Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13) (11 page)

Jeff looked affronted. ‘Money? I can’t believe you’d even talk to me about money. I got Jude into this. I’ll do whatever it takes to get him out of it. I don’t care if it costs every last penny in the bank.’

Ben lit a Gauloise. In ten seconds, he’d already smoked it down halfway. ‘The biggest problem we have is getting there. We need to be over six thousand kilometres away, and we need to be there now. There’s no time to mess about with visas. And the kind of hardware we’re going to need won’t pass for hand luggage. We’ll need our own aircraft.’

Jeff spread his hands. ‘That, as you say, is a problem.’

Ben worked on the cigarette a few more moments, puffing great clouds of smoke. Then it came to him. ‘Not when you can walk on water, it isn’t.’

Jeff’s face lit up. ‘Kaprisky.’

Ben nodded. ‘Time to call in that favour.’

Jeff was already looking up the number. ‘You know, two is going in a bit light for a job like this. There’s no shortage of blokes who’ll jump in if we ask.’

Ben agreed. At least four names sprang to mind and were just a phone call or a text message away. Men he trusted, and whom he knew would drop everything to rush to his aid. But the clock was working against them. It could take forty-eight hours to scramble everyone together in one place. ‘There’s no time for that, Jeff. It’ll just have to be the two of us.’

‘You mean the three of us,’ said a voice from behind them.

Ben and Jeff turned. Tuesday Fletcher was standing in the office doorway and he’d been listening to every word they’d been saying.

Three more times on his way down from D Deck, Jude almost got caught. What saved him was the gloom in the windowless passages, now that the bright neon lights that normally burned day and night had gone out. The deeper he ventured into the bowels of the ship, the darker it would get. He didn’t dare to use the Maglite until he could see nothing at all.

It was clear that the pirates were palpably more agitated now than before. The sudden loss of power to the whole ship was a real problem for them, and the fuss it seemed to be causing convinced Jude more than ever that they needed the vessel to be serviceable in order to steal it.

He was beginning to get a sense of their plans. If they’d wanted to hold it for ransom, he was certain they’d be keeping the crew alive to give them more bargaining leverage. But they weren’t doing that. They were apparently set on killing everyone on board, which told Jude they had other intentions. To use it as a floating base, maybe, as Gerber had said. Or sell it. The cargo alone must be worth a fortune.

Those weren’t comforting thoughts. Somehow, Jude kept telling himself, he and the rest of the crew were just going to have to hang on tight and hope that help arrived before it was too late.

Doubts were already crowding his mind. What if Jeff didn’t receive the email? What if nobody came?

Looking in all directions, Jude reached the corridor where the bosun’s body had been dragged away earlier. The floor was still slippery with blood. Jude gingerly sidestepped the trail of it and hurried on, past the open door of the mess.

He skidded to a halt. Crept back to the doorway and peered furtively through it.

Inside the mess canteen, a white man was standing with his back to the doorway. He was alone, bathed in the light from a porthole window and gazing out of it as if deep in contemplation, calmly sipping on a Coke and obviously unbothered by the blood all over the floor. The same small metal case Jude had seen him with before was still cuffed to his left wrist.

Carter.

Jude froze in the doorway, uncertain what to do. He desperately wanted to keep moving and rejoin his friends down below in the relative safety of the engine room. But he couldn’t ignore the part of him that wanted to understand what was happening here, and who this guy Carter really was.

Jude stepped silently into the room and sneaked up behind Carter, terrified that the man might suddenly whip round, spot him and put a bullet in his heart. He hardly dared to breathe as he eased the heavy torch out of his belt.

He was just three steps away when Carter sensed the presence in the room, and turned suddenly. They stared at each other. Then Carter dropped his Coke and his right hand dived for his pistol and Jude closed in and lashed out with the Maglite. The solid aluminium tube thumped into the side of Carter’s head with a dull meaty
crack
.

Carter dropped the gun. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and he went over sideways, collapsed against a plastic chair and then slumped to the floor.

Jude ran and shut the door, then hurried back to the still body. For a second he was concerned he might have killed the man, but a check of his pulse told him Carter was just unconscious. Thankfully, the torch was still working after being used as a club. Jude started searching through the man’s pockets for a wallet or a passport. He found a packet of gum, loose change, a loaded spare magazine for the pistol, and a ring with a pair of small keys.

Jude guessed that one of the keys must be for the handcuff on Carter’s left wrist. The other, presumably, was for the case. Why would anyone go around with a reinforced metal box chained to them unless they were protecting something important? Jude wanted to know what. He soon found which key was which. The case had two locks. They opened smoothly and easily. With a glance at Carter to check he was still unconscious, Jude flipped up the lid.

The case was lined with black egg-box foam and contained five thick rolls of cash that between them added up to more money than Jude had ever seen before. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds. Beside the rolls, a collection of three US passports were banded together with elastic. Jude checked them each in turn. Each had the same photograph of the man he’d just knocked out, but all three had different names: Tyrone Carter, Larry Holder and Payton Bequette.

So which one of them was he, if any?

Under the passports lay a thick, sealed manila envelope. Jude pulled it out and ripped it open and found that it was stuffed with printed papers, some kind of legal documentation that was meaningless to him.

That was when he noticed, nestling inside the foam under where the envelope had been, a leather pouch tied with a thong. He let the papers spill to the floor, reached down and picked it up. Something hard inside. And heavy. It felt like a lump of stone, big enough to fill his hand. Jude untied the leather thong and opened the pouch. The thing inside was wrapped in tissue paper.

Jude peeled the wrapping open to reveal the object. He held it raised up on the flat of his palm, so that the light from the porthole shone on it.

What the—?

At first sight, it looked like a big lump of clear crystal, like one of those pieces of quartz his mother had once collected. She’d lined every window-sill and mantelpiece in the vicarage with a whole variety of ornamental rocks and as a young boy Jude had learned all their different names – moonstone, amethyst, haematite, jasper, citrine, rose quartz. This one was much larger and more uneven in shape, all angles and pits and sharp edges. But despite its roughness its clarity was like no crystal he’d ever seen before. It seemed to glow with an inner light of its own.

Jude swallowed. He felt suddenly dizzy with confusion. It couldn’t be. It was way too big. Impossible.

Or maybe it wasn’t impossible. He could think of only one reason why a person would carry something like this inside a locked box chained to their wrist.

Jude couldn’t take his eyes off the thing. He couldn’t believe it. He could have stared at it all day long – but then he remembered where he was. On a hijacked ship with armed pirates swarming from deck to deck looking for someone to kill. He hurriedly wrapped the lump of whatever it was back inside the tissue paper, replaced it in its pouch and jammed it into his jeans pocket. It only just fit in there. As an afterthought, he snatched up Carter’s fallen pistol, which looked pretty much like the one Jeff Dekker had let him shoot at Le Val. He remembered roughly how it worked. ‘Designed for morons to use,’ Jeff had laughed. ‘And they do, so you shouldn’t have too much of a problem.’ Jude stuffed the gun into his waistband against the small of his back, dropped the spare magazine in his other pocket, then snatched up the torch and stuck it back through his belt, like a sword. He sprang to his feet, ran to the door and tentatively peeked out.

The coast was still clear, but Jude could hear voices and footsteps approaching from up the passage. With a last glance back at Carter’s inert body, he slipped out and ran like crazy.

The others heard him pounding on the engine room door. ‘It’s me,’ he panted. ‘Let me in!’

The bowels of the ship were plunged into near-total darkness, and without the Maglite, Jude could have been groping blindly about for weeks through the maze of passageways. As the hatch opened, he was dazzled by a torch beam shining in his face. Unseen hands grabbed him by the arms and hauled him in through the hatch. It seemed eerily quiet and still down here, without the steady background chatter and vibration of the engines. When the hatch clanged shut behind him, it felt to Jude as if he was stepping inside a tomb. The heat and stench of enclosed bodies hit him. Shadows danced everywhere. The beams of several flashlights pointed at him from the darkness.

‘We were worried as hell,’ Gerber said. ‘Those bastards must be all over the ship by now.’

‘They are,’ Jude said, nodding and gasping for breath, which wasn’t easy in the airless atmosphere so far below decks. ‘They started going apeshit when the power went down. But they didn’t see me.’

‘Did you manage to do it?’ Everyone but Scagnetti was crowded around Jude, anxiously waiting for the answer to the big question.

‘I did it,’ Jude said. ‘The message went off without a hitch. That’s the best we can do.’

There were grins and sighs of relief all round. ‘Well done, son,’ Diesel said, thumping Jude on the shoulder.

‘So now what?’ Condor asked nervously.

‘Now we wait,’ Gerber said. ‘What the hell else is there to do?’

‘Pray to God we make it through this,’ said Trent.

Gerber gave a grunt. ‘You go ahead and pray to that sonofabitch, if it pleases you. I stopped wasting my breath on him thirty years ago.’

‘I need to use the bathroom,’ Jude said, and Gerber motioned with his torch to show him over to a corner of the engine room where a bucket had been placed, out of sight in as private a spot as possible. It had already been used more than once. One bucket, for thirteen trapped men. As time went by, the smells inside the enclosed space would become horrendous.

In all the excitement, nobody had noticed the lump in Jude’s pocket sticking out as big as a tennis ball. Now that he had a moment’s privacy, he took it out and reopened the leather pouch to examine its contents more closely under the beam of his Maglite.

There was little doubt in his mind what it was he was holding. It was hard to believe the thing was even real. But it was real, all right. The more he stared at it, the more bewildered he became as questions layered up in his mind. Was this what the pirate leader was after, the big man with the awful scarred face? Or had Carter, or whatever his name was, been keeping it from him?

Amid all the uncertainty, one thing was for sure. If this thing was what Jude thought it was, forget the value of the cargo. Forget the value of the whole ship and everything aboard. Jude was no expert, but he was pretty certain you could buy an entire fleet of ships for the value of what he was holding in his hand.

He spent a fevered moment debating with himself whether he should tell the others what he’d found. Gerber, Hercules and Diesel, he felt strongly that he could trust. Some, like Trent, Allen, Lorenz and Park, he knew much less well, and it worried him how they might react. As for Scagnetti, it would be running a huge risk. Jude remembered Mitch’s warning. Scagnetti would be the first to slip a blade between your ribs for even a few bucks. With something like this, Jude wouldn’t trust him any more than he trusted the pirates. He wasn’t closed inside a steel box with them.

Jude decided that he should keep his secret to himself, at least for now. Then what was he going to do with it? He’d had no clear idea in his head when he’d picked it up, just a vague notion that he didn’t want Carter to have it. Should he toss it in the sea, first chance he got? Return it to the hijackers and hope for leniency? Use it as a bargaining chip to plead for the lives of the crew? Some hope. The pirates would just take it and kill them all anyway.

If the pirates didn’t, Carter certainly would. When the man came to and found it was gone, he was going to know exactly who took it, and he was going to want that person’s blood. Jude had seen him personally execute four men as if it were nothing. What wouldn’t he do to the thief who’d stolen
this
from him?

Even in the oppressive heat of the engine room, Jude felt a coldness wash over him. In taking this thing, he might have just made the worst mistake of his life.

Pender let out a long, tortured groan as he opened his eyes and the agony shuddered through his skull. ‘Jesus Christ!’ He tried to shake his head to clear it, but that only made the pain worse. ‘Mother
fucker
!’

He managed to prop himself up on one elbow. There was a burst of panic before he remembered that the blood on the floor had been there before, and wasn’t his own. With that memory came the recollection of the last thing he’d seen before the white flash and the ensuing unconsciousness. It was the thin young blond-haired guy sneaking up behind him with the torch in his hand. The bastard who’d clobbered him. He could have busted his damn head open. Must have been one of the crew. Why wasn’t he dead already?

Pender struggled into a kneeling position. As he moved, he felt the tug on his left wrist from the chain connecting him to the metal case. He had to smile. That was all that mattered. The crew weren’t his problem. Headaches, he could deal with. What was a little knock on the nut? A man in his position could forgive and forget such minor transgressions with great magnanimity.

But then the smile dropped like a ton weight from Pender’s face when he saw that the lid of the case was open. Someone had been through his pockets and got the key. The bundles of cash were strewn about. The thick envelope was torn open, the phony legal papers it contained scattered on the floor.

He didn’t give a shit about the papers, not even about the money. With a despairing moan he yanked the case to him and delved inside. He blinked. It was empty. Empty!

No. No. It couldn’t be. Please Christ oh Christ don’t let it be. Pender searched frantically about the floor, but there was nothing there.

It was gone. His rock. Fucking GONE!

He wanted to scream. He did scream. A howl like a wounded dog.

His aching head was completely forgotten. He leapt to his feet and dashed from the mess room, running aimlessly in a breathless panic until he got a grip on himself.

Gone. Stolen. By the same dirty rotten little shit who’d sneaked up on him. Was this a targeted attack? How could he have known what was in the case? No, it was impossible. It was just some sailor.

Pender was floored by this unthinkable turn of events. For this to happen, after all he’d been through, after planning everything so carefully down to the last detail!

The plan had been so beautifully worked out. Starting with the escape from Oman, personally organised weeks in advance by none other than Eugene Svalgaard, heir to the shipping line dynasty, as the perfect way to smuggle out of the country what was possibly the hottest piece of stolen property in modern history. Who better to set up a passage for three anonymous stowaways on board a ship than the owner of the whole fleet? All it had really taken was a small donation to Captain O’Keefe’s retirement fund. Fifty thousand bucks was a drop in all the world’s oceans put together for a man as obscenely rich as Svalgaard.

Pender’s fee for the job had been a little steeper, but then five million dollars was the going rate for hiring a professional mercenary and sometime jewel thief, never caught, to assemble a crew of hitters and carry out a home invasion robbery so serious that its perpetrators could never work again. The third-generation Dutch shipping magnate from New York hadn’t even blinked at the cost. As both Svalgaard and Pender knew very well, five million was a ridiculously small investment to make in return for such incredible booty.

Of course, ol’ Svalgaard had never had the faintest suspicion that, when he turned up in Mombasa for the rendezvous, there would be no ship, no Pender, and worst of all, no magnificent uncut rock the size of your fist waiting for him to collect and hustle home to his secure vault. The smug little crook was so used to getting his own way, it hadn’t seemed to even occur to him that a common gun-for-hire like Lee Pender could outfox him and snatch the loot for himself.

Yet it had been so damned easy. Already drooling over the fifty-thousand-dollar bribe Svalgaard had slipped him to take on the unauthorised passengers, Captain O’Keefe hadn’t needed too much persuading to accept a further hundred grand in cash from ‘Ty Carter’ to look the other way and make sure nothing was reported when the pirates appeared. Nobody would get hurt, Pender had assured O’Keefe. The pirates would help themselves to a few cargo containers and then go on their way rejoicing. It was just business. What did the captain care, anyway? This was to be his last voyage.

Pender had been a step ahead of everyone. The look on O’Keefe’s face when the old fart clocked that he’d been tricked! And how that arrogant burger-stuffing hog Svalgaard would rant and rave on the dockside in Mombasa, when it hit him that he’d been double-crossed and that the fortune he’d been so sure of had just slipped irretrievably out of his hands, and he couldn’t breathe a word about it to anyone! Pender hoped he’d have an apoplexy and drop dead on the spot.

Meanwhile Pender would be far, far away and laughing. Exactly where was the only part of his plan he hadn’t finalised yet: with this kind of wealth, he could spend the rest of his life in any paradise he chose. Monaco or Mustique? Palm Springs or Tahiti? Such tough decisions. Why not all of them, he’d dreamed over and over again. He could just hop back and forth from one palatial beachside mansion to another in his jet whenever he got bored.

The most worrying part of his plan had been put in place weeks earlier, two days after Svalgaard had confirmed the ship’s departure date from Salalah. That was when Pender had flown to Nairobi, Kenya, to meet with Jean-Pierre Khosa, known to hard-bitten veterans of African wars like Pender as ‘the General’. General of what exactly, nobody knew for sure. Pender had never met Khosa before, but he’d heard the stories. Who hadn’t? If even just half the stuff people whispered about the man was true, it was still enough to make you piss dust.

It hadn’t been easy making contact with Khosa. Until the last minute, Pender had been nervous about whether he’d even turn up for the lunchtime appointment in the lavish suite in Nairobi’s exclusive Fairmont The Norfolk Hotel. When the General eventually made his appearance, he was wearing a tailored Italian silk suit and accompanied by a pair of stone-faced bodyguards, who frisked Pender thoroughly for weapons and wires. Finally, the meeting was allowed to take place. Its purpose: to put the lucrative and highly illegal business proposition to Khosa, whom Pender knew to be badly in need of cash to further his own cause, one that Pender had no interest in.

He’d had to be extremely careful not to let too much slip with Khosa. The General might be one scary-looking sonofabitch, but he was also very, very smart. Over French cuisine and expensive wine, Pender had laid out the carefully concocted fiction that he was acting as a courier on behalf of a very rich client – that much was more or less accurate. Where Pender’s story deviated from the truth was that he was tasked with delivering certain documents which, without going into all the boring details, were worth a vast amount of money to the client and legally too sensitive to be carried by normal means, hence Pender’s involvement and the unorthodox means of transportation.

Khosa had just nodded through all of that. To Pender’s indescribable but very well-hidden relief, the General was content to skim over the boring details. He was just waiting to find out what was in this for him.

The fiction continued: Pender’s client had powerful enemies who stood to gain equally from the destruction of these documents, and thanks to new intelligence it was now believed that these people might have somehow infiltrated the client’s network in an attempt to intercept the package on arrival in Mombasa, or possibly even sooner. This made it essential for the documents to be removed from the ship, either by helicopter or boat, before someone else got to them first.

The tale was all highly improbable, of course, but it was the best Pender could come up with, and he’d put on a good act of making it sound semi-plausible. A lawyer would have laughed – but the General was no lawyer (although he had allegedly ordered the murders of a few in his time, and good for him). Pender’s hope had been that the promise of hard cash would be sufficient to distract Khosa from looking too hard for holes in the story.

And Pender’s gamble had paid off. The offer of one-point-five million dollars, either in cash or wired to the account of Khosa’s choice, had got the General’s eyes twinkling exactly as hoped. For that sum, Khosa’s task would be to supply the manpower and the means to whisk Pender and his precious ‘documents’ away, mid-ocean.

It was Khosa who had come up with the clever notion of the faked-up pirate attack, and Pender had jumped at the idea as enthusiastically as Khosa had jumped at the money. Piracy offered the perfect cover for the hijack. So many ships were already being knocked off around Africa that one more would attract very few questions. Pender’s only concern had been that there were so many real pirate gangs hunting about the Indian Ocean for easy victims. What if one of them hit the
Andromeda
before Khosa showed up? It was a risk he had to take.

An aggressive negotiator, Khosa had imposed certain conditions to sweeten the deal his way: in addition to the flat fee, which was quickly bumped up to two million dollars, the General laid claim to both the ship and her cargo, as spoils of war to take away and dispose of as he saw fit. This would, of course, Khosa had added with a smile, include the crew, on the understanding that he could either just kill them all on the spot or put them to other uses of his own choosing. If Pender would agree to that, they were in business.

Pender had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going along with Khosa’s whims. The $500,000 price hike had been expected and allowed for. He couldn’t care less what happened to Eugene Svalgaard’s valuable property, and he didn’t give a rolling rat fuck if the General’s band of cutthroats got their jollies slaughtering a bunch of ignorant sailors, either. Screw ’em.

And so, not without some trepidation, Lee Pender had entered into a binding agreement with the most notoriously unpredictable, grasping, violent and ruthless maniac in Africa. The phony legal papers purporting to be worth so much to his nonexistent client had already been forged, just in case he’d needed to show something to back up his cover story. White and Brown, the two expendables, had already been hired. The passage from Salalah was all set up with Svalgaard and O’Keefe. All that remained was to break into the home of Hussein Al Bu Said at the appointed time, take care of business there, snatch the rock, race undetected across the city to the port, jump aboard ship, endure a few days’ discomfort cooped up in the company of White and Brown, wait for Khosa’s dramatic entry and, at last, get the hell out of there a fabulously rich man. All the while letting not a living soul, least of all Jean-Pierre Khosa, know what he was really carrying. Piece of cake.

But for all its dangers and complexities, it had been the most beautiful plan. This had been the Big One that Pender had spent his life ready and willing to do anything to make happen. After surviving twenty-four years in the private military contractor business, he wanted out before his well ran dry or he met a bullet. At age fifty-five, with thirty more years of life expectancy, he’d literally wept with joy that such unbelievable good fortune could have fallen into his lap. He could walk away from the whole shitty world, the richest fugitive in history. Another new identity with passport and driver’s licence to match, a nose job to alter his appearance a little, a high-rolling lifestyle of fast cars and beautiful women and casinos and more money than he could hope to spend if he lived to be a hundred, no matter how hard he tried. That was the intoxicatingly wonderful future he’d envisaged.

He’d been so close to the finish line that he could taste the Martini cocktails, feel the soft white warm sand between his toes and hear the giggles of the adoring bikini-clad girls.

And now everything was suddenly falling apart. Pender could actually visualise his plans cracking and raining to the floor in pieces like fragmented china.

He could already have been out of here, if fucking Khosa hadn’t insisted on personally staying aboard the cargo ship until his guys finished off the last of the crew and sorted out the mysterious engine and power failure, instead of taking straight off in the fishing boat as first agreed. They were wasting time. What Khosa did with the ship was his business; Pender had been hopping with impatience to get on with his own. He’d been so disgusted with the circus up on the bridge that he’d wandered down to the empty mess room to find some coffee. And now look what had happened! Who let some young whippersnapper of a sailor go running amok like that? Pender couldn’t believe that he’d survived decades of warfare and dodged bullets everywhere from Angola to Libya, only to get cold-cocked by some kid with a flashlight.

Now Pender was compelled to remain aboard until he got back what was his. He’d tear the vessel apart with his own bare hands if he had to.

Furious, still clutching his splitting head, he stormed up onto the bridge to marshal a few men to come help him find that little shit who’d clobbered him, take back what he’d stolen and then disembowel the bastard. About eight Africans were scratching their heads around the dead instruments of the conning station, debating in flurries of their own language what switch they could press or lever to pull to restore the power. Until they could figure out what had caused the shutdown, the ship was going nowhere.

‘Maybe if you assholes didn’t butcher everyone on sight,’ thought Pender – the man who’d murdered the captain and mates – ‘then you might have a clue how to sail the ship.’

He was about to start yelling at them in fury when he saw the formidable figure of Jean-Pierre Khosa standing by the windows, casually lighting up another of his giant Cohibas. Standing with him was his right-hand man, Zolani Tembe, tall and muscular and apparently made of granite. Tembe wore ammunition belts the way Los Angeles rappers wore gold chains. His personal weapon was an M60 machine gun that was never out of his huge hands. A long, curved machete was stuck crossways in his belt.