Ivory (14 page)

‘Let's go now – today. I really can't wait. I have to be in Johannesburg in . . . What day is it today?'

‘You tell me. I think you might be a bit groggy still.'

‘I'm fine. How long was I unconscious for?'

‘About twenty-four hours. I was getting worried about you.'

‘Then today's Tuesday. I've got to be in Johannesburg by next Monday. I've got a train trip booked from Cape Town.'

‘Well, you're an awful long way from Cape Town. Is that where your ship was headed?'

She nodded, and the egg on her head hurt some more. ‘If I go with you to the mainland, how long would it take me to get to Johannesburg?'

‘Couple of hours by plane from Vilanculos. When the power's back on you can try calling Pelican Airways. I have to go to Johannesburg myself some time in the next week or so, on business. We could go together if you like.'

‘I don't fly. What about a train?' She hated admitting her fears to anyone.

‘There isn't one. You could try the local buses, but if you don't like travelling with chickens and goats I'd swallow my fear and fly if I were you.'

‘It's not funny. I don't fly.'

He nodded. ‘Sorry. I understand. I could drive you.'

He explained the journey to her in more detail. He proposed cutting across Mozambique from the coast, heading north-west to the border with Zimbabwe. From there they would head west, then south, crossing into South Africa at Beitbridge on the Limpopo River. From there, he said, it was less than a day's drive to Johannesburg. They could make it in three days, which meant if they left Thursday, she could be in the city by the weekend, in time for her meeting on Monday.

She desperately needed to call George. He would be worried sick about her, but she eventually conceded that Alex was right and she would have to wait until she got to the mainland to call him. She tried asking him if he could bring his trip forward to today, but he said some work was being done on the hull of his boat. It was frustrating.

‘Cheer up. There are worse places to be stuck. I'll show you around the island if you're up to it.'

‘Thanks, Alex. Look, I'm sorry. You must think I'm behaving like a spoilt city girl. I haven't even said thank you for rescuing me. It's all been a bit of a shock to the system.'

 

A shock was what it was, all right, Alex thought as he walked downstairs, leaving Jane to change. Maria had finished ironing her clothes and had delivered them and some other things Danielle and Sarah had left behind to his room while they were chatting. He'd planned on giving the leftover skirts and blouses both women had collected during their months in Mozambique to the ladies in the small village on the island, but hadn't got around to it yet.

He stepped over beams and around piles of tiles and cans of paint. He was doing all right for materials, it was skilled labour they were short of. And money. There were some things he simply couldn't steal – like
the new commercial refrigerators, stoves and ovens they would need to get the restaurant back on its feet. He stamped on a fat cockroach as he made his way through the filthy kitchen. His mother used to like telling people she'd never minded giving birth to Alex there, as it was cleaner than any hospital she'd ever seen in Lisbon.

Apart from his suite, where Jane was now dressing, there were no other rooms finished on the top floor. Each of his men had a suite, either on the first or second floor, and while these were renovated and decorated to varying degrees, there was no one of them suitable for a paying guest. If he ever did get the hotel completely renovated, and some or all of the crew stayed on, he would eventually need to find permanent accommodation for them. Alex would stay in the top-floor suite, though, where he had lived as a child. His family could have afforded a grand house elsewhere on the island, but his father had always insisted that the hotel manager's job was twenty-four hours a day, and that the only way to ensure his guests were getting top-class service was to live like one of them.

Alex walked outside into the bright light and Mitch sauntered over to him, rubbing his chest, which was badly bruised where Jane's bullet had hit his Kevlar vest. A grey sweat top covered the mark.

‘You think she's got the stones?' Mitch asked, lighting a cigarette.

‘I don't know. We've got until the day after tomorrow. She bought the story about the mechanic. Keep the generator switched off until we're out of earshot, then get back to work.'

‘Man, if she's carrying diamonds you can afford to employ a fucking army of builders to finish this place. How come we gotta work when we could be working her over?'

‘Enough, Mitch. I told you, no one touches her. And we don't even know for sure it was diamonds on board.'

‘Yeah, but you said before, Wu's boss was getting a million pounds for whatever was in that package. No one knows she's alive, Alex. Give me half an hour with her if you're too squeamish. I talked to Henri – he agrees with me and he said he'd help me. We'll find out if she's got the rocks.'

‘Right. And then what would you do with her? Let her leave the island once she's healed?' Alex had expected Mitch to come up with something like this, but it worried him that Mitch had been undermining him with Henri.

‘You know what I'd do with her. That bitch fucking shot me, man. It's payback. Don't mean nothing.'

‘I worry about you sometimes, Mitch, I truly do.'

‘You're just pussy-struck, man. Same as always. Every fucking broad you meet you fall for.'

‘Just get back to work, Mitch, as soon as we're gone. I'll find out if she's got what we're after. I'll also find out who those goons were who were waiting for us on board.'

Mitch shook his head, turned and walked off.

They'd towed the
Penfold Son
's lifeboat behind the
Fair Lady
as soon as they'd married up with Jose. Once back on the island they'd literally pulled the boat apart in case Jane had stashed the contraband on board. He'd searched Jane's meagre possessions – even the inside of her thermos flask – and found nothing. Mitch, of course, had suggested checking her body while she was unconscious, thanks to the sedative their medic Heinrich had administered before connecting a saline drip. Alex had refused. As he'd told the American, if she had something of value, he'd find out, and then he'd find it.

Perhaps she didn't have the loot. He was basing his assumption that she did on the warning one of the men shooting at them had called out. ‘She's got 'em,' the man had said. Alex presumed, or rather hoped, that meant the diamonds.

The raid had not been their finest hour. During a debrief they had gone over everything they could remember, from the helicopter-borne assault to the ignominious plummet off the stern of the
Penfold Son
in the lifeboat. The consensus was that their foes were ex-military. Their gunfire had been disciplined – two to three aimed shots at a time – and their weapons similar to the pirates'. What they'd seen of the men added to the presumption: they had military-style haircuts and were physically fit and broad-shouldered. In short, these were not merchant
sailors who'd happened to be carrying an arsenal of assault rifles and hand grenades.

‘The grenades worried me,' Heinrich had said. ‘Not defensive weapons. These guys were armed and ready to assault someplace, or someone.' Heinrich's back was a patchwork of wound dressings after Kevin had removed fifteen small pieces of shrapnel.

‘Mercenaries?' Henri had ventured.

‘Possible,' Kevin conceded, ‘but the Penfold Line's too big to be associated with something as low rent as soldiers of fortune.'

‘Maybe, but don't forget someone on board was into diamond smuggling. The ship's master could have been freelancing,' Alex pointed out.

There were too many questions, and these just added to the ones relating to the
Peng Cheng
and her crew. Captain Wu and his men were locked up in storage cages in the dank concrete-lined basement of the resort. He'd been given an email address for the boat's owner by Wu and had sent a message, offering to start negotiations for a ransom payment. There had been no reply as yet to the anonymous Yahoo account Heinrich had set up for the purpose.

The
Peng Cheng
and her cargo were moored at the deepwater jetty on the other side of the island, out of sight of the resort. Jane's tour wouldn't cover that part of the island. He didn't want her discovering their secret, as Danielle had. Something told him the corporate lawyer wasn't ready to drop the trappings of London life to live among a bunch of pirates. He didn't want to think about what would have to happen if she did find out the truth.

He looked out to sea, past the squeaky-clean sands of the beach and the pleasant thatched bar where they ate and drank every day and he thought, not for the first time, that it was all worthwhile. All the risk, all the problems, all the crime, and even the blood that had been spilled. No one had been killed in any of their raids – until the day before yesterday.

Alex thought again of the man toppling backwards over the railings into the sea far below. He had committed murder in the commission
of a crime, even though the man in question had been trying to kill him at the time. The dead man was presumably employed to provide security, and even though Alex's crew had convinced themselves the other shooters were there to protect a criminal enterprise, Alex knew he had crossed an invisible line. It troubled him, but he forgot his worries when he saw her.

Jane had showered and piled her freshly dried hair high on her head, showing off a graceful, pale neck. She'd chosen one of Sarah's few dresses – the short blue cotton one that had never failed to arouse him whenever the Australian girl had worn it.

‘I'm ready for my tour. I'm a stranger in paradise,' she said.

He laughed. ‘No, Paradise is further north of us.'

‘OK, I'm ready for my geography lesson now.' He pointed towards the beach and she fell into step beside him, her flip-flops slapping on the concrete veranda. Here and there were remnants of a tiled mosaic, once showing dolphins and whales. Jane paused and lifted her sunglasses to inspect the work. ‘They look nice.'

‘I'll get around to repairing that one day. If I had the money I'd bring a tiler over from Portugal. It's quite a skill. As to the geography, you're on an island in the Bazaruto Archipelago. The main islands are Bazaruto, the largest, then Benguerra, Magaruque, and Santa Carolina, also known as Paradise Island. Our island is so small it's usually omitted from maps. We're only two kilometres long, by one wide, and we're about thirty kilometres from the mainland. The bigger islands are all sand and were once part of a long peninsula joined to the mainland, but the Ilha dos Sonhos, like Paradise Island, is actually a rock island, so we have much deeper water around us than the others.'

They were on the beach now, and Jane removed her sandals. Alex noticed her toenails were painted pink and she wore a tiny silver ring on the second toe of her left foot. Her feet squeaked on the white sand.

‘How did you end up here?'

‘I grew up here. I was born in the hotel. My parents owned this resort but were chucked out of it and the country along with all the other Europeans in Mozambique in 1975. I grew up angry, wanting to come
back here and fight the people who stole our property and take it back by force.'

‘I take it you didn't?'

He shook his head. ‘I hated FRELIMO, the ruling power here in Mozambique, and for a while actively worked against them, from South Africa.'

‘You were in the South African Army?'

‘For a few years. I'd trained in the UK as a Royal Marine then moved to South Africa in the late eighties and took a commission there. They were fighting in Angola and propping up RENAMO, the pro-democracy opposition here in Mozambique. I was involved in arms smuggling, but what I saw changed my mind.'

He didn't want to go into details that might shock her. When she pushed him, he said, ‘Civil war brings out the very worst in people. There was wholesale destruction – of people, buildings, wildlife, you name it. I came to the conclusion that no one side was completely right or wrong and that warfare of this kind is the worst.'

‘There's a good kind?'

He shrugged, and stopped, pointing out to a far-off line of white water. ‘That's the reef. There's some fantastic snorkelling out there, if you're interested.'

‘So you left to find a “good” war?'

‘I went back to Britain and re-enlisted. I ended up in Afghanistan, where I felt we were doing some good, for a time, against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.' He left out any mention of the two years he'd spent in special forces, in the Special Boat Service, after being promoted to lieutenant. The time in the elite maritime operations unit had taught him everything he knew about boarding and capturing ships. During the countless hours he'd spent scaling the cliff-like steel sides of HMS
Rame Head
, an old Canadian-built merchant cargo vessel moored in Portsmouth Harbour, he'd never guessed the skills he was learning would provide an income stream one day. Likewise, during his time in M Squadron, which specialised in marine counter-terrorism, he'd learned how to blow his way into locked bridges and cabins.

They started walking along the beach again, but he stopped in his tracks when she said, ‘You were put up for a Victoria Cross, weren't you?'

‘How on earth do you know that?'

‘I thought I recognised your name. It came to me a little while ago, and when you mentioned Afghanistan I knew it was you. You were in the papers – something about saving your men from blowing up?'

He said nothing, but set off again along the beach.

‘I was at my parents' place. My father said he'd known your father when he was in the army. He said . . . well, he said you probably missed out on the VC because of your family, rather than what you had or hadn't done in Afghanistan.'