Silent Predator

by Tony Park

  Around him was a sea of busy yet ordered activity. His men checked each other’s free-fall parachute rigs, oxygen masks and altimeters, and the weapons and diving fins that were secured beneath their parachute straps. Chalky White hefted his boss’s parachute rig and Fraser slid his arms into the harness. White continued to help him rig up with his weapon – an MP-5 – life vest, oxygen, flippers and helmet.

  The cargo hold was illuminated by red lights set in the high ceiling, which bathed the men and their cargo in an alien spaceship glow. The men looked like automatons as they shuffled towards the tail of their mother ship.

  Tied down to the floor, near the hinge of the giant ramp which would open shortly, were three Zodiac inflatable boats, deflated and packed into separate containers each about the size of a large washing machine. A parachute sat atop each of the PLFs, which stood for ‘parachute load follow’. Fraser and his men would do just that, follow each of the deflated boats to the ocean below once the RAF loadmasters on board the C-17 had dispatched them over the ramp. Once in the water the boats would be reinflated with bottles of compressed air, and Fraser and the other seventeen men in the main assault force would get the outboards fired up and race in towards the beach, three kilometres from the landing point. The C-17, Fraser knew, was now flying at twelve thousand feet, out of sight and virtually out of hearing of anyone on the ground. If the terrorists did happen to hear the faint, far-off whine of jet engines they would mistake the bird for a passenger aircraft. There was no chance of anyone on shore seeing the men or the compact boats exiting.

  ‘Five minutes,’ one of the loadmasters yelled, holding up an open hand and waving it in front of all the SAS men he could see. Those who saw him passed on the signal, but the sudden draught of air and the switching on of red jump lights on either side of the lowering ramp told them all it was nearly time.

  Fraser loved parachuting – which helped in his line of business, as he had made over five hundred jumps – but for once it was excitement and the fear of what awaited on the ground that preoccupied him, not the ride down. Chalky gave him a thumbs-up, as if to reassure him all would be fine. Fraser nodded and returned the gesture.

  The boats rolled over the edge of the ramp. ‘Green on. GO!’

  Tom and Sannie huddled at the base of the sand dune which marked the start of the trail up to the farmhouse. They had followed Fraser’s instructions and were not overlooking the target, as Tom would have preferred. He was anxious to be up there now, keeping an eye on the dwelling and its occupants.

  ‘You know he’s right,’ Sannie whispered, not for the first time. ‘If we were seen now, that could be disastrous for your Mr Greeves. Also, Fraser’s right to be concerned about his own men. If one of his snipers with their night-sights saw you pop your head over the top of a sandhill he might pot you.’

  Tom nodded. She was right, of course. Fraser was right, of course. But that didn’t make him feel any better. For all they knew, the terrorists could be getting ready to cut their losses – literally – and videoing Greeves’s beheading while he and Sannie sat on the beach like a couple of lovers out for a bit of midnight nookie. He checked his watch. It was two minutes to four. Super soldier Fraser and his men were in the water now, according to the sergeant back at Hoedspruit, and should be hitting the beach any minute. Under the plan, Tom and Sannie were to guide the SAS troopers up the trail to the house once they arrived.

  A kilometre north of them, out of range of the shooting, was Sarel’s old four-by-four, parked on the edge of the water, its headlights on full beam pointing out to sea. Bernard was in the vehicle, under Sarel’s watchful eye. The lights served two purposes. One, in case Fraser’s GPS coordinates were out, the twin beams would give him a visual fix on the approximate location of the target – though he would know to land a kilometre to the left of them; and two, the headlights were aimed at an angle, pointing towards a gap in the reef that protected Paradise Cove’s beach from the ocean’s swell. The tide was still fairly high, though it had started to turn. Low tide was not until six fifty-five in the morning, but there was still a risk that one of Fraser’s rubber boats could be holed if it skimmed the top of the rocky reef.

  Tom felt sorry for Bernard. He knew the ex-submariner wanted to get into the fight, but Tom had to agree with Fraser’s assessment that with his injuries he would be more of a liability than an asset. Bernard had pleaded with Fraser over the sat phone that he alone knew the layout of the farmhouse, but Fraser had shot that argument down in flames by pointing to the extremely detailed floor plan Bernard had already provided. Tom, too, had seen the house for himself, so Bernard could not even claim to be the only one who knew its exact location. Sarel had sealed Bernard’s fate by mentioning that he even had a GPS setting for the house as he had once led a four-wheel-drive rally through the dunes for a bunch of South African off-road enthusiasts. To make him feel better, Sarel had given Bernard his nine-millimetre pistol and would drive Bernard to the house once it was secured. There was merit, Tom supposed, in as many of them as possible being armed, just in case there was a terrorist sentry they hadn’t accounted for who might spring out of the bush.

  Tom shifted his pistol from his right hand to his left and wiped his palm on his shirt. Once again, he felt Sannie’s touch on his arm. He wondered if she was just a touchy-feely sort of a person, or if she felt something of the attraction for him that he couldn’t deny feeling for her. ‘It’ll be fine, man. Stay cool. Listen, I think I hear the boats.’

  Chief Inspector Shuttleworth hung up on the Prime Minister of Great Britain and started to pace the concrete floor of the aircraft hangar, behind the SAS communications sergeant seated at a folding table littered with phones, laptops and radios.

  He wiped his brow. How the hell could it be hot enough for him to be sweating at four in the morning anywhere in the world? He knew, though, that the heat was not the only cause of his perspiration. He had just had to reassure the Prime Minister that an operation he had no part in planning or executing was going according to plan.

  The policy advisor from Number 10 was not going to be fobbed off to a signals corps sergeant when the Prime Minister wanted a first-hand update. She demanded to be put through to the senior man on the ground and the sergeant had gladly beckoned the police officer over. ‘PM’s office,’ he said, but Shuttleworth wasn’t to know that the policy advisor had already switched the phone through to the nation’s leader. Shuttleworth had recognised the voice immediately and cobbled together an account of the operation’s progress so far.

  It was unfair, he thought, that he was now established in the PM’s mind as responsible for this affair, when it was clearly a military operation. Surely the Prime Minister must understand the chain of command? He, after all, had authorised this action on foreign soil. Shuttleworth thought about Tom Furey. God help him. If Greeves was killed in the assault, the Hereford boys would break speed records in pointing the finger at the Met.

  Shuttleworth stood by his earlier defence of Furey to Fraser. What worried him now was that his two best men – Tom and Nick Roberts – were both out of the game. According to Bernard, poor Nick was dead, and Shuttleworth wondered if he had been caught in the sort of honey trap that had clearly taken Tom’s eye off the ball the night before Greeves was abducted. They were his best, but there was no doubt they had been found wanting. If it went well, if Greeves was brought out alive, then Tom might have a shot at keeping his job if not his rank.

  There were lessons for all of them in this fiasco, but they were also lessons taught in basic training.

  The SAS signalman raised a hand in the air, his other pressed to his headset. ‘They’re feet dry,’ he said, indicating the assault force had landed on the beach, ‘in case you want to ring the PM back.’

  Shuttleworth grimaced. Perhaps he should call the sergeant’s bluff and call Number 10 back. What harm would there be in the Prime Minister’s office thinking he had a key role in the rescue? In for a penny, in for a pound. He picked up the l
aminated sheet of paper with all the key phone numbers on it, snatched up the satellite phone he had just been using and rang the number.

  ‘Downing Street situation room,’ a woman said.

  ‘Get me the Prime Minister. It’s Chief Inspector Shuttleworth, Metropolitan Police.’

  Jonathan Fraser was in the lead boat and the first of the raiders to touch the sands of Mozambique as the Zodiac shushed its way up the sandy shore. It was a small detail, but one he hoped might be remembered.

  He had his MP-5 out and pointed ahead of him as he ran, bent double, towards the dune line. Off to his right the South African had extinguished the lights of his four-wheel drive. There was not another soul to be seen on the beach.

  Ahead of him he saw a small light. Furey was using his cigarette lighter. It was like something out of a World War Two movie, but the prearranged signal was effective enough. With Chalky behind him and the rest of the assault force now dragging their boats into the moon shadows in the lee of the dunes, he strode towards the two police officers.

  ‘Jonathan Fraser. Nice to meet you in person,’ he said, shaking Tom’s hand, though the greeting was hollow. Something else for the record. He smiled at van Rensburg as he shook her hand and she introduced herself. Very nice to put a face to that voice, which sounded sexy even over the sat phone. Fraser hoped she would be around for a debriefing in South Africa. ‘Any noise from the house?’

  ‘No, we’re too bloody far away,’ Furey pointed out. If he was one of his men, Fraser would have dressed him down for his insubordinate tone. The copper had made it plain that he wanted to keep his eyes on the target house. Fuck him, Fraser thought. This was his show and the plods were baggage now that they’d pointed to a pathway through the dunes.

  Fraser keyed his personal radio. He had already made contact with Forsythe, the captain heading the blocking force. ‘Dagger one, this is Dagger niner.’

  ‘Dagger one.’ Forsythe sounded calm in his earpiece.

  ‘We’re at the base of the dunes. Moving to the FUP now.’

  ‘Roger,’ Forsythe said. ‘We’re in position, boss.’ Fraser knew Forsythe would be passing the information on to the sniper teams now, letting them know that their own men would be moving into the hollow in the dunes to the south of the farmhouse – the forming-up point – in the next few minutes.

  Fraser turned to Tom. ‘You two stay here and watch our backs. We shan’t be long and I’ll call you up once it’s done. All right?’

  ‘No, it bloody well isn’t all right,’ Tom whispered. Van Rensburg shook her head in support of him.

  ‘We’ve got more than enough firepower to do the job,’ Fraser persisted. This wasn’t about politics. He simply didn’t want two extra bodies wandering about the dunes while he had men in motion and sniper teams in overwatch.

  ‘No deal, Fraser. I told you on the phone that Sannie and I are in on this thing until the end. Greeves’s safety is my responsibility until I’m relieved.’

  Sooner rather than later, Fraser thought. Still, he had neither the time nor the inclination to dally on this beach when there was a job to be done. ‘Very well. S’arnt Major?’

  White moved to Fraser’s side. ‘Sir?’

  Fraser knew that his use of White’s formal rank would alert his friend and chief head-kicker to the fact he was not happy about the orders he was about to issue, but he also knew Chalky would jump off a cliff if he told him to. ‘As well as your other duties in this op, I’d like you to escort Detective Sergeant Furey and Inspector Van Rensburg.’

  ‘Pleasure, sir,’ White said, and there was no mistaking how he felt about his new job. ‘Stay close to me and we’ll all be going home with ten fingers, ten toes and two eyes.’

  Sannie thought Fraser was a windgat, a windbag. No matter what Tom may have done wrong, he didn’t deserve the treatment he was getting at the hands of the army guys, and neither did she. She had hated the way the smarmy major had looked her up and down. The man should have been thinking about his job, not getting into her pants. White, however, seemed like a decent oke, even though it was clear he resented having to shepherd her and Tom.

  Sannie was excited. She couldn’t deny it. Despite the jealousy and penis-fighting that often occurred whenever two armed organisations got together to do a job, she was genuinely looking forward to seeing the much-vaunted SAS in action. How many people, she wondered, could say they had seen a terrorist stronghold taken down?

  The tactics interested her: the placement of snipers, the methods of entry they would use. She wondered how much experience the individual soldiers had. She imagined they had fought in one or more wars – probably Afghanistan or Iraq – but she privately doubted that any of them would have entered as many buildings in pursuit of armed offenders as she had in her ten years on the job.

  As a uniformed policewoman she had fired her weapon three times, wounding offenders twice. She had very nearly been killed in one of her first raids. They had been following up a tip-off about a drug dealer whose neighbours had complained about him after he killed a local boy in an argument over a lost heroin delivery. Sannie had been the junior member on the team of uniforms backing up the detectives. She had actually been outside the block of flats where the man lived, standing by the police bakkie when the raid went in. The man was living in a first-floor apartment and when the sledgehammer took his door off its hinges, the man ran through to the back bedroom and jumped over the balcony railing, landing hard on the ground not ten metres from where she was standing. The man was holding an American forty-five automatic, a canon of a gun, and he aimed it right at her chest as he dragged himself to his feet. Sannie fumbled for her own pistol, which was still holstered, and the man pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  Her partner, a sergeant approaching retirement who had been assigned to look after the new girl, was faster than she on the draw and put the dealer down with two bullets in the chest.

  Sannie remembered the shock of the incident, of how she had fought off the tears all day until she had gone home and crumbled in Christo’s arms. She had thought about giving up her job, but her husband, then also still in uniform, had told her she must be blessed. She didn’t think of herself as bulletproof, but the gangster’s misfire had taught her always to be ready. She and Tom trudged up the dune behind the sergeant major.

  ‘Please, God,’ she said to herself, ‘let this work out okay for Tom and for Robert Greeves. Tom deserves this. He’s a good man.’

  Fraser knelt in the shadows, in a depression between two dunes, and pulled his gasmask from its pouch. Around him, the other members of the main assault team were doing the same.

  He did a quick communications check to make sure he could send and receive with the mask on. They would hit the house with flash-bangs – stun grenades that produced a non-lethal but sense-shattering explosion of noise and smoke – and CS, or tear gas, grenades as soon as the entrances were breached. Greeves would suffer as much as the terrorists from the shock and the chemicals but, unlike his captors, he would live.

  ‘All teams, this is Dagger niner, confirm you are in position.’

  ‘Dagger one, roger, over.’ The blocking force and snipers were ready.

  ‘Dagger two, roger, over,’ said the commander of the second assault team, which would enter the house through the back door. Fraser was leading the assault team that would blast its way in through the front door of the house, on the beach side, and smash the window of the room where Greeves was being held.

  ‘Dagger niner, this is one, over.’

  Fraser tensed. He had been just about to give the order to move. ‘Dagger one, this is niner. What is it, over?’

  ‘We’ve got movement at the second window from the right at the rear. Shadows on the curtain, over. One X-ray. Looks like he was taking a peek, over.’

  Fraser frowned. ‘Roger, one. You know the drill when the assault goes in. If you see movement and you’re not going to hit one of the assault team, then take him out. Do you unders
tand, over?’

  This was Forsythe’s first real operation, even though he had practised his role in dozens of training exercises. Fraser knew he had failed to mask the irritation in his voice, but they all knew the rules of engagement and what was expected of them.

  ‘Roger, niner. Dagger one, out,’ the chastised captain replied.

  ‘All teams, this is Dagger niner. This is it. Stand by, stand by . . .’

  Sannie heard the scream and Tom looked at her, confirming he’d also heard the inhuman sound.

  ‘Bastards,’ White muttered under his breath.

  There was the noise again. A high-pitched yelp followed by grunting. Surely, she thought, it couldn’t be. She shook her head. No, she was right. She’d heard that sound a thousand times before – from as far back as she could remember, growing up on the banana farm.

  ‘Sergeant Major,’ Sannie said, tugging on the sleeve of his black jumpsuit.

  ‘Not now, ma’am.’ He turned to her, his annoyance plain. ‘OC’s just about to give the word to go in.’

  ‘No, wait, that noise, it was . . .’

  ‘Stand by, stand by. Go!’

  At Fraser’s command two men from each of the assault teams broke cover and ran, bent at the waist, to the front and rear doors. Each carried a small charge of plastic explosives covered with strong double-sided tape. They slapped the devices on the doors near the locks and activated the detonators. The method-of-entry men flattened themselves on either side of each door, and Fraser and his men, and the members of Dagger three, were on their feet and moving as the explosions shattered the balmy calm of the humid night.

  Birds squawked and took to the air, but their screeches were drowned out by commands and the sound of shattering glass, closely followed by the boom of exploding stun grenades. Each bang was accompanied by a flash of blinding white light that lit the surrounding dunes. Fraser and his men had tinted lenses on their gasmasks and radio earpieces and ear defenders to protect them from the horrific sound and light show.