The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (216 page)

Chapter Seventy-Five

Ben whirled around, his ears ringing from the huge gun blast that had come from just a few metres behind him. Spartak Gourko was standing in the study doorway. There was a thick dressing where his right ear had been, and a Russian military Saiga-12 shotgun in his fists. Its fat muzzle was pointing right at Ben’s stomach.

Ben’s hand tightened on the Colt, the muscles in his gun arm flexed ready to go into the rapid aim-fire motion that he’d practised a million times. Half a second was all he needed to hit his mark. But Gourko didn’t need that long just to flick a trigger, and at this range the Saiga-12 would separate Ben’s torso from his legs and smear him across the far wall. That would end things pretty quickly.

Ben let the Colt hang at his side. ‘You’re hard to kill,’ he said.

Gourko’s eyes flickered away from Ben to gaze at the corpse of his former employer. ‘You did that?’ he asked Ben, motioning with the shotgun. His hand had slackened on its pistol grip. Not much, but enough to make a difference.

Ben nodded.

‘You do my job for me,’ Gourko said. ‘I should thank you. The old man was weak. It was time for me to take over. Now
I
will be the Tsar.’

‘Do I get a prize?’

Gourko grinned. ‘You are my prize.’

Ben saw the scarred knuckles tighten on the shotgun’s grip. Saw the first joint of the index finger curl itself across the face of the trigger. The fingertip flattening and whitening around the nail as the pressure of the squeeze drove the blood from the tissues. A trigger break of maybe six pounds. Gourko had five and a half on it as Ben threw himself backwards over the broad desk with all the speed and strength he could muster. Knocking Shikov’s chair over and spilling the corpse to the floor, he used his momentum to overturn the desk with a crash.

Gourko’s shotgun roared, blasting a massive chunk out of the upturned desktop. Ben tumbled to the rug in a storm of flying splinters. His Colt whacked into Shikov’s fallen chair as he scrambled for cover, and went tumbling out of his grip. Laughing, Gourko flipped a lever on the receiver of his shotgun. Ben knew what it meant. It meant the world was about to come apart at the seams.

In full-automatic mode with a high-capacity magazine loaded with solid slugs, the Saiga-12 was probably the most destructive thing in the world at close range, shy of a nuclear warhead. The room exploded into an orgy of devastation. Flying plaster and glass and wood and dust and deafening noise filled the air. Only the heavy mahogany desk saved Ben from being blasted into jelly. The shotgun ripped through its thirty-round mag in just over two seconds. Ben saw his chance. He grabbed a big ornamental globe and hurled it through the window. He dived after it through the shattered pane, numb to the glass spikes that lacerated his arms and sides and legs as he tumbled through and hit the ground outside rolling.

He was in the grounds of Shikov’s home complex, a place he’d never seen before. The building he’d just escaped from was some kind of boathouse, right on the shores of a glittering lake that stretched all the way to the distant mountain peaks. The main house was a hundred metres away, long and low and rambling with flower gardens and trees. Between the two buildings was a concreted yard.

The black Humvee was sitting there next to a jacked-up Jeep Wrangler, just fifty metres away from Ben. He broke into a sprint for it. As he reached the parked Humvee, Gourko came storming out of the broken window after him, yelling in rage, gripping the shotgun. Another massive ripping blast chewed up the concrete around Ben’s feet and hammered the side of the vehicle, crumpling the gleaming steel panels as easily as stamping on a beer can.

But Ben had nowhere else to run. He ripped open the door of the Humvee and flattened himself across the front seats as the windscreen blew in and showered him with a hail of smashed glass. He groped for the ignition, praying his fingers wouldn’t find an empty keyhole. His hand connected with the dangling fob of the ignition key. Twisted it. Threw the automatic transmission into drive and kicked down hard on the gas.

The Humvee bellowed into life and charged forward. Gourko fired again, blasting one of its door pillars almost in half and blowing in the side windows. Driving almost blind from below the level of the dashboard, Ben kept the pedal to the floor and twisted the steering wheel hard. The Humvee pulled a tight skidding U-turn, crossed the yard and ploughed through a perimeter fence with a shuddering crash that tore down a ten-foot-high wall of wire mesh supported by concrete pillars. The vehicle bucked and lurched over the top of the wrecked fence and kept going, speeding away over the rough ground towards the forest.

Ben could feel the blood cooling on his skin as the wind roared in through the broken screen. Not all of it was Yuri Maisky’s. He ignored the pain from his cuts and drove faster. He had no idea where he was going. He just knew he needed to get away from Gourko.

In what was left of the wing mirror, he could see the man clambering in behind the wheel of the Wrangler and giving chase.

Ben powered the Humvee up a steep incline, unable to see anything but sky beyond its nose. Then the front of the truck dipped downward violently and he found himself speeding down a steep rocky valley into what seemed to be a huge stone quarry, a kilometre across from one steep wall to the other. It looked as though it had been put out of commission a long time ago and since put to other uses. In its centre, half-hidden behind tall wooden gates and barbed wire, a compound had been built consisting of a cluster of steel prefabricated buildings painted in military olive drab.

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 flattening 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.