The Babylon Idol

Chapter 22

If this had been the summer season, hordes of tourists would have been fleeing amid scenes of mayhem. Now in the dead of winter with nobody around to raise the alarm, the ruins of Olympia were the gunmen’s own private shooting range and they could expend all the ordnance they wanted.

The gunfire punched ragged holes in the silence of Olympia. Anna Manzini and Theo Kambasis froze like two rabbits paralysed in the headlights of an oncoming car. To the sound of another shot, Kambasis staggered and clutched at Anna’s arm. Still some forty yards away and running fast, Ben couldn’t tell if the old curator was trying to protect her, or was clinging to her for support. Anna let out a cry. The two of them fell back over the low wall by which they’d been strolling, and disappeared from view.

Ben ran harder, his heart thumping with anxiety, partly because it was impossible to know whether Anna had ducked out of sight, or been shot, and partly because rushing unarmed, empty-handed and in plain view towards a trio of heavily armed attackers wasn’t tactically the soundest option in anyone’s book.

A beat later, he knew that his warning yell had had exactly the effect he feared. Pausing in their stride towards the wall behind which Anna and Kambasis had disappeared, the gunmen turned and gazed in Ben’s direction, then raised their weapons and opened fire on him.

Ben had reached a crumbly archway that stood supported on a pair of columns. Whatever temple or shrine the arch had once been a doorway to, the rest of the building lay collapsed and strewn all over the ground, and it was behind those ruins that he dived under cover, pressing himself flat as scores of bullets cracked into the ancient stonework, stinging him with flying chips of masonry.

The big man motioned to his companions, as if to say, ‘I’ll take care of this guy, you deal with those two.’ The others turned back towards the low wall where Anna and Kambasis had dropped out of sight, while the big man started ambling casually towards Ben. If he seemed almost nonchalant, that was because he knew that if Ben had come ready for a gunfight, he’d have already returned fire.

On his hands and knees in the dirt, Ben looked desperately around him for some kind of improvised weapon. Even a handy chunk of stone would be better than nothing, but the only rocks he could see were broken segments of ribbed cylindrical columns and large square blocks that must have weighed two hundred pounds apiece.

The big man came closer, holding his weapon at waist level. It was the same kind of SIG Sauer MPX machine pistol they’d used to try to kill Ben in Florence. Possibly the very same weapon. It was fitted with a red-dot optical sight and long curved magazine, with a spare protruding from his hip pocket. He had the fire selector set to three-shot bursts, which hammered the stonework in percussive snorts as he walked closer.

Ben could almost hear him laughing.

Tactical advantages were few and far between in this situation, but Ben had one thing going for him: if he kept low enough the big guy couldn’t actually see him. Pinned under fire, he inched forwards like a crawling snake, until he’d managed to work his way out of the hot zone and could peer around the edge of a big stone block and see the big guy just feet away, blasting at the spot where he thought Ben was sheltering. He was grinning ear to ear, clearly a man who enjoyed his work. In the background, Ben saw the other two stepping closer to the low wall over which Anna and Kambasis had disappeared. They raised their pistols and let off two shots each, BLAMBLAM — BLAMBLAM, firing over the top of the wall at an angle towards the ground. It was exactly the angle they’d have been shooting at if they were executing two injured victims lying at the foot of the wall on the other side.

Ben went cold. Anna had just been murdered right in front of him and there’d been nothing he could do to save her. He’d been too late. It had been all for nothing.

The big man had reached the solitary stone arch and was peering over the piles of ruins strewn around it, the contented smirk on his face turned to a perplexed frown as he realised that his helpless target wasn’t where he’d thought he was. He stood bulkily framed beneath the archway, searching left, searching right. His eyes darting in all directions except for the one he should have been looking in, which was directly above him.

Ben had clambered up the rocks unseen and was perched on top of the archway right over the big guy’s head. The two other gunmen had only to turn round to spot him and open fire, but they seemed too busy admiring their handiwork over by the wall. Ben waited for the perfect moment, holding his breath, every muscle coiling like a spring. Then he pounced, like a leopard dropping from the foliage of a tree to surprise a gazelle grazing below.

Except this gazelle was more like a Cape buffalo. From a little distance away, the guy was huge. Close up, he was enormous. Ben’s 165 pounds landed squarely across his broad shoulders with an arm hooked around his throat, and he hardly seemed to sag under the sudden impact. Ben locked the stranglehold tighter and rained blows on his face and head. A massive elbow lashed backwards and caught Ben in the ribs, ripping his grasp loose and sending him sprawling to the ground.

Towering over him with a look of rage, the big guy pointed the machine pistol in Ben’s face. Before he could shoot, Ben lashed out with a prone kick and swept the man’s legs out from under him. This time he did go down, and hard, all that bulk raising his centre of gravity to bring him slamming to earth like a sack of concrete.

Then Ben was up on his feet, stamping on the guy’s throat and face as he tried to protect himself with his arms. Ben might as well have tried stamping on a tree trunk. Moving back, he snatched up the fallen gun, pointed it, squeezed the trigger — and nothing happened. In the failing light he’d missed what the big guy had missed moments earlier. The gun was empty, the bolt was locked to the rear, the breech open, good for hammering nails and not much else.

In the split second it took Ben to realise it, the big guy had scrambled back to his feet. A normal man would have been crippled by Ben’s surprise assault, but if he was hurt he didn’t show it. Now the two of them were circling one another beneath the archway. Ben was no dwarf at a shade under six foot, but he had to look up to make eye contact. The monster was at least a foot taller, and two feet wider. With a grin, he bent down and picked up a stone block that probably weighed more than Ben, as though it were made of polystyrene. He raised it to his shoulder and heaved it at Ben like a shot putter.

Ben ducked out of the way of the skull-crushing missile, tripping backwards as the block flew past him and struck the middle of one of the archway columns with a massive thud that left a crater and seemed to rock the whole arch on its shaky foundations. A shower of dust and loose chippings sprinkled from overhead. Ben hurled the empty machine pistol at his opponent. A hefty chunk of steel and aluminium hardware that bounced off his bunched pectorals as though Ben had pinged a pebble at his chest.

The big man bent down to pick up another rock. This time, he wouldn’t miss. He raised it high above his head, preparing to hurl it down and crush his enemy like a worm.

But he never got the chance as a ton of crumbling ancient blockwork came crashing down on him and flattened him to the ground. The impact of the hurled rock had finally proved too much for the supporting archway column. After withstanding all the ravages that two and a half millennia could inflict on it, now it gave way and buckled in the middle like a broken knee. The arch collapsed with a roar, burying the man’s head and torso under a pile of stone so that only his lower half protruded. His legs gave a couple of twitches, then stopped moving.

Covered in dust, Ben picked himself up and retrieved the empty machine pistol, then the spare magazine protruding from the hip pocket of his half-buried enemy. He quickly searched the rest of the guy’s pockets for things like ID, but found nothing. Then he reloaded the gun, scrambled over the pile of stone that had been the archway and peered through the falling dusk.

And what he saw next made his heart skip a beat.