The Khufra Run. Jack Higgins

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СКАЧАТЬ my bonds. By some means known only to himself, he had managed to break free and had used his belt to garotte the sentry, which gave us an AK assault rifle and a machete between us when we made a run for it.

      They were hot on our heels within a matter of hours which was only to be expected and in a brush with a fourman patrol, I took a bullet through the right leg, making me something of a liability from then on. Not that Turk would leave me, even when I did the gallant thing and ordered him to. Not then nor during the five days of hide and seek that followed, until the afternoon we were spotted in a clearing by a Medivac helicopter and winched to safety.

      He visited me a couple of times in hospital, but then I was flown back to Australia for treatment. I took my discharge six months later when it became obvious to all concerned that I was going to be left with a permanent limp.

      As for Turk, there was a brief period when his face seemed to stare out at me from every magazine and newspaper I bought which was right after he’d been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading a party of frogmen into Haiphong harbour to blow up four torpedo boats. I wrote, care of Corps Headquarters in San Diego, but after a while, my letter came back with a note to say he’d taken his discharge and they didn’t have any forwarding address.

      So that was very much that, until the night I was driving along the Avenida Andenes on the Ibizan waterfront and almost ran over a drunk lying in the middle of the road. Or at least I thought he was drunk until I got out and turned him over and found he was just another hippie, stoned to the eyes.

      He had the usual Jesus haircut, a scarlet headband holding it in place, giving him the look of some Apache Indian, an impression reinforced by the lean, ravaged face, deeply tanned by the Ibizan sun.

      He wore a linen kaftan and a silver chain belt at his waist, jeans and open sandals. You could have seen dozens like him any day of the week sitting at the tables of the open-air cafes along the waterfront, but in this case there was a significant difference. The Medal of Honor on the end of the silver chain about his neck.

      Even then I didn’t recognise Turk in this gaunt, ravaged man, until he opened his eyes, gazed up at me unwinkingly in the light of the headlamps and without any kind of surprise at all said gravely, ‘And how’s every little thing with you, General?’

      I didn’t live in Ibiza town myself at that time. I was operating out of a tiny fishing village called Tijola on a creek near Port Roig a few miles further along the coast. I didn’t need to take Turk home with me as it turned out. He had a boat moored down by the breakwater in Ibiza harbour, a thirty-foot seagoing launch, the Mary Grant, from which he operated as a freelance skin-diver, although he seldom ventured beyond the Botafoc lighthouse, preferring to earn his bread in more devious ways.

      But much of this I was to discover later and on that first night, I only knew that he had changed almost beyond recognition. That he was a sick man was obvious and when I got him down to the saloon he was barely able to stand.

      He sank into a chair, head in hands for a moment, then stood up slowly and leaned on the table. ‘You’ll have to excuse me for a minute, General, I need an aspirin or something.’

      He went into the aft cabin leaving the door slightly ajar, enough for me to see his reflection in a mirror on the cabin wall when I peered in. He had rolled up his left sleeve and was tying a cord around the forearm. As he took a hypodermic from a drawer, I turned away.

      He came into the saloon rubbing his hands together briskly, an entirely different person just like the after man in the patent medicine adverts. He took a bottle of brandy from a cupboard and found a couple of reasonably clean glasses.

      He pushed one across to me and raised the other in a kind of mock toast. ‘To you and me, General,’ he said. ‘Together again - the old firm.’

      And then he started to laugh uproariously.

      For a year now he had been going downhill a little bit more each day, slowly being eaten alive by some worm within him. Whatever it was, he never discussed it. He lived entirely in the present moment, blotting out past and future with either a second bottle of whatever came to hand or another fix, involving himself in one vaguely crooked scheme after another.

      Like this present affair, for example. When he’d first come to me with the offer I’d turned it down flat thinking it must be drugs, had to be, and that was something I wouldn’t have touched if I’d been starving.

      But I was wrong for he had got permission from his principals, whoever they were, to open the first package to prove to me that it consisted of dozens of neatly wrapped packets of good American dollar bills. So that was all right. I was just a middle-man, helping to move large sums of money illegally between countries, part of some complicated exchange process by which someone, somewhere, finally made a fortune.

      I was still thinking about it all when I made my landfall. I called up the control tower at the airport which was something the authorities insisted I do, in spite of the fact that I didn’t use their facilities. There was the usual interminable delay before I was given the all clear to land and turned in to make my final run.

      The island looked fantastic in the light of the full moon, the rugged, hilly landscape of the interior like a black paper cut-out against the night sky and a white band of surf showed clearly at the base of the massive south coast cliffs.

      I came in off the sea at three hundred feet, Port Roig to the left of me and beyond, between the two great natural granite breakwaters which enclosed the mouth of the creek, I saw the lights of Tijola. A green flare soared into the night giving me the all clear and as I passed between the two headlands, I put the Otter down into calm water and taxied towards the shore.

      It wasn’t much of a place. A couple of dozen small houses, a jetty, a few fishing boats, but it had everything I needed. Calm water to land in because of the enclosed nature of the creek, and lots of peace and quiet which suited me just fine.

      There was a small bar on the beach. I could hear a guitar playing in spite of the Otter’s engine, and someone was singing. I dropped the wheels as I moved in towards the beach, and taxied up on to a broad concrete ramp which I’d constructed myself earlier that year with the aid of a couple of locals.

      The three men who waited beside the hearse looked exactly the same as the ones I’d left in Cartagena. I switched off the engine, climbed down and they moved past me without a word and started to get the coffin out.

      ‘Heh, General, how did it go?’

      I turned round as Turk moved out of the darkness from the general direction of the beach bar. ‘Fine. Just fine.’

      The three men shuffled past me with the coffin and I reached into the cabin for the package. I hefted it in my hands for a moment. ‘Why don’t we just run for the hills with one of these?’

      ‘Don’t even think of it.’ Turk took the package from me. ‘No place to run. Not from these people. They’d leave you with a penny for each eye, that’s all.’

      ‘So what is it? Mafia money?’

      ‘Would that bother you?’

      ‘Not particularly. When do we get paid?’

      ‘Thursday. I’ll be in touch.’ He got into the passenger seat of the hearse and leaned out of the window as the driver started the engine. ‘You seeing Lillie tonight?’

      ‘I expect so.’

      ‘You’ll СКАЧАТЬ