The Armada Legacy (44 page)

He was ready.

‘Fuck it,’ he murmured. With a final puff, he took the cigarette from his lips and flicked it to the ground in a tiny shower of sparks. The burning tobacco and paper landed at his feet.

And ignited the primary powder trail that led off between the huts. The white flame snaked rapidly away towards the trees, sputtering and spitting like a living thing.

Ben turned to the others and spoke fast. ‘Stay near to me, Brooke. Whatever happens. Everyone else – you know what to do.’

The burning powder trail raced away through the trees, where it instantly set off the secondary trails that Ben and the others had carefully laid along little dug-out tracks branching out all around the periphery of the village. Each secondary trail split up several more ways. Within seconds, the dark vegetation everywhere was lit with the bright glow of the flaring gunpowder.

And then the hush of the jungle was shattered by the first series of gigantic explosions. They detonated in such quick succession that they sounded like one continuous ear-splitting roll of thunder.

M18A1, Scally had said. The old soldier had guessed correctly. That was the US military’s designation for their Claymore anti-personnel mine, a weapon so fearsomely effective that armies all over the world had devised their own versions of it.

And Ben had copied it too, here deep in the heart of the Peruvian rainforest with nothing at his disposal but a few primitive tools, a few metres of homespun twine, some hollowed-out branches and a cache of ancient black powder passed down through generations of Sapaki and hidden for centuries.

Each blazing powder trail terminated at a tree. Lashed at chest height with twine to each trunk, connected to the ground via a hollow branch filled with more powder, was a keg of the stuff mixed with hundreds of big lead musket balls and razor-sharp arrowheads. And there were over eighty of Ben’s improvised Claymores scattered at key tactical points all round the village, with carefully-hacked paths through the foliage to lure the unwary into their range.

Their combined effect rocked the jungle. Rolling fireballs mushroomed upwards amid clouds of white smoke that blotted out the stars. Trees were severed in half by the storm of missiles blowing outwards in a sixty-degree arc covering everything between the huts and the river.

A moment earlier, Serrato’s men had been making their stealthy, confident approach on an Indian village that looked for all the world as though it was asleep and unsuspecting – now suddenly the shocking wave of violence cut a swathe right through them. Body parts flew. Blood showered the foliage like rain. Many of those who weren’t instantly chopped to pieces were terribly maimed. Others fell back in terror. But before they could recover their wits, a second rolling detonation filled the air and a dozen more intersecting fields of fire levelled the jungle around them.

Then, silence, apart from the screams of the dying. Flames flickered through the smoke. The stench of sulphur was choking.

Ramon Serrato stood up shakily from behind the fallen tree where he’d taken cover. His face was spattered with the blood of the man next to him, who’d been too slow to duck at the sound of the first explosion and had been cut almost in half.

Serrato couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Indians didn’t
do
this. They didn’t fight back. It was unthinkable. He snatched up the fallen man’s rifle and spare magazine.

The time for stealth was over. Screaming at his few remaining men to follow him, Serrato dashed through the carnage of shattered bodies and torn vegetation towards the village. He could barely see through the gunpowder fog.

Suddenly he was in the midst of the huts. Two of them were on fire from the explosions, flames leaping through the smoke. ‘Come on!’ he screamed at his men. Piero Vertíz appeared at his side, ready for murder. Two others came up behind them.

Whoosh
… an arrow whistled through the night air and thudded into the chest of the man behind Vertíz. Dim figures flitted between the huts. Another arrow whizzed past Serrato’s ear.

‘Kill them!’ he yelled. He jammed back the trigger of his rifle and held it there, spraying the huts with bullets until his magazine was empty. He released it, slammed in the spare and went on loosing off rounds in all directions. Vertíz and the others did the same. The firestorm tore through the huts, ripped branches off the trees. One or two of the shadowy figures went down, but most simply vanished away into the night. It was like trying to kill an invisible enemy.

Ben had lost sight of Nico in the confusion. A number of Indians had been shot, including Waskar the red commander, killed while leading a group of his warriors into the attack. Tupaq, Father Scally, Pepe and the other warriors were still firing from the trees. Their volleys of arrows zipped between the huts, taking down more of Serrato’s men.

Ben kept an iron grip on Brooke’s arm and pulled her to the ground as bullets ripped through the hut next to them, showering them with shredded tufts of thatch. Telling her to stay down, he darted out from behind cover and fitted an arrow to his own bow. From where he was standing he could clearly see Ramon Serrato firing off shots like a madman from the centre of the village. Ben drew the bowstring taut and loosed his arrow.

His target wasn’t Serrato, but the big guy next to him. The arrow flew straight and drove deep into the man’s heart, knocking him backwards off his feet.

‘Come on!’ Ben dropped the bow and took Brooke’s hand. They started running back to where he’d hidden the loaded musket.

Serrato looked round to see Piero Vertíz lying motionless in the dirt with an arrow sticking up out of his chest. He was suddenly all alone. His rifle was empty. He drew the Glock pistol from his pocket and fired wildly into the darkness, screaming with fury. At the twelfth squeeze of the trigger, the Glock was empty as well.

And at that moment, for the first time since he could recall, Ramon Serrato was afraid. He dashed through the village, searching for the rest of his men. All he could see were arrow-skewered bodies littering the ground.

Then he skidded to a halt. Standing in the glow of the burning huts up ahead was Brooke.
His
Brooke.

Serrato was filled with wild rage at the sight of her – and of the man she was with. It was the blond-haired man whose picture had been in her purse. The man she’d assured him was nobody to her. ‘You lied to me!’ he seethed.

‘You shouldn’t have tried to find me, Ramon,’ Brooke said.

Serrato raised the Glock, then remembered it was empty with the slide locked back. With his other hand he fumbled in his pocket for another magazine. ‘I’ll kill you, you bitch!’

‘I don’t think so,’ Ben said. He picked up the Brown Bess from where it was propped against a hut wall. The musket was loaded with eighty grains of powder behind a musket ball wrapped in a small square patch of homespun Sapaki cotton, rammed down tightly inside the three-quarter-inch bore. Ben clicked the hammer back on full cock, hefted the long, heavy weapon and peered down the barrel at the lone figure of Ramon Serrato.

Serrato found the magazine in his pocket.

‘Shoot him, Ben!’ Brooke urged.

Ben took his finger off the trigger and lowered the musket. He shook his head. ‘No. I can’t shoot him.’

‘Ha! What did you expect, trying to kill me with that thing?’ Serrato laughed. In less of a hurry now, he began slotting the magazine into his pistol.

‘I can’t shoot him, because I made a promise,’ Ben said.

Serrato’s laughter died. ‘What promise?’

‘One to a friend,’ Ben told him.

Nico had emerged limping from the shadows. His face was covered in blood from where a bullet had creased his scalp. His eyes burned with a hotter fire than the blazing huts in the background.

Ben tossed Nico the Brown Bess.

Nico advanced. Serrato backed away, staring at him. ‘You!’ He raised his pistol. Too slow.

‘Adios, motherfucker,’ Nico said. He shouldered the musket and fired. There was a bright flash as the striking flint ignited the powder in the pan. A fraction of a second later the gun erupted with an ear-shattering blast.

Serrato was blown off his feet. He landed on his back with a fist-sized hole gaping in his chest, twitched twice, and then lay still.

Nico dropped the musket and fell to his knees. Now that they were avenged, he was finally able to weep for his dead children, and tears rolled down his bloody face.

It was over. Ben and Brooke left Nico alone and walked away, hand in hand.

‘We wrecked their village,’ he said sadly, surveying the devastation. The white pall of smoke was drifting high over the jungle, red-lit by the fires.

‘And saved half a million acres of forest from being destroyed forever,’ Brooke said, hugging him tightly.

The Sapaki people were re-emerging from the forest. There were cries of grief over the fallen, but before long they were lost in the victory chant of Tupaq and his warriors. Father Scally, Tica and Kusi began attending to the wounded. Come morning, the villagers would commence the task of rebuilding.

Ben stroked Brooke’s hair. He kissed her face. ‘You ready to go home now?’

She nodded.

‘Yes, Ben. I’m ready.’

Read on for an exclusive extract from Scott Mariani’s new novel, coming from Avon in 2014

Prologue

The Altai Mountains

Bayan-Ölgii Pro

Western Mongolia

The biting wind was starting to whip flurries of snow across the barren mountainside. Soon, Chuluun knew, the winter snowfalls would be here in earnest and it might be a long time before he could venture out this far ag
ain in search of food.

The argali herd the teenager was tracking had led him almost half a mile across bare rock from where he’d tethered his pony further down the mountain. Wolves were an ever-present concern, but the curly-horned wild sheep could sense the roving packs from a great way off, and they seemed calm enough, having paused on their trek to munch contentedly on a scrubby patch of heather, to reassure Chuluun that his pony was safe.

There was one predator too smart to let himself be noticed by the argali. Chuluun had been hunting over these mountains for six years, since the age of eleven, when his father had become too infirm to ride long distances any more, and he prided himself on his ability to sneak up on anything that lived, walked or flew. His parents and seven younger brothers and sisters depended almost entirely on him for meat, and in the harsh environment of Mongolia, meat meant survival.

Carefully staying downwind of the grazing sheep and moving with stealthy ease over the rocks, Chuluun stalked to within a hundred metres of his quarry before settling himself down at the top of a rise, in a vantage point from which his pick of the herd, a large male he estimated stood a good four feet at the shoulder, was nicely presented side-on.

Very slowly, Chuluun slid the ancient Martini-Henry into aiming position and hunkered down behind it. He opened the rifle’s breech, drew one of the long, heavy cartridges from his bandolier and slipped it silently inside. He closed the breech and flipped up the tangent rear sight. At this range he knew exactly how much elevation he needed to compensate for gravity’s pull on the trajectory of the heavy bullet.

The argali remained still, munching away, oblivious. Chuluun honoured his prey, as he honoured the spirit of the mountains. He blinked a snowflake from his eyelashes. Gently, purposefully, he curled his finger around the trigger, controlled his breathing and felt his heart slow as his concentration focused on the all-important shot. If he missed, the herd would be off and he couldn’t hope to catch up with them again today, nor this week. But Chuluun wasn’t going to miss. Tonight, his family were going to eat as they hadn’t eaten in a long while.

At the perfect moment, Chuluun squeezed the trigger.

And in that same moment, everything went insane.

The view through the rifle’s sights disappeared in a massive blurred explosion. His first confused thought was that his gun had burst on firing. But it wasn’t the gun.

Chuluun barely had time to cry out as the ground seemed to lurch away from under him and then heave him with terrifying violence into the air. He was spinning, tumbling, sliding down the mountain. His head was filled with a deafening roar. Something hit him with a hard blow and he blacked out.

When Chuluun awoke, the sky seemed to have darkened. He blinked and sat up, shivering with cold and beating the snow and dirt from his clothes, then staggered to his feet. His precious rifle lay half-buried in the landslide that had carried him down from the top of the rise. Still half-stunned, he clambered back up the rocky slope and peered, afraid to look, over the edge.

He gasped at the incredible sight below.

Chuluun was standing on the edge of a near-perfect circle of utter devastation that stretched as far as his keen young hunter’s eyes could see. Nothing remained of the patch of ground where the argali herd had been quietly grazing. The mountainside was levelled. Gigantic rocks pulverised. The pine forests completely obliterated. All gone, swept away by some unimaginable force.

His face, streaked with dirt and tears, contorted into an expression of disbelief. Chuluun gazed up at the strange glow that permeated the sky, like nothing he’d ever seen before. Blades of lightning knifed through the rolling clouds. There was no thunder. Just a heavy, eerie pall of silence.

Suddenly filled with conviction that something unspeakably evil had just happened here, he scrambled away with a terrified moan and started fleeing down the slope towards where he’d left his pony.

Chapter 1

Paris

Seven months later

The apartment was all in shadow. It wasn’t normal for Claudine Pommier to keep her curtains tightly drawn even on a bright and sunny June afternoon.

But then, it wasn’t normal for someone to be stalking her and trying to kill her, either.

Claudine was tense as she padded barefoot down the gloomy, narrow hallway. She prayed the boards wouldn’t creak and give her away. A moment ago she’d been certain she could hear footsteps outside the triple-locked door. Now she heard them again. Holding her breath she got to the door and peered through the dirty glass peephole. The aged plasterwork and wrought iron railing of the old apartment building’s upper landing looked distorted through the fish-eye lens.