Testament

by David Gibbins

  Macinnes put the phone down, leaned back in the chair, and put his hands behind his head. “So, Dr. Howard. We meet again. The Somali navy? That’s a joke. We’re in international waters, and they can’t touch us. Mr. Landor has gone ashore in our helicopter to broker an agreement with the Somali government so they get a cut of anything we find, our usual percentage. We find that generally works in Third World holes like this. Whichever naval officer is in charge of this puny operation is about to lose his job. Now, get off this ship and go home.”

  “We’re talking murder,” Jack said. “The murder of three Somali citizens, two of them marines, the third one a government employee in the museums service. That gives the Somali navy the right to make an arrest.”

  “You’re in way out of your depth, Howard. You should stick to your dinky toy excavations and your bits of broken pot. This is the big time.”

  “Yes, it is,” Jack said. “If you had any nautical sense you’d have noticed by now that the ship has changed course. In fifteen minutes you’ll have crossed into Somali territorial waters. That means you and everyone else on this ship will be arrested as accessories to murder. Next stop Mogadishu central jail, a really nice place for Westerners accused of messing around with this country, I hear.”

  Macinnes got up, angrily pushing the chair aside. “This is outrageous. Get out of my way. I need to see the captain.” He advanced on Jack, who unholstered his Beretta and leveled it at him.

  “One step closer, and I shoot.”

  Macinnes sneered at him and tried to shove him aside. “Get out of my way. You haven’t got the guts.” Jack pushed him back, leveled the Beretta again and fired a round close to Macinnes’s ear, a deafening crack that made him reel back in pain. Then he kicked him into the chair, keeping the gun leveled.

  “I know Landor’s not at some meeting in Mogadishu, as the naval commander has explained his implication in the murders to the Justice Minister and he’d be arrested on sight. In fact, he’s nowhere near Mogadishu. He’s gone for a trip to an island with your new friends, hasn’t he? Right now, I don’t care about that. I can deal with him later. All I want to know now is where is Dr. Kazantzakis?”

  Macinnes held his left ear, blood trickling down his hand. He looked at Jack, and guffawed. “That loser? I’m amazed you bother with him. That dive off Sierra Leone was one of the most incompetent things I’ve ever seen, all that fancy IMU equipment that doesn’t work. But when a little birdie told us you’d arrived in Somalia and were probably on our trail again, we knew your clown sidekick would be along as well. Lo and behold, he shows up. Take my advice, you’re well rid of him.”

  That was enough. If Landor knew they were in Somalia, there was no question about who was behind the kidnapping. Jack remembered the last time he had seen Macinnes, having to toe the line and endure his snide comments after he and Costas had boarded Deep Explorer for the UN inspection. This time, Jack was in charge. He lunged forward, kicked the chair back, and reached for the scruff of the man’s neck, pulling him up bodily and slamming him against the bookcase behind. He punched him as hard as he could in the face, let him collapse, and then picked him up again, the blood pouring out of his nose and down his chin. He pressed the Beretta behind Macinnes’s ear, pushing it as hard as he could, his other hand around his throat. “I don’t think I heard your answer. Where is Dr. Kazantzakis?”

  21

  The trawler slammed into the waves again, sending a tremor through the hull that seemed to jar every bone in Costas’s body. Over the past few hours he had learned to accommodate himself to the boat’s movements, tensing as it dropped into a trough and then relaxing as it rode the swell, the engine grinding against its mounting one way and reverberating and shuddering the other. Twice he had nodded off and lost the rhythm, and had paid the price in an excruciating jolt. Sleep, he knew, would be an impossibility as long as the sea was this rough, but they were probably past the halfway point and the rest of the trip was a matter of endurance. He guessed they were heading toward the island near Socotra, the one that Ahmed had identified as the site of the U-boat pen; from their embarkation point at a fishing village several hours north of Mogadishu they should reach the island not much after first light. It was a question of lasting out the remainder of the night, of keeping alert and learning anything he could from the noise and the smell, of seizing any opportunity that presented itself to overcome his captors and escape.

  He shifted slightly, bracing his feet against the engine mounting and his left shoulder against one of the timber frames of the hull, trying to find a better angle for his wrists. They had been handcuffed behind his back with a cable tie, and for several hours now he had been trying to cut the cable, pressing it hard with each jolt of the hull against an upturned metal edge beneath him. He had been blindfolded since being hustled out of the Toyota in the village and could only guess at his surroundings, but he knew that it was a large fishing vessel, undoubtedly the trawler that Captain Ibrahim had described, the mother ship for the pirate gang. He knew it was a fishing vessel from the appalling stench that had hit him when he was first pushed down the hatch into the hold, and the fish guts that slopped around his feet as the boat pitched and yawed. That and the stale sweat of the crew had made him gag and retch, but as soon as the engine had coughed to life he had been engulfed by diesel fumes and the reek of overheated oil. All he had been able to sense for some time now was a cloying in the back of his throat, whether from diesel fumes or blood from the beatings he could not tell. He felt as if he were a mountaineer in the death zone, knowing that no matter how much he breathed there was never going to be sufficient oxygen in this place to keep him alive. He desperately needed fresh air, and soon.

  The engine coughed and spluttered, running on idle for a few moments, and then hacked back to life again. The hatch above him clanged open and someone dropped into the scuppers. He could tell from the stink that it was his captor, his tormentor. He clenched his jaw tight, knowing what would come next. The blow when it came was still a shock, snapping his head sideways, and he felt his mouth fill up again with blood. A hand roughly grasped his jaw, and he smelled the man’s breath again, the reek of tobacco and khat and marijuana. “Hey, English,” his captor said, his voice heavily accented. “I bring you water.”

  “I’m not English,” Costas said hoarsely. “For the last time, I’m American.”

  “No Americans here,” the man said, taunting. Costas felt the muzzle of a gun thrust under his chin. “No American Embassy, no George Bush, no Obama, no Clinton. No help for you, English.”

  Costas strained his head up. “Your engine,” he said. “It’s bad, kaput. I can fix it. I’m an engineer.”

  He heard the rasp of a lighter and a deep inhalation, and then he smelled the smoke. The last thing they needed down here was a spark to blow them all to kingdom come—himself, his stoned captor, the others on the deck above. “The engine,” he tried again, speaking more loudly. “It’s kaput, finished. I can fix it.”

  The mouth of a bottle was pressed hard into his teeth, ripping at his gums. He drank as much as he could, trying to ignore the coppery tang of his own blood. The bottle was upturned as he drank, and most of the water spilled down his front. He heard the man inhale again, and his voice close against his ear, blowing smoke as he spoke. “No George Bush, no Obama, no Clinton,” he repeated. “No one to help you, no ransom. Soon it is you who will be kaput, English.”

  The engine spluttered again. A voice shouted down from above, and the man answered, speaking quickly in Somali. The other replied angrily, and there was a heated exchange. The man seemed to concede, and spoke to Costas again. “Okay, English. The Boss wants you to look at the engine. You look, you tell me what to do. Anything funny, you kaput, you understand?”

  Costas flexed his wrists, trying to keep the circulation going. He had no way of knowing how close he had come to cutting the tie, but he knew that he had at least made a notch in it. He felt the blindfold being pulled off, and then a searing
pain in his left eye as the pressure was removed from it. He remembered the blow to his head after Zaheed and the marines had been gunned down, and then a confusion of memory as he recovered consciousness in their attackers’ vehicle some time later. He blinked, able to see nothing through the swollen eye, and then caught sight of his captor for the first time, leering at him in the gloom.

  The man was scrawny, with sunken cheeks and eyes and yellow teeth, and of indeterminate age, probably much younger than he looked. He wore a grubby vest, and on one shoulder Costas saw the distinctive Badass Boys tattoo that Ibrahim had shown them, a stylized bird with a crescent above, and beneath that a dozen or so raised welts signifying how many people he had killed. He was holding a Kalashnikov with the wire butt folded in, the muzzle aimed at Costas’s gut. He leaned close, his eyes hazy and his chin covered with wispy hair, and took a final drag from his joint, flicking what was left into the scuppers and causing a small eruption of blue flame where leaked diesel ignited. Then he grabbed Costas by the hair and pulled him forward on his knees in front of the engine, holding the rifle to his head. “Now, English, you fix, okay?”

  Costas pretended to scrutinize the engine, and then got up on one knee, nodding toward the stern. “I need to see over there, the propeller shaft,” he said. The man backed off slightly and Costas started to rise, lurching sideways with the roll of the boat, his head bowed under the low ceiling of the deck. The boat jarred into another wave, and in that instant he saw his chance. He pulled his wrists apart and broke the tie, in the same movement swinging his arms around and slamming his hands into his captor’s head, pushing him off balance. The man fell hard against one of the frames, clutching his left leg in agony, his weapon falling into the bilge. Costas lunged for it, but was brought up short by a savage blow to the head. He fell forward on his knees, a searing pain in his neck, and looked up blearily to see the Boss standing over him, his own Kalashnikov raised.

  “Not so fast,” the man said, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. “Has my boy been giving you trouble?” He swung his rifle toward the downed man, firing a ten-round burst that ripped up his chest and into his head, exploding it like a watermelon. Costas stared in horror, his ears ringing from the noise, and then slumped back, wiping the spatter of blood off his face. The Boss grinned, showing a mouth full of gold. “See? No more trouble.” He took out the cigarette and spat a jet of khat juice on to the corpse. “Plenty more where he came from.” He sniffed exaggeratedly. “Man, it stinks down here. We need to get you some fresh air.”

  Costas rolled back, looking at the man. He had spent hours listening to him in the Toyota and through the hatch in the boat when it had been left open, but this was the first time he had seen him. He was young, too, but better fed and sharper-looking than the other one had been, his eyes less hazed by drugs. He spoke in a curious patois that seemed to owe something to hard-edged Hollywood gang movies of recent years, but that could have been a result of time spent in the US or Canada. Now he sat down beside the body, placed the Kalashnikov across his knees and offered Costas the cigarette. When he refused, the Boss leaned forward, looking him over with an exaggerated expression of surprise and contempt. “I’m examining my merchandise, and I don’t like what I see,” he said, digging a lighter out of the fallen man’s pocket and flicking it under Costas’s chin, examining his bruises and shaking his head. “I don’t see anyone paying a ransom for you any time soon, my man.”

  “If you kill me, your paymaster from Deep Explorer isn’t going to be too pleased, is he? Nor are my friends in the Somali navy.”

  The Boss stared at him, his jaw dropping theatrically, then sniffed and spat at his feet before suddenly letting out a high-pitched peal of laughter and slapping his knee. He jabbed the hand with the cigarette at Costas. “You trying to frighten me, man?”

  “Just putting you in the picture.”

  “I’ll tell you about the picture.” The Boss leaned forward, his face contorted. “That man Landor? He’s here now, upstairs. He’s different, he understands us, knows what makes us tick. The rest of you are all the same, Americans, English, you come here thinking you can take us on, and you run away as soon as you get a bloody nose. The Somali navy? Give me a break, man. And you know what? I’ll take his money, yes. But he and I have an agreement. Part of what’s on that island is mine. What we’re going to find now.”

  “You might want to take care. It may be a little hot for you to handle.”

  The Boss got up, staring, the whites of his knuckles showing where he was clutching the rifle. “Are you doing it again? Are you doing it again?”

  “Just a friendly word of warning.”

  Costas knew what was coming. He had provoked it, but he had known it was going to happen again at some point and he just wanted it over with. The blow when it came threw him back against the side of the hull, a blinding pain exploding behind his eyes. Then he felt nothing.

  * * *

  Jack gunned the Zodiac forward, twisting the throttle as it rose out of a deep trough and then easing it back again as he dropped down the other side, trying to keep a steady speed. Rather than taking the patrol boat’s larger rigid-hulled Zodiac he had opted for the four-meter inflatable with its forty-horsepower outboard, keeping their profile as low as possible and reducing the chances of anyone on the trawler spotting them. If he had tried to plane over the waves, the shriek of the propeller rising out of the water between the peaks might have given them away. Stealth was of the essence, and their progress so far had been good enough, meaning that they should be closing in on their target before dawn.

  He lowered himself to the floorboards, sitting with his back against one pontoon and his feet against the fuel tank, holding the tiller of the outboard with one hand and the painter line with the other. Wedged in the bow was Lieutenant Ahmed, keeping as far forward as possible so that his weight would stop the boat from flying upward as they rose above each trough. As soon as Jack had extracted confirmation from Macinnes on Deep Explorer that Costas was on the trawler, Ahmed had immediately volunteered for the mission, and Jack had seen the necessity of having two men in the boat, doubling the firepower. This operation was about rescuing Costas, but confronting the pirates was also a Somali naval responsibility, and Ahmed was the spearhead of their new rapid-reaction force, trained at the US Navy SEALS base at Quantico. With the plan they had devised with Captain Ibrahim for dealing with the trawler, Ahmed’s diving skills would also come in very useful.

  They were about two nautical miles ahead of the patrol boat and less than half a mile now from the trawler, all of them heading in a line toward the little island to the west of Socotra. Jack glanced back, throttling down even further to reduce the phosphorescence in their wake, thankful for the rough seas that should help to keep them concealed. He pulled the tiller sideways to aim at a rogue wave, climbing it and then pushing the tiller to get back on course, trying to keep his profile as inconspicuous as possible in the event that anyone in the trawler ahead was actually keeping a lookout. Everything was as close to black as they could make it—their wetsuits, their faces—and it was a moonless night, still more than an hour away from dawn. He ran again through a mental checklist of their equipment. Both men wore three-liter air tanks that would give them about twenty minutes or so underwater, with octopus rigs so that they had two regulator mouthpieces each. In backpacks beside the cylinders they carried small fins and low-volume face masks, with Jack carrying a second set. Around their waists they wore equipment belts with holstered 9mm Beretta pistols, spare magazines, fragmentation and stun grenades, and in Jack’s case a flare gun as well. Ahmed also had an MP5 submachine gun and a bandolier on his chest with additional magazines, his role being to provide suppressing fire to allow Jack to find and extract Costas.

  All they could do now was to keep going, to hope that the timing was right, to pray that nobody in the trawler saw them. An hour earlier, a drone launched from the patrol boat had seen the trawler’s skiff leave and go on ahead, taki
ng one white man who could only be Landor and at least a dozen others of the gang toward the island. It meant that there would be a reception for Jack and Ahmed if they did get to the island themselves, but that was too far ahead in the plan to think about now. The immediate consequence was fewer men to deal with on the trawler itself, a slightly higher chance of success if they did get on board. It was an audacious plan, but there had been no other way of interdicting the trawler without making their presence known in advance, potentially jeopardizing Costas’s chances even further.

  Jack had tried not to think about that, having blocked the worst-case scenario from his mind. Costas was only valuable to Landor as long as he thought his capture was deterring Jack from following him to the island. Landor himself might have bitten off more than he could chew. The gang boss was by all accounts a shrewd operator, wily enough to guess that the value of whatever lay on that island was a lot greater than he had been promised as payment. Landor might have offered him a cut, but that in itself might be seen as a sign of weakness, as if Landor were desperate. What seemed certain was that Costas would have little interest to them as a hostage for ransom, that his life would be forfeit the instant they knew that Jack was on their trail, the moment any of them saw the Zodiac approaching. Even if he were not killed immediately, Jack knew there would be little chance of reasoning with the gang, most of them probably off their heads on drugs, their boss a ruthless psychopath. All he cared about now was Costas, and the certainty that without their plan his friend would die.

  He kept his eyes glued ahead, seeing the dark shape of the trawler each time the inflatable crested a wave, and ahead of that the first hint of the island, a low shape on the horizon. He glanced at his watch, and nodded at Ahmed. They knew that Ibrahim on the patrol boat would have his binoculars trained on them, and that the larger Zodiac with a section of Somali marines would be prepped and ready for the follow-up action. He watched Ahmed crouched at the ready in the bow, holding his MP5 close to him against the spray. Less than an hour from now they would know one way or the other.