Chapter Fifty-five

I CONTINUED TO lie in the shadows, trying to think of a better plan, when I heard a door thrown open below and, a second later, the shattering sound of a stun grenade exploding. Turkish cops didn’t muck around. I figured they had made their way into Cumali’s bedroom and any minute they would turn their attention to the attic space.

I needed no more incentive than that. I got up, crouched low and ran fast for the edge of the house. Between one heartbeat and the next my feet lost contact with the tiles and I was swimming in clean air, willing myself forward, stretching with my arms and chest, trying to reach out and grab the guttering on the side of the warehouse. I was falling and for a terrible moment I didn’t think I had a chance, then my left hand touched the metal and slipped but my right hand caught and held. I swung like a bad trapeze artist and reached up and grabbed on with my failed left hand and hauled myself up on to the roof of the warehouse …

Unfortunately, the night wasn’t dark enough.

I heard voices yelling, the sharp crack of a gunshot and I knew at least one of the cops near the garage had seen me. The bullet must have gone wide, and I was confident that nobody had any chance of recognizing me in the gloom. The problem was going to be escaping off the roof.

Already I could hear orders being yelled, the sound of mobile radios being activated, and I didn’t need it to be translated to know that men were being told to seal off the warehouse. I had to find the maintenance stairs down from the roof, get into the building and run for the loading bays at the rear. Outside was the Vespa.

It was going to be a race and it got off to a bad start – one of the cops had called in a chopper.

The pilot had its searchlight on and I saw the bright finger of light approaching as I sprinted across the reinforced steel and climbed a ladder to an even higher section of the roof. I was heading for a pair of large cooling towers, figuring that Mr Gul and his Sons would make sure the water system got regular maintenance, and I wasn’t disappointed. A locked doorway next to them probably gave access to a flight of stairs. I levelled the Walther at the lock and blew it apart.

I kicked the door open and half jumped, half ran down the first flight of steps. There was barely any light but I saw that I was in the boat-repair building – a cavernous, eerie place. Between towering walls lay a group of dry docks and several dozen luxury cruisers hanging from huge claws above. The motorized claws were attached to steel rails bolted to the rafters, allowing the large boats to be moved hydraulically from one work area to another without ever going near the ground. Some facility.

As the hanging boats creaked and groaned in the high wind, I headed down the next flight of stairs. Four overhead lights – the big vapour variety – exploded to life.

Allowing the cops to see my face would be as bad as being caught, so I dropped to one knee and took aim. Unlike the long jump, I had always been pretty good on the firing range. I hammered out four shots in rapid succession and took out each of the lights in an impressive blast of gas and falling glass.

In the gloom I heard Turkish voices cursing, more men arriving and the sound of large roller doors being raised. I knew that very soon they would have enough boots on the ground to search line abreast until they had me cornered. I ran back up the flight of stairs, climbed on to a steel gantry just below the grid of steel rails and sprinted for a control box. I could see cops spilling into the facility below and I just hoped that none of them would look into the rafters and see me silhouetted against the ceiling.

I reached the control box and thanked a God I wasn’t even sure existed: six identical handheld devices were in chargers attached to the wall. I grabbed the first of them, switched it on and saw a numeric keypad and a display screen spring to life. I sprawled on the floor to conceal myself and, with no real idea what I was doing, working more by intuition than anything else, I aimed the device into the darkness and pushed its attached joystick.

The motorized claws holding a huge cruiser started to move, propelling the boat along the overhead grid. A group of four cops on the ground, all in uniforms with a lot of braid, looked up and saw the white and gold cruiser gather speed above them. The most senior of the cops, florid and overweight, his buttons straining against his belly – the Bodrum police chief, I figured – either took an educated guess or saw the glow of the handheld device and pointed at the gantry, yelling orders to his men.

Cops ran for access ladders on the walls and started climbing towards me. They were mostly young, hollering to each other, and I realized that a vacation atmosphere was creeping in – they knew a single man didn’t have a chance against so many and they were sure going to make him pay for violating the property of one of their own. I had the feeling an accidental ‘fall’ wasn’t out of the question.

Frantically, I experimented with the remote device. Each of the boats had a four-digit identification number hanging from its side and I realized that if I entered it on the keypad I could use the joystick to send each boat back or forward, left or right. As more cops arrived to help in the hunt, I lay out of sight, getting as many boats as possible in motion, hoping to create maximum confusion for when I made my run.

The only part of the device I wasn’t sure about was a yellow button at the bottom – I had my suspicions, but I didn’t want to fool with it. Instead, I ramped the white-and-gold cruiser up faster, turned it on to a track to converge with a forty-foot sloop and flattened myself.

One of the cops climbing the wall saw what was about to happen and screamed a warning. Everybody below ran fast – standing under two boats when they collided was no place to be.

The moment they hit, debris flew everywhere. The sloop parted from its claw, fell fifty feet to the floor below and exploded into kindling.

In the chaos and fear I scrambled to my feet. A forty-foot black Cigarette boat with twin gas turbines and a huge wing at the back – every drug smuggler’s dream boat – was coming towards me. As it sped past, I leapt, grabbing a chrome stanchion on the boat’s side, and hauled myself aboard.