Solo (29 page)

It was the crackle of a walkie-talkie that alerted him, rather than a torch beam. Then he saw the torch, playing among the trees. He heard the man’s voice.

‘Dawie – can’t see a thing, man. You sure he’s in the park? Over.’

There was the inaudible static of a reply.

Dawie, Bond thought: interesting. Some of Kobus’s RLI buddies from Dahum.

The man drew closer but he never heard Bond, who, as he passed, brought down the heel of his Beretta on the back of his head. He dropped at once, inert. Bond quickly lashed his hands behind his back and then tied his wrists to his ankles, using the switchblade to cut lengths of nylon rope. He ripped up a clod of earth and stuffed the man’s gaping mouth with turf. Then he fired his gun once into the air. He picked up the walkie-talkie, shouted ‘Dawie!’ fired again and switched it off.

Bond could hear somebody blundering through the bushes then saw a swaying torch beam sweeping through the trees. The man – it must have been Dawie – was shouting harshly into his walkie-talkie trying to summon the third guard to join them.

‘Henrick – over here, man,’ he shouted. ‘We’re by the west gate.’

Bond aimed slightly above the torch beam and fired twice. He heard a scream and saw the torch spin to the ground. Dawie started bellowing.

‘I’m down! I’m down! He’s over here!’

Bond crept forward as Dawie continued his shouted instructions, guiding Henrick towards him. Then he saw Henrick’s jerky torch beam as he ran through the trees.

Bond took his time, making sure he advanced in total silence. Dawie was moaning in pain and Henrick was crouched over his writhing body, looking for the wound. Bond took his nickel-and-dime cosh out of his pocket and slugged Henrick full on the crown of his head. He went down like a cow hit by a humane killer. He was so still Bond wondered if he’d delivered some kind of fatal blow. He held his fingers to his throat. There was a pulse – a thready one.

‘I’m dying. Help me,’ Dawie said. Bond turned Dawie’s fallen torch on him and saw that he’d been hit low and to the side of his abdomen – not fatal, though he was already pallid from blood loss. Bond said nothing, grabbing his collar and dragging him – groaning – to a tree, where he bound his arms behind it. He checked Henrick again – still breathing but out cold. He roped his wrists together and turned him on his side so that he wouldn’t drown if he vomited. He fired both their guns into the air a few times then slung them away into the darkness. He wanted whoever was still in the house to think the guards were engaged in a firefight in the furthest reaches of the park. When it all went quiet they would begin to worry – maybe panic: they had no idea how many potential assailants were out there.

He took one last look at Dawie and picked up his walkie-talkie.

‘I got him!’ Bond yelled into the microphone. Then switched it off.

‘If you shout loud enough someone will come for you,’ Bond said to Dawie. He knew it wasn’t true – he just wanted a few distant incoherent bellowings to be heard back at the house.

‘Don’t leave me, man,’ Dawie said plaintively, then added with surprising poetry, ‘I can feel my life flowing out of me, leaving me. I can feel it.’

Bond said nothing and headed off towards the house.

Some of the ground-floor windows were lit up, others had their curtains drawn, Bond observed as he approached. Through a gap in the curtains of the large oriel window of the main drawing room Bond saw Kobus Breed – his jacket off, his tie loosened at his throat – talking urgently on the phone. From time to time he broke off to shout into the walkie-talkie then hurled it away – obviously the lack of response from Dawie’s channel was making him furious.

Bond paused outside – he didn’t want to go into the house as he had no idea who else might be in there. Better to try and lure Breed outside into the darkness. Then he decided it might be a more efficient plan to climb and maybe break in on a higher floor and he began hauling himself quickly up one of the heavy lead downpipes that drained the roof gutters. In a few seconds he found himself up on the faux battlements with their Gothic buttresses, polygonal chimney pots and profusion of carved stone finials. Bond’s mind was working fast – sensing opportunities, weighing up options, minimising risk. He headed for a dark window and accidently bumped into one of the finials decorating a stumpy brick chimney stack. He felt the masonry slide and grate and the round stone ball on the top almost wobbled free. Bond steadied it. It was about the size of a medicine ball and must have weighed close to fifty pounds. He smiled to himself – he had an idea.

He removed Dawie’s walkie-talkie from his pocket and switched it on. He turned the channel frequency selection knob very slightly to one side so that it kept connecting and then cutting out. Through gritted teeth and strangulating his voice he repeated certain phrases into the microphone.

‘Come in – over – Bond – I have him – come in, come in – not receiving – Bond, repeat Bond, I have him, over.’

He assumed this garbled message would be picked up by Breed and others listening in. Then he searched his pockets for loose change in vain, before he remembered he was carrying a sock full of nickels and dimes. He unpicked the knot and helped himself to a small handful. He crept round the battlements until he had a good angle on to the drawing room’s oriel window. He leaned out and flung the small coins down at the glass and heard them rattle and ping as they hit. Then he threw another handful. He raced back to the finial he had nearly dislodged and, with both arms functioning as a cradle, heaved off the crowning stone ball. It was a dense dead weight, incredibly heavy. He shuffled with it to the edge of the battlements that projected out over the wide door that led from the drawing room to the lawn. Come on, Kobus, he said to himself, muscles straining – you must be curious, Bond is out there, Dawie has him.

The door opened slowly and a wand of light from the drawing room fell across the lawn.

Kobus Breed stepped out cautiously, a gun levelled in his hand.

‘Dawie?’ he shouted into the blackness. ‘Where the hell are you, man? You’re not coming through on your radio! You keep breaking up!’

Bond looked down on him, his muscles beginning to ache horribly. Breed’s head was a small target from this height – but he wanted to crush it like a ripe cantaloupe melon.

Breed stepped out another yard, his gun sweeping to and fro, expecting the danger to lie in the park beyond, not from above.

‘Dawie – show yourself! Have you got him?’

Bond dropped the stone ball and took a step back. He heard the impact – the sound of meaty crunching, bone and flesh compacting – and Breed’s bellow of acute, hideous agony and surprise.

He peered down. Breed was on the ground, writhing and moaning, his right arm flapping uncontrollably like some broken wing on a bird. The ball had missed his head but seemed to have landed square on his right shoulder, shattering bone, pulverising it.

Bond slid down the drainpipe and, back on the ground, cautiously approached round the side of the building, slipping his Beretta from his pocket. He should just kill him, he thought, but he wanted Breed to know why he was dying, why his pain and imminent execution were recompense for what he’d done to Blessing. There’d be no point in just blowing him away. Bond wanted to taste sweet revenge.

Bond levelled his gun as he drew near. Breed was face down – the stone ball beside his head – and was clearly in massive, intolerable pain and shock. His whole body was now jerking and twitching spasmodically. The stone ball’s impact looked like it had shattered the shoulder blade – and the collarbone. The down-force of the dead weight had also blasted the humerus into pieces. Three inches of thick sheared bone stuck through Breed’s shirt at the elbow.

Bond turned Breed over with his foot. Breed screamed as his shattered arm dug into the turf of the lawn. But in the good hand that had been underneath his body he had clung on to his automatic pistol. He fired at Bond and missed – his hand was shaking visibly – and fired again, this time the bullet striking Bond’s gun and spinning it off and away in a shower of sparks. Bond threw himself down, knees first, on to Breed’s chest and felt ribs crack and his sternum bend. He side-kicked Breed’s gun from his hand and rummaged in his jacket pocket for the switchblade. No switchblade but the small aerosol can of Savage Heat pepper spray.

Bond sprayed Breed’s un-closable open eye with a thick mist of oleoresin capsicum and heard his scream rip up from deep in his lungs. Breed’s right arm was useless so Bond stood on his left and let him writhe in the full torment of his pain, his legs kicking convulsively, the potent reduction of chilli peppers working on his seething eyeball. Breed wailed like a baby and Bond happily enveloped his head in another mist-cloud of Savage Heat.

‘This is for Blessing, you filth, you scum,’ he said, harshly, bending over him, ‘and this is from me,’ and sprayed his open eye again from a range of one inch.

Bond reached into his other pocket for the switchblade. He shot the blade out and tugged Breed brutally over on to his front again, burying the knife deep in the back of his neck, severing the spinal cord. Breed’s body jerked and then went slack, his screams dying to a burble of popping saliva in his throat.

Bond stepped back, breathing heavily, a little astonished at his own savagery. He massaged his tingling right hand and reminded himself of what Blessing had gone through – no tender mercies from Kobus Breed. He was angry with himself, however: never again, he thought – execute when the moment presents itself. Emotion – desire for just revenge – had undermined his professionalism, and had almost killed him. If you intend to kill – kill. Don’t hang around wanting to embellish the act in some way. He could hear Corporal Dave Tozer’s harsh voice in his ear: ‘DR, you stupid bastard. Disproportionate Response. Any threat – massive overkill. If he spits at you – tear his throat out. If he kicks you in the shin, take his leg off. Take both legs off.’

Bond began to calm. He looked down at Breed’s body – a mugger’s switchblade sticking out of the back of his neck. He could be carted away later. The fact that no one had appeared from the house when the shots were fired was a good sign. Bond roved around and found his gun. Breed’s second round had hit just in front of the trigger, scarring the metal with a raw weal. He cocked the gun, shot the clip out, slammed it back in. It seemed to be working fine.

He took off his balaclava and wiped the smear of sweat from his face. He pushed through the garden door into the drawing room and began to move quickly and watchfully through the public rooms: a library, a smaller sitting room then down a parqueted corridor towards the main hall with its wide solid staircase. Every now and then Bond paused and listened – but he could hear nothing that suggested there was anyone else in the house.

A pair of modern swing doors led off the hall behind the staircase. Bond pushed them open and saw that here the decor changed completely. Another wide corridor stretched before him, painted pistachio green with white rubberised tiles on the floor. It looked like a hospital and from behind closed doors – inset with panels of glass – came the hum of machinery. Bond peered into one room – incubators, centrifuges, sterilisers, freezers. Another room was fitted out like a ward with four beds and a nurse’s station. Other doors were labelled ‘X-ray’ and ‘Dispensary’. There was an office with the name ‘Dr Masind’ on it – a name that seemed vaguely familiar. This was clearly the state-of-the-art receiving clinic for the children from the AfricaKIN flights.

Bond kept listening and kept hearing nothing that alarmed him. He wondered where Gabriel Adeka was – upstairs? Perhaps he should turn back and explore the upper floors. Then he arrived at the end of the long corridor. To the left was a door and to the right a flight of stone stairs that led down to a basement or cellar area. He pushed open the door to find himself in a kind of schoolroom with two rows of desks facing a blackboard. On the floor in front of the blackboard was a pile of what looked like discarded clothing. Bond switched on the light to see that it wasn’t clothing but little rucksacks – the rucksacks the kids had been wearing when they disembarked. Bond picked one up – its bottom had been ripped out. He picked up another similarly torn open. All the rucksacks appeared to have been cut apart.

He turned to switch out the light and saw another rucksack intact on a side table. Beside the rucksack was a Stanley knife. And beside it was a neat stack of what looked like slabs of putty, wrapped in cellophane. Bond picked one up – eight inches long, four wide, one inch thick – about 500 grams, he reckoned. This must have been what Breed was occupied with when Turnbull McHarg had tooted his horn and Bond had shot the arc lights out. Bond picked up the knife and cut away the bottom of the rucksack to reveal in the lining another slab of what he now realised was raw heroin moulded into a flat bar, the size of half a brick. Twelve sick kids, twelve little rucksacks, six kilos of heroin. Who was going to search a malnourished child shivering with fever? Or an eight-year-old amputee? As drug-smuggling went it was heartless, brutal, simple and extremely effective. Each AfricaKIN flight must have its quota of—

Bond heard something – a cough.

He froze, then switched off the light and stepped back into the corridor. He heard the cough again, coming from down the stairs in the basement – lung-racking and feeble. Was there a child down there, Bond wondered? Some sort of isolation ward for the extremely contagious?

He levelled his gun and began to move carefully down the stairs. There was a night light set in the ceiling that gave off a pale pearly glow revealing a wide landing with two doors off it. The cough came again. No child – an adult, Bond thought. There was a key in the lock of the door behind which the coughing continued. He put his ear to the door and heard the sound of laboured breathing. Bond turned the key and then the handle, and shoved it gently open, his gun pointing into the room. The landing light provided enough illumination for Bond to see that there was a man lying on a mattress in the far corner. He groped for a switch, found it and clicked on the light.