Those in Peril

  ‘Hector!’ she whispered aloud. ‘He knows me so well; how I love presents from him. The darling is trying to comfort me.’ She picked up the envelope. It was not addressed, and the flap was not sealed. She opened it and slid out the card it contained, then stared at it in bewilderment. It was not written in English but in some eastern script.

  ‘Arabic?’ She was not certain. She looked down at the covered object, then reached out and took a corner of the cloth. She drew it aside, to reveal two large glass bell jars, the type in which laboratory specimens are preserved. Still puzzled, she stooped to make a closer inspection of the contents of the jars.

  Then she screamed. It was an expression of the wildest, deepest anguish of the soul. She reeled backwards and fell to the white-tiled floor. On her hands and knees she scrambled to the further corner of the room and curled up there like a wild animal in a cage. She began to urinate in a hot gush down her legs. She opened her mouth to scream again, but a powerful projectile stream of yellow vomit shot out of her mouth and cascaded halfway across the tiled floor.

  Her scream had electrified Hector. He bounded out of the bed and snatched up the pistol. As he raced across the bedroom he cycled a round of ammunition from the magazine into the breech. He burst into her bathroom with the pistol levelled in a double-handed grip. He crouched in the doorway covering the room. He saw her curled up in the corner, and smelled the reek of fresh vomit and urine in the air. He felt sick with dread.

  She is hurt, he thought, wounded. He went quickly to her and knelt at her side. ‘Hazel, what happened? Was there somebody here? Why are you so frightened?’ He put out his hand to her but she shied away from him, shaking her head and pointing at the vanity shelf. He turned quickly, with the pistol aimed and his finger resting on the trigger guard ready for a snap shot.

  Then he saw the two bell jars. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at. A disembodied human head floated in each jar filled with colourless preservative spirit. In the lefthand one was the head of Grace Nelson. Her eyes were closed and her skin was yellow with age, bagging and pouched. The thin silver strands of her hair were plastered across her face like seaweed. She looked very old, as if she had been dead a hundred years.

  In the righthand jar was the head of Cayla Bannock. Her eyes were open. They seemed to be looking directly at him. They were no longer bright sparkling blue. They were dull and expressionless as pebbles. Her lips were slightly parted and her white teeth showed in the vestige of a cynical smile. Her skin was pale, but smooth and flawless. Her hair floated around her face in a golden cloud. It seemed as though she had just woken from a deep sleep. He knew if he looked upon her loveliness for another instant his heart would break.

  He stooped and picked Hazel up in his arms and carried her through to the bed and laid her upon it. He picked up the bedside intercom and dialled Agatha. She answered almost immediately.

  ‘Get the security guards to search the house and grounds for an intruder. Call the police. There has been a murder. Then we need a doctor for Hazel.’ He paused. ‘It’s an emergency.’ He stripped off Hazel’s nightdress, and wiped her face and body with a damp towel. Then he covered her with a duvet, and came under it with her, taking her in his arms. She clung to him. Her whole body was shaking and her teeth chattered. Terrible, gut-wrenching sobs came up from deep inside her. He held her and whispered endearments to her until the doctor arrived.

  ‘My wife has lost her daughter. It has been a terrible shock,’ Hector explained.

  The doctor gave her an injection that dropped her into a deep dark hole of unconsciousness. ‘I want to take her to my clinic, and have a nurse attend her day and night until she recovers fully,’ he said.

  ‘Good!’ Hector agreed. ‘Things are going to happen here that she should not be involved in—’ He broke off as they heard the police sirens racing through the paddocks towards the house.

  ‘I will call for an ambulance right away.’

  After Hazel was carried downstairs on a stretcher, Hector kissed her unconscious face and watched the ambulance drive away. Then he returned to the bathroom and covered the two pathetic heads with the white cloth. He opened the envelope and read the Arabic script on the card.

  ‘The blood debt is four. Two heads taken and two more to take before the debt is paid in full.’

  Seven days later the Denver police recovered the decapitated body of Cayla Bannock from a storm drain at the back of the sports arena in the grounds of the university. People had called to complain of the smell. The corpse was in an advanced stage of decomposition. The undertakers sealed it in a lead sheath and then laid it in a white marble sarcophagus along with the embalmed heads of Cayla and her grandmother. The lid of the sarcophagus was engraved with both their names. A charter flight delivered it to Steam Boat Springs and a hearse carried it up to the Bannock mausoleum on Spy Glass Mountain. On the same day in South Africa the remains of Grace Nelson’s body were cremated and uncle John scattered her ashes on the Dunkeld vineyards.

  Only a handful of close family and friends attended the interment on Spy Glass Mountain. The sarcophagus was placed on a pink marble plinth to the right of Cayla’s father. The priest who had baptized Cayla conducted the simple service. There were no speeches. Afterwards each of the mourners placed a single red rose upon the lid of the sarcophagus as they filed out. Simon Cooper was amongst them and he wept openly.

  ‘I will never know another girl like her. We were going to be married and have a home and babies. She was wonderful.’ He broke off. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bannock, I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself.’

  ‘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, 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 succumbs 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 appetite 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 glasses 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, Europe
ans, 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 passionately. ‘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 assassins 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,’ she replied.

  ‘My God! 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 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 bastard 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 ‘Shining Light’. Lampos was not only the name of Hector’s warhorse in the classical 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? 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 bloody 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 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 shipping 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 ind
eed 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 offshore. And they are doing so with impunity. With all the cash he has Adam can now operate mother ships 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 warships 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 assets 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 ships 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 ships 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 ships 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.