THE TUNNEL: A Ben Hope Story (3 page)

After thirty minutes of observing, Ben finally emerged from his observation point and began the slow, painstaking final approach down the hillside and across the open ground towards the house. From here on in was the time of maximum danger, where he would be the most vulnerable to being spotted. The lie of the land was extremely exposed, not a tree or a bush or a rise behind which he could hide until he reached the stone wall that surrounded the property.

The wall was some fifty yards from the house at its nearest point, forming a wide rectangle that was completely closed off apart from the pillared double gateway in front. A beaten-earth track that served as a driveway led for sixty yards in a straight line right up to the main entrance. There was nothing between the gates and the house except a stone stable block converted into a long, low garage, slightly off to the left, and a barn to the right, both half-lost in shadow. To use either building as cover, he would still have to cross a good stretch of open ground in full view of the house’s dark windows. He didn’t like it much. If a powerful torch beam or security floodlight should suddenly blaze into life, he’d be caught in it like a lamped rabbit. But his instinct told him that wasn’t going to happen. Everything he’d seen so far convinced him that the element of surprise was in his favour.

Ben didn’t know it then, but that was a deadly mistake.

He reached the wall ten yards to the left of the gates and skirted along its edge, his footsteps crunching lightly on the frosty grass. He paused at the thick stone gate pillar to check his weaponry one last time before stepping up to the gates.

The black iron bars gleamed dully in the faint glow from the lit-up window sixty yards away. They were unchained. Ben ran his eye up their length, all the way up to the spikes at the top, looking for a security system that would sound off the moment he tried to open them. But there was nothing. He took a deep breath, gently placed a gloved hand against the bars of the left-side gate and gave a push.

The gate swung open a couple of feet, smoothly and silently. It was very much like Liam Falconer to keep his hinges well oiled. And to Ben, it was another small sign that his visit wasn’t expected. He stepped through the gap and started walking, very slowly, up the beaten-earth driveway. Fifty yards from the house. Step by step, thinking about tripwires, alarm mines, motion sensors, infra-red security cameras.

Forty-five yards from the house. He paused. Watched. Everything was still. The angles of the roof and the four chimney stacks were darkly silhouetted against the sky, their lines traced here and there by silver moonlight. The single lit upstairs window cast an amber shaft of illumination across the yard. Ben strained his ears for any sound of movement from the house. The scrape of a dark window opening. The cocking of a gun. The bark of a dog.

Nothing. He kept moving. Forty yards from the house. Thirty-five. He was almost level with the side of the garage block to his left. He paused again.

And froze.

He could still neither see nor hear anything except the whisper of the wind and the soft thud of his own heartbeat. But he could smell something.

Cigarette smoke. Just a trace of it on the cold night air. Faint, but unmistakeable.

Unless there had been a dramatic reversal in his habits, Liam Falconer didn’t touch tobacco. Wouldn’t have the stuff in the house.

With a rush of apprehension, Ben suddenly realised he’d been wrong in assuming that Falconer was alone here tonight. Very wrong. He quickly sidestepped off the drive and ran for cover towards the side of the garage.

And a dark shape charged out of the shadows to meet him.

The knife blade was black and dull and reflected no light, because it was a military killing knife designed for use in fast, brutal covert raids where speed and surprise were essential. Ben sensed it coming as the rushing figure closed in on him. He heard its sharp point whip through the air, slicing towards his throat. He ducked out of its swing, blocked the arm that was holding it and lashed out with his boot. Felt his heel connect in a solid impact. Heard the muted grunt of pain and the crunch of a kneecap.

The attacker went down on his back and a wheezing gasp burst from his mouth as the air was knocked out of him. Ben went straight down after him, pinning the knife arm to the ground and ramming the butt end of his submachine gun hard into the man’s face. Then again. He twisted the knife out of the man’s gloved hand. Grabbed him by the neck and dragged him a yard along the ground, to where the shaft of light from the house shone past the side of the garage.

The man’s face was streaming with blood and his nose and teeth were broken, but at a glance Ben saw he wasn’t Liam Falconer. He was twenty years younger, rough-featured, his cheeks mottled from standing outside a long time in the cold on guard duty. He was heavily wrapped up in a military parka and a fur-lined hunter cap. His eyes fluttered, then opened wide and he lunged up at Ben as if to head-butt him. Ben smashed him in the throat with the edge of his left hand, then clamped it over the man’s bloody mouth. With his right hand he drove the long, slim blade of the killing knife down hard, punching though the heavy coat, between the man’s ribs and deep into his heart. It was over for him.

But it wasn’t over for Ben.

The chatter of a silenced machine carbine set to fully-automatic fire was a sound designed to be lost among the ambient noise of a jungle or urban environment. Out here in the dead stillness of the Scottish glens it ripped the night air like the buzz of a chainsaw.

Even as the bullets were still in the air, Ben was moving. He dived away from the dead guard and hit the ground and rolled around the edge of the garage. The bullets thunked into the hard earth and cracked off the wall. Splinters of stone stung his face. He rolled over twice more and then sprang up to his feet just as the dark shape of the shooter appeared around the other side of the garage, fifteen feet away. Ben could see the glint of steel and the flash of his eyes and his feet braced wide apart in a combat stance as he drew his weapon up to fire. Ben was quicker. He had to be. He clamped the butt of the MP5 against his hip and let off a burst that stitched a line diagonally across the man’s torso before he could touch his trigger. The shooter let out a grunt and crumpled to the ground like a sack of washing.

Ben felt the wetness cooling on the side of his face from where the flying stone splinters had opened up his cheek. He didn’t bother to check the cut, just as he didn’t bother to check the second dead man on the ground. He already knew it wouldn’t be Falconer, either.

Lights were coming on inside the house as whoever else was inside was alerted by the shooting. Ben wasn’t worried about losing the element of surprise, because you couldn’t lose what you’d never had to begin with. He realised now that Falconer had been expecting him after all. Ben cursed himself for his stupidity. It had almost cost him his life. It might yet.

Ben thought,
Fuck it
, and sprinted for the front entrance. He shouldered his way in through the door. Light was coming from up a passage beyond the wide entrance hall, gleaming off heavy oak furniture and stone floors. The walls were thick and craggy.

Movement up ahead. A door swinging shut as someone quickly retreated back through the house, too fast for Ben to see his face – but it was a tall, lean man who could have been Liam Falconer. Ben chased after the retreating figure. Heard the loud crack of an unsilenced pistol and ducked as a mirror shattered a foot from his head. He let off another stream of fire at the closing door. The bullets punched through the solid wood.

He kept running. He reached the door and grasped the handle and wrenched it open. The inside of the door was tattered from where the bullets had torn through. Splinters littered the floor; a single spent .45 pistol cartridge casing rolled across the slate flagstones.

Nobody there. Ben paused, heart thumping, senses jangling. The air was heavy with the scent of fresh cordite and the trickle of gunsmoke that oozed from the muzzle of his weapon’s silencer.

He thought he heard uneven footsteps racing away, around the corner where the stone-floored passage twisted ninety degrees out of sight. He went after the sound. Framed oil paintings and Scottish broadswords and ancient flintlock fowling pieces and hunting trophies hung on the walls, the mounted antlers throwing spiky shadows down the corridor. Ben reached the bend in the passage and felt something slippery underfoot. He looked down and saw the bright red blood splats glistening on the dark flagstones. There was a trail of it. One or more of his bullets had certainly hit home, but his target was only wounded and still on the move.

Ben spent a second too long looking down at the blood.

Something moved behind him, coming out of the shadows. He whirled round and ducked simultaneously, catching his gun against the wall and letting it drop as the blast of a gunshot filled his ears like a bomb going off. The muzzle of the black combat shotgun was just feet away, swivelling towards him for a second shot as he lunged to grab hold of the weapon’s barrel before it could blow his head off. His ears were ringing and he was disorientated from the huge twelve-gauge blast in his ears, but if he didn’t move fast he was a dead man.

The struggle was short, intense and vicious. Ben’s gloved fist closed on the shotgun. He gripped it tightly and twisted it away from his face and thrust it backwards with all the violence he could muster, trying to unbalance the attacker who’d just almost managed to kill him. The shotgun butt slammed against the man’s collarbone and Ben felt the snap resonate through the length of the weapon as it broke. There was no time to turn the gun on his attacker. No time to draw his own pistol, no time to do anything except hurl himself at the guy in a wild exchange of strike, block, strike, block, kick and punch and head-butt and elbow and gouge. Ben’s opponent was strong and young and well-trained. It was hand-to-hand brutality in its purest form for several seconds, and it could have gone either way until Ben landed an elbow strike against his enemy’s smashed collarbone that produced a sharp scream of agony. The man staggered back a step and Ben hit him with a pincer punch to the throat that collapsed his windpipe. Disabled and choking and clawing at his neck to try to get air that would never come, the man crashed to the floor. Ben grabbed a heavy brass candlestick from a side table and upended it like a short axe and pounded its circular base into the man’s skull until he stopped thrashing and became inert.

Ben tossed away the bloody candlestick and leaned against the wall, panting hard. He closed his eyes for a few moments until he got his breath back and his hands stopped shaking. He was numb from all the blows he’d absorbed on his chest and arms, but he knew there’d be plenty of pain in his short-term future. If he lived that long. Falconer was still somewhere in the house.

Ben limped back to retrieve his fallen weapon. He picked up the blood trail again and started following it through the house. Nobody else tried to kill him. Not yet.

The further it went, the more the blood trail thickened. The zigzag of splashes and smears led Ben past doorways and rooms to a downward flight of stone steps. At the bottom of the steps was another door, heavy oak, with ancient iron hinges. A bloody hand was printed on the wood. More smears were on the old iron handle.

Ben opened the door slowly and tentatively, ready to shoot. The steps continued downwards into what he realised was not a basement, as he’d first thought, but a wine cellar, with a bare concrete floor and dim lighting from naked bulbs suspended on their wires from the arched ceiling. Ben descended the steps. The cellar smelled of damp. It was richly stocked with hundreds of bottles stored vertically on tall wooden racks. A connoisseur’s collection, labels faded and mildewed with age, the dark green bottles all dusty and venerable.

The blood trail snaked over the concrete floor, between the wine racks to where it terminated in a spreading pool in a corner. In the middle of the pool, sitting slumped against the wall with his legs splayed out in front of him, his chest heaving, his head lolling on his shoulder with a grimace of pain etched on his lean face, was Brigadier Liam Falconer CBE, former Director of UK Special Forces.

‘You shot me,’ he breathed.

Ben looked at him. Falconer stared back, his teeth slightly bared, like a trapped wild animal. His right hand fingers were still loosely curled around the handle of his Colt 1911 automatic pistol, but he could no longer raise it. His right arm was broken and useless, the sleeve of his white shirt almost black with blood. His left hand was clamped to the more severe wound in his stomach, the one most of the blood was coming from. Penetrating a solid oak door wiped some velocity off a nine-millimetre bullet. But not enough to prevent it from doing real damage to anyone who might be standing on the other side.

‘You’re not looking so good, Liam,’ Ben said, walking up to him. He kicked the .45 auto from Falconer’s hand. It clattered across the concrete floor, far out of the wounded man’s reach. Ben stepped back again. Falconer was in serious trouble. But he was also probably one of the hardest men to kill that Ben had ever known. It wouldn’t have been a good idea to get too complacent, or too close.

Falconer laughed, then broke into a cough. He spat. The spit came out red. ‘Benedict Hope.’

Ben shook his head. ‘Come on. You know I hate being called Benedict. By the way, your guard dogs are dead. It’s just you and me now.’

‘Why are you here, Major?’ Falconer tried to move, and his face clouded with pain. He winced.

‘Don’t call me that either. Just Ben will do fine. And I think you know why I’m here. I came to find out if what I’ve heard is true.’

Falconer glared up at him through eyes narrowed to slits. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. You broke into my house. You killed my men. What the hell are you playing at, Hope? Is what true?’

‘Don’t waste time you don’t have,’ Ben said. ‘You should have guessed that Operation Solitaire would catch up with you, sooner or later. You’ve had seven years to atone for it. Have you?’