Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13)

by Scott Mariani

  Ben had already donated one bootlace to the raft. Now he removed the other and attached a piece of bent wire to one end to use as a fishing line. Something shiny like a piece of mirror or even a coin could work as ‘bait’ to attract the attention of a curious fish, and Ben used a spent brass cartridge case. His survival instructors had warned that in an emergency situation, eating without a ready supply of drinking water could increase the threat of dehydration, because the body used up precious reserves of moisture in the digestion process. However, Ben also knew that marine life was more than just a source of food. The aqueous fluids from a dead fish’s body could be drained or sucked from its eye as a water substitute. The idea might not go down too well with the sailors, at least initially. But a man would drink almost anything, no matter how revolting, if he got thirsty enough.

  Ben crawled to the edge of the raft and lowered his makeshift line into the water. The hook had barely sunk below the surface before Jude called out, ‘Fin! Two o’clock, thirty yards.’

  ‘Hello, boys,’ Jeff said. ‘Wondered when they’d show up.’

  ‘This just keeps getting better and better,’ Tuesday muttered.

  Ben looked in the direction Jude was pointing, and spotted the ominous steely dark grey triangle of a dorsal fin splitting the water a stone’s throw away from the raft. The shark was cruising past them in a lazy curve. It wasn’t in a hurry. It had a captive audience, and all the time in the world to check out the floating larder and the juicy life forms aboard it.

  ‘Tiger shark,’ Jude said, following the fin under the shade of his good hand. ‘See the stripes down his back?’ It was the most excited he’d looked all day.

  Jude knew his sharks. Before Ben had ever met him, he’d been on an adventure tourism diving expedition to New Zealand, doing the man-in-a-cage Jaws thing with the great whites. Coming face to face with a thirty-foot eating machine in its own watery element was some people’s idea of a fun leisure activity. Maybe that was because Jude had never seen a man torn kicking and screaming to bloody shreds by one of them, right in front of him. Ben had. It wasn’t a sight you could easily forget. Even though the guy in question had had it coming, and the shark in question had been doing Ben a favour, not to mention saving him some effort.

  The dorsal fin glided below the surface until its tip vanished under, leaving just a thin streak of bubbles to mark its presence. But the shark wouldn’t be far away, that was for sure.

  ‘Looks like I picked a hell of a lousy time to go for my afternoon swim,’ Gerber said dryly.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, tigers are mostly night hunters,’ Jude explained. ‘If we leave him alone, he’ll probably leave us alone.’

  ‘Thank you. That makes all the difference for me,’ Gerber replied. ‘And if he changes his mind?’

  Jude shrugged. ‘Then I suppose he might come up underneath us and tip us all into the water for his dinner.’

  ‘Sorry I asked.’

  Ben reluctantly reeled in his improvised line. Fishing with sharks around was just asking for trouble, as was hanging your head and shoulders out over the side of the raft. The first fin was joined soon afterwards by a second, then a third. Impossible to tell how many unwanted visitors there were lurking unseen beneath the calm surface. Like vultures circling, except below them rather than above.

  And so they drifted on through the hours, huddled together, moving little to conserve their energy, trying to shield themselves from exposure to the fierce sun. Condor went on sleeping under the shade of the bivouac, with Gerber watching anxiously over him. Tuesday eventually gave up trying to fix the radio. Jeff occupied himself by stripping their only surviving weapon down to its component parts and carefully cleaning the saltwater residue off each one with a strip of his T-shirt before reassembling it. ‘Wish we had some gun oil.’

  ‘Wish we had a bunch of things,’ Gerber said.

  It was afternoon when they heard the sound of the plane.

  Chapter 33

  The distant twin-engine drone of an aircraft jerked Ben from his reverie, and he jumped to his feet and shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand to peer up at the sky. There it was, a tiny coloured speck tracking steadily above the horizon.

  ‘Shit, that what I think it is?’ Hercules said, and stood up so abruptly that his weight made the raft tilt.

  ‘Easy! You want to tip us over?’ Gerber warned him. ‘Flinging your lardy ass around like a hippo.’

  ‘You callin’ me fat, homes?’ Hercules said in a hurt voice.

  ‘Won’t be for long, if we don’t get rescued any time soon.’

  ‘Fuck you, man.’

  Jude, Jeff and Tuesday joined Ben in waving their arms and yelling at the tops of their voices to try and attract the attention of the faraway pilot. The speck against the sky didn’t grow any larger. The engine drone gradually died away. All they could do was stare in dismay as the plane shrank to a barely visible dot and then disappeared altogether.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ Jeff said, scowling up at the empty sky with his face screwed up against the sun’s glare.

  ‘They’ll be back. We’ll see them again soon,’ Jude insisted. ‘Or someone. It’s got to happen.’

  ‘It’s a big ocean,’ Gerber said.

  But Jude was right. They did see someone again soon.

  It was less than an hour later when they heard the sound of the second aircraft. It wasn’t the flat drone of a plane, but the thump of a helicopter. And it wasn’t just a speck bypassing the horizon, but coming their way and growing louder every minute.

  They waved their arms and flapped their brightly coloured life jackets in the air and shouted until they were hoarse, but it was unnecessary. The chopper pilot had spotted the raft, and was heading straight for them. As it got nearer, Ben could see it was a large helicopter, like one of the now-obsolete Westland Sea Kings that had been coming to the end of their RAF service life when he was a young soldier. It would have plenty of room on board for all of them.

  But something about it bothered him. He wasn’t sure what. Not yet.

  ‘Are those coastguard colours?’ Jeff asked, standing at his shoulder. Ben was no expert, but he didn’t think they were. In America, USCG choppers were generally bright red. In Britain, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency painted their fleet in red and white livery. The same was true of France. The old RAF air sea rescue Sea Kings had been high-visibility buttercup yellow, while in developing countries like Africa, where the fleets tended to be provided by United Nations, the standard colour was UN white. It was hard to tell from this distance with the sun’s glare behind it, but the helicopter coming towards them now looked like some kind of military drab olive green to him. He said nothing, kept watching its approach.

  ‘Condor! Condor!’ Gerber shook his friend’s shoulder, rousing him excitedly. ‘We’re gonna get out of here. We’re saved. You’re gonna be okay!’ Condor managed a weak smile and a croak.

  Hercules and Jude exchanged a jubilant high-five, both grinning irrepressibly and dancing about the raft like kids. ‘Boy, is it gonna be good to feel solid ground under my feet again,’ Hercules laughed. ‘Hear that, Murph? We goin’ home, lil’ brother.’ The parrot looked distressed by the gigantic roaring green monster eagle looming overhead. Hercules held out a finger and Murphy hopped onto it, grasping it tightly with lizard claws and flapping his wings. Hercules gently folded him into the big side pocket of his jacket, where the bird seemed content to ride with just his head peeking out.

  The thudding roar of the helicopter filled the air as it drew closer and settled into a hover, the downdraught from its rotors whipping up little white crests of foam off the water and making the raft’s plastic sheet bivouac crackle and flap.

  That was when Ben realised what he was looking at. It wasn’t a United Nations helicopter. And it wasn’t any kind of official coastguard rescue chopper, either. It was even older than the scarred Russian dinosaur of a seaplane that had carried him, Jeff and Tuesday from Hobyo. An ancien
t French Aérospatiale Puma medium transport/utility helicopter that had probably begun its long, hard military service life in the late sixties. It looked exactly like one of those countless thousands of aircraft that were thrashed and abused mercilessly as workhorses for decades on end in their countries of origin before being sold off as obsolete surplus and frequently ending up in the cobbled-together fleets of tin-pot Third World dictatorships and the like. It was painted in nondescript military matt green, but with no markings of any kind on its beaten-up fuselage. A ragged line of old bullet holes ran along its length, where it had been strafed by machine gun fire, once upon a time. Its side hatch was open. Black men with guns were crouched at the mouth of the hatch, looking down at them.

  Coastguard rescue helicopters didn’t go armed. Not as a rule.

  But then, it wasn’t here to rescue them. Not as such. Ben realised that now.

  The chopper came down lower, sending up a blast of spray off the sea.

  ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ Tuesday yelled over the roar.

  From the co-pilot’s cabin window, a familiar face grinned down at them. Gleaming white teeth in an ebony face that looked like a vision from the centre of hell.

  Jean-Pierre Khosa had said he’d be back. And now he was.

  Chapter 34

  Hercules stopped jumping around and the smile vanished off his face. He stared up at the chopper. So did Gerber. Jude looked at Ben. Ben looked at Jeff. Jeff looked at the submachine gun and pistol that were stowed next to where he’d been sitting. He looked up at the helicopter, then back at Ben.

  Ben shook his head. He knew what Jeff was thinking, because he’d thought it too, as the reality of their situation had hit him. But only for a second. Because the reality of their situation could potentially become a lot worse if either of them made a move for a weapon. There were at least six guns pointing down at them from the open hatch of the Puma, and those were just the ones he could see. Any momentary notions of opening fire on the chopper in the hope of disabling the turbine or piercing some critical engine component or taking out the pilot had to be dismissed in the knowledge that the enemy’s finger was already on the trigger and that two or three quick strafes were all it would take to turn the raft into a floating slaughterhouse.

  Which, for now at least, left them little option but to stand very still with their hands empty and plainly visible while waiting to see what happened next. Everything depended on Khosa’s intentions. If they were of the ‘shoot on sight’ variety, Ben and the others would find out soon enough. If Khosa’s men fired first, then that would change everything. Ben had his first response to that scenario already figured out. Jude was to his right, the guns to his left. The submachine gun was the one to go for. In the instant Ben made a grab for it, he would kick out with his right boot and knock Jude into the water. Then, at least Jude would have a chance of evading the ensuing two-way firestorm. Better to take your chances with the sharks. Jude could survive this, even if Ben, Jeff, Tuesday, Gerber, Hercules and Condor didn’t. He could swim like a fish and hold his breath underwater like nobody Ben had ever seen. He could dive deep and come up behind the raft two, three minutes later. In the unlikely event that the gunfight lasted that long, he could use the raft as cover. In the more likely event that everyone else would be dead long before then, Jude could dive back down again and bob up for quick, furtive snatches of air every couple of minutes until Khosa went away.

  Because it was easy to figure out that Khosa wouldn’t stick around for long, once he had what he came for. Ben knew exactly what that was. It was the same thing everyone else wanted and would die trying to take for themselves. First Pender, then Scagnetti.

  Ben could feel the hard lump of the diamond nestling against his thigh. He’d virtually forgotten he was still carrying it. An unimaginable fortune right there in his pocket. Enough money to purchase, equip and crew a large ship to take them all the way home to France, with enough change left over to buy a château or two there. The equivalent of enough stacks of paper money to sink their raft to the ocean bed. More weight than even the Aérospatiale Puma could handle. All things considered, it wasn’t so surprising what people would do to make it theirs.

  Ben wondered briefly whether the presence of the diamond gave him more options than he’d realised. What would Khosa do if Ben suddenly whipped the little leather pouch out of his pocket? Would he back off, fearful that Ben was about to do the unthinkable and throw it into the sea? At that moment, the diamond would become Ben’s hostage. Its value to Khosa would offer some leverage. But like all hostage scenarios, it would be a highly unstable situation. Because once established, the threat either had to be carried out, or not. If it was, then Khosa’s next move would be to order his men to kill everyone on board the raft, out of pure rage. Bad idea. If it wasn’t, Khosa had only to call the bluff, knowing that Ben couldn’t afford to lose the only ace he had up his sleeve.

  A no-win situation.

  So then Ben wondered what Khosa would do if the diamond was thrown into the helicopter instead, by way of a peace offering. The message would be clear enough: ‘Take what you came for and leave us in peace.’ It should work, in principle. Except not with a man like Khosa. Khosa would want his revenge for the humiliation he’d suffered at their hands, for the men he’d lost, and just because he was that kind of guy. He would still execute them all anyway. Another no-win situation.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Jude said, staring at Ben.

  ‘That’s what I’m still trying to decide,’ Ben said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, I don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ Ben said. ‘Not yet. We have to see how this plays out.’

  ‘This bastard’s beginning to piss me off,’ Jeff said, scowling up at the chopper. ‘He so much as farts at us, he’s the first to cop it.’

  ‘I’m with you on that one, mate,’ Tuesday said.

  Jude’s face was strained with guilt and regret. ‘You were right. I should have listened to you back there. I should have let you kill him, while we had the chance. But all I could think about was helping them. I was an idiot.’

  ‘I admired you for your humanity,’ Ben replied. ‘And I still do. But now we need to think about how we’re getting out of this.’

  The chopper came closer, and closer, until its scarred olive-green underbelly was almost right overhead, hovering thirty feet above the water. It was turned side-on to them and shifting slightly left and right, up and down. The noise was huge, the screech of the turbine adding a cutting treble to the bass whap-whap-whap of the rotors. The downblast was whipping up the sea in a wide circle all around the raft, tearing at their hair and clothes and threatening to rip the plastic bivouac sheet off its tenuous mountings.

  Then two things happened.

  The first was that two of Khosa’s men started lowering a rope ladder from the helicopter’s open side. It wobbled and shook, dropping jerkily a foot at a time until it dangled within reach of the raft.

  The second was that Khosa himself appeared in the open hatch, grinning down at the survivors. He seemed to have found a replacement for the big revolver that Ben had taken from him aboard the ship, but the weapon was still holstered on his gunbelt. The object he was holding in his hand wasn’t a gun. He raised the megaphone to his mouth.

  Which made it look to Ben as though Khosa wanted to talk. Which, in turn, meant that his immediate intentions weren’t to kill them all. That might come later, but for now it seemed that some kind of parlay was about to begin. Whatever it was Khosa was about to lay on the table, Ben wanted to get there first.

  Chapter 35

  Before the African could speak, Ben pulled the leather pouch from his pocket and held it up above his head.

  ‘This is what you want,’ Ben called up to Khosa. He had to shout hard to be heard over the deafening noise of the helicopter. ‘You get no argument from us. It’s yours. I let you have it, you spare our lives. Do we have a deal?’

  ‘You’re jus
t going to give it to him?’ Jude yelled at Ben.

  ‘Do we have a deal?’ Ben shouted up at the chopper.

  Khosa smiled behind the megaphone. ‘Oh, yes, we will have a deal. Thank you for keeping it for me, soldier.’ His voice was deep and resonant, its sonorous bass tones exaggerated over the loudspeaker. He lowered the megaphone and spoke briefly to the man on his right. Whatever was said, the man stared blankly at Khosa and listened. He didn’t show any reaction. He didn’t nod, because nodding would imply agreement, and agreement would imply that there was any notion of democracy going on here. If Khosa had told the man to jump into the sea, the man would have done it without hesitation. Or if Khosa had handed him a pistol and instructed him to blow out his own brains, he would have done that too.

  Instead, from the man’s response, Ben understood that Khosa had ordered him to climb down to the raft. With instant obedience the man slung his rifle over his shoulder on its sling, then lowered himself over the edge of the hatch so that his legs dangled in space. Then he grabbed hold of the sides of the rope ladder and twisted himself out and down and started scrabbling quickly down its length. Ben recognised him as one of the pirates they’d captured on board the Andromeda, except that he’d exchanged his loose, ripped T-shirt and frayed shorts for military khakis. He was the one of Khosa’s men to whom Ben had shown the controls for the MOB lifeboat before sending them all on their way. Doing the right thing.

  The man kept descending the ladder. He was only a skinny little guy, but the laws of physics were immutable. The further down he reached, the more his weight, combined with the side-to-side motion of the hovering chopper, made him sway like a pendulum. As he got to the bottom, he twisted his neck to look down, waiting for the right moment to let go. If he misjudged it, he’d be in the sea. Ben wanted to see that happen, especially if one of the sharks circling hidden beneath the surface happened to get lucky.