Those in Peril (Unlocked) (28 page)

Paddy whistled softly. ‘Did you kill that black-hearted bastard Uthmann?’

‘I had a shot at him, but he was still wearing his flak jacket. I hit him, but I don’t think he is dead. His body armour probably fielded my bullet.’

‘Big pity!’ Paddy growled. ‘I knew something must be up. From where I am sitting I can see that every road on your side of the border is swarming with vehicles. I have my binoculars on one of the enemy trucks right now. There must be twenty men in the back of it. All of them are heavily armed.’

‘Okay, Paddy. Hold your position and wait for my next call. If we can’t join up with Ronnie, we may be forced to come to you. Be ready to come in across the border and fetch us out.’ He cut the connection and looked at Hazel.

‘Did you hear what he said?’

She nodded. ‘You were right. It’s only our last option. But will it really take us eight hours to reach the coast?’

‘If we’re lucky,’ he replied, and he saw her eyeline shift. He glanced around and found that Cayla had quietly come up beside him.

‘I came to tell you sorry, Heck,’ she said meekly. ‘Sometimes there is a devil gets into me and I just can’t help myself. Can we be friends again?’ She held out her hand and he took it.

‘We have never stopped being friends, Cay. And I hope we never will. But you owe your mother an apology more than you do me.’

Cayla turned to Hazel. ‘I am so sorry, Mummy. Hector was right. I invited Rogier on board the
Dolphin
, and I bribed Georgie Porgie to give him a job.’

Hazel winced. Up until this moment she had tried not to believe it, but now she had to face the fact. Her baby was a baby no more. Then she reminded herself that Cayla was nineteen years of age, rather older than Hazel herself had been that momentous night on the back seat of her tennis coach’s old Ford when she had also become a woman. She rallied and held out her arms to Cayla.

‘We all make mistakes, baby. The trick is to never make the same mistake twice.’

Cayla looked back to Hector. ‘What is this fundament thing you keep telling me to put somewhere?’

‘It’s upper-class Limey speak for your butt,’ Hazel explained, and Cayla giggled.

‘Well, okay! I’ll buy that. Fundament is a pretty classy-sounding word. Much better than the other one.’

U
thmann struggled down the steep northern bank of the wadi. Every step was difficult and every breath was agony. He had abandoned the RPG and he clutched at his chest with both hands where Hector’s bullet had slammed into the front panel of his flak jacket. At first he expected to hear Hector and his men following him, but after a while he realized that they must be trying to regroup after the destruction of their helicopter. He stopped for a few minutes to discard the heavy flak jacket and examine his injury. Even though the bullet had not penetrated, the bruising and swelling at the point of impact was massive. Carefully he probed the area and felt the sharp spike of a broken rib beneath the skin. He worried that it might have punctured his lung. Although the pain was hardly bearable he took a deep breath. It seemed as though his lungs were uninjured and he hugged himself and staggered on down to where he had left Adam in the bottom of the wadi. He was no longer there. He must have climbed back to the rim of the bank where they had left the Sheikh and his men. Uthmann climbed the same route and found Adam at the top of the wadi, sitting on a rock and binding up his ankle with strips of cloth torn from his shirt.

‘What has happened?’ he demanded as soon as he saw Uthmann. ‘I heard shooting and a loud explosion.’

Between careful breaths Uthmann described what he had done, and Adam was elated.

‘So they have not escaped! Now they are stranded and I have them in the palm of my hand.’

‘Yes, we have them trapped for the moment. But as I explained to you and your grandfather, Cross has made contingency plans for other escape routes. Now he will probably head down towards the coast where he has a boat waiting to take them across to Saudi. Where is your grandfather? We need his truck to follow them up.’

‘He must have gone on to cross the wadi further down just as we arranged with him.’

‘Both of us are hurt. We can never catch up with either your grandfather or Cross on foot. We must wait for the other truck from the fortress to arrive. They should have been here long ago.’

‘Probably they have lost our tracks in the darkness,’ Adam said with a frown. ‘Or else they have had another breakdown.’

It was another hour before they heard the engine of the vehicle approaching, and finally it came into view over the ridge. There were two men in the cab and another dozen in the rear. Uthmann took a few minutes to strap Adam’s ankle and his own chest with bandages from the truck’s first aid kit, and then they mounted up and followed the tracks of the Sheikh’s hunting vehicle. From a distance of a mile they saw buzzards circling in the sky ahead of them, and Adam urged the driver of the truck on until they came on the scene where his grandfather had been murdered. His corpse lay in the sand of the dry riverbed. Half the old man’s face had been torn off and devoured by the birds, but his beard was untouched. Adam climbed down painfully into the sand and limped to kneel beside the corpse. Some other scavengers, probably a pack of jackals, had ripped open his belly and the entrails were already putrefying in the heat. The stench was nauseating.

Reverently Adam uttered the traditional prayers for the dead, but in his heart he was rejoicing. The years of his grandfather’s tyranny had ended and he was now indisputably the Sheikh of the clan of Tippoo Tip. Only four days previously the old man had formally named him as his heir in the mosque, in the presence of the mullah and all his sons and grandsons. From now on nobody dare dispute Adam’s claim to the chieftainship of the clan.

When he finished his prayers he rose to his feet and ordered the men to wrap his grandfather in a tarpaulin and lay him in the truck bed. He saw the new veneration towards himself in the eyes and bearing of the men as they hurried to do his bidding. Even Uth-mann’s attitude towards him had changed remarkably in acknowledgement of his elevation in rank and authority.

Uthmann had searched the area carefully while Adam prayed. He had found the tracks left by Hector and his ambush party. He went to where Adam stood and explained to him how the infidels must have come back across the wadi after the destruction of the helicopter, and by some evil chance had met the truck with the Sheikh aboard. They had murdered the old man and seized the vehicle.

‘What are your orders, my Sheikh?’ he asked. The sound of the title soothed Adam’s soul like a pipe of hashish.

‘We must follow my grandfather’s stolen vehicle until we can be certain in which direction the infidels are heading. Only then can we decide what we must do.’

Uthmann ventured to repeat his opinion. ‘As I have already explained to you, I know this man Cross well enough to guess accurately what he will do. Now he has the stolen hunting car he will surely try to reach the coast where his escape boat is waiting for him.’

‘What will he do if he cannot escape by boat?’ Adam demanded.

‘Then the only escape route still open to him will be the border of Ethiopia.’

‘Let us see if you are right. Get the men mounted up and follow them.’ They left the corpses of the bodyguards lying for the jackals and the birds and they went on after the tracks of the smaller vehicle. Soon they found the place where Hector Cross had stopped. They saw the footprints of his party where they had disembarked. Despite his injured chest Uthmann climbed down to examine the tracks, and then went back to report to Adam.

‘There are nine of them; six men and three women.’

‘Three women?’ Adam demanded. ‘One is my escaped prisoner, but who are the other two?’

‘I think one of them is the woman of Tariq who showed Cross how to enter the fortress. The third and last one arrived in the helicopter. I saw her for a few seconds only before I fired the RPG. My view of her was from a distance and partially obscured by the fuselage so I cannot be absolutely certain, but I think the third woman is the mother of your captive. I saw her many times at Sidi el Razig and I am almost certain it is her.’

‘Hazel Bannock!’ Adam stared at him while he struggled to come to terms with the full extent of his great good fortune. Not only was he now the Sheikh of his clan but he had one of the richest women in the world almost within his grasp. Once he closed his fist on her she would make him one of the most powerful men in Arabia and Africa.

‘Tens of billions of dollars and my own private army at my back! There is nothing I desire that I will not be able to have.’ His imagination reeled at the magnitude of it. ‘As soon as I have received the ransom money I will give Hazel Bannock and her daughter exquisite deaths. I will let every one of my men sport with them. They will take these two Christian whores in both their holes, a thousand times over from the front and from the back. If they cannot kill them with their pricks then they can use their bayonets in the same holes to finish the job. It will be fine sport to watch. We will share the pleasure of it with the assassin, Hector Cross. Then I will have to think of something original for Cross. In the end I will probably give him to the old women of the tribe with their little knives, but for a start many of my men will enjoy him from behind. They will stretch his anus wide enough to ride a horse through it. For a man like him the humiliation will be greater than any physical pain.’ He rubbed his hands together gleefully. ‘I will have the ransom and I will also have full settlement of my family’s blood feud.’ He called aloud to the truck driver, ‘Turn back to the oasis!’ Then to Uthmann he explained, ‘I must bury my grandfather with all the respect he deserves. I will radio to my uncle Kamal to warn him that the fugitives will try to escape by boat. However, if Cross wriggles out of it again he must try to reach the Ethiopian border, and that is where we will be ready for him.’

A
ll the remainder of the day they headed east. The going was hard. Three times Hector found they had run into a cul de sac of impassable ravines and they had to back-track several miles and search for an alternative route. When darkness fell Hector dared not switch on the headlights for fear of giving away their position to any pursuers. They had to wait for the rise of the moon before they could continue to grope their way eastwards.

Hector estimated that they were still twenty miles from the shores of the Gulf of Aden when their fortune seemed to have changed dramatically for the good. They reached a salt flat whose smooth surface stretched out before them to the limit of their visibility, smooth and gleaming in the moonlight. When Hector drove out onto it he was able to change into top gear for the first time since they had hijacked the Mercedes. They roared away with forty miles an hour registering on the speedometer towards the great silver disc of the moon which hung in the sky ahead of them. They had covered at least ten miles when without the least warning the crust of salt on which they were running gave way under them, and the truck was bogged down to its axles in the treacherous yellow mud of quicksands under the crust. It took almost three hours of heavy work for Hector to extricate them, using the truck’s high-lift jack to raise the wheels enough to be able to stuff dry salt bush under them, then burying one of the spare wheels with the end of the tow line attached to it to act as an anchor on which they at last managed to winch the Mercedes out backwards from the clutches of the quicksands.

It was only on the dawn of the second day that they looked down upon the azure waters of the Gulf of Aden from the vantage point of the low hills above the shoreline. They were on the Great Horn of Africa looking almost due north towards Yemen. Below the ridge on which they parked there was a single-lane road running parallel to the sea. Below that was the narrow beach of red sand. The water was shallow and clear as glass and Hector could see that the coral reef formed a barrier a hundred yards offshore. They would have to wade out that far to meet the MTB. All that time they would be very vulnerable.