Питер Джеймс: Billionaire

He hung, upside down, half-impaled on the steering column, with his head out through where the windscreen had been, supported by several inches of wet mud, his eyes staring at a grassy bank. He was still alive somehow, he knew; but the pain was terrible; and then, he realized, there were more pains, so many pains, one after the other, all getting worse, and he began to panic, for he knew, again, that he was going to die. He could feel his life ebbing away and he raged silently at himself, and then began to feel sad, and then raged again. He didn’t want to die, not here, not alone in this ditch, not with Amanda with that creep in his Porsche, whoever he was, and her not even knowing that he was here, not even caring a damn. It was ebbing away; he tried to stop it, but he knew it was no use. He lapsed into unconsciousness.

Baenhaker might have felt a great deal better had he known that in a few weeks’ time instructions would be issued, by the highest authority he knew, for the driver of that Porsche to be tracked down and killed.

The gunboat cut through the ink-black water of the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. The water was flat now, with just a slight swell; the storm that had raged for the past two days had finally died at dusk.

The commander of the gunboat, Nasir Hoos, stood beside the pilot on the bridge and looked at his watch. It was 1.30 a.m. At 5.00 the sun would appear and within an hour, the sea would become a glorious cobalt blue. But right now it was darker than the oil in the supertankers they were out here to protect: an average of three supertankers an hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, churned down through the Strait and turned right for the Western World. There was one now; he could see its lights. It was about five miles off, and coming across behind them.

The radar operator looked up from the screen. ‘I’m picking up something three miles to starboard, coming this way very slowly.’

Hoos nodded. Probably a fishing dhow; the night seas were sprinkled with them, badly lit and badly sailed. He looked out of the window, squinting his eyes to cut out the cabin light. ‘Three miles did you say, Hamoud?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can’t see anything. Probably a damned dhow without lights. Better take a look.’ He turned to the pilot. ‘Starboard thirty.’

‘Starboard thirty, Sir,’ the pilot repeated, turning the wheel. ‘Thirty of the starboard wheel on, Sir.’

The fast boat swung round quickly. Hoos waited a few moments and then gave the command to straighten out: ‘Steady.’

‘Steady, Sir. Course zero five degrees.’

‘Steer zero five.’

Hoos took his night-vision field-glasses and went out onto the deck; he put the glasses to his eyes and stared ahead, but could see nothing. The warm breeze gently whipped his face. He waited for five minutes, then raised his field-glasses again. He could make out the shape of a dhow, a fairly large one, about two miles dead ahead, and carrying no lights.

‘Gun posts,’ commanded Hoos. He never took chances on night patrol. The boat had four gun posts — twin MG machine guns mounted fore and aft, and twenty-millimetre cannon also fore and aft. ‘Slow ahead. Search lights,’ he said, after another eight minutes.

Five hundred yards of ocean in front of them erupted into a bright glare under the beams of the eight halogen search lights. Seconds later, the dark hull of the dhow rocked into the centre like an eerie stage prop in a pantomime. The forward guns swivelled and trained on the dhow and, with its speed cut to five knots, the gunboat cautiously began to circle the dhow in a large arc.

Hoos switched on the loud-hailer. ‘This is the Sultan of Oman’s Navy. Come up on deck and identify yourselves.’ The voice cracked out over the water; the dhow remained silent. As they closed in, they saw that the sail was in tatters and the mast was broken and tilting crazily; there was no sign of any movement. As they came around the stern of the dhow, they saw two figures slumped on the rear deck. ‘This is the Sultan of Oman’s Navy. You are in territorial waters of Oman. Anyone who is below deck is to come up immediately and identify himself.’

The silence persisted. ‘Take her alongside,’ said Hoos. ‘Stand by to board.’

The pilot brought the gunboat beam-to-beam with the dhow, and six naval ratings and a Petty Officer jumped aboard. Two secured the two vessels together and the other five went below, Webley revolvers drawn. After a few minutes, the Petty Officer came back up on deck and addressed Hoos, who remained standing on the gunboat.

‘Two below, Sir, two on deck; all dead. They are all in the uniform of the Israeli Navy, Sir.’

‘What?’

‘They’re Israeli sailors, Sir.’

Israeli sailors? Hoos felt a cold shiver run through him. What, he wondered, were Israeli sailors doing on a fishing dhow in the middle of the Persian Gulf? Something was wrong here, very wrong indeed. Piracy in the Gulf was not uncommon; boats with murdered crews he had seen before, several times. But this was different. He jumped onto the dhow, examined each dead sailor carefully, and then looked all around the deck and the squalid cabin area. There was no sign of violence, only the remains of an unfinished meal on four plates — an extremely nasty-looking dried-up stew.

‘Food poisoning?’ said Hoos.

‘Could be,’ said the Petty Officer. ‘Looks like it. I’m no expert on corpses, but I’d say they’ve been dead for a good day or so.’

‘Where’s this boat registered?’ said Hoos.

‘There’s a sea-worthiness certificate and fishing licence in the cabin — issued in Umm Al Amnah.’

‘Umm Al Amnah?’ said Hoos, with surprise. ‘They’ve drifted one hell of a way to be down here.’

‘Storm probably blew them down.’

‘Umm Al Amnah,’ repeated Hoos, to himself. ‘Search the boat from top to bottom; turn it inside out.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

Hoos began to walk around the boat, carefully, slowly, methodically; he felt uneasy. Umm Al Amnah had been a province within one of the Trucial states which comprised the United Arab Emirates; although, many years before the formation of the UAE, it had been a state in its own right. Umm Al Amnah was ruled by an eccentric despot, Sheik Hyyad bin Bakkrah al Quozzohok, who had been at loggerheads with the Government of the United Arab Emirates ever since their formation, in 1971. It was Quozzohok’s view that the United Arab Emirates had been formed for the sole purpose of squeezing Umm Al Amnah into oblivion, and he wasn’t having any of it. Anti-British, anti-American, anti-Israeli and apparently pro-Libya, his tiny province of one thousand, five hundred square miles and a population of seventeen thousand had been a continuing embarrassment to the United Arab Emirates. When, finally, in a bloodless military coup in 1975, he had declared Umm Al Amnah’s independence, he found he met with no resistance from the UAE at all and — if anything — a hint of relief.

The Western World, however, viewed Amnah’s independence less happily: over half of the West’s entire oil supply had to pass down the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz. With an unstable Iran, and a Russian-occupied Afghanistan controlling one whole side of the Gulf, the West needed all the friends it could get down the other side. Oman, which occupied the land one side of the narrow Strait of Hormuz, was openly friendly to the West, allowing both British and US forces to maintain bases in the country. The United Arab Emirates, which covered the area of coast on one side of the Gulf that ran up to the narrow Strait of Hormuz, was also friendly with the West, if less openly. Umm Al Amnah occupied forty miles of that coast within the UAE.