Voodoo Dawn Read online

  Voodoo Dawn

  Greg Barron

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  Cover

  Title Page

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  About the Author

  Copyright

  0500

  Deep in the silence before dawn, Peter Holt-Bennett sits up on the double berth, still warm from the quilt and Victoria’s body. He takes a moment to savour her sleeping form. She is twelve years younger than him, and beautiful.

  Dressing in the dark, then ducking down the steps into the portside hull, Peter looks in on Tasman in his berth. The four-year-old, tangled blonde hair spread on the pillow, is fast asleep, his sun-browned chest rising and falling with each breath.

  Turning away, Peter thinks he can hear a mosquito, but then the sound grows louder, one or more outboard motors in the distance, an angry snarl over the gentle wash of water against the hull.

  He climbs the companionway to the main cabin, past the galley then into the open cockpit. The moon hangs high over the black rocky peaks of the nearby island of Tinhosa Grande, off the coast of Equatorial Guinea.

  For two years Clover, a fifty-three foot catamaran, has been their home. Peter found early success in the world of business, and has achieved his dream of sailing the world at the age of forty-five. To do so with his wife and son gilds the perfection of this dream come true.

  The noise, he discovers, comes from the east. More than one outboard, buzzing discordantly together like bees. Peter reaches back inside the door and switches off the masthead anchor light. No point advertising their position. Still calm, he walks around the side decks to the bow, where the anchor chain runs taut down to the sea bed, the SARCA anchor gripping deep in the coral and kelp.

  Now, finally, he can see the boats, dark shadows in the silver shards of moonlight on the water. Three launches heading this way. Peter feels the prickle of unease. Clover is a long way from the coast, they should be safe here, but word on the cruising grapevine is that coastal pirates have been using mother ships to extend their range far offshore.

  Surely that’s further north, off the Niger Delta, not here …

  Making his way aft, then inside, he parts the curtains to where Victoria is still sleeping. One hand on her shoulder, he wakes her gently. Her blue eyes fly open, startled, then relax. He runs the knuckles of his first two fingers along the perfect line of her jaw, below her ear, to where the soft hair begins.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Some boats are coming our way. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, but you should get dressed.’

  ‘Should I get Tas up?’

  ‘Not yet. Wait and see.’

  ‘You don’t think …’

  His hand falls to the warm skin of her shoulder. ‘No. It’s probably just fishermen.’ Even now his eyes can’t resist looking at the swell of her breasts and perfect curve of her hips in the half darkness as she throws the sheet off. He turns away reluctantly, heading back on deck, wishing he could have pushed her gently back on the bed and made love to her as the sun rises.

  The thought soon leaves his mind. The launches have come up faster than he expected, one ahead of the others. They must have seen Clover’s mast, and are making directly for her. Peter tries to think of what to say to them. Then he sees the guns, with black banana-shaped magazines. Scratched and worn wooden stocks.

  The lead boat cuts the motor, drifts in closer. A filthy GRP launch, cracked right through in places, repaired with blue smears of raw fibreglass. The engine is an ancient Chrysler, a cloud of smoke chugging from below the sun-pitted white cowling.

  ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ Peter shouts.

  The answer is a burst of gunfire into the rigging, bullets striking stays and spars. Then comes the thump of the smaller boat’s bow into Clover’s stern. A man stands and shouts an order. His face is covered with a grey balaclava, with slits for eyes and lips.

  Peter turns and dives into the cabin. ‘Victoria, get down. Now.’

  Before they left Portsmouth, a state-of-the-art tracking and surveillance system was installed. Hidden behind a recess on the switchboard is a ‘panic button,’ activating a position-finding system linked to not only a British security company but the UK Maritime and Coastal Agency in Falmouth. Using an Immarsat Satellite cloud-based tracking system, the unit is designed to geofence and track the vessel. In addition, the switch activates three mini-dome low-light camera/microphones in the ceiling, all streaming audio and video back to the UK in real time.

  Peter lunges for the hidden switch out of sight above the Radar Target Enhancer unit, pushes it up, then meets Victoria coming the other way.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know. Go back. Go back.’

  The sound of shouting, heavy feet on deck. The door crashes open, admitting a line of men with assault rifles, all bony limbs and anger. Nervous sweat fills the cabin. Rifle barrels converge.

  ‘Down, down,’ someone shouts, and Peter starts to comply, but Victoria breaks away and he knows she’s going for Tas.

  ‘Do what they say,’ he calls, ‘or they’ll fucking shoot us.’

  Two men, with hunting-dog strides, go after Victoria, dragging her back, holding her around the belly while her arms and legs flail. Somebody hits her face and she falls to her knees beside Peter. Straddled by sweating men, her wrists are bound with plastic cable ties.

  Peter turns to Victoria, his face squashed by pressure against the floor. Blood dribbles from one nostril. ‘Just do everything they say. Maybe they’ll leave us alone if we don’t cause any trouble.’

  Someone switches on the interior LEDs. Peter lifts his face and sees them ransacking the cupboards and refrigerator. The attackers are all prison-camp thin. Shoving food into their mouths, opening bottles, smashing radios, turning on the TV, finding Sky channel football. Manchester City v Leeds. One singles out the Radar Target Enhancer, another takes down the EPIRB and crushes it in the sink under repeated blows from a tin coffee mug.

  One of the gunmen comes back through the passage, laughing, holding a screaming Tasman in his raised arms.

  Victoria tries to get up again. One of the men bunches a fist and brings the base of it down like a hammer on the top of her head, then he goes back to spooning last night’s spaghetti into his mouth, bolognaise sauce spilling from his lips.

  Peter stares. The man’s front incisors have been sharpened with a file so they resemble those of a shark. Around his neck is a necklace of white cord. Strung on it, hanging on his chest, are dried, blackened human ears.

  0900

  The ops room of the Royal Navy amphibious transport, HMS Albion, is cramped but eminently workable. The radar operators, each wearing a pair of white headphones, sit intently in front of their screens, fingers on keypads. The sub-lieutenant leads Marika Hartmann to a briefing area, dominated by a huge AMOLED screen, split into two. One half shows a map of the Gulf of Guinea, and the other appears to be CCTV footage of the deck and interior of a yacht.

  The captain, greeting Marika with a handshake, is a shortish man in dark blue trousers, white shirt and tie, a uniform known in the Royal Navy as ‘3As.’ His thick, muscled neck resembles a tanned concertina. His eyes are direct but expressionless. ‘Thanks for coming straight in. I heard good things about your work in Ghana.’

  ‘Thanks, the crew got a lot out of it too.’ For five days Marika and four other members of the 2CG team facilitated and participated in on-water training near the Ghanian Navy’s Western Command base at Sekondi-Takoradi. The Merlin chopper that brought them back to the ship had barely touched the flight deck before she was ushered down here. ‘What’s up?’

  The captain takes a stool and calls sharply to another man. Marika recognises the ship’s Intelligence Officer, a young Irish
man called Trevor Adams.

  ‘Trev, can you do the briefing on this?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ he says, then raises a black-lashed eyelid in Marika’s direction. ‘I hope you got some sleep last night—you’re going to be busy.’ He uses a wireless remote to change the screen to a single frame. A satellite view of a yacht—a catamaran anchored near a rugged and stony island.

  ‘This is Clover, a UK-registered yacht, fifty-three feet in length. This shot was taken by the new US NROL-65 satellite. Four hours ago Clover was approached by three motor launches and boarded by thirteen armed men. We know all this because she has state-of-the-art surveillance and tracking equipment, including CCTV.’

  ‘The GOST system?’

  ‘Similar kind of thing, but better integrated.’

  ‘Who owns the yacht?’

  ‘A London man, Peter Holt-Bennett. Business entrepreneur—music industry from what I understand.’

  ‘Any ransom demand?’

  ‘Not yet, but it’ll come.’

  ‘Thirteen hostiles,’ Marika muses, ‘that’s a tough gig for a target like that. I can see at least two RPGs out on the rail so we can expect the full range of light arms.’

  The SITPOL screen changes, showing a close up of a beautiful young woman, a year or two Marika’s junior. ‘This is Victoria Dalby. Former model, apparently. They also have a four-year-old son on board.’

  ‘Do we have IDs on the perpetrators yet?’

  ‘Nothing that’s filtered back to us, yet, but as you know, the Gulf of Guinea is worse than the Horn of Africa these days—poverty stricken fishermen are joining pirate gangs—the situation is exploding. We’ve been in touch with Tom Mossel, your boss. He’s happy to have you and your team attached to the ship’s command structure until this is resolved—there’s no one else remotely close enough to do anything about it. We’re steaming south towards the target at maximum cruise speed. We’ll be in range with the ship’s RIBS late this afternoon in time for an insertion after dark if we are authorised to do so.’

  Marika thinks for a moment. Her team have trained at hot insertions using Rigid Inflatable Boats. They are certainly capable of carrying out the mission.

  ‘OK. We’re on it. I’ll bring you a workable plan in an hour or two.’

  1100

  The thought of floating around the world with Peter had, at first, seemed idyllic. Coral islands surrounded by turquoise water and warmed by a languorous sun. Images to push away the memories of a lifetime of cold London winters.

  Being city bred, however, Victoria had no way of knowing the downside. Stuffy nights under sweat-sodden sheets. The air so thick with midges and mosquitoes that it was suicidal to go on deck. Bites that erupt into red sores that last a week. A grimy coating of salt-sweat that made it impossible to ever feel truly clean.

  Before those first shakedown voyages she hadn’t known how it felt to sail wildly downwind at twenty knots, plunging and rolling, or to thump under power into a head sea. She didn’t know what it was like to live with seasickness that never really went away, not even in the calm of a tropical anchorage.

  Endless days of confinement. Occasional internet contact with friends, but no shopping trips, or coffee shops; no change rooms or flirting with male photographers at fashion shoots. Just occasionally rafting up with other yachties—visiting other confined little cabins to tell stories and drink wine.

  Victoria has come to understand how ancient mariners worshipped the sea as a god. The Norse Aegir; Greek Poseidon; and Roman Neptune. The sea does indeed have moods, sometimes irrational ones. She and Peter talk of little else but swell, chop, wind and colour—the deep blue of the Benguela current, compared to the pale green of the sand cays of the West Indies, or the stirred up soups of mainland inshore waters. The sea rules their lives like a god, factored into the routine and plan for every day.

  Over two years she has learned that while Peter is indeed urbane and calm, he is also utterly self absorbed. He worships her body, yet his interest in her desires, thoughts and opinions is negligible. When she talks, he appears not to listen, nor even answer, often just carrying on with his own opinions as if she never said a word.

  Tasman, of course, she loves with a mother’s pure fervour. At four years old, he is unafraid of the sea and the night. At home in the ocean wilderness. No terror, only delight, running from fore to aft on tanned, broad feet.

  Now, however, this life she hates has taken another terrible turn. She sits at the dinette table, cable ties on her wrists, watching the hijackers ransack the kitchen, breaking open cupboards, eating everything they can find. Drinking an eighteen-year-old Lephroaig Scotch Whisky from the bottle, precious drops spilling down chins and to the floor.

  Tasman sits between her and Peter, silent and shaking. Victoria kisses his golden hair while Peter says nothing. Together they watch the systematic destruction of the galley. Every hiding place. Every drawer.

  Someone finds the housekeeping money. They pour the tin out on the bench and squabble over the many coins and few notes, in five different currencies. The man with the sharpened teeth frightens her, taking up station in the kitchen, ignoring the money. Beside him is a shorter man, with a veil of cowrie shells hiding his eyes, ritual scars down the side of his neck and the backs of his hands.

  The obvious leader of the group wears a grey balaclava and gloves. He comes in once or twice, but during those first hours he is busy on deck, then below, supervising the carrying of three cardboard cartons down there, shouting unintelligible, angry words.

  Finally he cracks a Coke from the eutectic fridge and sits down opposite them at the dinette. The eyes in their woollen slits scan over them. Victoria holds Tasman tighter in the crook of her arm, so tightly that he protests, and wriggles from her grip.

  Peter speaks at last, his voice high and thin, weak even to Victoria’s ears. ‘I insist that you leave this vessel immediately. This is an act of piracy.’

  The man with the hidden face slips a handgun from a holster at his waist and points it at Peter, the butt resting on the table. ‘Well I insist that you shut your mouth, and I have a gun. You are whores of the capitalist world, and now we will take back what we are owed.’

  One of the gunmen walks up from below, shouting with excitement. He tears at a package in his hands, fifty dollar bills falling to the floor and the others running for him, grasping for their share.

  Victoria knows that they have found the hidden compartment with their passports and cash. She prays silently. Please let that be enough for them …

  1120

  Within thirty minutes of the hijacking, the UK Maritime and Coastguard agency in Falmouth has informed the Department of Defence, the Home Office and the FCO that a ‘violent apprehension of a UK vessel has occurred in foreign waters’, and that British lives are in jeopardy.

  Acting on this information, the Home Secretary invokes the CONTEST strategy. Loosely defined as Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare, in this case there are twin responses. One is opening contact and initiating negotiation, the other is exploring the possibility of using lethal force to end the hostage situation.

  Police officers contact the hostages’ families and friends. Home Office staff liaise with Peter Holt-Bennett’s legal representative and business partner, Lloyd Collier, principal of a boutique firm of solicitors in St Albans.

  Telephone numbers for all parties are routed to a single telephone line in a nondescript room tucked away in the Home Office’s Marsham Street facility. On the desk is a telecommunications-ready laptop computer attached to a Plantronics headset system. Behind it sits a cut-glass vase holding a single red tulip.

  Marjory Parker, the designated negotiator, purchased the flower on her way through Chelsea that morning. Most of the time, a flower on the desk is enough to remind her that, whatever is going on down that telephone line, the world is still a beautiful place.

  After ten years in this line of work, cutting her teeth in domestic brawls and sieges for the Metropolitan Polic
e, Marjory is a highly regarded member of her profession. She fills in the time between emergencies running official training courses for British law enforcement and defence agencies.

  The satellite telephone number for the yacht is the only known point of contact. It is also the source of a call nine minutes earlier from Peter Holt-Bennett to Lloyd Collier, who answered under supervision. The call was a plea for money, and established, beyond doubt, that the yacht and its crew are in jeopardy.

  Marjory brings up the number on the screen in front of her. She dials, and it rings more than a dozen times before someone picks it up.

  The voice of the man in the balaclava, recorded since the hijack, is already undergoing analysis by experts. African-English dialect varies widely between regions and countries. This man uses elements of Nigerian naija slang, Swahili from the east coast, and South African funakalo.

  This wide-ranging vocabulary, along with an unusual diction, does not fit the pattern of the uneducated fishermen who make up the pirate fleets of West Africa, nor even a widely travelled black drifter. There is something else—a strong Afrikaner influence, that has the analysts still replaying the tapes and studying sound-wave patterns.

  ‘Who this?’

  ‘My name’s Marjory. I’m a negotiator appointed by the British Home Secretary.’

  ‘Sawa. About time. One warning. You make trouble with me and my men start shooting, OK?’

  ‘I am formally requesting that you release your hostages unharmed and leave the yacht. No attempt will be made to—’

  ‘Five million dollars. Unmarked bills.’

  Marjory does not comment on the amount. It’s about what they expected. ‘I have to warn you that Her Majesty’s Government does not pay ransoms or enter into deals with terrorists. Private parties sometimes do, but they require months to raise large sums of money—and your demand is certainly large. No one has five million dollars in cash sitting around—property has to be sold. Be realistic.’

  ‘Eight hours from now, just after dark tonight. Five million dollars. You get it in a waterproof package, airdropped from less than five hundred feet right here. No more trouble. If it don’t happen that way, the hostages die. Sawa?’