The two propane cylinders exploded almost simultaneously in a blast of expanding flame and rupturing steel. The kitchen door was blown off its hinges, and with much of the wooden planking of the wall, cannoned into the kitchen and into the tabletop barricade. Daniel cried out in terror. Ben felt the heat sear his flesh and pressed Roberta down harder. Then the burning pain was gone as the fireball swallowed itself back into the blazing passage.
Ben looked up. Everything beyond the door was a raging inferno. There was no way to get back up the passage, but as he now saw, that didn’t matter any longer as the explosion had ripped the whole back off the cabin and half the kitchen wall was gone. He clambered off Roberta, took her hands and helped her to her feet. ‘You okay?’
‘Great,’ she coughed. Still tightly clutching her hand, Ben led her at a run through the curtain of smoke and out of the shattered room onto the back porch. With Daniel staggering after them they jumped down onto the patchy grass of the yard. Suddenly they were breathing air and could feel the cool breeze on their faces. Ben turned back to look at the blazing wreck of the cabin and saw what carnage the exploding gas had inflicted on the attackers inside. A legless trunk had been blown clear and was burning on the ground. A severed hand lay nearby, still clutching a gun.
‘Are they all dead?’ Roberta asked, wheezing.
Ben shook his head and gazed into the crackling flames. ‘I don’t know.’
Suddenly the question was answered as two figures came running at them out of the smoke. From the weapon he was clutching, Ben instantly recognised the larger and more muscular of the two as the grenade shooter. He must have been too far from the cabin to have been caught in the blast. A big man, broad and powerful. The black-clad attacker sprinting along behind him was shorter and leaner, but no less deadly.
‘Run!’ Ben yelled. They dashed away from the porch. The only shelter was the open-fronted shed of the log store. They ducked past the large steel frame of the motorized log splitter. Bullets rattled and howled off it. Then the two of them were rounding the log store. Ben glanced all around him for a weapon, any weapon.
That was when he realised Daniel was no longer behind them.
The Swede was running wildly for the bushes, obviously hoping that the cloud of black smoke blowing from the cabin would mask him. It didn’t. As Ben watched, helpless, the masked grenade shooter unholstered a semiautomatic pistol and let off four, five, six rapid shots at the ungainly running figure. Daniel stumbled, but stayed on his feet. He crashed out of sight into the thicket.
The man reholstered his pistol and signalled to his companion. They began to circle the wood store. Ben and Roberta had nowhere to run. Ben’s eyes lighted on a chainsaw, and he was about to snatch it up when he saw the long-handled axe buried in the chopping block. He grasped the shaft with both fists and tore it out just as the first shooter came around the corner. The man’s gun was aimed at Ben’s face. The weapon cracked. With a resonating clang, the bullet deflected off the axe blade. Ben knew it was the luckiest moment he’d ever had in combat, but he didn’t take the time to celebrate. Before the man could fire again, he swung the axe violently. Felt the sickening impact of metal on meat as the blade chopped downwards at an angle through his opponent’s collar bone and almost took his head clean off his shoulders. The gun fell out of the man’s hands as he collapsed lifeless on the grass with a last look of surprise and horror in his eyes.
Ben dived for his fallen weapon, but he was half a second too slow to snatch it up before a sustained burst from the larger shooter’s AR-15 drove him back behind the log store. Bullets raked the wood pile and sent shreds flying. Ben grabbed hold of Roberta and was steering her urgently away from the source of the gunfire when he realised the weapon had fallen suddenly silent. He looked back and saw that the shooter was extricating a stoppage from his chamber. Failure to fire. For a precious moment, the rifle was nothing but an inert lump of black steel and aluminium.
Ben ran at him.
The big man saw him coming. The unfired round was clear of the chamber. He let his magazine drop into the grass, rapidly plucked another from his tactical vest and was slamming it into the rifle’s mag well when Ben’s diving leap sent him crashing backwards.
It was like wrestling a bear. Ben had to use all his strength to twist the rifle out of the man’s iron grip. Pinning the broad frame down with his knees he clubbed him across the face with the retracting butt until the blood was leaking through the black material of the mask. ‘Who are you working for?’ Ben rasped, and hit him again, then again. ‘Answer me!’
The answer was a punch that came out of nowhere and hit Ben square on the chin with tremendous force, knocking him backwards. His senses spun. For a precarious moment he was on the brink of a precipice, unconsciousness threatening to pull him down into the black depths. He blinked and shook his head to revive himself, just in time for his instinct to kick back in to deflect a battery of heavy blows that his attacker was hurling at his face and upper body. Fighting desperately back, Ben managed to grasp hold of a fistful of his hair through the mask. The man jerked his head violently away and the mask came off in Ben’s fingers, along with a tuft of short silvery-grey hair.
Even as they furiously traded blows on the ground Ben recognised the man he’d seen in Paris. The hard, cold face that had looked at him from the pursuing car in the tunnel, and again from the burning flyover.
Ben lashed out with the edge of his hand and felt the man’s nose break. The man made no sound, as if he felt no pain. He just kept fighting. Ben deflected a savage punch aimed at his throat, and managed to flip himself up onto his feet. But he was too slow to avoid the straight kick that would have smashed his knee in if it had been two inches lower. The impact made him stagger back. Something solid behind him tripped him and he sprawled backwards over it. A crippling jet of pain shot through his lower spine.
The man was up on his feet now, the lower half of his face covered in blood as he came on again.
Roberta ran over to the fallen corpse that had the axe still buried in it. She planted her foot on the dead man’s chest and twisted the blade out of the gory wound, hefted it and lunged at the silver-haired man with a yell. He saw it coming and ducked back out of the arc of the swing. The blade scored the material of his combat vest. Roberta had put all she had into the blow, and the momentum of the heavy blade carried the axe too far, twisting her body around and exposing her flank to him. The sole of his combat boot caught her hard in the hip and sent her stumbling against the edge of the wood store with such force that a corner piece of its timber frame hit her on the side of the head and almost knocked her out. She slumped down, dazed.
Through the pain, Ben realised he’d fallen across the log splitter machine. He tried to clamber upright, but the silver-haired man moved quickly and punched him hard, making him flop back. He could see stars and taste blood on his lips. His left hip was wedged hard up against the static vertical cutting blade so that he couldn’t roll off the machine, and there was no purchase for his legs. Another punch made him see stars.
The man reached towards the machine and yanked hard on the starter cord. The petrol motor spluttered, then roared into life. The man wiped blood from his mouth and grinned redly. His hand went to the vertical lever on the top of the machine and pulled it. A steel rammer emerged from the motor housing. Ben came to his senses just in time. With a violent heave he managed to twist his body off the machine before the rammer caught his side and pressed him into the static blade. If he’d been a log, he’d have been effortlessly chopped in half at the waist. He flopped to the ground, still stunned.
The silver-haired man was laughing over the roar of the engine. He walked around the side of the machine towards Ben and stood over him. ‘I always wanted to face up against one of you SAS guys. Frankly, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. This the best you can do?’
‘I know you,’ Ben said, looking up at the towering figure.
‘Sure you do. I’m Lloyd McGrath.
You might call me the handyman.’ McGrath spat a gout of blood on the ground and smiled. ‘After I kill you, then I’m going to have some fun with your girlfriend over there. Thought you might like to know that.’ He motioned towards the wood store. Then his smile contorted into a red leer and he raised his boot to stamp it down on Ben’s face with a skull-crushing blow.
Ben had taken a moment or two to realise what the solid object he could feel under him was. At first he’d thought it was a stone hidden in the grass. But it was colder, flatter. And sharper.
As McGrath’s boot came down with the full force and weight of his body behind it, the shaft end of the axe handle flew up. Solid hickory connected with the soft flesh between McGrath’s legs.
The broken nose hadn’t got a reaction out of him, but that did. McGrath staggered back with a howl of pain and rage, clutching his groin.
Ben stood up. ‘You haven’t got the balls for it,’ he said. He flipped the axe over in his hands and jabbed the flat end of the blade twice into the man’s face.
McGrath lost his balance and sprawled across the roaring log splitter.
‘So you were going to have some fun with me, were you?’ said Roberta’s voice. Ben looked and saw her stride up to the machine. There was a smear of blood on her temple and a look of cold anger in her eyes. Before McGrath could wriggle his muscular body out of the way, she gripped the vertical lever and pulled. The ram pushed out of the housing and punched into his ribs. He screamed as the motor drove him relentlessly against the wedge-shaped blade.
Ben had seen plenty of men come to nasty ends, but this time he looked away. The sound of McGrath’s inhuman gargling shriek and his wild thrashing against the pitiless machine was enough to tell him what was going on. It didn’t last more than two seconds. When the only noise left to be heard was the roar of the engine, the man’s legs were twitching on the ground on one side of the blood-spattered machine and the upper half of his body had slumped down onto the grass on the other. His eyes were still open.
Ben stepped over and switched off the engine.
‘That was for Claudine,’ Roberta said in the silence.
Ben nodded. He gazed across at the blazing ruins of the cabin, then at the trees. ‘We’d better go and find Daniel,’ he said.
Chapter Forty-Two
‘He went that way,’ Roberta said, pointing towards a thick clump of trees. ‘I don’t think they got him, but I can’t be sure. He might be hurt.’
‘Wait.’ Ben paused by the gruesome corpse of McGrath. There was no point even trying to frisk the bodies for any kind of ID or a clue about who had sent them. But the pistol was still in McGrath’s belt holster and Ben wasn’t about to venture into the woods unarmed in case of survivors. He knelt down by McGrath’s severed lower half. Reaching past the trailing intestines, he unsnapped the restraining clip of the bloody holster and drew out the handgun. It was the kind of old-fashioned pistol Ben favoured and trusted. All metal, no polymers or synthetics. A Colt Combat Commander model chambered in .38 Super. He wiped it clean on the dead man’s trouser leg and was about to stand up when he frowned and paused to examine the Commander more closely.
‘What is it?’ Roberta said, looking curiously at him.
‘Nothing,’ he said, standing up. He tucked the pistol into his pocket, walked over to where McGrath had dropped his assault rifle and picked that up too.
They moved cautiously through the trees, calling Daniel’s name. There was plenty of broken foliage to indicate where the Swede had gone crashing through in a hurry, but no sign of blood.
‘I hope he’s all right,’ Roberta said.
They found him in the hollow of an old dead tree a few hundred yards from the cabin. He started as he saw them appear through the leaves, then relaxed with a sigh when he saw their faces. He was shaking and pale and still out of breath from his sprint. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stammered. ‘I’m sorry I ran. I just couldn’t …’
‘You did the right thing,’ Roberta said, taking his arm and helping him out of the tree hollow. ‘Sure you’re not hurt?’
Daniel shook his head. ‘No. I mean yes. I’m not hurt.’ His eyes darted from Roberta to Ben and back again, taking in their bloodied appearance. ‘What about … Is it …?’
‘It’s over. They should have sent more guys,’ Roberta said with a dark smile.
‘And maybe they will,’ Ben said, ‘So we’d best get moving.’
As they walked back through the trees, Daniel caught sight of the smoke rising from the ruins of his home. ‘My cabin,’ he gasped.
‘It wouldn’t have been much use to you any more, anyway,’ Ben said. ‘It’s time for you to relocate.’
‘I thought we said I was coming with you?’ Daniel asked anxiously.
‘We hadn’t got around to deciding that,’ Ben said.
‘I can help. I know more.’
‘Then you’d better tell us all about it,’ Ben said. ‘But you can do it on the road. I’m driving.’ He held his hand out flat. ‘You’d better tell me the Land Rover keys are still in your pocket.’
Daniel nodded uncertainly, reached for the keys and dropped them into Ben’s palm. Ben took them without a word, walked over to retrieve his bag where he’d left it near the vehicle. His movements automatic and second nature, he removed the magazine of the AR-15 he’d taken from McGrath’s body, slid out the take-down pin and broke the weapon down into its separate components, then packed them inside the bag before slinging it into the back of the Land Rover.
‘Where are we going?’ Daniel asked as he clambered into the back seat.
‘Out of Lapland, that’s for sure.’
‘But how can you travel, with guns?’
‘Borders mean nothing to us,’ Roberta said. ‘We have our own private transport, remember?’
Ben fired up the engine and they left the scene of devastation behind them, bumping and rocking harshly along the rutted forest track. ‘Now talk,’ Ben said, making eye contact with Daniel in the rear-view mirror.
‘I was telling you about what Guardini told us, before he died,’ Daniel explained. ‘How he’d told us they were planning something, something big? Well, there was more to it that I didn’t mention before. He said that Shelton had described to him a secret base where the agency was doing all its research and development of the Tesla technology. Told us all about it.’
‘Where?’ Ben said.
‘Indonesia.’
‘Indonesia?’ Roberta said, turning round with a quizzical expression.
Daniel nodded. ‘One of the old CIA bases left over from the mid-sixties, when they were secretly involved in the purge of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. Half a million people were killed or executed. Then the Yanks supposedly went home after the “New Order” was set up. But they kept a foothold in the place, needless to say.’
‘What is this base, a laboratory?’ Roberta asked.
‘From the outside it just looks like a big industrial facility, all sealed off behind wire and teeming with armed personnel,’ Daniel said. ‘I can only imagine what’s inside the place, to be so heavily guarded like that.’
‘So you actually went there,’ Ben said. ‘All the way to Indonesia.’
Daniel nodded again. ‘That’s right. It was Claudine’s idea. She was convinced it’d lead us to the next stage. Personally, I wasn’t so sure, but she just wouldn’t let it rest until I finally agreed. We took a flight to Jakarta last April. We knew the base was on one of the islands, but Guardini had only given us a few clues, passed on from Shelton.’
‘What clues?’ Roberta said.
‘Claudine had them all written down. She was the one who was leading the way, like always. I was just there as her helper. Anyway, it took over a week of travelling from island to island and a lot of very careful asking around. We were losing hope of finding a damn thing and just about to give up, when we eventually found the place. You have to cross over from Java to Sumatra to get there. It’s on the west coast of the island, near a pla
ce called Arta Beach.’
Ben said nothing, but just listened intently as he drove the Land Rover along the bouncy track through the forest.
‘Do you think you could find it again, Daniel?’ Roberta asked.
The Swede shrugged. ‘It’s remote, right out on its own. Nothing nearby but a few small towns and villages. But sure, I’m pretty certain I could find it, if you were willing to risk going there. Like I said, the bastards have got the place wrapped up tighter than a max-security prison. The two of us didn’t stand a chance of getting inside. Before we’d got two hundred yards from the fence, the alarm was raised and a jeep full of guys with guns came speeding out to intercept us. We just ran like hell and managed to get back to our car in time. I’m certain they’d have shot us if they’d caught us. I’ve never been so scared witless in my life. Until today,’ he added.
‘So after you came back from Indonesia,’ Ben said, ‘That’s when you told Claudine you wanted out?’
‘What was I supposed to do? It was just too dangerous. I said I was going to come back to Sweden and find someplace to lie low and try to forget about all this. I said she should do the same. I did everything I could to persuade her to give the whole thing up. But she wouldn’t have any of it. She insisted on going back to Paris and carrying on like before so she could expose what these people are doing. Pleaded with me to join her, but I was so damn scared. It turned into a big fight between us. She said I was a coward, I said she was a fool. I really tried, but in the end there was nothing I could do. She broke things off with me and went off on her own. I came back here. Every so often I’d drive to a town and email her, try to make her see sense. But it was no use. The thing I was most afraid of happened.’ Daniel shook his head forlornly. ‘Now they’ve found me too. I won’t be safe anywhere, ever again.’