The Armada Legacy

by Scott Mariani

  The doorway led out onto the alley at the back of the pub. A cold damp wind was funnelling down the narrow passage from the main street to the left, blowing litter and dead leaves. Flanagan shoved Ben to the right, away from the street. ‘Walk.’

  ‘The car’s that way,’ Gary said, motioning back.

  ‘We’re not going to the car,’ Flanagan said. ‘We’re taking yer man for a wee scenic stroll, and then he’s going to find out what happens to big-mouthed fuckers like him who go around asking too many questions.’

  ‘What do you think about that, soldier boy?’ said Sean.

  ‘I think you’re making a mistake,’ Ben said. ‘But you still have time to get out of it.’

  ‘You won’t be so cocky with your liver hanging out,’ Flanagan said, jabbing the blade at Ben’s back. He paused, as if waiting for Ben to dissolve into a gibbering panic. When it didn’t happen, he added, ‘I’d just as soon have carved you up inside the pub, but why should they have to clean up all the mess?’

  ‘That shows a considerate side,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe you should consider putting the toothpick away, too. Because it’s going to hurt like hell when the doctor’s prising it out of your arse later.’

  ‘Would you listen to this fucker?’ said Sean.

  ‘I still think we should wait for the others,’ Gary muttered.

  ‘They’ll be here any minute,’ Flanagan said. ‘They can help put what’s left of this bastard in with the rubbish.’ He motioned at a wheelie bin at the side of the alley that was overflowing with garbage bags. Next to it was a row of battered metal dustbins with rusty lids. ‘Okay, that’s far enough,’ he told Ben, grabbing his collar and wheeling him round so his back was against the alley wall. Flanagan’s fingers were white on the hilt of the knife bayonet. ‘You’ll be dead in a couple of seconds, so if you’ve got anything to say, say it now.’

  ‘Stick him like a pig, Frank,’ Sean said excitedly.

  Flanagan sucked in a deep breath. Then his eyes flashed as he gathered up his energy and stabbed the knife hard and fast at Ben’s chest.

  Ben moved faster. There was a metallic screech as the tip of the knife sheared through thin sheet steel instead of human flesh. Flanagan’s eyes opened wide to stare at the circular lid Ben had whipped off the nearest dustbin at the last instant and was holding in front of him like a shield by its metal handle. The sharp blade, with two hundred and fifty pounds of bulk thrusting behind it, had punched through right up to the hilt.

  Before Flanagan could recover his wits, Ben twisted the dustbin lid violently, wrenched the trapped weapon out of his hand and then drove it straight back at him.

  The heavy steel pommel had been designed to attach the bayonet securely to a rifle barrel, but it also made a pretty good impact weapon. It caught Flanagan square in the mouth, ripped through between his lips and kept going about three inches before Ben tore the lid away and the knife with it.

  Flanagan let out a howling shriek and staggered backwards, clapping his hands over his mouth. Blood spurted from between his fingers and red and white dental fragments spilled out over the alleyway.

  Ben slammed the edge of the bin lid into the bridge of his nose with enough force to knock him flat on his back. ‘You were right, Flanagan. Why should the good folks at The Spinning Jenny clean up your mess?’

  As Ben expected, Sean didn’t hesitate as long as Gary before coming in for the attack. He ripped an extending baton out of his bike jacket and flicked it out to its full length as he rushed in, yelling at the top of his voice. Ben dodged the blow, tripped him and sent him flying headlong with all his weight and momentum into the alley wall. The top of his skull impacted the brickwork with the sound of a lumphammer crushing a cabbage.

  Before Sean’s unconscious body had slumped the ground, the sharpened screwdriver in Gary’s hand was punching through the air towards Ben’s throat. Ben blocked the stab with a blow intended to break bone. There was a crack and a screech as Gary’s wrist snapped. The screwdriver fell to the ground. Ben drove an elbow into his sternum, driving the wind out of him, then grabbed a fistful of his greasy hair and used it to drive the guy’s face down into a rising kneecap.

  After that, Gary wasn’t much use to anyone. He flopped down on the ground and Ben stepped over him, walking towards Flanagan, who had managed to clamber halfway to his feet. The big man’s mouth was a red hole and there was blood leaking all down his shirt. He staggered upright, turned and began to stagger away up the alley towards the street.

  Ben planned to let him go, but not just yet. ‘Come back here, Flanagan. Let’s have that fancy phone of yours, so your owner can call me on it within the hour and tell me how he’s going to give me what I want.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Flanagan screamed over his shoulder, his stagger turning into a run. Ben scooped the bin lid off the ground, yanked the knife bayonet out and flipped the weapon over in his hand so he was holding the tip of the blade lightly between forefinger and thumb. It was an ungainly object with that big steel rifle lug on the end, but when it came to throwing knives, judging the distance and the number of spins through the air was more important than balance.

  Ben gauged the throw, then let it fly. The blade flashed through the air and embedded itself deep in Flanagan’s left glute. Flanagan crashed to his face and began rolling and howling, clawing to get it out.

  Ben stepped up to him and was about to speak when there was the roar of an engine and a screech of brakes as a van skidded to a halt outside the mouth of the alleyway, blocking it.

  The van’s doors burst open. Three men leaped from the front, three more from the rear, all armed with baseball bats and machetes except one who was waving a semi-automatic pistol. A seventh guy followed them from the back of the van, manhandling a snarling, barking Doberman on the end of a chain.

  ‘Get him!’ Flanagan was bawling incoherently through his mangled lips from where he lay with the bayonet hilt protruding from his buttock. ‘Kill that fucking bastard!’

  Three inept morons with one decent knife between them was one thing. This was another. There’d been a time when a wilder, more reckless Ben might have gone wading into the attack. But he was older and wiser now, and he needed to think of Brooke. If she was still alive, he wasn’t going to be of much use to her all smashed and chewed up with a couple of bullets in him. He turned and sprinted down the alleyway, past the bins and the slumped bodies of Sean and Gary. The back doors of houses zipped by as he ran, broken windows and boarded-up entrances covered in graffiti. Racing footsteps and furious shouts echoed down the alley behind him. If they let the dog go, this would be over fast.

  He suddenly found himself in a maze of passages that wound in all directions between the houses. Set at intervals in the cracked concrete were iron bollards that he guessed were to stop local kids tearing down the alleys on their motorcycles. A fork opened up in front of him and he took the right turning, then a left a few metres further on, and almost collided with a large yellow builder’s skip that blocked most of the passageway. It was piled high with bits of scaffolding, old fence posts and rubble. Beyond the skip to the right was the recessed doorway of a house or flat that was either a squat or unoccupied, with planks nailed across the entrance and weeds growing from the cracked steps.

  Ben could hear the thunder of footsteps getting close. It sounded like two, at most three men. His pursuers must have split up to flush out the maze of passages. He couldn’t hear the dog; guessed its handler had taken one of the other turnings.

  He moved quickly to the skip, then slipped into the doorway and pressed himself flat against the planks.

  The two men appeared round the corner, running as fast as they could, darting their eyes left and right into every corner. One held a crude machete, the other had the handgun clenched in his fist. ‘Keep moving,’ he rasped breathlessly at his younger companion. ‘He can’t have gone far.’ They raced past the skip, running close together side by side in the narrow space.

  Neither of them had time to
register the blurred object that suddenly came swinging at them out of nowhere. To a dull clang that resonated all through the alley, all four of their feet left the ground together and kicked up high in the air in a sprawl of limbs before they crashed down on their backs against the concrete.

  Ben stepped out of the doorway. The length of heavy iron scaffold pole was still quivering in his hands from the impact. Two days’ worth of anguished frustration and pent-up rage had gone into the blow and it had knocked both men out cold. He laid down the pole and picked up the men’s fallen weapons. The machete was of no interest, and he tossed it over a wall. The other was an American Colt Government .45 automatic, badly scuffed with most of the finish worn away. If it had been one of the weapons supplied by the CIA back in the heyday of the Troubles, it had seen a lot of use over the years since. It was fully loaded, seven rounds in the magazine and one up the spout. Ben stuffed it in his belt.

  ‘So you must be John,’ he said to the gun’s unconscious owner, remembering what Gary had said. He reckoned he had about ten seconds before the others appeared. He dragged the two limp bodies to a nearby iron bollard, propped them sitting up back to back either side of it and used a coil of rusty old barbed wire from the builder’s skip to lash them together. He did a rough, hasty job of it, but they wouldn’t get free without leaving half their flesh on the barbs. Counting down the seconds he ripped strips from their clothing as improvised gags. He dusted his hands and stood over them. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  He drew the Colt from his belt, flipped off the safety and trotted towards the head of the alley just as the remaining four men appeared. They skidded to a halt at the sight of the pistol in his hand. The Doberman reared up when it saw him, fangs bared and straining its chain tight.

  Ben stood in the middle of the passage with the .45 in a two-handed Weaver stance and the dog square in his sights. ‘You’ll be burying Fido tonight if you let him go,’ he said.

  The four men gaped at him. The handler kept hold of the chain. Ben was glad of that. He was very fond of dogs, even ones that wanted to savagely rip him to pieces. He wouldn’t have liked to paint the alley with its brains.

  ‘Where’s Fergus Doyle?’ he said.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ one of the men blurted.

  Ben didn’t think he was going to get a lot out of these guys. If John had had the gun, that meant John was probably the furthest up the hierarchy. And John was currently trussed up ready for interrogation. He’d already wasted enough time on deadbeats and lackeys.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Ben said to himself, and resorted to the most effective way of clearing the decks. The Colt boomed and kicked in his hands, and again, and again, aiming off first a little to the left, then a little to the right. The fat .45 bullets ricocheted off the walls either side of the men, clouding the alley with masonry dust. They scattered in panic and fled, the dog handler desperately tugging his Doberman along behind him as he ran.

  Ben lowered the gun. Through the ringing in his ears he heard their racing footsteps disappear, then a few moments later the screech of spinning tyres as the van took off up the street at high speed. He turned and walked back to his two captives.

  They hadn’t gone anywhere. The one called John, who was a slab-faced nondescript guy of about thirty-five, had only just come to. The younger one, a spotty kid of about nineteen, had been awake long enough to start chewing frantically through his gag. They were both struggling against their bonds and rolling their eyes up at him as he stood over them.

  He thrust the Colt back in his belt and dropped into a crouch next to his prisoners. ‘Now, if you two want to go home today instead of to the morgue, you’re going to tell me where I can find Fergus Doyle. Who wants to start? How about you, John?’

  He was reaching out to rip away the guy’s gag when he felt a sudden pressure against the base of his neck.

  The cold, hard touch of a gun muzzle.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There were two basic possible responses to an unexpected turn of events like this. Ben didn’t consider the first one very long, because whipping round to lash the weapon out of the opponent’s hands wasn’t such a clever idea when he’d just heard the hammer go back with a small, sharp click-click. You couldn’t quite dodge or deflect a handgun bullet the way you could a knife bayonet in the hands of an idiot.

  The second response was just to go very still and hope that nothing terminal was about to happen in the next few moments.

  Ben went very still.

  ‘Lose the pistol,’ said a woman’s voice. It was a young voice, and might have been pleasant-sounding if she’d had something different to say. ‘Any tricks, this gun goes off and your frigging head goes off with it.’

  Ben slowly moved his hand to his belt, grasped the butt of the Colt between thumb and forefinger, drew it out and tossed it away with a clatter.

  ‘Now get on your feet. Slowly does it.’

  The gun muzzle stayed pressed to his neck as he stood. It still didn’t seem like a good moment for any sudden moves.

  ‘Now turn round,’ she commanded. The pressure disappeared from his neck as she took a couple of steps backwards.

  Ben turned cautiously round to face her. She was as youthful as her voice: not much more than twenty-one or twenty-two, willowy with a pretty face and long black hair, tousled, a little gypsyish. Her dark eyes were watching him unblinking down the barrel of the .357 Magnum revolver she was clutching. The gun looked oversized in her hands. Ben could see the jacketed hollowpoint rounds nestling in the mouths of the cylinder chambers. There was no chance she could miss at this range. The expanding bullet would blow a hole in him that a boxer could poke his fist through, glove and all.

  ‘Put your frigging hands up,’ she said.

  Now that they were face to face there was an edge to her voice that might have been anxiety, and Ben wondered whether she’d ever pointed a loaded gun at anyone before.

  ‘I know how to use this thing,’ she said.

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ he said. He put his hands up.

  ‘You hope so?’ she said. Her brow puckered up in a frown.

  ‘We wouldn’t want any accidental discharges. The old Model Nineteen has a light single-action trigger.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want with Fergus Doyle?’

  ‘Like I told those other guys,’ Ben said. ‘I’m looking for something.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘Someone. Someone who’s missing, whom I care about very much. If Doyle has her, I’d like to discuss business with him, man to man.’

  She frowned again, scrutinising him intently. ‘What kind of business?’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘The ransom kind,’ he said. ‘Money. If he can give me back what he took from me, I can offer him something in exchange.’

  A few months earlier, Ben had had Le Val valued for insurance purposes and the figure that had come back was a shade over 1.9 million euros. It was everything Ben had in the world. He’d already decided that was a small price to pay for Brooke’s return, and it was what he intended to put on the table.

  The young woman made no reply, just stared at him as if slowly digesting what he’d just said. Before she could speak, from somewhere far away beyond the houses came a wailing of sirens, growing rapidly louder. Ben guessed that the Belfast police weren’t so jaded nowadays that they wouldn’t respond to the sound of a forty-five being let off in the street.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

  ‘Tara,’ she replied after a beat. ‘Tara McNatten.’

  ‘If you’re going to fire that thing, Tara, you need to do it before the police turn up. It won’t suit either of us to be caught standing here.’

  She glanced over her shoulder, not quite long enough for Ben to move for the gun. ‘Okay,’ she said, appearing to make a decision. ‘You want to see Fergus Doyle. I’ll take you to him. That way.’ She motioned with the gun.

  ‘What ab
out your friends here?’ he said, looking down at the two captives lashed to the bollard, still struggling wildly to get free and moaning loudly behind their gags.

  ‘Those are no friends of mine,’ she said. Ben didn’t understand, but there wasn’t time to hang around discussing the finer points. The police sirens were getting close.

  He started walking the way Tara was pointing. She followed a few steps behind, keeping her revolver aimed steadily between his shoulder blades. The first police vehicle screamed to a halt and they could hear raised voices and the crackle of radios. Tara guided Ben into the entrance of a winding passage that snaked along between grimy houses and rundown fences for a hundred yards before it opened onto another dismal street. Parked a short distance away was a silver Honda SUV. There was nobody else in sight.

  ‘That’s my car,’ she said. ‘You’re driving.’ She kept the gun carefully trained on him as he opened the driver’s door. He could tell she wasn’t too experienced at this, but one thing she was was thoughtful. If she’d tossed him the key before he got behind the wheel, he might have been able to get the vehicle fired up and speed away without her; instead she waited until they were both inside, him in front and her behind, and only then did she let him have the key. ‘Go easy,’ she said. ‘Keep to the speed limits. Any tricks and I’ll shoot.’

  Ben started the car and pulled away. Following her directions he drove through the maze of streets and back out onto the main road, where they passed the police vehicles speeding in the opposite direction towards the scene of the shooting. Cops were like wasps. If you acted unconcerned about their presence, there was generally a pretty good chance they’d leave you alone. Ben drove the Honda at a steady, nonchalant pace and managed to get by the police without getting stopped.

  After a few minutes they were heading out of Belfast. A thin rain started up again, slanting out of the grey afternoon sky. Signs for Dromore and Banbridge flashed past. ‘Keep going,’ Tara’s voice said from the back seat. Finally, she said, ‘Okay, next right,’ and Ben turned off the main road to wind along a few miles of narrow country lanes. ‘See that stand of trees up ahead?’ she said. ‘There’s a gate just after them.’