Fair Game (51 page)

O’Brien’s team held their fire. There was no more shooting from the burning building, just the occasional crack of sniper fire in the distance.

Shepherd dropped the RPG tube and went back for a Kalashnikov before running over to the hut. He pushed open the door. The four hostages were huddled together at the rear of the building.

‘It’s OK,’ said Shepherd. ‘Come with me.’

Hooper and Clavier helped the two girls to their feet and they followed Shepherd out of the hut.

O’Brien was running towards them. Behind him Muller and Bradford were pulling the suitcases back to the plane.

Haschka, Jordan and Markus were following Bosch as they ran over to the control tower building, bent low but not under fire.

‘The area’s secure,’ said O’Brien. ‘There’s a dozen or so hostiles still armed but they’re too far away to do us any damage.’ He helped Hooper with Katie and they headed to the plane.

Shepherd ran alongside the Frenchman and Joy with his AK-47 at the ready but O’Brien was right, the shooting had all but stopped.

They went up the rear ramp into the cargo area, where Muller and Bradford were already sitting next to the cases. ‘Goddam it, that was a blast!’ said Muller, pumping the air with his fist.

O’Brien’s men began filing into the plane and taking their places, and the pitch of the engines increased as Jack Bradford prepared for take-off.

Bosch was the last to get on board and she winked as she sat down next to Shepherd. She was bleeding from her right forearm and Jordan pulled out a field dressing and slapped it on to the wound. She grinned when she saw the look of dismay on Shepherd’s face. ‘Flesh wound,’ she said. ‘But you’re welcome to suck the poison out if you want.’

‘Let’s go, Jack!’ shouted O’Brien as he headed towards the co-pilot’s seat.

The rear ramp rose and clicked into place and the plane started to roll, picking up speed quickly. Less than twelve minutes after they’d touched down on the runway they were back in the air and heading for Ethiopia.

Crazy Boy slipped into the Hilton Hotel through its revolving door and headed straight for the lifts. He was wearing a black baseball cap and he kept his head down. He rode up to the top floor and walked along to al-Zahrani’s suite. There were two bodyguards standing outside the suite’s double doors and they patted Crazy Boy down before allowing him inside.

Al-Zahrani looked as immaculate as he had done when he’d visited Crazy Boy’s house in Ealing. He got up off the sofa when Crazy Boy walked in and held out his arms. His suit was Armani, his shoes Bally and there was a diamond-encrusted Rolex on his left wrist. ‘My brother,’ said al-Zahrani. ‘Welcome to my temporary home.’ He hugged Crazy Boy and kissed him on both cheeks. Crazy Boy smelled a sweet and clearly expensive aftershave. Another bodyguard, the one who had accompanied al-Zahrani to Crazy Boy’s house, was sitting by the window wearing his trademark impenetrable sunglasses.

Al-Zahrani released Crazy Boy and waved for him to sit on an overstuffed easy chair. ‘Can I get you a refreshment?’ he asked.

Crazy Boy shook his head. ‘You said you are leaving tomorrow?’

‘My work is done here and I have things to do in the Gulf,’ al-Zahrani replied.

Crazy Boy took off his baseball cap. ‘It all went wrong,’ he said. He put his head in his hands. ‘I’ve lost everything. My uncle is dead, most of my men are dead or injured. The Somali government has moved into my base and is hunting down the rest of my gang. My bank accounts have been frozen. They’ve been around to my businesses. The cops here are on to me. I was being followed but I shook them off.’

‘I am sorry, brother,’ said al-Zahrani.

‘My life here is over,’ said Crazy Boy. ‘I have lost everything.’

‘You have your life, brother. And you have your faith. Remember what the Koran says. “Those who readily fight in the cause of God are those who forsake this world in favour of the Hereafter. Whoever fights in the cause of God, then gets killed, or attains victory, we will surely grant him a great recompense.” You will get your reward in the Hereafter, brother.’

‘But there has been no victory,’ said Crazy Boy. ‘They killed my men, they killed my family, they took the money back. Where is the victory?’

Al-Zahrani smiled. ‘Why, the ship, of course. Even as we speak it is sailing to its destination. You are helping to change the world for ever, brother. Your victory is on the horizon.’

Crazy Boy’s eyes widened. ‘It will still happen?’

‘Of course. Inshallah. God willing.’

Crazy Boy leaned forward. ‘I want to help,’ he said.

‘You have already helped. This has only been possible because of you.’

‘I want to do more,’ said Crazy Boy.

‘You are sure about this?’ asked al-Zahrani.

Crazy Boy nodded enthusiastically. ‘They sent their soldiers to kill my uncle and my men. I want to make them pay.’

Al-Zahrani nodded sympathetically. ‘Then make them pay you shall, brother,’ he said.

Charlotte Button raised her glass to Shepherd. ‘Job well done, Spider.’ They were in a wine bar overlooking the Thames, a stone’s throw from MI5’s headquarters, sharing a bottle of Bollinger. Shepherd had taken a taxi from Heathrow Airport, straight off a ten-hour Ethiopian Airways flight from Addis Ababa.

Shepherd clinked his glass against hers. ‘To dry land,’ he said.

‘
Terra firma
,’ she said. They both drank. ‘The PM’s very pleased, obviously,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been asked to pass on his personal thanks.’

‘Even though it never happened.’

‘Oh, it happened, it’s just that the British government wasn’t involved. It couldn’t have gone better, Spider. Kudos.’ Her face tightened a little. ‘That was a stupid thing to say, of course. What with one of the hostages being killed.’

‘At least it wasn’t our guys that did the killing,’ said Shepherd. ‘He was long dead by the time we got there.’

‘Horrible business,’ said Button. ‘But at least we got the rest of the hostages back, freed the ship and recovered the ransom.’

‘And got rid of a few pirates to boot,’ he said. ‘That’s what the so-called task force should be doing, of course, instead of shepherding ships in convoys. Send in the SAS and blow them apart.’ He raised his glass. ‘It’s never going to happen, of course.’

She raised her own glass in salute. ‘Seriously, you and Martin and the boys deserve a medal for what you did.’

‘Do you think I’ll get one?’ He smiled at the flustered look on Button’s face. ‘I’m joking,’ he said. ‘Just so long as all the bills are paid. Martin spent a hell of a lot setting it up.’

‘It’ll all be covered,’ she said. ‘After he got his god-daughter back in one piece, the PM’s not going to be quibbling about any budgets, not for a while at least.’

‘And what’s the press going to be saying?’

‘The Somali government is taking the credit for the raid in Somalia. Makes them look good, suggests that they’re serious about dealing with the pirate problem. The hostages were in a state of shock so they’re not sure what happened.’

‘And the ship?’

‘British special forces saved the day. More power to the men in black overalls.’

Shepherd sipped his champagne. ‘And Crazy Boy? Is he in custody?’

Button grimaced. ‘That’s the one fly in the ointment,’ she said. ‘He’s vanished. His house in Ealing is empty and his close associates have all disappeared too.’

Shepherd’s forehead creased into a frown. ‘What? How the hell did that happen?’

‘He was in his car, we had two vehicles tailing them and he gave them the slip. And he hasn’t been seen since.’

‘And when did this happen?’

‘Forty-eight hours ago. When the hostages were rescued.’

‘Do you think he knows we’re on to him?’

‘We’re not sure,’ said Button. ‘It depends if he’s on the run or if we’ve just misplaced him.’

‘I know what happened. Somebody screwed up.’

‘Spider, sometimes targets give their surveillance the slip. It happens. Tailing isn’t an exact science. We’ll pick him up again eventually. In the meantime we’re shutting him down, going after his assets. We’ll take everything and at the end of the day we’ll put him away on conspiracy and piracy charges.’

Shepherd ran a hand through his hair. ‘There’s something not right about this whole scenario,’ he said.

‘What, exactly?’

‘It just feels, I don’t know, like something’s not right.’

‘Specifically?’

Shepherd sighed and swirled champagne around his glass. ‘The ship was far bigger than any other vessels his men had taken,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I told you that before I went out to Malaysia. Big ships are really difficult to board.’

‘But they managed, didn’t they?’

‘Yes, but that’s what doesn’t feel right,’ he said. ‘The way the ship was taken wasn’t the way he usually operates. Something went wrong with the ship. Some sort of computer malfunction that brought us to a stop. And that was when his men turned up. We were dead in the water so it was easy for them to get aboard.’

‘So they were lucky?’

Shepherd shook his head. ‘No one is that lucky, Charlie. We were in the middle of nowhere when it happened. There was no sign of any other vessel, no mother ship or anything. That means the skiffs had to have been waiting for us.’

‘Sure, because they were after the
Athena
. They were tracking you.’

Shepherd sighed in exasperation. ‘But how did they know that the
Athena
would break down at that particular point? If the ship hadn’t stopped they wouldn’t have been able to board.’

‘You don’t know that for sure.’

‘Trust me, Charlie, a group of guys in a small boat have next to no chance of getting close to a ship the size of the
Athena
, never mind boarding her. If there hadn’t been a computer problem the ship would have gone right by them. Even if they’d given chase they’d soon have run out of fuel. And like I said, there was no mother ship close by.’

‘So what are you suggesting? That the breakdown was prearranged?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘How?’

Shepherd shrugged. ‘I don’t know for sure. We were heading along just fine and then the alarms started to go off. The alarms were saying that the engine was overheating, but according to the engineer everything was just fine. They had to stop the engine to check and that was when we were boarded. But half an hour after the pirates took over the ship we were moving again. The engine was fine and the alarms were off.’

‘So someone sabotaged the ship?’

‘The computer, maybe. We should get some experts on to find out what happened. Because if the computer wasn’t nobbled, maybe one of the engineers was working for Crazy Boy.’

‘An inside job?’

‘That would explain why the ship stopped exactly where his men were waiting. But there’s more, Charlie. So much of what happened didn’t fit Crazy Boy’s method of operating. Before the
Athena
they always seized their ships in the Arabian Sea, as they were joining or leaving the secure corridor. But they took the
Athena
well into the Gulf of Aden, almost at the Red Sea.’

‘Maybe it was easier to do it that way.’

‘But it wasn’t, was it? If they had organised the breakdown then they could have done it off the east coast of Somalia, before they were anywhere near the secure corridor. They could have done it in their old stamping ground. Why choose a new place?’

Button threw up her hands. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t see that it matters. How do we know what was going through their minds? They’re pirates, not master criminals.’

‘But Crazy Boy is smarter than the average pirate, remember? And this was all pre-planned. He chose to take the
Athena
where he did, we just don’t know why he made that choice. And there’s something else. Once his people had taken the ship, they headed north, to Yemen. Why didn’t they go south, to Somali waters?’

‘Maybe they didn’t care where they went, so long as they avoided the task force.’

‘But they could have gone south, couldn’t they? It was another choice, to go north. To Yemen.’

‘But they weren’t looking to dock. They just wanted the ship out of the way while they negotiated the ransom. I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill here.’

‘But then they went back to Somali waters,’ Shepherd continued. ‘That made no sense at all. And there’s another thing. Crazy Boy went to Somalia before the ship was taken. Why? Has he done that before?’

‘Not so far as we know, but he’s been taking ships for years and we’ve only been looking at him for six months.’

‘What was so important that he had to go in person?’ said Shepherd. ‘He went to see his uncle, right?’

‘We assume so. He flew to Nairobi and then chartered a small plane to the airfield.’

‘So why didn’t he phone? Or use Skype like he usually did? Charlie, there’s something not right about this. And the key is finding out how he stopped that ship the way he did.’

Button sipped her champagne. ‘OK, I’ll get that looked at. But in the grand scheme of things I really believe it’s a small point, just a loose end that needs tidying up. We got the ship back, we got the pirates and we rescued the crew of the yacht with only one hostage killed, and he didn’t die in the rescue.’ She raised her glass to him. ‘Go home, spend time with your boy. You deserve a rest.’

‘And a pay rise?’

Button’s smile tightened a fraction.

‘I was joking, Charlie,’ he said, and raised his glass to her. ‘You know I don’t do it for the money.’

Lisa O’Hara’s heart began to race when she saw the minicab pull up outside Shepherd’s house. She was parked far enough away that he wouldn’t see her but she still slid down in her seat as she watched him walk towards the front door carrying a black holdall. He let himself into the house and closed the front door behind him.

It was definitely him, she didn’t even have to check the photograph in her handbag. Daniel Shepherd was Matt Tanner and before long he would be dead.

She smiled to herself as she started her car and drove away. She had a call to make but she never used mobile phones so she drove to a British Telecom payphone in the centre of Hereford. The man she called was one of the Real IRA’s top bombmakers. He lived in Cork, where he ran a computer repair business, and he promised to be over within twenty-four hours. O’Hara had already obtained the explosives that he would need for the construction of the device. The Semtex had arrived in Ireland in 1985, a gift from Libya in the days when Gaddafi had been an enemy of the free world, long before Tony Blair had visited the country and British companies had started making fortunes from Libyan oilfields. The Real IRA had received more than a ton of legacy weapons from the Provisionals during the time when the government was demanding that the weapons be handed in and the IRA were arguing that decommissioning was enough. The Semtex had been taken, as had Kalashnikov assault rifles, half a dozen RPGs and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The government had never called the Provisional IRA to account for the missing ordnance; all they had been concerned about was the public relations value of being able to say that the IRA had laid down its arms.