Scott Mariani 2-book Collection: Star of Africa, The Devil’s Kingdom

Jeff looked affronted. ‘Money? I can’t believe you’d even talk to me about money. I got Jude into this. I’ll do whatever it takes to get him out of it. I don’t care if it costs every last penny in the bank.’

Ben lit a Gauloise. In ten seconds, he’d already smoked it down halfway. ‘The biggest problem we have is getting there. We need to be over six thousand kilometres away, and we need to be there now. There’s no time to mess about with visas. And the kind of hardware we’re going to need won’t pass for hand luggage. We’ll need our own aircraft.’

Jeff spread his hands. ‘That, as you say, is a problem.’

Ben worked on the cigarette a few more moments, puffing great clouds of smoke. Then it came to him. ‘Not when you can walk on water, it isn’t.’

Jeff’s face lit up. ‘Kaprisky.’

Ben nodded. ‘Time to call in that favour.’

Jeff was already looking up the number. ‘You know, two is going in a bit light for a job like this. There’s no shortage of blokes who’ll jump in if we ask.’

Ben agreed. At least four names sprang to mind and were just a phone call or a text message away. Men he trusted, and whom he knew would drop everything to rush to his aid. But the clock was working against them. It could take forty-eight hours to scramble everyone together in one place. ‘There’s no time for that, Jeff. It’ll just have to be the two of us.’

‘You mean the three of us,’ said a voice from behind them.

Ben and Jeff turned. Tuesday Fletcher was standing in the office doorway and he’d been listening to every word they’d been saying.

Chapter 17 (#ulink_e4e041ef-83e1-5d7a-a1d0-ded2fbd890bb)

Three more times on his way down from D Deck, Jude almost got caught. What saved him was the gloom in the windowless passages, now that the bright neon lights that normally burned day and night had gone out. The deeper he ventured into the bowels of the ship, the darker it would get. He didn’t dare to use the Maglite until he could see nothing at all.

It was clear that the pirates were palpably more agitated now than before. The sudden loss of power to the whole ship was a real problem for them, and the fuss it seemed to be causing convinced Jude more than ever that they needed the vessel to be serviceable in order to steal it.

He was beginning to get a sense of their plans. If they’d wanted to hold it for ransom, he was certain they’d be keeping the crew alive to give them more bargaining leverage. But they weren’t doing that. They were apparently set on killing everyone on board, which told Jude they had other intentions. To use it as a floating base, maybe, as Gerber had said. Or sell it. The cargo alone must be worth a fortune.

Those weren’t comforting thoughts. Somehow, Jude kept telling himself, he and the rest of the crew were just going to have to hang on tight and hope that help arrived before it was too late.

Doubts were already crowding his mind. What if Jeff didn’t receive the email? What if nobody came?

Looking in all directions, Jude reached the corridor where the bosun’s body had been dragged away earlier. The floor was still slippery with blood. Jude gingerly sidestepped the trail of it and hurried on, past the open door of the mess.

He skidded to a halt. Crept back to the doorway and peered furtively through it.

Inside the mess canteen, a white man was standing with his back to the doorway. He was alone, bathed in the light from a porthole window and gazing out of it as if deep in contemplation, calmly sipping on a Coke and obviously unbothered by the blood all over the floor. The same small metal case Jude had seen him with before was still cuffed to his left wrist.

Carter.

Jude froze in the doorway, uncertain what to do. He desperately wanted to keep moving and rejoin his friends down below in the relative safety of the engine room. But he couldn’t ignore the part of him that wanted to understand what was happening here, and who this guy Carter really was.

Jude stepped silently into the room and sneaked up behind Carter, terrified that the man might suddenly whip round, spot him and put a bullet in his heart. He hardly dared to breathe as he eased the heavy torch out of his belt.

He was just three steps away when Carter sensed the presence in the room, and turned suddenly. They stared at each other. Then Carter dropped his Coke and his right hand dived for his pistol and Jude closed in and lashed out with the Maglite. The solid aluminium tube thumped into the side of Carter’s head with a dull meaty crack.

Carter dropped the gun. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and he went over sideways, collapsed against a plastic chair and then slumped to the floor.

Jude ran and shut the door, then hurried back to the still body. For a second he was concerned he might have killed the man, but a check of his pulse told him Carter was just unconscious. Thankfully, the torch was still working after being used as a club. Jude started searching through the man’s pockets for a wallet or a passport. He found a packet of gum, loose change, a loaded spare magazine for the pistol, and a ring with a pair of small keys.

Jude guessed that one of the keys must be for the handcuff on Carter’s left wrist. The other, presumably, was for the case. Why would anyone go around with a reinforced metal box chained to them unless they were protecting something important? Jude wanted to know what. He soon found which key was which. The case had two locks. They opened smoothly and easily. With a glance at Carter to check he was still unconscious, Jude flipped up the lid.

The case was lined with black egg-box foam and contained five thick rolls of cash that between them added up to more money than Jude had ever seen before. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds. Beside the rolls, a collection of three US passports were banded together with elastic. Jude checked them each in turn. Each had the same photograph of the man he’d just knocked out, but all three had different names: Tyrone Carter, Larry Holder and Payton Bequette.

So which one of them was he, if any?

Under the passports lay a thick, sealed manila envelope. Jude pulled it out and ripped it open and found that it was stuffed with printed papers, some kind of legal documentation that was meaningless to him.

That was when he noticed, nestling inside the foam under where the envelope had been, a leather pouch tied with a thong. He let the papers spill to the floor, reached down and picked it up. Something hard inside. And heavy. It felt like a lump of stone, big enough to fill his hand. Jude untied the leather thong and opened the pouch. The thing inside was wrapped in tissue paper.

Jude peeled the wrapping open to reveal the object. He held it raised up on the flat of his palm, so that the light from the porthole shone on it.

What the—?

At first sight, it looked like a big lump of clear crystal, like one of those pieces of quartz his mother had once collected. She’d lined every window-sill and mantelpiece in the vicarage with a whole variety of ornamental rocks and as a young boy Jude had learned all their different names – moonstone, amethyst, haematite, jasper, citrine, rose quartz. This one was much larger and more uneven in shape, all angles and pits and sharp edges. But despite its roughness its clarity was like no crystal he’d ever seen before. It seemed to glow with an inner light of its own.

Jude swallowed. He felt suddenly dizzy with confusion. It couldn’t be. It was way too big. Impossible.

Or maybe it wasn’t impossible. He could think of only one reason why a person would carry something like this inside a locked box chained to their wrist.

Jude couldn’t take his eyes off the thing. He couldn’t believe it. He could have stared at it all day long – but then he remembered where he was. On a hijacked ship with armed pirates swarming from deck to deck looking for someone to kill. He hurriedly wrapped the lump of whatever it was back inside the tissue paper, replaced it in its pouch and jammed it into his jeans pocket. It only just fit in there. As an afterthought, he snatched up Carter’s fallen pistol, which looked pretty much like the one Jeff Dekker had let him shoot at Le Val. He remembered roughly how it worked. ‘Designed for morons to use,’ Jeff had laughed. ‘And they do, so you shouldn’t have too much of a problem.’ Jude stuffed the gun into his waistband against the small of his back, dropped the spare magazine in his other pocket, then snatched up the torch and stuck it back through his belt, like a sword. He sprang to his feet, ran to the door and tentatively peeked out.

The coast was still clear, but Jude could hear voices and footsteps approaching from up the passage. With a last glance back at Carter’s inert body, he slipped out and ran like crazy.

The others heard him pounding on the engine room door. ‘It’s me,’ he panted. ‘Let me in!’

The bowels of the ship were plunged into near-total darkness, and without the Maglite, Jude could have been groping blindly about for weeks through the maze of passageways. As the hatch opened, he was dazzled by a torch beam shining in his face. Unseen hands grabbed him by the arms and hauled him in through the hatch. It seemed eerily quiet and still down here, without the steady background chatter and vibration of the engines. When the hatch clanged shut behind him, it felt to Jude as if he was stepping inside a tomb. The heat and stench of enclosed bodies hit him. Shadows danced everywhere. The beams of several flashlights pointed at him from the darkness.

‘We were worried as hell,’ Gerber said. ‘Those bastards must be all over the ship by now.’

‘They are,’ Jude said, nodding and gasping for breath, which wasn’t easy in the airless atmosphere so far below decks. ‘They started going apeshit when the power went down. But they didn’t see me.’

‘Did you manage to do it?’ Everyone but Scagnetti was crowded around Jude, anxiously waiting for the answer to the big question.

‘I did it,’ Jude said. ‘The message went off without a hitch. That’s the best we can do.’

There were grins and sighs of relief all round. ‘Well done, son,’ Diesel said, thumping Jude on the shoulder.

‘So now what?’ Condor asked nervously.

‘Now we wait,’ Gerber said. ‘What the hell else is there to do?’

‘Pray to God we make it through this,’ said Trent.

Gerber gave a grunt. ‘You go ahead and pray to that sonofabitch, if it pleases you. I stopped wasting my breath on him thirty years ago.’

‘I need to use the bathroom,’ Jude said, and Gerber motioned with his torch to show him over to a corner of the engine room where a bucket had been placed, out of sight in as private a spot as possible. It had already been used more than once. One bucket, for thirteen trapped men. As time went by, the smells inside the enclosed space would become horrendous.

In all the excitement, nobody had noticed the lump in Jude’s pocket sticking out as big as a tennis ball. Now that he had a moment’s privacy, he took it out and reopened the leather pouch to examine its contents more closely under the beam of his Maglite.