Predator

by Wilbur Smith

  And so, at the very second that Torres and Congo counted, “One . . . blast-off!” the gigantic bomb went off. The force of the shock waves pushing the water away from the epicenter of the blast created a giant air bubble directly under the Bannock A. This meant that the 300,000 tons of ship, refinery and oil that had been supported by the water in which it was floating suddenly had nothing beneath it. So the entire weight was suddenly bearing down on a keel that was effectively suspended in mid-air.

  And the keel snapped.

  From where they were standing, Cross and O’Quinn saw, but could not really comprehend, a series of events that took place in an astonishingly fast sequence.

  The Bannock A, like the oil platform, was lit up at night like an industrial Las Vegas, topped by the flaming gas coming out of its towering chimney pipe.

  Suddenly the lights seemed to rise up into the air.

  Then they heard the muffled sound of the underwater explosion.

  The dazzling display of lights now plummeted back down as the bubble that had pushed the Bannock A skywards collapsed in upon itself, dropping the entire vessel back down into the sea.

  There was a second, far greater explosion as the Bannock A blew itself apart, a volcanic eruption of flame and smoke, followed immediately by a supersonic shock wave that hit Cross and Quinn and threw them to the steel deck, then the deafening sound of the detonation, and finally a wave as big as the one that had almost drowned Cross hurling itself at the oil platform in a fury of water and spray.

  Their ears ringing so that neither could hear what the other was shouting, Cross and O’Quinn picked themselves up and staggered back to the railing. They looked out across the water through scorched retinas and saw nothing but darkness. There were no lights, no flames, nothing.

  The Bannock A and every living soul upon it had been utterly obliterated.

  Cross was stunned, his senses still befuddled by the sheer force of the explosion. He screwed up his eyes and stared as hard as he could, but still there was nothing to be seen except that now he could detect flames dancing on the water, as if the ocean itself was on fire. It took him a few seconds to work out that they were patches of burning oil, floating on the surface.

  Cross thought about the people who had been on the ship. Cy Stamford, a colleague who had become a good friend, for whom this was never meant to be anything other than a last, very straightforward command before many well-deserved years of retirement. There was one of his own Cross Bow men on board too and to Cross’s shame he could not for the moment recall his name, any more than he knew the names of any of the crew, more than 200 of them, who had gone down with their ship. But then his grief was forgotten as another, even more shocking realization struck him. The attack on the rig that had seemed like such a major event was in fact just a distraction, a feint to lure Cross and his men away from the real attack.

  He had been lured to the rig like a River Tay salmon enticed by the fly on his line, and just like the fly, which was in fact a creation of feathers and thread, so he had been fooled by a fake. And he’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

  The bomb that ripped the Bannock A apart set off a firestorm on land as well. Environmentalists were up in arms about the huge amount of oil discharged into the Atlantic when the FPSO went down. Meanwhile, Bannock Oil found itself under concerted attack from a horde of financial speculators, led by Aram Bendick. He made no secret of the money he was making from a crash he had loudly prophesied and was available to any reporter who wanted a quote. “People call me a prophet. Prophet, my ass!” he told one group of reporters outside his Manhattan offices. “John Bigelow and his board were schmucks. They lost their shirts in Alaska, then they doubled-down in Africa and lost their pants as well. I warned them again and again that they were taking grossly irresponsible risks with stockholders’ money. After the sinking of the Noatak drilling barge off the coast of Alaska, they should have retrenched, cut costs and concentrated on maximizing revenues from their Abu Zara fields. Instead they added to their debts, took a crazy gamble on an unproven field in one of the most dangerous, unstable regions of the world, and this is the result. Bannock is doomed. Its stockholders are going to lose every cent of their investments. This is malfeasance on a criminal scale and I cannot believe that, once the dust has settled, there won’t be criminal charges against Bigelow and his senior executives, specifically Hector Cross, the security chief. This happened on his watch, under his nose. He should be held accountable.”

  Media coverage soon became fixated on the supposed failings of Cross and his team. The recapture of the rig was not reported as the daring rescue of almost 100 crew, but the bungled loss of more than thirty, for two of the seriously injured had died from their wounds. Then a reporter looking on the Bannock Oil website noticed that the two patrol boats were equipped with sonar, and so the question was asked: Why had Cross not ordered an underwater sweep of the area around and beneath the platform and the Bannock A? There was an obvious answer: no oil installation of any kind had ever been attacked by submarine before, so why would anyone be worried about that possibility when faced with the reality of terrorists occupying a rig and killing its crew? But that quibble was swiftly brushed aside by a host of self-proclaimed experts, all armed with perfect hindsight and keen to assure their audiences that they would certainly have anticipated an attack by water as well as air and deployed their sonar devices accordingly.

  If Cross had hoped to receive some support from his superiors and the military authorities, he was swiftly disappointed. Vice Admiral Scholz, who had been so swift to praise Cross, was suddenly engaged on other matters and too busy to comment.

  John Bigelow, meanwhile, appeared before news cameras outside the entrance to Bannock Oil’s headquarters, with his Corporate Communications man Tom Nocerino at his side and assured them that, “We fully accept that mistakes were made at the Magna Grande field. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, there’s little that anyone here in Houston can do to influence a security operation taking place almost eight thousand miles away, on the other side of the world. So we placed our trust in our people on the ground and I guess they tried their best, but clearly that was not good enough. We will be conducting our own investigation into what went wrong and will of course co-operate with any official inquiry.”

  Hector Cross was thrown into a battle on completely alien territory. He was a soldier. Faced with a living, breathing enemy, armed with the weapons of war, he knew precisely what to do. But now he had to contend with superiors lying to save their own skins and reporters who had no interest in, let alone understanding of, the actual circumstances. To that was added the threat of ambulance-chasing lawyers wanting to sue him on behalf of those who had died on the rig or the sunken ship, and even district attorneys assembling criminal cases against him. For just as Bendick had suggested, there was no shortage of ambitious prosecutors, with eyes on a political career, who wanted to bring the villain of the Magna Grande disaster to justice.

  “My people risked their lives to save the hostages on the oil platform and any Special Forces unit, anywhere in the world, would have been proud to recapture a rig like that with as few casualties,” Cross protested when Ronnie Bunter called to discuss his legal situation.

  “I know that, Heck, and so does anyone who looks at this with a fair, objective eye. But this is America. People can’t accept that sometimes bad things just happen. There has to be a scapegoat and there has to be money on the table.”

  “Well, then I’d better go to America and state my case, because I’m damned if I’m going to be made a scapegoat by anyone.”

  “No, you mustn’t do that,” the veteran lawyer warned him. “In fact, my strong advice to you is to stay out of the country. The moment you set foot on U.S. soil there’ll be someone wanting to slap you with a writ or an arrest warrant. Stay in London and get the best lawyer you can find because you’re going to need someone to fight the extradition warrant when it comes. The U.K. government signed a crazy de
al that allows the U.S. to take any British citizen who’s accused of any crime, irrespective of the strength of the case against them, without any of the protection that we demanded and got for our citizens that the Brits want.”

  “But what crime did I commit, for Chrissakes? I was faced with a situation and I dealt with it. How was I to know that I should have been looking somewhere else? And which part of any of it is criminal?”

  “Well, let’s see now, give me a moment . . .” Cross sat on his end of the line, waiting while Bunter tapped away at his PC. Then he heard the old man say, “OK, here we go . . . Section 6.03 of the Texas criminal code, dealing with definitions of culpable mental states, deems that a person is criminally negligent when he ought to be aware of a substantial risk, and I quote: ‘of such a nature and degree that its disregard constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the actor’s standpoint.’”

  “Are you seriously telling me that an ordinary person would watch terrorists landing helicopters on a rig and think: Hmm, I should start looking for submarines?”

  “No, Heck, I’m not, but a prosecutor might, and he might find twelve jurors dumb enough to believe him. And it might not be a Texan prosecutor, either. There are plenty of other states with much broader definitions of liability, and I don’t know how many states the folks who died came from, but I’m guessing it’s quite a few. Any of them could make a case against you on behalf of their people.”

  Dave Imbiss wanted to go on the media offensive. “Listen, Heck,” he said at one of an endless string of meetings in Cross’s office. “You don’t have to go to the States. We can win the argument from here. I’ve got the whole thing on tape: every bit of CCTV footage, every communication between me and you guys, and—which is the killer—every single word said between you, John Bigelow and Vice Admiral Scholz, before and after you went on to the rig. Just let me put together a package and release it to the media, or just put it out on social media and we can blow all the accusations away. An American admiral thought you were doing the right thing and wanted to pin a medal on you. No one’s going to claim you were reckless or irresponsible when they see that.”

  But the idea was immediately squashed by Jolyon Capel, a British solicitor Cross had hired on Bunter’s personal recommendation: “The man’s got the sharpest legal mind I’ve ever come across, and don’t be fooled by his appearance, he’s as deadly as a great white shark.” Capel certainly did not seem shark-like. He was a small, bespectacled, gray-haired solicitor with the quiet manner, furrowed brow and precise diction of a professor at an ancient Oxford college. And his first advice was not to go storming on to the counter-attack, as Imbiss had suggested, but to do nothing at all.

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Cross, I know this must be very frustrating for you, but you’re going to have to hold your fire,” Capel said. “The thing you have to bear in mind is that this case will first be fought in a British court and our approach to publicity is very different to the American one, where legal battles are fought as much in the court of public opinon as the court of law. In this country, however, judges are likely to take a very dim view of anything that might constitute an attempt to pervert the course of justice, and media publicity comes high on that list.”

  “But we aren’t in court yet,” Cross argued, “so there’s no judge to worry about.”

  “Not yet, no,” Capel conceded. “But we have to anticipate the moment when there is. The other issue to bear in mind is that anything you say before a case is a hostage to fortune once the case begins. It gives the other side a target to aim at, so to speak. They know what your argument is going to be and precisely how you are going to support it. If you were fighting a military battle, you wouldn’t tell your enemy precisely what forces you had and how you were going to deploy them. Well, the same applies in a legal conflict: you need to retain some element of surprise.”

  Just to add to Cross’s frustrations, Mateus da Cunha was busy denying that he had anything to do with the events at Magna Grande. “It is absolutely correct that the waters in which this appalling tragedy took place will belong to Cabinda when she is a free nation, taking her rightful place in the world. It is also true that I am leading the fight for a free Cabinda. But as I have said, time and time again, I am fighting a political and moral battle; I am not engaged in acts of violence or terrorism. And in this case, I can prove that this was not an action by Cabindan fighters. As the whole world knows, the leader of the attack spoke French. As any French person could tell, his accent was African, probably Congolese. He was certainly not from Cabinda, for there the people speak Portuguese. His so-called political demands were just a fig-leaf for his crime. This was a robbery, a stick-up, not the act of true freedom fighters. I deny absolutely any connection with this event and I express my deepest sympathy for all those who died and all who have been bereaved.”

  “You lying bastard,” Cross muttered as he watched da Cunha’s press conference on the BBC News at Ten. “You had plenty to do with what happened, you and Johnny Congo, and you bloody well know it.”

  “Come to bed, you angry old man,” said Zhenia, gently teasing him as she stroked his furrowed brow. “Why would you want to watch bad people telling lies on TV when you could be making love to me?”

  “Good question,” said Cross, looking with something close to wonderment at the beautiful girl who had come so magically into his life. For all the negativity in his life, Zhenia Voronova had retained her faith in him. “Nastiya told me that you were a hero, and I believe her, so I do not care what anyone else thinks,” she had told him with simple, almost childlike directness. “Also, I know you, Hector, the way that only a woman who loves a man can know him. You are a good, brave, honest man. That is why I love you.” Then she had paused, giggled, given him a look of pure, lusty wickedness, run a fingertip down his chest and purred, “Well, one of the reasons, anyway . . .”

  Minute by minute, hour by hour, Jo Stanley saw the life draining out of Bannock Oil. For all the Bunter and Theobald veterans, the various Bannock accounts relating to family members and the trust had been a central part of their professional lives from the moment they joined the firm. Now they were following Bannock Oil’s stock price diving downward on their computer screens. There would be audible gasps as one barrier after another was broken and the decline went past 10 . . . 20 . . . 50 . . . even 80 percent.

  The whispered conversations behind office doors became ever more desperate. People’s bonuses, their salaries, their jobs, even, were dependent on Bannock Oil’s continued prosperity, but now its very existence was in doubt.

  Tension grew as the original Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett staff, right up to partner level, began to realize that this catastrophe could wreak havoc with their lives too. The three senior partners had gone out on a very long financial limb to raise the very high price—far too high, in the view of many legal bloggers and media pundits—that they’d paid for Bunter and Theobald. Now the only justification for that price was blowing up before their eyes.

  Only one man in the whole set-up seemed unperturbed by the corporate and financial implosion taking place before everyone’s eyes. Oh, Shelby Weiss did his best to hide it. He maintained a look of anxious concern, suitably overlaid by a somewhat desperate attempt to sustain the morale of junior staff that befitted a partner with his name on the door. But Jo Stanley had taken Ronnie Bunter’s orders seriously. She had been watching Weiss with forensic attention to detail for the best part of two months now and, like a poker player mastering an opponent, she had learned to read his tells.

  His doodles, for example, tended to be around and even swirly when he was relaxed, but tightened into jagged straight lines when he was anxious or tense. Now here they were, sitting in a partners’ meeting, with the chief financial officer describing in painful detail what the effects on annual revenue would be if the Bannock accounts dried up—how many staff would have to be laid off; how
they would have to cut costs, not least by moving to cheaper offices in a far less prestigious location—and across the table from where Jo sat, Shelby Weiss was covering one corner of his legal pad with doodles that were positively rococo in their profusion of curves and curlicues.

  For a moment she thought there might be an innocent explanation. Weiss interrupted the litany of disaster to say, “Look on the bright side, people. If Bannock Oil goes under, then there are going to be some real pissed beneficiaries of the trust wanting to know who turned the money tap off. And they’ll be suing anyone they can find to see if they can somehow get it back on again. We’ll be generating more billable hours than ever, just you wait and see.”

  But his defiant show of optimism was almost immediately countered by his fellow partner Tina Burnett: “Nice try, Shelby, but that dog won’t hunt. Right now, there are only two family members who could possibly take action. One of them’s Carl Bannock, and no one’s heard from him in months and even years. The other is Catherine Cayla Cross. She’s just a baby and her daddy, Hector Cross, was the guy who was responsible for the safety of the Magna Grande oil platform that was attacked by terrorists, and the ship that got blown to the bottom of the Atlantic. If anyone takes legal action, Cross is going to the first guy they aim at. But is his little girl, who for all I know can’t even walk or talk, gonna hire us to take her daddy for every cent he’s got? I think not. And since Hector Cross’s money comes from his deceased wife Hazel Bannock Cross, which means it’s Bannock money, which is right now like saying no money at all, well, he ain’t gonna be worth suing anyhow, now is he?”

  It was a devastating takedown, which would have been enough to deflate any man. But Shelby Weiss merely kept on doodling all the same circles and swirls, which meant that he still felt just dandy. And as Jo watched him through the rest of the day, she realized that there was a real spring in his step and a secret smile he was having to fight to keep off his face. Shelby Weiss’s firm was falling apart and it wasn’t bothering him at all because something else was happening—something linked to the Bannock crisis—that was making him far more than he was losing. But what?