The Armada Legacy

by Scott Mariani

  The snowmobile kept coming. It was forty yards behind now, careering crazily down the slope, totally out of control, slamming off trees and exploding through bushes, its engine note screeching. Ben could see the rider clinging on like a berserker.

  Ben moved faster. Ducking to avoid another blast of gunfire, he tripped over a root, lost his footing and felt himself go. He reached out to check his fall by grabbing a nearby branch. It snapped off in his hand.

  There was nothing he could do to save himself from tumbling down on his face. He felt himself sliding and rolling helplessly, over and over. A blinding avalanche of snow slid down the hillside with him as he went. Certain that he was about to smash into a tree or a rock at any instant, he braced himself for the bone-crunching impact and tried to plan a way to scramble away to safety, like a wounded animal escaping a predator.

  But the impact didn’t come. He felt himself slide to a halt. He brushed the snow and dirt out of his eyes and blinked them open to see that he’d reached the bottom of the slope. The ground under him felt strangely hard; as hard and cold as sheet steel.

  When he scrambled to his feet, he understood why. At the bottom of the hillside was a frozen lake, and he was standing right on it. The opposite shore was a good hundred yards away, flanked by thick bushes and pines. Just visible through the trees were some buildings – a little chalet or cottage with a barn, offering cover and maybe, just maybe, some kind of improvised weapon that could help even Ben’s odds at closer range against his pursuer. Even a rusty pitchfork or a loose brick were better than nothing. And nothing was exactly what Ben had right now.

  All he had to do was make it across a hundred yards of open lake before the shooter caught up with him.

  Ben set out across the ice. The surface was smooth and glassy under just a thin layer of powder snow, too slick for the heavily-ribbed soles of his boots to get any purchase. He couldn’t run without falling on his face, so he skated, sliding one foot forward and then the other, arms outstretched to keep his balance. It was tough going, but he’d been able to cover about sixty yards by the time he heard the buzzing roar of the snowmobile catching up with him again.

  He snatched a glance over his shoulder, lost his balance and fell hard on the ice. He used his elbows rather than his hands to break his fall, because he knew from experience that bare flesh could stick to ice on contact. He didn’t feel like leaving half the skin from his palms behind.

  Crack. Where his right elbow had struck painfully against the surface, a thin blue fissure had appeared. All that separated him from the freezing depths of the lake were a few inches of fragile ice. He didn’t dare move in case the crack spread any further.

  He looked up. The snowmobile had somehow managed to reach the bottom of the slope without overturning. Without hesitation, the shooter steered the vehicle straight out onto the lake. Ben saw the man’s grin as the engine note soared and the craft accelerated towards him, veering madly from side to side on the slippery surface.

  Suddenly much less concerned about the crack in the ice, Ben clambered to his feet and skated onwards with all the strength he could muster. Thirty-five yards to the opposite shore. Thirty. He could see the buildings clearly now. They looked derelict, but he didn’t care. All his energy was focused on reaching them.

  But it was no good. The snowmobile was gaining too quickly. As it got to within a few paces, the engine note fell and it glided to a halt on the ice. Ben stopped skating. He turned slowly round to face his pursuer, and raised his hands. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  The shooter made no reply. Keeping the machine carbine pointed steadily at Ben, he tore off his goggles and tossed them into the back of the snowmobile, then climbed off the craft and took a step forwards. His face was hard, his jaw clenched, his eyes stony.

  ‘Where’s Cabeza?’ Ben demanded, although at this moment he wasn’t sure how much it would serve him to know the answer.

  Very slowly and deliberately, the man ejected the spent magazine from the gun’s receiver and slotted in another from the pouch on his belt, then let the bolt forward with a clack and raised the butt to his shoulder.

  Ben sighed. He’d come so far, only to get shot. There wasn’t much he could do about it. He thought of Brooke, and hung his head.

  The shooter took aim. He seemed to be relishing the moment.

  Until the first crackling sound came from the ice, and the surface gave a lurch under his feet. Ben felt it, too, and saw the web of blue-grey cracks suddenly appear and spread quickly out from underneath the snowmobile.

  The vehicle’s weight was too much for the frozen lake to support.

  The shooter’s aim wavered as he stared down in horror at the widening circle of unstable ice under him.

  Too late. There was a slow, ripping groan, then an explosion like the crack of a rifle as the ice gave way.

  The snowmobile’s front end rose sharply up in the air, then tipped over backwards into the water and was gone. The shooter staggered and let go of his weapon, windmilling his arms for balance and trying to jump towards more solid footing, but he was too slow. He fell with a splash and a cry that became a gurgle as the icy water closed over his head.

  It wasn’t because Ben had once lost a close friend to an icy lake, and that he knew what a horrible death Oliver had suffered, that he felt impelled to save the man. He had to know what was going on.

  The ice was breaking up alarmingly underfoot as he moved towards the edge of the ragged hole. For a moment he thought that the man had already sunk, overwhelmed by the deadly low temperature of the water – but then he saw his fingers gripping the edge of the hole, desperately trying to prevent himself from being drawn away under the ice sheet by the currents.

  Ben fell into a crouch and plunged his arms into the freezing water, grasping the man by both wrists and pulling with all his might to haul him out. More cracks rippled outwards from the hole, threatening to break away the thin, unstable ledge Ben was crouching on.

  The man’s head broke clear of the water, coughing and spluttering. Ben hoisted his shoulders and torso out of the lake, then laid him flat on the ice and dragged him away from the hole by the arms. The cracks were spreading everywhere. The ledge Ben had been crouching on seconds earlier suddenly gave way with a grinding creak.

  Whoever this guy was, he was as tenacious as he was reckless. Even as Ben was hauling him away from danger, he was struggling like a trapped animal – but he was too winded and stunned by the shock of the icy water to put up much of a fight, or to realise that the SIG machine carbine was still hanging from his neck by its sling. Ben dragged him the last few yards to the lakeside, grappled him down firmly into the muddy snow, ripped away the weapon and tossed it aside.

  ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Give it up.’

  The guy wasn’t ready to stop. He lashed out wildly with his fists. Ben blocked one blow, but the next caught him across the cheek and made him see stars. He smashed the man hard in the face. Blood spurted from the man’s nose and poured down his lips and chin.

  ‘Where is she?’ Ben yelled. He drew his bloody fist back for another strike, but he hadn’t saved him from the lake to beat him insensible. He held back the blow. ‘Where is she?’ he repeated.

  The man blinked; coughed up a gout of blood; blinked again. The expression on his face was a mixture of animal hatred and blank incomprehension.

  Ben snatched up the fallen machine carbine. It was in battery and the safety was off. He thrust the muzzle hard under the man’s chin, forcing his head up. The SIG 553’s trigger would break at just under eight pounds of pressure. Ben had about six pounds on it right now and could almost feel the first bit of give before it would let go and blast the man’s brains all over the snow. It would have been so easy.

  ‘You tell me what you’ve done with her,’ he rasped, ‘or you die.’

  The man spat red. His eyes blazed with defiance. His face was so numb with cold and his body was shuddering so badly after being soaked in the freezing lake that his vo
ice was nearly incoherent – but not so much so that Ben couldn’t make out his words.

  ‘Kill me, then, motherfucker! Then go tell your fucking boss it was me who shot the bitch. Me. Nico Ramirez. You tell him!’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Ben recoiled. For a moment he was dumbstruck. ‘What did you say?’ he asked. ‘Shot who?’

  Before Ramirez could answer, Ben had clubbed him over the head with the gun. Ramirez tried to cover his face with his hands. ‘What woman did you shoot?’ Ben roared, so hard he felt blood rise up in his throat. Terror was gripping his whole body. He felt as if he was on fire.

  ‘I shot Serrato’s bitch of a wife!’ Ramirez screamed back. ‘You tell him it was me who killed Alicia!’

  Ben stopped hitting him. Breathing hard and shaking with adrenaline, he kept the gun warily trained on the man and tried to make sense of what he was hearing. He was beginning to realise that he and his attacker, this determined maniac who’d very nearly succeeded in taking him down, and whom he’d been just about to beat to a bloody pulp, were totally at cross purposes. Who the hell was Serrato?

  Ben tried to focus his thoughts. The mannequin in Cabeza’s study. The music playing in the tower, loud enough to be heard by anyone approaching the house. It had been a lure. This Nico Ramirez – if that was his real name – had set a trap for someone he’d known in advance was coming to see Cabeza. Whoever that someone was, he wasn’t coming to consult the historian on a matter of scholarship. And Ramirez obviously believed that he’d caught the would-be assassin.

  ‘Where’s Cabeza?’ Ben demanded, just a little more gently. ‘Is he alive?’ But he could see that his prisoner was barely in a state to answer the hundred questions he wanted to ask. Blood was pouring from his nose and forehead, and he was convulsing with cold as the first stages of acute hypothermia began to take hold. Ben’s own clothes were wet through from the freezing lake and he could feel his extremities beginning to lose sensation. He slung the machine carbine over his shoulder, reached into his jacket pocket for his whisky flask and fumbled with his numb fingers to unscrew the cap. He took a gulp of the stinging whisky and then thrust the flask at Ramirez. ‘Drink some,’ he commanded.

  Ramirez took a shuddering sip, coughed, drank some more. Ben snatched the flask away and hauled him to his feet. ‘Now, hands above your head and move,’ he said. ‘That way,’ and pointed through the trees to the buildings near the lakeside.

  Ben marched his shivering captive up the snowy bank towards the largest of the old buildings. As they trudged wearily through the trees he could see the old cottage had been derelict for a long time. ‘Inside,’ he snapped, shoving Ramirez through the half-collapsed doorway.

  The place was littered with junk and debris. Judging from the rusted shotgun casings lying about, it had most recently been used as a hunter’s refuge by someone who’d been up here wildfowling on the lake in the summer or autumn, but it looked as though someone had lived here once. There was a crude stone chimney at one end, and the remains of a fire in the soot-blackened hearth. A broken-up rocking chair and a few mossy logs were all that was left of the firewood supply.

  Ben made Ramirez sit on an upturned bucket in the corner with his hands still on his head, found some old newspapers in a box and got to work getting a blaze going. When it was crackling nicely, he let the shivering man move closer to the fire and ordered him to strip off his wet things.

  Ramirez willingly obeyed. The shirt he was wearing was military issue, for extreme cold conditions. He’d obviously been prepared to wait up here a long time on the snowy mountain for whomever he intended to trap.

  When Ramirez was down to his underwear, Ben tossed him an old blanket he’d found, dirty and mouldy but dry. Ramirez towelled himself vigorously until his skin was pink, then wrung out his wet things and hung them up close to the leaping, crackling flames. As his clothes steamed, he sat down with the blanket wrapped tightly around him and gingerly prodded his bloodied nose and mouth with a wince of pain.

  ‘You’ll live,’ Ben said. He was keeping the SIG machine carbine pointed at Ramirez with a round in the chamber and the safety off. Given a chance, he’d have liked to dry his own wet clothes by the fire and get warm. But this man was dangerous and there were too many potential weapons lying around to be off his guard with him even for a second.

  He moved across to the fireplace, threw more broken pieces of wood and a log into the flames and then began frisking through Ramirez’s jacket for some identification. There was a wallet and a dripping wet passport. Ben examined them and saw that Ramirez hadn’t been lying about his name. His passport and personal identity card were marked ‘REPUBLICA DE COLOMBIA’; their owner Nicolás Ramirez had been born in 1974 in Bogotá. He was carrying a sheaf of fifty-thousand peso banknotes in among his thin supply of euros, as well as a much-creased and well-thumbed photo of a pretty woman with black hair and a white smile.

  But the most interesting thing Ben found in the sodden wallet was the faded, tattered ID bearing the green badge of the Policía Nacional de Colombia, showing the rank of sergeant. The ID had expired seven years ago.

  ‘So what do I call you?’ Ben said. ‘Sergeant Ramirez?’

  ‘People call me Nico,’ the Colombian muttered.

  ‘Even people you try to kill?’ Ben said.

  ‘Whatever, asshole.’

  ‘All right, Nico,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s start over. My name’s Ben Hope. We’ll get to what a former Colombian police officer is doing running around the Spanish Sierra Nevada taking pot-shots at people with a machine carbine later. First you’re going to tell me where Cabeza is.’

  Nico shot him a murderous look. ‘You can kill me. But you’ll never get him.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Ben said. ‘Not unless I have to. But I might have to, if you don’t tell me what I want to know. So let’s have some answers. I came here to see Juan Fernando Cabeza. Instead I find you. Why?’

  Nico spat on the ground between his feet. ‘Two words is all I have to say. Fuck. You.’

  Without another word, Ben pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot was harsh and painful in the enclosed space. The bullet cracked off the fireplace three inches to the left of Nico’s head.

  Nico’s reaction to the shot was interesting. Ben had seen, and dealt with, a lot of wild and crazy guys in his life – the kind of guys who would snap out a defiant ‘fuck you’ looking death in the face in the form of a loaded and cocked military rifle. Some of those men genuinely hadn’t cared whether they lived or died, but Nico wasn’t one of them. Ben had seen something in his eyes as the gun went off. More than just the fear of dying: an infinite sadness that death should have caught up with him now, at this moment, in this place, in this way. Nico Ramirez desperately wanted to stay alive, for a reason that he alone knew very clearly.

  ‘Like I told you, Nico,’ Ben said, ‘not unless I have to. How this works out is all down to you. Let me ask you again. Where’s Cabeza?’

  The defiant look was still there, but it was a little more tempered now. ‘Somewhere your boss Serrato ain’t ever gonna find him. Not if he sends a hundred men or a thousand.’

  ‘You’re getting it wrong,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t work for anyone called Serrato. I’ve never even heard of him. And I didn’t come here to hurt Cabeza.’

  Nico gave a cynical grunt. ‘Sure. You’d tell me that.’

  ‘You could be lying too,’ Ben said. ‘How do I know Cabeza’s alive? Maybe you killed him.’

  ‘He’s alive, motherfucker.’

  ‘He’d better be.’

  ‘Alive and safe.’

  ‘So you’re protecting him? Why would you do that? Protecting him from whom?’

  Nico said nothing.

  ‘Or maybe it’s not that you’re protecting Cabeza,’ Ben said, reading his face. ‘Maybe you’re just using him as bait. You knew someone was after him.’

  Nico remained staunchly silent, but a flicker behind his frozen expressi
on told Ben he was right. Seconds ticked slowly by and still Nico wouldn’t talk. Ben felt a molten ball of intermingled emotions rise up inside him, making him want to scream. ‘I need you to help me understand what’s going on here, Nico,’ he said, trying to keep his voice calm but hearing an edge of desperation in it. ‘I’m not working for anyone. I’m looking for a friend. More than a friend. They kidnapped her in Ireland, the day Roger Forsyte and his assistant were murdered. Do you know about them?’

  ‘I watch the news,’ Nico said. He was watching Ben intently, as if he knew more but was holding it carefully back.

  ‘I think Juan Cabeza might be able to help me find her,’ Ben explained. ‘I just want to talk to him. I don’t want to harm him. Far from it.’

  Nico looked at him long and penetratingly.

  ‘Please,’ Ben said. ‘I have to get her back. She’s been missing for over two days. Her name is Brooke. Brooke Marcel. Somehow all this is connected, but I don’t know how and I don’t know where else to go.’

  There was another long silence, during which Nico went on staring curiously at him, still apparently undecided as to whether he could believe him. Eventually he motioned at the weapon in Ben’s hands. ‘You tell me you need my help. But you’re the one holding the gun, amigo.’

  Ben looked down at the SIG. Looked back up at Nico and saw the earnestness and the depth of pain in his eyes, and it suddenly struck him that it was like looking into a mirror. Without another thought he flipped the gun round and passed it to Nico, butt first, with the muzzle pointing back at his own chest. ‘There. Take it.’

  Nico hefted the machine carbine in his hands and looked even more curiously at Ben.

  ‘Now you’re the one holding the gun,’ Ben said.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Nico Ramirez smiled and shook his head. ‘You’re a crazy motherfucker.’