by Wilbur Smith
‘As much as it takes to get him,’ Hazel whispered back, and she scrawled on the pad in front of her ‘$1,000,000?’ and turned it towards him so he could see.
‘That’s crazy!’ Hector shook his head, and said into the receiver, ‘We will go to quarter of a million.’
Bernie went very quiet for a while then he said, ‘I would really love to help you. Sorry, Heck. But it’s my reputation on the line.’
‘Is Nella there?’ Hector asked.
‘Yes, but—’
‘But nothing! Put her on.’ Nella came on the line with her thick Afrikaans accent.
‘Ja, Hector Cross. What’s your latest bullshit story, man?’
‘I just called to say I love you.’
‘Kiss my butt, Cross!’
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Nella. But you have to divorce that stupid husband of yours first. You know what he has just done? He turned down my offer for half a million, for ten days’ work.’
‘How much?’ Nella asked thoughtfully.
‘Half a million.’
‘Dollars? Not African Monopoly money?’
‘Dollars,’ he confirmed, ‘lovely US greenbacks.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Sidi el Razig in Abu Zara.’
‘We’ll be there the day after tomorrow for breakfast. And I love you back, Hector Cross.’
Hector and Hazel and four of the Cross Bow operatives were waiting on the airstrip as the monstrous four-engine transport aircraft circled and then banked steeply onto its approach run.
‘Nella is at the controls,’ Hector said with certainty.
‘How do you know?’ Hazel demanded.
‘Bernie flies like an old maid. Nella is the original rodeo cowgirl from Germiston, the city they would have to put the tube in if they wanted to give the world an enema.’
‘Don’t be rude. My paternal grandfather was born in Germiston.’
‘I bet that in every other respect he was a splendid fellow.’
The C-130 Hercules touched down, trundled down the airstrip and swung off to park close to where they were standing, its four huge contra-rotating propellers sending a stinging cloud of sand over them. Nella cut the engines and dropped the roll-on-roll-off ramp at the rear of the fuselage. She and Bernie came down the ramp. Nella was a brawny blonde with a baby-doll face. She was dressed in camouflage overalls. The sleeves were cut off and showed a tattoo of a flying angel on her beefy right arm. She towered over her husband.
‘Okay, Heck, what do you want us to do for half a mill? Knowing you, I bet it’s not going to be easy,’ she said as they shook hands.
‘You’ve got me all wrong, like you always did.’
‘Introduce us to your girlfriend.’ Nella looked Hazel over with a penetrating eye, trying not to let her jealousy seem too obvious.
‘You figure the relationship slightly wrong, Nella my love. This is Mrs Hazel Bannock – my boss and yours. So a little respect might be in order. Come on, let’s go up to the terminal where we can talk.’ They all piled into the two Hummvee trucks. In the situation room they sat at the long table and Hector explained their predicament to the Vosloos. When he had finished they were all silent for a while and then Nella looked at Hazel.
‘I also have a daughter. Thank the Lord, she’s found herself a good man in Australia. But I know how you must feel.’ She reached across the table and covered Hazel’s silken hand with her own huge paw which was ingrained with engine oil and grime. The nails were torn and broken off short. ‘I would fly you for free if you asked me, Mrs Bannock.’
‘Thank you, Nella. You are a good person. It shines out.’
‘For God’s sake, ladies. Cut it out. You will have me in tears if you don’t stop,’ Hector interrupted. ‘There’s only one problem. We’re not sure where we are going or when. But it will be close and it will be soon.’
‘How soon?’ Bernie Vosloo asked. ‘We can’t wait around here for weeks. Every day we spend sat on the ground costs us money.’
‘You hold your mouth, Bernie Vosloo!’ Nella rounded on him. ‘Didn’t you hear me give the lady my word?’
‘He’s right!’ Hazel said. ‘Of course, I will pay your down time. Twenty thousand dollars for the first day, increasing by another ten thousand every day longer that you sit on the ground.’
‘You don’t have to do that, Mrs Bannock.’ Nella looked abashed.
‘Yes I do,’ Hazel replied. ‘Now let’s listen to Mr Cross.’
It took four days but by then they were all on the starting blocks. Ronnie Wells and three of his men had taken the MTB down the Gulf and around to Ras el Mandeb. He was anchored in a deserted cove on the Saudi coast just north of the border with Yemen and across the strait from Puntland. His fuel tanks were topped up from the canisters he carried on deck, and he was in full and constant radio contact with Sidi el Razig.
The Hercules stood on the fringe of the airstrip beyond the tiny airport building. She had three of the Cross Bow long-range GM trucks lashed down in the hold, and a small 750-gallon two-wheel gasoline tanker which could be towed behind one of the trucks. The trucks were packed with equipment and each of them carried a pair of 50 calibre Browning heavy machine guns concealed under the tarpaulins. They could be mounted in minutes, and their fire power was devastating.
Hector had rehearsed the drop procedure with Bernie and Nella. As soon as they had acquired the target they would take off at nightfall and overfly it. Bernie and Nella had carried out dozens of parachute drops. They were experts. Hector’s stick would jump, and the Hercules would fly on to the selected border airfield. There it would land and Paddy and Dave would unload the trucks and take up a listening and waiting position as close to the enemy base as was safe and feasible. At the radio summons from Hector they would race across the border and head for a pre-arranged rendezvous.
Those were the two least desirable extraction vehicles. Hector was really relying heavily on Hans Lategan in Bannock Oil’s big Russian MIL-26 helicopter getting through to them for a quick and neat extraction. The crimson and white paintwork, in the colours of Bannock Oil, had already been sprayed over with mottled brown and dark green camouflage. It would be waiting on the nearest border, fully fuelled.
Hazel had sent a reply to the ransom demand, assuring the Beast that she was doing all in her power to raise the money that they demanded, but stating that considering the amount involved this would take time. She hoped that she would have the full amount ready to send to their instructions within twenty days. She received no acknowledgement, and she fretted incessantly. There was nothing left to do but wait, and Hazel Bannock was not good at waiting. After she had finished her daily conference call to her people in Houston and checked with Colonel Roberts at the Pentagon there were still eighteen hours of each day to fill.
Every morning Hector took her with him to meet the local passenger flight from Ash-Alman, the capital of Abu Zara. They scanned the faces of everybody disembarking, but Uthmann and Tariq were never amongst them. There was a limit to even Hazel’s athletic endurance, so they could not pass more than seven or eight hours a day running in the dunes or skin diving in the coral paradise offshore. Fortunately she was very easy to talk to once she began to trust Hector a little and to lower her defences a few inches. When they argued politics he began to detect a swing to the right in her original stance. However, she was vehemently opposed to capital punishment, and she still believed in the sanctity of human life.
‘You’re telling me that there is not a single ugly thug in this world, no matter how evil he is, who does not deserve to die?’ Hector demanded.
‘That decision remains with God. Not with us.’
‘The old man upstairs has whispered in my ear often enough when I have one of the thugs in my sights, Take him down, Hector my lad! When the Lord calls then Hector Cross obeys.’
‘You are a total heathen.’ She could scarcely hide her smile. He found that she was an old-fashioned believer, sublimely certain
of the omnipresence and omnipotence of Jesus Christ.
‘So you think that every time you get down on your knees J.C. is tuned in on your call sign?’ he asked.
‘You just wait and see, Cross. You just wait and see.’
‘You’ve been chatting to him recently, I can tell,’ he accused, and she smiled like the Sphinx. These discussions, and others like them, were good for passing the hours. Then after dinner one evening she spotted a cheap wooden chess set on a shelf behind the bar in the mess and challenged him to a game. He had not played since leaving university. They sat facing each other across the board, and he swiftly learned that she cared very little for defence, and relied on a fiery queen attack. Once she united her rooks she was well nigh impossible to contain. However, twice he was able to sucker her into a royal knight fork on her king and queen. They came out about equal over a dozen hard-fought games.
Then on the fifth day after the arrival of Bernie and Nella at Sidi el Razig, Hector told her, ‘Mrs Bannock, I am taking you out to dinner tonight, whether you like it or not.’
‘Keep going, and you might be able to talk me into it,’ she said. ‘Should I dress up?’
‘You look good to me just like that.’ He drove her out to a stretch of beach three miles up the coast. She watched him expertly setting up the barbecue.
‘Okay, you are a regular boy scout at fire-making, but what’s to cook?’
‘Come on, we have to go shopping.’ There was only an hour until sundown, but they swam out a few hundred metres to his secret coral reef. With three dives he collected a six-pound strawberry-coloured rock cod and two big rock lobsters. She sat on a picnic rug with her long bare legs curled up under her and a glass of red Burgundy in her hand while she watched him cook.
‘Dinner is served,’ he announced at last and they ate with their fingers, picking the succulent white meat off the rock cod’s bones and sucking the flesh out of the armoured crayfish legs. They threw the scraps in the fire and watched them blacken and burn. Then Hazel stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked lazily.
‘Swim,’ she answered. ‘You can come along, if you have a mind.’ She reached behind her back with both hands and popped the clasp of her bikini top. Then she placed her thumbs inside the elastic of the pants bottoms and wriggled them down over her hips until they fell to her ankles. She kicked the wisp of pretty cloth high in the air and stood for just a moment facing him. He caught his breath with the shock of delight. She had the body of a woman in her magnificent prime: tight and high-breasted, her belly flat and hard, with hips swelling out proudly from her narrow waist into the perfect lines of an Etruscan vase. This was a natural woman, not shaven in the modern fashion like a pornographic starlet. She laughed in his face, provocatively and wantonly, then spun around and raced down the beach to dive into the low surf and swim out into deeper water with a powerful over-arm crawl. There she trod water and, laughing still, watched him hopping around on one leg in the sand before he could kick off his swimming trunks.
‘I am coming after you, you little vixen!’ he shouted in warning and charged down the beach. She shrieked with delicious terror and churned the water foamy as she swam away from him. He caught her and turned her to face him while he reached for her mouth with his own. She placed her hands on his shoulders submissively until his lips were an inch from hers. Then she rose high above him and placed her entire weight on his shoulders, driving him deep below the surface. By the time he came up spluttering she was ten metres away. He bulled his way after her but as he reached out to grab her, she flicked both legs high in the air, jack-knifed her body and duck-dived deep into the dark water. He lost sight of her and trod water, turning slowly and watching for her to surface again. She came up nearer the beach and he charged after her, swinging his arms and kicking the water to foam behind him. She ducked down again like a cormorant after a fish. She was slowly and disingenuously working him back into shallow water.
Suddenly she stood up, only waist deep. She waited for him to come and then ran to meet him. They locked together, breath and belly. She felt him against her, huge and hard, as ready for her as she was for him. She flung her arms round his neck and clamped both her thighs around his hips. It took a moment of frantic manoeuvring by both of them before they could get themselves perfectly aligned and then he glided up deeply into her belly. It seemed to her that he might touch her very heart.
‘Oh, sweet God. This is the one I have waited for, for so very long,’ she breathed, and gave herself to him without check or reservation.
It was after midnight when they arrived back at the terminal buildings. He saw her to her room and would have left her at the door with a single lingering kiss.
‘Don’t be daft,’ she said, and held the door open. ‘Come on in.’
‘What will people think?’
‘To use your own lyrical terminology, I don’t give a good stuff!’ Hazel replied.
‘What a grand idea! Let’s do it.’ He chuckled and followed her through the door and locked it behind them. They showered together, openly and lingeringly gloating over each other’s bodies as they washed off the beach sand and sea salt. Then they went to the bed.
‘Hemingway called his bed the Fatherland,’ Hector remarked as they slid between the sheets.
‘Old Ernie has my vote,’ she laughed as she came in from the other side and they met in the middle. They made love joyously and tenderly, but always the shadow of tragedy coloured their happiness. When they had exhausted each other for the moment, she lay in his arms and pressing her face to his naked chest she wept softly but bitterly. He stroked her hair and shared her agony.
‘I am going to come with you when you go in to fetch Cayla,’ she said. ‘I cannot stay here alone. I have only endured this long because of you. I am as tough as any of your men. I can handle myself in a crisis, you know that. You must take me in with you.’
‘Do you know that you have the bluest and most beautiful eyes in all the world?’ he said. She sat up and stared at him angrily.
‘Are you cracking your stupid jokes at a time like this?’
‘No, my darling. I am telling you why you cannot come with me.’ She shook her head in incomprehension, and he went on, ‘Things might not go as we planned them. We might become stranded and have to try and blend into the local populace and worm our way out. The Arabs call eyes like yours devil’s eyes. The first of the enemy who looked into your face would know what you are. If I took you with me it would halve the chances of getting Cayla out safely.’ She looked at him steadily for a long while, then her shoulders slumped and she hid her face against his chest again.
‘That is the only reason why I would stay,’ she whispered. ‘I would not do anything that reduced the chances for her. You will get her out, Hector? You will bring her back to me?’
‘Yes, I will.’
‘And you? Will you come back to me? I have only just found you. I cannot lose you now.’
‘I will be back, I promise you, with Cayla beside me.’
‘And I believe you,’ she said. She slept holding on to him. He could barely hear her breathing. He was careful not to move and disturb her. She woke as the dawn light filtered through the curtains.
‘That’s the first night I have slept straight through since Cayla . . .’ She didn’t finish the sentence. ‘I’m starving. Take me to breakfast.’
Big Nella was in the mess before them with a huge platter of scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage in front of her. She looked up at Hazel, and a flash of intuitive understanding passed between them. Nella looked down at her plate and grinned.
‘Mazel tov!’ she said to her eggs, and Hazel blushed. Hector would never have believed that she was capable of such a thing, and he stared at the phenomenon with astonishment; for him it was more lovely than the sunrise. After they had eaten he took Hazel out to the Hummvee. She sat beside him in the front seat and every time he changed gear he touched her leg, and she smiled demurely. Hector parked the H
ummvee in the shade under the wing of the Hercules, for even at this hour the sun was already uncomfortably warm. Now they could hold hands. The Fokker F-27 Friendship was only half an hour behind schedule.
‘For Abu Zara Airways that is almost early,’ Hector told her, as they watched it taxi up to park in front of the terminal building and shut down its engines. The twenty or so passengers began to disembark and Hector watched them without any real expectations. They were nearly all Arabs in traditional dress carrying bundles and parcels of their possessions. Suddenly Hector stiffened and squeezed her hand hard.
‘Son of a gun! It’s them!’ He swore softly.
‘Which ones?’ Hazel sat upright. ‘They all look the same to me.’
‘The last two. I could tell them from a mile off by the way they walk.’ He blew a single short blast on the horn and started the engine of the Hummvee. The two Arabs looked across at them, and then headed towards them. They climbed into the back seat.
‘Peace be on you!’ Hector greeted them.
‘On you, peace.’ They responded in unison. Hector drove a mile along the track above the beach before he parked. Hazel swivelled in her seat to look back at the two men behind her.
‘This is driving me screaming mad,’ she blurted out. ‘I have to know! Have you found where my daughter is, Uthmann?’
‘Yes, Mrs Bannock. We have found her. I have been staying with my brother Ali in Baghdad. He is different to me. He believes the only way forward for our nation is the road of jihad. He is a mujahid and is allied strongly with Al-Qaeda. He knows that I do not support his views, but we are brothers and bound together by our blood. He would never divulge any of his jihadist affairs to me, but after I had spent these last weeks in his home he became relaxed and less secretive. Usually he uses a mobile phone and he never makes business calls from his home. A few days ago he mistakenly believed that I had gone out with his wife to visit friends of ours, but I was in the upper floor of the house when Ali used the land line to speak to one of his Al-Qaeda associates. I listened to the conversation on the extension. They were discussing the capture and the imprisonment of your daughter, and one of them mentioned that she was taken by members of the clan of Sheikh Khan Tippoo Tip.’