The Armada Legacy

Chapter Forty

Ben only needed a brief second to tell that the historian’s skull was crushed by its impact against the flagstones. In the same instant he also knew that it hadn’t been the fall that had killed him. No fall could produce such a razor-straight gash from ear to ear. Someone had sliced his throat, and not long ago.

Ben quickly shut the lighter, snuffing out its telltale flame – but too late, because whoever had killed Cabeza and punted his body off some ledge high above them already knew he and Nico were there.

The proof came with the pistol shot that filled the church like a thunderclap a second later. Ben caught a momentary glimpse of the orange-white muzzle flash overhead: in almost pitch darkness the jet of exploding gases lit up a section of wall and the stone stairway leading up to an arched alcove and what looked like a way through to the bell tower.

Nico let out a yell of pain. Stone chips exploded from the floor between their feet. Ben yanked him close in to the wall, where they were directly below the gunman and out of his field of fire – at least for the moment.

‘It’s just a graze,’ Nico muttered, clutching his arm. ‘I’m okay.’ Even in the semi-darkness Ben could see how much blood was welling out from between his fingers. He quickly slipped off his belt and wrapped it round Nico’s arm. ‘Hold it tight. Keep your arm bent.’

Nico drew in a sharp, sudden breath, and Ben thought it was a wince of pain until he realised the Colombian had seen something. Before Ben had time to react, a blinding light was shining on them both. He turned, shielding his eyes from the dazzling glare. He could just about discern a pair of figures behind the light. Two beams shining in his eyes, not one, each from the frame-mounted tactical torch of a pistol.

Above them, the trapped pigeon was still flailing wildly around the dome of the ceiling. A voice snapped out harshly in Spanish, ‘Up against the wall and get your hands in the air.’

Ben didn’t move. Footsteps were echoing down the bell tower stairway: the men who’d sliced Cabeza’s throat and pitched him from the alcove were coming to join their two colleagues on the ground. Three, four. In a matter of seconds the odds were going to double.

‘You. I said get against that wall,’ said the voice behind the light.

Ben could focus better now on the shapes of the two men in front of him, their outlines visible if not their features. ‘What do you reckon, Nico?’ he said quietly, not taking his eyes off them.

‘I say fuck them,’ Nico replied in a savage undertone.

Ben nodded. ‘That’s what I say too. I’m sick of getting shot at today.’ Then in one movement that was too fluid and fast for the men to register, he reached under his jacket, grasped the butt of the revolver that was stuck into his waistband behind the right hip, wrenched it out and squeezed the trigger without aiming.

When he’d come across the handgun in the dresser drawer back at La Catalina, he’d guessed it was the one Nico had procured from the drug dealer in Granada. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, he’d thought, and slipped it quietly into his jeans. The short-barrelled .44 Magnum revolver was even scabbier and more beaten-up than the Colt he’d got hold of in Belfast; and if it hadn’t been for the scorch marks on the cylinder from the two rounds Nico had already put into Serrato’s hired killer, Ben wouldn’t have been so sure he could rely on it. But as the hammer dropped on the next chamber in line, the gun went off like a grenade in his hand and the muzzle recoiled high in the air, haloed in white flame.

The bullet caught the nearest man in the chest and cannoned him into his companion. Ben’s hearing was suddenly drowned in a high-pitched whine. The man he’d shot dropped his weapon and its light beam flew around to point at the wall. The other was staggering off balance, his gun-torch shining wildly all over the place. Ben pointed the Magnum blindly at a point somewhere above and to the side of the light source, pulled the trigger again and once more the world seemed to erupt in a wall of sound. The hand-filling wooden butt of the revolver kicked back at him like a jab from a heavyweight boxer. Blood flew in the light from the bullet strike. The second man went crashing down on his side and rolled over, his body spread-eagled.

Ben didn’t need to check if the two men were dead or not. A handgun capable of knocking down large game at several hundred yards was overkill on a human target at extreme close range. Without a pause, he leaped over to the nearest of the fallen weapons and snatched it up to shine the light towards the stone stairway above him, just in time to see a fast-retreating figure make it to the top of the steps and disappear through the archway.

Four revolver rounds gone, two to go. The gun attached to the torch was a Ruger automatic with a capacity of eight. He picked up the other and was about to toss it to Nico when he saw that the Colombian was slumped against the wall, bent over. With all the blood on the flagstones it was getting hard to tell one man’s from another’s; Nico’s injured arm was dripping with it and he looked pale. ‘You’re full of fucking surprises, aren’t you?’ he managed to grunt painfully at Ben, eyeing the .44 Magnum in his hand.

‘The things people leave lying around in drawers.’ Ben could hardly hear himself speak over the whining tinnitus from the gunshots. ‘You’d better stay down here,’ he said, flashing his light up the stone steps. ‘I don’t want you fainting on me.’

‘I told you, it’s just a graze,’ Nico said defensively, then slumped back against the wall. ‘Fuck, it hurts.’

‘Getting shot’s never easy,’ Ben said as he headed up the steps. He had the hammer of the .44 cocked in his right hand and was using the Ruger to shine the way ahead. The open-sided staircase climbed some fifty feet up the inside of the wall before it led through the shadowy archway from which Cabeza’s body had been dropped. There was more blood there too, a lot more, from where they’d slit his throat. The poor bastard must have tried to hide from them up here, Ben thought. The bloody knife was still lying on the floor.

Ben’s hearing was beginning to return again, and he could make out the slap-back echo of the two men’s racing footsteps off the stone walls as he gave chase. There was only one way for them to go, and that was up the tower. Another stairway led steeply upward. Ben climbed it at a sprint. Beyond the reach of the Ruger’s tactical light he could see his quarry’s bobbing torch beams reflected on the stairway walls ahead. As he ran, one of the light beams suddenly swung round to point at him: there was a crack and a bullet ricocheted off the stonework, stinging his face with flying chips.

Ben levelled both of his pistols and squeezed both triggers at once. The simultaneous crash of the gunshots was numbing in the confined space. The man crumpled and came tumbling down the stairs. Ben jumped aside to let him come rolling and flopping lifelessly past, then raced on upwards after the last man, who had reached the top of the steps and disappeared from sight through another low doorway.

Ben reached the top step a second later, leaped through after him and found himself standing inside the church’s bell tower. The cold breeze coming in through its tall open-sided arches ruffled his hair and chilled the sweat on his brow. He looked around him but could see no sign of the man who’d just run in here ahead of him. The church’s massive bronze bell and its thick rope hung silhouetted against the sky and the dark hills in the distance. Montefrio was a speckle of lights around the base of the rock far below.

Ben heard a sound from overhead. He looked up to see the man making his way frantically up the iron rungs of the ladder that led to the very top level of the tower: a heavily-built, dark-skinned guy in a black coat. Realising he’d been spotted, the man hung off the rungs with his left hand, aimed his pistol down at Ben and squeezed off two rapid shots.

Ben felt the heat of the first bullet as it punched through the upper sleeve of his leather jacket. The second knocked the Ruger out of his left hand and sent it spinning away through the open arch and into empty space.

He dived for the cover of the bell as the man tracked him in his sights and fired a third shot. The bullet rapped sharply off the bell with an impact that set it swaying heavily on its mountings and filled the air with a quivering, juddering note like a hammer-strike on an iron gong. Ben’s left hand was numb from where the Ruger had been shot out of it. He checked his fingers. There was no blood, nothing broken. He took a breath, moved quickly out from underneath the bell, raised the .44 and fired the last deafening round in the cylinder.

The man screamed as the bullet blew open his thigh. He dropped from the iron rungs, hit the swaying bell a glancing blow and went sprawling to the floor so close to the edge of one of the tower’s open sides that he would have fallen through it if Ben hadn’t grasped his coat and hauled him to safety. Blood was pumping from the ragged hole in his leg. But even with half his quadriceps blown away by the .44 hollowpoint, there was still fight left in the man. Ben saw the knife blade flash in the dim light and moved out of the way of the slash just in time. Repeating out of pure instinct a move he’d drilled and executed hundreds of times in the past, he trapped the blade, knocked it from the man’s hand and twisted the wrist to breaking point. The man let out a howl.

‘Who are you?’ Ben demanded in Spanish. ‘Who sent you? Serrato?’ He saw the unmistakable flash of recognition in the man’s eyes. ‘That’s right. You know that name, don’t you? And what’s yours?’ Ben rifled through the man’s jacket and wasn’t surprised to find that he was carrying neither a wallet nor ID. He pointed the .44. ‘One round left,’ he lied. ‘I said, what’s your name?’

‘Gutiérrez!’ the man whimpered, his eyes rolling wildly. ‘Armando Gutiérrez!’

‘I’ll bet you’re not from around here, are you, Armando? I’ll bet you go travelling all over. Been to Ireland recently?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘No?’ Ben thumbed back the revolver’s hammer. That tiny metallic click-clack of the mechanism cocking and the cylinder snicking round another sixth of a turn was enough to loosen anyone’s tongue.

‘It wasn’t me! I swear!’

‘Wasn’t me who what?’

‘Who cut the English guy’s hands off. Bracca did it!’

Seized by a surge of rage, Ben tossed down the revolver, grabbed Gutiérrez by the throat and half-dragged, half-threw him through the arch towards the edge of the drop. ‘You’re going down, Armando, and it’s a long way to the bottom.’

‘No! Please!’

‘Where’s the woman?’ Ben demanded through gritted teeth.

‘What woman?’

Ben grabbed the collar of Gutiérrez’s jacket and shoved him brutally several inches farther over the edge of the drop, dangling the man’s whole upper body in space and wedging his own shoulder tight against the side of the arch to prevent them both from falling to their deaths. The wind whistled around them.

‘I’m not talking about the poor woman you left to rot in a derelict barn with her head blown off,’ Ben said. ‘I’m talking about the other one. Her name’s Brooke and you’re going to tell me where she is. Right now, or else I’m letting you go.’

Armando didn’t want to be let go, even though he was probably bleeding to death from the pumping bullet hole in his thigh. ‘We took her!’ he screamed.

‘Took her where?

‘El Capo – he wanted her.’

‘The boss? You mean Serrato?’

‘Yes! Serrato wanted her!’

‘So you made sure he got her, did you?’ Ben rasped. He could feel his eyes bulging. The fury was coursing through him so powerfully that it was hard to breathe.

‘I did what I was told!’

‘Wanted her for what?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘You’ve been eating too many burritos, Armando. I can’t hold you for much longer.’

‘I don’t fucking know! Please!’

‘Did you kill her when he was done with her? Did you hurt her?’

‘She’s alive! I swear it!’

‘She’s alive?’ Ben shook him hard from side to side. The material of the black coat began to tear.

‘Aagh! Don’t drop me! Yeah, she alive! I’ve seen her!’

‘Where? Where is she?’

‘At El Capo’s place in Peru! Madre de Dios, don’t drop me!

‘You really believe in God, Armando? Because you know, dirty liars burn in hell for all eternity.’

‘It’s the truth, I fucking promise on my mother’s grave I’m telling the truth!’

‘Then your final act in this world was an honest one,’ Ben said. ‘You can tell that to San Pedro when you meet him in a couple of seconds’ time. Make that five seconds. It’s quite a drop.’

‘No! Please!’

Ben relaxed his grip on the man’s coat collar and the material slipped out of his fist. With a last scream of terror, Gutiérrez dropped from the bell tower and went tumbling and cartwheeling downwards into empty air. He’d vanished into the darkness before Ben heard the muffled crump from far below. He got to his feet, flexing his sore hand. Turned round and saw Nico standing there looking at him.

‘That was pretty fucking harsh, man,’ the Colombian said.

‘What would you have done with him?’ Ben said.

‘What would I have done with him? You don’t want to know.’

‘Then we understand each other.’

Nico gave a pained grin. ‘So we’re partners now, huh?’

‘Till you get yourself killed or I find someone better to team up with,’ Ben said. ‘How’s the arm?’

‘Bleeding’s slowed down some,’ Nico said, looking down at the saturated mess of his sleeve and Ben’s belt.

‘It’s either the local vet for you, or needle and thread back at the house. Think you can handle that?’

‘I’ve been stitched up before,’ Nico said gruffly.

‘That’s fine, because I can’t have you pissing blood and flopping about all over the airport.’

‘Thanks a fucking million, man. So, we catching a plane?’

Ben nodded. ‘How many men did you say Serrato has?’

Nico grunted. ‘Plenty enough.’

‘You don’t have to come all the way. I just need you to point me in the right direction.’

‘You’d go in alone? Even after what I told you about that place?’

Ben said nothing.

‘Like I said, you’re a crazy motherfucker.’ Nico paused, chewed his lip. ‘Guess that makes two of us.’

‘Then let’s get moving,’ Ben said.