by Tony Park
The screaming started as soon as the image appeared. Robert Greeves was lying naked on a steel bed, the same type that Bernard had been tied to when they had beaten the soles of his feet, except that the masked man was not beating Robert. The camera had been placed at an obscene angle, facing between Greeves’s legs, at about bed level. Greeves shrieked then raised his head. The man with the ski mask moved from between the politician’s legs and Bernard could see a hand-cranked generator on the floor, which the man knelt behind. Wires ran from the dynamo to clips which were attached to Robert’s testicles. The man started to crank and Bernard winced and screwed his eyes shut again at the terrible, piercing scream.
‘Never!’ Greeves screamed on the recording. Bernard realised it was a recording of the torture session he had heard earlier.
‘Why? You are asking yourself why we are doing that,’ the man said as he pressed stop. Bernard looked at him with pure loathing, fantasising at that moment about freeing himself and killing the man. ‘Do you think I want him to cower on camera, to plead with his leader, with the British people, to release the inmates from Guantanamo Bay, or pull out your mercenary troops from Iraq?’
Bernard had assumed the message would be something like that.
‘Well, between you and me, Bernard, I don’t want him to say anything. And no, in case you’re thinking my friends and I are mere criminals, no, this is not about obtaining a monetary ransom.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray.
Bernard was genuinely confused now.
‘I’ll explain then, if you won’t guess. If things go as I plan, I won’t be inflicting much more pain at all on your master. I want Robert Greeves to be brave when I film him and release the video to the Western world via a friendly television network. I don’t want him crying and betraying his ideals by begging for the detainees to be released or the troops pulled out of Iraq. I don’t want the people of Britain to think of him as weak, because then, secretly, many of them won’t care if he is beheaded on TV. However, someone has to deliver the message . . .’
Bernard felt the bile rising in his throat and swallowed hard.
‘Having a spare hostage – you, Bernard – allows me more air time, as simple as that. I can show a video to the world of my men standing behind Robert Greeves, the sword resting on his shoulder, and one of us can make our demands, in Arabic, and that will play for two or three days in a row. If, however, I release a second video, this time with someone pleading for Greeves’s life – saying, perhaps, that the men who are holding you hostage have threatened to cut off one of Greeves’s fingers and toes each day that the UK government delays making a decision, then the effect will be enhanced, don’t you agree?’
Bernard stared into those cold, calculating eyes and a tiny part of him marvelled at the fact that a human being could be so resolute, so cruel, so pitiless.
‘I’m not going to torture you, though, Bernard, to make you talk on camera for me. And, remember, I don’t need Robert to say a word in the video. So, here’s how we’ll do it.’ The man turned to face the door, the better to project his voice, and yelled a command in Arabic.
From the next room came the sound of screaming again, and Bernard knew it was Greeves.
‘Enough!’ Bernard said.
The man called another command, and had to yell very loudly this time to be heard over the shrieks of pain. ‘You know, if this works out well, you may be released, Bernard. If, in the unlikely event that the Prime Minister does pull your forces out of Iraq and some innocents are released from the American prison, I will keep my word and release you and Robert. If, however, you cause me any problems, or attempt to escape, then I can promise you an extremely painful death. Let me show you another small movie to make my point.’ He pushed play again.
Bernard looked down at the screen. There was a man stripped naked, tied to a chair. He writhed in agony, his whole body shaking, straining against the restraints, but he was gagged, so only guttural groans filled the soundtrack. Twin streaks of blood ran down his face, from where his eyes had been.
‘Amazing how hard it is to recognise someone without their eyes, don’t you think? Force yourself to take a closer look, though. This video, by the way, was shot somewhere in London, not here in Africa. Just a few days ago. That’s the only clue I’m giving you.
Despite the horror, Bernard blinked and refocused. The hair, the shape of the nose, even though it, too, was bloodied, the strong jaw. ‘Nick . . .’
‘Well done. One hundred per cent correct. Detective Sergeant Nick Roberts, as the police might say, was assisting us with our investigations into your itinerary and Robert Greeves’s security arrangements. We were planning on killing him quickly, but he tried to escape, so I removed his eyes, one at a time.’
The video continued and Bernard saw the black cylindrical barrel of a silenced pistol held to the side of Nick’s head. He heard the whimpering. The gun fired, its report just a tiny cough, but the effect was instantaneous. Bernard watched for an instant, long enough to see the eyeless head thrown sideways, the blood spattering the wall beside him.
Tears rolled down Bernard’s cheeks. ‘What do you want me to say?’
15
‘Chokwe’s just ahead,’ Sannie said, looking up from the map and rubbing her eyes. The sun was nearly touching the horizon.
It had been a long, tiring day, but rest was the last thing on Tom Furey’s mind. Chokwe was an important waypoint on their journey. If their theory that the terrorists were heading for the Indian Ocean was correct, then the little farming town was where the dirt road the criminals would have taken after crossing the border met the main sealed road to the coast. It would be the point where Tom and Sannie’s path would at last cross the abductors’.
From here on, their plan was to question the police at every roadblock and station they came across. Sannie was prepared to use her language skills, her charm and their stock of South African rand to get answers. Tom suspected the last weapon at her disposal would be the most persuasive. She had warned him already that while the police in Mozambique were generally polite and friendly, they always had their hand out, and worked off lists of petty rules and regulations all designed to convince unsuspecting tourists to pay a fine.
The road into Chokwe was flanked by market stalls, mostly housed in corrugated-tin sheds. The vendors, who were now in the process of shutting up shop, offered an eclectic mix of goods, including tyres, coffins, plastic buckets, television antennae, lettuces, bicycles and clothing. A minibus taxi in front of them put on its brakes, forcing Tom to stamp on his pedal and swear. As he indicated and passed the bus, which had stopped for a fare, he saw the words Talk to my lawyer painted on the back window. He smiled, despite his annoyance.
As with the smaller towns they had passed through, Chokwe was a mix of decaying colonial elegance and chaotic, noisy African life. Music boomed from ghetto-blasters, and impatient drivers leaned on their horns. The milling of people on foot, on bicycles on the road and its verges, had forced Tom to slow down, so he was surprised when a rotund policeman in blue trousers and a white shirt waddled out into the middle of the thoroughfare and flagged him down.
‘How fast were you going?’ Sannie asked.
Tom checked the speedometer. ‘No more than fifty-five.’
‘Speeding. Licence,’ said the policeman, who was leaning on Tom’s windowsill, catching his breath.
‘Rubbish,’ Tom said.
‘Calm and patient, remember?’ Sannie said under her breath. She smiled at the policeman and greeted him in Tsonga Shangaan, immediately disarming him.
‘What does he say?’ Tom interrupted their burgeoning conversation.
‘He says you were doing sixty-two.’
‘Tell him to go fuck himself.’
Sannie kept a straight face and whispered, ‘Careful, he might know that much English.’ Tom smiled again and nodded like an imbecile at the policeman. Sannie talked at length with the man, never raising her voice and, eventually, pulle
d her South African Police Service credentials from her handbag. Tom saw the look on the man’s face change, possibly to one of worry. It was hard to tell. She fired a series of questions at him, and the African scratched his chin as he talked, and gesticulated with a thumb over his shoulder, towards the coast.
Sannie’s eyes widened. ‘Tom! He says everyone’s looking for two or three men in a bakkie with a tinted canopy on the back, heading for the coast.’
‘What else?’ Tom wiped away the rivulets of sweat that were stinging his eyes. It was hotter and much more humid the closer they travelled to the coast. Sannie spoke to the man again.
‘He says they’ve just had a radio call from Maputo, via their station in Xai Xai, to be on the look-out for up to three men in a Toyota HiLux, suspected of carrying two kidnap victims in the back.’
For the moment Tom shared her enthusiasm. At least they weren’t the only ones on the trail of the suspects. He wondered where the new intelligence had come from and suddenly wished he could call Shuttleworth – or anyone on the team, for that matter. However, there was no signal showing on his mobile phone.
The policeman looked past them anxiously. There were already three other cars – two overloaded pick-ups and the minibus taxi Tom had very nearly rammed – that had been pulled over for speeding by another officer and were queued up behind their Volkswagen. ‘Well, has he seen them?’
Sannie spoke to the man again. ‘He says he only came on duty two hours ago and there’s been no vehicle matching that description so far on his shift. I’ve got the name of his colleague, though, who was working this afternoon. He’s at the main station at Xai Xai.’
‘That’s something.’ The policeman waved them on, without them having to pay a bribe or a fine, obviously thinking there were easier targets behind them. They pulled over after leaving Chokwe and Sannie took a turn behind the wheel. She was a godsend, Tom thought. He knew he would have been completely out of his depth if he had crossed the border alone.
Twice they found themselves behind Toyota pick-ups and Tom slipped his pistol from his holster and held it ready between his thighs as Sannie, knuckles white on the steering wheel, accelerated and brought the Chico up beside the four-by-fours, which towered menacingly above the little car. One was driven by a Portuguese woman who had four children on board with her; the other’s occupants were an elderly African man and a woman of similar vintage, presumably his wife. Tom was frustrated, but also relieved as either truck could have sent their little car flying off the road into the bush with a gentle nudge.
They came to a T-junction where the road from Chokwe met the EN1, the main north-south road along the coast of Mozambique. ‘Well, here we are. Right or left? Right goes to Maputo, the capital; left goes all the way to Tanzania eventually.’
Tom glanced at the map again, touching the red line that marked the road, as if some unseen force would guide him. ‘It gets quieter, less populated as you go north, right?’
Sannie nodded. ‘Though a gang of kidnappers could very easily lose themselves in the slums of Maputo.’
Tom closed his eyes. ‘North,’ he said. Sannie turned left.
They made good time heading up the coast, with Sannie winding the Chico up to a hundred and twenty between towns where they were forced to slow to sixty again, both to avoid speed traps and to ask more local policeman if they had seen the fugitive vehicle. There were no confirmed sightings and Tom felt seeds of dread germinating in his gut.
They crossed a broad flood plain on a raised road and then a suspension bridge to enter the town of Xai Xai. It must have been quite pleasant in its day, Tom thought. There was more of the architecture he had already come to associate with the country – whitewashed Portuguese-style villas with red roofs and rendered buildings painted in pastel hues, but, unlike the other settlements they had passed through, Xai Xai was a holiday town. There were a couple of white concrete hotels, neither of which Tom would have fancied staying in, and a grassy park with a bandstand. It could have been any holiday town on the Mediterranean coast. Outside a cafe, two Portuguese men sat with four much younger African women in western clothes, one of whom was breastfeeding a coffee-coloured baby. A boy in board shorts and an American basketball shirt held up the largest prawn Tom had ever seen as they coasted past him.
‘River crayfish,’ Sannie said of the creature, which looked nearly as long as the lad’s forearm. Music pumped from a bar and it seemed the beat was almost loud enough to cause their car’s windows to vibrate as Sannie stopped to let a minibus disgorge passengers ahead of her.
It was hot and muggy here on the coast and Tom could smell the cloying scent of salt water above the diesel exhausts and the oily smoke of chicken grilling over sizzling charcoal. Youngsters ran alongside their South African registered car, waving bags of cashews and yet more prawns. ‘Howzit, my boet,’ one yelled at him and Sannie smiled and shook her head as she translated the Afrikaans slang for ‘Hello, my brother’.
‘This was once a nice place, but it’s too busy now. We stayed here not long after the country was opened again to South Africans, but I’m afraid my people have spoiled this part of the coast. These days you can buy cashews and prawns cheaper in South Africa than you can from these guys.’
Sannie had sourced directions to the main police station from the last speed trap they had stopped at and she turned off the main road through the centre of town and parked under a tree outside a building that looked as solid as a block house. The pockmarks in the wall told Tom that the police station had been well built to withstand gunfire and the civil war had proved the point.
Inside, Sannie asked the female police officer on duty at the front desk for Capitao Alfredo – she didn’t have his second name. The woman looked at her blankly for a few seconds, then turned and walked into a back room. Sannie looked at Tom and he shrugged.
‘Ah, good evening,’ said a thin man in blue uniform trousers and a starched white shirt, wiping his hands on a paper serviette as he emerged from the back room. ‘I am Capitao Alfredo Manuel.’ He wiped himself again, this time on the front of his trousers, and then shook hands with Tom and Sannie, who introduced themselves by name and rank. ‘My colleagues from South Africa and England. I have heard you would be coming.’
Sannie complimented the captain on his English and he explained that, ironically, he had learned the language in Russia, where he had trained as a soldier for Frelimo, the rebel force which had subsequently become the government in Mozambique. ‘I also speak Russian, of course, and German. I was a teacher before joining the struggle.’
‘Thank you for agreeing to help us, Captain,’ Tom said.
‘Not at all. The pleasure is all mine. It is not every day that we get reports of a senior politician being abducted by terrorists.’
He led them around the charge counter down the corridor to another room, which was his office. Tom and Sannie took bare metal chairs in front of a large antique wooden desk. Capitao Alfredo sat in a leather office chair. ‘Cigarette?’
They declined, but Alfredo lit up a Benson & Hedges anyway. Behind him on the wall was a map of Mozambique and a second one, which Tom couldn’t see clearly but guessed was of the local area. There were coloured pins stuck at intervals on what looked like the main north-south road. On the desk was an open Styrofoam takeaway food container with the bones of a half-chicken in it. Tom smelled chilli and fat. ‘You have heard that one of my officers saw a suspicious vehicle that matches the description of the one you are seeking?’
‘Yes, Captain . . .’ Sannie said.
‘Please, call me Alfredo.’
Sannie smiled. She was a white Afrikaner and he was a black African, but Tom thought the captain’s eyes were pure Latino when he looked at the attractive blonde. He also thought he saw a trace of a blush on Sannie’s cheeks. ‘Well, Alfredo, yes, we have heard that you are looking for the same Toyota HiLux we are pursuing and that one of your officers may have seen the vehicle in question.’
Tom was impres
sed at how she was winging it. The truth was that they only now knew they were looking for a Toyota because one of Alfredo’s men had told them that was the vehicle they had been warned to look out for. Tom and Sannie were still behind in the game, but this was their chance to catch up and, hopefully, get ahead.
Alfredo stood and turned to the maps behind him. ‘Sim,’ he nodded. ‘In fact, more than one of my people have seen it. After the bulletin came through, one of my men at Chisanno recalled seeing a HiLux with a tinted rear cab pass by him. He recalled it as unusual because the other windows on the double cab were untinted. He saw the bakkie about one o’clock this afternoon. You can talk with him if you wish. I have had him called to the station in case. I thought this may be the vehicle and warned all of my officers to be extra vigilant.’
He gave them a long, thoughtful look, as though giving them time to appreciate how efficient he had been in his policing. Perhaps, Tom thought, he was waiting for praise for having done his job. Just get on with it, he willed the man.
‘And then?’ Sannie prompted.
Tom looked at his watch.
Alfredo turned back to the map and planted a bony finger on a dot. ‘Here. Near Chongoene, about thirteen kilometres north-east of Xai Xai, later in the afternoon a HiLux with a tinted rear cab but untinted front cab ignored a direction by one of my officers to stop.’
‘Why did he flag it down? Did he recognise it as the suspect vehicle?’ Tom asked.
Alfredo turned back to him and shook his head. ‘Regrettably, no. The officers’ radio was unfortunately not working, but the vehicle was speeding. Sixty-five in a sixty zone.’
Tom thought the captain had talked about the crime as though it was one step removed from murder. ‘They didn’t pursue it?’
