At long last the sound started to bleed back through to his senses. First, his own desperate cries echoed through his bloodied ears. And then he became aware of something mixed in – something more chilling even than the scores of insects that were intent on feasting on his brains.
A human voice.
Deep-throated. Cruel. A voice that revelled in pain.
His jailer.
The voice brought it all flooding back. Black Beach Prison. The jail at the end of the earth. A place where people were sent to be tortured horribly and to die. Jaeger had been thrown in here for a crime he’d never committed, on the orders of a crazed and murderous dictator – and that was when the real horrors had begun.
Compared to waking to this hell, Jaeger preferred even the dark peace of unconsciousness; anything rather than the weeks he’d spent locked away in this place worse than damnation – his prison cell. His tomb.
He willed his mind to slip away again, back towards the soft, formless, shifting shades of grey that had sheltered him before something – what was it? – had dragged him up to this unspeakable present.
The movements of his right arm became weaker and weaker.
It dropped to the floor again.
Let the cockroaches feast on his brains.
Even that was preferable.
Then the thing that had woken him hit again – a rush of cold liquid to the face, like the slap of a wave at sea. Only the smell was so different. Not the ice-pure, bracing aroma of the ocean. This smell was fetid; the salt tang of a urinal that hadn’t seen a lick of disinfectant for years.
His tormentor laughed again.
This was real sport.
Chucking the contents of the toilet bucket in the prisoner’s face – what could be better?
Jaeger spat out the foul liquid. Blinked it away from his burning eyes. At least the blast of putrefying fluid had driven the roaches away. His mind searched for the right words – the choicest expletives that he could fling in his jailer’s face.
Proof of life. A show of resistance.
‘Go and…’
Jaeger began to speak, croaking out the kind of insult that would for sure secure him a beating with that same flex hose that he had learned to dread.
But if he didn’t resist, he was done for. Resistance was all he knew.
Yet he didn’t get to finish those words. They froze in his throat.
Suddenly, another voice cut in, one so familiar – so brotherly – that for several long moments Jaeger felt certain he had to be dreaming. The incantation was soft at first, but growing both in power and in volume; a rhythmical chant replete somehow with the promise of the impossible…
‘Ka mate, ka mate. Ka ora, ka ora.
Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!’
Jaeger would know that voice anywhere.
Takavesi Raffara; how could he be here?
When they’d been teammates playing the British Army at rugby, it had been Raff who’d led the haka – the traditional Maori pre-match war dance. Always. He’d rip off his shirt, ball his fists, and ripple forward to get eyeball-to-eyeball with the opposing team, hands thumping his massive chest, legs like pillared tree trunks, arms like battering rams, the rest of his team – Jaeger included – flanking him, fearless, unstoppable.
His eyes had bulged, tongue swollen, face frozen in a rictus of warrior challenge as he’d thundered out the lines.
‘KA MATE! KA MATE! KA ORA! KA ORA!’ Will I die? Will I die? Will I live? Will I live?
Raff had proven equally relentless when standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield. The ultimate fellow warrior. Maori by birth and Royal Marines Commando by destiny, he had soldiered with Jaeger across the four corners of the earth, and he was one of his closest brothers.
Jaeger swivelled his eyes right, towards the source of the chanting.
Out of the corner of his vision he could just make out a figure standing on the far side of the cell’s bars. Massive. Dwarfing even his jailer. Smile like a shaft of pure sunlight breaking through after a dark storm seemingly without end.
‘Raff?’ The single word was rasped out, ringing with a barely suspended disbelief.
‘Yeah. It’s me.’ That smile. ‘Seen you looking worse, mate. Like that time I dragged you out of that Amsterdam bar. Still, best get you cleaned up. I’ve come to get you, mate. Get you out of here. We’re flying BA to London – first class.’
Jaeger didn’t respond. What words were there? How could Raff be here, in this place, seemingly so close at hand?
‘Best get going,’ Raff prompted. ‘Before Major Mojo your buddy here changes his mind.’
‘Yah, Bob Marley!’ Jaeger’s tormentor forced a mock joviality from behind evil slits of eyes. ‘Bob Marley – you the real joker man.’
Raff grinned from ear to ear.
He was the only man Jaeger had ever seen who could smile at someone with a look that could freeze the very blood. The Bob Marley reference had to refer to Raff’s hair – worn long, in braids, the traditional Maori way. As many had learned on the rugby field, Raff didn’t take well to anyone disrespecting his choice of head apparel.
‘Unlock the cell door,’ Raff grated. ‘Me and my friend Mr Jaeger – we’re leaving.’
2
The jeep pulled away from Black Beach Prison, Raff hunched over the wheel. He handed Jaeger a water bottle.
‘Drink.’ He jerked a thumb at the back seat. ‘There’s more in the cooler. Get as much down you as you can. You need to rehydrate. We’ve got one hell of a day ahead of us…’
Raff lapsed into silence, his mind on the journey that lay before them.
Jaeger let the quiet hang in the air.
After weeks in that prison, his body was a mass of burning. Every joint screamed with agony. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since he’d been thrown into that cell; since he’d travelled anywhere in a vehicle; since his body had been exposed to the full blast of Bioko’s tropical sunlight.
He flinched in pain with every jolt of the vehicle. They were following the ocean road – a narrow stretch of blacktop that led into Malabo, Bioko’s one major town. There were precious few surfaced roads in the tiny African island nation. Mostly, the country’s oil wealth went into funding a new palace for the President, or another of his fleet of giant yachts, or to further inflating his Swiss bank accounts.
Raff gestured at the vehicle’s dash. ‘Pair of shades in there, mate. You look like you’re struggling.’
‘Been a while since I’ve seen the sun.’
Jaeger flicked open the glove compartment and pulled out what looked like a pair of Oakleys. He studied them for an instant. ‘Fakes? You always were a bloody cheapskate.’
Raff laughed. ‘Who dares wins.’
Jaeger let a smile creep across his battered features. It hurt like hell to do so. He felt as if he hadn’t smiled in a lifetime; as if the smile was cracking his face right in two.
In recent weeks Jaeger had come to believe he was never getting out of that prison cell. No one who mattered had even known he was there. He’d become convinced that he would die in Black Beach, unseen and forgotten, and that, like countless corpses before, his would be thrown to the sharks.
He couldn’t quite fathom it – that he was alive and free.
His jailer had let them out via the shadowed basement – the place that housed the torture cubicles – sliding wordlessly past blood-spattered walls. The place where the trash was dumped, plus the bodies of those who’d died in their cells and were ready to be thrown into the sea.
Jaeger couldn’t imagine what kind of deal Raff had cut, to enable him to walk.