by Wilbur Smith
So Cross requested and was given an honorable discharge. Since then, the fighting had continued, albeit no longer in Her Majesty’s service. Working almost exclusively for Bannock Oil, Cross had defended the company’s installations in the Middle East against terrorist attempts at sabotage. That was where he met Hazel Bannock, widow of the company’s founder Henry Bannock, who had taken over the business and, through sheer determination and force of will, made it bigger and more profitable than ever before. She and Cross were equally headstrong, equally proud, equally egotistic. Neither had been willing to give an inch to the other, but the combative antagonism with which their relationship began was, perhaps, the source of its strength. Each had tested the other and found that they were not wanting; from that mutual respect, not to mention a burning mutual lust, had come a deep and passionate love.
Marriage to Hazel Bannock had introduced Cross to a world unlike any he had ever known, in which millions were counted by the hundred, and the numbers in an address book belonged to presidents, monarchs and billionaires. But no amount of money or power altered the fundamentals of human life: you were no more immune to disease, no less vulnerable to a bullet or bomb, and your heart could still be torn in two by loss. And just as money could buy new friends, so it also brought new enemies with it.
Hazel was an African, like Cross, and like him she understood and accepted the law of the jungle. When Cross had captured Adam Tippoo Tip, the man who had kidnapped and later murdered Hazel’s daughter Cayla and her mother Grace, Hazel had executed him herself. “It is my duty to God, my mother and my daughter,” she had said before she dried her tears, lifted a pistol to the back of Adam’s neck and, with a rock-steady grip on the gun, put a bullet through his brain.
But death had begotten death. Hazel had been killed. Cross had killed Carl Bannock, one of the two men responsible for her murder. Now the other, Johnny Congo, was awaiting execution in an American jail. He would die, just as the others had done, but in the way Jo Stanley preferred: from a lethal injection, in an execution chamber, on the order of a court. Maybe that would end all the dying. For the first time in his life, Cross was prepared to consider the possibility that the time had come to walk away from the battlefield before he was carried away in a body bag. His life was different now. He had a daughter who had already lost a mother. He couldn’t let her lose her father too. And he had Jo. She brought peace to his life and the promise of another, better, happier way of living.
“You’re not as young as you used to be, Heck,” Cross told himself as he got up from the folding canvas stool on which he’d sat to eat his lunch with a crack of his knee joints. Though his muscles were still as strong as ever, they seemed to ache just a little more than they used to. Perhaps it was time to let his right-hand men, Dave Imbiss and Paddy O’Quinn, take charge of Cross Bow’s active operations. God only knew they were up to the task. So was Paddy’s blonde Russian wife Nastiya, who was as ruthlessly dangerous as she was magnificently beautiful.
Hector picked up his rod and waded back into the waters of the Tay for his afternoon’s fishing. But before he settled to the task a thought flashed into his mind: that he was almost ready to give Jo the news that she longed to hear; that he was ready to settle down. For once Johnny Congo was dead, that would be the last of his enemies gone. Maybe that would allow him to enjoy a quiet, peaceful life at last.
Just maybe, he thought as he prepared to cast his fly across the river, and just maybe salmon will learn to take a fly.
As befitted his status as one of the young pillars of Houston society, D’Shonn Brown had a luxury suite at Reliant Stadium, home of the city’s NFL franchise, the Houston Texans. He had invited his corporate security consultant Clint Harding, a former field lieutenant in the Texas Rangers, the state’s elite law enforcement agency, to join him as the Texans took on their divisional rivals the Indianapolis Colts. Harding’s wife Maggie and their three teenage kids came along, too, as did D’Shonn’s current girlfriend, a ravishing blonde real-estate heiress called Kimberley Mattson, who looked kooky but hot in an insanely expensive pair of old-fashioned five-pocket jeans by Brunello Cucinelli, rolled up at the ankle to show off her new rose-garland tattoo. The party was completed by Rashad Trevain, his wife Shonelle and their 9-year-old son Ahmad. In total, then, there were ten affluent, respectable Houstonians: young and old, male and female, black and white, all cheerfully socializing at a football game. An attendant was on hand to serve them from a private buffet of hot and cold gourmet foods. Ice buckets held bottles of Budweiser, white wine and soft drinks for the kids. A bank of TV screens showed live every other game being played that Sunday. A cheerleader dressed in shiny red boots, microscopic blue hotpants and a low-cut stretchy crop-top popped in for the personal visit granted to every luxury suite. All in all, what better image could there be of twenty-first-century America?
Midway through the second quarter, the Texans scored a touchdown. As the stadium rocked to the roar of the crowd, D’Shonn leaned over, gently pushed Kimberley’s hair away from her ear, which he then kissed and, while she was still smiling, said, “Excuse me, baby. Got to talk some business and nothing is gonna happen in the game for a while.”
“Anything I should know about?” asked Kimberley, who had powerful entrepreneurial instincts herself.
“Nah, Rashad’s got a problem at one of his joints. He thinks some of the bar staff are ripping him off. He can turn a blind eye to a free drink from time to time, but he draws the line at cases of champagne.”
D’Shonn got up from his seat and made his way to the back of the box, where Harding and Rashad were already waiting for him. “Got a solution for that pilfering issue?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Harding said. “I’ll put one of my boys in there undercover, have him work as a waiter. Anything’s going on, he’ll find out what it is and who’s doing it.”
“Glad you got that sorted. Now, tell me about what’s going to happen to Johnny Congo. It’s a funny thing. I could write you a dissertation about capital punishment from a legal standpoint, but I know a lot less about the specific practicalities. For example: how do they get a guy like Johnny from Polunsky to the Death House?”
“Real carefully,” said Harding, drily. He was a tall, lean man, as tanned and tough as pemmican, and he’d been a damn good cop, proud of it, too, before he came to work for D’Shonn Brown. The security job for which he’d been hired was a genuine one, but as time had gone by he’d become progressively more aware of the dirty truths that lay hidden behind D’Shonn Brown’s shiny, corporate façade. He’d not witnessed any actual crimes, but he could smell the lingering stench of criminality. His problem, however, lay in a second discovery: just how much he, and more importantly his family, enjoyed the extra money he was making since he’d quit the Rangers. There was no way he could go back to a government pay check, so Harding appeased his conscience the same way Shelby Weiss did, by never doing anything overtly illegal, or knowingly aiding in the commission of such activity.
Right now, for example, his old cop instincts were telling him that Brown and Rashad were up to something, but as long as nothing specific was said, and all the information he provided was in the public domain, he could honestly say that he had no knowledge of any actual felony being planned or committed.
On that basis he continued, “So, Polunsky’s about a mile east of Lake Livingston, and there’s nothing around it but grass and a few trees. Anyone gets out of that place, which is an impossible dream, there’s nowhere for them to hide. Now, the Walls Unit is different. It’s pretty much right in the middle of Huntsville.”
“What happens in between?” D’Shonn asked.
“Well, it’s about forty miles, I guess, as the crow flies between the two units. And the lake is right between ’em, so you got three basic routes you can take: go around the south of the lake, or around the north, or ride right across the middle on the Trinity Bridge. Now the Offender Transportation Office has a standard protocol for the operation. The p
risoner always travels in the middle vehicle of a three-vehicle convoy, with state trooper patrol cars back and front. The only people who know the precise time of the departure from Polunsky are the prison warders, police and Offender Transportation staff involved in the transfer, and the route to be taken is not made public.”
“But it’s one of three, right? North, south or middle?” Rashad Trevain chipped in.
“Yessir, those are the basic routes. But, see, they got ways to vary them all. I mean you got two roads out of the Polunsky Unit, just to start with. Then there’s a road along the west shore of the lake, from Cold Spring up to Point Blank, and that kind of links up the south route and the middle route, so you can move from one to the other.”
“Multiple variables,” said D’Shonn.
“Right, which is the whole idea, makes it impossible for anyone to try and guess the route in advance. Plus, when you’ve got three vehicles, all carrying armed officers, that’s a lot of firepower. Listen, Mr. Brown, I don’t know if this is good news for you or not, but your buddy Johnny Congo is going to make it safe and sound to his appointment.”
“Certainly sounds like it,” said D’Shonn. There was a roar from the stadium and a shout of “Turnover!” from J. J. Harding. “Time we got back to the game,” D’Shonn added, but as they were heading back to their seats, he tapped Rashad on the shoulder and said, “You and me need to talk.”
Modern technology abounds with unintended consequences. The pin-sharp satellite imagery of Google Earth gives anyone with a Wi-Fi connection a capacity for intelligence-gathering once reserved for global superpowers. Likewise, anyone who opens a Snapchat message immediately starts a ten-second clock ticking down to its destruction. And the moment it’s gone, it’s totally untraceable. That works perfectly for teens who want to swap selfies and sex-talk without their parents having a clue, and equally well for someone planning a criminal operation who doesn’t want to leave a trail of his communications.
D’Shonn Brown had connections. One of them was to a specialist arms dealer, who liked to boast of his ability to source anything from a regular handgun to military-grade ordnance. He and D’Shonn exchanged Snapchat messages. A problem was defined. A series of possible solutions was proposed. In the end, the whole thing came down to three words: Krakatoa, Atchissons, FIM-92.
While that debate was proceeding, a handful of high-end SUVs were stolen from shopping mall parking lots, city streets and upscale suburban neighborhoods. They were all luxury imported models, and all were built for speed: a couple of Range Rover Sports with five-litre supercharged engines, a Porsche Cayenne, an Audi Q7 and a tuned-up Mercedes ML63 AMG that could do nought to sixty in a shade over four seconds. Within hours of being taken, the cars had all had any tracking devices removed, before being driven to different workshops to be resprayed and given new license plates. Meanwhile, police officers were telling the cars’ owners that they’d do their best to find their precious vehicles, but the chances weren’t good.
“I hate to say it, but models like that get stolen to order,” one very upset oil executive’s wife was told. “Chances are, that Porsche of yours is already over the border, making someone in Reynosa or Monterrey feel real good about life.”
Rashad Trevain, meanwhile, had one of his people spend a few hours online, scouring every truck dealership from the Louisiana state line clear across to Montgomery, Alabama, looking for four-axle dumper trucks, built after 2005, with less than 300,000 miles on the clock, available for under $80,000. By the end of the morning they’d located a couple of Kenworth T800s and a 2008 Peterbilt 357, with an extra-long trailer that fitted those specifications. The trucks were bought for their full asking price from an underworld dealer who sold only for cash, didn’t bother with paperwork and suffered instant amnesia about his customers’ names and faces, then driven west to a repair yard in Port Arthur, Texas. There they were given the best service they’d ever had. The mechanics fitted bigger carburettors and new cylinder heads, pistons and tires. Every single component was checked, cleaned, replaced, or whatever it took to make these well-used machines move like spring chickens on speed. The day before Johnny Congo was due to go to the Death House, the trucks headed over to Galveston and picked up forty tons apiece of hardcore rubble—smashed up concrete, bricks, paving and large stones—in each of the Kenworths and fifty tons in the Peterbilt. Now they were loaded, locked and ready to go. One final touch: a plastic five-gallon jerrycan was tucked behind the driver’s seat in every cab, with a timer fuse attached.
Cross was half an hour into his final afternoon’s fishing when the iPhone in the top pocket of his Rivermaster vest started ringing, ruining the peace of a world in which the loudest sounds had been the burbling of the waters of the Tay and the rustle of the wind in the trees.
“Dammit!” he muttered. The ringtone was one he reserved for calls from Bannock Oil head office in Houston. Since his marriage to Hazel Bannock, Hector Cross had been a director of the company that bore her first husband’s name. He was thus powerful enough to have left instructions that he was not to be disturbed unless it was absolutely essential, but with that power came the responsibility to be on call at any time, anywhere, if need arose. Cross took out the phone, looked at the screen and saw the word “Bigelow.”
“Hi, John,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
John Bigelow was a former U.S. Senator who had taken over the role of President and CEO of Bannock Oil after Hazel’s death. “Hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time, Heck,” he said with all the affability of a born politician.
“You caught me in the middle of a river in Scotland, where I was trying to catch salmon.”
“Well, I sure hate to disturb a man when he’s fishing, so I’ll keep it brief. I just had a call from a State Department official I regard very highly . . .” There was a burst of static on the line, Cross missed the next few words and then Bigelow’s voice could be heard saying, “. . . called Bobby Franklin. Evidently Washington’s getting a lot of intel about possible terrorist activity aimed at oil installations in West Africa and off the African coast.”
“I’m familiar with the problems they’ve had in Nigeria,” Cross replied, forgetting all thought of Atlantic salmon as his mind snapped back to business. “There have been lots of threats against onshore installations and a couple of years ago pirates stormed a supply vessel called C-Retriever that was servicing some offshore rigs—took a couple of hostages as I recall. But no one’s ever gone after anything as far out to sea as we’re going to be at Magna Grande. Was your State Department friend saying that’s about to change?”
“Not exactly. It was more a case of giving us a heads-up and making sure we were well prepared for any eventuality. Look, Heck, we all know you’ve had to go through a helluva lot in the past few months, but if you could talk to Franklin and then figure out how we should respond, security-wise, I’d be very grateful.”
“Do I have time to finish my fishing?”
Bigelow laughed. “Yeah, I can just about let you have that! Some time in the next few days would be fine. And one more thing . . . We all heard how you handed that bastard Congo over to the U.S. Marshals and, speaking as a former legislator, I just want you to know how much I respect you for that. No one would’ve blamed you for taking the law into your hands, knowing that he was responsible for your tragic loss, and our tragic loss, too. You know how much all of us here loved and respected Hazel. But you did the right thing and now, I promise you, we in Texas are going to do the right thing. You can count on that.”
“Thanks, John, I appreciate it,” Cross said. “Have your secretary send me the contact details and I’ll set up a Skype call as soon as I’m back in London. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve just spotted what looks like twenty pounds of prime salmon and I want to put a fly in its mouth before it disappears.”
Cross dropped his fly on to the water downstream of where he was standing; then he lifted his rod up and back and into a perfect single Spey cast that s
ent his line and lure out to a point on the water where it was perfectly positioned to tempt and tantalize his prey. But though his concentration on the fish was absolute, still there was a part of his subconscious that was already looking forward to the task that Bigelow had set him.
It seemed to Cross like the perfect assignment to get him back into the swing of working life. His military expertise, and his ability to plan, supply, train for and execute an interesting, important task would all be utilized to the full. But the work, though challenging, would essentially be precautionary. Just like all the soldiers, sailors and airmen who had spent the Cold War decades training for a Third World War that had thankfully never come, so he would be preparing for a terrorist threat that might be very real in theory but was surely unlikely in practice. If he was really going to lead a less blood-soaked life, but didn’t want to die of boredom, this seemed a pretty good way to start.
It was half past eight in the morning of 15 November and all the morning news shows in Houston were leading with stories about the upcoming execution of the notorious killer and prison-breaker Johnny Congo. But if that was the greatest drama of the day, other tragedies, no less powerful to those caught up in them, were still playing themselves out. And one of them was unfolding in a doctor’s consulting room in River Oaks, one of the richest residential communities in the entire United States, where Dr. Frank Wilkinson was casting a shrewd but kindly eye over the three people lined up in chairs opposite his desk.