Tom Cain - Dictator

‘No,’ said Zalika, trying to sound as though she meant it.

‘It was five million dollars, US. That is roughly one-tenth of one per cent of Mr Klerk’s estimated personal assets. It is a fraction of what he paid to get rid of his last wife, the beauty queen, after just three years of marriage. What was she, Miss Austria?’

‘Czech Republic,’ said Zalika, before she could stop herself.

‘Thirty million he gave her to go away, or so the newspapers said. And all I want is five. Not for myself, but for my people. This money will be used to dig wells and buy tractors, medicines, solar electricity panels, schoolbooks, pencils. It will do far more good working for Africa than it ever could in Mr Klerk’s bank account, and yet… and yet, he will not pay it. He tells his people to bargain with me, to drive the price down. He threatens to walk away and leave you to your fate. I am sorry, Zalika, but he does not think you are worth saving.’

For his part, Moses Mabeki looked forward to his conversations with Zalika Stratten with keen anticipation. He derived great pleasure from seeing her humbled, stripped of all comforts, breathing the stench of her own filth. He enjoyed this daily proof of his newfound power almost as much as he had enjoyed giving the order to shoot Zalika’s brother dead; or pouring diesel fuel down a funnel into her father’s throat until it drowned him; or giving her mother to his men to do with as they pleased; or even the exultant moment when he faced his feeble, lickspittle father and took a machete to the treacherous body with which he had so willingly served the Stratten family. Hearing the pain and bafflement in Zalika’s voice when he had told her those lies about his father – that, too, had been something to relish. But what he was planning to do later this very night… well, that, he thought, he might enjoy even more.

They were keeping Zalika Stratten on the top floor of a two-storey building – one of the few in the village – that occupied the northeast corner of a crossing where two dirt roads intersected. In the classic fashion of a colonial African building, a ground-floor colonnade ran along the main facade and round the corner facing the road, providing shelter for passers-by. Above it on the first floor ran a covered open-air walkway, with a waist-high balustrade for the building’s occupants. The ground floor was occupied at one end by a shebeen – an illegal bar, whose clientele neither asked nor answered questions about one another’s business – and a half-empty excuse for a local store at the other. Upstairs there were three very basic apartments, all now occupied by Mabeki and his men. A stairway bisected the front of the building, connecting one walkway with the other.

Justus had installed himself in a derelict building directly across the street, having given the family who occupied it ten US dollars – almost certainly more than they could expect to earn in a month – to let him use it as an observation post.

Shortly after midnight, three hours before the operation was due to begin, Justus was scanning the target building’s facade with a pair of military-specification thermal-imaging binoculars. They reacted to temperature rather than light so that hot-spots showed up in colours that ranged from a warm red through orange and yellow to white-hot. A human body glowed white on a cold night at close range. If the line of sight was clear, visual identification of individuals was possible at ranges of a mile or more. But through the walls of the room in which Zalika was being held, people showed up as little more than vague orange blurs. That was enough, though, to allow Justus to discern Zalika’s body, lying on her mattress, just as it had enabled him to detect the man who had brought her evening meal. When, shortly afterwards, she had got up to use the bucket, he had turned his imager away to check the other apartments.

Now Justus was checking in with Carver, who was lying flat on the roof of a garage directly behind the target building. He was dressed in black, with a black balaclava hiding his face, and had melted into the shadows beneath the second-storey wall behind which Zalika was being held. It rose windowless for ten feet above him, its surface covered with a faded, crumbling painting of a giant Coca-Cola bottle.

The night air was filled with music, the raucous voices of hard-drinking men and the shrieks and laughter of the working girls coming from the shebeen. Carver had to put his finger to his earpiece as Justus spoke to hear his words distinctly.

‘Mabeki brought five of his men with him into Mozambique,’ Justus said. ‘Three of them are downstairs in the shebeen right now. One of the other two is in the inner hallway of the apartment, outside Miss Stratten’s room. The other is on duty as a sentry on the walkway. There is one figure in the adjacent apartment. I believe this is Mabeki. He… wait, he is moving. He is leaving the apartment and I think he is going to the room where Miss Stratten is held. Yes, he is entering it. Now he is going to the bed. Miss Stratten must have woken. She is sitting up. Mabeki is doing something down at her feet. Oh, I see, he is loosening her chain. Maybe he is about to move her.’

On the garage roof, Carver tensed, sensing that all his carefully calibrated plans were about to be rendered irrelevant. Well, he was used to that. He just had to work out when to go in, and – even more important – when to call Morrison. Whatever happened, he aimed to be in and out of the building in under sixty seconds. That left seven long minutes before the chopper arrived. He had to find a way to buy time. Then he heard Justus’s voice in his earpiece again.

‘No, he is not moving her. He is bending over her. Now he is on the bed. Oh no, he is on top of her. She has raised her hands. I think she is trying to fight him, but…’

‘Flattie!’ hissed Carver.

‘We’d already fired up the engine,’ said Morrison. ‘On our way.’

‘Mr Carver, this is very bad,’ said Justus.

‘Yeah, I get it,’ Carver replied. ‘Now listen, I need you to distract the sentry on the walkway. I don’t care what you do, just make sure all his attention is focused on you. Got that?’

‘OK…’

Carver stood up, quickly flexed his neck, shoulder and back muscles, then picked up a length of nylon rope attached to a grappling hook that he had placed beside him on the roof. He stepped back, threw the hook over the top of the wall above him and tugged on the rope until the hook caught on the roof parapet. It took him a matter of seconds to abseil up the painted Coke bottle and over the parapet on to the flat roof above. His MP5 submachine gun, fitted with a noise suppressor, was slung across his back. He also carried a knife, three grenades and a pair of black nylon pouches strapped to his hips. In them were two fifteen-round magazines, a powerful torch, an emergency flare in case he needed to mark his position for an incoming chopper, some nylon fishing wire and a basic first-aid kit.

Keeping his head down, he padded across to the front of the building and peered over the parapet down to the street. Justus was standing by the side of the road with a bottle in his hand, trying to strike up a conversation with the sentry. They were speaking in an African dialect, but Carver had no trouble getting the wheedling, drunken tone of what Justus was saying or the annoyance in the sentry’s voice. Perfect.

He moved to the side of the building, away from the point where the two men were talking, and climbed back over the parapet on to a narrow ledge that ran all the way round the facade of the building, providing additional shelter for the walkway below. Carver crouched down, placed his hands on the ledge and then lowered his legs and body over the side till he was hanging by his fingertips, suspended outside the walkway. A single lightbulb provided enough illumination for him to look all along it, straight towards the sentry who was now leaning on the balustrade, gesticulating at Justus down below.