She was sitting low on the rear passenger banquette, both hands gripping the bolster seat in front of her, the sleek-nosed vessel hanging in midair as its hull skimmed another swell. After what seemed an improbably long time, it crashed down into the water again, sending spumes of snow-white spray high into the blue sky.
She felt the wind in her hair and she smiled for the first time that day. God, this was therapy. To Martha, the ocean was like home, even after so many years living in the high-rise city. Those long seemingly endless days with her father - when they could go from dawn to dusk without seeing another soul - had engendered a deep respect for its moods, its vastness and above all its power. One of the first lessons he had ever taught her was that those who the ocean claimed with the most relish were those who claimed to have mastered her.
The Fountain belonged to the Marlin Bay, and its pilot was a dour-faced employee of Getty’s called Harold, a white Kenyan who seemed to regard the sheer exhilaration of the speedboat as an occupational hazard. He had barely said a word since they’d set off from the hotel’s private marina, and any approach of civility on her behalf had been met with a grunt. Still, Martha noted, Harold was good at his job even if he didn’t enjoy it. He handled the powerful boat expertly through the swells, and seemed to know the treacherous reefs and the sandbars as if they were old friends.
But now the engine note was changing as Harold throttled back. Ahead was the wide untidy mouth of Flamingo Creek, the muddy river current staining the sea where the freshwater met the salt. And now Martha felt a pang of apprehension, a sudden breathlessness accompanied by the thud of blood pulsing in her neck. The boat swept in a shallow arc into the navigation channel and she closed her fists so that her fingernails dug into her palms.
After a few moments, Harold gestured away to the left bank. ‘That’s it, Missy,’ he said.
Martha looked across at what looked like a pathetic collection of shanty buildings huddled around a ramshackle wooden jetty, and she felt the prickling of tears once again.
Oh, Daddy . . .
‘Friends of yours, Mr Moore?’ Jouma asked as the Fountain eased back on the throttle and coasted into the inlet.
‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’
The detective shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid none of my friends have expensive speedboats.’
‘Mine neither,’ Jake said grimly. It crossed his mind that these days the going rate for a fifteen-year-old tub like Yellowfin would be about as much as one of the Fountain’s turbo engines.
The boat idled up to the jetty and Jake caught the mooring rope. The pilot looked familiar to him, but only because he looked like a pilot. He had the same implacable, weather-beaten look of one of Suki Lo’s regulars.
The same could not be said of his passenger.
With her honey-blonde hair tucked into a baseball cap and her eyes hidden behind expensive-looking sunglasses, she exuded metropolitan cool. He was therefore surprised when she ignored his outstretched hand and vaulted lithely and expertly on to the jetty.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, landing lightly on the balls of her feet. She was smiling, but Jake could detect no friendliness there. It was the hard uncompromising expression of someone whose first instinct is mistrust. ‘My name is Martha Bentley. This is my father’s boatyard.’
Jake was stunned. Dennis had a daughter?
‘Might I ask what you’re doing here?’ the girl asked.
Jouma cleared his throat and introduced himself.
‘I was told the police had completed their investigation, ’ Martha said sharply.
‘That would be Malindi Police, Miss Bentley,’ Jouma told her. ‘I am from Coast Province CID.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m just the transport,’ Jake said, gesturing at Yellowfin.
‘Yeah?’ Martha said. ‘Well, if the two of you have finished snooping around, I’d appreciate a little privacy.’
‘Of course.’ Jouma nodded, grateful that the grilling was over. He turned towards Jake. ‘Perhaps it is time that we returned, Mr Moore. I would like to get back to Mombasa before dark.’
But Jake was not listening. His attention had fixed on the low-slung lines of a second speedboat, a red-painted Chris Craft, which had turned into the creek and was now making rapid, but erratic progress along the river towards the inlet.
‘Are you expecting company, Miss Bentley?’ he said.
There were two black men in the boat wearing leather jackets and baseball caps - but it was not until they were almost on top of them that Jake saw that one had what looked like an Uzi machine pistol in his hand.
‘Get down!’ he yelled, a split second before a burst of automatic gunfire danced across the brackish water towards them.
Jake leaped across the jetty, arms extended, and in one movement tackled Jouma and Martha to the ground, as bullets raked the dock, sending splinters of tinder-dry wood cartwheeling into the air. The flimsy structure shook as they landed, and Jake thought it might even collapse under them.
‘Anybody hit?’ he called out.
There was a groaned expletive from the pilot, who was sprawled in the front seat of the Fountain with blood streaming from a head wound. But the fact he was still very much alive suggested that a flying fragment from the jetty rather than a bullet had struck him. On the jetty itself, Martha and Jouma appeared to be unscathed.
‘What’s happening?’ Martha said, staring with almost childlike fascination at a piece of planking which had been chewed in half barely six inches from where she now sat.
Jake knew there was no time to figure out the whys and wherefores. He looked up to see the Chris Craft executing a shallow hairpin turn a hundred yards upriver. The pilot was no expert, and the boat was an old model that had clearly seen better days - but, even so, he calculated that they had only a few seconds before the vessel made a second, deadly pass.
‘Get into the workshop,’ Jake ordered. ‘Now!’
But there were fifty yards between the jetty and the workshop, fifty long excruciatingly exposed yards with nothing but scrub and discarded oil drums for cover. The triggerman in the Chris Craft was no sharpshooter, but with an Uzi you didn’t have to be. All you had to do was aim in the general direction and six hundred rounds a minute usually did the rest. As Martha and Jouma began running, Jake cursed as he realised that they would be in range long before they reached shelter.
He jumped down into the Fountain and, after dragging the blood-soaked pilot out of the driver’s seat and into the footwell, started the engine. The turbos exploded into life immediately and, having jettisoned the mooring rope from its cleat on the bow, he manoeuvred the boat in a tight one-eighty so that it now pointed out of the inlet towards the river.
The Chris Craft was careering towards the boatyard again, the gunman standing in the rear of the boat with one foot braced against the guard rail, baseball cap pulled down low, brandishing the Uzi in one gloved hand. Jake jammed the throttles forward and, with a furious roar of boiling water, the Fountain shot outwards into the navigation channel. He wrenched on the wheel and brought the bow directly in line with the Chris Craft, then gunned the powerful engines until even they whined in protest.
Up ahead, the pilot of the second boat stared wide-eyed as the Fountain headed towards him on a direct collision course. As the two boats reached the moment of impact, he swerved his vessel to the left, just as the gunman behind him drew a bead on Jake’s head with the Uzi. The gunman was sent reeling backwards and Jake heard a ripping sound as the weapon spat out its magazine of bullets.
Then he was out in open water again, zigzagging against the roiling wake of the Chris Craft. He swivelled in his seat and saw the other boat was now out of control and heading at speed for the far bank. The pilot was slumped against the steering wheel with what appeared to be half his head shot away, while the gunman was desperately attempting to extricate himself from the floor of the cockpit where he had become wedged between the rear couch and the pilot�
�s seat. His head popped up just as the boat ploughed into a submerged sandbank, flipped end over end as if it was made from balsa wood, and then smashed against a palm trunk and burst into flames.
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ Almighty.’ Harold, his face latticed with blood, pulled himself up on to the rear banquette and stared across at the inferno. ‘What the fuck was all that about?’
‘I have no idea,’ Jake said. But, as he swung the boat round and headed back to Dennis Bentley’s boatyard, he was going to make damn sure that he found out.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
There was something about crocodiles that filled Tug Viljoen with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Perhaps it was their hypnotic calm, the self-awareness of the power and terrible savagery of which they were capable - yet unleashed only when necessary. He marvelled at such self-control, studied it intensely, tried to learn from it, because he knew that it was a characteristic he himself lacked and that, no matter how hard he tried, he could never achieve.
Still, he was able to console himself with the fact that crocs might have been around for sixty-five million years, but there was only one dominant species on this fucking planet right now.
For three days now, Viljoen had been watching a twelve-footer in the south lagoon. It basked, muscular and arrogant, on its rock, its mouth permanently twisted into a knowing smile, and it goaded Viljoen from behind the fencing. The other crocs in the lagoon behaved as they should; they got the few visitors who came to Croc World excited by wrestling and thrashing their tails in the water when he tossed chunks of raw meat at them. But not this one. This one - exquisitely powerful, implacably dangerous - clearly thought itself above the circus routine.
Which was why, in a yard up behind the maintenance sheds far from the prying eyes of the public, it now hung by its tail from a steel gibbet.
Trapping it had not been easy. The croc was too big and powerful to be simply chain-lassoed. Instead, Viljoen had to prepare a noose trap, a sturdy metal frame dug into the ground at the edge of the lagoon and baited with freshly killed reedbuck. It had taken time, but finally the succulent carcass had proved too much of a temptation for the croc and it had lunged for it. The spring mechanism popped, snaring the monster by its front and back legs. Viljoen had then dragged the croc slowly up and down the path between the lagoons, chained and muzzled and hooked to the back of a quad bike, before taking it to the yard. The object was to humiliate it, to show the other crocs who was boss.
Certainly, the big croc was not so arrogant now, Viljoen noted with some satisfaction as he slipped a stiff leather glove on to his right fist and adorned it with a brass knuckleduster. For more than an hour, it had thrashed frantically against its bindings, smashing its armour against the steel post, trying to gain purchase on the metal chains around its tail with its long jaws. It had been strong all right. But now it hung exhausted and motionless, its jaws slightly agape, its dwarfish legs spread-eagled and useless.
Viljoen approached it, flexing his fingers in the confines of the glove, feeling the brass pinching across his knuckles. The first punch sank deep into the croc’s unprotected abdomen, doubling the creature up. As the jaws snacked blindly at him, Viljoen punched and punched again until his rhythm was metronomic and he was barely conscious of anything other than the sound of his fist against the leathery underbelly.
Only when the creature was dead did he stop, staring with fascination at the wounds he had created with his own hands and the cold reptilian blood he had spilled over his own bare chest, arms and face.
Now he felt better.
For the last two days, Viljoen’s mood had been Stygian, thanks largely to an unexpected visit from some uppity bitch from Customs & Excise in Mombasa wanting to see details of his livestock transactions as part of an investigation into wildlife poaching. She had got right up his nose with her hectoring. Who the hell did she think she was coming down here and telling him what to do? What did she know about anything? Had she spent fourteen years in the South African army? There was a big difference between swanning around with a clipboard and providing the thin white line between civilisation and kaffir anarchy in Jo’burg.
No, there were too many pen-pushers like her pulling rank these days, Viljoen thought acidly. She was no different to the brassnecks who had taken over South Africa in the bleak years following Mandela’s release, the accession of kaffir rule and the formation of the laughable Rainbow Nation. They didn’t have a clue about the real world either; all they cared about was tokenism and looking good.
But then they weren’t up in Gauteng five years after the great revolution, when a thousand screaming kaffirs were smashing windows, torching cars, looting shops and throwing bricks at anyone with a white face.
He had been there. Sergeant First Class P. T. Viljoen and the rest of the thin white line. Ninety-six of his men had ended up in hospital that day, one on life-support. CCTV caught Viljoen beating one kaffir looter with his rifle butt outside a burning electrical shop.
Guess who felt the wrath of the Rainbow Nation!
‘Sorry, Viljoen,’ the brassnecks had told him, ‘but they’ve got the tape. It could be embarrassing.’
And that was it: fourteen years of loyal service to the military down the pan, just like that.
There’d been a sop, of course. Just to soften the blow a little. Somebody knew a friend of a friend who had a rundown croc park that, with a little bit of military-style organisation, could be something of an earner. Oh, and one other thing: the croc park was in Kenya. Was he interested?
Did he have a choice? The only alternative employment for white South African soldiers was bodyguarding kaffirs in suits, and that was one irony too far as far as Viljoen was concerned. No, he was interested all right. He’d go to Kenya, run the croc park and fuck the lot of them.
After the Customs bitch had left, Viljoen had gone through his five-strong workforce like a dose of salts, making their lives even more miserable for the rest of the day. After that, he had gone to a whorehouse on Mbaraki Road in Malindi and drunk a bottle of Pusser’s Navy Rum, while some scrawny mulatto with a Caesarean scar tried in vain to give him a hard-on. Hitting her hadn’t made him feel any better. He’d lain awake all night in his caravan, seething about the injustices in his life.
His mood had just gone downhill from then, exacerbated by a dull thump in the back of his head that wouldn’t go away. It didn’t help either that a dozen of the crocs were showing signs of skin disease, or that two of his staff had run off while he’d been in Malindi. Strung out on Tylenol and copious mugs of strong coffee laced with rum, Viljoen had nearly lost it on two occasions with the three that remained. He’d had one of them - a rabbit-eyed teenager whose job was to paint the sheds - up against a wall by the throat. His fist had been cocked and it was only the pathetic entreaties of the two other staff that had prevented him pulling the trigger and knocking the boy’s head off.
The visit of Harry Philliskirk that morning had provided a pleasant enough diversion, and he thought real progress had been made regarding the pressing business to which he had to attend. But the banter and the wacky baccy hadn’t changed his mind about killing the arrogant croc once Harry had left.
Only now that it was done, Viljoen noted with satisfaction, had his headache finally subsided.
Yes. He most definitely felt better now.
But his good mood would not last for long.
As he walked back to his caravan to change out of his bloody clothes, the holstered cell phone attached to his belt began ringing. He answered it with a bad-tempered grunt.
‘I take it you’ve heard what your trained monkeys have done!’ the caller said in a voice that was nudging the shrill upper reaches of hysteria.
‘What the fuck are you talking about, Captain?’
‘They’ve only gone and taken pot-shots at some fucking Mombasa policeman!’
Viljoen stopped walking and grimaced with irritation. ‘Like I said: what the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Is he dead?’
‘No.’
‘Too bad.’
‘But the monkeys are. They drove their boat straight into a tree. Burned to a crisp.’
‘Then what’s the problem?’
There was an audible gasp as the caller sucked air into his lungs. ‘The problem? Jesus Christ, Viljoen - apart from the fact there is now a detective wondering why someone wants him dead, Bentley’s daughter was there!’
‘So what?’
‘What if your monkeys had killed her? She’s an American citizen, for God’s sake! You’re talking about an international incident! The last thing we want is the FBI and the CIA crawling over everything. ’
‘My monkeys?’ Viljoen snapped. ‘’Scuse my ignorance, Captain - but why do you keep calling them my monkeys?’
‘They worked for Kili. And Kili works for you, right?’
Viljoen paused. ‘I don’t know anything about this.’
‘Well, you’d damn well better find out and do something about it pronto.’
‘Are you threatening me, Captain?’ Viljoen said menacingly.
There was a bark of laughter. ‘What difference does it make? If things go belly up round here, then we’re all dead men. All of us, Viljoen. Including you.’
‘You worry too much.’
‘Do I? Well, for your information, our friend Whitestone has just been in touch. He wants us to arrange another shipment.’
This took Viljoen by surprise. ‘But the next one isn’t due until next month.’
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