Predator. Wilbur Smith

passenger and they were suitably respectful. Shortly after take-off, as the Citation was speeding south across the Gulf of Mexico, the pretty brunette who was a member of the cabin crew giggled as she plucked up the courage to speak directly to him, ‘Excuse me, Your Majesty, but we were informed that you had a special request for your in-flight meal this evening.’

      Then with a flourish she set before him a bone-china plate on which lay a long sandwich, filled with meat and cheese and oozing mayonnaise.

      Johnny Congo gave the girl a smile that pleased, excited and terrified her in just about equal proportions. ‘Right on!’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to my first Subway ever.’

      He took a rapacious bite, and beamed contentedly as his cheeks bulged and his mouth filled to overflowing. Then he lay back in the cream leather chair and chewed contentedly.

      He was free and now he could concentrate every ounce of his strength and every cent of his enormous wealth on the complete and utter destruction of Hector Cross.

      As they left US airspace, Johnny Congo mused aloud, ‘Not Hector Cross alone. I am going to get that skinny bitch Jo Stanley who he’s been screwing and also his itty-bitty baby girl. I am going to make Cross watch as I off them slowly, with tender loving care. Only then will I start working on him.’

      Night had fallen and Route 190 was no longer a war zone. But if anything the chaos had only increased in the aftermath of Johnny Congo’s escape. Banks of floodlights lit up the road all the way from the gas station to the two burned-out dumper trucks, surrounded by their discharged cargoes of rubble that marked the point where the trap that caught the prison convoy had sprung shut. In truth though there was little need for any additional illumination: not with the headlights and multicoloured roof lights of ambulances, fire trucks, tow trucks and a host of police vehicles all attending the scene.

      Every cop from Polk, Walker and San Jacinto counties had been called in to marshal the traffic that had piled up on either side of the blockage. Drivers were being directed away to a hastily arranged set of diversion routes, but not before every single one of them had been told to show their driver’s licence, provide contact details and describe anything that they had seen, or even better recorded during the brief, bloody, one-sided battle. Everybody who’d been at the Shell gas station or Bubba’s was also processed. As a result, more than two dozen witnesses had been asked to stay behind to be interviewed at greater length by the detectives, and numerous phones and tablets containing still photographs and video footage had been collected.

      Pretty much every image they contained had been already uploaded on to one social media platform or another by the time the first squad car arrived at the scene – this was the twenty-first century, after all – and the best footage was already being played on TV stations across the nation. The entire media corps that had been gathered in Huntsville for the execution had decamped to Route 190 to report on the events that had prevented it, and other news organizations had still more personnel and equipment hurrying to this stretch of the East Texas highway.

      To add to the hullabaloo, the number of law enforcement agencies present at the scene was multiplying like viruses in a petri dish. The Governor had requested assistance from the FBI and called out the Texas State Guard, but no clear chain of command had yet been established and so the usual turkey-cocking was taking place between representatives of the various local, state and national organizations, all jostling to make sure that they took any credit that was going for any shred of success, while avoiding the looming shitstorm of criticism and blame that would pound down on anyone deemed in any way responsible for the afternoon’s disaster. Anyone like Major Robert Malinga of the Texas Rangers, for example.

      ‘My God, Connie, did you ever in your life see anything like this?’ he asked as he picked his way between the charred remnants of the shot-down helicopter towards the wreckage of the BearCat. A few yards away a young cop, not much more than a kid, was slumped on his knees by the side of the road, throwing up into the grass. Just beyond him a dismembered head, still wearing the headphones of a helicopter pilot, was wedged between the branches of a pine, like a kid’s soccer ball in a suburban garden.

      ‘I did a tour in the Pech Valley, Afghanistan,’ the woman walking alongside Malinga said. ‘Things got real kinetic there. Saw buses hit by IEDs, markets after T-men had blown themselves up. This is right up there with the best of them.’

      Lieutenant Consuela Hernandez was Malinga’s second-in-command. Every time she went home, every other woman in the family – her sisters, mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins, all of them – would tell her how pretty she would be if she only made an effort. But making an effort, just so she could find some slob to spend the rest of her life with, the way all those other women had done, was not Connie’s style. She had served six years as a Criminal Investigations Special Agent in the US Military Police Corps before joining the Rangers. Within a week of arriving at A Company, she’d already convinced Malinga that she was a good cop. The one thing he couldn’t understand was why she was a Ranger. ‘The MPs have always been a great place for a woman to get ahead. But I hate to say this, the Rangers haven’t had the greatest reputation when it comes to gender equality.’

      ‘I know,’ Hernandez said. ‘That’s why I’m here. Just wanted the chance to piss you all off.’

      For a fraction of a second, Malinga had feared that he’d been landed with a professional ball-breaker, the kind who was only ever one off-colour joke away from a sex-discrimination suit. Then he noticed the sly smile playing around the corners of Hernandez’s mouth, realized she was yanking his chain and burst out laughing. From that moment on they’d got along just fine.

      ‘Now I really do feel back in the Pech,’ Hernandez said, looking at the BearCat.

      The back of the armoured personnel carrier had been obliterated. The rear axle had collapsed so that the whole vehicle had slumped towards the ground. A couple of crime scene investigators were working their way through the vehicle. In the light from their torches, Malinga could see the blackened corpses of the SWAT personnel who’d been sitting in the back of the carrier when it had been attacked. Every one of them had been wearing helmets and body armour, but their bodies had been ripped apart by the sheer ferocity of the assault.

      ‘What the hell hit them?’ Malinga asked one of the CSIs.

      ‘Everything,’ the investigator replied. ‘First, there was some kind of projectile that was powerful enough to blow through the armour on the rear of the vehicle like it wasn’t any thicker than a tin can. Then someone just let rip with an unbelievable barrage of shotgun fire from no more than twenty feet. We’ve counted almost sixty twelve-gauge cartridges on the road and they must’ve been fired unbelievably fast. No one inside had time to fire a single round.’

      ‘They weren’t in any condition to shoot,’ Hernandez said. ‘Even if the blast hadn’t killed them, they’d have been totally stunned and disoriented. Talk about a flash-bang.’

      ‘Any trace of the perpetrators anywhere? Fingerprints, DNA, anything?’ Malinga asked.

      The investigator shook his head. ‘Not that we’ve found. There’s a limit to what we can do here, so we’ll take the vehicles away for examination. But my bet is we’ll be lucky to find anything at all. They torched the trucks they rode in on. Whoever they were, they sure knew what they were doing.’

      ‘That they did,’ Malinga agreed. Walking away from the BearCat, he spoke to Hernandez. ‘You know the single most common denominator amongst convicted criminals? Stupidity. Sure, they’re sociopathic, liable to have substance-abuse issues, have an exceptionally high rate of clinical depression, all that good stuff. But above all, they’re dumb. Not these guys, though. They were real smart, or the guy in charge of them was. And they had money. They had trucks, getaway vehicles, automatic weapons, ground-to-air missiles, for Chrissakes.’

      ‘That’s some serious coin,’ Hernandez agreed.

      ‘So the question becomes, was Johnny Congo rich and smart enough to put this together from jail, or was there someone else who did it for him?’

      ‘Smart and rich, huh?’ Hernandez mused.