Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3)

by David Hickson

“That’s where it is,” said Lebogang, and the greed in him struggled with his anger so that he had to clear his throat and say it again. “That’s where the gold is? In that warehouse where my brother died?”

  I gave a regretful smile again, and a tiny nod of affirmation.

  “He thought you were just hiding out there. Vusi was convinced you had the gold hidden somewhere else. Why didn’t he tell me this?”

  “He was a man of honour. We asked him not to say anything to anyone until we had dealt with the Breytenbach problem, but then of course …”

  Lebogang stared at me, and I realised I had overplayed the honour line. I pushed on.

  “You see our problem. When the police finish their investigation into your brother’s death, the men that killed him are going to take the gold for themselves.”

  “Breytenbach’s men,” said Lebogang, as if our meaning was beginning to penetrate.

  “They plan to walk in there,” said Robyn bitterly. “And take the gold for themselves, trampling over your poor brother’s departed spirit.”

  A new light had appeared behind Lebogang’s eyes as Robyn’s impassioned plea mingled with the results of his mathematical calculations. His voice was a little hoarse as he said, “Lebo, call me Lebo.”

  “Thank you, Lebo, I will.”

  “What do you need me to do?” he asked, a question that ended in a rasping cough because of the grief and the greed conspiring to clog his throat.

  “Breytenbach’s men are nothing short of a small army,” I said. “We don’t stand a chance against them. We need to get into the warehouse, and keep his men clear of the area.”

  Lebogang moved his body for the first time since the start of our discussion. Some muscles deep beneath the belly pushed his chest upwards, and he leaned forward over his desk, placed his elbows on the glass surface, and clasped his enormous fists together.

  “I have an army,” he said. “If they want to play war games, we’ll play with them. We’ll show them what war really is.”

  Robyn and I both smiled in unison.

  “We expected nothing less of you, Lebo,” I said.

  “An eye for an eye,” said Lebo, from whom the fire of vengeance fuelled by greed was bringing forth the orator. “My Vusi was worth ten of those men.”

  “Amen to that,” said Robyn.

  The first strike in the gang war that would later be christened the “Docklands War” was struck by the Dark Bizness team, although we were the only ones to know that because they didn’t announce themselves before opening fire on a jeep that was patrolling through the docks with three of Breytenbach’s private security on board. They were wearing well-worn camouflage outfits and the weapons they fired were AK-47s. These two details inspired the suggestion that they were a team of mercenaries brought in from one of the trouble spots to the north of our country, sparking furious allegations that foreigners were destroying our fragile balance. One of Breytenbach’s men died, one was wounded, and the third claimed to have inflicted some damage on their assailants, although this was not confirmed.

  The situation escalated fast. The Breytenbach side responded by sending in reinforcements, and three more gun battles took place in the next twenty-four hours. Thirty-six hours after the first shot was fired, the army moved in, and the entire area of the Cape Town docks was declared an emergency zone.

  “We’ll give them eighteen hours to get it under control,” said Chandler, as he placed his teacup into its saucer and glared at it as if he suspected it of being poisoned. He had given up on ordering coffee from the Twelve Apostles kitchen.

  “You found a boat?” asked Robyn.

  “We did,” said Chandler. “Perfect for the job.”

  “It’s barely seaworthy,” I said, but Chandler laughed that off.

  “Nonsense, the boat is perfect.”

  Chandler would not be floating out to sea in the rough collection of wooden planks we’d hired for an exorbitant rate that morning from a scoundrel who operated a salvage business in the docks.

  “It hasn’t left harbour for fifteen years,” I pointed out.

  “That’s because they took his licence away,” said Chandler.

  “Which is another reason I am concerned about going to sea with him,” I insisted.

  “And I don’t do sea,” Fat-Boy reminded us.

  “You’ll be fine,” said Chandler. “The Angel goes because he can steer the boat, if it comes to that. You go because we need the muscle you’re hiding under all that flab. Do you expect Robyn to haul those concrete blocks around? Besides, the captain is Xhosa – you can speak the lingo with him. Honestly, you two. Nobody said this was going to be easy.”

  Fat-Boy pouted, and I looked out to sea. From our quiet corner of the terrace, the sea resembled a flat sheet of grey steel.

  “They’re forecasting a storm for tomorrow,” I said.

  “All the better,” said Chandler, and he gave us an encouraging smile.

  The storm was forecast to hit the shore the next evening, but there were some warm-up acts in the form of rain showers that started early in the morning and continued relentlessly through the day. Despite being an emergency zone, the docks needed to maintain some level of operation, and the soldiers posted at the west entrance were allowing workers in and out because most of the trouble was in the eastern section. They warned us not to drive too far east, and Chandler assured them we wouldn’t do anything so foolish, but then drove us to the second last quay on the eastern edge – the one with seven cranes. Across the stretch of water that separated the quay from its neighbour we could see the figures of soldiers standing miserably in the rain around our warehouse, which had been identified as the central focus of the Docklands War.

  “No good,” proclaimed Chandler, and he sucked his teeth in a disparaging way, squinting up at the cage that held the counter-weights. The massive concrete blocks dripped the morning’s rain over us.

  “No good?” repeated the supervisor from beneath his broken umbrella and he peered up reluctantly through the gap where the material had pulled away from the metal rib. “You can tell that from here?” he asked doubtfully.

  The supervisor, who had three missing teeth, an exhausted face, two gold earrings and a bald head upon which his hard hat perched like the top half of a peanut, had suggested that we come back for the inspection on a day that it wasn’t raining. But Chandler had laughed, insisted that we weren’t made of sugar, and had pushed me ahead of him into the rain with nothing but our hard hats to keep us dry.

  “Tell you what,” said Chandler, still peering up at the collection of dripping concrete blocks. “We can get started on this one today and look at the others later. That suit you?”

  The supervisor didn’t look as if that suited him at all, but the thought of inspecting the other six cranes in the midst of a rainstorm suited him less.

  “They didn’t know what they were doing,” said Chandler cheerfully as we picked our way around the puddles back to the supervisor’s brick hut. “That much is obvious. What were they? A team of amateurs?”

  The supervisor didn’t answer that, but Chandler wasn’t really looking for an answer from him. His eyes were on me and they were laughing. The amateurs that had cast the concrete counter-weights on that crane had been Fat-Boy and me. Mostly me, because I had returned to set the one hundred and twenty gold bars into the concrete after Fat-Boy had been shot while offloading them from the crate we had concealed them in. To describe it as an amateur job was an understatement.

  “We got a ship coming in early tomorrow,” complained the supervisor, “and with all this trouble, the army and all …”

  “Which is why we’ll get them replaced tonight,” said Chandler. “Rain doesn’t bother us, does it?”

  I assumed that question was also aimed at me, but I didn’t answer it. The rain did bother me – I was not looking forward to spending the night trying to substitute three tonnes of concrete blocks while avoiding the army patrols. Chandler’s analysis of the situat
ion held that both Breytenbach’s black-suited goons with their R5s and Dark Bizness’s troops of militia with their AK-47s would stay hidden tonight. He was probably right – three men had been killed and several wounded, and if anyone understood the rhythm of war it was Chandler – but I was struggling to share his confidence in our ability to sneak the gold out while the two private armies focused their attention on one another. It seemed to me that it would be the fool in the middle, the one trying to hide the gold bars from the others, who had the lowest chance of survival.

  The rain stopped at eighteen-hundred that evening, but the quay was little more than a series of stepping stones in the midst of the ocean because of the amount of rain that had collected. The cage of counter-weights was lowered by a bad-tempered crane operator, and Fat-Boy chewed his tongue as he operated a front-end loader to carefully remove the concrete blocks one at a time, lift them off their steel frame and lay them in neat stacks of three atop each other on a set of wooden pallets on the edge of the quay.

  “Don’t drop any in the water,” I teased. “We’ll never be able to get it back up, and it’ll come out of your share.”

  Fat-Boy glared at me through his good eye, told me to stop being racist and assured me he knew what he was doing, although I noticed he reduced the speed he was driving at, so I suggested he speed up a bit or we would be there all night.

  “You just be sure we got the right crane and the right fucking blocks,” he said, and came to stand beside me as I used a knife to scrape away a section of concrete. I had set eight bars into each block, arranged in a simple grid and covered with about a centimetre of the pale concrete mix. It took a few minutes to cut away a strip of concrete, then the blade struck something harder, and Fat-Boy shone a torch into the small hole and we saw the glint of gold shining back. Fat-Boy’s face split into a hundred white teeth and he gave an ecstatic sigh.

  “There you are,” he cried. “My little soldiers, safe and sound. We’re coming for you babies, not long now, hang on in there.”

  A little after twenty-hundred an open-topped army vehicle came bumping over the stepping stones of the quay and a soldier asked Fat-Boy what we were doing. Another soldier pointed his Heckler and Koch MP5 in our approximate direction, in case we happened to be planning an assault on one of the warring factions with our blocks of concrete. I kept my head down and used the hard hat to shield my face. Not that I expected they had any idea what members of the ‘Gold Heist Gang’ looked like. They weren’t much interested in me anyway – Fat-Boy distracted them enough by complaining that he was being abused by his racist foreman and suggested they give him a hand – but they laughed, turned their vehicle around and left us to it, despite not having received a clear answer to their question.

  It started to rain again shortly after that, and I began to worry that the docks were so quiet. Despite Chandler’s sense of the rhythm of war, it was odd that there was absolutely nothing happening. Where were Breytenbach’s men? And Lebogang’s militia? We had seen no sign of them. Fat-Boy suggested that the rain was keeping them away, and I wanted to agree with him, but I felt uneasy nonetheless.

  At twenty-one-hundred our boat arrived. A wooden barge with cracked paint and black smoke billowing from the pipe above the ramshackle bridge. It hadn’t looked seaworthy to me when Chandler and I had met with the captain the day before, so I was surprised it had made it all the way to our quay. The captain had assured us the boat could reach fifteen nautical miles from shore with no problem, even though it hadn’t left the harbour confines for over fifteen years because of bureaucratic difficulties he was having with the authorities. And he had showed us a mouth that was missing most of its teeth, in a smile that was in no way reassuring. His weatherbeaten cheeks were all wrinkles, his eyes were bloodshot and the iris of his left eye had lost all its colour: he told us he was blind in that eye, but assured us that didn’t affect his ability to steer his boat, even outside the harbour, and reminded us that Xhosa people had the sea in their blood. Chandler said that he thought the Xhosa were land-based people who tended to cattle as opposed to being a seafaring race with the sea in their blood. The captain, whose name, just to confuse us further about his racial heritage, was Jannie, had laughed and looked at Chandler through his good eye with wheezing anticipation of his next joke.

  Jannie poked his wizened head out of the broken perspex window of the bridge and waved to us as the wooden barge approached the edge of the quay at an alarming speed.

  “Shouldn’t he slow down?” asked Fat-Boy, but the barge twisted sideways and coasted gently against the quay so that the old tyres hanging from its side bumped against the edge in a chorus of muted squeaks.

  “The weather not a problem?” I asked, after Jannie had fastened the lines to hold the boat in place, had greeted Fat-Boy with what sounded like an abusive string of Xhosa insults, and had exchanged a sequence of handshakes with me that left me wondering whether I had been initiated into a secret organisation.

  “Weather?” said Jannie as if he wasn’t familiar with the word, and he gave a cackling laugh that carried a strong smell of garlic and alcohol.

  The barge had a crane mounted on the stern, which was the primary reason Chandler had chosen it; the secondary reason was the bureaucratic troubles that Jannie had endured, which had tainted his respect for officialdom. Jannie undid the ties holding the arm in place and operated the levers so that the arm unfolded and dangled a hook over the pallet of concrete weights we had arranged for him to bring as substitutes for the ones on the quay. He looped a worn set of straps around the pallet, connected them to the hook, and then pulled a lever to lift it. The boat shifted and bobbed in the water in a worrying way as the pallet lifted. But Jannie didn’t seem to notice, so I kept quiet about it, and helped to guide the pallet into position on the quayside.

  Jannie called out something in Xhosa to Fat-Boy as he struggled to loop the straps beneath one of our pallets for the return trip of the loading arm. Fat-Boy hurled an answer back at him, and Jannie laughed.

  “I say he’s too fat,” explained Jannie, “but he’s a real Xhosa that one – tells me size means wealth. He must be one wealthy Xhosa.” Jannie’s good eye narrowed and I suspected he was looking for the opportunity to ask about these heavy blocks of pale concrete we were paying him so handsomely to take to sea, despite his bureaucratic difficulties. But he said nothing, gave me a toothless smile instead, and kept himself busy with the loading. No questions had been one of Chandler’s conditions.

  It took us almost two hours to transfer the concrete weights, and then Fat-Boy climbed down the iron rungs set into the side of the quay, stepped onto the boat and gave me an anxious glance as it wobbled under his weight.

  “I don’t do boats,” explained Fat-Boy as he and Jannie went through their handshake routine. He said it in English for my benefit so that his complaint could be formally lodged. “Don’t do sea nor water of any kind,” he said. “Don’t swim neither.”

  “You don’t need to swim,” said Jannie. “That’s why we got the boat.”

  “What kind of Xhosa drives a boat?” said Fat-Boy, which seemed to support my thoughts about the spurious nature of Jannie’s claim that the sea was in his blood. Jannie laughed at that, which didn’t make me feel any better about his ability to take us out to sea and bring us safely back again. And then he rummaged about in a locker and produced two well-used life jackets.

  “This thing won’t make me float,” protested Fat-Boy when he’d strapped it on. “You seen how big I am?”

  But Jannie laughed again and said that Fat-Boy wouldn’t need to be doing any floating. We went up to the bridge to enter the first set of coordinates into the GPS. I had memorised them at Chandler’s insistence: there were three separate coordinates so that we didn’t sail a straight line to the ship waiting for us, in case someone followed. The bridge smelt of diesel and comprised a wheel, some engine instruments, a radio with a microphone on a cable that had been poorly repaired with electrical insulation tape
, a cracked wooden counter on which stood a half-empty bottle of cheap whisky, a large-screen GPS with a damaged screen that flickered off and on, and enough standing room for me and Jannie and about half of Fat-Boy. Jannie said it would take us three hours to reach the first position, and suggested that we make ourselves comfortable below deck where he had bunks for us to rest, and a few bottles if we had any difficulty with that.

  He climbed back onto the quay, untied the ropes, looped them around the bollards, and tossed the ends down to us so that we could hold the boat in position while he climbed back down. Then he cast off, gave the engine a brief boost, and spoke into his radio. The harbour master gave us permission to transit the harbour entrance, Jannie brought the engine up to a constant hum and he pointed the nose to sea with the maniacal look of a man about to break the law.

  Sixteen

  Fat-Boy stood in the cabin below deck and held onto a pole that provided the bunks with support. He swayed like an enormous beach ball as the boat rolled over the calm swells of the harbour.

  “I don’t do boats,” he said to me angrily, then clamped his mouth shut as a wave of nausea struck him.

  “It will be better up on deck,” I said, and helped him up the gangway steps.

  The rain strengthened its onslaught as we travelled across the outer basin of the harbour. A large tanker was squeezing through the winking lights of the outer moles, and its wake raced across the water towards us like an underwater monster. Jannie turned our boat to cut across the wake, and we bobbed up and down like a child’s toy in a bathtub. Fat-Boy’s eyes widened, and he clutched onto me. The two of us lurched in unsteady steps towards the wooden railing at the edge, and we grasped at it as the boat settled again and the thrumming sound of the engines picked up speed.

  “Not feeling good,” said Fat-Boy.

  “Focus on the horizon,” I recommended, but it was useless advice. The horizon was a worrying haze of thrashing waves and rain squalls when it was visible at all.