Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13) (26 page)

‘There,’ Khosa said, and swung up an arm to point towards the sunset.

It was a moment before Ben spotted the distant speck in the sky, but by then there was already no doubt in his mind what he was going to see up there. The aircraft was still a few miles away, gently dropping altitude as it droned closer. The speck grew larger as they watched, then larger still. Coming right towards them. Even at this distance Ben could tell it was a sizeable plane, a big flying tank of a thing, broad in its wingspan and much larger than Kaprisky’s sleek private jet. An aircraft of that size coming in to land in the middle of nowhere, in a desert of rubble and scattered brush miles from any kind of airport, should have been an unreal, improbable sight.

But Ben was realising what he’d missed before.

Now he understood what the disused compound really was. It was much more than just an old abandoned military base for embattled government or rebel forces to hole up in during a civil war nobody talked about any more. It was the lack of any kind of smooth, level, metalled runway that had fooled him into never twigging until now that the place was an airfield. The broad avenue between the facing rows of buildings wasn’t any kind of drill or parade ground. It had been hammered out and levelled into a rough landing strip. Nothing like the one that he, Jeff and Tuesday had landed on at Obbia, which looked like Heathrow by comparison. Nothing you could remotely call an airport, not even in African terminology.

And Ben hadn’t reckoned either on the kind of plane you could land on a rough, rutted strip of compacted earth in the middle of the arid, rock-strewn arsehole of nowhere.

He hadn’t reckoned on a Dakota. Two mistakes in one. He was angry with himself for not thinking of it before.

It was the sound that gave it away, even before he recognised it by sight. Nothing like the ear-ripping high-decibel screech and whistle of an incoming jet. The thrumming, clattering rumble of the approaching plane sounded like a thousand pneumatic drills all pounding away at once. It sounded exactly like what it was, the roar of twin nine-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engines driving a pair of massive three-bladed propellers towards them out of the falling dusk. It sounded like something out of World War Two.

Because it
was
something out of World War Two, literally.

The Douglas DC-3 Dakota, or ‘Old Methuselah’ as it was often called by the pilots who both loved and hated it, was like no other plane ever built. The first one had rolled off the production line at the Douglas factory in Santa Monica in 1935 and the last one just ten years later at the close of the war. But in that short production period it had become legendary as the most versatile and durable airliner ever made, and quickly found useful service all over the planet. It was the only airliner still flying that could take off and land on runways of dirt and grass, making it the hot ticket for developing countries everywhere. The landing distance it required was much shorter than modern airliners, and could take off in little more than half that. It was also one of the toughest warbirds ever made. It could go anywhere, in any weather. It could fly on one engine if needed. Ben had heard of one US Air Force Dakota during WWII that had been riddled with over three thousand shells from Japanese fighters and not only reached base safely but been put back in service just hours later, patched up with canvas and glue. Despite its supposed maximum passenger load of just thirty-five, a hundred Vietnamese orphans had been crammed on board one Dakota that had scraped out of Saigon under heavy fire during the city’s evacuation in 1975.

Ben had only ever seen two of them in his life, one in the air over Sierra Leone many years ago, and another smashed into a mountainside high up in the Hindu Kush, not far from the Khyber Pass near the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, pillaged and looted for anything the local militias could strip out of it and reduced to little more than a skeleton. But he knew that hundreds of these living dinosaurs were still in daily use in Third World countries everywhere even after seventy-odd years of hard service, and that you could still pick up a battered but sturdy example for a couple of hundred thousand US dollars.

Jean-Pierre Khosa had apparently done just that.

Do not underestimate me, soldier.
Ben was suddenly beginning to wonder if that was another mistake to add to his account. And he was wondering what other surprises the man had in store. It was a deeply uncomfortable thought.

The Dakota came down low and slow, a huge lumbering monster with the falling sun casting red glints along its fuselage, scarred and battered and dull olive green like the three helicopters in the compound, but dwarfing them completely in size. Over sixty feet long and almost a hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip. Its undercarriage was lowered, those two wheels so huge that they couldn’t be fully retracted below its wings, attached to massive hydraulic struts that canted forwards like the legs of an eagle swooping down on its prey.

The Dakota’s clattering roar filled Ben’s ears, and the hurricane from its propellers and slipstream filled the air with a storm of dust and loose particles of dirt whipped up from the sun-baked ground as it cleared the perimeter fence by a matter of feet and came down to earth in the broad open space between the buildings.

The huge wheels hit the dirt with a jarring crash and an explosion of dust. The aircraft juddered and bounced, the wings slewed at a crazy diagonal angle, and for a second Ben thought the pilot had come in too hard and fast, and that the starboard wingtip was going to plough a massive furrow into the ground and flip the whole plane over and round in a circle and tumble it over end to end, wreaking a giant trail of exploding carnage right through the middle of the compound.

But whoever was at the controls was a cool and experienced hand who must have done this a thousand times before. The Dakota dropped back from its erratic bounce into an even landing, its tail settling, its rear wheel touching down with hardly a bump. The aeroplane roared down the beaten-earth runway with its wings just a few yards clear of the buildings either side, making Ben and Khosa’s soldiers step back out of the great slap of wind and cover their eyes and noses against the choking dust. Khosa himself didn’t flinch as the giant wing passed right over his head. The Dakota roared on, past the parked helicopters and the fuel truck that Khosa’s men had, Ben now realised, tucked in close to the buildings to make way for its landing. The pilot backed off the throttle and the deafening roar of its engines rapidly subsided as the Dakota slowed.

Khosa watched with a beaming smile and his hands on his hips while the plane rolled by for another fifty yards, reached the open ground beyond the buildings and then began to taxi back round on itself in a wide circle, steering by its pivoting rear wheel, barely visible for the clouds of dust swirling around it like smoke. The Dakota rolled to a halt, stones crunching and popping under its gigantic front tyres. The engines shut down with a splutter, first one and then the other. The three-bladed props with their yellow-painted tips and silver nose-cones clattered to a standstill. The drifting dust began to settle back down to earth.

Khosa turned to face Ben, his demon’s face split by that beaming white smile of triumph. He pointed at the Dakota.

‘You want to know how we will return to my kingdom, soldier?’ Khosa said, laughing. ‘That is how.’

Ben looked at him. ‘I warned you. I hope you listened to me.’

‘Say goodbye to the world you have known, soldier. You are mine now. We leave at first light.’

Serena Beach

Mombasa

From where Eugene Svalgaard was lying fully clothed on the king-size bed, cellphone in hand, he was able to raise his head and peer through the glass doors and out over the balcony and the low-rise cluster of mock-thirteenth-century something-or-other luxury hotel complex to take in the whole mawkish picture-postcard thing that scads of dumb schmucks from all over the world paid good money to come see. Waving coconut palms against the balmy sunset. The surf rolling in over the ribbon of white sand that was the last land eastwards between here and … wherever. The hotel manager had told him a lot of couples came here to be married. Ha. Good luck to ’em. The stupid suckers would still be paying for it after they were divorced.

What Eugene was in fact raising his head off the bed to stare at through the glass windows and over the balcony was the infinite stretch of the Indian Ocean beyond. Somewhere out there was his diamond. The only possible reason why he’d have dragged his weary ass all the way to godforsaken fuckin’
Kenya
, for Chrissakes.

The long-distance call over, Eugene tossed the phone away and closed his eyes to digest the news that Sondra Winkelman in New York had just broken to him. Not good news, but hardly unexpected. It was the confirmation of what he’d already more or less accepted to be the case.

‘Well, there it is,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Shit happens.’

The rotten old harridan had just informed him that the wreckage picked by the navy destroyer USS
Zumwalt
off the Somali coast in the aftermath of the typhoon was now officially confirmed as belonging to the cargo of the MV
Svalgaard Andromeda
. Eighty miles east of where the
Andromeda
’s course should have taken it, the patrolling warship had winched aboard a floating forty-foot shipping container that was half-full of seawater, half-full of soggy electrical equipment bound for Mombasa.

The computers had done the rest. Every container transported anywhere in the world was logged with its own unique BIC code. BIC stood for ‘Bureau International des Containers’, a horrible bit of Franglais that would have language purists tearing their hair out in outrage, but which was nonetheless the name of the head office located in Paris where all such information was processed. The BIC code of the recovered container had been checked against the Svalgaard Line’s own data records, and there was absolutely no doubt any longer that the
Andromeda
was one of several vessels (though none of them anywhere near as large or valuable) that had fallen victim to the monster storm that had wreaked havoc up and down five hundred miles of the Somali coast.

As Sondra had gone on to notify him, the Svalgaard shipping line had already begun the long and painful proceedings to recoup their loss. Insurance company lines were buzzing. Salvage crews were already en route to locate the wreck. Less importantly, but even more of a chore for the Svalgaard executives, also underway was the process of contacting the relatives of the ship’s captain and crew to inform them of the tragic news that the vessel had been lost at sea, apparently with all hands. There would be the usual coolly corporate expressions of sympathy and commiseration.
Our thoughts are with you at this terrible time, you’ll get over it, they knew the risks, life goes on.
Not necessarily in those exact words, but that was the gist of it. Shit happens.

None of which was allocated much room in Eugene’s turbulent thoughts at this moment. He was far too consumed with his own private interests. Over the last few days his mind had been working through a sequence of logical twists and turns that would have bamboozled even him, if he hadn’t been so obsessively driven to find his way through the maze. It all went something like this:

If the
Andromeda
had indeed sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean with all hands, then the most obvious and immediate conclusion to draw was that Lee Pender had gone down with it. It wasn’t the idea of Pender being at the bottom of the ocean that had been giving Eugene heartburn. The guy was a Grade A shitsack and it was very unlikely that a living soul existed who would mourn his passing. What had been knotting Eugene up inside was the idea of the diamond being down there with him. Gone. Lost. Chances of recovery, virtually nil. Barring a miracle.

It got worse.

Because even
if
a professional marine salvage crew did manage to locate the sunken ship somewhere on the ocean bed at some indeterminate point in the future, and
if
one of their divers just happened to find the lost diamond down there among a million tons of wreckage, the possibility of preventing that lucky individual from a) reporting it to the authorities or b) more likely, simply pocketing it for himself, was even more outside Eugene’s control than the typhoon that had taken the ship down in the first place.

The way Eugene saw it, in such a case it would be infinitely preferable for the marine salvage diver to just quietly take the damn thing for his own retirement fund. Because
if
the authorities did by chance learn that the world’s currently most valuable and therefore hottest piece of stolen property, linked to a notorious quadruple murder, had been discovered on board a Svalgaard ship, and
if
some clever dick managed to put that information together with the little-known but not entirely undiscoverable fact that the ship’s owner happened to be one of the world’s most avid diamond collectors, then it didn’t take much imagination to see how the trail could lead straight back to Eugene’s door and wind up with him being locked away for the rest of his life. He’d rather the diamond was never found at all.

But those were only the most obvious conclusions. They weren’t the only conclusions. If they had been, Eugene would have been throwing himself out of the window around now. As it happened, he wasn’t.

In fact, he was smiling.

Because the glimmer of optimism that had first dawned on him back in Rome had steadily grown stronger since then. That single-minded ray of hope was what had been keeping him going, against all the odds, for one simple reason. Namely, the whole unthinkable worst-case scenario that would have had Eugene flinging himself to his death, or beating his own brains out against the wall, or spending the rest of his days in jail, all depended on Pender having gone down with the ship. But there was a flaw in that assumption. It failed to take into account one very crucial factor, which was the fact of Eugene’s prior suspicions back in Rome that his man might be playing a tricksy little game with him. The weird call on the sat phone. Pender hanging up on him like that. Something not quite right about the way the guy was acting.

If Pender hadn’t been a dirty thieving crook, Eugene wouldn’t have given him the job in the first place. Then again, the possibility of his being additionally a dirty thieving
double-crossing
crook, one who might try and take the diamond for himself, had been a major source of concern. Though only a temporary one. Soon after that initial panic, it had dawned on Eugene that Pender’s double-crossing ways could actually be the best thing to come out of this situation.

Eugene being something of a crook himself, it wasn’t hard for him to put himself in Pender’s place. If Eugene had been Pender, and if he’d wanted to run out on his employer and grab the rock for himself, then he’d have no intention of being still aboard the ship when it sailed into Mombasa port with his employer there on the dock waiting to meet him. No, he’d want to get off the ship before then, slink off somewhere at sea and disappear, laughing his pants off at how he’d suckered his boss. And for a guy who’d just been paid millions of dollars to pull off a heist and home invasion involving multiple murders, there had to be a thousand ways to get off a ship mid-ocean. You could hire a helicopter to whisk you into the blue. You could arrange a rendezvous with another vessel. You could even escape in the damn lifeboat if you couldn’t find another way.

Which potentially changed everything. Because a sneaky conniving double-crossing sonofabitch who’d high-tailed it to a life of wealth and luxury was not at all the same thing as a sneaky conniving double-crossing sonofabitch lying rotting on the ocean bed with Eugene’s diamond in his pocket. If Pender had got off the ship before the storm hit, then there was every chance the bastard was still out there somewhere, alive and well.

And if Pender was still out there somewhere, then Eugene could find him. Because Eugene could find anything and anybody. He’d found the diamond, after all. Nothing was impossible, when you had money. More specifically, Eugene himself wouldn’t find Pender; rather, he’d get someone else to do the legwork. Someone efficient, dependable and hard as galvanised nails who, for the right price, would scour the earth for as long as it took to sniff the little scumbag out. And who, when he found him, would pin him like an insect to a board and return the diamond to its rightful new owner, with no questions asked. Nobody was more suited to that job than Victor Bronski, and that was precisely why Eugene had called him from Rome to set him on the trail.

And was precisely also the main reason Eugene was smiling, instead of jumping out of the window. Because Sondra Winkelman hadn’t been the first person with whom he had spoken on the phone that day.

An hour before she called, Eugene’s cell had buzzed and a different voice had spoken to him. Slow, calm, quietly self-assured, infinitely patient. Like the man himself. Ex-NYPD. Ex-FBI. Ex a lot of things that Eugene didn’t know about and didn’t need to know about. The most diligent, most careful and most ruthlessly efficient private investigator money could buy. Lots of money, in fact, but price was no object here.

‘Are you alone?’ Bronski had said.

‘We can talk. Where are you calling from?’

‘Nairobi. You in Mombasa yet?’

‘Since last night. Well, have you got anything for me?’

‘News.’

‘Good or bad?’

‘I found him.’

‘What! Where?’

‘Keep your hat on, boss. Pender’s dead.’

‘Down with the ship?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. No way to tell. But he’s history, all right. As sure as you live and breathe.’

‘Bronski, what are you talking about? You just said you found him.’

‘I found his trail, which adds up to the same thing.’

‘Only if it leads to the right place.’

‘Like I said, keep your hat on. How I know your guy’s dead, is that he left tracks that a blind man could follow. A few weeks before your ship sailed he had a meeting with someone that nobody ever has a meeting with without ending up that way, sooner or later.’

‘That sounds like an assumption. I don’t pay you to make assumptions, Bronski. An assumption is just one small step up from a guess.’

‘You want to hear this or not?’

‘Of course I want to hear it. What meeting?’

‘Right there where you are, in Kenya. The Fairmont The Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, top-floor suite. Very nice. You might want to check the place out yourself some time. Best wine selection in Africa, or so I’m told.’

‘Cut to the damn chase, Bronski. You’re killing me here.’

‘This’ll kill you, all right. You ever hear of one Jean-Pierre Khosa?’

‘Should I have?’

‘Okay, well, you ever hear of Joshua Milton Blahyi, otherwise known as General Butt Naked?’

‘I think so. He’s some kind of African warlord, right? Ivory Coast? Ghana?’

‘Close enough. Liberia. He called himself Butt Naked because that was how he went into battle. Thought he had magic powers, all that kind of shit. People said he was a satanist and a cannibal. Killed about twenty thousand people during the first Liberian civil war. Or maybe it was the second. You lose count.’

‘Okay. So?’

‘So, this guy Khosa makes Joshua Milton Blahyi look like Mahatma fuckin’ Gandhi. My advice, don’t try to read his résumé on a full stomach. I’m guessing that your man Pender must’ve read it too, because that’s who he called the meeting with in Nairobi. This nutjob calls himself
General
Khosa. Born June third, 1972, in some little village near a place called Lingomo, south of the Congo River. Killed his first man at the age of eight and never looked back. He and his brother were said to have hooked up for a while with Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, while they were still in their teens. Uganda, Zaire, Sudan. Lots of very, very nasty shit going on. Then a few years later they split from Kony. Apparently he was too humanitarian and touchy-feely for their tastes and ambitions, and they wanted to go their own way. You want the details?’

‘I just want to know what the hell this has to do with me and my diamond.’

‘No problem, boss. Khosa turned up at the Fairmont The Norfolk in a black limo full of badass African dudes in black suits. Very hardcore. Packing lots of heat, but hey, we’re talking Kenya, right? Two of them were guarding the door while Pender and Khosa talked inside for nearly three hours. Had the hotel staff in a hell of a twist, wondering what kind of big-shot player this white guy must be to call a meeting with these fellas. One of them got curious enough to listen in through the wall of the room next door. Air vent, or something.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘What do you pay me for, boss? I told you, Pender left a trail like a goddamn slug. I know because I was there. Poked around, asked a few questions, spent a few bucks. I got the hotel employee on tape. He didn’t catch all of their conversation, but he caught enough, even if he didn’t understand what it was about. Stuff about a ship, one that Pender was going to be on, and how he wanted to be taken off it before it reached port. He kept on about some bullshit regarding a bunch of sensitive legal papers that some client didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands. An obvious crock of crapola. I’d be surprised if Khosa was dumb enough to swallow a word of it. Anyway, then we get to the interesting part. Right there, Pender offers Khosa one and a half million bucks to intercept the ship and get him off it, “legal papers” and all. Khosa must surely already be seeing through the bull if he’s got any sense, because when he bumps the price up another half a mill, Pender apparently doesn’t blink. Who pays two million dollars for a bunch of papers? And where’d a lowlife like Pender get that kind of money from?’