The Leper Ship Read online

  Cappaldi was standing by one of the halogen lamp standards. He had used a wing nut on the stem as a coat hanger for his suit jacket, after a pantomime of obvious concern that the combination of dust and perspiration might soil the garment. Now the temperature in the clear desert night was falling rapidly and he wanted to put it on again but before doing so he was checking it carefully to make sure that the lightweight cashmere fabric was unblemished. What he must have paid for it, Salah calculated grimly, would probably have kept one of these stricken families in food for a year. And they knew it. Even here, newspapers, magazines and television programmes kept the people well up to date with Western fashions, and what they cost. The certainty of this spurred the tall freedom fighter into speedier action.

  ‘Stop fussing with that,’ he said rudely as he approached, for all the world as though the young Italian executive was a child.

  ‘Get yourself across to my truck as quickly as you can without making it too obvious. Get in the back and hide.’

  The Italian’s face registered shock and disbelief. The backs of the trucks were not just filthy, they were being loaded with containers of lethal waste that he had every reason to believe were leaking dangerously. ‘What—’

  ‘Do as I say!’ Salah spat, walking straight past Cappaldi as though he were not talking to him at all. ‘They’ll kill you any moment unless you move!’

  Without pausing to see what effect his words had, Salah walked on into the middle of the collection zone. Ali had parked the truck at the head of the column and it was fully loaded now. They all were, except the fourth and last. Six white-suited waste disposal experts were sitting in a group with their protective hoods thrown back, chatting and smoking as the sailors from Napoli’s crew loaded the pallets with fork-lift trucks. ‘Any of you speak English?’ asked Salah casually as he approached.

  One of them nodded. He was the tallest of them, a dry-looking, almost elderly man. A professor of some kind. He was the leader of the scientists and, oddly enough, the one who had placed the explosives. Salah spoke directly to him. ‘Tell the others to get on to the trucks now,’ he said. ‘Drivers and crew members into the cabs—as many as will fit. The rest in the backs. All the leaking drums have already been removed with the contaminated sand. This last lot is safe. You can hide behind them if you have to.’

  The old man’s eyes rested briefly on Salah as though he could not understand the rapid English words. Then they drifted away to the rim of the pit where there were suddenly a lot of shadowy figures in tattered Arab dress looking down on them. He nodded once and spoke to the other scientists. They were up even before Salah turned to the crew. Niccolo had anticipated him; he was already giving the crew orders. A few terse words and the men simply vanished. To cover them, the Italian officer and Salah stooped in concert and lifted the last pallet—providentially empty and light—up into the back of the last truck.

  Then suddenly it was finished and there was silence. Salah swung round slowly and walked out from behind the truck as Niccolo slammed the tailgate up into place. The only other outsider visible was Fatima, standing by the open door of the first truck, waiting for him. Beyond and behind her, Ali ibn Sir and the villagers stood in a wide, still fan, watching. The only gun he could see was Ali’s Uzi but that was more than gun enough. He wondered how many of them would need to die before the villagers would be satisfied. He wondered how they expected to get the last of the stuff aboard the Napoli with half of the crew here, dead. And the captain. And the first officer. But they would have thought of that. Ali must have a plan, he would have it all worked out, Salah was certain. Mouth dry, heart thumping, he walked forward.

  The engine of the lead truck coughed into life. Fatima swung round, her face a mask of surprise and consternation, to look up into the cab. Salah froze for an instant. They all did. It was the last thing any of them expected. With a scream of tortured gears, the truck was off, careering forward at Ali and the villagers. In the thunder of its movement, the other lorries all fired up as well and began to roll forward in convoy after it. Salah broke into a sprint. The open door of the first truck swung wildly as the Mercedes moved. It caught Fatima and hurled her away to one side. The truck reached the villagers and they too flew this way and that, most of them diving safely out of the way. Salah pulled Fatima to her feet. The side of her face was darkening into a bruise but her eyes were open and bright. ‘Cappaldi,’ she called over the thunderous row, explaining everything with that one word. They looked back down the convoy as the second, then the third truck thundered past them, deserting them in the panic rush to escape. But Niccolo was driving the fourth one and he stood on his brake as he came abreast of them. Strong hands pulled them up and into the cab then handed them back like bundles of washing at a dhobi through the canvas partition in the rear into the flat bed of the truck.

  The barrels of chemical waste made an effective shield but they were loosely loaded. It was easy enough to see between them to the bright pandemonium rapidly receding behind them.

  Ali and most of his men had picked themselves up now and were in animated conference, clearly debating the best way to give pursuit. As Salah watched them pick up the bodies of the two men who had not managed to dive out of the way of Cappaldi’s truck, he knew there would be no quarter for them now. Then the sand thrown up by the convoy swirled in behind them and there was nothing left to see.

  *

  Two more dead, thought Ali savagely, and all because he had hesitated. He should have shot Cappaldi as soon as he sat up in the cab of the lead truck. Then he should have shot Fatima and Malik. That way all of them would still have been here, trucks and all. But there was no point in hanging about swapping recriminations. He looked around desperately for anything fast enough to follow the Mercedes trucks. The earth-moving equipment was still up on the rim of the pit. He could climb to the first heavy vehicle there almost as quickly as the convoy of trucks could grind up the corkscrew incline on the side of the pit.

  No sooner had the thought come than he was in motion, scrambling up the sloping sand, with the quickest-thinking of his men close behind. The vehicle he was making for was a big Ford dumper. It was not fast, certainly not as fast as the trucks, but it was unladen and might well bring him up with the convoy if any of their drivers was less than expert. And Cappaldi in the lead truck gave every sign of being inexperienced in handling the huge vehicle; he might well slow the rest of them down.

  At the Ford, Ali stopped. A tall, thin figure was standing just beside it, silent and unmoving. For a horrific moment he thought his father had returned from festering death to guard the vehicle for him. But then the figure stepped forward out of the shadows. ‘You are going after them?’ his brother asked.

  ‘Of course, Ibrahim. At once.’ At his word, half a dozen of the men who had followed him up the pit began to scramble into the rear of the Ford. Ibrahim turned and reached up with his right hand to open the Ford’s door high above his head and Ali saw what was in his brother’s left hand: a long, bolt-action Lee Enfield rifle. As he looked at it, Ali heard again the voice of his father telling him about the weapon many years before: ‘I took it from the British when I was fighting on the Gaza Strip. It works as well as ever.’

  Ali gave a lean smile. ‘Climb aboard quickly, Ibrahim.’

  The Ford dumper-truck was surprisingly agile for such a large vehicle; the big tyres rode over the sand and boulders with an ease that the smaller Mercedes vehicles could not match. It had an automatic gearshift which gave Ali more time to concentrate on steering the most efficient course and working with the accelerator to coax the great diesel engine to efforts which must have been beyond its design specifications even when it was new. This was the road he had first followed with Ibrahim that long, terrible time ago when all this was just beginning, but it was not disguised any more. And Ali knew it well. Better than Cappaldi in the lead truck fighting it unhandily every inch of the way, trying to get his battered old vehicle to behave like a Lamborghini.

>   In the rear of the last truck, Salah, satisfied that Fatima was not badly hurt, looked back anxiously, waiting to see the light of the Ford come cutting through the dark sandstorm in their wake. But before that happened, something else caught them unawares. In their urgent desire to be gone, they had forgotten the maimed crowd that lined their way. Through it, like wind through a cornfield, ran an unspoken message, a suspicion of what was going on.

  When the first stone bounced off the windscreen, Cappaldi thought it was just a freak, thrown forward and upward, somehow, by the motion of the truck. But the second shattered the sidelight and exploded into the cab beside him. Apart from himself, it was empty; there was no one to protect him from the onslaught of rocks and flying glass. A steady hail of rocks of all sizes hurtled in from out of the darkness. All of the side windows went. The windscreen starred and threatened to shatter. A particularly shrewd shot hit the cursing Roman on the side of the head and he lost consciousness. The Mercedes swung off the road, mercifully into a small gully where no one was standing, and came to rest, its motor still chugging gamely. The other trucks thundered past, but the last one slowed just enough to drop two dark figures over the tailgate to brave the hail of stones, sprint back and pile in to their crippled companion.

  Salah and Fatima rolled the unconscious Cappaldi back through the canvas into the rear portion of the truck. Then they were off, driving wildly through the unforgiving night, trying to catch up with the others.

  *

  Cappaldi came to with a splitting headache and complete confusion as to where exactly he was. Indeed, at first he thought he must have taken a tainted line of coke at a party the night before and experienced an exceedingly bad trip. He half expected to turn over and find, as he habitually did at home, some vaguely remembered beauty snugly asleep beside him in the huge bed of his apartment on the Via Appia. Reality arrived with a deep rut in the trackway and a lurch which felt as though it had loosened his brain. And with a seemingly huge figure which erupted out of the darkness to hover over him like doom. He actually screamed as he sat up, but the sound was lost in the din of the truck’s progress through the desert night. He found himself facing Captain Fittipaldi of the Napoli in a sort of redoubt behind a stockade of metal drums mounted on wooden pallets. He reached up and took the old man’s arm, steadying himself as he looked around.

  Such was the noise of the engine and the wheels and the flapping of the canvas sides in the wind of their flight that conversation was impossible. Looking over his shoulder through the soft perspex window of the cab’s canvas back, he saw Malik and the girl who accompanied him everywhere. Young enough to be his daughter, thought Cappaldi, side-tracked; his mistress, no doubt. Fatima. She was thin and strong and vividly dark. Cappaldi preferred statuesque blondes; nevertheless, had they stayed any longer in this godforsaken place he would have taken Fatima for himself—out of sheer boredom if nothing else. But they were going back to the ship now. Once they had the last of this stuff loaded aboard her, he could see about taking the next flight out of the nearest available airport. He should be home within forty-eight hours.

  The headlights which suddenly shone in on him took Cappaldi completely by surprise. From the look on the captain’s puffy visage, it was clear he was equally taken aback by the utterly unexpected brightness. But their surprise was as nothing to their shock when the first bullet ricocheted off the canisters in front of them to punch its way out of the flapping canvas wall leaving a hole as wide as the captain’s screaming mouth. It took very little imagination on Cappaldi’s part to calculate that the damage done to the canvas could all too easily be repeated on the cashmere and silk currently pampering his own frame. His first thought was to hide; to cower behind the canisters and wait to arrive at the Napoli. But he, perhaps better than anyone else here, knew how dangerous the contents of those canisters really were. The thought of being showered with toxic waste should a bullet manage to pierce one of them was even more terrifying than the thought of being shot himself. It was this that spurred him into action. ‘Come on!’ he yelled at the terrified captain. ‘We must put the Arabs off our track before they hit one of these canisters!’

  ‘But how? They have a gun and we are unarmed! We cannot fight. We must hide.’

  ‘I haven’t time to explain, old man, but believe me, being shot is far better than being covered with the stuff in these containers!’

  ‘But they are reinforced steel. They are safe.’

  If you only knew the truth, thought Cappaldi. ‘They aren’t strong enough to withstand—’

  Another bullet exploded through the side of the truck. Both men felt it pass immediately above their heads, and this time, instead of simply slapping through thick canvas, it chopped a metal strut in two. ‘They aren’t strong enough to withstand that!’ yelled Cappaldi, and this time Captain Fittipaldi was convinced.

  *

  Ibrahim crouched in the Ford’s cab beside Ali, the backs of his legs braced against the front seat, trying to sight through the raised flap-windscreen, along the length of the bucking bonnet. Dust billowed up in front of them and swept back into Ali’s eyes. ‘Wait for a moment,’ he yelled to his brother. ‘There’s a straight section coming up, level and smooth. If you wait for that and then shoot quickly, you’ll really be able to do some damage!’

  Ibrahim frowned into the swirling dust ahead. ‘They are doing something in the rear truck…Something I do not like the look of.’

  Ali paid scant attention to his brother, concentrating fiercely on wrestling the unwieldy Ford along as fast as possible. The sand boiling up from the convoy in front of him was nearly blinding him. The twists in the familiar road seemed unexpectedly vicious. He was not used to the Ford’s steering system. The figures at the roadside crowded almost on to the trackway itself in their eagerness to impede the speeding Mercedes trucks containing the Italians. It was a dangerous combination; Ali had visions of plunging into a crowd of villagers on a particularly sharp bend, doing yet more damage to them.

  But then, as he had promised Ibrahim it would, the Ford suddenly steadied as the road became flat, smooth and straight. A wind from the north sprang up and abruptly the dust plumes were rolling away to his left and he could see the last vehicle in the column clearly. Ibrahim gave a howl of joy and worked the bolt feverishly, jacking another round up into the rifle’s breech. Ali kept his eyes on the truck ahead; he could now see what his brother had been talking about earlier. Two figures, stark in the cave of the canvas, caught by the massive glare of his headlights, were wrestling with one of the canisters. It was clear that they meant to drop it overboard, hoping it would damage the Ford in some way. Little chance of that, thought Ali with grim satisfaction. The American dumper-truck was reassuringly massive around him. He allowed himself a wolfish smile. ‘The young one,’ he called to his brother. ‘Spoil his suit for me.’

  Ibrahim had in fact been aiming at the captain, wanting to kill the officer first, which seemed the logical thing to do. But at Ali’s command, he swung his sight to the right, changing his target and aim. Just as the sight at the end of his rifle barrel converged with the apex of the V sight, pointing at the young Italian’s chest, the two distant figures heaved the first canister up between them. He squeezed the rifle’s trigger gently, trusting to the smoothness of the road. And as he did so, the Mercedes braked sharply, bringing his target leaping back towards him.

  *

  The third bullet thumped into the canister just beside Cappaldi’s shoulder. It should have ricocheted off in a shower of sparks, soft lead shrugged aside by the curved steel, but it smashed through the rotting, sub-standard metal almost as easily as its predecessors had slapped through the canvas. At the far side of the canister, flattened but by no means spent, it thumped into Cappaldi’s chest, straight through the centre of his breast pocket. The young man was hurled back, dead instantly, to lie on the bed of the truck. The canister, spewing its contents from the ragged wounds in its sides, rocked wildly in the captain’s hands unti
l by a power only terror could have lent him, he pushed it over the tailgate and down into the roadway. The instant he did so, the fourth bullet smacked through his temple and the sound it made splitting open his head was the last thing Napoli’s captain ever heard.

  The flat section of roadway ran over a low plateau of rock which lay like an enormous step between the desert and a deep wadi which led down to the coast. At the end of that flat step, the roadway turned through the first of three hairpin bends leading down the valley side perhaps fifty feet sheer. Malik braked fiercely here, aware that this would bring the Ford up closer behind him but governed by the need to keep the screaming Mercedes under some kind of control; then he accelerated away into the bend. The canister, toppling backwards out of the truck under the captain’s dead hands, was instantly thrown clear. Already ruptured, it hit solid rock and split further, sending a wave of its lethal contents out to either side across the road. On one side of it, the truck accelerated away down the valley side, turning into the first hairpin. On the other side of it, the Ford came thundering down, to collect the canister on its first bounce and complete its destruction with its radiator. Ali also braked fiercely, as Salah Malik’s truck revealed the bend before them. The Ford’s great tyres skidded through the mess on the roadway. A spray of toxic chemical came up through the open windshield, blinding Ibrahim at once. Ali fought with grim concentration to keep the bucking monster on the twisting road. Hand over hand he hauled the steering wheel round to his left while his feet, one on top of the other, both trod on the brake. Slowly the great vehicle answered his command and swung round into the hairpin, just barely under control.