In Treacherous Waters
Page 1
About the author
Richard’s early working life was as a construction engineer, a career that also took him abroad to work in Zambia and Jordan. Returning home, he joined a major Japanese corporation, administering large civil and industrial projects in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. A career change to run a small family business and read for a Masters Degree in Maritime Studies led to him writing his first novel, A Cast of Hawks, published in 2010. The sequel, Batsu, was followed by Shadows in Sunshine, set in Madeira. In Treacherous Waters is the fourth book in the Ian Vaughan thriller series. Away from his writing, Richard is a keen sailor when generous friends have deck space available for him.
Also by Richard V Frankland
A Cast of Hawks
Vanguard Press 2010
ISBN 9781843866077
Batsu
Vanguard Press 2012
ISBN 9781843868590
Shadows in Sunshine
Vanguard Press 2015
ISBN 9781843869689
IN TREACHEROUS WATERS
Richard V Frankland
In Treacherous Waters
Vanguard Press
VANGUARD KINDLE
© Copyright 2020
Richard V Frankland
The right of Richard V Frankland to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All Rights Reserved
No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,
copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions
of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal
prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is
available from the British Library.
ISBN (PAPERBACK) 9781784657 20-8
Vanguard Press is an imprint of
Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie Publishers Ltd.
www.pegasuspublishers.com
First Published in 2020
Vanguard Press
Sheraton House Castle Park
Cambridge England
Printed & Bound in Great Britain
Dedication
To my daughters Caroline and Victoria.
Acknowledgements
First of all I would like to thank my wife, Sandra, for her tireless support and encouragement during the long months of writing this novel, and for providing thorough initial proofreading and plot sanity checking, in addition to a busy working life of her own.
No publication is complete without professional editing and I thank Natasha Orme for her valuable work in improving and sharpening my text.
I also want to thank Jonathan Temples for his excellent work on the cover design.
Finally, I wish to thank my readers for their reviews and kind messages that ring as clearly in my mind as the applause would do to an actor taking a bow.
Thank you all.
CHAPTER 1
Ian Vaughan stepped off the running machine and waited while the nurse removed the ECG pads from his chest.
“Um, one hundred heart rate; any pains?”
“No.”
“Let me take your blood pressure, come and sit over here.”
Vaughan sat and waited as the nurse took the readings.
“I’ll come back in twenty minutes and take it again.”
Vaughan stood and wandered across to the comfortable chairs in the corner of the room, looked down at the scar that marked where the hospital in Madeira had extracted his appendix and a 7.62 mm bullet, then sat hoping that he would be released in time to get to his ex-wife’s cottage in Derbyshire to take his daughters up to Cumbria for some pony trekking.
Several minutes had passed when Dr Veronica Appleyard entered, walked across to Vaughan and sat beside him, “The Commodore has been telling me about your latest little exploit Mr Vaughan. Tell me, how did you manage to get involved in exposing a coup in Madeira when you were sent purely on a diplomatic mission to befriend a Tunisian political leader at a four nations conference?”
Vaughan sighed, “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I simply helped a young boy who was stranded on a sailboard a couple of miles out at sea.”
“And?”
“Oh, his widowed mother was playing host to her Brazilian uncle who was part of the group organising a coup.”
The doctor looked at Vaughan steadily waiting for him to continue.
“Well, this uncle of hers escaped arrest initially but could not get off the island and eventually found his way back to her apartment where he was cornered and tried to use her as a shield and hostage, but he made a mistake and in the scuffle that followed a Portuguese soldier shot him from behind and the bullet went through him and was ‘caught by my appendix’.”
“You make it sound like a cricket match with you fielding at silly mid-on.”
“It was hardly cricket and yes very silly to shoot a bad guy at close range with a rifle when a good guy is standing the other side of him.”
“What about your real mission?”
“Oh, that went okay.”
“Oh, just okay.”
Vaughan nodded.
The nurse approached again and took Vaughan’s pulse, “Ooo, seventy – good recovery.”
“Can I look at the test results please?” asked Dr Appleyard.
“Yes, Doctor, do you want the X-rays as well?”
“Yes please.”
While Dr Appleyard looked through the test results and studied the X-Rays she gave Vaughan a summary of his condition, “For a man of your age you are remarkably fit, good liver function, which for someone in your line of business is unusual, normally your colleagues have spent a lot of time in bars. Kidneys appear to be functioning okay and your ticker is sound, in fact, considering what you have been through I am amazed.”
“Can I take your blood pressure again, Mr Vaughan.”
Vaughan walked back to the nurses’ desk and sat whilst she did the test and wrote down the result.
“Out of interest what was it?” asked Vaughan.
“One hundred and ten over seventy,” the nurse replied, not really believing what she had just recorded.
Half an hour later Vaughan was saying goodbye to the Sister and nurses who had been looking after him at the clinic, “I will miss you all, really, you have been wonderful. Thank you, thank you very much.”
Sister Mitchell walked with Vaughan to the main entrance of the clinic, “You are very, very lucky to be alive, Mr Vaughan, and I have made that very clear to your superiors.” Vaughan looked at her and frowned with curiosity. “This is not the first time that you have chosen to get involved in gun play so I am told, a trait that has some worrying aspects concerning your mental outlook on life.”
“Believe me I don’t suffer from suicidal tendencies, Sister, in that situation I had to make split second decisions and on this occasion I am very confident that I made the right one, but thank you for your concerns. Goodbye, I promise that I will try to avoid troubling you again.”
Shaking her head, Sister Mitchell watched Vaughan go down the steps to the waiting hire car and drive away to catch up with his daughters.
***
Anna-Maria Patterson slowly descended the stairs, her silk tai chi outfit, cool against her tanned body, comfortable in the air-conditioned chill of the riverside villa th
at stood in the centre of Luanda’s most affluent area. At the foot of the stairs she turned and strolled towards the stoep that overlooked the pool, garden, and beyond the high wall, the river. Sliding the stoep door open she stepped outside into heat and clammy humidity of a typical Angolan day. As she walked across the iroko hardwood decking a blue tailed skink, hunting for insects, scurried out of her path to the edge of the stoep then turned to stare defiantly at her. Entering the mosquito netted tent, suspended over the bare wooden table, she took a seat and waited for Emmanuel to bring her breakfast, the one meal in the day she looked forward to, because she could eat alone, her mother and stepfather preferring the chill of the air-conditioned dining room.
Staring unseeingly out across the river she considered again submitting her application for the post of assistant lecturer at the university’s English Language faculty. In fact, it was more than just that, she was at last considering her whole future.
People taken in by Anna-Maria’s outward appearance of being just a very pretty young, but rather vacuous woman, would be very surprised by the quick intellect hidden behind the dreamy eyes, and the strength and fitness hidden by the languid movements. Born in Lisbon, Anna-Maria Ronaldo, to a Portuguese father and half Portuguese half South African mother, Anna-Maria enjoyed a childhood surrounded by wealth, receiving with that a good education. Speaking perfect English and French in addition to her native tongue, and with well-connected friends, her future in high circles seemed assured until the day her father was killed in a car accident near Porto. Anna-Maria’s mother, never feeling quite at home in Portugal, insisted they move to Cape Town, where she met businessman, Jan Vermeulen, marrying him after just six months. Two years later Vermeulen’s business interests meant that the family moved to Luanda, where, at a party, Anna-Maria met David Patterson, introduced as an English geologist assisting the Angolan Government on natural resource assessment. Anna-Maria, twenty-three at the time, found in Patterson the soul mate she had sought ever since leaving university and in Anna-Maria, Patterson found someone to match his intellect. A whirlwind romance led to the two marrying and setting up a home of their own in Luanda.
Three years of complete joy followed and despite her husband’s many absences, Anna-Maria remained blissfully happy with her life and completely unaware that her husband was an SIS agent, planted in Angola by the British Government to hunt down illegal arms traders. When he was shot and hacked to pieces whilst on a visit to Cabinda Province his death was blamed upon the FlecPM separatist movement, but she had always felt that there was more to it than her David being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Emmanuel entered the tent with her breakfast and they greeted each other. He informed her that overnight the garden boy had become a father again to a son. He left her now idly wondering how a poorly paid garden boy could afford to raise a family of five children and deciding how much money she should give him for the child’s clothes when her musings were interrupted by her stepfather shouting.
“The bastards! Shit, shit, shit! Carla! Carla! Get in here!”
Anna-Maria’s whole body gave a nervous jerk and she strained to listen. Immediately she heard the clatter of Carla’s shoes on the villa’s ceramic floor tiling as the girl hurried to his office. Her stepfather was waiting for Carla at his office door.
“I want you to get on the phone straight away and…”
The door to his office closed with a bang, shutting out any chance of learning what crisis had occurred. She waited, nervously wondering, would he summon her. Had he discovered what she had been up to? Was now the moment to go to her room and grab the pre-packed suitcase hidden at the back of her wardrobe. Only now did she consider how to get it to her car and drive off before Jan Vermeulen’s men stopped her.
Inside the villa, Carla Correia had found Vermeulen standing at his office door staring at his mobile phone with what could only be described as an expression of fear on his face. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and to Carla’s eyes not very good looking at all, and definitely someone you would not want to argue with. At this moment however, he looked strangely rather small, as if he had shrunk and his normal commanding glare was replaced by an almost pleading expression.
“I want you to get on the phone straight away,” he said as the noise of the office door slamming behind them reverberated down the passageway, “and get air tickets for myself, Karl, Pieter, and you had better get one for my wife as well, on this morning’s eleven o’clock flight to Lagos.”
Carla turned to leave. “And when you’ve done that tell my wife I want to see her urgently,” he added.
“Is there something wrong, Senhor Vermeulen?” she asked anxiously, noting her boss’s shortage of breath and the unusual sight of perspiration on his face.
“Yes, so hurry, we must get that flight, we can’t risk missing it, so go!”
Vermeulen’s eyes were still focused on the screen of his mobile on which the tip-off message had appeared, his mind in turmoil; how did the British get onto the deal and trace it to him, who was the bastard who grassed him up. Despite the coolness of his air-conditioned office he felt hot, claustrophobic and had a ridiculous desire to run out of the house and just keep running. Frantically, he fought to calm his thoughts and plan a way out; he would need more cash funds and that meant a visit to Elmoctar, the only one of his recent clients who had not made the final payment due on a shipment; use of credit cards was out until he could reach London and the Docklands flat that he kept in the name of Henri Vanderkloof. A distant police car siren had him staring in terror out of his office window at the driveway, sitting upright and motionless until the sound drifted away into the distance leaving him looking around his office as if he were expecting policemen to spring from behind his filing cabinets. After a while the silence surrounding the house slowly brought him a sense of relief.
When Lucia, his wife, arrived Vermeulen was brief, “Very urgent business has cropped up and I need you to join me, so get packed, usual limit for air travel. We leave in one hour.”
“Ooh, where are we going Jan? Somewhere exciting?”
“First stop Nigeria, then maybe a couple more stops depending on flight availability, now hurry I have a lot to do.”
“How long will we be away?”
“Quite a time, why?” He would tell her the truth later, now was not the time; he could not waste time answering questions when the net could close in at any moment.
“If it means me sitting in hotels for hours on end waiting for you to finish your meetings I would like Anna-Maria to come as well, for company, Jan,” Lucia replied, a little haughtily, aware from past experience what such trips entailed.
Vermeulen thought for a moment or two, “Yes, maybe it would be better to have her along, tell her, then tell Carla to add her to the list would you, dear.”
When his wife had left he got up and went across to his safe and on opening it took out his and his wife’s South African passports and a second Dutch/EU passport in the name of Henri Vanderkloof. As he turned to his desk he caught his reflection in the glass of the full height trophy cabinet and stopped. Where was the lean, fit looking man of six years ago seen smiling back at him from the framed photograph, holding the Van der Bijl rifle shooting trophy? He held in his expanding stomach then shook his head, his life with Lucia had been too comfortable, what will she say when he tells her that they must leave all this for good.
***
Lucia found her daughter finishing her breakfast on the stoep, “Anna-Maria darling, Jan has asked me to join him on one of his boring business trips, would you be a dear and come along as well? I just can’t bear all those hours sitting on my own waiting whilst he has meetings or goes off to visit his customers’ work places.”
Reluctant at first, Anna-Maria finally accepted, now reasonably sure that, as she had not been immediately summoned, her spying activities had not been discovered. The trip could also offer the chance to learn more about her stepfather’s illegal businesses an
d clients, if she could just hold her nerve. Leaving the stoep with her mother they both went to their rooms to pack unaware that Vermeulen was frantically emptying his filing cabinets of all documents and carrying them out to the garden incinerator. A final check around his office then a hurried packing of a suitcase was completed just as the taxis arrived.
“Lucia darling, you and Anna-Maria go in the first car with Karl, Pieter and I will follow in a few minutes, we will see you at the airport. I have just two more things to do.”
On hearing that Vermeulen’s minders were joining the party Anna-Maria started to doubt the wisdom of her agreement to join the trip, Vermeulen would only have his minders along if he thought thug protection might be necessary and neither man had travelled with him and her mother on their previous trip to Russia.
As the first taxi pulled away Vermeulen turned to Pieter, “Hey, go to the garden store and get the can of petrol out, then set light to all the stuff in the incinerator while I deal with Carla and Emmanuel.”
Later in the day the Angolan Police would find Carla’s body slumped over her desk and a bullet hole in her head. There was now no way that she could tell them where her boss had gone, that would take several more hours to find out by which time it would be too late. Emmanuel’s body was found in the dining room in a pool of blood, Vermeulen had never liked his wife’s choice of servants and Emmanuel had an air of superiority about him that Vermeulen detested. Switching on computers brought up a demolition derby game behind which was running a virus corrupting the hard drive.