Broken promises

I guess I’m not really very good at keeping promises.

Several times I’ve said a book would be available by a certain date and almost invariably I’ve been wrong. “Hunted” is no exception. I promised it for Christmas and once again I’m way out. This time though I’ve erred in the right direction, I was a little distracted by an election but, despite this, my latest offering is ready before Thanksgiving.  You can read a taster below and then find the rest on Amazon. Createspace, Goodreads and in any good bookshop.

Enjoy.

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Alex Mitchell. Most of you won’t recognize it but I’m prepared to bet a lot of you have seen it, even though you didn’t take any notice at the time. I’m a single, thirty-two year old male who stands six feet tall, weighs in at around a hundred-seventy-five pounds and has blue eyes and brown hair that usually looks tousled because I have a habit of running my fingers through it when I’m thinking.

I own a house and a few acres in Putnam County, West Virginia but I’m rarely there because of what I do for a living. I’m a freelance journalist and, although I say it myself, I’m a pretty good one. That’s why you’ve probably seen my name without paying attention to it.

I’ve won some of the big prizes, had pieces in all the better magazines and most of the national newspapers. My stories have been used on TV and my pictures can be found on the internet.

Editors like to use me because, if it’s a big story, they know I’ll cover it and give them a piece they can use, usually with an angle no one else has seen. I’ll also go anywhere, no matter what the story, how dangerous it is or where I have to go to get it. In my time I’ve covered drug cartels in Columbia, poverty in India, Argentina and Brazil, wars and epidemics in Africa and riots in Europe. I’ve also been to Russia twice, Iraq five times and Afghanistan three. I’ve been shot at, bombed, threatened and have a few scars to prove it.

Today, I’m covering an easy one for Time Magazine. It’s in London, England and the chances of violence are negligible.

It’s an appeal against extradition by a man with the unlikely name of Kgosi Gebhuza. I seriously doubt it’s his real name – apparently it means something like King Butcher.  I can’t imagine his parents calling him such a thing, but you never know, they may have done so and it is apt.

Gebhuza was a warlord who led an army in Central Africa. For more than five years his men caused mayhem in several countries. They bombed churches and school buses, shot politicians, raided villages, massacring the men and kidnapping the women and children. Male children were inducted into Gebhuza’s army but women and girls were not so lucky.

There are stories that he slept with a different female every night, choosing anyone over the age of twelve, and each morning he personally executed each of them by cutting their throats. There are even rumors he drank their blood but I’ll need to see some hard evidence before I really believe there’s any truth in them.

Anyway, his own people couldn’t stop him and neither could the neighboring countries, but then he made the mistake of raiding a convoy of European aid workers. Eight men were shot in cold blood, including a priest and two doctors. A dozen women, including nurses and nuns, were kidnapped.

The decapitated body of the first nurse was found a few days later. After the body of the third one was discovered the UN stepped in. It took three weeks, several drone strikes and a landing by Special Forces, but Gebhuza’s makeshift army was gone. The man himself was supposed to have been killed in a drone strike. I remember doing a story on the boy soldiers he used and being told he’d been in a house when it was blown apart.

That was five years ago and Gebhuza was virtually forgotten by all except his victims. Forgotten until last year, when a black male was stopped for speeding on London’s orbital motorway. The driving license he produced at the scene was genuine enough but it had been reported stolen by its real owner. The man was arrested and, protesting his innocence, was taken to a West London police station where he was fingerprinted and had his photograph taken. Normally, the authorities would have checked his address, found it to be genuine and let him go with instructions to attend a magistrate’s court later. No doubt if they had done that he would have just vanished again. It took less than an hour for Scotland Yard’s computers to match his details however. They realized who they’d caught, the news leaked out and all hell let loose.

When word Gebhuza was alive and in custody was officially confirmed the world went crazy. Five countries, including France and the United States, both of whom had lost citizens in the raid on the aid convoy, applied for his extradition. The African state of Rwanda got in first. They counted his victims in thousands and a judge ordered him to be returned to them.

The butcher appealed on the grounds that if he were sent there he would not receive a fair trial but would be tortured and executed. He also applied for political asylum in Britain and the rumor was he might actually get it.

Personally I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for his chances if he were released. He had so many enemies someone was bound to get him eventually but the British like to appear to be doing things fairly. He’d been granted bail, was living in the penthouse of a luxury hotel and was attending the hearing each day surrounded by half a dozen hand-picked bodyguards. As I said, Time Magazine, were paying me to cover the story and I’d been negotiating with Gebhuza’s legal team to get an exclusive interview with the man.

At first they’d demanded a stupid fee for a chance to talk to the General, as he liked to be called, but I can be very persuasive and pointed out telling his side of the story might help his appeal. Time recognized this could be the story of the decade and authorized me to spend up to ten grand on buying ten minutes of his time. They’d wired me the money and I’d managed to get his lawyer to agree to three thousand British pounds for thirty minutes. It was going to cost me another thousand for NKambi Jacobs, Gebhuza’s right hand man but it was worth it.

I’d done my research and knew their strange story. Gebhuza was a giant of a man, standing at six-four with the muscles of a professional wrestler. Jacobs is a little weasel of a guy. He’s a good foot shorter than the warlord and probably weighed around one-thirty but they were born in the same village and grew up together. When Gebhuza went into the bush and began gathering his army Jacobs graduated from mission school where he excelled, was given a church scholarship to high school and from there went to college in Britain. He graduated with honors around the time his old buddy was beginning his reign of terror in Central Africa.

Their lives could not have been any different but it seems they kept in touch and when Gebhuza’s army began looting and pillaging much of the proceeds somehow found their way through devious channels into Jacobs’ hands.

A source at the Solicitor General’s office told me Jacobs was suspected of providing the funds for the warlord’s weapons and also of secreting millions of stolen pounds away in numerous bank accounts. He hadn’t been caught however and nothing connecting him to the rapes and murders in Africa was found and so he was still a free man.

It was he I was going to see now. We’d met twice before, once with Gebhuza’s lawyers and once here at the hotel. The last time was when he told me a small gift of perhaps a thousand pounds would smooth the path to seeing the warlord.

He’d started in by asking for five times the amount but I’d beaten him down and we’d finally agreed on a thousand in cash and today would be the day. Normally on an assignment like this I’d take a photojournalist to handle the pictures but it seems the butcher is shy and would only talk to me if there was no one else there. For this reason I was carrying my trusty Nikon and was hoping to get some pictures of the man’s luxury suite. I already had plenty of archived photos of the devastation he’d left behind in Africa and had the start of an idea for a comparison article.

I entered the hotel lobby and immediately spotted two of Gebhuza’s goons sitting at a table nursing coffee cups and looking bored. They were hardly inconspicuous. Both were black. They wore dark suits, white shirts and ties and, despite being indoors, both had sunglasses on. Presumably they were trying to emulate secret service agents and were there as an advance guard to warn their boss if anyone he didn’t want to see arrived. They looked up when I walked in and one of them raised his wrist to his mouth and said a few words.

I suppressed a smile, they really did think they were secret service and I wondered if I could get a picture of them. I thought they might object so I’d ask Gebhuza, if I finally managed to get in to see him.

I went to the desk and had to stand in line behind an American couple who were checking in. They were having some hassle about their room and I was getting impatient but then one of the elevators dinged, the doors opened and I saw the tiny figure of Jacobs emerge.

He greeted me with a smile and a handshake then put his hand on my arm and gestured to a couch near one of the big front windows of the lobby. ‘Shall we sit down, Mister Mitchell?’ he said.

Immediately I was suspicious. ‘Aren’t we going up to see General Gebhuza?’ I asked.

‘There will be a small delay,’ he replied. ‘If we can just sit here I can perhaps give you a little background while we wait.’

I got a feeling the guy was about to lean on me for more cash before he’d let me see his boss. I had his thousand in an envelope and there was about three grand in British pounds left out of the Times’ bribe money. Knowing how these things worked, I had it in a coat pocket but I wasn’t going to give it to him unless I absolutely had to. We’d agreed a price and if he tried to change it I’d tell him I would write a story which would make General Gebhuza look worse than Hitler and Stalin rolled together. Reluctantly I stepped over to the couch he indicated and sat down.

‘Have you any idea how long the general will be?’

He shrugged and grinned, showing large, startlingly white teeth. ‘He has been entertaining a lady to lunch,’ he replied in perfect Oxford English. ‘One cannot rush these things.’

In other words the Butcher had enticed some floozy up to his suite. Fleetingly I wondered if she’d leave with her head still attached to her body but I dismissed the thought. Even Gebhuza would not be stupid enough to try the same sort of thing in Britain, especially with his extradition appeal pending. I pointedly looked at my watch.

‘I hope he won’t be too long,’ I said. ‘I have an appointment at the Home Office later and I’d really hate to have to just write their side of the story.’

It was a lie but it brought another big smile and Jacobs said, ‘No, no. I’m sure the General will be with us very shortly.’

The man had almost certainly not spoken a truer word in his life. Even as he finished speaking there was a brief, piercing scream from outside followed immediately by a crunching explosion of sound like a car wreck.

Instinctively we both turned to look out of the window. There was a black London taxi cab at the curb. All its windows appeared to be smashed and its roof was caved in. Lying grotesquely upside down, his legs on the roof and the rest of him where the windshield used to be was the naked body of a big black guy. His face was towards us, the eyes wide open and staring and blood flowed freely from his mouth, nostrils and ears.

Jacobs gave a little, almost feminine screech and came to his feet. ‘General…’ he gasped. I was as shocked as he was but I’ve been a reporter a long time. Instinct took over and I found the camera in my hands, lens cap off and finger pressing the power button. I got to my feet and got off a number of shots as I edged toward the main door. There was a crowd gathering around now, standing about a dozen feet back from the horror on the cab’s roof. I turned slightly and got a picture of NKambi still staring disbelievingly out of the window then I looked around for the two bodyguards I’d spotted as I walked in. They were no longer at the table where I’d seen them so I turned to scan the lobby.

The staff and people around reception had all rushed forward to look at the scene outside so the area in front of the elevators was clear. As my eyes swept across the space one of the elevators made a dinging sound, the indicator above it lit up and the doors slid open.

A man and a woman emerged. He was about thirty, big and muscular with cropped dark hair and a closely trimmed beard. Wearing a dark suit and black polo shirt he looked like any other young business man but it wasn’t him who grabbed my attention, it was the girl.

She would be twenty-nine years old on July fourteenth and was tall for a woman, five feet ten in fact. Her hair was shoulder length and dark with a hint of auburn in certain lights, her face was oval, her eyes cornflower blue and she had a wonderfully slim figure with a small, star-shaped mole on the top of her left hip. Not that she was showing her body now; she was wearing a mid-thigh, red dress with a short, black jacket over it. I knew every inch of her perfect form intimately though. I’d kissed every smooth, supple part of it and I’d dreamed about it a thousand times.

Her name was Rachel Darcy, we had been lovers for three hot, passionate nights three years ago and it was absolutely impossible for her to be here because four months after we met she took her own life.