‘We’re under attack!’ yelled Meeks, his one eye opening wide.
Everyone stared in horror at Hacker.
Hacker had no idea what was happening, but of one thing he was certain. ‘It’s him. It’s Hope.’
Chapter 60
‘Come an’ see what I found, laddie,’ Boonzie had said, beckoning. ‘I think ye’ll find it interesting.’
And he hadn’t been wrong.
Ben followed, mystified, as Boonzie led him over to the far end of the hut, cupping a hand over the lantern to shade its light away from the windows. In the hours since his escape from the dungeon Boonzie had made himself a little workspace back here, and he’d spent his time productively. The propane heater whose fumes Ben had been able to smell sat beside a rudimentary bench table with an upturned packing case for a chair. On the bench lay two large cardboard boxes and some odds and ends Boonzie had salvaged from the stores inside the hut: an assortment of tools and bits of wiring and tape, a small yellow spray-paint can.
Boonzie picked something off his work surface and pressed it into Ben’s hand. It was a half-pound lump of what looked like pale white clay, the size of a small potato, cold and clammy to the touch. But Ben knew it wasn’t clay, because he’d seen something very much like it before, on quite a few occasions.
‘Is this what I think it is?’
Boonzie nodded with a wicked smile that made his teeth gleam in the semi-darkness. ‘Aye, it certainly is.’
Ben stared at his old friend and asked, ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain to me where you found half a pound of RDX high explosive?’
‘Same place as I found the other thirty-nine an’ a half pounds,’ Boonzie said, pointing at a larger box on a shelving unit. ‘In that other box over there, twenty-one detonators. An’ that’s not all.’
Ben could hardly believe his ears. But then he thought about the stores of building materials inside the hut, and realised. Stuart’s castle was just a rich man’s folly that hadn’t been constructed all that many years ago. The way it nestled into the slope of the mountainside suggested that thousands of tons of solid rock and stone must have needed to be blasted away to level the ground beneath its foundations. Such a major civil engineering project required the unleashing of immense destructive energy.
RDX fitted that bill perfectly. Its proper chemical name was cyclotrimethylene trinitramine but Britain’s Royal Arsenal, who had first developed the formula during World War II, had called it ‘Research Department Explosive’ and the acronym RDX had stuck. It had been used in the Dam Busters raid against Nazi Germany in 1943. In modern times it was still favoured as a component of military bombs, and also terrorist ones, due to its stability, plasticity and extreme potency, which was significantly greater than that of alternatives like TNT or dynamite. And it was safe. You could whack it all day long with a lump hammer, shoot holes in it or set it on fire. Nothing except a detonator or blasting cap could make it go bang. Civilian operators liked it for the same reason; hence, RDX was a primary ingredient of Semtex, used in commercial demolition and quarrying.
‘They must have used a truckload of the stuff when they built this place,’ Ben mused.
‘Wi’ just a wee bit left over after the job wiz done,’ Boonzie replied. ‘Should’ve been disposed of or kept under lock an’ key. Naughty, naughty. An’ now it’s gonnae bite them on the bum. Look.’
He motioned for Ben to peer inside the larger of the two cardboard boxes on the workbench. Ben looked, and knew what he was seeing. Boonzie had used half of the RDX and all but one of the detonators to rig up an arsenal of twenty small but powerful one-pound bombs. Each device had a yellow number spray-painted onto it.
‘Check this oot.’ Boonzie showed Ben something that looked like a walkie-talkie. It was a radio remote detonator trigger device with multiple channels allowing one bomb at a time to be exploded at the touch of a button, or all at once.
‘Handy toy,’ Ben said.
‘Aye, an’ that’s not all the stupid buggers left lyin’ aroond for the wrong folks tae find.’ Boonzie reached under the bench and pulled out a cable reel wrapped around with what looked like bright blue nylon rope.
‘Detonating cord,’ Ben said.
‘A hundred metres o’ the stuff.’ Then Boonzie told him how he’d planned on using it, along with the remaining twenty pounds of RDX. ‘What dae ye think?’
‘I think you’re the kind of evil genius that gives evil geniuses a bad name.’
Boonzie flashed a roguish smile. ‘Then let’s get this show on the road, laddie.’
Which they set about doing as fast as they could, keeping warm by the sputtering flame of the propane heater. Their first job was the one that Boonzie had been about to take care of when Ben had unexpectedly turned up. That was to divide the remaining twenty pounds of RDX into twenty equal lumps, then unravel the hundred metres of detonating cord and attach the lumps all along its length at five-metre intervals, binding them securely in place with tape before fixing the last of the blasting caps to the end of the cord. As Boonzie rewound the cable reel, Ben set about transferring the twenty individual bombs from their box into an old fertiliser sack.
Once that was done, they turned their attention to transportation. They had no intention of trekking into battle on foot through the blizzard that was still raging outside. Ben wasn’t surprised to discover that Boonzie had already test-started the Polaris utility vehicle, checked that it had fuel and made sure the tyres were pumped. They whipped off the tarp and loaded the sack of home-made RDX bombs aboard with the cable reel. Ben had the radio remote in his pocket, along with Carter’s phone. Banks’s phone was now Boonzie’s, the pair set up to speed-dial one another in case they got separated.
Then, with no time to waste, they finalised their strategic plan of attack and clambered aboard the Polaris, Ben at the wheel and Boonzie at his side. The 600cc single-cylinder engine thumped into life. The headlights blazed against the doorway of the hut. They buckled up their seatbelts. He turned to Boonzie. ‘Ready?’
‘As I’ll ever be.’
‘Then hold onto your hat.’
Ben slammed the auto transmission into drive and stamped his foot on the gas, and the buggy leapt forwards like a spurred horse. The front crash bar burst through the flimsy door and they came storming out into the blizzard. The icy blast enveloped them like a white blanket.
Ben kept his foot to the floor as they set off wildly bouncing over the rough ground, their knobbly tyres and torquey four-wheel transmission making light work of the deep snow. The buggy’s powerful headlamp beams cut like lasers through the swirling flakes. The snowclouds had completely blotted out what little was left of the daylight and visibility ahead was poor verging on nonexistent, though Ben was glad of that. It made it less likely that anyone inside the castle would see them do what they were about to do.
But they’d find out soon enough.
Chapter 61
Ben steered across the grounds in the direction of the castle, relying on his natural homing instinct in the low-visibility conditions. All he and Boonzie could do was cling on tight as the Polaris bucked and lurched wildly over the snow. Already his hands and face were getting numb from the icy blast of the wind.
As they approached the castle, Ben was suddenly able to make out the faint glow of its lights through the swirling whiteness. But as the walls drew closer, instead of heading straight towards them he veered off to the right and began cutting a wide circle around. Towers and ramparts loomed above them in the murk. Ben pressed on harder, steering parallel with the east wall and heading straight towards the mountainside that rose up behind it to the north. He could only hope that the howling wind would make the roar of the Polaris’s engine inaudible from within the castle buildings.
Now the buggy was reaching the steep terrain of the mountainside, tyres biting and slithering over rocks and ruts. Ben and Boonzie were pressed back into their seats by the sharp upwards angle of their ascent. He kept his foot down on the g
as and fought to keep the leaping, bucking vehicle’s nose pointing straight ahead as they climbed up and up. It was a long way to the bottom, if he lost momentum or allowed the vehicle to tip over. He gritted his teeth and kept on going. Soon the castle seemed to shrink below them, dwarfed by the vastness of the mountain. Ben could see the lights of its windows and the outline of the main courtyard from above.
Which meant that they had climbed far enough. The next phase of the plan was the most risky. At Boonzie’s signal, Ben brought the buggy around in a curve so that they were pointing parallel with the rearward-facing north wall of the castle. The angle of the slope was hair-raising. One more degree of sideways cant, and the buggy would have tipped over and not stopped rolling until it pulverised itself and both men inside it on the rocks below. Another signal from Boonzie, and Ben rolled to a halt. Neither man spoke, or needed to. Boonzie jumped out, grabbed the cable reel from the back of the buggy and rolled out a few feet of detonator cord. Working fast, he wedged the loose end of the cord under a heavy boulder so that it was pinned in place. Then he jumped back aboard the buggy clutching the cable reel, letting it unravel as Ben continued on their precarious path. As intensely cold as it was, they were both sweating. But the buggy clung like a spider to the rock face, and after a hundred anxious metres all of the cord had been used up.
Boonzie pinned that end under a second boulder. With the detonator cord stretched sideways across the sloping face of the mountainside above the gables and towers of Stuart’s castle, it was time to begin the next phase of the plan.
The descent was just as dangerous as the climb, as the front tyres pattered and skipped over loose rocks and boulders and the whole vehicle threatened to tip over forwards. Now the looming castle walls were to their left. Ben killed the lights and shifted the box into neutral so he could cut the engine and coast silently back down to level ground. No movement from the castle. The snow kept drifting down over its roofs and courtyard. The place could have been deserted. But in just moments from now, things were set to liven up considerably.
Ben let the buggy roll to a halt thirty metres from the gates, hidden in the lee of the wall. With that, the Polaris had done its work. They disembarked. Ben took the fertiliser sack full of bombs from the load bay. He had the radio remote detonator trigger in his pocket. Glancing at Boonzie he could see a thrill in his friend’s face that he hadn’t seen since the last time they’d gone into combat together. Wordlessly, noiselessly, they made their way through the deep snow gathered at the foot of the wall and sheltered just by the gates, hidden from view of the castle windows. Ben peered inside the courtyard and could see the three identical boxy black Audi four-wheel-drives parked in a row out front, snow layered thickly over their roofs and bonnets. The druggies’ Mazda was still where he’d left it earlier. The Audis hadn’t been there then. Which meant that Hacker’s reinforcements had turned up in the meantime. All ten of them, right on cue.
‘Cold night,’ Boonzie muttered.
Ben took the remote from his pocket. ‘What do you say we warm things up a little?’
‘Thought ye’d never ask.’
Twenty-one detonator caps, twenty-one channels. Ben dialled up Channel One, said a silent prayer that it would work, and hit the SEND button.
It worked.
Faster than Ben’s prayer could have reached the ears of whoever might be listening up there, the radio signal from the remote activated the blasting cap wired to one end of the detonator cord. The cord itself was just a fuse, a hollow tube filled with volatile powdered explosive. But it was a very, very quick fuse. At the press of the button all hundred metres of line went up so simultaneously from end to end that from below it appeared as a single linear explosion, touching off the twenty packages of RDX in a spectacular leaping curtain of flame that lit up the night and seemed to shake the ground.
Ben had seen some impressive pyrotechnics, back in the day. Some of those had involved several tons, not just a few pounds, of high explosive. By contrast their home-made device was a pretty modest affair. But for Ben and Boonzie’s purposes that night, it was plenty good enough. Good enough to dislodge a hundred-metre section of loose rock and boulders that erupted from the mountainside in a broad avalanche and came tumbling and spinning and hurtling downwards, gathering speed and momentum as it came. For a breathless moment it seemed to hang in the air.
Then it hit. Rocks the size of small cars smashing into roofs and gables and towers like a missile bombardment from a thousand siege engines of old. Many an ancient castle had been reduced to rubble by the primitive ballistic technology of rock and stone. With Grace still trapped somewhere inside the building, Ben had no intention of wreaking that much devastation. Not yet. He was just getting started.
‘The basturts’ll ken we’re comin’ noo,’ Boonzie said.
Ben nodded. ‘And we’re not going to disappoint them. Let’s get this done.’
Chapter 62
The assault on Stuart’s fortress stronghold had begun. Ben and Boonzie crept inside the gates and crossed the snowy courtyard, keeping to the shadows. Ben had the sack of bombs over his left shoulder. Boonzie was right there behind him as they stalked fast and quietly through the darkness. If Ben had been worried about Boonzie’s heart condition, so far it seemed as though his concerns were unfounded.
There was still no visible movement from inside the castle, but Ben could guess at the kind of chaos that his explosive surprise must have triggered among the enemy. Things were about to get worse for them in there. Approaching the row of parked Audis, he reached inside the sack and pulled out a pair of bombs, numbered 2 and 3 in bright yellow. He rolled them under the parked Audis. Two pounds of RDX was easily enough to rip all three vehicles to pieces and give the enemy something more to think about. Ben hurried a safe distance away from the cars and thought about detonating the charges, then decided it could wait.
They were deep in enemy territory now. No telling when the resistance might kick off. Keeping in the shadows of the walls, Ben and Boonzie skirted around the side of the castle and flanked the inside of the west wall towards the rear. As they rounded the north-west corner of the castle Ben could see a dark rubble field of rocks and boulders strewn all over the snowy ground. A portion of the north wall had collapsed under the force of the landslide. A panel van that was obviously some kind of service vehicle for the estate had taken a direct hit from a large boulder and was almost entirely crushed. There were various garage blocks and admin units out back, some of which had suffered damage as well. Among them stood a steel building with louvred doors and high-voltage warning signs, about the size of two large shipping containers standing a couple of feet off the ground on concrete risers. Ben guessed this must be the electrical room that supplied all the mains power to Stuart’s residence, filled with essential equipment like voltage regulators and transformers and backup generators. Thick cables snaked from the side of the building and into an underground conduit feeding power to the castle. Ben stepped closer to the electrical room and could hear a droning hum coming from it. Landslide debris lay all around, but the main power source for Stuart’s home had been lucky enough to escape damage.
Time to remedy that. Ben took bomb number four from the sack, dropped it on the ground and kicked it under the raised floor of the electrical room. He signalled to Boonzie and they hurried away to take cover behind one of the garages. Ben dialled up channel 4 on the radio remote and hit SEND.
The blast ripped the silence of the night, much louder up close than the explosion on the mountainside had seemed from far away. A percussive shockwave haloed out from the electrical room as it erupted in a fireball and was torn loose from its concrete risers. The mushroom of flame rolled up out of the smoke. Shrapnel and wreckage cannoned off the buildings. The castle windows all went simultaneously dark. Boonzie flashed Ben a grin and made a thumbs-up.
Moving quickly on, they found a rear service entrance to the main building and filtered inside, pistols ready. Ben had been hoping f
or two effects of his surprise diversion attack. Firstly, that it would disorientate and unnerve the enemy and scatter them through the castle as they responded to go hunting for their attackers. By Ben’s reckoning he could expect to encounter eleven armed men in all, including Hacker. His second expectation was that their military training would have impelled them to split up into two- or three-man teams. From the enemy’s point of view, the tactic gave them a better chance of flushing out the intruders they would by now expect to be invading their fortress. From Ben’s, it also made it easier for him and Boonzie to deal with them, one team at a time.
It wasn’t long before Ben’s plan turned out to have been right. As he and Boonzie pressed into the pitch blackness of the castle’s interior they soon encountered the first attempt at resistance. It came in the form of a pair of bobbing tactical weapon lights that suddenly became visible at the head of a long, broad corridor and came slowly their way, sweeping left and right as the two men holding the weapons to which they were attached searched for living targets in the darkness. Ben had expected Hacker’s Dishonourable reinforcements to come heavily tooled up, and this was no surprise to him.
Instead, the surprise was all theirs. Because while weapon-mounted lights offered the user a fine advantage in night-time combat, they also presented the major disadvantage of giving your opponent something to aim at in the dark. And for the SAS, the dark was their element of choice.
The four pistol shots ripped out of the shadows like a single staccato burst from a submachine gun. The two lights faltered and the murky figures behind them crumpled and thumped to the floor. Ben and Boonzie closed swiftly in. One of the fallen men jerked and struggled on the floor, not yet dead. Ben shot him in the head and he went limp. No time for mercy.
Neither of the corpses was Hacker. One had a missing ear, the other a patch over his left eye. A pretty twosome, bringing Ben’s mental tally of enemy casualties to a total of six so far, with nine more to go.
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