The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  ‘This is it,’ Pelham said, motioning at the room. ‘This is as good as it gets. Live with it.’

  ‘You don’t understand how complex this thing is,’ Adam shouted.

  ‘You’re supposed to be the expert,’ Pelham said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  Adam could feel his face turning crimson as his shouts reverberated around the inside of the vault. ‘And if I can’t get it to work, then you know what? You know whose fucking fault that’ll be? Not mine. Yours, asshole. Your fault, because if you fuckers hadn’t killed my colleagues, if Michio and Julia were here with me now, the three of us might have figured it out. The way things are, you can do what you want, but you’ll never see this thing working. Understand? It can’t be done. So why don’t you just pick up the phone and tell your employers, whoever the fuck they are, that it’s over? That’s it. And then you’re just going to have to let me and my son go back to our lives.’ By the end of the tirade his shouts had diminished to a sob. He couldn’t talk any more.

  There was silence in the vault. Adam steadied himself against the machine, panting.

  Pelham spoke softly. ‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Adam? Your nerves are ragged. You feel weak and confused and you don’t know how you can go on.’

  Adam’s head sagged. He screwed his eyes shut and felt dizzy. He was one breath away from bursting into tears. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘If I could just sleep a while. Please. Then I’ll keep trying. I promise. Forget what I said. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.’

  Pelham got up from his armchair, walked calmly over to Adam and put an arm benignly around his shoulders. ‘Can I tell you a story? I was a soldier once. Not your normal infantryman. We were something… special. Our selection training was very intense. You wouldn’t believe the things we had to do. Just when we thought we’d been tested to the absolute limit, they moved it to the next level.’ He smiled. ‘You can’t imagine what it feels like to be hunted like an animal, can you? Alone in the dark, running scared, no food except what you can catch with your bare hands, no shelter, no sleep for days on end. But that’s what they did to us. They were teaching us to stretch the limits of what we thought possible, and those days taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I learned that those extremes of fear, pain, fatigue were my friends, because they concentrated my mind. Made me find reserves of strength within myself that I’d never dreamed of. That’s how I kept going. I made it through.’ Adam stared wordlessly at him.

  ‘But not every man passed the test,’ Pelham went on. ‘Some were broken. They gave in. And you know what they said, those losers, as they were being carried off, crying like babies? “I’m tired.”’ He paused. ‘What I’m saying is, I could let you go back to your cell right now, so that you could spend the next ten hours sleeping. But the truth is, Adam, I don’t think it’s going to help you to give in like that. Deep down, I think you have the strength to keep going. You just need help to find it within yourself.’ He walked away from Adam and went over to the table beside his armchair. On it was a radio handset.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Adam said numbly.

  Pelham picked up the radio. ‘Irina, this is Pelham. Respond, over.’

  A pause, then a fizz of static. Reception was poor inside the mountain. But then Adam heard the woman’s voice reply and he felt his knees going weak.

  ‘Fetch the boy,’ Pelham told her. ‘Bring him down to the vault. You know what I’m saying. Over and out.’ He turned off the radio.

  ‘No,’ Adam said. ‘No, no. You don’t have to do this. I’ll—’ Pelham pointed at the machine. ‘You’ll make it work, believe me,’ he said. ‘When she’s cutting your son’s face off, five minutes from now right here in this room while you watch, I guarantee that’s going to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Let’s see how tired you are then.’

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  ‘Again. On three.’

  Dangling side by side from the filthy rungs of the ladder, Ben and Jeff kicked against the iron grate of the crematorium hatchway one more time. The dull clang resonated through the chamber.

  ‘I’m going to puke,’ Jeff mumbled.

  ‘Again,’ Ben said. They’d been trying for what seemed like forever, and he could only hope that nobody had heard the noise. They swung their weight back from the hatch, then lashed out in unison.

  This time, the clang of their boots on the iron grate was mixed with a screech as hinges rusted solid for over half a century gave way and the hatch moved. Not much, just an inch. But it moved, and Ben felt the relief scorch through his veins like whisky.

  ‘We’re nearly there. Once more.’

  The final kick sent the hatch crashing open.

  ‘You go first,’ Ben said, and Jeff wasted no time in clambering past him and crawling out of the hole. Ben followed. After a few feet he was able to stand, and looked around him through his night-vision goggles.

  They were in the rough-hewn stone anteroom from where the SS soldiers must have flung the bodies of the dead before sloshing gasoline over them and setting them alight. Maybe towards the very end, when the soldiers needed every drop of fuel to escape the approaching Soviet troops, they hadn’t bothered burning their victims at all, but just shot those still alive in the back of the head and turfed the corpses into the hole to rot.

  Ben thought about Don Jarrett, the Holocaust denier. Another trip to Bruges suddenly seemed like a very good idea.

  If he ever got out of this.

  Up three pitted stone steps and they were in a passageway. The air was dank and foul, but it felt like pure oxygen after the obscenity of the crematorium. The passage wound onwards. They unslung their weapons and flipped off their safeties as they came to an unmarked doorway. Ben counted one – two – three. A deep breath and they pushed through.

  The light hit them. Across the corridor in which they found themselves, cobwebbed lamps strung together by loose wires threw a dim, yellowish glow that was unbearably bright with their goggles. They flipped them up, blinking to adjust their vision.

  There was nobody about. They turned left and kept moving. They were on full battle-alert now, in that state of heightened awareness in which every muscle was tight, every nerve jangling and the mind racing with constant anticipation of what could be waiting around every corner. Life never felt more vivid than when death was just an instant away.

  A door opened up ahead. Voices. Two men. Ben and Jeff pressed themselves flat into a shadowy alcove in the wall. Footsteps approached, and as the voices grew louder Ben could hear the two men were speaking Croat.

  ‘I’m not gonna take much more shit from that bastard Pelham,’ one of them was complaining bitterly sotto voce, as though he thought Pelham might be listening.

  ‘Relax,’ the other one said in a more laconic tone. ‘Think of the money.’

  ‘No fucking amount of money is worth being stuck in this hole. I hate this place.’

  The men walked past where Ben and Jeff were hidden in the shadows, close enough to smell their body odour. The complaining one was stick-thin inside a rumpled leather jacket, with a facial twitch and long, greasy hair scraped back in a thin ponytail. The laconic-sounding one wore a khaki cold weather field shirt that looked like Russian military issue. His shaven head glistened in the lamplight.

  Ben glanced at Jeff. He peeled himself silently off the wall as his fingers moved down to the hilt of the killing knife that was strapped to his thigh and drew it out of its sheath. Jeff was right at his side as they crept noiselessly but quickly up behind the men. The bald guy was Ben’s. Ponytail belonged to Jeff.

  Then they struck. Hard and fast. Ben clamped his hand over the bald guy’s mouth and jerked his head back and stabbed the knife into his throat. In the movies, it zipped as easily through flesh as a hot knife through butter and left a clean, straight red line from ear to ear. In real life, to cut through the tough gristle and cartilage of a man’s windpipe you had to saw brutally. Close your mind to what you were doing and keep sawing like crazy thr
ough the horrific mess until the blood was spraying out over your hand and the air was hissing out of the guy’s lungs with that eerie gurgling sigh that you knew was going to haunt your dreams forever. Hold on tight until the victim’s death struggles diminished and you could wipe the bloody knife clean on his clothes and move on and hope you never had to do anything like that again. Till the next time.

  Ben and Jeff dragged the bodies into the shadows. They were in, and they were committed now. It was starting.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Irina Dragojević stood back from the cell door as she watched her tall companion turn the key in the lock. Pelham hadn’t said much on the radio, but he hadn’t needed to. She had a very clear idea of what he wanted, because they’d already discussed the contingency plans. They were very persuasive, but the truth was she had no interest whatsoever in the outcome. The slim knife in the sheath on her belt was whetted and honed past razor-sharpness. When she thought about what she was going to do with it, and how nobody was going to stop her this time, her breath caught. The feeling was almost sexual. It dulled the throbbing ache in her arm where the bullet had creased it that day in Ireland. It made her feel whole and serene.

  As she watched the cell door swing open, she heard that small, distant voice in her mind again.

  Why do you do the things you do, Irina? Why?

  There’d been a time, years ago, when she’d heard those voices often, and had been greatly troubled by them. But that had been before she’d come to see things clearly, to appreciate how beautifully simple it all was. The voice had no power any more. The power was all hers.

  The tall man stepped inside the boy’s cell. Irina went in behind him. She stopped. Narrowed her eyes as her colleague turned to stare at her in bewilderment.

  The cell was empty. Rory O’Connor was gone. Irina grabbed the radio.

  Ivan’s fingers were painfully tight around Rory’s wrist as he led him quickly through the stone corridors. The man had barely said a word since he’d come bursting into his cell two minutes before, seemingly in a desperate hurry to get him out of there.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Rory asked.

  ‘Somewhere safe,’ Ivan told him. ‘Things are beginning to happen.’ He was frowning as he kept an ear open for fresh activity on the crackling radio handset in his jacket pocket. ‘Come, we must go faster.’

  ‘They’ve come for me? The other agents?’

  Ivan nodded. Tugged on his wrist. ‘Move faster.’

  ‘Please, Ivan. Tell me what’s happening.’

  ‘Pelham sent Irina to fetch you, to hurt you again. I heard it on the radio. You are lucky. I was closer. I got there first.’

  Rory shuddered and felt the colour drain from his face. He looked at Ivan and realised he’d never felt such a bond with anyone before. Except for one. ‘Where’s my dad?’ he asked.

  ‘Waiting for you on the outside,’ Ivan said. ‘Keep moving.’

  Rory gulped air. He was going to get out of here. He was going to see his father. It would soon be over.

  The radio fizzed into life. Through the spit and hiss of static, Rory listened to the exchange between the man called Pelham and the woman and his heart began to thump faster.

  ‘I want him found!’ Pelham yelled from the tinny speaker, and then the voices dissolved back into white noise.

  ‘I won’t let them find you,’ Ivan reassured him. ‘You are with me now. We are friends, no?’

  ‘Yes, Ivan.’

  They kept walking. Ivan was glancing furtively around him all the time, keeping an even tighter grip on Rory’s wrist as he led the boy down passages he’d never seen before. ‘Quickly,’ Ivan kept saying. ‘Quickly.’ They came to a flight of steps leading downwards into murky shadows. Ivan turned on a flashlight and lit the way ahead. Down and down through a shaft that was carved out of the rock. It was echoey, and Rory could hear the steady plop of dripping water.

  ‘Is this where we’re meeting the other agents?’ he asked breathlessly, and heard his voice reverberate off the walls.

  Ivan didn’t reply.

  Then the staircase ended abruptly, terminating in an unfinished cul de sac. In the torchlight, Rory could see the pickaxe marks that scarred the rock face. The floor was littered with debris and old tools that had lain there so long, they’d rusted away to almost nothing. It was as though whoever had been digging the tunnel out of the solid rock had just stopped working one day, put down their tools and gone. He wondered what had happened. But more than that, he wondered why Ivan had brought him here. He turned and frowned up at his friend.

  Ivan smiled in the beam of the flashlight. ‘We are safe down here,’ he said as he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘It is just you and me now.’ Then he moved closer. His lips parted.

  Rory stared for a second, and then he realised Ivan was trying to kiss him.

  Chapter Sixty

  Adam O’Connor was cackling like a lunatic as Pelham paced the vault with the radio in his fist.

  ‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’ The man’s composure had slipped away completely, and he was shouting in rage.

  ‘He isn’t here,’ said the woman’s voice through the spitting static.

  ‘How could he have got out?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied.

  Pelham yelled into the radio, ‘I want him found!’

  ‘Go for it, son,’ Adam giggled to himself. ‘We’ll show these bastards.’

  Pelham threw the radio down and stormed over to him. ‘Oh, you think this is funny, do you, Adam?’

  ‘The look on your face,’ Adam laughed at him. ‘You should see yourself right now. Your little world is just falling down around you. How’re you going to explain this to your boss, asshole?’

  ‘Laugh at this,’ Pelham said. He reached his hand across his chest, pulled out the pistol that he wore under his jacket and cocked the action with a sound that rang around the stone walls. He aimed it in Adam’s face. His jaw tightened.

  ‘Shoot me then, jerkoff,’ Adam taunted him. ‘Let’s see you make the machine work after I’m dead.’

  The gun wavered.

  ‘I’m all you’ve got,’ Adam went on, waving his arms like a wild man. ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’

  ‘Wrong,’ Pelham said. He dropped his arm eighteen inches and squeezed the trigger. The pistol flashed and boomed in his hand.

  Adam felt his leg get kicked out from under him and collapsed to the concrete floor, clutching his thigh. The blood began to pump out through his fingers. He pressed hard, desperately trying to stem the flow. He felt no pain, not yet. But he knew it would come. ‘You shot me,’ he mumbled in shock.

  Pelham stood over him with the smoking pistol dangling loose at his side. ‘I could have shattered the femur or split the artery and made you bleed to death,’ he said calmly over Adam’s screams. ‘Next time I will. Get on your feet. Let’s try this again.’

  Rory twisted frantically away as Ivan’s mouth sought his. He felt the material of his sweater rip in the man’s fingers. Backed away against the wall, bewildered and hurt. He’d thought until this moment that Ivan was his friend. Suddenly he was alone again.

  Ivan came at him, and Rory lashed blindly out with his foot. The kick caught Ivan squarely in the groin. Rory stood rooted in horror for a second as Ivan dropped the torch and fell to his knees with both hands clapped over his testicles and his eyes rolling back in agony. The boy grabbed up the fallen flashlight, turned and ran as hard as he could back up the winding staircase. He could hear Ivan’s cries of pain and rage echoing up the carved-out shaft. Rory kept running like the wind. After what seemed like just a few seconds he could hear Ivan giving chase. He burst out of the mouth of the stairway and out into the lamplit corridor. He was lost now, his breath rasping in his ears, his heart in his mouth, no idea where to turn. The sole was flapping off his right trainer from where the kick to Ivan’s groin had torn it half away from the shoe’s upper. He pulled the shoe off and tossed it aside.


  He could hear Ivan’s running footsteps behind him, but a quick glance over his shoulder told him the man was out of sight down the twisty passages. Rory came to another junction in the corridor. Big signs on the wall that he couldn’t understand. He turned right and kept going, hobbling on just one shoe for a few more yards until he knew he had to lose that one, too, or risk stumbling and twisting his ankle. He bent down and gripped the toe and heel of the shoe and yanked it off. The floor was cold and hard through his thin socks.

  Rory stopped. Backed up a few steps to where he’d passed a round hole in the wall to his right. It was some kind of shaft, big enough for him to crawl into and hide. He shone the torch into the curving tunnel, put his hand to it and felt a breath of air caress his fingers. Maybe it led somewhere, and anywhere was better than here. He quickly climbed into it and started crawling as fast as he could down its length. Rusty metal under his hands and knees, not rock. It was a pipe of some kind, like an air vent, he thought.

  And now he could really feel the breeze on his face. Cool, fresh, sweet air.

  Air coming in from the outside.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Ben worked the rusted iron bolt loose, creaked open the iron door and peered inside at the long, low, dark chamber. It was a primitive dormitory – row upon row of rudimentary bunks with open latrines just a few feet away. Skeletons littered the floor. Scores of them, gnawed apart by rats, covered in dust and cobwebs.

  ‘Slave workers,’ he said to Jeff. ‘They must have starved to death down here when the Nazis abandoned the place.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Jeff’s voice said in Ben’s earpiece.

  They shut the door of the dormitory, and Ben grimly closed the bolt. He took the folded plan from his pocket, and studied it again. The gruesome discovery meant they were still in the lower levels, where the labourers had been housed. The next level up from there had been mainly for storage of equipment and provisions; then above that was the upper level with its complexes of operations rooms and offices, together with the barrack accommodation and shower blocks for the SS soldiers stationed at the facility. He and Jeff had agreed on the plane that it would be the most likely place to improvise a holding cell for a young hostage. As for Adam, it was Ben’s guess that the kidnappers would have put him to work in the strange vault-like chamber which, as far as he could tell from the faded drawings, was the location of the mysterious Kammler invention. Deep inside the mountain, the chamber was only accessible from a lift shaft on the upper level.