by Andy Maslen
‘I hope Galele and Naomi treated you respectfully,’ he said to Stella.
‘They were perfect ladies. I hope I can rely on you to be the perfect gentleman,’ she said.
He gestured to the table, where two extra seats had been drawn up.
‘Sit. Beer?’
‘No thank you.’
He shrugged and slid into his own chair, signalling one of his men to bring him another bottle.
‘Fine by me if you don’t want to drink my beer,’ he said, before picking up the bottle sitting by his elbow and draining it.
He smacked it down on the table with a sharp rap. Eli was pleased to see that Stella didn’t even blink. Rejecting the proffered chair, she took up a position with her back to the wall where she could keep all four guards in view.
‘Right,’ Stella said. ‘We waited for a convenient time. We came to this shithole of a bar for the second time. And we submitted to a strip-search. Let’s talk ivory, shall we, or were you planning on jerking my chain a second time?’
If her bolshie speech upset the spiffily dressed Botswana, he didn’t show it. He just grinned again.
‘Brave words for a woman who just gave up her gun and is sitting in my boardroom. With my board of directors watching,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Edward?’ he called out over Stella’s right shoulder. ‘Has this nice white lady got bigger balls than you?’
The man he’d addressed got up from the sofa, grabbed his AK and sauntered over to the table. He stopped just inches from Stella, so his groin was at the level of her face.
‘She just pussy like they all, boss,’ he said. ‘She give you disrespect,’ – dizrispec – ‘I teach her some manners.’ He grabbed his crotch for good measure and grinned at the other three men.
His friends cackled with laughter. Eli reckoned the dope had more to do with it than the witticism. She scowled at him, counting the many ways she knew to relieve a man of his genitals.
Without turning her head by a fraction, Stella jabbed her right elbow out hard and fast, straight into the place Eli had been mentally attacking. Eli smirked as the man, so cocksure just a few seconds earlier, doubled over, both hands cupping his insulted scrotum. She shot a warning look at the second sofa-dweller, whose hand was straying towards his AK.
‘Don’t!’ she barked.
His hand stopped in mid-air, but his eyes stayed focused on Joshua. The question was clear to all who could see him. Do I kill them, boss?
Stella was still on the offensive. She leaned across the table and pointed a red fingernail at Joshua’s face.
‘Tell your man to get the fuck out of my face. If he tries anything like that again he’ll be singing soprano in the church choir.’
Joshua raised his eyebrows. He leaned over the side of the table.
‘Edward. Go and sit down. I’ll speak to you later.’ He straightened. ‘My apologies, Joyce. I was only joking with what I said earlier.’
‘Yeah? I’d buy a new joke book, if I were you. Now, for the last time. What can you tell me about ivory?’
‘Well, now. I can tell you a lot of things. I can tell you I have a stockpile worth ten million dollars. I can tell you I am connected to some very rich Chinese gentlemen who love ivory more than gold. I can tell you that I have thirty-seven men under my command who are completely and utterly ruthless. When your resume has “child soldier” on it, you are not scared of a few poorly paid government troops.’
‘Ten million, eh? So you can cut me in on the action, can’t you? For a suitable level of investment.’
He spread his hands.
‘Ah, Joyce. If only it was that simple.’
‘What’s making it complicated? You’re a businessman, aren’t you? I’m a businesswoman. I’ve got cash, you’ve got ivory. What’s the problem?’
‘The problem is my business partners. You think this is like the Wild West out here in deepest, darkest Africa? No law, no honour, just winner takes all and the Devil take the hindmost?’ He shook his head. ‘No. It’s not like that at all. I have contracts. Supply. Wholesaling. Processing. Distribution. Security. Sales and marketing. Exclusive deals.’
‘So you’re running a proper little company. Good for you. I can take two million dollars’ worth right now. I’ve got cash at my hotel or I can even wire it to you.’
‘Do you know what my partners would do to me if I went outside our exclusive agreement, Joyce?’
‘Would they sue you for breach of contract?’
‘Very funny.’ He called out once more. ‘Joyce thinks my partners would take me to court if I double-crossed them, boys.’
The men laughed. A nasty sound. While she’d been watching Stella, the standing pair had picked up their rifles. The men on the sofa, Edward still clutching his balls with one hand, held machetes. Both were glaring at Eli. She mentally named them First and Second Machete.
They’d all stubbed out their joints. And though their eyes were still pink from the effects of the drug, she detected a fixity of purpose in their gaze.
Her pulse sped up. She calculated distances, angles. Lines of fire. In a small room like this, opening up with automatic weapons would be suicidal. The machetes, though. Those could be wielded to devastating effect without risking wounding or killing their own side.
She pushed off from the wall, balancing her weight equally on the balls of her feet. Getting ready to move.
Joshua was speaking again.
‘No. No courtroom. No lawyers. No judge. They would take me out into the bush, far from G-City. They would use knives on me. Like the ones my boys here have. Not kill me. Just cut my hamstrings, my Achilles tendons. Remove my hands. Then they would sit in their Hiluxes and wait. You know what for?’
‘An ambulance?’
Eli mentally applauded Stella’s bored response. It was worth a Best Actress Oscar.
‘Jackals. Hyenas. Lions. Vultures. They’d watch them tear me to pieces and film it on their phones. Then they put it on YouTube. A warning, you know? I have one I downloaded last year.’ He pulled his phone out of an inside pocket. ‘You want to see it? The screaming is very loud when a hyena cracks his skull open.’
‘I’m good. So tell me, Joshua. If you’re not going to deal, why are we here?’
‘To give you some advice and to suggest a different kind of partnership.’
A machete blade clanked hollowly against the wooden arm of the sofa.
Eli was already moving slowly but purposefully towards the four guards. ‘The advice is, go to the market. Down the supply chain. Vientiane. Laos. That’s where you can pick it up wholesale and still make some profit.’
‘Thanks,’ Stella said, getting to her feet. ‘We’ll try that.’
‘Wait!’ Joshua said, raising his voice. ‘You haven’t heard my proposal yet.’
Eli could see two machetes glinting in the light from the guttering candles and two AKs held level across their owners’ flat stomachs. Shit! Hadn’t Stella worked it out? They were in trouble. Big trouble.
‘No need,’ Stella said, backing up. ‘Ivory’s the only proposal I’m interested in, and you can’t deliver that.’
Joshua shook his head. The smile had gone, replaced with a predatory expression. A narrow-eyed stare that said, ‘I’m coming for you’.
‘I think, seeing as I have been so generous with my market intelligence, you two ladies should show your gratitude. I was thinking you could entertain me and my boys here for an hour or two.’
‘Get fucked,’ Stella said, turning and heading for the door.
‘I intend to,’ he said, the wolfish leer widening. ‘What do you say, boys? Shall we teach these little white pussies how G-City boys make love?’
‘Come on, Eli, we’re leaving,’ Stella said in a low, tight voice as stoned leers turned into looks of animal lust.
‘No. You are not,’ Joshua said, holding up a finger.
One of the guards with an AK slid round the periphery of the room and barred Eli and Stella’s route to the door.
Everything happened fast.
33
Eli backed up towards the guard at the door.
Without turning her head she bent, twisted, then reared up at him and straight-armed him under the point of his chin. A classic Krav Maga move. People never expect to be hit by someone facing away.
As he went down, she chopped him hard across the side of the neck, crushing the nerves running beside the thick ropy blood vessels and paralysing him. She pulled her right foot back and kicked him so hard in the side of the head that she felt the jolt as an electric current running from her foot to her hip.
Stella had leaped into the centre of the room, then taken one of the machete guys before he’d had a chance to lever his lanky frame out of the sofa.
Her booted right foot lashed out and hit him in the face, snapping his nose with a sound like bubble wrap. Beside him, Second Machete was swinging his foot-long blade at Stella’s leg.
Which was no longer there.
Instead, his vicious blow embedded six inches of the blade’s edge into his friend’s thigh, severing half a dozen blood vessels which spouted blood up to the ceiling.
Over the screams of pain, Stella jumped up onto the sofa and with a yell of pure warrior spirit stamped down on Second Machete’s groin.
Joshua was out of his seat and reaching into his waistband.
If he’d been dealing with an ivory smuggler and her hired help, he might have got the chance to put a round or two into one of them.
So it was his poor fortune to be facing Eli Schochat and Stella Cole.
His gun arm came up, fingers wrapped round the grip of an ageing Browning Hi-Power. Aiming for the back of Stella’s head.
‘Stel, down!’ Eli screamed.
She kicked Joshua’s wrist so that the shot spanged off a ceiling light. Ricocheting, the bullet smashed the window and passed, harmlessly, into the night.
Also unfortunately for Joshua, Eli was now the proud owner of the door-guy’s AK-47.
She struck him across the forehead with the muzzle, tearing a huge flap of skin free that flopped down like a veil, blinding him. She cut off his scream with a monstrous blow to the stomach with the rifle butt, dropping him in a crumpled heap of bloody white silk.
A burst of automatic gunfire deafened her. She spun round. The last remaining guard had jumped onto the sofa and sprayed a three-second burst at Stella. She’d rolled for cover behind Joshua’s desk, and although the rounds smashed into the heavy wooden top, none penetrated.
Eli grabbed a fallen machete and flung it at his head.
The blade whickered through the air and hit his left temple, slicing off his ear and a sizeable portion of his scalp. It clattered onto the desktop and skidded off the far side.
With a howl, he whipped round, blood spraying outwards in a spiral. He jammed his finger down on the AK’s trigger. The magazine was empty in seconds.
Several rounds found the two men on the sofa. Second Machete lost half his face in an explosion of pink mist. First machete took one in the throat and one in the chest. He died drowning in his own blood, which frothed from his grimacing mouth.
Then the shooter’s eyes rolled up in their sockets.
He toppled sideways, head lolling from a gaping wound as Stella smashed a machete into the side of his neck. The blade jammed between two cervical vertebrae. She stood back as he fell, taking the blade with him.
The gun smoke had thickened the atmosphere to a thick blue fog. Eli’s ears were ringing as she turned a full circle, AK cocked and ready at her hip. Her nose was prickling and itching at the sharp smell of burnt propellant and hot brass, and the coppery tang of blood.
Out of the five men who’d been preparing to gang-rape them, three were dead, one was out cold and one, their leader, was slumped against a chair, cradling his face with both palms and struggling to replace his floppy brow in its rightful place beneath his hairline.
His suit jacket was scarlet from lapels to waist. The front of his trousers looked as though he were auditioning for a punk band, streaks and spatters of red forming criss-crossing streaks across the shimmering white fabric.
Eli strode over to him and lifted his chin with the AK’s muzzle. His eyes were wide, and although he held onto his forehead with one hand, he raised the other in supplication.
‘Please. Don’t kill me. There’s money over there, in the safe. Take it. I can give you the combination. It’s—’
‘Shut up! We don’t want your money.’
Outside the door she could hear people shouting. Someone was hammering to be let in. Eli turned, flicked the fire selector switch to single shot and fired once into the very top of the door.
The hammering stopped.
She returned her gaze to Joshua.
‘Three questions. Three answers. Tell the truth, you live. Lie, you die.’
‘Sure, sure,’ he said, in a panicky voice.
‘The market in Vientiane. Address?’
‘It’s an old Catholic church on Tad Thong Road. By…’ he gasped, ‘by the river.’
‘Good. When is it held?’
‘First Monday of every month.’
Eli paused for a moment. That gives us a week.
‘What’s the security?’
‘I do not know what you mean. What security?’
‘Oh dear. And we were doing so well.’ Eli took a half-step closer. She pointed the AK at his stomach. ‘Goodbye, Joshua.’
‘No! Wait! The market boss is called John-Antoine Vong. You need a password. It’s…’ He hesitated. ‘Mekong.’
Eli stood.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’
She stamped down hard on his right instep. He screamed and clutched his foot. She crouched in front of him.
‘Mekong? Really? Every fucking tourist in the place would be saying it.’ She got right in his face, so close she could smell his fear-sweat and the blood that was slowly congealing on his cheeks. ‘Last chance, Joshua. Password.’
‘I am looking for the Pompidou Centre,’ he grunted.
‘What?’
He repeated himself. ‘That’s what you say. Then the door guy, he says, “You’re a long way from Paris”. And then you say, “But Vientiane is cheaper.” Then you’re in.’
Eli stood. Satisfied. It was too random for him to have made it up.
‘Stel, you ready?’ she asked.
Stella was hunched over one of the dead guards.
‘Hold on,’ she said, then she stood up and turned to Eli.
Eli winced. Had Stella just taken a trophy? But there was no ear or nose clasped between her fingers. Just a couple of flick-knives and a small chrome revolver.
She held them out to Eli.
‘Leave the Kalashnikovs, but take these.’
Eli nodded. She collected the AKs and dropped out the magazines. These she stuffed into her bag.
‘Ready?’ she asked.
‘The window, I think,’ Stella said.
Eli nodded. Smart. She rammed one of the unbroken chairs under the door knob then bent and, with a grunt, lifted the unconscious door guy onto its well-worn seat.
She cleared the sharp glass teeth from the window sill with one of the AKs then dropped it inside as she scooched herself up and over and into the street. Stella followed, handing Eli one of the knives.
‘Let me have the gun,’ Eli said, holding out her hand.
‘Fuck off! It’s an Airweight. A Model .38? Believe me, I know how to use one of these.’
Eli grinned as some of the adrenaline began to leave her system.
‘OK, “Joyce”, but let’s be quick.’
Stella reached the front of the Oasis Lounge. So automatic gunfire clearly didn’t put off the usual crowd. The young man they’d paid to look after the Hilux was still there, with his friends, a bottle of beer in his right hand, his left resting on the hip of a girl in a white string vest over a fluorescent-orange bra.
‘Lively tonight, yes, Missus?’ h
e said, to caws of laughter from the crowd.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘That’s Old Naledi for you,’ he said with a grin. ‘Best neighbourhood in G-City.’ He turned and pointed at the Hilux. ‘There’s your wheels. Just like you left ’em.’
‘And here’s your money. Just like I promised. You want to earn a little extra?’
‘Sure. What you want me to do?’
Eli pulled another fifty from her pocket. She held it up where he could see it.
‘If the cops arrive, tell them four white guys arrived in a white Range Rover and shot the place up. They took off that way.’
Eli pointed in the opposite direction to her route back to the hotel.
He winked. Plucked the note from her fingers and stuck it into the waistband of his Calvin Klein boxers, of which a good three inches showed above his belted jeans.
‘They were big guys, officer,’ he said. He held his hand flat about a foot over Eli’s head. ‘Up to here. Built like tanks. South Africans.’
She smiled.
‘Attaboy!’
As they regained the relative safety of G-City’s commercial district, a police car shot past them in the opposite direction, lights flashing, siren wailing. Eli turned to Stella.
‘Trouble in Old Naledi.’
‘I heard some South Africans have been running riot.’
Eli grinned. Stella grinned back. Eli swerved to avoid a pothole deep enough to drop a body into.
‘Shit!’
Half a block behind them, the Syrian watched their tail-lights weave for a second. His own lights were dark.
34
He estimated he had killed about eighty people. Of those, he had assassinated precisely fifty-eight. The approximation came from his exploits in uniform where his prowess with a heavy machine-gun had led to a large but unspecified number of deaths.
As he observed the two British women in the Hilux, tracking east along Kudumatse Road, he mentally revised his commercial total to sixty. Unprofessional, he knew, to count his chickens before they died in a welter of blood and tissue, but really. Two women, British women at that! Well, it was hardly a rough day at the office, now was it?
