Part 21 (1/2)

'I am so glad you came, Simon,' she told him.

When Hector and Hazel were alone they walked down the lawns and sat together on the stone bench. Hector looked up at the sky. Hazel smiled sadly.

'I'm afraid Henry isn't going to show,' she said. 'He hasn't the time to flit around in his goose persona. At the moment he has his hands too full with Cayla and Grace.'

'You read my thoughts. I was waiting for Henry,' Hector admitted. 'I think this is the first time I've seen you smile since it all started.'

'I am all cried out,' she told him. 'The weeping time is behind us. Let's leave Henry and Cayla alone for a while so they can get to know each other again.' She stood up and took his hand and they started down the mountain path to the house beside the lake. As they walked he kept glancing sideways at her face. She is not like any other woman I have ever known She is not like any other woman I have ever known, he thought. Those others would have been totally destroyed by such a cruel loss. But it is almost as if she has gained strength and resolve from it. I can see now how she has achieved so much in her short life. She is a fighter and she never gives up. She never succ.u.mbs to self-pity. She might always mourn for Cayla, but she will never let that debilitate her. She lost Henry at a critical time in her life. She misses him still but she fought on alone, and took over his legendary mantle. I feel deeply honoured to have received the gift of her love. It is my armour. With her at my side I shall never again know loneliness. Those others would have been totally destroyed by such a cruel loss. But it is almost as if she has gained strength and resolve from it. I can see now how she has achieved so much in her short life. She is a fighter and she never gives up. She never succ.u.mbs to self-pity. She might always mourn for Cayla, but she will never let that debilitate her. She lost Henry at a critical time in her life. She misses him still but she fought on alone, and took over his legendary mantle. I feel deeply honoured to have received the gift of her love. It is my armour. With her at my side I shall never again know loneliness.

Neither of them had any appet.i.te for dinner. They sent the dishes back to the chef in his kitchen. Hector opened a bottle of claret and they took it and the gla.s.ses down to the end of the jetty and sat with their legs dangling over the water. They drank the wine in silence and watched the moon come up over the lake. Hazel spoke first.

'The police have not yet been able to trace the person or persons that placed those heads of my two poor darlings for us to find,' she sighed.

'That isn't surprising,' Hector replied. 'Your security on the Houston ranch is not very tight. There are literally hundreds of service people who have access: contract gardening service teams, delivery people bringing supplies, daily hired hands, meter readers, plumbers, painters, electricians and all the others.'

'But how could Adam have reached any of them from Africa so many thousands of miles away? Surely these people are all Americans.'

'Plus Latinos, Europeans, Asians, Africans and other immigrants of twenty different nationalities ... including Somalians, from Puntland.' She turned to stare at him.

'Somalians? How is that possible?'

'Canada alone has over a quarter of a million Somalians who have entered that country legally, and the US-Canadian border is wide open. Your mother's country, South Africa, is flooded with refugees from the north of the continent. Not only Zimbabweans and Malawians but huge numbers of Nigerians and Somalians. Most of the Somalians are from Puntland and they are still under the sway of Tippoo Tip. If the police ever catch those involved in the murder of Grace and Cayla, they will be very small fish who will not even know who it was that ordered the killings.' Hector paused and put his arm around Hazel's shoulder. 'So you see, my darling, this is not the end of the business. Adam has only just begun. He has thousands of underlings to send against us. It is useless to cut off the tentacles of the Beast. They grow back swiftly. I have to go back to cut off its head.'

'Don't you see that is exactly what he is trying to force you to do? That is why he left that taunting warning about taking two more heads. You mustn't let him suck you in. You mustn't go.' She placed her hand on his forearm, and spoke earnestly and pa.s.sionately. 'If I lose you, then I have lost everything.'

'We have no choice,' he told her.

'If you go, then I am going with you.' The tone of her voice was final, brooking no argument. A short silence fell.

'No, my sweet. I can't let you come. You know how it was last time. We will be on the Beast's home ground again.'

'Send Paddy then. That's what he's paid for. That's what he's good at,' she said.

'I can never send another man to do what I am afraid to do myself. If I don't go then the Beast will come after us as he has threatened.'

'Yes, that's the best solution. Let him come. Make him meet us on our home turf for a change. This time you can be ready for him.' Hector stared at her in the moonlight.

'Yes!' he said thoughtfully, then shook his head. 'No. He'll never come himself. He'll send hired a.s.sa.s.sins after us, just as he did before. There are those hordes of religious fanatics for him to call on.'

'Then we must place irresistible temptation in his way,' she said softly, 'something so tantalizing that he will not be able to resist it.'

'Are you suggesting we lay out a bait for him? It's a clever thought.' He nodded. 'But what is there that will bring him personally into the open?'

'The Golden Goose Golden Goose,' she replied.

'My G.o.d! You're right,' he whispered. 'We know he is greedy. We know he is vindictive. We also can deduce that he is puffed up with power and self-importance by his new station in life - the Sheikh of his clan. The Golden Goose Golden Goose might be the only thing we have to bring the Beast out of his cave.' might be the only thing we have to bring the Beast out of his cave.'

Now that they had something tangible to divert them from the despair of their bereavement, both Hector and Hazel were filled with renewed energy and determination. When Hector was able to contact him, Paddy was in the final departure lounge of Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, waiting for his flight to Dubai and the Middle East.

'Change of plans, Paddy. We want you back at the Bannock Oil headquarters in Houston as soon as you are able to get there.'

'By Jesus, Heck! Something has brought you back to life again. I can hear it in your voice. You're no longer the sad and sorry b.a.s.t.a.r.d you were when I left you a few days ago.'

'Lock and load, my old son! You and I are hitting the warpath again,' Hector told him, and his tone was crisp and incisive.

Hazel and Hector had debated making either Abu Zara or Taipei the base for the operation. In the end they agreed that both of these locations were too close to the lair of the Beast and were susceptible to infiltration by Adam's agents. Finally they decided on Bannock House, the corporation headquarters in Houston. Bannock House was on Dallas Street, down the road from the Hyatt Hotel. The twenty-fifth floor at the top of the building overlooked the park. The entire floor was Hazel's personal domain. The security was ironclad, the amenities all-embracing and the comfort hedonistic. Hazel had pondered on the code-name for the operation. She had finally decided on 'Operation Lampos'. The Greek meaning of the word was 's.h.i.+ning Light'. Lampos was not only the name of Hector's warhorse in the cla.s.sical mythology of Virgil and Homer, but it was also the name that Cayla had chosen for her favourite palomino mare.

'The connection to both you and Cayla is strong,' Hazel explained. 'But only to those who know you intimately.'

'Operation Lampos, I like it. We have a name for it. Now we need the men for it. Paddy should be here tomorrow. Then we can discuss who else we need.'

When Hector propounded Operation Lampos to Paddy, he listened without comment and even when Hector finished speaking he did not immediately reply. He went on doodling on the notepad in front of him. At last he dropped the pencil and looked up.

'The Golden Goose Golden Goose? Who thought this up?' he asked, then his eyes swivelled to Hazel who had been sitting quietly at the end of the table. 'It has a feminine flavour.'

'Don't you like the idea, Paddy?' she asked.

'I love it. It's plain b.l.o.o.d.y brilliant.' He guffawed happily.

'Who do we need to bring in, Paddy?' Hector asked.

'The fewer the merrier,' Paddy replied, still chuckling. 'Dave Imbiss for a start. He is our IT geek and red-hot on planning and procurement of equipment and materials. Then we must have your old half-section, Tariq. We need a hard warrior, a born Arabic speaker who can think like the Beast, somebody who knows the enemy and the battleground intimately.'

'Where is Tariq now?' Hector asked. 'Can you contact him?'

Paddy nodded. 'Yes. Tariq and I have worked out a call sign. He is still undercover in Puntland but I can get him out very quickly.'

'Very well. So far it's Hazel, me, you, Dave Imbiss and Tariq. Who else do we take on board?'

'That will do for a start. The way I see it is that the four of us, and of course Hazel, will brainstorm the basic plan. As we add refinements we may have to call in experts to deal with the details. How long do we have before the Golden Goose Golden Goose is ready to sail?' is ready to sail?'

'She is scheduled to take on board her first load of natural gas from the Abu Zara field at the beginning of October,' Hazel answered.

'Four and a half months from now. We must move quickly,' Paddy said.

'Get Dave and Tariq here as soon as you can,' Hector ordered.

Dave Imbiss and Tariq Hakam came into Houston four days later on a flight from Dubai and Paris. Within an hour of their arrival the first planning session of Operation Lampos was under way on the top floor of Bannock House. Hector outlined the basic concept for them.

'The object of the exercise is to entice Adam out of the fortress at the Oasis of the Miracle. It will be easy enough to suck in his underlings, but if we are going to bring an end to this blood feud he is waging against us then we have to take him out.' He looked around their faces. They were all intent and serious. 'We know that the campaign of piracy being conducted against all foreign maritime traffic in the Indian Ocean is orchestrated and controlled by Sheikh Adam Tippoo Tip. This campaign has intensified and become more sophisticated since Adam succeeded his grandfather as Sheikh.' Hector pressed the control switch on the table top in front of him, and the screen on the wall facing them lit up and displayed rows of dates and figures. 'These are the statistics for the number of pirate attacks in the last year of his grandfather's rule. As you see there were twenty-eight attacks on s.h.i.+pping and all of these were localized to the Gulf of Aden. Of these only nine were successful, but they reaped ransom money of an estimated one hundred and twenty million dollars.' He changed the display on the screen.

'These are the statistics for the last twelve months.' David Imbiss whistled softly with surprise, and Hector went on, 'You may indeed whistle, Dave. One hundred and twenty-seven attacks, ninety-one of which were successful. The ransom money collected was an estimated one point two-five billion dollars.' They were stunned into silence. 'Yes, that's a lot of money. Almost all of it goes into Adam's coffers. The interesting thing is that Adam's attack boats are now operating as much as a thousand nautical miles offsh.o.r.e. And they are doing so with impunity. With all the cash he has Adam can now operate mother s.h.i.+ps for his attack craft. We know from Tariq that he is using captured Taiwanese and Russian trawlers for this purpose. These all carry sophisticated electronic equipment, but more significantly he has built helicopter pads on their decks. He now has two, or possibly three, Bell Jet Ranger helicopters in service. This enables him to scour the waters for hundreds of miles around, to spot both dangerous naval wars.h.i.+ps and fat and juicy mercantile targets.'

'Why don't the navies of the Western powers destroy his attack boats wherever they find them?' asked Dave.

'Two reasons,' Hector replied. 'First off, it's not easy to find a small boat in hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean. To do this effectively the cost of the surveillance a.s.sets they would have to deploy would be prohibitive. And even if they were able to find them, they would have to catch them actually red-handed in an act of piracy. They cannot simply blow Adam's s.h.i.+ps out of the water as they lie at anchor in Gandanga Bay. They are hamstrung by the complex laws of the sea, and the old-maidish sensibilities of many of the stridently socialistic countries, who are more concerned with the human rights of pirates captured in the act of seizing s.h.i.+ps on the high seas than they are for the victims. They fret that a captured pirate may not receive a fair trial, indeed may be shot out of hand. It's so big-hearted and politically correct of them. Meanwhile, Adam rampages across the oceans and puts billions of dollars into his piggy bank.

'The crews of the merchant s.h.i.+ps are unarmed, in accordance with the terms of the owners' insurance policies, which forbid them to take up arms, and their own sense of self-preservation which tells them that if they shoot first the pirates are going to shoot back and they will have superior fire power. For Adam it's open season, Christmas and New Year every day of the week.' Hector let them think about that for a moment. 'So what are we going to do about it? Dave and Tariq, you have missed out on what has been decided so far, so I will go over it for your benefit.' Briefly he explained what they hoped to achieve by Operation Lampos.