Helen MacDonald sat at her desk in her office in Westminster and tried again to get the words right for the holding statement. She wiped away a tear with the back of her hand.
The phone rang.
‘Hello, I’m calling from South Africa. My name is Pauline le Roux, from Radio 702. I’m glad to get through to you at last, Helen. Look, we’ve had a call from a reporter in the east of the country near our Kruger Park and she says that Robert Greeves has gone missing. I need you to confirm that, please, and tell me all the details you have so far.’
‘Have you gone to air with this yet?’
‘No, and no one else has either. So it’s true?’
‘I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say to you that will stop you from running this story for twenty-four hours, is there?’ It was worth a try, Helen thought morosely.
‘I’ll take that as a yes, then. And no, you’re right, there’s nothing you can say that would stop me running this story. If you want to go on air, I’ll take you now.’
‘I’ll send you a statement in half an hour.’ Helen hung up. She had neither confirmed nor denied that Robert was missing. She’d bought herself enough time to finish her statement, but the news was out now. She called the Prime Minister’s office.
Forty-five minutes later, at midday South African time, Eugene Coetzee, freelance photographer, tuned the radio in his Corolla sedan to 702 to listen to the news. There had been some funny goings-on around Tinga that morning.
Eugene guessed his quarry, the English politician Robert Greeves, would be going on an early morning game drive from Tinga. Having missed getting the shot the previous afternoon, he was determined to ambush the minister this time.
Eugene had booked himself into a rondavel at Skukuza camp the night before — he was sure the British newspaper he was stringing for would cover the expense of a self-contained hut — and set the alarm on his cell phone to wake him at five. He’d recovered quickly from the several Klipdrift and Cokes he’d had the night before and been in the head of the queue of cars waiting at the camp gates when they had opened at five-thirty.
He knew Tinga’s schedules. It had only taken a phone call a few days ago, with him pretending to be interested in staying at the lodge, to find out how many drives they offered per day and their departure times. He knew the official guests wouldn’t leave the lodge before six-fifteen, and they first had to drive along the private road that linked Tinga Legends Lodge with the main sealed road. Eugene was waiting on the corner, parked on the dirt verge, at six-fifteen sharp. But no game vehicles had come.
He had wondered if they had deliberately changed the schedule after his bid to get a picture of Greeves yesterday. In all his twenty years as a member of the paparazzi, Eugene had never encountered a politician so shy — mostly they lived for getting their pictures in the newspaper. He had no idea why the World was so interested in this guy, and didn’t particularly care. But Eugene loved a challenge, and this was shaping up to be a battle of wills.
Not long after six-thirty, he heard the growl of a Land Cruiser and started his own engine as the Tinga game-viewing vehicle came into sight. Oddly, there were only two people in it — an African guide driving and a white man sitting next to him, the one who had been sitting in the rear of the vehicle that had cut him off and prevented him from getting his shot yesterday. The pair accelerated rapidly, quickly reaching a speed that looked dangerously close to illegal, and they pulled away from Eugene’s Corolla.
He smiled. Such an obvious decoy. Did they expect him to follow them? Perhaps he was supposed to think that Greeves’s game viewer, with Minister Dule on board, had left earlier and they were speeding out now to catch up with them. Eugene switched off his engine and waited. And waited.
He listened to the radio news at seven — nothing of much interest on the bulletin — and then decided to turn on his radio scanner, which was tuned to the police and national parks frequencies. Immediately he picked up some agitated chatter. A Tinga game viewer had been reported speeding. Isaac Tshabalala, the old man in charge of the cops in Kruger, was heading from Orpen down to somewhere in the south of the park. Something funny was going on.
Throughout the rest of the morning he had watched an odd assortment of vehicles coming and going from Tinga. Cop cars, an unmarked detective vehicle — at least, a detective was what the beefy white man behind the wheel had looked like. Then, a short while ago, the pair from the Tinga vehicle — the guide and the man he assumed was Greeves’s bodyguard — had returned, but in a different game viewer. They were hunched over something or someone in one of the back seats.
The midday news brought some clarity and sent a jolt of adrenaline coursing through his veins. Robert Greeves was missing from the luxury game lodge, presumed kidnapped. Dule was unharmed. And he, Eugene Coetzee, was the only photographer on the scene — for now, anyway.
An ambulance screamed past him and Eugene started his engine again. He accelerated into the vehicle’s dust cloud as it raced down the private access road to Tinga. Eugene was a member of the press following a story — the gloves were off now. He stayed close to the ambulance and tailgated it through the unmanned electric gates that led to the luxury lodge.
Major Jonathan Fraser stood on the Tarmac at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire. The busy military air transport hub was based in the otherwise peaceful green chequerboard of West Country farmland, a short drive at high speed from the Special Air Service’s home at Hereford, near the Welsh border. He watched as the last of six black Land Rover Discovery vehicles rolled up the rear cargo ramp into the waiting C-17.
The big fat grey aircraft’s jet engines whined at an idling speed. The members of Fraser’s SAS troop filed across the apron to the ramp to await their turn to walk on board. The noon day sun was barely making its presence felt through the whited-out autumn sky.
Fraser wore civilian clothes — blue blazer, tan trousers, oxford button-down collar — they didn’t move about in uniform when on counter-terrorist operations lest they draw any more attention to themselves than a convoy of black four-wheel drives would otherwise have done. The Director of Special Forces, a major general, had been driven straight to Wiltshire from a meeting with the Prime Minister.
‘You know the odds aren’t good, Johnno?’ The major general had been commanding officer of the regiment when Jonathan had been one of his young troop leaders. No one else would get away with calling him that.
It had been Jonathan’s feeling for many years that while the SAS were highly trained in hostage rescue, they were making a mistake common to most fighting forces throughout history — they were training to fight their last big battle. The DSF was right. There was little chance that they would find Greeves alive and, if they did, the terrorists would be well prepared to execute both of their hostages and a good number of the assault force as soon as the direct assault began. The hostage situation at Beslan, in Russia, where Chechens had held a whole school captive, was, in Jonathan’s view, solely an exercise in targeting Russia’s special forces troops. He believed it had never been the intention of the captors to release any of the children under any circumstances, and that the whole operation was geared towards generating terror — in its purest form — and wiping out a good number of trained counter-terrorist soldiers in the process. Britain was still fighting the war on terror with the gloves on. The Yanks were marginally better at it. If they identified three or four al-Qaeda types driving through the desert in someone else’s country they wiped them off the face of the earth with a hellfire missile fired from an unmanned drone. Pre-emptive strikes — that was the way to go, in Jonathan’s view. Get the bastards before they did their dirty deeds, not afterwards. Sadly, Greeves’s execution may have already been filmed for release to the satellite television networks. ‘Yes, sir. Even if we find Greeves and his man they’ll probably kill them before we get near them.’
‘Exactly. Still, they came damn close to catching the culprits this morning. Some poor oaf of a plod who lost Greeves in the first place almost redeemed himself.’
‘ “Almost” doesn’t really cut it in our game, does it, sir?’ He’d read the preliminary intelligence reports and, while he knew little about the copper who had been Greeves’s replacement bodyguard, he had noted with interest that two of the terrorists had been killed in a fire fight in the African bush that morning, while he’d been driving to Lyneham. Perhaps there would be a scent for Jonathan and his hounds to follow after all.
‘You’ve got the boats as well?’
‘Mozambique does have two and a half thousand kilometres of coastline, sir, so if that’s where they are, the boats could come in handy.’
‘You always were a cheeky sod.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The boats were rubber Zodiacs, packed deflated into containers which could be pushed out the back of the C-17 and then reinflated via compressed air cylinders by the troopers who would follow the load out of the aircraft. They could be dropped kilometres offshore, unseen by the enemy, and motor in for an assault. As well as the cargo aircraft taking them to South Africa, Fraser would have air support from the South African National Defence Force in the form of three Oryx helicopters
‘Of course, if you do pull it off, you’ll write yourself into the history books.’
‘It’s just another job, sir.’
‘That’s the spirit, Johnno. Remember, though, it’s Africa, and someone else’s country, won’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘One other piece of good news for you, before you leave. Our cousins across the Atlantic have offered what support they can. They’ll retask a satellite to give us imagery if you get an idea of where they’ve holed up. Also, there’s an American carrier in the Indian Ocean at the moment. I’ve asked for an aircraft with FLIR and they’ve offered an FA-18. It’ll be at the South African base at Hoedspruit by the time you get there, OPCON to you.’
That was the best news he’d had so far on this job. Being given operational control of a fast jet equipped with a Forward Looking Infra-red camera from another country’s navy was a good indicator of the magnitude of the operation and the faith his superiors were placing in him. If the terrorists were traced to a fixed base, the jet could fly over at altitude but use its radar to pick up heat signatures of people inside. The aircraft would also be carrying enough bombs and rockets and guns to win a small war.
‘PM’s most upset by this brazen attack, Johnno, as you can imagine. He’s intimated to me that if we’re too late, if Greeves and his flunky are dead, and you still get eyes on the target, then we don’t want to be messing around with arrests and show trials and whatnot.’ The major general raised his eyebrows. ‘So feel free to use your aeroplane to maximum effect. The Yanks won’t mind a bit.’
‘Understood. Better go, sir. Don’t want to miss my flight.’