and took Abed’s shoulder. ‘Abed,’ he said again.
Abed turned to look Ibrahim in the eyes. For a moment, Ibrahim thought he saw fear in his face. He had always believed Abed did not know the meaning of the word and was suddenly filled with concern. His own orders, privately conveyed from the sheiks, was that if anything happened to Abed, he was to take charge of the mission, and if any member of the team had a change of heart, for whatever reason, he was to be instantly killed. They had never said as much but that would include Abed.
Ibrahim’s hand tightened on his scimitar and slowly started to draw it from its scabbard. But whatever was going through Abed’s mind seemed to pass and he lowered his eyes and faced the corridor again.
He drew his scimitar, adjusted his grip around the haft and stepped from the darkness of the weather-lock into the brightness of the ship, followed by Ibrahim and the others.
Chapter 2
Stratton stood in the arched entrance of a grand Elizabethan country house set in ten acres of manicured gardens, looking down on to a spacious, groomed lawn where a hundred well-heeled guests were enjoying an official morning garden party: VIPs, the titled, ambassadors, statesmen and ministers of various levels. He had arrived with his four-man team at dawn to carry out preliminary security checks, search the grounds and scan the extra staff, caterers and valets as they arrived.The guests had started trickling in around 10 a.m. and an hour later everyone of importance had arrived.
It was a fresh, sunny day and Stratton was dressed in a smart jacket and tie, his dark hair shorter than it had been in many years, and he was bored as hell. This was not his usual employment by a long shot but he knew why he was here. His bosses in the Special Boat Service thought they knew, but they did not. The mandarins in Whitehall, far above his superiors at the SBS headquarters in Poole, had retired him, thrown him out and back into ‘normal life’, a relative term for life in Special Forces could never be described as normal. It was not a punishment though, far from it. In their eyes, they had done him a favour.
Bodyguard work was the most boring job for anyone, let alone an SF operative. It meant long hours hanging around doing nothing but watching and waiting, in cars, restaurants and always at the whim of those they looked after. It was true that a lot of Special Forces work was also spent waiting and watching but, for Stratton at least, bodyguard work had some features that qualified it as the most loathsome of assignments in his business. He hated working for civilians, and the work felt like nothing more than glorified servitude.
Civilians and soldiers mixed like oil and water in their working modes: there was no mystery about being a civilian since all soldiers had been one, but few civilians could truly understand the life of a soldier. There was an even bigger chasm between civvies and Special Forces; a civilian might scratch the surface of understanding life in SF by reading every book available on the subject, but they could never begin to fathom the mentality of an operative. There were civilian parallels - sportsmen, firemen and police armed-response teams for instance - which touched on aspects such as the team ethos, but the lifestyles and working conditions did not begin to compare with those who fought side by side in a war and weathered the dangers of operating alone on undercover operations. The job created bonds for life.
Within this microcosm, Stratton was an anomaly; he was highly respected for similar reasons to those of civilians who respected SF: they did not know what he did. He was a regular SF operative, but he was also a favoured agent for military intelligence and had often been called upon to carry out assignments independent of his parent unit, the SBS.
His unusual relationship with MI5 and MI6 began in Northern Ireland many years before while working against the IRA. Like many others, he had first been noticed as an intelligence gatherer with the Northern Ireland undercover detachments. It became evident to his masters in London that his Special Forces combat skills, intelligence and aptitude for working alone made him a versatile tool that could be utilised to a far greater degree. Before long he was brought into the inner sanctum of military intelligence and