‘It’s the stress. Saw it in ’Nam. Some fellas just fall apart, you know? I think we should watch Park.’ Gerber paused. ‘What about you, son? How’re you holdin’ up?’
‘Loving every minute of it.’
‘Tell me something,’ Gerber whispered. ‘This Jeff guy you’re in contact with. He’s a cop, right?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Then he’ll have known who to call. They should be here any time. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ Gerber said quietly.
Jude was getting cramps from sitting so long on the hard metal floor, and he still had Pender’s pistol hidden in his waistband, where it kept digging into him. He shifted, trying to get comfortable. In the process, the diamond slipped out of his fingers and hit the floor with a dull clunk.
‘What’ve you got there?’
‘Nothing,’ Jude said, quickly scrabbling in the dark for it. His fingers found it and clasped it tightly. It felt like a heavy burden, one that Jude badly wanted to share with someone. The pressure of keeping it secret was wearing him down. Lou Gerber was a good guy. He was a friend. Surely he could be trusted?
Jude wrestled with the idea, and relented. ‘If I tell you, you have to promise to keep it to yourself,’ he said in an extra-low whisper, leaning close to Gerber’s ear.
‘Sure. What?’ Gerber murmured.
Jude took a deep breath, hoping it wasn’t an unwise move to take Gerber into his confidence. He opened the fist that was clutching the diamond.
Just then, there was the thump of footsteps very close by, and the jabber of loud voices just the other side of the engine room hatch.
Gerber forgot all about what Jude had been about to show him. He gripped Jude’s arm. ‘They’re here.’
More voices. The pirates were trying to spin the wheel that opened the watertight seal, but it was all locked solid from inside. When the lock wouldn’t open, there was a pounding against the thick steel that sounded like a battery of lump-hammers and echoed loudly through the whole engine room.
Every single one of the thirteen men inside was up on his feet, frozen. Nobody breathed or spoke, or dared to turn on a torch.
The clanging stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The voices receded. Could the pirates have given up so quickly, and moved on elsewhere?
Gerber relaxed his grip on Jude’s arm. Jude sensed the older man turn towards him in the darkness. Gerber seemed about to say something. But whatever words came out of his mouth were drowned out by the huge, crashing explosion that seemed to rock the whole ship.
Jude’s ears were filled with a high-pitched whine. Beside him, Gerber had staggered backwards and nearly fallen over. Jude grabbed his torch and shone it towards the hatch. The steel was buckled, the seal broken, smoke from the blast seeping in through the uneven gaps that had appeared around the edges of the door. But the solid hinges and locks had held. The door was still in place. There was a strong stink of cordite.
‘Those crazy bastards!’ Diesel yelled.
‘RPG,’ Gerber said. ‘Gotta be.’
Jude had no idea what an RPG was. But he knew it was bad news. The pirates had finally located the engine room and they were determined enough to use artillery to break their way in.
Jude shone his torch around the room. Park was groaning continuously. Even Scagnetti had stopped humming and cackling. They all backed away as far as they could from the door.
Moments later, another stunning explosion punched Jude’s eardrums and made him rock on his feet. The pirates had fired another missile at the door, but still, the door had taken the impact. Flames were licking through the widened gaps around the edges of the buckled steel. Fire had broken out in the passage. The pirates could be heard yabbering in a chorus of panic. After a few moments, there was the whoosh of a fire extinguisher, and the flames died down.
‘They keep this up, they’re gonna sink us,’ Gerber said.
‘Or burn us out and barbecue us,’ Diesel added.
Jude shook his head. ‘They’re not about to destroy the engine room. They want to keep the ship. Why else would they still be here?’ It was little comfort either way.
There were no more explosions. It took another ten minutes of voices calling out commands in their own language, and more footsteps and pounding and the scrape and rattle of equipment being lugged into the passageway, before it became apparent what the pirates were planning to try next.
They were going to cut their way through the hatch door with an oxyacetylene torch.
The murky day had been merging into evening by the time the Alpina screeched up at the private terminal of Le Mans Arnage airport. Ben, Jeff and Tuesday were met by Auguste Kaprisky’s men, who introduced themselves as Adrien Leroy, the chief pilot with whom Jeff had already spoken on the phone, and his number two Noël Marchand. Both appeared to be quick-witted and businesslike, and well aware of the urgency of the situation as they ushered them briskly across the tarmac to meet the waiting aircraft.
Ben explained the slight detour that was necessary to pick up equipment en route. Leroy said he would make the necessary adjustment to the flight plan, no problem. The Gulfstream was fully fuelled, and wouldn’t need to touch the ground anywhere else. The only concern was weather. Sleet was forecast for Stuttgart that evening, but Leroy insisted that nothing short of a blizzard would prevent them from flying.
No questions were asked about the nature of the equipment they were picking up in Germany. Nor did either Leroy or Marchand pay any attention to the heavy bags that Jeff and Tuesday were loading aboard the sleek, white Gulfstream while they talked with Ben.
The aircraft was in the air just fifteen minutes later. Stiff from the fast two-hour drive and his neck and shoulders creaking with tension, Ben eased himself into one of the plush leather seats, closed his eyes and tried very hard to empty his mind of racing thoughts.
He didn’t open them again until, just short of an hour later, they made their descent through the clouds and touched down on the glistening runway in a very cold and wet Stuttgart, for what might have been the quickest stop-off in civil aviation history.
Rudi Weinschlager had been as good as his word and come through with all their requirements, packed inside two large wooden crates and one bulging NATO-issue kit bag, in an unmarked black VW panel van that was waiting for them exactly as promised. With the van backed close by on the tarmac, Ben, Jeff and Tuesday hurriedly transferred the gear aboard. ‘You still haven’t told me what’s in these boxes,’ Tuesday grunted as they lugged the heavy crates aboard, each one more than six feet long. ‘They weigh a bloody ton.’
‘Why ruin a surprise?’ Jeff told him.
The plane lacked any kind of cargo hold, but its forty-five-foot-long executive cabin offered some two hundred cubic feet of baggage space. The crates crammed the centre aisle, only just fitting between the seats and looking very out of place in the Gulfstream’s luxurious interior. Adrien Leroy frowned at the extra payload but said nothing.
They left Stuttgart soon afterwards at 6.53 p.m., managing to get off the ground ahead of the forecast sleet, and without being bogged down by the weight of its unorthodox cargo. Jeff and Tuesday shared a plate of sandwiches offered to them by Noël Marchand. Ben could not eat, and returned to his seat for the longest leg of a journey that, so far, had progressed smoothly and precisely according to plan.
But was his plan the right one? With nothing else to do but