He stood up and moved out of camera shot. His place was taken by four of the masked men. They had laid aside their firearms. They lifted Cayla to her feet and turned her to face the camera. One of them took a handful of her blonde hair from behind and hauled her head back. Another masked man entered the shot from the right, and he drew a dagger with a rhino-horn handle and a curved ten-inch blade from his belt. The blade was inlaid with gold Arabic script. He held the point of the blade under Cayla’s chin, almost touching the velvety skin of her throat.
‘No! Please!’ she gabbled. The group stood for a full minute without moving. Then he lowered the blade slowly until it pointed at her left breast, the outline of it showing through the black cotton of her abaya. Then the man moved his free hand up over her right breast. He cupped it in his hand and joggled it almost playfully. Cayla redoubled her struggles, and the men holding her laughed under their masks. The sound was like the cackling of hyenas that had picked up the scent of blood on the wind.
The dagger man hooked his finger into the collar of the abaya and held it open. Then he ran the blade into the space between the black cloth and Cayla’s skin. She felt the cold metal and she froze and looked down as he moved the knife blade down between her breasts. The cloth split open and one of her breasts bulged out. The skin was pale as cream but the nipple was red as a ruby. The man sheathed the dagger and then reached into the open gown. He brought out both her breasts, one in each hand, and squeezed them so brutally that their delicate nipples stood out and Cayla screamed with pain. He released her breasts and hooked his forefinger into the slit in the thin cloth and ripped it down to her ankles. Under the abaya she was naked. The photographer panned the camera in and lingeringly recorded every detail of her body, dwelling on her bosom and then moving down to the soft golden fur of her pubes.
Cayla stood docilely. She offered no further resistance when the four men holding her lowered her onto her back and held her spreadeagled on the carpet. There was one of them on each of her arms, holding her by the wrists. The other two grasped her ankles. They pulled her legs wide apart. The photographer altered the focus of his lens, moving into a close-up and high-definition shot of the pink lips of her genitalia. Cayla rolled her head from side to side.
‘Please don’t do this!’ she whimpered. ‘Please . . .’
The man who stood over her undid his belt and let his baggy white trousers drop around his ankles. He stared down at Cayla’s sex and spat on the palm of his right hand. He spread the spittle over the head of his penis to lubricate it. The camera followed each of his movements. His penis stiffened and extended out of the mass of jet-black pubic hair. It was enormous. Thick blue veins twisted around the shaft like some loathsome climbing vine. Cayla stared up at it, wide-eyed and speechless with fright. He knelt between her knees, and lowered himself onto her. She tried to kick him off, but the men held her legs apart. The buttocks of the man on top of her were muscular and covered with dense black hair like those of an animal. They clenched and drove downwards. Cayla screamed shrilly and her whole body convulsed. While he pounded down on her, the other men from the watching circle laid aside their weapons and came forward to form a line, lowering their trousers and with their hands working themselves up into a state of readiness for their turn.
As one finished and stood up, another took his place immediately. After the fourth rape Cayla lay quiescent, no longer screaming or struggling. After the sixth there was blood, much blood, bright against her pale thighs. When the tenth man stood up grinning and hoisting his breeches, the camera pulled away to focus on the face of Adam, as he watched emotionlessly. He turned to look into the lens.
‘I am very sorry you had to witness this, Mrs Bannock,’ he said softly. ‘I do not think that your daughter can stand much more of it. You and I can put a stop to it at once. All you have to do is to order a wire transfer to a bank in Hong Kong for the amount of ten billion United States dollars. You know how to contact the people who are doing this to Cayla. You will be given the bank details when you let them know that you are ready to send the money.’
During the day Hazel carried the BlackBerry under her blouse, suspended on a cord around her neck. She had strapped it to the skin between her breasts with a strip of adhesive tape so that, even when she was running, parachuting and training with the men she could reach it before it rang twice. At night she kept it under her pillow and often woke to find she was holding it in her hand. It was as close as she could get to Cayla.
When at last it did ring she was sitting at the situation room table with Hector Cross while he gave his senior operatives their daily briefing. The security duties of Cross Bow had to continue with their full efficiency. Hector was very much aware that the enemy might take advantage of the disarray caused by Cayla’s abduction and that they could spring another surprise attack at any time. The meeting ended and Hector looked around the table.
‘Any questions? Good! I will detain you no longer . . .’ He broke off as the BlackBerry under Hazel’s khaki safari shirt rang.
‘Oh, God!’ she whispered and ripping open the buttons, she reached under her shirt and brought out the device.
‘Leave us!’ Hector snapped at his men. ‘Get out! Now!’ They obeyed instantly, and Paddy O’Quinn led them out and closed the door behind them. Hazel already had the phone to her ear and was shouting into the mouthpiece,
‘Hello! Who is this? Speak to me. Please, speak to me!’ Hector reached out and took her shoulder. He shook it gently.
‘Hazel, it’s not a voice call. It’s a text message or an attachment.’ In her agitation she had not recognized the difference in the ringtones. Working in desperate haste, she located the body of the message.
‘You’re right,’ she blurted. ‘It’s an attachment. It seems to be a photograph or a video. Yes, it’s a video! A long one . . . twelve megabytes.’
‘Wait! Don’t open it yet!’ Hector tried to stop her. He had a presentiment of the evil to come. He wanted to prepare her for it. But she seemed not even to hear him. She was already running the video directly onto the small screen of the device.
‘It’s Cayla!’ she exclaimed joyfully. ‘She’s still alive. Oh, thank God! Come and watch her, Cross!’ He came around to her side of the desk.
‘My poor baby, she looks so beautiful but so tragic.’ On the screen Cayla was walking towards the man seated on the carpet in the circle of masked and armed Arabs. The man’s face was also masked with a head shawl. But the camera closed in on him until only his head and shoulders were framed in the shot. The man removed the shawl that concealed his features.
‘Who is that man, Cross? Do you know him?’ Hazel asked with agitation.
‘No, I have never seen him before. But now I shall never forget him,’ Hector said quietly. Adam made his short speech and they both listened in silence staring at the screen as though it were a venomous reptile.
‘. . . Pay the ransom money and your beautiful daughter will immediately be returned to you,’ Adam ended quietly.
‘I’ll pay it,’ Hazel whispered, ‘I’ll pay anything to have her back.’
‘I am sorry, Mrs Bannock,’ Hector said gently, ‘but he’s lying to you. Everything he says is a lie. This is the Beast and he is the master of the lie.’ The image on the screen changed, the Arab with the knife advanced on Cayla.
‘He isn’t going to hurt her. No, he mustn’t hurt her. I will pay anything. Anything to stop them hurting my baby!’ Her voice was rising hysterically.
‘Be brave! For Cayla’s sake, be brave.’
‘Surely these people are human beings, not animals,’ she said. ‘They won’t hurt an innocent young girl who has done them no harm.’
‘No, they are not animals. The most savage animals are good and noble compared to these creatures.’ The Arab on the screen stood over Cayla and exposed his grotesque sex. Hazel sobbed and reached for Hector’s hand. Then she was silent as the full horror began to unfold. But she was shaking as though in high fever.
‘Turn it off!’ Hector ordered her, but she shook her head and her grip on Hector’s hand was like a steel vice. He could hardly believe the power of it. He made no effort to remove her hand; although the pain made his eyes water he could not deny her any comfort he was capable of giving to her. It seemed to both of them that the multiple rapes of her daughter went on endlessly. Hector felt a rage rising in him such as he had never experienced before. When the image of Adam appeared again on the screen, Hector had a focus for his hatred. He stared at the face as though trying to engrave the features indelibly on his mind. At last the video had run its dreadful course and the screen went blank. Neither of them moved or spoke for a long time. They went on staring at the empty screen.
‘I would pay them if I could,’ Hazel whispered.
‘You don’t have the amount they are asking. Ten billion dollars,’ Hector said, and it was a statement rather than a question. She shook her head, and released her grip on his hand.
‘Bannock Oil does not belong to me. It belongs to the shareholders. Seventy-three per cent of the issued share capital is owned by Henry’s trust. I have the power of attorney to vote those shares, but I certainly cannot dispose of them. I have only about two and a half per cent of the total paid-up share capital of the company registered in my own name. If I sold those shares and all the other assets I have, I might be able to scrape together five billion or perhaps five and a half. Perhaps I could negotiate with them.’
‘Don’t even think of it!’ Hector said. ‘If you had twenty billion it would still not be enough. They want something else from you.’
‘What else can we do?’
‘We have got to stall them, until Uthmann and Tariq get back. Tell them you are raising the money, but that it will take time. Tell them anything. Meet their lies with our own.’
‘Then what?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘At this stage there is only one thing I know with any certainty.’ Hazel turned to look at him for the first time since the video had started playing. It was as though she had never seen him before. His face seemed sculpted from a pale adamantine marble. It had been purged of any trace of human emotion, except hatred. His eyes burned green. This face was the mask of Nemesis.
‘What are you certain of?’
‘That I am going in to get that child out of there, and I will kill anybody who tries to stop me.’ She felt a strange emotion rising in her like an incoming spring tide. Here was a man, the first real man she had known since Henry Bannock had been taken from her. This is the one I have waited for. I want him, she thought, I need him. Cayla and I both need him. Oh God, how we need him.
‘We have received a ransom demand, at last,’ Hector told the men that he had assembled in the communications room. They watched his face intently.
‘How much?’ Paddy O’Quinn asked quietly.
‘It doesn’t matter how much,’ Hector replied. ‘We can’t pay it. We won’t pay it.’
Paddy nodded. ‘You’d be bloody mad to do so. But what are you going to do?’
‘Hot extraction,’ Hector said. ‘We are going in to pull the girl out.’
‘Do you know where they are holding her?’ They all leaned forward eagerly as hounds given a whiff of the scent.
‘No!’ They sat back in their seats, and made no effort to hide their disappointment. Paddy spoke for all of them.
‘Then it seems to me that we have a small problem.’
‘Tariq and Uthmann will be back soon. They will have found out where they are holding her.’
‘Are you sure of that?’ Paddy asked.
‘Have they ever failed yet?’
No one replied for a few moments, then Paddy remarked, ‘Always a first time.’
‘Listen, you dismal Johnnie, I’ll give you odds of ten to one, if you put a hundred pounds on it. Put up or shut up.’
‘Where am I going to find that sort of money with what you pay me?’
‘Right! When Tariq and Uthmann do get back we must be ready to go immediately. Wherever we are going, there is only one way in. We jump at night from high altitude.’ There were nods of assent. ‘Not too many of us, a stick of ten men. All our Arabic speakers who can pass for locals.’
‘Instead of parachuting in, why can’t you use the company helicopter?’ Hazel asked.
‘They would hear us coming. Then a night landing, even in a chopper? No thanks.’ Hector turned her down brusquely, but she showed no resentment.
‘Okay, you can use my jet.’
‘I have never jumped from a Gulfstream before.’ Hector glanced around the room. ‘Anyone here done it?’ They shook their heads, and Hector looked back at Hazel. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea. There is the problem of the pressurized hull, and the location of the hatch forward of the wing. The wing could slice your head off as you jump. Then the speed of the plane . . . No, I think we will have to go for something not quite so exotic.’
‘How about Bernie Vosloo?’ Paddy suggested.
‘Just what I was thinking.’ Hector nodded and turned to Hazel. ‘Bernie is an ex-South African Airforce pilot. He and his wife operate an ancient C-130 Hercules transport, hauling heavy loads around Africa and the Middle East. They aren’t too fussy about the nature of the cargo and they know how to keep their mouths tight shut. I have used them a number of times in the past. Their Hercules has a partly pressurized hull, and they can get up to 21,000 feet if they give it a kick in the arse. At that altitude, to a listener on the ground they will not be making much more noise than a cat pissing on a sheet of velvet.’ Hazel had never heard the expression before and she kept an elaborately straight face as she tried to suppress a smile, but her eyes twinkled blue as fairy lights. Bloody marvellous eyes, Hector thought, but distracting. He looked away from her to the men.
‘However, we don’t want to jump from 20,000 feet, so Bernie will throttle well back to keep the noise level low and he will descend to 10,000. At which level he can depressurize the cabin and we can bail out. As always we keep close contact during the drop, so that we hit the ground in a formation and we will be fully wired to deal with an unfriendly reception committee.’
‘After that what happens?’ Dave Imbiss asked.
‘Don’t worry about it, David old son. You won’t be there, you and your baby-pink face,’ Hector told him and then went on, ‘That’s the easy part. The difficult part will be the return journey. As usual there are three possible ways out: land, sea and air. The first-class return ticket would be by company helicopter.’ He nodded at Hans Lategan who was sitting in the back row. ‘We will have Hans in his chopper standing by on the border of the nearest civilized state, ready to pick up our call sign and come in to fetch us. That should do it – ’ he paused – ‘but we are all aware of what can happen to the best laid plans of mice and men, so we will cover the other two exit routes. I’m pretty certain that they are holding Miss Bannock in either Puntland or Yemen. These lads are pirates so they will probably never be too far from the coast.’ Hector pulled up the map projection on the wall screen and moved the marker over the area to demonstrate his point. ‘Whatever happens we will have Ronnie Wells waiting offshore in his MTB.’ He looked at Ronnie in the back row, sitting next to Hans. ‘What’s your range in that old tub of yours?’
‘With my new auxiliary deck tanks, it is well over a thousand nautical miles,’ Ronnie replied, ‘And I’ll thank you for remembering that she is no old tub. She can touch forty knots if I open her up.’
‘I apologize for the unfortunate choice of words, Ronnie,’ said Hector with a smile. ‘So Ronnie will be waiting to give any of you who make it to the beach a free pleasure cruise of the Red Sea on your way home.’
‘And if neither Hans nor Ronnie is able to keep the appointment, what happens then?’ Paddy asked.
‘Ah! That’s where you come in, Paddy. You will be waiting on the nearest land border with a column of trucks. If the target turns out to be in Yemen you will be on the border of either Saudi or
Oman. If the target turns out to be Puntland then you will be waiting in Ethiopia to come in and fetch us. Bernie Vosloo and his good wife can fly you and your trucks into position once we know where we are heading. By the way, you’d better make damned sure you have the doctor with you. Somebody is sure to be hurt if we are forced to take the Ethiopian route.’ Hector looked around the circle of their faces. ‘So all of you have some work to do. I want to be ready to go within twenty-four hours of acquiring our target, and that could be any day now. Let’s move arse!’ As soon as the others had left the room, Hector called Bernie Vosloo on the satellite phone. Hazel was listening in on the extension.
‘Bernie, it’s Hector Cross. Whereabouts are you and your lovely missus?’
‘Hi, Heck. I am in Nairobi, but not for much longer. Are you still alive? Those darkies are really poor shots, aren’t they?’
‘Their aim is just fine, but I have learned to dodge. Listen, Bernie, I have a job for you.’
Bernie chuckled. ‘So has everybody else in Africa, Heck. Nella and I are flying our cute little bums off day and night. Tomorrow we light out for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that ironically named little cesspit of a country.’
‘Come to Abu Zara. The weather and the beer are great here.’
‘Sorry, Heck. I have a contract to fulfil. A big client. I cannot let him down.’
‘How much is the contract worth?’
‘Fifty thousand.’ Hector covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked across at Hazel.
‘How far can I go?’ he whispered.
‘Who is that you are talking to?’ Bernie demanded sharply.
‘The lovely lady I work for. Hold on, Bernie.’