Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13) (9 page)

‘Sure, we can throw the master switches on everything right here. Engine power, electrics, hydraulics, air, emergency generator, the works,’ Diesel said, still staring at him, as were the others, apart from Scagnetti who had wandered off on his own to light a roll-up and pollute the unbreathable air of the engine room still further.

‘What about the radar?’ Jude asked.

‘Uh-huh,’ Diesel said, uncertain where Jude was going with this. ‘We can knock that out along with every other instrument in the conning station. So?’

Jude could feel a smile spreading over his face as his confidence in his plan grew stronger. ‘And if we cut the engines, the ship will stop moving and stay pretty much put?’

‘As long as the sea’s calm, sure,’ Diesel replied. ‘We’ll drift, but not by more than a few points, depending on the currents. Cut to the chase, kid. What the hell is this about?’

‘Listen,’ Jude said.

Jude’s brainwave caused a lot of disagreement among the others. Condor thought he must be nuts to contemplate taking such a risk, with pirates almost certainly scouring every inch of the ship to murder each and every one of them. Gerber declared he had some balls on him and reckoned, on consideration, that it was worth a try. Nobody denied that Jude was the quickest and knew his way around the ship as well as any of them.

‘It’ll work,’ Jude kept saying.

Scagnetti was sitting on a duct pipe, swinging his legs and puffing his roll-up. ‘Who you gonna call in, Limey Boy?’ he called out with a grin. ‘Friggin’ Double O Seven?’

‘Shut it, Scagnetti,’ Gerber warned him.

‘Never thought I’d say it, but Scagnetti has a point,’ Hercules said. ‘You wanna take this kind of crazy-ass risk to send a lousy email? To who?’

‘I have an idea about that,’ Jude said. ‘Trust me, okay?’

‘It’s not going to work,’ Diesel said. ‘The moment you shut down the power, the pirates will know something’s up. These guys ain’t stupid. They’re sailors. They know ships. We cut the juice and engine power just like that, it’ll give us away for sure. Like waving a big flag saying “Here we are!” They’ll be all over us in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’

‘I thought you said it’d take a rocket to get through that hatch,’ Condor said.

‘It would. But none of us wants to be out there with ten fuckin’ Somalis blocking the way back with AK-47s.’

‘We don’t cut the power right away,’ Jude said. ‘I’ll need it for the satellite hookup. Fifteen minutes, that’s all I need, then throw the switch.’

‘Then you have another problem,’ Diesel said. ‘We have to assume the pirates are all over the bridge, right? Which means that if the power’s still on they’ll be able to monitor the watertight door indicator. The panel of lights will show them exactly which doors and hatches are opening and closing below. It’ll give your position away from the moment you start moving.’

Jude wasn’t put off. ‘I’ll take my chances with the indicator panel. They probably won’t even notice.’

‘It’s nuts.’

‘Maybe so, but it’s the only way,’ Jude said. ‘I’m going for it. Exactly quarter of an hour after I step out of that hatch, you pull those switches. I’ll leg it back down below before they realise what’s happening.’

‘You’re crazy, you know that?’ Hercules rumbled, shaking his head. ‘You gotta death wish?’

‘Hey, if stupid wants to go get himself creamed, let’m,’ Scagnetti said.

Diesel wasn’t happy about it, but it was clear to everyone that Jude couldn’t be dissuaded. Nobody had yet come up with anything better.

‘Hold on,’ Gerber said as Jude started opening the hatch. ‘You can’t go up there without some kind of weapon. Take my axe.’

Jude looked at it. ‘I can’t run about with that. It’s too big.’

‘How about this, bro?’ Hercules said, offering Jude the butcher’s knife.

The idea of using a knife on a living person made Jude’s flesh crawl, but he knew how lame that would sound to the others. ‘If I slip on a ladder and fall on it, it’ll go right through me,’ he said, by way of an excuse.

‘You’ll need this, at least,’ Diesel said, handing Jude a long, heavy metal Maglite. ‘It’s going to get pretty dark below decks once the power goes off.’

Jude stuck the torch in his belt. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m not planning on getting caught.’

‘Good luck, son,’ Gerber said as they unlocked the engine room hatch. Jude kicked off his shoes, thinking he’d be quieter without them, and padded barefoot through the open hatchway, his heart rate instantly quickening as he suddenly began to ask himself what the hell he thought he was doing.

Once the hatch closed behind him, there was no going back. Jude set off furtively down the narrow metal passageway to the vertical ladder they’d scrambled down minutes before. He paused at the bottom rung, peering up through the circular hole above him as he listened for approaching footsteps or voices. Hearing nothing, he took a deep breath and climbed upwards towards the next level.

The coast seemed to be clear, so far. He wasn’t dead yet, although that could easily change at any second. His heart was in his throat as he padded gingerly to the next upward hatchway. He paused once more at the top, sweating. Then kept moving. Another bare metal passage with ducts and pipes running along the wall, another open-tread iron ladder.

It was as he was about to emerge onto the level above that Jude very nearly got caught for the first time. He ducked his head and shoulders down out of sight through the hatch and held his breath as a group of pirates appeared around a corner and passed directly above him, their footsteps clanging on the bare metal floor just inches away. There were three of them, heavily armed and apparently combing the ship for the rest of the crew, but they weren’t taking it too seriously, as if mopping up survivors was just another part of the game to them. Jude could hear them laughing among themselves, and caught a whiff of something that wasn’t tobacco smoke.

He waited until they were gone. When he could breathe again, he crept quickly onwards and upwards. Five minutes. Ten to go before Diesel shut down the power and the pirates would know something was up.

He was on A Deck now, into the bottom level of the house and approaching the heart of the danger zone. His pulse was escalating with every yard. Around the next ninety-degree corner was the mess room door, hanging ajar.

He drew breath as he saw the slick of blood on the metal step and across the passageway. The blood trail stopped in a pool that reflected the neon striplights above. In the middle of the pool, inert and spreadeagled on his belly, his head turned sideways with his cheek pressed to the floor and looking straight at Jude with lifeless porcelain eyes, was Jack Skinner, the ship’s bosun. He’d managed to drag himself this far before he died from his gunshot wounds.

Jude was gaping at the corpse when the mess room door swung wide open. He ducked behind it just in time to avoid being spotted by the two armed Africans who stepped out and walked through the blood towards Skinner’s body. They bent to seize a wrist each. Peering around the edge of the door, Jude was just three feet away from them, close enough to smell their sweat and the firing-range tang of cordite on their clothes. Their bare arms were muscled and lean and glistening. The pirate nearest him had his rifle casually slung over his shoulder, tantalisingly within Jude’s reach, and for a moment he was insanely tempted to make a grab for it.

The pirates started dragging the bosun’s body up the passage towards the external hatch that led to the main deck. The smeared blood trail they left in their wake made Jude want to throw up. He stood motionless until they were out of sight, then with legs like jelly he ran on towards the hatch for B Deck.

Up and up. Twice more, he froze as he heard voices and laughter, and whipped out of sight. By the time he reached E Deck his stomach muscles were clenched so tight that it hurt and he was cursing himself for having come up with this lunatic idea.

But they hadn’t got him yet, and he’d almost reached his objective.

Eight minutes, thirty seconds. Six and a half minutes to go before the guys below threw the power switch. The sands were running fast out of the hourglass.

The door of the captain’s cabin was shut, but not locked. Slowly, slowly, he eased it open and peered inside, ready to yank the big flashlight out of his belt and start flailing away with it as a club. As if it would do him any good against automatic weapons.

To Jude’s relief, the cabin was empty. He slipped through the doorway and quickly bolted it behind him. If anyone came, he could always scramble out of the window, which was open just wide enough to admit a blessed breath of fresh air. Jude crept over and peered cautiously over the sill. He could see the whole length of the main deck from here. It was swarming with armed Africans. He swallowed hard, then harder as he saw what they were doing.

The pirates were dragging bodies across to the starboard rail and dumping them into the sea. As he watched, the pair who’d almost caught him earlier heaved Jack Skinner’s corpse up and over by the wrists and ankles, leaving a red smear on the railing as it slithered out of sight, followed a second later by a dull splash. Jude fought the urge to throw up.

The mother ship had come up alongside the
Andromeda
. It was a battered-looking fishing vessel, its hull more rust than paintwork. More pirates were milling about the trawler, every single one of them armed with the ubiquitous Kalashnikov. Then, as Jude kept watching, he saw two men walk up the deck of the cargo ship, deep in conversation. He instantly recognised one of them as Carter, still carrying the small aluminium case chained to his left hand.

The other was a demon.

The tall, powerfully-built African was the most frightening-looking man Jude had seen in his life. He was a commanding presence, dressed in a loose rendition of military uniform: boots, khakis, a red beret worn at an angle and a gunbelt with some kind of enormous handgun in a flap holster. Bandoliers loaded with pointed rifle cartridges hung crossways around both shoulders. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, revealing thick, muscled forearms. The huge gold watch on one wrist caught the sunlight, as bright as a beacon against his ebony skin.

But it wasn’t what the man was wearing. It was his face. Even from a distance, the sight of it made Jude draw a breath. He looked monstrous. Inhuman.

Jude had forgotten all about the ticking clock. He felt the same icy tingle of fear down the back of his neck that he’d felt as a young boy, when he’d sneaked downstairs in the dead of night to the living room of the vicarage to turn on the TV and be illicitly terrified by his first-ever horror movie.

At first glance Jude thought the African must have been burned or mangled in some kind of accident; then he realised what he was seeing was deliberate mutilation. Huge raised ridges of scar tissue ran in parallel lines up both sides of his face, from his jaw to where they disappeared under the red beret. More tracks had been carved in downward-pointing V shapes on his forehead, distorting his brow into a permanent expression of furious rage. They looked as if they had been gouged into his flesh with a hot knife. Patterns of lumps, like raised pockmarks, circled his eyes. Something had been done to his cheekbones to make them stand out like horns. Like something out of a nightmare.

The scarred man was unquestionably the leader of the pirates. While his men ran back and forth over the decks of both vessels, he stood calmly smoking a long cigar, breaking off from his conversation with Carter to issue orders and signals to the others.

The fifteen minutes were almost up. Jude managed to tear himself from the window, shaken by the sight and reminding himself of what he’d come here to find.

Captain O’Keefe had kept the personal belongings in his cabin in immaculate order, including the small desk set into an alcove in the wall. The Dell laptop was powered down, the lid closed, a light blinking on its front panel. Jude stepped over to the desk and flipped the laptop open. The screen flashed into life, showing the email program and the half-finished message that the captain had been in the middle of writing to his wife back home in Indiana when he’d left it to attend to his duties. It began: ‘
Dear Emily …
’

Jude felt a moment of shame for intruding on a dead man’s privacy. He imagined the awful scene in store when Emily O’Keefe received the news of her husband’s death. Remembering the captain’s final words to Carter before the man had shot him, Jude found it easy to have more sympathy for her than for her late husband. Whatever kind of a deal the man had struck with Carter, it had landed them all in mortal danger. It had already cost the lives of Mitch and several other innocent men.

So burn in hell, Henry Hainsworth O’Keefe.

His time was nearly up. He was going to have to work fast. He deleted the unfinished email and clicked on COMPOSE NEW MESSAGE. He racked his brain to recall the position coordinates he’d seen on the readout in the conning station. As the figures came streaming into his mind, he started tapping keys and rushed out his message. There wasn’t a lot to say. He didn’t even know if it would work. By the time its recipient saw it, he and all his fellow crewmen might be dead and the ship stolen away to Christ knew where.

When he’d finished, he addressed the email to the only person he’d been able to think of to contact. The man who had got him here. Jeff Dekker.

Jude hit SEND and held his breath in a silent prayer as the email winged its way off into cyberspace. It was nearly twenty to five, his time. Two hours earlier in France.

Time up. Right on cue, Jude saw the power light of the laptop fade and die, and the battery light come on. The screen dimmed as it switched to its own power. A second later, Jude felt the ever-present low thrum of the engines go quiet. Diesel had been as good as his word. The ship was now effectively dead in the water.

Jude felt momentarily elated. The crew were still a long way from regaining full control of the ship, but they’d just scored a decisive little victory. It wouldn’t be long now before Carter and the pirates twigged what was up.

He crept back over to the cabin window. Pirates were still marching about the deck, but Carter and the terrifying African were gone. No telling where they could be now. Heading straight for him, maybe.

Jude grabbed his torch and hurried from the cabin. He had no idea whether he’d make it back down to the engine room alive. But he’d completed his task.

Now only time would tell whether it had been worth it.