The Lost Relic

  Seconds away and gaining fast, the Wrangler cleared the top of the rise and came jolting and bouncing down after Ben on its oversized tyres. Gourko had the windscreen down flat and the shotgun out over the bonnet, holding it with his left hand as he controlled the wheel with his right.

  Ben heard the booming shots and felt the impact of the massive twelve-gauge slugs ripping through the body of the Humvee. The downward slope was steepening. Any faster, and the vehicle was going to start getting out of control. Ben jabbed the brakes – and felt no resistance from the pedal. It pressed flat to the floor, and he was still gaining speed. He guessed that one of Gourko’s slugs must have taken out a brake line, reducing fluid pressure to zero.

  With no way to stop, all Ben could do was wrestle the steering wheel and line up the harshly bucking vehicle with the wooden gates. The Humvee was doing over eighty kilometres an hour when it hit. Ben was thrown violently forward in the driver’s seat as the Humvee burst through, ripped planks flying up over its roof.

  The gates had barely even slowed the heavy truck down. It went speeding across the compound. Ben swerved to avoid one steel building, but the ground was loose and the vehicle went into a skid and smashed into the prefabricated hut next to it. Ben was hurled into the steering wheel and felt a rib crack.

  A piece of buckled metal sheet fell to the floor as Ben opened the Humvee’s door and stumbled painfully out into the wreckage of the shed. There were no windows, and the only light in the place was the hole he’d ripped coming through the wall. As his eyes quickly grew accustomed to the dim light, Ben saw the stacks of steel crates – hundreds of them, everywhere around him. The Humvee had knocked over a stack of oblong boxes stencilled in white Cyrillic lettering. Two had burst open, revealing rows of Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifles in their original Soviet armoury packing. The smell of gun oil was fresh and sharp. This had to be where Shikov had kept his little arms cache.

  Ben heard Gourko’s jeep screech to a halt outside.

  He examined the fallen crates. Some ammunition for the AK rifles would have been handy at that moment, but it was probably stacked away in any one of the hundreds of other crates. He glanced around him, imagining Gourko striding his way with the Saiga shotgun in his hands. He kicked open another crate.

  Inside, lying on its belly supported on a heavy-duty bipod, was a piece of equipment that was little more than a massive long steel tube with a crude stock at one end and a bulbous muzzle brake the size of a car exhaust silencer on the other. Nestled in the crate beside it was a webbing ammunition belt that held a row of tapered brass shells six inches long, like cannon rounds.

  It was a Russian bolt-action anti-materiel rifle. Something on the side for Shikov’s Taliban friends, maybe. Accurate at fifteen hundred metres. Just the thing for taking out British army light armoured vehicles on patrol in Helmand Province.

  Ben felt the strain on his lower back as he hoisted the heavy rifle out of its crate. He slung the ammunition bandolier over his shoulder. If Spartak Gourko wanted to play with big guns, let him get a dose of this.

  There was no time to load the magazine. He opened the bolt and fed one of the enormous cartridges into the breech, closed the bolt and locked it. He lugged the huge weapon over to the ragged hole in the side of the shed and kicked through the buckled metal sheets.

  The Jeep Wrangler was parked facing away from him between the buildings, eighty metres off. That was point-blank range for the AM rifle. Ben threw himself flat on the ground. Resting the gun on its bipod, he lined the Jeep up in the mil-dot reticule of the scope and squeezed the trigger. The rifle recoiled brutally into his shoulder with a sound like a thunderclap, sending a spasm of agony through his injured side. Almost simultaneously, the Jeep burst into a fireball that rolled up into a mushroom of flame and sent a column of black smoke rising into the sky.

  Ben’s ears were singing loudly from the shot. Enough to drown out the sound of his own whistle at the power of the rifle.

  But not enough to mask the rapidly rising turbine roar that he could suddenly hear coming from a prefab construction hidden among the other buildings. Ben clambered to his feet, wincing at the pain in his ribs. Staring at the building, he realised that it had no roof. Bad news.

  The noise was quickly building to a deafening howl. Ben worked the bolt of the rifle, and the empty casing the size of a small beer bottle fell to the ground.

  Before Ben had time to insert another round, the Black Shark had risen clear of the roofless hangar walls, whipping up a blizzard of dust and debris with the blast from its twin concentric sets of rotors. The machine turned with terrifying agility. Nose down, tail up, scanning the ground like a huge mechanical predator seeking out its prey. The 30mm rotary machine cannon slung at its flank made Ben’s sniper rifle look like a boy’s airgun.

  As the monster bore down on him, he drew a second shell out of the bandolier, slammed it into the breech and worked the bolt home. Firing at a steep upward angle into the air without the benefit of an anti-aircraft mount, the stunning recoil almost knocked him flat on his back.

  In the movies, the helicopter would have exploded into a thousand spinning pieces of shrapnel and come crashing down to the ground.

  This wasn’t the movies. Ben’s shell kicked sparks off the armoured fuselage and bounced off harmlessly.

  And now it was Gourko’s turn.

  Ben sprinted for his life as the rotary cannon blazed into life. Its rate of fire was so high that the sound wasn’t the regular staccato thunder of a heavy machine gun, but a continuous roar. The cannon excavated trenches deep enough to bury a car as Gourko chased Ben across the compound and into one of the buildings. Ben might as well have tried to take cover in a cardboard box. The strong steel walls and roof were torn into smoking shreds around him. A solid steel support girder snapped in half and its pieces crashed to the floor. He hurdled over them, almost dropping the rifle, and sprinted on through the destruction, half a step ahead of the pummelling 30mm shells. He dived out through the back of the building seconds before the whole thing folded in on itself with a screech of rending metal.

  Ben could imagine Spartak Gourko laughing to himself as the helicopter roared overhead. He was sent sprawling on his face by the downdraught. Still clutching the rifle, he scrambled to his feet. The Black Shark was banking steeply for another pass, coming in faster and tighter than any combat chopper he’d ever seen before.

  He desperately needed cover. There was none.

  Unless . . .

  It was crazy. Suicidal. But it might just work.

  Ben took off towards the nearest wall of the quarry. A desperate, heart-pounding, breathless two-hundred metre sprint with the dead weight of the anti-materiel rifle in his arms. The Black Shark hovered in the distance, as if anticipating its prey’s movements. Then its tail rose up and it came back in for the attack.

  Gourko was having fun.

  With a whooshing scream that froze Ben’s blood in his veins as he kept on running, two rockets detached themselves from the Black Shark’s bristling payload and snaked after him. Ben threw himself flat. The rockets roared overhead, scorching him with their jets, and impacted against the steep rock wall ahead of him. Stones and debris rained down. Ben looked up, coughing, half blinded by the massive dust cloud that was rising up all around him.

  The dust cloud was just what he wanted. If it could cloak him for just long enough . . .

  He dashed the rest of the way to the foot of the cliff and started clambering wildly up the loose rocks, dragging the butt of the rifle behind him. As the dust cloud began to settle, he could make out the dark shape of the helicopter hovering ominously about three hundred metres away. He threw himself down in a hollow between two large rocks, planted the rifle bipod in the dirt and quickly loaded the last four of his shells into the magazine.

  The Black Shark saw him and came roaring in for the kill, hard and fast, looming up like an express train. Except that express trains didn’t come loaded with ordnance capable of flat
tening a mountain. There was nowhere to hide from it now, nowhere to run.

  Stay calm. Breathing. Control. Ben fought the pounding of his heart and lined up the sights on the monster’s nose and let rip with another harshly-recoiling round.

  The Black Shark kept coming.

  Ben ripped the bolt back, rammed it forward, fired again. Boom. The pain lashed through him once more.

  Nothing. The machine was less than two hundred metres away now.

  Two rounds left. Ben fired again. Saw the sparking flash of his impact on the armour plating just a hand’s breadth away from the only weak point the impregnable machine had – the thick plate glass of the cockpit was resistant to normal small arms fire, but not to anti-materiel rounds.

  One hundred and fifty metres and closing.

  Ben ejected the hot casing and slammed shut the bolt for the last time. He sucked in a breath. The target was wobbling crazily in the crosshairs of the scope.

  One shot, one kill.

  He squeezed the trigger. Just before the recoil tore the sight picture away, he thought he saw a small black hole appear in the corner of the cockpit screen.

  The Black Shark kept coming, undeterred. One hundred metres.

  Ben ripped open the bolt and stared at the empty breech. That was it. He’d given it his best shot.

  The readout on Gourko’s console told him his missile systems were armed and ready to go. He had his thumb on the fire button, but he wanted to wait until the final instant. He wanted to see the last look in Ben Hope’s eyes just before the rockets pulverised his body across a hundred metres of rocks. Who was this man who thought he could shoot him down with a puny little rifle?

  Gourko watched the magnified figure in his viewfinder. I have you now. He hit the trigger.

  Hit it again. Nothing happened.

  The rockets didn’t launch.

  The quarry wall was looming up fast. Gourko yanked on the stick to peel off for another pass.

  That was when he realised something was dreadfully wrong. The controls were no longer responding. For the first time in his life, Spartak Gourko experienced the cold tremor of fear. Twisting in his seat, he saw the smoke and flame pouring from the banks of electronics behind him, where he now realised the bullet had hit.

  Malfunction. Systems meltdown.

  The quarry wall was racing towards him.

  Gourko had only one option. The Ka-50 was just about the only combat helicopter in the world with an ejector seat. He reached for the control, armed it, braced himself. His fingers closed on the lever. He yanked, hard.

  And in that terrible fraction of a split instant of time that seemed to last forever before the rockets ignited under his seat and fired him to safety, he understood that the electronic safeguard that would blow out the rotor blades from the turret a flash before the ejector system kicked in . . .

  Wasn’t . . .

  Working . . .

  From where Ben was crouching among the rocks, clutching his empty rifle and unable to do anything but wait for death, he saw the pilot’s overhead canopy burst open. In the next instant, Spartak Gourko was launched like a human cannonball from the cockpit.

  Straight up into the concentric rotor blades.

  There wasn’t time to look away. From seventy-five metres, Ben could almost see the man’s mouth opening in a scream – and then his body disintegrated into a red mist as he was minced into nothing by the spinning blades.

  The Black Shark’s nose, sprayed with blood and gore, dipped as the aircraft began its terminal descent.

  Straight towards Ben’s vantage point.

  Ben let the rifle clatter away. He scrambled desperately up the quarry wall.

  The aircraft impacted with the force of an earthquake. Its rotors shattered and its armoured fuselage crumpled and blew apart. Wreckage tumbled down the quarry face, flew a hundred metres in the air. Ben flattened himself against the rocks. For an instant he thought the fireball that engulfed the slope was going to roast him where he lay; then the hot breath of flames receded suddenly, and the next thing he was engulfed in choking, blinding black smoke. Racked with coughing, he kept climbing and climbing until finally he reached the top and stumbled over the lip.

  He glanced back down at the quarry. The smoke was rising high into the sky from the burning helicopter.

  ‘Maybe not so hard to kill, then,’ he muttered.

  He turned away.

  He could see the lake in the distance, and Shikov’s house, as peaceful as if nothing had ever happened there. He started walking towards it.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  ‘You utter, absolute bastard.’

  Ben smiled to hear the sound of her voice on the other end. ‘Hello, Darcey.’

  ‘It took me six hours to get out of that bloody cellar.’

  ‘I knew you’d find a way out eventually,’ he said. ‘A resourceful lady like you. How was the champagne?’ With his free hand he uncapped the bottle of old Bowmore single malt he’d been pleasantly surprised to find among the well-stocked drinks cabinet in Shikov’s huge, luxurious kitchen. If there’d been any more of the Russian’s men around, they’d long since scattered.

  ‘Where are you? Where did you go?’ Ben could hear the anxiety in Darcey’s voice.

  ‘I think I’m in Georgia,’ he said. ‘Not sure where exactly.’ He poured a couple of fingers of the whisky into the crystal glass on the gleaming hardwood worktop. ‘Shikov’s dead,’ he added. ‘I’ll tell you all about it.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Ben touched his side gingerly and narrowed his eyes from the pain of the cracked rib. ‘You should see the nine other guys.’

  Darcey paused. ‘You did it to protect me, didn’t you?’

  ‘I had a feeling you’d want to come along. You’re stubborn that way.’

  ‘What a fine twosome,’ she said. ‘I’m stubborn. And you’re crazy.’

  ‘Maybe just a little,’ he said.

  Darcey sighed. ‘Then it’s over.’

  ‘Not quite. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m where you left me. In the old bag’s place. Where else could I go?’

  Ben smiled. ‘Tell the old bag I’ll do what she asked,’ he said. ‘On one condition.’

  ‘What’s the condition?’

  ‘That she has her driver take you to Rome in the back of that limo of hers. I’ll meet you there tomorrow at midday. Piazza del Campidoglio, in the Capitol.’

  ‘I know it,’ she said. ‘Why Rome?’

  ‘Because I could really use an ice cream,’ he said. ‘Oh, and Darcey? Bring that fax printout with you.’

  When he’d finished talking to Darcey, Ben dialled the number for Le Val. Jeff wasn’t around, so Ben left him a brief message to reassure him that things were OK and he’d be home soon.

  After that, he poured himself another measure of whisky and stared at the phone for a long time. He saw Brooke’s face in his mind.

  He didn’t even know where she was. Back in London, maybe, or still in Portugal with . . . it hurt to think about it. And the idea of talking to her confused and terrified him even more. He swallowed hard, grabbed the phone and stabbed out the digits of her mobile number. As he waited for it to ring, he downed an anxious gulp of whisky and tried to formulate what he wanted to say. Nothing came to him.

  He caught his breath when a woman’s voice answered – but then he realised it was the sugary tones of Brooke’s answering service.

  He hung up.

  Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome

  Ben’s journey back from Georgia had been a long one, and a couple of times he’d thought he wouldn’t make his rendezvous. In the end, he was there fifteen minutes early. The world passed him by as he stood in the middle of the square, licking a curly vanilla cone and gazing across at Michelangelo’s facade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. White statues gleamed against the blue sky. Pigeons flapped about the piazza, squabbling over the scraps left by the tourists.

  At exactly twelve o’clock, Ben
saw Darcey making her way through the crowd towards him. She was wearing new clothes and carrying a shoulder bag. He couldn’t help but grin at the sight of her.

  She trotted the last few steps towards him, put her hand on his shoulder and kissed him quickly. ‘All this way, for an ice cream?’

  ‘And a couple of other things,’ he said. ‘Am I one of them?’ she asked with a smile.

  Ben scanned up and down the broad square. ‘She should be here in a minute. There she is.’

  Darcey followed his gaze and saw a tall, attractive brunette in a dark trouser suit cutting across the square’s geometric paving towards them. ‘Looks glamorous. And familiar. Who is she?’

  ‘She’s someone we might be seeing an awful lot of on TV soon,’ Ben said. ‘Her name’s Silvana Lucenzi. She’s a reporter.’

  Darcey raised an eyebrow. ‘Might be seeing an awful lot of?’

  ‘That depends, Darcey. Depends on you. Did you bring the file?’

  She nodded, dipped a hand in her shoulder bag and brought out a clear plastic folder.

  ‘There are two ways we can go with this,’ Ben said. ‘One, we can call this guy Mason Ferris, tell him we have evidence that could sink him and his whole department for a thousand years and quietly blackmail him into dropping all the charges against both of us, as well as giving you your old job back. With promotion, of course.’

  Darcey said nothing.

  Ben nodded towards the approaching Silvana Lucenzi. ‘Two, we give the file to Silvana and let her do her thing. Press the nuclear button on these people. The world will never be the same again. Neither will your career. It’s your call.’

  ‘You think I’d even hesitate?’ she said. ‘Fuck ’em. Let’s do it.’

  Silvana Lucenzi walked up to them, staring at Ben in astonishment. ‘What are you doing here? You are wanted by the police.’