Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7) (40 page)

Wesley Holland had lost his balance as his injured leg gave way under him, and now came tumbling backwards down the stairs, still clutching the sword.

The four remaining guns were turning back towards Ben. It was the quickest mover that Ben homed in on. His trigger finger flicked twice and rattled off two more rapid rounds. A scream. Blood sprayed vertically up the wall and the guy’s weapon dropped out of his hands.

The thick of the gunfight lasted only a short instant, but with his heart and brain running on pure adrenaline it felt to Ben like a full minute. The exchange of shots was almost a continual deafening roar in the confined space. Empty shell cases spilled and bounced across the floor. The stink of cordite filled the air. In the chaos Ben saw the team leader’s pistol muzzle line up on his head and knew he couldn’t react fast enough. But before the man could shoot, Wesley Holland’s tumbling body had crashed to the bottom step and hit him from behind in the legs, knocking him off-line and sending the shot wide.

A bullet from another gun seared past Ben’s face and plaster exploded from the wall. He returned fire. The pistol he’d taken was a high-capacity Walther, good for at least another eight shots before he ran dry. But he’d no intention of holding his ground in a protracted stand-up gunfight against three determined assailants.

He wasn’t that eager to find out if there really was a heaven up there.

He crashed the front door open with his shoulder. Threw himself out of the doorway and rolled on his back onto the dark terrace, firing wildly as he flipped up on his feet and ducked away from the doorway.

The helicopter was coming in fast, hovering fifty feet above the beach, The white-blue glare of its halogen spotlamps was blinding, forcing Ben to shield his eyes as he ran along the terrace parallel with the wall of the house; he stumbled in the glare and almost fell on his face, and it probably saved his life. A blast of automatic fire rang out from the chopper and raked the house where his head had been an instant earlier. Splinters of white wood flew. A window burst apart, raining glass everywhere.

Ben hurdled the terrace railing with high-velocity bullets zipping overhead and smacking into the wall right behind him. He landed with a grunt on soft sand, fell to his knees, scrambled up again and began to sprint hard towards the dunes at the side of the house. The chopper descended closer towards the beach, its downdraught whipping up a sandstorm.

Then Ben was among the dunes, leaping from one to another, trying to escape the glaring beam of the chopper’s spotlight and find cover among the long, black shadows that it threw for a hundred yards across the beach. His heart was pounding. He wondered what was happening to Wesley, and felt bad that he couldn’t go back to help the guy. Then he wondered where Jude was, and hoped he was far away by now.

The team leader and his remaining gunmen had emerged from the front of the house and were running across the beach. Voices shouted. Several more men leaped down from the landing chopper to join them. Ben halted for a second in the reedy gully between two high dunes, to check his pistol. Just four rounds left in the magazine, plus the one still in the chamber. Not enough against so many men.

And then the odds worsened. Two dark shapes came roaring in on the water, heading in a twin arc of white foam towards the beach. RIBs, rigid inflatables. Ben couldn’t make out how many occupants were aboard the outboard craft, but at least six more black-clad figures disembarked as they came sliding up the wet sand. The glare of the helicopter lights picked out the gleam of their weapons.

Ben slammed the magazine back into his pistol and scrambled to the top of the dune, crackling through the reeds. If he could slither down its far side unnoticed, there was a chance he could make it to the Jeep. The key was—

Shit.
Jude had the key.

Ben suddenly felt very cold. But as he crawled to the top of the dune, he saw that having the key would have done him little good anyway. The Jeep was being guarded by three men.

Then he had to try to find some other way out of here. He half-slid, half-rolled down the soft sand of the dune and started desperately searching for another escape route. The voices of his pursuers were getting louder, and coming from different directions as they split up to search for him. The beams of flashlights darted through the long grass. He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the baying of dogs coming after him. The enemy had taken no chances this time. It was as if they’d stepped their game up a gear.

Ben turned and was suddenly blinded by searing white light. He covered his eyes with his arm. Nowhere to run. He was bathed in the glare, caught like a deer in a hunter’s lamp with enough hardware aimed at him to blow him to pieces.

A voice yelled, ‘There he is!’

Another shouted, ‘Drop the weapon!’

If he hung onto the pistol for another instant, he was dead.

He tossed it away and it hit the sand with a dull thud.

And then the racing figures were closing in all around him. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, and put up his hands.

There was no point in trying to resist any longer as they fastened his wrists and marched him roughly across the sand to the idling chopper.

In minutes, the whole section of beach in front of the house had come alive with activity. It looked like the aftermath of a military operation. The gunmen who’d come from the sea returned to the boats, started up their motors and churned the water white as they roared away. The team leader and the remaining members of the assault team were at the chopper, talking with the air crew as the pilot readied for takeoff. They were all still wearing their ski masks. The team leader carried a large, translucent Ziploc bag, through which Ben could make out the lustre of bronze and steel.

Wesley Holland’s sword of Christ. So now the enemy had what they’d been looking for all along.

Ben could see something else, too. The sword’s blade was smeared with blood. He frowned. How had that happened? As he was led closer, he was able to pick snatches of the men’s conversation over the noise of the turbine.

‘—about the Yank?’

The team leader shook his head and motioned to the bag in his hand, and Ben heard him say, ‘He fell on it.’

Then the blood was Holland’s. Ben felt sorry. The way he saw it, the team leader had no reason to lie to one of his own people. The American must have impaled himself on the blade as he’d come tumbling down the stairs.

Poor Wesley hadn’t deserved that. But then, Ben was pretty sure these people would have killed him anyway. Maybe falling on a sword was a better death than being made to kneel and having to spend your final moments waiting for a bullet in the head. The Samurai would have agreed with that one.

Thinking about it led Ben to ponder another question, one that haunted him. Now that they had the sword, why did they want him alive?

‘Load him up,’ the team leader commanded, waving at the chopper. Ben was shoved towards it. The helicopter was a standard U.S. Army Bell UH-1 Iroquois with the military markings removed and painted matt black. It still retained its side-mounted pair of M240 general purpose machine guns.

As Ben was pushed into the open hatch, the turbine note began to rise to a howl. The team leader and remaining assault team members clambered aboard and took their positions, watching him with hostility. Moments later, the aircraft lifted off from the beach in a whipping tornado of sand.

As they climbed into the air, Ben looked out of the window. Down below on the dark beach, the first orange-red flames were flickering in the windows of Wesley’s house. They were going to burn it to the ground, erasing every trace that he’d ever been there. The case of the billionaire who’d vanished off the face of the earth would keep the media buzzing for months and go on intriguing the public for years. Ben wondered if anyone would ever find the vault underneath, and the valuable collections inside.

The chopper banked steeply and headed out to sea, flying roughly southwest. Ben craned his neck back at the dark stretch of beach and the lights of houses that speckled the island’s coastline, and thought of Jude. He was down there somewhere. Somehow, he’d make it home.

Ben turned to face the team leader. ‘You can take your masks off,’ he said over the roar of the prop. ‘I won’t laugh.’

‘Shut him up,’ the team leader ordered one of his men, who got up and approached Ben with a fiendish grin and a roll of duct tape.

‘Anyone want to tell me what this is all about?’ Ben said before a length of tape was slapped over his mouth and a hood yanked roughly over his head. That effectively ended the conversation.

Impossible to tell where they might be taking him. Ben knew that the operational range of a Bell UH-1 was around three hundred miles, which meant their destination could lie anywhere within a radius half that distance; in his mind he traced a circle on the map, and it covered a whole wedge of the U.S. mainland from New York City to the south all the way up into New Hampshire in the north.

After about an hour, Ben sensed the aircraft settling down to land. As they touched down there was noise and activity all around him. The hatch opened and lights shone through the material of his hood. He was grabbed by the arms, hauled out of the chopper and marched across hard ground. Cold wind pierced him for a few moments, then stopped as he was led inside a building where voices echoed in empty space.

‘This way, dickhead,’ someone said gruffly close to his ear, jerking his arm. He could almost feel the presence of any number of guns pointing at him as he was marched along. Doors opened ahead and were slammed behind them, leading deeper into the building. Then he was shoved roughly down a short flight of steps. The hood was yanked off his head, and he blinked as torchlight flashed in his face. An unseen hand ripped the tape painfully from his lips while the blade of a knife passed between his tethered wrists and cut away the plastic tie.

‘Sweet dreams, fucker,’ said the same gruff voice, and then something hit him hard from behind and he blacked out.

Ben awoke on a hard stone floor, shivering with cold and blind in the darkness. His head was throbbing badly. Touching his fingers to the lump on the back of his skull, he felt the crust of dried blood where his captors had clubbed him. He stood up and let his eyes adjust to the blackness, and gradually he was able to make out his surroundings. The stone cell was about eight feet square and windowless. A plain wooden bunk was mounted to one wall, a washbasin and rudimentary toilet to another.

He could tell from the airless, damp atmosphere that he was underground. His pockets had been emptied, but they’d let him keep his watch. Its faintly glowing dial read after 4 a.m., December 24th.

He settled on the bunk and rested his aching head in his hands, trying to empty his mind so that time would pass more quickly. But it was impossible to shut off the endless cascade of thoughts that kept swirling around. He kept hearing Brooke’s voice, and wondering when he might ever hear it again. More than anything, he agonised over Jude, stranded on Martha’s Vineyard. Jude would surely have been able to make his way back to Edgartown, on foot if need be, where he’d be able to make a credit card withdrawal. If he could scrape enough cash together for the ferry back to the mainland, maybe he could phone Robbie from there, or Robbie’s uncle—

Over and over, a hundred different scenarios. One way or another, Jude was all right.
He had to be.

The hours dragged by. Ben’s headache eventually diminished, leaving him with the sick nausea of fatigue and worry. 6 a.m., 8 a.m. The cell remained dark. His mind drifted. Slowly, slowly, his eyelids began to droop, his breathing slowed and he finally felt the blessed angels of sleep coming to deliver him to a place of tranquillity …

And then the cell door banged open. Ben jolted upright as three men burst into the small space. ‘Wakey, wakey!’ said a harsh voice. He blinked, certain that he’d been asleep for just a few moments – but a glance at his watch told him it was after 11 a.m. He rose to his feet, stiff from the hard bunk. Two of the guards grabbed his arms and led him towards the dimly lit doorway as the third kept a pistol trained on his chest. They were all wearing heavy jackets and gloves.

For the first time, he was able to see where they’d taken him last night. The corridor leading from the cell was narrow, its rough walls shiny with condensation. The men shoved open a succession of doors, led him around corners and up a flight of steps. He could smell fresh air at last. The man in front opened a final door to the outside, and the morning sunlight flooded over Ben, making him blink. He stood and breathed in the sharp, cold air. He couldn’t believe the surreal sight in front of him.

He was in the grounds of a magnificent mansion, formal gardens stretching away as far as the eye could see. Lawns and summerhouses and pergolas coated in fresh snow. Looking back, he realised that he’d been kept housed in some kind of bunker attached to a cluster of outbuildings and storage sheds.

The roofs and gables of the mansion itself were just about visible beyond a ring of snowy conifers up ahead. There was not a whisper of traffic noise. They were somewhere deep in the countryside.

‘Move,’ said the guard with the pistol at his back. Nobody spoke as they trudged through the snow towards the house and along a broad path that led through an archway and around to the front. It was a millionaire paradise to rival just about any that Ben had seen. They led him through the tall front doorway and into a hall with gleaming wooden floors. ‘You guys had better wipe your feet,’ he said.

‘Shut up,’ said the one in front, and pointed at a door across the hall. ‘Get in there and wait.’

‘What am I waiting for?’ Ben asked, but they didn’t reply as they shoved him inside the room and slammed the door shut behind him.

It was better than the cell, at any rate. He was in a large, elegant drawing room filled with tasteful period furniture, a vast Persian rug spread over the polished floor. There was a fire crackling in the hearth. Ben went over to warm his hands by it, then wandered across to gaze out of the French window at the snow-covered lawns that seemed to stretch for miles to the distant trees. He wondered what lay beyond – a road, a town?