Kingmaker (Alex King Book 16), page 20
“Your word means nothing to me, you baturai animal!”
King said nothing. He knew his words would be worthless. This time he heard David approaching. The ringing in his ears from the gunfire was subsiding and the pounding of his pulse had eased.
“Clear,” David said. He made his way across the room and manhandled the two girls ahead of him. “Come on, what’s the hold up?”
“Nothing,” King replied irritably. He pulled the boy to his feet and pushed him forwards. The woman followed and King hesitated beside a framed photograph of Mustafa, his wife and their three children. They seemed happy, there was a lake in the background and a mountain in the distance. He snatched the picture frame and tucked it inside his jacket, then followed with his weapon ready and his head back in the game.
Chapter Fifty-One
Mick had the sentry in his sights. One hundred metres. No wind. He double tapped his throat mic and waited. A double tap came back almost immediately. Ten seconds later, a second double tap squawked in his ear. All three men were in position, and now had five seconds to take the shot. Not one second before, not a second after. His finger tightened on the two-stage trigger taking up all slack. He held his breath, kept the crosshairs centred. Three… two… one… He squeezed the trigger and the compound crossbow made a sound no louder than the thud of a shoe being dropped on a carpeted floor. He caught the flash of the bolt and then the sentry slumped in the tower. He could not see, but at the same moment the other two sentries had met the same fate. The broad-headed arrow tips, sharpened to a razor’s edge and coated in potassium cyanide had done their job. Mick couldn’t vouch for the others, but his bolt had struck the sentry in the centre of his chest, and it was unlikely that the man would have needed the addition of cyanide, but it had been a matter of belt and braces.
Stewart put down the field glasses and nodded at Stan. “Okay, you’re up.”
The veteran soldier nodded. There was no hint of guilt nor anticipation for what he would do next. The man had been taking orders his entire adult life and he had got over the emotion in killing people years ago. He had a handsome payday on the horizon and the fact that he was working indirectly for the British government motivated him past financial gain. Stewart had selected each man for their task, based on their military records and Stan was the man for this job.
Stewart watched as Stan led the team of eight down the hill, the gas canisters and spray pumps weighing them down. Stewart activated his mic and said, “Bravo Team, go…” He brought the field glasses up to his eyes and surveyed the scene before him. Keth and his eight-man team were armed with silenced Makarovs and were tasked with leading Stan and his team silently to their objective. Stewart could see all eight men donning gas masks, while Stan’s team were wearing full NBC suits and breathers. The Scotsman took a deep breath. This was about the worse thing he had ever done, and he closed his eyes as he watched the men file off into three lines and cross the camp. He was still an agnostic, and this mission wasn’t going to find him the light of right and truth any time soon, but he prayed for forgiveness, nonetheless. Had he gone too far this time? Undoubtedly. Had he been played by the higher echelons of MI6 who knew he was the type of man who couldn’t bear to lose? Possibly. Or perhaps they were simply too attuned to assign seemingly impossible tasks and people like Stewart had created their own res ex necessitas, sui facere. For as long as men like Stewart found a way, expectations would always be unreasonably high.
Stewart watched as one of the lines of men reached the barracks block and another stood outside the armoury. He checked with his laminated plan of the camp. The darkness made it difficult to see, the high intensity field glasses picking out too many shadows now that the men had successfully crossed open ground, but he could see single muzzle flashes in the gloom, and thankfully no return fire. They were taking down the guards one-by-one and from his position some three-hundred-metres distant, Stewart couldn’t hear a thing. It was all going to plan. For now, at least.
Stan pressed his back up against the wall as Keth neutralised a guard with a single headshot from the silenced Makarov. Despite being cut loose from the SAS and honourably discharged from the army on medical grounds after losing his eye in a gun battle in Iraq, the Brummie was a superb pistol shot, primarily because he had only his right eye and there was no struggle for eye dominance. He had worked as a mercenary ever since and was highly regarded on the circuit. He nodded to Stan and stepped to the side of the door while the rest of the team caught up with them. Keth eased the door open then holstered his pistol and unslung his Kalashnikov. The other men followed suit and they crept forward, the sound of men taking in some downtime ahead of them. Voices, laughter, music and the drone of a television set. Keth stepped in past the stacks of muddy army boots and tatty and worn M-65 field jackets hanging off pegs and peered in through the second door. He held up a hand and beckoned the others inside. He counted off quietly. “Three… two… one… go!” He kicked the door open and swung inside, his Kalashnikov aimed at the mass of men who looked up in an air of confusion. Three more men held their weapons on the room, while Stan walked confidently through the hut to the other end. The second man with the gas canister upon his back and the spray pump in his right hand, his pistol in his left. Before the men could protest both men sprayed their way down the hut, meeting briefly in the middle before turning around and spraying the men perched on the beds on the other side. There were coughs and eye rubbing, then choking. But it was over quickly and by the time Stan and the other soldier switched off the battery powered pumps, forty men lay dead or dying before them. One of the team was filming the scene on a digital camera. He held the frame on the last dying man, then followed the rest of the men out into the night.
Stewart watched the men mopping up guards with the silenced pistols. They had fanned out through the camp, and only one Republican Guard soldier had returned fire. He had been cut down after a minute-long firefight. Nobody stirred within the huts. The cyanide gas had been absolute. When he saw the men take three separate paths back towards his position, he put down the field glasses and took out his battered silver hip flask and took a large pull on the twenty-year-old Macallan inside. He had tried and failed to remain dry on this mission, and now he frankly didn’t care. He closed his eyes, savouring the burn and the calm the whisky brought to him. He had done some terrible things in his past, things he would have to live with, but this really was the pinnacle. And he was no less responsible than the unfortunate men he had tasked with using the pumps. More so, even.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Phil was at the wheel of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, its engine running and its headlights illuminating the bodies of the security detail lying lifelessly on the ground. The rear of the vehicle was dented and had lost its bumper from where he had used it as a battering ram and reversed multiple times into the gates to gain access. The glass of the rear window was smashed, and the tailgate was twisted. When he saw Clive limping behind the four family members, his pistol in his left hand and using his assault rifle as a makeshift crutch, he got out, opened the rear door and started to shove the children inside. He looked up as King and David came out carrying Ollie’s body between them.
“Forget it, there’s no room,” he snapped at them, his military seniority and experience coming out. “There’s no playbook for this. We can’t take him home.” He pulled King away and David struggled with the weight on his own and dropped the body on the ground. “Get in the Jeep!” he shouted, then bent down and checked Ollie’s pockets. They had all been told to leave wallets, ID and personal effects at the house, but he made sure, nonetheless.
King made room for Clive in the front and the man grimaced as he got in. “Is it bad?” he asked, looking at the blood-soaked white bandage wrapped over his combat trousers around his calf.
Clive shook his head. “Technically, no. Through and through the meat. But it hurts like fuck…”
King nodded. “Do you want morphine?”
“No. I want my senses intact until we’re in the clear,” he replied through clenched teeth, the pain obviously challenging his resolve.
King thought it made sense for him not to hit the morphine yet, and he closed the door and watched as Phil pulled the pin on a soviet era phosphorus grenade and placed it underneath Ollie’s body. He walked calmly back to the vehicle as the grenade popped and fizzed and started burning white-hot, green smoke billowing into the air. He got back behind the wheel as King and David stepped onto the step bars on either side of the Jeep and hung on tightly to the roof rails as Phil set off down the driveway. King looked back and regretted it. Now he knew why soldiers never looked back. Ollie’s body was burning fiercely in the centre of a white, green and orange fire and the spare ammunition he had been carrying was cooking off in the heat, gunshots ringing out in the night. By the time they had driven out of the smashed gates and a mile down the road, only faint ‘pops’ were audible behind them, a faint glow in the distance as the white phosphorus burned fiercely at 800ºC.
They reached the parked SUVs, hidden from the road on a plantation track, and King unloaded the woman into his Jeep and the boy into another. The girls were placed in the third with Clive still in the front and David now behind the wheel. There were screams and a lot of yelling as the family were separated, but King knew that he could not afford to have all their eggs in one basket and separating them was essential. In the distance blue and red flashing lights were accompanied by sirens as the police and emergency services arrived at the compound. Their escape route had been meticulously planned to avoid the roads leading to Umfasu and as they now started out on three different routes to their safehouse, King thought their chance of success to be more than fifty-fifty now they were clear of the compound, and that was a hell of a lot more than he thought when the five of them had first stood around an outspread map and started to plan this madness.
“What are you going to do to my children?” the woman asked from the rear seat. Her hands were bound with cable ties behind her back, and she rested awkwardly in the seat, the seatbelt stopping her from slumping forwards. “Is it money you want?” King said nothing, but the woman persisted. “Tell me!” she snapped. “I can get you money. A lot of money!”
“I don’t want money,” King replied quietly, reflecting the irony that a socialist leader would have such a fortune. But that was Africa. Hell, that was politics the world over. “And your children will be fine. I said that they would not be harmed. I gave you my word.”
“Your word!” the woman scoffed. “The word of a mercenary?” She laughed bitterly. “Why should I believe you, a baturai pig?”
King did not appreciate the racist slur. His family had been a mixed bag, and he had a mixed-race brother. The boy had been fostered after their mother had died and King had never seen him again, but he had loved him, missed him dearly and despised racism of any kind. “Listen, I’m trying to put you at ease. I have said your children will not be harmed, and I mean it. You will be with them within the hour.”
“You’re lying…” she said, but King did not reply. “Murderous scum! I hate you! I hate your kind! Murderer!”
“Coming from the wife of an unelected dictator,” he sneered at her in the rear-view mirror. “Living a life of luxury in a protected compound while men, women and children starve in your slums and have their rights taken away without anyone being held to account. And don’t talk to me about murder. Your husband has thousands of deaths on his hands!”
“This is Africa,” she replied hostilely. “What leader hasn’t? Certainly not that playboy Lucky Man Jonathon Mugabe.” She laughed contemptuously. “Even the self-righteous Mandela killed people and advocated violence and torture! He wasn’t always a fucking choir boy!”
It was true that Nelson Mandela rose to greatness. Freed after twenty-seven years in a South African jail, the anti-apartheid fighter emerged not bent on vengeance but healing the political system. He negotiated a peaceful end to apartheid, and as the first president of democratic South Africa, preached - and practised - reconciliation. In this he was great. A healer. An inspiration. For many whites abroad, he seemed even Christ-like - someone who’d suffered for the sins of white guilt and absolved those who believed in him of the sin of racism. But Mandela was no Christ nor even Gandhi nor Martin Luther King. He was for decades a man of violence. In 1961, he broke with African National Congress colleagues who preached non-violence, creating a terrorist wing. He later pleaded guilty in court to acts of public violence, and behind bars sanctioned many more, including the 1983 Church St car bomb that killed nineteen people. Mandela even suggested cutting off the noses of blacks deemed collaborators. His then wife Winnie advocated ‘necklacing’ instead - a burning tyre around the neck. Mandela’s support for other leaders of violence was even less forgivable. He maintained close ties to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and backed Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat. As president in 1997, he gave his country’s highest award for a foreigner to Libya’s dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had donated $10 million to the ANC. He gave the same award to the corrupt Indonesian president Suharto, who was said to have donated $60 million. He supported Nigerian coup leader Sani Abacha, refusing to say a word publicly to stop the 1995 hanging of writer, television presenter and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. It was true that Mandela did many great things. But many of his more radical supporters in the West used that greatness to wash clean his record of political violence - and his support for dictators who’d used it. Perhaps the woman had a point. Even great leaders with Nobel peace prizes had blood on their hands.
“There’s Desmond Lambadi,” King ventured.
The woman was hesitant, but after a few seconds’ silence she said, “Well, that man was a dreamer. Yes, he had many great ideas, but it was Lucky Man Jonathon Mugabe who cut short his presidency.”
“As indeed did your husband with him.”
“Lucky Man Jonathon is a worthless playboy. He needed to go.” She paused. “He killed Desmond Lambadi. Just as he will kill my husband. That was my husband’s mistake, leaving Lucky Man Jonathon Mugabe alive.”
“Not for want of trying. He escaped to South Africa ahead of a death squad. And your husband has sent men to try and kill him in Switzerland, and then again in Monaco.” King paused, realising he had said too much, but the woman’s arrogance had infuriated him. “Anyway, Desmond Lambadi was not killed. I have seen him. Spoken to him, even.”
“I do not believe you.”
“Your husband knows that Lambadi is alive. He is in one of your government’s unmoderated prison camps.” King paused. “No better than a concentration camp for anyone who speaks out against the Burindi government.”
“A British invention, you will find. Concentration camps were created by the British for the Boers in South Africa and Rhodesia.” She stared at him somewhat defiantly in the rear-view mirror. “Anyway, like I said, I don’t believe you. Desmond Lambadi is dead.”
“I don’t care what you believe.” The headlights swept across the plantation as King took the rutted track to the house. Once tarmacked, the rains had washed much of the road away and after Mustafa’s overthrow of Mugabe’s government, nobody had been around to mend the driveway. King swung the car around and parked nose outwards as a precaution. He always liked the option of a fast getaway. “Time to get out,” he said, and he watched as she tensed in her seat. He got out, opened the rear door and unfastened her seatbelt. She was reluctant to move, her eyes on the house which was shrouded in darkness.
“You are going to rape me, kill me…”
“Just get out of the damned car.” He reached inside and pulled her out. She was unsteady on her feet, and he helped her up the path and the seven marble steps to the imposing front door. Inside, the house smelled damp and unused. They had not opened the windows to improve the smell but had taped cardboard to the windowpanes instead. King closed the door and switched on the light. Nobody outside would see that the building was occupied, as having been empty for so long it would have created suspicion. He led the woman to a seat and told her to sit. Outside, he could hear a vehicle and he walked to the door and picked up the FN SLR rifle that had been made ready and left in an umbrella stand. He switched off the light and eased open a slit he had made earlier in the cardboard. He relaxed when he saw David getting Clive unsteadily out of the passenger seat of the Jeep, and a set of headlights in the distance which he hoped would be Phil.
King got the door and Clive struggled through the doorway while David shepherded the two girls inside. King closed the door and switched on the lights. The girls saw their mother and rushed over amid tears and hushed words that King found difficult to understand. Once again reminded of Patois spoken in Jamaica with its English and Creole influences.
“Lights again,” he said and switched them off, peering outside. Phil was already walking towards the house with the teenaged boy gripped tightly around the collar. King opened the door for them, then closed it once more and switched on the lights. The boy saw his family and went to walk towards them but hesitated, looking at Phil. The man nodded and the boy ran over and dropped onto his knees in front of his mother.
