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

Jeff shook his head. ‘Not a boat. They have a seaplane in the harbour that was confiscated from a Somali smuggling gang the cops nabbed last month. It’s been sitting there waiting for some legal clerk to sign off on a compulsory destruction order for it. Chalmers heard about it a couple of weeks back through the grapevine and was thinking of taking it off their hands to sell on, but the port authority guy was being awkward over the price. Theoretically, it’s still up for grabs.’

‘What kind of seaplane? What condition is it in?’

‘Some kind of big ex-Soviet flying boat, he says. The smugglers souped up the engines and kitted it out with extra-large tanks for long range. It’s old and tatty as fuck, but Chalmers reckons it’s in good nick.’ Jeff spread his hands and looked sceptical. ‘I don’t know, Ben.’

‘How much does this guy want?’

‘Unknown. The Chimp says he needs to make a couple of calls and get back to us.’

‘We don’t have a lot of time,’ Ben said. They were three-quarters of the way to Le Mans now, and the minutes were ticking by faster than he liked.

‘You heard me tell him that. We’ll just have to wait, for what it’s worth.’

Fifteen anxious minutes later, Jeff’s iPhone started buzzing in his hand. He answered immediately. ‘Dekker.’

Jeff listened, stone-faced. Ben glanced at him as he drove, trying to gauge what was being said.

‘Let me think about it and call you right back,’ Jeff said after a couple of minutes.

‘What did he say?’

Jeff still didn’t look happy. ‘He talked to his guy. The port authority fella will rent us the plane, and he’s got a local pilot called Achmed Mussa who’ll agree to fly it the five hundred klicks from Mog and meet us at the port in Hobyo. Reckons Mussa can be on his way within the hour and be there waiting for us when we arrive. In with the deal, no extra cost, there’s another local guy who’ll drive us there from Obbia airport in his Land Cruiser.’

Ben was well aware of how things worked in Africa. You could get pretty much absolutely anything you wanted there, which was what made the place such a goldmine for the likes of Chimp Chalmers. Across much of the continent, laws were seldom observed and even more seldom enforced, especially when the odd palm was crossed with silver and the odd blind eye was turned, both of which were the norm. But that kind of handy corruption inevitably came at a price.

‘Money?’

‘Thirty thousand dollars for the rental, plus another ten for the pilot. Plus another ten as a finder’s fee for the Chimp.’

‘What?!’ Tuesday exclaimed from the back seat.

Ben didn’t blink at the extortionate price. There was no choice, and they were in no position to haggle. ‘I’ll pay you back,’ he said to Jeff, immediately back to wondering how much he could get for his place in Paris.

‘I’m not worried about the money,’ Jeff said. ‘I’m worried that we get there and this thing’s missing its props and the fucking wings are about to drop off. I told you, Chimp Chalmers is a shyster. But it’s your call, Ben. The money’s in the bank. I can wire him the fifty grand online, right now. Take me half a minute.’

‘Do it,’ Ben said.

Without a word, Jeff got to work.

‘It’s done,’ he said soon afterwards.

‘We have a seaplane,’ Ben said.

‘We have a seaplane.’

‘How do you want to do this?’ Ben asked. He glanced away from the road to look quizzically at his friend, and could see from the look on Jeff’s face that they were both thinking the same thing. Whether it was with an AK-47 or a rocket-propelled grenade, seaplanes weren’t the hardest of things to blow out of the air. Assuming that they’d find the Andromeda at the coordinates Jude had given them, there would be no easy way to get close to a container ship loaded with heavily armed pirates. They’d be heard and spotted a mile away.

Jeff said, ‘I’m thinking, MV Nisha, but underwater.’

‘Me too.’ Ben angled the rearview mirror to look back at Tuesday in the rear seat, and asked him, ‘Can you swim?’

Tuesday’s eyes met Ben’s in the mirror. ‘Black guys sink like a stone. It’s a well-known fact. Yeah, of course I can swim.’

‘Ever jumped out of a plane?’

‘I’ve done the basic two-week army parachute course. Never got into the nitty gritty stuff of the SAS training, for obvious reasons.’

Ben nodded. That would have to be good enough. ‘Do we still have dealings with that guy in Stuttgart?’ he asked Jeff.

‘Rudi Weinschlager? Time to time, yeah. I’ve got his number here on my phone.’

‘Ask him if he’s still doing deals on those ex-military DPVs. If he can promise to have two of them ready and prepped and delivered in time to meet us at Stuttgart airport, we can divert to pick them up on the way. Along with all the other necessary kit.’

Jeff hesitated. ‘That’s a lot of gear. What’s the max takeoff weight of a Gulfstream?’

‘We’ll get off the ground,’ Ben said. ‘If we have to tear the seats out to lose weight.’

‘Kaprisky’s going to love us.’

Jeff dialled the number, and moments later was through to one of Europe’s biggest suppliers to the police and security industry, trade customers only. Ben gritted his teeth and waited through the brief conversation. Then Jeff was back to wiring upwards of another twenty grand from the Le Val account, and the deal was done.

It was turning into an expensive afternoon, but Ben was past caring. He’d gladly have given ten times more to get Jude off that ship. He could only pray they could make a difference.

‘What’s a DPV?’ Tuesday wanted to know.

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Jeff told him with a grin. ‘Best get ready to get your feet wet.’

It was coming together. A few quick calculations told Ben that with luck, they could make the whole trip from Le Mans to the last known position of the Andromeda in around ten hours.

All Jude had to do was stay alive until then.

Chapter 21 (#ulink_261934db-c105-5cee-b17e-97cf4e1dcb32)

Down there in the darkness and the heat and the stink of sweat and fear, tobacco smoke and diesel oil and stale urine, they waited for something to happen, and tried not to think about what it might be.

It had only been three-quarters of an hour or so since Jude had returned from above decks, but it seemed as if hours had passed. The pitch blackness of the engine room just made it worse. The torches were all switched off, to save on batteries. The only light was the occasional flare of a lighter and the tiny red glow of cigarettes burning as anxious men tried to calm themselves by smoking. The engine room echoed to the sound of the eerie creakings that resonated through the hull of the immobilised ship, and the tick-tick of contracting metal as the shut-down engines gradually cooled. Diesel and his assistants had partially dismantled the machinery in a deliberate act of self-sabotage to deprive the pirates of any chance of getting the vessel back under power.

There remained nothing to do but sit it out. The silence was broken now and then by a nervous whisper, and the tune that Scagnetti kept quietly humming to himself, somewhere in the darkness. Scagnetti would occasionally break off from humming to mutter and cackle to himself. If he’d been deliberately trying to unsettle the others, he couldn’t have done it better. Even Gerber had given up telling him to shut the hell up.

The only other voice that could be heard was that of Park. In between long silences, he would begin to mutter to himself in Korean and break into a whimper. The whimper would sometimes die away, or else grow into a tortured moan, like the whine of a sick dog.

Further away, they could hear the dull thud and clatter of running footsteps and hatches opening and closing as the pirates hunted through the bowels of the ship for the hiding crew. The sounds of movement and voices seemed to be drawing steadily closer and closer. Everyone knew that the pirates must have figured out the remaining crew members were hiding in the engine room, and that it was just a question of their locating it. The pirates were working their way down towards them methodically, level by level, investigating one compartment after another.

It was a big ship, but it wasn’t that big. Not big enough. They would be here soon.

Jude could feel the tension growing among the others. It wasn’t helped by Park, who was growing more nervous and vocal by the minute. It was obvious what the Korean was thinking, and he wasn’t the only one. They were doomed. Nobody was coming to rescue them. The pirates were going to find them and butcher them, one by one.

Hunched cross-legged in a lonely corner of the darkness, Jude was finding it difficult not to believe it, too. He was the only one who’d personally witnessed the bodies of their dead fellow sailors being slung overboard like garbage for the sharks, something he had wisely chosen not to share with the others. He had to will himself to stay calm, which he did by mentally reciting over and over the words of the message he’d emailed to Jeff Dekker. It was the only glimmer of hope he could cling to.