'Thanks.'
Gannon knelt down so that his head was level with Liam's. 'You should be very proud of your father.'
'I am,' said Liam.
Gannon ruffled the boy's hair. 'Is that your gran over there?' Liam glanced at Moira and nodded. 'Why don't you go over and see if she's all right?' said Gannon. 'I want a word with your dad.'
'Okay,' said Liam, and ran over to his grandmother.
Gannon straightened up. 'We've found him,' said Gannon.
'Where?'
'On a Colombian ship in the Atlantic. Used the ship's sat-phone to talk to his wife and kids and the NSA tracked it.'
'And?'
'We're going out to get him.'
'Officially?'
'Oh, yes. The DEA has formally requested that the Increment do the dirty.' The Increment was Gannon's unit, an ad-hoc pulling together of SAS and SBS troopers capable of carrying out tasks deemed too dangerous for the Security Services. On the far side of the graveyard, Moira held one of Liam's hands and Tom took the other. 'Do you want to come?' asked Gannon.
Shepherd watched Tom and Moira walk away with Liam. He knew that his place was with his son, being a father. But the adrenaline kicked in and his heart beat faster. He wanted to be a father, but he wanted to see Carpenter pay for what he'd done. Carpenter had kidnapped Liam and threatened to kill him. He'd forced Shepherd to help him escape. And he'd ordered the killing of Jonathon Elliott. Carpenter had to pay for his crimes, because if he was allowed to get away with them then everything Shepherd had done would count for nothing.
'Yes,' said Shepherd. 'Yes, I do.'
It was a vision from Hell, Shepherd thought. Black figures with protruding snouts, huge eyes, and massive humps on their backs, crouching by the walls, bathed in red light. Their chests rose and fell as they pulled air into their lungs through tubes that ran up to the roof. The troopers were all bent forward, not wanting their parachutes to rub against the fuselage of the Nimrod. They were cradling their Heckler & Koch submachine-guns, barrels pointing down. They were all kitted out with full high-altitude parachute life-support system equipment. All the men wore black balaclavas and helmets, oxygen masks, bottles and carriers, boots and insulated over-boots. They wore felt gloves close to the skin for insulation and leather ones for protection, goggles to protect the eyes from the icy wind. Strapped to their chests were the LCDs of their computerised navigation systems. Their black thermal suits had felt liners to protect them against the high-altitude sub-zero temperatures. A thermometer on the fuselage of the Nimrod gave the temperature as minus 48 degrees Fahrenheit, and once they jumped, the wind-chill factor would kick in. Without the protective clothing they'd be blocks of ice by the time they reached the target.
On their backs were parachute canopies, two-thirds larger than a standard sports parachute, attached to a standard army harness, with a smaller reserve chute at the front of the rig. They had handguns in holsters and knives strapped to their legs. The submachine-guns were on webbing harnesses. All the troopers had the Heckler & Koch MP5SD4, a silenced model with a three-round burst facility in addition to single and full automatic fire. It had no butt stock so it was less likely to get tangled in the parachute rigging, and the silencer meant they'd have the element of surprise. They had extra ammunition in pouches on their webbing belts. Everything, in fact, that the trooper about town needed to drop in from thirty thousand feet and kill people.
They'd all been weighed at the Royal Navy Air Station in Culdrose and equipment had been distributed to equalise the men's weights. The time taken for a high-altitude high-opening jump was dependent on weight. The heavier the man and his equipment, the quicker he'd descend, and for what Gannon had in mind it was vital they landed together.
Gannon was at the front of the plane, closest to the crew exit door. There was a loader there, a man in olive green overalls and a quilted jacket linked to the fuselage with thick webbing straps. The Nimrod was designed for high-altitude surveillance not for dropping two four-man SAS bricks out at six miles high, so the loader was far from happy about what he was being asked to do. He was more at home in a Hercules C-130 transporter. Like the SAS troopers, he was breathing from an oxygen mask connected to the plane's central system. The Nimrod had been depressurised ten minutes earlier, when they had come close to the dropping-off point. Two of the four jet engines had been switched off so that it could be slowed to below a hundred knots.
'Okay, communications check,' said Gannon, into his radio microphone. One by one the troopers went through their call signs. Shepherd was Alpha Two.
Then Gannon told them to set the altimeters they were wearing on their right wrists. Thirty-two thousand feet above sea level. It would take them almost an hour to reach the target and during that time they would travel forty miles. A needle in a haystack didn't come close to hitting a converted oil tanker sitting in the Atlantic Ocean, but the GPS-linked navigation system brought the odds down to an acceptable level. But there was no margin for error: they were doing the drop at night and if anyone missed the ship it was one hell of a long swim home.
The eight troopers split into twos and checked each other's equipment - the oxygen supply, the webbing straps, the Irvine height-finder and the device that would ensure all the chutes opened at precisely twenty-six thousand feet.
Shepherd checked Gannon's rig, then gave him the OK sign, a circle formed from the thumb and first finger of his right hand. Gannon checked Shepherd's then clapped him on the shoulder. He put his masked face close to Shepherd's ear. 'You okay?' he yelled, over the noise of the engines. 'Stay close, yeah?' He was shouting because if he used comms the rest of the troopers would hear what he was saying.
'I'll be fine,' Shepherd shouted back. He'd done high-altitude high-opening drops before, admittedly never on to a ship in the middle of the ocean with little in the way of a moon, but the principle was the same: exit the plane; hope the parachute opens; guide the canopy down to the target; don't break anything on landing. Simple.
The ship was a medium-sized oil tanker. There was a superstructure at the rear containing the bridge and crew accommodation, but all over the quarter-mile long deck there were hatches and pipes that could easily snap a leg or a hip. It would have been a difficult jump at the best of times. A HAHO drop would give them plenty of time to make the right approach, though, and the chutes were so big that they'd move in slowly. The alternative, HALO - high altitude, low opening - wouldn't give them time to make a safe approach and Gannon had discounted it, even though it would have reduced the risk of them being spotted in the air.
There was a third option - high altitude, no opening - but the SAS tried to avoid that manoeuvre as far as possible. A twelve-stone trooper with fifty pounds of kit travelling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour made a hell of a mess on impact. Shepherd flashed back to his first HALO jump high over Salisbury Plain in the West Country. He had been one of six on the course, under the wing of a grizzled sergeant who'd been with the Regiment for going on fifteen years. As the sergeant was lining up Shepherd and the others, he'd stuffed a large piece of parachute silk into Shepherd's pack. When it was Shepherd's turn to exit the plane, the sergeant had tapped his shoulder. Shepherd had turned, seen what looked like a ripped chute, and the sergeant had pushed him out. It was the longest two minutes of Shepherd's life, hurtling towards the ground at terminal velocity in full kit, not knowing if he had a faulty chute on his back. It had been a week before he'd seen the funny side.
The red light on the bulkhead flicked off and the amber one went on. The troopers took off the oxygen masks linked to the plane's supply and replaced them with their own, then shuffled towards the front of the plane. The loader nodded at Gannon and opened the crew exit door. Shepherd stood next to Gannon, breathing slowly but deeply, the adrenaline coursing through his veins, heart pounding, stomach churning as his body geared up for what was to come. Part of him was terrified at the thought of jumping out of a plane six miles above the ocean, but another part relished the fear. He was doing what he'd been trained to do.
The engine noise died down as the pilot pulled back on the throttles of the remaining two engines to idle and the nose of the plane went up. Shepherd almost lost his balance and Gannon reached over to steady him. The Nimrod shuddered as the pilot fought to keep it steady at the close-to-stalling airspeed. Shepherd looked through the open door at the black night sky, peppered with a million stars. Far below was a layer of thick cloud, from fifteen thousandfeet to six thousand, which meant gliding through nine thousand feet of close-to-freezing water vapour. That and the landing would be the most dangerous phases of the operation. It was easy to get disoriented in cloud and there was a risk of collision - dealing with tangled chutes in cloud at night was an interesting proposition that Shepherd was keen to avoid.
The amber light winked off and the green light went on. Gannon grinned at Shepherd, behind his mask, then
