‘That’s where you come in. You’ll lead the frontal assault on the six sangars guarding the airport. We’ll have the element of surprise and overwhelming force.’

  ‘What about getting our guys on the Herc?’

  ‘There are two security guards posted at the front of the terminal building. I’ve arranged for a couple of prostitutes to pay them a visit in the early hours. So Liam and Deet should be able to sneak through security without raising the alarm. Once they’ve given us the all clear, our main force will load onto the Herc. By the time any reinforcements show up, we’ll be long gone.’

  Bald grinned. ‘When do we leave?

  ‘2100 hours. The airport’s a seven-hour drive north of here. I’ll be riding in the lead vehicle with Deet. You’ll follow in the second Dodge. Harvey and Eli will be right behind you. The rest of the team will follow in a train of Hiluxes.’

  ‘What about the kids?’ Priest asked. ‘They’re coming with?’

  Bald detected a slight twitch on the face of the PMC chief. ‘I love my children dearly, but stealth ops aren’t their thing. They’ll stay here and keep the camp secure, look after the prisoners until I send for them. Here.’ Pretorius nodded at the Grouse. ‘Since you like it so much, Jimmy. Keep the bottle.’

  Pretorius stood up, signalling the end of the meeting. Sunlight, bleaching the camp white, blinded the two operators as they passed Deet and exited the hut. The ground was so hot Bald could feel it burning his feet through his boots. In the middle of the village the child soldiers had gathered by the well and were playing a game. Tag. Mama Alice stood to one side of the group, her deep yet lyrical voice rising above their wild shrieks of laughter. Bald watch the underage killers running around in circles, tagging each other, and wondered how much weirder this day could possibly get.

  ‘We’re in the shit, boss,’ said Priest.

  Bald turned to him. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Flying a plane?’ Priest puffed out his cheeks. ‘What are we gonna do when it comes to the op? Soon as I step into the cockpit, we’re rumbled. Pretorius will know we’re not the guys he sent for.’

  ‘We’ll figure something out. Worst-case scenario, you’ll have to wing it.’

  Priest looked at Bald, his dumb eyes wide, jaw slack with disbelief. ‘Pretend to fly a Herc?’

  Bald glanced at him and shrugged. ‘What choice do we have?’

  Priest said nothing to that. He looked away from his partner, scratching his cheek as he frowned at the kids. ‘Why the Comoros, anyway? Why not launch a coup here, or somewhere else on the mainland?’

  ‘Fuck knows, mate. Maybe it’s the easiest target.’

  Priest was about to reply when Eli hobbled over, supported by a wooden crutch. The slave sported a clean dressing on his trauma wound. The Obama shirt was gone and he sported a fresh olive-green T-shirt and faded beige shorts. Some of the colour had returned to his face. He looked a little less shitty. Michael Jackson on a good day.

  ‘You’re still alive,’ Bald said with fake concern. ‘Fucking shame, that.’ He nodded at the crutch. ‘I guess your injury rules you out of the op.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Eli snorted. ‘Where master goes, I go.’ He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening. Then he went on, ‘Besides, you still have to fulfil our deal.’

  Bald laughed. ‘Bollocks. We’re on the team now. You can take your deal and shove it.’

  ‘Perhaps you forgot the arrangement we made on the boat. You agreed to help me escape master, remember? And in return I won’t tell Mr Pretorius that you and your friend’ – he tipped his head towards Priest – ‘killed Vincent Dallas.’

  Bald chewed on the air. Vincent Dallas. He and Priest had battered the guy to death in the toilet of a bar moments before he could reveal Bald’s true identity to Stegman and blow their cover story. But Eli had witnessed the attack. The Scot hated to admit it, but the slave had him by the balls.

  ‘I’ve given this some thought,’ Eli said. ‘And here’s what you’re going to do. I want you to kill master.’

  Bald did a spit-take. ‘No chance.’

  Eli shot him a cold look.

  ‘Once master is dead, I’m a free man.’ He took a step closer to Bald. ‘You’re going to do it or I’ll make sure that Mr Pretorius finds out the truth.’

  ‘Know what’d be easier?’ Bald stepped into Eli’s face. ‘Killing you.’

  ‘Do that,’ Eli replied, holding his gaze, ‘and master will have you thrown off the team.’

  He’d called Bald’s bluff and both men knew it. The slave smiled the kind of thin smile that could slice a watermelon in two. Bald resisted a powerful urge to punch him in the groin.

  He went on: ‘We land on Grande Comore tomorrow morning. I know that Mr Pretorius has ordered master to lead the attack on the radio station. You will both volunteer to go with him. Once you’re alone – you’ll kill him.’

  Then Eli wheeled away and shuffled along the dirt track. Bald watched him go. Blood simmering, the migraine thumping relentlessly away inside his skull. So much for self-medicating. He balled his hands into angry fists. First Pretorius had dropped the pilot bombshell on them. Now Eli was threatening to shaft the mission. He was in the mother of all tight spots, and as the sun beat down on him he figured it was only a matter of time before the op went sideways.

  Twenty-seven

  2058 hours.

  They rolled out of the camp under cover of darkness. Half a dozen vehicles riding in a loose train, the two Dodge Rams out in front followed by four Toyota Hilux rust buckets, paintwork scraped off like the foil on a scratchcard, dirt crusted on the windscreens, soldiers jostling for space on the flatbeds next to the weapons crates, worn tyres churning loose soil and coughing up thick plumes of dust that blazed white in the electric glow of the headlights. Twenty-six guys in total. Enough men to infiltrate an airport and steal a Herc? Maybe, thought Bald as he steered down the mud track leading north-east out of the village. In the bad old days after the fall of Siad Barre, tribal warlords had regularly seized Mogadishu’s airport in order to ‘tax’ the aid shipments landing there. But with the transitional government asserting its control over the city and surrounding area, Bald figured a meatier presence might be waiting for them at the airport. His stomach muscles contracted.

  At 1815 hours the sun had burned itself out on the horizon, its cigar glow replaced by a night sky thick as a river of ash. Now Bald could see only a short distance ahead of him as he steered the Dodge off the mud track and onto the rutted main road. The lead Dodge motored along four metres ahead of him at a steady eighty kilometres per hour, its lights slicing like steel blades through the flat dark. Pretorius and Deet were in the lead Dodge, Stegman and Eli in the Hilux behind Bald. The convoy would ride the main road south for ten kilometres until they hit the town of Jilib. Then travel north and east along the main coastal road for three hundred kilometres. If everything went according to plan, they’d arrive at the airport around 0400 hours.

  Beyond the lead Dodge lay an impenetrable black void which even the quartz sheen of the moon seemed unable to illuminate. Bald fiddled with the air-con unit. Christ, it was hot. And sticky. Dusk had brought respite from the unrelenting glare of the sun, but at night the air had taken on the consistency of melted tar. He’d tried opening the windows but that simply brought a rush of hot air into the cab, making it feel like he was putting his head into a blast furnace. So he gritted his teeth and stuck it out with the feeble a.c. Next to him Priest was sweating like a Brazilian on a Tube train.

  Imogen brooded in the back seat. The only one of Pretorius’s wives to be dragged along for the journey to Grande Comore. Which got Bald thinking. She was the chief’s favourite – she’d said so herself when he rescued her from the dhow, and now Pretorius insisted on taking her on the coup. Had to be a good reason for that. He would have quizzed her, but she was giving Bald the silent treatment and even his famous charm couldn’t break through that icy exterior. She stared blankly out of the window, indifferent to where they were going, not even bothering to acknowledge Bald and Priest. She looked good, though. Or at least better than she had done in the cage. Mama Alice had cleaned her up a bit, made her look presentable. She now wore a shapeless black shawl around her body, with a brightly coloured hijab wrapped about her head. The sight of her breasts lingered in Bald’s memory. In different circumstances, he would definitely have been tempted to have a crack at her.

  He drove with his left hand, swigged from the bottle of Famous Grouse with his right. He’d downed half of it already. Going into an op half-cut ranked as pretty fucking dumb even by his standards, but he consoled himself with the fact that he didn’t have a choice. The migraines were excruciating. Horrific images swirled inside his skull – the child soldiers hacking up the Somali pirates; the kid he’d slotted lying in a pool of his own blood. No matter how much whisky he downed, he couldn’t shift that last mental image. He remembered squeezing the Beretta, the look of mute horror on the kid’s face. Pretorius had done this to him. And yet there was something about the PMC chief that reminded Bald of himself: his fearlessness, his charisma. Pretorius wasn’t afraid to cut down anyone who got in his way, and if he could skim a little cream off the top along the way then, hey. But there was more to it than that, Bald knew. Pretorius had his eye on the grand prize. Money, power, the five-star lifestyle: all the things Bald craved.

  Focus on the mission, he told himself. Killing Pretorius was the reason the Firm had sent him to Kenya in the first place. But slotting the chief had proved impossible so far. The problem was one of timing. At the camp he could have observed Pretorius from afar for a day or two, monitored his routine, worked out the best time to plan his attack and given the guy the double-tap while no one was looking. Job done. But now they were on the move, preparing to enter a combat situation. When things got noisy he would be too busy trying to stay alive to worry about taking down Pretorius. Which meant he’d have to wait until they landed in the Comoros to slot him. And by then it might be too late. The islands might already have fallen into his hands. The Firm would blame Bald, naturally. He’d take the fall, his last shot at a clean break flushed down the toilet.

  So maybe you don’t kill Pretorius, he reasoned. Maybe you go along with it. How much do you owe the Firm anyway? After the way they hung you out to dry?

  Bald tried to put the lid on that voice. He was conflicted. It sounded crazy when he thought about it. When you laid out the promises he’d made to Avery Chance to keep his nose clean and the threat hanging over him from the Firm. But there it was, all the same. The voice had been quiet to begin with. A soft tickle at the back of his mind. With every passing moment in the camp it had grown louder and louder, until it became a deafening pulse between his temples, distinct from the migraines. Is this really what you want? the voice asked. Truthfully, Bald was no longer sure. He had been, once. But not now.

  There was the problem of Eli, too. Didn’t matter if he slotted Pretorius or joined forces with him – if the slave spilled his guts to Stegman, Bald was fucked either way. Part of him wondered whether he ought to be concentrating his efforts on killing Eli rather than Pretorius. A pleasing thought. But at the same time, Eli clung to Stegman like flies to shit, and Bald was up against the same problem he had with Pretorius: how to get the guy alone long enough to send him south.

  All of this weighed heavily on his mind as he drove through the night. He wasn’t aware of how much time had passed but at some point the convoy passed Jilib and steered onto the motorway, or what was left of it. The motorway carried the scars of decades of civil war. Craters swallowed up entire sections of tarmac and the Dodge nosedived then pitched sharply up as they hit a major hole in the road, temporarily jolting Bald out of his drunken stupor. Then Priest’s voice cut through the silence.

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  Bald checked the rear-view mirror. Imogen was sound asleep. ‘Still working on it,’ he replied.

  He was steaming, slurring his words. He was on the Grouse big time. It was the only way to keep the lid on the migraines. He could feel them lurking under the surface. Ready to sink their claws into his cranium the moment he sobered up. He took another hefty swig.

  ‘Boss,’ Priest said after a beat. ‘We have to take him down. Pretorius, I mean. Before we get on that plane. Otherwise the op is dead in the water.’ He pursed his lips. ‘We’re running out of time.’

  ‘That’s going to be tricky.’ Bald stared at the road. At the blackness. Like they were heading into the mouth of a cave. ‘Deet follows him everywhere.’

  Priest considered this. ‘We have to warn Avery, then. Give her the heads-up. What do you think?’

  He waited for an answer. Bald said nothing. The thrum of the engine filled the silence. Priest said, ‘We’re helping someone take over a foreign country. We’ve got to do something.’

  Bald shot his partner an angry glance. ‘We had to toss our BlackBerrys into the water outside Mombasa, remember? We’ve got no way of contacting the Firm. If we get the chance, we call in and give them the int. Until then we stick to the plan. Got it?’

  Uncertainty flickered across Priest’s face for a moment. Then he nodded and looked ahead at the scarred road, apparently happy with the new plan. Bald had just bought himself some time. He still didn’t know what he was going to do. Kill Pretorius and wipe the slate clean with the Firm? Or shake hands with the devil and instigate a coup d’état in some forgotten colonial atoll? He drove in silence, steering through a war zone, alone with his whisky-soaked thoughts, his mind returning to the promise Pretorius had made to him at the camp.

  ‘We pull this one off, Jimmy, we’re going to live like kings.’

  At 0349 hours the K50 Airport slowly disgorged from the horizon, an indigo smudge against the night sky. Four hundred metres due south of it the convoy slowed to fifty per and Bald ran his eyes over the airport. From this distance he could make out a few basic details. The K50 was strictly functional: it made Luton Airport look like a six-star Dubai skyrise. There was a single terminal building, a two-storey, whitewashed concrete block with an aircraft hangar to the left and a radio control tower to the right. A hulking black mass rested on the runway: the Hercules C-130. Its vertical stabilizer jutted out of the dark roots of the earth like a shark’s tail in open water, navigation lights on the wingtips pulsing red and yellow. As they drew nearer, Bald tried to reach deep inside himself and feel bad about nicking a plane that was used to deliver vital aid to a famine-hit people, but honestly, he didn’t feel a thing.

  About three hundred metres from the airport, Bald glanced to his right. Two kilometres due east the crests of waves flashed like knives out on the Indian Ocean, before fizzling out in the enveloping blackness. Impossible to tell where the sea ended and land began. Six metres ahead of Bald, the lead Dodge went dark as Pretorius and Deet suddenly killed the lights and veered off the main road, lurching onto the scrub desert at their nine o’clock. Bald switched off his lights and followed them. So did the four pickups at his six. Imogen stirred as Bald wound the Dodge down to thirty per and lurched across rocky terrain. The soldiers in the pickups to the rear cut out the chatter. The only sound Bald could hear was the soft crackle and pop of the tyres rolling over loose stones. That and the furious rush of blood in his ears.

  You’re here now, John. What’s it going to be? Pretorius, or the money?

  Pretorius and Deet came to a halt two hundred metres due west of the airport. Bald stopped a couple of metres behind their pickup. Priest looked at him and said, ‘What now?’

  ‘Now we go to work.’

  The operators debussed. Priest helped Imogen out. The Toyotas stopped in a rough semicircle around the two Dodges. Soldiers hopped off the flatbeds. Drivers climbed out of the cabs and stretched their stiff legs. Bald sucked in a lungful of toasted air. Better. He’d laid off the booze for the last stretch of the journey, pulled himself back from the brink. Adrenalin had done the rest of the work, sobering him up and squashing the migraines. Now he was ready. He looked at his watch.

  0353 hours.

  Almost time.

  Everyone automatically entered silent mode. Stegman lugged two black gym bags out of his Hilux and dumped them at his feet. Wiping sweat from his brow, Bald leaned in for a closer look as Stegman unzipped the first bag to reveal a pile of Vertex EVX-530 two-way digital radios nestled inside. He began distributing them to the guys on the team. Each walkie-talkie came with a tactical headset equipped with soft-hook earpieces designed to pick up the slightest transmission and boom microphones attached to the lapel clips. Bald clipped his radio to the waistband of his combats and connected his earpiece to the handset.

  ‘The comms packs are pre-tuned to the same VHF frequency,’ Stegman said quietly to the group. ‘Stay in contact at all times, but keep chatter to an absolute minimum.’

  He unzipped the second bag and dug out some xGen Pro Digital Night Vision monoculars, which he handed to Pretorius and Deet.

  Now Pretorius spoke. ‘This is the last time I’ll run through the plan, so listen hard. Right now, the guards are having some fun time with the local talent. With the guards distracted, Liam and Deet will be able to enter the main terminal and reach the Herc without being detected, then once aboard run the pre-flight checks.’ A thought occurred to Pretorius and he turned to Priest. ‘How long do you need?’

  Priest gulped loudly. ‘Uh, I’m guessing, thirty, maybe thirty-five—’

  Deet cut in. ‘We’ve got to check the three main tank boost pumps on the fuel system, the APU bleed air leak, electrical systems, the brakes and nose-wheel steering systems. Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, max.’

  ‘You’ve got fifteen. Whatever corners you can cut, do it.’

  Deet nodded and glared at Priest. They set off in the direction of the terminal building, Priest glancing back helplessly at Bald. Fuck that prick, Bald thought. If he was found out, the guy was on his own. Bald would deny knowing anything about the guy. He watched his partner go, maybe for the last time. The two men shrank to the size of insects and quickly melted into the darkness.