Predator: A Crossbow Novel

by Wilbur Smith

  They’d stopped three times, all for false alarms, by the time they came to the base of the derrick. McGrain stopped and held up his hand, halting his little column. Then he gave another quick series of hand signals that sent the men fanning out around him: Flowers to his left, the other two to the right. At the bottom of the derrick was an open working area, like a clearing at the heart of a steel forest, where pipes and girders took the place of trees. The drillers’ room was some twenty feet or so above them, overlooking the whole area, and at the center of this clearing rose the drill pipe itself: the heart and purpose of the platform.

  Two hostiles were crouched at the base of the pipe. They were placing blocks of C4 explosive beside it. And if those blocks should ever go off and turn a pipe filled with oil into a gigantic flamethrower then, as Donnie McGrain knew only too well, you could kiss the rig and everyone on it goodbye.

  Herschel Van Dijk had spent no more than three minutes in the main control room before he worked out what the matter was with the platform’s CCTV system: someone had hacked it. The feed to the control room had been cut off, but he’d bet his last buck someone out there was watching what was going on. He looked up at the terrorist who was glaring at him with a look of deep suspicion and mistrust right across his face and cradling his AK-47 in a way that suggested he wouldn’t need much of an excuse to use it. Wasn’t your lot, was it, you bloodthirsty bastard? Too busy killing my brus. So who was it then, eh?

  There were no more than three or four men on board who had anything approaching the skills required to do a job like this. Van Dijk was one of them and the others were currently stuck in the canteen waiting their turn to die. That meant it was someone on the outside, and the very obvious reason why they’d done it was to help them get on the rig and move about it unobserved. So help was coming and now his continued existence on the planet depended on his ability to string his captors along for long enough that the guys in the white hats had time to get aboard and save the day.

  He spent another couple of minutes scrolling rams of code across his screen, opening different files and generally trying to look like a man getting to the very depths of the problem. Somewhere off in the direction of the canteen he heard a burst of gunfire: that was another one of his workmates killed. Van Dijk kept the charade going for a little bit longer and then looked at the terrorist. “Você fala português?” he asked.

  The man looked at him blankly.

  Well, if you can’t make out a word of Portuguese, you’re not from Angola, Van Dijk thought. So what the bloody hell are you doing on a rig in Angolan waters?

  He was pretty certain he’d heard the terrs’ leader using French words, which meant that these men could come from any number of French-speaking African nations, from Morocco to Madagascar. So the next statement he made was in Swahili, the Bantu language that is the closest thing to a common tongue across a great swathe of Africa: “Mimi haja ya kuzungumza na bosi wako—hivi sasa!” or “I want to speak to your boss—now!”

  “Kwa nini?” the terrorist replied: “Why?”

  So now Van Dijk knew one thing about the men who’d attacked the rig: they came from a part of Africa where both French and Swahili were spoken, and that could only be the eastern half of the DRC. So they weren’t Angolan, they were Congolese, and so, once again: what the hell were they doing here?

  Staying in Swahili, Van Dijk said, “Tell him the reason the cameras aren’t working is that the computer that controls them has crashed. Do you understand that, boy?”

  The terrorist’s liquid brown eyes narrowed. “Yes, I know what a computer is, musungu.”

  Van Dijk grinned. When the first white explorers had arrived in East Africa, the local tribes saw these strange men walking across their lands, not knowing where they were going, and called them “mzungu,” which means “aimless wanderer.” Since then the term had come to mean “white man’ and was used, with regional variations, by tens of millions of Swahili speakers.

  “Glad we understand each other, then,” he said.

  The terrorist was about to reach for his phone, but then he realized he had a problem: he couldn’t make a call and point a gun at the same time. He frowned, trying to work out how to solve the problem. Van Dijk had to turn back to the computer so that he didn’t laugh in the man’s face. He’d provoked him enough already; any more and there could be trouble. He started tapping away at the keyboard, looking as if he was doing something to fix the system, while actually typing complete gibberish.

  Van Dijk heard a noise behind him, no louder than a knock on the door.

  A second later the terrorist’s head and shoulders slammed down on the edge of the U-shaped desk at which Van Dijk was sitting, and lay there, gazing up at him through sightless, wide-open eyes. There was a small red hole at the back of his head.

  Van Dijk spun around on his chair. A tall, broad-shouldered man in a black drysuit was standing there. He had a scar over one eye and a nose that was either born crooked, or made that way by someone else’s fist. In his right hand he was holding a stainless-steel pistol with a weirdly long barrel, while his left index finger was raised to his lips: “Ssshhh . . .”

  Imbiss had told Cross to expect one hostile and one member of the rig’s crew in the control room and that’s exactly what he’d found. Better yet, the oilman had reacted with admirable cool to seeing a corpse hit the desk about two feet from where he was sitting. Keeping his voice low, Cross glanced at the dead terrorist and asked, “Any more of them around?”

  “Not here,” Van Dijk replied.

  Cross nodded an acknowledgement and then got on the comms to Imbiss. “Control room cleared, one hostile down. Thanks for the steer, Dave. What’s the score so far, over?”

  “One hostile at the helipad. Paddy’s waiting for the go-signal. Two by the wellhead, McGrain says they’re laying a charge. Signal’s intermittent but I think there are two more in the driller’s room, and I count another pair in the galley. There’s one more standing guard outside the canteen, seven inside. Add the one you’ve just taken out, I make that sixteen, which is all of them.”

  “Right, I’ll take my lads up to the canteen. We’ll deal with the sentry. Then we’ll await your go-signal. Keep me updated with any developments. Over.”

  Cross turned his attention back to the man at the control desk. “It’s about to kick off,” he said. “So stay here and keep your head down.”

  “Wait,” said Van Dijk. “What are you: white Zims? Kenyan? I hear Africa in your voice.”

  Cross didn’t have time for expatriate chit-chat. “I was born in Kenya. What of it?” he asked impatiently.

  “Because you’ll get what I’m about to say. My Bantu friend here didn’t understand a word of Portuguese, but he spoke Swahili. And his boss kept breaking into French. See what I’m getting at?”

  It took a second for Cross to focus on something other than the next stage in the anti-terrorist operation and follow what the man was saying. “So they’re not Angolan or Cabindan . . .”

  “Ja . . . and . . . ?”

  “They’re Congolese. French and Swahili, they have to be.”

  “Correct. And what are a bunch of pekkies from the Congo doing on this rig, eh? That’s what I want to know.”

  Good question, thought Cross. He grunted once more, then said, “Thanks,” as he turned for the door. There would be a time when that piece of information and the question it provoked might come in very handy. But now was not that time. Now it did not matter where the terrorists came from, only that they were taken out. The other three men in his squad had been checking out the offices and meeting rooms in the vicinity of the control center. None of them had found any hostiles, but they reported several bodies of dead crew members. Cross could see the discoveries had only made his men more angry than they already were. “Stay cool,” he said. “Keep your emotions under control. Right, now we deal with the canteen.”

  Nastiya was leading a four-person squad, tasked with securing the galley area
adjacent to the canteen. Imbiss had warned her to expect at least two hostiles. Her men comprised Lee Donovan, an ex-Para who was one of the two non-specialists McGrain had reckoned was ready for the swim, and two SBS veterans: Halsey and Moran. They were making their way down the passageway that led to the galley, with Donovan on point, Nastiya behind him and the two SBS men bringing up the rear. Halsey had pulled the canister on the swim to the rig. Now he had its contents on his back, two metal cylinders that made him look like a scuba diver. He had been positioned third in line, the safest place to be, but not because anyone cared particularly about him: it was the cylinders that mattered.

  Suddenly they heard the sound of gunfire and screaming from up ahead. Nastiya picked up speed and ran down the passage and past the swing doors to the galley, coming to a halt with her back against the bulkhead on the far side of the door. Donovan took up a similar station on the other side of the door. Halsey held back, waiting a few meters down the passageway, with Moran standing guard over him and his precious load.

  By the doors, Donovan pulled a stun grenade from a pouch. The whole operation had been conducted as silently as possible, but the cacophony inside the galley had rendered that an unnecessary irrelevance. Nastiya counted down with her fingers: three . . . two . . . one. On zero, she pointed at the doors. Donovan stepped up, kicked one door open and threw in the grenade, leaping back out of the way as a burst of firing came from the galley. Half a second later the grenade detonated in an explosion of dazzling light and ear-splitting noise. Nastiya and Donovan barged their shoulders through the swing doors and with both hands gripping their Rugers raised their arms so that they were already in the firing position as they entered the galley.

  The move was just a precaution. The flash-bang should have left anyone in the vicinity of the galley entrance dazed and incapable of defending themselves.

  But the grenade had rolled up against one side of the open door to one of the four walk-in refrigeration units that ran in a line down the left-hand side of the galley.

  Two of the hostiles were on the far side of the fridge door, sheltered from the blast. One of them came out from behind it brandishing his AK-47 and fired a three-round burst that hit Donovan in a diagonal pattern across his chest, hitting his heart and lungs and killing him at once.

  Nastiya fired back, but the hostile had darted back behind the fridge door. She aimed two more shots straight at the door. The door was sturdily built with two layers of steel separated by tightly packed insulating material and the lightweight around failed to penetrate it. But Nastiya had anticipated that before she pulled the trigger. She just wanted to keep her enemies’ heads down.

  Now they had a stalemate. She and the hostiles were less than ten feet apart. If the men came out from behind the fridge, she would kill them. If she exposed herself to their fire, they would kill her.

  Nastiya heard a moan coming from inside the walk-in fridge. It was silenced by two gunshots. She glanced around the galley. In front of her stood a cook’s station with a steel work surface next to a six-burner hob that was positioned at right angles to the line of fridges. One of the cooks must have been about to prep a tuna when the attack began because the fish was lying on a chopping board, with a cleaver and filleting knife beside it. Nastiya noted the precise position of the two knives, fired another burst of bullets to keep her enemies’ heads down, then slung her gun over her shoulder and, as silently as a cat on a fur rug, sprang forward, placing her hands on the work surface and vaulting over it. As she did, her right hand gripped the handle of the cleaver, so that when she hit the floor and turned toward the open fridge she was already lifting her arm and then bringing it down in a throwing motion that sent the cleaver through the air, end over end, right into the throat of one of the hostiles.

  His comrade had his back turned to Nastiya and his gun hanging loose by his side as he faced into the fridge. When he saw his comrade go down he turned, and as he did Nastiya sprang forward, picking up the filleting knife in her left hand, transferring it into her right and twisting her body to mirror his turn, so when she reached him she was already behind him and her left hand was over his mouth, pulling his head back so that her newfound knife could fillet his throat.

  As the man fell at her feet, Nastiya saw that he had been holding a smartphone in his hand. The bastard had been filming what he and his pal had been up to. Nastiya muttered a string of contemptuous Russian expletives as she picked the phone up and tucked it away in a pouch, then she cast her eyes over the interior of the walk-in fridge. There were five bodies—all south-east Asian—lying between the shelves filled with provisions, like so many joints of meat. All had been shot multiple times at close range. She checked all the bodies for signs of life, but found none.

  Five kitchen staff: that surely wasn’t enough to provide three hot meals a day, each with multiple food options, to 120 hungry workers. Nastiya went back out into the galley and opened the next fridge door, ducking as someone hurled a large can of tomatoes at her.

  “Stop!” she shouted. “I’m a friend!”

  It was not so much her words as the female pitch of her voice and the fact that she was speaking English that registered with the eight cold, shivering, fearful catering staff who emerged from their hiding places behind, and in some cases lying on, the shelves.

  “Are there any more of you?” Nastiya asked as they followed her out of the fridge.

  “No,” one of them said. “Just our friends”—he nodded at the other open door—“in there.”

  “If you want to be safe you must leave here,” she said, leading them back out of the galley and into the passage. She pointed at Moran: “This man will look after you. Stay here and don’t move unless he tells you to.”

  Nastiya waited a moment to make sure that she had been both understood and obeyed, then her voice took on a very different, impersonal tone as she told Imbiss, “Galley secured. Two hostiles killed. One man down, Donovan, killed. Multiple crew fatalities. Eight further crew secured alive and well. Am proceeding as planned. Over.”

  She heard Imbiss reply, “Message received and understood. Good luck. Out.”

  Nastiya looked at Halsey and said: “OK, let’s go.”

  She returned to the galley with the SBS man just behind her, passing the carnage by the fridges, and heading into another area filled with bakers’ ovens and wheeled metal shelf units stacked with loaves of bread. She stopped in the middle of the floor and looked up at the ceiling, where a steel mesh grill had been inset between two strips of neon light, reached inside the waterproof pouch attached to her drysuit and pulled out a gas mask.

  “I’m going to need a leg-up,” she said, before pulling the mask over her head.

  Halsey stood beneath the grill with his two hands cupped. Nastiya placed her right leg on his hands and was lifted up into the air. She reached up as far as she could and pushed the grill up and out of the way, then gripped one side of the grill with both hands and pulled herself up into the open vent. Halsey helped her on her way, grunting with effort as he raised his hands above his head until Nastiya’s shoulders were through the hole, then her hips and finally her entire body had disappeared up into the darkness.

  Nastiya had been chosen for this part of the mission because she was the smallest, lightest and most nimble member of the team. But even she had precious little room to move inside the air-conditioning duct, and the gas mask not only impaired the already limited visibility but added to the claustrophobia that came from being in a cramped metal tube. With some difficulty, she manoeuvred herself until she was peering like a goggle-eyed monster from the vent through which she’d just climbed. She lay down on her side and stretched an arm down toward Halsey as he swung one of the cylinders off his back and held it up for her to grab.

  There was a handle at the top of the cylinder. Nastiya wrapped her fingers around it and pulled with all her might. As long as Halsey was giving her a hand from below the task of dragging the cylinder up into the duct was not too tou
gh, but then it was beyond his reach and she was taking the entire weight. “Mother of God, this is heavy!” Nastiya muttered into her gas mask as she hauled the cylinder, inch by inch, up and over the lip of the vent until it landed beside her with a clang of metal upon metal that seemed to echo and reverberate off into the distance.

  Nastiya froze. If any of the terrorists, less than twenty meters away in the canteen, had heard that crash and took it into their heads to check out what had caused it the whole mission was done for. She waited, her heart thumping and the sweat of tension and fear prickling her armpits. But the moment passed, there was no sound of any reaction from the canteen and very slowly, doing her utmost to drag the cylinder as quietly as possible, she crawled and slithered into the black embrace of the air-conditioning duct.

  There were two vents up ahead, marked by the columns of light that rose from them and acted like beacons to Nastiya. She crawled around the first and went to the furthest one, where she placed the cylinder on its side. It had a short length of hose protruding from its top and Nastiya positioned this right above the vent, with its tip pointing down.

  Next she went all the way back to the opening above the galley, where Halsey was still waiting, and repeated the whole painful, nerve-racking procedure, but this time leaving the cylinder by the first of the two vents she had earlier passed. Next to the hose, on the top of the cylinder, there was a flat around tap. Nastiya turned it, scuttled a little further into the depth of the air-conditioning duct and whispered: “Gas on.”

  “I hear you,” Imbiss replied.

  Then she crawled on down the duct to the furthest vent and turned the second gas tank on as well.