As he drew ever nearer and there remained nothing more specific to see, McGregor had to confess to himself that he had no idea what he might actually be looking for. Blisters were beginning to form on his hands from the rub of the oars, and he was aware that every further stroke he took now, he’d have to duplicate to get back. He was beginning to feel a bit daft, in fact, floating out there in his bloody pyjamas and raincoat. If he did discover anything untoward, he was hardly going to cut a very credible figure confronting it. Worse,if something went wrong and he had to be rescued, the last thing he wanted was those numpties from Rosstown nick finding him in this state and reinforcing their impression that he was some attention-seeking headbanger.
With that thought, he stopped the boat and turned to face the other direction. He flexed his shoulders a little and rubbed the smarting palms of his hands, then gripped the oars again to begin his return journey. Now that he was looking towards the floating hotel, he therefore had a perfect view of the rocket-propelled grenade that had been launched from it and was fizzing through the night sky towards him.
‘Sufferin’ Christ!’
The missile plunged into the water only a few yards to the left of the boat, sending out an arc of spray and a circular wave that pulsed powerfully underneath. McGregor heard the fizzing sound again, and saw that a second projectile had been fired from the platform. He let go of the oars and dived over the side of the boat, kicking downwards to take himself deeper into the water, where he struggled free of his shoes and the now somewhat moot raincoat.
The shock of the cold jolted through McGregor’s body, electrifying him into frenetic, energised thrashing and clawing, which took him further away from the grenades’ intended target. To his enormous relief, he could tell that his body temperature was non-fatally readjusting to that of the water, but he estimated that you’d need an electron microscope to see his scrotum at that point. A few seconds later there was light and sound from above him as the boat suffered a direct hit, exploding into matchwood third time lucky. It was a small but important consolation that the explosion at least reminded him which direction the surface lay. He stayed under for as long as his complaining lungs would allow, all the time swimming further away from the wreckage.
McGregor’s head emerged from the waves with a gasp and he began to tread water. He’d learned that, God knows how many years ago: treading water. They taught you it at life-saving classes, during which he’d always been extremely sceptical about the instructors’ insistence that you jump into the swimming pool clothed in your pyjamas. Well, he knew now: never let it be said they were anything less than prescient at the Leith Vicky baths.
Debris was bobbing on the surface a few yards away. Watching it, McGregor was fairly confident that he could now supply an accurate but strictly non-reasonable explanation for what had happened to puddle-man back at the farm.
‘An unfortunate accident.’
‘It’s not unknown for former officers’ imaginations to run away with themselves a wee bit.’
Fuckin’ arseholes.
He glanced around himself, turning in the water. He was a lot nearer the rig than the shore, and in recent years the most strenuous swim he’d attempted was a couple of lengths before lunch in Majorca. On the other hand, there were men with explosives complicating his alternative. He was truly caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
McGregor looked closer at the giant construction, focusing between the pillars that jutted up from the water. Around the central support there appeared to be three rubber dinghies, equipped with outboards. If he could fire up one of those, he would be a lot harder to hit, moving fast and zig-zagging erratically all the way to shore. It had taken them three goes to blow up a near-stationary rowing boat, so it was definitely worth a shot. He trod water for a few more moments until he was happy he had his breath back, then he began a cautious breaststroke towards the rig.
He kept his gaze trained on the central pillar as he approached, gradually making out the encircling jetty that the dinghies were moored to. There didn’t appear to be anyone guarding it, which made him all the more nervous of where else his approach might be observed. The rockets had been launched from platform-level, and he was confident that he was now beneath their line of sight, but there were decks and gantries above him, any of which might be patrolled. He turned on to his back for a few strokes. He couldn’t see anyone, but that was hardly reassuring. Snipers generally didn’t tend to be extroverts.
His arms were starting to seriously ache from the combined efforts of rowing and swimming. The sleeves of his pyjama shirt weren’t proving very aqua-dynamic, but pulling the thing off while in the drink would be like trying to do origami with clingfilm. In space. He trod water for another few breath-restoring seconds, then, heartened that he hadn’t been machine-gunned yet and that neither had he seen any heavy ordnance for a good ten minutes, he summoned up renewed effort and crawled the last twenty yards.
McGregor reached the nearest of the dinghies and threw an arm over the side, preparing to climb in. The rubber tube compressed flacidly under his weight with an incontinent rasp of air, causing him to slither helplessly back under the water. He came up and tried again, gripping the dinghy a bit nearer the front, but with similar results.
The thing was barely afloat. The weight of the outboard motor was slowly pulling the boat under from the back, a process McGregor had accelerated by assisting the deflation of the air chambers on one side. He swam to the jetty and hauled himself up, water gushing from his pyjamas and pouring with a steady cadence on to the wooden boards.
Standing upright, he could see that all of the dinghies had been sabotaged, each of their air chambers slashed in several places. Someone had made damn sure nobody was leaving this rig, including, now, McGregor. He was cold, drookit, and worst of all for a Leither, marooned.
‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘If I’d ken’t it was this much fuckin’ fun, I’d have retired years ago.’
McGregor had another look at each of the boats, as though he might have failed to notice the first time that one of them was actually fine. They remained consistently jiggered. Short of sticking one of the outboards up his arse, lying on his back and opening his legs, it looked like he was here for the duration. He sighed heavily and began walking around the jetty to see where it led.
On the other side of the central column there were two shoogly looking stairways leading to the deck above. Lying in front of these was a dead man in cammy gear and a black balaclava, sporting holes for the eyes, the mouth and the bullet-wound in his forehead. In a way, McGregor found it comforting to meet someone who’d had a worse night than himself. Nonetheless, he was mightily confused to discover a corpse kitted out in the classic terrorist away-strip. McGregor wasn’t complaining, but he’d been kind of expecting any dead people he encountered to be wearing civvies.
To further confirm which team the dead man was on, he still had a machine gun strapped to his shoulder, though his hands evidently weren’t on it at the time of death. McGregor’s confusion grew. Either he’d been drilled from distance – which seemed unlikely, given the pin-point position of the plug-mark – or he’d been taken by surprise, which seemed equally unlikely, as the only approach was via the two stairways he was lying in front of. It was of course possible that he was just a shite sentry, but that still begged the time-honoured question: whodunnit?
McGregor knelt down beside the body and pulled off his soaking pyjama top, dumping it with a splat on the boards. Removing the man’s machine gun, he noted with a shudder that the corpse’s temperature suggested he hadn’t been dead an hour. The man’s camouflage-vest was therefore still warm as McGregor pulled it over his own head, a sensation similar to, but several million times less comfortable than, sitting on an already tepid lavvy seat.
The man’s boots were too small for him, as were, even more frustratingly, his trousers. McGregor tugged manfully at the waistband to get it beyond his thighs, but after tumbling to the deck twice
and almost spilling into the water, he was reluctantly forced to squelch back into his pyjama-breeks. Between those, his bare feet, the cammy-semmit and the machine gun, he reckoned he must look like the leader of the Demented Geriatric Liberation Front. With that inspiring thought, he bounded up the gangway.
22:54 fipr radioheadgames
‘Jackson? Jackson? Jackson, come in, over. Jackson, come in, over. Oh look, stop playing hard to get, you bleeding-heart Geordie tosspot. I know that you and your new best friends are listening to every word I transmit, and every word that’s transmitted to me. So in that case you’ll have heard your former comrade-in-arms Mr Quinn a few minutes back, informing me that he’d captured the elusive Mr Gavin Hutchison. No doubt you also heard me order Quinn to bring his prisoner directly to the ballroom. Well, Jackson, bugger me backwards with a banana if they aren’t both standing in front of me right now. So here’s how it’s going to be. You tell the hostages to come out from wherever they’re hiding, or else their gracious host will be forced to take his leave of them. It’s kind of an it’s-my-party-and-I’ll-die-if-I-want-to scenario. You pass the message on: they’ve got five minutes to show up in front of this hotel and do business with me, or Mr Hutchison here does business with the Desert Eagle lead-export company. Five minutes, I said, starting now.’
22:59
‘Jackson? Jackson? I mean it. I’m going to drill him right now. I thought you were the big hero, Jackson. Do you want this man’s death on your conscience? Do the hostages want his death on theirs? Did you even tell them the situation? Maybe you should let me talk to them. Maybe they should be told how your recklessness is likely to get them all killed, whereas if they just give me what I want, nobody has to get hurt.
‘That five minutes is up, Jackson. Time’s run out for Mr Hutchison, here, I’m afraid. I just hope if I’m ever in his position, I’ve got better friends than he has tonight. Unless, of course, his friends would like to intervene and request a stay of execution. I’m sure I could grant another five minutes’ clemency if somebody spoke to me really nicely. Maybe I’ll give Mr Hutchison thirty seconds more, just in case that plea comes. Then again, maybe I won’t.’
22:59 and thirty seconds
‘Jackson?Are you listening? You callous bastard. You’ve just signed Mr Hutchison’s execution order. I want you to know that his blood is on your hands as much as it’s on mine. It didn’t have to be this way, you know. A simple negotiation, that’s all it would have taken. This is just so unnecessary. Maybe if you had seen sense, if the hostages had seen sense, it would never have come to this, but here we are—’
‘Oh look for fuck’s sake, Connor, knock it on the head, this is pitiful. We know you don’t have Gavin Hutchison, so stop making a cunt of yourself. You can tell Quinn his acting’s fuckin’ shite. And don’t call me a Geordie again, you ignorant Scottish get.’
‘Ah, so you’ve found your voice at last, Acks. But I can assure you that I do have Mr Hutchison. I’m looking at him right this second, down the barrel of my gun.’
‘Aye, sure, Bill. Tell you what, then: we’ll trade him for Lord Lucan here. He’s bound to be worth a few bob more. We’ll throw in Shergar as well. Can’t say fairer than that.’
‘All right, Jackson, you smart-arsed prick. We don’t have Gavin Hutchison, but what we do have is a truckload of guns and about twelve hours before this rig is due any contact from the outside world. I’ve got units scouring every inch, and there aren’t that many places you can hide fifty people around here. We’ll find you soon enough.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But I reckon you’d be better usin’ your time to get out of here. You might have twelve hours, but this isn’t hide and seek, mate. We’re not hidin’, we’re dug in. Cut your losses, Bill. This was all a daft mistake. I saw that, and it sounds like Dawson saw it too. Be smart, Bill. Call it off.’
‘Hmm. Actually, know what, Acks? You’re probably right. I should call it off. I might have put a lot of planning and effort into this, and there’s millions of pounds at stake, but I suppose you do have to look at the bigger picture sometimes, don’t you? And right now that bigger picture is showing how futile it would be for me and my men to even attempt to take on an elite fighting force such as you must have assembled and trained in the past hour. Perhaps I should let my men know what they’re up against, rather than ask them to go unwarned into a fight they couldn’t possibly win.
‘All units, be advised. All units, be advised. This assault will bring you up against adversaries who are trained catering contractors. I have reason to believe there may even be a crack corp of travel agents and several venture capitalists in their ranks. Any man who feels this mission would be suicide has my permission to stand down. Anyone? Anyone? Oh, I suppose not, then. Sorry, Jackson. I guess these guys of mine just don’t know when they’re beat.’
‘Well, they’ll know soon enough.’
‘Connor, come in, over. Connor, come in, over.’
‘Connor here. What is it?’
‘It’s Booth, sir.’
‘Yes, Booth, what is it?’
‘No, this is Dobson. I mean the issue is Booth.’
‘What issue?’
‘Well, primarily, I suppose, the issue of who disembowelled him with a circular saw, then made off with his guns and his radio. He’s dead, sir. Very, very dead.’
‘But I’ve been speaking to Booth on and off for the past … Jackson.’
‘Don’t blame me, mate. I don’t know anythin’ about that one. Can’t claim credit for Conroy down at the jetty either – I notice he’s not been answerin’ his calls, so I’m assumin’ the worst. It’s not lookin’ good, is it? Face it, Bill. This whole thing’s comin’ down around your ears. You’ve lost Dawson, you’ve lost Gaghen. Who does that leave? You and a bunch of fuckin’ amateurs. Did you all hear that out there? Fuckin’ amateurs, the lot of you. Like Booth was an amateur. Like Conroy was an amateur. Well, unless you bail out, it’s me and my amateurs against you and yours, and we haven’t lost any so far. I’ll take those odds, Bill, what do you say?’
‘I say ten out of ten for bravado, Jackson, but we’ll see how tough your new pals are once the shooting starts. It’s amazing how they can lose their stomach for the fight after one of them’s lost his stomach altogether.’
‘Aye, well, like I said, we haven’t lost any so far. Go an’ ask Booth how he feels about your chances.’
‘Fuck you, Jackson.’
‘Right back atcha, Bill.’
‘You doin’ all right there, McQuade?’
‘Oh aye. Is there a military term for shitin’ yoursel’? Whit was aw that aboot?’
‘Just talkin’ smack, mate. Just talkin’ smack. He’s tryin’ to scare me, I’m tryin’ to scare his lot.’
‘Why didn’t you tell him who we really are, seein’ as it sounds like the baw’s on the slates already for these guys. Might sow that bit of dissension in the ranks.’
‘No chance. These idiots’ll do whatever Connor says, no matter what, believe me, because they’re fuckin’ lost without him. But more to the point, as long as he believes you lot are rollin’ in cash, he’s got an interest in keepin’ you alive, so it wouldn’t be the wisest idea to disabuse him of that particular notion.’
‘Understood.’
‘But havin’ said that, it’ll only be a tactical consideration for a little while longer. He has no idea how much I’ve told you lot about him, so he’ll assume the worst. He’ll assume that at the very least you know his name, so whether he gets money out of you or not, he needs you silenced afterwards. My guess would be he’s already set himself a time limit for recapturin’ you all alive. Once that’s past, it’s a straight fight to the death. Us or them. All or nothin’.’
‘How many of them are there?’
‘Let’s see. Dawson’s gone, Gaghen’s dead, Booth’s dead, the two from the ballroom, probably Conroy too, by the sound of it. That leaves eleven.’
‘Eleven! All with Uzis an’ stuff?’
<
br /> ‘Uzis, shotguns, and don’t forget the rocket launchers. Connor won’t use those until his time limit’s up, but when he does …’
‘Yeah, I’ve played a lot of Quake. The guy with the rocket launcher usually wins. So you’re sayin’ we’ve not only got to hold out – we’ve got to win this fight, an’ win it before a deadline expires, against a clock that only the other guy can see?’
‘That’s what I’m sayin’, lad.’
‘Can’t you go back to talkin’ smack?’
Ally watched Jackson walk away, striding off with that imposing gait to check on maybe Lisa or Charlie at one of the other barricades. He felt all the more scared and helpless as soon as the big man left. It was selfish, but he wanted it to be his post Jackson was closest to when … whatever happened, happened. Selfish, but natural: they were all kids tonight, and Jackson was the only adult.
The ever-bleakening picture he painted shouldn’t have come as a surprise: the darkest-before-dawn rule of action flicks dictated that the situation always got one level more scary than the trailers and even the plot so far had previously hinted. Ally just hoped that had been it.
He looked at his watch, though it couldn’t tell him anything pertinent to the timescale he really needed to know about. Less than two hours had passed since he was standing drinking champagne with old friends, happily immersing himself in the past for a night because there was the rest of his life to deal with the future. Now it felt like he’d never had that past, just seen it on video like any other empty and irrelevant tale. Now there was no past, there was no future, and time existed only in another man’s mind.
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Page 28
