Tony Park - Silent Predator

‘Bloody cock-up,’ she heard White muttering as he listened in to the radio transmissions. ‘Stay here, ma’am, Mr Furey.’

‘Bollocks,’ Tom said, brushing past him ignoring the man’s outstretched hand.

Sannie followed Tom, leaving White standing there in the open, shaking his head as he spoke into his radio.

Troopers were emerging from the house now, removing their gasmasks. One started to laugh out loud, but White barked at him to shut his gob. The man complied immediately.

Sannie and Tom walked through the splintered, smoking remains of what had been the front door. The lounge area, furnished only with a couple of upturned wooden chairs, was empty, but the smell of cordite and smoke was strong in the air. Along with something else.

‘Monkey kak,’ Sannie said as Tom wrinkled his nose.

‘How? It can’t be.’

‘I’m telling you.’

They turned right into the hallway and Sannie waved her hand in front of her face to clear the air. From the room where Greeves had supposedly been held, the shrieking and screaming continued.

When they walked in, Jonathan Fraser was standing at the foot of the bed, gasmask off and sub-machine gun hanging limply from his right hand. One of his men had lit a cigarette and the other was standing there looking down at the pathetic little creature writhing in fear.

‘Told you,’ Sannie said, though without a trace of triumph in her voice.

Strapped to the bed with plastic cable ties was a grey and white vervet monkey. The little primate was fully grown, though still only about a metre long when fully stretched out, as it was. It bared its sharp pointy fangs at them from its dark face and continued to screech.

‘Just fucking shoot it, boss,’ one of the men said to Fraser.

Fraser seemed completely dumbstruck.

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Sannie said. ‘Give me your knife, soldier, and stand well back. All of you. Shame, this poor little thing is half out of its mind.’ The big, tough military men all heeded her advice and took a pace back.

Sannie reached down and deftly sliced through the ties securing the monkey’s feet. It flipped itself over backwards and tried to use its tiny humanoid feet alternately to scratch at her and gain purchase on the bare bed springs. Sannie grabbed its tail and hoisted it up off the bed, quickly slicing one of the two hand restraints. ‘Make room for it. Clear the doorway and the windows. This’ll be very quick.’

Sannie was right, and even she gave a little yelp and jumped back as she cut the final restraint. She just managed to get her wrist out of the way of the monkey’s mouth, though she was right in thinking that its main priority was to flee rather than fight. With a speed that left all of them surprised, the vervet went flying out the broken window and into the night. ‘How many others?’ she asked.

The man who had suggested killing the vervet answered. Fraser still seemed in a state of semi-shock. ‘Three. They were roaming around the house. One of the boys put a bullet in one of them — in its arm, he reckoned — but the other two were too quick. They scarpered right past us.’

Sannie shook her head. ‘Poor little thing. He’ll probably live, though. I’ve seen vervets getting around with only one leg and one arm after they’ve been caught on electric fences and — ’

‘For Christ’s sake, woman,’ Fraser said, ‘I don’t give a flying fuck about the bloody monkeys!’

‘Cool it,’ Tom said.

Fraser turned on him. ‘Don’t you tell me to fucking cool it. This is all your fault. Hear me? This was a fuck-up from the beginning and you’re the one who caused it.’ Fraser’s face was reddening, his eyes bulging. He pointed at Tom’s chest, but Tom stood his ground and said nothing.

Fraser took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

Tom looked at Sannie. ‘We need to get word to Alfredo. Tell him to get his roadblocks set up early. It’s almost first light.’

She nodded, but she could see Tom was just going through the motions. ‘I’ll go find Sarel and get him to take us to our car in his four-wheel drive. There’s not much we can do here now.’

‘Thanks,’ Tom said. ‘Major, if you’ll excuse us. It’s not over for us just yet.’

‘Oh, yes it bloody well is,’ Fraser said.

The detective in Tom wouldn’t let him wallow in self-pity at the outcome of the raid — he would leave that to Fraser. He almost felt sorry for the SAS major. A mission that might have written him into the history books would now be remembered as a tragic farce.

Tom was beyond considering his or anyone else’s reputation or career. He had already resigned himself that he would be out of a job by the time he returned to England but that couldn’t shake him from his one remaining task — to find Robert Greeves, dead or alive. It had grown even firmer in his mind while he waited at the foot of the dunes for the assault boats to arrive. He had sinned and he would not be forgiven — by himself as much as anyone else — until he found Greeves. The set-up by Carla, the chase, and now the cunningly cruel decoy that had thrown them off the terrorists’ trail, had become personal. He had been made to look a fool from start to finish. It was as if the terrorists were baiting him and rubbing his succession of failures in his face.

It was going to stop. Although he wouldn’t admit it aloud, and quickly suppressed the errant thought before it even fully formed, it didn’t really matter if Greeves was dead or alive. The men who had done this would pay.

He walked down the corridor to the bathroom. In a corner he saw a piece of crumpled newspaper with what looked like human hair on it. Other strands of grey and black were scattered about the floor. He recalled that Greeves’s head had been shaved for the video. Tom had brought half-a-dozen zip-lock plastic bags with him from their hire car. Sannie had bought them at a service station in Mozambique to store any leftover food from their meals. He turned a bag inside out and grabbed a handful of hair. It might not prove anything other than that Robert Greeves had indeed been in the house, but everything counted in an investigation. He recalled the crime scene investigator’s mantra — details, details, details.

He saw the bloody footprints on the polished concrete floor, in the bathroom and leading down the hallway. He supposed they were Bernard’s, but there was only one set. Bernard had said that when he had spoken to Greeves in his room, the minister’s feet had been bloodied, like his own. Had the terrorists put shoes on Greeves to walk him to the bathroom, or had they cleaned up after they had shaved him? If so, why had they left the newspaper with his hair on it sitting on the floor? He mentally filed away his observation and wished he had brought his notebook with him. He’d write down these thoughts later.

The stink of the place assaulted his nostrils. As a uniformed bobby he’d once been called to a bedsit in Islington where an old lady had died in her sleep but hadn’t been missed for days. It was summer and when they’d opened the door he’d had his first whiff of a decomposing human body. The monkey smell wasn’t nearly as bad but it was rank all the same.

How long had the animals been in there? he wondered. It was four hours, give or take, since Bernard had made his escape. The terrorists had worked quickly to capture the primates and ensconce them in the house before escaping. They must have known that the rescue team would have heat-sensing equipment. It was a brilliant ploy. The monkeys would show up as human-like on the infra-red radar, but only a very skilled interpreter might have noticed that the creatures were too small to be men.