Gray Redemption

by Alan McDermott

  That information, according to Veronica Ellis, had died with Carl Gordon.

  The good news was that they had managed to rebuild the website Farrar had been communicating through, though the latest message they’d intercepted an hour earlier hadn’t made today’s task easy.

  Ellis had given Harvey a brief rundown on the events of the previous evening, and it seemed Farrar had believed the news he’d been fed by Andy Hill. On the understanding that Campbell and Levine were out of the way, Farrar had left a curt note on the website:

  “Information no longer required. Terminate their journey.”

  For Harvey, this changed the entire game. Up until a few hours ago he was looking for someone who wanted the people in the container alive, which meant being subtle and choosing the moment carefully. Now, however, the strike could occur at any time, and Harvey and Owen would be the only ones concerned about the passengers’ safety.

  He would have felt a lot better if he had a full team behind him, but when he suggested the idea to Ellis, she ruled it out. There simply wasn’t time to get anyone else in place, and using the local cops was out of the question.

  “What happens if you and the police catch some guy in the act,” Ellis had said, “and the locals want to take him in? That’s only natural, as it’s their country. We might lose access to him and our case against Farrar falls apart.”

  Her reasoning was sound, but it didn’t make his job any easier. What did was the recent discovery made by Gerald Small. His eventual success at hacking the Port Authority servers meant they knew that the larger consignment was to be delivered to a small firm to the south of the city. The mom and pop company operated normal business hours, which meant that unless the truck could reach them before five in the afternoon, it would have to park up overnight, and the logical place to do so was the Wenban facility. Small had been searching for further details, such as the offloading time, when the server security systems recognised the intrusion and kicked him out. That information would have been handy, but at least they knew a lot more now than they did a few hours earlier.

  Owen’s mobile chirped and he hit the Accept button. After the briefest of conversations he nodded to Harvey, grabbed his jacket and headed towards the door.

  Harvey tucked the pistol into his waistband and covered it with the Hawaiian print shirt. Owen was similarly dressed in order to create the impression that they were just tourists out enjoying a drive.

  In the hotel reception, Owen was greeted by two young blondes from the Durban office who he’d arranged to come along on the surveillance, adding to the pretence. After brief introductions, the girls led them to the car, an Audi A5 convertible. Harvey climbed in the back with Clara while Elaine took the front passenger seat.

  On the short drive to the port, Harvey gave Clara a smart phone and was glad to discover she was familiar with the model.

  “It’s set to record video,” he said. “Just hold it up to your ear and make sure you aren’t covering the camera lens.”

  As they drove, Clara pretended to make a short phone call, then handed the phone back to Harvey who looked at the recording.

  “All I’m getting is the wheels of the vehicles,” he told her. “If you can hold it vertical we should get some good images.”

  Clara tried once more, this time with better results. Harvey wiped the test video and handed the phone back, then pulled his own from his pocket. After a dummy run, he declared them good to go.

  Earlier in the day, Owen and Harvey had studied aerial shots of the port before spending a couple of hours monitoring movement from the main exit, Bayhead Road. They knew that the trucks would turn left onto South Coast Road and head south until they had a chance to join the M4 highway heading north towards their depot.

  Following the likely route, both Harvey and Clara set their phones recording, placed them to their ears and pretended to be deep in conversation as they cruised along at a sedate pace. They passed shops and service stations built in the fifties and looking like they hadn’t had a lick of paint since. Their job wasn’t made easy by the sheer number of vehicles on the road, and though Harvey had a clear view of the occupants of the vehicles parked along his side of the street, Clara’s phone was mostly capturing oncoming traffic.

  It took almost fifteen minutes to travel the two miles to the M4 on-ramp, where Owen made a U-turn and retraced their route. Once they’d reached their starting point at the junction of Bayhead Road, Harvey uploaded the videos to a cloud storage site and emailed Hamad Farsi, asking him to scan through the images and see if any of the faces captured were known to the service. It was a long shot, but if they could identify their suspect before the truck arrived, it took the targets out of the equation.

  “Let’s go meet up with Kyle,” Owen said.

  He drove down Bayhead Road and pulled up at a service station where he’d parked his BMW that morning. Kyle Ackerman was waiting by a Suzuki Jeep and he came over as they parked up. Owen handled the introductions and thanked Kyle for helping out.

  “No problem,” Kyle said. “Two thousand Rand for following a truck is the easiest money I’ve ever made.”

  Harvey wasn’t sure that having someone with no field experience on the operation was a good idea, but Kyle was the only person Owen could call on at short notice. When Owen had suggested the idea, Harvey had asked for someone who could handle themselves in a tight situation, and Kyle had been Owen’s only option. His four years spent in the Royal Marines would have to make up for his lack of field craft, and hopefully his only task would be to tail a slow-moving vehicle for a few miles.

  Owen thanked the girls for their help and promised to treat them when the mission was over, and Clara slipped Harvey a business card and a smile before climbing into the driver’s seat and gunning the engine.

  “You’re a sly one,” Owen grinned as Harvey studied the phone number he’d been handed. “She’s not usually that forward.”

  “Hey, I’m as surprised as you!”

  “Trust me, that’s one call you wanna make.”

  Harvey was flattered by the invitation, but his first concern was ensuring Kyle knew what was expected of him.

  “Dennis said I just had to stay behind the truck and wait for a phone call from you guys,” Ackerman smiled. “Not really rocket science.”

  Harvey found himself warming to Kyle, his easy-going approach making him a likeable sort, but concerns about his ability to pull off the mission pushed those thoughts aside.

  “It might get a bit hairy,” he warned. “If the first container looks big enough to hold a couple of dozen people, Dennis and I will follow it, otherwise it’s yours. We have no idea which one contains the people we’re looking for, and we don’t know where or when it’s going to be hit. We don’t even know how many people will be looking for it.”

  “Lots of imponderables,” Ackerman said, as the smile melted away and his demeanour suddenly went into professional mode. “Don’t worry, I’m not stupid enough to take on an army all by myself. If I see anything suspicious, I’ll let you guys know.”

  Harvey nodded, his confidence in the man growing by the minute. He handed over the card Carla had given him.

  “Take this,” he said. “I prefer brunettes.”

  Kyle screwed it up and tossed it into a nearby bin.

  “Been there, done that,” he winked.

  The ship was due to dock at any moment, but it could be hours before the containers they were interested in were ready to come ashore. Harvey knew they wouldn’t be able to park at the service station for long without arousing suspicion, but for a while they would be a lot less conspicuous than if they were to park right on the junction, and the truck would have to pass them on its way to the highway.

  They went into the service station and ordered coffee before finding seats near the window so that they could keep an eye out for the distinctive Wenban livery. Their thoughts turned to the mission ahead, and after all the preparation, all they could do now was wait. Owen had pre
pared passports for both Smart and Baines, and two more were waiting to be processed once they had new photos for the other two passengers. There was still no confirmation that the mysterious Sam Grant was one of them, and Harvey thought back to the file that was currently locked in his hotel room safe.

  He’d studied the picture time and time again, and while it still seemed like a composite, the eyes had once again struck him as remarkably familiar.

  Hopefully the next few hours would provide some answers.

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, just as Hamad Farsi was informing Harvey that no matches had been found within the images — either within their own database or Interpol’s — Sean Littlefield drove past the service station and continued down Bayhead Road until he reached the junction with Langeberg Road, the arterial route leading from the cargo terminal.

  “It’s going to be a long wait,” he observed as he parked the Mercedes Sprinter van.

  Ben Palmer nodded, but his thoughts were on the operation that lay ahead.

  Since getting the message from Farrar, he’d been thinking about the take down, and they’d stopped off at a hardware store on the way to buy a few items. He got out of the passenger seat and climbed into the back of the van to prepare his improvised munitions.

  With the need for subtlety gone, Palmer had wanted to get his hands on some proper grenades rather than the flash-bangs Littlefield had provided. He didn’t know if his targets would be armed, but experience told him that it was always safer to assume they were. Unfortunately, it was too late in the day to acquire the real thing, so Palmer set to work adapting the flash-bangs so that they would be as lethal as fragmentation grenades.

  His first task was to cut out a piece of cellophane the same height as the barrel of the M84 stun grenade and long enough to wrap around it, plus an extra three inches. The grenade had a thin aluminium core surrounded by a perforated steel body, which allowed the magnesium-based pyrotechnic to escape and temporarily blind the victims. Palmer’s plan was to wrap layers of putty heavily impregnated with small steel screws around the barrel. It was based on the principle that if you set off a firecracker in the palm of your hand, you burn your hand, but if you wrap your fingers around it, you’ll never play the piano again.

  The M84 produces a subsonic deflagration rather than a supersonic detonation, but by encasing it in the putty the effect of the blast would be magnified, and the screws would be as deadly as any bullet. He’d considered using ball bearings, just like those found in Claymore mines, but the irregular shape of the screws would produce more collateral damage, tumbling as they entered the bodies, tearing flesh and fragmenting bone. The idea wasn’t to inflict pain, just to cause as much shock to the system as possible so that the body shuts down.

  Palmer used the first piece of cellophane as a template to produce another eight before cutting out slits in each one to accommodate the grenade’s handle, then smeared the first three with a thin veneer of the putty. He sprinkled around fifty screws onto each sheet and used the putty tin to roll them flat. Once he’d trimmed off the excess, he wrapped a sheet around each of the M84s, using electrical tape to hold them in place. After waiting a few minutes to let each layer dry, Palmer repeated the process twice more until the grenades were completely encased.

  The sun had set by the time the weapons were ready, and the container was still an hour away from being offloaded. Trucks filed past as he climbed back into the passenger seat, some destined for local trading estates, the majority heading inland.

  “All set?” Littlefield asked, and Palmer nodded.

  * * *

  When Arnold Tang’s car pulled up to the entrance of the Hong Wing restaurant, the owner was already standing near the entrance ready to welcome him. The visitor was quickly shown to a table near the rear, where waiters were busy laying place settings.

  “Are you dining alone?” The manager asked, and Tang informed him that a friend would be along shortly. His henchmen took their positions at a nearby table as Tang sat in a chair facing the door, and a bottle of Remy Martin Louis XIII was quickly placed in front of him.

  A few minutes later, Koh Beng Lee arrived with his own entourage. Arnold greeted him and poured two glasses of cognac, and they exchanged small talk until the waiter arrived to take their order. Once he was gone, Lee steered the conversation towards business.

  “I have another twenty people from Singapore ready to make the journey west,” he said. “When is the next ship leaving?”

  “On the twentieth,” Tang told him. “How do you want them to travel once they reach Durban?”

  Lee knew the options open to him. Tang had two tiers of travel, the first and cheapest being overland from Durban to Morocco. After a short ferry ride to Spain it would be overland all the way to Calais for the short hop to Dover.

  The second option cost an extra ten thousand US dollars and meant a plane ride to the north of the continent, shaving fifteen days off the journey and avoiding a lot of dicey border crossings.

  As the people making the journey tended to be the poor looking for a better life, very few could afford option two.

  “They will all be going overland,” Lee told him, and gestured to one of his men, who brought over a briefcase. He opened it to reveal bundles of fifties, and Tang nodded. He wouldn’t insult his friend by counting it, and Lee already knew the consequences of being so much as a dollar short.

  Tang placed the case on the floor next to his feet and poured another two drinks.

  “I trust you heard about Timmy Hughes,” Lee said as he savoured the spirit. “He was a good customer of mine. I understand you had...dealings with him, too.”

  Tang’s demeanour shifted instantly at the mention of the name. “What about him?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “He was killed two weeks ago. Shot in the head, I was told.”

  Tang rubbed the bridge of his nose as he digested the news, then suddenly banged a meaty fist on the table. One of his men ran over, hand inside his jacket and ready to draw down if his boss was in danger. Tang waved him away and pulled out his mobile phone.

  “Where is the last shipment?” He barked. It took a moment for his new lieutenant to find the information, and that got Tang wondering.

  Was Hughes’ death somehow linked to the disappearance of two of his men a fortnight earlier? They were good men, and had handled the people smuggling operation efficiently before they suddenly vanished. Was another player trying to move into his territory? Had they simply decided to work for someone else, or had they been taken out in an effort to cripple his business?

  Anger boiled within him, his face taking on a crimson hue.

  The first thing to deal with was Hughes’ fare-dodging friends. When his lieutenant came back on the line he was told that the ship had landed in South Africa an hour earlier.

  Tang had already given instructions for the passengers to be killed once they’d arrived in England and he’d received his payment from Hughes, but as that money was never going to arrive, there was no point in paying for an unnecessary plane journey. He was going to be slightly out of pocket on the deal, and the passengers would pay for it.

  “Call Leng in Durban. Get him to cancel the gweilo’s flight, then I want him to take them somewhere remote and dispose of them.” He thought for a moment, then added: “Tell him to rape the woman and make the men watch, then kill them all.”

  He hung up and poured himself a large measure of cognac. The possibility that someone might be making a move on his operation would gnaw at him for days, and the death of the gweilos would be small recompense.

  Chapter 12

  Monday May 7th 2012

  “Here we go.”

  Andrew Harvey saw the blue truck with lightning flashes approach the service station and he grabbed his coat, following Owen out of the door.

  “Follow the next one, and be careful,” he warned Ackerman, who nodded solemnly.

 
They allowed several other vehicles to get between them and the target, both men making a mental note of the drivers and passengers. Owen eventually pulled into the traffic and saw the red container roughly a quarter of a mile down the road.

  “Don’t get too close unless it leaves the expected route,” Harvey said, angling the rear-view mirror so that he could see who was behind them.

  The truck turned left onto the coast road, retracing their earlier steps, before obligingly hitting the M4 on-ramp which led to the Wenban compound. The road threaded its way through central Durban before heading to Durban Beach and hugging the coast as it meandered north. By now only three vehicles remained between them and the truck, and that soon fell to two. Traffic was disappointingly light at this time of night, and Owen held off the throttle to allow the gap to open up.

  After twenty minutes, one of the cars ahead pulled off the M4 at an off-ramp, and Harvey checked the mirror for the hundredth time and saw that their tail was clear.

  “That has to be our guy,” he said, indicating to the van up ahead.

  Owen agreed. “Sure you don’t want me to just pull him over?”

  “No,” Harvey said. “Slowly overtake them both and then stay half a mile ahead of the truck.”

  He pulled his phone out and prepared the video camera before holding it to his ear. The powerful BMW closed the gap easily and they cruised past the van, Harvey recording the driver’s face while simultaneously noting the licence number. By the time they’d eased ahead of both vehicles, Harvey had plenty of footage. He scanned through it quickly and saw the lone driver, a man in his fifties. Not recognising him, he sent the video to Farsi along with a note requesting details of the van’s owner.