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At that time, he had drawn help from the Libyans and the Russians, a fact which more than anything had prompted the pro-West United Arab Emirates to disown Amnah. Ever since then, relationships with the UAE Government had been strained at the best of times, with frequent border skirmishes, on Quozzohoks’s instructions, at the slightest hint of territorial infringement. The West would now not dare lift one finger to help them for fear of upsetting the UAE, with whom the West now had major economic ties.

It had taken Amnah eight years to throw off the claws of Libya and Russia. Neither country was pleased with the way it had been treated by Quozzohok after helping Amnah to gain Independence, and it was unlikely either would be willing to help again, on anything other than complete takeover terms.

He wished he could discuss the situation rationally with his father, but he knew his father would not listen. His father would not believe that his people, whom his family had led for eleven hundred years, could even contemplate rising up against him. If he told his father about the incident with his Mercedes, it would only lead to even more water-holes being filled in, and create more misery and greater resentment still.

At dawn, Missh came to a decision: he would have to bring in a private army, one whose loyalties were to money and money only, one which would not be influenced by political or religious views. He needed someone thoroughly experienced in the field of mercenaries to advise him on the numbers and types of mercenaries he needed, and to set the whole thing up for him. There was one man, he knew, who might be able to help. He was the man through whom they had bought most of their military equipment during the last eight years — a man who was able to produce gunboats, tanks, aeroplanes, with the ease of a village shop delivering a weekend grocery order. He lifted the telephone receiver and started dialling an Athens telephone number. The phone rang three times, and then a voice answered.

‘Jimmy Culundis?’ said Missh.

‘Speaking’, said the Greek arms dealer.

‘This is Abby Missh. I have some business to talk.’

8

The white golf ball climbed gracefully through the air, high above the manicured fairway, and seemingly high above the peaks of the mountains that surrounded the course at Crans Montana, in the Swiss Alps. The man who stood on the eleventh tee, peering over the top of the lacquered head of his three wood at his ball’s flight, was short and plump. He wore a bright red Lacoste T-shirt, green tartan trousers, white shoes, a yellow peaked cap, and was festooned with heavy, vulgar jewellery. As his ball dipped down towards the fairway, it was momentarily obscured from his vision by a cloud of Bolivar smoke that belched out of his mouth and out of the damp stump he held clenched between his tobacco-stained teeth.

The ball bounced onto the green, ran forwards towards the pin and stopped what appeared, from where they were standing, to be only inches from a hole in one. Jimmy Culundis, the multi-millionaire Greek arms dealer, chuckled, removed the stump from his mouth and spat onto the ground. His companion, a tall man with a handsome, if slightly weak face, dressed in a cream silk shirt, paisley cravat, yellow cashmere V-neck cardigan and well-cut beige trousers, frowned at the perfect shot, and then glared down at the puddle of spittle on the ground. Slightly embarrassed, he looked behind him; the Moroccan Ambassador to Switzerland, the French Foreign Secretary, the French Commercial Attaché to Switzerland and the Couve de Meurville stood behind them with their battery of caddies, patiently waiting for them to move on, and with expressions of undisguised disgust on their faces.

Claude Louis Santenay Jarré du Charnevrau Ducarme de Louçelle, fifteenth Viscomte Lasserre, beamed a crushing aristocratic expression at the Greek, which, without words, told Culundis that the Viscomte approved neither of the shot nor the spitting.

‘Shot!’ said the Viscomte in a curt, grudging tone.

‘Good, hey!’ said the Greek, twiddling his finger in his ear.

The Viscomte placed his ball, and took his four wood. He cracked the ball high and hard over to the right, and it dropped neatly between the roots of a fir tree about eighty yards to the right of the green. He pushed his club back into his bag and, pulling their trolleys, the two men set off. They had no caddies because they wanted to talk, and did not want an audience; for it was here at Crans Montana, home of the Swiss Open Championship, that the two men met once a month during the summer months, to discuss their business.

Neither of them stood out particularly from any of the other rich people who hacked and bashed their way around some of the most exclusive kilometres of cultivated grass in the world, neither in appearance nor in standard of play. The Greek’s handicap was nine, the Viscomte’s twelve. The backgrounds of the two men could not have been more dissimilar. The Greek was the son of a twelfth generation lobster fisherman; when he was born, his family owned a single-storey cottage with no running water and no electricity. When the Viscomte Lasserre was born, his family owned Chateau Lasserre, a massive grey and white stone chateau, set in front of a two hundred acre lake, in a seventeen thousand acre estate which included fifty-five acres of cinquième cru vines. To most people, Chateau Lasserre was possibly the most beautiful of all the chateaux in the Médoc region of France. To all Frenchmen, its claret was, without doubt, one of the worst. The current Viscomte’s grandfather had, some sixty years previously, upon discovering that fewer and fewer people in France would buy his wine, succeeded in selling the entire output for one hundred years to an English shipper who knew that with a smart name, an old year and a cheap price, there would be no shortage of punters in the English restaurant trade.

The Greek, like many sons of fishermen, had gone into shipping. But whereas that other man from his country, Stavros Niarchos, had gone in for tankers, Jimmy Culundis had gone in for vessels for gun running. At first it had been on a local scale, providing boats to carry guns into Turkey, but soon he built it up into an international business, illegally shipping at first guns and ammunition, then graduating to all types of warmongering hardware, from armoured vehicles to jet fighters. His clientele comprised mainly terrorist organizations and guerilla outfits which legally no one was allowed to supply, or which were politically sensitive. He shipped guns to the IRA, gunboats to Israel, uranium to Libya.

It took him a mere five years to graduate from being the carrier to arranging the entire deals from start to finish. By the time he was thirty-three years old, he had completely equipped the armed forces of nine African countries, three Arab countries, and six South American countries. There was scarcely a terrorist in the world that had not at some time carried a weapon purloined from Jimmy Culundis.

Right from the very start, Culundis had always taken great pains to conceal his clandestine activities behind a carefully-maintained respectable front, although now it was a front that was in the process of crumbling fast. For over twenty years he had been one of the world’s leading bona fide arms dealers, and had been trusted widely by many governments. But stories of the murkier side of his business had been coming to the surface in many parts of the globe. The British Sunday Times Insight columns had plucked truckloads of skeletons from his closets, as had the Washington Post. So that at the age of fifty-three, he had been blacklisted by most of his major clients; and whilst there was still plenty of business for him in supplying the more dubious of customers, the massive empire he had constructed had lost the support of his biggest punters, and was in grave danger of collapsing.