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