The Armada Legacy

by Scott Mariani

  Even more noticeable were the bullet holes that had chewed up the Jaguar’s rear bodywork and shredded its back tyres.

  Ben swallowed. The particular kind of hole made by a nine-millimetre full metal jacket round as it punched through thin sheet steel was a very familiar sight to him. He’d seen enough bullet-riddled vehicles in enough war zones all over the world to tell at a glance that this kind of damage was the work of fully-automatic weapons. Whoever had carried out the attack, they were disturbingly well equipped and not afraid to use it.

  Ben sensed a presence next to him and turned to see that Amal was standing at his shoulder.

  ‘Oh, my God, look at the state it’s in,’ Amal groaned as the recovery crew started securing the Jaguar to the lorry’s flatbed. ‘It looks even worse than it did on TV. How could anyone—?’

  Survive that, Ben knew Amal had been about to say. And under normal circumstances, Amal would have been right. Nothing could walk away from that kind of firepower.

  Unless …

  ‘See where most of the damage is?’ Ben asked him, pointing. ‘The mass of the gunfire was concentrated on the car’s undercarriage, not the bodywork at passenger height.’

  ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘That the gunmen were aiming to disable and stop it, not to kill everyone inside. If they’d wanted to do that, it would have been easy for them.’

  Amal nodded, but didn’t seem much reassured.

  Ben couldn’t feel entirely reassured either. He didn’t want to think about the amount of lead that had been sprayed into the car with Brooke inside, or the fact that a stray bullet could easily have ripped a path through enough layers of thin steel and plastic and leather to find its mark. But the thought wouldn’t go away. He kept seeing Brooke’s face in his mind, and he wondered with an icy chill whether he’d ever see it again for real. His hands felt shaky and he was breathing fast.

  But there was no time for sentimentality here, he reminded himself with an effort. He had to keep his wits about him or he’d be about as much use to her as the police.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ Amal asked. The cold and damp were getting to him, making him shiver.

  ‘I wanted to see it for myself.’

  ‘So you’ve seen it. What happens now?’

  ‘I need a moment,’ Ben said. He left Amal hovering uncertainly as he walked a few yards closer to the crime scene. Among the sparse grass of the verge near the cordon was a tall flat rock, wet and glistening under the floodlights and the blue swirl from the police vehicles. Ben leaned against the rock and reached into his jacket’s hip pocket for his crumpled pack of Gauloises and his Zippo lighter. He fished out a cigarette and lit it, but after a few seconds the drizzle had made the paper soggy and his heart wasn’t in it anyway. He tossed the fizzling cigarette down into the grass at his feet, and was mechanically crushing it into the dirt with the heel of his boot when he felt something under his sole and looked down.

  It wasn’t a pebble. He dropped into a crouch and poked around in the wet grass. When he found the small object, he held it up to the light to examine it closely.

  ‘What’ve you found?’ Amal asked him, walking across.

  Ben didn’t reply. Clasping the object in his palm he stepped over the police tape to look for more.

  An angry yell made him turn to see a short, stout figure in a flapping raincoat marching rapidly towards them from the direction of the Land Rovers.

  ‘Hoi! You! This is a police crime scene!’ As the man approached, shouting and gesticulating at them, Ben could see in the glare of the overhead floodlights that it was a plain-clothes detective, a stockily-built guy in his mid fifties or thereabouts.

  ‘That’s him,’ Amal said in a low voice. ‘Hanratty, the one I told you about.’

  Chapter Nine

  Detective Inspector Hanratty stormed up to them, scowling. A slick of carrot-red hair was plastered across his puckered brow. He had mud spattered over his shoes and the bottoms of his trouser legs were sodden. But Ben guessed that spending hours out here in the shit weather wasn’t the sole reason for the sour grimace on Hanratty’s face. It looked permanently etched into his ruddy features. Ben’s first impression was of a chronically malcontented guy who, when he’d finished harrying and persecuting his work colleagues for the day, bullied his wife and kicked the dog.

  ‘This is a police crime scene,’ Hanratty repeated loudly. ‘Get out.’

  Following a few yards behind was a female officer. Like her colleague, she was in plain clothes – a detective sergeant, was Ben’s guess. She was petite, elfin in her looks, with dark shoulder-length hair that had gone limp from the drizzle. She was visibly tired, but in contrast to the dogged stupidity in Hanratty’s eyes, hers were quick and sharp.

  ‘My name’s Hope,’ Ben said. ‘I’m a close friend of one of the victims, Brooke Marcel.’ He reached for his wallet and took out the little photo of her that he carried inside. The picture had been taken in France during summer. She was smiling and the sun was in her hair. He couldn’t bring himself to look at it.

  Hanratty gave it only a cursory glance. ‘See that police tape there?’ he blustered. ‘Know what that means? It means keep your nose out of where it doesn’t belong, understand?’ He turned his sour gaze on Amal, and his eyes narrowed with recognition. ‘Ah, Mr … Ray, wasn’t it? What are you doing poking around here with him? We’ve taken your statement already, so now you can—’

  Ben looked at him. ‘Listen, I came to help, not to argue with you, okay?’

  Hanratty flushed and was about to fire an angry reply, but his colleague got in first. ‘Mr Hope, I’m Detective Sergeant Lynch,’ she said calmly. ‘We do have the situation under control, thank you, so if you’d like to return to your vehicle …’

  Ben opened his clenched palm and tossed them the small object he’d found in the grass. Hanratty caught it in his fist, peered down at it and then stared up at Ben in surprise and indignation. Lynch stepped closer to her colleague to see what it was.

  ‘It was lying over there by the roadside,’ Ben said. ‘Thought it might be useful. It’s a nine-millimetre shell casing.’

  Hanratty’s features twisted into a sardonic leer. ‘How helpful of you, sir. It happens we’ve already recovered a number of these.’

  ‘Then I imagine you’ve learned something from them,’ Ben said.

  Lynch took the small steel casing from Hanratty’s hand and examined it. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Hanratty growled. ‘Get out of here before I—’

  ‘Learn what?’ Lynch said. ‘We already know shots were fired at the car.’

  Ben pointed at the cartridge in her fingers. Her nails were trimmed short and practical. ‘Thin steel, not brass,’ he said. ‘Plus, two small flash holes in the primer socket instead of the more usual single larger hole means the cartridge was designed to take a Berdan type primer. That’s unusual. You don’t normally see them, except with milsurp ordnance. That’s military surplus,’ he added for the benefit of Hanratty, who was glaring at him with widening eyes and turning mottled under the floodlights. ‘Secondly—’

  ‘Secondly?’ Lynch said. She was listening closely, her head cocked slightly to one side.

  ‘See where the case mouth is dented from the weapon’s ejector port, where it spins and smashes against the receiver on its way out? That denting is typical of the way the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun mashes its spent shells. Expensive weapon, and this one was brand new.’

  ‘How the hell can you tell that?’ Hanratty snapped impatiently.

  ‘Scrape marks on the side of the casing, from loading,’ Ben said. ‘The magazine isn’t fully broken in yet, follower spring’s a little stiff. It’s normal for the first few hundred rounds. So your perpetrators are using milsurp ammo, hard to come by without the right contacts, and they’re very professionally equipped.’

  Lynch arched an eyebrow. ‘Is there more?’

  ‘Just that the placement of the empty casings you’ve a
lready found, and the others that’re probably still scattered in the grass, should allow you to figure out by the distance and the angle of ejection more or less where the gunmen were standing, how they moved,’ Ben said. ‘Might help you to find footprints, determine the exact number of shooters, little things like that. If it were me, I’d have the team searching over here instead of out there in the field.’ He smiled a thin, humourless smile. ‘But then, who am I to tell you your job?’

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ Hanratty demanded.

  ‘Forget it,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t have time to waste talking to idiots. Come on, Amal, let’s go.’

  ‘Hey!’ Hanratty yelled as they headed back towards the car. ‘Don’t you walk away from me. Who’re you calling an idiot?’

  Ben kept walking. Amal followed along nervously.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Lynch called out, trotting after them. ‘Mr Hope, wait.’

  ‘I’ve seen all I need to see here,’ Ben said without turning round. He was nearly at the car when she caught up with him and gently grasped his arm.

  He wheeled round to face her. ‘I’ve dealt with a thousand Hanrattys in my time,’ he said. ‘He’s a fool, and he’s totally out of his depth.’

  A long-suffering little smile played at the corners of Lynch’s mouth, as if she’d be only too happy to agree with him if she were free to. ‘You’re not dealing with him now,’ she said calmly. ‘You’re dealing with me, DS Kay Lynch. Let’s talk, Mr Hope. Please.’ There was no hostility in her expression, no suspicion, just earnestness and fatigue.

  ‘No offence, Kay, but I think someone like Tommy Logan at the ERU in Dublin should be handling this.’ The Garda’s Emergency Response Unit was the nearest thing the Irish police had to SCO19. One or two of their units had undergone hostage extraction training with the SAS during Ben’s time, and Commander Tommy Logan had sent a team for instruction under Ben and Jeff Dekker’s tutelage last year.

  Lynch frowned. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I told you who I am. I’m a friend of Brooke Marcel who was in that car.’

  ‘No, I mean, who are you really? You’ve got experience at this kind of thing, haven’t you?’

  ‘More than your friend there, for sure,’ Ben said, with a dismissive gesture at the distant figure of Hanratty, who was marching back over to the Land Rovers and barking orders at the forensic team.

  Ben had had enough of this place. He was about to turn back towards the car, but the expression in Lynch’s eyes made him hesitate. He slipped his wallet and a ballpoint from his inside pocket and pulled out one of his business cards, slightly crumpled. It bore the name Le Val Tactical Training Centre in bold letters, with his name below. For the sake of appearances, it showed his former military rank – something Ben had never liked but which Jeff Dekker had persuaded him would impress clients.

  Ben scribbled his mobile number on the back of the card and handed it to Lynch. ‘The web address is there too, if you want to check me out,’ he told her. ‘It’ll give you an idea of my background and what I do.’ In fact, the information about him on the website had been trimmed and edited down to the barest possible minimum. Little of what he’d done in his life, both during and since his military days, could be stuck up online for all to see.

  But the card alone was enough. Lynch glanced at it and raised an eyebrow. ‘All right, I’m impressed. Do I call you Major Hope?’

  ‘It’s just Ben now,’ he said.

  ‘So what did you mean when you said you came here to help, Ben?’

  ‘I came here to find Brooke. That’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘This is a police investigation. We don’t normally invite civilians to come on board.’

  ‘I didn’t ask to be invited. I’ll do this with you or without you.’

  ‘I have to caution you to stay out of it. For your own sake as well as hers, and that of the other victims.’

  ‘Of course. The last thing you need is a crazy guy like me messing the whole thing up.’

  Lynch looked at him. ‘I understand that this a very difficult time for you. You’re upset and frightened. The police have a victim support counselling service …’

  ‘What frightens me the most is that prick Hanratty,’ Ben said.

  ‘I’m serious,’ she warned. ‘You can’t go meddling in this on your own. I don’t want to have to arrest you.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t.’

  Her eyes narrowed for an instant as she sensed the quiet menace in his voice. Then she seemed to soften. ‘Look. There’s nothing you can do here.’

  ‘You’re still waiting for the ransom demand, correct?’ he said after a pause.

  Lynch hesitated to reply. ‘There has been no contact as yet, no. They’re still up at Carrick Manor.’

  ‘Carrick Manor?’

  ‘That’s where the party was supposed to take place,’ Amal put in. ‘The big house.’

  ‘Forsyte’s land base during the salvage project,’ Lynch said, ‘while he wasn’t supervising the operation from on board his ship. They’re expecting the ransom demand call either to come through there, or to the company’s main offices in Southampton.’

  Ben pointed past Lynch’s shoulder. ‘Now, that cordoned area on the left side of the road. What’s that?’

  Lynch didn’t need to look round to know which area he was talking about. She pursed her lips. ‘You think I can’t see what you’re doing, trying to prise information out of me? I told you, you can’t get invol—’

  ‘It’s where the body of the driver, Lander, was found, isn’t it?’ Ben cut across her.

  She rolled her eyes, nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Thirty yards back from the crash site,’ Ben said. ‘Ideas?’

  ‘You’re pretty damn persistent, aren’t you, Mr Hope?’

  ‘Just Ben. And yes, I can be. Tell me something, Kay. Lander’s body. Apart from the gunshots, what other injuries did he have?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Crush injuries, for instance? Like he’d been run over?’

  ‘Y-yes,’ she blurted, her eyes opening wider. ‘There were tyre marks on the body that matched the tread pattern of the Jaguar. But how … ?’

  ‘Indicating that the car was driven over the top of him after he’d been shot. I thought so. And I’m guessing that there are traces of paint on the front right wing of the car. White or blue?’

  ‘White,’ Lynch said, staring at him.

  Ben nodded. ‘So it was blue before. It was an overspray,’ he explained. ‘Figures.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Just from looking around,’ he said. ‘This is how I see it. The car was coming along this road when it was overtaken and forced to stop by a white van. A Ford Transit, maybe, or a Fiat Ducato, something like that, bought cheap and repainted in a hurry.’ His eyes were fixed on the scene, as if he were watching the events unfold in front of him in real time. ‘Lander, the driver, gets out of the Jaguar to have it out with the van’s occupants, who have already stepped out of their vehicle. I’d say two of them, at least. He’s got no idea of their intentions, not until it’s too late. They open fire on him from near the van, shooting in this direction. Just a short burst, three rounds apiece. The empty cases are ejected into the left-side verge.’

  ‘We found half a dozen of them there,’ Lynch muttered.

  ‘Lander goes down at the side of the road. Brooke, Forsyte and his PA must have seen it all happen right in front of them. It’s at this point that someone inside the Jaguar takes charge of the situation and gets behind the wheel.’

  ‘That’s more or less what we figured out, too,’ Lynch said, still stupefied but struggling to hide it. ‘One of them tried to make a break for it. Probably Forsyte. That’s what the DI says, at any rate.’

  Ben was certain it had been Brooke. He knew the way she responded in a tight spot, and this was exactly what she’d have done here. The stab of proud admiration he felt was quickly swallowed up by a fresh surg
e of grief and anxiety. He reined in his emotions and pressed on.

  ‘Now whoever’s taken the wheel of the Jaguar needs to get out of there by the most direct route. They’ve got the van in front of them partially blocking the way, and Lander’s body in between. But there’s no other way round, no choice but to aim straight ahead. That’s what I’d have done. The car goes right over Lander’s body and rams into the left wing of the van from an angle, shunting it far enough aside to the right to create a gap. Hence the traces of white paint on the car’s wing, and the sideways tyre marks on the road. The gunmen must have had to jump out of the way as the Jaguar forced its way through. But as the car accelerates up the road, they open fire on it. Now they’re shooting in the opposite direction and the empty cases are flying this way, bouncing off the tarmac into the right-side verge. There’ll be a lot more there besides the one I found. They take out the tyres and the car loses control.’

  Lynch finished for him. ‘The victims are moved out of the car and transferred into the van, leaving Lander’s body behind. That pretty much sums it up. Well, you’ve certainly put this together, haven’t you?’

  ‘You’d have to confirm it with your genius friend Hanratty,’ Ben said. ‘But that’s how I see it happening.’

  ‘And now what?’ Amal said restlessly. ‘What’s being done?’

  ‘All that can be done,’ Lynch told him. ‘You need to believe that. And you,’ she said, facing Ben, ‘need to go home, sit tight and get some rest.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘What I need is to be kept informed. I can’t be left on the outside. If there are developments I don’t want to be seeing them on the TV along with the rest of the public half a day later.’