And then? What?

He thought about Sam and the urgent look on his face.

He thought about Sam.

Time passed.

A knock on the window. Jacob tensed. He looked out. A policeman. ‘Défense de stationner ici.’ No parking. He looked at his watch. Gone midnight. No point arousing anyone’s suspicion for the sake of a good parking spot. He nodded at the cop and started the engine. Round the corner he found a better place to park. No streetlights.

He continued to wait.

12.58. Jacob stepped outside with his rucksack containing the hired GPS unit, the garden lopping shears and a bottle of water. Opening the boot his hands groped for the weapons bag. It was heavy. He felt the muscles in his arm tense as he lifted it from the boot and locked the car. The bag firmly in his hand, he walked back towards the marina.

The halyards were still tinkling, but there was nobody around now. A reassuring breeze carried the sound of a car ferry from nearby Calais. Jacob stepped confidently along the boardwalk until he reached his boat. He stashed his gear in the hull, then took the lopping shears and went to work on the small chain that moored the boat to the pier. They cut through the metal without much problem. The boat was free in under a minute.

Jacob started the outboard motor with a tug of the starter cord; it purred easily into life. The boat nudged its neighbour as he moved it out, but before long he was heading inconspicuously towards the port entrance. Two green lights up ahead indicated that the exit was clear. Jacob held his course and directed the vessel out into open sea. It was suddenly much colder here and Jacob was glad of his wet-weather gear. Bringing the boat momentarily to a halt, he grabbed his rucksack and pulled out the GPS unit, before altering the scale on the screen so that the coastlines of both France and England were visible and he himself was a small green dot between the two. Forward throttle and he was heading north again.

There were no lights on the boat, but even if there had been he wouldn’t have turned them on, preferring to benefit from the cover of darkness. The swell of the sea itself was illuminated only by the ripple of the moonlight; in the distance he could see the glow of cross-channel ferries and other fishing traffic. He concentrated on keeping clear of them and heading as straight as possible into the impenetrable darkness of the ocean and towards the south coast of England.

The fuel lasted for half an hour before the engine spluttered and stopped, leaving the vessel to bob impotently in the middle of the sea. The swell was bigger here; Jacob’s clothes were wet from the spray as it lapped against the side. The GPS indicated he’d travelled a third of the distance in that time. More than he’d hoped; but now it was time to sail. It had been a long time since the Regiment had given him his Yachtmaster training and it had come in handy a few times since then. Never in a million years would he have thought he’d use his knowledge for purposes such as this; but times had changed and Jacob had changed with them.

His fingers were cold out here. Cold and numb. He detached the outboard motor and pulled it into the boat. Untying the canvas from round the boom was a slow business. When it was off he folded it neatly and stowed it in the hull, weighted down under the weapons bag, then turned his attention to the main sail. It was wound tightly round the boom and tied with a sturdy cord. Jacob unwound it carefully: a rip in the main sail and it would be a long swim back to Boulogne. He pulled on the halyard and his fingers felt for the cleat, a small metallic U with a screw that closed up the open end. His cold fingers grappled with that tiny screw; once it was finally off, he threaded the cleat through the ring at the top of the mainsail, reattached the screw and prepared to hoist the sail.

Jacob felt for the wind. He was square to it. The moment he hoisted the sail it would billow up and the vessel would start moving. He needed to prepare everything before that happened. He attached the rudder to the back of the boat, fixed the tiller then slid the centreboard through the hull. A quick check of the weapons bag, which he stowed underneath a bench at the fore end of the boat; then a good swig of water. He relieved himself over the side, checked everything was okay with his GPS, then prepared to sail.

He tugged hard on the halyard and braced himself. The sail slid easily up the mast and started flapping in the wind. Grabbing the mainsheet – a thick rope that was now flapping around in the hull – he tugged. The sail billowed and filled with wind. Almost immediately he felt a crash of spray as the boat lurched forward and slammed into the swell of the sea. With his other hand he grabbed the tiller and held the rudder square to the vessel. The GPS was in his lap. The boat had turned slightly to the west, so he pulled the tiller and readjusted the sail so that he was heading north.

He was already soaked, so the spray didn’t bother him. It was cold out here at sea, but he was concentrating too much on manoeuvring the boat to feel uncomfortable. He needed to keep the thing steady. He needed to keep her on course. He needed to keep her upright.

Jacob Redman put all other thoughts from his head as he set his jaw and his course. With nothing around him but darkness, it was impossible to sense how quickly he was moving. A fair rate, he deduced, from the sound of the wind screaming in the sails and the tilt of the boat. Occasionally there was a gust; whenever that happened, Jacob spilled some wind by letting out the mainsheet a little until the gust had passed. He kept half an eye on the GPS unit. Slowly the little green dot grew closer to the northern shoreline.

He kept a careful track of time, knowing how easy it was to lose a sense of such things at sea. 02.00 passed.

03.00.

04.00.

And then the sky started glowing with a faint pink light. Morning. And with it, in the distance, the sight that Jacob had been waiting for.

Land.

The wind was behind him now, urging him onwards. The tiredness that he felt from being awake for nearly twenty-four hours fell away as Jacob looked carefully towards the shore, his eyes searching for unpopulated areas and deserted stretches of beach. Only when he was a couple of hundred metres out did he see a likely target. He adjusted his course and started tacking towards it.

His body was aching with cold and tiredness. Exhaustion. It took all his effort, as he approached this rocky inlet, to lean forward and pull the centreboard, first halfway and then, when he was only a few metres out, fully up. The boat wobbled precariously; Jacob braced himself just as she slammed on to the pebble-strewn shore. The wind was still screaming in the full sails; he crawled to the centre of the boat and tugged the halyard down, bringing the sail with it.

All of a sudden the noise stopped. He was surrounded by an almost silence. Just the lapping of the waves and the calling of a seagull. Without giving himself a moment to rest, however, he grabbed the weapons bag and his rucksack, then climbed out of the boat.

And for the first time in six long years, Jacob Redman stepped out on to English soil.