explosive-tripped box that had contained Jordan’s letter of reference. The challenge to Deacon’s leadership had been an upset, despite his best efforts to reason a way through it. He knew what was behind it. It wasn’t so much that he had been challenged but by whom. A former SBS twat. Just because this happened to be an oil platform on the ocean, did that make him more qualified to run the operation than Deacon? Typical of the kind of decision civilians made. Just because Mackay knew more about how the SBS operated, that qualified him to be in charge, did it? Only a military specialist would know that the terrain made no difference. A specialist was a specialist on land or sea. The only difference was a little technique when it came to certain environments. The CEO of an envelope company doesn’t need to know all there is to know about envelopes in order to run it. By rights Jordan should have been hired simply as an adviser to Deacon.
He felt like calling the emergency number on his sat phone and insisting on talking to someone in charge about it.They needed to be told that you don’t put an SBS bloke in charge of an SAS bloke. That sort of thing might go on these days but it hadn’t in his day, or at least not to him.
Deacon picked up the sat phone to check for the number when the inner door opened and Jordan walked in, his coat and leggings soaked and dripping water. Deacon put the phone down with a frown. He put the box back in his bag.
Jordan shuffled past the technician monitoring the control panels and hung his coat on a hook. He went over to the makings corner, put a tea bag in a mug, filled it with water from the permanent heater, added a couple of spoons of sugar and powdered milk and stirred it.
He sat down at a desk, dumped the tea bag and took a sip of the hot, sweet liquid. It felt good as he warmed his hands around the mug. Jordan contemplated his situation. It had become something of a habit over the last few months, and more so since he’d taken on this task. The road to the Morpheus had been a strange one. He’d had bouts of guilt about his decisions but had managed to beat them off. He could do it easily enough. Whatever he could get out of his country, his government, he would. And he felt justified. They owed it to him, those wankers in the Ministry of Defence. His umpteen requests to stay in the SBS in any role other than as a storeman? Ignored. It hadn’t been much to ask. They’d done it for others in the past. He was an invalid but not useless. It was their decision to ignore that, and so he would prove it. Give the nobs a demonstration. If they wouldn’t let him stay on the team, then he would be against them. It sounded extreme at times but he had to do it to believe in himself.
The only problem that he had with this operation was the potential threat to the SBS lads themselves. They weren’t to blame for anything that the MoD had done to him. If it had been up to them, Jordan would have been able to stay in the service. He was reasonably confident he could work it so that none of them got hurt. As long as he could control Deacon and his apes. It had been one of his bargaining chips with the organisers. To his surprise they had accepted this reasoning without debate. They didn’t want anyone to get hurt either. This was a pure money-making task and had been planned in such a meticulous way that violence could pretty much be avoided.
Jordan had practically given up on life after leaving the SBS, with little to show for the forty years he’d been on the earth apart from a terraced house in Dorchester. He’d paid off the mortgage with his meagre medical-discharge payment. The monthly pension was all right but it was just paying him to sit around until he died. He’d been feeling dead already. When his girlfriend of ten years left him soon after the discharge he pretty much stopped believing in anything. Who wanted a civilian cripple? She’d told him that the spark had gone out of his life. It was true enough, although he didn’t think