It was the eyes which did it; a slight glimmer, for just a fraction of a second.
Cole moved instinctively as an iron bar swung down towards his head from behind him. Turning quickly, he kicked the first of Abu’s friends in the gut. The second moved in with a knife, and Cole reached out for the knife arm, wrenching the man around and securing the attacker’s forehead with his arm as he slit the attacker’s throat with his own knife.
Blood spurted out onto the deck, showering al-Zayani as he ran for the steps down to the jetty, and Cole took off after him, stabbing the first man — just rising after the kick to his gut — through the chest as he went; but then the gorilla-sized form of Abu stepped between Cole and al-Zayani, handgun raised.
Cole’s hand snaked out to the side, ripping an oar from its place secured to the starboard wall, and in the same action slammed the heavy wood down onto Abu’s arm. He heard the arm crack and the man try and stifle the scream as the gun dropped to the ground. Cole moved forwards quickly, sweeping both of Abu’s legs out from under him with the oar and leaping over the falling body just as al-Zayani reached the steps.
Pulling the man around, Cole’s hand fired out in two rapid strikes to the man’s neck, rendering him instantly unconscious.
He turned to see Abu rising unsteadily back to his feet, hands groping about on the deck for the gun. Cole dropped al-Zayani’s body and shot forwards, cracking Abu across the head with the blade of the oar.
The big man staggered backwards, his eyes rolling back into his head, but miraculously he still remained standing and Cole rammed the point of the oar towards Abu’s throat.
With incredible speed, Abu caught the oar in mid-air and smashed the forearm of his other hand straight through it, coming back at Cole with the broken half.
Cole used his own half of the oar to block the attack, swinging it back round to slice across Abu’s cheek and ear, the broken wood splintering on his face.
His eyes filled with rage, Abu attacked again, but Cole sidestepped the giant and sent a kick into his knee which dropped him to the deck. And as the big man fell, Cole arm accelerated the broken oar outwards, the jagged end piercing the side of Abu’s thick neck, until it was buried up to Cole’s knuckles, blood spilling in thick gouts over his hand and arm.
Cole let the body drop to the deck all the way, and it landed with a loud thud.
Taking a few deep breaths, Cole surveyed the deck for any sign of more attackers; seeing none, he turned his gaze back to the yacht club. Nobody was coming to investigate, and presumably the action had gone mercifully unnoticed.
But, Cole decided, it was probably time to take the yacht out for a little sailing.
It was another hour later before al-Zayani regained consciousness; and when he did, it was clear to Cole that he wished he could have just stayed asleep.
Al-Zayani was upside down, hanging off the edge of the boat, head close to the water; to his right and left were the similarly inverted bodies of his colleagues — or at least what was left of them.
‘Bull sharks,’ Cole said from the deck, and he saw al-Zayani crane his head up to look at him, terror in his eyes. ‘Nasty little bastards. They enjoyed having your friends for dinner though,’ he said amiably, as if they were still talking business back at the yacht club.
Cole had sailed out into the waters of the Arabian Gulf, and although there were sharks out here, they hadn’t caused the horrific, bloody damage to the bodies strapped next to al-Zayani on the side of the boat; Cole had done it himself.
It had been a nasty job, but he needed al-Zayani to talk, and to talk honestly; and there weren’t many men who could overcome the fear of being eaten alive by a hungry shark. Even a man with a knife wasn’t as inherently terrifying as a shark; you could reason with a man, after all.
‘Attracted to blood in the water,’ Cole said casually, leaning down and stroking the blade of his knife across al-Zayani’s exposed belly.
‘No!’ al-Zayani screamed. ‘No, please! I’ll tell you everything! Please!’
‘Why did your men attack me?’ Cole asked.
‘They were only going to question you,’ al-Zayani sobbed, ‘I promise you! Please! I promise you! Pull me up! Pull me up!’
‘Question me about what?’ Cole asked as the ship bobbed up and down in the dark waters, the movement of the waves making al-Zayani scream again in terror, thinking that it was sharks approaching the boat.
‘About who you are,’ al-Zayani said weakly. ‘When you beat me at the club this morning, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I called the Colonial and asked about you, they were surprised, they said you weren’t that good, I should have beaten you easily! I asked what you looked like, and their description didn’t really match, I called Texas Mainline and they confirmed that it was you, but I just had to know!’
‘Do Saudi National Oil executives routinely ask questions with thugs, knives and guns?’ Cole asked, aware of the irony; al-Zayani had been trying to lure Cole to the boat in exactly the same way Cole had been trying to get him there.
‘No, I–I…’
‘Or is it that you were worried about something else?’ Cole asked, blade tickling al-Zayani’s ribs. ‘Maybe about something connected to a twenty million dollar payout to Jemaah Islamiyah for the hijacking of the Fu Yu Shan?’
There was a pause while al-Zayani weighed his options, hanging upside down between his three supposedly half-eaten colleagues, black waters below him threatening him with the same fate. In the end, it was no choice at all.
‘What else do you know?’ al-Zayani asked fearfully.
‘Let’s not get involved with what I know; I want you to tell me what you know. Now, what was in the crate that was so important?’
‘I don’t know!’ screamed al-Zayani. ‘Please, I don’t know!’
‘Wrong answer,’ Cole said coldly, drawing the knife across al-Zayani’s abdomen, opening up a thin cut which immediately started leaking blood down over his chest and face, until it dropped in small rivulets into the dark sea below.
‘No!’ al-Zayani screamed in unbridled terror. ‘No, please! Let me up! I will tell you everything!’ he shouted. ‘I will give you the Lion! It was the Lion! It was Abd al-Aziz Quraishi, the Assistant Minister for Security Affairs, it is his group, Arabian Islamic Jihad, he told me to do it! Please, let me up!’
The man was sobbing uncontrollably now, and Cole decided that the time had come to relent; he pulled the terrified man back up onto the yacht and let him fall to the teak deck, shaking with fear.
Abd al-Aziz Quraishi wasn’t a name he was familiar with, but Cole had recently heard news reports about this Arabian Islamic Jihad; wasn’t that the same group which had killed Brad Butler, the CNN correspondent? And hadn’t the man who’d beheaded Butler referred to himself as ‘the Lion’? The stories had also implicated the organization in the attacks on Riyadh, Muscat and Dubai; Arabian Islamic Jihad was obviously an emerging force. And if it had big oil money behind it, then the danger was increased exponentially.
Cole put a blanket around the shivering man and pulled him up, assisting him across the deck to the cabin.
He would get the man warm and comfortable, and would then learn everything he could about this man known as the Lion, and the terrorist group he commanded.
PART FIVE
1
Just two hours later, Cole had everything he would ever get from al-Zayani, and was satisfied that he’d been told the truth; the threat of being returned to the sharks was too overwhelming a possibility for al-Zayani to try lying about anything.