Star Of Africa Part 22

'Do not be modest. If you are still alive now, it is because you have shown me that you have the same virtues that the true warrior has shown through history. The virtue of courage. The virtue of mercy. And the virtue of loyalty. This last virtue, you will now prove to me by becoming my military advisor. You will teach my men these same qualities and make them strong. The training will begin as soon as we reach our home base.'

'All the way to the Congo, in a ratty truck and three antique helicopters that look like they'll fall apart before they've covered half the distance,' Ben said. 'If that's the best you can do to mobilise this army of yours, you're even more deluded than I thought.'

'Do not underestimate me, soldier. This would be a very grievous mistake.'

Khosa carefully replaced the diamond into its leather pouch, and tucked it away safely into his pocket. He looked at the gold Rolex on his wrist. 'I have spoken enough. Come. It is time.'

Ben said, 'Time for what?'

The African smiled, but there was no humour in it. 'Time for me to show you the next part of my plan, soldier. Then you will begin to understand who you are dealing with in Jean-Pierre Khosa.'

Khosa stepped out of the building and into the fading sunlight. Ben followed, with no idea what Khosa was talking about. But whatever it was, Ben didn't like it.

The General's personal guard had a.s.sembled outside the doorway and gave Ben hostile looks as they all walked out across the compound. Ben glanced over at the mess hut and could see no sign of Jude and the others. It worried him to lose sight of them, but he reasoned with himself that they were still in there, eating. Or Jeff and Tuesday eating, and the other three still being stubborn about it, with Jude being the most stubborn of all.

He is young, but he has much spirit. Like his father.

Ben looked away from the mess hut and watched Khosa. He was gazing up at the sky, into the west where the sun was dropping fast towards the horizon, like a giant orange slowly turning to vermillion red as purple and gold streaks of cloud drifted across its swollen disc.

Khosa said, 'Listen.' He cupped a hand behind an ear and c.o.c.ked his head. He looked around, turning wide eyes on his men, who were all rapt with attention. 'Can you hear it?'

Ben listened, but all he could hear was the chirping of a billion insects from all around, reaching a shrill crescendo in the last hour of daylight. The men all nodded, as if they could hear it too.

Ben had extremely sharp hearing, which he'd depended on more than a few times to save his life. However much he strained his ears, he still couldn't make out anything except the incessant surround-sound chirp-chirp-chirping. He was sure the men were just humouring their leader, out of fear of what he might do to any va.s.sal who appeared to contradict him.

If Khosa really could hear something, Ben thought, he must have the ears of a German shepherd. The aural senses of a bat. Or else, he only imagined he could hear something. Ben wondered about that. Could a crazy person have auditory hallucinations, as well as strange prophetic visions? Ben was no psychiatrist, but he'd crossed paths with a few nutcases in his time. If a disturbed individual could persuade themselves that they could hear voices from inside their heads telling them what to do, or whispers calling their name from the darkness, then Ben reckoned just about anything was possible.

Thirty seconds went by. Khosa stood rooted as a statue, listening and nodding to himself. A full minute. Ben began to wonder how long he was going to keep the show up. Maybe he was getting ready to proclaim, 'Yes, G.o.d. I hear Thee. I will endeavour do Thy bidding, oh Lord.' Then turn around with eyes glowing like an evangelist preacher's and relate to his blinking, staring men what the Almighty had said to His chosen one. Maybe next would come the laying on of hands, or Khosa would suddenly produce snakes from his pockets, for the taking up of serpents in Mark, Chapter Sixteen.

Or maybe Khosa didn't talk to G.o.d. Maybe it was the other guy he had conversations with.

But then, Ben was startled. To his amazement, now he could hear something, though it was so faint and faraway that it seemed impossible that human ears could have detected it more than a whole minute ago.

The sound was coming out of the west, in the exact same direction towards which Khosa was gazing and nodding. A soft, ever so distant rumbling drone that seemed to emanate from some invisible point in the red-streaked sky. Ben listened hard. He closed his eyes to focus on the sound as it grew clearer and louder. With his eyes shut, he suddenly felt as if he was back on that raft drifting in the middle of the Indian Ocean, desperately straining his ears for the minutest whisper of a sign that rescue was coming.

And then he knew what it was, and opened his eyes.

Chapter 45.

'There,' Khosa said, and swung up an arm to point towards the sunset.

It was a moment before Ben spotted the distant speck in the sky, but by then there was already no doubt in his mind what he was going to see up there. The aircraft was still a few miles away, gently dropping alt.i.tude as it droned closer. The speck grew larger as they watched, then larger still. Coming right towards them. Even at this distance Ben could tell it was a sizeable plane, a big flying tank of a thing, broad in its wingspan and much larger than Kaprisky's sleek private jet. An aircraft of that size coming in to land in the middle of nowhere, in a desert of rubble and scattered brush miles from any kind of airport, should have been an unreal, improbable sight.

But Ben was realising what he'd missed before.

Now he understood what the disused compound really was. It was much more than just an old abandoned military base for embattled government or rebel forces to hole up in during a civil war n.o.body talked about any more. It was the lack of any kind of smooth, level, metalled runway that had fooled him into never twigging until now that the place was an airfield. The broad avenue between the facing rows of buildings wasn't any kind of drill or parade ground. It had been hammered out and levelled into a rough landing strip. Nothing like the one that he, Jeff and Tuesday had landed on at Obbia, which looked like Heathrow by comparison. Nothing you could remotely call an airport, not even in African terminology.

And Ben hadn't reckoned either on the kind of plane you could land on a rough, rutted strip of compacted earth in the middle of the arid, rock-strewn a.r.s.ehole of nowhere.

He hadn't reckoned on a Dakota. Two mistakes in one. He was angry with himself for not thinking of it before.

It was the sound that gave it away, even before he recognised it by sight. Nothing like the ear-ripping high-decibel screech and whistle of an incoming jet. The thrumming, clattering rumble of the approaching plane sounded like a thousand pneumatic drills all pounding away at once. It sounded exactly like what it was, the roar of twin nine-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engines driving a pair of ma.s.sive three-bladed propellers towards them out of the falling dusk. It sounded like something out of World War Two.

Because it was something out of World War Two, literally.

The Douglas DC-3 Dakota, or 'Old Methuselah' as it was often called by the pilots who both loved and hated it, was like no other plane ever built. The first one had rolled off the production line at the Douglas factory in Santa Monica in 1935 and the last one just ten years later at the close of the war. But in that short production period it had become legendary as the most versatile and durable airliner ever made, and quickly found useful service all over the planet. It was the only airliner still flying that could take off and land on runways of dirt and gra.s.s, making it the hot ticket for developing countries everywhere. The landing distance it required was much shorter than modern airliners, and could take off in little more than half that. It was also one of the toughest warbirds ever made. It could go anywhere, in any weather. It could fly on one engine if needed. Ben had heard of one US Air Force Dakota during WWII that had been riddled with over three thousand sh.e.l.ls from j.a.panese fighters and not only reached base safely but been put back in service just hours later, patched up with canvas and glue. Despite its supposed maximum pa.s.senger load of just thirty-five, a hundred Vietnamese orphans had been crammed on board one Dakota that had sc.r.a.ped out of Saigon under heavy fire during the city's evacuation in 1975.

Ben had only ever seen two of them in his life, one in the air over Sierra Leone many years ago, and another smashed into a mountainside high up in the Hindu Kush, not far from the Khyber Pa.s.s near the AfghanistanPakistan border, pillaged and looted for anything the local militias could strip out of it and reduced to little more than a skeleton. But he knew that hundreds of these living dinosaurs were still in daily use in Third World countries everywhere even after seventy-odd years of hard service, and that you could still pick up a battered but st.u.r.dy example for a couple of hundred thousand US dollars.

Jean-Pierre Khosa had apparently done just that.

Do not underestimate me, soldier. Ben was suddenly beginning to wonder if that was another mistake to add to his account. And he was wondering what other surprises the man had in store. It was a deeply uncomfortable thought.

The Dakota came down low and slow, a huge lumbering monster with the falling sun casting red glints along its fuselage, scarred and battered and dull olive green like the three helicopters in the compound, but dwarfing them completely in size. Over sixty feet long and almost a hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip. Its undercarriage was lowered, those two wheels so huge that they couldn't be fully retracted below its wings, attached to ma.s.sive hydraulic struts that canted forwards like the legs of an eagle swooping down on its prey.

The Dakota's clattering roar filled Ben's ears, and the hurricane from its propellers and slipstream filled the air with a storm of dust and loose particles of dirt whipped up from the sun-baked ground as it cleared the perimeter fence by a matter of feet and came down to earth in the broad open s.p.a.ce between the buildings.

The huge wheels. .h.i.t the dirt with a jarring crash and an explosion of dust. The aircraft juddered and bounced, the wings slewed at a crazy diagonal angle, and for a second Ben thought the pilot had come in too hard and fast, and that the starboard wingtip was going to plough a ma.s.sive furrow into the ground and flip the whole plane over and round in a circle and tumble it over end to end, wreaking a giant trail of exploding carnage right through the middle of the compound.

But whoever was at the controls was a cool and experienced hand who must have done this a thousand times before. The Dakota dropped back from its erratic bounce into an even landing, its tail settling, its rear wheel touching down with hardly a b.u.mp. The aeroplane roared down the beaten-earth runway with its wings just a few yards clear of the buildings either side, making Ben and Khosa's soldiers step back out of the great slap of wind and cover their eyes and noses against the choking dust. Khosa himself didn't flinch as the giant wing pa.s.sed right over his head. The Dakota roared on, past the parked helicopters and the fuel truck that Khosa's men had, Ben now realised, tucked in close to the buildings to make way for its landing. The pilot backed off the throttle and the deafening roar of its engines rapidly subsided as the Dakota slowed.

Khosa watched with a beaming smile and his hands on his hips while the plane rolled by for another fifty yards, reached the open ground beyond the buildings and then began to taxi back round on itself in a wide circle, steering by its pivoting rear wheel, barely visible for the clouds of dust swirling around it like smoke. The Dakota rolled to a halt, stones crunching and popping under its gigantic front tyres. The engines shut down with a splutter, first one and then the other. The three-bladed props with their yellow-painted tips and silver nose-cones clattered to a standstill. The drifting dust began to settle back down to earth.

Khosa turned to face Ben, his demon's face split by that beaming white smile of triumph. He pointed at the Dakota.

'You want to know how we will return to my kingdom, soldier?' Khosa said, laughing. 'That is how.'

Ben looked at him. 'I warned you. I hope you listened to me.'

'Say goodbye to the world you have known, soldier. You are mine now. We leave at first light.'

Chapter 46.

Serena Beach Mombasa From where Eugene Svalgaard was lying fully clothed on the king-size bed, cellphone in hand, he was able to raise his head and peer through the gla.s.s doors and out over the balcony and the low-rise cl.u.s.ter of mock-thirteenth-century something-or-other luxury hotel complex to take in the whole mawkish picture-postcard thing that scads of dumb schmucks from all over the world paid good money to come see. Waving coconut palms against the balmy sunset. The surf rolling in over the ribbon of white sand that was the last land eastwards between here and ... wherever. The hotel manager had told him a lot of couples came here to be married. Ha. Good luck to 'em. The stupid suckers would still be paying for it after they were divorced.

What Eugene was in fact raising his head off the bed to stare at through the gla.s.s windows and over the balcony was the infinite stretch of the Indian Ocean beyond. Somewhere out there was his diamond. The only possible reason why he'd have dragged his weary a.s.s all the way to G.o.dforsaken f.u.c.kin' Kenya, for Chrissakes.

The long-distance call over, Eugene tossed the phone away and closed his eyes to digest the news that Sondra Winkelman in New York had just broken to him. Not good news, but hardly unexpected. It was the confirmation of what he'd already more or less accepted to be the case.

'Well, there it is,' he muttered to himself. 's.h.i.t happens.'

The rotten old harridan had just informed him that the wreckage picked by the navy destroyer USS Zumwalt off the Somali coast in the aftermath of the typhoon was now officially confirmed as belonging to the cargo of the MV Svalgaard Andromeda. Eighty miles east of where the Andromeda's course should have taken it, the patrolling warship had winched aboard a floating forty-foot shipping container that was half-full of seawater, half-full of soggy electrical equipment bound for Mombasa.

The computers had done the rest. Every container transported anywhere in the world was logged with its own unique BIC code. BIC stood for 'Bureau International des Containers', a horrible bit of Franglais that would have language purists tearing their hair out in outrage, but which was nonetheless the name of the head office located in Paris where all such information was processed. The BIC code of the recovered container had been checked against the Svalgaard Line's own data records, and there was absolutely no doubt any longer that the Andromeda was one of several vessels (though none of them anywhere near as large or valuable) that had fallen victim to the monster storm that had wreaked havoc up and down five hundred miles of the Somali coast.

As Sondra had gone on to notify him, the Svalgaard shipping line had already begun the long and painful proceedings to recoup their loss. Insurance company lines were buzzing. Salvage crews were already en route to locate the wreck. Less importantly, but even more of a ch.o.r.e for the Svalgaard executives, also underway was the process of contacting the relatives of the ship's captain and crew to inform them of the tragic news that the vessel had been lost at sea, apparently with all hands. There would be the usual coolly corporate expressions of sympathy and commiseration. Our thoughts are with you at this terrible time, you'll get over it, they knew the risks, life goes on. Not necessarily in those exact words, but that was the gist of it. s.h.i.t happens.

None of which was allocated much room in Eugene's turbulent thoughts at this moment. He was far too consumed with his own private interests. Over the last few days his mind had been working through a sequence of logical twists and turns that would have bamboozled even him, if he hadn't been so obsessively driven to find his way through the maze. It all went something like this: If the Andromeda had indeed sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean with all hands, then the most obvious and immediate conclusion to draw was that Lee Pender had gone down with it. It wasn't the idea of Pender being at the bottom of the ocean that had been giving Eugene heartburn. The guy was a Grade A s.h.i.tsack and it was very unlikely that a living soul existed who would mourn his pa.s.sing. What had been knotting Eugene up inside was the idea of the diamond being down there with him. Gone. Lost. Chances of recovery, virtually nil. Barring a miracle.

It got worse.

Because even if a professional marine salvage crew did manage to locate the sunken ship somewhere on the ocean bed at some indeterminate point in the future, and if one of their divers just happened to find the lost diamond down there among a million tons of wreckage, the possibility of preventing that lucky individual from a) reporting it to the authorities or b) more likely, simply pocketing it for himself, was even more outside Eugene's control than the typhoon that had taken the ship down in the first place.

The way Eugene saw it, in such a case it would be infinitely preferable for the marine salvage diver to just quietly take the d.a.m.n thing for his own retirement fund. Because if the authorities did by chance learn that the world's currently most valuable and therefore hottest piece of stolen property, linked to a notorious quadruple murder, had been discovered on board a Svalgaard ship, and if some clever d.i.c.k managed to put that information together with the little-known but not entirely undiscoverable fact that the ship's owner happened to be one of the world's most avid diamond collectors, then it didn't take much imagination to see how the trail could lead straight back to Eugene's door and wind up with him being locked away for the rest of his life. He'd rather the diamond was never found at all.

But those were only the most obvious conclusions. They weren't the only conclusions. If they had been, Eugene would have been throwing himself out of the window around now. As it happened, he wasn't.

In fact, he was smiling.

Because the glimmer of optimism that had first dawned on him back in Rome had steadily grown stronger since then. That single-minded ray of hope was what had been keeping him going, against all the odds, for one simple reason. Namely, the whole unthinkable worst-case scenario that would have had Eugene flinging himself to his death, or beating his own brains out against the wall, or spending the rest of his days in jail, all depended on Pender having gone down with the ship. But there was a flaw in that a.s.sumption. It failed to take into account one very crucial factor, which was the fact of Eugene's prior suspicions back in Rome that his man might be playing a tricksy little game with him. The weird call on the sat phone. Pender hanging up on him like that. Something not quite right about the way the guy was acting.

If Pender hadn't been a dirty thieving crook, Eugene wouldn't have given him the job in the first place. Then again, the possibility of his being additionally a dirty thieving double-crossing crook, one who might try and take the diamond for himself, had been a major source of concern. Though only a temporary one. Soon after that initial panic, it had dawned on Eugene that Pender's double-crossing ways could actually be the best thing to come out of this situation.

Eugene being something of a crook himself, it wasn't hard for him to put himself in Pender's place. If Eugene had been Pender, and if he'd wanted to run out on his employer and grab the rock for himself, then he'd have no intention of being still aboard the ship when it sailed into Mombasa port with his employer there on the dock waiting to meet him. No, he'd want to get off the ship before then, slink off somewhere at sea and disappear, laughing his pants off at how he'd suckered his boss. And for a guy who'd just been paid millions of dollars to pull off a heist and home invasion involving multiple murders, there had to be a thousand ways to get off a ship mid-ocean. You could hire a helicopter to whisk you into the blue. You could arrange a rendezvous with another vessel. You could even escape in the d.a.m.n lifeboat if you couldn't find another way.

Which potentially changed everything. Because a sneaky conniving double-crossing sonofab.i.t.c.h who'd high-tailed it to a life of wealth and luxury was not at all the same thing as a sneaky conniving double-crossing sonofab.i.t.c.h lying rotting on the ocean bed with Eugene's diamond in his pocket. If Pender had got off the ship before the storm hit, then there was every chance the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was still out there somewhere, alive and well.

And if Pender was still out there somewhere, then Eugene could find him. Because Eugene could find anything and anybody. He'd found the diamond, after all. Nothing was impossible, when you had money. More specifically, Eugene himself wouldn't find Pender; rather, he'd get someone else to do the legwork. Someone efficient, dependable and hard as galvanised nails who, for the right price, would scour the earth for as long as it took to sniff the little sc.u.mbag out. And who, when he found him, would pin him like an insect to a board and return the diamond to its rightful new owner, with no questions asked. n.o.body was more suited to that job than Victor Bronski, and that was precisely why Eugene had called him from Rome to set him on the trail.

And was precisely also the main reason Eugene was smiling, instead of jumping out of the window. Because Sondra Winkelman hadn't been the first person with whom he had spoken on the phone that day.

An hour before she called, Eugene's cell had buzzed and a different voice had spoken to him. Slow, calm, quietly self-a.s.sured, infinitely patient. Like the man himself. Ex-NYPD. Ex-FBI. Ex a lot of things that Eugene didn't know about and didn't need to know about. The most diligent, most careful and most ruthlessly efficient private investigator money could buy. Lots of money, in fact, but price was no object here.

'Are you alone?' Bronski had said.

'We can talk. Where are you calling from?'

'Nairobi. You in Mombasa yet?'

'Since last night. Well, have you got anything for me?'

'News.'

'Good or bad?'

'I found him.'

'What! Where?'

'Keep your hat on, boss. Pender's dead.'

'Down with the ship?'

'Maybe. Maybe not. No way to tell. But he's history, all right. As sure as you live and breathe.'

'Bronski, what are you talking about? You just said you found him.'

'I found his trail, which adds up to the same thing.'

'Only if it leads to the right place.'

'Like I said, keep your hat on. How I know your guy's dead, is that he left tracks that a blind man could follow. A few weeks before your ship sailed he had a meeting with someone that n.o.body ever has a meeting with without ending up that way, sooner or later.'

'That sounds like an a.s.sumption. I don't pay you to make a.s.sumptions, Bronski. An a.s.sumption is just one small step up from a guess.'

'You want to hear this or not?'

'Of course I want to hear it. What meeting?'

'Right there where you are, in Kenya. The Fairmont The Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, top-floor suite. Very nice. You might want to check the place out yourself some time. Best wine selection in Africa, or so I'm told.'

'Cut to the d.a.m.n chase, Bronski. You're killing me here.'

'This'll kill you, all right. You ever hear of one Jean-Pierre Khosa?'

'Should I have?'

'Okay, well, you ever hear of Joshua Milton Blahyi, otherwise known as General b.u.t.t Naked?'

'I think so. He's some kind of African warlord, right? Ivory Coast? Ghana?'

'Close enough. Liberia. He called himself b.u.t.t Naked because that was how he went into battle. Thought he had magic powers, all that kind of s.h.i.t. People said he was a satanist and a cannibal. Killed about twenty thousand people during the first Liberian civil war. Or maybe it was the second. You lose count.'

'Okay. So?'

'So, this guy Khosa makes Joshua Milton Blahyi look like Mahatma f.u.c.kin' Gandhi. My advice, don't try to read his resume on a full stomach. I'm guessing that your man Pender must've read it too, because that's who he called the meeting with in Nairobi. This nutjob calls himself General Khosa. Born June third, 1972, in some little village near a place called Lingomo, south of the Congo River. Killed his first man at the age of eight and never looked back. He and his brother were said to have hooked up for a while with Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army, while they were still in their teens. Uganda, Zaire, Sudan. Lots of very, very nasty s.h.i.t going on. Then a few years later they split from Kony. Apparently he was too humanitarian and touchy-feely for their tastes and ambitions, and they wanted to go their own way. You want the details?'

'I just want to know what the h.e.l.l this has to do with me and my diamond.'

'No problem, boss. Khosa turned up at the Fairmont The Norfolk in a black limo full of bada.s.s African dudes in black suits. Very hardcore. Packing lots of heat, but hey, we're talking Kenya, right? Two of them were guarding the door while Pender and Khosa talked inside for nearly three hours. Had the hotel staff in a h.e.l.l of a twist, wondering what kind of big-shot player this white guy must be to call a meeting with these fellas. One of them got curious enough to listen in through the wall of the room next door. Air vent, or something.'

'How do you know all this?'