The Nemesis Program_Ben Hope

by Scott Mariani

  On landing, the soldiers ushered the three of them from the helicopter and marched them in relaxed fashion across the hot asphalt to one of the many generic military buildings that circled the compound. After being made to wait in a stifling ante-room they were hustled into an office to be greeted from behind a desk by an unsmiling NCO. The officer was holding the John Freeman passport his men had found inside Ben’s bag, and studied it with a look of extreme dubiousness before launching into a barking, staccato barrage of questions at them in broken English: where had they come from? Which of them was the pilot? Who did the aircraft belong to? Why had they travelled to this country? Lastly, with a glimmer of deep suspicion in his eye, he wanted to know what such a large sum of cash was doing in their possession.

  As patiently as he could, Ben explained that they were wealthy tourists and had been en route to Kuala Lumpur before their aircraft had got into difficulties: sadly, their Malaysian visas and most of their passports had been lost in the lake along with the rest of their things. The NCO listened to the story with an enigmatic half-smile and then informed them that his senior officer would attend to them shortly. Until then, they could wait in comfort inside a special hospitality lounge within the base.

  To Ben’s extreme disquiet, the hospitality lounge turned out to be a narrow, dingy corridor containing a row of steel cell doors. ‘This isn’t necessary,’ he protested. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong.’ But he knew it was pointless to resist as the soldiers separated them and led Roberta and the sullen Daniel to their respective cells. Roberta shot Ben a reassuring smile; then her door was clanged shut and Ben was being ushered inside his.

  Time passed. Ben paced restlessly up and down the length of the cell. The dank, airless, windowless room measured exactly six paces by five across, with a filthy toilet in one corner, a sink with a rusty tap that spurted brownish water and a metal bunk attached to the wall. The temperature was easily over forty degrees. The cockroaches liked it best. Now and then, one would scuttle out from behind the toilet and race across the floor.

  What the hell was taking so long? He hated being separated from Roberta. After an hour had gone by, his frustration had reached boiling point and he beat his fist on the door and yelled for a guard. Nobody came. Ben went on thumping against the door and shouting until he finally gave up and sat simmering on the edge of the bunk.

  It wasn’t until half an hour later that his cell door clanged abruptly open. Not just one or two guards, but five fully-armed soldiers whose faces he recognised from earlier on burst into the cell with their assault rifles trained right at his head, safeties off and fingers on triggers.

  Something had changed. The soldiers’ demeanour was completely different. Before, they’d been relaxed and nonchalant around their prisoners. Now, they were acting as though Ben was a serious threat and could take five men down unarmed with a flick of his finger if they took their eyes off him for so much as a second.

  In reality, it would have taken more than a flick of a finger. But if it hadn’t been for Roberta’s involvement in this situation, he might have gone for it anyway.

  Instead, he rose slowly from the bunk and stood very still as the soldiers circled him, rifle muzzles inches from his head. Those Pindads were an ungainly-looking mash-up of AR-15 and Kalashnikov designs and Ben wouldn’t have trusted his life to one in a fight. But they were useful enough at this range to blow his brains all over the cell wall.

  The little NCO walked into the crowded cell. He was as jumpy looking as his troopers. Regarding Ben with an expression of fear and loathing, as if five military rifles weren’t enough, he pulled out a 9mm pistol and poked it at Ben’s face.

  Ben looked down the barrel of the pistol. It was wavering slightly in the officer’s fist. ‘If this is about those overdue library books,’ he said, ‘I can explain.’

  On a command from the NCO, the soldiers jostled him roughly through the doorway and marched him down the corridor past the other cells. As he passed Roberta’s door he called her name and received a sharp jab in the back from a rifle barrel.

  ‘Ben?’ Her voice was muffled behind the steel door. But at least she was all right.

  Ben gritted his teeth and let himself be marched on down the corridor. He’d get them out of this.

  Though maybe not quite yet.

  The bare-block room they took him to was empty apart from a single wooden chair planted in the middle of the concrete floor where the light filtered through the bars of a dirty window.

  ‘You people really know how to make a guy feel welcome,’ Ben said. The NCO sneered at him and snapped another command at the soldiers. They hauled Ben by the arms to the chair and forced him to sit. A rifle muzzle hovered close to his temple as his hands were yanked roughly behind the backrest of the chair. He felt the cold steel of cuffs around his wrist, and their bite into his flesh as they were tightly closed.

  And then it began.

  If he’d been caught smuggling drugs, if they’d suspected him of some heinous terrorist plot, if he’d been arrested for espionage, then the brutality would have been interspersed with a lot of questions. But there were none. This wasn’t an interrogation. They didn’t even ask his name.

  It was the burliest, broadest of the soldiers who’d been allocated the muscle job. With a smile the guy handed his weapon to one of the others, shed his uniform jacket, stood by the chair with his feet braced apart and got to work. His arms were thick and heavily veined. Judging by the scars on his knuckles, he’d done this before.

  Ben had been here before, too. The name the SAS gave to the bruising sessions it inflicted on fresh recruits was ‘RTI: Resistance To Interrogation’. The punishment they dished out didn’t feel like training – it felt genuine, and it was fully intended to push the subject past the limits of normal human endurance, probing to see where their breaking point was and to give them a taste of the unpleasant treatment they could expect if they were ever taken prisoner by a real enemy, in a real military conflict. Ben hadn’t enjoyed it much, but one thing he’d learned about himself: if you wanted to break him, you’d have to kill him. He’d worn out three interrogators before they’d finally released him to the military hospital to be patched up.

  Ben’s guess had been right – the burly Indonesian had done this before. He enjoyed it, too. After the fifth hard punch to the face, Ben could taste blood in his mouth. He spat a bright red gout of it in the soldier’s face. ‘Is that all you’ve got to give? Old Winnie could hit harder than you.’

  The soldier didn’t understand English, but he got the drift of Ben’s defiant tone and put his back into the next one. The punch caught Ben in the solar plexus and drove the wind out of him. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to goad the guy, he thought as he strained against his bonds, gasping for breath.

  The beating went on a good while longer. Ben sensed the blows but not the pain. He’d become detached, letting his mind wander through a series of disconnected random thoughts and memories. He was only faintly aware that his tormentor was beginning to tire, delivering his punches with far less enthusiasm. By the time they undid Ben’s cuffs and dragged him from the chair, the burly soldier was puffing hard and shining with sweat, and had retreated into a corner of the room to nurse hands that looked like lumps of raw meat.

  As they half-marched, half-carried him back to his cell, Ben’s only concern was Roberta. It didn’t matter what they did to him. He most likely had it coming anyway.

  He tried to call her name again as they shoved him staggering past her cell door, but he was too winded to make a sound. They unlocked his door and threw him sprawling to the floor.

  He lay curled up for a long time, his mind drifting, blood pooling where his face was pressed against the concrete. Slowly, slowly, his senses returned. With them came the pain, and with the pain came the rage. The boiling fury made him focus. He raised his head from the floor, blinked and tried to control his breathing to soften the agony that made his skull feel about to explode. With effort he managed
to prop himself up on one elbow, then up onto his knees. He reached for the edge of the grimy sink, clasped it tightly and with a low groan pulled himself shakily, inch by inch, to his feet. He creaked open the tap, cupped his hands under the spurting brown water and splashed the brackish liquid over himself. When he’d washed the dried blood out of his eyes and could see again, he turned away from the sink. Dropped down to the floor and forced his aching, screaming body to pump out five press-ups. Then five more. Then five more. Focus. Survive. Fight. Win.

  He was asleep when the cell door crashed open for the second time and the soldiers marched in to take him away again.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  At first, Ben thought they were going to drag him back to the room with the chair for another beating. He walked calmly, straight, not wanting to show pain or fear or even the slightest hint of weakness. His eye was fixed on the butt of the NCO’s pistol as it protruded from its holster just a grab away. In his mind he played out in slow-motion detail exactly how he’d go about using it to kill all five of the soldiers before drilling a neat round satisfying little 9mm hole through the middle of the NCO’s forehead. Right here. Right now. It was sorely tempting.

  The cell keys were dangling from a ring on the officer’s belt. Maybe, Ben mused, just maybe there was a way … His heartbeat began to quicken. His fingers began to twitch.

  But his reckless, dangerous stream of thinking was interrupted when he realised he wasn’t being taken for another dose of punishment. Rather, they were leading him back to the room where they’d first been processed on arrival at the command base.

  The NCO strode ahead and pushed open the door. The first thing Ben saw inside the room was Roberta’s face, breaking into an expression of alarm and horror as she turned to see him come in.

  ‘What have they done to you?’ she cried out. ‘Jesus, your face …’

  ‘I stood on a rake,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ It hurt to speak. He looked around the room. Roberta was being guarded by half a dozen more soldiers he didn’t recognise. But someone was missing.

  ‘Where’s Daniel?’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t seen him since we were locked up,’ she replied.

  They were ordered to be quiet and pressed against the wall at gunpoint. There was a tense atmosphere, as if the NCO and his men were waiting for something.

  Or waiting for someone.

  Another door opened, and in walked a short, trim Indonesian officer in his fifties, wearing the insignia of a colonel. The NCO snapped a salute. The soldiers stood rigidly to attention, as much as they could without taking their eyes and gunsights off Ben.

  But it wasn’t the Indonesian Army colonel Ben was looking at. It was the man who’d entered the room with him. He wasn’t wearing military uniform, just a plain khaki shirt and trousers, but the soldiers all seemed to defer to him just as much as they did to an officer of high rank.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ Roberta whispered, staring. ‘How can it be?’

  Daniel Lund looked like a different person. The hapless, nervy aura he’d exuded before was gone. He stood straighter, even walked differently, and his ruddy features wore an expression of calm superiority that they hadn’t seen before.

  In fact, he was a different person. The role play was over. They were seeing the real Daniel now.

  The Swede ran his calm gaze around the room and smiled at the sight of Ben’s bruised face. ‘So, our friends roughed you up a little, did they?’ He shook his head in mock sympathy. ‘Only got yourself to blame, though. The more you struggle, the more it hurts.’

  Even his accent had changed. He sounded completely American.

  ‘You asshole!’ Roberta hissed at him. She slapped away a rifle muzzle with a sharp ‘Get that thing out of my face’ to the soldier holding it, and stepped towards Daniel, eyes flashing in rage. The soldiers bristled and closed in around her, looking to their commandant for the order to shoot the woman. Daniel intervened, nodding to the colonel, who immediately gave a curt order to stand down.

  The soldiers backed off instantly. It was clear who commanded the highest authority in the room.

  Daniel turned to Roberta with an even smile. ‘I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed, Miss Ryder.’

  Roberta glowered at him. ‘You mean you lied about the secret installation at Arta Beach. You lied about everything, you piece of shit. You were one of them, all along.’

  Daniel shrugged, his smile broadening. ‘I didn’t quite lie about everything,’ he said. ‘The installation exists, all right. As a matter of fact, that’s the reason I had you and Major Hope here released from custody. We’re taking a little trip there right now.’

  The same Aérospatiale Puma was waiting for them on the helipad when they left the building and stepped out into the blazing sun. Ben and Roberta were prodded and shoved into the back of the chopper and made to sit on the bare metal floor with half a dozen guns pointing at them. Daniel coolly took a seat up front with the officer. He seemed completely at ease and seldom threw a glance in their direction, but Ben never took his eyes off him as the helicopter lifted off and climbed high above the command base.

  By Ben’s reckoning, the Puma was taking them south-west. Teeming jungles, rivers and dizzy canyons passed below. Conversation was impossible over the loud roar of the turbine and the rush of warm air coming through the open hatch. Sitting close up against him, Roberta slipped her fingers through his and held his hand tightly while resting her head against his shoulder. Ben sat perfectly still and his breathing was calm, but inside a storm was raging. He’d have done anything to take her out of this situation, make sure she was safe. As for himself, if she hadn’t been here he’d gladly have risked everything to bring the chopper down, whatever it entailed.

  Thirty-five minutes in the air, and after flying over the snaking, crowded Trans-Sumatra Highway and a number of towns, the western coastline of the island came into view on the horizon. Ben watched as Daniel looked keenly down at the ground below. Soon afterwards, the helicopter began to descend.

  The mysterious installation that Daniel had brought them halfway around the world to see was a far cry from the heavily-guarded hive of sinister activity he’d described to them back in Sweden. Standing a quarter of a mile or so from the nearest coastal town on the tip of a forested peninsula not much above sea level, the squat grey building looked like a deserted factory or some kind of massive bunker. Behind it, the flat blue-green ocean stretched out with just the scattered land masses of the Mentawai Archipelago dimly visible on the horizon. The calm strait between the mainland and the small islands was dotted white here and there with faraway yachts and ships, a strangely serene sight.

  As the helicopter came down to land by the huge building, the obvious signs of neglect and abandonment came into view. The security fence surrounding the perimeter had long since fallen into disrepair, sections of wire missing where they’d collapsed into the long, yellowed grass or been pillaged by locals. Weeds grew tall through the cracks in the concrete around the building. There wasn’t a vehicle or a living soul in sight, let alone hordes of armed guards patrolling the place in Jeeps.

  Roberta’s anxious look asked the same question that was in Ben’s mind: why are we being brought here?

  The Puma touched down on the concrete near a dilapidated entrance that seemed to be the only way in or out of the building. At an order from their officer, the soldiers made Ben and Roberta climb down from the hatch and marched them across the weed-strewn ground. Daniel confidently led the way, striding along with a little half-smile on his face. The NCO deferentially walked a step behind him.

  Roberta was glaring at Daniel with a mixture of contempt and hatred. ‘We should have known,’ she muttered. ‘We should never have trusted him.’

  Ben said nothing. It was only then that he noticed that one of the soldiers was carrying his old green bag. He hadn’t reckoned on ever seeing it again. He began wondering why they’d brought it here.

  Daniel reached
the entrance, a tall double doorway of rusted, riveted steel closed off with a heavy padlock and chain. He produced a key, undid the lock and the chain fell loose. It took three soldiers to heave the steel doors open. Daniel passed through the entrance into the shadows of the building.

  The rest followed. It looked as much like an old factory on the inside as it did on the outside, except that whatever industrial machinery it had once housed had all been stripped away, leaving only a cavernous, echoey shell containing only a row of brick columns that towered up to the roof girders forty feet overhead. The sound of the soldiers’ heavy boots rang off the bare walls. The floor was thick with dust, the droppings of birds nesting high up in the roof space and sand blown in from the beach. The only windows were on the ocean side of the building, little more than slots high up in the wall, their cracked panes opaque with the cobwebs of a hundred generations of spiders.

  ‘Not exactly what he led us to expect,’ Roberta said acidly. ‘This place has been abandoned for years.’

  Daniel stopped and spoke a few quiet words to the NCO, who in turn gave an order to his men. The soldier carrying Ben’s bag handed it to Daniel and then trotted over to join his troop as the NCO led them back towards the entrance and the waiting chopper, leaving the three westerners together.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  ‘And here we are again,’ Daniel said with a wide grin. ‘Just the three of us. I told you I’d bring you here, didn’t I? We made it in the end. Problem is for you, it really is the end.’ He chuckled at his own joke.

  ‘You’re being very trusting, Daniel,’ Ben said. ‘Sending your guard dogs away like that. Don’t you feel a bit unprotected?’

  ‘Not that unprotected,’ Daniel replied. ‘I do have this, remember.’ He reached into his trouser pocket and brought out a familiar-looking Colt Commander. He pointed the weapon at them with relish.