The Martyr’s Curse (Ben Hope, Book 11)

by Scott Mariani

  He flashed a glance at her. No time to reply. He flipped the weapon’s fire selector switch to three-shot bursts. Front and right, the Citroën’s doors flew open and its occupants piled out, guns drawn. Front and left, the two on foot halted fifteen metres away and raised their pistols in two-handed grips, legs braced, knees bent, the classic combat shooting stance they’d been taught in police academy and maybe had cause to use in real-life confrontations before. Or maybe not. Either way, they looked ready to deliver the goods. Fingers on triggers. Sights lined up squarely on Ben. Screaming at him to drop the weapon.

  The blue Subaru squealed to a halt behind the Citroën. The fifth and sixth cops tumbled out and aimed their guns from behind their open doors.

  Six against one on open ground with no available cover. Six automatic weapons pointing his way. Escape impossible, capture out of the question. And he wasn’t allowed to hurt anyone.

  Here we go, he thought.

  Chapter Forty

  Ben had a mixed attitude towards self-knowledge. In many ways he was a mystery to himself. He often had little clue why he acted the way he did in his everyday life. He’d spent more sleepless nights than he could begin to count, staring up at the dark ceiling and trying to analyse his own behaviour, wondering who he really was, what it was he really wanted from life, where he was going and where he’d end up.

  In paradoxical stark contrast were those areas of absolute rock-solid certainty. Aspects of his personality and behaviour that presented no mystery whatsoever. Qualities in himself that he could trust and rely upon with utter confidence and unshakable self-belief. And one of those things was his ability to remain ice-cool and focused in moments of extreme danger that would reduce most men to a mewling sack of jelly. He’d simply been born that way, with a natural ability that his SAS instructors had recognised in their young recruit right from day one, and trained up to off-the-charts levels of perfection even before years of experience had honed and refined it still further. He’d confounded army doctors in medical tests by showing an actual decrease in heart rate and blood pressure during simulated combat situations. At times like these, his mind was able to compress seconds into milliseconds, so that what seemed to a normal person like a sensory overload of frantically speeded-up film, he experi-enced in frame-by-frame slow motion, allowing him all the time he needed to think and act. Calm and smooth and controlled. Evaluation. Observation. Analysis. Decision. Execution. No stress. No panic.

  Not like the six men in whose field of fire he was standing at this moment. Facing an opponent like him had each of them exploding with supercharged nervous tension, a tidal wave of adrenalin threatening to drown them at any instant. He could see it in their bulging eyes and their terror-white faces. This was a first time for them.

  He’d evaluated the situation. Now it was time to make his move. Which he did in a heartbeat. He swung the rifle muzzle a few degrees left, pulled the trigger and the FAMAS rattled off a three-shot fully automatic burst that stitched the ground at the feet of Cops One and Two and sent them flying backwards for cover. One of them fell to his knees and scrambled and rolled under the train. The other collapsed on his face as if he was trying to press himself into the gaps in the gravel.

  By then the FAMAS muzzle was already swinging to the right and Ben’s finger was squeezing another burst out of it. The windscreen of the Citroën crumpled, its side mirrors exploded into shards of plastic and glass. Cops Three and Four dived around the back of the car. Ben paused momentarily to flip the fire selector switch to full-auto, pulled the trigger again and held it. The FAMAS spewed a deafening stream of copper-jacketed lead into the Citroën that perforated and crumpled the bodywork like paper and blew out the rest of the windscreen, shredded the plastic radiator grille, blasted the headlights apart. The front left corner of the car sank down on a shredded tyre. Then the right.

  Then his gun was empty, the bolt locked back, smoke trickling from the open breech. The cops were cringing behind their cars. Not a single shot fired. Ben stood his ground in the open. Calmly dropped the empty twenty-five-round magazine from his rifle and inserted another from the holdall. Released the bolt with a smack of his palm and fired another sustained burst that chewed up the Citroën’s left flank and blew out the rear tyre, weaved a snaking line of bullet strikes up the road and drove Cops Five and Six in a jittery panic away from the cover of their Subaru.

  ‘Weapons on the ground,’ he said in a strong, clear voice. The cops barely hesitated. Six clattering sounds, muted in Ben’s ears after the heavy gunfire, as their pistols hit the dirt. He swept the rifle muzzle in a ninety-degree arc, left to right, covering them all. ‘Out where I can see you. Nice and easy.’

  The cop hiding under the train crawled out. The one lying in the gravel pushed himself up on to his knees. The two cringing behind the shattered Citroën emerged tentatively, arms raised submissively, eyes cowed. The two who’d made a break from their Subaru put their hands on their heads and walked slowly back towards the road.

  Silvie was staring at Ben as if she’d never seen him before. In the background he faintly registered noises of alarm and chaos from the train as the traumatised passengers witnessed the spectacle taking place.

  Ben herded all six cops together into a ragged line next to the train. Keeping the rifle trained on them he collected their fallen weaponry. Five of the cops’ pistols were the ubiquitous ugly but functional Glocks. The sixth was an old Browning Hi-Power. Ben’s favourite personal defence weapon from years back. He dropped all six in the bag.

  ‘Phones and radios on the ground in front of you,’ he told the cops. ‘Drop your trousers. Then get down on your knees.’

  Hostile, glowering looks, but no resistance as they obeyed. First the radios and phones. Then they started undoing their belts and unzipping themselves and revealing an array of briefs and boxer shorts. One by one they knelt down gingerly on the stony ground with their trousers around their ankles, furious and humiliated.

  Ben jerked the rifle brusquely at Silvie, the way he’d have done with a real hostage. ‘You, pick that lot up and put it in the bag,’ he commanded, and she nodded and meekly hurried over to collect the mobiles and radio handsets from the ground in front of the line of kneeling officers. She dropped them in the green bag.

  ‘Now get in the car,’ Ben told her, motioning towards the blue Subaru. Silvie hurried across to it and got into the passenger seat. The rifle trained on the cops, Ben picked up the holdall and walked over to the Subaru and slung it on to the rear seats. He walked back and did the same with his green bag, then tossed the rifle in after it. Quickly pulled Eriq Sabatier’s Beretta from his belt and pointed it at his angry prisoners, in case they got any clever ideas as he stepped around to the open driver’s door. The Citroën looked like wreckage from a war zone, but the Subaru was untouched. Exactly as Ben had intended.

  He slid in behind the wheel next to Silvie, slammed his door, waved bye-bye to the cops through the window, twisted the key, and the engine burbled into life with a note that promised all the performance he could have wished for. He steered around the remains of the Citroën, then stamped on the accelerator. The Subaru’s tyres squealed and spun, then dug in ferociously and the car took off with a roar, pressing them hard into their seats.

  ‘Maybe you’ll listen to me next time,’ he said to Silvie as they sped away. The immobile train shrank in the mirror, until the road peeled off its parallel course with the railway tracks and Ben threw the Subaru into a series of bends that cut the train from sight.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Okay, so that might have been a slight tactical miscalculation on my part.’

  Ben fell silent and concentrated on driving. The Subaru was some kind of souped-up police interceptor, all right. The suspension was stiff and responsive, the steering quick and agile. It surged forward aggressively at the slightest touch of the throttle and stayed glued to the road no matter how recklessly he hurled it into the twisty bends. Scenery people would pay to see flashed past t
he windows in an invisible blur. The throaty roar of the turbocharged engine filled the cockpit.

  But not quite loudly enough to drown out the thump of rotor blades overhead. Ben glanced upwards and glimpsed the dark shape of the chopper swooping down on them out of a sky that had been empty moments earlier, GENDARMERIE painted in bold white letters on its fuselage.

  ‘Shit,’ Silvie said again.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Ben nudged the gas a little more forcefully and felt the car draw on its apparently limitless power reserves as the twisting road carried them steeply upwards into mountainous terrain. Using the width of both lanes, he took a racing line through a set of S-bends; then the way ahead opened up into a long straight, with a drop-away view to their right and an upward-sloping rock wall to their left. The road was similar to the one he’d negotiated in the old Belphégor, except now he was tackling it several times faster.

  Still the dark shadow of the police helicopter stayed right overhead, pursuing them like a bird of prey descending on a running hare. Ben floored the throttle hard in fourth at over a hundred and seventy kilometres an hour and the Subaru howled and leaped forwards, reeling the horizon in, the road ahead a flickering ribbon disappearing rapidly under their wheels. The shadow of the chopper dropped back momentarily and then crept back up.

  ‘Might be worth fastening your seatbelt,’ Ben said to Silvie over the engine roar. She quickly clipped it into place. Unfazed by the wild speed they were doing, she reached behind her into Ben’s bag for one of the stolen police radios and checked it, scanning through the channels in the hope of tuning into their communications. She shook her head. ‘Radio silence. They know we’re listening in.’

  Ben said nothing. The speedometer climbed past one-ninety. Two hundred. Two-two-five. About as fast as he had ever driven before, but the chopper was faster. It effortlessly overtook them, just metres above the Subaru’s roof, then dropped down to half the altitude so that its skids almost skimmed the road surface and its sleek fuselage blocked out Ben’s view through the windscreen. It was a highly dangerous manoeuvre. The slightest touch of the skids on the rushing tarmac and the aircraft would go nose-down into a tumble that would destroy it and the Subaru in a split second. But Ben could see what the pilot’s strategy was even before it began to happen. The pilot eased off the throttle and the chopper’s swaying tail rotor seemed to come rushing backwards towards them, forcing Ben to scrub off some of his own speed. Then the pilot would keep throttling off, a progressive stranglehold that wouldn’t slacken until they were at a standstill. Whereupon, armed men would come leaping down from the aircraft to arrest them.

  No dice.

  Ben kept his foot relentlessly down and twisted the wheel hard to the right, throwing the Subaru into a howling swerve that narrowly missed spearing the windscreen on the back of the chopper’s right skid. Silvie let out a gasp as they shot through the gap between the low-flying aircraft and the vertiginous drop to their right. One tiny mistake, one twitch, they’d veer straight off the edge taking the flimsy crash barrier with them, and go plunging hundreds of feet to their deaths. The vicious hurricane from the rotors buffeted them as they screamed past. The steering wheel vibrated violently in Ben’s clenched fists. He tightened his jaw and kept his eyes front and sped onwards. Felt the car clear the downdraught. Twisted the wheel to the left and the Subaru swerved away from the edge, straddling the middle of the road at blistering speed with its rear wing just two or three metres from the nose of the pursuing helicopter.

  Silvie was clutching the sides of her seat now, eyes screwed shut. The deafening thud of the rotors filled their ears once more as the chopper pilot drew level with them, trying a new tactic: to force them into the rocky left side of the road. The left wing mirror tore away with a loud bang and Ben sawed the wheel to control a wobble. Then, as if sensing the risk, the chopper rose a few metres before swooping back in overhead and attempting to slow them down by blocking the way once more. Twisting left and right in his seat to see past the swaying aircraft, Ben saw a long left curve come flashing towards them. He refused to slow down. Kept the needle steady at one-ninety; then another straight opened up ahead and suddenly there was a high rocky bank hurtling directly towards them as the road disappeared into a tunnel through the mountainside. Ben had time to smile, imagining the look on the pilot’s face.

  The chopper pulled up into a steep emergency climb, disappearing from view as the car rocketed ahead and roared into the mouth of the tunnel. Ben glanced back and saw no fiery carnage and conflagration in the mirror – the pilot must have managed to clear the slope. The slap of rotors from the hovering aircraft was faintly audible as the car raced through the long, winding tunnel.

  Ben knew it was only a temporary reprieve. The chopper could simply wait for them on the other side. If Ben had been running their show, he’d have had the pilot hovering just beyond the end of the tunnel, blocking the whole width of the road and cutting off all chance of escape. Plus, he’d have whatever armed agents were on board already on the ground, ready to intercept and arrest the fugitives at gunpoint. A fail-safe strategy. Not one that he wanted to deal with.

  He braked, hard. The speedometer reading dropped like a stone and the car came to a slithering halt.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Silvie asked.

  ‘Getting out,’ Ben said. He shut off the Subaru’s engine. Plucked the key from the ignition and threw open his door.

  There was a vehicle coming in the opposite direction, headlights blinking in the tunnel. Moving fast. A low-slung little wedge of a sports car. Ben stepped out of the Subaru, wrenched open the back door and grabbed the FAMAS rifle. Planted himself in the middle of the road, aiming it at the oncoming car. The approaching headlights wobbled. The engine note dropped in pitch and was replaced by the shriek of brakes. The sports car halted a few metres away. A white Peugeot RCZ two-seater convertible with the top down, showroom-shiny. Probably being taken on its maiden voyage by its proud owner, a snappy-looking young guy in a golf cap and designer sunglasses, who was staring in shock at this unexpected turn of events.

  ‘Out of the car,’ Ben said, aiming at his chest.

  ‘Wh-what do you mean, out of the car?’ the young guy stammered.

  ‘I’m commandeering it,’ Ben said, moving around the side. Silvie was already lifting their things out of the Subaru.

  ‘You can’t have it,’ the guy said.

  Ben whipped the golf cap off his head and put it on.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘On the double now, there’s a good chap,’ Ben said. He opened the sports car’s door and grabbed the guy’s arm, hauling him out.

  ‘This is robbery!’

  ‘Call it a swap,’ Ben said, tossing him the Subaru keys. ‘Now shut your mouth before you start annoying me. And I’ll have those sunglasses, too.’ He snatched them off the guy’s face and put them on. Passed the FAMAS to Silvie, who brandished it menacingly as Ben tossed the bags into the narrow space behind the RCZ’s seats. There was a jacket neatly folded on the passenger seat. Probably silk, most likely Italian, undoubtedly expensive. Ben could think of a use for that, too. He got behind the wheel and gunned the engine. Silvie hurried round to the passenger side, flung the rifle in with the bags and piled in next to him and they took off, leaving the guy standing there clutching the keys to the stolen police car.

  ‘That was a little bit mean,’ Silvie said as they streaked back in the direction they’d come, her hair streaming in the breeze blowing through the open cockpit.

  ‘I’m a very mean kind of person,’ Ben said.

  She smiled. ‘You don’t fool me.’

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The Peugeot burst out of the tunnel, back into the sunlight. They’d won three minutes, maybe five. The moment the young guy emerged from the other side in the Subaru and was accosted, the cops would be right back on them and they’d know exactly what they were looking for. Ben spotted a minor junction on the left that they’d blazed past earlier withou
t seeing. He threw the nimble little sports car into it; the narrow road snaked steeply downwards.

  ‘Sorry if you got a scare back there,’ he said.

  ‘That was nothing,’ said Silvie.

  ‘You had your eyes shut.’

  ‘I did not.’

  Within less than two kilometres they were descending into thick pine forest. Ben looked up. The trees formed a canopy overhead that would shield them effectively from watchers in the air. Another two kilometres and he took another junction that led down a single-track country lane with passing places every few hundred metres, alternating right and left. No sign of anyone following them, either by road or by air. That was good news, and he intended to keep it that way. He pulled up in the next passing place and hauled his bulging green bag out from the space behind the seats. The little car’s engine idled in a civilised purr. He dumped the heavy bag on his lap, leaned it against the steering wheel and opened it up.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked.

  ‘Not much point in depriving the enemy of their communications if they can use them to track us,’ he said, rooting around inside. With six more fully loaded handguns to add to their arsenal, plus the money and the gold bar acting as ballast in the bottom of the strained canvas, the bag was getting pretty full. His fingers felt a familiar shape and he took out the Browning Hi-Power that he’d removed from one of the cops. Ben was no gun worshipper, but the Browning was an old friend from days gone by. Its shape, weight and balance fitted his hand like an extension of his arm after the countless hours of training he and it had put in together. It was good to feel one again. He slipped it in his pocket.

  Then he sifted out the small collection of phones and radio handsets they’d captured from the cops and laid them in a row on the dashboard. He checked the radios. Still no activity. He flung each in turn high over the windscreen of the open-top Peugeot, watched it arc down and hit the road and bounce and break apart into shattered fragments of brittle plastic and circuit board. That left the phones. He smashed one, two, three, four. The road ahead was littered with debris.