Passenger 13

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The beautiful, stately three-masted hundred-metre sailing yacht had cost her present owner just a shade over eight million pounds. She was capable of twenty knots under a full spread of canvas, more if her massive auxiliary engines were brought to bear. At the moment, though, her loose-hanging sails crackled in the soft breeze and cast a welcome shade over the deck as she stood at anchor just out of sight of Little Cayman.

Lounging in that shade, sipping on tall iced drinks, chatting and laughing, most of them casually attired in shorts and sandals and polo tops or florid Hawaii shirts, were nine of the world’s publicly least-known but most influential power-brokers: the senior committee of the organisation known only as Tartarus. Their ages ranged from early fifties to late seventies; between them they possessed over three and a half centuries’ worth of experience at the highest, most secretive level of international politics, and the kind of knowledge that could tear a government down and reduce its country to rubble overnight. With the recent exception of Hayden Roth, not one of them had personally discharged a firearm at a living human being for many years — yet the total of the victims they’d claimed during their careers couldn’t easily be counted.

‘Excuse me one moment, gentlemen,’ said Roth. He carried his clinking gin and tonic over to the chrome rail that lined the deck, and looked at his watch. The boat should arrive soon, he thought. His eyes shaded from the sun by the brim of his Panama hat, he scanned the blue horizon. No sign of it yet. Had there been some delay?

At that moment, his phone rang. He snatched it up. ‘Jenner, where are—?’

‘Jenner’s indisposed at the moment,’ Ben said on the other end of the line.

Roth was too thunderstruck to utter a reply.

‘Look up,’ Ben told him. ‘Due south. You should be able to see me. I’m that little yellow speck in the sky.’ He had to talk loudly over the thrumming rumble of the single radial propeller engine a few feet above him. From where he was sitting behind the Supermarine Sea Otter’s mass of dials and gauges, he could just about make out the majestic sails of the Hydra far below. He eased the joystick, bringing the aircraft down in a shallow dive closer to the waves.

‘Hope? What … y-you were supposed to meet the boat,’ Roth stammered.

‘I did,’ Ben said. ‘But there’s been a slight change of plan.’ He checked his readings: air speed, engine speed, flaps; the altitude gauge spun freely as the Sea Otter dropped another hundred feet, almost skimming the waves. She was so heavily laden that it would take all her power to get her up again. But that wasn’t Ben’s idea.

The Hydra was coming closer with every second. Ben could see the little matchstick figures on the deck. ‘Is that you in the dinky straw hat, Roth?’

‘Hope, what the hell are you doing?’ Roth’s voice growled on the end of the line.

‘I told you I was coming on board,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what I’m doing.’

Things might have been different if Hayden Roth hadn’t made one mistake: that night at the disused military base, he’d let it slip that it would be a CIC flight taking Ben to Little Cayman.

From there, the new plan had hatched quickly in Ben’s mind. In the bathroom of the Gulfstream he’d used a pick-pocketed ballpoint to write a message to Tamara on the inside of his cigarette packet, asking her to get back to Grand Cayman as quickly as she could, and giving her the coordinates to fly Nick’s Sea Otter to Little Cayman and meet him on the shore outside Palm Tree Lodge. A hastily-scribbled footnote said: ‘BRING DRUMS SPARE AVGAS. MANY AS POSS.’

On the outside edge of the cigarette packet Ben had written in block capitals the words: “FOR TAMARA MARTÍNEZ, FROM BEN HOPE. URGENT!!”, and below them the secret phone number on which she could be contacted. When he’d used his smoking ploy on board the Trislander later that day to get the attention of Jo Sundermann, the CIC flight attendant, he’d held the cigarette packet out in such a way that she was sure to see what was written on it. From the look on her face as she’d taken the packet, he’d been sure that she’d call the number. Tamara would surely realise that the message could only have come from Ben, and once she returned to Grand Cayman and Jo Sundermann showed her the cigarette pack, she’d recognise the unusual brand from the night they’d sat in her kitchen.

As to whether Tamara would respond to his call for help in time — that was something Ben could only hope for.

The first day of his captivity at Palm Tree Lodge had passed without anything happening. As the second day had dragged on, Ben had grown steadily more and more anxious and painfully aware of the far too many weaknesses in his plan: Jo Sundermann might have binned the cigarette pack without calling Tamara; or maybe Tamara hadn’t answered her phone; or maybe she’d been too frightened to help. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Towards sunset on the second day, just as he was starting to become despondent, Ben’s heart had leapt at the rumble of the approaching aircraft and he’d hurried outside to see the bright yellow Sea Otter touch down on the water and taxi towards the shore.

Tamara had come running to meet him on the sand, and hugged him tight as she explained how she’d come rushing back the minute Jo had called her. Ben had returned her embrace with a real surge of affection.

‘What’s happening?’ she’d asked him in alarm when she’d noticed the electronic tag on his ankle.

‘I’ll explain,’ he’d said. ‘Did you bring the fuel?’

‘Just like you said. As many drums of 100LL avgas as I could carry. Even strapped one to the co-pilot’s seat. Why did we need them?’

‘You’d better sit down,’ he’d said. ‘I have a lot to tell you.’

They’d sat on the steps of the Lodge, and as the sun set across the beach he’d told her everything, watching her reaction shift from stunned disbelief to helpless tears to silent rage. When he’d reached the end of his long account, he’d described the idea that had been forming in his mind.

There had been no hesitation on Tamara’s part. ‘It’s what Nick would have done,’ she’d said. ‘Let’s do it.’

‘We can hide the plane beyond those trees,’ he’d said, pointing down the beach past Cuban George’s open-air bar, to where the coastline receded out of sight into a hidden bay. ‘You’ll have to sleep on board and wait for my call tomorrow.’

Sometimes, the simplest plans worked out the best. Ben smiled to himself as the Sea Otter roared low over the waves towards the Hydra. He patted the drum of fuel strapped to the co-pilot’s seat. 100LL avgas, one of the most highly combustible and explosive forms of petroleum fuel ever devised. The bright yellow Sea Otter, Nick Chapman’s pride and joy, was about to crown its long career by going out in a blaze of glory.

Ben could almost hear Nick laughing.

The magnificent sailing yacht was just two hundred yards away and closing fast. On the sweeping, gleaming deck, tiny figures were scattering in panic: either desperately trying to lower the lifeboats or clambering over the side to take their chances in the water. Hayden Roth stood his ground in the middle of the deck, roaring like a bull into his phone. ‘Hope! I order you to stand down immediately! You are a servant of Her Majesty’s Government!’

‘Not any more. I quit,’ Ben said into the phone, and tossed it out of the window.

The Sea Otter was almost on the Hydra. The ship’s expanse of white canvas sails blotted out the view from the cockpit as the aircraft swooped towards the deck. Ben caught a glimpse of muzzle flashes down below as Tartarus agents opened fire with submachine guns. Bullets raked the Sea Otter’s fuselage and cockpit windows.

But there was nothing they could do to prevent what was about to happen. This one was for Nick, and Hilary, and all the other innocents who’d lost their lives thanks to the men aboard the Hydra.

At the last possible instant, Ben leaped out of the pilot’s seat and dived towards the hatchway, grabbing the small rubber dinghy off the floor as he went. The rushing wind tore the inflatable out of his hands and snatched his breath away as he launched himself into space.

The stunning impact drove him deep underwater. Everything was a tumult of noise and confusion. Bubbles streamed from his mouth as he thrashed wildly to regain the surface.

His head and shoulders burst clear of the water at the same instant the Sea Otter hit the Hydra in a shattering, deafening collision of tangled wreckage and wings and sails and rigging and toppling masts. The explosion hurled Ben several yards back in the water and its heat seared his face as both aircraft and ship were engulfed in a gigantic rolling fireball that mushroomed high up into the sky.

Then the sea was suddenly burning, a slick of blazing avgas spreading rapidly across the water. Ben dived under the surface just before the carpet of flames burned him alive. Debris hit the water like a barrage of mortar shells and spiralled into the depths all around him as he swam like crazy away from the circle of devastation.

When he surfaced again, he turned to see a secondary explosion tear apart the shattered remains of the Hydra. Nobody on board could have had any chance of escape. A column of acrid black smoke towered into the sky. Flakes of ash rained down like black snow. Treading water, Ben watched the blazing wreck sink slowly into the sea. Only when it had slipped beneath the waves did he turn away.

The little dinghy was bobbing on the swell nearby. Ben swam after it, clambered on board and unclipped the folding oar from its side. His ears were ringing badly from the noise of the explosion, and the skin of his face felt tender where the heat of the fireball had scorched it. It would probably take a while for his eyebrows to grow back — but then, he wasn’t going anywhere. Not back to Credenhill RHQ, not back to Iraq — not any more, knowing what he knew. It was a different world for him now.

The burble of an approaching outboard made him look up and catch sight of the motorboat in the distance. Tamara’s black hair caught the wind as she stood behind the wheel and waved at him.

Ben waved back with a smile and started paddling across the water to meet her.