by Tony Park
Kevin was lying on the floor of the cargo compartment, in the same position he’d occupied during the hook-up of the net full of ivory. He was counting off the metres between the chopper and the ship, speaking into the flight engineer’s headset.
Alex braced himself with a hand on the hatch and leaned out. Two Chinese crewmen stood on the raised teak and plywood platform that had been added to the stern of the Peng Cheng by Wu and his crew during their last few days of internment on Ilha dos Sonhos. Around the landing pad hung a net made of knotted rope, wide and strong enough to catch anyone who might have to leap off the structure in case of an emergency. It was an idea Alex had borrowed from US Navy aircraft carriers. One of the men on the makeshift helipad held up a bamboo pole insulated with thick rubber and anchored by a cable to the platform. As the net descended above him he touched it with the pole, discharging the static.
Kobus settled into a hover and the two crewmen retreated to the edge of the structure, holding hands up to their eyes to protect them from the downwash. The helicopter slowly turned, the net hanging a couple of metres above the wooden deck. Alex could see Captain Wu and Chan standing in the open wing of the bridge. Chan was waving at them, pointing downwards with his thumb, like a Roman emperor giving a death sentence.
Alex stepped out of the cargo compartment, letting the winch cable take his weight. He nodded to Novak, who pressed the button to lower him. Alex turned slowly through three hundred and sixty degrees as he descended to the platform, giving him a chance to survey as much of the ship as was visible from the outside. He noted a couple more crewmen in baggy shorts and grimy off-white singlets. None of them was armed.
Odd, he thought.
With so much ivory and so much money at stake Chan would have been as wary as Alex was of a double-cross. Chan was scurrying down a ladder. As Alex unclipped himself from the harness Chan jogged across the open cargo deck between the helipad and the bridge. He lurched slightly from side to side. Although the swell was negligible the gangster had not been on board long enough to find his sea legs.
Alex stood still, ignoring the rotor downwash that flicked his long hair about his face.
Chan cupped his hands on either side of his mouth. ‘PUT MY IVORY DOWN ON THE DECK!’ He gestured furiously at the laden net.
Alex shook his head. ‘HALF! UP FRONT!’
Chan mouthed something in Mandarin.
Alex looked up at Kevin, whose head was hanging over the edge of the cargo floor. He raised his thumb. Kevin spoke into the intercom and Alex reached for the swinging rescue harness and started to put his head through it.
‘WAIT, WAIT! I GUESSED YOU WOULD DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS!’
Alex gestured up at Kevin with an open palm and removed his head from the harness again. Chan waved at Wu, who despatched a young crewman from the bridge. The boy carried a black nylon sports bag and ran with it across the hot metal of the deck. He handed it to Chan who threw it at Alex. He caught the bag one-handed and used his other to unzip it. Inside were stacks of banded US dollars. There was no way to tell if they were counterfeit.
Alex unsnapped a metal karabiner from his assault vest and used it to fasten the two loop handles of the bag to the rescue hoist. He gave a thumbs up and the bag whizzed skywards.
‘NOW!’ yelled Chan.
Alex nodded and Kobus started to lower the helicopter. Chan took Alex gently by the arm to steer him away from the descending net, towards the bridge, and allow the two crewmen to move in closer, but Alex shrugged him off and backed away in the opposite direction, towards the stern.
Two kilometres away, out of sight of the men on board the Peng Cheng and those hovering above it, Lieutenant Oliver Msimang watched the stolen Oryx helicopter on the video screen in his cockpit. He keyed the radio: ‘Command, this is Kestrel One. Target helo is lowering the ivory onto the suspect vessel. Request permission to engage, over.’
‘Hold, Kestrel One,’ came the voice of the naval captain at the Joint Operations Centre thousands of kilometres away in Pretoria. The irascible Colonel De Villiers had been sidelined by the chain of command.
‘He’s cut away the net, Oliver,’ Jaco Kronje, his weapons officer, said into their private intercom.
Msimang returned his gaze to the screen as he held the hover. He checked the fuel gauges. They hadn’t miraculously climbed out of the red since the last time he’d looked, two minutes earlier. ‘Control, this is Kestrel One. Target has released cargo net and is climbing.’ So, too, was the note in his voice. He took a breath. ‘Target helo is holding above suspect vessel. Request permission to engage, over.’
Come on, come on, Oliver said to himself.
‘Cargo is being loaded into the ship’s hold. Request permission to engage, over.’
‘Hold, Kestrel One, damn you. I said hold.’
The weapons officer was intent on his display screen and systems readiness. ‘Look, they’ve got the net stowed. The Oryx is coming in to land. We’ve got two, three minutes at the most, and not enough fuel to chase him and stay with the ship if he gaps it for the coast.’
Oliver pushed the stick forward and started flying towards the ship.
‘Hey, where are we going?’
‘To war, Jaco.’
Alex’s men had a rhythm going now, passing tusks from man to man and finally to Novak, who stood on the wooden deck, overseeing the transfer to a stream of Chinese crewmen. Alex stood back, his R5 still slung but the barrel covering the operation. Chan, he saw, stayed on the far side of the helo, with Wu next to him. The pair started to back away, towards the bridge. Novak had noticed the movement as well and looked over at Alex, who raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement.
The helicopter was nearly empty now. Alex hoped Chan and Wu were going to collect the balance of his money. There were thirty or forty tusks lying on the deck next to the Oryx, but the antlike flow of crewmen had stopped and none had returned from the hold amidships, where they had been ferrying the ivory down a series of ladders. Up until now they had been efficient, jogging to the hole in the deck with full loads and sprinting back empty-handed for more.
Alex raised his hand to get Novak’s attention. ‘GET ON BOARD!’
Novak backed up to the helicopter and sat in the open hatchway. He had unslung his rifle and held it at the ready.
‘Kestrel One, this is Command. You are to engage target helicopter and destroy. Repeat, engage and destroy target helicopter. Suspect vessel is not to be engaged. SAS Talana is closing on your position. Make best speed. Acknowledge, over?’
‘Yes!’ Jaco called from the front seat of the Rooivalk.
The South African Ship Talana was one of four frigates bought from the Germans a few years earlier. It had a big fat landing deck and fuel just waiting for him. Oliver pictured them arriving on the ship, with nothing but fumes in his fuel tanks – he and Jaco climbing down from the cockpit and being carried on the shoulders of cheering sailors, just like Tom Cruise in Top Gun.
‘Closing,’ Oliver said.
‘Roger.’
Oliver felt the sweat dampening the fabric of his flying gloves as he gripped the stick tight. His heart was clunking in his chest and he took a breath to steady himself.
‘I’ve got visual on the ship,’ Jaco said. ‘At one o’clock.’
Oliver peered out into the near-blinding haze coming off the ocean and made out the dark speck.
‘Selecting guns. Guns armed,’ Jaco said.
Oliver couldn’t see the target vessel and helicopter now, because of the haze that blurred the line between water and sky. He was banking on the ship’s crew being similarly blind to their approach. Until it was too late.
Alex looked around for Chan or Captain Wu but neither was in sight. He unslung the R5 from his shoulder and started backing towards the Oryx. He wasn’t going to leave without the balance of his money.
He turned and looked at Kobus through the perspex and waved his hand in the air in a circling motion. The rest of the men were on board. ‘Tak
e off!’
Kobus hesitated, but Novak was inside the chopper now and Alex saw his bull-necked head appear next to the pilot’s. He yelled something into Kobus’s ear and the Oryx started to lift off.
Novak knew the drill for such an eventuality. They would hover a short distance from the ship and at the first sign of trouble, or a double-cross, they would return and start raking the decks with automatic fire. If Alex were still alive they would try to rescue him.
As the Oryx’s fat wheels left the deck the gunfire started.
‘Seven hundred, six hundred,’ said Jaco, counting off the metres. ‘Guns hot, target acquired.’
‘Fire when ready,’ Oliver said.
‘Target’s lifting off. Adjusting aim.’
Control of the Rooivalk’s twenty-millimetre cannon was slaved to Jaco’s flying helmet and the monocular sight attached to it. Simply by tilting his head a little the long, lethal barrels rose. Jaco started to squeeze.
‘Incoming!’ Oliver was watching the whole of the ship rather than focusing on the other helicopter and saw the winking muzzle flashes before his gunner. Instinctively he pulled back on the stick.
Jaco swore, but pulled the trigger home even as the Oryx disappeared from his sight. The Rooivalk shuddered as thirty of the long fat projectiles erupted from the rotating barrels of the cannon. There was another sound, too, like hail on a tin roof.
The tracer rounds in the mix glowed red, burning an arcing path through the afternoon haze, but flying harmlessly past the Oryx and over the bow of the ship.
‘We’re taking fire!’ Oliver yelled, his earlier cool all but gone.
Oliver saw the ship flash away, below and to his left. The Oryx was disappearing from view on the far side of the ship, staying low, the pilot keeping the nose down to gather speed.
Alex leapt from the wooden deck but instead of hitting the water below he was caught in the cargo net surrounding the landing platform. In his mind, when ordering its installation, he’d thought of many things that could go wrong during the exchange of ivory for cash. A full-scale war wasn’t one of them, but the ropes had saved him for the moment.
He heard shouts on the far side of the Peng Cheng, in English.
The unannounced arrival of the helicopter gunship had taken them all by surprise, and that, too, had probably been a major contributing factor to his continued existence. He craned his neck and saw the sleek helicopter wheeling around. He had little time to worry about Novak and the others in the Oryx, because copper-jacketed lead slugs were tearing through the timbers above his head.
Cradling his R5 in the crook of his arms he leopard crawled his way awkwardly along the netting. At the very stern of the ship he slung the rifle around his neck, grabbed the edge of the rope with both hands and rolled forward. Dangling two metres above the deck, he let go, and landed hard but intact.
The gunfire had slowed to the occasional shot now. Reconnaissance by fire, the Americans called it. It was a simple ‘pray and spray’ technique designed to get him to fire back, but guile and silence would be the only things that would help him now, unless he had a man’s head in his sights.
How many had there been? Seven? Eight? Nine? Wu only had five crewmen on board the small freighter. Others, English-speakers, had joined them, and they must have come by sea.
Alex heard a noise like a buzz saw in the distance. The sun glittered off spinning rotors and a cockpit windscreen as the helicopter gunship chased his men in the Oryx. The noise was another deadly spurt from the long-barrelled cannon in the turret under the Rooivalk’s chin.
He moved slowly, unlike his beating heart. He smelled rotting food and saw the stains on the rails and the stern of the hull where the cook tossed his waste. Alex peeked around a corner of the ship’s superstructure and saw two Chinese crewmen creeping aft. Both were armed and Alex had time to register that the lead man carried a stubby green plastic Steyr carbine, the same weapon he used on his pirate raids. Odd, as it was an unusual weapon in Africa. Beyond them, of more interest, was a rope ladder, dangling amidships, and tethered to a bollard in the same location was a rigid-hulled inflatable boat. The boat bounced alongside the Peng Cheng. The name of the rubber tender’s mother ship was painted in bold white – Penfold Son. Things started to make sense. Chan had blackmailed Penfold, but now they were in cahoots. The tender was Alex’s only means of escape, and he had to get to it.
The sailors moved with exaggerated caution, their weapons held high. He saw the fear in their faces. These were not warriors. He took a breath, stepped out fully, dropped to one knee and raised his R5 to his shoulder, all in one fluid, well-practised move.
The lead Chinaman fired his Steyr. As Alex expected, the man had jerked the two-stage trigger hard enough to fire the rifle on full-auto and, just as predictably, the carbine pulled high and to the right. Bullets pinged off the deck head above the starboard walkway, ricocheting over his head and out to sea behind him. Alex fired two aimed shots into the man’s chest, which threw the hapless sailor back onto his crewmate.
The other discharged his AK-47 into the air out over the railing as his friend’s body knocked him to the ground. Instead of throwing down his weapon he raised it, one-handed, and aimed at Alex, who was on his feet by now, moving towards them, his weapon pulled tight in his shoulder. Alex didn’t give the man time to fire. He put one round into the man’s neck, and the other between his eyes.
He felt nothing. Chan and Wu had laid an ambush to kill him and his men. This was war.
He stopped and knelt by the bodies. He didn’t need to check if they were dead. He picked up the Steyr. He didn’t need to check the serial number to know that it was his. Slinging it over his shoulder would only make his movement more awkward and there was only the one magazine, now half empty, in the rifle. He tossed it, and the other man’s AK, over the side rail into the Indian Ocean. His R5 was warm and had tasted blood. Its aim was true, plus he had plenty more magazines full of ammunition.
Alex stepped over the bodies and ran towards the rope ladder. Two metres short, Piet van Zyl rounded the forward edge of the superstructure and opened fire.
A bullet tugged at the camouflage sleeve of his uniform. Van Zyl was no amateur and his first snap shot had nearly found its mark, even though Alex was moving. He dived left into an open hatch and pulled the steel door shut behind him. Alex grabbed a crowbar lying nearby and wedged it into the hatch’s locking dog.
‘Shit.’ He’d been almost in reach of the ladder and freedom. Now he’d have to make his way through the stinking bowels of the Peng Cheng.
As the rubber soles of his boots squeaked on the metal decks he navigated his way inwards, moving by instinct and memory. In addition to the usual smells of a freighter – diesel fumes, sweat, disinfectant and engine and cooking oils – was the lingering reminder that this ship had once been a floating zoo, and not all the animals had survived. Behind him he heard the frustrated swearing and clanging of rifle butts on the jammed hatch. They’d soon find a way in.
As he moved, he thought about his rifle, which he had thrown overboard. The fact it had turned up on board this ship was ominous. Either Chan, together with the freed Wu and his ship’s crew, had overpowered Jose and gotten into the armoury in the boatshed on Ilha dos Sonhos or, perhaps worse, Van Zyl and his men had been to the island.
Jose, his brother in all but blood, would not have let them take weapons off the island without a fight.
He also feared for Jane’s safety. If she had made it to the police in Cape Town with the evidence of Penfold’s crime there was little chance his flagship would have been allowed to leave port. The surest way for George to stop Jane would have been for him to kill her.
A door opened beside him and Alex turned and sidestepped as the silver blade of a meat cleaver swung in an arc. The tip of the honed metal passed millimetres from his nose. Alex reversed his rifle and smashed the butt into the face of the Peng Cheng’s chef. The grey-haired man reeled backwards, in a clatter of pots and pans,
and fell to the greasy floor of his bug-infested galley. Alex stamped mercilessly on the man’s right forearm and felt bone shatter under his boot. The cook yelped like a dog. They were determined to stop him – even the ones who couldn’t be trusted with a rifle. Alex had hijacked their ship, but when he thought of the meals Henri had cooked for the crew when they were hostages he felt nothing but contempt for this gang.
There was more shouting. Van Zyl and his mercenaries were behind him. Alex pulled another hatch closed and stopped. He was breathing hard, sucking in great gulps of air as he opened one of the pouches on his vest. From it he took one of the fragmentation grenades the crippled gun dealer had sold him in Alexandra. He took a small roll of trip wire from another pocket, quickly tied one end to the ring, then pulled the pin almost completely out. Gently, as the slightest disturbance would free the pin, he wedged the green orb in between a fire extinguisher and the metal bulkhead to which it was mounted. He pulled the wire taut and tied it off to the locking dog of the hatch. The footsteps on the other side were loud, as were the orders barked by Van Zyl.
Alex ran down the companionway and through the next hatch, which he closed and locked just as he heard the one behind him being opened.
The next door led to the cargo hold. It was empty bar the net full of elephant tusks, which had been lowered down via the ship’s crane.
‘Grenade!’ someone shouted.
The ship vibrated with the explosion. Those who survived the blast would have been deafened in the confines of the closed compartment. Alex clambered up onto the mountain of yellowed, bloodied ivory and began shifting tusks, unstacking them as he dug down into the core of the white gold.
31
‘Here he comes again,’ Novak said into his headset. He and Heinrich sat side by side in the open cargo hatch of the Oryx, their rifles ready, full magazines loaded for the Rooivalk’s next pass. Novak thought it would probably be the gunship’s last.
