LITMIR.BIZ

      ONE

       Autumn 2008

      Death came in at three minutes to four on a sluggish morning tide, and changed Harry Tate’s life forever.

      It edged up a shrouded Essex inlet, a scrubby white fifty-foot motor launch with a fly bridge, its engine puttering softly against the slow current. The exhaust sounds were muffled by a heavy, early mist rolling along the banks, blanketing the dark marshland like cold candyfloss.

      Three figures stood outlined by a flush of refracted light from the open cockpit. One was on the forward deck, a swirl of dreadlocks framing his head like a war helmet. He was holding a thick pole balanced on one shoulder. Number two, the helmsman, was a bulky shape up on the fly bridge, head turning constantly between the instrument panel and the banks on either side.

      The third man stood on a swimming platform at the stern, inches above the murky wake. Skeletal, with long, straggly hair under a baseball cap, he had one hand down by his side, the other bracing himself on the rear rail.

      ‘It’s Pirates of the frigging Caribbean!’ The whisper drilled softly into Harry’s earpiece, gently mocking, forcing a smile in spite of the tension in his chest. The voice belonged to Bill Maloney, his MI5 colleague, in cover fifty yards along the bank to his right.

      A light breeze lifted off the water, brushing past Harry’s position behind a hummock of coarse grass, fanning his face with the sour smell of mud and decay. The sickly tang of diesel oil seemed to ooze out of the ground everywhere, and something was seeping through his trousers. He tried not to think about the kinds of toxic waste festering beneath him from decades of commerce, skulduggery and neglect.

      He toggled his radio. ‘Where the hell are you, Blue Team?’ The query was strained with urgency. As Ground Controller, he’d been chasing the back-up police unit for fifteen minutes with no response.

      Still nothing. Accident or a comms malfunction? Either way, they weren’t here. He swore softly. Having been slashed at the last minute – economic demands, was the vague explanation – and now with the support van lost somewhere in the darkness, they were down to three men. With what was rumoured to be concealed in the boat’s bilges, from bales of hash to ‘bricks’ of heroin, each containing up to fifty individual pay-and-go bags, and enough methamphetamine crystals to send half the kids in London off their heads for a month, the prize was too valuable. They needed all the help they could get.

      But it wasn’t there.

      He leaned to his right and peeled aside some strands of grass, eyeing the misty darkness where Blue Team should have been in position. Nothing. Instead, he heard a click in his ear, then a hiss of static.

      ‘That’s a negative, Red One . . . repeat negative. We’re up to our axles in mud, five hundred yards from your O.P. The fucking ground’s like molasses. Blue Team out.’

      Harry’s gut turned to water, the urgency now the bitter pre-taste of panic.

      With a narrow window the previous day

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