Dictator

by Tom Cain

  ‘But my father was a good boss,’ she argued. ‘All our workers had running water and electric power.’

  ‘There is no such thing as a good boss,’ Mabeki spat back. ‘There are only the rulers and the oppressed. You talk about running water and power as though they were luxuries for which the workers should be grateful. They are basic human rights. And running water means more than a tap in every village. Power means more than a few bare lightbulbs.’

  ‘What about your father? Isaac did not think Dad was a bad man. He was devoted to him.’

  ‘Is that what you think? Then you are a fool. Your eyes have been closed all your life. Do you imagine that my father came back to our meagre hovel, with its four bare walls of breezeblock and its corrugated iron roof, and felt affection for a man who lived in mansions built on land that our ancestors ruled as kings? Do you think he was grateful when your father declared that he would pay for my education? That money was made from land stolen from its rightful owners – stolen by the white man from the black!

  ‘And tell me, Zalika, since your father was such a fine man: what did he do for all the workers on his farms and his game reserves who suffered from HIV? Did he get them treatment, the latest drugs? No, they were worked until the disease became so bad that they could not work any more. Then they were dismissed and left to die, while new workers were hired in their place.’

  Some days Mabeki updated her on the latest development in the negotiations he was conducting from his satellite phone with the hostage rescue consultants brought in by Wendell Klerk. ‘Your uncle does not wish to spend any of his money to free you,’ he said one time. ‘You could be at his house in Cape Town right now, or in London, or on his country estate, or even sunbathing at his place in the Bahamas if he had simply paid what I asked. Do you want to know what price I put on your head?’

  ‘No,’ said Zalika, trying to sound as though she meant it.

  ‘It was five million dollars, US. That is roughly one-tenth of one per cent of Mr Klerk’s estimated personal assets. It is a fraction of what he paid to get rid of his last wife, the beauty queen, after just three years of marriage. What was she, Miss Austria?’

  ‘Czech Republic,’ said Zalika, before she could stop herself.

  ‘Thirty million he gave her to go away, or so the newspapers said. And all I want is five. Not for myself, but for my people. This money will be used to dig wells and buy tractors, medicines, solar electricity panels, schoolbooks, pencils. It will do far more good working for Africa than it ever could in Mr Klerk’s bank account, and yet … and yet, he will not pay it. He tells his people to bargain with me, to drive the price down. He threatens to walk away and leave you to your fate. I am sorry, Zalika, but he does not think you are worth saving.’

  For his part, Moses Mabeki looked forward to his conversations with Zalika Stratten with keen anticipation. He derived great pleasure from seeing her humbled, stripped of all comforts, breathing the stench of her own filth. He enjoyed this daily proof of his newfound power almost as much as he had enjoyed giving the order to shoot Zalika’s brother dead; or pouring diesel fuel down a funnel into her father’s throat until it drowned him; or giving her mother to his men to do with as they pleased; or even the exultant moment when he faced his feeble, lickspittle father and took a machete to the treacherous body with which he had so willingly served the Stratten family. Hearing the pain and bafflement in Zalika’s voice when he had told her those lies about his father – that, too, had been something to relish. But what he was planning to do later this very night … well, that, he thought, he might enjoy even more.

  13

  They were keeping Zalika Stratten on the top floor of a two-storey building – one of the few in the village – that occupied the northeast corner of a crossing where two dirt roads intersected. In the classic fashion of a colonial African building, a ground-floor colonnade ran along the main facade and round the corner facing the road, providing shelter for passers-by. Above it on the first floor ran a covered open-air walkway, with a waist-high balustrade for the building’s occupants. The ground floor was occupied at one end by a shebeen – an illegal bar, whose clientele neither asked nor answered questions about one another’s business – and a half-empty excuse for a local store at the other. Upstairs there were three very basic apartments, all now occupied by Mabeki and his men. A stairway bisected the front of the building, connecting one walkway with the other.

  Justus had installed himself in a derelict building directly across the street, having given the family who occupied it ten US dollars – almost certainly more than they could expect to earn in a month – to let him use it as an observation post.

  Shortly after midnight, three hours before the operation was due to begin, Justus was scanning the target building’s facade with a pair of military-specification thermal-imaging binoculars. They reacted to temperature rather than light so that hot-spots showed up in colours that ranged from a warm red through orange and yellow to white-hot. A human body glowed white on a cold night at close range. If the line of sight was clear, visual identification of individuals was possible at ranges of a mile or more. But through the walls of the room in which Zalika was being held, people showed up as little more than vague orange blurs. That was enough, though, to allow Justus to discern Zalika’s body, lying on her mattress, just as it had enabled him to detect the man who had brought her evening meal. When, shortly afterwards, she had got up to use the bucket, he had turned his imager away to check the other apartments.

  Now Justus was checking in with Carver, who was lying flat on the roof of a garage directly behind the target building. He was dressed in black, with a black balaclava hiding his face, and had melted into the shadows beneath the second-storey wall behind which Zalika was being held. It rose windowless for ten feet above him, its surface covered with a faded, crumbling painting of a giant Coca-Cola bottle.

  The night air was filled with music, the raucous voices of hard-drinking men and the shrieks and laughter of the working girls coming from the shebeen. Carver had to put his finger to his earpiece as Justus spoke to hear his words distinctly.

  ‘Mabeki brought five of his men with him into Mozambique,’ Justus said. ‘Three of them are downstairs in the shebeen right now. One of the other two is in the inner hallway of the apartment, outside Miss Stratten’s room. The other is on duty as a sentry on the walkway. There is one figure in the adjacent apartment. I believe this is Mabeki. He … wait, he is moving. He is leaving the apartment and I think he is going to the room where Miss Stratten is held. Yes, he is entering it. Now he is going to the bed. Miss Stratten must have woken. She is sitting up. Mabeki is doing something down at her feet. Oh, I see, he is loosening her chain. Maybe he is about to move her.’

  On the garage roof, Carver tensed, sensing that all his carefully calibrated plans were about to be rendered irrelevant. Well, he was used to that. He just had to work out when to go in, and – even more important – when to call Morrison. Whatever happened, he aimed to be in and out of the building in under sixty seconds. That left seven long minutes before the chopper arrived. He had to find a way to buy time. Then he heard Justus’s voice in his earpiece again.

  ‘No, he is not moving her. He is bending over her. Now he is on the bed. Oh no, he is on top of her. She has raised her hands. I think she is trying to fight him, but …’

  ‘Flattie!’ hissed Carver.

  ‘We’d already fired up the engine,’ said Morrison. ‘On our way.’

  ‘Mr Carver, this is very bad,’ said Justus.

  ‘Yeah, I get it,’ Carver replied. ‘Now listen, I need you to distract the sentry on the walkway. I don’t care what you do, just make sure all his attention is focused on you. Got that?’

  ‘OK …’

  Carver stood up, quickly flexed his neck, shoulder and back muscles, then picked up a length of nylon rope attached to a grappling hook that he had placed beside him on the roof. He stepped back, threw the hook over the top of the wall ab
ove him and tugged on the rope until the hook caught on the roof parapet. It took him a matter of seconds to abseil up the painted Coke bottle and over the parapet on to the flat roof above. His MP5 submachine gun, fitted with a noise suppressor, was slung across his back. He also carried a knife, three grenades and a pair of black nylon pouches strapped to his hips. In them were two fifteen-round magazines, a powerful torch, an emergency flare in case he needed to mark his position for an incoming chopper, some nylon fishing wire and a basic first-aid kit.

  Keeping his head down, he padded across to the front of the building and peered over the parapet down to the street. Justus was standing by the side of the road with a bottle in his hand, trying to strike up a conversation with the sentry. They were speaking in an African dialect, but Carver had no trouble getting the wheedling, drunken tone of what Justus was saying or the annoyance in the sentry’s voice. Perfect.

  He moved to the side of the building, away from the point where the two men were talking, and climbed back over the parapet on to a narrow ledge that ran all the way round the facade of the building, providing additional shelter for the walkway below. Carver crouched down, placed his hands on the ledge and then lowered his legs and body over the side till he was hanging by his fingertips, suspended outside the walkway. A single lightbulb provided enough illumination for him to look all along it, straight towards the sentry who was now leaning on the balustrade, gesticulating at Justus down below.

  Carver rested his feet against the balustrade, pushed them away and then swung them back towards the walkway, letting go of the ledge above and dropping over the balustrade, down on to the floor. He landed noiselessly on rubber-soled boots, swung his weapon up to his shoulder and put two bullets through the sentry’s head before the man even knew he was there.

  Having checked that the sentry was dead, Carver smashed the light with the stock of his gun, plunging the walkway into darkness. Then he peered over the balustrade and signalled to Justus to get the van and drive it round the side of the building. The Malemban nodded and ran off.

  For a moment, the noise from the shebeen dipped and Carver could hear a muffled female scream coming from inside the building. Carver prided himself on his ability to remain calm and dispassionate, but there was a difference between being professional and being a robot. The sound of that voice awoke a primal male instinct in him to defend and avenge a female in distress.

  There was a door from the walkway into the apartment where Zalika Stratten was being held. Carver kicked it open and advanced into the building, his gun raised and ready to fire.

  14

  Moses Mabeki had planned on taking his time. This was a self-indulgence to be savoured. Then he heard the crash of the outside door slamming open and the jolt of shock and fear that flooded his nervous system made sex the last thing on his mind. He rolled off Zalika and, all but sightless in the darkness of the room, scrabbled on the floor for his trousers and the Chinese-made Norinco pistol that he’d jammed into one of the pockets. His fingers tried to extract the gun from the fabric wrapped round it and finally, after an eternity of fumbling, it was in his right hand.

  Mabeki heard a shout of alarm from the guard in the hall. It was suddenly cut short, ending in a strangled cry of pain followed by the thud of a body slumping against the door to the room. Somebody was out there, he realized. They were willing to kill. And he was next.

  Still kneeling on the floor, Mabeki fired three rounds in the rough direction of the door, the sound of the shots almost deafening in the small, echoing room. Behind him, Zalika was raising herself on her elbows. Mabeki didn’t want her crying for help. He turned back to the mattress and gave the girl a hard backhanded slap to the face. She whimpered in pain.

  ‘Quiet!’ he whispered. ‘Not a sound!’

  He could just about see the outline of her nodding head. There was a sniff as she tried to control her tears, then Mabeki heard a scraping sound as the body was dragged from the door by the unseen predator.

  He shot again, twice more. This time there was a wordless shout from beyond the door and more stumbling footsteps, followed by the sound of a body against a hard surface. Whoever was out there had been hit, but how badly?

  Mabeki needed to find out, but he wasn’t leaving the safety of the room with just his gun to protect him. Zalika Stratten would be his shield. He got to his feet, then, still holding the gun in his right hand, he bent down and grabbed Zalika with his left, making her wince as he clamped his fingers round the soft flesh of her upper arm.

  And then he heard another sound from beyond the door.

  15

  The bullet that hit Carver as he tried to dodge to one side of the door had struck him a glancing blow beneath his left armpit and spun him across the hallway. There was a lot of blood and it hurt like hell. Every breath ended with the sharp stab of a broken rib. But aside from that, he was still in one piece and more pissed off than ever. The blasts from Mabeki’s gun would surely have been heard down in the shebeen. No matter how drunk they were, his people were bound to investigate.

  Carver strode back to the door, the face behind his balaclava clenched in furious determination, and kicked hard. The flimsy door with its rusty hinges and half-rotten wood flew open.

  Ahead of him and to the right, Carver could see Mabeki, dimly illuminated by the light from the hallway. He was bending over the mattress, dragging Zalika Stratten to her feet with one hand while holding a gun in the other. He wasn’t wearing any trousers and the sight of his bare legs only underlined the obscenity of what he’d been about to do to the girl.

  Mabeki let go of her. His head and shoulders were rising back up and turning towards Carver. He was bringing his pistol to bear.

  Carver put his first bullet though Mabeki’s jaw, which exploded, showering Zalika Stratten with blood and fragments of flesh and bone. As the impact sent Mabeki staggering backwards, Carver fired again, hitting him in the upper torso.

  Mabeki was thrown to one side. He lay still as the blood, just one more liquid shade of black, pooled round his body and spread across the floor.

  The girl started screaming. She was huddled on the bed, shaking uncontrollably. Somehow, her pitiful vulnerability affected Carver far more than the shattered body on the floor.

  ‘Time to go,’ he said, his voice sounding far harsher than he intended.

  She looked up, eyes wide with horror at the sight of the masked, faceless figure looming over her.

  ‘Come on!’ Carver insisted.

  Zalika did not move, just pointed at the body and sobbed, ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ Carver replied, holding out a hand. ‘Now, please, get up. We’ve got to get out of here before his mates arrive. Your uncle’s expecting you.’

  That seemed to do the trick. Zalika took Carver’s hand and let him pull her up. But then she stiffened, unable to move any further, still transfixed by the sight of Mabeki’s body. Carver tightened his grip on her wrist and started running, dragging her with him, forcing her to follow him out of the room, past the body in the corridor towards the outside walkway.

  ‘Stay here,’ he mouthed as they reached the door to the walkway.

  He let go of Zalika’s hand and inched out into the open. People were starting to spill out of the shebeen on to the street. He could not see them, but he could hear them, just as he heard the sound of heavy boots clattering up the concrete stairs. The silhouette of a heavy-set man appeared a few paces down the walkway and swayed slightly as he took his bearings. Carver dropped him with a single headshot. There were no more footfalls on the steps.

  Carver gestured with his cupped left hand, ordering Zalika out on to the walkway. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘Stick tight to the wall.’

  He led her away from the two dead men, through the shadows to the side of the building till they reached the place where he’d jumped on to the walkway less than a minute earlier.

  A shout came from the street below, followed by more excitable, angry voices. The
y’d been spotted.

  Carver muttered a curse. Then his spirits rose as he heard the coughing and spluttering of the VW van and saw it pull up directly beneath them. Justus got out and dashed to the side of the building. He raised his arms and said, ‘Let her down, I will catch her.’

  Carver manhandled the terrified girl to the balustrade and then, wincing as the pain from his cracked rib sliced through him, lifted her up and over it. He let go of her arms and watched as she fell six or seven feet into Justus’s arms. The African buckled under Zalika’s weight, but kept her from hitting the ground.

  As he pulled himself and the girl to their feet, Justus turned his head then looked back up at Carver and shouted, ‘Quick, they are coming!’

  Carver vaulted over the balustrade and fell to the ground, unable to stifle a sharp cry of pain at the impact. He looked up to see Justus bundling Zalika into the back of the VW and closing the rear passenger door behind her. Beyond them about fifteen or twenty men were rounding the corner of the building, the pitch of their voices rising as they saw the car and its would-be occupants. Their advance slowed as they saw Carver straightening with the gun in his hand. He raised the MP5 to point at the crowd. The men came to a halt, looking at one another as if seeking guidance. None of them appeared to be armed.

  Carver heard the sound of Justus starting up the VW behind him. He moved back very slowly towards the vehicle, keeping his eyes and gun fixed on the crowd.

  It was the movement that alerted him, an anomalous shift in the pattern of limbs, bodies and faces captured on the edge of his peripheral vision that told him someone was aiming a gun. Carver flicked his eyes to a man in the second rank aiming an AK-47. He was using his companions as cover, assuming Carver would be reluctant to shoot unarmed civilians.