It was the point beyond which Stratton felt uncomfortable.
He headed back to the theory room, where he bumped into Smithy.
‘Hi,’ Smithy said fumbling with the fingerprint analyser. ‘I’m excited to be coming along.’
Stratton doubted that very much.
As they went in they saw Binning and Jackson in fireproof suits, looking ready to go. Binning held up a rigid laptop-sized plastic box. ‘This is the G43 overlook device.’
‘How will we block the Chinook’s comms?’ Stratton asked, interested in the more immediate problem.
‘Same device,’ Binning said.
‘You can do that from here?’
‘No. Nothing can transmit from down here except through the secure cabling. It’s already active. Soon as we’re through the screens it’ll block all comms.’
Jason and Rowena walked into the room wearing firesuits and carrying kitbags. It didn’t surprise Stratton that Rowena’s suit fitted her shapely body very well. ‘What else are we taking apart from the G43?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ Jason replied. ‘We’ve taken your advice and gone for lightness.’
Stratton nodded. ‘Okay. Look after your kit. Make sure it works. In the middle of the North Sea in the dark when the chopper has left is not a good time to discover you have a leak.’
‘We’re ready,’ Jason assured him. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to the others, forgetting for a moment that Stratton was in charge.
As they walked, Binning came alongside Stratton. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’
Stratton glanced at the man he didn’t think he could ever warm to. It was more than Binning’s cocky, condescending attitude. The scientist had an underlying greyness, an indistinctness about him. Stratton couldn’t put his finger precisely on it but it was ever-present. ‘What?’
‘The story between you and this Mackay chap who’s on the platform. What is that?’
Jason overheard the question and glanced back as if he too was interested to know the answer. Stratton didn’t particularly want to talk about it, not with this lot. ‘It was just an operation in Afghanistan that didn’t go to plan.’
‘Rowena found a watered-down report on the incident,’ Jason said. ‘It implied that some bad decisions were made but did not lay blame. You were the team commander.’
Stratton suspected they were trying to wind him up.Yet a twinge of guilt rippled through him. ‘If you’re wondering whether or not it was my fault, the answer is yes, it was.’
‘You made a mistake?’ Binning asked.
‘I made a decision. There are always choices in any operation. Sometimes none of them are any good.’
Stratton had never explained the incident in detail to anyone, other than in the clinical post-operational report he had written. He was suddenly attracted to the notion of telling the MI16 lot about it. There was no harm in them knowing. He thought back to that dark and dangerous night. ‘It was in Helmand. We went into a village a few hours before sun-up to lift a guy, a warlord,’ he said. ‘He was a grower - heroin - and he’d kill anyone, coalition forces, locals, to protect his business. He paid off the Taliban, who also protected him.
‘We knew where he was. A small army, three fifty, four hundred men, surrounded the house. Our surveillance showed they weren’t very alert at night. Sentries slept at their posts. We went in on foot, walked right into the village. We took out anyone in our way . . . At the first sentry position half a dozen Taliban lay on the ground, sleeping. We killed them all. The next lot in our way were talking and smoking around a fire. We took them out, too. The silenced weapons we used weren’t really silent. You can’t hear the bullets coming out of the muzzles. But you can hear the machinery, the clatter of the working parts inside the weapon, pushing the next round into the breech before it fires. Click, click, click. That became our catchphrase for killing. Click-click.What are you doing tonight? Click-click. We did a lot of that over there.
‘We went in through the back door of one of those mud-walled houses, a bungalow filled with the smoke from kerosene lamps. They were sleeping on the floor. People all over the place. We divided up and shot every one of them simultaneously, except in the end room where the target lay. We gagged him and he woke up and we bound his arms. Our Afghan guide told him we would kill him if he tried to raise the alarm. He understood.’
They had stopped walking now, a few steps from the compound’s lift. Stratton had the scientists’ attention.
‘I went to the front door and looked out onto the street. We intended to walk on out of the village with this worlord. But men were up and walking about in every direction. We didn’t know why. Maybe they’d found bodies. A couple of men approached the house. We let them enter and then we killed them. Click, click, click. But we couldn’t do that all night. If one of them had managed to get off a round none of us would have got out of there alive. They would have hit us with everything they’d got, even if it meant killing their warlord. We could only carry so much ammunition and no one would have been able to get to us in time.
‘I had two options, as I saw it. We could walk out of there and hope we didn’t bump into anyone. Or we could call in our vehicles. That was Jordan’s team. In the original plan he would pick us up beyond the village, when we were clear. But we had discussed the possibility of him driving through. The white Toyota pick-ups we used were the same as the Taliban used in that area. Convoys of them came through the village at any time of the day or night. We felt we could get away with it. A one-off. When I signalled Jordan he asked if we could get closer to the edge of the village. He could see movement on the road and thought he might be challenged. Once the Taliban got a look at the occupants of our Toyotas there would be a battle. I said no. He had to come in and get us. I thought he had more chance of success that way than us going to him.
‘Jordan wasn’t the type to argue, not in a situation like that. So he came on in - the three pick-ups, loud as hell, headlights cutting through the blackness. A handful of Taliban challenged them on the edge of the village but they pushed through. The Taliban didn’t fire, they hadn’t seen enough. Jordan kept on coming. Men walked out of houses as the pick-ups passed, or stood where they had been sleeping, wrapped in blankets. They always had AK- 47s, as if the guns were part of their bodies.
‘It was obvious it had to be a moving pick-up. We moved out of the house. A couple of Taliban came towards us. The warlord decided this was his best chance of surviving. We took the Taliban out. Click-click. Others came. We took them out. As the pick-ups arrived we ran to them and dived into the backs. The warlord began to scream, he could see we were succeeding. We shot him through the head. The op was over. We’d failed. It was survival time. It’s not unusual. Not every op is a success. You can only plan for so much. You let go of the trapeze a hundred feet above the ground and look for another.’ Stratton glanced at Rowena.
‘The Taliban opened up on us. Our vehicles weren’t armoured. All we had was the dust we kicked up and the rounds we could put down. Every vehicle got hit but somewhow we all made it out of the killing zone. We lost one vehicle with a stalled engine outside the village but everyone managed to get into another Toyota. Two of my lads were hit - nothing serious. I didn’t know Jordan had been shot until we got to the air-extraction RV. He’d driven without a complaint for twenty minutes until he lost so much blood that he started to fall unconscious.
‘He kept quiet, hoping it was nothing serious so that I wouldn’t get blamed for it. When he told me this later it was his only admission that he thought I’d made the wrong call. Within months he’d been invalided out of the service.’
The lift doors stood open before them and they stepped inside.
‘Do you still believe you were right?’ Jason asked as the doors closed.
‘That’s not the point,’ Stratton said.
‘What
‘If you need to ask you wouldn’t understand.’
The lift came to a halt and they walked out into the tacky lobby. The others were dissatisfied with Stratton’s answer. ‘Was Jordan a good operative?’ Jason asked.
‘Very.’
‘Did
It was an interesting question. That was Stratton’s only complaint about his old friend. ‘You know how beekeepers deal with getting stung? They can’t blame the bees.’
Stratton left them to ponder the comment and he opened the exterior door enough to look towards the helipad. The sound of the helicopter’s purring engines increased measurably. ‘That thing working?’ he asked Binning.
Binning held the plastic case in his hand. ‘I promise you it is.’
