Diamondhead

by Patrick Robinson

  In the shipyard, the dragnet tightened by the hour as squads of guards, directed by Pierre and Raul, closed in on the concourse, clearing out buildings and leaving small platoons of guards in each one. Mack watched them from on high, passing the time counting the active security operators in their bright-yellow jackets, the afternoon sun glinting off their rifles.

  Shortly after two thirty the accompanying police convoy that would travel to Saint-Nazaire with Henri Foche was assembled outside the elegant townhouse in the most expensive part of Rennes. There were four armed officers positioned in the tree-lined front driveway, one on the front door, and one inside the hallway. Four of them would ride shotgun on police motorbikes that were parked on the street, blue lights flashing. The street was temporarily cordoned off. The Foche Mercedes-Benz was flanked front and rear by police cruisers, each of which contained four armed officers, including the driver. They waited with engines running, blue lights flashing. To the casual bystander it looked like a psychedelic nightclub had escaped into the daylight.

  Henri Foche and his wife were finishing their coffee, and Claudette had asked him for the umpteenth time to “call off this crazy trip to this stupid shipyard where a madman is waiting to shoot you, and probably me.”

  “No one is going to murder me in Brittany,” he scowled. “These shipyard people are counting on me. Nothing is going to prevent me from addressing them this afternoon. For them! And for France.”

  Claudette rolled her eyes heavenward. “I just have no idea why you want to do this—deliberately walking into danger, and taking me with you.”

  “First of all,” he replied, “the danger is minimal. Half the security forces in France are swarming through Saint-Nazaire. And in Raul Declerc I have one of the best professional killers in the world. And he works with the French police. I made sure of that. He’s with Pierre in the shipyard right now.”

  “Even Pierre wanted to call it off.”

  “Claudette, my policies must be heard by the workers, the people who look to me. They want to know their jobs are safe, and that I will protect those jobs. We will build France, with our own hands. Pour la France! Toujours pour la France!”

  “Well, since you are obviously planning to get us both killed today, I ought to tell you that little actress you’re seeing in Paris telephoned about two hours ago. I know it was her, even though she put down the phone. Why don’t you send her a condom with Viva la France! inscribed on it?”

  “Shut up about that. I’m not even seeing her. And stop changing the damn subject. This is a big day for me. I must be faithful to the wishes of the voters.”

  “Wow! Faithful! Coming from you, Henri Foche, alley cat. Pour la Bretagne! Pour la France!”

  “Claudette, for the wife of the next French president, you have a low mind.”

  “And for the next French president, you have a low life. And one day, it will catch up with you.”

  Foche just stared at her, incredulous that she could not comprehend his true greatness. He shook his head, at a loss for words at the astronomical level of her dumbness.

  Just then the guard at the door called, “Monsieur Foche, the police think we should leave now. Everyone’s ready when you are.”

  Henri and Claudette both stood up from the table. Foche picked up his jacket, and his wife walked over to the mirror and brushed her hair. Within two minutes they were seated in the back of the Mercedes, with the final two police guards in the front, one driving. The convoy moved slowly through the streets to the southwest side of Rennes and then drove swiftly out to the fast N137 highway that leads down to Nantes and the road along the Loire to Saint-Nazaire.

  Foche was not talkative. There were times when he detested his wife, whom he knew he had treated abominably. But his stature, his ability to allow her to live like a duchess, must surely have overridden that. She was, after all, a former call girl, and in Henri’s mind that overrode his marriage vows.

  There was a natural law in the universe, he believed, a law that ensured the order of things, and he, Henri, had married a trophy wife, beneath him in every sense. And all he wanted from her was gratitude, and plenty of it. Not insolence and smart-ass remarks. Surely that was not too much to expect?

  The procession sped south. The two lead motorbikes kept their flashing lights going all the way. But the other police vehicles drove without illumination. The plan was that all lights and sirens would go on, blazing and blaring, once the outskirts of Saint-Nazaire were reached. It was an integral part of an overall scheme masterminded by Pierre Savary, designed to unnerve the assassin.

  Foche read his speech and occasionally made pencil marks on the pages. Claudette tried to sleep, even though, in the deepest recesses of her mind, she thought it entirely possible this might be her last day on this earth. Christ, she hated Henri. But she had an ingrained code of loyalty in her soul. And if he wanted to walk into the jaws of death, and he wanted her with him, then she would follow.

  They reached the city of Nantes around four. The police officer in the front seat was on the phone to Raul Declerc, reporting speed and position. Back in the shipyard Raul ordered the final search of the buildings around the concourse to begin.

  He was particularly concerned with the drydock, where there were so many workmen, all in blue overalls, all looking the same, all toiling on the hull of a new freighter. There were steelworkers, painters, plumbers, and electricians. There were men on the scaffold, dozens more inside the hull. How the hell could he tell if one of them had a hidden firearm right here in the drydock, with the intention of attacking the Gaullist leader?

  It was the busy places that concerned Raul. The remote outlying places would be accurately searched, and were easy to locate. Around the main concourse vast squads of guards were beginning to congregate, and, as he had planned, Raul deployed them into the workshops and unfinished ships. Their orders were simple: search every inch of this place for a hidden gunman or firearm. Raul ordered the underside of the podium to be swept with metal detectors every twenty minutes. The street beyond the yard was out of bounds for both cars and pedestrians.

  When Henri Foche walked to the podium on this simmering summer afternoon, there would be a steel curtain of forty guards surrounding him. As far as Raul and Pierre Savary could tell, Henri would be the most difficult man in the whole of France to assassinate on this particular day.

  Up on the sixth floor of the warehouse, Mack Bedford began to change. All plans to bluff his way out of trouble as a workman were abandoned, just because it was too late. Foche would be arriving in a half hour. Mack stripped off his blue overalls and slung them high onto the shelves. He had nowhere to carry a flashlight, but the SEAL wet suit had a slim custom-made recess on the thigh for the combat knife.

  He removed his Jeffery Simpson wig, mustache, and spectacles. Deep inside his wet suit top, there was just one waterproof pocket, and he folded the lightweight wig and slid all three items inside. Then he took down the toolbox and assembled the rifle made with such loving care by Mr. Kumar in Southall.

  Into the breech he slotted all six of the chrome-colored bullets, setting one of them into the firing chamber. He slid the telescopic sight into place, and screwed the silencer onto the barrel. Then he held it in the firing position, almost caressed it, as he pulled the stock into his shoulder and stared through the sight, balancing the rifle, centering his whole body for the shot that would echo around the world.

  He delved once more into the toolbox and removed the Draeger, the underwater rebreathing equipment, and he strapped it to his back rather than the correct position on his chest, where it would be a hopeless encumbrance. He pulled up his hood and fitted it snugly over his forehead.

  He took out his big underwater goggles and tightened them on, fixed high on the hairline, ready to be tugged down fast as soon as he was in the water. Last time Mack did that he’d just stormed and dismantled Saddam’s offshore oil rig.

  Then he took out the attack board and fitted all three instruments—
the clock, the compass, and the GPS—with the batteries he’d bought at the hardware store. He screwed them back into place, watertight. When he’d completed this he pushed the rifle, the toolbox, and the attack board back into the shelves behind his locked door.

  But soon he would unlock it. If they searched this building, as they surely must, and found just one locked door, they would definitely blast it open and come charging in, mob-handed, as the SAS was apt to describe a full-blooded raid. If, however, the door was unlocked like all the rest, there was an excellent chance that just the regular two- or three-man search party would come in alone—unsuspecting and, he hoped, not particularly thorough. The door gets unlocked—no ifs, ands, or buts. But not until the last moment.

  Mack walked to the window and looked down. He could see two of the three men who had emerged from the limousine seven hours previously. They were standing in the center of a great throng of guards, probably waiting for orders. When Raul’s cell phone rang at 4:30, Mack saw him answer it. Foche was within seven miles of the shipyard.

  Immediately, Raul ordered the search of the big empty warehouse that faced the podium. He’d ordered it last because it was the emptiest, most obvious, and easiest place to clean right out. There were ten floors. Raul ordered fifteen men into the building, three armed guards to each floor, moving up. The two Foreign Legion men were to close right in on the front door, ensuring no one went in or came out while the search was being conducted.

  Mack could see the sudden surge of the guards, and he turned away and climbed the shelves once more to the smaller window, set high above the little side throughway that led to the wall above the water. This window had a different catch, and he quietly pushed it open and peered outside, looking down to the single door on the side of the building, through which he had entered the previous night.

  The guards were beginning to arrive in formation and move into the warehouse. Mack pulled the window shut and climbed down, listening. Far below he heard the general commotion as the security parties separated and began to search each floor. There were footsteps on the stone stairway, and the shouts of the men echoed in the cavernous stairwell.

  Mack pulled his driving gloves on and opened wide one window on the front side and one on the back. He unlocked the door. Then he flattened himself behind it, tight against the hinges. Three or four minutes went by before the men from the ground floor leapfrogged the others and ran up to the sixth-floor landing.

  Outside, Raul’s cell phone rang again to announce that Henri Foche and Claudette were now only two miles from the main gate of the shipyard.

  That was when Mack Bedford’s door was pushed open, tentatively, and a machine gun barrel was pushed forward into the room. Mack could not see it, because the door was wide and pushed back almost to the wall. If he had not been standing there, it would have been flat against the wall. As it was, the door was flat against his chest.

  The three armed guards walked into the room, and swiveled into a three-pronged attack formation, each man facing a different way, their backs toward each other. The room was by no means bright, but it was perfectly light, and each one of them scanned the shelves, the room, and its corners.

  One of them called out in French, “There’s no one in here. Room’s empty.” None of them spotted the toolbox and the assembled rifle because they were pushed back into the corner shielded by the door.

  “Okay, guys,” said their leader. “All clear on floor six.” Outside a sentry called down to the team, “No problem floor six. It’s empty.”

  The first two guards made for the doorway, but the third man suddenly spotted the blue overalls slung up on the high shelves. “Is that anything?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s not a person,” said another. “You want me to go up and check it out?”

  “Go ahead,” said his colleague.

  The man walked over to the shelves, put down his rifle, and started to climb, which was when he saw Mack Bedford jammed behind the door.

  He let out one hell of a shout, which was only cut short when Mack’s iron hand clamped over his windpipe and dragged him bodily off the lower shelf. He then delivered one of the most brutal attacks in the entire SEAL repertoire, a crushing bone-shattering bang in the middle of the forehead, delivered with the butt of his knife handle, and then a pile driver of an uppercut, delivered with the butt of the open hand, which rammed the nose bone deep into the man’s brain.

  This took five seconds, and the door swung back. The other two men had heard the strangulated yell, and came charging back into the middle of the room. Mack Bedford by now had his hands on the barrel of the dead man’s rifle, and he took the first of the other two with a baseball swing that obliterated the skull behind the right ear, smashed the nerve center, and killed him instantly. The third man swung around, on the attack, his rifle leveled as he tried to draw a bead on Mack Bedford. He almost succeeded, but Mack had his left hand on the barrel and turned it away, swiveling the third guard to the right, just about at arm’s length, just about far enough to slit the man’s throat almost in half with a slashing pinpoint-accurate swipe with the fish knife from the hardware store. No civilian can kill quite like that. This was combat, close combat, designed by SPECWARCOM to eliminate an enemy.

  Mack reached the door. The landing was empty, the sentry having made his call and progressed to floor seven. Quietly, Mack closed the door. Only seventeen seconds had passed since the first intruder had stepped into the room, and now he clicked the lock shut. Even as he did so he heard the wail of the police sirens as Henri Foche’s motorcade came speeding along the main street that led to the shipyard’s entrance.

  So far the three dead guards had not been missed. Everyone had heard the all-clear call from the sixth floor sentry, and everyone was busy with the rest of the warehouse search. For the moment Mack was safe behind the heavy-duty door.

  He placed the toolbox and the attack board at the base of the rear wall. Then he picked up Prenjit Kumar’s sniper rifle, the precision Austrian SSG-69, and moved to the edge of the open front window. Right inside the main entrance he could now see clearly the police outriders talking to two of the men who had arrived by limousine.

  The convoy was waved through, and the police car moved forward just far enough for Foche and Claudette to disembark right at the foot of the steps that led up to the podium. Right now he was not surrounded, as he would be six seconds from now. Raul stood on his left quarter, just behind. Pierre was marshaling the police to form their cordon at the back of the stage.

  Mack was on his knees, the rifle rock-steady on the window ledge. Everyone was looking at Foche and his strikingly beautiful wife. And now Mack had him in the crosshairs of the telescopic sight. A clear, unimpeded, uninterrupted shot. It was never going to be better than this. For a second Mack’s heart ceased to beat, and then he squeezed the trigger.

  The high-velocity bullet ripped out of the finely turned, shortened barrel, and it hit Henri Foche with fantastic force slightly left of center, almost in the middle of his forehead. Deep inside his brain, the bullet exploded, blasting a hole that blew blood and tissue out of the back of his head, through a gaping hole five inches across.

  Mack snapped the bolt of the rifle back hard, and fired another. The bullet hit Henri Foche as he fell backward. It smacked into him on the left-hand side of his chest, straight through the scarlet handkerchief, and blew his heart asunder. The Gaullist leader never knew what had hit him.

  “I guess that one was for you, Charlie,” gritted Mack Bedford. “From the goddamned Euphrates River to right here in Saint-Nazaire, that one was for you.”

  And then he moved as fast as any human being had ever moved, dismantling the rifle, fitting it back into the toolbox, ramming down the lid. He then turned his Draeger around, fastening it tight to his chest. He stuck to his belief that an unlocked door does not attract, and he flipped back the lock, still working on the theory that if one or two men tried it and it opened, they would not sound an alarm. If it was tightl
y locked, a hefty steel door like this might attract thirty gun-toting guards with det-cord or even dynamite.

  Meanwhile, down on the concourse, there was nothing short of total pandemonium. Only those closest to Henri Foche understood he had been hit by an assassin’s bullet and was now dead. Pierre Savary was among those. Raul Declerc thought he had other problems, and Claudette was cradling her dead husband in her arms, loyal to the bitter end.

  Savary called the ambulance personally, and now the crowds began to surge around the shocking scene that had evolved at the foot of the podium steps. The body of Henri Foche was slumped backward close to the car. It was crimson with blood, and Claudette was spattered, kneeling down, holding his head, saying over and over, “Why did we come here? Will someone just tell me why we had to come here?”

  Raul Declerc was staring up at the warehouse, scanning the front of the building. It took him a full minute to spot the wide-open window on the sixth floor, but 99 percent of the crowd still had no idea what had happened. Raul knew he still had men in that building, and he began dodging through the still-growing throng. It was only 4:45 when he began heading to the side door of the warehouse. Plainly, the guards at the front door had heard nothing because no one had moved, and these were trained guys.