Predator

by Wilbur Smith

  He gave her a charming smile, revealing perfect, dazzling white teeth and Nastiya could actually feel the envy-laden female stares boring into her back as da Cunha said, “I am proud of my Cabindan blood, but I am also half-French and it is therefore quite impossible for me to turn down a request from a beautiful woman. Please, madame, ask your question.”

  “Actually, it is mademoiselle,” Nastiya purred, flirting shamelessly and provoking even more silent rage.

  “All the more impossible for me to say no, then.”

  “Very well. My question is this: you are the leader of the political movement for freedom in Cabinda and the creator of the Cabinda Foundation. Can we assume, then, that you will be the first leader of a free Cabinda? After all, you will go to so much trouble on Cabinda’s behalf, it would only be natural.”

  Nastiya had, in the sweetest possible way, effectively accused da Cunha of wanting to stage a coup d’état, and she could sense the sudden tension in the room and, for a second time, the pattern of suppressed anger, swiftly followed by apparently lighthearted humor.

  “What a question!” da Cunha exclaimed. “Are you sure you’re not really an English journalist?” He let the laughter subside before he continued, “I will answer you like this: I am not a prince in exile, waiting to be acclaimed by his people. I am a man who dreams of bringing freedom and democracy to a homeland from which he has long been excluded. By that same token I must accept the will of the Cabindan people. If they one day choose me to lead them, that would be the greatest honor I could ever receive. If they do not, then the knowledge that I helped give them the right to choose will be enough of a reward. Benjamin Franklin was never the President of the United States of America, but his place in history is just as secure as those who were. I would be honored to be Cabinda’s Benjamin Franklin.”

  It was a mark of his arrogance that da Cunha could compare himself to one of America’s Founding Fathers, and an equal proof of his charisma that his audience responded with rapturous applause. Da Cunha bowed his head in thanks; then he stepped down from the dais and made his way straight to Nastiya.

  “Are you sure you’re not a reporter?” he asked with another dazzling smile calculated to set any female tummy fluttering.

  “Quite sure,” Nastiya said, reminding herself that she was just as adept at manipulating the male of the species. “But I admit that I had a reason for asking my question.”

  “Apart from attracting my attention?”

  “Maybe.” Nastiya produced a little shrug and pout of her own.

  “So what was your reason?”

  “It was a practical, business issue.” The words and her straightforward, no-nonsense tone were not what da Cunha had been expecting. “As I informed your office, I act as a representative and consultant to a number of very wealthy individuals. My job is to seek out interesting investment opportunities, like the work of a young artist who’s about to become a star; or a property that’s not officially for sale, but whose owner is open to offers . . . or a country that does not exist yet, but which could make a great deal of money for anyone bold enough to back it from the start.”

  “And you want to know whether I am a safe investment?”

  “Exactly. My clients need to know that you will be in a position to deliver your promises once Cabinda is free. They don’t want someone else coming in and saying, ‘Sorry, the deal’s off.’”

  “Someone who doesn’t owe them anything, you mean?”

  “That’s one way of putting it. So, my question stands: What guarantee can you give that you will achieve independence for Cabinda, or that you will lead the new nation when it wins its freedom?”

  “Hmm . . .” da Cunha paused, and Nastiya could see that for once he wasn’t performing, or trying to create a particular effect. He was genuinely weighing up the degree to which he should take her and her potential backers seriously. “Those are certainly important questions,” he finally said, “and they deserve serious answers. I must attend to my other guests now and I am busy in meetings with potential supporters all of tomorrow and most of the day after. So perhaps you might join me for dinner, two days from now, and I will do my best to give you the right answers.”

  “That sounds like a delightful idea.” Nastiya smiled, just to let him know that she wasn’t all just business, and da Cunha replied in kind.

  “Then dinner it is,” he said.

  Just as the capital of Mexico is Mexico City, so the capital of Cabinda—in fact, its only sizeable town—is also called Cabinda. It stands on a promontory that juts into the Atlantic like a stunted thumb. Jack Fontineau had been in Cabinda for less than a month and already he was so sick of the place that it was all he could do to stop himself walking out of his stifling office—where a single ancient fan, too old and decrepit to rotate at any speed, was all that stirred, let alone cooled the air—across the plain of dirt and dust littered with rusting containers and washed-up hulks that served as a dockside, on to the single long jetty at which ships of any size could berth and right into the shark-infested sea.

  It was ten at night, which meant four in the afternoon back home in Houma, Louisiana, where his office at Larose Oil Services, his Chevy Silverado and the house which he shared with his wife Megan and their three kids were all not just air-conditioned, but damn near refrigerated. Jack could be there now if he hadn’t been foolish enough to accept what his boss Bobby K. Broussard swore was both a promotion and a great opportunity. “Go out to Africa, it’s the new frontier,” the lying bastard had said. “We want you to set up our office in Angola.”

  Jack knew guys that had worked out of Luanda, and they said it was all right. There were decent hotels, beach clubs, bars where you could get any kind of imported booze you wanted. Sure, the prices were insane, but what did that matter when you were on expenses? But Jack wasn’t sent to Luanda. No, B. K. had figured out that most of Angola’s oil was up to the north, off Cabinda. So if Larose Oil Services could get into Cabinda ahead of the other companies that provided services for offshore rigs they’d have a captive market. It was only when Jack got to Cabinda that he discovered there was a reason everyone else was still in Luanda. The place was a dump. Most of the houses weren’t much more than shacks, and a three-story building with rusty metal windows and filthy whitewash peeling off the sides of crumbling walls was the locals’ idea of a luxury office complex.

  As for running a serious offshore supply operation here, forget it. The government had plans for a fancy new port and oil terminal a few miles up the coast from the city. They’d put up a website with maps showing where the deep-water jetties, the rig-repair dock and the warehouses would be. But they’d yet to stick a single shovel in the ground, or cement one brick on top of another. A man could die of old age around here, waiting for things to get done. Forget mañana, that was way too soon for your typical Cabindan. But Jack couldn’t make the folks back at head office understand that, any more than he could get them to appreciate that he was six hours ahead of Louisiana time, which was why he’d ended up starting his working day around lunchtime and then staying at work till eleven o’clock at night, or even midnight, just so he could be on the end of the line when someone tried to call him. It was marginally less hot working evenings, too, which helped.

  So now he was getting ready for another call from head office in which he’d try to explain why he wasn’t anywhere near hitting his new business targets for the quarter and pray that they’d send some other sucker out to take his place, even if it meant getting fired. Better that than taking a walk off the end of the jetty.

  There were five men in the ancient Nissan Vanette driving down the Rua do Comércio, the main road that runs along the Cabindan waterfront. They wore a combination of jeans, cargo pants and calf-length shorts. One of them had a Real Madrid football shirt, another sported a Manchester United crest on his T-shirt. He had a baseball cap on, too, the peak pointing sideways. All five of the men were armed with guns or machetes, though they weren’t expecting
to have to use their weapons because this was only meant to be a symbolic operation: a wake-up call to the authorities to pay attention and take their demands seriously, or the next time people would get hurt. The message would be sent by the very basic IED—not much more than a block of C4 explosive, a detonator and a timer—that was sitting in a canvas bag in the footwell of the front passenger seat. The van pulled off the road and drove across an open expanse of unpaved ground to a cluster of small warehouses and offices, slowed down so that the driver could pick out the sign he was looking for and then came to a halt. There was a brief burst of conversation as the men debated whether they’d found their target, agreed they had and then geed one another up with shouts of encouragement and exhortations to have courage and get the job done. Then they piled out of the Vanette, looked around to make sure that no one was watching and headed for the warehouse door.

  Listen, B. K., you can set all the targets you like, but they don’t mean shit once you get out to a place like this,” Jack Fontineau said into the telephone. “Most people don’t have any kind of presence here at all, and the ones that do aren’t authorized to make decisions, so we’ve got a better chance of getting their business in Luanda, or even back home than we do here . . . Yeah, yeah, I know that this is where the oil is, but . . . Hold on, I think I just heard something. Gimme a second, will ya? I’m just going to check it out . . .”

  The five amateur bombers were surprised to discover that the side door to the warehouse was unlocked at this time of night, but it made their job a lot easier. Once inside they received a second shock. One of the men was carrying a torch, but the moment he switched it on it was apparent that far from being filled with supplies for offshore rigs, the warehouse was virtually empty. In fact, the only object of any significance was a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser sitting just inside the main goods entrance. They stood pondering the significance of this for a moment and then someone pointed toward the far end of the warehouse, about thirty meters away, where there was an office with its lights still on. Through the window they could see a white man, talking on the phone. Then he put the phone down, got out of his chair and walked toward the office door. Someone hissed a warning at the man with the torch and he turned it off. Now the only light was coming from the office and in the semi-darkness the men raced to hide behind the hefty bulk of the Land Cruiser.

  Jack Fontineau had a torch, too. He picked it up as he walked toward the door and switched it on as he stepped out on to the warehouse floor. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d heard, just a combination of noises and a flicker of light in the corner of his eye that added up to a sense that there was someone else in the building. There it was again, a pattering sound like running feet. He swept the torch very deliberately from left to right across his field of vision and then back again and it was on that second sweep that he saw something—or someone—scuttling behind his Land Cruiser.

  “Who’s there?” Fontineau called, wishing he’d got more than a torch with which to defend himself. “Come out. I know you’re there.”

  He walked forward slowly, not really wanting to go any further, but forcing himself to stay calm, breathe steadily and keep going. There was nothing to worry about, he told himself. Anyone could see there wasn’t anything here to steal apart from the Land Cruiser and they were welcome to that. He wasn’t going to risk his own safety for the sake of a company car.

  Then he heard another sound. Fontineau stopped in his tracks and frowned as he tried to place where the sound had come from. He shone the beam to his left but saw nothing. Then he swung it back the other way, to the right . . .

  . . . and saw a man, no more than a couple of paces away. He was young, black, a head taller than Fontineau and built like a cruiserweight. The man was moving right at Fontineau and raising his right arm. Fontineau saw a flash of metal, glinting in the torchlight. He tried to shout, to beg for mercy, but before he could even form the words the man had hurled his arm back down, plunging the blade of his machete so deep into the side of Jack Fontineau’s neck that his head was almost severed from his body. As Fontineau fell to the ground, a geyser of blood erupted from the terrible wound, covering his attacker’s arm, chest and face and spattering across the bare concrete floor of the warehouse and the Land Cruiser’s white bodywork like paint flicked on to a bare canvas.

  Now the other four members of the bombing team emerged from behind the vehicle, shouting and gesticulating in a mixture of excitement, bloodlust and panic until their leader, who had the canvas bag with the bomb in it, called for silence. The voices subsided as the leader took out the bomb and placed it inside the rear of Fontineau’s car, close to its massive 138-litre fuel tank. He set the timer and then pointed toward the warehouse door. It was time to leave.

  The five men were back inside the Vanette and heading out of town on the Rua do Comércio when the bomb exploded. A cheer rang around the interior of the battered old vehicle. They had done their job. Now they would get paid.

  A bomb that’s planted in an empty warehouse in an obscure African city is not a news story. But a bomb that’s planted in a warehouse that’s empty except for an American, whose charred, dismembered body is found in the smouldering ruins, well, that’s a whole different matter. Jack Fontineau’s death was made all the more dramatic by the fact that he was on the phone to his boss in Louisiana when the attack took place. Bobby K. Broussard was soon besieged by reporters and, with a suitably mournful, emotionally stricken expression on his face, he told them: “Jack said, ‘Give me a second, I’m just going to check it out.’ Because that’s the kind of man Jack was. He didn’t shy away from danger. He didn’t leave it to other people to risk themselves for him. He faced up to his responsibilities, like a man. And in the end that bravery cost him his life. Now our thoughts and our prayers are with Jack’s wife Megan and their three darlin’ children.”

  Megan Fontineau was a former cheerleader at Louisiana State and she made sure to face the cameras looking her beautiful, blonde best, with glamorous designer shades that she removed to reveal her tearful, cornflower-blue eyes. Her two daughters were both as pretty as pictures and Jack Jnr, aged eight, was a photogenic, all-American, gap-toothed little scamp. Their pictures hit every TV network, front page and news website in the western world.

  Pretty soon the media were doing background stories on Cabinda and reports were coming out of Paris of a rebel leader called Mateus da Cunha, who was half-French, sophisticated and looked great on camera. He gave the world’s media the same line he’d given the guests at his reception: he wasn’t in favor of violence himself, but he could understand the frustrations that led other people to take up arms in their struggle against oppression. One starstruck CNN reporter called da Cunha “a new generation’s Nelson Mandela” and the phrase started to gain traction as other commentators picked it up and ran with it.

  In Caracas, Johnny Congo laughed out loud when he heard that. “Mandela, my ass!” he chortled at the TV screen. Congo knew a scam artist when he saw one. Da Cunha didn’t disapprove of violence; he loved it, any fool could see that. In fact, Congo was prepared to bet the man had set the whole thing up himself. Plus, the story concerned Angola and oil, two subjects currently of great interest to Congo, who went online and checked da Cunha out. Soon he’d learned all he needed to know about the Cabinda Foundation and the struggle for independence from Angola. This, he realized, was the final thing he’d been waiting for, the last nail he’d hammer into Hector Cross’s coffin.

  Congo called a satphone number that belonged to Babacar Matemba, a West African paramilitary commander, whose political, criminal and homicidal activities had been funded by the sale of blood diamonds and coltan, a metal essential to the electronics industry that, ounce for ounce, is the next best thing to gold. In the days when Johnny Congo and Carl Bannock had been running their own private kingdom in Kazundu they’d helped Matemba smuggle his contraband goods on to the global market. Now it was time to get back in touch.

  The two me
n exchanged greetings. Congo told Matemba about his escape from Death Row and assured him he’d soon be back in business. “In fact, that was what I was calling you about. I wondered if you could spare me some men. I need experienced fighters, good enough to train other people, so they’ve gotta be smart. I need the best and I’m willing to pay real well, maybe make up for some of what you’ve not been getting from Carl and me lately.”

  “What do you want my men to do?” Matemba asked. He listened while Congo told him and then said. “I like the sound of that, Johnny.”

  “Me too, Babacar. Me too.”

  The next call Congo made was to the Cabinda Foundation. “I want to speak to da Cunha,” he said.

  “May I tell Monsieur da Cunha who is calling and what it concerns?”

  “My name is Juan Tumbo. I want to donate money to your foundation. A lot of money.”

  The call was put right through. Ten minutes later, the Cabinda Foundation had a major, anonymous donor and Johnny Congo knew exactly how he was going to destroy Hector Cross, and make a shedload of money doing it, too.

  As an ex-Marine, Congo was well acquainted with a lot of men who had been trained to a very high level in the arts of sabotage and destruction, and had practical battlefield experience of putting their training to work. As a former convict and career criminal, he also knew a large number of individuals who had a total absence of scruple or conscience and were prepared to cause any amount of material damage or physical harm if the money was right. In a few particular cases, which Congo valued highest of all, these were one and the same men. Chico Torres had served in the Marines as a combat engineer. His particular genius was for blowing things up, on land, on sea—hell, if you found a way to get Chico to Mars, he’d blow the shit out of that, too.

  Chico was all ears when Congo got in touch and told him all about his new-found interest in the Angolan offshore oil industry. He asked a few pertinent questions about the specific nature and scale of Bannock’s set-up at the Magna Grande field, then told Congo, “Yeah, I can see the weak link in the chain. Think I know how to break it, too. Just need to do some detailed investigation, get my numbers right, you know what I mean. Gimme a few days, I’ll get back to you, man.”