Sean Dillon 08 - Day of Reckoning by Jack Higgins

Author:Jack Higgins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Published: 2011-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

LEBANON

AL SHARIZ

9

Brendan Murphy leaned over the rail of the small coastal freighter, the Fortuna, and watched the distant lights of Syria. The ship was Italian-registered and had definitely seen better days, but under its battered exterior the essential bits, the engines, were in excellent condition. They'd left the Black Sea two days earlier and had made good time.

The man who approached him, wearing a seaman's reefer coat, held a cup of coffee in one hand, which he passed to him. His name was Dermot Kelly and he had unfashionably Irish blond hair and a hard, pocked face. He lit a cigarette.

'Jesus, Brendan, they're all fugging Arabs, this crew. If I light up in the saloon, they glare at me. Lucky I brought a bottle on board.'

'Fundamentalists,' Murphy said. 'Army of God, this lot. They're just waiting for death in the service of Allah, so they can go to Paradise and have eternal pleasure and all those women.'

'They must be crazy.'

'Why? You mean we're Catholics and we're right, and they're Muslims and they're wrong? Come off it, Dermot.'

An Arab, in a reefer coat the same as Kelly's, came down a ladder from the bridge. He was the captain and his name was Abdul Sawar.

'How's it going?' Brendan demanded.

'Excellent. We'll be on time.'

'Well, that's good.'

Sawar said, 'Any problems?'

'Well, I miss bacon and eggs for breakfast,' Kelly told him.

'We do our best, Mr Kelly, but some things are not possible.'

'Well, you'd probably have a problem in reverse in Dublin,' Kelly told him.

'Exactly.'

Sawar went back up the ladder, and Murphy said, 'Don't stir the pot, Dermot. You can't expect good Irish bacon on an Italian boat crewed by Arabic fundamentalists off the coast of Syria.'

'All right, so I'll just think of the money.'

'The gold, Dermot, the gold. Speaking of which, we'll check it out.'

He led the way to the stern of the ship, and went down a companionway to a rear saloon. There were two cargo boxes wrapped in sacking.

Dermot lit a cigarette. 'They look like shire to me.' 'Five million in gold, Brendan.'

'How do we know?'

'Because Saddam wants another cargo next month, so he won't screw around with this one.'

'Do you think it's all going to work?'

'Like a Swiss watch. Fox will be on a plane. We'll offload the gold, and take it to the airport at Beirut, where the right officials have been bribed. The plane is routed to Dublin, but it puts down at an old air force base in Louth on the way. We unload our half and Fox carries on, announcing a mid-air change of destination.'

'Where will he go?'

'Supposedly Heathrow, but on the way there, when the plane is in uncontrolled air space, he'll put down on this estate nearby in Cornwall, called Hellsmouth. There's an RAF aerodrome there from the Second World War. The runway's a bit rough, but it can take a plane like the Gulfstream.'

'Sounds good to me, Brendan.'

'And me, Dermot.'

The other man smiled, took a half bottle of Paddy whiskey from his pocket, unscrewed the top, and drank deeply.

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