by Tony Park
Alex walked outside into the bright light and Mitch sauntered over to him, rubbing his chest, which was badly bruised where Jane’s bullet had hit his Kevlar vest. A grey sweat top covered the mark.
‘You think she’s got the stones?’ Mitch asked, lighting a cigarette.
‘I don’t know. We’ve got until the day after tomorrow. She bought the story about the mechanic. Keep the generator switched off until we’re out of earshot, then get back to work.’
‘Man, if she’s carrying diamonds you can afford to employ a fucking army of builders to finish this place. How come we gotta work when we could be working her over?’
‘Enough, Mitch. I told you, no one touches her. And we don’t even know for sure it was diamonds on board.’
‘Yeah, but you said before, Wu’s boss was getting a million pounds for whatever was in that package. No one knows she’s alive, Alex. Give me half an hour with her if you’re too squeamish. I talked to Henri – he agrees with me and he said he’d help me. We’ll find out if she’s got the rocks.’
‘Right. And then what would you do with her? Let her leave the island once she’s healed?’ Alex had expected Mitch to come up with something like this, but it worried him that Mitch had been undermining him with Henri.
‘You know what I’d do with her. That bitch fucking shot me, man. It’s payback. Don’t mean nothing.’
‘I worry about you sometimes, Mitch, I truly do.’
‘You’re just pussy-struck, man. Same as always. Every fucking broad you meet you fall for.’
‘Just get back to work, Mitch, as soon as we’re gone. I’ll find out if she’s got what we’re after. I’ll also find out who those goons were who were waiting for us on board.’
Mitch shook his head, turned and walked off.
They’d towed the Penfold Son’s lifeboat behind the Fair Lady as soon as they’d married up with Jose. Once back on the island they’d literally pulled the boat apart in case Jane had stashed the contraband on board. He’d searched Jane’s meagre possessions – even the inside of her thermos flask – and found nothing. Mitch, of course, had suggested checking her body while she was unconscious, thanks to the sedative their medic Heinrich had administered before connecting a saline drip. Alex had refused. As he’d told the American, if she had something of value, he’d find out, and then he’d find it.
Perhaps she didn’t have the loot. He was basing his assumption that she did on the warning one of the men shooting at them had called out. ‘She’s got ’em,’ the man had said. Alex presumed, or rather hoped, that meant the diamonds.
The raid had not been their finest hour. During a debrief they had gone over everything they could remember, from the helicopter-borne assault to the ignominious plummet off the stern of the Penfold Son in the lifeboat. The consensus was that their foes were ex-military. Their gunfire had been disciplined – two to three aimed shots at a time – and their weapons similar to the pirates’. What they’d seen of the men added to the presumption: they had military-style haircuts and were physically fit and broad-shouldered. In short, these were not merchant sailors who’d happened to be carrying an arsenal of assault rifles and hand grenades.
‘The grenades worried me,’ Heinrich had said. ‘Not defensive weapons. These guys were armed and ready to assault someplace, or someone.’ Heinrich’s back was a patchwork of wound dressings after Kevin had removed fifteen small pieces of shrapnel.
‘Mercenaries?’ Henri had ventured.
‘Possible,’ Kevin conceded, ‘but the Penfold Line’s too big to be associated with something as low rent as soldiers of fortune.’
‘Maybe, but don’t forget someone on board was into diamond smuggling. The ship’s master could have been freelancing,’ Alex pointed out.
There were too many questions, and these just added to the ones relating to the Peng Cheng and her crew. Captain Wu and his men were locked up in storage cages in the dank concrete-lined basement of the resort. He’d been given an email address for the boat’s owner by Wu and had sent a message, offering to start negotiations for a ransom payment. There had been no reply as yet to the anonymous Yahoo account Heinrich had set up for the purpose.
The Peng Cheng and her cargo were moored at the deepwater jetty on the other side of the island, out of sight of the resort. Jane’s tour wouldn’t cover that part of the island. He didn’t want her discovering their secret, as Danielle had. Something told him the corporate lawyer wasn’t ready to drop the trappings of London life to live among a bunch of pirates. He didn’t want to think about what would have to happen if she did find out the truth.
He looked out to sea, past the squeaky-clean sands of the beach and the pleasant thatched bar where they ate and drank every day and he thought, not for the first time, that it was all worthwhile. All the risk, all the problems, all the crime, and even the blood that had been spilled. No one had been killed in any of their raids – until the day before yesterday.
Alex thought again of the man toppling backwards over the railings into the sea far below. He had committed murder in the commission of a crime, even though the man in question had been trying to kill him at the time. The dead man was presumably employed to provide security, and even though Alex’s crew had convinced themselves the other shooters were there to protect a criminal enterprise, Alex knew he had crossed an invisible line. It troubled him, but he forgot his worries when he saw her.
Jane had showered and piled her freshly dried hair high on her head, showing off a graceful, pale neck. She’d chosen one of Sarah’s few dresses – the short blue cotton one that had never failed to arouse him whenever the Australian girl had worn it.
‘I’m ready for my tour. I’m a stranger in paradise,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘No, Paradise is further north of us.’
‘OK, I’m ready for my geography lesson now.’ He pointed towards the beach and she fell into step beside him, her flip-flops slapping on the concrete veranda. Here and there were remnants of a tiled mosaic, once showing dolphins and whales. Jane paused and lifted her sunglasses to inspect the work. ‘They look nice.’
‘I’ll get around to repairing that one day. If I had the money I’d bring a tiler over from Portugal. It’s quite a skill. As to the geography, you’re on an island in the Bazaruto Archipelago. The main islands are Bazaruto, the largest, then Benguerra, Magaruque, and Santa Carolina, also known as Paradise Island. Our island is so small it’s usually omitted from maps. We’re only two kilometres long, by one wide, and we’re about thirty kilometres from the mainland. The bigger islands are all sand and were once part of a long peninsula joined to the mainland, but the Ilha dos Sonhos, like Paradise Island, is actually a rock island, so we have much deeper water around us than the others.’
They were on the beach now, and Jane removed her sandals. Alex noticed her toenails were painted pink and she wore a tiny silver ring on the second toe of her left foot. Her feet squeaked on the white sand.
‘How did you end up here?’
‘I grew up here. I was born in the hotel. My parents owned this resort but were chucked out of it and the country along with all the other Europeans in Mozambique in 1975. I grew up angry, wanting to come back here and fight the people who stole our property and take it back by force.’
‘I take it you didn’t?’
He shook his head. ‘I hated FRELIMO, the ruling power here in Mozambique, and for a while actively worked against them, from South Africa.’
‘You were in the South African Army?’
‘For a few years. I’d trained in the UK as a Royal Marine then moved to South Africa in the late eighties and took a commission there. They were fighting in Angola and propping up RENAMO, the pro-democracy opposition here in Mozambique. I was involved in arms smuggling, but what I saw changed my mind.’
He didn’t want to go into details that might shock her. When she pushed him, he said, ‘Civil war brings out the very worst in people. There was wholesale destruction – of people, building
s, wildlife, you name it. I came to the conclusion that no one side was completely right or wrong and that warfare of this kind is the worst.’
‘There’s a good kind?’
He shrugged, and stopped, pointing out to a far-off line of white water. ‘That’s the reef. There’s some fantastic snorkelling out there, if you’re interested.’
‘So you left to find a “good” war?’
‘I went back to Britain and re-enlisted. I ended up in Afghanistan, where I felt we were doing some good, for a time, against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.’ He left out any mention of the two years he’d spent in special forces, in the Special Boat Service, after being promoted to lieutenant. The time in the elite maritime operations unit had taught him everything he knew about boarding and capturing ships. During the countless hours he’d spent scaling the cliff-like steel sides of HMS Rame Head, an old Canadian-built merchant cargo vessel moored in Portsmouth Harbour, he’d never guessed the skills he was learning would provide an income stream one day. Likewise, during his time in M Squadron, which specialised in marine counter-terrorism, he’d learned how to blow his way into locked bridges and cabins.
They started walking along the beach again, but he stopped in his tracks when she said, ‘You were put up for a Victoria Cross, weren’t you?’
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘I thought I recognised your name. It came to me a little while ago, and when you mentioned Afghanistan I knew it was you. You were in the papers – something about saving your men from blowing up?’
He said nothing, but set off again along the beach.
‘I was at my parents’ place. My father said he’d known your father when he was in the army. He said . . . well, he said you probably missed out on the VC because of your family, rather than what you had or hadn’t done in Afghanistan.’
‘Ancient history,’ he said. ‘But you’re right – my family name’s remembered for all the wrong reasons. My old man was a bit of a scoundrel in his youth.’
‘Cad, my father said.’
They both laughed. ‘He mended his ways when he met my mum. Hopefully I haven’t inherited his worst traits.’ Although he knew he had.
‘Is that how you lost your fingers, in Afghanistan?’
He nodded. He didn’t really want to talk about it, but he reminded himself that what he was actually doing here, taking her around the island, was designed to get her talking, so he took a breath and told the story.
He skipped over the sheer unadulterated terror of what it’s actually like to have someone firing bullets at you and trying to kill you. He left out the bit about one of his marines wetting himself while they were pinned down. He didn’t admit what a high, what a rush it was, to raise his head above the medieval mud-brick wall, line up a Talib in the sights of his SA-80, pull the trigger and see the man’s face disappear in a spray of red. The killing had given him courage. The rush, the bloodlust of war, had taken over from the cool, calculating decision-making processes they’d taught him during his officer’s training. When the grenade had come over the parapet he had pushed his men aside and dived for it. He’d hefted it with his left hand – his right still holding his rifle – and just about got it away when it went off, mangling his hand and removing two fingers. The left side of his body and face had been peppered with shards of shrapnel.
One of his men had bandaged the bloody mess of his hand and then he, bellowing with pain and rage at what they’d done to him, led them out from behind the barricade to retake the village. Thankfully none of his men had been killed due to his act of madness.
‘Anyone would have done the same thing,’ he said. ‘This is our beach bar – hub of all activity on the island.’
Reggae played softly from speakers mounted in the thatch above them and Jose looked up from a book of cocktails. ‘Inxhlecane, Alex.’
‘Inxhlecane. Mo hine cu vuka?’
‘I’m fine, man,’ Jose replied in English. Alex liked to stay in practice with his Xitswa, the language of the people who lived on the islands and the mainland coast around Inhasorro and Vilanculos. Alex introduced Jane to the stocky African and he shook her hand.
‘We need some limes. I want to make a mojito for the lady,’ Jose said, consulting his book again. ‘I saw it on Sex and the City, when the satellite was still working. How about a Coke in the meantime.’
‘Thanks,’ Alex said, shaking his head. ‘Jose has a degree in Chemistry – a good background for any successful barman.’
‘A santi wawena a sassekile,’ Jose said.
‘Jose says he’s a better barman than he was a chemist. Don’t let him near the swimming pool chemicals.’ Actually, Jose had just told Alex that he thought his new wife was beautiful. Alex made a face at him.
Jane laughed. ‘What brings you to the island, Jose?’
‘I was born here,’ he said. Jose passed the dripping bottles of cola across the bar then walked around to join them. ‘This reprobate and I grew up together. His father was the owner of the resort and I was the son of the best barman north of Maputo. We played together as children. Then the war happened.’
Alex saw Jane try hard not to stare at Jose’s artificial leg. The prosthesis was a modern one, a Cheetah flexible running blade.
‘I was recruited – forced at gunpoint, actually – into the ranks of FRELIMO. I was sent to Russia where I studied Chemistry at university and bomb-making in a military camp. It was around the same time Alex was running guns to my enemies.’
‘What happened to you?’ Jane asked.
‘When I came back to Mozambique I was in the bush, fighting RENAMO, when I stepped on an Italian-made landmine. They’re plastic, so the mine detectors – even if we’d had them – wouldn’t have picked it up. I hate landmines.’
‘But not Alex?’
Alex looked at his friend for a reaction. It was a valid question. ‘We got caught on opposite sides of the war. Alex hated everyone in FRELIMO for a while and I hated everyone in RENAMO and the people who backed them. But I saw my side do some bad things, as he did his. The government told me to reopen the hotel, to lure foreign tourists back, but I’m a chemist and a barman, not an hotelier, so I got the party to endorse Alex’s claim on the property. The headache’s all his now.’
‘Jose’s being modest. He’s my business partner.’
‘I can’t believe we fought each other, for so long. But things are looking up now. Hopefully there will be no more killing,’ Jose added.
‘But I thought the civil war here was long over.’
‘What Jose means,’ Alex said, finishing his Coke and setting it down firmly on the bar, ‘is that he hopes this country never sees conflict again.’
‘Exactly,’ Jose said.
Alex and Jose spoke briefly in Portuguese and the African nodded.
‘He says he’ll have a word to the cook and organise us some giant lobster for tonight. Is that OK?’
‘It’s sensational. Bye Jose.’
Alex led her off the beach to an old short wheelbase Land Rover, of similar vintage to the one Sarah had driven into the surf when they’d hijacked the car transport. The top had been removed and the windscreen folded flat to the bonnet, giving it the look of an off-road convertible. Alex opened and closed Jane’s door for her, and she nodded her thanks.
The vehicle bounced along the sandy roads and the breeze generated from their motion kept the heat of the day at bay. It took only a few minutes of driving amongst low scrub and palm trees for them to arrive at a cleared area dotted with huts of thatch and woven reed walls. A fire smoked under a rack of drying fish, and a woman in a brightly printed wrap waved and smiled at Alex, without disturbing the ten litre plastic bottle of cooking oil balanced on her head. ‘Most of the island’s population left after the revolution, though a few, like Jose, have come back. About fifty local people live here now.’
‘What do they do?’ Jane asked, waving at two small girls who had peeked their heads out the door of one of the huts.
‘That’s very generous of you.’
‘It’s their island and their wealth, as much as mine.’
‘That sounds a bit socialist for a former British officer and South African Army gun-runner?’
Alex smiled and nodded. ‘It’s ironic that the people I wanted to overthrow invited me back, and that one of them was my best chum when I was a child.’
‘Isn’t there some lingering animosity towards the former colonial regime – to you, as a Portuguese?’
‘I’m Mozambican, Jane. I was born here, and so was my mother and her parents. I don’t agree with everything the Portuguese did here, just as I don’t agree with everything the current government does. This is my birthplace, and for people like Jose and me, living here is our birthright.’
From the village Alex took a track which ran close to another beach, south of the main resort. Alex stopped near the shells of a line of eight timber buildings. Little was left of the huts other than splintered beams and dead palm fronds.
‘God, this is a beautiful beach, but what happened to the houses? Were they destroyed when the Portuguese left?’ Jane asked.
Alex shook his head. ‘No, this was my fault. When I first came back to Ilha dos Sonhos, after I’d been invalided out of the marines, I used my compensation payout to build a small holiday resort – a backpackers place with these few huts and a campsite. My plan was to get business back to the island and make some more money before I started restoring the hotel.’