by Wilbur Smith
“We say ‘ravishing,’ same thing. And yes, she is. So, you’re a woman, you tell me . . . are they real?”
“What, Zhenia’s breasts?” Nastiya looked outraged at the very suggestion. “One thing I can tell you about the women in my family, Hector: we don’t need any help in that department!”
“No, not them, her lips.”
Nastiya smiled. “Ah yes, they are magnificent: so full, so soft. I must confess I envy her a little for that mouth. The way she always has just a little pout, it’s as if she’s kissing the world.”
“I never knew you were so poetic, Nastiya.”
She gave a dismissive shrug and then went on, “So are they real? Well, I can tell you that her mother has exactly the same lips, so either they both went to the same surgeon or they were both blessed by the same genes. Why don’t you go and ask her?”
“I couldn’t do that!” Cross protested.
“Why not?”
“It’s rude, that’s why.”
Nastiya looked at him skeptically. “Oh, and it’s not rude to talk about my sister behind her back? Ha! You go and ask her, like a man, or I will tell her that you asked me.”
“Very well, you give me no choice,” said Cross. “I have no option but to go and talk to your stunning sister. It’s a tough job, but . . .”
“Enough.” Nastiya laughed. “Go!”
Yevgenia was on her haunches, playing a little game with Catherine, holding a toy monkey in front of her, and moving it every time she tried to grab it, producing shrieks of childish laughter. Cross stopped a couple of feet away, just to watch, and then Yevgenia registered his presence, got to her feet and introduced herself, adding, “But since you are Nastiya’s boss, and also one of her closest, most trusted friends, then you are my friend too, and you can call me Zhenia.”
The way she said her name made it seem as soft and sensual as a woman’s hand running across mink.
“Then you’d better call me Heck,” he replied. “You’ve already met my daughter Catherine.”
Zhenia’s face lit up. “Oh, she’s so adorable! Nastiya told me all about her, and she’s even sweeter than I dreamed she would be.”
“Thank you.” Cross smiled at the child and said, “I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone else in the world . . . apart from her mother, of course.”
Zhenia’s brow crumpled into a sympathetic frown. “Yes, Nastiya told me about Hazel, too. I’m so sorry . . .” A brief silence fell and then she brightened up. “So! You were talking to Nastiya and both of you were looking at me . . .”
“Was it that obvious?” Cross asked.
“A woman always knows when she is being studied.”
“Which must be most of the time, in your case.”
“All the time,” she sighed. “Anyway, I could see Nastiya giving you orders—she loves giving orders, that one!”
Cross laughed. “Yes, but sometimes she forgets who’s really in charge.”
“And that’s you?”
“Yes,” he said with calm, unforced authority.
“Even so, Nastiya gave you an order . . .”
Cross nodded ruefully. “That’s true. I asked her a question about you, and she told me I should just come over here and ask it to you, instead.”
“And . . . ?”
“My exact words were: Are they real?”
Zhenia looked down at her cleavage. “What, these?”
“That was pretty much her reply, too, but I was talking about your lips. They’re extraordinary.”
“I know,” she said and pursed them together in a silly duck face that made them both laugh. “So, you think maybe I had fillers or implants? Hmm . . .” She pursed her lips thoughtfully again, making her natural pout just a little bit more apparent. “You know, there’s only one way to find out for sure . . .”
Cross looked at her coolly, letting her wonder whether he’d call her bluff and kiss her, enjoying the unmistakable charge of flirtation in the air.
Then the mood was broken by a cheerful cry of “This way, everybody!” as Paddy summoned them to join him in the kitchen-diner, built in a conservatory that looked out on a small but well laid-out garden. As Nastiya directed each of her four guests to one of the chairs arranged around a rustic kitchen table, Paddy proudly declaimed the menu: “Today we have a fine joint of prime English beef, cooked medium rare, nice and pink in the middle and maybe just a drop of blood for you, boss. With that there are roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, and a fine selection of vegetables, straight from the freezer, courtesy of Mr. Birdseye, because I love you all dearly, but I’m not after scraping carrots and podding peas all morning. If you drink enough of that Chilean red that’s waiting for you on the table, you’ll never know the difference anyway. Meanwhile, baking away in the oven there’s a splendid apple pie and the custard will be made fresh and not from a packet, that I promise. Ladies and gentlemen, luncheon is served!”
The Bell 407 helicopter was 300 miles northwest of Cabinda City, close to the maximum extent of its range, when the pilot called out to his single passenger, “There she is, right up ahead of us, just where she should be. Man, that’s one strange-looking boat!”
Johnny Congo looked out across the calm Atlantic waters until he saw what the pilot was pointing at: a ship shaped like a paper dart, or an old Delta-wing bomber, with a sleek narrow prow that flared outwards toward a broad, squared-off stern. As they flew closer, Congo could see that it was a trimaran, with three hulls bound together by a single deck, like three piers beneath a bridge. Now he made out a tall, triangular A-frame structure that rose from the main deck, just forward of the stern. A bright yellow craft of some kind was suspended from the A-frame and men, still ant-size at this distance, were clustered around the frame as it tilted backward, carrying the craft over the stern and then lowering it into the water.
By the time the process was completed, the helicopter was preparing its final approach to the vessel, heading straight toward the superstructure that rose in three decks, each smaller than the last, like a gleaming white ziggurat. A crewman wearing white shorts and a navy blue sleeveless shirt was standing on the bow deck, guiding the helicopter in to land, and now Congo could see the “H” painted on the bow deck that marked the landing pad. The pilot brought the Bell into a perfect, smooth touchdown and cut the Allison turboshaft powerplant as the crewman ran in under the rotors and secured the skids to the deck and then remained by the helicopter as the entire pad started to sink into the ship’s black hull. It settled with a barely perceptible or audible bump on the floor of a large hangar and it was only then that the pilot undid his seatbelt and invited Congo to do the same.
As he climbed down on to the hangar floor, Congo saw a short, muscular figure in combat fatigues and a khaki T-shirt striding toward him. “Chico! My man!” he said, holding his hand out straight so that Chico Torres could reach up and high-five it. “This is some boat you got me, bro.”
Torres laughed, his teeth gleaming behind his close-cropped goatee beard. His head was shaved and tanned a deep nut-brown and his whole body exuded a tough, compact muscularity. “Welcome to the Mother Goose, baby,” he laughed. “She’s one of a kind, and this is her maiden voyage. Quite a way to start, huh? C’mon, I’ll give you the guided tour . . .”
Congo followed Torres out of the hanger, down a passageway and then up a flight of stairs that led to a hall, which opened on to a series of lavishly decorated living and dining rooms, culminating in an outdoor space where anyone sitting at the bar only had to swivel their stool to look past the sunloungers and the plunge pool all the way across an aft deck big enough to fit a tennis court to the A-frame that was lifting the odd little yellow craft back out of the water.
“So, Mother Goose is the Triton 196, so-called because it’s one hundred and ninety-six feet, or sixty meters in length,” Torres said. “For the first hundred and twenty feet she’s your basic superyacht, designed to appeal to your basic, bored billionaire, plus his buddies and babes. The
se people, they’ve seen everything, done everything, what else is left? Answer: what happens in the last seventy-six feet. Check it out.”
Torres opened a hatch that led on to a steel ladder, going down. They descended back into the hull, through another hatch and into a hanger that looked like an even bigger version of the one that the Bell was sitting in. In any normal superyacht, this would be where the “toys,” as owners like to call them, were kept: launches, jetskis, sailing boats, windsurfers and the like. But the Mother Goose’s toys were a little different.
“Here’s the main attraction,” said Torres, “one of two Triton 3300/3 mini-submersibles—guess you saw the other one hanging from the A-Frame as you came in. We’re practising getting ’em in and out of the water, as fast and as smoothly as we can. Funky-looking, ain’t it?”
“No kidding,” said Congo, walking around the sub.
The gleaming yellow hull was U-shaped like one of the inflatable neck-rests people buy when they’re flying long haul, economy, and are desperate for anything to get the muscle spasm out of their necks. In the middle of the U, a spherical cabin, made entirely from transparent acrylic thermoplastic, nestled like the passenger’s head in his neck-rest. The sub was so tiny—just thirteen feet long and nine wide—it looked as though Congo could just pick it up and throw it across the hangar. He was looking at it now with doubt and disappointment etched into his features. “This is it?” he asked. “A frickin’ Yellow Submarine? That’s our secret weapon?”
Torres laughed. “Better believe it. This baby can go down to a depth of one thousand meters—that’s three thousand three hundred feet. She can operate underwater for twelve hours, non-stop. By the time we’ve finished working on her, she’ll be more than capable of doing exactly what you asked me to do. So say hello to your little friend, Johnny C. And don’t worry, she’s gonna pack a real big punch.”
Cross sat down and cheerfully helped himself to a classic English lunch, washed down with a very drinkable Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. The Parkers turned out to be Mike, a witty, self-deprecating but obviously brilliant lawyer, and Caro, his art-curator wife. They were planning a safari holiday in Africa to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary and were delighted to discover that Hector was not only a fount of information on the subject, but a fully fledged Maasai warrior. Then Zhenia fielded endless questions about life in Russia and its strange and often frightening foreign policy with charm and intelligence.
The gathering was alive with warmth, laughter and a sense of relaxed, everyday family life, as one parent or another—Hector included—had to get down on their knees to deal with their child, or sit at the table with an infant on their lap, keeping pudgy little hands away from the stems of wine-glasses. It struck Cross that he had never really known this kind of normality. For most of his adult life he had either been a soldier or the boss of a security firm. His working life had been spent in barracks and messes, with little attention, if any, paid to home comforts. Then he’d met Hazel Bannock, been plucked from his Spartan existence and plunged into the life of the super-rich, with all the private jets, personal servants and sprawling homes that entailed. But the fact was, Paddy’s roast beef, which came straight from the local supermarket, tasted just as good as any he’d been served at a duke’s stately home, and the wine—which cost thirty-five quid for half a case from a cut-price booze merchants—went down just as readily as Château Lafite did at a hundred times the price.
Cross could tell that Zhenia was loving it also. All the money in the world hadn’t compensated her for having an abusive father, but here, in this normal, everyday world, she seemed completely relaxed, bubbling over with fun and laughter. The relationship between her and Nastiya was deepening before his eyes: two sisters who’d lost one another for so many years weaving a connection that had made both of them happier. Now Caro Parker was chatting about the ice rink that was erected every winter in the courtyard of Somerset House, on the banks of the River Thames, just a stone’s throw from the Savoy, saying how much she wanted to go, but was Charlie still too young for it, when he wasn’t even three yet?
“Too young?” Nastiya protested in horror. “In Russia children skate before they can walk. If a mother waited until her son was three before putting him on the ice, all the other mothers, they would say, ‘Why have you been so cruel to your little one?’”
“Let’s go skating right now!” Zhenia exclaimed. “Come on, Nastiya, let’s show these British how a Russian can skate!”
“I’ll have you know I’m not British, I’m Irish,” said Paddy with mock dignity.
“And I’m not British, I’m Kenyan.” Cross struck a Napoleonic attitude of defiance. Then it occured to him for the first time ever that while he was a splendid shot, a strong runner and swimmer, a master of several martial arts, who could freefall parachute, ski, climb mountains and survive in almost any environment on earth, he had never in all his life gone ice-skating. It wasn’t something that Kenyan-born children tended do, growing up on the African savannah. A second later he realized something else: he did not want to make a fool of himself in front of Yevgenia Voronova.
Damn it, man, don’t be ridiculous, Hector told himself. The girl’s not yet twenty-five; you’re practically old enough to be her father. In her eyes you’re an old man.
He thought of Bobbi Franklin. She was gorgeous, she was smart and she was completely age-appropriate. But she wasn’t here, and Zhenia was, and suddenly Paddy was on the phone ordering cabs and Cross was gathering up all the huge number of items Nanny Hepworth deemed essential before she’d allow Catherine out of the house.
“I’ve yomped across the Brecon Beacons with packs lighter than this,” Cross muttered to himself as he shoved yet another stuffed toy into the bulging baby-bag, and Zhenia was pleading with him to sit next to her in the cab, “So that I can spend more time with baby Yekaterina—my Tsarina Catherine the Great!” And there they were, speeding through West London, the streets already dark, though it was only five in the afternoon, dropping the baby off at Cross Roads where Bonnie Hepworth was waiting to sweep her away for her bath, and then heading on to Somerset House, just the two of them.
Neither said much. Zhenia was too busy looking out at the glittering shop windows and Christmas decorations and Cross was perfectly content just to watch her. When they reached Somerset House, Mike Parker was waiting, clutching a fistful of tickets and saying, “We’re in luck! Normally you have to book weeks in advance, but they had some spare places for the next session. The others are all putting on their skates, even Charlie!” he added, leading them to the cabin where the skates were issued. Zhenia grabbed hers and went off to find Nastiya, with whom she was soon deep in conversation, chattering in Russian at a million miles an hour and giggling conspiratorially at regular intervals.
“Are you any good at this, boss?” O’Quinn asked, nervously, as the two of them laced themselves into their boots.
“I don’t know, old sport,” said Cross breezily. “Never done it before in my life.”
“I don’t know about you, but I think I’m about to make a complete tit of meself.”
“Nonsense! We’re men. We’re proud veterans of the SAS. There’s nothing we can’t do!”
“Speak for yourself . . .”
Cross tried to approach the situation logically. He’d done a fair bit of Arctic warfare training, which involved endless miles of cross-country skiing, which involved travelling across flat snow, instead of ice. And now he came to think about it, he’d been given a pair of roller skates when he was a boy. If you put those two skills together, you practically had ice-skating.
“Absolutely,” Mike Parker agreed, when Cross put this theory to him. “The key thing is not to lift the skates up and down. No plonking! Just ease your leading foot on to the ice, slide forward and outwards, then do exactly the same thing with the other foot. Nothing to it.”
Parker stepped out on to the ice and set off at a steady, unspectacular, but relaxed pace. Well, that lo
oked easy enough, Cross thought.
Then Paddy O’Quinn tiptoed nervously out, took a couple of terrified steps, desperately waving his arms for balance, and fell flat on his backside, cursing furiously all the way.
Finally it was Cross’s turn. Don’t plonk. Slide forward and out. Now the next foot. Suddenly he was moving. It was hardly a Winter Olympic medal-winning performance. But he was upright and he was moving and—bloody hell!—he was coming to the end of the rink and now he had to turn left, to follow the anti-clockwise direction in which everyone was circulating. He took a moment to take in his surroundings, for the rink was surrounded on all sides by the splendid neo-classical façades of one of London’s most magnificent old buildings. But then an unexpected crisis suddenly reared its ugly head: How did you turn? Answer: Cross didn’t. He just slid into the barrier at the end of the rink, held on for dear life, turned around to face the rink and then leaned up against the barrier, casually surveying the scene and doing his best to look as though this was all entirely intentional.
But where was Zhenia? On their way out of the house she’d grabbed a bright red fleece beanie and a short, black Puffa gilet, cinched in at the waist to ensure that no one could fail to notice her figure, even when covered in quilting. The hat, at least, should be easy to spot under the dazzling floodlights. Cross scanned the crowd, one stranger’s face after another, until he suddenly spotted her, darting across the ice, weaving in and out of slower skaters, hotly pursued by Nastiya. The two of them looked exultant, laughing at the sheer joy of doing something that was clearly as natural to them as breathing. Then Zhenia saw him. Cross waved and she waved back, changing course to skate straight at him, flat out, her eyes never leaving Cross’s until she came sliding to a stop in a shower of ice, so close to him they were almost touching.
Zhenia spun to her left, facing in the same direction as the circulating skaters, held out her right hand and said, “Come on. I’ll help you.”
Cross was not used to seeking assistance from young girls, but he swallowed his pride and said, “Thanks. I may need it.”