by Wilbur Smith
It was only on the dawn of the second day that they looked down upon the azure waters of the Gulf of Aden from the vantage point of the low hills above the shoreline. They were on the Great Horn of Africa looking almost due north towards Yemen. Below the ridge on which they parked there was a single-lane road running parallel to the sea. Below that was the narrow beach of red sand. The water was shallow and clear as glass and Hector could see that the coral reef formed a barrier a hundred yards offshore. They would have to wade out that far to meet the MTB. All that time they would be very vulnerable.
While they watched only a single vehicle passed along the beach road, and that was one of the ubiquitous African buses that cover every mile of the network of roads across the entire continent. The bus was so dusty that no glimpse of the original paintwork was visible. The mountainous luggage of the passengers, including baskets of live chickens and bunches of coconuts, was strapped to the roof. The racket of the engine, the clash of gears and the rattling and banging of the bodywork and chassis over the heavily rutted road carried clearly to them as they watched from the ridge. No other traffic followed it and Hector could find no evidence of enemy presence. He set up the satphone and called Ronnie Wells.
‘We are in sight of the beach, opposite the coordinates you gave me. How far are you offshore?’
‘According to my chart we are four point three nautical miles out from the beach.’
Hector used his new Nikon binoculars to search the open waters along the bearing that Ronnie had given him, and immediately he picked up the cluster of tiny islands, dark as a pod of whales, at approximately the correct bearing and range.
‘Roger, Ronnie! I think I have you. I want you to put up a yellow smoke rocket to confirm that I am looking in the right place.’
‘Okay, Heck. Hold on. It will take me a few minutes to rig the rocket.’ When it went up it left a brief yellow trail against the horizon, which dissipated almost immediately on the wind. It was so shortlived that an observer would have had to be watching out for it. Hector knew he had taken that chance, but he had to be absolutely certain of Ronnie’s position before he exposed his party.
‘Roger, Ronnie! You are on a bearing of fifteen degrees from our position. Come into the beach on a reciprocal heading.’
‘Can you spot any other traffic in my vicinity, Heck?’
‘There are a few small local fishing boats dotted about inshore of you, but they all seem to be at anchor. Then I can make out a large container ship on the horizon several miles beyond you. Nothing unusual.’
‘Okay, Heck. I will be coming in at full throttle. Be ready for a quick pick-up. We don’t want to muck about on the beach.’
‘One other thing that you should be warned about, Ronnie. We have had a traitor in our midst. Uthmann Waddah is an enemy agent. He knew about our rendezvous here. At the first sign of trouble you must abort and make a run for it.’
‘Uthmann Waddah! It’s a hard game, Heck. I know how you feel about him.’
‘What I felt about him, Ronnie – past tense. I will kill him next time we meet. I tried once already, but next time I will make no mistake.’
‘Roger that! See you on the beach.’
As soon as he had received the warning from Uthmann Waddah that Hector Cross might attempt to escape by sea, Kamal Tippoo Tip had taken all his attack boats out of the harbour at Gandanga and run northwards to station them in a line along the stretch of coast nearest to the Oasis of the Miracle and the fortress. This is where he could reasonably expect the infidel to attempt his escape from Puntland. The boats were anchored a mile offshore and every boat was in sight of the others on each side of it, so that they formed a chain of observation almost fifty miles long. Kamal had placed himself in the centre of the chain, and it was he who spotted the ephemeral yellow smoke trail against the eastern sky. Before the smoke had blown away he was on his shortwave radio calling his entire fleet of twenty-three attack boats to assemble on him.
In the sandy cove three nautical miles further offshore than Kamal’s ambush, Ronnie ordered his crew to stand by to weigh the anchor at which they had been riding for the past seventy-two hours. He went forward to remove the tarpaulin cover from the twin 50 calibre Browning heavy machine guns mounted in the bows. He loaded both weapons and traversed them port and starboard to make certain the mountings were clear. Then he hurried back to the cockpit of the MTB and started the engines. They kicked in smoothly and he ran them up to 3,000 revs, then throttled back to idle and let the needle of the engine temperature gauge climb into the green arc. He gave a hand signal to the foredeck crew and the anchor winch whined, the chain clattered into the anchor well and the anchor itself came aboard, and was lashed down securely by the crew. Marcus, the bosun, gave a thumbs up and Ronnie engaged the reverse gear and manoeuvred the boat until it was bows-on to the entrance of the cove. Then he opened up both engines and they roared out into the open sea, and swung onto the heading for the distant beach. In the binoculars Hector picked up the gleaming wake of the Rolls-Royce motors heading directly towards him.
‘Here comes Ronnie!’ he told Hazel as soon as he was certain.
‘Second time lucky,’ she said, and he nodded.
‘It’s a racing certainty,’ he agreed, but the words of the old saw rang a caution in his head. ‘The first the worst, the second the same, the third the best of all the game.’ He put the saying out of his mind, and called to Tariq to get everybody into the Mercedes. They ran to obey him and Hector climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. He took one last look out to sea to make sure that everything was developing smoothly, and what he saw struck ice into his soul. Hazel saw his expression change.
‘What is it, Hector?’ she asked in alarm.
‘We tempted fate, and fate was listening,’ he said softly so as not to alarm Cayla. With his chin he pointed out to sea. She saw it at once.
‘Holy mother of God!’ she whispered and grabbed his hand for comfort. What they had taken to be small fishing boats were nothing of the kind. The surface of the sea, which minutes before had been troubled only by a light onshore breeze, was now boiling like a pot of soup. The silver wakes of numerous fast-moving small craft were lacing the surface, criss-crossing each other from every direction, like the spokes of a great wheel converging on a point in their centre. Moving less swiftly but kicking up a greater propeller wash than all the rest, Ronnie Wells’s MTB was the central point of all this violent activity. Hector switched off the engine of the Mercedes and grabbed the satphone. On the MTB the phone rang once and Ronnie Wells snatched it up.
‘Hector?’ he demanded.
‘Ronnie! Abort! Abort!’ Hector shouted at him. ‘There are pirate boats coming at you from every direction. It’s an ambush. Of course, Uthmann set you up. Get out of there. Do you hear me?’
‘Roger! Stand by for my famous vanishing act.’
‘Leave the sat connection open,’ Hector ordered. Ronnie dropped the telephone receiver onto the chart table beside him without breaking the contact. Now Hector was able to hear everything that was happening on board the MTB.
‘Hold on!’ Ronnie shouted to his crew and put the wheel hard over. The big boat whipped viciously around in a 180-degree turn. One of his men was unprepared and he was hurled off-balance headfirst into the coaming of the hatchway. His skull cracked loudly and he went down as though from a head shot with a .44 Magnum revolver.
Ronnie ignored him and shouted to his bosun, ‘Marcus, get forward and man the Brownings. As soon as we have a target I will turn you on to it. Shoot any other boat you see. They will all be bandits!’
Ronnie was staring back over their wake. He could see nothing, but he knew they were there, so low in the water that they were not visible in the swells unless they were closer than a few hundred yards. From the locker under the chart table he took out an Uzi submachine gun, and checked the magazine before he laid it on the seat at the level of his knees, then from the same locker he brought out four M.67 phosphorus g
renades and placed them beside the Uzi SMG.
He glanced back over the stern and saw the head and shoulders of a man pop out above the swells. He could not see the hull of the boat under him, but knew it was the driver of the first attack boat standing at the controls while the rest of his crew crouched in the bilges. They were closing the gap between the two craft surprisingly swiftly. Ronnie picked up the satphone.
‘I am not going to be able to run away from this one, Hector. They have got the legs on me,’ he said. ‘I have to turn back and fight. They won’t be expecting that.’
‘That’s what you were built for, you old sea dog,’ Hector answered lightly although his heart was a stone in his chest. ‘Give them hell, Ron!’
‘Sorry you couldn’t be here to join the fun.’ Ronnie dropped the phone again and Hector heard him shout to Marcus behind the twin heavy machine guns. ‘Ready about!’
Marcus acknowledged with a pump of his right fist and Ronnie put the wheel hard over. The MTB spun on its axis and went roaring back under full power. The two boats rushed together at a combined speed of almost one hundred miles an hour. The Arab boat was taken completely by surprise. Before its crew could emerge from hiding under the gunwale the tracer fire from the MTB’s heavy machine guns was chewing the hull into splinters and wood chips. Almost immediately the boat went out of control and nosedived into the next wave.
‘That was so lovely to watch!’ Ronnie laughed, but three more attack boats appeared from behind the swells and the crews were all blazing away at the MTB with their assault rifles as they closed the range. Most of their fire was screeching overhead or ploughing into the waves ahead of the hull. But some of it was tearing into the MTB. Ronnie’s windshield shattered and flying glass cut his forehead and the blood ran into his eyes, but he turned to take on the closest boat bow to bow. Relying on his superior size he went to ram it, but the attack boat sheered away and they roared past each other with only a narrow strip of water separating them. As they passed Ronnie tossed a phosphorus grenade into the attack boat and ducked as it exploded in a blinding white sheet of flame. Two of the Arab crew were blown clean overboard and the man at the helm simply disappeared in the flash and the smoke.
Ronnie was consumed with battle madness, that sense of euphoria that could not be induced by any drug. He turned after the next boat and rammed it full on. The collision wrecked the MTB’s bows, but he trampled the attack boat under him and spilled its crew into the sea where they floundered and drowned.
Now there were attack boats converging on him from every direction. The Arab crews were screeching, ‘Allahu Akbar!, and sweeping the MTB with close-range automatic fire. Marcus was killed outright by a burst from an AK and he collapsed over his guns, the twin barrels spiralling aimlessly and tracer shells spraying into the sky. Another boat hurtled alongside, and a robed and bearded Arab hurled a grappling iron onto the MTB’s deck and the hooks bit into the wooden gunwale. Within minutes others had followed his example, and Ronnie was dragging a mini-flotilla behind his own. He looked around him and found that he was the only one of his crew still alive, the bodies of his men lying in abandoned attitudes in puddles of their own blood. Miraculously in the storm of gunfire Ronnie stood untouched. When he looked back over the stern he saw that a gang of Arabs were using the grappling lines to pull their attack boats up to the stern of the MTB, and they were bracing themselves to scramble onto his afterdeck. He emptied the magazine of the Uzi into them, knocking down two. When the magazine was empty he dropped the weapon, and locking the wheel hard astarboard he snatched up a grenade in each hand. He pulled the pins from the grenades with his teeth as he started back to hurl them into the trailing attack boats. But he had taken only two paces before a bullet from an AK hit him low in the abdomen. It sliced through his guts and exited from his spine, shattering two of his lower vertebrae. His legs collapsed under him, and he sprawled on the deck. His legs were paralysed, but he used his elbows to drag his maimed body as far as the auxiliary fuel tank and he curled up against it, still clutching the grenades against his chest. He felt the thumps as the hulls of half a dozen attack boats struck the sides of the MTB, and then the slap of many bare feet on the decking as the pirate horde came pouring on board, screeching and ululating triumphantly, jostling and shoving each other to be the first to take possession of the prize. One of them spotted Ronnie curled up against the fuel tank. He ran to him, stood over him and pulled his head back to slash his throat with a curved Arabian dagger. It was a clumsy stroke and it missed the jugular but sliced open the windpipe. Before he could hack at his throat again Ronnie rolled over and held up the two grenades.
The rest of the pirates were crowding forward, laughing and shouting, but when they saw the grenades they drew back in consternation. Ronnie felt no pain, just a great surge of adrenalin that lifted him like a magic carpet. Vaguely he understood that this was what he had wanted all along: to die with a weapon in his hands and an enemy confronting him, and not in the infirmary of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. He laughed at them and the air puffed from his severed windpipe in a fine pink mist. He wanted to shout some witticism about beating them to paradise and expropriating every one of their seventy virgins, but his vocal cords were severed and he could not enunciate the words. He opened his hands and let the handles fly from the grenades.
The rabble of pirates broke and ran, howling with terror, but none of them reached the boats alongside before the explosion consumed them in flame. Ronnie was still laughing as he was caught up in the double explosion, and a moment later the fuel tank against which he had been propping himself exploded and a pillar of flame and black smoke shot high into the sky.
Hector was watching through his binoculars and he felt the shock wave of the explosion ruffle his hair, and saw the tower of smoke and the brilliance of burning phosphorus, brighter than the sunlight on the waves. Simultaneously the satphone in his cargo pocket went dead. He went on staring through the lens for a few minutes longer while he gathered himself. Then he felt Hazel’s hand on his arm.
‘I am so sorry, my darling.’ It was the first time she had used that term of endearment. He lowered the binoculars and turned to her.
‘Thank you for your understanding. But it’s what Ronnie would have wanted. This very moment he is probably jeering at the fates.’ He gave his head a little shake, putting his sorrow aside for the moment, and shouted to Tariq, ‘Get everybody mounted up again.’ Then he turned back to Hazel. ‘That smoke rocket was my mistake. Now they can be sure we are here, and that Ronnie was signalling us. We have to move out quickly.’
With the Mercedes loaded Hector turned onto the coastal road and drove fast along it in the opposite direction to the pirate lair at Gandanga Bay. They covered almost fifteen miles before Hector spotted the dust of a strange vehicle approaching from the north. Quickly he pulled off the road and parked behind a clump of windswept thornbushes. He ordered all of them to dismount and sit behind the truck which was camouflaged by its thick coating of dust and dried quicksand. He crouched down behind the trunk of one of the thorny trees and watched another passenger bus grinding southwards, effectively wiping out their own tracks with its wide double tyres. As soon as it was out of sight he and Tariq each cut themselves a tree branch from one of the trees and went back to the verge of the road where they had left it. They came back to the parked truck, walking backwards and carefully sweeping all the signs of their passing from the hard baked surface, and straightening the strands of coarse brown grass that had been flattened by the wheels of their truck.
Satisfied at last that they had done all they could to throw off any pursuit by the pirates who were bound to come looking for them along the road, he ordered everybody to take their allotted seat in the vehicle and then headed back into the wilderness the way they had come, in the direction of the Oasis of the Miracle and the Ethiopian border. When darkness fell and it was not safe to continue onwards for fear of hitting a rock or crashing into one of the wadis, Hector parked the Mercedes
. They brewed coffee on a small carefully screened fire of brushwood and drank it black and unsweetened to wash down the dry army survival rations. Every one of them was exhausted, so Hector took the first turn of guard duty. All the others threw themselves down on the hard earth and slept almost immediately. Even Hazel who was one of the toughest and most determined of them all had at last succumbed. She lay with Cayla cuddled in her arms, both of them still and silent as statues. When the night air turned cooler Hector spread his jacket over them; neither of them so much as twitched.
He let them all sleep for an hour after the moon rose. When at last he roused them and chivvied them back into the truck, he handed over the driving to Tariq and let the rocking and swaying of the Mercedes over the rough terrain lull him to sleep. He slept sitting upright in the high hunting seat with the loaded rifle across his lap held by the strap, ready for an instant response to any threat. He was awakened by a change in the truck’s motion. Suddenly it was much smoother and the engine note changed as Tariq engaged a higher gear. Hector opened his eyes and saw that they were moving faster on a roughly demarcated but beaten track. He glanced at the stars to orient himself. Orion was hunting the western sky with Sirius, his dog, running ahead of him. The moon was high. They were still heading west without headlights showing, relying on the moon and the glow of the Milky Way to light their route. He checked his wristwatch; he had been asleep for almost three hours. They must be getting close to the more fertile and populous areas of land along the main highway. He leaned forward and touched Tariq on the shoulder.
‘Peepee pause,’ he announced. Tariq braked and they all climbed down. The women went to the rear of the truck and the men to the front. Standing shoulder to shoulder with him, Hector spoke quietly to Tariq.
