ask you for your help, but…’
The Afrikaner reached under his wide wood-topped bar and pulled out a nine-millimetre automatic pistol. It looked like a toy in his huge hands as he pulled back the slide and chambered a round. ‘We go now,’ he said, stuffing the weapon in the waistband of his shorts.
‘Tom,’ Sannie said as he turned to leave.
‘Yes?’
‘Be careful.’
The exhaustion and feelings of hopelessness that had started to cripple him in the stultifying heat of the camping ground at Xai Xai had disappeared, replaced with a continuous transfusion of pure adrenaline. Tom revved the throttle of the four-wheel-drive quad bike and followed Sarel down the steep incline of the sand dune.
The still-wet sand left in the wake of the receding tide felt as solid as concrete when they turned onto it and Tom gunned the bike to catch up with Sarel, whose curly hair looked even wilder as he accelerated.
So as not to alarm the occupants with the sound of engines so late in the night, they would leave the bikes a couple of hundred metres from the base of the dune where the track led to the old farmhouse. Sarel pulled his quad into the moon shadow cast by a tall dune and Tom parked behind him.
‘It’s about one kay from here. We go this way,’ he whispered, pointing upwards.
‘No, I go that way,’ Tom said, shaking his head. ‘Just give me the directions.’
Sarel looked as though he was about to argue, but Tom told him, ‘If you hear gunfire, get back and tell the others. Take Sannie back to the main road and tell her to set up a roadblock. If you want to use your gun then, be my guest, as I’ll already be dead.’
Sarel smiled. ‘Walk up the track for two hundred metres and you’ll see the farmhouse on the top of the next dune back from the ocean.’
Tom climbed the sandy pathway. He kept to one side, close to the cover of the low bushes that covered the dune.
Near the top of the dune he found a little-used side track leading off to one side and decided to take that rather than sticking to the main route. His luck was in. The detour took him to the top but allowed him to stay in cover. He thought the path must have once been a shortcut used by farm workers or fishermen. He crouched when he saw a light.
As his eyes adjusted he made out the angular form of the old Portuguese farmhouse. The light in one of the windows was weak. At first he thought it was from a lantern, but as he crept closer he saw that a curtain had been drawn across the window and the light was shining through it. A shadow flickered on the fabric, as someone passed between the source and the drape. Tom dropped to one knee again and nestled into some bushes.
His spirits soared — they were still in there. But then a piercing scream made him catch his breath. It was a shriek of pain the likes of which he’d never heard before, despite all the fights he’d seen and been involved in as a copper. ‘Bastards,’ he whispered. They were torturing Greeves. Perhaps they were trying to find out if Bernard had spoken to him before he left.
Tom risked moving a little closer and his every instinct told him to rush the place now, kick the bloody door in and nail the swine who were abusing a defenceless human being. He took a deep breath and forced his pulse rate down. Shuttleworth had not only given him a direct order, he’d been right about it.
From behind the trunk of a tree that stood nearly as tall as he was, Tom saw moonlight playing off the windscreen of a Toyota pick-up that had a canopy covering its rear compartment. The vehicle description had been spot on. He considered moving in and disabling the pick-up, but checking his watch told him he needed to be getting back with the updated information asap. He comforted himself with Sarel’s advice that it was four kilometres of hard driving through sand in and out of the farmhouse. The US Navy jet would be overhead soon, and if they got word that the abductors were leaving, Tom and Sannie could head them off before they reached the main road. He winced as he heard another screech from inside, then quickly retraced his steps back over the dune and down to the water’s edge.
‘They’re still there,’ he said to Sarel. ‘Let’s move.’
Tom sat his mobile phone on the bar and pressed the loudspeaker button so that by crowding around the device he, Bernard, Sannie and Sarel could all hear Major Jonathan Fraser’s voice tinnily coming through.
Fraser was dialling in from Hoedspruit, and the Defence Secretary and other senior military officers and bureaucrats were on the secure link-up from the Cabinet Office briefing rooms in Downing Street. Nicknamed COBRA, this was the government’s emergency response nerve centre.
Despite the presence of his superiors on the conference call, the major was running the virtual meeting. ‘Well done for getting eyes-on, Tom, but the FA-18 has already confirmed the same information — in a bit more detail.’
Tom tried to ignore Fraser’s condescending tone and held his tongue as the SAS man continued.
‘The Hornet’s FLIR — that’s Forward Looking Infrared camera to the civilians among us — picked up the heat signatures of four people in the house. One was stationary in a room — presumably, Mr Greeves still chained to his bed — and three X-rays moving about the house, quite briskly, according to the pilot.’
Sannie mouthed the word ‘X-rays’.
‘Bad guys,’ Tom whispered in explanation.
The major continued, ‘My concern is that they may be preparing to leave the house. This calls for a fast direct action. As we speak, the C-17’s engines are warming up and my men are enplaning. We will be in the air within minutes of the end of this briefing, so listen in and keep any further questions until the end.’
19
The plan, such as it was, had more holes in it than a poster of Saddam Hussein on the day after the invasion of Baghdad. Jonathan Fraser had been in the smoking, shell-shocked city that day and had seen a tyrant fall. He’d also been back twice to a war that seemingly had no end. He knew that the best of intentions, the finest of plans, sometimes backfired.
The other old military adage, Fraser recalled as he listened to the pilots of the C-17 chatting through the cans — the headphones he wore in the spare seat on the cockpit deck — was that no plan survived the first shot or the first ten minutes.
Despite his ingrained pessimism, something he proudly attributed to his Scottish heritage, the plan was as sound as anyone could have hoped for in the circumstances.
‘Dagger, this is Gunsmoke,’ came a Texan drawl through the headset. Lieutenant Junior Grade Pete ‘Frenchy’ Dubois was straight out of central casting, Fraser thought. The young American FA-18 pilot had a spiky gelled crew-cut and the chiselled looks of a Hollywood movie star.
‘Gunsmoke, this is Dagger, over,’ Fraser replied, keying his radio switch. Fraser had transferred control of the operation from Hoedspruit to the C-17 as soon as they were airborne. They were now orbiting at fifteen thousand feet over the Indian Ocean, just off the town of Xai Xai on the Mozambican coast, waiting for the last of the assets at Fraser’s disposal to get into position.
‘Dagger, I confirm target is still in position, no change. One soul down and hogtied, the other three moving around like they’re on speed, over.’
Fraser smiled to himself. The American’s laconic patter barely concealed his excitement. Fraser, too, was keyed. If he pulled this one off, it would be the biggest coup in the regiment’s long list of honours since Princes Gate, when counter-terrorist troopers had stormed the Iranian Embassy in London and liberated the hostages held there. Much of the SAS’s wartime and peacetime operations was so secret that few members of the British public knew of the elite force’s exploits — at least, in between sensationalist tell-all books by disaffected former members — but if this op was a success there would be media coverage and analysis of it for months to come. As much as he usually voiced contempt for former soldiers who wrote books about their time in the SAS, Fraser thought he might try his own hand at writing after this one. He hadn’t joined the army for the money but he had a weather eye on retirement. He might get the CO’s slot if they saved Greeves’s life, but if he didn’t a million quid in publishing royalties and newspaper extracts would be a good consolation prize. ‘Roger, Gunsmoke.’
‘Cheetah six, this is Dagger, send locstat, over,’ Fraser said into the radio.
