Hedge was feeling absolutely terrified. He was finding it hard to catch his breath, as the air was rushing past his mouth so fast that it seemed like he couldn’t inhale any of it. He closed his mouth so that just a small opening was left, and he found this made it somewhat easier to breathe. He made a mental note to ask his tandem partner why he hadn’t pointed out this before they had left the aircraft.
The earth was still rushing up towards him. He tried to look around below him and take in some of the amazing sights. He could see various large fields below, planted with crops that blazed a golden colour in the bright sunshine. Then there was a river, slowly winding its way across the landscape. Here and there he saw patches of thin cloud beneath them. They looked like clumps of cotton wool just hanging in mid air.
Then their free fall was over.
‘Brace yourself. I’m pulling the main cord. This will slow us down a little,’ Cole shouted in his ear. Such was the speed of the air rushing past him though, that Hedge only faintly caught the words.
Hedge felt the arm behind him tug on something, and he waited for the descent to slow down. Then he felt the tug again, once, twice. But they didn’t slow down. They were still falling at around one hundred and twenty miles an hour.
‘Fucking thing,’ he heard Cole shout. ‘It won’t pull. Bloody hell!’
There was panic in his voice. Not full blown panic that you might expect in a situation like this, but enough to worry Hedge.
They still weren’t slowing down. Hedge couldn’t think quickly enough to do the maths. Falling at over a hundred miles an hour, with maybe six thousand feet of drop remaining? He had no idea how long that would take them. But then he just looked at the ground coming up from below to meet him, and that told him all he needed to know.
He turned to try and see what was going on behind him, but he couldn’t see very much. ‘Cole. What the hell is happening?
Cole was swearing continuously as he tried to resolve the problem. Hedge thought they must have used up about a third of their height in the last ten seconds or so. Then it dawned on him. In around twenty seconds they would both hit the ground. At this speed they would die instantly. The earth below them would feel like concrete when they hit it. It would be like driving a car into a brick wall at top speed.
‘Cole, Cole, for fucks sake, do something.’ Hedge was beyond panic. He was beyond terror. He could feel himself wanting to cry. He was completely helpless though – there was nothing he could do. The situation was totally reliant on Cole. The ground was still hurtling up towards them. He felt his underwear becoming wet. He must have pissed himself he thought. But he didn’t care. He wanted to cry like a baby. He didn’t want to die like this. Who would look after Maddie? Hadn’t she had enough loss in her young life?
The ground was close now. He could make out individual trees and hedgerows. He could see the water flowing in the river, the surface glittering as the sun’s rays bounced off it and scattered in different directions.
‘Cole,’ he shouted again. ‘Jesus Christ, Cole. Do something.’
He could hear Cole swearing under his breath. He could also feel his arms busy behind him. Cole had pulled a knife from a pouch in his trousers and had cut away the main parachute. He was now trying to pull the reserve chute out, but it wasn’t budging. It appeared to be stuck inside the backpack. Cole looked down and realised that they had around five or six seconds left before they would impact the ground. He could hear Hedge screaming in front of him.
Cole was trying to work with his arms behind him. They ached like mad. He couldn’t quite free the reserve chute. He had run out of time. He knew it. What a way to go, like this.
‘Fuck it,’ he shouted loudly and slashed at the reserve pack with the blade of the knife. It was one last throw of the dice. The risk was that the ropes holding the small back up parachute would also be cut. But he had no choice. There was a rustle of cloth and then a loud ‘whoomph’ as the parachute pulled itself out of its pack. The ground was now so close, but it appeared to stop moving before their eyes. They must have been well under a thousand feet from the ground.
The next few seconds disappeared as they floated down to the earth. Beneath them was a grassy field, the sort that cows might graze in, but there were no animals here today. They landed heavily on the grass. Both of them lay still for a short while. Thankful to still be alive and just trying to regain control of their breathing.
Cole eventually stood up. He unstrapped them from each other and Hedge rolled away, before finally kneeling and being sick several times.
Cole took in a few deep breaths of the warm, clear air. He surveyed the scene, before looking over at his jump partner.
‘See, I told you it would be fun,’ he said.
Hedge turned and tried to reply. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. He faced back down towards the grass and continued to vomit.
Chapter Thirty Two
Cole had decided that the best way to get to talk to Spiro was to make a business appointment. As well as the Greek restaurant, Spiro also ran a significant cash and carry operation working in the food service sector. He stocked all kinds of produce, and had a warehouse down by the port area.
They were shown in to the Greek man’s office by a smartly dressed, young receptionist.
Spiro greeted them warmly. ‘I understand you two gentlemen operate a meat import business, and are keen to break into the South Africa market. My head buyer, the man who made this appointment, advises me that you are willing to undercut local prices in order to establish yourselves.’
Spiro was a tall man, with a thin face. He had the worried expression of someone who was always looking over their shoulder. Perhaps he got that from his dodgy business dealings, or something else.
Cole was keen to get to the point of the meeting. ‘Before we discuss our business arrangements, perhaps I could ask you a question?’
‘Of course,’ said Spiro. He frowned, and shrugged his shoulders as if it was not a problem.
Cole put a photograph on the table in front of him. ‘Have you seen this man recently? He may have come to see you within the last two years.’
The Greek man looked down at the photo. He shook his head from side to side. Cole studied his face carefully. His features remained calm, and his expression was neutral. But the eyes gave him away. The pupils dilated rapidly, and he blinked too quickly.
‘No. I’m afraid I don’t recognise this person. Let me see if any of my managers may know him.’
Spiro pressed a button on the side of his desk. Within a few seconds a heavily built man strode confidently into the office. He looked fit, clean shaven, and dressed in an expensive looking designer suit. Cole wasn’t able to determine who the suit might have been made by, but he instantly recognised the compact Sig P250 handgun that the man was holding in his right hand.
‘Why are you looking for this man?’ Spiro asked casually.
‘I believe he has kidnapped my wife,’ said Cole.
‘And what has that got to do with me?’
‘This man came looking for you sometime last year, I believe.’ Cole glanced across at the man with the gun. He looked competent. Perhaps ex-military he thought to himself.
Spiro went quiet for a few seconds, looking quite thoughtful. The he threw his shoulders back and laughed out loud. ‘And he found me. Come, I will show you.’
They followed him out of the office and down a long corridor. The man with the pistol walked with them, a few paces behind. At the end of the corridor, they passed through a large opening with a plastic curtain behind it. As they went through the curtain, the temperature dropped considerably. They walked across a room full of pallets containing boxes of various types of processed food. Then they came to a sliding door. Spiro pulled hard on the handle and it swung open. A blast of even colder air hit them. They followed him inside.
‘This is our main deep-freeze. It’s around minus twenty degrees centigrade in here,’ Spiro shouted above the noise of t
he refrigeration equipment.
The four of them walked to the far side of the freezer. Hedge wrapped his arms around himself tightly. It was as cold as he had ever been. He didn’t think anyone would last long in this temperature.
Spiro leant down over a large wooden box in the corner of the room. He pulled the lid off and told his visitors to look inside.
Hedge looked down and then immediately jumped back.
‘What the hell?’ he said.
There was a male corpse in the crate. It was completely naked. The body was fully intact and looked in good condition, obviously due to it being deep frozen. Hedge looked again. It wasn’t quite as intact as he had first thought. There were two areas of concern for the deceased person. Firstly, there was a small bruised area in the centre of the forehead, and in the middle of the forehead was a neat hole. The size of hole that might have been made if a pencil had been pushed into the head.
‘Bullet, from close range,’ Cole said, as if he was answering Hedge’s unasked question.
The second thing that Hedge noticed was the large red streaks running down the man’s legs, directly below his missing genitalia.
‘This is me.’ Spiro laughed. ‘Or at least that’s what you’re friend in the photograph believed. One of my employees was very similar looking man to me. He could have almost been my twin. It was quite a remarkable likeness, and very useful. He used to entertain boorish clients for me when I would rather not do it myself. The guy was a very loyal member of staff, right to the end.’
Spiro leaned down into the makeshift coffin and grabbed hold of the dead man’s hand. It was as hard as rock, and frozen solid. Three of the fingers on the hand were stuck together, but the thumb and the index finger remained separated. Spiro took hold of this finger and pulled up hard. It snapped off with a dry cracking noise, like the sound of a dry twig being broken off a tree branch.
The Greek man turned to Cole and chuckled. He held out the dead man’s finger towards him. ‘Here. Take this. It’s a souvenir for you to take back with you.’
He let out a great bellowing laugh. The man with the Sig P250 replaced the weapon in the holster under his jacket. He too was laughing.
Spiro closed the lid.
Cole looked across at the tall, Greek man. His face showed no emotion as he spoke. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about a parachute that failed to open?’
Spiro’s eyes narrowed a little. The laughter had gone from his face. ‘I don’t like to have people asking about me. I have to be careful, you know. It occurred to me that you may have been the man who shot my friend here.’ He nodded down at the box in front of him. ‘Anyway, no harm was done it seems, except possibly just a small moment of panic. I do hope you forgive me. No hard feelings.’
The Greek man held out his hand. Cole studied him for a moment, and then shook the offered hand.
‘No hard feelings,’ he said. It sounded sincere.
‘Wonderful,’ said Spiro. He turned and strode off back in the direction of his office.
‘Will you join me for coffee and a sandwich?’ he shouted back to his guests. ‘I can order in some sausage rolls as well, and then we can call it a “finger buffet”’.
His laughter echoed down the hallway all the way back to his office.
Chapter Thirty Three
Cole felt like he hadn’t really learnt very much from his trip to Cape Town. It seemed that Spiro had been visited in South Africa, and that whoever had come to find him had left believing that he was dead.
Cole was keen to get back to London. He had received a text message from Docherty saying that he had some more news on Solomon.
Hedge hadn’t enjoyed the trip at all. He wasn’t quite sure how he had managed to get caught up in all this. He wanted to help his friend Cole, but wasn’t sure what they could do next. He had sat alone in the hotel bar the previous evening, slowly getting drunk. Cole had disappeared for the evening, saying he was returning the rental car, and disposing of the crossbow. They hadn’t needed the weapon as it turned out. Hedge was thankful for that.
The flight back from Cape Town to London was uneventful. Hedge slept most of the way, or half slept. He woke every so often in a panic, reliving the nightmare of falling to earth with no parachute. Every time he jumped in his seat, and his eyes flew open, Cole just looked across at him and smiled.
In truth, Cole had also been shocked by the incident. He had survived many dangerous situations in the past, but he really didn’t want anything bad to happen to him right now. He needed to stay fit and alert if he was going to find his wife. She was out there somewhere, maybe in danger, possibly in distress. He needed to find her. A black gloom settled over him as he thought about how desperate he was to get her back. He was a man who was used to being in charge of events. He didn’t like not knowing why she had been taken, or where she might be. It felt like it was driving him slowly mad.
Cole pulled out the newspaper he had bought in the departure lounge at Cape Town airport. It was that morning’s edition of the Cape News. He glanced at the headline on the front page about the effect of rising crime on the tourist industry of the country. The second page was covering an ongoing story about corruption amongst government ministers, although the Deputy President had made a statement advising that all possible steps were being taken to eliminate such activities.
It was the article on the third page that attracted his attention. The Cape Town police were investigating the bizarre killing of a local Greek businessman. The dead man had been found inside a refrigeration unit. What was strange was that the man’s head had been pushed between two large sides of pork meat, and it was being held in place by a twenty inch long, carbon bolt. This appeared to have been forced into one side of pork. It had then gone clean through the brain of the man, with the sharp end finally piercing the other piece of meat.
Cole shook his head. ‘No hard feelings,’ he said with a stern look on his face.
He folded up the newspaper and shoved it under his seat. He glanced across at Hedge sitting next to him. No need for you to see that, he thought to himself, you are jumpy enough already, my young friend.
He laid his head back and closed his eyes.
Chapter Thirty Four
As soon as they were clear of the airport terminal at Heathrow, Cole’s cell starting ringing.
It was Docherty.
The two of them talked for a while. Cole explained the events that had occurred on their visit to South Africa. He left out the article from the newspaper. Docherty didn’t need to know about that, he thought. Anyway, he would probably find out eventually.
Docherty had some more information. ‘We have been trawling around to find out a bit more about this man Solomon’s movements. I’ve had to call in a few more favours. As well as a visit to South Africa, it turns out shortly after that he paid a brief visit to an island in the Azores.’
‘The Azores,’ said Cole. ‘Where the hell is that? I thought I had heard of most places on the planet.’
Docherty explained that the Azores was the collective name for a set of islands in the Atlantic Ocean. They were officially a Portuguese territory. The largest and most significant island was called Sao Miguel.
‘Why would he go there?’ Cole enquired.
‘No idea. That’s what you may want to go and find out. It’s in the middle of nowhere. The sort of place you might go if you didn’t want to be found.’
‘It’s probably just another waste of time. Like Cape Town,’ Cole said.
He wasn’t sure if the previous few days had been useful or not. He hadn’t found Solomon. But he had discovered Spiro. Were they connected though? He had no idea.
‘It may be a waste of time, but it’s worth looking into,’ Docherty said. ‘My source is reliable. Go and check it out. See what you can turn up. We need to know what Solomon was doing in the Azores. We can catch up again when you get back.’
Docherty hung up.
Hedge had called Maddie and told them that he
wouldn’t be home just yet. She wanted to see him, so they agreed to meet for a coffee in the Departure lounge at Heathrow’s terminal five. She would catch a train, and be there in around forty five minutes.
Cole was keen to see Maddie again. He liked Hedge’s sister, but he really wanted to know if she had any more thoughts on the whereabouts of his missing wife.
‘She’s not a bloody fortune teller, you know,’ Hedge said to Cole.
‘I know, but she has already helped me a little. Talking to her again can’t do any harm.’
Hedge shrugged. He guessed that was true. Anything that would give Cole something to cling on to would be useful. He just wanted to protect his sister. He had spent the first twenty or so years of his life without knowing that she had even existed. She had become very precious to him.
Maddie met them in Starbucks coffee shop in the terminal building. She looked wonderful Cole thought. Her long hair flowed half way down her back. He had never seen anyone look so good in a simple pair of blue Levi jeans.
They ordered coffee and croissants, and then sat down in some soft chairs in the corner of the cafe.
‘How are you feeling Cole?’ Maddie asked softly.
‘Concerned,’ he said, ‘and a little bit frightened. How are you?’
‘I’m good. But then, the person I love most in the world hasn’t been kidnapped.’
Her eyes turned automatically towards her brother, and then looked back at Cole.
‘Have you heard anything more about her?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing. It’s so frustrating. Have you had any more thoughts regarding Alice, or Athena?’ he said hopefully.
Maddie shook her head. ‘Not really.’
The Terminate Code: A gripping, page-turning, action adventure revenge thriller, with a fast pace, and a terrifying twist in its tail ! (Hedge & Cole Book 2) Page 13
