‘If you’re going, then so am I.’
He shook his head emphatically. ‘No way. I’m doing this alone.’
‘Don’t do this to me. I’ve come this far. You can’t leave me hanging.’
‘You’ve been lucky. Now you need to quit while you’re ahead. Too many innocent people have been hurt already. I can’t take you where I need to go. I can’t be responsible for you.’
‘So, what, I just sit tight in that Perryman roach-hole?’
‘We’re not going back there. I’m taking you to a better place, downtown. You’ll be safe there for now, as long as you keep a low profile.’
Erin just looked at him and made no reply, but he could tell she didn’t like it. Ben pointed backwards with his thumb. ‘Then I’m going to offload Sleeping Beauty there. He’ll wake up in an hour or two, counting his fingers and feeling the joy of living like never before. Then if he’s got any sense he’ll start running and not stop until he’s in Barrow, Alaska.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t hurt him. You’re a good man, Ben.’
‘You don’t know me that well.’
‘I’m worried about you going after McCrory alone. Let me come with you. Please? There’s got to be something I can do to help. I could … I don’t know. Keep watch, or something.’
‘I work best alone. Always have.’
‘Even if it means getting killed? It’s insanity. People don’t do this kind of thing. Not in the normal world.’
‘There is no normal world, Erin. Just this one.’
‘You’ll be dead. I won’t ever see you again.’
He glanced across at her. It almost sounded as if she cared.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back for you when it’s over. Then you’re going home.’
Erin was checked into room 421 at the Hyatt Regency on East 2nd Street, under the name Rosie Lang. The plush decor and amenities were a welcome change from the Perryman. Ben thought she’d earned it. He stayed with her until she was safely in her room, which was spacious and comfortable with floor-to-ceiling glass that looked out over neighbouring scenic gardens. He told her to lie low and wait for his call, promised he’d see her soon and then left quickly, saying no more than he had to.
Back out on the street, he got in the Plymouth and sped away, heading southeast across Tulsa. Mid-morning, the sun was hot and he kept the windows rolled down to blast the inside of the car with cool air as the Muskogee Turnpike took him through the adjoining city of Broken Arrow. A few miles beyond, he left the highway and followed a series of turnings onto progressively smaller and quieter roads, past dotted farms and holdings until an unsurfaced country lane took him to the quiet kind of spot he was looking for. He stopped the car in a cloud of drifting dust and climbed out into the heat. There was nothing around but patchy scrubland and rocks. The grass was tall and burned, and the air was full of the buzz of insects.
Ben popped the lid and manhandled the chair out of the trunk, then dragged it a few yards from the roadside to a spot screened by bushes. Kurzweil was still semi-conscious, his head lolling sideways like a drunk’s. Ben left him sitting there and walked back to the car to fetch his bag and the shotgun, then returned to join his slowly awakening prisoner.
Ben sat a few yards away on a rock, laid his bag down at his feet and the shotgun next to him. He removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The chirping of the crickets was loud, a harsh pulsing rasp from all around. Ben closed his eyes. A stolen moment of reflective stillness. The quiet before the storm. It would be soon.
He thought about Ritter and Moon. They’d been through a level of training reserved for the cream of the world’s dedicated warriors. They were younger than him. Faster. And they’d got the better of him twice already.
He lit up his last cigarette and took his time over it, knowing it might be a while before he had another. It might equally be never. But Ben didn’t let that thought concern him. It never had in the past, and there was no need for it to now.
While he waited for Kurzweil to wake up, he checked the Stamford journals. They looked a little more beaten-up since he’d dived out of the moving Jeep with them, and one of them was scored along its cover from the bullet that had gone through the bag during the car park shoot-out.
He thought for a while about what to do with the journals. He’d no further use for them himself. They’d served their purpose, as far as he was concerned. The rest was just paper and leather. He wasn’t much of a bibliophile. But he couldn’t bring himself to dump them, and there was no denying their historical value. After a few moments’ reflection he remembered the little museum in Glenfell. It was decided, then. If he came through this okay, he’d send the books there for posterity.
And if he didn’t come through it okay, then maybe one day they’d be found again by someone who gave a damn. Or maybe not. It would be out of his hands then.
He sat and smoked and soaked up the sun’s heat and watched Kurzweil until the last Gauloise was just a stub. He flicked it away and ground it into the dirt with his heel. By then, the prisoner’s eyes were open and gazing resentfully at him from the chair. The eyes followed him, widening, as Ben reached once more into his bag and drew out the US army trench knife.
Ben stood up and walked over to Kurzweil, slipping his fingers through the knuckleduster hilt and unsheathing the blade. Kurzweil began to struggle again before he realised that Ben was cutting him loose. The ropes fell slack and Ben stepped away. Kurzweil eased himself stiffly from the chair, grimacing with discomfort and rubbing his chafed wrists.
‘I told her I’d let you go,’ Ben said. ‘Because that’s what a good and decent person would do. Because it would have upset her if I’d said that things don’t work that way. You understand?’
Kurzweil nodded. Acceptance.
Ben drew the forty-calibre from his belt. It was cocked and locked, a round in the chamber and the safety on. He tossed it to Kurzweil, and Kurzweil caught it.
‘First move’s yours,’ Ben said.
A sharklike grin spread over Kurzweil’s face. He hefted the gun. ‘You’re a crazy man. You coulda killed me.’
‘I’m not an executioner,’ Ben said. ‘I was once. I can’t do it any more.’
They locked eyes. For two long seconds, they stood completely still. Then Kurzweil went to shoot. In the time it took for him to punch the pistol up and out at arm’s length and disengage the safety and square his sights on Ben, the shotgun was up off the rock and a blasting roar of flame ripped from the sawn-off muzzle. The Brenneke slug hit Kurzweil in the sternum and cut him in half.
Ben picked up the pistol and wiped the blood off it, then collected his things and walked back towards the car, leaving what was left of Kurzweil spread out over the ground. The buzzards would find him soon enough.
The Plymouth rumbled into life and moved off in the dust haze.
The killing had started.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Eleven miles further southeast, after crossing the county line at a steady ninety-five miles an hour with the wind blast roaring around his ears, Ben reached the town whose name was on his sheet of directions. Adonis, Muskogee County. Population: zero. It wasn’t the most vibrant of places. As Ben sped through the single main street, which seemed to be pretty much all Adonis had ever consisted of, just a cursory glance at the empty, tumbledown clapboard houses, the fallen-in roofs and glassless windows and the sprawl of weeds everywhere was enough to tell that the town had been abandoned for at least seventy years, perhaps longer. Even the local vandals looked to have stopped bothering with it.
Following the directions, Ben turned left, then left again, leaving the ghost town behind and heading into open, flat country. Barbed wire sagged from fence posts left to rot along the lonely roadside. The occasional dead tree and clump of tangled bushes dotted the landscape, and the rest was desiccated grass and dust and rock. The road was unmetalled, just two compacted-earth wheel-tracks worn into the dirt.
But for a place long sinc
e abandoned, it seemed nonetheless to get more than its due share of traffic. That certainly tallied with what Kurzweil had told him. As he drove, Ben’s eye picked out many overlaid tyre tracks. Wide, heavy vehicles had been making frequent journeys along here. Stopping to examine the tyre marks in the dirt, he found that the freshest of the tracks were recent. Very recent, unevaporated moisture pressed from the ground, telling him that the road had been used within the last couple of hours.
He felt a stirring in his heart and stomach. They were here.
Left again at a stand of bushes, like the directions said; the car bumped up a short incline and onto a narrower track. The trucks had been this way before him, and not long ago. Three hundred yards further on, Ben came to a tall locked metal gate in a high fence that stretched as far as he could see in both directions.
He drew up to the gate and got out. The fresh truck tracks passed under the fence and carried on up the dirt road that sloped gently upwards to the collection of old farm buildings whose tops he could see just over the brow of the hill some four hundred yards away. The fence that barred Ben’s approach wasn’t new, but it wasn’t old. Eight feet high, strong weld-mesh wire, and it seemed to go on for miles. Who would splash out the money for security fencing out here in the place that time forgot? He already knew who. The same illegal operator who’d ensured that the gate was secured with three stout padlocks, keeping unwanted visitors firmly out.
The remains of the original gate were still visible inside the perimeter, along with the ancient weathered hand-painted sign that depicted a snarling bear’s head. Big Bear Farm, as it had once been.
Ben got back in the Plymouth and backed it up all the way down to the turn-off, where he tucked it out of sight behind the cluster of prickly, thirsty-looking bushes. He grabbed the binoculars, tucked Kurzweil’s pistol and the trench knife into his belt and put on the leather jacket, despite the oppressive heat. He popped the four solid-slug rounds out of the shotgun’s magazine and replaced them with heavy buckshot. In close, hectic combat against multiple moving targets, you needed a street-sweeper with spread-out killing power, not something you had to stop to aim like an improvised rifle. He jacked a round into the chamber, topped the magazine up to make five, then dropped extra cartridges into his jacket pockets where he could get to them quickly. He slung the loaded gun over his shoulder and checked the time. Almost noon.
He didn’t pause to think about what he was walking into. This was the job he’d come to America to do, and now he was ready to do it. It was as simple as that. He locked the car and walked back to the gate, scaled the wire mesh and jumped down to the other side, dusting his hands. To stay on the track was asking to be spotted by any lookouts posted on guard, so he kept to the long grass and whatever shrubbery he could use as cover as he cut a zigzag path towards the distant farm buildings. As he got closer, he moved with extreme caution. He was on his own out here with no backup against an enemy force who greatly outnumbered him and knew the terrain. There was no margin for tactical errors.
He’d been right about sentries keeping watch. The guy was standing in knee-high grass cradling a scoped bolt-action Ruger scout rifle and gazing absently down the track in the direction of the gates, which were obscured by the slope of the land. He looked bored and deep in his own thoughts, whatever those might have been.
Ben worked his way painstakingly around the guard’s flank, keeping low as he slipped smoothly from bush to tree to clump of grass and pausing now and then to check that the guy hadn’t seen him and wasn’t tracking him through the grass with the riflescope. He hadn’t.
Ben crept closer, until he could almost smell the guy. Then closer still. Within a few feet of the guard’s back, he slipped the trench knife from his belt. He counted mentally, one – two – three – GO and covered the remaining distance like a leopard that had stalked up within charging range of an antelope for that final, explosive attack. He took the guard down fast and silently and cut his throat in a sawing motion. The British army had taught Ben long ago to kill at close quarters without thinking twice. Thinking made you hesitate. Hesitation meant you were the one getting killed.
Ben rolled the corpse over in the bloody grass and checked for ID. He found a phone and a wallet and took both, then relieved the dead man of his rifle and his sidearm and moved on.
The final approach was painstaking and awkward, laden down with two long guns. Ben worked his way around the side of the old farm to a vantage point between two dead tree stumps that formed a V on slightly raised ground, from where he could scout the layout without being seen. He laid the scoped rifle in the crook of the stumps, where he could return to it later. Lying flat on his belly, he scanned the range of buildings through the binoculars. It looked exactly like what it was, a sad old place that had fallen into disuse a very long time ago and had all the hallmarks of dereliction to show for it. Old tyres and rusted-out oil drums and abandoned farm machinery lay scattered about between corroded sheet-metal buildings.
Ben had known many such places in his time. Some had been battle zones heaped with dead bodies. Some had been hideouts where kidnappers kept their victims in appalling conditions. Others had been a cover for sophisticated drug production facilities. Big Bear Farm had been put to a different purpose.
It was a hive of industry down there. In a broad dirt yard maybe fifty yards across between rundown buildings, three large trucks, several miscellaneous 4×4 vehicles and a whole team of men were gathered around what looked at first glance like a dug-out hole for an Olympic-sized swimming pool, only much deeper. The hole was lined with concrete and until very recently had been covered with an enormous iron sheet that was now attached by chains to the back end of a tractor and had been dragged aside, leaving scrape marks in the dirt. It was probably half-inch steel plate, weighing several tons.
Inside the hole, Ben could see stack upon stack of crates. Some were square, some oblong, some plain white wood and others painted military green with white stencilled lettering on their sides and lids. A crane lorry like the kind used in builders’ yards to shift tons of sand and stone was parked up by the edge of the hole. A guy stood beside it working a remote control panel and guiding the big yellow steel arm downwards. Powerful claws clamped around another crate and the crane lifted it out, swivelled its dangling, swaying cargo across to the rear of one of the trucks and deposited it on a hydraulic lift where two men jacked it up onto a cart and wheeled it into the bowels of the truck’s loading bay.
Meanwhile, more men were descending into the hole on ladders and hauling out some of the lighter crates to be passed along in a line for stacking inside the truck. They were working hard. Even at this range Ben could see the sweat and dust on their faces. They’d been at it for some time, because the first truck was already loaded and had been moved back from the arsenal store, where two guys were securing the straps holding the sides in place. With the second truck half loaded and the third waiting in line, they were halfway through their job.
Scanning back and forth, Ben counted eighteen men. All were carrying sidearms in belt or hip holsters. They’d propped their rifles untidily against the side of the nearest building, the way criminal rabble or the worst kind of crappy guerrilla soldiers would do. He couldn’t see McCrory, which was no surprise or disappointment. Ben wasn’t here for him – not yet.
No sign of Ritter or Moon, either, but they might have been supervising things from inside one of the buildings. Nearly all the focus was on the truck that was being loaded. Just one guard was standing by the one that was already full, nursing a Benelli twelve-gauge auto and looking quietly relieved that he’d been given such light duty.
Ben put away the binocs and slipped away from his vantage point. It took less than three minutes for him to thread his way down among the buildings and reach the truck unnoticed. He drew the knife again as he crept silently up behind the second guard. Same routine. Same horrible sensation of the cold steel blade puncturing flesh and slipping deep inside. Same muted cry o
f shock and surprise as Ben eased the wriggling body gently to the ground behind the wheel of the truck and kept his hand clamped over the guy’s mouth until he was still.
Ben peered around the side of the vehicle. Nobody had seen him or noticed the guard’s sudden disappearance. A quick glance through the truck’s cab window told him that it was empty and the key was in the ignition. He moved back down the side of the truck and quickly undid two of the side straps before clambering up into the loading bay. There was little room to move among the stacks of crates. He used the knife to slash the straps holding the cargo in transit, and then to prise open the lid of the first crate. He dug into the packing material to reveal a neat row of brand-new KRISS Vectors. Ten of them; at a quick count there were maybe forty more crates of the same type inside the truck. Between three trucks, some hundred and twenty crates. Over a thousand weapons, all destined for the trigger-happy little hands of the Los Locos cartel.
The next crate he checked was bigger. It was full of rotary grenade launchers, like the one he’d watched Ritter use to lay waste to the lakeside cabin. There were about twenty of the damn things, enough to take on an army division. A whole stack of crates nearby was marked HIGH EXPLOSIVE; Ben levered it open with the tip of the blade and pulled away the lid. He gave a low whistle. He was looking at more forty-millimetre grenades than he’d seen together in one place for a very long time. And that was just one crate out of over a dozen he could see at a glance.
How US army quartermasters could fail to sound the alarm over the disappearance of this much ordnance was beyond him. But there was no time to dwell on such questions. He could hear the crane and the voices of the men outside. He grabbed two of the rotary launchers from one crate. Loaded five grenades into each, snapped them shut and slipped out of the cargo bay with a launcher in each hand. Quickly, quietly, he moved towards the cab door and opened it. He tossed the launchers inside, then climbed in after them and swung himself up behind the wheel.