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

by Scott Mariani

  Chavanne reached the point of the fence where the intruders had been sighted. He gave a low whistle. Nada. Maybe the boss had been dreaming. Maybe this was just some drill he’d concocted to keep them from getting fat and dull watching movies all the time. He grinned at the thought.

  Then something impacted the back of his neck very hard and his vision exploded white like a magnesium flare. He barely registered hitting the ground, and didn’t register the cold steel blade slipping between his ribs as more than a momentary flash of agony.

  Then he knew nothing at all.

  Stefan Ringler caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to his left, frowning hard and pointing his weapon in the direction of where Chavanne had been just a moment ago. He couldn’t see him any more. He changed course, cutting ninety degrees towards the fence. The trigger pull on his MP5 weighed in at about six pounds, and he had about four pounds of pressure on it as he stalked through the trees.

  Two metres closer. Still no sign of Chavanne.

  Three metres closer. Where the hell was he? This was no time to nip behind a pine trunk for a slash. He opened his mouth, but knew he had to stay silent.

  Stefan Ringler stayed silent for the rest of his life, which lasted less than four seconds. Technically, long enough to yell out and alert his teammates, but the black-clad forearm that whipped around his neck from behind and locked itself in a boa constrictor grip around his throat made any kind of sound impossible, apart from the thrashing of his legs as he was swiftly dragged to the mossy ground and the life choked out of him. Then, a terrible pain as his neck was twisted left and right and something snapped deep inside, and the lights went out.

  Ben let the body fall limply away from him and got back on his feet. Silvie Valois was just a shadow among the trees, five metres away. He tossed Ringler’s MP5 and the shadow reached nimbly out and caught it without a sound. He pointed at her, then motioned past her through the trees, then tapped his watch and held up five fingers, and the shadow nodded imperceptibly in reply. He crept along the line of the fence as Silvie moved silently at a perpendicular angle away from him and curved round to her left to come up behind the wing man on the far side.

  Ben counted down the last of the five seconds, heard the sharp metallic purr of suppressed gunfire twenty metres away through the trees, and then opened up with the submachine gun he’d taken from the first dead guy. The Heckler & Koch Maschinenpistole was even more familiar to him than the Browning Hi-Power. He’d carried it in deserts and jungles and urban war zones, fired it in snow and underwater and in total darkness. He was as proficient with it as it was possible to be.

  But even for a novice shooter, the enemy were too close and distinct to be missable. That was all they were in that moment: the enemy. Not men, not people. Three remaining, and none of them had the slightest inkling what was happening until the angled crossfire of two shooters mowed them down, left to right, right to left. The MP5SD silencer was highly effective. He felt the gun judder in his hands and the muzzle try to climb under the combined recoil of fifteen nine-millimetre Parabellum rounds a second. Five solid seconds of automatic fire. A combined total of one hundred and fifty copper-jacketed bullets zipping through the foliage and clipping leaves and punching through vital organs and bone and soft tissue as the men crumpled and fell amid almost eerie silence.

  Ben would never know their names or care one way or the other, but Dominik Baiza, Wolf Schilling and Riccardo Cazzitti all died within five seconds of one another. Which was a far shorter and more merciful interval than Streicher’s victims at Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux had had to endure.

  It would have been more like two seconds, but Wolf Schilling didn’t die right away. Ben walked over to the fallen man as he twitched and kicked face down on the mossy ground. He stepped on the submachine gun still clenched in the man’s hand. Crouched down and drew the SOG once more. He slipped it up into the soft spot behind the man’s ear and buried it deep inside the base of his brain. The blade found its mark with surgical precision and the kicking stopped.

  Ben withdrew the knife, wiped the blade on the dead man’s sleeve, then sheathed it and stood and stepped away, feeling nothing much except the quiet knowledge that every opponent no longer walking equalled one less obstacle between him and the end of this.

  He looked over at Silvie as she stepped out from between the trees. She had her rifle slung over her back and the submachine gun cradled in front of her, a wisp of smoke still curling up from the muzzle of the hot silencer. All the ugly black hardware dangling from her body made her look smaller and slighter than she was.

  Ben said, ‘Okay?’

  She nodded, pale but handling it. ‘I’m fine.’

  He studied her face for a moment and believed that she wasn’t about to start shaking and collapse in shock.

  ‘I guess they know we’re coming now, don’t they?’ she said.

  ‘I would imagine so,’ he said.

  She gazed down at the bodies. Liquid sadness in her eyes, the wistful expression of a young veterinarian who’d been compelled to euthanise a litter of kittens. ‘You’ve done this before,’ she said, turning the look on him.

  He nodded. It would get worse from here on in, he thought. But he didn’t say it.

  ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘Not like that. It was self-defence, those other times.’

  Welcome to my world, Ben thought, but didn’t say that either. He switched his submachine gun for a fully loaded one from one of the dead men, then started frisking the bodies. Nothing on the first two, apart from a stick of gum and some cigarettes, loose change, a Bic lighter. He moved to the third and rolled him over. Like the others he was a white European, late thirties or so, short brown hair, ruddy features. Ben found a remote-control handset in his pocket. Some kind of custom-produced unit, with no maker’s name anywhere on it. It had a keypad and two coloured buttons, one red, one green. Ben didn’t know what to make of it.

  The dead man’s right arm was draped limply across his chest. Ben brushed it aside so he could check the rest of the pockets. The dead arm flopped to the ground, the fingers slightly clawed. Ben noticed a stain on the palm of his hand, like oil, or smeared ink. He picked up the limp hand and uncurled the fingers.

  It wasn’t a stain. It was the sweat-smudged remnants of a six-digit number hastily scribbled on the dead man’s palm in biro.

  Ben looked at it, then at the remote, and realised what he was seeing. The kind of raging paranoiac Streicher was would spare no effort in constantly changing passwords and numbers for everything he did, just like he kept issuing new phones to his people. Security numbers would be no different. Or the passcode to open an electronic lock. He’d reset them so often that even his closest aides couldn’t keep track.

  Unless they wrote them down. Human error. The fallibility principle. No matter how secure the system, there was always a weak link somewhere.

  ‘I think we just found our way inside,’ he said to Silvie.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The steel shutter was solid and immovable. It looked and felt as if it would take an armour-piercing rocket to get through it. Unless you happened to be holding the key.

  ‘Here goes,’ Ben said. He pointed the remote and pressed the red button.

  Nothing happened. One down, one to go. He pressed the green button, and something went click, an electric motor whined and the shutter began to roll up. So far, so easy. But they still had no idea what to expect inside. As the shutter cranked upwards like the portcullis of a fortress, they jumped to the sides with their guns ready.

  There was no violent response. No explosion of enemy gunfire spraying out of the entrance to repel the intruders. Nothing at all. There wasn’t a living soul inside the hangar.

  But it was far from empty.

  ‘Jesus,’ Silvie said as they stepped inside the cavernous space. ‘It’s like a damn auto museum.’

  Ben looked across the gleaming red-painted concrete floor at Streicher’s
assembled fleet: the Bell 429 chopper resting on its wheeled undercarriage in one corner. The Volvo articulated lorry and trailer parked along the opposite wall. The collection of expensive motorcycles sparkling under the lights, all chrome and lustrous paintwork. The three identical black Range Rovers, and the exotic sports car that looked like something from a science-fiction movie. Finally, the menacing dark hulk of the Lenco BearCat assault truck.

  Ben walked over to it, feeling a tightening in his muscles. He touched the massive battering ram welded to its front. There were splinters of the monastery gate still embedded in the rivet heads. He plucked one out and gazed at it for a moment.

  ‘Just a big empty space,’ Silvie said, gazing around them. ‘Where’s the rest of it? It’s as if those guys came from nowhere.’

  Ben pointed straight down at the floor between his feet. ‘They came from underneath. Streicher’s down there too.’

  ‘Under the ground?’

  ‘It’s just like Donath said.’

  ‘I know he did. It sounded weird to me at the time. Now we’re here and it seems even weirder.’

  ‘They’re here,’ Ben said. ‘I know it.’

  ‘Where? You see any kind of trapdoor or opening?’

  Ben didn’t reply. He tapped the six-digit code into the keypad. The green button had worked for the shutter, so he guessed that red was for something else. He pressed red.

  Nothing happened.

  Maybe the red button didn’t do anything, he thought. A wire could be loose inside.

  Silvie frowned at him and opened her mouth to speak. Probably to express more scepticism.

  Then fifty tons of thick concrete slab seemed to lurch under their feet, to the sudden sucking whoosh of hydraulics and the rotation of unseen gears. A deep bass throb filled the air. The power of the mechanism made the walls tremble and their ribs vibrate. Invisible seams cracked wider and wider as a whole central section of the floor opened up in front of them, twenty metres long by five wide, hinging at one end to form an enormous ramp that sloped steadily downwards to connect flush with the hidden tunnel beneath. The operation took more than fifteen seconds, during which time all Ben and Silvie could do was stare. Finally, the mech-anism came to rest with a soft thud that resonated all through the building.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ she breathed when there was silence again.

  ‘One of the world’s best-kept little secrets,’ Ben said. ‘How the other half live while the rest of us perish among the ruins of the post-nuclear wasteland.’

  ‘Streicher built this?’

  ‘Or bought it. I gather he’s not short of a bob or two.’

  ‘It’s incredible.’

  ‘I get the feeling there’s a lot more to it,’ Ben said. ‘Only one way to find out.’ He looked at the golf buggies that were parked by the mouth of the gaping hole, and saw that all three had the keys in them. Transportation for their welcoming committee, he guessed. Each had a soft double seat and a polished fibreglass bodyshell and shiny chrome wheels with chunky tyres. Stylish.

  Ben unslung his rifle and submachine gun and stowed them in the carrying space behind the seat of the nearest buggy, then clambered aboard, put his foot on the pedal and the electric motor kicked silently in. He powered round in a tight U-turn and paused at the top of the ramp, waiting for Silvie to get on. She peered uncertainly into the tunnel. Light shone from the depths. Nothing but silence from down below.

  ‘It looks like the entrance to hell,’ she said.

  ‘Then let’s get down there and join the party,’ Ben replied.

  Udo Streicher had witnessed the whole thing unfold on the bank of monitors in his office. First the merciless slaughter of his men. Next, the Faban bitch and her unknown companion breaching hangar security as if it were nothing. Now he watched helplessly as the insolent bastards boarded one of his own golf buggies and disappeared down the mouth of the tunnel, heading straight into the heart of his hitherto undiscovered and totally inviolate sanctuary.

  Now Streicher was gripped by terror at the question revolving in his mind: who was Michelle Faban? Clearly, that wasn’t her real name, just as Streicher was certain that Dexter Nicholls had been a fake identity created to dupe him. Were they police? Government spies? Then more would come. A whole host of them could be set to descend on him at any moment. They could be on their way right now.

  He snatched the bottle of antitoxin and the remaining syringes from the desk. They were too precious to let out of his sight. He burst out of the office at a run. ‘Hannah!’ he yelled, even though she couldn’t possibly hear him in the vast network of tunnels. Where could she be? ‘Hannah!’

  He stopped, his brain speeding from the combined effects of panic and cocaine. Hannah didn’t matter. Only one thing really mattered. He turned in the opposite direction and sprinted down a brightly lit corridor to the nearest buggy station. A whole fleet of them were stationed at various points around the nuclear bunker, plugged into the juice from the underground diesel generators to keep them topped up. He was breathless by the time he got to the charging bay. Unhooking the power cable of the first buggy in the line, he threw himself aboard and floored the pedal, urging the thing on as fast as it would go.

  He rushed towards the laboratory.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Anton Lindquist felt exactly as predicted, like shit. He’d noticed the first hint of the antitoxin’s side effects while he was still disposing of the dead monkey. By the time he’d finished up in the lab and was finally ready to head for his quarters to get some badly needed rest, his head had started pounding and the nausea was coming on strong.

  Udo Streicher’s sudden appearance was the very last thing Lindquist needed. The buggy tore up the corridor and screeched to a halt outside the lab window. Streicher leaped out. His hair was dishevelled, his eyes wild and his nostrils rimmed with white powder. ‘The canisters!’ he yelled. ‘I need the canisters!’

  Lindquist showed him where he’d put them in the outer chamber of the main lab room, carefully wrapped in packaging material and protected inside a plastic crate. Streicher ordered him to load it on the buggy. ‘Hurry. Are you sick? Get a grip on yourself, man.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Lindquist asked in a faint voice, struggling to keep from vomiting. His face was a ghastly shade of white.

  ‘We’re under attack by government agents. Take this.’ Streicher drew his pistol and held it out butt-first. ‘You have to protect me. We’re leaving. If we run into trouble along the way, you know what to do.’

  ‘I’m a technician, not a fighter,’ Lindquist protested, staring at the gun.

  Streicher pressed his face so close to Lindquist’s that their noses almost touched. ‘I am your leader,’ he hissed through bared teeth. ‘You will do your duty by me, science boy, or I’ll snap your scrawny neck.’

  As the buggy sped through the tunnels with Lindquist riding shotgun, Streicher managed to raise another of his remaining men on the radio. ‘Zwart? Is Wokalek with you? Now listen to me. The bunker has been breached by intruders. Arm yourselves and do whatever is required to repel this attack. That’s an order.’ Without waiting for Zwart’s reply, he switched to the separate radio channel that he and Hannah used.

  No response. Where the hell was she? He stuffed the handset in his pocket and yelled at the buggy to go faster.

  ‘This place is unreal,’ Sylvie said. ‘No wonder we couldn’t find the bastard. How long has he been living down here?’

  They’d ditched their transport on penetrating the inner core of the nuclear bunker, and now they were moving on foot through an apparently endless web of rounded tunnels, sweeping from room to room. Ben had no idea exactly how deep they were underground, but an oppressive deadness about the atmosphere made him feel a long way from anywhere. They could have been orbiting Jupiter’s moons, or encased inside a submarine combing the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trench. Silence, except for the background electrical hum from the generators and the whisper of th
e air conditioning.

  The place seemed deserted. Ben’s instincts told him otherwise.

  He kicked open another door and pointed the MP5 into a room that looked like the dorms on board a naval battleship. Sleeping quarters for the men, and recently used by the look of the rumpled bedding and the smell of stale sweat. Next to it were five more identical rooms, then a canteen filled with tables and hard chairs, and next to that a mess lounge with a big-screen television.

  They moved on. More tunnels, more doors. Comfortably appointed reception areas that could have been lifted straight from the corporate headquarters of a fancy legal firm in Zurich or New York. A dining room with a vast walnut table and Persian carpet, gleaming silverware, a marble fireplace, and what looked to Ben’s unschooled eye like original Matisse and Cézanne works hanging on the walls. The post-nuclear holocaust, survived in style.

  Further on, they discovered that the bunker wasn’t all about comforts either. Ben had to whistle as they walked through a storage area that seemed to fill about a mile of corridor and contain a bewildering and highly organised inventory of edible and non-edible supplies. Even to begin to catalogue it all would have taken a month.

  ‘He’s been putting this together for years,’ Silvie muttered, shaking her head.

  The armoury section they came across further on beat it all. Ben had been in countless cathedral-sized military arms depots without ever batting an eyelid. He’d once seen inside a former Soviet atomic bunker that had been adapted by the Ukrainian military as a storehouse for more than ten thousand Kalashnikov rifles. That had been an impressive sight, but pound for pound, Udo Streicher’s private small-arms arsenal was in another league just for the sheer dedication, persistence and financial commitment it must have taken to accumulate and gather together this much hardware, even in firearm-friendly Switzerland. Heavy machine guns. Shoulder-mounted rocket grenade launchers. Long-range sniper systems capable of taking out moderate-to-heavy armour from two miles away. Assault rifles from China, Russia and the USA. Submachine guns and combat shotguns and handguns of every make and calibre. Rack after rack after rack, standing both sides of the centre aisle and towering all the way to the curved ceiling.