Fair Game (36 page)

She walked by his side, her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket. ‘I’m all ears,’ she said.

‘Your man, Matt Tanner. You were right, he’s MI5.’

O’Hara smiled. ‘You know who he is?’

‘He’s been identified, but I had to do some string-pulling. And it goes without saying that no one must ever know how you got this information.’

O’Hara put her arm through Fox’s. ‘It’s me, Uncle Robbie. You know you can trust me.’

Fox chuckled. ‘Aye, lass, that I can. But I’ve had to vouch for you, so don’t go letting me down.’

‘That’ll never happen,’ she said.

‘And they want him dead. Same as you killed that bastard major.’

‘That’s the plan,’ she said. ‘So who is he?’

‘His name’s Shepherd. Daniel Shepherd. Former SAS. We don’t have an address but we have a date of birth so it won’t be difficult to find him.’

‘Excellent,’ said O’Hara.

‘The fact that he was in the Sass set alarm bells ringing,’ said Fox. ‘Gannon couldn’t have acted alone when he killed my boys.’

O’Hara nodded slowly. ‘And you think Shepherd might have been involved.’

‘I don’t expect we’ll ever know for sure,’ he said.

‘We could interrogate him.’

Fox sighed. ‘The Army Council made it clear they want a clean kill, Lisa. And they’re calling the shots.’

‘Either way he’s dead, Uncle Robbie.’

Fox put his arm around her and gave her a hug. ‘Aye, that’s the truth,’ he said. ‘I just wish I knew where my boys were so that I could give them a proper burial.’ There were tears in his eyes and he turned his head away from her as he blinked them away.

Shepherd was having trouble sleeping and after an hour of tossing and turning he pulled on some clothes and went up to the bridge. It was just after midnight and there was a Filipino seaman standing at the side of the bridge scanning the waves with a pair of binoculars. Dominik was standing on the port outdoor wing of the bridge, blowing smoke up at the stars. He grinned when Shepherd walked out on to the wing. ‘Can’t sleep, Company Man?’ he asked. He offered his pack of cigarettes but Shepherd shook his head.

‘Don’t smoke,’ he said.

‘Have you tried?’

‘I gave it a go,’ he said. ‘Didn’t like it.’ Actually he’d taken up smoking several times during his undercover career. It was often the quickest way of getting into conversation with a stranger. ‘So we don’t slow down at night?’

‘There’s no need,’ said Dominik. ‘We’ve got the radar and the AIS and any vessel out there should have their lights on. If they don’t it’s their own fault.’ He blew smoke into the wind. ‘Fishing boats are the problem because we’ve got to give way to them. But this far from shore there’s not too many about.’ He pointed off the port bow. ‘See the small yellowish spot, just above the horizon?’

Shepherd looked to his left. Even without binoculars he could see the small yellow circle, a few degrees over the horizon.

‘That’s Venus,’ said Dominik. He turned around and looked to the rear of the vessel. ‘And the bright one over there? That’s Jupiter.’

Shepherd looked over at the second planet. ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’

‘People in cities, they never get to see the stars or the planets,’ said Dominik. He took a long drag on his cigarette and then blew more smoke up at the stars. ‘Too much light pollution.’

Shepherd looked up. It was an amazing sight, the heavens seeming to go on for ever, dotted with an infinity of stars. A small light moved high overhead, little more than a pinprick moving in a straight line. Too slow to be a meteor, it was almost certainly a satellite. Shepherd wondered if there were cameras on the satellite and if somewhere in London Charlotte Button was watching him on a screen. He smiled to himself. There were hundreds of satellites circling the Earth and the chances were slim in the extreme that the one he’d seen was even involved in surveillance.

‘Over there is the Big Bear,’ said Dominik, pointing to the right. ‘See the four stars there, with the three leading away from it?’

‘The Plough,’ said Shepherd. ‘We call it the Plough.’

‘And the two stars at the back, you follow them up and there we have the North Star,’ said Dominik. ‘And there,’ his hand moved across the sky, ‘there’s the Little Bear.’

He leaned back and pointed directly overhead. ‘And there’s the Milky Way. Have you ever seen a more beautiful sight than that?’

Shepherd looked up. It was an awesome sight, the stars appearing to be so close together that they formed a foamy white band that stretched across the night sky.

Dominik pointed out half a dozen stars in quick succession, his finger moving confidently around the heavens.

‘You know your stars,’ said Shepherd.

‘It’s just a hobby these days,’ said Dominik. ‘They don’t even teach celestial navigation any more. GPS has done away with it. Show a sextant to the cadet and he probably wouldn’t know what it was, never mind how to use it.’

‘Really? I’d have thought that sailors would need to know how to navigate by the stars.’

Dominik laughed and flicked the butt of his cigarette over the side. ‘Maybe fifty years ago. But not any more. It’s all done by computers and before long they won’t need men on ships any more. Or maybe just one man monitoring a computer screen back at head office. But I’ll have retired by then.’ He sighed. ‘The world’s changing, Mr Blackburn, and it’s changing for the worse.’

‘It’s hard to argue with that,’ said Shepherd. ‘And you can drop the “mister”. Just Oliver is fine.’

‘Have you got children, Oliver?’

‘No,’ said Shepherd, and felt the involuntary twinge of guilt that always came when he denied the existence of his son. Liam was the most important thing in his life but he wasn’t part of the Oliver Blackburn legend. Blackburn didn’t have a wife either, even one who had died in a senseless car accident. Dan Shepherd wasn’t Oliver Blackburn; Oliver Blackburn was the figment of someone’s imagination, someone in MI5 who had created a fiction that would allow him to complete his mission, and once that mission had been completed Oliver Blackburn would simply cease to exist. ‘You?’

‘Two boys, two girls,’ said Dominik. ‘Perfect balance.’

‘Are any of them into sailing?’

Dominik shook his head. ‘My elder boy wants to be a doctor, the elder girl is already a teacher. The other two are still at school and they hate the sea.’

‘Because?’

‘Because it takes their father away from them. Four months on and two months off, they get to see me for just one third of the year. I’ve missed big chunks of their lives. And for what? Do you know how much I get paid?’

Shepherd shook his head.

Dominik’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re a company man, you surely know how much I earn.’

‘I keep telling you, Dominik, what people earn doesn’t have any bearing on what I do. I’m only concerned with what people do.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you. Five thousand euros a month, that’s what they pay me. And for that I spend months away from my family and my kids grow up without knowing their father.’ He looked out over the waves. ‘My brother-in-law is a plumber in London and he earns twice what I earn. My wife keeps telling me I should go and work with him.’

‘Why don’t you?’

Dominik shrugged, then waved his arm at the night sky above him. ‘Because I’d miss the stars. And the sea. I’m a master, that’s what I do. It’s in my blood. Yes, I miss my family, I miss being away from them, and there are easier ways to earn a living, but this is my life and it always will be.’ He shrugged again. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

Shepherd smiled. ‘Actually, what you say makes perfect sense to me,’ he said.

Shepherd stayed on the bridge for an hour talking to the captain, then went down to his cabin. This time he fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. His alarm woke him at seven and he went down for breakfast. Hainrich was already there, along with Tomasz, the chief engineer, and Konrad Krol, the Polish second engineer. It was the first time that Shepherd had met Konrad so he introduced himself and shook hands.

Hainrich said something in Polish and they all laughed.

‘I guess he’s telling you that I’m the company man and I’m not to be trusted,’ said Shepherd as he sat down. Hainrich was eating toast and marmalade, but the two engineers both had fried eggs and bacon in front of them.

‘Actually, the chief was saying that I should show you the Burma Road,’ said Konrad. He was quite small, probably under five feet eight, with close-cropped wiry hair and a tattoo of a mermaid on his left forearm. He had a thick gold wedding band but no watch. Shepherd had noticed that most of the officers and crew didn’t wear wristwatches, probably because the time on board ship was always being changed as they moved across time zones.

‘Burma Road?’

‘You’ll understand when you see it,’ said Hainrich. He said something to Konrad and all three of the Poles laughed.

Jimmy appeared at Shepherd’s shoulder and asked him what he wanted to eat. Shepherd asked for an omelette and toast as he poured himself a glass of orange juice.

Hainrich, Tomasz and Konrad chatted away in Polish as Shepherd ate his breakfast. It wasn’t a language he was at all familiar with and very few of the words they used had any resonance. They made no effort to include him in the conversation, which suited Shepherd just fine because pretty much every conversation that he did understand seemed to involve the officers taking verbal potshots at him.

When they had finished, Tomasz ordered a coffee but Konrad pushed his plate away, burped, and grinned at Shepherd. ‘So, do you want to see where the real work’s done?’

‘The engine room? Sure.’

‘Get your hard hat from your cabin and I’ll meet you in the Ship Office on the Upper Deck.’

When Shepherd got to the Ship Office, Konrad had pulled on a pair of white overalls and was holding two pairs of orange and black ear-defenders. ‘You’ll need these,’ he said. Shepherd took a pair and Konrad picked up his hard hat. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. He led Shepherd down the corridor to the lift and took him down to the engine control room. There was a large green metal console peppered with computer screens and dials, and a set of engine controls that matched the one up on the bridge, including a throttle lever. The third engineer, a Filipino, was studying one of the screens.

Shepherd pointed at the controls. ‘You can run the engine from here?’ he said. ‘You can use the throttle and everything?’

‘It’s not a throttle, it’s the telegraph,’ said Konrad. ‘In the old days it was a way of communicating with the engine room but these days it’s all computer controlled. The captain uses the telegraph on the bridge to set the speed but with the control switches on that panel we can bypass the bridge completely.’ He nodded at Shepherd’s ear-defenders. ‘Put them on and we’ll go through to the engine room.’

Shepherd put the ear-defenders on and then his hard hat and followed Konrad through a hatchway into the main engine room. Even with the ear-defenders on he could hear the throb of the massive engine, and felt the vibration running up his legs.

Konrad took him first into a large room which was very hot, filled with thick pipes, most of which were lagged with bulky silvery insulation. Konrad put his mouth close to Shepherd’s right ear and by shouting loudly he could just about make himself heard. ‘This is where we heat the fuel,’ shouted Konrad. ‘It’s thick, almost solid, at room temperature so we have to heat it before it goes to the engine.’

The heat was stifling, and after just a few seconds Shepherd’s face was bathed in sweat. He followed Konrad back into the main engine room and they went down a flight of metal stairs to the second level, from where they could get a view of the entire engine. It was huge, the size of two double-decker buses, and seemed to be in two parts, two large steel cylinders stuck end to end at the back, and in front of them twelve massive green piston units that reminded him of spark plugs, with metal pipes connecting them all. Even from twenty feet away the vibrations of the engine ran through his body from his feet to his head.

Shepherd looked at the engineer, lost for words. The sheer power of the engine was breathtaking.

‘Almost one hundred thousand horsepower,’ shouted Konrad.

‘Awesome,’ shouted Shepherd.

Konrad nodded. ‘There are twelve pistons,’ he said. He pointed to the left, where there were two giant pistons hanging from a gantry. They were more than twenty feet from top to bottom. ‘Those are spares.’

‘They’re huge,’ said Shepherd.

‘A man could stand in one of the cylinders,’ said Konrad. ‘If he wanted to.’ He took Shepherd down another flight of metal stairs and they walked around the engine. It was spotless, not a drop of oil or soot anywhere, and all the surfaces gleamed as if they were in a chemical processing plant and not the engine room of one of the biggest container ships in the world.

At the back of the engine were huge steel cowlings that led from the engine up into the roof of the engine room. ‘Turbochargers,’ shouted Konrad. ‘They heat the air before it’s mixed with the fuel.’ He pointed to one of the huge pipes that slanted up to the ceiling, four storeys overhead. ‘That takes the exhaust to the funnel.’

‘How much fuel does the engine burn?’ shouted Shepherd.

Konrad shrugged. ‘At full speed, about two hundred and fifty tonnes a day,’ he shouted. ‘Cruising, like now, about a hundred and fifty tonnes.’

Konrad took him to the rear of the engine, where the massive driveshaft emerged. It was about four feet across, a tube of gleaming metal that whirred around, driving the propeller at the stern. A metal gantry ran above the shaft and the two men stood on it looking down. ‘And this is what it’s all about,’ said Konrad. ‘All the fuel, all the power, it’s all about turning this piece of metal around so that the propeller pushes us through the sea.’ Konrad clapped him on the shoulder. ‘OK, we’ll go back now,’ he shouted. On the way to the engine control room Konrad showed Shepherd the desalination plant that converted sea water into drinking water, the sewage plant, and the generators that provided power for the ship.

When they reached the engine control room, Tomasz had joined the third engineer and they were studying one of the computer screens. On it was a computer schematic showing the twelve pistons and the temperature at which they were operating. ‘What do you think?’ asked Tomasz, removing his ear-defenders.