Питер Джеймс - Billionaire

‘I think you have something personal against Monty.’

Culundis glared at him.

‘So gold has risen $156. When Israel announces she is going to block the Persian Gulf, you think it’s not going to rise any more? The world has gone gold-mad this week — Mon Dieu, Jimmy, are you going senile? When Israel announces her intentions, you know what is going to happen? I’ll tell you: Gold is going to go not to one thousand, but to two thousand!’

The foursome finally plopped their last ball into the hole and moved off the green. Culundis took his nine-iron and bent over his ball. ‘I hope you’re right,’ he said. He swung at the ball and it dropped to a halt less than six inches from the hole. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘How about that?’

‘Shot,’ said Lasserre, grudgingly.

Lasserre took his own nine-iron, and swung; the ball dropped short of the green into a bunker. Culundis looked at him quizzically: ‘Want to bother to putt out?’

Lasserre shook his head. ‘I concede — well played.’

They walked to the green and collected their balls and then walked towards the Clubhouse. ‘You played very well today — better than ever.’

The Greek shrugged his shoulders, and spat out a mouthful of phlegm in full view of the Club Secretariat and about ten other members. Lasserre winced as a battery of dubious frowns greeted them at the Nineteenth hole.

‘I’ll buy you a drink,’ said the Greek.

Lasserre looked at his Tissot watch. ‘Just a Perrier and a coffee.’

‘You really have to get back tonight? Why don’t we have dinner and both leave in the morning?’

‘I have to be in Limoges tomorrow at nine — and I don’t want to have to get up at five. You’re okay, you have your own pilot. You can go to sleep in your plane — I have to fly myself.’

‘Claude,’ said Culundis, ‘you know — you are so poor, I feel so sorry for you. Seventeen generations of Lasserres, and what you got to show for it? A few acres of piss and a lousy golf swing.’

Lasserre grinned. ‘Just you better watch out next month when we play — you’d better bring plenty of money.’

‘Why — you going to have golf lessons?’

‘No — I’m going to give you one.’

At ten o’clock, Viscomte Lasserre looked down from the cockpit of his Piper Navajo at the lights of Bergerac, cut back the throttle and began his descent. It was a crystal clear night, and he had navigated visually the whole way from Sion Airport — it was a route he knew almost with his eyes shut. He stared at a point in the darkness about ten miles beyond Bergerac, leaned forward and pushed a button at the top of the instrument panel; within a fraction of a second, the lights of a runway appeared in the darkness. He smiled to himself; his new radio-controlled switch system worked well.

There was no wind tonight, so he could go straight down from this direction. Ahead of him, he could make out some of the rooms of the chateau. His height dropped to 1,000 feet, then 900; he checked the airspeed, lowered a little more flap, corrected a yaw. Funny, he thought, the runway seemed a fraction further from the house than usual. He decided he must be more tired than he realized. He pressed the undercarriage button and felt the clunk of the three wheels locking; the three green lights on the instrument panel showed him they had locked safely into place.

He lined the aircraft up exactly on the centre of the runway and pushed the throttle lever further in; he gave a little more flap and eased the throttle a fraction further, until he was happy with his approach.

The altimeter read 200, 150, 100; he was almost onto the runway, still perhaps a fraction high. He pulled the nose up and gave still more flap, and they began to drop a fraction faster. Now he was completely satisfied. The altimeter read fifty, then something, something he knew was not right: the huge shadows to his right. ‘It couldn’t be! — impossible—’ Before he had time to think further, the right-hand wing of the Piper ripped into the pine trees, and snapped off halfway down. The plane dropped onto its starboard side, hit the grass with the stump of the wing tip from which petrol was gushing, and cartwheeled at eighty miles an hour towards the trees. It slammed into a clump of six trees close together and exploded on impact, setting the whole forest on fire. Somewhere, still strapped in his seat in the midst of the blazing mess, remained the seventeenth Viscomte Lasserre.

At about the same time as the forest on the Chateau Lasserre estate began to burn, Jimmy Culundis’s DC-8 touched down at Athens Airport. Thirty minutes later, his helicopter landed on the lawn of his house, in the hills, overlooking the fishing village where he was born.

The children had gone to bed, but his wife, Ariane, was up and had dinner prepared for him. She poured him a glass of wine and sat down at the table with him, but he wasn’t talkative.

‘How was your game?’ she asked.

‘It was good — I won — how about that, hey?’

She smiled. She had met Lasserre when he had been to her house. Such an impressive man. She still could not get used to the fact that her husband lived all his working life, and much of his private life, in the company of the rich and, frequently, the famous. Lasserre was a Viscomte: she wasn’t clear what a Viscomte was, but she was profoundly impressed that a Viscomte had deigned to visit her home. Now she was even more impressed that her husband, a simple Greek fisherman, had managed to beat a Viscomte at golf.

Culundis lapsed into silence and munched his way through his salad, occasionally stopping to swill down a mouthful of the cold wine.

‘You must be tired,’ she said.

‘No — not really — I have some problems on my mind. I’m okay.’ He smiled reassuringly and she sat for the rest of the time in silence, while he ate.

Culundis churned over in his mind the events of the past few weeks. Something was worrying him a lot, and he wasn’t sure what it was. He was certain they were being screwed by Elleck and if he found that was the case, then Elleck would be a sorry man, a very sorry man indeed.

He went through the operation in his mind: everything was in place. The 100 Israeli sailors there, in secret. They were happy. They had been briefed by Ephraim that they were on a top-secret mission and had to follow orders either from him or from Hamid Assan, Culundis’s chief of staff in Amnah. Culundis had picked an Arab as his chief of staff for many reasons, the most important of which was in order to be sure of a rapport with the Emir’s own armed forces. The nuclear mines were all in place too, in the warehouse, ready to be loaded. Steaming towards the Gulf, under remote control, at this very moment, was the SS Arctic Sundance, with a twenty-kiloton nuclear explosive charge taped to the inside of her oil-storage tank. On Thursday night, as she started the run up towards the Strait of Hormuz, her crew would leave by helicopter; Friday morning, as she entered the Strait, in full view of the Omani coastguard, and programmed by her computerized auto-pilot not to be within ten miles of any other ship, the charge would detonate, reducing the SS Arctic Sundance into tiny slivers of metal and glass.

Within ten minutes of the detonation, a message would be sent, direct from the Knesset, to every Head of State in the world. The message would state that Israel had taken command of Umm Al Amnah, and from Amnah it had organized the mining, with nuclear mines, of the Strait of Hormuz. The mines would be difficult to locate, and impossible to defuse if found. No mention of the quantity of mines would be given. The message would continue that only Israel knew the position of the mines and the signal that could defuse them; it would not make the Strait of Hormuz safe for shipping until new borders for Israel were agreed between Syria, Jordan and Egypt. These would be ratified by the signatures of the Governments of every major power in the world and, as security against a future break, all export oil revenues to every Arab country must be paid for a period of ten years, through the Israeli government. Culundis twiddled with his ear. After that, there would be no further demands by the syndicate on General Ephraim. Culundis wondered what kind of rumpus there would be in the Knesset when the Prime Minister learned of what had happened — that, unbeknown to him, the head of the Mossad had invaded and conquered another country and had blockaded the Persian Gulf. Israel would have egg on her face for months while the Prime Minister issued denials — which would not be believed, because of the actual presence of the Israeli sailors in Amnah. Maybe Lasserre was right, he thought. Regardless of what it was now, gold would go straight up through the heavens.