The Armada Legacy

Chapter Thirty

Ben wheeled round to see the man striding across the room, headed right for him. He’d been hiding behind the door as Ben came in – a powerfully-built man of thirty-five or forty with short dark hair and a look of animal ferocity on his face. He wore black combat trousers and a military-style jacket.

The gun in his hands was one that Ben recognised instantly. It was a SIG SG 553 carbine: stubby, black. Special Forces and tactical law enforcement personnel termed it a primary intervention weapon; everyone else in the world would call it a machine gun. Seven pounds one ounce of lethal Swiss efficiency, mounted with laser and optical sights and handled by someone who seemed to know disconcertingly well what he was doing as he pointed it directly at Ben’s chest. He wore the weapon’s black nylon tactical sling round his neck and shoulder like a man who’d been trained in combat. The expression in his eye told Ben he wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

A quarter of a second later, Ben was proved right. But by the time the room erupted with deafening gunfire and the flurry of high-velocity 5.56mm bullets was in midair, Ben was already flying over the desk for cover. The windows shattered. Plaster exploded in chunks from the wall, showering Ben with white dust as he crashed to the floor on the other side of the desk, bringing it down with him and colliding hard against the side of the leather chair, knocking it over.

Out of the corner of his eye Ben saw the body of Juan Fernando Cabeza spill out of the fallen chair, his head rolling off his shoulders and falling down separately to split open into a liquid mush on the carpet.

Except that it wasn’t a real man – it was a mannequin. The beige fleece jacket and corduroys had been stuffed with towels. The head was an overripe pumpkin topped with a straw-coloured wig. The hems of the trousers had been carefully draped over the empty ankle boots, which stayed where they were as the rest of him fell apart.

Ben wasn’t able to gape at the fallen dummy for more than an instant before the man with the gun opened fire again. Bullets thunked into the top of the overturned desk. It wasn’t much of a shield against the potent assault weapon. The gunman rattled off another string of fully-automatic fire that whipped up a storm of splinters from the rapidly disintegrating desk.

Ben was aware there could only be one reason why the shooter hadn’t just walked right up to him, pointed his weapon over the top of the desk and shot him to pieces. He must think that Ben was armed.

And if that was the case, it wouldn’t be long before he sussed out that he wasn’t. Which meant Ben had to get out of this trap, and fast. There was only one way he was going to do that. He flung himself out from behind the desk and made a dive for the smashed window.

Broken glass raked his arms and sides as he went crashing through what was left of the window pane. He dropped through empty space for what seemed several seconds, cold air whistling in his ears, arms and legs outflung. Then the impact of the pine branch below the window drove the air out of his body. He let out a grunt of pain, bounced away from the branch, dropped a few more feet and felt another crash into his ribs. His fingers raked twigs and branches but he was falling too fast to get a purchase on anything solid. His vision became a spinning kaleidoscope of green foliage and gnarly bark and the white snow below as he tumbled, ripping and crackling, through the foliage of the tree. The white ground rushed up to meet him. Then suddenly he was buried, blinded, coughing and choking and groping frantically to claw his way out of the deep snowdrift that the wind had piled up at the base of the tower.

Ben burst out of the snow and struggled to his feet, ignoring the crippling pain of dozens of minor cuts and bruises. Looking up, he saw the shooter appear at the smashed window high above. The spent magazine from the SIG dropped into the snow as the man discarded it with professional cool and slammed in another. Before he could release the bolt and resume firing, Ben took off at a stumbling sprint through the snow, heading between the trees in the direction of the car and running in a wild zigzag to make himself a harder target.

The shooter opened fire again. Single shots now, let off in rapid succession with deliberate, surgical precision. A bullet thwacked off a pine trunk just inches from Ben’s head.

Who was this guy? A soldier? He acted like one.

Ben sprinted on towards the car, reaching into his pocket as he went for the ignition key, praying it hadn’t fallen out during his tumble from the window and muttering a quick thanks when his fingers closed on the cold metal key ring. He’d reached the fallen tree now. He hurdled over the top of it, snow flying in his wake, and hit the ground running. The Volkswagen was just a few yards further.

The shooter wasn’t about to let him get there. The car’s windscreen and side windows disintegrated into a thousand fragments. A line of holes punched through the metal of the bonnet. Another burst took out the lights and shattered the front grille. The perforated bonnet flew open. Liquid spewed out of the destroyed radiator. The VW wasn’t going anywhere.

Ben veered away and changed course, heading deeper into the forest. The bursts of gunfire were following close behind, and gaining. A snow-laden pine branch exploded into a hail of ice fragments a foot from his head. Then suddenly the terrain was with him as the ground sloped away from the house, putting him out of sight of the shooter.

He kept running. Silence from the house now; the only sound the rasping of his own breath in his ears and the crunch of his boots on the snow. He knew the gunman faced a choice: either to leap out of the smashed window after him and take his chances with the tree and the snowdrift below, or else to run back down the spiral staircase, through the house, out the door and down the steps after him. Ben didn’t think the guy would be crazy enough to choose the former. Which gave him a time advantage, albeit a slight one.

A hundred and fifty or so yards from the house, the hillside was sloping more and more steeply downwards. Ben took a diagonal line down the incline, nimbly avoiding jutting tree roots that could hook and break a running man’s ankle. He had no idea where he was going. He could only hope that the slope wouldn’t lead him to the edge of a sheer drop, cutting off his escape. He leaped over the black, rotted trunk of a fallen pine, misjudged the depth of the snow beyond it, stumbled and fell, his arms disappearing up to the elbow. He cursed, staggered upright and kept moving.

Then he stopped, listening hard, suddenly aware of the buzz of a chainsaw in the distance. There was somebody else in the forest.

Or was it a chainsaw? As the wavering two-stroke engine note grew rapidly louder, he realised that it was coming from the direction of the house. It was the sound of a snowmobile, and it was getting closer very quickly. The shooter was coming after him.