by Tony Park
‘Which accounts for spitting a teenage boy’s head on a spear and leaving it outside his mother’s hut in their village.’
‘Can I smoke in here?’ Van Zyl asked.
‘No.’
The South African shrugged again. ‘That boy was a fighter – he hid under an upturned canoe with a light machine-gun and tried to kill me. I had more respect for him than I did the men who paid me. Like you, Mister Penfold, they sat me in an airconditioned office in a city far from Africa and got me to tell my war stories. I can read as well as kill, you know. I do my research. I know from what I read, and from that crooked nose of yours, and the small scar above your right eye, that you fought to get to where you are. You want to know if I will be a liability for you one day? Perhaps. But that depends very much on what you want me to do.’
‘Harvey’s briefed you on the current situation, and I assume you’ve read online or in the financial press about my designs on a certain African shipping company?’
Van Zyl nodded.
‘Maritime crime is on the rise and in particular there is a small but apparently professionally organised gang based somewhere on the coast of Mozambique. These aren’t Somali brigands – they’re reportedly led by a white man.’
The South African shook his head. ‘You’d be mistaken – and racist – to think a black man can’t organise a bunch of pirates, Mister Penfold. I’ve met Angolans and South-West Africans who turned murder and crime into an art form.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting any such thing, what I was inferring was –’
Van Zyl held up a hand to stop him. ‘I know what you mean. I told Harvey on the way, so he hasn’t had time to brief you, but I’ve already been making some calls. There are rumours of a group of ex-special-forces guys working the coast of South Africa and Mozambique. It sounded like a bit of a fairy tale to me at first, but I checked the number of attacks and modus operandi. I called the home of an ex-army acquaintance of mine, Mark Novak, in Johannesburg. He used to run a diving operation in Mozambique, near Vilanculos, but he went bust. His wife told me he was back working in Moz, but when I asked her what he was doing she was vague. When I mentioned rumours of some ex-Recce Commandos working as pirates she made an excuse to end the conversation.’
Penfold was impressed. ‘So you’ve got a lead already?’
‘I didn’t say that. Tell me what you want me to do, Mister Penfold. What this job’s really all about. I like to hear it from the man at the top, in the big office, with the big desk.’
Penfold opened a drawer and pulled out three Cuban cigars. He took an antique silver cutter and nipped the end off each cigar and handed one to Harvey and to Van Zyl. ‘Harvey, there’s some cognac in the sideboard, if you don’t mind.’
Reynolds walked to the bar and poured three snifters of brandy.
‘I thought you didn’t like smoking?’ Van Zyl said.
‘It’s the smell of cigarettes I can’t abide. In business, it’s best never to assume anything.’
George leaned forward and held the flame from his lighter to Van Zyl, who rotated his cigar and drew on it until the tip was glowing.
‘When you board the Penfold Son you’ll meet the only other passenger. My lawyer, Jane Humphries. If anything happens to her en route to Africa, or while she’s there on business, I’ll see you never get a decent contract again in your life. If you or any of your men so much as flirt with her I’ll have you killed.’
Van Zyl laughed out loud. Harvey sat the drinks down on the table and didn’t smile. He knew when his boss was being serious. ‘You’re not the only trained killer for hire, Van Zyl.’
The South African nodded. ‘So, after we’re finished protecting the woman?’
‘You find out what you can about this gang of pirates, locate their base if you can, and report back to me.’
Van Zyl nodded. ‘So you don’t want me to do anything that might get you or Penfold Shipping in trouble with the court of public opinion.’
‘Not yet, Mister Van Zyl, not yet.’
5
The five men were already on board the Penfold Son when Jane returned to the port at Mombasa, though they had evidently arrived not long before her.
A Hispanic man with heavily tattooed arms and his hair done in a top knot was lugging a long green plastic trunk into the guest cabin next to hers. He smiled at her and she tried not to stare at his gold tooth.
‘Hey, Enrico, take bloody care with that,’ said a South African voice from within.
Jane paused by the opening and saw a man with the most strikingly white hair. He looked at her and smiled. ‘Howzit. You must be Miss Humphries.’ He wore black jeans and a tight black T-shirt that showed off racks of muscles.
‘Jane.’ She leaned around Enrico, whose hands were full, and shook the other man’s hand.
‘I’m Piet van Zyl. Me and Enrico here and the rest of my guys will be joining you for the trip to the Cape. We’ll try not to get in your way.’
He seemed pleasant enough for a bodyguard, though Jane still resented the fact that George thought she needed protecting. ‘I don’t know how to say this politely, Piet, but I’m a big girl and I don’t need looking after.’
He shrugged. ‘I go where I’m paid to. Your boss is concerned about the increase in piracy off the coast of Africa, so our primary job is to get some intel on the local situation. Don’t worry, we won’t be accompanying you to the ladies room.’
He laughed, but she found his last remark a bit creepy. He was quite a handsome man, but his eyes reminded her of a shark she’d seen on her cruising holiday to Australia, in the Sydney Aquarium – cold, glassy and pitiless. She wondered if he peroxided his hair.
Van Zyl and his men joined her and the captain for dinner that night. The conversation was polite but strained. Jane had become comfortable in the presence of the gruff Captain Iain MacGregor. She imagined him a man of few friends, but the arrival of the new passengers was evidently some cause of concern for him.
‘It’s young George’s money, so he can spend it how he wishes, I suppose,’ MacGregor said on learning from another of Van Zyl’s men, a Russian named Ivan, that their team had flown business class from London to Mombasa.
‘You’ve had no trouble with pirates before?’ Van Zyl asked.
MacGregor shook his head and speared a slice of roast beef. ‘I’m not too worried by gangs of Somali ruffians or petty thieves. This is a big ship.’
Van Zyl raised the recent hijacking of the Oslo Star, but MacGregor waved off his question. ‘We’re carrying washing machines and farm machinery. Hardly the sort of cargo modern-day buccaneers would salivate over.’
Jane had read in the online weekly piracy report that a ship containing building materials and paint had been boarded, as well as another which had lost its cargo of television sets. Perhaps washing machines were exactly what this gang of cutthroat DIYers were after. She smiled to herself.
‘You don’t seem too worried by all this talk of piracy, miss,’ said Tyrone, a muscled African-American from Harlem, New York.
‘I’m sure the captain knows how to stay out of trouble.’
‘Aye. Thank you, Jane. And in the unlikely event that anything did happen, I don’t imagine they were broomsticks in those long crates you and your men loaded today.’
‘Tools of the trade,’ Van Zyl said.
The fifth member of Van Zyl’s squad was a red-headed Ulsterman named Billy. He laughed at his boss’s cryptic reply. He had a spider’s web tattooed on the right side of his neck and when he leered across the table at Jane – not for the first time – she excused herself from the mess. On the way back to her cabin she detoured via the open deck beneath the bridge and leaned on the railing, watching the last golden rays of the sun disappear behind the horizon.
If George had thought the presence of a squad of mercenaries on board would make her feel safer, he was wrong; as a gesture of his concern for her, as his lover, it was too heavy-handed. If he’d despatched this group of armed men b
ecause he was genuinely worried about the possibility of an attack on the Penfold Son, then she had cause to worry. But if the men’s primary role was to gather information about a band of pirates operating from the coast of Mozambique, then surely it would have been better for them to fly to that country and liaise with the local police or maritime authorities. And why were they so obviously so very heavily armed?
Something smelled wrong to her.
The MV Peng Cheng stank like no other vessel he’d been downwind of.
He cut the outboard and let the rigid-hulled inflatable raider coast silently across the black waters towards the freighter, which was using its engines to maintain a stationary position about a kilometre offshore.
‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ Kufa whispered to him.
‘Me too. Masks on.’
Kufa and the others on board Alex’s boat, Novak and Henri, reached into the pouches strapped to their legs and drew out their gasmasks. Alex looked across at the other camouflaged boat and saw Mitch, Heinrich and Kevin were doing the same. From both craft came the sound of bullets being chambered in automatic weapons.
‘Merde,’ Henri said, screwing his nose in disgust before gratefully covering his face.
‘Exactly. It smells of shit. Check comms,’ Alex said into the radio mouthpiece inside his mask. All of them checked in.
They’d seen the Chinese-registered freighter, the Peng Cheng, in the waters of the Mozambique Channel before – many times, in fact. Alex’s curiosity about her business had been as aroused as the others’, though he was less convinced of the merits of this speculative raid.
Neither democracy nor socialism ruled on the Ilha dos Sonhos. They were all ex-military men, but old ranks meant nothing on the island. Alex commanded this otherwise unruly bunch of brigands by virtue of two reasons. Firstly, the hotel – their lair – was his. At least it was his name on the ninety-nine year lease from the government. They were there as his guests and, in the case of prying eyes from the mainland, employees. The second reason was that he was a natural leader.
Alex had been taught the theories of leadership in a classroom and had tested them on the field of battle. Here, though, with no code of military justice to make men follow him, or enforce his rules, he led by virtue of who he was.
Sometimes he missed the ability to say, ‘Just do this because I bloody well told you to’. A reliance on rank alone didn’t work with these guys, just as it rarely worked in the elite special forces units in which they had all served. With so many alpha males in one workplace, one needed to be a special breed to lead.
But Alex knew his hold was slipping.
It had started with the departure of Danielle and Sarah. While Mitch had resented the fact that both had spurned his advances in favour of Alex, no one denied that the women had been valuable members of the crew. Alex’s concern was that the others might see the women’s departure as a vote of no confidence in his leadership. Mitch simply wanted to raid the Peng Cheng to see what loot it was carrying, but Alex knew they needed another target to hit soon to keep them focused and coherent as a team. Nevertheless, he’d tried to talk the crew out of Mitch’s suggestion that they raid the Chinese freighter.
‘She’s up to something, man,’ Mitch had nagged him over drinks at the bar the night after the girls had left. ‘Drugs? Illegal immigrants? I don’t know. She’s obviously not a fishing boat and she spends too much time just hanging around off the coast, like she’s waiting for a pick-up.’
Henri lit a cigarette and looked to Alex . ‘Perhaps the Peng Cheng is a spy ship?’
Alex had set his beer down firmly on the wooden bar top, polished smooth by generations of elbows. ‘The fact that we don’t know her business is why we shouldn’t raid her. The success of all our ops has been research, intelligence gathering and planning.’
‘Bullshit. What about the Fair Lady?’ Mitch stood, ostensibly to reach for another beer behind the counter, but he remained on his feet, putting himself at the centre of the seated crowd.
Mitch had been right about the seizing of the vessel Alex claimed as his own. That job had been done with no planning or forethought. They’d come across the Fair Lady at night, near the mainland, on their way to intercept a cargo ship bound for Beira. The cruiser was landing people and goods on a deserted beach in the middle of the night. A woman’s scream, audible even above the purr of their outboards, had drawn them in. The luxury motor cruiser was running drugs and people – underage girls, as it turned out. Alex and his men had seized the Fair Lady and left her crew trussed on the beach. He’d called Captain Alfredo and the local police chief had basked for weeks afterwards in the glory of busting the smugglers.
The Peng Cheng was up to no good, but then again, so was he. Alex bent to the will of his men, who lusted not for a life of legitimate normalcy but of plunder. Yet even though he was here, out on the water in the dark of the night as they wanted, he felt his hold on them had weakened by having allowed them to convince him.
As they closed on her, Alex noted the ship looked almost as bad as she smelled. Streaks of rust painted her off-white hull, and other stains, the colour of raw sewage, oozed from the scuppers.
‘What’s that noise?’ Mitch asked into his radio.
Alex held up a hand for silence. The rasping cough was a chilling memory from childhood visits to the zoo in Lourenco Marques, and bush holidays spent in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique and Wankie in Southern Rhodesia.
A shriek carried across the calm waters. ‘That ain’t human,’ Mitch said.
‘I don’t want to board,’ Kufa said.
‘Shut it. All of you. We all go. Ready the grappling hooks.’
Alex looked up as the stern of the Peng Cheng loomed large above him. The stench at her foul rear end was even worse. He swung the first of the rubber-coated hooks and it sailed up over the safety railing. It caught with an audible thud, though Alex hoped the noise of the throbbing diesel engines had masked the noise from the bridge.
Alex climbed hand over hand. As always there was the mix of excitement and dread as his hand left the rope and grasped the metal railing. He heaved himself up and over. Nothing. Memories of the brief and bloody encounter with the Norseman on the Oslo Star had quickened his pulse rate. He drew his pistol and crouched, covering the others as they clambered aboard. He lifted his mask and smelled smoke above the excrement. He heard voices speaking Chinese. He pointed to the bridge above them, where an oriental face was momentarily illuminated by the flaring tip of a cigarette.
Mitch raised his M4. Alex motioned for the American and the others to follow him.
He crept along the deck and paused when he heard the sawing cough again. Normally they would have gone straight for the bridge, but the two crewmen above, still smoking and savouring the balmy night air, would have seen them in plenty of time to raise the alarm.
‘Let’s take a look below decks first,’ he said into his radio. The nods from the men nearest him confirmed they were as curious as he about the Peng Cheng’s cargo.
A rusting handle squeaked in protest and Alex paused, making sure no one else had heard, before pulling open the watertight door. They moved silently down the narrow corridor and heard a radio blaring behind a closed hatch. ‘Crew’s quarters. Heinrich, stay here and keep a look out,’ Alex whispered.
Heinrich nodded. Of all of them, the former GSG9 counter-terrorist commando was the least likely to question an order, and Alex wanted someone trustworthy watching their backs.
He pressed on, descending lower into the cargo hold. Scratches and other noises, hard to distinguish over the increased volume of the engines, made him grip the pistol even tighter. His slung rifle dug into his back.
In front of him was a wooden crate, about a metre and a half high by two metres long. Several holes were drilled in the side of it. Alex removed his mask and put it back in its pouch. The others followed suit.
‘Fuck, my eyes are watering,’ Kevin said. ‘What is that? Cat piss?’
>
Alex sniffed the ventilation holes in the crate. Kevin was right. He pulled a mini Maglite torch from one of the pouches in his vest and turned it on. Pointing the beam into the hole he knelt and, closing one eye, looked inside. The whole crate shuddered and a snarling, rasping growl from inside made Alex back off. ‘It’s a leopard.’
The others had started exploring.
‘Hell, there’s the biggest bloody python I’ve ever seen in my life here, man,’ Novak said.
‘Birds,’ Henri reported. ‘Parrots. They’re crammed into the one cage. This is inhumane.’
‘Lizards over here,’ Kufa said. ‘This ship is evil. We should not have boarded.’
‘Boss, check this out,’ Kevin said.
Alex moved around a wire cage containing a pangolin, an African version of the heavily armoured armadillo, and found the Australian locked in a staring match with a vervet monkey. The primate started calling in a squeaky, two-part alarm.
‘Shut that thing up,’ Mitch said.
‘You want me to kill it?’ Kevin raised his pistol, which had a silencer screwed to it.
‘No,’ Alex said. ‘Scout around, see what else they’ve got in this floating zoo.’
Urine and faeces slopped under Alex’s boots as he moved through the fetid cargo hold. Mitch whistled softly as he used a crowbar he’d found hanging on a hook to prise open a wooden crate. ‘Ivory. Maybe a hundred grand’s worth. We’re taking that.’
Alex had seen Mozambique’s wildlife before and after the revolution. It sickened him that the international market in animals and their body parts had been responsible for the extinction and decimation of so many species. Now was not the time to get into an argument with Mitch, though. ‘What else?’
‘Dagga. Marijuana, boss,’ Novak said. ‘Fifty k-g’s worth at least. Dried. This place isn’t just a zoo, it’s a bloody goldmine.’
Alex stayed away from one sack which was writhing and hissing, but cautiously opened another, which contained three rhino horns. Worth a small fortune to a Chinese herbalist who would grind it up and sell it as a cure for fever, or to an oil-rich Yemeni who would turn the matted hair into a polished handle for his dagger. He shook his head in disgust.