Part 1 (1/2)

WILBUR SMITH.

THOSE IN PERIL.

MACMILLAN.

This book is for MOKHINISO.

Queen of my Heart without whose love and encouragement it might never have been written

Eternal Father, strong to save,whose arm has bound the restless wave,who bidd'st the mighty ocean deepits own appointed limits keep,O hear us when we cry to theefor those in peril on the sea.

THE KHAMSEEN had been blowing for five days now. The dust clouds rolled towards them across the brooding expanse of the desert. Hector Cross wore a striped keffiyeh wrapped around his neck and desert goggles over his eyes. His short dark beard protected most of his face, but the areas of exposed skin felt as though they had been scoured raw by the stinging grains of sand. Even above the growl of the wind he picked out the throbbing beat of the approaching helicopter. He was aware without looking at them that none of the men around him had heard it as yet. He would have been mortified if he had not been the first. Though he was ten years older than most of them, as their leader he had to be the sharpest and the quickest. Then Uthmann Waddah stirred slightly and glanced at him. Hector's nod of acknowledgement was barely perceptible. Uthmann was one of his most trusted operatives. Their friends.h.i.+p went back many years, to the day Uthmann had pulled Hector out of a burning vehicle under sniper fire in a Baghdad street. Even then Hector had been suspicious of the fact that he was a Sunni Muslim, but in time Uthmann had proved himself worthy. Now he was indispensable. Among his other virtues he had coached Hector until his spoken Arabic was almost perfect. It would take a skilled interrogator to discern that Hector was not a native-born speaker.

By some trick of the sunlight high above, the monstrously distorted shadow of the helicopter was thrown against the cloud banks like a magic lantern show, so that when the big Russian MIL-26 painted in the crimson and white colours of Bannock Oil broke through into the clear it seemed insignificant in comparison. It wasn't until it was three hundred feet above the landing pad that it was visible. In view of the importance of the single pa.s.senger, Hector had radioed the pilot while he was still on the ground at Sidi el Razig, the company base on the coast where the oil pipeline terminated, and ordered him not to fly in these conditions. The woman had countermanded his order, and Hector was not accustomed to being gainsaid.

Although they had not yet met, the relations.h.i.+p between Hector and the woman was a delicate one. Strictly speaking he was not her employee. He was the sole owner of 'Cross Bow Security Limited'. However, the company was contracted to Bannock Oil to guard its installations and its personnel. Old Henry Bannock had hand-picked Hector from amongst the many security firms eager to provide him with their services.

The helicopter settled delicately on the landing pad, and as the door in the fuselage slid open, Hector strode forward to meet the woman for the first time. She appeared in the doorway, and paused there looking about her. Hector was reminded of a leopard balancing on the high bough of a Marula tree surveying its prey before it sprang. Though he thought that he knew her well enough by repute, in the flesh she was charged with such power and grace that it took him by surprise. As part of his research he had studied hundreds of photographs of her, read reams of script and watched hours of video footage. The earlier images of her were on the Centre Court of Wimbledon being beaten in a hard-fought quarterfinal match by Navratilova, or three years later accepting the trophy for the women's singles at the Australian Open in Sydney. Then a year later came her marriage to Henry Bannock, the head of Bannock Oil, a flamboyant billionaire tyc.o.o.n thirty-one years her senior. After that came images of her and her husband chatting and laughing with heads of state, or with film stars and other show-business personalities, shooting pheasant at Sandringham as the guests of Her Majesty and Prince Philip or holidaying in the Caribbean on their yacht the Amorous Dolphin Amorous Dolphin. Then there were clips of her sitting beside her husband on the podium at the annual general meeting of the company; other clips of her fencing skilfully with Larry King on his talk show. Much later she was wearing widow's weeds and holding the hand of her lovely young daughter as they watched Henry Bannock's sarcophagus being installed in the mausoleum on his ranch in the Colorado mountains.

After that her battle with the shareholders and banks and her particularly venomous stepson was gleefully chronicled by business media around the world. When at last she succeeded in wresting the rights that she had inherited from Henry out of the grasping fingers of her stepson and she took her husband's place at the head of the board of Bannock Oil, the price of Bannock shares plummeted steeply. The investors evaporated, the bank loans dried up. n.o.body wanted to bet on a sometime tennis player c.u.m society glamour girl turned oil baroness. But they had not taken into account her innate business ac.u.men or the years of her tutelage under Henry Bannock which were worth a hundred MBA degrees. Like the crowds at the Roman circus her detractors and critics waited in grisly antic.i.p.ation for her to be devoured by the lions. Then to the chagrin of all she brought in the Zara Number Eight.

Forbes magazine blazoned the image of Hazel in white tennis kit, holding a racquet in her right hand, on its front cover. The headline read: 'Hazel Bannock aces the opposition. The richest oil strike for the last sixty years. She takes on the mantle of her husband, Henry the Great.' The main article began: magazine blazoned the image of Hazel in white tennis kit, holding a racquet in her right hand, on its front cover. The headline read: 'Hazel Bannock aces the opposition. The richest oil strike for the last sixty years. She takes on the mantle of her husband, Henry the Great.' The main article began: In the bleak hinterland of a G.o.dforsaken and impoverished little Emirate named Abu Zara lies an oil concession once owned by Sh.e.l.l. The field had been pumped dry and abandoned in the period directly after WWII. For almost sixty years it had lain forgotten. That was until Mrs Hazel Bannock came on the scene. She picked up the concession for a few paltry millions of dollars and the pundits nudged each other and smirked. Ignoring the protests of her advisors she spent many millions more in sinking a rotary cone drill into a tiny subterranean anomaly at the northern extremity of the field; an anomaly which, with the primitive exploration techniques of sixty years previously, had been reckoned to be an ancillary of the main reservoir. The geologists of that time had agreed that any oil contained in this area had long ago drained into the main reservoir and been pumped to the surface leaving the entire field dry and worthless.However when Mrs Bannock's drill pierced the impervious salt dome of the diapir, a vast subterranean chamber in which the oil deposits had been trapped, the gas overpressure roared up through the drill hole with such force that it ejected almost 8 kilometres of steel drill string like toothpaste from the tube, and the hole blew out. High-grade crude oil spurted hundreds of feet into the air. At last it became evident that the old Zara Nos. 1 to 7 fields which had been abandoned by Sh.e.l.l were only a fraction of the total reserves. The new reservoir lay at a depth of 21,866 feet and held estimated reserves of 5 billion barrels of sweet and light crude.

As the helicopter touched down the flight engineer dropped the landing ladder and dismounted, then reached up to his ill.u.s.trious pa.s.senger. She ignored his proffered hand and jumped the four feet to the ground, landing as lightly as the leopard that she so much resembled. She wore a sleekly tailored khaki safari suit with suede desert boots and a bright Hermes scarf at her throat. The thick golden hair, which was her trademark, was unfettered and it rippled in the Khamseen. How old was she? Hector wondered. n.o.body seemed to know for sure. She looked thirtyish, but she had to be forty at the very least. Briefly she took the hand that Hector proffered, her grip honed by hundreds of hours on the tennis court.

'Welcome to your Zara No. 8, ma'am,' he said. She spared him only a glance. Her eyes were a shade of blue that reminded him of sunlight radiating through the walls of an ice cave in a high mountain creva.s.se. She was far more comely than he had been led to believe by her photographs.

'Major Cross.' She acknowledged him coolly. Once again she surprised him by the fact that she knew his name, then he recalled that she had the reputation of leaving nothing to chance. She must have researched every one of the dozens of her senior employees that she was likely to meet on this first visit to her new oilfield.

If that's the case, she should have known that I don't use my military rank any longer, he thought, then it occurred to him that she probably did know and she was deliberately riling him. He suppressed the grim smile that rose to his lips.

For some reason she doesn't like me and she makes no effort to hide the fact, he thought. This lady is built like one of her oil drills, all steel and diamonds. This lady is built like one of her oil drills, all steel and diamonds. But she had already turned away from him to meet the three men who tumbled out of the big sand-coloured Hummvee that braked to a halt beside her and formed an obsequious welcoming line, grinning and wriggling like puppies. She shook hands with Bert Simpson, her general manager. But she had already turned away from him to meet the three men who tumbled out of the big sand-coloured Hummvee that braked to a halt beside her and formed an obsequious welcoming line, grinning and wriggling like puppies. She shook hands with Bert Simpson, her general manager.

'I am sorry it took me so long to visit you, Mr Simpson, however I have been rather tied up at the office.' She gave him a quick, brilliant smile, but did not wait for his reply. She moved on and in rapid succession greeted her chief engineer and senior geologist.

'Thank you, gentlemen. Now let us get out of this nasty wind. We will have time to become better acquainted later.' Her voice was soft, almost lilting, but the inflexion was sharp and clearly Southern African. Hector knew that she had been born in Cape Town and had only taken up US citizens.h.i.+p after she married Henry Bannock. Bert Simpson opened the pa.s.senger door of the Hummvee and she slipped into the seat. By the time Bert had taken his place at the wheel, Hector was in an escort position in the second Hummvee close behind him. A third Hummvee was in the lead. All the vehicles had the logo of a medieval crossbow painted on the doors. Uthmann was in the first, and he led the little convoy out onto the service track which ran alongside the great silver python of the pipeline that carried the precious muck a hundred miles down to the waiting tankers. As they drove on the oil rigs appeared out of the yellow haze on each side, rank upon rank like the skeletons of a lost legion of warriors. Before they reached the dried-out wadi Uthmann turned off the track and they climbed a ridge of gaunt rock, sooty black as though scorched by fire. The main building complex was perched on the highest point.

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 p.r.i.c.kle 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 b.l.o.o.d.y fields around the wicked old world. It had taken a long time for him to a.s.semble 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 d.a.m.ned 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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+pshape, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' 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 a.s.sault 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-sh.e.l.led, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds before sundown.' It took four hours; 'these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds' 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 b.l.o.o.d.y rags. The last one had been partially s.h.i.+elded 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 a.s.sault 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.

When he got back to the compound from the range the sun had gone and in the brief desert twilight the night came swiftly. He went to the well-equipped gym and ran for an hour on a treadmill and finished with half an hour of weights. He took a steaming hot shower in his private quarters and changed his dusty camouflage fatigues for a freshly washed and ironed pair, and at last went down to the mess. Bert Simpson and the other senior executives were at the private bar. They all looked tired and drawn.

'Join us for a drink?' Bert offered.

'Decent of you,' Hector told him and he nodded to the barman who poured him a double tot of the Oban eighteen-year-old single malt. Hector saluted Bert with the gla.s.s and they both drank.

'So, how is our lady boss?' Hector asked.

Bert rolled his eyes. 'You don't want to know.'