Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7) (19 page)

When Ben still didn’t reply, Jude made a grab for the steering wheel. Ben slapped his hand away and shoved him back in his seat. The dog started barking wildly. Jude lashed out. His fist connected with Ben’s jaw.

It was a solid punch, and for a moment, Ben reeled. Jude lunged at the steering wheel again, and Ben didn’t react in time to stop him yanking the Mazda violently off course. The wheels ploughed into the slush and mud at the side of the road and lost traction. The car went into a slide that Ben only just managed to control before they went spinning off the road and smashed into a dry stone wall. The Mazda slithered to a halt in the ditch and the engine stalled.

‘Well done,’ Ben said, rubbing his jaw where Jude had punched him. ‘That was really mature.’

Jude didn’t speak. Before Ben could stop him, he shoved open his door and leaped out of the car.

‘Jude!’ Ben shouted.

But Jude was off, racing away into the darkness. The dog sprang out of the car and went belting after him, barking excitedly as if this were some fun new game the two-leggeds were playing for his benefit.

Ben swore furiously and flung open the driver’s door. ‘Jude!’ he yelled. ‘Jude!’ His voice sounded flat, muffled by the impenetrable mist.

‘Fuck it,’ he muttered. There was nothing for it but to go after him. Ben broke into a sprint. The mossy, rocky terrain sloped steeply upwards from the road. Jude was already lost in the smoky fog, and Ben was terrified of losing track of him. He ran faster. As an icy gust parted the mist for a moment, he caught sight of him up ahead, darting over the craggy landscape like a man demented. Ben called his name again. Jude didn’t look back, and then he was lost in another swirl of mist.

Ben kept running, scrambling up a rough sheep track that carried him steeply upward, stones and dirt sliding underfoot. Had Jude come this way? Ben paused, listening – then heard the dog bark from somewhere beneath him and to the left, and realised that Jude had taken a different path. Ben peered down the slope and spotted him twenty yards away, just visible through the mist. Jude had skidded to a halt, his progress blocked by thick brambles and a mound of enormous moss-covered rocks that must have come down in a landslide centuries earlier.

Jude hadn’t seen Ben standing above him. He hesitated, glanced back, then seemed to decide that he had to clamber over the rocks, as though convinced that there was a perfect escape route or a handy getaway car waiting for him on the other side.

Ben raced down the slope, and before Jude managed to scramble more than a few feet up the rocks, he’d grabbed him tightly by the arms and hauled him down to the ground. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re running off to?’

Jude wriggled violently in Ben’s grip, showering him with foul curses as he tried to throw him off. Ben held him down tightly. ‘You’re determined to make this difficult for both of us, aren’t you?’

‘Let me go. You’re a fucking weirdo.’

‘And you’re a stubborn little bastard.’

That was when the first shot cracked off the rock just a few inches from Ben’s head.

Flying stone chips stung Ben’s face. Almost simultaneously, he heard the muted bark of the gunshot in the distance.

Even as Ben instinctively flattened himself on the cold, wet moss, dragging Jude down with him, he was calculating the position of the shooter. Whoever he was, he was upwind and on higher ground. The hard impact of the bullet told Ben it had been fired from a high-velocity rifle. The muffled report told him the weapon was fitted with a sound moderator and firing subsonic ammunition. Slow and comparatively low-powered but still capable of filleting a man like a fish from half a mile away. This was no place to be.

‘Maybe you should have stayed in the car,’ Ben said, dragging Jude roughly across the ground to the shelter of a large boulder five feet from the rock pile.

‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ Jude squawked, face-down in the dirt.

‘So do you believe me now?’ Ben asked. ‘Or do you think I’ve set this little shooting gallery up on purpose to trick you?’

Jude stared at him in terror. ‘Is that a
gun
firing at us?’

‘Certainly appears so,’ Ben murmured as he peered cautiously over the top of the boulder. A gust of wind brushed his face and the curtain of mist eddied and parted for a moment. Just as he was expecting it, a second shot rang out, and this time Ben saw the muzzle flash pierce the darkness before he ducked down again and the bullet smacked off the boulder uncomfortably close by.

‘He’s perched on a ridge up there,’ Ben said to Jude. ‘Back towards the road, about two hundred yards at ten o’clock. Has to be using infra-red night sights.’ More military hardware. It was a great time to be completely unarmed. Even if Ben hadn’t left the shotgun in the car, it would have been next to useless against a sniper.

‘It’s someone out hunting,’ Jude said, wide-eyed. ‘They think we’re a deer or something. If we jump out and wave our arms …’

‘You’ll have them blown off,’ Ben said. ‘He knows what he’s shooting at. And it doesn’t have antlers.’ He counted two seconds, three, long enough for the sniper to work his bolt and line up his next shot.

A crater burst open in the dirt just inches away and the bullet wailed off the rocks behind them. The shooter had moved position, trying to flank them and drive them out from behind cover.

‘Scruffy!’ Jude called out. The dog was going crazy, barking frenetically at the darkness. Ben reached out and grabbed his collar and thrust him into Jude’s arms. ‘Hold on to him. Keep behind the rock.’

‘Who’s firing at us?’ Jude quavered, clutching the wriggling terrier in a death grip and pressing himself as tightly as he could behind the boulder.

‘That’s what bothers me,’ Ben said. ‘Right now I can only see one of them. But I’m betting he’s not alone. They must have followed us from near the farm, driving without lights.’ He cursed himself for having been too preoccupied with Jude to notice they’d had company.

‘What do they want with us?’

‘Well, if they don’t just shoot us dead here, they’ll probably march us back to the car at gunpoint. Then they’ll most likely want to punt us off a cliff or crash us through a nice big stone wall. Maybe they’ll burn the wreck once we’re dead.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked,’ Jude hissed. ‘Are you
kidding me or what
? Oh!’ He curled up into a ball as another shot exploded against the underside of the boulder.

Ben gauged the angle and shoved Jude a few inches to the left. ‘The media will say I was drunk or on drugs,’ he said. ‘They’ll have a witness from the local pub saying I was looking for directions to Robbie’s place. And we all know what goes on there.’

Jude gaped at him, bits of wet grass and dirt stuck to his face. ‘How do you know all this stuff?’

‘Because that’s how these people operate,’ Ben said. The wind had dropped for a moment, and the mist was hanging immobile in the air like the sails of a ship lying in a dead calm. The shooter wouldn’t be able to see much in his sights until the breeze stirred it again.

That didn’t seem to put him off. The fifth bullet tore a chunk the size of a fist off the rocks just a foot and a half away from where he was crouching. Jude flinched. And Ben saw his moment. He quickly peeled off his leather jacket, dumped it on the ground by the boulder and arranged it so that a few inches protruded from behind the rock. In the ghostly image of an infra-red scope it would look like a man’s elbow sticking out as he crouched down for cover.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Wait here.’

‘You can’t leave me here alone!’ Jude burst out.

‘Do as I say, and don’t move.’

Ben ran out from behind the boulder, keeping low, moving fast and quiet as a snake over the rough terrain. In the ten yards of open ground he crossed before a stony mound offered reasonable cover, there were no more shots. The silence was uncanny. He moved on, working his way from rock to hollow, gradually skirting around the side of the shooter’s position and praying that the mist would keep him hidden.

As he kept moving, he was thinking. You didn’t deploy a sniper against your target unless getting up close and personal posed too much of a risk. The enemy were taking no chances, and his guess was that they’d worked out who he was by now. Somebody had been doing their homework. Somebody smart and ruthless. Ben was desperately worried that he’d left Jude alone and unprotected back there. And he was worried because he knew that this shooter wasn’t working alone. His associates were out there in the mist.

Ben had covered nearly two hundred yards when a fresh gust of cold wind ruffled his hair and the mist drifted aside like a cloud to reveal the moor and the starry sky above. He could see the boulder behind him and the ridge a little further ahead.

The seventh rifle shot sounded much closer. The white muzzle flash briefly lit up a stony outcrop no more than seventy-five yards away. Ben heard the bullet whip through the air and strike against the boulder. The shooter hadn’t seen him, but now Ben knew exactly where he was.

Ben moved closer, coming round in a curve to approach the man from behind. His heart beat hard as he saw the black-clad figure among the rocks, lying prone in the classic sniper position, one leg straight out behind him, one crooked, both elbows on the ground. The rifle was a bolt action, mounted on a bipod, with a long fat silencer attached to the barrel. Ben recognised the night vision scope as a piece of Russian military hardware. Expensive. Exclusive. Available only to those with the right connections.

Ben didn’t breathe as he closed in the last few yards. He felt no emotion, no pity. Pity would get you killed. Like remorse, it could wait until later.

The sniper was about to fire again when Ben landed on him from behind and pressed his knee hard into his spine, clapped one hand over his mouth and the other under his chin and jerked his head back violently, twisting it hard left and then right. The man’s struggles lasted no more than a couple of seconds before his neck broke.

Ben let go of the man’s head and it smacked down lifelessly against the rocks. Taking the rifle from the dead sniper’s arms, he rolled the corpse away with his foot, then raised the rifle to his shoulder and scanned the landscape through the scope. As the mist cleared rapidly, the night vision image brought everything vividly to life. He swivelled the rifle back towards the road. And recognised with a shock the black car that had pulled up behind the Mazda.

It was the Range Rover that had followed him earlier.

Two men were standing on guard nearby, both clad from head to toe in black, both wearing night vision goggles over ski masks. The goggles explained how the Range Rover’s driver had been able to follow him in the dark without lights. One of the guards was clutching Ben’s bag, the other the shotgun they’d taken from it. Not good.

One sniper, two guards. Three men. No way, Ben thought to himself. They’d have sent more than three men.

He pointed the rifle back towards the boulder where he’d left Jude, and now saw that he’d made a bad mistake. The sniper hadn’t meant to kill him and Jude, only to pin them down as the rest of the group moved in to take them alive. Two more men in black were working their way quickly through the rocks towards Jude’s hiding place. They wore the same night goggles as their colleagues by the car. The one on the left was clutching a pistol with a long silencer. The one on the right was carrying a submachine gun.

They certainly weren’t taking any chances. Ben had been right about that, too.

In the green-hued image of the scope, Jude’s anxious face peered out from behind the boulder, searching for Ben. He had no idea that the two men were just yards away and about to close in on him.

But neither the two men stalking up on Jude nor their associates down on the roadside guarding the car had any idea that their sniper friend was now lying among the rocks with his neck snapped. Things were a little more even now.

Ben pressed the rifle butt in tight against his shoulder, lined the scope crosshairs up on the man on the left and squeezed the trigger. The rifle bucked in his arms and he saw his target crumple to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Green blood splashed the rocks.

If the two guarding the car had heard the report, they’d assume it was the sniper doing his job. Ben quickly worked the rifle bolt and picked up the second man in his sights. Not quickly enough – before he could get off the next round, the man took off across the rocky hillside. Ben followed his running target ten, fifteen yards, then squeezed off another shot. The man ducked as the bullet passed close by his head, and kept running, clutching his submachine gun to his side. By the time Ben had the sights lined up again, the man had flitted away into shadows so dense that not even the infrared could make him out.

Then he was gone. Still armed and dangerous, still out there. Ben looped the rifle’s tactical sling around his shoulder, scrambled down from the ridge and ran back to rejoin Jude.

‘Where did you get that thing?’ Jude asked in astonishment, gaping at the rifle. He obviously hadn’t noticed the corpse lying just a few yards away.

‘From the sniper up there,’ Ben said.

‘You mean you just took it?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Who
are
you?’

‘We don’t have time for a conversation,’ Ben said. ‘Grab the dog and let’s go.’

They ran back towards the car, Ben cradling the rifle, Jude clutching Scruffy to his chest. At the top of the slope overlooking the road, Ben caught Jude’s arm and pulled him to a halt.

‘Shit,’ Jude breathed as he saw the Range Rover and the two men standing by the Mazda.

‘Turn away,’ Ben said.

‘What?’

‘Don’t look.’

Jude understood and turned away. Ben dropped to one knee, levelled the rifle and fired. Slid the bolt smoothly back and forth and fired again. ‘Now move,’ he said to Jude. The rifle’s magazine was empty. He let the weapon drop as they ran down the slope towards the car.

‘Are they
dead
?’ Jude gasped when he saw the two bodies lying in the road.