But the redoubtable Nazim al-Kassar wasn’t about to allow such piffling concerns to deter him. By the light of the rising sun he could make out some houses and buildings in the distance, a few hundred yards inland from the beach where verdant hills and fields rose up high above sea level.
He pointed. ‘This is a rural area. The people are all peasants, and look how green the land is. Which means there’ll be farmers everywhere, and farmers have large trucks and tractors and trailers for carrying all kinds of loads like manure and livestock. Those weigh a lot more than nine tons.’ Nazim’s confidence was authoritative, his knowledge of this place he’d never seen before absolute. He turned and swept his pointing finger across the beach. ‘The ground is all rock and shingle. We’ll have no problem getting a heavy vehicle down here to the boat. Then we’ll just load up the barrels and be on our way. All right?’
‘Whatever you say, boss.’
‘Shaykh, Jamshid, Mahmud, Dariush, hurry up to those houses and find a suitable vehicle while the rest of us stay here and guard the cargo. Steal it and bring it back here as fast as you can. If anyone gives you any trouble, kill them, but do it quietly.’ Nazim thought for a moment, then added, ‘In fact, bring back two suitable vehicles. We also need a car capable of carrying six men.’
‘Why do we need a car as well, Nazim?’
‘Because,’ Nazim explained as patiently as possible, ‘we can’t drive all the way to Paris in some shit-covered tractor. We wouldn’t make it halfway down the motorway before we were stopped. And none of us wants that. So our first priority is to get the cargo off the beach and transport it somewhere safe, not too far away, while six of us slip back to the port and collect the vans, so we can carry on to Paris like before. Hence the need for a reasonably large car that can carry two men up front and four in the back. Do you understand?’
They understood. It seemed like a fine plan.
Until they started trying to put it into action.
As instructed, Shaykh, Mahmud, Jamshid and Dariush shouldered their AK-47s and set off at a sprint towards the distant houses. A track from the beach connected with a narrow road that wound upwards through the hills and fields. They had only the vaguest notion of what a French farm might look like, but even so the very first property they came to looked promising. It was a pretty black-and-white traditional Normandy cottage with a neat garden filled with flower beds, a picket fence and a few scattered barn-sized outbuildings, one of which the four men were certain must contain the large truck or tractor and trailer they were looking for.
‘Be on your guard,’ Shaykh warned the others. ‘Any sign of trouble, we must end it fast.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Jamshid replied, pulling a face. ‘You heard what Nazim said. These people are just weak peasants. They won’t give us any problem.’
Unslinging their weapons they hopped over the fence and began hunting through the property. The first outbuilding they came to was a lean-to garage in which a tiny, bright red Citroën was parked.
‘Look, guys, the keys are in it,’ said Dariush, peering in the driver’s window. ‘We can steal it, easy.’
‘I’m not getting in that thing,’ Mahmud said, pointing disdainfully at the chromed ichthys Christian emblem stuck to the back. ‘Besides, we’d never get six of us inside.’ Which was a fair point, since the car could seat only four large adults at a pinch.
‘We could always steal this one and another as well.’
‘Then we’d have to steal three vehicles, not just two,’ Shaykh said. This was getting complicated.
Jamshid, who seemed to have assumed leadership of the group, shook his head and said, ‘Let’s do this properly. Keep looking.’
The second outbuilding was a large wooden shed that turned out to be a chicken house. No trucks, no tractors, no trailers. Scouting further, the terrorists spotted another property half a field away, which they suddenly realised looked much more like an actual farm than the black-and-white cottage. The blocky stone house was rather run-down and rough around the edges, surrounded by a dirty yard and a collection of much larger, purposeful-looking barns. Two chunky hardtop pickup trucks with jacked suspension and bull bars stood parked outside the farmhouse, hinting at the presence of more useful vehicles inside the barns.
‘We should check that place out instead,’ Jamshid declared.
But the moment he said it, they heard an angry yell from behind them. All four whirled around to see a middle-aged, overweight white man in a dressing gown and slippers, storming towards them from the cottage clutching a double-barrelled shotgun in his fists. Apparently, it wasn’t every day the locals woke up to find three Middle-Easterners and a Nigerian armed with assault rifles lurking in the garden. The guy seemed quite worked up about it, red in the face and shouting at them in French. ‘What in God’s name are you people doing on my property?’
At the sight of their weapons, the householder started yelling even more angrily, and levelled his shotgun at them. A loud blast split the morning air. Whether the guy had let the shot off accidentally due to nerves, or intentionally missed in the hope of scaring the intruders off, nobody would ever know. A fencepost four feet to Dariush’s left splintered in a hail of birdshot. The terrorists looked at one another. Nazim had said to keep it quiet, but it was too late for that now. All four of them raised their AK-47s, aimed at the old fat white guy and opened fire before he could get a second shot off. The simultaneous bursts of full-automatic gunfire were much, much louder than the shotgun boom. And much more accurate. A dozen or more high-velocity rifle bullets tore into the man’s chest, killing him instantly and hurling him flat to the ground.
‘I told you these peasants could cause us trouble,’ Shaykh said to his companions.
‘What do you expect from a Christian?’ Dariush sneered.
Before anyone else could reply, a woman burst out of the cottage. She was about the same age as the fat guy, wearing a nightdress. And screaming at the top of her voice as she ran a few steps and faltered at the sight of her dead husband lying in the dirt covered in blood.
They shot her, too. Bullets ripped at her nightdress and she tumbled backwards into a flower garden with a muted squawk.
By now the tranquillity of the rural Normandy morning was well and truly shattered. The sharp reports of rifle fire could easily be heard from the beach, where Nazim and the others were guarding the grounded boat. And they could certainly be heard from the house half a field away from the cottage.
The terrorists had been right in supposing that this was the home of real, actual farmers. Seven of them: four brothers called Jean-Luc, Jean-Étienne, Jean-Claude and Jean-Pierre Pasquinel and their three cousins Léon, Noah and Axel. All strong, rough-hewn and brawny country boys, aged between eighteen and thirty-one. The Pasquinel land covered twenty-nine hectares, enough to keep them busy, and had been in the family for eight generations. René Pasquinel had died some years back, leaving his sons to work the place and look after their mother. The cousins had joined them a while later; the most recent arrival was twenty-three-year-old Axel, currently on the lam after skipping bail over a petty misdemeanour.
Like all farmers the Pasquinel boys and their cousins had been up early that morning, and were finishing breakfast around the long farmhouse kitchen table when they were startled by the sound of gunfire coming from the Simonot place next door. ‘What the—?’ said Jean-Luc, the eldest, spilling his coffee as he jumped up from the table and went to the window to look.
Moments later, they were grabbing the hunting rifles that hung on racks near the door, and running outside. Jean-Luc and his brothers leaped into one of the pickups and went tearing out of the farmyard and across the field that separated their property from that of Maurice and Suzette Simonot. As they approached the cottage they stared in horror at the torn, bloodied bodies on the ground: Maurice sprawled out on his back near the barn, Suzette crumpled in the flower bed. Stunned shock quickly gave way to speechless anger as the brothers spotted four stranger
s, clutching what appeared to be Kalashnikov rifles, piling into the Simonots’ little bright red Citroën C1 and taking off in a hurry.
Jean-Luc whipped out his mobile phone to tell his eldest cousin Léon back at the house the barely believable news that a bunch of crazed killers with machine guns had just murdered their friends next door and stolen their car. Moments later, Léon, Noah and Axel were arming themselves with another rifle and two shotguns, leaping into the second pickup truck and hammering across the field to join the four brothers.
By the time the pickup trucks reached the road the killers had vanished. It took a couple of screeching wrong turns on the maze of country lanes before they realised that the fleeing perpetrators had been heading for the beach. ‘I see the fuckers!’ roared Jean-Pierre, pointing down the hillside at the little red dot of the car hammering along the rocky path. He skidded and turned back, the second pickup truck following right behind.
To their astonishment, as the pickup trucks hurtled down the track in pursuit, they saw there was a whole boatload of the bastards on the shore. The four killers had just got there, joining a group of at least another ten who were all similarly toting automatic weapons. There was no other possible explanation: this was surely the vanguard of the long-awaited invasion force, the one they’d been reading about on various websites, set to sweep through Europe and spread death and destruction. And the Pasquinel boys were the thin line of resistance.
Neither the brothers nor their cousins were the kind of people who were inclined to call the police at such moments of crisis. For generations the Pasquinel family, stretching back in time from their late father to his father to his father before him, had been used to sorting out their own problems. And the way France was going now, nobody trusted the authorities any more. Acquaintances in Paris had been shot at, batoned, tear-gassed, hospitalised and jailed in the riots. The Pasquinels and their cousins all harboured the same grievances against the police and the state as the protesters. No goddamned way were they going to call for help. Not to mention there was the fact that Axel stood to be arrested if the law caught up with him.
‘Lock and load, boys,’ Jean-Luc said, cocking his hunting rifle. ‘These motherfuckers are going down.’
It was 8.24 a.m. and the cool, misty October morning was about to warm up considerably.
Chapter 55
The Alpina blasted out of Le Havre and stormed up the D940 coastal highway at blistering speed. It was a route Ben knew well and had travelled often in the past, because the road would take them within a rifle shot of Étretat where he sometimes went kayaking and climbing the sheer white cliffs. He was so close to home, and yet he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this far from his objective.
Next to him in the passenger seat Roth was playing it cool and lounging in silence with his feet up on the dash. Ben had left the port without asking the American any more questions, but plenty of them were swirling around his head as he drove and he couldn’t hold them back any longer.
‘I’m going to need some answers, Tyler. Who were you talking to back there? Where are you getting fed this information?’
‘Now ain’t the time to go into all that,’ Roth said dismissively. ‘Oh, and don’t even thank me for getting you out of a hole just now. Didn’t your momma teach you not to bite the hand that feeds you?’
‘She also taught me not to trust people who keep too many secrets. You seem to make a habit of it. And get your feet off the dashboard.’
‘Touchy,’ Roth said, and straightened up in his seat with his head towards the window. The conversation appeared to be over. Ben was resolved to get the truth out of him later. For now, though, they had some distance to cover in as little time as possible and he needed to lay down all of the Alpina’s four hundred horsepower on the twisty coastal road without getting them killed. Big wide open fields zipped by on both sides, the hazy grey sea in the distance; now and then a village that forced him to scrub off some speed before he put his foot back down hard and the Alpina’s gauge needles soared in the dials. Every few minutes Roth was receiving a new text message from some mysterious source, and was reading them with a frown on his face and the phone angled away from Ben like a poker player’s cards. Ben bit his lip, fixed his eyes determinedly on the road and said nothing.
The Alpina rocketed past his old haunt of Étretat. He took the D11 and raced for the home stretch, through the pretty village of Bénouville and then jumping onto a minor road through a valley called the Fonds d’Étigue, running parallel with the coastline. It occurred to him that Roth must have received his tip-off from the same person who’d alerted them to the GIGN raid in Villejuif. But then, how did this person apparently know things the police didn’t even know yet?
At last, they were coming into Vaucottes. Ben had covered the thirty-eight kilometres from Le Havre in just over eighteen minutes, which would have been closer to fifteen if he hadn’t had to slow down for built-up areas. He cut through the narrow country lanes past the scattered homes and farms, heading towards the beach with still no idea of what Roth was leading them into. The bag of guns and ammunition was a reassuring presence on the back seat, ready for action in case they were about to stumble on a war zone. It certainly didn’t look like one. It looked exactly like a quiet little corner of the world that had existed trouble-free for the last seventy-odd years, ever since the final shot of the Battle of Normandy had rung out over the landscape.
But whatever had been happening here earlier that morning, it was all over now. As the Alpina hit the rough track down towards the sea and the beach came into view, they saw that it was empty.
Empty, apart from the Gendarmerie Airbus H-135 helicopter sitting on the shingle, a few metres away from a large boat that was grounded and lying at a tilted angle on dry land.
Roth said, ‘Shit.’ Ben braked the car to a halt on the track, tyres pattering on the rocks.
The police chopper seemed to have only just arrived on the scene, its fast-spinning rotors slowing to idle speed. The pilot and five passengers had climbed out and circled the grounded boat. Four of them were clambering aboard and crawling up the sloping deck to check out the contents of its hold.
‘These cops are worse than Texas yellowjackets,’ Roth grumbled. ‘Always buzzing around your head when they’re not wanted.’
The gendarmes were too far away and too preoccupied with what they’d found on the beach to have noticed the car on the track. Ben slammed into reverse and backed up a short distance to where they’d passed a sandy lane off to the left, which looked to him as though it climbed and snaked upwards towards the clifftop overlooking the beach. His guess was right. The rise of the land kept them hidden from below as they made their way up the incline. The track petered out and Ben went bumping and lurching through long yellowed grass and rocky ruts, coming to a halt a short distance from the cliff edge. He turned off the engine, grabbed the binoculars from the glove compartment and stalked from the car to find a good vantage point.
He didn’t have to search for long. About a million years ago part of the cliff had subsided to form a V-cleft and a long, jagged mound of rubble sloping down to the western end of the beach, like a staircase for giants. Flattened on his belly in the reedy grass of the cleft Ben had a perfect sniper’s view of the goings-on below. The chopper’s rotor blades had slowed almost to a standstill. The same four gendarmes were still at the grounded boat and seemed extremely interested in what was inside.
Roth joined Ben, moving through the stiff grass without making a rustle. He lay flat next to him and produced a mini-pair of binocs of his own, apparently out of nowhere.
‘Bet your ass, that there’s our pirate vessel. Looks like she’s been run aground. I can’t believe they had it all planned out this way. More likely they stole her from the port, right while we were sitting talking to Segal in his goddamned hotel room. Can you believe the fuckin’ audacity of these guys?’
Ben was seriously contemplating pointing his pistol at the American
and forcing the truth out of him. But he was too intent on what was happening down there to look away. The four cops had lifted out some of the contents of the hold and were obviously in a hurry to unload the rest. Ben could see why. The tide was coming in, each new wave rolling and foaming a little further up the shingle than the last. They didn’t have a lot of minutes before the water’s edge would be lapping at the boat.
As he watched, the cop down in the hold lifted up a shiny aluminium drum to pass to his colleague. It was obviously heavy. The second cop passed it along to a third, and the fourth set it down on the shingle next to the boat hull. Ben counted eight drums, with more to come. They looked like brewer’s beer kegs. Except as he and Roth both knew, what was inside them wasn’t beer.
‘And there’s our fentanyl,’ Ben muttered. ‘All nine tons of it, with any luck.’
Roth smiled one of his shark smiles. ‘It won’t be long before the cops figure out they’ve just made the largest drugs haul in history. As for Nazim, his bosses won’t be too pleased with him that he’s lost their merchandise. Looks like we derailed their plans, big time.’ He frowned. ‘The only question is, where’d the sonofabitch go?’
The remaining two cops weren’t at the boat. Ben scanned across to observe them. That was when he saw the unmistakable dark shapes on the beach and knew he was looking at dead bodies. Three of them. One lay curled up among the rocks about thirty metres from the boat, the other two a little way further up the beach. The binocs didn’t magnify enough to give much detail, but Ben was able to make out that two of the dead were Caucasian males, not old, maybe in their twenties. One of the gendarmes was examining the third body, which belonged to a dead African guy, lying face-up with his head thrown back and a beard like a bird’s nest jutting into the air. Lying on the shingle next to the corpse was a firearm with the unmistakable shape of an AK-47. A short distance away, the other cop was busy setting up a row of cones from the chopper and stretching police tape to cordon off the scene.
House of War Page 28