“Good of you to join us, Mr Carpenter,” said Turner, staring at him. “I hope we haven’t interrupted whatever you were doing. I’ve no doubt it was extremely important.”
You’ve no idea, thought Jamie. No idea at all.
There was a giggle from his left, and he felt his face flush with heat. He turned to see who had laughed; it had not been Kate or Larissa, and they were the only other people he was expecting to see in the room. But he immediately saw that he had assumed wrongly; five faces were staring at him, not two.
Sitting at one desk were Kate and Larissa, the former regarding him with a stern look, the latter with a mischievous little smile. Two desks away, a distance that was clearly deliberate, sat three more Operators, two of whom Jamie recognised immediately; the third was a girl in her early twenties whom he had heard a lot about, but had never met. She was smiling widely at him; it had clearly been her who had laughed.
The three Operators made up Operational Squad F-7, commanded by Lieutenant Jack Williams. Jamie’s friend smiled at him from across the room, and Jamie returned it with an uncertain one of his own.
What the hell are you three doing here? he wondered.
Sitting beside Jack, Shaun Turner’s face regarded Jamie with wide grey eyes that were as expressionless as his father’s. He was tall, taller than Jamie or Jack, and broad, the naturally powerful figure of a rugby player. He sat easily in his chair, waiting for Jamie to say something.
The girl, who Jamie knew from Jack’s fervent, fluttery descriptions was called Angela Darcy, was still smiling at him, and as he looked at her, actually looked at her, he was struck by how remarkably attractive she was. Her blonde hair was darker than Kate’s, almost a golden colour, and her face was sharp and angular, drawn in straight lines by a hugely talented artist. He knew from Jack that she had been an SIS agent, recruited out of Oxford in her first year, and had served with distinction in some of the most unstable and dangerous backwaters of the globe. She apparently spoke at least six languages, and was an expert in the art of wetwork – assassinations and state-sanctioned murders carried out at such close range that it was impossible to avoid being covered with the blood of the target.
Jamie was pretty sure that Jack was at least a little bit in love with her; he was absolutely sure that he was scared of her. But her smile was wide, and friendly, and Jamie was glad it was her laughter that had made him blush; he was sure that her smile would have had the same effect, and would have been a lot more difficult to explain to Larissa.
Behind him, someone cleared their throat, and he realised he hadn’t answered Major Turner. He looked back to the front of the room, and saw the former SAS officer staring at him with an unnervingly patient expression.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he lied. “Something came up on the lower levels. It won’t happen again, sir.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” replied Turner. “But I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it. Sit down, Carpenter.”
Jamie walked sheepishly over to the table where Larissa and Kate were sitting, pulled a chair out and flopped into it between them. As Paul Turner set the pages of his briefing on the lectern, Jamie cast a glance at Angela, who favoured him with a sympathetic smile. He smiled back, then returned his attention to the front of the room, his blood boiling at the unfairness of it all.
“Operators,” said Major Turner. “This is OPERATION: PROMISED LAND, a two-squad reconnaissance and elimination mission. It’s relatively straightforward, but please try and concentrate. I’d rather not have to keep stopping to answer stupid questions. Clear? Good.”
Turner pressed a button on the portable console in his hand, and the wall screen above his head burst into life. It showed a satellite image of a large container ship; the tiny swells of white water at her aft showed the Operators that the ship was in motion.
“This,” continued Turner, “is the Aristeia. She’s a Panamax-class freighter, two hundred and twenty-eight metres long, thirty-two metres wide, able to carry three thousand standard freight containers. She’s Greek-built, flying the Bahamian flag.”
“If she can carry three thousand containers,” said Angela, “why does it look like she’s carrying about fifty?”
Turner favoured her with what passed for a smile, and tapped his console. The image magnified until the ship filled the screen.
“You’re correct,” he said. “She’s carrying sixty-eight containers on a deck built for forty-four times that many. She departed from Shanghai eighteen days ago; those containers would need to be filled with diamonds to cover the cost of the fuel it’s taken to get her where she is now.”
“Where’s that?” asked Larissa.
“About eighty miles off the north-east coast,” replied Turner. “Her heading puts her destination as the entrance to the River Tyne, where she’ll arrive in roughly seven hours.”
“What does this have to do with us?” asked Shaun Turner.
“There has been only a single radio contact with the Aristeia since she left port,” replied Major Turner. “When she passed through the Suez Canal. Before and since, nothing. She spent the last week making her way through the Mediterranean, and all attempts to contact her, by the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese, have failed.”
“Pirates?” asked Kate.
Angela snorted, and Larissa fired a stare full of razor blades in her direction.
“No,” replied Major Turner. “Or at least, we don’t think so. There’s never been an instance of a pirated vessel being taken voluntarily through the Med, or through the Canal. If she’d been boarded, we’d expect the pirates to have taken her to the coast of Somalia, where they could moor her and make their demands. This ship had to go through Somali waters to get to Suez.”
“Terrorists?” suggested Jack Williams. “Could it be carrying a bomb?”
“Satellite spectro-analysis says not. Also, why would you use a ship like this to make an attack? They’d know we could sink her in the middle of the ocean. Cargo freighters are not renowned for their manoeuvrability.”
“So what is it then?” asked Jamie, sharply. He was getting bored with playing guessing games.
Paul Turner gave him a look full of warning, then continued.
“The Surveillance Division monitored the attempts to contact her, and when she entered UK waters, we put a satellite over her. Here’s the infrared.”
The image on the screen blurred out, then sharpened into a bright rainbow of colours. The frigid water surrounding the ship was a blue so dark it was almost black, the hull and deck of the Aristeia a pale shade of aquamarine. A thick bloom of red glowed at the rear of the ship, where the huge diesel engines were producing the power that pushed the enormous freighter through the water. The rectangular containers on the ship’s cargo deck glowed a pale orange, and were studded with small blobs of yellow which, the watching Operators realised, were moving around inside the boxes.
“Jesus,” said Jack Williams. “There must be two hundred people in those containers.”
“Two hundred and twenty-seven,” confirmed Major Turner. “Look at the bridge.”
The huge crescent-shaped bridge, which towered almost four storeys above the surface of the deck, was pale yellow. The heat was emanating from seven points of light that were almost white, such was the heat they were giving out.
“Vamps,” said Shaun Turner, matter-of-factly. “Seven vamps, and two hundred humans. What the hell is this ship?”
“It’s not a ship,” said Angela. “It’s a prison. A floating