Star of Africa

Chapter 34

Hercules stopped jumping around and the smile vanished off his face. He stared up at the chopper. So did Gerber. Jude looked at Ben. Ben looked at Jeff. Jeff looked at the submachine gun and pistol that were stowed next to where he’d been sitting. He looked up at the helicopter, then back at Ben.

Ben shook his head. He knew what Jeff was thinking, because he’d thought it too, as the reality of their situation had hit him. But only for a second. Because the reality of their situation could potentially become a lot worse if either of them made a move for a weapon. There were at least six guns pointing down at them from the open hatch of the Puma, and those were just the ones he could see. Any momentary notions of opening fire on the chopper in the hope of disabling the turbine or piercing some critical engine component or taking out the pilot had to be dismissed in the knowledge that the enemy’s finger was already on the trigger and that two or three quick strafes were all it would take to turn the raft into a floating slaughterhouse.

Which, for now at least, left them little option but to stand very still with their hands empty and plainly visible while waiting to see what happened next. Everything depended on Khosa’s intentions. If they were of the ‘shoot on sight’ variety, Ben and the others would find out soon enough. If Khosa’s men fired first, then that would change everything. Ben had his first response to that scenario already figured out. Jude was to his right, the guns to his left. The submachine gun was the one to go for. In the instant Ben made a grab for it, he would kick out with his right boot and knock Jude into the water. Then, at least Jude would have a chance of evading the ensuing two-way firestorm. Better to take your chances with the sharks. Jude could survive this, even if Ben, Jeff, Tuesday, Gerber, Hercules and Condor didn’t. He could swim like a fish and hold his breath underwater like nobody Ben had ever seen. He could dive deep and come up behind the raft two, three minutes later. In the unlikely event that the gunfight lasted that long, he could use the raft as cover. In the more likely event that everyone else would be dead long before then, Jude could dive back down again and bob up for quick, furtive snatches of air every couple of minutes until Khosa went away.

Because it was easy to figure out that Khosa wouldn’t stick around for long, once he had what he came for. Ben knew exactly what that was. It was the same thing everyone else wanted and would die trying to take for themselves. First Pender, then Scagnetti.

Ben could feel the hard lump of the diamond nestling against his thigh. He’d virtually forgotten he was still carrying it. An unimaginable fortune right there in his pocket. Enough money to purchase, equip and crew a large ship to take them all the way home to France, with enough change left over to buy a château or two there. The equivalent of enough stacks of paper money to sink their raft to the ocean bed. More weight than even the Aérospatiale Puma could handle. All things considered, it wasn’t so surprising what people would do to make it theirs.

Ben wondered briefly whether the presence of the diamond gave him more options than he’d realised. What would Khosa do if Ben suddenly whipped the little leather pouch out of his pocket? Would he back off, fearful that Ben was about to do the unthinkable and throw it into the sea? At that moment, the diamond would become Ben’s hostage. Its value to Khosa would offer some leverage. But like all hostage scenarios, it would be a highly unstable situation. Because once established, the threat either had to be carried out, or not. If it was, then Khosa’s next move would be to order his men to kill everyone on board the raft, out of pure rage. Bad idea. If it wasn’t, Khosa had only to call the bluff, knowing that Ben couldn’t afford to lose the only ace he had up his sleeve.

A no-win situation.

So then Ben wondered what Khosa would do if the diamond was thrown into the helicopter instead, by way of a peace offering. The message would be clear enough: ‘Take what you came for and leave us in peace.’ It should work, in principle. Except not with a man like Khosa. Khosa would want his revenge for the humiliation he’d suffered at their hands, for the men he’d lost, and just because he was that kind of guy. He would still execute them all anyway. Another no-win situation.

‘What are we going to do?’ Jude said, staring at Ben.

‘That’s what I’m still trying to decide,’ Ben said.

‘And?’

‘And, I don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ Ben said. ‘Not yet. We have to see how this plays out.’

‘This bastard’s beginning to piss me off,’ Jeff said, scowling up at the chopper. ‘He so much as farts at us, he’s the first to cop it.’

‘I’m with you on that one, mate,’ Tuesday said.

Jude’s face was strained with guilt and regret. ‘You were right. I should have listened to you back there. I should have let you kill him, while we had the chance. But all I could think about was helping them. I was an idiot.’

‘I admired you for your humanity,’ Ben replied. ‘And I still do. But now we need to think about how we’re getting out of this.’

The chopper came closer, and closer, until its scarred olive-green underbelly was almost right overhead, hovering thirty feet above the water. It was turned side-on to them and shifting slightly left and right, up and down. The noise was huge, the screech of the turbine adding a cutting treble to the bass whap-whap-whap of the rotors. The downblast was whipping up the sea in a wide circle all around the raft, tearing at their hair and clothes and threatening to rip the plastic bivouac sheet off its tenuous mountings.

Then two things happened.

The first was that two of Khosa’s men started lowering a rope ladder from the helicopter’s open side. It wobbled and shook, dropping jerkily a foot at a time until it dangled within reach of the raft.

The second was that Khosa himself appeared in the open hatch, grinning down at the survivors. He seemed to have found a replacement for the big revolver that Ben had taken from him aboard the ship, but the weapon was still holstered on his gunbelt. The object he was holding in his hand wasn’t a gun. He raised the megaphone to his mouth.

Which made it look to Ben as though Khosa wanted to talk. Which, in turn, meant that his immediate intentions weren’t to kill them all. That might come later, but for now it seemed that some kind of parlay was about to begin. Whatever it was Khosa was about to lay on the table, Ben wanted to get there first.