had been the junior member on the team of uniforms backing up the detectives. She had actually been outside the block of flats where the man lived, standing by the police bakkie when the raid went in. The man was living in a first-floor apartment and when the sledgehammer took his door off its hinges, the man ran through to the back bedroom and jumped over the balcony railing, landing hard on the ground not ten metres from where she was standing. The man was holding an American forty-five automatic, a canon of a gun, and he aimed it right at her chest as he dragged himself to his feet. Sannie fumbled for her own pistol, which was still holstered, and the man pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
Her partner, a sergeant approaching retirement who had been assigned to look after the new girl, was faster than she on the draw and put the dealer down with two bullets in the chest.
Sannie remembered the shock of the incident, of how she had fought off the tears all day until she had gone home and crumbled in Christo’s arms. She had thought about giving up her job, but her husband, then also still in uniform, had told her she must be blessed. She didn’t think of herself as bulletproof, but the gangster’s misfire had taught her always to be ready. She and Tom trudged up the dune behind the sergeant major.
‘Please, God,’ she said to herself, ‘let this work out okay for Tom and for Robert Greeves. Tom deserves this. He’s a good man.’
Fraser knelt in the shadows, in a depression between two dunes, and pulled his gasmask from its pouch. Around him, the other members of the main assault team were doing the same.
He did a quick communications check to make sure he could send and receive with the mask on. They would hit the house with flash-bangs — stun grenades that produced a non-lethal but sense-shattering explosion of noise and smoke — and CS, or tear gas, grenades as soon as the entrances were breached. Greeves would suffer as much as the terrorists from the shock and the chemicals but, unlike his captors, he would live.
‘All teams, this is Dagger niner, confirm you are in position.’
‘Dagger one, roger, over.’ The blocking force and snipers were ready.
‘Dagger two, roger, over,’ said the commander of the second assault team, which would enter the house through the back door. Fraser was leading the assault team that would blast its way in through the front door of the house, on the beach side, and smash the window of the room where Greeves was being held.
‘Dagger niner, this is one, over.’
Fraser tensed. He had been just about to give the order to move. ‘Dagger one, this is niner. What is it, over?’
‘We’ve got movement at the second window from the right at the rear. Shadows on the curtain, over. One X- ray. Looks like he was taking a peek, over.’
Fraser frowned. ‘Roger, one. You know the drill when the assault goes in. If you see movement and you’re not going to hit one of the assault team, then take him out. Do you understand, over?’
This was Forsythe’s first real operation, even though he had practised his role in dozens of training exercises. Fraser knew he had failed to mask the irritation in his voice, but they all knew the rules of engagement and what was expected of them.
‘Roger, niner. Dagger one, out,’ the chastised captain replied.
‘All teams, this is Dagger niner. This is it. Stand by, stand by …’
Sannie heard the scream and Tom looked at her, confirming he’d also heard the inhuman sound.
‘Bastards,’ White muttered under his breath.
There was the noise again. A high-pitched yelp followed by grunting. Surely, she thought, it couldn’t be. She shook her head. No, she was right. She’d heard that sound a thousand times before — from as far back as she could remember, growing up on the banana farm.
‘Sergeant Major,’ Sannie said, tugging on the sleeve of his black jumpsuit.
‘Not now, ma’am.’ He turned to her, his annoyance plain. ‘OC’s just about to give the word to go in.’
‘No, wait, that noise, it was…’
‘Stand by, stand by. Go!’
At Fraser’s command two men from each of the assault teams broke cover and ran, bent at the waist, to the front and rear doors. Each carried a small charge of plastic explosives covered with strong double-sided tape. They slapped the devices on the doors near the locks and activated the detonators. The method-of-entry men flattened themselves on either side of each door, and Fraser and his men, and the members of Dagger three, were on their feet and moving as the explosions shattered the balmy calm of the humid night.
Birds squawked and took to the air, but their screeches were drowned out by commands and the sound of shattering glass, closely followed by the boom of exploding stun grenades. Each bang was accompanied by a flash of blinding white light that lit the surrounding dunes. Fraser and his men had tinted lenses on their gasmasks and radio earpieces and ear defenders to protect them from the horrific sound and light show.
As they had rehearsed on the quick dry-run before they left Hoedspruit, one of Fraser’s men was kneeling with a cut-down aluminium ladder by the window to Greeves’s room. Smoke from the entry blast billowed from the opening and one of the men tossed a stun grenade inside. Fraser put a foot on the middle rung and hurled himself in as the grenade detonated.
Fraser landed, catlike, on his feet in the smoke-filled room and heard the terrible, wailing sound again. It disorientated him as he lifted his MP-5 and scanned the room with the aid of the torch fixed to the stubby barrel. ‘Robert Greeves! We are British forces come to rescue you!’ Fraser heard the rest of the team coming through behind him and the gut-thumping boom of another flash-bang going off somewhere else in the house.
Two shots were fired and someone swore from the corridor.
Fraser saw the bed through the smoke and something was writhing on it, screaming its head off.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Fraser swore, and his mother would have slapped him if she’d heard him, but that was the least of his worries right now. ‘It’s a bloody…’
‘Monkey. I’m telling you, that noise we heard was a monkey,’ Sannie said as she and Tom ran, side by side, towards the gutted, smoking house, hard on the heels of the burly Warrant Officer White.
‘Bloody cock-up,’ she heard White muttering as he listened in to the radio transmissions. ‘Stay here, ma’am, Mr Furey.’
‘Bollocks,’ Tom said, brushing past him ignoring the man’s outstretched hand.
Sannie followed Tom, leaving White standing there in the open, shaking his head as he spoke into his radio.
Troopers were emerging from the house now, removing their gasmasks. One started to laugh out loud, but White barked at him to shut his gob. The man complied immediately.
Sannie and Tom walked through the splintered, smoking remains of what had been the front door. The lounge area, furnished only with a couple of upturned wooden chairs, was empty, but the smell of cordite and smoke was strong in the air. Along with something else.
‘Monkey kak,’ Sannie said as Tom wrinkled his nose.
‘How? It can’t be.’
‘I’m telling you.’
They turned right into the hallway and Sannie waved her hand in front of her face to clear the air. From the room where Greeves had supposedly been held, the shrieking and screaming continued.
When they walked in, Jonathan Fraser was standing at the foot of the bed, gasmask off and sub-machine gun hanging limply from his right hand. One of his men had lit a cigarette and the other was standing there looking down at the pathetic little creature writhing in fear.
‘Told you,’ Sannie said, though without a trace of triumph in her voice.
Strapped to the bed with plastic cable ties was a grey and white vervet monkey. The little primate was fully grown, though still only about a metre long when fully stretched out, as it was. It bared its sharp pointy fangs at them from its dark face and continued to screech.
‘Just fucking shoot it, boss,’ one of the men said to Fraser.
Fraser seemed completely dumbstruck.
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Sannie said. ‘Give me your knife, soldier, and stand well back. All of you. Shame, this poor little thing is half out of its mind.’ The big, tough military men all heeded her advice and took a pace back.
Sannie reached down and deftly sliced through the ties securing the monkey’s feet. It flipped itself over backwards and tried to use its tiny humanoid feet alternately to scratch at her and gain purchase on the bare bed
