12

Neil Colhoun shut the door of his office behind him, propped the umbrella up against a wall, and dropped himself in the tattered chair. The only sound he could hear was the rain beating a tattoo on his windows. It was something of a change from home, where the members of his family were indulging their belief that God provided rainy Sunday afternoons for testing the volume controls on the house’s three sound systems. Caught in the crossfire between his wife’s country music, his younger daughter’s new Björk single and his son’s current favourites – the Crash Test Dummies – Colhoun had decided the office was the best place to consider an SBS invasion of the United States.

He picked up the transcription of the lengthy report Marker had sent by burst transmission on Friday afternoon, shortly after his and Cafell’s return from their jaunt in the Everglades. And put it down again. By this time he could probably have recited the damn thing word for word.

He reached for the Admiralty and FO memos, which were almost as familiar. The Americans were not altogether happy with their British allies. In fact, they seemed to be a trifle hurt. In future it was hoped that cooperation in this particular endeavour could be more of a two-way street.

Fuck ’em, Colhoun thought sourly, and knew he was being unfair. If SEALs were conducting themselves on British soil the way Marker and Cafell were behaving in Florida he would be outraged, and he knew it. But . . .

He started leafing through the computer-enhanced blow-ups which the Illustrators’ Branch had generated from the pictures Marker had faxed. The quality wasn’t that great, but the negatives would be arriving by express post on the following morning and better reproductions would then be possible. There was one picture in particular which Colhoun wanted to examine more closely. It showed the back of the lodge, and in the blown-up version some unusual-looking machines could be made out through the windows of the door. They seemed to be partly made of clear plastic, and their shape had touched a chord in Colhoun’s memory. An unresponsive one, unfortunately.

He went on to the next picture, which showed the two men sitting on the wooden dock. The uniform, as Marker had suspected, was that of an Everglades National Park Ranger.

When it came down to it, Colhoun thought, he simply didn’t trust the American authorities. He didn’t trust their Special Forces to be efficient, and he had no faith in their security. If the man in the picture had been wearing a Coast Guard’s uniform he wouldn’t have been surprised.

Americans might be no more prone to corruption than Brits, but those working in Florida law enforcement certainly had more than their fair share of temptation to overcome. With so much drug money swilling around in the state the real surprise lay in the continued existence of honest and dedicated officials. The problem was in knowing who they were. Without such knowledge, enlisting American help was like entering a lottery. One in which the losers were apt to die.

It would be safer for all concerned to let Marker proceed with his plan. After all, Colhoun thought cynically, the four SBS men would simply constitute one more armed gang on American soil, and as far as the SBS CO knew, there was nothing against either carrying arms or gang membership in the US Constitution.

He tried to imagine selling this argument to the Foreign Office and failed. But then there was no reason why the FO should be told anything. As far as Colhoun was concerned he had been given carte blanche to sort this business out, and until such time as someone revoked his authority he intended to make the most of it.

Outside, the rain was still falling. He picked up the internal phone and called the duty office to tell them that he was on the premises. ‘If anything comes in from London or the States, I want to see it right away,’ he added.

‘There’s a fax here already,’ the corporal replied.

Colhoun rolled his eyeballs at the ceiling. ‘Send it over,’ he said, and hung up.

It turned out to be the intelligence report he had been waiting for. One of the Washington MI6 contingent had done some local research in Florida, and come up with the name and owners of the property on Hell’s Lake. Anhinga Lodge belonged to the Friends of Zion Health Care Trust, which ran hospitals in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Pierce and St Petersburg. It functioned as a weekend wilderness resort for the Trust’s two thousand employees. There was a staff of ten on duty from noon on Friday to noon on Monday throughout the winter high season, and sporadically during the summer low season. There were two live-in caretakers. Staff, visitors and supplies were all flown in by one of the Trust’s four helicopters.

Colhoun leant back in his chair, hands behind his head. There was something . . .

He had it!

He skimmed through the pages of his address book, found the number he was looking for, and reached for the phone.

‘Can I speak to your dad?’ he said when the child answered.

‘You may,’ the girl said primly, before apparently dropping the phone. A few moments later Dick Ferguson came on the line.

‘Dick, it’s Neil. I need to see you. Now, if possible.’

‘We’re just about to eat.’

‘At four o’clock?’

‘We eat late on Sunday, not that . . .’

‘It’ll only take a minute. I just need you to look at a photograph.’

‘Come on over.’

Colhoun hung up, told the duty office he was leaving, and drove into Bournemouth. He had known Ferguson for five years now, since the doctor had performed the operation on his father-in-law. An initial prejudice against money-grabbing consultants had been eroded, if not completely removed, by a common Scots heritage, a mutual taste for malt whisky, and a love of rugby.

Ferguson opened the door himself, napkin still tucked inside his collar, and led Colhoun into the empty living room.

Colhoun handed him the blow-up. ‘Those,’ he said, pointing out the machines.

Ferguson stared at them. ‘They look like Belzer-Kountz machines,’ he said at last. ‘I wouldn’t want to stake my life on it, but that’s what they look like.’

‘And what are Belzer-Kountz machines?’

‘They’re for preserving human organs between removal and transplantation.’

Colhoun took back the photograph. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘Is that it?’

‘Aye, you can get back to your supper.’

‘Lunch.’

Colhoun walked back to his car and sat behind the wheel, letting the pieces of the puzzle slip into place. The fact that a health trust owned the lodge, the fact that Russell, a paramedic, had been kidnapped rather than killed.

And Cafell had been right, he thought. It had to be Haiti – there was no way the necessary facilities could be hidden on one of the empty Bahamian keys.

Arcilla was smuggling human organs out of Haiti and into Florida, where desperate people were no doubt paying a fortune for something to which they had no earthly moral right. The more Colhoun thought about it, the angrier he felt.

He gunned the car’s engine, and headed for home. He had already decided who Marker’s reinforcements were going to be.

Fifteen miles away, Ian and Helen Dubery were parked in a New Forest lay-by, watching gusts of rain sweeping across the road. At least the weather was familiar, he thought unhappily. If this much wind and rain didn’t make his wife feel more at home, then nothing would.

‘I’m looking forward to seeing Mum,’ she said, confirming his suspicions. She always looked forward to her trips back home. He wondered if she ever told her family on Benbecula that she was looking forward to returning south. Some hope.

But why should she? Her friends were there, as well as her family. In Poole she had only him and a job she hated.

He had no doubt she loved him. After all, they had loved each other since they were about twelve. And he knew that loving him was enough to keep her here. But it wasn’t enough to make her happy.

What could he do? He loved his work. Getting into the SBS had been like having every dream he had ever had come true, the realization of aspirations which had begun on the day his father first took him boating in the Sound of Monach. He was only four then, but the green sea and blue sky were still vivid in his memory.

What was he supposed to do – give it all up? For what? There was no work in the outer islands. The fishing fleets were a shadow of what they once had been. All the young people left, just like he and Helen had done.

For a moment he felt angry with her, but what was the point?

The shower was ending as abruptly as it had begun, the sun breaking through the overhanging trees. She turned towards him, a smile on her face. As always, he felt his anger melt away.

‘Where now?’ he asked.

‘Home,’ she said.

‘Question twenty-nine,’ the Scouse voice boomed through the amplifier. Silence settled on the Hardy Arms. ‘What is the average lifespan of an ostrich? That’s an ostrich,’ the Liverpudlian repeated. ‘I’ll give you five years either way.’

Three tables away, Stuart Finn leant forward and whispered ‘fifty’ to the team member who was writing in the answers.

‘You sure?’ one of his team-mates asked doubtfully. ‘My budgie only lasted about six months.’

‘That was because you breathed on it,’ Finn retorted.

‘Fifty does seem kind of old,’ Dave muttered.

‘How about forty,’ his girlfriend Jean suggested.

‘Jesus!’ Finn said. ‘Fifty’s the right answer, leave it alone.’

‘How come you’re so sure of a thing like that?’ Jean asked.

Finn smiled at the woman. ‘I just am,’ he said, placing a beer mat on the edge of the table. He flicked it up and caught it deftly with the same hand.

‘The last question,’ the quizmaster bellowed. ‘That’s number thirty to youse who can count. What was the name of the Titanic’s captain?’

Finn and the other six members of the Hounds of Heaven quiz team stared blankly at each other. ‘What a fucking question,’ Dave moaned. ‘Finn, you’re in the fucking navy,’ someone else said.

‘The Titanic wasn’t a warship.’

‘They’re all boats, aren’t they?’

Finn ignored him. The girl on the next table was staring at him again, and this time he just smiled at her. She smiled brazenly back at him for several seconds before turning away. Maybe, Finn thought, the man next to her was her brother or something.

She was going to the bar now, and Finn could see her legs for the first time. They were nice. Shame about the blouse, he thought, but then not everyone could have taste as good as his.

‘I’m still not sure about the ostrich,’ one of his team-mates lamented.

‘I am,’ Finn said, getting up, ‘and if you change that answer I will go out and find a dead ostrich and stuff it up your arse.’

‘He’s always right about those things,’ Jean said. ‘It’s depressing.’

‘He certainly has a way with threats,’ Dave said.

Finn grinned and went to the bar, squeezing in beside the woman. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked.

‘No thanks,’ she said, ‘I’m buying one for my boyfriend.’

‘Lucky man,’ Finn said. ‘So why were you staring at me?’

She handed a fiver to the barman. ‘I work at the Institute for the Deaf in Bournemouth,’ she said with a smile. ‘As a lip-reading instructor. No one on our team knew what the average lifespan of an ostrich was.’

Finn was still smiling to himself the following morning, when he and Ian Dubery found themselves waiting for an audience with the CO. At first the summons had given Finn some cause for alarm – not that he could remember actually doing anything worthy of a reprimand – but his fellow-corporal’s presence had reassured him. Ian Dubery was not the type to get keelhauled across the CO’s carpet.

Colhoun lost no time in telling them what they were there for, and was pleased, if not surprised, by the eagerness on each man’s face as he recounted the genesis of the operation and the developments to date. ‘You’ll be flying out from Heathrow this afternoon,’ he said. ‘One or both of the others will meet you at Miami Airport.’

‘Uniform, boss?’ Finn asked.

‘No. And as far as US Immigration is concerned, you’re just a couple of tourists come to do some diving on the reefs off the Florida Keys. So when they hand round the form on the plane, and you get to the question about purpose of visit, just tick “pleasure”, don’t write in “illicit military operations on US territory”.’

The two men dutifully laughed.

‘Captain Marker will brief you on what you’ll actually be doing,’ Colhoun continued. ‘Any questions?’

‘Aye,’ Dubery said, almost apologetically. ‘Do we know exactly what it is these people are smuggling into Florida?’

‘Not for certain,’ Colhoun admitted. ‘But the door-to-door trip takes longer than ten hours, which apparently rules out hearts and livers. According to an expert I talked to last night the best bets are kidneys and corneas, and maybe bone tissue.’

‘It must be a pretty expensive business,’ said Finn, ‘running two helicopters, two submarines, a treasure hunt and a wilderness lodge. They must be either getting an astronomic price or shifting a hell of a lot of kidneys.’

Colhoun checked the notes he had made while talking to Ferguson’s friend at the School of Tropical Medicine in London. ‘A kidney will fetch $20,000, a cornea about $7000,’ he told them. ‘A knee joint goes for about $2500. Three small ear bones – $750. You may find this hard to believe, but if you could extract an entire skeleton from a fresh corpse, and powder the bones, you would be talking nearly a quarter of a million.’

‘Christ,’ Dubery said.

‘Looks like my Dad is going to leave me something after all,’ Finn murmured.

Colhoun smiled despite himself. ‘The reason’s simple,’ he said. ‘Supply and demand. The queues keep getting longer, and for the best reasons. Since seat belts were introduced here and in America road deaths – and particularly brain deaths, which allow the organs to be removed from a technically living body – have declined dramatically. So there are less organs for transplant. When they raised the speed limit in some US states from fifty-five to sixty-five the death rate increased again, and the transplant surgeons thought it was Christmas. And then some states started imposing handgun controls, which tightened the supply again.’

‘Sick,’ Finn commented.

‘Aye,’ Dubery agreed. ‘But if someone you loved was desperate for a new kidney . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a hard call.’

‘This smuggling is illegal in America, right?’ Finn asked.

‘Oh aye,’ Colhoun said, checking his notes again. ‘The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 made it a criminal offence to buy or sell a human organ. But it’s not illegal in a lot of Third World countries. In India it’s quite common for families to sell a daughter’s kidney. And even in places where it is technically illegal there seems to be a lot of it going on. In Russia loads of families can’t afford to bury their dead unless they agree to sell off the profitable bits. And there was a case in London the other day of a Turkish immigrant caught selling his kidney to some man from Birmingham. In some places in Central America gangs just round up children and help themselves. Even at its nicest this is a very nasty business. And we have no way of knowing if the organs being smuggled into Florida have been donated voluntarily or not. For all we know some bastard warlord in Haiti could just be slaughtering people and cutting them up. Carefully.’

‘I think we get the picture, boss,’ Finn said soberly.

‘Good. I don’t want to find out that pieces of you two are on sale in half a dozen Florida hospitals.’

While waiting for the word from Poole on their request for reinforcements, Marker and Cafell found themselves with plenty of spare time on their hands.

This proved a mixed blessing as far as Marker was concerned. Usually there were few things he enjoyed more than simply messing around on or beside the sea, but on this occasion he found that the lack of a controlling purpose left his mind open for the demons to roam. He had hardly thought about Penny over the past couple of days, but now he seemed trapped once more by memories of his life with her.

One part of him wished he had left the Marine Corps, as she had wanted. They would probably have had a child by now, maybe even two. He would have been helping to bring new life into the world, rather than taking life away. He had no name for the man he had killed, and the only face he had seen had already been half obliterated by the bullet from the Browning.

Penny’s face also seemed harder to visualize with each passing day, and once, when he tried to conjure it up, he found himself staring into the dead eyes of Tamara Arcilla. Maybe time would untangle these knots of grief, but Marker was no longer so sure. One thing he did know was that any future relationship would have to live and breathe in the shadow of both these women. The past, which had always seemed like a springboard to the future, now felt more like a set of emotional chains.

Rob Cafell had never killed anybody, but he too found himself dwelling on the man whose corpse was now rotting on the bed of Lostman’s River. The trip back across Hell’s Lake in the submarine had been like one of those black farces on TV, where a body keeps turning up despite the best efforts of all involved. Cafell had laughed at such programmes in the past, but he doubted if he would laugh at one again. And he wondered whether the authors of such pieces had ever seen death up close. For the first time he began to understand his father’s lifelong reluctance to talk in any detail about his experiences in the war.

Russell was just finishing putting all the medicines back on the pharmacy shelves when Emelisse came into the room. ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she said.

It was a copy of the New York Times.

‘Where did that come from?’ he asked.

‘Oh, Calderón has the Tuesday edition sent up from Port au Prince every week. He likes to read the “Science Times” section. Keep up with developments.’

‘I expect Dr Frankenstein was a regular subscriber,’ said Russell.

She sighed and tapped the front page. ‘Haitian Junta Faces Ultimatum’ the headline read.

Russell skimmed through the report, which suggested, without offering any evidence in support, that American military intervention in Haiti was a couple of weeks away at most, and perhaps only a matter of days.

‘Maybe it is not worth trying to escape,’ she said softly. ‘If the Americans bring back Aristide then Joutard’s days are numbered.’

He put a hand on each of her shoulders. ‘Emelisse,’ he said, ‘if law and order comes to Haiti it will come first to Port au Prince. And what do you think people like Joutard will do – wait for it to reach out for them?’ He answered his own question. ‘Of course not. They will cover their tracks, bury the evidence. And we are part of that evidence. All those young men and women with scars on their bodies are part of it.’

She took it in, and her eyes closed as in pain.

‘Come with me,’ he urged her.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘It frightens me,’ she said, though as far as he could tell there was not a trace of fear in her eyes. ‘But you are probably right.’

‘You’ll come?’

‘Oh no, you don’t understand. If you are right, then this is one more reason why I must stay.’

The burst transmission from Poole announcing the dispatch of reinforcements arrived at 09.00 hours on Monday morning. Both the decision and the selection were welcomed by the two recipients. Ian Dubery was as good a boat handler as anyone in the SBS, and Stuart Finn was known to be as effective in a crunch as he was insubordinate.

Marker had ‘talked’ to Franklin via the PRC 319 on their return from Hell’s Lake, and now he composed another message, typed it out on the keypad, and sent it. In a way he felt sorry he couldn’t offer the ex-SAS man a more active role, for Franklin had felt like an integral part of the team ever since their arrival in the Turks and Caicos.

Marker and Cafell decided that only one of them was needed to collect the incoming tourists that afternoon, and the younger man drew the short straw. Marker was left to go over the tactical plan once more, take a swim, and watch cartoons on TV. He felt in control again, and told himself that there would be time enough to sort out the meaning of sex, the universe and everything when they had Arcilla behind bars.

Cafell, meanwhile, arrived at Miami International with plenty of time to spare, parked the car, and started circumnavigating the now familiar sights. He bought and started reading a new paperback account of the Battle of Midway, and missed the on-screen announcement of the plane’s arrival.

Hurrying down to the relevant gate, he caught sight of them through an open door, as they waited to be processed through Immigration. Dubery was the taller one, with dark, boyish good looks which reminded Cafell of the Match of the Day pundit who once played for Liverpool. Finn had lighter hair, swept back and heavily dosed with gel. He looked like one of the lads – Cafell’s father would have called him a ‘wide boy’. Standing in the Immigration queue, Finn seemed faintly amused by the whole business. Dubery, by contrast, looked slightly worried, as if conscious of how far he was from the presumed simplicities of life in the Outer Hebrides.

The two of them got through Immigration and Customs without any trouble, and Cafell hurried them down to the basement car park.

‘Nice motor,’ Finn commented.

‘Wait till you see the boat,’ Cafell told him.

They drove south out of Miami, setting sun to their right, rush-hour traffic all around them. Dubery gazed out of the window with interest, but Finn, happily spread across the two back seats, had apparently seen it all before.

‘How many square feet of skin do you reckon you have, boss?’

‘What?’ Cafell exclaimed.

Finn repeated the question.

‘He’s been driving me mad all day,’ Dubery lamented. ‘He bought one of those mini-encyclopaedias at Heathrow, and he’s been showing off ever since. When the hostess brought the meal on the plane he asked her when the microwave was invented.’

‘And when was it?’

‘Nineteen forty-seven,’ Finn said from the back. ‘And the average human has twenty square feet of skin.’

‘I’ll be able to sleep at night now,’ Cafell said. The light was rapidly fading now, the lights of the oncoming cars like a river stretching into the distance.

‘So what’s the score, boss?’ Dubery asked.

‘Marker will tell you the plan. You’ve got the camcorder?’

‘State of the art, according to the Illustrators,’ Finn said from the back. ‘The man said it would shoot in just about any light short of pitch-darkness. He said the Yanks use something like it for filming their drug busts.’

‘Sounds ideal.’

‘What are we going to be filming,’ Finn asked, ‘porno flicks with the boss and this Cuban guy’s sister?’

Cafell suppressed a smiled. ‘I wouldn’t suggest that to Captain Marker if I were you,’ he said. ‘In fact I wouldn’t mention the woman at all.’

‘Left a nasty taste in the mouth, did she?’ Finn asked mischievously.

‘Something like that.’

‘Why, was she really ugly or something?’

Cafell grunted. ‘She was a stunner.’

‘Then . . .’

‘Don’t ask me. And don’t ask him either if you don’t want your head bitten off.’

‘OK, I get the message.’

They drove on, through Homestead and then on to the two-lane Keys section of Highway 1. As they went past Key Largo’s Holiday Inn Cafell asked the other two if they had heard of The African Queen. Finn had, Dubery hadn’t. Finn expressed his doubts as to whether they had flush toilets yet in the Outer Hebrides. These had been invented, he added gratuitously, in 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada.

For the next half hour Cafell treated the two corporals to a lecture on the defeat of the Armada, something he had studied and modelled in some depth.

‘And you thought I was a know-all,’ Finn said to Dubery as they arrived at Buena Vista.

Marker was waiting at the door to shake their hands. Supper was already heating in the microwave.

‘Invented in 1947,’ Cafell said, nodding at it.

‘When else?’ Marker agreed.

After eating, Finn and Dubery were shown over the Slipstream Queen, beers were retrieved from the fridge, and the four men sat in the boat’s lounge as Marker went over his intended plan of action.

‘My first idea was simply to take over the lodge and round up everyone as they arrived – the sub, the chopper, even the Indian in his canoe if he’s part of the set-up. But there’s one big problem with that. Either of you two see what it is?’ he asked the newcomers.

They both thought for a moment. ‘A lapful of kidneys,’ Finn said eventually.

‘Right. We can hardly expect the bad guys to go ahead and deliver them for us – they’d just make a run for it. And there’s no way we could deliver them ourselves. We could just ignore the damn things, but after people have donated them – whether by choice or not – it seems like a terrible fucking waste not to let them go where they’re needed.’

Marker looked from face to face. ‘So this is what we’re going to do instead . . .’

Russell strung the water bottle across his back and checked that he had everything else he needed. The food had been shared out between his pockets, the scalpel he had lifted from the surgery was stuffed in his right boot, inside a sheath made from paperback covers. The length of rope was wrapped around his neck.

It was one o’clock, the time he had decided offered an optimum balance of risks. Later would have been safer as regards escaping the compound, and earlier would have given him more time to get across the island.

Let’s go, he told himself, and picked up the grappling-hook he had fashioned from bedsprings. After opening the front door he waited half a minute, watching the compound for any sign of movement, and then walked briskly through the trees and darkened bungalows to the southern perimeter wall.

The grappling-hook caught on the strands of barbed wire at the first attempt, and he quickly pulled himself up the face with the help of the twisted sheet rope. Once at the top he gathered together the sheet to make a cushion, and used it to roll across the barbs. He landed as well as he could have hoped in the bare dirt on the other side.

It had been too easy, he thought. If getting out of the compound was that easy, then getting off the island was likely to be a real bugger.

He stood up gingerly and took his first look at the outside world. It was not the way he had imagined it.

Away to his right a few tumbledown homes were gathered around the gate, and beyond them a line of tall palms followed what was probably a stream bed around the far side of the compound. But that was the extent of the cover. The forested hills he had expected were covered with low scrub up to about five hundred feet, and bare above that. It looked more like Provo than the Haiti he had imagined.

And the gibbous moon riding in the eastern sky was bathing the slopes in pale grey light.

Reckoning that the stream bed probably offered the easiest and most inconspicuous route up into the hills, Russell carefully threaded his way through the shacks beneath the watch-tower, keeping one eye on the guard above. Fortunately the man only seemed interested in what was going on inside the walls of the compound.

The stream bed was full of dry pebbles. Russell followed it uphill, slowly until he was sure he was out of earshot, then as fast as the terrain would allow. The moonlight ensured that he had no trouble finding his way, and until the stream bed petered out in an ocean of scrub he made good progress.

The last uphill stretch was a different matter, and it was almost four o’clock when he reached the ridge top, and found himself looking out across several miles of ocean channel at the distant Haitian mainland. Away to the west, he thought he could make out a few pinpricks of light where the town of Port de Paix was supposed to be.

Below and to his left, some two miles distant, a village was stretched along the sides of a small bay.

The downhill leg proved no easier. The southern slopes of the range were not so bare, and this time he had no stream bed to follow through the scrub. More than an hour had passed when he finally emerged into the cultivated fields above the village, and crawled to the crest of the last small rise overlooking the bay.

There were several small boats moored at a ramshackle dock, and one large enough to serve as a public ferry. Russell was strongly tempted to walk straight down, steal a boat, and take his chances out on the water.

But it was gone five o’clock, and the chances of his reaching the far side of the strait before dawn were non-existent. He would have no time to pick and choose which boat to steal. And he would be a sitting duck if they caught him on the water.

On the other hand, he told himself, if he waited until the following night he could be sure of arriving on the mainland during the hours of darkness, and that would vastly increase his chances of finding some sort of sanctuary in Port de Paix before the local thugs found him.

He didn’t much like it, but the smart money was on digging in for the day. He walked back through the cultivated fields, and into the scrub, where he dug out his first hide since the one above Port Stanley twelve years before. This one was blessed with natural cover, and didn’t need to be constructed so professionally, but he was pleased with his work just the same.

Which was all to the good. Only a few minutes after incarcerating himself Russell heard the swelling drone of a helicopter. The search was underway.