Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 Read Free Page B

we’ve got a bit more to do than chauffeur people round an airfield all night.’ He frowned. ‘Rear-echelon motherfucker,’ he muttered under his breath.
     
    It was a blowy night for a chopper ride. The Med was as rough as Danny had ever seen it. But it wasn’t nearly as rough as the atmosphere inside the Wildcat.
    Danny wanted to be anywhere else but here. Back home, his three-month-old daughter was waiting for him. Danny had wanted to name her Susan after his own mother. But the child’s mother, Clara, had vetoed it and they’d named her Rose. Danny and Clara were together, but things were not good between them. It didn’t seem to affect the baby, though. She was a good-natured kid, with a shock of black hair just like his own. Clara told Danny that babies were supposed to look like their dads because it stopped them from leaving mother and child after the birth. It had led to an argument, of course, with Danny trying to explain that his was not the kind of job that kept him safely behind a desk, and back home for bath time.
    No. Danny’s job was the kind that meant that on a blustery December night, five days before Christmas, he had to be cruising high above the choppy waves on his way to RV with HMS Enterprise , a Royal Navy Echo-class survey vessel, currently on Mediterranean rescue deployment. The waters of the Med were awash with migrant boats, crammed full of frightened, impoverished refugees fleeing the battle zones of the Middle East. It was Enterprise ’s job to help these people when their barely seaworthy boats fell apart in the middle of their crossing, as they almost inevitably would.
    Danny glanced at Tony. The bastard had been insufferable since their OC had taken him to one side in Hereford and given him unit command. It was an obvious snub for Danny, who’d been i/c last time they’d done a job together. Since then, it had been no secret around RAF Credenhill that Danny and Tony were at each other’s throats. The way Danny saw it, giving Tony the nod was a clear indication of which side of that particular fence the Ruperts had come down on.
    But the bad blood between Danny and Tony wasn’t the worst of it. It was an open secret that Tony was having a fling with Caitlin, the Aussie military intelligence operator currently sitting to his right. She’d more than proved her worth, but Danny didn’t like it. It wasn’t the fact that Tony was a married man that bugged him – what Tony did on his own time was none of Danny’s concern. But having two members of the unit shagging each other was a liability. Their minds would be on something else, when they should be on the job in hand.
    And then there was Spud. He and Tony had hated each other since the day they met. While Spud had been temporarily invalided out of the Regiment in the wake of a disastrous foray into the deserts of northern Yemen, it hadn’t been a problem. But Spud had, against all the odds, regained his fitness and shown his mettle. Now he was under the command of the man he loathed the most.
    Spud had his eyes closed as he sat against the webbing-clad side wall of the Wildcat. Tony was staring at him with a cold expression, like he was sizing him up. Danny had seen that look on Tony’s face before. He had a bad feeling about the next few hours.
    Danny had warned their ops officer, Ray Hammond, before they’d left base. ‘It’s a bad call, boss. Tony doesn’t have the respect.’ Danny wasn’t about to grass anybody up, but surely Hammond had heard enough of the whispers about Tony Wiseman – that his loyalty to the Regiment came a distant second to his lucrative contacts in organised crime. Spud’s jibe had been bang on. And everyone had seen Tony’s wife Frances around Hereford, with a split lip and a shiner on her left eye that she insisted had come from falling down the stairs.
    ‘Just do your job, Black,’ Hammond had said. ‘And be thankful you’ve got one. There’s more than one spook in Whitehall gunning