Fire Force(2)

The government of Equatorial Guinea didn’t have much sympathy for white mercenaries. And neither did the Foreign Office.

‘You have to get him out, Steve,’ Katie had said, weeping on his shoulder. ‘You’re my only hope.’

So, reluctantly, Steve had agreed to try. It was either that, or else go back and tell Katie to put her wedding dress in mothballs. Because Broken Ridge didn’t look like the kind of place that had a parole board.

‘I’m folding,’ grumbled Abago. He slammed his cards down on the table.

Steve reached across and collected the pot. It came to $120, a fortune in a country where most people earned less than that in a year.

‘Another round?’ he suggested.

He was keeping his voice as casual as possible but that wasn’t the way he felt. After checking into the Sofitel downtown, he’d scoured the street market and bought the first handgun he could find, a Raven-25, and then he’d caught a taxi right up here. Ollie had accepted a $100,000 contract to break out a man called Newton Bunjira who’d already spent ten years locked up here. Now it was costing the same guys another $250,000 to break him out: even with that kind of money on the table Steve wouldn’t have taken the job unless Katie had begged him. He had kitted himself out with $1,000 in cash, and ten South African minted gold Krugerrands, each one weighing a single troy ounce, then come straight up to the bar. There was only one way into Broken Ridge, and that was through the front door.

I just have to get the Commandant to let me in, he thought. And the only way to do that is over a card table.

Abago clicked his fingers and one of the four girls sitting at the bar walked across to the table, draping her arms across the man’s sweaty chest. She didn’t look any older than fifteen. Her skin was smooth and supple, and she was wearing a white cotton dress that did little to disguise her figure. ‘Deal us some cards, you bitches,’ he growled.

Another girl had already placed her hands across Steve’s shoulders. He looked up into her huge, dark eyes. She remained silent, massaging the back of his neck, then reached down for the deck and shuffled the cards with her long red fingernails.

‘What’s your business in my country, Mr West?’ asked Abago.

‘Import, export.’

‘In the oil trade?’

Steve nodded. Keep it simple, he told himself. Just play the part of an innocent businessman dealing with the local oil companies. A guy who’s stumbled into this bar for some relaxation.

‘I hope you make plenty of money, Mr West . . .’ the Commandant took a hit from his beer bottle and squeezed the girl around the waist, his fat fingers digging into her skin until she squealed in pain ‘. . . because then I can win it from you at poker.’

Steve turned up the two cards lying face down on the table.

A pair of eights.

He felt another bead of cold sweat edge down his spine.

‘Sodding eights,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘It’s going to take more than that to break my mate Ollie out of this Hell’s Butlins.’





Two

I’S THIS A PRIVATE GAME, OR can anyone play?’

Ian Murphy had already pulled up a chair and helped himself to a bottle of beer. He was a small man, with a build that was half-footballer, half-bricklayer: short and round, with a low centre of gravity, and thick, bruising muscles. His cropped brown hair looked like it might turn orange if it was left out in the sun, and his cheeks were marked with freckles. A pair of thick dark glasses were wrapped around his face, obscuring his eyes completely. ‘The Bomber’, thought Steve. The man wasn’t much to look at, but give him some fuse wire and some Semtex and there wasn’t any kind of chaos he couldn’t unleash.

‘Another white man,’ said Abago, grinning. He took a long, hard swig of his beer. ‘If there’s one thing I enjoy more than taking a woman off a white man . . . it’s taking his money.’

‘Make yourself at home, pal,’ said Steve tersely, looking up towards Ian.

Ian had taken a different route into Malabo from Steve. He’d caught a British Airways flight to Casablanca, then connected onto a Royal Air Maroc plane down to Equatorial Guinea. The two men were staying at the same hotel, but they had checked in at different times and hadn’t said a single word to each other. They were planning to keep it that way. If they were to have any chance of pulling this off, then it was absolutely vital that nobody realised they were working together.

We don’t want to find ourselves locked up in this rat hole, Steve thought. Saving Ollie’s miserable skin isn’t worth twenty years in this place.

‘Five card?’ said Ian.