Round after round drowned them in a river of lethal lead, smoke fluting out of the barrel of the Negev. The weapon threatened to overheat in Bald’s hands. He kept firing. The gunmen jerked and spasmed. The LMG worked overtime, smoke forming a thin mist in front of him, clouding his line of sight. Heat came off the barrel in thick waves, blowing back into Bald’s face. Lead particles and dirt filled the air all around him. He didn’t count how many rounds he put down on the five targets. Enough to slot them all in quick succession. Bald saw one guy flop on top of his dead mucker as bullets stitched him. He went on firing. The last guy writhed in agony on the ground and crawled towards him. Screamed something at him in his native tongue. Bald didn’t understand what he said, cared even less. He brassed up the last gunman, sent him on a hot date with Muhammad.

  After what felt like a long time Bald eased his finger off the trigger.

  The gun smoke around him cleared and he had a line of sight down to the bank. The motorboats were a hundred metres from the dhow. If they moved now, he thought, they could get away into the forest before the enemy had a chance to beach and debus. He scuttled down the bank with Priest, racing towards Stegman. A dull ache resonated in his muscles, the stress of combat taking its toll on his body. War. Adrenalin carried you through the heat of it, but once that last round had been discharged the buzz quickly evaporated and you were left feeling all spat out and chewed up. Bald could still hear the roar of the LMG rattling like a tin can in his skull, the blood rushing in his ears. His feet kicked against spent cartridge jackets littering the slope of the bank. He looked down at a sea of gleaming brass.

  At the bottom of the bank Bald set down the Negev. Wisps of smoke still drifted off the barrel. More than half of the link had been fed into the chain. Which meant that he’d expended a hundred rounds on the gunmen. As he approached Stegman a thought flashed through his head. The pirates had committed a lot of resources to the ambush. Ten gunmen on the bank, plus the three motorboats. Assuming the two motorboats waiting to finish them off were each carrying the same number of pirates as the first one, that meant twenty-five men in total. Twenty-five guys seemed a lot of manpower to throw at the job on the off-chance that the Marlowe was carrying something valuable.

  That thought kept niggling at Bald as he drew close to Stegman. The two motorboats were ninety metres away now.

  Have to hurry, he told himself. Get out of here before they have a chance to fuck us up.

  For a couple of seconds Stegman didn’t notice Bald casting a shadow over him. He was busy tending to Eli, wrapping a makeshift tourniquet torn from the dead slave’s shirt around his wounded thigh. Eli was bleeding heavily. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead and he was convulsing with a fever. Tears welled in Stegman’s eyes. His hands worked fast to secure the tourniquet. When he’d finished he clasped his hand tightly around Eli’s and tenderly stroked his face.

  ‘You’ll be OK, my child,’ Stegman said softly, stroking Eli’s cheek. ‘We’ll get you to the camp. You’ll live, I promise.’ Then Stegman took Eli’s hand in both of his and the way he did it made Bald think they were more than just master and slave. There was something sexual about it. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach and screwed up his face in disgust.

  As Stegman lifted his eyes to Bald, his face hardened. ‘You almost killed my son,’ he said quietly.

  ‘He’s still breathing, isn’t he?’ Bald replied with fake sympathy, knowing that Eli had him bang to rights on the Dallas killing. He regretted not killing the slave while he’d had the chance. Swallowing his regret, he nodded at the motorboats steaming downriver towards them.

  ‘What about the cargo?’ Stegman asked. ‘The guns—’

  ‘Lost cause,’ said Bald.

  ‘Shit,’ Stegman muttered. He was silent for a moment. Then he gazed up at Bald. ‘There’s one thing we absolutely must bring with us.’

  Bald glanced at the advancing motorboats, now seventy metres from the dhow. At their current speed the pirates would be landing at the bank in less than thirty seconds. He turned back to Stegman and shook his head.

  ‘There’s no time.’

  ‘We can’t leave it behind. Pretorius will flip out.’

  Bald shrugged like he gave a shit. ‘Not my problem.’

  ‘It will be when Pretorius finds out you’re the one who decided to abandon it.’ Stegman licked his lips. His eyes glowed. ‘You can forget about getting on the team.’

  Bald was burning up inside. Sixty metres between the motorboats and the dhow. ‘I’ll get it. Just tell me where to find it.’

  Stegman grinned. He fished out a key from his pocket, chucked it to Bald. ‘It’s in the main cargo hold. There’s a padlock on the latch. You’ll find it inside.’

  ‘There must be tons of shit in the hold. How will I know what I’m looking for?’

  That grin again. ‘Oh, you’ll know when you see it.’

  Confused, wiped, out of breath and running out of time, Bald turned away from Stegman and indicated the motorboats to Priest. ‘Put down rounds on the pirates. Keep them away from the bank and wait for me here until you displace. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  The AK-47 had a theoretical maximum range of eight hundred metres. Theoretical because in practice its effective range was more like half that. Against a rapidly moving target, Bald figured, Priest would be unlikely to nail any of the gunmen on board the two vessels. The best he could hope for was that his partner would put the brakes on their advance and force them to shuttle farther along the river to attempt a landing – buying Bald valuable seconds to retrieve this damn cargo.

  Now he sprinted towards the Marlowe, wondering what was so important on board the dhow that Stegman refused to leave it behind. He moved quickly, scaling the side of the hull. Priest put down single rounds from his AK-47 on the approaching motorboats as Bald threw open the wooden hatch located midway along the deck and descended the short flight of steps leading down into the cargo hold.

  It was gloomy inside the hold. The air was heavy with the scents of spices mingled with the smell of diesel and fish. The hold was roughly the size of a squash court, the ceiling low enough that Bald had to almost bend double to avoid hitting his head against the wooden beams. Squinting, he glanced around. At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking for.

  Then he saw it.

  In the far corner, a pale object was obscured by the iron bars of a cage. Bald took a step closer to the cage, a finger of cold pushing through him.

  The woman inside the cage had been bound and gagged and stripped half naked. Her silk bra and knickers were smudged with dirt, her eyes wide with terror and her arms and thighs purple with bruises. Bald stopped in front of the cage, rooted to the spot, feeling draining from his head to his toes. Staring at the woman’s face. He had seen her before somewhere. Then he remembered.

  She was the abducted woman he’d seen on the news.

  Twenty-two

  River Jubba, Somalia. 0800 hours.

  The woman in the cage looked up at John Bald and whimpered.

  It was hard to see much in the gloom of the cargo hold. A shaft of sunlight shone down through the open hatch at the opposite end of the hold, revealing vague shapes and smudges of grey and brown amid the speckled dark. Bald’s eyes slowly adjusted. The woman behind the bars of the cage was blonde, blue-eyed and thirtyish. Her hands were tied behind her back with white plasticuffs; her ankles were cuffed too. Her mouth was gagged and her face was all cut up, like someone had used her cheeks for a game of noughts and crosses. The bruises on her arms and legs looked like eggplants. Blood and snot matted her hair. Her left eye was clamped shut and the lid swollen to the size of a walnut shell.

  The woman whimpered again. Remembering the key in his hand, Bald inserted it in the padlock securing the door of the cage and gave it a clockwise twist. The door groaned open. Bald reached in and pulled the rag from the woman’s mouth. It was soaked with saliva. And tears maybe?

  ‘I’m not going back,’ she said, gasping. ‘Please. He’ll kill me, just like he did all the others. No, no, I won’t go back to him.’

  Bald watched her let it all out. Then he said, ‘What’s your name?’

  The woman took a deep breath and closed her eyes. ‘Imogen.’ She popped her eyes open and looked up at Bald with something like fear. ‘He says I’m his favourite, you know.’

  ‘Who?’ said Bald.

  ‘Pretorius, of course.’

  The name went through Bald like a knife. Kurt Pretorius – the rogue PMC chief he and his partner on the op, Jamie Priest, had been sent to kill. They had been attacked by Somali pirates en route from Mombasa to the camp where Pretorius and his militia had based themselves. In the ensuing firefight Bald had beached the dhow they’d been sailing on and ducked into the hold, where he’d discovered Imogen. Now he had to figure out how to escape the surviving pirates, reach Pretorius’s hideout, work his way into his inner circle and secure a place on his PMC team – then slot the bastard before his militia plunged Somalia into chaos.

  Kill Pretorius, and Bald could look forward to a full-time career with the Firm. Fail, and his paymasters would send him down for good. Without the Firm – without his handler, Avery Chance, looking out for him – his future looked as bleak as shares in MySpace.

  ‘Pretorius did this to you?’ Bald said as he ran his eyes over the woman’s purpled lips, the bruises on her cheeks, the clumps of dried blood and dirt in her hair. Ashamed, she turned away.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ said Bald.

  Imogen glanced back at him, curious now. ‘I haven’t seen your face before. At the camp.’ She frowned and edged farther into the cage. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A friend,’ said Bald. And then: ‘What did Pretorius do to you?’

  Imogen hesitated. ‘He made me his wife.’

  ‘That’s why he kidnapped you?’

  It was like she hadn’t heard him. ‘I was his favourite,’ she repeated.

  More than one, Bald thought. Pretorius has multiple wives. A second thought pricked his skull: if this woman had been married, or whatever, to Pretorius, what was she doing in a cage down in the cargo hold? He wanted to hear her story, get the inside track on Pretorius and the goings-on at his camp. But he also knew he had to bug out of the dhow before the remaining pirates landed and overran their position. He stayed put as Imogen went on.

  ‘His men came in the night. To our villa. We were on our honeymoon. They killed my husband, took me to the camp and Pretorius told me I was his new wife.’ The woman’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘He warned me, if I ever tried to run away—’ She looked pleadingly at Bald, her eyes red-rimmed. ‘I can’t go back, you see? He’ll punish me. Like the others.’

  Now he understood why she had been bound and gagged in the cage: she’d tried to escape. Again he thought back to seeing her picture in press and TV reports in Kenya the previous day. At the time he hadn’t paid much attention to the story. He remembered a few scant details: the woman had married a Swiss biochemical industrialist at a ceremony that cost somewhere north of a million. Gunmen had snatched her from the island of Kiwayu, a sliver of white sand a few kilometres off the Kenyan coast: paradise hermetically sealed in on all sides by grinding poverty. The news reports had marked a month since her abduction. The police had no leads, although they’d suspected a cross-border raid by Somali kidnappers.

  But mostly he remembered her face. In the photographs Imogen had the kind of looks that could make a guy dunk in his fists in a bucket of hot tar: a smile that gleamed like Swarovski, hair like Lana Del Rey, lips parted suggestively in the middle, like she was about to blow you a kiss and break your heart.

  The woman in front of Bald was no longer that beauty. Not even close. She had been stripped to her underwear, degraded, humiliated, to the point that every trace of her old life – the one with the gold AmEx and the chauffeur-driven Bentley and the seven-figure wedding – had gone.

  ‘I shouldn’t have tried to run,’ she said bitterly. ‘Foolish of me to think I could ever get away from him.’

  Bald searched for some reply to her pain. ‘How many wives does Pretorius have?’

  ‘A dozen.’ Imogen looked away again. Her entire body seemed to shiver despite the clammy heat of the hold. ‘He keeps us in cages. Feeds us like, like – dogs.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I’ve seen what he does to the others. When they try to escape. He stitches their hands and feet together and buries them alive.’

  Bald’s jaw clenched tight in anger. The more he heard about Pretorius, the more he realized that the guy’s elevator didn’t stop at every floor.

  ‘You say you’re a friend.’ Imogen swallowed painfully and looked Bald hard in the eye. ‘Then help me get out of here.’

  It’s none of your business, the voice at the back of his head told him. Every second he spent here was time wasted. You need to get a move on. Away from the river and the pirates. Imogen saw the cold look in his polished-metal eyes and broke down. Her lips quivered. Tears welled in her open eye.

  ‘Kill me then,’ she said in a cracked voice, straightening her back. ‘Shoot me. But I won’t go back to the camp.’

  Bald knew he should leave. But something stopped him from turning his back on Imogen. A memory stabbing at his mind, constricting his throat. Northern Ireland. Twenty years ago. Avery Chance had been a case officer in MI5 back then. Kidnapped by the Nutting Squad. Stripped naked and tortured in a barn south of the border. Every time he looked at Imogen, he thought about Chance. About how he’d risked everything that night to save her. He’d done some bad stuff in his time. But had he sunk so low he could now walk away from Imogen?

  ‘Kill me,’ she implored. ‘Do it.’

  Bald said nothing.

  ‘Coward,’ she said. ‘You won’t help me. You won’t kill me. What kind of man are you?’

  Bald looked away and scanned the cargo hold. Found what he was looking for lying on the topmost of a low stack of crates next to the cage. A boat knife. He snatched it up and stepped towards Imogen. She instinctively flinched at the sight of the blade and shrank to the back of the cage, shielding her battered face with her swollen hands. She started to scream. Then he squatted down and slid the blade between her ankles, and with a sharp jerk slashed through the plasticuffs.

  Imogen was quiet now.

  ‘Give me your hands,’ said Bald.

  ‘You’re . . . letting me go?’ she asked as he cut through the plastic cord tied around her wrists. She considered her unbound hands with something approaching awe. Bald pointed to the cage door.

  ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Now.’

  Bald clasped his free hand around her wrist, pulled her up and helped her out of the cage. It took practically zero effort. He owned coats that weighed more than Imogen. Perhaps Pretorius had starved her. Or maybe she hadn’t weighed much to begin with. She looked like the kind of woman who spent her days jumping from one celebrity fad diet to the next. He hauled her across the hold and up the wooden steps leading to the main deck. Above her whimpering he could hear the incessant crack of gunfire from beyond the dhow, the waspish drone of motorboat engines in the distance.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Imogen asked. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  The problem with female hostages: they talked.

  ‘Shut up and keep moving,’ he replied, gritting his teeth.

  ‘But you can’t—’

  Bald shoved Imogen up the steps. Her moans pierced the air as she flopped down on the deck. Bald climbed up after her, emerging to an oppressive heat as thick as a wall. Had to be in the mid-forties. An acrid tang of burnt gunpowder hung in the air, coating his skin like a resin and pasting his T-shirt to his back. He blinked sweat out of his eyes and scanned the river. The dhow had beached bow-first, its tall prow jutting out over the river bank and its stern pointing out to the dull, tea-coloured water. Shielding his eyes from the sun, Bald spotted the pirates: two motorboats seventy metres upriver from the dhow, five men to each boat. Bows slicing through the water and churning up long trails of surf, they were circling. They couldn’t venture any closer: Priest was putting down a steady rate of suppressive fire from a clump of rocks three metres along the bank from the dhow. The AK-47 assault rifle looked like a plastic toy in his grip. The sheer size of the guy amazed Bald. Priest was that big, he could have been on show in a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museum. His shoulders looked like lead weights stacked on either end of a barbell. His neck merged into his back, as if someone had screwed his head on too tight. He unloaded another burst at the motorboats. The rounds fell short and slapped violently into the water.

  ‘Hurry, boss,’ Priest called out. ‘Can’t hold them much longer.’

  The pirates returned fire. Priest ducked behind the rocks. Bullets thwacked into the branches of acacia trees a couple of metres to one side of him. Others chopped up the water nearby.

  No time to fuck about. Bald pulled Imogen sharply to her feet and shunted her over the edge of the deck. She let out a cry as she plummeted to the river bank and landed with a light thud. Bald jumped down after her. Spent brass glimmered along the bank like scattered gold. The water around the dhow was stained dark red. The boat itself was studded with bullet holes, the canopy shot through, the fenders severed from their ropes and gently bobbing alongside the hull. Above the dhow, the incline was carpeted with dead pirates.

  Got to breeze out of here, Bald thought. Before the pirates catch up with us.

  ‘Jimmy.’

  With one hand holding Imogen’s wrist, Bald glanced across his other shoulder. A figure stood at his three o’clock. He had the build of a Men’s Health cover model. His crew-cut hair was so blond it appeared to be on the verge of overheating and his biceps threatened to burst out of his shirt. A wad of khat bulged in one side of his mouth like a clenched fist. Harvey Stegman. A former operator in the South African Special Forces, now the 2iC under Kurt Pretorius.