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.
Pender swallowed and tried to play it cool. Only a very foolish man would vent his anger to the General’s face. Pender had no wish to end up as chopped shark bait.
‘You, you and you,’ he said, jabbing a finger at three Africans who didn’t seem to be doing much. ‘Come with me.’
‘What do you want them for?’ Khosa said, in that deep, calm voice of his. Whenever he spoke, it was always with great deliberation, as if he considered every syllable in advance.
‘I’ve been robbed.’ Pender held up his left arm with the empty case dangling from it. ‘One of the crew is running around loose, and he took my papers.’
Khosa’s mutilated brow distorted into an even deeper frown. ‘Why would he do this?’
‘How the hell do I know what some illiterate deckhand would want with them? Use them to wipe his ass with, for all I know. That’s not the point. I have to have them.’
Khosa roared with amusement amid a cloud of cigar smoke. Then, turning to the puzzled gang at the conning station, he dropped the smile and laid a big hand on the dead electronic consoles. ‘The problem is not with the equipment. The crew have done this. They are controlling the ship from the engine room. That is where we will find them. And that is where you will find your paper thief, messenger boy,’ he added for Pender’s benefit. He motioned at Zolani Tembe. ‘Gather the men and find this engine room. We must get this ship working.’
‘And the crew?’ Tembe said.
‘Bring them to me. We will take the ones that we can sell or use, and kill the rest.’
The first of many urgent calls that day had an instantly positive outcome. The octogenarian billionaire Auguste Kaprisky was overjoyed by the chance to repay what he saw as his debt to Monsieur Hope for saving his life. His greatest fear, he told Ben on the phone, had been that Ben would never ask. Without any hesitation and not a single question about why it was needed, Kaprisky granted them full and free use of his private jet. The aircraft was kept in its own hangar at Le Mans Arnage airport, just a few kilometres from Kaprisky’s estate, and he maintained two pilots on full-time salary, ready to fly at a moment’s notice. The weather forecast was looking dicey, but they’d taken off in worse.
The old man upgraded his plane every couple of years. His latest acquisition, he proudly declared, was a brand new Gulfstream G650ER, capable of covering thirteen thousand kilometres at a stretch, travelling at a steady Mach .85 with up to nineteen passengers on board.
‘That’s more than plenty,’ Ben said. ‘I can’t thank you enough, Auguste.’
‘Anything for you, my friend. I mean it.’
Jeff was on his iPhone, cancelling clients and calling in the security firm they employed to look after Le Val when there was nobody around. With time so short, the rest of the plan was going to have to come together en route.
Kaprisky had additionally offered to send his personal Bell 407 helicopter up to Le Val to collect them, but Ben had declined, thinking he could make slightly better time by road in the Alpina. While Jeff was making the last of the calls, Ben and Tuesday set about transferring equipment from the armoury to the back of the car.
‘I got to spend a little time with Jude while he was here,’ Tuesday said, a little awkwardly, searching for the right words. ‘I like him. I’m really sorry, you know?’
‘He’s not dead yet,’ Ben said.
Le Val’s armoury room was buried beneath several feet of reinforced concrete, with an armoured steel door and hi-tech security system. It housed scores of military-grade weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition, all painstakingly licensed by the authorities, itemised down to the last round and wrapped in enough red tape to tie up the French navy. One or two items stored down there, however, had never been registered officially, so that they could be set aside for a rainy day and never traced if things went awry or the guns had to be ditched. Over the years Ben had ‘collected’ four MP5 submachine guns and an assortment of shotguns, rifles and pistols whose serial numbers were unlisted. It was the pick of those that would be travelling with them to Africa.
Ben was still unsure about the wisdom of bringing Tuesday Fletcher along. The young guy had proved his worth as a soldier, no doubt about that, but he was an unknown quantity. ‘How’s that leg?’ Ben asked him as they hauled the gear up from the armoury.
‘Never better,’ Tuesday replied, grabbing another case of ammo.
‘This isn’t going be a walk in the park. I don’t want to be responsible for you if it goes south.’
‘I get it,’ Tuesday said with a frown. ‘Just because I was invalided out of the service, you think I’m not fit for this, yeah? You worry about Jude. I’ll worry about my leg. I won’t let you down.’ He paused. ‘It’s an honour working with you, man. You’re a legend.’
‘I’m just a person like anybody else,’ Ben said, wishing Tuesday would shut up.
‘Seriously. I heard stuff some of the older guys still talk about. Like the thing in Basra in 2003. That was the bollocks. I mean, forget the Iranian Embassy siege, right? Who dares wins.’
Ben put down the heavy kit bag he was carrying towards the car and turned to glare at him. ‘What you’ve heard is bullshit. You want to know what your glorious SAS were really doing in Basra? Setting up false-flag bombing targets against civilians to create PR spin for the war on terror. Killing innocent people so that puppet leaders in the West could wave their bloody flags on TV and get re-elected. That’s what we were doing. It’s why I disobeyed orders and almost got myself court-martialled. It’s also one of the main reasons I quit the regiment and never looked back. So you can stuff your “legend”. Don’t ever call me that again, okay? If you want to come, come. Just try not to get killed out there. I’ve enough crap to deal with already.’
Tuesday looked as if he’d been gut-punched. His smile vanished and he fell silent. When Ben’s anger died down, he felt bad for having lashed out at the younger guy and thought about saying so, but didn’t.
Minutes later, they were throwing hastily packed personal belongings into the back of the car and piling in after them. Jeff sat up front next to Ben, still talking on his iPhone, and Tuesday clambered in the back. Ben fired up the engine, popped the clutch and scattered gravel as the BMW took off.
It was 3.16 p.m.
Le Val to Le Mans Arnage airport and the waiting jet was just over two hundred and sixty kilometres. For the next two hours, Ben concentrated on getting them there in one piece and not attracting unwanted police attention, while Jeff worked the phone and covered pages of a pad in his lap with scrawled notes and numbers.
The sky was darkening as the sun, invisible all day behind a blanket of grey cloud, now began to set. Ben kept his foot down hard while icy rain lashed the Alpina and the wipers worked hard to swat the deluge aside. The road was slick and shiny, too treacherous to be driving so fast. The taillights of other vehicles starred and flared on the wet windscreen as Ben blew past everything in front of him. Lost in his own anxious thoughts and chain-smoking one cigarette after another, he was barely aware of what Jeff was saying over the phone. Every