Headhunters

Chapter Fifty

There were over a thousand islands in the Adriatic within easy reach of Dubrovnik. Businesses gathered around the harbour offered tourists the opportunity to hire speedboats, sailing boats and yachts, some with skippers and others without, so that they could make excursions out to the beautiful and unspoilt beaches that were all within easy reach. Milton wanted a speedboat, although he had no interest in relaxation. He waited until it was just after midnight before scouting the jetties that accommodated the hire craft. He found a Maestral 599, a RIB that was a touch under six metres from aft to stern and powered by a Yamaha outboard motor. He waited until he was confident that the harbour was quiet, tossed the new rucksack down into it and then boarded the boat. He crouched down low and shuffled to the stern and the motor. He popped off the motor cover and dug out the quarter-inch nylon emergency starter rope with a small wooden handle at the end. He turned the valve on the fuel primer to the open position and squeezed the fuel primer three times so that he could hear the fuel squirting. He fixed the knot on the end of the starter rope into a notch on the flywheel and pulled. The engine caught. Milton reduced the revs a touch, cast off the mooring line, and then gave the engine enough revs to edge the boat out into open water.

Milton waited until he was beyond the fifteenth-century fortifications of the Old Town and the Porporela lighthouse and then opened the throttle all the way. The engine growled and then roared, and the Maestral picked up speed, bouncing across the gentle waves. He passed Lokrum, an island that could be reached with a vigorous swim from the city, and headed to the south. He ran dark, with no lights, and maintained a course that kept him around two hundred yards from the shoreline.

In twenty minutes, he was adjacent to the landmarks he remembered from his reconnaissance. The cliffs reached up sharply like crenulated battlements, the villa nestling within their embrace. Milton cut the engine and let the boat drift, bobbing up and down on the swell. The only sounds were the lapping of the water against the hull and, somewhere above, the crying of a gull. He collected the claw anchor from the bow of the boat and tossed it over the edge. The rope unspooled for ten seconds before it went taut.

Milton opened his waterproof rucksack and took out the equipment that he had purchased earlier. He found his binoculars and scanned the coastline. He followed the glow of a car’s headlights as it traced the headland before disappearing into a copse of trees. He scanned along the cliffs, across inlets and outcrops of rock, and saw no one. Finally, he examined the villa. There were lights in the windows on all three levels. Milton studied them for five minutes until he was rewarded with a dark shadow that moved across a window on the top level. He was too distant to identify Meir Shavit, but he was prepared to assume that his target was home. Ziggy’s investigation suggested that he lived alone. The two pieces of information were all that Milton needed to decide to put his plan into operation.

Milton undressed, folded his clothes and placed them in the bag, then pulled on the wetsuit and zipped it up. He took out one of his two scuba knives and fastened the scabbard around his right ankle. He put his boots in the sack and fastened it all the way around until it was watertight and then he slung it across his back. He put on his flippers, fitted the goggles over his eyes and put the attached snorkel into his mouth. He fastened a weight belt around his waist so that the natural buoyancy of the wetsuit might be neutralised, sat on the edge of the boat and rolled backwards into the water.

It took Milton ten minutes to swim the two hundred feet to shore. The tide was treacherous, with an undertow that seemed determined to sweep him back to the boat and then out to sea. He stayed just below the surface, relying on the snorkel to breathe, and kicked hard until his thighs and buttocks burned.

He finally reached the shore, negotiating the cleft in the rocks so that he could swim past the natural breakwater and into the calmer water beyond. The stone had been fashioned into a smooth slab and the metal ladder that he had seen Shavit use before was fitted into it, descending down into the water. Milton reached up for it and anchored himself, then reached down and removed his flippers. He slid his left arm through the fin straps and the mask, leaving his right hand free to use the scuba knife should he need it, and then slowly pulled himself out of the water. He ascended another two rungs so that he could look over the lip and reconnoitre properly.

He saw two sun loungers, a folded parasol, and the stairs that led up to the first of the three terraces.

He climbed to the top of the ladder and hurried across the space until he was able to press up against the cliff face next to the stairs. He removed the goggles and snorkel, and put them and the fins into his rucksack.

He dug a prepaid cell phone and a balaclava out of the kit bag and left them on the stone. He took a length of paracord, knotted one end through the straps of the waterproof bag and the other around the end of the ladder. He took off the weight belt, put it into the bag with his flippers, fins and mask, and tossed it down into the water. The bag hit the water with a splash and, weighed down by the weight belt, it sank out of sight.

He activated the cell phone, navigated to email and found the draft that Ziggy had prepared earlier. There was no message, just a packet of code that he said would do what Milton had asked him to do.

He sent the email and put the phone back into his pack. He was shrugging it across his shoulders once again when all of the house’s interior and exterior lights went out. One moment they were lit, and the next moment they were not. Milton had seen the motion detectors that were connected to big security lights, the CCTV cameras that studded the walls of the house, and knew that there would be a sophisticated alarm system that would summon the local police if it was activated. But the email had wakened a custom exploit that Ziggy had inserted into the programmable logic controllers of the local power company, creating a limited and very targeted blackout. Milton glanced over the water to the clutch of other villas that were perhaps half a mile away around the curve of the bay. They, too, had gone dark. No power meant no lights.

No power also meant no security.

Milton reached down for the scuba knife and released it from its scabbard, holding it in his right hand. He checked again that the way ahead was clear and, satisfied that it was, he turned out of cover and started quickly up the stairs.

Meir Shavit was tidying up the kitchen when the lights went out. Everything died. The dishwasher stopped mid-cycle and the Internet radio, which had been tuned to Galei Zahal, the Israeli army’s own station, went silent. He knew that something was wrong. He put down the cigar that he had been smoking and went to the window. Everything was dark. The lights that illuminated the balcony, the overhead lights above the stairs that led down to the terrace — they were all extinguished. He gazed across the sickle of the bay to the other properties and saw that they were dark, too. A power cut, then. It was odd.

He collected his stick and hobbled across the kitchen to the door to the larder. He opened it. It was a walk-in space fitted with shelves on all sides. Bottles of wine and spirits were racked in the wall facing him. He kept his shotgun here, on the top shelf, and he stretched up and collected it. It was a Beretta 1301 Tactical, gas-operated and compact, perfect for home defence. He checked that a round was chambered and, the gun in his right hand and his stick in his left, he stepped out of the larder.

When he saw the man, it was already too late. He was dressed all in black, with a woollen balaclava on his head that showed his eyes and nothing else. A hand, fast and accurate, stabbed down for the barrel of the shotgun and grasped it, holding it pointed down to the floor. The motion was quick and forceful and, before Shavit could even try to respond to it, he had been struck on the side of the jaw by the man’s opposite elbow. He dropped the gun, which the man deftly collected, and staggered to the side. He turned just as the man drew back his fist. The blow was powerful and accurate, landing flush on his jaw. Shavit dropped, unconscious before he even hit the floor.