Recoil Page 8

As I walked up the concrete ramp that had replaced the front steps, I rehearsed what to say. I hadn’t called to let him know I was coming. I was probably the last man on earth Crazy Dave wanted to see and I didn’t want the fucker wheeling it for the hills.

  At the same time, I knew from my last visit that his office was a fortress. He could drop the firearms-standard shutters and that would be that. I could pretend to be a delivery man, but he might tell me to leave it on the doorstep. Or I could say I was one of the guys from the camp, but nobody would come here without an appointment.

  The decision was made for me. There was a camera in the porch, new since my last visit. No point bluffing. I pressed the buzzer. ‘Dave, mate. It’s Nick Stone. Just passing, thought I’d say hi.’

  There was no reply but the door buzzed open. I walked inside. Nothing had changed. There was still a stairlift parked at the bottom of the stairs, and at the top, enough climbing frames for Dave to move about on to keep a whole troop of baboons happy. The only thing different was a few framed pictures on the wall, of a girl in her twenties with Dave’s big bulbous nose. She was holding a baby, who luckily took after its dad.

  I walked into a no-frills living room. Laminate flooring, three-piece suite, a large TV and that was about it. The rest was open space so he could rattle about in his wheelchair.

  French windows opened on to the garden, accessed via another ramp. I followed a narrow path of B&Q fake Cotswold stone that led up to a pair of doors set into a wall. The garage had been converted into an office. There was a stud wall where the up-and-over door had once been, and no windows.

  Crazy Dave was waiting for me behind his desk. Balding, with a moustache like a seventies porn star, the only thing about him that had changed was the expression on his face. Last time I was there he was all smiles. Now he looked tense. Just here to say hi, my arse. He knew there’d be more to it than that, but couldn’t fight his basic greed. I might be here with a million-dollar contract, or a caseful of Iraqi oil bonds with no idea how to sell them on.

  9

  On the desk in front of him, next to a telephone and an open laptop, sat the two most important assets his business possessed: a pair of small plastic boxes stuffed with index cards containing the names and details of more than a hundred former members of special forces. No wonder the garage had drop-down steel shutters and weapons-grade security: to people wanting to know which companies were doing which jobs, those cards would have been worth more than a containership full of RPGs.

  I closed the door behind me. ‘All right, mate? Want a brew?’ I kept my tone light and happy, but he knew as well as I did that I wasn’t here for tea and a KitKat.

  The little table with the brew kit was still against the opposite wall. I even recognized the Smarties and Thunderbirds mugs that would have come with an Easter egg.

  He shook his head while I went to test the weight of the kettle.

  ‘OK, Dave, let’s crack on.’ I flicked the switch and stopped playing Mr Nice. ‘By the time I get to Heathrow this evening I want a ticket to DRC and a contact in-country who’ll get me to Ituri province and a fucked-up village called Nuka.’

  Crazy Dave’s face didn’t even twitch. He just stared. If he’d been able to move his legs I was sure he’d have put them up on his desk, sat back and chuckled.

  ‘Write the name down, Dave. N-U-K-A. I need to be there as of yesterday.’

  He still didn’t move.

  ‘There are two reasons why you need to pull your finger out and get on with it. One, it’ll stop me putting the word around about how you tear the arse out of the commission so much you make more money on every job than the fuckers in the field. They wouldn’t be impressed with you, would they? They’d probably take you out of here and give that chair of yours a bit of a roll down the hill, know what I mean?

  ‘Two. What are the companies going to say when they discover you don’t even check that guys like Charlie have all their pistons working? Sending out cripples isn’t the finest quality control, is it? I mean, if word got out, you wouldn’t be left with much to broker, would you? And these are good times, aren’t they?’

  I leaned against the wall. ‘By the way, is that your grandkid on the wall in the hallway there?’

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  The kettle clicked and I threw a teabag into the Smarties mug. ‘But that’s not to say I ain’t going to bubble you anyway, one day. Charlie shouldn’t have been on that job in the first place. He wasn’t physically capable, and you ripped him off. How much was it?’ I put the kettle down and picked up a Tetrapak of UHT milk. ‘Oh, yeah, I remember. You gave Charlie two hundred grand and kept three hundred yourself. Wasn’t that how it went?’

  I looked at Dave. He wasn’t embarrassed, he was angry. He was fuming. His hands gripped the sides of his wheelchair so tightly his knuckles were white.

  I squeezed the teabag with a spoon. ‘Just think, Dave, if you’d got all that money you ripped off instead of kindly donating it to Charlie’s widow you wouldn’t be living here now, eh? I bet that grandkid would be all squared away with an education trust and that girl of yours could have had a nose job. But let’s not worry about that for the moment. I’ve come all the way from sunny Switzerland to hear how you’re going to get me to Nuka.’

  ‘I know where Nuka is. I’m a broker, remember?’ He pushed himself away from the desk and manoeuvred his high-tech chair round it to face me. ‘You finished?’

  ‘Nope.’ I thought I might as well push my luck. I picked up pen and paper from the desk and started to jot down the details of my Citibank account in Virginia. ‘Let’s say twenty grand in cash on top and we’ll call it quits – for now.’

  ‘You know, Nick, if I could stand I would. Then I’d fucking chin you.’

  He raised himself an inch or two off his seat but only to relieve the pressure on his arse or something. He held himself like that for a few seconds. Maybe he needed a fart.

  ‘Here’s how it is, Nick. The Gospel according to St Real.’ He sat himself down again. ‘I fucked up, got greedy and regret it. Charlie was a good guy, but I’ve paid my debt to him. Now, I’ll go this extra mile for you, but then that’s it. We’re all square. I want you out of my way. You’ll always be trouble.’

  ‘I like being around you, Dave.’ I tested the brew: it was good. I had a bit of a weakness for UHT. ‘I like to remind you now and again of what you did to Charlie. Remind you that I could fuck up business and at the same time fuck up that head of yours. Know what I mean?’

  ‘You can try and fuck up whatever you want. In the short term, yes, you could do business some damage. Long term? Forget it. The blokes want work, the companies need bayonets. Supply and demand, Nick. Who gives a fuck as long as the pay cheques keep coming?

  ‘Besides, you’ve got more to worry about than what you’re going to do with me. I keep in touch with Hazel, you know. Loves me, she does. Last time we spoke, she sent her regards, told you not to be a stranger. All over me, she is. Seems I did more for her and Charlie than she can ever thank me for. So, giving me the name of that box-head of yours was only a tiny favour. She threw in a cell number, email address and her stepfather’s home address as a bonus. And the news that she works for Mercy Flight. I like to keep records, Nick. I get the odd one or two fuckwits coming in here and going psycho on me.

  ‘Now, let me see. You don’t need the brains of a bishop to work this one out. Mercy Flight’s all over the place – even in the Congo, if I remember right. What I reckon is, you want to get to her, get something to her, or get her out of there. And it seems to me that if I don’t help you you’re fucked. It’ll take you weeks trawling bars and making grovelling calls. Chances are she’ll be fucked and hanging from a tree by the time you get there. You need me.’

  I looked down at him, and he looked up at me. A hint of a smile spread under his porn-star moustache. He was liking this too much. My brew didn’t taste so good now.

  ‘I’ve got a hundred bayo
nets on my books. Three are just a press of a panic button away right now. How stupid do you think I am? Try to fuck me around any more and I’ll get them to persuade you to think again. I won’t even have to pay them, just promise to push them up the pecking order.

  ‘Besides, that isn’t going to get you to the box-head, is it? I have what you need. I’m the broker – that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I’m in a wheelchair, not fucking retarded. Now, can we get down to business?’

  There are times when you have to accept you’ve been fucked over, and this was one of them. I was still giving him the long, hard stare, but it became a long, slow nod.

  ‘Good. ’Bout fucking time.’ He tapped a few keys on his laptop, studied the screen, and tapped a few more. He glanced at his watch, then hit another key. The printer in the corner began to whir.

  Crazy Dave wheeled himself away from the desk. He came back with two sheets of A4. ‘Here’s your e-ticket – on the house.’

  I gave it a glance. It was for nine thirty that night, from Heathrow. It was just after three now. I’d have to thrash the Corsa.

  He handed me the second sheet. ‘Your contact. He’ll get you most of the way. There are people working in the area, they’ll take you in. The debt’s paid. Now fuck off out of my sight.’

  I folded the two sheets of paper and tucked them into my jeans pocket, then picked up my brew. I looked at it for a second, then tipped it over his head.

  He yelped and his hands flew up like a pair of copulating pigeons.

  I frisked his neck for the panic button. I found it, hanging like a pendant, and pulled it over his head.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing? You don’t realize what you’re doing.’

  ‘Yep, just getting ahead.’

  I grabbed his right calf and started towards the door, dragging him and the wheelchair behind me. He screamed and shouted at me to stop, but I kept going.

  We got to the door. Crazy Dave couldn’t hold on to his chair any longer and fell out on his arse. I dragged him through the rain towards the patio doors. He tried to squirm round so his hands could grip me, as if that was going to help.

  We bounced over the ramp and through the front room, leaving a long wet trail over the laminate. Crazy Dave wasn’t saying anything. All his effort was going into trying to get himself upright.

  I carried on through the front door and only let him go when we reached the Popemobile. He flailed around on the wet Tarmac, trying to pull himself along on his elbows, back towards the house.

  I didn’t know why I’d done it. It was immature, gratuitous and got me nowhere – but, fuck, it put a smile back on my face.

  I got into the car, wound down the window, and threw the panic button at him.

  And as I drove out of Bobblestock, windscreen wipers going nineteen to the dozen, I felt that for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours my hand was back on the tiller. But it didn’t feel as good as I’d thought it would.

  There was so much about each other we didn’t know.

  I had been continually putting off explaining to Silky what I was. I’d told her just before she met him that I’d been a soldier once and had done a bit of parachuting with Charlie, but that was about it. As for the promise to tell her the whole picture that I’d made myself yesterday? Deep down, I knew it was bollocks. It wouldn’t have happened. The plain fact was, I was scared she’d reject me.

  She was everything I wasn’t. I came from the world she hated with a vengeance – the world of war and death, the heartless fucking over the defenceless.

  As I changed down a gear to drive up Aylestone Hill, I realized I wouldn’t have to explain anything. If it all went pear-shaped, she might be seeing it at first-hand, and in real time.

  PART THREE

  Cape Town

  International

  Saturday, 10 June,

  16:05 hours

  1

  We flew round Table Mountain, then north along wide, sandy beaches before circling back inland across vast stretches of vineyard. The city nestled between the lower slopes and the Atlantic.

  Thank fuck the flight was over. I’d been jammed in cattle class for the best part of twenty hours. It hadn’t been direct: we’d had two dropo-ffs on the way. I could picture the grin on Crazy Dave’s face, once he’d managed to crawl back to his desk. The bastard must have bought the cheapest ticket going.

  I looked for taxi signs as I wandered towards the exit, checking my empty voicemail. Then I punched in Lex’s airfield office number. It was a mass of sevens and fives and I kept getting the little fuckers in the wrong order.

  The woman who answered had such a strong accent I felt she was beating me over the head with it.

  ‘Hello, it’s Nick Stone again. I called last night for Lex. Is he there?’ I carried on through acres of glass and concrete, past Vodafone stalls hiring out mobiles and dozens of businessmen poring over their laptops in the hot zone.

  ‘You’re late, man. Didn’t you leave last night?’

  ‘We stopped off in Jo’burg and Port Elizabeth.’ My mouth tasted like a rat’s arse and I could only just peel open my eyes.

  ‘It’s Saturday afternoon, man. He said he’ll meet you at the bar.’ The way Mrs Bring-Back-Apartheid pronounced it, it sounded like something you’d do if you were looking for an oilfield.

  ‘Which bar? And what’s his last name?’

  ‘You coming by car?’ She started spouting roads and exits.

  ‘Whoa, I’ll find a pen and paper. I’ll call you back.’

  I closed down the mobile and went over to a Nescafé stall masquerading as a street barrow. I got the loan of a pencil while the vendor made me a very bad cup of instant coffee. Granules lapped against the rim of the cup as she handed it to me because the water wasn’t hot enough.

  Lex being in a bar wasn’t good news. Bars meant alcohol, and where I came from, it was ten hours from bottle to throttle. Well, sometimes.

  I called the number again, and had to keep slowing her down until I had the details. ‘OK, the False Bay bar. Where’s that?’

  ‘Erinvale. He’ll be there all night.’

  ‘His surname?’

  ‘Kallembosch.’ She said it like I was stupid and should have known, but I tried to sign off pleasantly.

  ‘And what’s your name?’ Nice to be nice, and all that.

  ‘Hendrika.’ She sounded as if she had done resistance-to-interrogation training.

  ‘Thanks, Hendrika.’ I couldn’t help myself. ‘Have a nice day.’

  As I crunched my way through the Nescafé, I checked my balance at an ATM. I knew Crazy Dave wouldn’t have given me a penny, but I lived in hope.

  Even in my current state of frustration, I was still struck by the two things that got me every time I came to Africa: the quality of the light and the brilliant blue of the sky. It was like they’d passed a law banning clouds.

  I didn’t hold the thought for long. As the taxi turned east out of the airport on to the N2, I resisted the temptation to tell the driver to put his foot down. I wouldn’t get back in the air any quicker. I had to grip myself and calm down. I was making as much progress as I could.

  The driver seemed a nice enough guy, but this place was full of horror stories about passengers being driven out to the townships, drilled in the head with a 9mm and robbed. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘Give us a look at your road atlas, mate.’ I pushed myself forward between the two front seats so I was level with him. ‘I’d like to check out the area. See how the land lies . . .’

  He passed it back to me. Erinvale was the other side of Somerset West, some forty Ks east of Cape Town. The estate lay between two mountain ranges and the coastline of False Bay.

  I handed the map back. ‘Looks just like Switzerland.’

  ‘Mediterranean climate, man.’ He beamed proudly. ‘Rain in winter. That’s why we make great wine.’

  Sweat was pooling at the base of my spine. I opened the window. My sunglasses were in the holdall
, in the boot, so I had to squint against the light. My eyes were still stinging, and my body had developed the layer of grease that comes with long flights and the constant battering of the hot, stale air they pump out to stop you getting too energetic with the flight crew. The last thing I was looking forward to was a night in a smoky bar with a grizzled old bush pilot swinging the lamp while he told me his war stories, but if he ended up flying me into DRC as soon as he could focus on his instruments, I’d have to lump it and smile a lot.

  I checked my mobile again. The signal was good, but the display was still empty.

  2

  It only took us about twenty minutes to reach Somerset West, but there’d been plenty of time to see why the area was called Cape Wineyards. The sun beat down on thousands of rows of vines that stretched all the way to the horizon. They must have been shifting a fair few cases. Every house was in perfect repair, every wall, fence and roof a pristine red or white. From where I was sitting I could almost smell the fresh paint, and there wasn’t an HIV poster in sight.

  We took a left for Erinvale. It turned out to be a heavily protected country estate. Security scrutinized us at the entrance before the white range gates were opened and we were waved through.

  The Merc glided over perfectly level Tarmac. Either side of the road were hundreds of acres of deep green grass, dotted with white sandy bunkers. Electric golf carts piloted by men in yellow polo shirts trundled out of the driveways of enormous mansions.

  We took the direct route to the clubhouse, which could have doubled as a grand hotel. Sprinklers threw a fine mist across the fairway, and there were rainbows everywhere. Things were looking up. Maybe Lex was downing an orange juice after a quick eighteen holes.

  I paid off the driver with rand I’d bought with my Swiss francs at Heathrow, and walked into the reception area, holdall in hand. Dark wood panelling lined the walls. A giant fan moved lazily above me, but it was only cosmetic. The air-conditioning took care of business. This place had only been built to look old.