself whether killing him is enough. The answer I get is no. I wanna see him suffer. I want him brought down low. I want him to know what it’s like to be poor, feel humiliation, be afraid for hisself and his family, feel it deep in his bones. That’s where you come in, ’cause the more Cross loses, the more you and me win.”

“How are you planning on doing that, exactly?”

“By poisoning the well that provides Cross and his kid with all their money: Bannock Oil. See, I got a lot of information about that particular corporation: inside information, shit that don’ get made public. I know exactly how to hurt Bannock and Cross as well, hurt ’em in a way that’ll take eighty, ninety percent off the share price and make Cross about as popular as a leper with a bomb. Way I figure it, you can bet against Bannock on the way down, then use the money you make to buy the whole damn business at ten cents on the dollar, five if you’re lucky.”

“So why me? Why don’t you do the whole deal yourself?”

“Well, let’s just say I value my privacy. Plus, I checked you out. I saw how you operate, bad-mouthing corporations and executives, throwing any crazy shit you can find at them, all over the internet, the media, dragging chief executives through the mud. I like your style, man.”

“OK, but what do you want from the deal, aside from screwing Cross over?”

“Half the money, that’s what.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then your wife’s a widow. So, you in?”

“You making me an offer I can’t refuse?”

“No, I’m making you an offer you’d have to have garbage for brains to refuse.”

Bendick shrugged. “Is that what you think? You haven’t told me what the deal is. All you said is you want to hurt Hector Cross, like I could give a shit about that, and you’re gonna bring down Bannock. But you haven’t said how you’re going to do that, and I can tell, just by listening to you, that you don’t have the first frickin’ clue about the best way to profit from a corporate meltdown. So go ahead, big boy, tell me what you really got to offer me.”

Tumbo didn’t say anything. He just looked down at Bendick and for a moment the financier was truly afraid that he’d gone too far. The way Tumbo was gritting his teeth, like he was really struggling against a powerful inner impulse, it was possible he might just forget about all the money he had riding on Bendick’s safe return.

Finally, Tumbo spoke. “Don’t you ever, ever disrespect me like that again, ’cause if you do, I’m going to rip your ugly kike head right off of your scrawny white neck . . .” He raised his hands, the fingers spread, and then he bunched his fists, just inches from Bendick’s suddenly sweating face. “You don’ know how lucky you are, boy. I’ve killed men for way less’n you just said. But I’m working on my anger management, trying to turn over a new leaf, so I’m gonna take a deep breath, count to ten and then I’ll tell you as much as you need, or wanna know.”

Bendick didn’t say anything. For once in his life, there was nothing he could say to help him get what he wanted. He just had to zip it and let this very large, very angry man take his time, let him count to a hundred if it made him feel better.

Luckily, ten seemed to do the trick. Tumbo exhaled slowly, breathed in again and then said, “Bannock Oil lost a rig up in the Arctic, right?”

“Right,” said Bendick, only too happy to be in agreement for once.

“So that means they lost money twice over, once from the cost of the rig and a second time from all the oil they can’t be drilling no more. Right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now, what if the same thing happened right here, in Angolan waters? What if they lose another rig, and they lose the chance to make money from getting to all that sweet African crude? I mean, once is bad enough, but twice? C’mon! They gonna be screwed.”

“In theory, yeah, but the Bannock board already know the risk they’re facing and they’ve taken steps to protect themselves. Bigelow’s been on TV, spoken to the Wall Street Journal, given briefings to all the top financial bloggers just letting everyone know there’s never been an offshore field in history had the kind of defensive systems they’re putting in place here. Listen, you’re not the only one around here knows about Bannock Oil. You think when I go after a corporation I don’t get dossiers on all its top people? Hector Cross is in command of the whole operation, and he knows what he’s doing. He’s kept the oil flowing out of Abu Zara for years and if any wise guys ever try to disrupt production there, Cross and his men just whack ’em. What makes you think he’s gonna mess it up, just because he’s killing Africans instead of Arabs?”

“Let’s say I got my reasons,” Tumbo replied. “I’d like to tell you what they are, but you don’t want me to do that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s for your own protection. If’n you don’t know what’s going to happen, you can’t be responsible or accountable when it does. You can say, ‘Hey, I didn’t know they was gonna do that. I just figured, Africa’s a dangerous place, something might go wrong and I’m going to be ready when it does.’ And no one can do anything, ’cause you’ll be telling the truth. But if certain, ah, unfortunate events take place, and you knew about them all along, then that might make you an accomplice, or a conspirator, and you don’t need that, my friend, ’cause believe me, you’d be easy meat the moment you stepped inside a jail.”

“This is you giving me deniability, huh?”

“Exactly. Now, one more thing: you suggested I was manifesting ignorance about the ways and means of making money from a corporate meltdown. Go ahead, then, enlighten me.”

“OK,” said Bendick, relieved to be back on his own territory. He gave Tumbo a brief lecture in the basics of leveraged trading. First he talked about stock options: how it was possible to pay for the right to buy stock at a set price, at a set future date, if you thought the stock was going to rise above that price; or pay for the right to sell at a set price, at a set future date, if you thought it was going to fall below that price. But Tumbo was not impressed.

“I know that long and short shit, man. ‘Put options’ and ‘call options’ ain’t no more than a fancy way of calling up a bookie and placing a bet. What else you got?”

“Well, do the initials CDS mean anything to you?”

“I know they are one letter away from a TV network, that’s for sure.”

Bendick laughed politely, not wanting to offend. “Yeah, CBS, that’s a good one . . . but it’s not what I had in mind. A CDS, or credit default swap, is basically a form of insurance. Say you loan someone a million bucks and you think to yourself: Man, what if that sonofabitch goes bust and can’t pay his debt? . . .”

“Then I go around there and whup on him till he pays me, or dies, I ain’t bothered which,” Tumbo said casually.

“Or . . . or you could buy a credit default swap,” Bendick suggested. “Basically, it was invented as a way of insuring a debt. So you loan the million bucks, then you go to someone else, who sells you a million-dollar CDS, in return for an annual premium, just like a regular insurance policy. You pay them a set amount every year for the full term of the agreement. If the money you loaned is paid back, then you’ve spent the premium money, but you don’t care because you were probably getting more in interest from the guy who took your money.”

“Damn straight I am.”

“But if the guy who took your money defaults, then the one who sold you the CDS has to pay you the million you just lost. It’s exactly like an insurance company paying you if your car is written off or your house burned down, except for one big difference. In regular insurance, you can’t insure something you don’t own. I mean, say you live next to a guy and you know he’s a smoker, plus he gets wasted every night. You figure, sooner or later he’s gonna burn his damn house down. So you know something the insurance company doesn’t know and if you could buy insurance on this neighbor’s house, then you’d collect a ton of cash when the house burned down. You with me?”

“All the way.”

“OK, so, back to that burning house . . . the problem here is, you can’t buy that insurance, not if you don’t own the house. But, and here’s the thing, you don’t have to own shit to buy a CDS. If you think a business is going to fail, you can buy a CDS secured on that business—strictly speaking, on its corporate bonds—and when it goes under, you collect on the full value of the CDS. Now, if you’re looking at a triple-A-rated corporate bond, then the premium rate is real low, not much more than ten basis points—that’s one tenth of one percent. So you can buy a billion dollars” worth of coverage for a million bucks a year. That means you stake a million to win a billion.”

“Oh, I like those odds.”

“Yeah, well, they won’t be so good for Bannock. The whole world knows it’s had a rough ride lately, so the premium will be higher, maybe even as much as one hundred bps, which is one percent, so now you’re staking ten mill to make that billion. But that’s still terrific odds, am I right?”

“Damn straight.”

“And here’s the real beauty of it: Bannock doesn’t have to go bust. Suppose it gets hit real bad, so it’s not flat out on the canvas, but it’s definitely taking a standing count. Well, then the premium price of a CDS goes up and up, in line with the risk. I mean when it looked like Greece was gonna default on its loans, the price of a CDS on Greek government bonds went up to ten thousand bps. That was one hundred percent, the full value of the loan, payable every year. So if you’re holding a billion-dollar Bannock CDS with a really low premium, someone who’s got Bannock bonds and is in danger of losing every cent of them is gonna pay you a whole lot of money to take that CDS off your hands, just so they’re covered if Bannock goes under. Still with me?”

“Oh yeah, I sure am,” Tumbo purred. “And I’m thinking to myself, maybe you should take that hundred mill I put into your fund and into that escrow account and go buy every cent you can of credit default swaps on Bannock Oil for me, and as many as you want for yourself with your own money, too.”

“No, that’s not how it’s going to work,” Bendick said. “What’s going to happen is I’m going to put your money into those CDSs and we’re gonna split the proceeds fifty-fifty.”

Tumbo looked at him, frowning, then burst into laughter. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re just busting my balls, ’cause you can’t possibly be serious ’bout taking half my money offa me, just to be my damn broker.”

“Absolutely I am. My guess is, you would have a hard time as an individual finding anyone willing to take your business. They might want to know your real name for a start. So I’m taking a risk, right from the off, and I need to be compensated. In addition to that, I operate very publicly and if people see me, the famous Aram Bendick, taking a massive short position against Bannock Oil, they’re gonna think they should be in on the action, too. So the price of Bannock CDSs will rise and the price of Bannock stock will fall and I’ll have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I figure that’s worth half your money. Plus whatever I put in for myself, as well.”

“You’re forgettin’ two things,” Tumbo said. “In the first place, none of this happens unless something goes wrong for Bannock out at sea on that rig, and you ain’t having nothin’ to do with that. And second, you really don’t want to mess with me. I mean, I thought we established that already. But still, I’m gonna be generous. You can have ten percent of my action, plus whatever you add for yourself. I’m in for two hundred mill. That’s pretty much all my spare capital, but I have faith in this proposition and I know you won’t let me down, now, will you?”

Bendick gulped. “No, I won’t, but I must have twenty-five percent of the upside. Hell, that’s pretty much standard hedge-fund rates.”

“Fifteen, and I ain’t going any higher.”

Bendick thought about it. He was getting $30 million worth of CDS action for nothing more than being himself—maybe $3 billion in potential profit on a single deal. What kind of fool said no to that? “I’m in,” he said.

“Then we got a deal. Now I’ll get you back on that plane. The sooner you land in New York, the sooner you can start buying that CBS, CDS, whatever-you-call-it shit, and the sooner you’n’me start making money.”

Five minutes later, Bendick was back in the Range Rover, heading for the airport, wondering what the hell he’d got himself into, and how the hell he was going to get out the other side.

The Cross Bow operation at Magna Grande would require two complete teams of boat crews and armed security personnel, so that they could operate a three-weeks-on/three-weeks-off rotation between the offshore field and dry land. There wasn’t enough room at sea to train both groups simultaneously, so Cross and his core staff would have to spend six weeks on the water, so that they could make sure everyone was up to standard. Meanwhile, they were working sixteen-hour days, selecting enough top-class personnel from existing Cross Bow staff and contract operatives to man this operation without stripping their operations on Abu Zara bare. They also had to find and recruit men with the specialist skills required for maritime work, which was another way of saying ex-SBS, Navy SEALs and Marines, as well as sorting out the complex logistics required to provide all the supplies needed by a large number of people on a long-term mission at sea.

At the same time, studying detailed schematics of the Bannock A and the oil platform, they had to work out strategies for dealing with all the various crises that could possibly occur aboard two of the world’s biggest floating petrol-bombs. Every conceivable contingency from a long-range missile strike to a single man with a bomb was considered and appropriate responses prepared. New equipment was required, including drysuits that could be worn in the water and on the installations, and the special carbon-fiber helmets whose streamlined shape and ridged surface made them resemble giant shells that are used by waterborne Special Forces.

All Cross Bow’s standard weaponry had to be reviewed in the light of the particular problems caused by operating in an environment where a singe stray around could spark a fatal conflagration. Under those circumstances the use of firearms had to be a last resort and even then they would have to use ammunition with less penetration, and thus less stopping power than Hector would normally consider acceptable. Furthermore, if the rig or the FPSO ever fell into the hands of terrorists any operation to recover them could well involve a swim, which severely limited the weight of gear that anyone could carry.

By far the best option in these circumstances was the Ruger Mk II semi-automatic pistol. Though its moral standing had been somewhat diminished by its popularity among hitmen, who loved it for its reliability and the lack of mess caused by the lightweight .22 rounds it fired, the good guys liked the Mk II as well. The U.S. Navy SEALs used its long-barreled AWC TM-Amphibian “S” format, which came with a built-in suppressor and a love for water so great that the makers even suggested pouring a tablespoon or two into the suppressor to make it super silent. In this Special Forces format the Mk II was accurate to seventy meters, an excellent distance for a pistol and far more than was ever likely to be needed in the confines of an oil platform or ship. It weighed just 1.2 kilos, which was much lighter than any rifle, and was still small enough to be holstered against the body or leg without impeding the ability to swim. Cross put in his order without delay, sourced ammunition and holsters and then left the world of gun-dealers for one final, essential requirement: a large box of condoms.

As he told Agatha, who was far too unflappable to be shocked by the arrival of a gross of contraceptives, “I don’t care how amphibious this gun is supposed to be, a man should always keep both his weapons dry.”

Just in case conventional methods were not enough, Cross did have one last trick up his sleeve, and to discover how to play it he needed another long session in Harley Street with the ever-reliable Rob Noble. From there he returned to the office for yet more hours of planning. Well after midnight, Hector and Nastiya were scraping the last bits of food from the cartons of Chinese takeaways scattered between them on the conference table when she said, “You need a break, just a little time away from all this.”

“No, I can’t,” Cross said automatically. “There’s too much to do.”

“But you can’t do it all yourself. Why don’t you come to lunch with me and Paddy on Saturday? You’ve never even been to our house, and we’ve had it ever since we got married.”

“If I take any time off this weekend, it’ll be with Catherine Cayla. Nanny Hepworth is bringing her across from Abu Zara.”

“Well, bring her too! We have some friends who have a little son. Maybe she can meet her first boyfriend.”

“Over my dead body!” said Cross with mock indignation, his mood lightening up a little.

“Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of women to act as chaperones. Come on, it’ll do you good. And there’s someone I want you to meet—someone who’s done you a big favor.”

Despite himself, Cross was intrigued. “Really, who’s that?”

“My sister Yevgenia. She was Maria Denisova’s personal assistant on that da Cunha business, and if it wasn’t for her, I’d never have thought of persuading my father to get some of his associates to be my imaginary business clients.”

“You know, I’d been wondering how you did that.”

“Aha! Well, you can ask Yevgenia all about it, and if you ask her very nicely and are very charming, she may let you call her Zhenia and then you’ll know that you are her friend.”

“Is she as dangerous as you?”

Nastiya laughed. “With a gun or her fists, no. In other ways . . . possibly. Come on, Mr. Spoilsport! We’re only in Barnes, so you won’t have to come far.”

“Barnes!” Cross exclaimed, as if the charming south-west London suburb were some barely civilized, distant corner of the globe. “But that’s miles away.”

Nastiya laughed. “It’s five miles, Hector, that’s all! Catch a train at Waterloo. You’ll be here in no time.”

“If I do come, I’ll drive.”

“If you drive you can’t drink, and then it’s not so much fun for you. Take a taxi.”

“I’ll think about it,” Cross prevaricated. But Nastiya was a hard woman to refuse. So at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon he paid off a cabbie and walked up the path to the front door of the O’Quinns’ terraced house in Barnes.

He had Catherine, still strapped into her portable baby seat, in one hand and a bag of essential nappies, toys, and spare clothes, specially packed by Bonnie Hepworth, in the other. Nastiya bade him a cursory hello and then swooped on the little girl, whom she had adored almost from the day she was born, billing, cooing and then unstrapping her from the seat and carrying her off into the living room to be admired by the other female lunch guests.

“Now you’ve dropped me right in it,” said Paddy O’Quinn, who’d appeared at Cross’s side, wearing a chef’s apron and carrying a very welcome Bloody Mary, made hot and spicy, exactly as Cross liked it. “I’ll be getting earache all night about why don’t we have a baby? Believe me, boss, it isn’t for the want of trying.”

“Thanks, Paddy, but I don’t need to hear the sordid details of your sex life,” Cross said as he took a sip of the Bloody Mary and cast his eyes around the room. The O’Quinns had invited some near-neighbors called the Parkers over to join the lunch party, along with their two-year-old son Charlie, who was currently toddling across the room, sporting a spectacularly runny nose, toward the corner where Miss Catherine Cayla Cross was holding court.

“So, I understand that there are two women present that I don’t know and one of them is your sister-in-law,” Cross said to O’Quinn. “I’m guessing it’s not the one currently wiping her little nipper’s snotty nose, which leaves the one in the skintight jeans . . . Just as a general observation, they really know how to turn out beautiful women in the Voronov family, don’t they?”

“Oh, you’ve noticed, have you?” Paddy smiled. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a joint of beef to check.”

As Daddy Parker joined the clean-up operation on Junior, Hector took a proper look at Yevgenia Voronova. She very clearly came from the same stock as Nastiya. Cross could see it in the cool, blue eyes set beneath quite straight eyebrows that suggested strength of purpose and character. And yet Yevgenia was quite different, too. Her body, though beautifully proportioned, was a fraction fuller and softer, more curvaceous than Nastiya’s lean, athletic figure, but this did not strike Cross as any kind of disadvantage. Yevgenia’s rich chestnut hair was parted to one side of her face and fell across her forehead and down in glorious waves that broke over her shoulders before tumbling down her back. Her nose was fine and straight, tilted upward from her mouth. And oh, Cross mused, what a mouth that was.

Nastiya O’Quinn had walked over to Cross while he was carrying out his inspection. He kissed her casually hello and then nodded in her sister’s direction and said, “She’s almost as good-looking as you are.”

Nastiya smiled. “You’re a very flattering English gentleman, but Yevgenia is ten years younger than me and, as the French say, ‘ravissante.’”

“We say ‘ravishing,’ same thing. And yes, she is. So, you’re a woman, you tell me . . . are they real?”

“What, Zhenia’s breasts?” Nastiya looked outraged at the very suggestion. “One thing I can tell you about the women in my family, Hector: we don’t need any help in that department!”

“No, not them, her lips.”

Nastiya smiled. “Ah yes, they are magnificent: so full, so soft. I must confess I envy her a little for that mouth. The way she always has just a little pout, it’s as if she’s kissing the world.”

“I never knew you were so poetic, Nastiya.”

She gave a dismissive shrug and then went on, “So are they real? Well, I can tell you that her mother has exactly the same lips, so either they both went to the same surgeon or they were both blessed by the same genes. Why don’t you go and ask her?”

“I couldn’t do that!” Cross protested.

“Why not?”

“It’s rude, that’s why.”

Nastiya looked at him skeptically. “Oh, and it’s not rude to talk about my sister behind her back? Ha! You go and ask her, like a man, or I will tell her that you asked me.”

“Very well, you give me no choice,” said Cross. “I have no option but to go and talk to your stunning sister. It’s a tough job, but . . .”

“Enough.” Nastiya laughed. “Go!”

Yevgenia was on her haunches, playing a little game with Catherine, holding a toy monkey in front of her, and moving it every time she tried to grab it, producing shrieks of childish laughter. Cross stopped a couple of feet away, just to watch, and then Yevgenia registered his presence, got to her feet and introduced herself, adding, “But since you are Nastiya’s boss, and also one of her closest, most trusted friends, then you are my friend too, and you can call me Zhenia.”

The way she said her name made it seem as soft and sensual as a woman’s hand running across mink.

“Then you’d better call me Heck,” he replied. “You’ve already met my daughter Catherine.”

Zhenia’s face lit up. “Oh, she’s so adorable! Nastiya told me all about her, and she’s even sweeter than I dreamed she would be.”

“Thank you.” Cross smiled at the child and said, “I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone else in the world . . . apart from her mother, of course.”

Zhenia’s brow crumpled into a sympathetic frown. “Yes, Nastiya told me about Hazel, too. I’m so sorry . . .” A brief silence fell and then she brightened up. “So! You were talking to Nastiya and both of you were looking at me . . .”

“Was it that obvious?” Cross asked.

“A woman always knows when she is being studied.”

“Which must be most of the time, in your case.”

“All the time,” she sighed. “Anyway, I could see Nastiya giving you orders—she loves giving orders, that one!”

Cross laughed. “Yes, but sometimes she forgets who’s really in charge.”

“And that’s you?”

“Yes,” he said with calm, unforced authority.

“Even so, Nastiya gave you an order . . .”

Cross nodded ruefully. “That’s true. I asked her a question about you, and she told me I should just come over here and ask it to you, instead.”

“And . . . ?”

“My exact words were: Are they real?”

Zhenia looked down at her cleavage. “What, these?”

“That was pretty much her reply, too, but I was talking about your lips. They’re extraordinary.”

“I know,” she said and pursed them together in a silly duck face that made them both laugh. “So, you think maybe I had fillers or implants? Hmm . . .” She pursed her lips thoughtfully again, making her natural pout just a little bit more apparent. “You know, there’s only one way to find out for sure . . .”

Cross looked at her coolly, letting her wonder whether he’d call her bluff and kiss her, enjoying the unmistakable charge of flirtation in the air.

Then the mood was broken by a cheerful cry of “This way, everybody!” as Paddy summoned them to join him in the kitchen-diner, built in a conservatory that looked out on a small but well laid-out garden. As Nastiya directed each of her four guests to one of the chairs arranged around a rustic kitchen table, Paddy proudly declaimed the menu: “Today we have a fine joint of prime English beef, cooked medium rare, nice and pink in the middle and maybe just a drop of blood for you, boss. With that there are roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, and a fine selection of vegetables, straight from the freezer, courtesy of Mr. Birdseye, because I love you all dearly, but I’m not after scraping carrots and podding peas all morning. If you drink enough of that Chilean red that’s waiting for you on the table, you’ll never know the difference anyway. Meanwhile, baking away in the oven there’s a splendid apple pie and the custard will be made fresh and not from a packet, that I promise. Ladies and gentlemen, luncheon is served!”

The Bell 407 helicopter was 300 miles northwest of Cabinda City, close to the maximum extent of its range, when the pilot called out to his single passenger, “There she is, right up ahead of us, just where she should be. Man, that’s one strange-looking boat!”

Johnny Congo looked out across the calm Atlantic waters until he saw what the pilot was pointing at: a ship shaped like a paper dart, or an old Delta-wing bomber, with a sleek narrow prow that flared outwards toward a broad, squared-off stern. As they flew closer, Congo could see that it was a trimaran, with three hulls bound together by a single deck, like three piers beneath a bridge. Now he made out a tall, triangular A-frame structure that rose from the main deck, just forward of the stern. A bright yellow craft of some kind was suspended from the A-frame and men, still ant-size at this distance, were clustered around the frame as it tilted backward, carrying the craft over the stern and then lowering it into the water.

By the time the process was completed, the helicopter was preparing its final approach to the vessel, heading straight toward the superstructure that rose in three decks, each smaller than the last, like a gleaming white ziggurat. A crewman wearing white shorts and a navy blue sleeveless shirt was standing on the bow deck, guiding the helicopter in to land, and now Congo could see the “H” painted on the bow deck that marked the landing pad. The pilot brought the Bell into a perfect, smooth touchdown and cut the Allison turboshaft powerplant as the crewman ran in under the rotors and secured the skids to the deck and then remained by the helicopter as the entire pad started to sink into the ship’s black hull. It settled with a barely perceptible or audible bump on the floor of a large hangar and it was only then that the pilot undid his seatbelt and invited Congo to do the same.

As he climbed down on to the hangar floor, Congo saw a short, muscular figure in combat fatigues and a khaki T-shirt striding toward him. “Chico! My man!” he said, holding his hand out straight so that Chico Torres could reach up and high-five it. “This is some boat you got me, bro.”

Torres laughed, his teeth gleaming behind his close-cropped goatee beard. His head was shaved and tanned a deep nut-brown and his whole body exuded a tough, compact muscularity. “Welcome to the Mother Goose, baby,” he laughed. “She’s one of a kind, and this is her maiden voyage. Quite a way to start, huh? C’mon, I’ll give you the guided tour . . .”

Congo followed Torres out of the hanger, down a passageway and then up a flight of stairs that led to a hall, which opened on to a series of lavishly decorated living and dining rooms, culminating in an outdoor space where anyone sitting at the bar only had to swivel their stool to look past the sunloungers and the plunge pool all the way across an aft deck big enough to fit a tennis court to the A-frame that was lifting the odd little yellow craft back out of the water.

“So, Mother Goose is the Triton 196, so-called because it’s one hundred and ninety-six feet, or sixty meters in length,” Torres said. “For the first hundred and twenty feet she’s your basic superyacht, designed to appeal to your basic, bored billionaire, plus his buddies and babes. These people, they’ve seen everything, done everything, what else is left? Answer: what happens in the last seventy-six feet. Check it out.”

Torres opened a hatch that led on to a steel ladder, going down. They descended back into the hull, through another hatch and into a hanger that looked like an even bigger version of the one that the Bell was sitting in. In any normal superyacht, this would be where the “toys,” as owners like to call them, were kept: launches, jetskis, sailing boats, windsurfers and the like. But the Mother Goose’s toys were a little different.

“Here’s the main attraction,” said Torres, “one of two Triton 3300/3 mini-submersibles—guess you saw the other one hanging from the A-Frame as you came in. We’re practising getting ’em in and out of the water, as fast and as smoothly as we can. Funky-looking, ain’t it?”

“No kidding,” said Congo, walking around the sub.

The gleaming yellow hull was U-shaped like one of the inflatable neck-rests people buy when they’re flying long haul, economy, and are desperate for anything to get the muscle spasm out of their necks. In the middle of the U, a spherical cabin, made entirely from transparent acrylic thermoplastic, nestled like the passenger’s head in his neck-rest. The sub was so tiny—just thirteen feet long and nine wide—it looked as though Congo could just pick it up and throw it across the hangar. He was looking at it now with doubt and disappointment etched into his features. “This is it?” he asked. “A frickin’ Yellow Submarine? That’s our secret weapon?”

Torres laughed. “Better believe it. This baby can go down to a depth of one thousand meters—that’s three thousand three hundred feet. She can operate underwater for twelve hours, non-stop. By the time we’ve finished working on her, she’ll be more than capable of doing exactly what you asked me to do. So say hello to your little friend, Johnny C. And don’t worry, she’s gonna pack a real big punch.”

Cross sat down and cheerfully helped himself to a classic English lunch, washed down with a very drinkable Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. The Parkers turned out to be Mike, a witty, self-deprecating but obviously brilliant lawyer, and Caro, his art-curator wife. They were planning a safari holiday in Africa to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary and were delighted to discover that Hector was not only a fount of information on the subject, but a fully fledged Maasai warrior. Then Zhenia fielded endless questions about life in Russia and its strange and often frightening foreign policy with charm and intelligence.

The gathering was alive with warmth, laughter and a sense of relaxed, everyday family life, as one parent or another—Hector included—had to get down on their knees to deal with their child, or sit at the table with an infant on their lap, keeping pudgy little hands away from the stems of wine-glasses. It struck Cross that he had never really known this kind of normality. For most of his adult life he had either been a soldier or the boss of a security firm. His working life had been spent in barracks and messes, with little attention, if any, paid to home comforts. Then he’d met Hazel Bannock, been plucked from his Spartan existence and plunged into the life of the super-rich, with all the private jets, personal servants and sprawling homes that entailed. But the fact was, Paddy’s roast beef, which came straight from the local supermarket, tasted just as good as any he’d been served at a duke’s stately home, and the wine—which cost thirty-five quid for half a case from a cut-price booze merchants—went down just as readily as Château Lafite did at a hundred times the price.

Cross could tell that Zhenia was loving it also. All the money in the world hadn’t compensated her for having an abusive father, but here, in this normal, everyday world, she seemed completely relaxed, bubbling over with fun and laughter. The relationship between her and Nastiya was deepening before his eyes: two sisters who’d lost one another for so many years weaving a connection that had made both of them happier. Now Caro Parker was chatting about the ice rink that was erected every winter in the courtyard of Somerset House, on the banks of the River Thames, just a stone’s throw from the Savoy, saying how much she wanted to go, but was Charlie still too young for it, when he wasn’t even three yet?

“Too young?” Nastiya protested in horror. “In Russia children skate before they can walk. If a mother waited until her son was three before putting him on the ice, all the other mothers, they would say, ‘Why have you been so cruel to your little one?’”

“Let’s go skating right now!” Zhenia exclaimed. “Come on, Nastiya, let’s show these British how a Russian can skate!”

“I’ll have you know I’m not British, I’m Irish,” said Paddy with mock dignity.

“And I’m not British, I’m Kenyan.” Cross struck a Napoleonic attitude of defiance. Then it occured to him for the first time ever that while he was a splendid shot, a strong runner and swimmer, a master of several martial arts, who could freefall parachute, ski, climb mountains and survive in almost any environment on earth, he had never in all his life gone ice-skating. It wasn’t something that Kenyan-born children tended do, growing up on the African savannah. A second later he realized something else: he did not want to make a fool of himself in front of Yevgenia Voronova.

Damn it, man, don’t be ridiculous, Hector told himself. The girl’s not yet twenty-five; you’re practically old enough to be her father. In her eyes you’re an old man.

He thought of Bobbi Franklin. She was gorgeous, she was smart and she was completely age-appropriate. But she wasn’t here, and Zhenia was, and suddenly Paddy was on the phone ordering cabs and Cross was gathering up all the huge number of items Nanny Hepworth deemed essential before she’d allow Catherine out of the house.

“I’ve yomped across the Brecon Beacons with packs lighter than this,” Cross muttered to himself as he shoved yet another stuffed toy into the bulging baby-bag, and Zhenia was pleading with him to sit next to her in the cab, “So that I can spend more time with baby Yekaterina—my Tsarina Catherine the Great!” And there they were, speeding through West London, the streets already dark, though it was only five in the afternoon, dropping the baby off at Cross Roads where Bonnie Hepworth was waiting to sweep her away for her bath, and then heading on to Somerset House, just the two of them.

Neither said much. Zhenia was too busy looking out at the glittering shop windows and Christmas decorations and Cross was perfectly content just to watch her. When they reached Somerset House, Mike Parker was waiting, clutching a fistful of tickets and saying, “We’re in luck! Normally you have to book weeks in advance, but they had some spare places for the next session. The others are all putting on their skates, even Charlie!” he added, leading them to the cabin where the skates were issued. Zhenia grabbed hers and went off to find Nastiya, with whom she was soon deep in conversation, chattering in Russian at a million miles an hour and giggling conspiratorially at regular intervals.

“Are you any good at this, boss?” O’Quinn asked, nervously, as the two of them laced themselves into their boots.

“I don’t know, old sport,” said Cross breezily. “Never done it before in my life.”

“I don’t know about you, but I think I’m about to make a complete tit of meself.”

“Nonsense! We’re men. We’re proud veterans of the SAS. There’s nothing we can’t do!”

“Speak for yourself . . .”

Cross tried to approach the situation logically. He’d done a fair bit of Arctic warfare training, which involved endless miles of cross-country skiing, which involved travelling across flat snow, instead of ice. And now he came to think about it, he’d been given a pair of roller skates when he was a boy. If you put those two skills together, you practically had ice-skating.

“Absolutely,” Mike Parker agreed, when Cross put this theory to him. “The key thing is not to lift the skates up and down. No plonking! Just ease your leading foot on to the ice, slide forward and outwards, then do exactly the same thing with the other foot. Nothing to it.”

Parker stepped out on to the ice and set off at a steady, unspectacular, but relaxed pace. Well, that looked easy enough, Cross thought.

Then Paddy O’Quinn tiptoed nervously out, took a couple of terrified steps, desperately waving his arms for balance, and fell flat on his backside, cursing furiously all the way.

Finally it was Cross’s turn. Don’t plonk. Slide forward and out. Now the next foot. Suddenly he was moving. It was hardly a Winter Olympic medal-winning performance. But he was upright and he was moving and—bloody hell!—he was coming to the end of the rink and now he had to turn left, to follow the anti-clockwise direction in which everyone was circulating. He took a moment to take in his surroundings, for the rink was surrounded on all sides by the splendid neo-classical façades of one of London’s most magnificent old buildings. But then an unexpected crisis suddenly reared its ugly head: How did you turn? Answer: Cross didn’t. He just slid into the barrier at the end of the rink, held on for dear life, turned around to face the rink and then leaned up against the barrier, casually surveying the scene and doing his best to look as though this was all entirely intentional.

But where was Zhenia? On their way out of the house she’d grabbed a bright red fleece beanie and a short, black Puffa gilet, cinched in at the waist to ensure that no one could fail to notice her figure, even when covered in quilting. The hat, at least, should be easy to spot under the dazzling floodlights. Cross scanned the crowd, one stranger’s face after another, until he suddenly spotted her, darting across the ice, weaving in and out of slower skaters, hotly pursued by Nastiya. The two of them looked exultant, laughing at the sheer joy of doing something that was clearly as natural to them as breathing. Then Zhenia saw him. Cross waved and she waved back, changing course to skate straight at him, flat out, her eyes never leaving Cross’s until she came sliding to a stop in a shower of ice, so close to him they were almost touching.

Zhenia spun to her left, facing in the same direction as the circulating skaters, held out her right hand and said, “Come on. I’ll help you.”

Cross was not used to seeking assistance from young girls, but he swallowed his pride and said, “Thanks. I may need it.”

He took hold of her hand and then gasped as he was suddenly hit by a physical shock, a power surge he felt right to the depths of his being. He looked back at her and she smiled as if to say, “Yes, I felt it, too,” but then her expression changed and she called out, “Come on! Follow me!”

He let her pull him out into the crowd and responded as she guided him with her hand, towing him around the corners and showing him how to get into a nice, even rhythm on the straights. They completed a lap, and then another. Cross didn’t tell her that he’d been doing fine on his skates for a while now, gaining confidence every time he negotiated a turn or managed to slow down of his own accord, but the feel of her hand in his was so magical he just didn’t want to let go. Then, on the third lap she pulled away a little, only keeping her fingertips very lightly touching his. The occasional brushing of her skin against his was even more thrilling and when she took her hand away at the end of the circuit and said, “You’re on your own now! Follow me!” he felt like an addict whose drug had been taken away. But then he discovered that there was something new to excite him: the sight of her perfect bottom, caressed by skintight denim, swishing to and fro in front of him.

Cross set off after it like a donkey after a dangling carrot, seriously aroused now, wishing he could grab that fabulous body, press his mouth against her perfect lips and breathe in the scent of that tumbling chestnut hair. But how could he make a pass at Zhenia with Nastiya and O’Quinn, both of them his employees, watching him? Nastiya would kill him . . . or would she? She’d invited him to lunch, after all, telling him that he should meet Zhenia. She’d even told him to go and ask the girl an obviously leading question. Was Nastiya setting the two of them up? Or was it that she simply couldn’t imagine he would ever actually stoop to seducing her baby sister?

In the end, when the session had ended and they’d all taken off their skates, it was Zhenia who spoke out. “Take me for a walk, Hector. Show London to me.”

“Isn’t Nastiya expecting you to come home with her?”

“Nastiya is not my mother. And anyway”—she flashed a wicked little smile—“she won’t mind. She says you are too sad and too alone. You need some happiness in your life. We are Russians, you see. We have a more joyous view of life.”

“I’m not actually dying of sorrow,” he protested.

“No,” she said. “Not now, you aren’t.”

They walked down the Strand and into Trafalgar Square. A choir was standing beneath the Christmas tree given to London annually by the people of Norway, and singing carols.

“This is so beautiful,” she said, looking around at Nelson’s column, the National Gallery and the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

“So are you,” Cross said, and she turned her head to regard him quizzically, placing it in exactly the right attitude for kissing. Hector hesitated for the smallest part of a second and then took advantage of it.

“You two should get a room somewhere!” a stranger called out to them good-humoredly, prompting laughter from a few other passers-by. It was hardly the most poetic of compliments, but it made Zhenia giggle and cling to him, which in turn boosted Cross’s good humor; both of them revelling in the joy of the magic moment when they realized that they wanted the same thing.

They strolled up to Piccadilly Circus holding hands, and suddenly she asked, “Do you live very far from here, Hector?”

“Only about fifteen minutes away,” he answered.

“Is your bed comfortable?”

“My bed is the most comfortable in the whole of England.”

“OK! Then I bet you that I can make it to your house before you.” She challenged him with eyes that shone.

“How much?” he demanded. “How much will you bet?”

“A million.”

“A million of what?”

“Whatever you want.”

“That will do for a start,” he agreed and they started to run.

Shelby Weiss was in his den, watching the University of Texas Longhorns take on the Oklahoma Sooners in front of 100,000 fans at the Memorial Stadium in Austin, cracking open his second can of Coors and generally feeling good about life. Then the phone beside him rang and suddenly his Saturday afternoon took a serious turn for the worse.

“Yo, Shelby, how you doing, man?”

The color drained from Weiss’s face. Only half-a-dozen words, spoken by a man who hadn’t even given his name, but they’d been enough to chill his blood as cold as his beer and scare him absolutely witless.

“What . . . what the hell . . .” he babbled, trying to collect his scrambled thoughts. “For Chrissakes, man, you can’t just call me up on my cellphone! What, you’ve never heard of the NSA? Those guys listen to everything—everything! And you’re a wanted felon. Oh yeah, you made the Feds’ Ten Most Wanted list. You’re a frickin’ rock star of crime. And you’re calling me?”

“Whoa, easy, tiger.” Weiss heard a deep, throaty chuckle that was as scary as a naked blade. “You musta got me confused with some other dude. See, my name is Juan Tumbo, says so right there on my passport. And I’m a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record, no reason for you not to take my call, ’specially when I happen to know you’re sitting on a coupla million bucks a buddy of mine advanced you, just in case he should need some legal representation.”

“Hey, Johnny . . .”

“Juan. The name is Juan Tumbo. I told you, I got nothing to do with no Johnny. Now, you listen to me, Mr. Weiss. I’ve been entering into certain business transactions with a guy in New York, Aram Bendick. He’s a big-time investor; you may have hear of him.”

“The name is familiar to me, yes,” Weiss agreed, wondering where the hell this was all heading.

“OK, so Mr. Bendick and myself have entered into a series of financial arrangements. Matter of fact, I’ve given the man a hundred million bucks.”

“Did I hear you right?” Weiss gasped. “One hundred million dollars?”

“Yeah, lotta coin, right? Now, I can imagine that some fools might think: This dumb nigger put a hundred mill in my pocket, I’m’a takin’ it all for myself. I don’t believe Bendick is that crazy. I think he knows that I might make my objections known, if you understand what I mean.”

“Yes, Jo— Mr. Tumbo, I believe I do.”

“But it doesn’t hurt to take precautions, am I right?”

“Totally.”

“So, that being the case, I’d like you to pay a visit to Mr. Bendick, talk to him about the situation and draw up contracts, specifying exactly what he’s going to do with my investment, and how he’s going to make sure that I get the best possible return. And I mean the best possible. Not an OK deal. Not a good deal. The best.”

“When I make a deal for my clients, it is always the best it can possibly be.”

“Good. So you fly up to the Apple tomorrow, go see Bendick bright and early Monday. He’ll lay out what it is we have in mind. My guess is, you’ll want a piece of the action. So if you want to buy in, be my guest.”

One thing Shelby Weiss prided himself on was that he could always smell money and now he was getting a real good sniff of it. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about I forgo my fee and just take a percentage of any profits?”

Silence fell. Five seconds went by . . . then. “Hello?” Weiss called. “Hello? Mr. Tumbo? You still there?”

Finally he received an answer. “Yeah, I’m here. I just been breathing deeply, counting to ten, trying to calm myself down. See, I thought I already mentioned the two million bucks you got in your account.”

“But they weren’t paid by you, were they, Mr. Tumbo?”

“Listen to me, Mr. Weiss. Listen carefully now, ’cause this is important. I’m gonna give you a chance now to save your own life. All you have to do is go to New York and cut a deal for me, the best deal you can possibly get, just like you said. You want to try to make your own deal with Aram Bendick, on the side, be my guest, it’ll make you rich. Now you do that, everyone’s happy. You don’t do that, well, cast your mind back to the events of, what was the date now? Yeah, November fifteenth. Think about the people that died that day. Consider, if you will, the power and planning and resources it took to carry out an operation like that. Now consider what would happen if that same power and planning and resources was all directed to the task of ripping your head off and stuffing it up your ass, and crucifying your wife, and sticking your children on skewers and—”

“Stop! For God’s sake, stop. I’ll do it. I’ll do anything you want. Just leave my family out of this.”

“No problem, Mr. Weiss. I was just pulling your leg anyway, exaggerating a little so’s you got my general point, you follow me?”

Weiss threw his empty can of Coors into the bin, jumped up from his desk and strode across the room to his private minibar. Screw beer, he needed something stronger. “Yes,” he said, unscrewing the cap on a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “I understand. I’ll go to New York. I’ll cut you the best frickin’ deal anyone ever got out of Aram Bendick.”

“Now, that’s the Shelby Weiss I’m used to hearing! You go to New York, take care of business, catch a show. Believe me, brother, you’ll be glad I called.”

Holding Zhenia’s naked body in his arms Hector smiled secretly as he realized that there was no greater proof of youth being wasted on the young than the insecurity that afflicted even this most gorgeous young woman when the critical hour struck, and he found that Zhenia’s psychological armor fell away along with her clothing and the fiesty, flirtatious Muscovite socialite became shy and even slightly awkward.

Hector had been very gentle with her. He had undressed her lovingly. He spent time kissing her and stroking her hair, whispering to her how beautiful she was and describing how wonderful it felt to run his hands over her lovely high breasts. Then he kissed her neck and sucked her erect blood-darkened nipples. Very gently he held each delicate bud between his teeth, feeling them swell and harden. Then he was caressing her belly with his lips. He cupped her tight around buttocks in his hands, drawing them toward him so that her thighs fell apart and the secret cleft between them opened shyly before him. Her inner lips were pink and glossy, pouting in shy invitation. When he ran the tip of his tongue deeply between them, she gasped with shock, then clasped her hands around the back of his head and drew him even closer to her.

“Yes!” she whispered. “Like that. Don’t stop. Please don’t ever stop!”

Later when he awoke the sun was shining through a gap in the curtains. Zhenia was sleeping in his arms, curled up with those firm around buttocks thrust hard into his belly, gripping both his arms firmly by the wrists and holding his hands in front of her to cup her breasts; her breathing was soft as the wind and the smell of her lubricious sex filled his head and heightened his senses.

He was suffused with a sense of warmth and contentment such as he had not known since the death of Hazel Bannock, his wife and the mother of Catherine Cayla. Then as he came fully awake his wellbeing was replaced by a sensation of guilt.

“Cradle-snatcher!” he accused himself silently. “She’s a baby.” Then he rallied against the accusation and came to his own defense. “An infant is one thing she’s not. She is a full-grown woman in her middle twenties: old enough to drive, vote, work, marry, fight wars and have children. When I was her age I had already commanded a platoon of men in combat, shot and stabbed enemies by the score, seen friends and comrades killed and maimed beside me. She’s old enough to make her own decisions and she was absolutely party to this one. The jury finds you not guilty.” He grinned with self-satisfaction. “And strongly suggests that you do it again just to make certain of your motives.”

He could not deny that basic, red-blooded lust for a delicious member of the opposite sex was one of his motives. But it wasn’t the only reason he revelled in her presence in his bed.

Zhenia was every bit as smart, funny, feisty and beautiful as her big sister. He was not in any doubt that both girls had inherited from their father the drive, hunger and unfettered ambition that had made him an oligarch. But he would never suggest that to either of them.

Of course, Zhenia wasn’t a trained fighter like Nastiya, but she had the spirit and the courage for it: Cross was utterly certain of that. And she made him feel young; rejuvenating him with her lust for life and her sense of fun. He would never have gone skating if she hadn’t suggested it, nor would he have been willing to make a fool of himself on the ice without her presence to spur him on. His relationships with both Hazel and Jo had been overshadowed by fear, violence and danger, right from the off, but today had just been fun, from his first sight of Zhenia at that little house in Barnes, to the ecstasy of their orgasmic lovemaking.

Suddenly Zhenia turned in his arms and stared at him, the pupils of her hazel eyes enormous with sleep. “Why so serious, Hector,” she mumbled. “What are you thinking about?”

“I was just thinking . . .” He broke off but continued to stare at her enigmatically. She came fully awake and raised herself on one elbow, her expression taunt with consternation.

“Tell me. Is something wrong?”

“I was just thinking that we must do that again immediately to make absolutely certain it was as good as I thought it was the first time.”

“Well, then tell me why are you wasting precious time?” she asked demurely.

These contracts . . .’ Shelby Weiss began, sitting in Aram Bendick’s Manhattan office and trying very hard to act a great deal calmer and more unflappable than he actually felt. “As far as I can see, they are all, ah, predicated on the collapse of Bannock Oil’s stock and even of the entire corporation.”

“That’s correct,” Aram Bendick agreed. “As I explained to Mr. Tumbo, the regular put-option trades will become profitable once the stock price drops below the level at which I bought, which it’s already on course to do, following my very public attacks on the Bannock board. And the credit default swaps will similarly increase in value as the market starts to see an increased risk of Bannock Oil not being able to pay its debts, so we can either sell them then, or wait to see if the company does, indeed, default. That’s when profit would be maximized, obviously. My advice to Mr. Tumbo would be to mix’n’match. Sell some on the way down, take enough profit to eliminate his downside, but then hold on for the really big bucks when and if Bannock Oil does collapse.”

“Excuse me for being confused, Mr. Bendick, but are you aware that Mr. Tumbo has a very large personal interest in Bannock Oil?” Weiss replied. “His financial security is tied up with Bannock’s.” Not to mention the fact that I just blew every dime my partners and I have got buying a law firm that barely exists without Bannock, he thought to himself. “Can you explain why he would consent to enter into financial agreements that are predicated on the failure of his greatest asset?”

“Because he’ll make far, far more out of Bannock Oil dead than he ever will when it’s alive.”

“That can’t be possible.”

“Sure it is. Back in the early Nineties, George Soros made a billion dollars on one trade, betting against the British pound. John Paulson called the property crash of 2007, bought credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities and made four billion when they all tanked. If Bannock Oil collapses, we’re gonna make so much money those guys’ll look like two-bit day traders.”

Weiss fought hard to keep his jaw from dropping open. “You mean, you’re in this for billions?”

“Many billions.”

“And what makes you think it’s going to pay off? I mean, I’m very aware that Bannock’s taken a helluva hit up in Alaska. But word on the street in Houston is they’re going to make up for it and more in Africa.”

“Let’s just say that Mr. Tumbo was very certain that there would be a precipitous fall in the value of Bannock stock. I got the feeling it was a personal crusade for him, that he was going to make it happen. Now, you’re the man’s attorney, you tell me: can Juan Tumbo make things happen?”

He bust out of the convoy taking him to the Death House: yeah, he can make things happen, Weiss thought. He said, “Sure, in my experience he’s a very resourceful individual.”

“Then Bannock Oil will collapse and Mr. Tumbo will become much, much richer than he already is.”

“Then I guess I don’t have any objection to approving the contracts on my client’s behalf.” Weiss was frantically running calculations through his mind: If I remortgage the house, and the condo at Vail, and I empty the kids’ college funds, maybe I could raise a mill . . . “In fact, this deal looks so sweet”—Weiss forced a sickly grin across his face—“well, I might just be tempted to get some of it myself.”

Bendick laughed. “Yeah, Tumbo told me you might say that. He also figured it would be a good way of making sure we were all on the same team, aligning our interests, so to speak. So, sure, if you want to join the party, I can make that happen. Just one condition, though: you keep this to yourself. No one, but no one outside the three of us gets to hear exactly what I have in mind. Understand?”

“Believe me, Aram—I hope you don’t mind me calling you that, now we’re in business together—this one’s strictly private.”

“Glad we got that clear,” said Bendick. “So, you want a Scotch to celebrate?”

He poured the drinks and handed one to Weiss. The mood was much more relaxed, both men feeling certain that they were on to a winner. “Just out of curiosity, what kind of name is Tumbo, anyway? Like Dumbo without the ‘D.’ I mean, come on . . .”

“Why don’t you ask him that question?” Weiss asked.

Bendick laughed. “Oh no! I’ve met the man. Whatever he wants to call himself, that’s just fine by me.”

Hector Cross spent three days and nights with Zhenia Voronova before he and his team left for Angola. As he kissed her goodbye at Farnborough Airport he was so physically exhausted that he knew he’d be asleep before the wheels of the Bannock Oil jet had left the ground. But at one and the same time he also felt refreshed, re-energized and filled with life in a way that he hadn’t since before Hazel died. Zhenia had worked some kind of magic on him: “Let me be your second spring,” she had said, and she had been just that, warming his soul, melting all the winter ice and reviving what had once seemed dead.

“Please come back to me,” she whispered as they parted.

“I will, I promise,” Cross replied, meaning it with all his heart.He bade farewell to Catherine Cayla, too. For safety’s sake, she was being taken back to Abu Zara. Cross told himself that she was still too young to understand what Christmas was, but still it hurt him to be apart from her then, of all times. Never again, he swore to himself. In future, I spend Christmas with my girl.

On land, Cross was as good a fighter and commander as there was to be found anywhere in the British Army. He’d been schooled at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst; been accepted by the SAS; fought in numerous conflicts (not all of them publicized) on Her Majesty’s behalf and then, having left the forces, done battle all over the world with men who had threatened his clients or his family. At sea, although he had some experience of taking on Somali pirates, he was not remotely as well qualified, and he knew it.

Cross therefore wanted the men who would be responsible for protecting Bannock Oil’s personnel and property at the Magna Grande field to receive the best possible training for the job, and he included himself in that number. That was why he had asked Paddy O’Quinn to track down some talent from the SBS, which was not only the first specialist waterborne Special Forces unit in the world, but also—in its own eyes, at least—by far the best.

So it was that an initial force of thirty men reported for training duty at the Cross Bow base on the one-time Arctic supply tug Glenallen. Alongside Cross were the two O’Quinns and Dave Imbiss. Half of the rest were the smartest, toughest, most reliable men on Cross Bow’s books. They were immediately distinguishable from the newcomers because, having long been used to having her among them, they weren’t trying to sneak long, lecherous looks at Nastiya. Those that were comprised ten crewmen, all veterans of the Special Boat Service, the SBS, led by a Glaswegian by the name of Donnie “Darko” McGrain.

Darko had been a Class 1 Warrant Officer, the Marines equivalent of an Army sergeant major. He was not physically imposing, being of average height with a scrawny physique apparently comprised entirely of bone, muscle and gristle. But he exuded an air of unrelenting energy, focus, determination and malice that was enough to reduce much bigger, stronger men to quivering wrecks. He made his presence felt from the moment he strode into the briefing room that had been constructed, along with basic sleeping, washing and off-duty quarters within the holds originally intended to carry spare parts, food and other supplies for the Arctic drilling barge Glenallen had been designed to support.

The men were sitting or sprawled in a variety of postures in the chairs set up opposite a low stage from which briefings and training lectures would be conducted. Most of them were bantering and joking with one another. Dave Imbiss and the O’Quinns were sitting at the front, deep in their own conversation. Then Cross walked in accompanied by Darko McGrain and suddenly every man, and the lone woman in the room, swung around, eyes front, back straight, waiting to hear what the boss had to say.

“Good morning gentlemen . . . and lady,” Cross began. “Four weeks from now all the preparations end and Magna Grande comes on stream. You can’t see them, but there are half a dozen oil wells within a few kilometers of here, all ready to feed oil to the rig and from there to the Bannock A floating, processing, storage and offloading vessel. There the crude will be turned into the usual range of products you’d expect from a land-based refinery and will then be loaded on to tankers for distribution around the world. So we are watching over an incredible undertaking, capable of generating tens of billions of dollars and, along the way, keeping you lot in work for years to come. But don’t think for one moment that this is some kind of easy-going ocean cruise. We’ve had credible intelligence reports that Cabindan separatists, who want independence from Angola, have targeted this field. They may be planning a spectacular, something that will put them on the world map, the way 9/11 did for al-Qaeda. Our job is to make sure that they cannot and will not succeed. And the only way we can do this is if we are fit, disciplined, well organized and well trained. Some of you have had experience of ocean-swimming, getting on to rigs and large vessels and carrying out counter-terrorist operations at sea. But most of us—and that includes me—know very little about any of that. So we have to learn fast. Therefore let me introduce you to the man who’s going to knock us into shape over the next four weeks: Donnie McGrain.”

There was a half-hearted smattering of applause as McGrain stepped to the front of the stage and looked out over his audience with a beady, piercing stare. “Right then, let’s see just how bad this is,” he barked in a Glasgwegian accent as rough as a bag of rusted nails. “How many of ye’s have served in the Royal or U.S. Marines, the SBS or Navy SEALs, or anything like that in any other armed forces?”

Six hands went up. McGrain shook his head and spat out an expletive. “Six? Ye’ll no’ retake a rig wi’ six men, Mr. Cross, I can tell ye that for sure.” He sighed heavily. “Youse lot with yer hands in the air then . . . Anyone got their SC qualification—that’s swimmer-canoeist for anyone who wasn’t SBS?”

Two hands remained in the air.

“Have youse bright sparks done any exercises on the North Sea rigs?” McGrain asked; and the two hands were lowered.

McGrain sighed and clutched his brow theatrically. “So ye cannae swim, cannae climb, dinnae know yer way around a rig. But trust me, four weeks from now ye will . . . bah God ye will. And if ye don’t, Ah will personally kick ye’s up the arse, off this ship and intae the bloody ocean, and ye’s can swim yer way back hame. Do I make masel’ clear?”

There was a wordless rumble around the room that more or less amounted to a “yes.”

McGrain was not impressed. “Ah said, DO AH MAKE MASEL’ CLEAR?”

This time the voices replied as one, “Yes, sir!”

McGrain nodded. “Tha’s better. But I was a warrant officer, no’ a bloody Rupert. So ye dinnae address me as ‘sir.’ Mr. McGrain will be perfectly adequate.”

Five minutes later, McGrain was in the cabin Cross had commandeered as his personal office. Both men had mugs of coffee in their fists. “It won’t be easy, Mr. Cross, I can tell you that,” said McGrain in a far less broadly Glasgwegian accent. “But you say these are good men.”

“The best,” Cross replied.

“Well, they’d better be. We’ve got four weeks to teach them how to swim hundreds of meters, carrying all their gear; how to get aboard the rig and the FPSO; and then how to overcome anyone on board without blowing the whole thing to hell.”

“These men work around oil installations all the time. They’re well aware of what could happen if a stray bullet hit an oil tank or a gas pipe, as am I. We’ve already taken precautions to minimize the risk.”

“Aye, but it’s not just your lads you have to worry about. It’s the terrorists, too. A bunch of African guerrillas running around an oil rig, shooting off their AK-47s, is not my idea of fun. See, Mr. Cross, sir, here’s what you need to remember. An oil rig is a place where the risk of fire and explosion is so great that you can’t take a single everyday electrical device into the production area. Not your phone, not your camera, nothing. Oh, aye, that platform is equipped with all the latest safety features, I’m certain of that. There’ll be steel plates between the production and accommodation zones. If there’s an explosion, they’ll deform and absorb the blast, like the crumple-zone of a car absorbs a crash. And every single drop of paint applied to any metal surface of the rig will be what’s called ‘intumescent.’ That means that when it’s exposed to fire, it bubbles up and forms a protective, heatproof layer between the flames and the metal.

“Now that’s all fine and dandy, but this is still an oil rig. And oil is highly flammable. And where there’s oil there’s also gas, which is highly explosive. And even if there’s time for some clever laddie to realize that the platform is under attack and initiate the shutdown procedures, ye cannae turn the flow of oil off, just by flicking a switch. It takes three hours, minimum, for the pressure to drop to nothing and if something makes the whole bloody place go bang at any point in those three hours, well, you can have all the steel plates and fancy paint you like, but it’s nae going tae make a blind bit of difference.”

The Glenallen supply tug was a substantial ship, capable of crossing any of the world’s oceans in virtually any conditions, but she looked like a little dinghy compared to the towering mass of brutally functional engineering that was the Magna Grande drilling rig. The rig in its turn was dwarfed by the Bannock A production facility, which was moored about a mile away. Somehow, Hector Cross and his team had to protect these two huge vessels, using a pair of patrol boats that buzzed around their charges like little birds around a pair of exceptionally ugly hippos. But what if the enemy broke through their defenses, or caught them by surprise and managed to capture either or both of Bannock Oil’s prize assets?

Hector Cross had ordered the Glenallen to take up a station some 400 yards from the rig. Then he assembled his men on the deck, looking out across the smooth, gentle swell of the ocean toward the subject of this afternoon’s briefing. “Take a good look at that rig, gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s imagine the worst happens. Suppose a bunch of terrorists have decided to take control of it and they’re threatening to blow it up, or kill the crew unless their madcap demands are met. OK, then, how do we stop them?

“Answer: we don’t, not unless it’s absolutely necessary. In order to recapture a large vessel, or rig, standard operating procedure requires an initial, clandestine insertion of around twenty Special Forces operatives from the water, whose job is to secure the position for a full-scale assault by fifty to one hundred airborne troops brought in by helicopter. So it’s way out of our league. But there may come a time when we have no option. As you all know from your own experience, defense cuts have left virtually all western armed forces smaller and more run-down than at any time since the start of the First World War. So maybe the military can’t get here in time, or maybe there just isn’t anyone available to come to our help. Then we’re just going to have to do the job ourselves.

“This afternoon, we’re going to set out the basic issues involved in recapturing that rig. Once we’re topside on the rig, we’ll be dealing with the kind of anti-terrorist operation with which most of us are very familiar. But first we have to get there. And I’ll leave it to Mr. McGrain to tell you how that’ll be done.”

“Right!” barked Donnie McGrain. “This here is what is known as a semi-submersible rig. It’s a bit like a bloody great metal iceberg, because most of it is beneath the surface. As you can see, the rig, also known as a platform, has four diamond-shaped legs. Each of these legs has a side-support sticking out diagonally into the sea, like a metal wall. The part you can’t see is the huge, and I mean absolutely bloody gigantic underwater pontoon that the legs and the supports are standing on. That’s because the legs, the support and the pontoon have all been flooded with seawater, making them sink down into the sea, leaving just the upper section of the legs and the actual rig structure visible above the water. The pontoons are anchored to the seabed, which is about two thousand five hundred feet beneath us—och aye, it’s a long way down—and that’s what keeps the whole thing in place.

“Now, if there is an attack on the rig, the chances are it’ll happen at night, so as to have the maximum chance of taking us by surprise, and for the exact same reason, any counter-attack against them will also be carried out under cover of darkness. Now, that rig lights up like Las Vegas at night and illuminates the sea all around it. So you will make your initial approach from outside that lit area. You will be dropped into the water, either from this boat that we are on, or from one of the two patrol boats that operate from it, and count yourself lucky you’re not being chucked out of a submarine, the way we used to do it.

“Once in the water, you will swim in pairs, staying submerged for as much of the journey as possible. If the sea is rough, the waves will act as cover and reduced visibility will make it harder for anyone aboard the rig to spot you. And dinnae worry: the men in each pair will be linked by a buddy-line, so no one’s going tae drift away into the ocean without anyone noticing.

“In order to climb up a leg, the lead man—who for the time being will be me, or one of the other ex-SBS men—will hook on to one of the legs, secure the line to the leg and then start the process of climbing the rig. Now, there are ladders and walkways going up the legs of the rig, but we do not use them, if we can avoid it, because those ladders are the first thing that any terrorist with even half a brain in his wee head will booby-trap. So we start by heading for the spider deck, which is the first deck above water level—you can see it, over there, hanging underneath the main deck of the rig, between the four legs. Tae do that the lead man fires a grapnel, to which a rope is attached. He climbs up the rope, secures the spider deck and then pulls up the rope. While he’s doing that the second man in attaches a rope ladder to the rope, so that it’s pulled up to the spider deck and up they all go. We also have telescopic ladders, with a hook on the end that can, if conditions permit, be extended up to the spider deck without the need for a grapnel.

“Once you get on to the spider deck, you can repeat the process to get on to the main deck. But what if the entrance to the main deck is blocked, or there’s some bastard with an AK-47 standing the other side of it? Then the best climber in the team gets the chance to play at being Spidey-man. He hangs on to the underside of the main deck and makes his way to the edge of the rig, using carabiner clips and a rope to create a line the others can use. Then he climbs up the outside of the rig, rolls over the railing, lands on the main deck, shoots the bampot guarding the entrance in the back and whistles tae his pals to come and join him. And if you’ve got that far intact, then dinnae worry. Compared to what you’ve just done, the rest of the job’s a piece of piss. So does anyone have any questions?”

McGrain dealt with the various inquiries the men had to make, then said, “Right, youse lot. It’s been hot, boring work, standing here in yon sun, listening to me blathering on. What you need is a nice, wee, bracing dip. So in you go, right now, shoes off but keep your clothes on, all of them, and give me four laps of the boat. You too, Mr. Cross.”

Hector didn’t need to be told. He was already climbing up on to the rail and was the first to plunge into the water, twenty feet below. Once their boss had shown willing, the rest of the team could hardly hang back, but still there were plenty of muttered complaints as one after another they jumped into the water and formed a line of thrashing figures, following their leader like chicks after a mother duck.

The twice-daily swims were the bane of the men’s lives. A lap of the Glenallen was approximately 250 meters, so McGrain had begun Day One of training by ordering two laps per session. Men who thought nothing of a ten-kilometer run found themselves struggling to swim a twentieth of the distance. And then there was the shark factor. Tough, battle-hardened soldiers flinched at the thought of plunging into deep, dark ocean waters, filled with who knew what deadly sea creatures. But McGrain showed no mercy. He forced everyone into the water, like it or not, and had them swimming around and around, upping the distance every day, until they were so exhausted they would have considered it a mercy to be gripped in the jaws of a hungry man-eater and spared the unrelenting slog around, and around, and around the Glenallen.

Soon the days and then the weeks started racing by. McGrain began by using the tug as a training ground, getting them used to the idea of being in the water—just in swimming trunks at first—grabbing hold of a climbing net draped over the side of the boat and clambering up to the deck. By week two they were working on the vessels they were going to be defending, learning to climb up the hull of the Bannock A as well as the legs of the Magna Grande rig, and now they discovered a new enemy: heat. Combat clothing for this kind of operation was based on a drysuit that could be worn in and out of the water, but drysuits are designed to keep their wearers warm and both swimming a long distance and climbing up the hull of a semi-submersible rig or a giant floating oil refinery are tasks that generate a huge amount of body heat. Even in the cold conditions of the North Sea, overheating can be a serious problem for fighting men. In the equatorial heat off the coast of West Africa the heat factor was a potentially deadly problem and a great deal of time, effort and experimentation was devoted to finding gear that would provide the combatants with all the pouches and webbing they needed, while still being light and breathable enough to keep heatstroke at bay.

Day by day, session by session, whether carrying out fitness drills and practical exercises, or doing classroom work, learning and memorizing the location and function of every important area of the rig and FPSO, the Cross Bow landlubbers were turned into something close to proper amphibious troops. But as the final week began, McGrain was still worried that there were holes in the team’s preparations. “They’ve had it too easy,” he told Cross. “The weather’s been steady: no high winds, no rough seas, barely even any rain. And we still haven’t started night training.”

“Are they ready for it yet?” Cross asked.

“Impossible to tell, boss. I mean, you get some fellas and they’re tough as nails, but you throw them into deep water at night and when they’re ten feet under, and everything’s black, and they don’t know which way is up, they just go tae pieces. There’s only one way you ever find out which ones can hack it and which ones cannae, and that’s doing it.”

Before Cross started sending his men up a ship’s hull and a rig’s legs in the middle of the night he had to inform the men in charge of them and get their agreement to what he had in mind. As a long-serving U.S. Navy veteran, Captain Cy Stamford had no objection to letting Cross and his men carry out nighttime exercises on the Bannock A. It helped that the two men had worked together before, fighting pirates off the coast of Puntland in northeast Somalia and had developed a healthy, mutual respect.

“Sounds like a good idea to me, Heck,” Stamford said. “You don’t have to tell me that wars are fought at night, and that means you have to train at night, too. I guess once your guys have learned how to get on to the ship, they’re going to have to practice fighting on it, too.”

“That’s the plan, Cy. I think it’ll be good for your crew too. The more accustomed they are to the idea of combat, the easier they’ll find it to deal with and keep calm if it ever happens for real.”

“I agree. I’ve got to inform Houston, just as a matter of protocol. But I’ll tell them what I’m telling you: this has my complete support. And I’m not the only Navy vet among the men on board. If there’s anything we can do, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Thanks. If the balloon ever does go up, we’ll almost certainly be conceding numerical superiority to the bad guys, so we should definitely talk about how to make the most of you and your men. If we can find a way to include you in training that would be even better.”

“Sure, it would make a pleasant change. Life can get dull around here. I didn’t go to sea just so’s I could sit in the same place, week after week.”

“Then I’ll see what I can do to liven things up,” Cross promised him, feeling grateful to be dealing with someone who understood the realities of his world. But when he made the same request to Rod Barth, the Offshore Installation Manager, more commonly known as “OIM,” or just “boss” of the Magna Grande platform, the reception was very different.

“Listen here, Mr. Cross,” Barth said, wiping a hand across his perspiring forehead, “I’m an oilman. I’m the guy who makes sure that this baby makes money. I get the oil out of the ground and into the pipelines, 24/7, and I don’t appreciate anything that gets in the way of my oil. It’s bad enough having guys climbing aound like monkeys during the day—no need to have them doing it at night as well. And if you want them running around my rig in the dark, playing at soldiers, forget it. It’s not going to happen, not as long as I’m in charge here, and I don’t plan on going anywhere else any time soon.”

“Me neither,” said Cross, resisting the temptation to grab Barth by his fat, jowly neck, shove him up against a bulkhead and give him a short, sharp introduction to the kind of violence he could expect if a terrorist ever got on board. “My job is the same as yours: to keep the oil flowing. And nothing would stop it more effectively than a terrorist blowing this rig to pieces with you and everyone else who works on it on board.”

Barth gave a porcine snort of contempt. “Gimme a break, Cross. We both know that’s not going to happen. You tell me when a terrorist last blew up a rig? Oh, wait, you can’t, because it’s never happened.”

“No one had flown two jets into skyscrapers until 9/11, either. Listen, I have credible information, both from my own sources and the U.S. State Department, that there is a genuine risk of attack. I’m responsible for ensuring the safety of all the people and installations at this field. I’m telling you I need to be able to train my men at night and I’d appreciate your co-operation.”

“Here’s what I’ll do,” said Barth. “I’ll call Houston. I’ll ask the folks at Operations how they feel about the safety risks to our workers and to the equipment on this rig if we’ve got military exercises being conducted on it at night by a bunch of mercenary hotheads who don’t have the first clue about the dangers of offshore oil production.”

Cross took another deep breath and then, not bothering to hide the anger simmering beneath his usual steely composure said, “My men are not mercenaries. They’re highly experienced ex-servicemen, they’re trained to stay cool under pressure and they’ve spent years working around oil installations in Abu Zara.”

“Yeah, sitting in the middle of the damn desert. That’s a totally different situation to this. I reckon Houston’ll agree with me, too.”

Cross sighed. “I didn’t want to do this. I was hoping we could come to a civilized agreement. But now I’m going to pull rank. I’m a main board director of Bannock Oil and I can get straight on the line to Senator John Bigelow, the President and Chief Executive, and get his direct order in support of my plans.”

“You can call the White House, for all I care. Won’t make a bit of difference. Your boys aren’t coming on to my rig, ever, and that’s all I’ve got to say.”

Cross called Bigelow, who assured him, “Don’t worry, Heck, I get it. Of course your people have got to be able to train for every possible eventuality. I’ll sort this out right away and get back to you.”

Three hours later, Bigelow was on the line, exactly as promised. But what he had to say took Cross completely by surprise. “I’m afraid it’s a ‘no,’ Heck. Now, before you blow your top, just hear me out. What we’ve got here is a legal issue. Bannock Oil is responsible for the safety of everyone aboard the Magna Grande rig and the Bannock A production vessel, including people who work for the many sub-contractors we’ve got out there. If any of these people were to be hurt, let alone die as a result of anything that happened during one of your training exercises—which fall outside the parameters of the work and conditions they are contractually obligated to accept—then the company could be liable for millions of dollars in damages. The same applies to your people, too. If they suffer injury as a result of a workplace incident, we could be liable.”

“But they work for me. They’re employed by Cross Bow.”

“Yes, and Cross Bow has been a subsidiary of Bannock ever since your wife bought it off you, and this is a Bannock project, so again we’d potentially be liable. No hazardous activities, Hector, do you hear me? If the seas are rough, don’t go swimming in them. Nothing after dark unless there are lights everywhere and safety harnesses are worn.”

“For God’s sake, John, these men are former soldiers,” Cross protested. “They’ve gone to war. They’ve risked their lives to protect Bannock’s oilfields in the past because that’s what they’re paid to do. These are men who actually like risking their necks. Believe me, they’d much rather be training and getting some action that sitting around being swathed in cotton wool because of some suit’s pathetic obsession with safety.”

“It’s not an ‘obsession,’ it’s the opinion the legal department has given me after due consideration of the law and our potential exposure. For the record, I cannot ignore that opinion because then I’d be violating all the insurance policies we have in place to cover against possible legal action.”

Cross made one last attempt to sway him: “But, John, if the field is ever attacked, and neither my men nor your staff have had any training, we wouldn’t be talking about an injury here or there. We could be looking at large numbers of fatalities and millions of dollars’ worth of damage to your installations. Seriously, let’s get down to dollars and cents. You stand to lose far more from a terrorist assault than you ever will from a training exercise.”

“I hear you, Heck, really I do,” Bigelow said. “But the way Legal sees it, looking at our past experience and that of other oil companies, the odds of any such assault are so minimal that we can safely ignore them. But the chances of injury or even some kind of emotional trauma caused by exposure to combat training are much higher. Therefore we have to play the odds and say no to your request.”

“For God’s sake, John, this can’t be the right decision. You’re putting the whole future of Magna Grande, even of Bannock itself, in danger.”

“That’s enough, Heck!” Bigelow snapped. “I have a lot of respect for the work you’ve done for Bannock Oil, and of course I’m aware of your personal ties to the company, but when you talk of the company being in danger, why, that just sounds like scaremongering. You’re a better man than that, Heck, and a braver one, too. I’m sorry, but the decision is final. No training of any kind on the rig or the production vessel after dark, and no simulated combat situations, on either facility at any time.”

Cross slammed down the phone and sank back in his chair. They could still practice night swimming in the water around the Glenallen. They could use the tug as a surrogate training ground. But one of the biggest potential advantages he’d been counting on against any assailant was familiarity with the battlefield, and that had just been thrown away.

Cross prayed that corporate stupidity in Houston didn’t lead to defeat in the Atlantic Ocean. He’d always had a sixth sense about what he called “the Beast.” It was an evil, malevolent creature that constantly sought ways to attack him and those he cared for. Its face changed from time to time as it found new human carriers for its violent virus, but its essential nature remained unchanging. Recently he had begun to feel the presence of the Beast again. It was close at hand, and that meant Congo had emerged from wherever he’d been skulking since his escape from Caracas. He wasn’t far away now, Cross was sure of it, and if he knew how the Bannock Oil suits were conspiring to make his life easier, he’d be laughing. But then Cross brought his mind up short. “Stop whining!” he told himself. “You’ve faced worse odds, in much less favorable situations, and you’ve beaten Johnny bloody Congo to a pulp in your time. So get a grip, do your job and make damn sure that whatever Congo or anyone else does, you still win anyway.”

The first thing Cross had to do, he realized as his temper cooled, was to eat a slice of humble pie. He gritted his teeth and called Bigelow once more: “I’m sorry if I sounded insubordinate there, sir. There’s a chain of command and I have to abide by it.”

“That’s no problem, Heck,” Bigelow replied, his voice oozing the satisfaction he felt at having his place at the top reinforced. “Hell, we all get a little heated from time to time—I know I’ve done it often enough, fighting for the issues that really matter to me. And if there’s anything I can do to help you improve security at Magna Grande, without compromising the safety of our people out there, you just let me know.”

“Thank you, John, I appreciate that,” said Cross. He’d counted on Bigelow wanting to display his magnanimity, and his power to grant gifts. “Even if we can’t train on the platform or the FPSO we really need to be familiar with their layouts. My guys can’t do anything to help if they’re blundering around like tourists without a map. If we could recce both units in detail—under the supervision of their safety officers, of course—then that would be a real benefit to my team, and to the people and property they’re supposed to be protecting.”

“That makes sense,” Bigelow agreed. “I’ll make sure we get it all set up as soon as possible.”

“And one other thing,” Cross added. “My people are stuck on a tug, 24/7. The food’s pretty basic and there’s not a lot to do, other than train and sleep, but the rig and the FPSO both have canteens, gyms, movie rooms, pool tables and God knows what else. If we could use those places that would be great for morale, and it would create familiarity between security and operations staff. Believe me, if we’re ever in any kind of hostage or combat situation, being able to recognize faces and know which side people are on could be the difference between life and death.”

“Well, we can’t deprive your people of good food and videos, now can we?” Bigelow chuckled. “Consider it done.”

“Thanks, John, I appreciate that,” said Cross. What he did not add, but still thought, was: But all the guided tours, good meals and gym workouts in the world won’t mean squat if we have to go into battle without proper training.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail: just because that was a cliché didn’t make it any less true.

Johnny Congo had agreed the date and time of the attack with Babacar Matemba at the upcountry training base and Mateus da Cunha in Paris. Aram Bendick, meanwhile, had been establishing massive short positions in Bannock Oil stock and bought well over $2 billion worth of Bannock credit default swaps. He’d also been getting nervous. “I spent three frickin’ days talking percentages with that shyster of yours, now it’s almost a month later and I’m still standing here with my dick in the wind, waiting for something to happen. You’d better make it worth my while soon, man, ’cause I am damn sure I won’t stand here much longer.”

“Not long now, white boy,” Congo assured him. “That dick of yours’ll be nice and hard real soon, don’t you worry ’bout that.”

Now the day had come and it began with good news. “Weather report is showing a low front coming in from the west,” Chico Torres told him over breakfast on the Mother Goose. “It’s gonna get a little rough.”

“That a problem?” Congo asked, feeling nervous about the sheer scale of what he was attempting, but not wanting to seem pussy about it.

“No way, man, anything but,” Torres replied. “We’re gonna be a hundred meters beneath the waves and it’ll be smooth as silk down there. Could be an issue getting launched. But if we time it right, we’ll go in ahead of the weather, it’ll pass right over us and by the time we get to the target they’ll be rocking on the surface and we’ll still be taking it easy down below.”

Congo nodded, but then Torres added a quick postscript. “The only thing bothers me is the birds. The kind of weather we’re going to get tonight, a Marine pilot could fly right through it with his eyes shut. But any time you’re relying on local talent, you gotta wonder if they can handle it.”

“You suggesting an African can’t fly a helicopter?”

It suddenly struck Torres that he was talking to a man who’d been born in Africa. Congo: the clue’s in the name you dumb jerk, he chided himself. “No way, man, not at all. Just, it’s a specialist field, you feel me? Night-flying over water in bad weather, low visibility, high winds, all that shit.”

“They’ll manage, and you know how I know that? Because if they don’t manage they’re gonna die and ain’t no one wants to do that.”

“Then we’re good to go.”

So now they were twelve hours and twenty-four nautical miles away from H-hour and both Triton 3300/3s had been lowered into the water. Now the A-frame was hoisting up a powered submersible sled, laden with a three-ton cargo that weighed almost as much as one of the subs, then swinging it out over the water and bringing it down at a point between them. Towlines were run from the sled to the subs and made fast, with Torres standing on the hull of the sub in which he would be riding, giving instructions and ensuring that the cable which would allow him to control the sled from inside the Triton’s transparent cabin was properly connected and functional. Then final wishes of good luck were shouted down from the support ship, the hatches were closed and the two yellow submersibles sank beneath the ocean swell, towing their cargo behind them, and an instant later were completely invisible.

Congo went over the mission’s timetable in his head, just in case, even at this late stage, there was something that he’d missed: a factor that hadn’t been considered. But if there were such a thing, he couldn’t spot it. The subs would travel at three knots for eight hours before setting up their side of the deal, turning around and heading back the way they came.

The Mother Goose, meanwhile, would follow a spiral course, at first travelling away from the Magna Grande field before curving around and coming in closer. When she was nine nautical miles from the target, by which time night would have fallen, she’d cut her lights, stop for no more than ten minutes to pick up the subs at an agreed rendezvous point, then move off again, once more moving away from the field. If the weather prevented a quick retrieval, the subs’ crews would be brought abroad and the crafts themselves scuttled. By this point, the only thing anyone on any vessel or rig in the vicinity would be thinking about would be the storm and no one would give a damn about the Goose, what she was doing or where she was going.

When the subs had turned for home, Congo would call Babacar Matemba and tell him to get his birds and his men in the air. “And then,” Congo said to himself, “it’s showtime!”

Close to the equator the sun sinks so fast that you can actually watch it move across the sky as it sets. This evening the towering black thunderclouds massing to the west blocked most of its descent, right up to the final moment when it stabbed one last, dazzling beam of light across the ocean, fell beneath the horizon and darkness descended. The storm, however, had yet to hit the National Air Force of Angola base where two Russian-made Mil Mi-35 “Hind” attack helicopters were preparing for take-off. All their markings had been crudely obliterated with black paint. Despite the prospect of worsening conditions, the two crews chatted animatedly as they walked toward their craft. They were happy, as well they should be—every man had been promised $10,000 in cash for a single night’s work. The base commander, who was turning a blind eye to the temporary disappearance of the only two Hinds in Angola’s helicopter fleet that were actually airworthy, was pocketing $250,000. The Minister of Defense, meanwhile, had confirmed the receipt of $5 million in his bank account in London. London is the preferred financial laundry for corrupt politicians from the developing world, thanks to a capacity for turning a blind eye to dirty money that puts the gnomes of Zurich to shame; a property market that is one of the world’s safest investments; and an obsession with the human rights of foreign criminals that is in its own perverse way profoundly immoral. No matter how appalling the accusations against a man may be, or even his proven guilt, it is virtually impossible to deport anyone who can either claim the slightest family contact with the United Kingdom or suggest that he is in fear of the doubtless well-deserved punishments that he faces back home. In the event of a coup, or—less likely—an election defeat, such considerations would be extremely important to the minister concerned.

With all the key players bought and paid for, Johnny Congo knew that he would get what he wanted. Sure enough, he soon received word that the helicopters were in the air, on a course that would take them out to sea and then northeast toward Cabinda. And he had the personal assurance of their commanding officer that the pilots he had chosen, the finest at his disposal, would be more than capable of dealing with the weather.

The Mother Goose met her chicks at the assigned rendezvous. The crew’s training proved to be worthwhile because both submersibles were recovered, despite the waves that were already being whipped up by the wind. Radio communication with the subs had been impossible when they were underwater and Congo was desperate to know if they’d been able to carry out their mission as planned.

“Take it easy, bro,” Torres told him. “The timer’s set, the package is in position A and the target ain’t going nowhere. You wanna know if there could be any kinda snafu? Yeah, sure there could. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong and all that shit. But we checked everything, then we rechecked it, then we checked again, just for the hell of it. And it was all good.”

Babacar Matemba selected the fifteen men who had performed best in training for the attack on Bannock Oil and brought them to a landing strip just a few kilometers from the Cabindan coast to await their pick-up by the Angolan helicopters. Not wanting to find himself trapped on a rig if things went wrong, he delegated command of the raid to one of his most ambitious subordinates, a tough, merciless killer called Théophile Bembo who had spent fifteen of his twenty-two years on the planet carrying a gun in the service of one warlord or another before settling on permanent employment with Matemba’s private army. Té-Bo, as he preferred to be called, thinking the name was “beacoup plus gangsta” than the one he’d been christened with, was built like an ebony Adonis, with the heavily muscled physique characteristic of West African men. When not under fire he went everywhere with a pair of bright red Beats by Dr. Dre headphones clamped to his shaven head, nodding to the pounding rap rhythms slamming through his brain and stopping from time to time to bust some moves in front of his admiring comrades and any good-looking women who might be passing.

He was still wearing the phones and listening to Kanye West as he led seven of his men on to one of the Hinds, both of which had now been topped up so that their fuel tanks were filled to overflowing. Neither Matemba nor any of his men were remotely bothered by Té-Bo’s apparently lackadaisical attitude. They knew that when the bullets started flying, the Beats would come off, Té-Bo would snap into warrior mode and their enemies would fly before him like seed husks in the wind.

On the Glenallen, Hector Cross finished the bedtime story he read every evening, via Skype, to his beloved Catherine Cayla, then headed up to the bridge, bracing himself as he went against the movement of the boat. The sea was becoming distinctly rough and for the first time since they’d arrived in African waters the wind and rain were making their presence felt.

“Anything I need to know about?” Cross asked the skipper, a Swede called Magnus Bromberg who’d learned his trade in the chilly waters of the Baltic and the North Sea.

“A bit of weather coming through,” he said casually. “It’ll blow a gale, force eight, gusting nine maybe, enough to make some of your boys seasick, I think. It’s OK, my ship and my crew survived the storm of the century unscathed, so this is nothing to worry about, I can promise you that.”

“I’ll be sure to issue Kwells for anyone who needs them,” Cross said drily. “Oh, and speaking of violent sickness, what’s the cook knocking up for dinner tonight?”

“Veal Milanese with pasta and tomato sauce,” Bromberg replied, smacking his lips. “One of his best dishes, I would say, but it could get a little messy on a night like this. Hard to keep the plate still!”

Cross laughed, thinking of baby Catherine and her astonishing ability to cover every surface for miles around in bits of flying pasta and wondering if he and his men were going to be any tidier tonight. He still had a few duties to complete before he could relax over an evening meal. Though forbidden from conducting exercises on the Bannock A or the rig, he had at least obtained permission to have one of his men, unarmed, on watch at all times, both to report any suspicious circumstance and to remain with the vessels’ crews if anything did go wrong.

All the vessels on the Magna Grande field could communicate via conventional ship-to-ship radio and for most practical purposes—such as Cross’s conversation with Cy Stamford, for example—this was still the simplest way to talk. In addition, however, the oil platform, the FPSO and the tug were all equipped with VSATs, or very small aperture terminals, which were in turn linked to overhead satellites. This meant that not only did they all have high-speed onboard Wi-Fi, but they could all communicate online, in real time with one another, and Bannock HQ in Houston.

Cross had taken advantage of this by giving miniature earpieces to his sentries on duty on the platform or the Bannock A through which they could talk to the command post on the Glenallen and receive messages in return. His reasoning was very simple. The only time the sentries would really matter would be if any or all of the vessels were attacked. And if that happened, then the ability to communicate without the enemy’s knowledge would be essential.

As a matter of operational protocol, all communications with the sentries were handled via their earpieces, which was how Cross, who could receive their messages via his phone, now checked with the men at both locations. He was told by both not to worry. There were no signs of trouble anywhere. “You’d have to be a bloody stupid terrorist to set to sea in this,” the man on the Magna Grande platform, an ex-Greenjacket called Frank Sharman, joked.

“Well, a lot of terrorists are bloody stupid, that’s why they’re terrorists,” Cross pointed out.

“Yeah, true, boss, but there are limits!”

“Fair enough,” Cross said, but he couldn’t help but feel that Sharman had a point. With any luck they’d have nothing worse to worry about than keeping their veal Milanese on their plates. But in Cross’s experience, Lady Luck had a way of slapping a man in the face if he ever took her for granted. And then there was the Beast to think about. He could practically feel its fetid breath on the back of his neck. It was close now, he knew it, and it was getting ready to strike.

The storm was coming in, whipping the rain against the helicopters flying just a few meters above the foaming ocean, daring the waves to hit them. They’d skimmed between passing ships and oil rigs, using them as cover, and maintained strict radio silence for the entire flight. Perhaps that’s why the radar operators on duty aboard the Bannock Oil installations didn’t detect the approaching aircraft until they were barely twenty kilometers away from their target. Only then was Cy Stamford informed that there were two unidentified aircraft, almost certainly helicopters, approaching on a bearing that would take them directly over his ship and the rig.

“Find out who they are and what the hell they think they’re doing,” he ordered.

Seconds later, the pilot of the lead Hind was telling Té-Bo: “One of the Bannock ships wants to know our identity and what we are doing in their area. What do you want me to say?”

He received no reply. Té-Bo had eschewed the helicopter’s earphones for his trusty Beats and was still getting in the groove. It took frantic gestures by the Hind’s crew and a shake of the shoulder from one of his men before he was alerted to the need to respond. He swapped cans, listened as the pilot repeated his question and then just said, “Nothing.”

Stamford ordered the request to be resent and the pilot passed it on to Té-Bo for a third time. This time the young guerrilla leader said, “Tell him that you are National Air Force, because that is the truth. Then say that you are on a regular training flight.”

“At night? In a storm?” the pilot protested. “That is not regular! No one will believe it.”

Té-Bo pursed his lips, almost pouting as he thought. “Then say that you are training to carry out a rescue mission in bad weather, at night, because emergencies are more likely to happen on a stormy night—no?—than on a fine day when the sea is calm.”

The pilot did as he was told and was happy to be able to tell this moody brat who for some reason seemed to be in charge that the men on the Bannock A seemed satisfied by his story.

Cy Stamford, however, was far from convinced. He called Hector Cross. “You aware that there are two helicopters claiming to be from the Angolan National Air Force heading in our direction?”

“Yes, Bromberg’s just told me about them. I’m up on the bridge now, keeping tabs on the situation.”

“They say they’re practising their emergency response in extreme weather conditions. I guess it’s possible, but we weren’t informed in advance and they didn’t exactly volunteer the information willingly.”

“Sounds dodgy to me. I’m putting both my patrol boats in the water. If they do turn out to be hostiles, we’ll be waiting for them.”

“OK,” Stamford replied. “But here’s some advice from an old sea dog: think real hard about what you’re going to do next.”

As Cross put his handset down he was doing precisely what Stamford had just told him: thinking. And, as the veteran captain had implied, he wasn’t finding it easy to come to a satisfactory conclusion. His problem was not that he lacked the means to defend the rig or the Bannock A. His two patrol boats were both armed to the full military specification. At the bow, each carried a Browning M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun, mounted on a retractable Kongsberg Sea Protector weapons platform and firing control system, complete with smoke-grenade launchers. Aft of the cockpit, they each had a Thales Lightweight Multi-Role Missile launcher, capable of attacking both ships and aircraft. So once they put to sea they’d be capable of destroying the two helicopters at will. The question was: What would they be destroying?

Suppose the two birds really were conducting a training exercise for the Angolan Air Force, and, what was more, an exercise preparing them to come to the aid of offshore oil projects? If an oil company boat blew them and their crews out of the air, the political consequences would be catastrophic and no one would blame the Angolan government if it demanded massive compensation and withdrew Bannock Oil’s right to drill in its waters. Even if the men on board were terrorists, how would he ever be able to prove it once they and their helicopters were sitting on the seabed, half a mile beneath the ocean waves?

So he couldn’t fire until he had absolute proof that the helicopters were hostile. But the only way he’d get that proof was if they actually mounted an attack on the rig, and at that point he couldn’t order sea-to-air rockets to be fired at them for the simple reason that only a madman or a blithering idiot causes a massive explosion directly above an oil rig. That meant that Cross’s only course of action was the one he most despised: do nothing. It wasn’t even worth launching the patrol boats just yet because if there really were Cabindan terrorists about to mount a raid on the rig, there was no point showing them precisely what he had to fight back with.

In fact the less they could see, the better. Cross turned to Bromberg: “I want to watch those helicopters, but I don’t want them watching us, so we need to go dark. No external lights. All windows covered. No lights on up here, either, if you can still handle the ship that way.”

“All the controls are illuminated. If I can keep them lit, we can do it,” Bromberg replied.

“Then do it.”

“What about the men preparing your patrol boats for launching?”

“They can stand down for the time being. But they’ve got to be ready to move fast when I tell them.”

A lesser man might have protested, or asked for clarification, or questioned Cross’s authority. Bromberg just took in what had been said, gave the information a moment’s thought, nodded and said, “You’ve got it.”

“One more thing,” Cross added. “I need to get a sight of the helicopters as soon as possible, but as long as the rig’s between us and them, with all its lights blazing, that’s impossible. Can you get me a better angle?”

“Sure.”

Bromberg gave his orders and the Glenallen picked up speed, taking up a new course that sent it to the east of the rig, moving with the wind. Cross went outside, on to one of the small, open weather decks that flanked the bridge, ignoring the driving rain and bracing himself against the bucking and diving of the tug as she rode the increasingly high, foam-capped waves. He was carrying a thermal imager and as he put it to his eye he turned to the northeast, from where the helicopters were coming. Slowly, painstakingly, he tracked from side to side, slightly shifting the vertical angle of his imager to track at different heights, and avoiding the dazzling blaze of light that surrounded the rig as he searched for the faint heat-glow that would signal the presence of an aircraft. His hair was plastered to his head, his clothes were soaked through and he had to stop every few seconds to shake away the rainwater puddling on the thermal-imaging unit. One minute became two.

They had to be really close now. Why couldn’t he see them?

And then as he panned once more across the sky, there they were, coming in at such a low altitude that they might almost be stones skimming across the water. They were close enough that Cross could get a clear picture of the shape of their fuselages. To anyone with any military experience it was unmistakable.

“They’re Hinds,” Cross said to himself.

He’d heard of one Hind that was owned and operated by a South African mercenary, but if they were flying in a pair they had to be military. Angola had its own take on the Communist hammer and sickle on its national flag and had always bought the bulk of its military kit from the Russians. So the evidence was overwhelming: these had to be Angolan Air Force helicopters, and that meant it really might be a training exercise after all.

But what if it wasn’t? Cross spoke to Frank Sharman on the rig: “Two helicopters, Hinds by the looks of them, are approaching your location. Keep an eye on them. They claim to be on a training mission. If they are, fine. If they show any sign of hostile action, keep me informed of exactly what’s happening and await further instructions.”

“You got it, boss.”

Cross could feel a tightening in his guts and around his throat. It was the first sign of the tension that gripped him in the moments before combat and he knew precisely what it meant. As much as his mind had come up with a perfectly good, rational argument for accepting these helicopters at face value, his instincts had marked them down as threats. He raised his eyes briefly to the waterlogged heavens and prayed that his instincts were wrong, for once.

Té-Bo’s boyhood hero was Usain Bolt, and as he grew older one of the things he came to admire most about his idol was the way that Bolt could be fooling around on the track just seconds before the start of an Olympic final, yet when the starting gun fired, he was right into the zone, focused on nothing but his race, instantly ready to run faster than any other human who had ever lived. In the same way, Té-Bo prided himself that he could snap into his own zone, as a warrior and leader, at a moment’s notice. So it was that he was now firing orders at the men in his lead helicopter and the one behind, making sure that everyone knew their assignments, and that all of them were as ready as he to wreak havoc on their target and its inhabitants.

One of the Hind’s crew pulled open the fuselage door, letting in a blast of rain-soaked air. Many of the men shouted at the sudden drenching, but Té-Bo barely noticed it. So far as he was concerned, the bad weather was his friend, for looking down at the platform he could see that its helipad was deserted. No one would be expecting an incoming flight on a night like this. Now, as its companion took up a station immediately over the derrick, the first Hind came in to land. The second its wheels hit the pad, Té-Bo was jumping down on to the surface of the platform, waving his men down after him and dispatching them to their assigned destinations around the rig. The helicopter rose back up into the air, adding its downdraught to the gale-force wind, and the second bird came in to land.

There was no response from the crew of the platform. How could there be? They had no weapons, so all that they could do was to call for help and then try to find somewhere to hide away until help arrived. But there would be no one to answer their call. Té-Bo’s leader, Babacar Matemba, and the other man—the one who called himself Tumbo—had assured him that the Angolan Navy was a joke and there were no Americans for 1,000 kilometers in any direction. They told Té-Bo not to worry. He would seize the Magna Grande rig, do what had to be done and be back on the helicopters, flying back to the biggest pay check he had ever received—enough to buy the love of any girl in the Congo—long before anyone was close enough to stop them. Matemba had always told Té-Bo the truth, so why should he disbelieve him now?

The Hinds had been flying so low that for a short time they were actually out of sight behind the oil platform, but the moment the first of them gained altitude, came into view and darted toward the helipad, Cross knew that while the aircraft belonged to the Angolan Air Force—he was certain of that—they were not on any kind of training mission. Seconds later the lead aircraft touched down on the helipad and men were dropping down from it on to the platform.

At this distance, in atrocious visibility, the new arrivals were little more than blurred outlines. But Cross could see at once that they knew their business. There was no panic, no rushing around, none of the “spray and pray” that he had seen among some Middle Eastern and North African insurgents, who liked to blaze away just for show without the slightest idea of how to hit a target. Instead they moved off the helipad swiftly and with purpose and the reason for their discipline wasn’t hard to find. The first man off the Hind had taken up a stationary position on the platform, guiding everyone else toward their individual targets and remaining where he was as his helicopter took off, the other replaced it and another squad disembarked.

Cross heard Sharman’s voice coming through his iPhone’s earpieces. “First off, boss, the helicopters are definitely Air Force, or ex-Air Force. Someone’s tried to paint over the markings, but they missed.”

“OK, so now what’s happening?”

“I count eight men on each bird,” Sharman went on. “They’re fanning out across the platform, moving toward the production areas and the accommodation and administration block.

“As close as you can get to the OIM,” Cross told him. “Barth likes to throw his weight around, but I seriously doubt his ability to stay calm under fire. You’ll have to nursemaid him. So find him. Try his office first. Make sure he doesn’t make too many stupid decisions. Try to stop him panicking. And keep me up to speed.”

“Yes, boss.”

“One other thing . . . These terrorists, rebels or whatever the hell they call themselves, are either going to blow the rig, or take everyone aboard hostage, or both. If you get taken, you won’t be able to talk. So take out your earpiece and try to leave it as close as you can to whoever’s in charge. The more we can hear, the more we’ll know what’s going on and what we can do about it. Got that?”

“Yes, boss . . . Wait . . .”

There was something that sounded like a crackle of static in Cross’s ear, then Sharman’s voice: “The shooting’s started. Can’t tell exactly where it’s coming from. I’ll try to find out. Meanwhile, I’m off to deal with that pillock Barth. Hope they do him first.”

Cross moved back into the bridge, wiping the water off his forehead and hair as he came through the door. He was greeted by the sound of a frantic, desperate voice emanating from a speaker positioned on the wall. “We’re under attack! Can you hear me? It’s an attack! Oh God, I can’t believe this, they’re firing guns! This is impossible! Mayday! Mayday! For God’s sake, someone help us!”

“As you can hear,” said Bromberg drily, “the Offshore Installation Manager is not responding well to the crisis. I thought it best to put this on speaker. Saves the radio op having to repeat everything.”

Sharman’s deeper, much calmer voice could now be heard saying, “It’s all right, sir, don’t you worry. The security people know what’s happening. Just relax, and let the professionals take care of everything. Why don’t you sit down over here, sir?”

“Get your hands off me!” Barth yelled and then, “Abandon ship! Abandon ship! This is not a drill! We are under armed attack . . .”

“Excuse me, sir.”

Cross could hear the sound of some kind of impact, a grunt and then the thump of a heavy object hitting the ground.

“I’ve given Mr. Barth a sedative, boss,” Sharman said. “Christ, there are people running everywhere, they’re heading to their muster stations, hang on . . . Oh no . . .”

Cross heard the sound of gunfire in the distance and then Sharman’s voice commanding, “Stay where you are! For your own safety do not, repeat not attempt to abandon ship. Remain indoors and stay still.”

Over the next few minutes Sharman gave a running commentary on what was evidently a well-planned, efficiently executed operation, as more Bannock workers died and more and more of those who were still living were herded toward the canteen: the largest internal space on the platform. Then he very calmly said, “I can hear people coming; they’re at the door. Uh-oh . . .”

Seconds later there were voices jabbering in what sounded to Cross like French, though he knew that the European language spoken in Angola, including the province of Cabinda, was Portuguese. Sharman’s steady, measured tones cut in, “I understand, comprendo: me go with you. Look, hands up, see? I surrender. Whoa! No need to point that at me. I’m coming . . . No fight, OK? . . . I’m coming . . .”

The voice on the tannoy died away as Sharman was led away, out of the range of the radio mike. But Cross still had the feed from Sharman’s earpiece as he and Barth were led to join the others in the canteen.

It was time Cross talked to Houston. He walked back into his command post. Dave Imbiss was already sitting there, tapping away at a computer keyboard linked to a large screen.

Cross sat down opposite his own laptop and was about to put a Skype call through to John Bigelow when he heard Imbiss call out, “Hector, quick, you’ve gotta look! This is streaming live, right now.”

Cross spun his chair so that he could see Imbiss’s screen. An impossibly young African face appeared. With his headphones around his neck, he could have been any street kid in any city from Los Angeles to Lagos. “This action is being carried out on behalf of the oppressed people of Cabinda,” he began, speaking English in a heavy French–African accent. “We demand the independence of Cabinda. We demand recognition by the United Nations and all the permanent members of the Security Council. We demand the return of Cabinda’s natural assets to the Cabindan people. We will negotiate only with the President of the United States. Until our demands are met we will kill one person every five minutes. We are completely serious. Regardez!”

The young man’s face disappeared from view to reveal Rod Barth being held by a man in green combat fatigues while a second pointed a gun at him and a third tied a blindfold around his head. Sharman was nowhere to be seen. Now Barth was being forced down on to his knees, begging for mercy: “No, no! Please, don’t do it . . . I can get you anything you want . . . Let me talk to someone . . . please!”

“My God, that’s Barth, the Installation Manager,” Cross said.

The young man now reappeared in the shot, several feet from the camera, to which he turned once again. “I repeat, we are completely serious. Our demands must be met. Or else, in five more minutes, you will see this.” There was a holster on the young man’s belt. He unclipped it, pulled out a Sig Sauer pistol, raised the gun-barrel to Barth’s temple and fired, blasting an eruption of blood, brain and bone from the far side of his skull.

Cross could hear the sound of the shot in his earpiece, just out of synch with the internet feed, and Sharman groaning, “Oh no . . .” and then shouting out, “No! Don’t be daft!” as a confused babble of protests and barked orders was followed by a burst of gunfire, the screams of a wounded man, another couple of shots and then a terrible silence.

On the screen, the kid with the headphones leered into the camera again. “Now you know what we do to people who make resistance. And remember: cinq minutes.” Then the screen went dead.

Cross didn’t need to call John Bigelow. The President of Bannock Oil was on his laptop screen within seconds of the terrorist webcast ending. “Did you see that? They blew Rod Barth away! One of our most senior employees! For God’s sake, Cross, how could you let a thing like this happen?”

“The attack was mounted using Angolan Air Force helicopters,” Cross replied, determined to ignore the eagerness with which Bigelow was rushing to put the blame on him. “I could not fire on them without risking a major international incident.”

“But that’s impossible! You just heard the guy. They want freedom for Cabinda, from Angola.”

“I know, sir. But the fact remains, those are Angolan aircraft with their markings painted over. So either someone’s hijacked them—”

“We’d have heard about that if they had,” Bigelow interrupted.

“I agree. So either they’ve been bought by someone, but again, why would Angola sell to rebels? Or they’ve been obtained by other means, such as bribery. Or someone in the Angolan regime is in league with the rebels. With the money there is to be made in Cabinda, anything’s possible.”

“So now what are we going to do?”

“Well, the best people to sort this out are the U.S. military. So we need to get on to the Pentagon, immediately, and find out what assets they have anywhere near here. But they’d better be bloody close. The next shooting’s due in less than three minutes.”

“Leave this to me,” Bigelow said, and the screen went dead.

Cross got out his iPhone and wrote a text: “CP now.” He sent it to the O’Quinns and Donnie McGrain. Less than sixty seconds later all three were in the room. “We need to start putting an operation together,” Cross said. But before he could elaborate Imbiss was saying, “They’re back online.”

Beats Boy, as Cross now thought of him, repeated his demands. Then he killed another man, in a blue boiler suit this time. Then he said, “Five minutes.”

There was a ringing from Cross’s laptop: another Skype call from Bigelow, but this time he was sharing the screen with the image of a uniformed man sitting at a desk with a Stars and Stripes just visible behind him. “Heck, this is Vice Admiral Theo Scholz of the U.S. Fleet Forces Command, he’s going to put you in the picture.”

“Good evening, Mr. Cross, let me get right to it. I’m afraid I’ve got nothing but bad news for you. We have forces currently deployed in the North Atlantic, Caribbean and South Atlantic; also the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea; but there aren’t any surface vessels closer than four days from your current position and a sub would be no damn use to you. The best option would be SEALs. We currently have units in Bahrain, as well as right here in Little Creek. The problem is getting them to you. We have no forward air bases in West Africa. We can try to persuade the Angolans to help us, but even then . . . God, it’s a logistical nightmare, you’re looking at twelve hours at absolute minimum, probably twenty-four. I guess what I’m saying is—”

“We’re on our own.”

“Sure looks like it.”

“Is there anything the President can do?”

Bigelow butted in. “You must know, Heck, the President of the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”

“Yes, I understand that,” Cross replied. “But the most powerful man in the world doesn’t sit on his arse doing nothing while a bunch of gunmen led by a murdering psycho who doesn’t look old enough to shave kill the American workers of an American corporation. Not if he wants to get re-elected. So maybe someone can think of a way that he can do something, or say something that can stop—”

A shot rang out from Imbiss’s screen. Bigelow and Scholz must have been watching, too, because they both looked horrified at what they had just witnessed.

“It was a woman this time, Heck,” Imbiss said.

“You’ve got to do something, Cross, before they kill them all,” Bigelow insisted.

Scholz shook his head in despair. “This is terrible, just terrible. Good luck, Mr. Cross. And may God be with you.”

Right, first things first,” Cross said as his key people formed a circle around him. “We have to get aboard that rig, despite the fact that we’ve never climbed it in the daytime, let alone at night, and we’ve never swum in rough seas or darkness, either. So, Donnie, how many of our people would you trust to jump off a patrol boat, swim a couple of hundred meters to that rig and arrive at the right place in one piece?”

“Mah lot for sure,” McGrain replied, “and youse lot probably. No offense, Mrs. O’Quinn, I’m worried about you, being a wee scrap of a lassie in conditions like that, but I’m too bloody scared of what you’d do if I said no.”

“You should be,” said Nastiya.

“What about the rest of them?” Cross asked.

McGrain shook his head ruefully. “Not many, if I’m being honest. See, you can forget about two hundred meters. If you want to approach unobserved, you’ll want to be four hundred away from the platform, minimum. If the boats just make a slow pass, lights off and nae stopping, maybe you can get everyone in the water without being spotted. But any closer than that ye’ve got nae chance.”

“Four hundred meters is too far,” Cross said. “In these seas it could take ten or twelve minutes to swim it, even with the wind and waves behind us, and that’ll leave another two, maybe three hostages dead. No . . . the platform lights up the sea all around it. The boats will go in as close as they can to the edge of that pool of light and we’ll go in from there. So, Donnie, there’s you and your SBS lads, and me and my lot. Who are the best of the rest?”

“The two lads who got their swimmer-canoeist badges—Flowers and King—for sure. There’s Schottenheimer who was a Navy SEAL. Of the others, you can only count on three: Keene, Thompson and Donovan. I can’t guarantee they’ll make it, but they’ve more chance than the rest of them.”

“Good, then we’ll go into the water in pairs, connected by buddy lines. I’m not having anyone floating off into the wilds of the Atlantic. Donnie, you and me go first. How much time do you need to climb up to the spider deck and drop a line back down for the others to go up?”

“Ah’m no’ bothering climbing, sir.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Well, the way Ah see it, there’s no way any of them terrorists have had the time to start booby-trapping ladders and gantries way down by the water-line. Am Ah right?”

“I’ve not seen any sign of that,” Imbiss agreed.

“On the other hand, the risk of someone getting killed or washed away into the wild blue yonder if we try any fancy stuff, rigging lines and playing at Spiderman, is somewhere between high and a bloody certainty. So Ah say, go up the rig’s ladders right up to the final ascent on to the main deck. At that point, yeah, mebbes we can be a wee bit more discreet.”

“Are you willing to be first up the ladder?” Cross asked.

“I’d be a bloody hypocrite if I wasn’t. So aye, Ah’ll put my money where my mouth is.”

“How long will you need to get up to the spider deck and check that the way up is safe?”

“Three minutes, max. And one more thing . . . You need tae make sure there’s always one of my lads at the bottom of the ladder. There’s nae way yon beginners’ll get up on to it without someone to catch the wee buggers and pull them up.”

“Good point,” Cross agreed. “So, we’re looking at a three-minute delay after the first pair. After that, we need three groups of four people—that’s two pairs at a time—each group two minutes apart. I’ll select and task each group at the briefing. And before anyone asks, yes, I know that four of us from London, five of Donnie’s SBS people and six of our Cross Bow guys makes a total of fifteen people, and I’ve just counted out fourteen swimmers, but Dave, I need you here. It’s no reflection whatever on your fighting abilities. You don’t need to prove them to me. But I need you to work your magic on that keyboard over there. Can you get into the rig’s CCTV system?”

“If it’s controlled by a computer that’s linked to the internet, absolutely,” Imbiss agreed.

“Good. Then get inside that computer, mess with the cameras. I don’t know if any of the bad guys are watching the monitors, but if they are, I don’t want them seeing anything that looks remotely like us lot getting on to the platform and walking around it. But get us the real feed. I need to know where the terrorists are and what they’re up to.”

Imbiss nodded: “OK, that should be doable. What else?”

“Just monitor all the comms in and out of the platform. If they get instructions from whoever’s behind all this; or they make any new demands; or they start killing more people, or fewer, I want to know. And if it ever gets critical and you get the feeling something big’s about to happen, I need to know that too.”

“How do you want to communicate?” Imbiss asked.

“We’ll use the earpieces. We don’t have enough for everyone, but we’ll divvy them up so that there’s at least one per pair.”

“And if, by some blessed miracle, we actually swim as far as that bloody great beast of a platform, and climb up the bloody thing, and get to the top without so much as a scratch: what then?” asked Paddy O’Quinn.

“Then all the hours we spent in London planning how to recapture an oil rig from a bunch of hooligans won’t have been wasted. McGrain, summon everyone, boat crews included, to the briefing room, on the double. The briefing starts in two minutes and anyone who isn’t there when I start talking is going to regret it,” Hector replied.

“Yes, sir.”

“Paddy, give him a hand rounding up the troops,” Cross continued. “Dave, I need you to get the CCTV feed from the canteen so we can see what’s going on there, and find Sharman while you’re at it.”

A grainy, monochrome image of the canteen appeared onscreen showing two of terrorists who’d helped kill Rod Barth cradling AK-47s. They had taken up a position by the door and the kid in the headphones was standing in front of them with a big grin on his face. Then Imbiss panned the camera and Cross could see what had cause the little bastard’s amusement. A terrorist was dragging a screaming woman through the crowd, accompanied by a mate who was using the club of his AK to beat anyone who tried to obstruct them.

“That’s five terrorists so far, but there may be more where the camera can’t see them,” Imbiss said. “As for hostages, I reckon there’s at least seventy. Could be more of them, too. Now, where’s Sharman . . . ?”

The camera panned to and fro before Imbiss muttered, “Gotcha!” and zoomed in on one section of the canteen.

Cross saw Sharman’s face come into focus and said, “Sharman! This is Cross. I can see you on the security camera. Nod if you can hear me.”

Sharman nodded.

“Good,” Cross went on. “We count five terrorists. Is that correct?”

There was a shake of the head.

“So there are more. How many more?”

Sharman raised his right hand up to his face and gazed intently as if inspecting his fingernails. His thumb, however, was bent and holding down his little finger. So there were three fingers showing.

“I make that three more men making eight in total. Correct?”

Another nod.

That makes sense, Cross thought. Headphones has got well over half the platform crew in one place so he needs enough men to be sure he can pacify them.

“Good work, Sharman,” he said. “Hang tight, we’re coming to get you.”

Sharman gave a discreet thumbs-up.

“Any sign of the other terrorists?” Cross asked.

“I’ve got one guarding the helipad,” Imbiss told him. “I saw some heading toward the derrick, but for some reason the feed is really poor from the production side of the platform and the image keeps breaking up, so I can’t see what they’re doing. Other than that, I’m getting flashes of guys walking down passages in the general accommodation area.”

“I imagine they’re rounding people up.”

“Well, if they are, they’re killing them there and then because I’m not seeing any more people being taken up to the canteen.”

“OK, keep me posted if there are any developments. I’ve got to get this mission under way.” Cross left the command post, walked into the briefing room, saw that everyone was there and got straight down to business. He tasked the various members of his team to deal with the helipad, the production area, the residential and administrative block and the canteen where the bulk of the platform’s staff were being held hostage. Then he described how he hoped to get into the canteen and take out the terrorists who controlled it while limiting the danger to the hostages. It took less than five minutes—enough for another hostage to lose their life, as he was painfully aware—but by the end of it everyone knew exactly what was required of them. He wrapped it up with an order to the boat crews to get their boats in the water faster than they’d ever done before, and weather conditions be damned.

“I don’t care if there’s a storm out there. There are people dying on that platform and we are the only hope of saving them. So get that boat in the water, pronto, or I’ll kick you in myself and you can swim all the way to the rig!”

Té-Bo was enjoying himself. Exactly as Commander Matemba and Monsieur Tumbo had predicted, the entire Magna Grande installation was helpless. No one had come to its rescue, and the only signs of resistance had come from a few of the oil workers who had tried to use hammers and wrenches against men armed with AK-47s. That resistance had not lasted long. Some of the shots had sparked small fires, but the rig’s automatic sprinkler systems had dealt with them. That was good. The rig would be destroyed, but not while Té-Bo and his men were still on it.

His phone started ringing. It was one of his men, Yaya Bokassa, who’d been sent to the control room to monitor what was happening on the platform. “The screens have all gone dead!” he told Té-Bo. “I can’t see what is happening anywhere.”

“Sabotage!” announced Té-Bo dramatically. “Someone must have cut a wire, or smashed the cameras.”

“Impossible! We have accounted for all the personnel on the rig. And how could they kill all the cameras at once? There must be a malfunction in the system.”

“Then make it work again!”

“I don’t know how. I need help.”

Té-Bo gave a disgusted “Pah!”; he stopped the call and turned to face the hostages. “Écoutez! Listen to me!” he called out. “I require any man who knows how works the control room to announce himself now. If you do not, I will kill two of you, right now. You have ten seconds, or I commence to shoot.”

Té-Bo began counting down. He had reached “two” when a man called out, “I’m the control room manager. I’ll tell you what you need to know. Just, please, don’t shoot.”

“Très bien,” Té-Bo said as the man stepped forward, hands above his head. He spat out a series of quickfire orders in French to one of the terrorists and then asked the man in front of him, “What is your name?”

“Herschel Van Dijk,” he replied in a strong Afrikaaner accent.

“So, you say you can operate the control room. Very good. It does not function correctly. So you will make it function. If you do not do this, you will die.”

Té-Bo issued more orders to his man and Herschel was led away toward the control room.

It was a minor setback, but overall Té-Bo was still perfectly content. Everything was going according to plan. He looked at the stopwatch function on his phone. It showed four minutes and fifteen seconds. Time to find another hostage to kill.

Cross took the two patrol boats on a course upwind of the platform, pushing the boats right to the very edge of the lightpool, allowing just enough leeway that they’d still be hard to spot if the pilot of the airborne helicopter happened to be looking in their direction. Every member of the team was armed with a long-barreled Ruger. Many had pouches carrying additional, specialist gear. Two of the SBS men, swimming in the same group as Nastiya, were going in as a pair, one of whom had an additional line attached to his waist, next to his buddy line. The far end of the line was clipped to a canister about a meter long. The last thing Cross did before he went in was to tell him, “Whatever you do, look after that thing. If it doesn’t get on to the rig in one piece, we might as well just jump back into the water and swim home.”

“Don’t worry, boss, you’ll have it.”

“Good. Right, Donnie, time we went in for our evening dip.”

On the Glenallen Cross had talked about swimming to the platform. Once he was actually in the water it was more a matter of frantically trying to produce something remotely close to a freestyle stroke as the waves picked him up, swept him forward and then plunged him into a churning, foaming vortex. Time after time he struggled back up to the surface, gasped for breath and then started thrashing his arms and legs again, feeling the tug of the line that linked him to the much faster, more experienced McGrain.

To make matters worse, the drysuit, sealed at his wrists and ankles and specifically designed to keep moisture coming in or out, was turning into his own private sauna, trapping all the heat generated by his exertions. Not a drop of seawater had penetrated the suit and yet Cross was soaking wet in his own sweat as his temperature rose. Now he understood something all SBS and SEALs had long known: that heatstroke is as great a danger to a combat swimmer as the sea itself. Cross and all his people were in a race against time to get on to the platform before their body heat got to them.

All the while, the gargantuan bulk of the Magna Grande platform loomed ever more imposingly above them and Cross felt smaller and smaller as the sheer scale of what he had to master became ever more apparent. The massive legs with their side supports looked like an immobile, unyielding quartet of steel cliffs, waiting with cruel indifference for the sea to dash the raggle-taggle band of feeble, struggling humans against them. The waves crashing against the legs were forming eddies and rip currents between them and the ocean was propelling Cross directly into the maelstrom so that he faced a choice between being flattened against a leg like a bug on a windscreen, or being drowned as he was sucked down into the hungry sea.

He thanked heavens for McGrain up ahead of him. “Och, it’s no’ so bad, sir,” the Scotsman had said as the leading patrol boat had manoeuvred into position. “Compared to a bad night on the North Sea this is a bloody millpond.”

Now they were close enough that even with the rain and spray battering his eyes, Cross could make out the rusty ladder running down one of the legs that McGrain was aiming for. He saw the SBS veteran turn his head back toward him, though his eyes were focused on something beyond them both. Cross turned, too, to check what McGrain was looking at, and then his blood, so recently close to boiling, seemed to chill to ice in his veins.

A wave was coming toward them. It was higher by far than any they had yet encountered. It was a black wall of water, glinting with the reflected lights from the rig and it seemed as solid as the platform itself; it rose above Cross like a great jackboot, ready to stamp down upon him.

On and on it came, encircling and enfolding Cross. He seemed to be in a long tunnel, whose sides were all water. Then the sides of the tunnel began to collapse as the wave broke and all Cross could do was take one last breath, and pray.

Oohhh, shit!” Donnie McGrain had seen plenty of waves, but never one like this. Where the hell had it come from? It was as if every other wave had been a Transit van and this one was a Chieftain tank. He put his head down, thrust his arms forward in a racing freestyle stroke and kicked hard, ignoring his heaving lungs and aching muscles as he dragged one last burst of speed out of his body. He did not have to look; he could sense the weight of the water arcing over him as he raced the wave to the rig.

The ladder was just a few meters in front of him now. It seemed to be taunting his pleading fingers as he stretched out his right arm and fell just short.

Now he could feel the undertow dragging at him as the wave drew itself up to break with all its might against the human structure that had the impudence to resist its journey across the ocean.

McGrain’s left arm wheeled over his body, reached for the ladder . . . and though his fingertips brushed the metal he could not make them stick.

He kicked again as the crest of the wave hit the leg high above him, made one last, desperate lunge and felt his fist clench around a rung as the water flung him against the ladder, knocking the breath from his lungs. Sensing rather than seeing Cross being hurled at the face of the leg, just a couple of meters away from him, McGrain gasped for air and then the weight of the seven seas seemed to fall on him as the wave plunged down, tore him from the ladder and sucked him deep into its grasp.

It wasn’t just his own descent that was the problem. McGrain had Cross’s weight dragging him down too and he knew that a first-timer, even one as proficient in so many other military disciplines, was bound to feel disoriented when he was plunged under water at night. If Cross started swimming deeper rather than heading for the surface he would drown them both.

But then McGrain felt the line go slack beneath him. For an instant he wondered if Cross had cut the line, not wanting to drag them both down. He was the kind of man who’d do something that insanely self-sacrificial. But then McGrain saw a patch of even deeper, more Stygian black against the gloom of the water, thought: The pontoon! and smashed into raw steel for a second time. He tugged on the line and felt an answering tug back. So Cross was conscious. McGrain yanked the line again, this time pulling upward. He prayed that Cross had got the hint, steadied himself against the pontoon, squatted and then thrust upward. Cross came with him and McGrain started kicking for the surface.

He was out of breath and they were still at least ten, probably more like twenty meters below the surface. McGrain ignored the pain in his lungs and fought the screaming voices in his head tempting him to breathe out, expel all the stale gas from his body and suck clean, fresh air back in.

But there was no air, just water. To breathe in was to drown and die. He had to make do with what he had . . . but he so, so wanted to breathe out.

McGrain kicked again and sensed Cross doing the same thing as the line slackened once again. McGrain could feel his oxygen-deprived brain start fizzing like an untuned TV screen. Blissful, painless unconsciousness was just a moment away. Now it was not his swimming training that he drew upon, but the brutal lessons he had been taught about resisting the pain of torture, blanking out the agony, ignoring all your deepest instincts.

He kicked again, and again, and again, lost in a black, sunless universe in which there was nothing but hurt, and water, and kicking . . . and suddenly his head burst out of the water into the open air and now he could open his mouth and drag the salty air deep down into his starving lungs. He trod water, looked around and saw Cross, behind him, doing the same thing, and beyond him was the ladder, just stuck there imperturbably on the side of the leg as if saying, “Well, where the hell have you been?”

The sea seemed a little calmer now and McGrain had little difficulty grabbing hold of it, climbing a few rungs and helping Cross up after him. “Right,” he said, “let’s get to the top of this bastard rig.”

There was no sign of any hostiles on the spider deck, or any evidence that they had been there. The platform was rectangular in shape and at each end of the long sides there were metal stairways, enclosed in protective steel mesh but otherwise open to the elements, that zig-zagged up the outer sides of the platform. They rose past three lower decks to the main deck itself. The accommodation and administration block stood at one end of the main deck, with the helideck perched on its roof. The various processing functions of the production block were at the other end of the deck, as far away from the living quarters as possible, with the derrick towering up above the platform in-between. Once he was out of the water, Cross had put in his earpiece and was now receiving information from Dave Imbiss once again.

“We’ve lost another two hostages,” Imbiss told him. “Hostiles are still distributed as before: most in the canteen and accommodation areas, some by the derrick—I think they’re down near the turntable, right by the drill-string, though the signal’s still breaking up. Doesn’t look like anyone’s expecting company. The hostile by the helipad is the only lookout but he’s not the outdoors type—he’s spent most of the time trying to get out of the weather. I suggest taking him out first, just in case he starts doing his job.”

“Copy that,” said Cross. “What about the crews of the Hinds—can they see anything?”

“Doubt it. The ones on the pad won’t have a line of sight from their cockpit to anything happening beneath them. As for the bird in the air, if anyone’s hanging out the side door, looking down, they could see people moving on open decks, maybe. But the visibility’s lousy, so it would be really hard to distinguish us from their buddies and unless these guys are trained air-sea rescue personnel, which I seriously doubt, I don’t see them wanting to stick their heads outside the cabin in a storm like this.”

“Understood. Any indication of anyone placing IEDs?”

“Not that I can see, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

On one level Cross was pleased by the apparent carelessness of the men who had seized the platform. Their failure to take any of the obvious steps required to hurt anyone mounting a counter-attack had made it much easier for Cross to get his people aboard. But this was very clearly a well-planned and ruthlessly executed operation. So why make such an obvious mistake? And what were the helicopters doing, hanging around when—as he had every intention of demonstrating—they could easily be destroyed? It was plain that whoever had planned this attack had never had any intention of letting it play out for very long. In fact, it had every appearance of being a suicide mission. But to what purpose? Was it just a case of killing as many oil workers as possible and making a mess of the platform? Or was there something else?

That was a question for later. Cross had to focus all his attention on the here and now. O’Quinn and Thompson had been tasked with securing the helideck. One swift movement of Cross’s hand was all the signal they needed to get on their way.

Now the other teams took up their positions at the bottom of their respective stairwells. McGrain was on the far side of the spider deck, ready to lead his team up toward the derrick to take out the hostiles there. Cross and his three men were heading for the accommodation block, with the aim of clearing a route to the canteen. Once there, Cross had to achieve the safe rescue of the hostages and destruction of the hostiles who were holding them. All the men were under orders to minimize the use of ammunition by shooting to kill at extreme close range, with minimum risk to the hostages or the safety of the platform itself. But in order to fulfil those orders, they had to get into the canteen, prevent the hostiles opening fire and simply gunning all their captives down and find a way to get close enough to men armed with AK-47 assault rifles to be able to kill them at point-blank range.

No sane commander would ever sanction such a wildly improbable set of objectives unless he had absolutely no alternative. That was, however, the situation in which Cross found himself. He had one very slender chance of making his plan work. And for that, he was counting on Nastiya.

Paddy O’Quinn was standing behind the stern of an orange lifeboat that was positioned at the top of a slide from which it could be launched into the sea. Dave Imbiss had guided him to that vantage point, barely thirty feet from the foot of the ladder that led up to the helideck. The sentry was huddled beneath the overhang of the deck itself. He didn’t look like much of a hostile, more like a scrawny kid who’d got the job no one else wanted and was now as miserable as countless sentries through the ages who’ve been sent outside to keep watch on wet and windy nights. The lookout was such a pathetic sight that O’Quinn felt genuinely sorry for him, but that did not alter the fact that he represented a potential danger to the mission. And so, resting the long brushed-steel barrel of his Ruger against the hull of the lifeboat, O’Quinn fired twice, secure in the knowledge that there was no way anyone in the helicopter that stood on the helideck with its engine idling could possibly have heard the shots even if the Ruger had not possessed its inbuilt suppressor. O’Quinn had aimed for the kid’s heart. Both rounds hit him in the center of the chest and as his body crumpled to the ground, Thompson dashed from his own position, even closer to the helideck, picked the corpse up and pulled it deeper into the shadows.

Making sure to remain under cover, O’Quinn made his way to where Thompson was standing. They were now just a few feet from the bottom of the ladder. Soon they would both be dashing up it, but not yet.

O’Quinn switched on his comms. “Hostile down. Repeat, hostile down. The way is clear. Over.”

“Message received and I’ll pass it on. Good work,” Imbiss replied.

A second later Cross was informed that O’Quinn had dealt with the lookout. Now the other three teams could start making their ways up through the platform and the rescue mission could begin.

There were countless danger spots aboard the Magna Grande rig, but high on the list was the wellhead where the oil being pumped up from hundreds of meters beneath the seabed finally came aboard. So that was one of the key targets for any anti-terrorist mission and McGrain, being the man in the team with the most experience on offshore platforms, was given the job of securing that area, and the drillers’ cabin, from which the entire drilling operation was controlled. His team of three other men included Terry Flowers, a Royal Marines veteran who’d qualified as a Class One Ammunition Technician and was thus trained, among many other things, to disable any booby traps or explosive devices that the insurgents might have left along the way. The quartet walked slowly toward their target area, looking like a group of World War I soldiers who’d been blinded by gas. McGrain was in front, with his head down, sweeping a torch from side to side, with Flowers walking behind him, his eyes focused on the beam from the torch. Flowers had one hand on McGrain’s shoulder, ready to squeeze hard if the torch lit up anything that might be a trip wire or pressure-plates that could trigger a blast. The other two shuffled along behind, but their attention was concentrated on what was going on around them as they looked for any sign of the terrorists themselves.

They’d stopped three times, all for false alarms, by the time they came to the base of the derrick. McGrain stopped and held up his hand, halting his little column. Then he gave another quick series of hand signals that sent the men fanning out around him: Flowers to his left, the other two to the right. At the bottom of the derrick was an open working area, like a clearing at the heart of a steel forest, where pipes and girders took the place of trees. The drillers’ room was some twenty feet or so above them, overlooking the whole area, and at the center of this clearing rose the drill pipe itself: the heart and purpose of the platform.

Two hostiles were crouched at the base of the pipe. They were placing blocks of C4 explosive beside it. And if those blocks should ever go off and turn a pipe filled with oil into a gigantic flamethrower then, as Donnie McGrain knew only too well, you could kiss the rig and everyone on it goodbye.

Herschel Van Dijk had spent no more than three minutes in the main control room before he worked out what the matter was with the platform’s CCTV system: someone had hacked it. The feed to the control room had been cut off, but he’d bet his last buck someone out there was watching what was going on. He looked up at the terrorist who was glaring at him with a look of deep suspicion and mistrust right across his face and cradling his AK-47 in a way that suggested he wouldn’t need much of an excuse to use it. Wasn’t your lot, was it, you bloodthirsty bastard? Too busy killing my brus. So who was it then, eh?

There were no more than three or four men on board who had anything approaching the skills required to do a job like this. Van Dijk was one of them and the others were currently stuck in the canteen waiting their turn to die. That meant it was someone on the outside, and the very obvious reason why they’d done it was to help them get on the rig and move about it unobserved. So help was coming and now his continued existence on the planet depended on his ability to string his captors along for long enough that the guys in the white hats had time to get aboard and save the day.

He spent another couple of minutes scrolling rams of code across his screen, opening different files and generally trying to look like a man getting to the very depths of the problem. Somewhere off in the direction of the canteen he heard a burst of gunfire: that was another one of his workmates killed. Van Dijk kept the charade going for a little bit longer and then looked at the terrorist. “Você fala português?” he asked.

The man looked at him blankly.

Well, if you can’t make out a word of Portuguese, you’re not from Angola, Van Dijk thought. So what the bloody hell are you doing on a rig in Angolan waters?

He was pretty certain he’d heard the terrs’ leader using French words, which meant that these men could come from any number of French-speaking African nations, from Morocco to Madagascar. So the next statement he made was in Swahili, the Bantu language that is the closest thing to a common tongue across a great swathe of Africa: “Mimi haja ya kuzungumza na bosi wako—hivi sasa!” or “I want to speak to your boss—now!”

“Kwa nini?” the terrorist replied: “Why?”

So now Van Dijk knew one thing about the men who’d attacked the rig: they came from a part of Africa where both French and Swahili were spoken, and that could only be the eastern half of the DRC. So they weren’t Angolan, they were Congolese, and so, once again: what the hell were they doing here?

Staying in Swahili, Van Dijk said, “Tell him the reason the cameras aren’t working is that the computer that controls them has crashed. Do you understand that, boy?”

The terrorist’s liquid brown eyes narrowed. “Yes, I know what a computer is, musungu.”

Van Dijk grinned. When the first white explorers had arrived in East Africa, the local tribes saw these strange men walking across their lands, not knowing where they were going, and called them “mzungu,” which means “aimless wanderer.” Since then the term had come to mean “white man’ and was used, with regional variations, by tens of millions of Swahili speakers.

“Glad we understand each other, then,” he said.

The terrorist was about to reach for his phone, but then he realized he had a problem: he couldn’t make a call and point a gun at the same time. He frowned, trying to work out how to solve the problem. Van Dijk had to turn back to the computer so that he didn’t laugh in the man’s face. He’d provoked him enough already; any more and there could be trouble. He started tapping away at the keyboard, looking as if he was doing something to fix the system, while actually typing complete gibberish.

Van Dijk heard a noise behind him, no louder than a knock on the door.

A second later the terrorist’s head and shoulders slammed down on the edge of the U-shaped desk at which Van Dijk was sitting, and lay there, gazing up at him through sightless, wide-open eyes. There was a small red hole at the back of his head.

Van Dijk spun around on his chair. A tall, broad-shouldered man in a black drysuit was standing there. He had a scar over one eye and a nose that was either born crooked, or made that way by someone else’s fist. In his right hand he was holding a stainless-steel pistol with a weirdly long barrel, while his left index finger was raised to his lips: “Ssshhh . . .”

Imbiss had told Cross to expect one hostile and one member of the rig’s crew in the control room and that’s exactly what he’d found. Better yet, the oilman had reacted with admirable cool to seeing a corpse hit the desk about two feet from where he was sitting. Keeping his voice low, Cross glanced at the dead terrorist and asked, “Any more of them around?”

“Not here,” Van Dijk replied.

Cross nodded an acknowledgement and then got on the comms to Imbiss. “Control room cleared, one hostile down. Thanks for the steer, Dave. What’s the score so far, over?”

“One hostile at the helipad. Paddy’s waiting for the go-signal. Two by the wellhead, McGrain says they’re laying a charge. Signal’s intermittent but I think there are two more in the driller’s room, and I count another pair in the galley. There’s one more standing guard outside the canteen, seven inside. Add the one you’ve just taken out, I make that sixteen, which is all of them.”

“Right, I’ll take my lads up to the canteen. We’ll deal with the sentry. Then we’ll await your go-signal. Keep me updated with any developments. Over.”

Cross turned his attention back to the man at the control desk. “It’s about to kick off,” he said. “So stay here and keep your head down.”

“Wait,” said Van Dijk. “What are you: white Zims? Kenyan? I hear Africa in your voice.”

Cross didn’t have time for expatriate chit-chat. “I was born in Kenya. What of it?” he asked impatiently.

“Because you’ll get what I’m about to say. My Bantu friend here didn’t understand a word of Portuguese, but he spoke Swahili. And his boss kept breaking into French. See what I’m getting at?”

It took a second for Cross to focus on something other than the next stage in the anti-terrorist operation and follow what the man was saying. “So they’re not Angolan or Cabindan . . .”

“Ja . . . and . . . ?”

“They’re Congolese. French and Swahili, they have to be.”

“Correct. And what are a bunch of pekkies from the Congo doing on this rig, eh? That’s what I want to know.”

Good question, thought Cross. He grunted once more, then said, “Thanks,” as he turned for the door. There would be a time when that piece of information and the question it provoked might come in very handy. But now was not that time. Now it did not matter where the terrorists came from, only that they were taken out. The other three men in his squad had been checking out the offices and meeting rooms in the vicinity of the control center. None of them had found any hostiles, but they reported several bodies of dead crew members. Cross could see the discoveries had only made his men more angry than they already were. “Stay cool,” he said. “Keep your emotions under control. Right, now we deal with the canteen.”

Nastiya was leading a four-person squad, tasked with securing the galley area adjacent to the canteen. Imbiss had warned her to expect at least two hostiles. Her men comprised Lee Donovan, an ex-Para who was one of the two non-specialists McGrain had reckoned was ready for the swim, and two SBS veterans: Halsey and Moran. They were making their way down the passageway that led to the galley, with Donovan on point, Nastiya behind him and the two SBS men bringing up the rear. Halsey had pulled the canister on the swim to the rig. Now he had its contents on his back, two metal cylinders that made him look like a scuba diver. He had been positioned third in line, the safest place to be, but not because anyone cared particularly about him: it was the cylinders that mattered.

Suddenly they heard the sound of gunfire and screaming from up ahead. Nastiya picked up speed and ran down the passage and past the swing doors to the galley, coming to a halt with her back against the bulkhead on the far side of the door. Donovan took up a similar station on the other side of the door. Halsey held back, waiting a few meters down the passageway, with Moran standing guard over him and his precious load.

By the doors, Donovan pulled a stun grenade from a pouch. The whole operation had been conducted as silently as possible, but the cacophony inside the galley had rendered that an unnecessary irrelevance. Nastiya counted down with her fingers: three . . . two . . . one. On zero, she pointed at the doors. Donovan stepped up, kicked one door open and threw in the grenade, leaping back out of the way as a burst of firing came from the galley. Half a second later the grenade detonated in an explosion of dazzling light and ear-splitting noise. Nastiya and Donovan barged their shoulders through the swing doors and with both hands gripping their Rugers raised their arms so that they were already in the firing position as they entered the galley.

The move was just a precaution. The flash-bang should have left anyone in the vicinity of the galley entrance dazed and incapable of defending themselves.

But the grenade had rolled up against one side of the open door to one of the four walk-in refrigeration units that ran in a line down the left-hand side of the galley.

Two of the hostiles were on the far side of the fridge door, sheltered from the blast. One of them came out from behind it brandishing his AK-47 and fired a three-round burst that hit Donovan in a diagonal pattern across his chest, hitting his heart and lungs and killing him at once.

Nastiya fired back, but the hostile had darted back behind the fridge door. She aimed two more shots straight at the door. The door was sturdily built with two layers of steel separated by tightly packed insulating material and the lightweight around failed to penetrate it. But Nastiya had anticipated that before she pulled the trigger. She just wanted to keep her enemies’ heads down.

Now they had a stalemate. She and the hostiles were less than ten feet apart. If the men came out from behind the fridge, she would kill them. If she exposed herself to their fire, they would kill her.

Nastiya heard a moan coming from inside the walk-in fridge. It was silenced by two gunshots. She glanced around the galley. In front of her stood a cook’s station with a steel work surface next to a six-burner hob that was positioned at right angles to the line of fridges. One of the cooks must have been about to prep a tuna when the attack began because the fish was lying on a chopping board, with a cleaver and filleting knife beside it. Nastiya noted the precise position of the two knives, fired another burst of bullets to keep her enemies’ heads down, then slung her gun over her shoulder and, as silently as a cat on a fur rug, sprang forward, placing her hands on the work surface and vaulting over it. As she did, her right hand gripped the handle of the cleaver, so that when she hit the floor and turned toward the open fridge she was already lifting her arm and then bringing it down in a throwing motion that sent the cleaver through the air, end over end, right into the throat of one of the hostiles.

His comrade had his back turned to Nastiya and his gun hanging loose by his side as he faced into the fridge. When he saw his comrade go down he turned, and as he did Nastiya sprang forward, picking up the filleting knife in her left hand, transferring it into her right and twisting her body to mirror his turn, so when she reached him she was already behind him and her left hand was over his mouth, pulling his head back so that her newfound knife could fillet his throat.

As the man fell at her feet, Nastiya saw that he had been holding a smartphone in his hand. The bastard had been filming what he and his pal had been up to. Nastiya muttered a string of contemptuous Russian expletives as she picked the phone up and tucked it away in a pouch, then she cast her eyes over the interior of the walk-in fridge. There were five bodies—all south-east Asian—lying between the shelves filled with provisions, like so many joints of meat. All had been shot multiple times at close range. She checked all the bodies for signs of life, but found none.

Five kitchen staff: that surely wasn’t enough to provide three hot meals a day, each with multiple food options, to 120 hungry workers. Nastiya went back out into the galley and opened the next fridge door, ducking as someone hurled a large can of tomatoes at her.

“Stop!” she shouted. “I’m a friend!”

It was not so much her words as the female pitch of her voice and the fact that she was speaking English that registered with the eight cold, shivering, fearful catering staff who emerged from their hiding places behind, and in some cases lying on, the shelves.

“Are there any more of you?” Nastiya asked as they followed her out of the fridge.

“No,” one of them said. “Just our friends”—he nodded at the other open door—“in there.”

“If you want to be safe you must leave here,” she said, leading them back out of the galley and into the passage. She pointed at Moran: “This man will look after you. Stay here and don’t move unless he tells you to.”

Nastiya waited a moment to make sure that she had been both understood and obeyed, then her voice took on a very different, impersonal tone as she told Imbiss, “Galley secured. Two hostiles killed. One man down, Donovan, killed. Multiple crew fatalities. Eight further crew secured alive and well. Am proceeding as planned. Over.”

She heard Imbiss reply, “Message received and understood. Good luck. Out.”

Nastiya looked at Halsey and said: “OK, let’s go.”

She returned to the galley with the SBS man just behind her, passing the carnage by the fridges, and heading into another area filled with bakers’ ovens and wheeled metal shelf units stacked with loaves of bread. She stopped in the middle of the floor and looked up at the ceiling, where a steel mesh grill had been inset between two strips of neon light, reached inside the waterproof pouch attached to her drysuit and pulled out a gas mask.

“I’m going to need a leg-up,” she said, before pulling the mask over her head.

Halsey stood beneath the grill with his two hands cupped. Nastiya placed her right leg on his hands and was lifted up into the air. She reached up as far as she could and pushed the grill up and out of the way, then gripped one side of the grill with both hands and pulled herself up into the open vent. Halsey helped her on her way, grunting with effort as he raised his hands above his head until Nastiya’s shoulders were through the hole, then her hips and finally her entire body had disappeared up into the darkness.

Nastiya had been chosen for this part of the mission because she was the smallest, lightest and most nimble member of the team. But even she had precious little room to move inside the air-conditioning duct, and the gas mask not only impaired the already limited visibility but added to the claustrophobia that came from being in a cramped metal tube. With some difficulty, she manoeuvred herself until she was peering like a goggle-eyed monster from the vent through which she’d just climbed. She lay down on her side and stretched an arm down toward Halsey as he swung one of the cylinders off his back and held it up for her to grab.

There was a handle at the top of the cylinder. Nastiya wrapped her fingers around it and pulled with all her might. As long as Halsey was giving her a hand from below the task of dragging the cylinder up into the duct was not too tough, but then it was beyond his reach and she was taking the entire weight. “Mother of God, this is heavy!” Nastiya muttered into her gas mask as she hauled the cylinder, inch by inch, up and over the lip of the vent until it landed beside her with a clang of metal upon metal that seemed to echo and reverberate off into the distance.

Nastiya froze. If any of the terrorists, less than twenty meters away in the canteen, had heard that crash and took it into their heads to check out what had caused it the whole mission was done for. She waited, her heart thumping and the sweat of tension and fear prickling her armpits. But the moment passed, there was no sound of any reaction from the canteen and very slowly, doing her utmost to drag the cylinder as quietly as possible, she crawled and slithered into the black embrace of the air-conditioning duct.

There were two vents up ahead, marked by the columns of light that rose from them and acted like beacons to Nastiya. She crawled around the first and went to the furthest one, where she placed the cylinder on its side. It had a short length of hose protruding from its top and Nastiya positioned this right above the vent, with its tip pointing down.

Next she went all the way back to the opening above the galley, where Halsey was still waiting, and repeated the whole painful, nerve-racking procedure, but this time leaving the cylinder by the first of the two vents she had earlier passed. Next to the hose, on the top of the cylinder, there was a flat around tap. Nastiya turned it, scuttled a little further into the depth of the air-conditioning duct and whispered: “Gas on.”

“I hear you,” Imbiss replied.

Then she crawled on down the duct to the furthest vent and turned the second gas tank on as well.

Then she slumped back against the side of the vent and took a series of slow deep breaths through her gas mask. She was calming her mind, gathering her strength. Not long to go now.

Té-Bo looked at his timer and saw that five minutes were nearly up. Time for another execution and another body to add to the blood-drenched pile that was building up in one corner of the room. A couple of the victims had soiled themselves in fear and the stench of their excrement was adding to the general smell of sweaty bodies crammed into a confined space. Not that Té-Bo was bothered. The slums he had grown up in had stunk far worse and it wouldn’t be long now before they’d be on their way. Once the bomb was set beneath the derrick, he would order his men to fire at will into the hostages, killing them all, and then it would just be a matter of getting on to the helicopters and heading back to base.

“Alors, it is time!” he called out and then ordered two of his men to seize another victim from the crowd.

By now any thought of resistance seemed to have left the hostages. Té-Bo could see that they were all thinking of nothing other than saving their own skins, somehow staying alive long enough for someone to come to their rescue: But that someone will never come.

His men grabbed a white man with very pale skin and thinning red hair. He put up a feeble struggle as he tried to wriggle free of their grasp, but a gun-butt to his kidneys soon knocked the fight out of him. They were dragging the man back to the execution site, where Té-Bo was checking that his gun was still in perfect working order, when a man’s voice rang out from the back of the room.

“Take me!” he said. “I know that man: he has a wife and children. I don’t. I’ve got no one depending on me. Take me!”

Té-Bo laughed. “You are in luck, m’sieur,” he said to the redheaded man, who had just been shoved down on to his knees and was moaning, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die . . .” again and again.

“Take him away,” Té-Bo commanded and the man was pulled back on to his feet. Again he resisted, unaware that his life was being saved until he saw the other man walking at a calm, steady pace through the crowd toward their captors. Now the condemned man realized that this newcomer was taking his place and he cried out, “Thank you, thank you! God bless you,” before he was shoved back into the crowd.

Come on, Cross, get your bloody arse in gear! Sharman thought as he walked through the disbelieving crowd of hostages to the terrorists waiting to kill him. Their leader had a big grin on his face, clearly loving the idea that anyone would be so stupid as to volunteer for their own execution. His mates were poking each other with their elbows, grinning all over their faces, enjoying the show—all except for one, who was filming the whole episode, adding extra entertainment to the live snuff movie being uploaded for the whole world to see.

But dying was not part of Sharman’s plan. He had positioned himself beneath one of the air-conditioning vents and heard the noise of someone moving in the duct above him, followed by the faint hissing of gas and the sweet smell that Imbiss had warned him to expect. He’d also found himself feeling a little lightheaded, even spacey. But his mind was still working clearly enough to know what he was doing. He was taking his time as he approached the small group of armed men, looking around him, spotting the first yawn here, a woman shaking her head as if trying to clear it over there. But there was no sign of anything happening to the terrorists just yet. They still looked full of beans. No . . . wait. One of them had just rubbed a hand across his face and another was blinking with slow, heavy eyelids. But the hands that now took hold of him were full of energy and strength and the terrorist leader with his big Beats headphones was bright-eyed as he shouted at the camera: “Are you watching, Monsieur le Président? Do you doubt the will of the Cabindan people? Do you think we are cowards or old women who collapse at the sight of blood? No, we are not! We are men and we will kill and kill again. The five minutes have passed and so another . . .” He gave a stifled yawn. “. . . another one must die.”

Sharman saw his own killer come toward him with a gun in his hand. He saw the gun being raised. He prayed that he had actually seen a tremor of the barrel as it was raised to his head . . . And then his world went black and he was plunged into absolute nothingness.

Go! Go! Go!” Imbiss shouted into the comms system.

On the ladder just below the lip of the helideck O’Quinn and Thompson unholstered and loaded their Rugers. Then O’Quinn mouthed a single word: “Now!”

The two men sprang up on to the deck and started blazing away at the crew inside the glazed cockpit of the Hind that was sitting there, its rotors idling.

The Hind was armed with a devastating 12.7-mm Yakushev Borzov Gatling gun, with a 1,470-round magazine capable of destroying entire units of infantry. But the magazine was empty, for the very Air Force officers who had accepted bribes to let the two helicopters be taken for the night had refused to sanction the loading of any ammo or rockets, for fear that they might be double-crossed and find the Hinds’ weapons being turned on them. So now the crew had no means of firing back.

This need not have mattered. The helicopter’s armor was famously tough and well able to withstand small-arms fire. But the windows around the cockpit were made of toughened glass and it takes strong nerves for men to remain calm and immobile while bullets are cracking against windows right by their heads. The pilot did what Cross and O’Quinn had expected he would and powered up his rotors for the speediest possible take-off. He heaved the Hind up into the air, not noticing that his enemy had actually ceased firing, and turned the helicopter away from the platform and out to sea. The pilot of the second Hind, still circling above, saw what his comrade was doing, assumed—with considerable relief—that they were abandoning their passengers to their fate and followed his leader.

They’d cleared the platform by no more than 100 meters when O’Quinn said, “Patrol boat one, fire at will,” into his mike.

Two missiles burst out of the darkness beyond the platform where the patrol boats were lurking, screamed across the sky and hit the Hinds beside their exhaust outlets. The helicopters exploded and burning wreckage fell through the rain to the foaming waters of the Atlantic.

O’Quinn spoke again: “Both birds down. The hostiles are now trapped on the platform. I say again, the hostiles are trapped.” Then he turned to Thompson and said, “Right, let’s see if Cross needs a helping hand.”

McGrain had sent two of his men up toward the drillers’ room. Any hostiles looking through its glass-fronted façade would have a clear line of sight, and thus of fire, down on to the area beneath the derrick where the hostiles had almost finished arming their bomb. So they had to be dealt with.

The second they heard the go-signal the men kicked in the door of the drillers’ room and threw in a flash-bang, praying that its blast would be contained within the room’s steel walls. Then they charged in, found two dazed, disoriented hostiles and killed them the old-fashioned way, with wire garrottes that sliced through their windpipes and the carotid arteries and left them bleeding and suffocating to death.

McGrain had intended to do the same to the men by the turntable, but they saw him and Flowers coming, picked their rifles off the floor beside them and turned to shoot. McGrain had no option but to open fire himself: a few well-aimed rounds from a .22 pistol had far less potential to cause fire or explosion than two magazine-loads of automatic fire from an AK-47 sprayed at a moving target.

The two hostiles went down. Flowers had run straight to the IED. “So, can you disable it?” McGrain asked.

Flowers grinned. “Piece of piss, mate. Absolute piece of piss.”

Nastiya turned off the tap on one tank of the sevoflurane anaesthetic that Dr. Rob Noble had supplied to Cross before the team left London and then scrambled along the duct to turn the other one off too. She rolled it away from the vent, kicked the vent open and dropped through it on to one of the canteen dining tables. As she landed, she saw Halsey and Moran burst through the door to the galley, race through the area behind the serving counter and enter the canteen itself.

Then she looked around through her mask and there, at the far end of the room was Cross.

There are times when stun grenades simply won’t do the job. They work very well on a few closely grouped people in a confined space, but are much less effective against multiple targets spread around a wider area, such as a large works canteen. One alternative is knockout gas, but that has a less-than-noble history as a means of rescuing hostages. In October 2002, the Russians used the ventilation of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow to distribute a chemical agent—its identity a secret ever since—that incapacitated around forty armed Chechen rebels and the 850 audience members that they had taken hostage. All the rebels were killed, but 130 hostages also died from adverse reactions to the gas. The Russians had never seen any need to apologize for their actions: better that than have all the hostages killed by the grenades, mines and improvised explosives hanging from their captors’ bodies.

Cross accepted that logic, but if he ever used gas, as he feared he might have to on either the platform or the FPSO, he did not want to have to explain why his actions had killed any innocent people at all, let alone a hundred or more.

He’d put his requirements to Rob Noble: “I need a gas and a means of delivering it that will make the bad guys unable to fight without actually taking out any of their victims.”

“You do realize that one requirement virtually cancels out the other, don’t you?” Noble had replied. “I mean, if you really want to put someone out cold, the thing I’d choose is M99, otherwise known as etorphine. It’s an opiate vets use to incapacitate large animals. Where humans are concerned it’s a Class A drug, largely because it doesn’t just knock people out, it’s liable to kill them too. There is an antidote, but it has to be injected, and if you’ve ever got tens, or even hundreds, of people to worry about, that’s a non-starter.”

“So what do you suggest?” Cross had asked.

“Sevoflurane. It’s an effective anaesthetic, frequently used in surgery, and it’s perfectly safe if properly administered. Now, you’re hardly going to have a platoon of trained anaesthetists caring for all the people you want to knock out, but you should be all right if you deliver it in modest concentrations and get it out of the air as fast as possible afterward.”

“That’s a bit tricky. Most ship’s portholes and oil-platform windows are sealed shut.”

“Well, blow the buggers open, then,” said Noble. “I’ve never known you to be shy of a good, big bang.”

So now Cross was charging into the canteen, which looked like the aftermath of a drunken, drugged-up night of debauchery as people sprawled across chairs and tables, or staggered around in slow, befuddled confusion. Ahead of him Cross saw the terrorists’ leader, the one he’d labelled Beats Boy, trying to point his gun at Sharman’s head. But the weapon seemed to be getting heavier and heavier in the young terrorist’s hand and when Sharman slumped to the floor, it was the gas not a bullet that was responsible.

Cross hit Beats Boy with a double-tap. Looking around he saw other hostiles going down, dying in slow motion as the Cross Bow team took them out with cold, practiced precision. He picked up an AK-47 dropped by one of the terrorists and aimed it at a window. This was a far more powerful firearm than his lightweight pistol and it was time to let some air in.

The men who had stormed the rig had all been dealt with. Now the main priority was getting all the hostages out of the canteen before they suffered any side-effects from the sevoflurane, other than feeling very, very sleepy. Cross had gratefully peeled the gas mask from his face and was just telling Paddy O’Quinn to organize a body count of the hostages, rescuers and terrorists when Dave Imbiss came over the comms. “I’ve got some people here would really like to express their thanks for what you all just did, so I’m putting this out to everyone: go ahead, sir . . .”

“Hi, Hector, this is John Bigelow, I just want to say on behalf of everyone here at Bannock Oil and, I’m sure, of all the loved ones of the folks you and your people rescued today: you did a great job. I always had faith that you would rise to the challenges of working in this offshore environment, but I never dreamed that you would be called upon so soon, to face such a terrible situation.”

“Thank you, John, that means a lot to all of us . . .” Cross replied, thinking, Really? You didn’t dream? Not even when I told you, in plain English, exactly what might happen?

“We’re just sorry we couldn’t save everyone,” Cross added. “But we did all we could and we certainly made sure that the people who attacked this rig paid a very heavy price for their crime.”

“We’re very glad you did,” Bigelow replied. “It sends out a message to anyone who’s thinking of assaulting an oil installation that they can expect immediate retribution. Now I’d just like to hand over to someone else who’d like to say a few words.”

“This is Vice Admiral Scholz from the Fleet Forces Command of the U.S. Navy. We spoke earlier, if you recall, Mr. Cross.”

“Yes, sir, you gave us a very clear picture of our situation,” Cross replied.

Scholz laughed uncomfortably. “Which wasn’t too good, as I recall.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, that only underlines the scale of your achievement. What you and your people achieved tonight, recapturing an offshore rig in the most testing weather conditions, with virtually no time to plan your mission . . . I’d say that constitutes a military miracle. If you were a U.S. serviceman, they’d be pinning quite a medal on your chest, and on all the personnel who supported you so valiantly.”

“Thank you, sir. We were just doing our jobs to the best of our ability.”

“And you should all be very proud of yourselves.”

The line from the U.S. went dead, to be replaced by the sound of a dozen ex-soldiers making sarcastic remarks about the sudden stench of corporate and military horse manure.

“I could use some fresh air myself,” said Cross and headed out on to the main deck to get it.

Hey, Johnny,” said Chico Torres on the bridge of the Mother Goose, “you wanna do a countdown? Cause our baby’s about to blow—just a few minutes to go now.”

Congo laughed. “Yeah, let’s be Mission Control, take it right on down to blast-off. So, which way do I look to see the big show?”

“Dead astern. Tell you what, why don’t we go down to the bar, fix ourselves a good drink, you know, raise a glass to a job well done.”

“Hell, we don’t know it was well done,” Congo objected.

“Believe me, Johnny. I was there, and it was done just fine. So, like I say, we get a drink, we go out on to the aft deck . . . you don’t mind a bit of wind and rain, right? That’s where we’ll get the best view.”

“I gotta tell you, Chico, I don’t hold with getting wet, as a rule. But on this particular occasion, I might just make an exception. C’mon, let’s go see what they got behind that bar.”

The storm had abated and there was only a gentle drizzle falling over the Magna Grande field. Cross and O’Quinn were standing on the main deck of the rig, leaning on a guardrail and looking out over the ocean, straight toward the Bannock A, a mile away across the water.

“So, Donovan was the only man we lost,” Cross said.

“Yeah, no one else was even wounded.”

“He was a good man. Had a wife and a young kid, didn’t he? Make sure they’re looked after . . . Still, one man in fourteen: I’d have taken those odds an hour ago. How about rig crew?”

“Twenty-nine dead, more than forty wounded, but most of those are no more than bumps and bruises. There are also about a dozen missing, but it looks like a lot of people found places to hide, so it could be a while before they all come out of the woodwork.”

“How about the ones with serious injuries?”

“There’s seven of them and we’re working out the best way of getting them treatment, either on the Glenallen or the Bannock A. There’s a sick bay here, of course, but the medic was one of the hostages who got shot. He was number five.”

Cross sighed and shook his head. “We lost too many crew, but I can’t think of any way we could have got here sooner, or done a cleaner job.”

“Don’t even go there, Heck. You heard that admiral fella, you pulled off a military miracle.”

“No, if it had been a miracle, I’d have walked on the water to get here.”

O’Quinn laughed, but then said, “Seriously, he’s right . . . We had no help from anyone, no air support, no proper training on the rig . . .”

“I’ll bloody well have words with Bigelow about that. He can count his lucky stars his precious platform didn’t go up in smoke.”

“Exactly . . . Look, we saved three-quarters of all the people on this rig, and you were the man in charge. Suppose someone had saved three-quarters of all the people in the Twin Towers. Would you bollock him for not getting the other quarter out?”

“Of course not . . .” Cross grimaced. “But you know as well as I do, Paddy, that it only takes one smart-arse journalist or ambulance-chasing lawyer to say we could have done better and suddenly everyone’s saying it was a disaster.”

“Ach, screw them, what the hell do they know?”

“About the things we have to do?” Cross asked. “Nothing. They couldn’t even imagine. And you’re right, we did a good job tonight, a bloody good job.”

On the Mother Goose, Torres and Congo were looking to the east, swigging from bottles of Bud and Cristal respectively. Torres was keeping an eye on the timer displayed on his mobile phone. “OK, baby, here we go,” he said. “Ten . . .”

Congo joined in as they both intoned, “Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . .”

The submersible sled that Torres had towed behind the mini-subs was anchored to a spot directly beneath the stationary hull of the Bannock A. On it were approximately 4000 pounds of high explosive, with a sealed, waterproof detonator linked to a timer that was itself co-ordinated precisely with the one on Chico Torres’s phone.

And so, at the very second that Torres and Congo counted, “One . . . blast-off!” the gigantic bomb went off. The force of the shock waves pushing the water away from the epicenter of the blast created a giant air bubble directly under the Bannock A. This meant that the 300,000 tons of ship, refinery and oil that had been supported by the water in which it was floating suddenly had nothing beneath it. So the entire weight was suddenly bearing down on a keel that was effectively suspended in mid-air.

And the keel snapped.

From where they were standing, Cross and O’Quinn saw, but could not really comprehend, a series of events that took place in an astonishingly fast sequence.

The Bannock A, like the oil platform, was lit up at night like an industrial Las Vegas, topped by the flaming gas coming out of its towering chimney pipe.

Suddenly the lights seemed to rise up into the air.

Then they heard the muffled sound of the underwater explosion.

The dazzling display of lights now plummeted back down as the bubble that had pushed the Bannock A skywards collapsed in upon itself, dropping the entire vessel back down into the sea.

There was a second, far greater explosion as the Bannock A blew itself apart, a volcanic eruption of flame and smoke, followed immediately by a supersonic shock wave that hit Cross and Quinn and threw them to the steel deck, then the deafening sound of the detonation, and finally a wave as big as the one that had almost drowned Cross hurling itself at the oil platform in a fury of water and spray.

Their ears ringing so that neither could hear what the other was shouting, Cross and O’Quinn picked themselves up and staggered back to the railing. They looked out across the water through scorched retinas and saw nothing but darkness. There were no lights, no flames, nothing.

The Bannock A and every living soul upon it had been utterly obliterated.

Cross was stunned, his senses still befuddled by the sheer force of the explosion. He screwed up his eyes and stared as hard as he could, but still there was nothing to be seen except that now he could detect flames dancing on the water, as if the ocean itself was on fire. It took him a few seconds to work out that they were patches of burning oil, floating on the surface.

Cross thought about the people who had been on the ship. Cy Stamford, a colleague who had become a good friend, for whom this was never meant to be anything other than a last, very straightforward command before many well-deserved years of retirement. There was one of his own Cross Bow men on board too and to Cross’s shame he could not for the moment recall his name, any more than he knew the names of any of the crew, more than 200 of them, who had gone down with their ship. But then his grief was forgotten as another, even more shocking realization struck him. The attack on the rig that had seemed like such a major event was in fact just a distraction, a feint to lure Cross and his men away from the real attack.

He had been lured to the rig like a River Tay salmon enticed by the fly on his line, and just like the fly, which was in fact a creation of feathers and thread, so he had been fooled by a fake. And he’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

The bomb that ripped the Bannock A apart set off a firestorm on land as well. Environmentalists were up in arms about the huge amount of oil discharged into the Atlantic when the FPSO went down. Meanwhile, Bannock Oil found itself under concerted attack from a horde of financial speculators, led by Aram Bendick. He made no secret of the money he was making from a crash he had loudly prophesied and was available to any reporter who wanted a quote. “People call me a prophet. Prophet, my ass!” he told one group of reporters outside his Manhattan offices. “John Bigelow and his board were schmucks. They lost their shirts in Alaska, then they doubled-down in Africa and lost their pants as well. I warned them again and again that they were taking grossly irresponsible risks with stockholders’ money. After the sinking of the Noatak drilling barge off the coast of Alaska, they should have retrenched, cut costs and concentrated on maximizing revenues from their Abu Zara fields. Instead they added to their debts, took a crazy gamble on an unproven field in one of the most dangerous, unstable regions of the world, and this is the result. Bannock is doomed. Its stockholders are going to lose every cent of their investments. This is malfeasance on a criminal scale and I cannot believe that, once the dust has settled, there won’t be criminal charges against Bigelow and his senior executives, specifically Hector Cross, the security chief. This happened on his watch, under his nose. He should be held accountable.”

Media coverage soon became fixated on the supposed failings of Cross and his team. The recapture of the rig was not reported as the daring rescue of almost 100 crew, but the bungled loss of more than thirty, for two of the seriously injured had died from their wounds. Then a reporter looking on the Bannock Oil website noticed that the two patrol boats were equipped with sonar, and so the question was asked: Why had Cross not ordered an underwater sweep of the area around and beneath the platform and the Bannock A? There was an obvious answer: no oil installation of any kind had ever been attacked by submarine before, so why would anyone be worried about that possibility when faced with the reality of terrorists occupying a rig and killing its crew? But that quibble was swiftly brushed aside by a host of self-proclaimed experts, all armed with perfect hindsight and keen to assure their audiences that they would certainly have anticipated an attack by water as well as air and deployed their sonar devices accordingly.

If Cross had hoped to receive some support from his superiors and the military authorities, he was swiftly disappointed. Vice Admiral Scholz, who had been so swift to praise Cross, was suddenly engaged on other matters and too busy to comment.

John Bigelow, meanwhile, appeared before news cameras outside the entrance to Bannock Oil’s headquarters, with his Corporate Communications man Tom Nocerino at his side and assured them that, “We fully accept that mistakes were made at the Magna Grande field. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, there’s little that anyone here in Houston can do to influence a security operation taking place almost eight thousand miles away, on the other side of the world. So we placed our trust in our people on the ground and I guess they tried their best, but clearly that was not good enough. We will be conducting our own investigation into what went wrong and will of course co-operate with any official inquiry.”

Hector Cross was thrown into a battle on completely alien territory. He was a soldier. Faced with a living, breathing enemy, armed with the weapons of war, he knew precisely what to do. But now he had to contend with superiors lying to save their own skins and reporters who had no interest in, let alone understanding of, the actual circumstances. To that was added the threat of ambulance-chasing lawyers wanting to sue him on behalf of those who had died on the rig or the sunken ship, and even district attorneys assembling criminal cases against him. For just as Bendick had suggested, there was no shortage of ambitious prosecutors, with eyes on a political career, who wanted to bring the villain of the Magna Grande disaster to justice.

“My people risked their lives to save the hostages on the oil platform and any Special Forces unit, anywhere in the world, would have been proud to recapture a rig like that with as few casualties,” Cross protested when Ronnie Bunter called to discuss his legal situation.

“I know that, Heck, and so does anyone who looks at this with a fair, objective eye. But this is America. People can’t accept that sometimes bad things just happen. There has to be a scapegoat and there has to be money on the table.”

“Well, then I’d better go to America and state my case, because I’m damned if I’m going to be made a scapegoat by anyone.”

“No, you mustn’t do that,” the veteran lawyer warned him. “In fact, my strong advice to you is to stay out of the country. The moment you set foot on U.S. soil there’ll be someone wanting to slap you with a writ or an arrest warrant. Stay in London and get the best lawyer you can find because you’re going to need someone to fight the extradition warrant when it comes. The U.K. government signed a crazy deal that allows the U.S. to take any British citizen who’s accused of any crime, irrespective of the strength of the case against them, without any of the protection that we demanded and got for our citizens that the Brits want.”

“But what crime did I commit, for Chrissakes? I was faced with a situation and I dealt with it. How was I to know that I should have been looking somewhere else? And which part of any of it is criminal?”

“Well, let’s see now, give me a moment . . .” Cross sat on his end of the line, waiting while Bunter tapped away at his PC. Then he heard the old man say, “OK, here we go . . . Section 6.03 of the Texas criminal code, dealing with definitions of culpable mental states, deems that a person is criminally negligent when he ought to be aware of a substantial risk, and I quote: ‘of such a nature and degree that its disregard constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the actor’s standpoint.’”

“Are you seriously telling me that an ordinary person would watch terrorists landing helicopters on a rig and think: Hmm, I should start looking for submarines?”

“No, Heck, I’m not, but a prosecutor might, and he might find twelve jurors dumb enough to believe him. And it might not be a Texan prosecutor, either. There are plenty of other states with much broader definitions of liability, and I don’t know how many states the folks who died came from, but I’m guessing it’s quite a few. Any of them could make a case against you on behalf of their people.”

Dave Imbiss wanted to go on the media offensive. “Listen, Heck,” he said at one of an endless string of meetings in Cross’s office. “You don’t have to go to the States. We can win the argument from here. I’ve got the whole thing on tape: every bit of CCTV footage, every communication between me and you guys, and—which is the killer—every single word said between you, John Bigelow and Vice Admiral Scholz, before and after you went on to the rig. Just let me put together a package and release it to the media, or just put it out on social media and we can blow all the accusations away. An American admiral thought you were doing the right thing and wanted to pin a medal on you. No one’s going to claim you were reckless or irresponsible when they see that.”

But the idea was immediately squashed by Jolyon Capel, a British solicitor Cross had hired on Bunter’s personal recommendation: “The man’s got the sharpest legal mind I’ve ever come across, and don’t be fooled by his appearance, he’s as deadly as a great white shark.” Capel certainly did not seem shark-like. He was a small, bespectacled, gray-haired solicitor with the quiet manner, furrowed brow and precise diction of a professor at an ancient Oxford college. And his first advice was not to go storming on to the counter-attack, as Imbiss had suggested, but to do nothing at all.

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Cross, I know this must be very frustrating for you, but you’re going to have to hold your fire,” Capel said. “The thing you have to bear in mind is that this case will first be fought in a British court and our approach to publicity is very different to the American one, where legal battles are fought as much in the court of public opinon as the court of law. In this country, however, judges are likely to take a very dim view of anything that might constitute an attempt to pervert the course of justice, and media publicity comes high on that list.”

“But we aren’t in court yet,” Cross argued, “so there’s no judge to worry about.”