Liam was a rat. A rat with very little life left. The mix of carrot and stick, of compromat, debts and the promise of escape had been effective. The handlers were experts. And he'd been an idiot. A smart idiot, capable of prying into all sorts of things, feeding information back to people he had known would never let him off the hook. He'd used and abused every connection he had to get the details. Some had let him in easily, working off the trust he'd gained back when he was in the business, and him keeping on probing. Others had made him use less gentle persuasion. His 'employers' had provided resources, sometimes in the form of burly personal security contractors, other times in cash, but always just the right tool for the job of extracting information. Whoever they were, they held all the cards in the world now. He shuddered to think of the apocolypse they could unleash. He hoped they wouldn't. He hoped they hadn't intercepted his postcard from South Africa, when he'd been shadowing an arms dealer who knew some stuff. The addressee was a former teammate. The postcard was his declaration of rathood, indicated by the mention of Mickey Mouse in the text. Sending it meant it was only a matter of time before he'd be hunted down and interrogated, then thrown into a special prison, or simply into an unmarked grave. He'd never been involved in a ratcatching op, but from the start of his career it had been made clear that rats met bad ends if they were caught. That wasn't a problem though. He had discharged his duty, to let them know he'd been turned. They (his handlers) nabbed him at the airport, as he'd been passing through immigration, right in the little narrow channel to which the automatic door had opened as the nice lady smiled and said 'Welcome to Malayasia'. As he walked down the passage, the door closed, and another opened behind him, out of which came a pair of uniformed guards. From there it was into a holding cell, and then a car ride to a safehouse apartment. It was a very nice apartment. Apparently the intelligence service had a sweetheart deal with the local financial crimes unit, to use what they'd seized. No one had spoken to him beyond instructions to move, but it was clear he wasn't permitted to leave. Then what he reckoned was the interrogation team had shown up, and laid out his options. He'd chosen the easy one, like always. That was what had put him in this situation, a low-rent anti-piracy guard on the least nice vessels which had ever plied the seas. They'd shook what he knew out of him, so far as Project Cork was concerned. He didn't really have what they wanted, but it didn't matter as they already knew just about everything he knew. Minor details differed, and to be honest, he suspected they knew more than him. They'd done 3 interview sessions that first day, with breaks for meals. That was an evaluation. They'd have pegged him pretty well with that, and they'd know that he was an absolute degenerate gambler and yes-man. Project Cork was designed to keep Russia 'bottled up' in their harbours in the event of them attempting to move against NATO. It was a series of seabed torpedo mines, which had mostly been deployed from submarines, as well as a few which had been placed from ships. When activated, it would sink just about anything that sailed within 40 miles. Liam had been one of the Special Boat Service engineers who'd worked on the resupply tender on the job, loading the mines onto the submarine while out at sea. In the end, he hadn't ended up on any of the delivery ops to drop them in the spots that automatic deployment from the submarine hadn't been an option, or the battery replacement ops every 3 years. They'd sent him to one of the bedrooms to sleep, and hadn't disturbed him till he'd come out at about 10am the next day. Then it was back to it, with a laptop out on the table, flicking through pdfs of their information. They'd picked out his targets mostly by this stage, and what he needed to get off them. They'd figured out the control side somewhat, something that he hadn't known about. Turned out that it was sound waves in the ocean, from a big speaker array in the North Sea that had a control cable that ran back to Scotland. They needed to know how to hit the switch at the end of the cable. They also wanted information on the South African involvement. They knew there'd been a demonstration and discussion of exports, but no more. Liam told them he reckoned the cable would run back to a hardened command post, which would have the same security that you saw at the American ICBM sites, with a safe which held the instructions are 2 keys to be inserted in keyholes which are physically too far apart to be turned simultaneously. That would mean they'd need to get 2 agents in and get through the security, or trick the Navy into thinking there was impending Russian attacks. They left him alone then, had him make a phone call of excuse to the shipping company, and he hung out in this apartment watching Malaysian TV, working out a little with pushups and such. A week passed. There was no one to miss him, he'd done a pretty good job of destroying all his relationships before now. They did another session with him on what he knew, found a few more tiny details he'd forgotten himself. 3 more days of Malaysian TV. They sat him down again. They'd confirmed that the cable ran back to 2 secure bases. Physical access to it wasn't on the cards. They'd decided to come up with a substitute speaker array, if they could figure out the control channel details. And they were going to have him get the information.