springs. Sannie grabbed its tail and hoisted it up off the bed, quickly slicing one of the two hand restraints. ‘Make room for it. Clear the doorway and the windows. This’ll be very quick.’
Sannie was right, and even she gave a little yelp and jumped back as she cut the final restraint. She just managed to get her wrist out of the way of the monkey’s mouth, though she was right in thinking that its main priority was to flee rather than fight. With a speed that left all of them surprised, the vervet went flying out the broken window and into the night. ‘How many others?’ she asked.
The man who had suggested killing the vervet answered. Fraser still seemed in a state of semi-shock. ‘Three. They were roaming around the house. One of the boys put a bullet in one of them — in its arm, he reckoned — but the other two were too quick. They scarpered right past us.’
Sannie shook her head. ‘Poor little thing. He’ll probably live, though. I’ve seen vervets getting around with only one leg and one arm after they’ve been caught on electric fences and — ’
‘For Christ’s sake, woman,’ Fraser said, ‘I don’t give a flying fuck about the bloody monkeys!’
‘Cool it,’ Tom said.
Fraser turned on him. ‘Don’t you tell me to fucking cool it. This is all your fault. Hear me? This was a fuck-up from the beginning and you’re the one who caused it.’ Fraser’s face was reddening, his eyes bulging. He pointed at Tom’s chest, but Tom stood his ground and said nothing.
Fraser took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
Tom looked at Sannie. ‘We need to get word to Alfredo. Tell him to get his roadblocks set up early. It’s almost first light.’
She nodded, but she could see Tom was just going through the motions. ‘I’ll go find Sarel and get him to take us to our car in his four-wheel drive. There’s not much we can do here now.’
‘Thanks,’ Tom said. ‘Major, if you’ll excuse us. It’s not over for us just yet.’
‘Oh, yes it bloody well is,’ Fraser said.
20
The detective in Tom wouldn’t let him wallow in self-pity at the outcome of the raid — he would leave that to Fraser. He almost felt sorry for the SAS major. A mission that might have written him into the history books would now be remembered as a tragic farce.
Tom was beyond considering his or anyone else’s reputation or career. He had already resigned himself that he would be out of a job by the time he returned to England but that couldn’t shake him from his one remaining task — to find Robert Greeves, dead or alive. It had grown even firmer in his mind while he waited at the foot of the dunes for the assault boats to arrive. He had sinned and he would not be forgiven — by himself as much as anyone else — until he found Greeves. The set-up by Carla, the chase, and now the cunningly cruel decoy that had thrown them off the terrorists’ trail, had become personal. He had been made to look a fool from start to finish. It was as if the terrorists were baiting him and rubbing his succession of failures in his face.
It was going to stop. Although he wouldn’t admit it aloud, and quickly suppressed the errant thought before it even fully formed, it didn’t really matter if Greeves was dead or alive. The men who had done this would pay.
He walked down the corridor to the bathroom. In a corner he saw a piece of crumpled newspaper with what looked like human hair on it. Other strands of grey and black were scattered about the floor. He recalled that Greeves’s head had been shaved for the video. Tom had brought half-a-dozen zip-lock plastic bags with him from their hire car. Sannie had bought them at a service station in Mozambique to store any leftover food from their meals. He turned a bag inside out and grabbed a handful of hair. It might not prove anything other than that Robert Greeves had indeed been in the house, but everything counted in an investigation. He recalled the crime scene investigator’s mantra — details, details, details.
He saw the bloody footprints on the polished concrete floor, in the bathroom and leading down the hallway. He supposed they were Bernard’s, but there was only one set. Bernard had said that when he had spoken to Greeves in his room, the minister’s feet had been bloodied, like his own. Had the terrorists put shoes on Greeves to walk him to the bathroom, or had they cleaned up after they had shaved him? If so, why had they left the newspaper with his hair on it sitting on the floor? He mentally filed away his observation and wished he had brought his notebook with him. He’d write down these thoughts later.
The stink of the place assaulted his nostrils. As a uniformed bobby he’d once been called to a bedsit in Islington where an old lady had died in her sleep but hadn’t been missed for days. It was summer and when they’d opened the door he’d had his first whiff of a decomposing human body. The monkey smell wasn’t nearly as bad but it was rank all the same.
How long had the animals been in there? he wondered. It was four hours, give or take, since Bernard had made his escape. The terrorists had worked quickly to capture the primates and ensconce them in the house before escaping. They must have known that the rescue team would have heat-sensing equipment. It was a brilliant ploy. The monkeys would show up as human-like on the infra-red radar, but only a very skilled interpreter might have noticed that the creatures were too small to be men.
He had been duped, and he felt stupid about it. If he had let Sannie come with him on his first recce she would have recognised the monkeys’ screams, which he had thought was Greeves being tortured, immediately. If he and Sannie had been allowed to bring the target under surveillance while they waited for the assault troops, she could have called off the raid sooner and they could have been back on the terrorists’ trail. If, if, if. They might have bought themselves another hour, but would that have been enough? Probably not.
Alfredo had no roadblocks operating after dark, so the terrorists were at least three hours ahead of them. On reasonable roads, that could be three hundred kilometres by now. The next move, unfortunately, was up to them.
‘Blood!’ Tom heard the voice from the room next to the one in which Greeves and the hapless monkey had been imprisoned. ‘Buckets of it.’
Tom walked into the room. Two black-suited troopers were shining a torch on the floor, illuminating a large bloodstain. ‘Can you move away, please.’ Tom dropped to one knee. The blood had pooled and then, judging by the adjoining smear, the body had been dragged a short distance. Using his Surefire torch, Tom focused on an imprinted pattern in the dried blood near the end of the drag mark. He guessed something fibrous — a blanket, perhaps — had been laid down, and the body rolled into it.
The trooper was wrong about the amount of blood. Not buckets — not even half a pail, in fact. Tom reckoned it was more like a pint, half a litre, give or take. It always looked like there was more of it than there was. He looked up from the floor to the walls. Nothing — no blood spattering.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ one of the soldiers asked his mate.
Tom stood and swallowed hard. Although the soldier’s estimate was way out, there was too much blood for it to be from a monkey’s arm wound.
‘Sir!’ another voice called out.
‘What now?’ Fraser asked. He walked past the open door to the room in which Tom and the others stood.
Tom followed the major out into the hallway and to the kitchen. On a scratched laminate benchtop was a small grey-coloured box. ‘What’s that?’ he asked no one in particular.
‘It’s a portable video playback monitor. I’ve got one at home for my digital camera,’ the soldier who had found the device said. ‘Do you think it might be booby-trapped, boss?’
Fraser strode across the kitchen and grabbed the box. The young soldier took an involuntary pace backwards, but nothing happened.
Tom thought the trooper was right to be concerned and he was worried by the wild look in Fraser’s eyes. Was the man so incensed by their failure that he had given up caring about the possibility of injury to himself and his men — as well as ignoring all protocols about fingerprints and evidence?
Fraser flipped open the player’s screen, placed it back on the counter and pushed play.
Nick Roberts’s tortured face appeared on the camera. Tom screwed his eyes shut for a second, then forced himself to watch. Bernard had talked him through the scene he had witnessed on the tape, but nothing could have prepared Tom for the actual moving images of his former colleague’s execution.
