The Armageddon Conspiracy (29 page)

36

V
ernon could
hear engines.
Strong vibrations passed through him.
On the move
.
Where was he?
He opened his eyes again, but this time there was no burning
wreckage, no trooper’s body, no priest giving him the last rites,
no Sergeant Morson.
Above all, no Lucy.
How wondrous it was to see
her again, just that glimpse; but so much disappointment to know it
must have been a dream.
Now here he was in a white room, in bed.
He
moved his head.
Someone was beside him, a soldier in a black
uniform.

‘
I’m Sergeant Ernst
Kruger,’ the man said.

Vernon tried to understand the accent.
Definitely not American: European English.

‘
Do you remember what
happened?’
Kruger asked.

Fragments, dreams: Vernon wasn’t sure
what he remembered.

Kruger explained patiently.
A
helicopter crash.
Crew wiped out.
Half of an SAS unit killed too.
The others somehow managed to fight their way out.
They drove back
an attack, but lost another two men.
One of the SAS troopers killed
a soldier who was about to shoot Vernon.
The SAS managed to
withdraw, dragging Vernon with them down to the beach.
The only
person unaccounted for was Colonel Gresnick.
He was presumed dead
or captured.

I did see
her
, Vernon thought.
Lucy in the flesh.
Not
a dream.
She seemed normal, healthy, just like she used to
be.

The Swiss Guards must have picked up
the survivors of the crash on the beach.
Now, if his guess was
right, he was on a ship.

‘
You’re with friends,’
Kruger said.
‘You’re badly bruised and have a number of cuts, but
we’ve bandaged you up and you’ll be OK.’

Kruger started talking about how much
he admired the SAS troopers – to be able to put up a ferocious
firefight after being involved in a crash like that.
Remarkable, he
said, especially after what they’d seen seconds earlier.

‘
What
did
they see?’
Vernon
asked.
He groaned as a pain tore through his ribs when he tried to
adjust his position.

‘
Later,’ Kruger said.
‘Right now, I need you to think very carefully about something.
I’m
sure you know that my men and I work for the Vatican.
Lucy Galahan
was under our protection.
The Delta Force unit…were you pursuing
them?’

‘
How did you know about
them?’

Kruger smiled.
‘The Vatican has the
most efficient intelligence network in the world.’

‘
Where are we going?’
Vernon started panicking.
They might be heading away from Lucy.
That was no good.
They had to find her, save her.

‘
We’re on a ship on our
way to Bristol.
I don’t know how much you know about all of this,
so it may sound strange, but we’re certain the deserters will take
Lucy to sites linked with King Arthur, just as we were planning to
do.
Tintagel was our starting point, but we weren’t certain what
came next.
We were expecting Lucy to work it out for us, but now we
have you instead.’

‘
We need to go back,’
Vernon groaned.
‘Follow the trail of the deserters.’

‘
We can’t go after
them.
We were lucky to escape alive from Tintagel.’
Kruger turned
away.
‘Most of us, that is.
We had to leave our captain behind.’
He
got up, walked to one of the portholes, and stared out.
‘I detest
snipers,’ he said.
‘Snakes.’

‘
We can’t leave Lucy
behind.’
Vernon was practically shouting.

‘
We have no choice but
to regroup.
We need to work out their next move, to be a step ahead
and surprise them.’

‘
How?’

‘
We have something to
show you.
We think we can use it to work out where they’ll take
Lucy.’

Vernon hated being in this bed, feeling
so weak.
‘It had better be good.’

Kruger gestured to him to get up.
‘Come
and see for yourself.’

Vernon pulled the sheets away and
hauled himself out of bed.
It only now occurred to him how
fortunate he’d been.
No serious wounds, no limbs missing,
practically unscathed.
‘What happened to the helicopter?’
he asked
as he followed Kruger down a narrow corridor.

Kruger halted.
‘If I hadn’t seen it
with my own eyes...’

‘
Was it…’ Vernon
hesitated.
It seemed so ridiculous.
‘An angel?’

Kruger spun round and stared at
him.

‘
Where
he
came from, he was the
brightest of all.’

‘
What?’

‘
He was the only one
who could rival God himself.
The most beloved, like a
son.’

Vernon shook his head.
‘I don’t
understand.’

‘
In this world, he’s
the opposite.
No light, just darkness, the most terrible darkness
of all.’

‘
You’re not making any
sense.’
Yet Vernon understood perfectly.
He’d never seen darkness
like the one that wrapped itself around the helicopter.
A black
hole.
A perfect absence of light.

‘
You understand that
these are the End Times, don’t you?
That’s why
he
appeared.’

‘
For God’s sake, tell
me what you saw.
What was it that attacked our
helicopter?’

Kruger made the sign of the cross.
When
he answered, a shiver swept through every cell of Vernon’s
body.

‘
Lucifer
.’

37

H
alf of the
soldiers in the truck were asleep, while the others looked around
drowsily.
They probably took it in shifts to sleep.
Lucy realised
something had changed – the noise of the engines had vanished.
That’s why she’d woken.
She gazed out of the small, uncovered
section at the back.
It was no longer night time, but it wasn’t
clear what type of day had arrived.
Mist covered
everything.

The black soldier sitting opposite her
had his eyes closed, but she didn’t think he was sleeping.
His
nametag said he was Colonel Gresnick.
Perhaps he’d come with James
just as he said.
It was certainly remarkable that he was the only
black.
These days, every American army unit had many black
soldiers, but not this one.
Each soldier here, apart from Gresnick,
was blue-eyed and blond.
Were they some sort of racist unit, a pure
white ‘elite’?

‘
Everyone out,’ a man
barked, and all of the soldiers began climbing out.

A soldier stepped past Lucy and looked
down at Gresnick.

‘
Wake up, sleeping
beauty.’
He kicked the colonel’s feet.

Gresnick opened his eyes and glowered
at the soldier.
When the colonel stood up, the soldier grabbed him,
turned him round and forced handcuffs on him.
He was pushed out of
the truck at gunpoint.

Lucy followed and climbed down to the
ground.
For a second she felt invisible: no one was paying any
attention to her.
Some Messiah.
One of the soldiers started handing
out food and drink from a large holdall – cartons of orange juice
and nondescript energy bars.

She munched on her bar and, with each
bite, felt more alone.
She wanted to talk to someone.
What was that
weird noise last night?
Had anyone else sensed the strange presence
out there?
Was it following her?
The mist wasn’t like any she had
seen before.
It had an odd orange tint and a surreal quality.
But
that was true of everything these days.

As they breakfasted,
the mist gradually lifted.
Someone muttered something about how
beautiful the new dawns were now.
New
dawns
?
She gasped when she saw the sky.
It
didn’t contain even a trace of April blue.
It was red, like blood.
Now she understood the strange comments she’d heard the nuns making
lately, why they’d stopped taking her outside, why they’d boarded
up the windows throughout the convent.
They spoke of the world
suffering from stigmata, of bleeding wounds across the earth, of
natural catastrophes reflecting the corrupt state of humanity’s
soul.
Lucy had imagined the sky bleeding.
If it had started to
rain, would blood have fallen?
If the whole world were like this,
no wonder people thought the end was coming.

It was only when she studied the
countryside around her that she realised she knew where they were.
Everything had initially seemed unfamiliar because of the strange
light from the sky, but now it all fell into place.
The big
giveaway was the mound a few hundred yards away, rising several
hundred feet above the plain – Cadbury Castle in Somerset.
Like
Tintagel, this was considered a possible site for Camelot.
In fact,
it had the stronger claim.
If King Arthur existed, he was likely to
have been a warrior chief living in the years after the Romans left
Britain.
He would have been a leader of the native Celts, fighting
off the barbarian tribes invading from the Continent – the Angles,
the Saxons and the Jutes.
Ultimately, he failed.
That’s why England
was named after the Angles.

What was certain was that Arthur wasn’t
a medieval king living in a great stone castle.
All of England’s
monarchs were known in detail, and Arthur wasn’t one of them.
He
lived before the time of kings, before the age of stone castles.
That meant that Camelot, if there ever was such a place, was
wooden.
Archaeological studies at Cadbury Castle revealed there was
a wooden hill fort on top of the flat-topped mound.
The stone
castle at Tintagel could never have been Camelot, but the
long-vanished wooden fortress that once stood here fitted the
historical profile perfectly.

Lucy took in the red-tinged scenery and
let out a deep breath.
Cadbury Castle, surrounded by picturesque
farming land, was breathtaking.
Last time she was here, the fields
were full of grazing cows and sheep.
There were no animals now.
A
circle of trees surrounded the mound, while the plateau was empty
apart from a small chapel in one corner.
Despite the name, there
was no visible castle at Cadbury Castle.
Cadbury Hill would have
been a better name.
There were elaborate earthworks round the top
level of the mound, the remnants of the defences its Celtic
inhabitants once constructed.
There was little doubt thousands of
people once lived here.
In its day, it must have been a glorious
sight, a huge fortified hill dominating its surroundings.

Near Cadbury was the
River Cam.
Lucy always believed this was the most likely location
of Arthur’s final battle.
Why had the soldiers brought her to such
a place?
Her mind searched for possible connections with other
mythical battlefields.
The Jews spoke of an ancient, terrible
battle at a place called Megiddo.
They believed the same site would
one day host the final Doomsday battle between good and evil.
It
was more familiar to people under its Westernised name –
Armageddon
.