by Andy McNab
‘Wounded Hero Stands Up for Accused Brother,’ said the headline. It went on: Disgraced City trader Christopher Stedman leaves court with decorated war-hero brother Adam …
I read on: At the trial, Adam Stedman, who lost an arm in Afghanistan, spoke of his younger brother’s devoted care for their mother, who died of liver cancer earlier this year …
There he was beside his brother, face to camera, all his medals on display, the empty right sleeve of his tunic folded and pinned. A subtler move would have been to tuck it into his side pocket. But that wouldn’t have screamed ‘War Hero’ as loudly.
Stedman obviously guarded his privacy vigilantly. Stepping into the media glare like that would have been a very big deal. An act of brotherly love and solidarity? I scanned the rest of the story. Christopher, a derivatives trader, had been fucking about playing Masters of the Universe with his fellow traders. He’d narrowly escaped doing time, but the fat fine for his part in the scam meant he wouldn’t be going to lunch by helicopter in the near future. Having to pay his own costs should have cleaned him out altogether. Whoever was now bankrolling the expedition, it surely couldn’t be him.
I was still awake, so before I wrote off Stedman’s brother as the money connection, I searched some more. The trial didn’t seem to have dented his lifestyle – he was splashed all over the gossip pages: glitzy parties, gallery openings, racing events and weddings, each time with a different date on his arm. Even his Thameside penthouse was available to view in the ‘How to Spend It’ section of the FT, with a lavish spread featuring a bath supposedly carved out of a lump of rock crystal – and all after the court case. So who was picking up the tab for the disgraced trader’s lifestyle now?
I decided to take a closer look at whom he was partying with. Most of them seemed to be over- or under-dressed women. There were eight images of him splashed across Tatler Online, usually centre stage, with a babe on each arm – models, heiresses, whatever. There was a handful of posh boys in the frame too, none of whom looked like he’d done a decent day’s work in his life. From the helpful captions I made a list and checked them out one by one. Ninety minutes later I had a pretty comprehensive map of his social world.
The common denominator was inherited wealth, much of it probably kept offshore. Not one of them was self-made. Several from the Gulf States, either late teens or twenties, who shipped their blinged-up cars to London for the summer, stayed at the Dorchester, where they could see the motor from their suite, hung out in members’ clubs charging a grand for a bottle of Krug, and staggered out at five a.m. to roar up and down the King’s Road, winding up the local residents.
The others were mainly Russian expats, sons of oligarchs who had taken flight from Mr Putin. This was very elevated company to hang out and keep up with. They didn’t seem the sort who’d organize a whip-round to keep young Christopher in crystal baths.
One who appeared very frequently at Stedman Junior’s side was Uri Arkov, a baby-faced twenty-five-year-old. His old man had decamped from Moscow to Cyprus ten years ago, from where he ran an air-freight operation. Among other things, they offered an exclusive door-to-door VIP service promising, for a mere thirty thousand dollars, to deliver your favourite vehicle from your home garage – be it in Dubai, Ibiza or Shanghai – to the London hotel of your choice. A nice gig, if flying motors around the world was your thing. But what caught my attention was the name: Skyship.
I’d seen it on a cargo plane parked up at Longyearbyen airport. They had a forty-strong fleet, so it wasn’t such a coincidence. But I hadn’t seen any Lamborghini Aventadors doing doughnuts on the permafrost. What else did Skyship carry? Apart from the car thing, the rest of their cargo was listed as ‘general freight’.
I finally decided to get my head down. I shut the laptop, killed the light and got undressed. The room was still too bright. As I reached for the eye mask, I caught sight of something small and flat in the thin strip of light beneath the door.
It didn’t say a lot: 6 a.m. Blue VW Transporter. Car park. Jules.
23
The VW nine-seater’s lights were off but a plume of exhaust vapour and the condensation on the inside of the windows showed it was occupied. The note had been for real. I knocked on the passenger window as the wind, now stronger still, attacked my face. A gloved hand swiped a porthole in the condensation and a face peered out briefly. Then the door opened to reveal Jules at the wheel, her red hair covered with her parka hood and its fur ruff.
‘Get in.’
I pulled myself into the warmth of the front passenger seat. ‘Where’s Will?’
‘Asleep, at last. I wanted to connect last night, but it was a bit crowded for a discreet chat.’
‘I didn’t know we needed one.’ I was hungry and tired. This had better have a point.
She put the vehicle into gear and moved off.
‘Where are we headed?’
‘Just somewhere we can talk in a neutral space.’
She’d been watching too many spy films, but I was too fucked to care. I just sat back and enjoyed the heat.
Less than a block in I could see she knew what she was doing: holding the revs low, turning into a skid, letting the engine do the braking. Being a medic in war zones required a whole lot of skills beyond the actual doctoring.
‘Does this involve breakfast?’
‘There may be something left in there.’ She waved me towards a grey alloy Stanley flask in the rear foot-well. A bolt-action rifle lay across the seat above it – I hoped it was for the bears. I reached for the flask. It was half empty and what was left was cold.
Her face was etched with worry. She had a lot more on her mind than coffee.
‘I need your help.’
The outside went by in a whitish-grey blur.
‘You saw what happened last night. Stedman is a fucking liability. He’s completely unsuitable. And he’s trouble.’
I was tempted to ask what it had to do with me, but knew she was probably right, and after my internet trawl I wanted to know more. ‘In what way exactly?’
‘Every way. Look at him.’
‘Can you narrow it down a bit?’
‘How about the guy with the knife for a start?’
‘Yeah, what was that about?’
‘How would I know? It was all in Russian. I only have French and German.’
‘Leila say anything to you? On the way to the hotel she claimed he was just some drunken nutter.’
She pulled the hood down so I could get the full force of her glare. ‘Really?’
‘Stedman didn’t seem that bothered …’
‘Well, there’s our problem in one. The only thing he gives a shit about is Adam Stedman.’
‘What does Will think? He know you’re here?’
She eased the VW round a corner and turned into a narrow, unlit alley between two buildings. I figured she wasn’t going to reach for the rifle so I sat tight.
‘So you and Will aren’t on the same page about Stedman.’
She gave a humourless smile. ‘Will only ever sees the good in people.’
‘But Stedman? He seems to have rescued the expedition.’
She gave me an exasperated look. ‘Jack dropped him after Alverstoke. Do you know why?’
Alverstoke was the Institute of Naval Medicine, where they’d have been tested for general fitness and resistance to extreme temperatures, among other things – and rigorously. I didn’t say that Jack had mentioned a drug habit.
‘Because he used blood doping and bronchodilators to pass.’
This sounded a bit more calculated.
‘He took some of his own blood and re-injected it immediately before the tests, to increase his oxygen saturation. It’s standard practice in athletics and cycling. Bronchodilators are like asthma treatments – they boost your lung capacity – so he scored as much fitter than he actually was. But he overdid it, of course, so his levels were implausibly high.’
‘And you found him out?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘That and the cocaine. It was obvious. Or it should have been. I mean, that’s what the monitors are for. No one believes me, but my bet is they looked the other way – none of them had the balls to say, because of their … because of what the boys had all been through, and what they were trying to do.’
‘So you told Jack.’
‘I had to. I went over all their readings with a fine-tooth comb. Will was furious. Thought I didn’t trust him. It caused quite a rift. In fact, I tend not to trust anyone. Anyway, that’s not the point. Stedman’s readings were too good to be true so I demanded they do them again. He’s physically not up to it, he’s a liar, and I was glad he was found out. He could have brought the whole thing down.’
‘Must have been a hard decision for Jack.’
‘It was out of his hands.’
‘How come?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Because I told his father.’
That explained a lot.
‘Well, I thought Stedman and Jack might find a way of suppressing it. I mean, you can’t stop someone going to the Arctic. But when his father weighed in, Jack was fresh out of choices.’
No wonder Jack was so keen to keep his old man away from this.
24
I was starting to get a clearer picture of Jules: tough, professional, by the book, and definitely not one to cross. The sort of person who could be a godsend and a massive pain in the arse at the same time.
‘Now he’s back, and already there’s trouble.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘This! Having rows with people in bars. People with knives, for God’s sake. He’s totally out of control.’
‘The row seemed to be with Leila.’
‘Yes, well, she’s in it up to her neck.’
‘In what?’
She shook her head. ‘This … deal, whatever it is. The money that’s magically going to come our way.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘You know Jack’s father, don’t you? Can’t you get him to intervene?’
‘Jack’s his own man.’
A pair of eyes suddenly appeared very close to the bonnet of the minibus, just above head height. She stiffened and braked.
The outline of the reindeer the eyes belonged to emerged out of the darkness. She flashed the main beams and it trotted away. She was in no mood to appreciate the wildlife.
‘Come on, Nick, surely you don’t expect me to believe you turned up here and bumped into him completely by chance.’
‘So you want Stedman out – even though it might jeopardize the trip?’
‘Will’s not walking to the Pole with that twat. Not if I have anything to do with it.’
‘That doesn’t seem to be how he sees it.’
She sighed. ‘He’s so – argh! I have to look after him, OK? If that man goes on this trip, he’ll put them all in danger – not least my husband. And this may not mean much to you, but I’d very much like him to come back alive.’
‘So tell him not to go.’
‘You don’t understand. He doesn’t care if Stedman is on it or not. He doesn’t see what a risk he is – he just wants it to happen. Will needs this expedition. His head is in bits, not just his face. He needs it to help him put everything back in some kind of order. He needs to reinvent himself – get past his past. It eats away at him, every single day.
‘The expedition is all he’s focused on for the last year. He is capable, I know. I’ve trained with him, with the team, from the start. Not to go would destroy him. It would destroy them all.’
I couldn’t see the problem, but that was because I didn’t love Will, I supposed. Stedman could get the cash. So what if it turned out to be dodgy and he was on the trip? There were five of them, enough bodies to keep each other going. No matter what bits and pieces they were missing, they still needed to challenge and redefine themselves. I understood that, and could probably have done with a chunk of it myself. ‘OK, maybe we can sort things out another way. What do you know about where the cash comes from, and Stedman’s plan? What’s he said to Will and the others?’
‘I don’t know.’ She seemed pained. ‘But whatever the so-called plan is, you’re probably too late to do anything about it. Where were you a week ago?’
Thinking about my dead wife and son, and beating myself up because I was still trying to keep their death at a distance.
And in that same instant I realized something.
I’d seen plenty of guys like Will in my time, stuck in a black hole, gripped by depression. Enough of them, for sure, to know that what affected someone physically would also affect them mentally – and whatever affected them mentally would ultimately affect them physically.
When any of the lads had been killed, I’d seen their mates react in a host of different ways. I’d seen them throw themselves into work or family or any number of meaningless activities to make themselves so busy they didn’t have time to process the shit. Some made pilgrimages to where their mates had died, built cairns, set up charities. Grief projects. Was this my job?
But my numbness – my coldness – wasn’t denial or disbelief or any of that psychobabble shit. It was just me, Nick Stone, dealing with things in my own way. The questions were being asked. My head just wasn’t ready yet to take it all in and deal with the fallout.
There were times when I couldn’t feel but that didn’t mean I didn’t care. It was my bubble, like the expedition was theirs. Why wasn’t I reacting normally to Anna and Nicholai’s deaths? Fuck it, maybe I was. Will was doing it his way. I was doing it mine – the only way I knew.
I clicked back into info-gathering mode. ‘How much kit have they already got?’
‘The basics – skis, tents, clothing and so on from their original sponsors, which was how they were able to run the pre-trip. But that’s all. They’ve been practising like mad since they got here.’
‘What else do they need?’
‘They’ve got the pulks, the stoves, the toolkits, but not enough dehydrated meals or cooking fuel – or, of course, the cash to fly them north.’
That would be a big spend. It would cost more to fly to the start line than a first-class return from London to Sydney.
‘What about guides? Who’s in charge of navigation?’
She shook her head in despair. ‘Because they’ve been in the fight they think everything else is a piece of piss.’ She glared at me in case I was guilty of making the same mistake.
I steered the conversation back to Stedman. ‘Do you have any idea what time Stedman’s meeting was?’
‘Why do you think we’re sitting in this thing?’ She pointed to the road signs that told us we were heading towards the airport. ‘Talk to him, Nick.’
Maybe she was a spy after all.
‘OK. I’ll do my best to find out what he’s up to. The thing is, without Stedman, the expedition is fucked. And the more desperate anyone is for cash, the more problems come with it. But they’re big boys, you know.’
She drove the rest of the way in silence, and dropped me by the terminal building.
25
On the other side of the massive glass wall that bordered the runway, and brought some very dull light into the building, an Antonov 74 sat alongside a couple of Russian-made red Mi-8 helis.
The AN-74 had no markings, apart from its identification letters: UIA. So it was Ukrainian, and had to be the air bridge to Barneo. It was the only thing out there that had been built to conquer extreme weather and survive every kind of dodgy landing strip – and one of the check-in desks boasted a board with a picture of the 74 landing on ice, with ‘BARNEO’ plastered all over it. The wide-diameter, twin-engine pods mounted on top of its wings had earned it the nickname Cheburashka, after a big-eared Soviet-era cartoon mouse that was still popular back east.
A few heavily padded and hooded ground crew were moving about on the apron, and one of the aircraft, in Arktikol livery, was being fuelled. There was no sign of Stedman inside the ha
ll, just a life-size statue of a bear. It dominated the vast open space, in case anyone had forgotten that a few of them were wandering about outside.
The place was deserted, except for a cleaner working his way methodically across the glossy floor with a scissor-mop, trapping cups, food trays and other shit. The café hadn’t opened but I spotted a coffee machine opposite the freight desk. Since there was nothing to eat I pressed the milk and sugar options to add some excitement. The result was warm and brown but any resemblance to coffee ended right there.
A woman in a parka with the world’s biggest ruff round her hood appeared behind the freight desk, pulled off a pair of padded gloves and cupped her hands over her mouth to warm them. I approached the counter. She surveyed me through narrowed eyes, then turned away.
‘Morning. Seen a man with one arm around here?’
She turned back. Her eyes narrowed further and she treated me to the sort of look you’d give someone who asked if you’d seen a man with one arm in a deserted airport, prior to calling security.
No answer.
‘Do you speak English?’
‘Of course.’
Russian: just my luck.
‘Do Skyship make regular flights into Svalbard?’
Again she acted as if she hadn’t heard me. Years of stonewalling unwelcome questions – or any questions at all – combined with the cruel wind whipping off the airfield had frozen her features into a permanent expression of contempt. It was all too familiar from my previous dealings with Russian officialdom. The only upside of Anna’s death should have been that I would never again have to deal with people like that. Now they seemed to be everywhere I went.
