Red Station

ONE

Autumn 2008

Death came in at three minutes to four on a sluggish morning tide, and changed Harry Tate’s life forever.

It edged up a shrouded Essex inlet, a scrubby white fifty-foot motor launch with a fly bridge, its engine puttering softly against the slow current. The exhaust sounds were muffled by a heavy, early mist rolling along the banks, blanketing the dark marshland like cold candyfloss.

Three figures stood outlined by a flush of refracted light from the open cockpit. One was on the forward deck, a swirl of dreadlocks framing his head like a war helmet. He was holding a thick pole balanced on one shoulder. Number two, the helmsman, was a bulky shape up on the fly bridge, head turning constantly between the instrument panel and the banks on either side.

The third man stood on a swimming platform at the stern, inches above the murky wake. Skeletal, with long, straggly hair under a baseball cap, he had one hand down by his side, the other bracing himself on the rear rail.

‘It’s Pirates of the frigging Caribbean!’ The whisper drilled softly into Harry’s earpiece, gently mocking, forcing a smile in spite of the tension in his chest. The voice belonged to Bill Maloney, his MI5 colleague, in cover fifty yards along the bank to his right.

A light breeze lifted off the water, brushing past Harry’s position behind a hummock of coarse grass, fanning his face with the sour smell of mud and decay. The sickly tang of diesel oil seemed to ooze out of the ground everywhere, and something was seeping through his trousers. He tried not to think about the kinds of toxic waste festering beneath him from decades of commerce, skulduggery and neglect.

He toggled his radio. ‘Where the hell are you, Blue Team?’ The query was strained with urgency. As Ground Controller, he’d been chasing the back-up police unit for fifteen minutes with no response.

Still nothing. Accident or a comms malfunction? Either way, they weren’t here. He swore softly. Having been slashed at the last minute — economic demands, was the vague explanation — and now with the support van lost somewhere in the darkness, they were down to three men. With what was rumoured to be concealed in the boat’s bilges, from bales of hash to ‘bricks’ of heroin, each containing up to fifty individual pay-and-go bags, and enough methamphetamine crystals to send half the kids in London off their heads for a month, the prize was too valuable. They needed all the help they could get.

But it wasn’t there.

He leaned to his right and peeled aside some strands of grass, eyeing the misty darkness where Blue Team should have been in position. Nothing. Instead, he heard a click in his ear, then a hiss of static.

‘That’s a negative, Red One… repeat negative. We’re up to our axles in mud, five hundred yards from your O.P. The fucking ground’s like molasses. Blue Team out.’

Harry’s gut turned to water, the urgency now the bitter pre-taste of panic.

With a narrow window the previous day to reconnoitre the area where the shipment was coming in, he and Maloney had ambled in on foot, posing as sometime fishermen on an idle day out. The inlet, bordered by a muddy track, was mostly used by working boats, weekend sailors and jet-skiers. The going, while reasonably solid underfoot, showed some evidence of a spongy sub-layer.

They’d spent an hour in the area, fishing, sipping beer and competitively skimming stones on the water, all the while scouting for cover in hollows, bushes and overturned or rotting boats. Other than a woman walking her dog and a couple of dinghies making laboured trips to boats further along, they had seen no-one who shouldn’t be there.

As they were leaving, it had started to rain; hard, slashing drops like liquid gobstoppers, pounding the softer patches into mud holes and blanketing the harder ground with a layer of filthy water. They had highlighted these areas on a laminated map for special attention.

Blue Team clearly hadn’t read the signs.

Harry closed his eyes against a rising nausea. Of all the luck. He could be at Jean’s place right now, replete and warmed by her infectious humour, enjoying her company. Instead, he was stuffed with a growing disaster of Titanic proportions.

Except that he knew deep down that this was as much a drug for him as the narcotics on the boat were for others.

‘Stand by.’ He toggled the switch to warn the other two men and watched the boat slide by thirty yards away. It was too late to abort, too risky to do nothing; within hours the stuff on board would be hitting the streets, flooding veins with its false promise and sending the weak and vulnerable to an early, hazy oblivion.

It was now or never.

He was clutching a handful of grass with his right hand. He forced himself to let go and slid his fingers into his jacket, to the reassuring touch of a semi-automatic.

‘Is it a go or not?’ Parrish, the third man. A firearms officer on loan from the local force, he was to Harry’s right, close by the water’s edge, positioned to cut off the boat’s retreat. A last-minute replacement for an MI5 officer off sick, he was nervy, impatient and looking to prove himself.

‘Wait!’ Tate breathed, and hoped the idiot wasn’t about to leap from cover and do a Rambo along the bank. As he spoke, the helmsman on the boat called a soft warning to his companions and cut the engine, steering the nose towards a short wooden jetty jutting out from the near bank.

‘Blue Team… you out yet?’ It was a wasted call, but gave him a few more seconds before having to make a final, no-going-back decision.

‘Negative, Red One. We’re not going anywhere. Sorry.’

‘You forgotten how to fucking run?’ he blasted back, and instantly regretted it. Five hundred yards in full gear, stumbling through the dark; even with night-vision kit they’d be like a pack of elephants.

He decided to give it another two minutes, to allow the boat’s crew to split up and come ashore. Divide and conquer. Maybe, he thought wryly, when they saw they were surrounded by just three men stranded on a muddy bank in the dark, they’d give up without a fight.

Then bad luck and timing chose that moment to join the party.

From Harry’s left, the opposite end of the approach track from Blue Team’s last position, the familiar harsh roar of a Land Rover engine pierced the night, and a dark, square shape burst into view. Its lights were on low, but were sufficient to burn through the mist and highlight the surrounding bank… and the white hull of the docking vessel.