Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  The plot had been used as a rubbish dump. There were piles of garbage. A broken bottle or jagged piece of scrap iron could cut through the canvas and rubber boots he wore. He picked his way with care.

  Fifty feet from the fence he laid down the ladders and crouched behind a rusty car body. He studied the depot. There were no lights burning in the warehouse, no floodlights illuminating the fence. That seemed odd.

  “Too good? Too easy?” he asked himself, and crept closer. The only light was in the guardhouse at the front gate. It gave him sufficient back lighting with which to examine the fence. He saw at once that it was not electrified, and he could discover no trip-wire for an alarm system.

  He moved stealthily to the corner-post at the rear of the property. If there were an infri alarm system, the eye would be mounted here.

  Something white gleamed on top of the post, but on closer inspection he realised that it was the bleached skull of a chacma baboon, and he grimaced. He felt vaguely uneasy as he went back to fetch the ladders from where he had left them beside the wrecked car.

  Back at the corner of the fenced area, he settled down to watch for a guard making his rounds. After half an hour he had convinced himself that the fence was unguarded.

  He moved in. The quickest and safest method of entry would have been to use the wire-cutters, but if possible he wanted to leave no trace of his visit. He extended both ladders to their full length. Then steeling himself for the squeal of a hidden alarm, he propped one of the ladders against the concrete corner-post.

  He let out his breath when no alarm sounded.

  Carrying the second ladder, he scaled to the top of the fence. Balancing on the top rung, leaning backwards to avoid the offset barbed wire on the summit, he swung the spare ladder over and inwards.

  He had intended lowering it carefully on the far side, but it slipped from his grip. Although it fell on grass, which cushioned the impact, the sound was like the report of a .357 magnum in his own ears. He teetered on the top of the ladder, his nerves screwed tight and waited for a shouted challenge or a shot.

  Nothing happened, and after a minute he breathed again. He reached into the front of his clothing under the polo-neck jersey, and brought out the roll of foam rubber which he used as a pillow when sleeping under the stars. It was an inch thick, just enough to pad the top strand of barbed wire. He spread it carefully over the top of the fence.

  He took a firm grip between the spikes of the wire with his gloved hands and rolled smoothly over, dropping nine feet to the lawn on the far side.

  He broke his fall with a forward somersault and crouched low, listening again, peering into the darkness. Nothing.

  Quickly he set up the second ladder against the inside of the fence, ready for a speedy retreat. The unpainted aluminium gleamed like a beacon to catch the eye of a patrolling guard. Nothing we can do about that, he told himself, and crossed to the side wall of the warehouse.

  He slipped along the wall, thankful for the darkness, and reached the corner. He crouched there for a minute, listening. Somewhere far away a dog barked, and there was the distant sound of a locomotive shunting in the railway yards. Apart from that, nothing.

  He glanced round the corner, and then crept down the long back wall of the warehouse. There was no opening here, except for a single row of the skylight windows very high up under the caves of the saw-backed roof, at least thirty feet above him.

  Ahead he made out a small shed in the gloom. it was attached to the rear wall of the warehouse, but its roof was much lower than that of the main building. As he approached it, he became aware of a faint but foul odour, like guano fertiliser or untanned hides.

  The smell was stronger as he circled the shed, but he thought little of it. He was studying the shed. There was a downpipe in the angle where the shed’s wall joined that of the main warehouse. He tested the pipe with his weight, and then went up it easily, hand over hand.

  Within seconds he was lying stretched out on the roof of the shed, looking up at the row of skylights in the main wall now only ten feet above him. Two of the panels stood open.

  From the bag in the small of his back he brought out a coil of nylon rope and quietly tied a Turk’s head knot in one end to give it weight.

  Balancing on the peak of the shed’s roof he flicked the rope out and then got it swinging in an easy circle. With a snap of the wrist he shot the weighted knot upwards. It struck the jamb between the two open panels and then dropped back in a tangle around his shoulders. He tried again with the same result. At the fifth attempt the knot dropped through the open skylight, and immediately he tugged and it whipped back and made three natural turns around the jamb. He pulled back hard and the wraps held. Keeping pressure on the line he began to climb.

  He used the rubber soles of his canvas boots for purchase against the unpainted asbestos wall, and went up with the agility of a monkey. He had almost reached the windows when he felt the end of the line start to unravel. With a sickening lurch he dropped back a foot and then it held again. Daniel gathered himself and lunged upwards. A gloved hand over the bottom frame of the open skylight steadied him.

  He hung thirty feet above the ground, his feet kicking and slipping against the wall and the steel frame cutting into his fingers, even through the glove. Then with another convulsive effort he flung his right hand up and got a double grip. Now with the strength of both arms he was able to draw himself up smoothly and straddle the frame of the skylight.

  He took a few seconds to catch his breath and listen for any sound from the dark interior of the building, then he unzipped the bag and groped for the Maglite flashlight. Before he left the hotel room he had screwed a red plastic shade over the lens.

  The shaft of light which he shot downwards was a discreet -ruby glow that was unlikely to attract attention from outside the building. Below him the warehouse floor was piled with towers and walls of packing cases in a multitude of sizes and shapes. Oh no! he groaned aloud. He had not expected such abundance. It would take a week to examine all of them, and there were four other bays to the warehouse complex.

  He flashed the torch-beam down the wall. The corrugated cladding was fixed to a framework of intricately welded angle iron. The frames formed an easy ladder for him to reach the cement floor thirty feet below. He swarmed down and switched off the flashlight.

  Swiftly he changed position in the darkness. If a guard was creeping up on him he wanted to confuse the attack. He crouched between two cases, listening to the silence. He was about to move again, when he froze.

  There was something, a sound so small that it was just within the range of his comprehension, he felt it with his nerve ends rather than truly heard it. It ceased, if it had ever been.

  He waited for a hundred beats of his racing heart but it did not come again. He switched on the torch and the light dispelled his unease.

  He moved softly down the aisle between the masses of trade goods and bales and crates. He had seen the pantechnicon parked in the end bay. That’s the place to start, he assured himself and he sniffed the dark air for the smell of dried fish.

  He stopped abruptly and switched off the torch. Once again he had sensed something, not definite enough to pin-point, not loud enough to be a sound, just a premonition that something was close by in the darkness. He held his breath and there was a whisper of movement, or of his imagination. He could not be certain, but he thought it might be the brush of stealthy footfalls perhaps, or the gentle sough of breathing.

  He waited. No. It was nothing but his nerves. He moved on down the dark warehouse. There were no interior walls in the building, only pillars of angle iron supporting the roof, separating the spaces between each of the bays. He stopped again, and sniffed. There it was at last. The smell of dried fish. He went forward more rapidly, and the smell was stronger.

  They were stacked against the end wall of the furthest bay, a high pile of sacks, reaching almost to roof level. The smell was strong. Printed on each sack were the words: Dried fis
h.Product of Malawi. together with a stylised rising sun emblem with a crowing cockerel surmounting it.

  Daniel groped in his bag and brought out a twelve-inch screwdriver. He squatted before the pile of fish sacks and began to probe them, stabbing the point of the screwdriver through the weave of the jute sacks, and then working it around to feel for any hard object packed beneath a layer of dried fish. He worked quickly, five or six quick stabs to each sack as he passed, reaching up to the sacks above his head, and then scrambling up the pyramid to reach the summit.

  At last he stopped and thought about it. He had presumed that the ivory would be packed inside the fish sacks, but now he reconsidered and discovered the fallacy of his original theory.

  If Ning Cheng Gong had indeed transferred the ivory from the refrigerator trucks to Chetti Singh’s pantechnicon, then there certainly would not have been the opportunity to repack it in the sacks and seal them during the few hours before Daniel had intercepted Chetti Singh on the Chirundu road. The very best they could have done was to lay the ivory on the floor of the cargo bed and pile the fish sacks over it.

  Daniel clucked his tongue with annoyance at his own impetuosity. Of course, the fish sacks were too small to contain the larger tusks of the hoard, and they would make an impossibly flimsy packing in which to smuggle the ivory out of Africa to its final destination, wherever that might be. The heavy pointed tusks would surely work their way through the outer layer of fish and rupture the woven jute sacks. Damn fool.

  Daniel shook his head. “I had a fixed idea.”

  He flashed the shaded ruby beam of the torch about, and his nerves jumped tight. He thought he saw something big and dark move in the shadows at the extreme range of the beam, the glint of animal eyes, but when he steadied the torch and stared hard, he realised that it was his imagination again.

  “Getting old and windy,” he rebuked himself.

  He slid down the pyramid of fish sacks to the floor, then he hurried along the aisle between the mountains of goods. He examined the labelling on the packing cases as he passed. Defy Refrigerators, Koo Canned Peaches, Sunlight Soap Powder.

  Each case consigned to Chetti Singh Trading Company. It was all incoming cargo. He was looking for an outgoing cargo.

  Ahead of him he made out the shape of a fork-lift truck standing high on the loading ramp near the main doors. As he moved towards it he saw a large case balanced on the fork arms of the truck. Beyond it, almost blocking the ramp, was a high pile of identical cases. They were ready for loading on to the empty railway truck that stood waiting in the bay below the ramp.

  Obviously, this was an outgoing cargo and he almost ran down the length of the bay. As he approached he realised that they were traditional tea chests, with sturdy plywood sides and solid frames, bound with flexible steel straps.

  Then he felt an electric tickle of excitement lift the hair on his arms as he read the address stencilled on the side of the nearest chest:

  LUCKY DRAGON INVESTMENTS 1555 CHUNGCHING S ROAD TAIPEI TAIWAN

  “Son of a gun!” Daniel grinned happily. “The Chinese connection! Lucky Dragon. Lucky for some!” He crossed to the fork-lift truck and reached across to the controls. He clicked on the master switch and operated the controls. The electric motor putted and the chest rose silently.

  At head-height Daniel stopped it. He slipped beneath the suspended case.

  He did not want to leave any trace of his visit by interfering with the lid or sides of the case.

  Working between the forked arms of the trunk, he thrust upwards into the bottom of the tea-chest with the screwdriver.

  The plywood crackled as he punched out a circular opening just large enough to admit his hand. He found that the interior of the case was lined with a heavy-duty yellow plastic sheet that resisted his efforts to tear through. He paused to find the clasp-knife in his bag, and then slit out a flap of the sheeting.

  There was the familiar smell of dried tea leaves, and he began to dig into the compressed black vegetable mass, spilling the tea out on to the concrete floor. Soon he had dug into the full length of the screwdriver without encountering any alien object hidden in the case.

  He felt the first prickle of doubt. There were hundreds of tea-chests piled on the ramp; any of them could contain the tusks, or none of them.

  He widened the hole with a few more blows of the screwdriver, then he drove the steel point up into the mass of tea with all the strength of his doubt and frustration.

  It hit something solid with a force that jarred his wrist, and he almost shouted aloud with triumph. He ripped at the edges of the hole until he could get both hands into the chest, and he dug out lumps of tea that fell on to the ramp around his feet.

  Now at last he could touch the hard object buried in the tea.

  It was round and smooth. Crouching under the chest he twisted his neck to look up into the aperture, slitting his eyes against the soft rain of dried tea leaves that trickled from the hole. In the beam of the torch he made out the soft creamy alabaster gleam.

  With the point of the screwdriver he attacked the exposed surface of the object, stabbing and prising it, until at last a splinter lifted and he pulled it loose. It was the size of his thumb. “No more doubts,” he whispered, as he examined the sample and picked out the distinctive chicken-wire pattern of the ivory grain. “Now I’ve got you, you murdering bastards.”

  Quickly he stuffed the torn flap of plastic back into the hole to prevent any more tea spilling out on to the ramp. Then he swept up the fallen leaves and scooped them into his pockets. It wasn’t a very effectual job of tidying up, but he hoped that the loaders would be careless enough, not to notice anything amiss when they started work again in the morning.

  He went to the controls of the fork-lift and lowered the tea chest to its original place on the ramp. He flashed the beam of the torch around to make certain he had left no other evidence of his visit, and this time he saw it clearly. A great dark shape crouched at the edge of the ramp, watching him with eyes that glowed like opals even in the muted beam of the torch.

  As the light struck it the creature seemed to dissolve like a puff of smoke, almost supernatural in its uncanny stealth. Daniel recoiled instinctively against the side of the fork-lift, trying to probe the darkness with the torch.

  Then suddenly there was a sound that ripped across his nerve ends like an emery wheel. It echoed through the dark cavern of the warehouse and rang against the high roof. It was a hacking cadence, like a wood-saw cutting metal, and it set his teeth on edge. He knew what it was instantly, but he found it difficult to believe what he was hearing.

  “Leopard!” he breathed, and with a chill in his guts he realised his danger. All the advantage was with the beast. The night was its natural environment. Darkness made it bold; darkness made it aggressive.

  He pulled the red filter off the lens of the torch and now the bright white shaft of light sprang out across the warehouse. He swept it back and around, and he glimpsed the cat again. It had moved in behind him, circling in. That was the most hostile manoeuvre. The predator circles its prey before rushing in for the kill.

  As the light hit it, the leopard flashed away. With one lithe bound, it disappeared behind the wall of tea-chests, and its fierce chorus of hatred echoed through the darkness once again. “It’s hunting me!”

  Whilst he was warden of Chiwewe one of his rangers had been mauled by a leopard, and Daniel had been first on the scene to rescue him. Now he recalled vividly the terrible injuries the beast had inflicted.

  The other dangerous cat of Africa, the lion, does not have the instinctive knowledge of how best to attack the upright two-legged figure of a man. He will charge in and knock a victim down and then will bite and claw indiscriminately at whatever part of the man’s body he can reach, often gnawing and crunching a single limb until the victim is rescued.

  The leopard, on the other hand, understands the human anatomy. Baboons form a large part of the leopard’s prey, and it knows how to go
directly for the head and the vulnerable guts of the primate. Its usual attack is to leap on to its victim and hook into his shoulders with the front claws, while its back legs kick like those of a domestic cat playing with a ball of wool.

  The long talons, unsheathed, will disembowel a man with half a dozen swift kicks, stripping his guts out. At the same time the leopard sinks his teeth into the face or throat and with one front claw reaches over to hook the back of its victim’s scalp and tear it off the skull.

  Often the dome of the skull comes away with the scalp, like the top sheared off a softboiled egg, leaving the brain exposed. All this flashed through Daniel’s mind as the leopard circled him, its wild savage call echoing through the open bays of the warehouse.

  Still crouched beside the fork-lift, Daniel zipped his leather jacket tightly up under the chin to protect his throat and slid the nylon bag around from the small of his back to cover his stomach. Then he shifted the screwdriver to his right hand, and with his left swung the torch to cover the leopard’s menacing circles. “My God, he’s a huge brute!” Daniel realised, as he saw the true size of the cat. In the torchlight it was panther black. Bushlore has it that the dark-coloured cats are the most ferocious of the breed.

  It was impossible to hold the leopard in the beam of light. It was as elusive as a shadow. Daniel knew he would never make it back to where he had broken into the warehouse. It was too far to go with his back unprotected. The cat would be on him before he had covered half the distance. He flicked the torch beam away for a second, seeking another avenue of escape.

  The fish sacks. He saw the pyramid piled against the near wall, reaching as high as the windows, thirty feet above the warehouse floor.

  “If I can just reach the skylight,” he whispered. There was a long drop down the outside wall, but he had the nylon rope to lower himself at least part of the way.

  “Move!” he told himself. “You’re running out of time. It’s going to rush you any moment now.”