SKELETON GOLD: Dark Tide (James Pace Book 4) Read online

  Barely five feet, five inches tall, she wore her naturally red hair in a short, boyish cut and concealed a sensational figure with drab, ill-fitting clothing, mainly procured from local charity shops. Always a loner, vilified from her early teens for being gay, she had embraced social exclusion by distancing herself in every way; the most obvious being her passion for tattoos.

  Unlike many young women, she had no visible tattoos on her wrists, arms, calves or ankles and her awful clothing tended to keep the rest of her body hidden from view, even in the hottest weather. In the privacy of her shower, or bedroom, any voyeur would have been amazed to see how much of her body was inked.

  At sixteen, her first tattoo had been of a large wolf’s head on her left thigh, quickly followed by a red and gold Chinese dragon on her right. Her back was entirely covered with a gorgeous Pegasus; the mythical winged horse, flying through swirling storm clouds. As though to protect herself, an intricate castle rampart completely covered her belly and diaphragm, its guard towers seeming to support her small breasts from beneath.

  A range of smaller designs further patterned her skin; most in traditional greys and blacks while a few tattoos of hummingbirds stood out starkly on each hip due to their brilliant colouration.

  Complementing this rebellion, Charlene had also experimented with body piercing, although to a lesser extent. Each ear sported five, gold looped earrings and she wore a gold bar in her belly button. Her tongue was pierced with a simple gold stud and a tiny diamond stud sat, barely noticeably, above her left nostril. A clitoral piercing had failed to live up to the hype of increased sensuality and she had discarded it barely two months after tolerating the horrendous embarrassment of having it done.

  After a shaky start to her early school life, she had excelled academically, throwing herself with fierce single-mindedness into her studies as a way of coping. Gaining a Masters in mathematics, and forever searching for the perfect job in theoretical mathematics, she supported herself by working as a carer in a local nursing home that specialising in dementia.

  Her flat was rented and she struggled every month to afford the payments. One day, though, she knew her ship would come in.

  The men had eastern European accents and had seemed very earnest in wanting to see her. One had a gold incisor that struck her as very odd, while the other two had shifted nervously from foot to foot, keeping a wary eye out behind them as though they were expecting trouble.

  Charlene knew, instinctively, that very soon they would be knocking on her door again and that this time they would not be so easily put off.

  Looking through her closed net curtains, she toyed with the idea of ringing the police but hesitated. As one of her coping strategies for being hated by everyone, she had found comfort in cannabis, years before, and been arrested a few times already for possession. Luckily, she’d always got away with a reprimand, or a caution. Being well-known to the police, she wasn’t sure they would take her seriously, possibly citing drug-induced paranoia.

  What the hell did these people want? She had little choice but to make sure all the doors and windows were locked, lie low, and hope they went away. Living on her own for a few years already, her mum had forced her to fit additional locks even though she’d never told the landlord. She was dead now, along with her stepfather a few years beforehand. Now, she was desperately glad of the sense of security.

  There was no point pretending she wasn’t in, as they knew she was. With everything locked, and all heavy curtains quickly pulled shut, she decided to simply try and forget them and get on with a normal evening. To this end, she turned on the oven and threw in a tray of frozen chicken nuggets and potato wedges, poured herself a large glass of cheap, red wine, and flopped down in front of the television.

  By eight o’clock, they were knocking, ringing and tapping on her door and windows, which Charlene ignored. They called out for her to open up, tempting her with suggestions that they had something very important to discuss with her.

  Steadfastly refusing to be baited, she waited them out. By eleven o’clock, perhaps fearing that the police might soon put in an appearance, her unwelcome visitors went away.

  As a light drizzle set in, she listened to them getting into a car and drive away. Yawning, tired from being on heightened alert for hours, her sixth sense told her that her visitors were toying with her. Pretending to leave, she felt that they would soon return. If she was going to get out, it had to be now.

  Throwing a few essentials into an overnight bag, Charlene made sure she had her purse and car keys before slipping out of the back door, navigating her way successfully down the dark, rain-sodden rear alley to where her battered old Ford Fiesta was parked.

  Clambering inside, shaking off rainwater from her short hair and locking the doors behind her, she started the engine and inched the car slowly down the alleyway, keeping the headlights switched off until she turned on to the main road at the end of the shadowy corridor.

  Pulling into light traffic, Charlene drove away from her home at the same moment that the strange men were quietly breaking their way through the multiple locks on her front door. They had only driven a short distance and were convinced that their quarry was still safely tucked up inside her little flat.

  By the time they gained access and searched every nook and cranny, expecting to find her hidden away somewhere, Charlene had already checked in to a nearby Travelodge, booking a double room in a false name and telling the rather bored-looking receptionist that her boyfriend would be along later. She hoped it would throw anyone off the scent, if they happened to ring around the local hotels to see if a lone woman had recently booked in.

  Once safely behind the bedroom door, Charlene immediately closed the curtains before using the room facilities to make a cup of tea, and crunching on a plain digestive biscuit that she found nestled in the bottom of her purse.

  Now, what could she do? Flicking through the very short list of friends on her cell phone, she had little faith in any of them being very helpful. She was still mulling it all over, attempting to find any reason why strange men might be looking for her, when the bedroom telephone suddenly jangled into terrifying life.

  There was no point ignoring it, she told herself, willing her thumping heart to quieten. It was probably just the reception desk. Sucking in a calming breath, she reached out one trembling hand and snatched the receiver up, lifting it to her ear.

  ‘Hello,’ she stammered, her throat strangely dry despite the recent tea that had rinsed it.

  ‘Miss Pringle?’ asked a strange voice.

  ‘No, you have the wrong room,’ Charlene snapped, a little too quickly. She had registered under the name of Brown. ‘My name is Brown.’

  ‘If you play games with me, young lady,’ said the voice darkly, ‘it won’t matter what you call yourself.’

  Charlene reeled from the words, her eyes opening wide and she gripped the telephone so hard that it hurt. Flailing around for an appropriate response, the caller gave her no time.

  ‘Those men are resourceful, believe me, so hiding out in a hotel won’t fool them for long. You only have one chance, and that’s me.’

  Breath coming in terrified pants, Charlene gathered her wits. ‘Who the hell are you? What the hell is going on?’

  ‘If you let me help, everything will be okay,’ promised the caller. ‘I know who they are and you are in danger. I can help you but you’re going to have to trust me.’

  ‘I think it’s time I called the police,’ Charlene decided. ‘They can sort it out.’

  ‘No, they can’t. You won’t live long enough to speak to a policeman.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ she snapped, suddenly finding energy in anger. ‘I just have to ring 999 and they’ll be here in a minute. Problem solved.’

  The stranger’s voice went quiet for a moment, as though contemplating her words, then returned, edged in steel. ‘Charlene, you don’t have five minutes. In fact, those men have just driven into the hotel car park and they will soon b
e smashing down your door.’ The voice softened a little. ‘Please, let me help you.’

  Walking to the window, she edged the curtain aside and gasped as she saw the three strange men from her flat, getting out of a dark green Renault Espace in the car park below. Her heart lurched painfully beneath her ribs.

  Frozen in fear, the telephone dropped from her numb fingers and she began to hyperventilate, feeling light-headed and nauseous. The room began to whiten and her vision blurred as blind panic set in, accompanied by the pathetic sounds of her own whimpering.

  ‘This cannot be happening,’ she cried to herself.

  The men hunting her were all smiling grimly as they left the receptionist on the floor behind her counter, unconscious from a vicious punch to her temple, delivered after they got the information they needed. It was time to finish the job so they could all get back home and, more importantly, get paid for their services.

  The flimsy hotel door popped open on the first hefty kick and they moved inside quickly. Their intended victim could do nothing to save herself as they closed in. Immobilised by fear, barely able to see anything through the blinding haze, she heard them laughing, smelling a waft of stale garlic and tobacco.

  Time slowed to a crawl. Her head was pounding with an instant migraine as her knees buckled and she sagged to the carpet.

  The sounds of falling bodies cut through her incoherence, one after the other, followed by an eerie silence. Nobody touched her and, very slowly, her vision swam back into focus.

  Charlene found herself kneeling on the floor, surrounded by three corpses, all lying face down with a look of surprise fixed into glazing stares. Turning her head, dazed and confused, she registered another presence in the room. A man stood over by the smashed door with a small handgun gripped in one hand, still wafting smoke from an elongated, silenced barrel.

  ‘Are you alright, Miss Pringle?’ The voice was the same as the one on the phone. ‘Miss Pringle?’

  ‘They’re de…e…ad,’ she blubbered, her eyes and nose suddenly streaming.

  ‘Better them than you,’ said the man, matter-of-factly. ‘We have to go.’

  ‘Go?’ Charlene asked. ‘Go? With you?’ The man nodded. ‘Where? Why?’

  ‘Because if you stay, more men will come and they will kill you.’

  ‘Who are you?’ She demanded, staggering to her feet and sucking in a deep, calming breath.

  ‘My name is Baker,’ the man smiled and reached out a steadying hand. ‘I’m a friend.’

  2

  Doyle McEntire was furious and distraught in equal measure. After losing contact with the Sea Otter, it quickly became clear that she had met a sticky end. No trace from her transponders could be found and detailed satellite scans of her last know coordinates had turned up only empty ocean.

  The ship had cost him millions to buy and adapt. It was crammed with every modern communication device and covert weapon system that they could fit into the hull, and the crew were experienced McEntire employees, especially the captain.

  McEntire knew the ship was more than capable of defending itself, even against a small warship if necessary, but nobody outside the Corporation knew anything about her secret capabilities. Weather had been rough the last couple of days before the ship vanished but had been steadily improving before contact had been lost. This was clearly not a tragic accident. The ship had been deliberately targeted and sent to the bottom of the sea.

  Not being one to hang around, he already had a salvage ship heading out to the area to try and locate the wreck; from the same company that was currently retrieving millions of pounds worth of gold bars from the wreck of the K-19, off the Skeleton Coast. It would be on station within a week and then, perhaps, they would get some answers. Not that this helped him when it came to breaking the news to his daughter.

  Sarah McEntire had very nearly lost her lover, James Pace, during the disastrous Race Amazon event a few months before. Since getting together, the two had become very close and she had not taken the news of the ship’s loss well. She had been so grief-stricken that she’d stormed off to Pace’s floating home and was now refusing to see him, or even take his calls. He understood how she felt and decided to leave her alone for a while, whilst quietly posting an ex-SAS sniper to guard the wooded area above which Pace’s home was tethered.

  If something unknown was targeting the McEntire Corporation, he needed to know that his daughter was safe.

  Upset though he was, Doyle McEntire understood that they had lost their ship because of a leak. Someone on the inside had leaked information about the Sea Otter’s defences. Nothing should have been able to get anywhere near Sea Otter without its advanced radar, sonar and thermal imaging equipment alerting the crew.

  And there was something else. The McEntire Corporation was tapped into all the key satellites orbiting the planet, including most of the top secret military ones that weren’t supposed to exist, from multiple nations. It also had a few of its own up there.

  Although Sea Otter was autonomous, every McEntire vessel was passively tracked and any vessel closing to within fifty miles was supposed to trigger an alarm in the main computer network. No alarm had been raised.

  His only light relief recently, if it could be called that, was some suspicious activity from a group of Latvian enforcers, typically linked to organised crime in the Midlands. It was one of many dozens of groups that his company monitored, all of them completely oblivious to the surveillance. The activity had concerned a young student by the name of Charlene Pringle.

  As part of his research into the enigma of Project Scorpion, McEntire had ordered some further digging into the background of the unfortunate diary author, Paul Pringle. His wife had relocated to Canada, where she remarried a few years later. She already had two children with her missing husband and had never had any more. Oddly for the time, she had refused to change her name, instead insisting on remaining a Pringle.

  Both Pringle’s children had grown up, married and had children of their own, with one of his granddaughters, Abigail Pringle, opting to move back to England in the mid-seventies, where she fell in love with a fellow teacher and married, eventually settling in Chatham, Kent. She gave birth to a single son, Steven, who remained with her when she moved to Barking, in London, after divorcing her husband a few years later. After the divorce, she had also reverted back to the family surname.

  Steven Pringle had been a gifted musician and athlete, with a promising future ahead of him. He’d breezed through school, as a top student, and taken himself off to Exeter University where he’d met a gorgeous mathematics student called Emily Taylor. After seeing each other for only two months, Steven had been tragically killed in a hit-and-run outside a popular pub, unaware that Emily was already pregnant with their unborn child. Charlene Pringle.

  Inheriting her mother’s love of mathematics, Charlene had grown up in a very stable family, despite her father’s untimely death. Her mother had been forced to give up her studies and move back to live with her parents after discovering she was pregnant. She then met a caring, successful older man and married when Charlene was barely two years old.

  Raised in a loving home, in the popular seaside town of Bournemouth, she had wanted for nothing except the siblings who never came. It was in their comfortable house, perched on a small hill with wonderful views of the sea, that Charlene grew up fascinated by her mother’s stories of their heroic ancestor, who had mysteriously vanished in his submarine.

  The unknown fate of Paul Pringle had been the topic of many school stories and essays for her, and the birth of the internet and genealogy websites had allowed her to dig further into the life of Lieutenant Paul Pringle. Strangely, her attempts at tracking down his military records had been a miserable failure so far, including taking herself to London to try and look at any paper war records that should have been held in the British Library, at Kew.

  Oddly, the files had been lost, she was told, and nobody could tell her when, why or how. The mystery deepe
ned further when she ran into another dead end at the Imperial War Museum, where a kindly Kew librarian had subsequently directed her.

  Sometimes, she’d been told, paper files that were deemed important, or contained delicate information, were stored in the vaults of the museum. But nobody had any information for her, or admitted to any knowledge of Pringle’s records. Aside from the basic information on his dates of service, gleaned online, the information trail was mysteriously cold.

  Doyle McEntire considered the situation as he sipped a cup of sweet tea. Close monitoring of electronic and cell phone information had thrown up Charlene’s name, linked to the Pringle name that the McEntire Corporation had added to their ‘trigger’ words after the old diary had surfaced.

  When the intelligence indicated that someone had put out a contract on her life, the McEntire machine swung into action, albeit quietly.

  McEntire had assigned his top security operative to Charlene, as an unseen bodyguard, while the security teams started the process of tracking down who wanted her dead, and why.

  For the past three days, Baker had assumed his role of sentinel without complaint, using all his formidable Special Forces training and espionage skills to stay close but hidden from her, usually in plain sight. He had not been at all surprised to see the three killers turn up outside her little flat.

  Baker had played a hunch and decided not to act immediately. Some of the intercepted calls had made it clear that there was a question over what the victim actually looked like and a clear instruction that the hit must only take place when her identity had been confirmed. Secreted in a small bedsit, in a dingy block opposite Charlene’s flat, the crosshairs of Baker’s powerful sniper rifle followed the men all the way up the steps, just in case.

  As he suspected, there was a brief conversation, after which the men returned to their car to wait. A sensitive, covert listening device that he’d already planted in a small fissure in the rotten door frame the evening before, relayed the words clearly into a tiny earpiece in his left ear. Unsure who the men were, Charlene had wisely batted them away by pretending to be somebody else.