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But somehow Afghan heat, Iraqi heat, African heat, didn’t feel so bad.
He grinned to himself: maybe it was the rounds cracking off past your swede. That had a funny way of putting things like the ambient temperature into context.
The two pretty Spanish girls got up and wiggled and jiggled off down to the water, giggling as they went.
Carr risked a quick glance.
Caught George’s eye.
‘You sad bastard,’ said his son, with a grin and a shake of his head. ‘You sad, sad bastard.’
8. (#ulink_2d522c2d-a01d-551c-a5d9-9c75ee5986d0)
SIXTY KILOMETRES NORTH-EAST, the MS Windsor Castle sat at anchor on Pier 1 of Málaga’s Eastern dock.
On the bridge, the captain – an Italian, Carlo Abandonato – sipped his coffee and studied the latest weather reports.
In a few hours, they would be underway again, heading up and through the Strait of Gibraltar, three days out from Southampton on the final leg of the cruise.
The Strait could be a tricky little stretch, even for a ship such as the Windsor Castle, which – while not in the front rank of such vessels – was relatively modern and well-equipped.
The convergence of the roiling Atlantic with the almost tideless Mediterranean, in that narrow channel where Africa stared down Europe, created strange and unpredictable currents, and local weather conditions could make that much worse.
The cold Mistral, blowing down from the Rhone Alps, could quickly turn a warm summer’s day such as this a bitter, wintry grey, and when the Levanter blew across from the Balearics it often brought with it a sudden summer fog.
Worst of all was the Sirocco, which whipped up heavy seas and hurled sand from the distant Sahara at you in a blinding fury.
But today the water was duckpond flat, the wind no more than a warm breath, and the radar was set fair for the next few days.
Good news for Captain Abandonato, good news for the crew, and good news for the five hundred passengers who were currently drinking, eating, and sunbathing on the six decks behind and beneath him, or enjoying lunch ashore in one of Málaga’s many excellent restaurants.
He was looking forward to getting to Southampton; from there he would head up to Heathrow to fly home on leave to Civitavecchia.
His wife was expecting their second child – a son, the doctors had said – and was due to give birth the day after he arrived home.
Abandonato had booked a whole month off to spend time with Maria and their children.
He was looking forward to it so much it hurt.
It was always a wrench to leave, but at least it paid the bills: Maria was under an excellent but cripplingly expensive obstetrician, they were looking to move to a bigger house inland, near the lake at Bracciano, and their daughter was down for one of Roma’s best private nursery schools.
Such things did not come cheap.
He finished his coffee and looked at his watch.
Shortly after 13:00hrs.
He turned to his Norwegian staff captain, the second-in-command and the man who really drove the boat.
‘I’m going to freshen up and then have a walk round and see how the passengers are, Nils,’ he said. ‘Let’s have dinner together later?’
‘Sure,’ said Nils.
Abandonato pulled on his cap, straightened the epaulettes on his crisp, white shirt, and left the bridge.
9. (#ulink_1439b57b-cc5f-5db8-a666-b2abe0506e00)
A GUY WITH dark eyes came out of nowhere and walked in front of John Carr.
There he stopped, temporarily blocking Carr’s view of the sea.
Flip-flops in hand, white three-quarter length linen trousers, billowing ivory shirt.
Flashy gold watch, which stood out on his tanned wrist.
Another Eurotrash millionaire, thought Carr.
The place was crawling with them.
Carr thought at first that the guy was staring at him, and Carr didn’t like being stared at, but then he realised that the man’s eyes had swept on, and that he was looking past him at another bunch of people.
Five seconds he stared, and then he carried on walking.
At which point Carr looked closer, his eye drawn by the guy’s odd, limping gait, and the deep scar on his right calf, where something had taken a big bite out of the muscle.
It looked to Carr like shrapnel damage, something he’d seen plenty of.
As the guy moved away, almost unconsciously, from force of habit, Carr stored his image in the vast filing cabinet in his head.
Longish black hair, wavy and greasy, held back by a pair of Oakleys pushed up on his forehead.
Dark eyes.
Kind of a cruel mouth.
Lopsided walk.
And that big, pink hole in his right leg.
Once inside Carr’s head it would never leave. He had an uncanny knack for remembering stuff like this – the skill had been honed during his near-two decades in the Special Air Service, and it had often proved invaluable on ops.
He looked over his right shoulder at the group the guy had been eyeballing.
Four young couples were in the process of laying out their towels, paperbacks, and iPads.
Their pale skin, Boden and Crew kit and beach cricket gear, would have marked them out as members of the British middle class, even if their accents had not confirmed it.
‘For goodness’ sake, Jemima,’ one of the young men was saying, ‘I thought you were bringing the Kindle.’
‘Oh piss off, Thomas,’ said Jemima. ‘You’re really getting on my nerves today.’
‘Yeah, Tom,’ said one of the others, good-naturedly. ‘Take a day off, why don’t you? What are you reading, anyway? Fifty Shades of Grey?’ There was a ripple of mocking laughter and jeers. ‘Right, who’s coming in?’
The second speaker pulled off his T-shirt and headed for the water, followed by three of the girls.
Very tidy, thought Carr. Especially the tall brunette, and the blonde girl in the shocking pink bikini.
He could see why the guy with the gammy leg had been gawping at them.
But it wasn’t worth the aggro, not with Alice by his side and George running his gob, so he turned his head and looked conspicuously in the opposite direction.
Way off at the top of the beach, unnoticed by Carr or anyone else, a young man in cut-off denim shorts and a Manchester United replica shirt hung around under a palm tree, and made a phone call.
As he did so, he watched the new arrivals keenly – though he took care not to show it.
The call was answered a hundred metres away, by the man with the dark eyes and the cruel mouth.
He was by now standing on the deck of a powerful white yacht, moored up in the marina at the extreme western edge of the Puerto Banús beach, at the end of Calle Ribera.
The open sea a matter of metres away.
‘Yes,’ said Dark Eyes. ‘Keep watching them, and await further instructions.’
He killed the call, stood up, pulled his Oakleys down from his forehead, and stuck a Marlboro Light in his mouth.
The dark-eyed man did indeed look like a member of the wealthy, leisured Eurotrash, who idled their summers away sailing around the Med, their winters in Klosters and Courchevel 1850, and the rest of the year drinking pink champagne at 38,000 feet.
But the flashy gold Rolex was fake, and the linen trousers stolen, and John Carr was quite correct about the damage to his leg – it had been caused by a piece of red-hot Hazara shrapnel at Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, in 1997.
He was actually a Chechen, called Argun Shishani, and he was not the owner of the boat, the Mistral 55 class Lucky Lady.
He was merely borrowing it from someone – someone who, admittedly, would never need it again.
He had chosen this particular boat because its twin 7,400hp Codag engines made it capable of more than fifty knots – 52kts, to be precise, or 96kph, or a shade under 60mph.
And because it had a mooring ticket at Puerto Banús.
Argun Shishani threw his half-smoked cigarette into the water.
Watched in amusement for a moment or two as a dozen silver sardines flashed in and fought over it.
Then looked up at the endless blue sky, smiled, and went below to make the final preparations.
10. (#ulink_0fd98a44-aa78-53a8-b196-bbf2951c49d1)
CARLO ABANDONATO HAD taken time to walk around the sun deck, and all looked in order.
About half of the Windsor Castle’s passengers had gone ashore, and those who had remained were sipping cocktails, splashing in the pool, or slowly giving themselves skin cancer in the roasting sun.
It was a mid-range boat, so they were mostly families and a few pensioners – the bulk of them British with a few Americans, Canadians and Europeans thrown in.
A young woman waylaid him as he walked by, and Abandonato stopped to crouch down by her sun lounger.
She was a Londoner, he thought, and not unattractive, and she was flirting furiously; her husband was taken up with their toddler, and either didn’t notice or was used to it.
‘So how do I go about getting an invitation for dinner at the Captain’s table?’ the young woman was saying, looking at him over her sunglasses.
‘It’s a big mystery,’ said Abandonato, smiling. He was a handsome man, and he knew it, but he seemed to exert a particularly hypnotic effect on English women which he had never really understood. ‘The maître d’ has his ways, but I’m afraid I leave it to him.’
‘Well, tell him Becky in 414 on deck four would like to come,’ she said, with a conspiratorial grin. ‘Just me, my husband will be busy with our daughter.’
‘Oi, oi,’ said the husband, distractedly.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Abandonato, standing up. ‘Everything else is okay for you?’
‘Wonderful,’ said Becky, looking him up and down. ‘The view especially.’
Carlo Abandonato chuckled and walked on, heading to the elevator.
He’d travel a deck down, to two of the ship’s three restaurants, to make sure the lunch service was going well.
After that, he’d book himself off for an hour, go back to his cabin, and call his wife via the sat-link.
Then back to the bridge, go through the departure checks ready for 17:00hrs, when they were due to weigh anchor and be on their way.
He smiled to himself as the elevator doors closed and he started sinking.
There were worse jobs in the world.
11. (#ulink_cdcd7ad9-b75b-570a-aec4-d79b7f83ca35)
EIGHTY FEET BENEATH him, below the waterline, in the belly of the Windsor Castle, Farouk Ebrahim stood in the humming, throbbing engine room of the huge ship, looked at the wall clock, and spoke to the first engineer.
‘Excuse me, boss,’ he said, wiping his hands on a rag. ‘Is okay if I go toilet?’
The first engineer – an experienced ex-Royal Navy man called Phil Clarke – glanced at Ebrahim over his clipboard.
‘Again, Farouk?’ he said. ‘That must be the fifth time today.’
‘Sorry, boss,’ said the young Filipino motorman, putting the rag into the pocket of his red overalls. ‘I have a problem in my stomach.’
Clarke scratched his head. There wasn’t much doing – the engines were only running to generate power – and Farouk seemed like a good kid.
Not long on the crew, but eager to learn, and well aware of his place in the scheme of things.
‘Okay,’ said Clarke. ‘But don’t take all day, yeah?’
Ebrahim nodded and hurried from the engine room, and up and out to the tender station on deck three.
