Requiem of a Terrorist

By Gordon Andrews

On the way to a new job as an engineer in Somalia, one doesn’t really expect to get kidnapped, especially when being accompanied by one’s wife!
Although I had been trained as an agent I had never really utilised my skills in this area but now, separated within two complexes in the middle of the desert, I was made to do major repairs to their Artisan Wells while my wife was held as hostage at the mercy of a power crazy woman. Even worse was that the whole area was under the control of a man who I had been warned about years before and told he may need to be apprehended.
It seemed that I would have to use my agents skills after all but could I do that and rescue my wife too?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barny Books
• Release date: Nov 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370448043

Gordon Andrews

Gordon Andrews was born in Thurrock, Essex on 26 February 1922 and he is believed to be the oldest person to have a novel published. He left the local grammar school to become an engineering design draughtsman. He was called into the Royal Ordinance Corps for service in the Second World War later into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He graduated from the Military College of Science as a Staff Sergeant rising to the rank of Armament Sergeant Major, serving in India and Burma. Leaving his original employer to start his own Engineering Consultancy he made a successful venture into Property Service Company. When he was sixty years old a stroke forced his retirement. What started as a therapeutic exercise has become an all-embracing past time and his first book, fans and feathers was published in the December 2011. His second book The Outlanders was published a year later. Then came The Devils in Innocence, loosely based on his upbringing and now he is moving into ebooks. His first ebook (Requiem on a Terrorist) was published in February 2016 followed quickly on it’s heels by The Lady of the Company in May 2016.

Book preview

REQUIEM FOR A TERRORIST

G.A.Andrews

First published by Barny Books

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any way or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval, without prior permission of the publisher.

Publishers: Barny Books www.barnybooks.co.uk

All characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

EBOOK ISBN No: 978.1.906542.89.4

Also written by Gordon Andrews (all paperbacks):

978.1.906542.76.4 Devils In Innocence

978.1.906542.41.2 Fans and Feathers

978.1.780034.23.2 The Outlanders

978.1.906542.91.7 The Lady of the Company

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter One

Blazing heat, from which there was no relief even in the shade, beat down on our rusty old ship as it cleared the Suez Canal on our way to Somalia. I was to commence work on a government contract. Air-conditioning hadn't been invented when the keel of this ship had been laid in a dockyard on the River Clyde in England and past owners had either been too impoverished or neglectful to have it installed.

So the little bunch of passengers sweltered, including me and my wife Gloria, whom our Company had decided should go on loan to work for the Somalian government. Our company did not believe in pampering its lesser employees. This was one of the reasons we spent a lot of time walking round the ship to find a breeze or sat in the super-heated air, blown by one or two fans.

The company had instructed us to join this vessel at the Tilbury Docks landing stage in Essex. Having received our instructions, my wife and I sat at home figuring out how to get to the pickup point. There was no point in us using our own car to leave it in an open car park since the terms of the contract indicated a stay of some three years. An automated response from the railway operating company’s telephone contact informed us trains no longer went to the nearest station.

Interpreting the reproachful look on my wife's face, I decided to try to pull some weight with the company and suggested the least they could do was to lay on transport. A pat on the shoulder from my wife Gloria congratulated me on my temerity. A kiss was my reward when they agreed. On our way to Tilbury, the taxi driver asked which ship we were to board and, when I told him the Dunrae, he was taken aback.

Ye gods, is that old girl still sailing? I heard it had been torpedoed during the First World War! Still, like a lot of other old ships, I suppose she's been bought up by some tin pot country who can find ways of getting round the safety regulations!

Realising perhaps he had said too much, he amended his remarks quickly by saying, Not that I'm implying the old girl isn't safe you understand. Far from it! I don't think she's designed to carry many passengers so you ought to be very well looked after.

Watching him carefully from the back seat next to my wife I caught the suppressed mirth as he lent forward ostensibly to find his way. He skirted the town of Tilbury itself by taking fairly recently constructed concrete roads leading to the landing stage. I found the enormous piles of rusty cargo containers and their great overhead yellow gantries to be less than picturesque. Gloria thought them depressing and she was right, as usual.

Assisted by the taxi driver and a discarded but serviceable old railway luggage truck, we arrived at the Customs point. Passing through with another couple was a formality whilst another small group of people, who were obviously to be fellow passengers, suffered considerable poking and prying into their belongings. Gloria was chuffed at this, whispering it was about time the Company acknowledged my worth. The uniform of the two Asian stewards who came to collect our luggage warned us what to expect when we boarded. No one piece of uniform had ever been in the company of another piece! Not only were they ill-fitting but badly in need of a visit to the laundry. The dirty state of their hands upset Gloria to whom cleanliness is godliness!

Waiting for our baggage to be taken on board gave me time to have a good look at this old lady of the sea. Elderly was the right terminology. When we first came on to the landing stage we were surprised to see she was a freighter. The single slender funnel, painted a garish red with a wide black band near the top stuck up from a small white superstructure. Whoever painted the funnel had never used masking tape to differentiate between the black and the red. Hence the dribbles of black paint resembling stalactites fouled the heavily painted red. Apprehensively, I looked at the top of the funnel thinking she might still be coal-fired but was reassured by the wisps of diesel fumes leaking out.

Fore and aft large masts sprouted as well as booms which were obviously used to load and unload cargo from the two covered holds. Later, managing to get a glimpse of the cargo manifest we saw she was already loaded with second hand refrigerators for destinations throughout Somalia. The white superstructure containing the bridge and passenger accommodation shone white in the sunlight but upon closer inspection it was like the face paint on a raddled old lady of the night. The paint had been applied thickly to cover the effect of years of saltwater corrosion as well as the holes and fissures delineating fatigue stress. The same had happened to the glossy black hull.

Upon coming aboard and being welcomed by the Captain, a grizzled old Scot, who introduced himself as George Stewart and insisted I must be a native of Scotland like himself, despite my insistence that both my wife and I were English. He satisfied his nationalistic zeal by a statement to the effect that we were immigrants to England from Scotland. Bluntly he and his officers looked disreputable wearing a number of ill-fitting uniforms denoting different nationalities. They neither looked, nor acted, with the competent assurance one expected from ships’ officers. I had a suspicion that if I demanded to see their certificates of competence they would have quit the boat en masse like rats which one suspected were passengers as well as us.

There were ten passengers in all and we were by no means a motley crew. All of us were couples, married men with their wives. The pair who passed through customs with us were going out to relieve embassy staff on an agreed rota. The three other men were all specialised engineering managers going out to join small companies already trading in Somalia. Once the English frost of first meetings had thawed, we gelled quickly as a group and looked forward to an interesting voyage. Shielded envious glances came my wife's way for Gloria was a lovely woman. Not for her the jutting bosom, the blonde hair with dark roots, the heavily made up Botox assisted face, the dieted tiny waist and long tanned legs of the modern model.

My wife was very fit and had a trim figure. She was a brunette, but her dark brown hair was shot with bronze streaks and was naturally curly. Her face was transformed into a beauty when a smile appeared. Not only was she very intelligent but intuitive and had an aura about her which drew people to her, especially men. She treated male advances with good humour and repulsed them with kind authority, which sometimes included me! I don't mean to imply the other ladies were dowdy for they most certainly were not. All were well dressed, educated and experienced and it was a pleasure to be in their company and that of their husbands.

For many years I had been used to the barely concealed startled expression when people met me. I was told by a so-called friend that it was because the kick in the face during the rugger scrum had rearranged my otherwise undistinguished features into something resembling a gargoyle on a church roof. My wife told me her first impression when meeting me was that she had met Quasimodo or Hank the Hulk in person. One of the results of the kick had been to turn my mousy hair into a golden thatch which, according to my lovely wife, made matters worse! I persisted in courting her however and, to my ultimate surprise,