Star of Africa

Chapter 30

Ben stepped out from behind the crane and placed himself between Jude and this man who wished him harm. That wasn’t going to happen. Not today, not ever, not while Ben lived and breathed.

Ben patted the zipped pocket of his combat vest where the hard lump of the diamond nestled. ‘You want it?’ he said calmly, just loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the wind. ‘It’s right here. Come and get it.’

Scagnetti hesitated, and for a moment he seemed to deflate as his confidence wavered. But only for a moment. He was the one with the knife. Ben’s hands were empty. In Scagnetti’s world, that meant just one thing. It meant I win. If this guy facing him wasn’t afraid of that, he soon would be.

Scagnetti tossed his head, flicking his straggly wet hair out of his eyes. He lowered his stance like the big knife fighter he was, feet braced, knees bent, arms spread, playing the blade in sweeps and circles. ‘You got it, huh? Then do yourself a favour, asshole. Hand it over or I’m gonna carve you up real bad.’

‘It’s not a fair fight,’ Ben said. ‘You with a knife.’

Scagnetti laughed. ‘Not so fuckin’ tough now, are ya?’

‘I mean it’s unfair on you, Scagnetti.’ Ben took a step closer to him. ‘You should have brought a gun if you meant to tangle with me.’

‘Yeah? That a fact?’

Ben nodded. ‘Yes. It is.’

Scagnetti moved in quickly and lashed out with the blade, low and fast. He was a good mover, even on a badly rolling deck slick with seawater. Footwork was everything in knife fighting, and Ben could see he was practised. He was the kind of scrapper who was tough and mean and wily, with years of experience and many a bloodied bar-room floor to his account. He plied the knife with dexterity, never taking his eyes off Ben, shifting his body weight from side to side, ready to feint and jab, duck and slash. A dangerous man with a blade. Hard to beat.

So Ben took a whole five seconds, instead of three, to break his scrawny neck.

The blade flashed towards Ben’s chest. Ben sidestepped the stab and palmed Scagnetti’s arm away from him, tried to get control of the knife hand but missed, and had to withdraw fast to avoid the knife as it thrust at his throat. Scagnetti was quick, all right, but he wasn’t quick enough to dart out of the way of the low kick that Ben aimed hard and square at an imaginary point about eight inches behind Scagnetti’s right knee.

A hard blow is one that connects forcefully with a vital part of the body. A crippling blow is one that goes right through. Which Ben’s boot did, with a crunch that folded Scagnetti’s right leg in the opposite direction to which nature had intended. Scagnetti would have screamed in pain, but in the same moment he had no air to expel from his lungs because Ben had crushed his larynx with a brutal elbow strike while seizing Scagnetti’s knife arm and dashing it against the side of the container stack. The knife whipped away across the deck. Ben beat Scagnetti’s head twice into a container’s steel edge. Disarming a man like this wasn’t enough, because he would always find a way to come back at you. Brain damage wasn’t enough either, because his mind was already deranged. A man like this, you had to end it; and end it decisively and without hesitation. That was exactly what Ben was trained to do. And exactly what he intended to do. No hesitation, no pity.

The secret of a good neck break, one that ensured instant death, wasn’t the side-to-side movement you saw in movies. It was a combination twist in two planes, sideways and up at an angle. Ben supported Scagnetti’s limp weight in his arms, placed one hand behind his head and gripped his chin with the other, and snapped it clean. Scagnetti never made a sound.

Then Ben flipped him over his shoulder and carried him to the rail and dumped him over the ship’s side. Five seconds from the first knife jab, Scagnetti’s broken body was engulfed in the leaping, crashing waves and vanished forever.

It was as if the storm gods had been animated into a renewed frenzy by the violence of their fight to the death, drawing in the primal energy and ramping it up to redirect it ten thousandfold stronger. The deafening scream of the wind seemed to have peaked to a new crescendo an octave higher in pitch. The sea was like a wild animal driven berserk, as if all the rage and fury of the world had concentrated itself in the forces of the storm. The deck heaved and juddered under Ben’s feet as he turned to Jude.

‘I’m sorry,’ he wanted to say, but he wasn’t sorry. Jude was clinging to the container stack, looking at him with wide eyes in a face that looked ghostly-pale through the murk and the driving rain. Ben started going over to him. Then suddenly, he was pitching forwards as the world seemed to tilt at an impossible angle under him.

For a disorientated fraction of a second he thought that Scagnetti’s spirit had arisen from the waves, and come back to attack him, possessed with some inhuman power. In the next, cold water filled his ears and nose and the massive wave that had broken over the deck of the Andromeda lifted him off his feet and slammed him headlong against the container stack. His shoulder connected with bone-crushing force into something hard, jolting pain through his body. He gasped, sucked water, couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t cry out for Jude or see where he was. Then the deck under him was tilting the other way and he was sliding backwards in a torrent of white foam, scrabbling for a hold but powerless against the primal force that was enveloping his body and drawing him back. It was going to suck him under the rail and drag him down into the depths. He kicked and struggled and reached out in desperation for something to hold onto, but his clawing hand found nothing but water. The fear was a pure, burning white light inside him. As the certainty of death closed over him, he thought of nothing but Jude.

He felt a hand close around his own, gripping tightly.

‘… en!’

Jude’s voice, a million miles away through the roaring in his ears.

‘… ng on! I’ve… you!’

Ben felt Jude’s other hand grip his arm. He kicked against the slippery deck with all the strength he had, and now he suddenly had a foothold against the power of the receding wave. He gasped and blinked the stinging saltwater from his eyes and looked up, and saw Jude’s face looking back at him.

‘I’ve got you!’ Jude yelled. ‘Hang on!’ Jude was stretched across the impossibly tilting deck with one foot hooked underneath the bottom edge of the container stack and both arms reaching out with a death grip on Ben’s left hand and arm.

Ben opened his mouth to speak, but his voice was lost in the ripping, cracking, groaning, buckling and rending of metal as the crane above them came shearing loose from its mountings and started to topple. Its forty-foot jib swung like a giant arm over the containers as it fell, its momentum carrying it with unstoppable force straight into the windows of the ship’s superstructure. The crane buried itself into the Andromeda’s bridge as if it had been made of paper mâché, ripping through steel and glass. Wreckage and flailing cables crashed down over the deck. Then the crane ripped itself free as the ship went into another wild tilt, toppled over and smashed down into the container stack, hanging far out over the edge of the deck.

Its unbalanced weight was too much for the ship to bear.

The Andromeda began to capsize.

As the deck rose into a near-vertical incline, Jude lost his grip and both he and Ben slid helplessly towards the rail. But it was the angle of the slope that saved them from being crushed like insects as the container stack ripped loose of the deck and separated into its individual steel boxes that came bouncing and tumbling down over their heads like loose bricks into the ocean. The wind was screaming all around them now, coming from everywhere at once, more water than air. They were in the eye of the cyclone and there was no force on earth that could stand up to it.

Ben’s feet hit the rail as he slid to the edge of the deck. He clung on with his legs and braced himself to avoid slipping through its bars. He wouldn’t let go of Jude. No matter what, he’d never let go.

As if in slow motion and with a terrible deep grinding groan, dragged under by the wrecked crane, the Andromeda kept rolling over until her superstructure overhung the ocean at a crazy angle, the whole side of her massive hull submerged so deep beneath the waves that the port rail was engulfed in foam.

Ben’s head went under the surface. All he could hear for a few seconds was the bubbling roar of the water in his ears. Jude was right there with him, eyes wide and gaping into his under the water. So close, yet so infinitely beyond Ben’s power to save him.

Nobody is ever so utterly alone as when death is near — and at that moment it was so near that Ben could taste it. Jude’s fingers felt like iron claws locked onto Ben’s left hand. Ben could feel every joint in his body stretching as the sea tried to drag him down, but he clung on as he’d never clung to anything in his life. For an instant, his head broke the surface. He spouted water and gasped for air but then the ship gave another lurch as it rolled over further still, and he was plunged back deeper under until his lungs seemed about to burst. Just when he was on the point of drowning he heaved himself free of the boiling foam and managed to snatch more air — but then he realised that his left hand was empty.

Jude wasn’t there any more.

‘—ude!’ Ben’s scream tore his throat, but it was soundless in the insane wail of the cyclone.

The giant wave that finally broke the back of the foundering Andromeda took its time coming. It seemed to pause above the capsized vessel before it hit, frozen like a mountain face as it gathered its power.

Ben had time to stare up at the sheer wall looming high overhead and say ‘Come on, then, you bastard’, before a million tons of water crashed down and smashed him under like a fist and everything dissolved into blackness.