He made his way down, his feet echoing on the metal steps inside the white and brightly lit steel cavern. As he reached the last bend in the stairs before the bottom he could see the two bodies in blue overalls were the Philippine engine-room workers. They were lying where they had been found and would be removed when the forensic officers had inspected them. When the initial reports of the dead came in, the number totalled twenty-four, which left three unaccounted for. Because of its distance from the superstructure the locker was the last place searched and when the tanker looked like it was going to run aground the front of the boat, especially below the waterline, was not a place anyone wanted to be. It was Jacko, leader of team Alpha, who had reported finding the last three crewmembers.
The two operatives glanced up at Stratton and one of them pointed to a far corner the other side of the stairwell. Stratton looked to see Jacko staring up at a man lying across several pipes above him.
Stratton stepped down on to the lowest point of the ship and walked over to him.
‘Stratton,’ Jacko said, greeting him.They both stood and looked up at the body a few feet above them, all evidence suggesting it had fallen from some height. The man, a Caucasian, was wearing white overalls indicating he was an officer. He looked tall, more than six feet anyway.
‘Chief engineer, I think,’ Jacko said. ‘Him and the other two must’ve made a run for it and tried to hide in here . . . At a guess I’d say the bastards threw him off there,’ he said, indicating a midway stairs landing. ‘They’ve all been razored. Throats slit. I don’t think any of ’em ’av been shot. The two Filipinos look like they put up a bit of a fight. They’ve got slashes and stab wounds all over ’em.’
Stratton looked around, trying to picture what had happened. He saw a wallet on the floor directly below the man on the pipes and picked it up. Inside were some US dollars, an identification card and two photographs. One was of a woman and two children and the other was the dead man with another man, slightly broader and harder looking, but very likely his brother, perhaps even his twin. The engineer’s name was Vladimir Zhilev, a Russian from Riga, Latvia, and he was the chief engineer as Jacko had said.
‘Any clues as to who did it?’ Stratton asked.
‘Nothing so far. Got to be Al Qaeda or one of those lot. Who else would do this?’
Stratton took a plastic evidence bag from a pouch and was about to drop the wallet in it when he noticed a piece of paper stuffed into its side. He pulled it out and opened it up. There was something scrawled on it and a red stain. The writing looked Arabic and on closer inspection the red stain was a thumb print in blood.
‘Where’s this shit gonna end?’ Jacko said.
‘It’s only just started,’ Stratton said as he folded the paper, replaced it in the wallet and dropped it into the evidence bag.
‘Give this to forensics when they get down here. It’s his,’ Stratton said, indicating the engineer and handing the bag to Jacko. ‘Navy’ll be here in twenty minutes. I’ll see you up on deck.’
Chapter 3
A grey, ten-year-old Saab Estate covered in a couple of weeks of dirt and grime drove slowly along a residential street on the outskirts of Riga, Latvia, cutting through several days’ old, grey slush. The suburb was two miles across the river from the old city and this part of it was not as unpleasant on the eye as others built during the Russian occupation. More brick and wood than concrete had been used to construct the buildings in this street, most of which were houses and bungalows. The grey, soulless, depressing apartment blocks the Russians were famous for building throughout its former empire were at the other end of the housing estate and practically out of sight from this street. The winter snows did much to hide the ugliness but the sun was now shining brightly through a patchy sky to shrink back the heavy downfall that had fallen a week before.
The car pulled up alongside the kerb, stopped and the engine was switched off. It was a quiet neighbourhood, the houses comfortably spaced with street-parking guaranteed.
Mikhail Zhilev climbed out of the vehicle and registered pain on his granite, Slav face, which was covered in a two-week-old beard, as he stretched his six-foot-three, fifty-year-old body until his spine cracked. He had been determined to finish the last eight-hour leg of his two-day drive without a stop but his stubbornness had not come without a price. The old twinge in his neck which had plagued him for the past twelve years had throbbed continuously since leaving the mountain road and in the last hour or so had become almost unbearable. When anyone ever asked him about his discomfort he always explained it away as the result of thirty-five years of Sambo wrestling, a Russian self-defence discipline, in particular the last few weeks of those years when he pushed himself hard in the hope of finally winning the heavyweight division of the Russian Army Championship, a hope dashed in the semi-finals when a bad fall almost left him with a broken neck. But the few people who truly knew him, all old comrades in arms except for his brother, knew the real culprits were the Russian scientists and their damned experiments, and also the OMRP (Detachment of Marine Reconnaissance Point - Naval Intelligence) and their bosses in the GRU (General Intelligence Department) who allowed the ridiculous practice of using the military’s finest as medical guinea pigs.
Zhilev let his head fall gradually forward and then, with a grimace, forced his chin the last few inches on to his chest until the vertebrae in his neck also cracked. It gave him a little relief although he knew from experience it would not last long. He thought of the bottle of Temgesic tablets he always kept in his pocket, heavy-duty painkillers, but only for a second before dismissing the notion. He carried them for much the same reason some former smokers keep a packet of cigarettes, as a constant test of resolve and willpower. Soon he would be sitting back in his armchair, his feet up, a towel rolled behind his neck, relaxing and taking the weight off his shoulders, the only sure way to relieve the pain. In his philosophy, painkillers were for the weak, and no one who knew him had ever described him as being weak. One glance at his tall, slightly stooped demeanour, his rock of a head and determined eyes, his powerful shoulders, long arms, gnarled fingers and oaken bones bound in old iron muscles and there was no doubt that this man had spent his entire life in physical hardship. His career may have prematurely aged him but only a blind fool could fail to sense he still had a great capacity for physical destruction.
Besides, there was a much deeper truth behind his disdain for pills. Zhilev had a psychosomatic aversion to any form of drug, and for understandable reasons.
Zhilev opened the back of the car and pulled out an old canvas A-frame rucksack which had a military-style web-belt, pouches and a knife secured to the top. He pulled it heavily on to one shoulder, ignored the pain as he straightened up, steam shooting from his mouth and nostrils as he exhaled the frosty air, shut the boot and trudged up his garden path. He stepped on to his porch where snow remained against the house, sheltered from the direct sunlight, and pulled a bunch of keys out of his coat pocket. He unlocked the front door and stamped his boots on the wooden decking before stepping over the small drift that had moulded solid against the door and entered the house. A pile of mail littered the entrance and he crouched to pick it up before closing the door and walking down the sparse, creaking hallway and into the kitchen.
The house was clean, tidy and organised, the furnishings basic and austere, and noticeably void of a feminine touch.
He placed the letters on the wooden kitchen table, bare except for a half-burned candle in a saucer, dropped the rucksack on the clay-tiled floor, hung his coat on a hook on the wall and gave his neck a brief pressure massage.As he brought his head forward to stretch the vertebrae, he opened his eyes and they fell on a black-and-white framed photograph, twenty-five years old, on the wall by the door. It was of a dozen young, athletic men in black-rubber diving suits posing casually for the camera, some wearing unusual-looking diving sets which did not have air tanks. Some carried underwater mines magnetised to metal sheets strapped on to their backs, others held small flotation boards with compasses and depth gauges attached. Behind the men, on a specially built trailer, was a black ‘Proton’ type underwater two-man tug, or miniature submarine, some twenty feet long from nose to rudder, a red hammer and sickle stencilled on the side. The men were smiling, some of them shyly as if unused to cameras, or perhaps caught unaware by the photographer. Beneath the photo was the badge of the Russian Combat Swimmer, a parachute with wings either side and a diver on an underwater tug across the base of a parachute.
Zhilev stared at the picture as his thoughts went back to those glorious days. He looked at himself in the photograph, the handsome youth in the centre, clean-shaven, straight-backed, short hair parted neatly at the side, a proud warrior of the highest order in the prime of his life. The nostalgia washed over him and he remembered the day the photograph was taken as if it were yesterday and, as always, found it hard to believe so much time had gone by so quickly.
Zhilev disconnected from the picture which always managed to fill him with despondency and loss rather than pride. He turned to the task of cleaning his kit, the first thing a good soldier did as soon as he returned from the field, and hung the belt with its attached pouches and knife on another hook beside his coat and opened the rucksack to empty it. Everything had an old army surplus look about it: no bright colours, earthy, sturdy and practical. The last items at the bottom were a sleeping bag and poncho. He pulled out the poncho and put it to one side, picked up the rucksack and carried it to a cupboard under the stairs. The small space was crammed with military equipment that looked more suited to a museum than any modern Western army. Hanging on hooks or placed neatly on a shelf were items such as compasses, maps, flashlights, a folding spade, knives and a pile of rations. There was also a variety of camouflage outfits, boots and cold and wet-weather gear. Several semi-automatic pistols were laid out neatly on a shelf with their magazines and boxes of cartridges beside them: a Tokarev, a more recent Makarov and a WW2 Luger, all in fine condition. He draped the sleeping bag over a line, hung the rucksack on a nail and closed the door. He put the poncho on a chair by the back door since it would need hosing down before it was put away.There was no tent. Zhilev preferred to sleep on the ground in the open no matter what the conditions and under a poncho only when it snowed or rained. In the field he liked to travel with the bare necessities and sleep with all-round visibility. It was a behaviour he had formed after years of operating in small intelligence-gathering teams, often in the most inhospitable weather and terrain.
Satisfied his gear was sorted out and organised, he filled a chipped enamel kettle from the sink tap and placed it on an old stove. He lit the gas that gushed from the ancient cast-iron ring and sat down at the table to sort through his mail.
The majority of it he tossed into a bin without reading beyond the first clue that it was junk, and when the sorting was complete he was left with three letters of any significance.That was about average for the two weeks he had been away walking in the hills.
Zhilev went alone on long camping expeditions at least twice a year, sometimes three. He had left the military twelve years earlier, medically discharged as unfit for duty, and even though he was often in great discomfort he refused to become a ‘soft civilian’. His legacy of pain from those days of service to his country was accompanied by an unhealthy level of hate and loathing for those who had caused it. Looking back, he had loved his life in the Spetsnaz, Russian Special Forces, but he had been cheated out of at least three more years of active service, and perhaps more importantly the opportunity to work with naval intelligence as a rear-echelon field adviser, a posting ideal for older, experienced men, and one that could have kept him employed in a special forces capacity into his sixties. The doctors had given him a zero physical rating in his final report with the added comment that his damaged neck could one day cause him paralysis and perhaps, due to the extent of the damage which was close to his skull, even death. Zhilev refused to accept it and pleaded with them to let him prove they were wrong and that he was strong enough to do any task they set him. But they refused to even consider his plea and furthermore warned him to discontinue any strenuous physical activity for the rest of his life. There was no measure of how much he loathed those fools for first using him like a guinea pig and then, after almost killing him, deciding he was no longer good enough even to teach new recruits from the vast pool of experience he had gained over twenty years and countless operations in the service.
The National Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Defence Ministry of the Russian Federation was the lofty banner these scientists operated under, and they often used Spetsnaz to test their concoctions designed to do a variety of things such as raise physical endurance, remove the feeling of fear, increase tolerance against harsh environments and allow a soldier to operate for up to a week without sleep. The experimental drug that poleaxed Zhilev was a serum created to delay death after receiving a lethal dose of radiation such as during a nuclear attack. Whereas an untreated person would collapse within hours as their brain and internal organs swelled and rapidly degenerated, and their skin blistered and broke apart causing an horrifically painful death, the drug allowed a soldier to operate almost normally for up to four days, giving him the strength to carry out his mission before suddenly dropping dead.
Zhilev was given the newly developed drug in pill form, one every four hours, and ordered to conduct a gruelling map march with forty kilos of equipment over mountainous terrain to test its effects. After two days he became delirious and fell down the side of a crag fracturing his neck. He would have died of exposure had he not been found that evening by his comrades after he failed to make a checkpoint. He lay in a hospital bed for six weeks recovering from the fall and the effects of the drug. When he learned he was to be kicked out of the military he wanted to blow the entire experimental medicine institute to bits. He might have done so too, for Zhilev was certainly a most vengeful man and he had the knowledge and training as well as access to the explosives and equipment necessary.The only reason he did not was because he was not completely certain the door to the service was shut to him. He had high hopes that his colleagues would succeed in an appeal against the decision.