The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) (46 page)

Craine might have looked frail, but he was hard and wiry and could move lizard-fast. Suddenly the ebony-handled sword stick was back in his hand. Ben ducked back as he saw the slash coming, felt the razor-keen blade slice the air an inch from his nose.

Ben retreated. There was no time to do anything except avoid the slashing blade. Craine came on, fire in his eyes and teeth bared like a madman.

The guards were back at the door. Jeff was lying in a pool of blood. His gun rattled. Boonzie was backing him up. His gun ran empty. He reloaded. Jeff did the same. Ammo was running thin.

Quigley wasn’t moving.

The firing mechanism deactivated itself after five seconds and the glass cover whirred shut.

‘You!’ Craine rasped. ‘You think you can walk into my world and undo the work of a lifetime?’
Whoosh
. The blade came whipping sideways at Ben. He was running out of space to retreat. The blade scored his combat vest and he felt a sear of pain as it opened up a gash across his chest.

‘Yeah, I do,’ he said. Drew the Steyr pistol from his holster and shot Victor Craine between the eyes. The gun flashed and boomed and kicked back against his palm.

The old man staggered to a halt. The sword cane fell loose from his fingers. He gazed at Ben in vague puzzlement for a brief moment and then fell on his face.

Ben directed the pistol at the doorway. He fired, fired again, and again, and saw two more guards fall back and the rest retreat further into the command centre. But there were still too many of them waiting to storm the control room and kill everyone inside.

Ben glanced at the shattered remains of the remote detonator. Goodbye, limpet mine. There was no longer any way to destroy this ship. And no longer any possibility of avoiding getting shot to pieces by an enemy of overwhelming numbers. If they’d fallen silent for a moment, it was only that they were regrouping for the next assault. This could be the last stand.

Unless …

A crazy idea had begun to form in his mind. It wouldn’t be the first. Might just be the last, though.

‘Jeff? Boonzie?’ The room was so thick with gunsmoke, he could hardly see them any more.

‘Still here,’ came Jeff’s voice, thick with pain.

‘Havnae had this much fun in years,’ Boonzie called out.

Ben clambered over Craine’s dead body to where Quigley was lying sprawled on his back. The American was still alive, but there was a lot of blood leaking out from the stab wound in his chest. Two inches lower, and Craine’s blade would have thrust through his heart.

Ben gripped his arm. ‘Hold on, Jack. We’re getting out of here.’

Quigley’s unfocused eyes gazed up at him. ‘The mine …’ he gasped weakly.

‘Change of plan,’ Ben said. He dropped the mag from his Steyr and slammed in a spare in time to let off three rapid double-taps at the guard who’d been trying to aim an M4 through the gap in the doorway. The man dropped his weapon and fell dead.

The crazy idea was growing in Ben’s mind. He ran over to the targeting computer. His eyes searched the screen, taking in the complex menu. He thought furiously. Began to punch at keys.

The guards had regrouped, reloaded and now they were back in force. Gunfire raked the room, shattering screens, splintering the wood panelling. Boonzie and Jeff returned fire from behind their makeshift cover. Suddenly Boonzie’s gun ceased firing. He yelled, ‘I’m out! Ben! What the fuck!’

‘Down to half a mag,’ Jeff called out.

‘Hold on!’ Ben yelled back. Another bullet passed by his head, so close he smelled its trail of cordite.

He’d finished entering the new coordinates. He twisted the arming key. The glass trigger cover whirred open.

Quigley had managed to prop himself up, clutching in agony at his chest. ‘What are you doing?’ he gasped.

‘You know what I’m doing,’ Ben said.

‘You crazy sonofabitch.’

‘So everyone keeps saying,’ Ben said.

The guards burst into the room. The one in front brought his M4 up to the shoulder and aimed it directly at Ben.

Ben smiled at him and pressed the red button.
Kill me. It’s too late.

The guard hesitated. His weapon wavered in his hands. His eyes darted across the room to glance at one of the few screens that hadn’t been shattered in the exchange of fire. It was the screen showing the ship’s GPS position near the eastern extremity of the Gulf of Finland. Then his gaze shot across to the screen of the targeting computer and his eyes widened. Because the coordinates were the same on both.

The … same … on … both. Which meant—

Realisation lit the man’s face up in horror. He lowered his rifle. Stared at Ben for an instant as if to say the same thing Quigley had just said. Then he stumbled back towards the doorway, shoving past his colleagues and tripping over dead bodies in his panic. ‘Run! Out of here!’ he screamed to the other guards who were amassed in the command centre.

‘What the fuck have ye done, Ben?’ Boonzie asked, turning pale.

‘We have a little under four minutes to get off the ship,’ Ben said.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Four minutes. Two hundred seconds. A hundred and eighty. A hundred and sixty. Time became very compressed when every moment mattered this much.

Ben led the way with the bleeding, half-conscious dead weight of Jack Quigley draped across his shoulders. Behind him, Boonzie had Jeff’s arm around his neck, half carrying him, half dragging him as they struggled through the ship’s passageways, clattered up steps, stumbled through hatches in a race to reach the upper deck in time. Ahead they could hear the echoing steps of the personnel members running in panic to abandon the vessel any way they could now that the word had spread like wildfire that they were about to self-destruct.

A deep vibration seemed to come from the core of the ship. The lights flickered and dimmed, as if some gigantic power drain were sucking in all its energy.

Ben kept moving, hanging tightly onto Quigley with his teeth gritted in determination. He could suddenly see Brooke’s face in his mind and held that image there, letting it spur him on to run faster. ‘Come on!’ he yelled behind him to the others. ‘Keep going!’

Ninety seconds. The fresh air and bright light hit them as they burst out of the last hatchway into the morning sun. The sea was calm, the sky an unbroken expanse of blue except for the smoke still rising from the smouldering fires on deck. Running figures raced ahead of them between the cargo containers. Some of the personnel were trying to lower lifeboats, others clambering over the rail and leaping wildly into the sea from a height that would almost certainly be fatal.

Seventy-five seconds. Ben blinked the sweat from his eyes. He thought of the rope ladder hanging from the ship’s side down to the moored rigid inflatable below. They’d never make it down to the boat.

One minute. ‘The helipad!’ he yelled. It was a short sprint across the deck to the resting chopper. Could he get it up in the air in time? He didn’t know, but it was the only chance they had.

He ran, legs straining from his burden. He could hear Jeff and Boonzie’s grunts of pain as they laboured to keep up.

Fifty seconds. Crossing the helipad, he tore open the aircraft’s side hatch. He roared with effort as he bundled Quigley into the back. Racing around to the pilot’s seat, he hurled himself in behind the controls. Boonzie and Jeff were clambering aboard now. Boonzie’s grating rasp in Ben’s ear: ‘Fly this thing, laddie!’

Forty seconds. Ben glanced around him at the unfamiliar cockpit layout.
Come on. Get it together.
He flipped switches. Powered up the turbine. The rotors began to turn. Slowly, maddeningly slowly, then a little faster. Then faster still, until the yellow blade tips became a solid halo above the cockpit and the engine revs were rising to a howl.
Go, go
, screamed the voice in his mind.

Ten seconds. Nine.

The chopper’s skids shifted on the deck as the aircraft started to go light.

Eight. Seven.

‘Fly it!’ Boonzie yelled.

Ben hauled on the controls. The chopper rose into the air, hesitated, rose a few feet more.

Five seconds. Four.

The helicopter climbed steadily upwards. The
Triton
’s towering superstructure was like a skyscraper next to them. Up and up. They were going to make it.

Then the ship seemed to disappear in a soundless explosion. It was as if an invisible hurricane of unimaginable fury had suddenly struck out of nowhere. Every intact window burst apart. Railings and cables and containers and bits of walkway and masts were suddenly shearing away, toppling, tumbling through the air. The hull crumpled and was torn apart at the seams just as easily as if it had been a child’s plastic model. The ship’s prow reared up as its back broke, hurling thousands of tons of cargo loose and crashing about the deck. The sea exploded all around. Foam and spray leaping skywards. The air black with flying debris.

Ben never even saw the steel cable that fouled the rotor blades with a massive shrieking crunch and sent the chopper gyrating wildly off course just as it cleared the deck enough to accelerate upwards and away. He couldn’t hold it. The aircraft began to spin and then plunge towards the mountainous swell.

The last thing Ben saw before he blacked out was the white water surging up to swallow them whole.

It was the cry of a seagull that woke him. The bird flapped down to land beside him, eyeing him curiously. The sky above was clear blue and the grey sea rose and fell gently, tugging his body back and forth on the swell. He blinked and looked around and realised he was clinging to a shattered rotor blade. What had happened? His fogged mind began to piece the memories together.

Where the ship had been, there was nothing but a circle of floating wreckage half a mile across. He was alone. Just him and the bird, and the silence and emptiness of the whispering sea.

As he bobbed there on the slow heave of the ocean, he thought about his life, his past, his future. Maybe he had none to look forward to; maybe he’d die out here. Maybe that wasn’t such a terrible thing, he reflected, and not undeserved either.

But if he somehow ever got back to shore, what would his life be then? A future with Brooke? He didn’t know. Didn’t even know if he’d ever see her again.

He thought about his friends. He’d brought them into this and now they were gone. Gone, like all the plans he’d made. More regrets. He had so many.

He drifted numbly, getting colder in the water. The seagull lost interest in him and flapped away to investigate the wreckage elsewhere. ‘Be like that,’ he called after it.

Then he was alone.

Though not as alone as he’d thought he was.

‘Ben!’ came a cry from across the water. He knew that voice. Clutching at the buoyant piece of rotor blade, he began to paddle through the drifting debris.

When he saw them, he let out a yell of joy and paddled faster.

‘Look what we found,’ Jeff said. His face was pale from blood loss and pain, but he was grinning from ear to ear. He, Boonzie and the weakly conscious but smiling Jack Quigley were sitting in the rigid inflatable boat.

‘You got room for one more?’ Ben let the rotor blade drift away. He swam to the boat and clambered aboard.

‘Outboard’s buggered,’ Boonzie said.

‘Guess I’m the only one fit to row,’ Ben said, unclipping the single oar.

‘Then you’d best get started, laddie. It’s a fair distance to shore.’

The sun rose and fell overhead as the hours passed. Nobody spoke. Quigley fell asleep. Jeff and Boonzie silently nursed their wounds. The only sound was the slap and gurgle of the paddle in the water as Ben rowed. Somewhere beyond the horizon was the coast of Estonia.

‘My son loves the sea,’ Ben said absently after about four hours’ silence.

‘You have a son?’ Boonzie said, amazed despite his pain.

‘That’s a long story,’ Ben said.

About the Author

Scott Mariani is the author of the worldwide-acclaimed action-adventure thriller series featuring ex-SAS hero Ben Hope, which has sold over a million copies in Scott’s native UK alone and is also translated into over 20 languages. His books have been described as ‘James Bond meets Jason Bourne, with a historical twist’. The first Ben Hope book,
THE ALCHEMIST’S SECRET
, spent six straight weeks at #1 on Amazon’s Kindle chart, and all the others have been
Sunday Times
bestsellers.

Scott was born in Scotland, studied in Oxford and now lives and writes in a remote setting in rural west Wales. When not writing, he can be found bouncing about the country lanes in an ancient Land Rover, wild camping in the Brecon Beacons or engrossed in his hobbies of astronomy, photography and target shooting (no dead animals involved!).

You can find out more about Scott and his work, and sign up to his exclusive newsletter, on his official website:

www.scottmariani.com

By the same author

The Alchemist’s Secret

The Mozart Conspiracy

The Doomsday Prophecy

The Heretic’s Treasure

The Shadow Project

The Lost Relic

The Sacred Sword

The Armada Legacy

Copyright

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2014

Copyright © Scott Mariani 2014

Cover design:
www.headdesign.co.uk

Scott Mariani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.