Predator - Wilbur Smith

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      ‘Exactly. And in all that time I don’t think I ever set to sea in an uglier tub than this one. Even her mother couldn’t love her.’

      The veteran skipper, who had spent more than forty years in the US Navy and the Merchant Marine, was speaking no more than the truth. With her blunt, shorn-off bows and box-like hull Bannock A resembled nothing more than a cross between a gigantic barge and a grossly oversized container. To make matters worse, her decks were covered from end to end with a massive superstructure of steel pipes, tanks, columns, boilers, cranes and cracking units, with what looked like a chimney, well over 100 feet tall and surrounded by a web of supporting girders, painted red and white, rising from the stern.

      Yet there was a reason that the board of Bannock Oil had sanctioned the expenditure of more than $1 billion to have this huge floating eyesore constructed at the Hyundai shipyards in Ulsan, South Korea, and then appointed their most experienced captain to command her on a maiden voyage of more than 12,000 miles. As FPSO Bannock A made her slow, cumbersome way through the Korean Straits and into the Yellow Sea, then on across the South China Sea; past Singapore and through the Malacca Straits to the Indian Ocean; all the way to the Cape of Good Hope and then round into the Atlantic and up the west coast of Africa, the moneymen in Houston had been counting down the days to payback time. For the initials FPSO stood for ‘floating production, storage and offloading’ and they described a kind of alchemy. Very soon Bannock A would start taking up the oil produced by the rig that stood about three miles north of where she now lay at anchor; the first to come into operation on the Magna Grande oilfield that Bannock Oil had discovered more than two years earlier. Up to 80,000 barrels a day would be piped to Bannock A’s onboard refinery, which would distil the thick, black crude into a variety of highly saleable substances from lubricating oil to gasoline. Then she would store the various products in her tanks ready for Bannock Oil tankers to take them on to the final destinations. The total anticipated production of the Magna Grande field was in excess of 200 million barrels. Unless the world suddenly lost its taste for petrochemicals, Bannock Oil could expect a total return in excess of $20 billion.

      So Bannock A was going to earn her keep many, many times over. And it wouldn’t be long now before she got right down to work.

      Hector Cross unclipped the leather top of the Thermos hip flask, removed the stainless steel stirrup cup contained within it, unscrewed the stopper, poured the steaming hot Bullshot into the cup, and drank. He gave a deep sigh of pleasure. The rain had stayed away, which always had to be considered a mercy in Scotland, and there had even been a few glorious shafts of sunlight, slicing through the clouds and illuminating the trees that clustered along the riverbank, creating a glorious mosaic of leaves, some still holding on to the greens of summer, while others were already glowing with the reds, oranges and yellow of autumn.

      It had been a good morning. Cross had only caught a couple of the Atlantic salmon that accumulated in the Tay’s lower reaches during the late summer and early autumn, one of them a respectable but by no means spectacular thirteen-pounder, but that hardly mattered. He had been out in the open, out on the water, surrounded by the glorious Perthshire landscape, with nothing to trouble his mind but the business of finding the spots where the salmon were resting, and the looping rhythm of the Spey casts that sent his fly out to the precise point where he thought the fish might best be lured into a bite. All morning he’d been filled with the sheer joy of life, chasing the dark demons of the night away, but now, as he took a bite from the sandwich the castle cook had provided for him, Cross found his mind drifting back to his nightmare.

      It was the fear he had felt that astonished him: the kind of terror that liquefies a man’s limbs and tightens his throat so that he can barely move or even breathe. Only once in his life had he known anything like it: the day when, as a lad of sixteen, he had joined the hunting party of young Maasai boys, sent out to prove their manhood by hunting down an old lion that had been driven out of his pride by a younger, stronger male. Naked but for a black goatskin cloak and armed with nothing more than a rawhide shield and a short stabbing spear, Cross had stood in the centre of the line of boys as they confronted the great beast, whose huge, erect mane burned gold in the light of the African sun. Perhaps because of his position, or because his pale skin caught the lion’s eye more easily than the black limbs to either side, Cross had been the one whom the lion charged. Though dread had almost overwhelmed him, Cross had not just stood his ground, but stepped forward to meet the lion’s final, roaring leap with the razor point of his spear.

      Though he had been given his first gun when he was still a small boy and hunted from that moment on, the lion had been Cross’s first true kill. He could still feel and smell the heart blood that had gushed on to his body from the mortally wounded lion’s mouth, could still remember the elation that came from confronting death and overcoming it. That moment had made him the warrior he had always dreamed of being, and he had pursued the calling ever since, first as an officer in the SAS and then as the boss of Cross Bow Security.

      There had been times when his actions had been called into question. His military career had come to an abrupt halt after he had shot three Iraqi insurgents who had just detonated a roadside bomb that had killed half a dozen of Cross’s troopers. He and his surviving men had tracked the bombers down, captured them and forced them to surrender. The motley trio were just emerging from their hideout with their hands in the air when one of them reached inside his robe. Cross had no idea what the insurgent might have in there: a knife, a gun, or even a suicide vest whose detonation would blow them all to kingdom come. He had a fraction of a second in which to make a decision. His first thought was for the safety of his own men, so he fired his Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, and blew all three Iraqis away. When he examined their still-warm bodies, all of them were unarmed.

      At the subsequent court martial, the court had accepted that Cross had acted in his own defence and that of his men. He was found not guilty. But the experience had not been a pleasant one and though he had no trouble ignoring the taunts and smears of reporters, politicians and activists who had never in their lives faced a decision more brutal than whether to have full or semi-skimmed milk in their morning cappuccinos, still he couldn’t abide the thought that the reputation of the regiment he loved might have suffered because of his actions.

      So Cross requested and was given an honourable discharge. Since then, the fighting had continued, albeit no longer in Her Majesty’s service. Working almost exclusively for Bannock Oil, Cross had defended the company’s installations in the Middle East against terrorist attempts at sabotage. That was where he met Hazel Bannock, widow of the company’s founder Henry Bannock, who had taken over the business and, through sheer determination and force of will, made it bigger and more profitable than ever before. She and Cross were equally headstrong, equally proud, equally egotistic. Neither had been willing to give an inch to the other, but the combative antagonism with which their relationship began was, perhaps, the source of its strength. Each had tested the other and found that they were not wanting; from that mutual respect, not to mention a burning mutual lust, had come a deep and passionate love.

      Marriage to Hazel Bannock had introduced Cross to a world unlike any he had ever known, in which millions were counted by the hundred, and the numbers in an address book belonged to presidents, monarchs and billionaires. But no amount of money or power altered the fundamentals of human life: you were no more immune to disease, no less vulnerable to a bullet or bomb, and your heart could still be torn in two by loss. And just as money could buy new friends, so it also brought new enemies with it.

      Hazel was an African, like Cross, and like him she understood and accepted the law of the jungle. When Cross had captured Adam Tippoo Tip, the man who had kidnapped and later murdered Hazel’s daughter Cayla and her mother Grace, Hazel had executed him herself. ‘It is my duty to God, my mother and my daughter,’ she had said before she dried her tears, lifted a pistol to the back of Adam’s neck and, with a rock-steady grip on the gun, put a bullet through his brain.

      But death had begotten death. Hazel had been killed. Cross had killed Carl Bannock, one of the two men responsible for her murder. Now the other, Johnny Congo, was awaiting execution in an American jail. He would die, just as the others had done, but in the way Jo Stanley preferred: from a lethal injection, in an execution chamber, on the order of a court.

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