Those in Peril (Unlocked) (2 page)

Two Cross Bow sentries in battle fatigues swung the gates open and the three Hummvees raced through. Immediately the vehicle carrying Hazel Bannock peeled off from the formation and crossed the interior compound to stop before the heavy doors that led into the air-conditioned luxury of the executive suites. Hazel was whisked through them by Bert Simpson and half a dozen uniformed servants. The doors closed ponderously. It seemed to Hector that something was lacking once she had gone – even the Khamseen wind howled with less fury – and as he paused at the doorway to Cross Bow headquarters and looked up at the sky he saw that the dust clouds were indeed breaking up and subsiding on themselves.

In his private quarters he removed the goggles and unwound the keffiyeh from his throat. Then he washed the grime from his face and hands, squirted soothing drops into his bloodshot eyes and examined his face in the wall mirror. The short stubble of dark beard gave him a piratical air. The skin above it was darkly tanned by the desert sun, except for the silver scar above his right eye where years ago a bayonet thrust had exposed the bone of his skull. His nose was large and imperial. His eyes were a cool and steady green. His teeth were very white like those of predator.

‘It is the only face you are ever going to get, Hector my lad. But that doesn’t mean you have to love it,’ he murmured, then he answered himself, ‘But, thank the Lord for all those ladies of less fastidious tastes out there.’ He laughed softly and went through into the situation room. The hum of the men’s conversation died away as he entered. Hector stood on the dais and looked them over. These ten were his squad leaders. Each of them commanded a stick of ten men, and he felt a small prickle of pride. They were the tried and true, hardened warriors who had learned their trade in the Congo and Afghanistan, in Pakistan and Iraq and in other bloody fields around the wicked old world. It had taken a long time for him to assemble them, and they were a totally reprehensible bunch of reprobates and hardened killers, and he loved them like his brothers.

‘Where are the scratches and teeth bites, boss? Don’t tell us you got away from her scot free,’ one of them called. Hector smiled tolerantly and gave them a minute to deliver their heavy humour and to settle down. Then he held up his hand.

‘Gentlemen, and I use the term loosely, gentlemen, we have in our care a lady who will attract the ardent attention of every thug from Kinshasa to Baghdad, from Kabul to Mogadishu. If anything nasty befalls her I will personally cut the balls off the man who let it happen. I give you my solemn oath on that.’ They knew this was not an idle threat. The laughter subsided and they dropped their eyes as he stared at them expressionlessly for a few seconds after silence had fallen. At last he picked up the pointer from the desk in front of him and turned to the huge aerial blow-up of the concession on the wall behind him and began his final briefing. He delegated their duties to them and reinforced his previous orders. He did not want any carelessness on this job. Half an hour later he turned back to face them.

‘Questions?’ There were none and he dismissed them with the curt order, ‘When in doubt shoot first and make damned sure you don’t miss.’ He took the helicopter and had Hans Lategan, the pilot, fly him along the pipeline as far as the terminal on the shore of the Gulf. They flew at very low level. Hector was in the front seat beside Hans, searching the track for any sign of unexplained activity; alien human footprints or wheel tracks made by any vehicle other than his own GM patrol trucks or the engineering teams servicing the pipeline. All his Cross Bow operatives wore boots with a distinctive arrowhead tread on the soles, so even from this height Hector could tell friendly tracks from those of a potential thug.

During Hector’s tenure as head of security there had already been three vicious sabotage attempts on the Bannock Oil installations in Abu Zara. No terrorist group had as yet claimed responsibility for these acts, probably because none of the attacks had succeeded.

The Emir of Abu Zara, Prince Farid al Mazra, was a staunch ally of Bannock Oil. The oil royalties that accrued to him from the company amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Hector had forged a strong alliance with the head of the Abu Zara police force, Prince Mohammed, who was a brother-in-law of the Emir. Prince Mohammed’s intelligence was strong and three years previously he had alerted Hector to an impending seaborne attack. Hector and Ronnie Wells, his area commander at the terminal, had been able to intercept the raiders at sea with the Bannock patrol boat, which was an ex-Israeli motor torpedo boat, with a good turn of speed and twin .50-calibre Browning machine guns mounted in the bows. There were eight terrorists on board the attacking dhow, together with several hundred pounds of Semtex plastic explosive. Ronnie Wells was a former Royal Marine sergeant-major, a seaman of vast experience and an expert handler of small attack craft. He came out of the darkness astern of the dhow, and took the crew by complete surprise. When Hector called on them to surrender over the loud-hailer they replied with a fusillade of automatic fire. The first burst from the Brownings touched off the cargo of Semtex in the hold of the dhow. All eight terrorists on board had simultaneously departed for the Gardens of Paradise, leaving behind them very little trace of their previous existence on this earth. The Emir and Prince Mohammed had been delighted with the outcome. They ensured that the international media were given not even a sniff of the incident. Abu Zara was proud of its reputation as a stable, progressive and peace-loving country.

Hector landed at the terminal at Sidi el Razig and spent a few hours with Ronnie Wells. As always Ronnie had everything shipshape, renewing Hector’s faith in him. After their meeting they walked out together to where Hans was waiting in the helicopter. Ronnie glanced obliquely at him, and Hector knew exactly what was worrying him. In three months’ time Ronnie would be sixty-five. His children had long ago lost interest in him and he had no home outside Cross Bow, except possibly the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, if they would accept him as a pensioner. His contract with Cross Bow would come up for renewal a few weeks before his birthday.

‘Oh, by the way, Ronnie,’ Hector said, ‘I have got your new contract on my desk. I should have brought it with me for you to sign.’

‘Thanks, Hector.’ Ronnie grinned, his bald head glowing. ‘But you do know I will be sixty-five in October?’

‘You old bastard!’ Hector grinned back at him. ‘Here I have been thinking you were twenty-five for the last ten years.’ He swung up into the helicopter and they flew back just above the sandy surface of the track alongside the pipeline. The Khamseen wind had swept the surface like an industrious housemaid so that even the tracks of the desert bustards and oryx were clearly printed on it. Twice they landed for Hector to examine any sign that was less self-evident and might have been made by unwelcome strangers. These proved innocuous. They had been made by wandering Bedouin probably searching for lost camels.

They landed again for the last time at the site where three years previously an ambush had been laid by six persons unknown who had infiltrated the concession from the south. They had covered sixty miles on foot through the desert to reach the pipeline. When they arrived the intruders made the unfortunate choice of attacking the patrol truck in which Hector was riding in the front seat. Hector spotted something suspicious halfway up the dune that ran beside the track as they drove along it.

‘Stop!’ he yelled at his driver, and he scrambled onto the roof of the truck. He stared up at the object that had caught his attention. It moved again, a tiny slithering movement like a crawling red snake. That movement was what had first caught his attention. But there were no red snakes in this desert. One end of the snake protruded from the sand and the other end disappeared under the scrawny hanging branches of a thornbush. He studied it carefully. The bush was sufficiently dense to hide a man lying behind it. The red object was like nothing in nature that he knew of. Then it twitched again and he made up his mind. He mounted his assault rifle to his shoulder and fired a three-shot burst into the thornbush. The man who had been lying behind it leaped to his feet. He was turbaned and cloaked with his AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a small black box in his hands, from which dangled the thin red insulated cable.

‘Bomb!’ Hector screamed. ‘Heads down!’ The man on the dune detonated the bomb, and with a thunderous explosion the track 150 metres ahead of the truck erupted in a towering column of dust and fire. The shock wave almost knocked Hector off the roof of the truck, but he braced himself and kept his balance.

The bomber was almost at the top of the dune, running like a desert gazelle. Hector was still unsighted by the blast, and his first burst churned up the sand around the Arab’s feet, but he kept running. Hector caught his breath and steadied himself. He saw his next burst catch the Arab across his back, dust flying from his robe as the bullets struck. The man pirouetted like a ballet dancer and went down. Then Hector saw his five companions leap up out of cover amongst the scrub. They crossed the skyline and disappeared before he could take them under fire.

Hector swept a glance along the face of the dune. It extended for three or four miles both forward and aft of their present position. Along its whole length it was too steep and soft for the truck to climb. It would have to be a foot chase, he decided.

‘Phase Two!’ Hector shouted at his men, ‘Hot pursuit! Go! Go! Go!’ He leapt from the truck and led the four of them up the dune face at a run. When they reached the top the five insurgents were still in a loose group running across the flat salt-pan almost half a mile away. They had established that lead while Hector and his stick were forced to struggle up the face of the dune. Looking after them, Hector smiled grimly.

‘Big mistake, my beauties! You should have bomb-shelled, each of you should have taken a different direction! Now we have you nicely grouped.’ Hector knew with absolute certainty that in a straight chase there was no Arab born who could run away from these men of his.

‘Come along, boys. Don’t dawdle. We have to bag these bastards before sundown.’ It took four hours; ‘these bastards’ were just a wee bit tougher than Hector had reckoned. But then they made their final mistake. They stood to fight it out. They picked a likely depression, a natural strong point with a clear field of fire in all directions, and went to ground. Hector looked up at the sun. It was twenty degrees above the horizon. They had to finish this thing quickly. While his men kept the terrorists’ heads down, Hector wriggled forward to where he could have a better view of the field of play. Immediately he saw that they could not take the Arab position head-on. He would lose most if not all of his men. For ten minutes more he studied the terrain, and then with a soldier’s eye he picked out the weak spot. Running past the rear of the Arab position was a very shallow fold of ground; too shallow to deserve the name of wadi or donga but it might conceal a man crawling on his belly. He squinted his eyes against the low sun and judged that the fold crossed forty paces behind the enemy’s redoubt. He nodded with satisfaction and wriggled back to where his men lay.

‘I am going to get around behind them and toss in a grenade. Charge as soon as it blows.’ Hector had to take a wide detour around the enemy to keep out of their sight, and once he was into the donga he could only move very slowly so as not to raise the dust and warn them of his approach. His men made the Arabs keep their heads well down, shooting at any movement above the rim of the depression. However, by the time Hector reached the nearest point to the depression there was probably only another ten minutes of shooting light before the sun went down below the horizon. He rolled onto his knees and with his teeth pulled the pin on the grenade he was holding in his right hand. Then he sprang upright and judged the distance. It was at extreme range. Forty or maybe fifty metres to lob the heavy fragmentation grenade. He put his shoulder and all his strength behind the throw and sent it up on a high looping trajectory. Though it was a good throw, one of his very best, it struck the rim of the redoubt and for an instant seemed as if it would stick there. But then it rolled forward and dropped in amongst the crouching Arabs. Hector heard the screams as they realized what it was. He leapt to his feet and drew his pistol as he raced forward. The grenade exploded just before he reached the redoubt. He paused on the edge and looked down on the carnage. Four of the thugs had been torn into bloody rags. The last one had been partially shielded by the bodies of his comrades. Nonetheless shrapnel had ripped through his chest into his lungs.

He was coughing up gouts of frothing blood and struggling to catch his last breath as Hector stood over him. He looked up and to Hector’s astonishment recognized him. The man spoke through bubbling blood and his voice was faint and slurred, but Hector understood what he was saying.

‘My name is Anwar. Remember it, Cross, you pig of the great pig. The debt has not been settled. The Blood Feud continues. Others will come.’

Now, three years later Hector stood on the same spot, and once again puzzled over those words. He could still make no sense of them. Who was the dying man? How had he known Hector? At last he shook his head, then turned and walked back to where the helicopter stood with its rotors turning idly. He climbed aboard and they flew on. The day melted away swiftly in the desert heat and when they got back to the compound at No. 8 there was only an hour before sunset. Hector took advantage of what remained of the light to go out to the range and fire a hundred rounds each from both his Beretta M9 9mm pistol and his SC 70/90 automatic assault rifle. All his men were expected to fire at least 500 rounds a week and turn in their targets to the armourer. Hector regularly checked all of them. His men were all deadly shots, but he did not want any complacency or sloppiness to creep in. They were good but they had to stay that way.