Legacy of War Read online

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  Saffron watched Joshua go up to the front door. She saw him open it. And then she and Gerhard heard the alarm sound.

  ‘Oh hell!’ Saffron muttered. ‘Here we go.’

  She got out her Beretta and wound down the window. Ten seconds went by and nothing happened. The ten seconds became thirty . . . almost a minute. The chill of the night made Saffron give a little shiver.

  ‘Would you like—’ Gerhard began, reaching into his jacket, but then the door of the garage seemed to explode. The sound of a high-powered engine roared like a lion in the night and headlights cut through the blackness.

  Saffron felt her stomach tense. It could only be Konrad’s car, and it was coming straight for them. The rounds from her small-calibre revolver would bounce off its bodywork like peas off an elephant. She’d have to aim for the lights or the tyres.

  The Merc was seconds away. The lights were shining in her eyes, almost blinding her.

  Gerhard had turned on the engine of the Jaguar, ready to get out of the way.

  Suddenly, the headlights weren’t shining in Saffron’s eyes. They’d vanished. Dazzled, she tried to make out what was happening.

  She heard a clanging sound. A section of the fence had disappeared and two beams of white light, followed by a huge black shadow, passed across her field of vision. The Mercedes raced through the hole that had appeared in front of it. There was more clattering as the Mercedes drove over the fencing that had fallen to the ground.

  The beams turned ninety degrees until they faced back down the road, towards the Jaguar. They started moving closer and as they passed, Gerhard slammed the Jaguar into gear, raced forward and immediately wrenched the car around, with the tyres screeching and smoking in a one-eighty-degree turn.

  He too was facing down the road, pointing south, in the same direction as the Mercedes.

  Gerhard turned to Saffron and she saw a predatory grin.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s see how fast this car is.’

  The Jaguar hurtled down the road. Every time Gerhard changed gear, Saffron felt a punch in the back as another surge of power was engaged. The speedometer moved from zero to sixty miles an hour in the blink of an eye, and it kept moving until it passed a hundred. Gerhard never seemed rushed; his handling of the car was smooth and controlled.

  They were gaining on their quarry. Saffron could see the red pinpricks of the rear lights on Konrad’s Mercedes and the beam of his headlights on the road ahead. The Merc turned hard right and then vanished.

  ‘That’s the hairpin bend where the road turns back up towards the Atlantic coast,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to watch out.’

  Gerhard waited until the turn was almost upon them. He braked a lot later, harder and for a shorter time than Saffron would have done. Then he started accelerating again, even as he was pulling the car round a bend so tight they almost doubled back on themselves.

  The Jaguar was rapidly picking up speed when Saffron shouted ‘Slow down!’ to make herself heard over the roar of the engine and the rushing of the wind.

  Gerhard looked at her, shrugged, and did as he was told. Then he understood.

  The road ahead was empty. There were no lights anywhere.

  ‘They’ve disappeared,’ Saffron said.

  Von Meerbach had considered every permutation of available routes away from his property. He knew where opportunities to lose a pursuer could be found. And one of them came after the switchback bend at Smitswinkel Bay. A left-hand turning led onto a dirt track that ran across the nature reserve to Cape Point. The track was more than four miles long, but von Meerbach had no intention of going further down it than was necessary.

  He turned as quickly and sharply as he dared. The Mercedes slewed from side to side as the tyres fought for grip on the dusty, pebble-strewn surface. Francesca was taken by surprise. The car had no safety belts. She was thrown hard against her husband’s shoulder, then back again towards the door, banging her head.

  The pain of the impact against her broken jaw was excruciating, a lightning bolt of agony inside her head worse than anything she had ever known. It took her a few seconds to realise that the pain now had a second source, for her nose was in agony too. As new wounds were added to the old, blood was pouring into her mouth and down the back of her throat. Francesca started to cry. She tried to sniff. And nothing happened.

  ‘Stop snivelling,’ Konrad snapped, unaware of the look of panic that had just flashed across his wife’s face.

  He had turned off the headlights. His mind was fixed on getting the car to a point he knew: a slight turn that passed behind a bush that would be more than adequate to hide a black car at night.

  He would wait until his pursuers had gone by, then sneak back onto the main road and head in the opposite direction, past his house and on to Simon’s Town, Fish Hoek and the city.

  First von Meerbach had to find the bush.

  It was somewhere close by. He knew it was. He had scouted the area in daylight and made a mental note of its position. But in the early hours of the morning, with dawn almost three hours away, he could not find the damn thing.

  Francesca started coughing, the sound muffled by her closed and blood-filled mouth, like a trumpet by a mute. Still, it was enough to infuriate her husband.

  ‘Shut up!’ von Meerbach shouted. ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate!’

  She paid no attention and gave a few feeble punches against his arm.

  Von Meerbach swatted her away with his left hand. He could not see the damn bush.

  Francesca threw herself at her husband, jolting him so hard that he wrenched the steering wheel to the right. The car ran across the road and onto the surrounding earth before Konrad braked and it came to a stop.

  He grabbed Francesca and threw her away from him, slamming her into the door frame. Only then, as he looked at her for the first time and saw her frantically clawing at her mouth, did he get the message she’d been desperately trying to convey.

  Her nose was blocked. Her mouth was wired shut. Von Meerbach saw blood, as black as oil in the near-darkness, seeping between her lips. She could not breathe. She was choking to death.

  Von Meerbach’s planning had allowed for every contingency. But he had not anticipated a wife who could not breathe unless her jaw wires were cut by a pair of nail scissors. Nor had Francesca thought to grab the pair lying on her bedside table as von Meerbach manhandled her towards the secret escape-door in the back of the wardrobe.

  So now she was suffocating. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  Frantically, von Meerbach grabbed hold of his wife’s face and tried to wrench her jaws apart by sheer brute force, but as her limbs thrashed wildly in response to the excruciating torture he was inflicting on her, the dentist’s wiring remained as firm as ever.

  Von Meerbach felt helpless, impotent. That made him angry. And his fury was directed at Francesca because this was her fault. She was wrecking his getaway, thrashing around and dying when he wanted to be hiding the car and waiting for the chance to escape.

  She was grabbing him, glaring at him with terrified eyes, making feeble, wordless mewling sounds, knowing that her life was coming to an end.

  Her death could only be a minute away, a couple at most, but von Meerbach couldn’t wait. He had placed his gun in the map pocket attached to the door beside him, in case he had to fire at his pursuers.

  He reached inside, pulled out the gun and placed it on Francesca’s forehead. Her eyes widened, pleading. She tried to scrabble backwards, away from the gun.

  Von Meerbach fired.

  The bullet entered the middle of Francesca’s forehead, blowing out the back of her skull and smashing a hole in the window behind her.

  Konrad von Meerbach had played a hand in the deaths of countless thousands of innocent people. He had been present when hundreds more, including his own brother, were tortured. But he had never spent a day on a front line. He had never killed anoth
er human being in cold blood.

  Now he had murdered his own wife.

  Von Meerbach opened his door and flopped out of it, onto his knees on the russet earth of the nature reserve, and threw up. He was kneeling there, his hands on the ground, his head hung low, when he heard the sound of a highly tuned sports car engine.

  It was coming closer.

  Von Meerbach saw the lights coming towards him and realised that the plan he had worked on for years, and honed over countless hours, was falling apart by the second.

  Saffron had thought about the empty road. She considered what von Meerbach might have done. She pictured the map that Joshua had laid out on the dining table. She remembered a dotted line running down from the road. And then, approximately ten seconds after Gerhard had brought the Jaguar to a halt, she said, ‘Turn the car around.’

  Gerhard executed a swift three-point turn.

  ‘Now what?’ he asked.

  ‘Go back. But slowly. Look for a turn on the right. It’ll probably be unmarked.’

  They found the turn.

  ‘I think he’s down there,’ Saffron said. ‘Waiting for us to get far enough away that he can sneak out again and go back the way we came.’

  ‘But Joshua and his guys will still be there, blocking his route,’ Gerhard said.

  ‘Not if he hangs around long enough to let them follow us and go by.’

  ‘Okay, let’s try it. All or nothing . . . Lights out?’

  Saffron nodded.

  Gerhard rolled the Jaguar onto the dirt track and drove forward slowly. A minute went by as they crawled along. Gerhard began to increase the pace as his eyes adjusted to the absence of the lights and his night vision improved. But there was no sign of Konrad’s car.

  They heard a single sharp, explosive crack.

  Gerhard stopped the car. ‘Gunfire?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, but not at us,’ Saffron replied. She thought for a second and realised there was only one possibility. ‘Oh, Jesus . . . has he killed Chessi?’

  Gerhard waited a few more seconds, but there was no second shot.

  ‘Lights on,’ said Saffron. ‘Let’s go.’

  They saw the car barely fifteen seconds later, and the figure on his knees beside it.

  They saw Konrad realise that they were almost on him and leap back into his car. They were no more than twenty yards away when the Mercedes started moving, and almost on its bumpers before Konrad could pick up speed. And then they were off.

  The two cars sped down the single-lane track. Konrad could see the road ahead of him, and he knew it well enough to feel confident about the twists and turns as it crossed the bush towards the cape. Gerhard could only react to the movement of the car ahead, and the task was made harder by the dust churned up by the Mercedes’ wheels, which blinded and choked him and Saffron in their open-top car.

  ‘Back up!’ Saffron shouted over the roar of the Jag’s engine and the clattering of the tyres and suspension over the rough track surface.

  Gerhard glanced at her as if to ask why.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Saffron assured him. ‘He’s trapped. This is where Africa ends.’

  Joshua Solomons and his men had run to their cars and set off on the road heading south. Their saloons were not as fast as the customised machines they were chasing. They were half a minute behind the two von Meerbach brothers when their own pursuit got underway, and lost another fifteen by the time they reached the turn at Smitswinkel Bay. As they took the hairpin bend and looked at the long, straight stretch of road ahead of them, the Mercedes and Jaguar had disappeared.

  Joshua brought his two cars to rest, just as Saffron and Gerhard had done. He had a smaller pocket map in his car and was trying to work out what had happened when he heard the gunshot. It came from the nature reserve, to the south of the road. There was nothing there but open country, all the way to the Cape of Good Hope, and beyond it open sea to Antarctica. But someone was firing a gun at a quarter past three in the morning.

  ‘They’re in that direction, somewhere.’ He looked at the map. He too saw the dotted line that marked the dirt road. ‘There,’ he said, stabbing at the paper. ‘That’s where we go.’

  ‘I know where Konrad’s going,’ Saffron said. ‘There’s a disused lighthouse on Cape Point, at the top of the cliff. Perfect place for a final stand. Anyone trying to get there has to go along a causeway, uphill. It can’t be much more than six feet wide, eight at most. They’re sitting ducks for anyone who’s already at the top.’

  Gerhard asked. ‘Is there a drop off the side of the cliff?’

  ‘Eight hundred and fifty feet, straight down to the sea.’

  ‘If he thinks he’s losing, Konrad will jump. So how do you get to this lighthouse?’

  ‘There’s a bus called the Flying Dutchman that gets you part of the way in the daytime, but at night you have to climb.’

  ‘Eight hundred and fifty feet uphill . . . huh!’

  ‘There are steps to make it a little easier.’

  Ahead of them the ground rose to a sharp, triangular hill that looked like a miniature alpine peak, more than a thousand feet high.

  ‘Where’s the lighthouse?’ Gerhard asked.

  ‘The other side of that hill,’ Saffron said. ‘Look where Konrad’s going . . .’

  Gerhard saw the Mercedes following the road as it curved around the base of the hill.

  ‘There’s a car park below Cape Point where you can catch the bus or start up the steps. It’s uphill from there,’ Saffron told him.

  ‘My doctor wouldn’t like me chasing Konrad up those steps,’ Gerhard replied. A mischievous smile crossed his face as he said, ‘Hold on tight when I tell you to. And when I say jump, get out fast, and run like hell. I’ll be right behind you.’

  The Jaguar picked up speed. Saffron liked the idea of going into battle, side by side with her man. And she had absolute confidence that he could deliver the plan that he had in mind, whatever it might be.

  The Jaguar steadily caught up with the Mercedes. Konrad must have spotted the headlights looming in his rear-view mirror because he sped up. The two cars were racing across the bumpy surface of the track and, as they rounded the pointed hill, Konrad’s destination became visible.

  Cape Point lay ahead of them, a black shadow rising into the deep purple sky, and at its top the stubby tower of the old lighthouse. The open expanse of the car park came into view. At the far end of it stood the restaurant that catered to tourists visiting the lighthouse, boarded up for the night. To the right of the restaurant were the steps at the foot of the climb.

  Konrad turned the Mercedes towards the steps.

  The instant Gerhard spotted the change of course, he flattened the accelerator and sent the Jaguar shooting forward, coming up behind the Mercedes, then swinging out and pulling alongside it.

  Konrad didn’t slow down.

  Gerhard was going faster.

  The two brothers were playing chicken, heading for a wall of solid rock, neither willing to give way.

  But Gerhard was the faster driver in the better car. He overtook the Mercedes, passing by its passenger side. Saffron glanced across, and saw the blown-out window.

  The Jaguar was past the Mercedes, and the hill was so close it filled her entire field of vision.

  ‘Hold on!’ Gerhard yelled.

  He pulled the handbrake hard with his left hand and yanked the wheel clockwise with his right. The Jaguar screamed in protest as it turned in an instant through ninety degrees. Saffron was buffeted from side to side, but clung on for dear life.

  Gerhard stamped on the brake pedal, bringing the car to an emergency stop in front of the onrushing radiator grille of Konrad’s Mercedes.

  ‘Jump!’ Gerhard shouted, but Saffron was already head first over the passenger door and scrabbling up the first step.

  Gerhard grabbed hold of the top of the windscreen, vaulted over it and onto the car’s bonnet.

  Konrad made a desperate attempt to brake.
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  Gerhard leaped again, over the nose of the Jaguar. He stumbled as he landed, hitting the ground hard and winding himself.

  The Mercedes slowed down, but Konrad had left it too late. With a deafening, screeching bombardment of steel against steel, his car piledrived into the side of the Jaguar, almost snapping it in two. Konrad’s body was thrown against the steering wheel, then slumped back against his seat.

  ‘Run like hell,’ Gerhard had said, and for once, Saffron was following his orders, racing up the steps, not looking behind her. Maybe he’d be behind her. Maybe he had another plan. Sometimes you just had to trust that the other person knew what they were doing.

  Konrad survived the impact, but at the cost of a punctured lung and half a dozen fractured ribs. To his right, through a gaping hole in the shattered windscreen, he could make out the dark mass of his brother’s body, still flat out on the ground. He was no threat in his physical state. But his wife was lethal and out there somewhere. And she was a highly trained operative. Konrad decided to concentrate on her.

  His nose was broken, and blood was streaming from a deep cut on his forehead. Yet brute strength and willpower, fuelled by furious hatred, gave Konrad the energy to punch open the door and pull himself out of the car. He got to his feet, his gun in his right hand, resting his left for support on the side of the car and looked around in the gloom.

  Up the hillside, Konrad could hear the sound of the woman’s breathing and her feet on the steps as she ran away up the hill. Then he saw his brother move. Suddenly the woman could wait. As Konrad lifted his gun he had a closer, better target.

  Gerhard got to his knees, gasping for breath. He’d been planning to follow Saffron up the steps. Now here he was in the dirt, facing up the hill, parallel to the crashed Mercedes to his left. He glanced across at the car and saw the door burst open, saw Konrad emerge holding a gun, less than ten metres away, and knew at once that he’d been spotted.

  Dragging oxygen into his lungs, Gerhard lifted his knees off the ground, like a sprinter getting set for a race.