by Tony Park
As they had rehearsed on the quick dry-run before they left Hoedspruit, one of Fraser’s men was kneeling with a cut-down aluminium ladder by the window to Greeves’s room. Smoke from the entry blast billowed from the opening and one of the men tossed a stun grenade inside. Fraser put a foot on the middle rung and hurled himself in as the grenade detonated.
Fraser landed, catlike, on his feet in the smoke-filled room and heard the terrible, wailing sound again. It disorientated him as he lifted his MP-5 and scanned the room with the aid of the torch fixed to the stubby barrel. ‘Robert Greeves! We are British forces come to rescue you!’ Fraser heard the rest of the team coming through behind him and the gut-thumping boom of another flash-bang going off somewhere else in the house.
Two shots were fired and someone swore from the corridor.
Fraser saw the bed through the smoke and something was writhing on it, screaming its head off.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Fraser swore, and his mother would have slapped him if she’d heard him, but that was the least of his worries right now. ‘It’s a bloody . . .’
‘Monkey. I’m telling you, that noise we heard was a monkey,’ Sannie said as she and Tom ran, side by side, towards the gutted, smoking house, hard on the heels of the burly Warrant Officer White.
‘Bloody cock-up,’ she heard White muttering as he listened in to the radio transmissions. ‘Stay here, ma’am, Mr Furey.’
‘Bollocks,’ Tom said, brushing past him ignoring the man’s outstretched hand.
Sannie followed Tom, leaving White standing there in the open, shaking his head as he spoke into his radio.
Troopers were emerging from the house now, removing their gasmasks. One started to laugh out loud, but White barked at him to shut his gob. The man complied immediately.
Sannie and Tom walked through the splintered, smoking remains of what had been the front door. The lounge area, furnished only with a couple of upturned wooden chairs, was empty, but the smell of cordite and smoke was strong in the air. Along with something else.
‘Monkey kak,’ Sannie said as Tom wrinkled his nose.
‘How? It can’t be.’
‘I’m telling you.’
They turned right into the hallway and Sannie waved her hand in front of her face to clear the air. From the room where Greeves had supposedly been held, the shrieking and screaming continued.
When they walked in, Jonathan Fraser was standing at the foot of the bed, gasmask off and sub-machine gun hanging limply from his right hand. One of his men had lit a cigarette and the other was standing there looking down at the pathetic little creature writhing in fear.
‘Told you,’ Sannie said, though without a trace of triumph in her voice.
Strapped to the bed with plastic cable ties was a grey and white vervet monkey. The little primate was fully grown, though still only about a metre long when fully stretched out, as it was. It bared its sharp pointy fangs at them from its dark face and continued to screech.
‘Just fucking shoot it, boss,’ one of the men said to Fraser.
Fraser seemed completely dumbstruck.
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Sannie said. ‘Give me your knife, soldier, and stand well back. All of you. Shame, this poor little thing is half out of its mind.’ The big, tough military men all heeded her advice and took a pace back.
Sannie reached down and deftly sliced through the ties securing the monkey’s feet. It flipped itself over backwards and tried to use its tiny humanoid feet alternately to scratch at her and gain purchase on the bare bed springs. Sannie grabbed its tail and hoisted it up off the bed, quickly slicing one of the two hand restraints. ‘Make room for it. Clear the doorway and the windows. This’ll be very quick.’
Sannie was right, and even she gave a little yelp and jumped back as she cut the final restraint. She just managed to get her wrist out of the way of the monkey’s mouth, though she was right in thinking that its main priority was to flee rather than fight. With a speed that left all of them surprised, the vervet went flying out the broken window and into the night. ‘How many others?’ she asked.
The man who had suggested killing the vervet answered. Fraser still seemed in a state of semi-shock. ‘Three. They were roaming around the house. One of the boys put a bullet in one of them – in its arm, he reckoned – but the other two were too quick. They scarpered right past us.’
Sannie shook her head. ‘Poor little thing. He’ll probably live, though. I’ve seen vervets getting around with only one leg and one arm after they’ve been caught on electric fences and –’
‘For Christ’s sake, woman,’ Fraser said, ‘I don’t give a flying fuck about the bloody monkeys!’
‘Cool it,’ Tom said.
Fraser turned on him. ‘Don’t you tell me to fucking cool it. This is all your fault. Hear me? This was a fuck-up from the beginning and you’re the one who caused it.’ Fraser’s face was reddening, his eyes bulging. He pointed at Tom’s chest, but Tom stood his ground and said nothing.
Fraser took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
Tom looked at Sannie. ‘We need to get word to Alfredo. Tell him to get his roadblocks set up early. It’s almost first light.’
She nodded, but she could see Tom was just going through the motions. ‘I’ll go find Sarel and get him to take us to our car in his four-wheel drive. There’s not much we can do here now.’
‘Thanks,’ Tom said. ‘Major, if you’ll excuse us. It’s not over for us just yet.’
‘Oh, yes it bloody well is,’ Fraser said.
20
The detective in Tom wouldn’t let him wallow in self-pity at the outcome of the raid – he would leave that to Fraser. He almost felt sorry for the SAS major. A mission that might have written him into the history books would now be remembered as a tragic farce.
Tom was beyond considering his or anyone else’s reputation or career. He had already resigned himself that he would be out of a job by the time he returned to England but that couldn’t shake him from his one remaining task – to find Robert Greeves, dead or alive. It had grown even firmer in his mind while he waited at the foot of the dunes for the assault boats to arrive. He had sinned and he would not be forgiven – by himself as much as anyone else – until he found Greeves. The set-up by Carla, the chase, and now the cunningly cruel decoy that had thrown them off the terrorists’ trail, had become personal. He had been made to look a fool from start to finish. It was as if the terrorists were baiting him and rubbing his succession of failures in his face.
It was going to stop. Although he wouldn’t admit it aloud, and quickly suppressed the errant thought before it even fully formed, it didn’t really matter if Greeves was dead or alive. The men who had done this would pay.
He walked down the corridor to the bathroom. In a corner he saw a piece of crumpled newspaper with what looked like human hair on it. Other strands of grey and black were scattered about the floor. He recalled that Greeves’s head had been shaved for the video. Tom had brought half-a-dozen zip-lock plastic bags with him from their hire car. Sannie had bought them at a service station in Mozambique to store any leftover food from their meals. He turned a bag inside out and grabbed a handful of hair. It might not prove anything other than that Robert Greeves had indeed been in the house, but everything counted in an investigation. He recalled the crime scene investigator’s mantra – details, details, details.
He saw the bloody footprints on the polished concrete floor, in the bathroom and leading down the hallway. He supposed they were Bernard’s, but there was only one set. Bernard had said that when he had spoken to Greeves in his room, the minister’s feet had been bloodied, like his own. Had the terrorists put shoes on Greeves to walk him to the bathroom, or had they cleaned up after they had shaved him? If so, why had they left the newspaper with his hair on it sitting on the floor? He mentally filed away his observation and wished he had brought his notebook with him. He’d write down these thoughts later.
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br /> The stink of the place assaulted his nostrils. As a uniformed bobby he’d once been called to a bedsit in Islington where an old lady had died in her sleep but hadn’t been missed for days. It was summer and when they’d opened the door he’d had his first whiff of a decomposing human body. The monkey smell wasn’t nearly as bad but it was rank all the same.
How long had the animals been in there? he wondered. It was four hours, give or take, since Bernard had made his escape. The terrorists had worked quickly to capture the primates and ensconce them in the house before escaping. They must have known that the rescue team would have heat-sensing equipment. It was a brilliant ploy. The monkeys would show up as human-like on the infra-red radar, but only a very skilled interpreter might have noticed that the creatures were too small to be men.
He had been duped, and he felt stupid about it. If he had let Sannie come with him on his first recce she would have recognised the monkeys’ screams, which he had thought it were Greeves being tortured, immediately. If he and Sannie had been allowed to bring the target under surveillance while they waited for the assault troops, she could have called off the raid sooner and they could have been back on the terrorists’ trail. If, if, if. They might have bought themselves another hour, but would that have been enough? Probably not.
Alfredo had no roadblocks operating after dark, so the terrorists were at least three hours ahead of them. On reasonable roads, that could be three hundred kilometres by now. The next move, unfortunately, was up to them.
‘Blood!’ Tom heard the voice from the room next to the one in which Greeves and the hapless monkey had been imprisoned. ‘Buckets of it.’
Tom walked into the room. Two black-suited troopers were shining a torch on the floor, illuminating a large bloodstain. ‘Can you move away, please.’ Tom dropped to one knee. The blood had pooled and then, judging by the adjoining smear, the body had been dragged a short distance. Using his Surefire torch, Tom focused on an imprinted pattern in the dried blood near the end of the drag mark. He guessed something fibrous – a blanket, perhaps – had been laid down, and the body rolled into it.
The trooper was wrong about the amount of blood. Not buckets – not even half a pail, in fact. Tom reckoned it was more like a pint, half a litre, give or take. It always looked like there was more of it than there was. He looked up from the floor to the walls. Nothing – no blood spattering.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ one of the soldiers asked his mate.
Tom stood and swallowed hard. Although the soldier’s estimate was way out, there was too much blood for it to be from a monkey’s arm wound.
‘Sir!’ another voice called out.
‘What now?’ Fraser asked. He walked past the open door to the room in which Tom and the others stood.
Tom followed the major out into the hallway and to the kitchen. On a scratched laminate benchtop was a small grey-coloured box. ‘What’s that?’ he asked no one in particular.
‘It’s a portable video playback monitor. I’ve got one at home for my digital camera,’ the soldier who had found the device said. ‘Do you think it might be booby-trapped, boss?’
Fraser strode across the kitchen and grabbed the box. The young soldier took an involuntary pace backwards, but nothing happened.
Tom thought the trooper was right to be concerned and he was worried by the wild look in Fraser’s eyes. Was the man so incensed by their failure that he had given up caring about the possibility of injury to himself and his men – as well as ignoring all protocols about fingerprints and evidence?
Fraser flipped open the player’s screen, placed it back on the counter and pushed play.
Nick Roberts’s tortured face appeared on the camera. Tom screwed his eyes shut for a second, then forced himself to watch. Bernard had talked him through the scene he had witnessed on the tape, but nothing could have prepared Tom for the actual moving images of his former colleague’s execution.
‘Fucking animals,’ the young soldier said, staring morbidly at the little screen.
‘Who’s that?’ Fraser asked.
Tom explained and the major said, ‘Sorry.’ It sounded like he meant it. Ego and bullshit aside, Tom guessed the prickly officer had himself probably lost friends and comrades. It came as a shock to him, despite Bernard’s warning, to see the blood streaming down Nick’s face from the empty sockets where his eyes had been. He saw the pistol – small calibre, and silenced, maybe a two-two – brought close to Nick’s temple and not a man in the room didn’t flinch when the pfft sound of the muffled shot escaped from the video player’s tiny speaker.
‘Bastards,’ another of the soldiers said.
Tom felt unsteady on his feet as another face flickered onto the screen. The video, like that of Nick’s killing, was grainy and jumpy, but there was no mistaking the identity of the man who was taped as the hand of an unknown assailant – his face out of camera shot – forced him to his knees. It was Robert Greeves.
‘This is what comes of stupid attempts at escape,’ a voice said in the background.
Tom, like Fraser, craned closer to the small screen, straining to hear every word, but there was no talking. Tom heard footsteps in the corridor behind him, but was too engrossed in the image of Greeves’s face to turn around.
Greeves stared at the camera, and his look was one of despair tinged with resignation and the last flushes perhaps of an angry response made before the camera started rolling.
As with Nick, a hand holding a small-calibre silenced pistol appeared, near Greeves’s left temple. There was no statement, no threat, no warning. Just a solitary gunshot. Unlike the tape of Nick’s execution, which had ended at this point, the camera kept rolling as Greeves’s head flicked to one side. Blood pumped from the small entry wound and Tom caught a glimpse of the bulk of a man behind Greeves, and of gloved hands under the minister’s armpits. The man was holding him up for the camera as the life force poured from him. The screen went blue.
Tom forced himself to analyse what he saw, even as bile rose in the back of his throat. He swallowed hard. It would have been a two-two hollow point. The narrowed lead walls of the bullet would have split apart on impact with the skull bone. The shock wave from the blast had turned the minister’s brains to mush, and as the projectile opened up inside Greeves’s head, the fragments would have bounced around inside, ricocheting off the insides of his skull but not exiting.
That was one reason why the assassins had chosen a small-calibre round. There would be no slug to dig out of a wall, and they would have picked up the ejected cartridge case. Professionals. Cut-down AK 47s for gunfights, and the two-two for the execution. Had the killing been planned all along? The man standing behind the seated politician had been there to hold him up for the camera – to give the world’s media the shot they wanted, if they were sick enough to use it. Tom knew that once the bullet had done its work Greeves would have fallen like a puppet whose strings had been severed. There was no slow, rolling, theatrical fall to the floor like in the movies. Death was instantaneous.
‘Replay it,’ Fraser said.
Tom forced himself to watch it again. As Greeves again died on camera, Tom heard a sharp intake of air behind him.
‘Bernard!’ It was Sannie’s voice and Tom spun around to see Bernard disappearing out of the room into the corridor. It had been he and Sannie who had entered while he was watching the video.
‘He saw it?’
Sannie simply nodded. They both had the same thought, rushing from the room together with Tom narrowly beating Sannie through the doorway.
‘Bernard!’ Tom called as he ran through the house towards the smoking back door frame.
‘There he is, heading for the dunes!’ Sannie called.
Tom realised it must have been the same route Bernard had taken on his escape, running from the room where he had tried in vain to free Greeves through the house and towards the sounds and scents of the ocean. Tom caught sight of his moonlit silhouette as Bernard crested a larg
e dune at a run.
He and Sannie chased him, but their feet were slowed by the deep, warm sand that made every step an effort. Tom had had dreams like this in which he was trying to escape from some unseen, unknown evil, but his progress was hampered by mud or sand. He wasn’t running from evil now – just trying to avert its consequences.
Sannie caught up with Tom as he reached the top of the last dune. Spread out before them was the endless sea, its rippling surface flecked white-gold by the dying moon. Out on the horizon the sky was pinking as the sun waited to make another entrance.
Below them they saw the solitary figure slow as he reached the foot of the sandhill and walk out towards the water. The tide was turning, the patch of dark, wet sand widening with every small wave’s gentle lap and retreat.
Tom ploughed on down the hill, Sannie by his side. She called Bernard’s name again, but he ignored them.
‘Slowly,’ Tom whispered, placing a gently restraining hand on Sannie’s arm as they reached the flat sands.
Bernard was walking into the water. The foam was at his knees when he stopped.
‘There’s nothing you could have done,’ Tom said, his voice just loud enough to cover the distance between them. The water broke over his shoes and Sannie stood with a hand at her mouth.
‘I know, Tom,’ Bernard called, though still looking away from them, out to the first tiny fingernail of morning light.
‘We’ll get them, Bernard,’ Tom said.
Bernard shrugged, then finally turned and faced them. ‘Yes, I do believe you will, some day, but that’s not the point, is it?’
‘You did the right thing by going for help,’ Sannie said.
‘Yes, I know,’ he said to her. He looked at her for a couple of seconds and slowly nodded his head. ‘Yes, the right thing. I followed orders. His orders.’
