The Bach Manuscript

Chapter 55

The guy by the pump had spotted them. He started to give chase, pulling the Glock from his belt holster and shouting in Serbian. He pointed the pistol as he ran and was about to squeeze off a wild shot at the two fleeing intruders heading for the carport. Nobody would ever hear the shot.

The man was a few paces from the entrance of the storeroom building when it blew, engulfing him in a massive explosion that tore the building apart and hurled its corrugated roof high into the sky. A gigantic fireball rolled upwards. Shrapnel from the ruptured propane bottles flew in all directions, hammering like deadly hailstones off the wall of the carport where Ben and Madison had taken cover an instant before the blast. Windows and headlights of the parked vehicles shattered. Alarms began shrieking. Roiling flames gushed from the windows of the shattered storeroom. A monumental tower of black smoke that could probably be seen from Belgrade was filling the sky and blocking out the sunlight. Small secondary explosions sent stabs of flame through the heart of the smoke.

‘There goes our element of surprise,’ Madison yelled in Ben’s ear.

‘Hold on tight.’

The remaining man inside the hangar had leapt away from the helicopter in a panic and snatched his rifle from the metal table when the shockwave of the explosion knocked him off his feet. Now he was scrambling back upright and going for his fallen rifle when Ben stepped out from behind the carport wall and shot him twice in the chest and he went back down.

Ben flipped his M16 to burst fire and sent a couple of bursts into the fuel pipe and drum of Jet-B. The punctured pipe ripped apart and the end still connected to the pump began writhing and leaping like an injured cobra, spraying fuel all over the hangar floor, the dead man and the helicopter. Arcs of Jet-B spouted from the holes in the drums. The flames from the burning storeroom were already licking at the inner wall of the hangar. It took only moments for the spreading rivulets of leaking fuel to reach the blaze.

In those same moments, through the smoke, Ben saw the figures of men emerging from the block building beyond the hangar, and more running from the direction of the house. He heard shouts and snapping gunfire. Then the approaching figures disappeared behind a huge curtain of flame that leaped twenty metres into the air as the jet fuel ignited and the whole hangar and everything around it burst alight. The helicopter was swallowed in the raging fire. Then it exploded, bringing half of the burning hangar down around it.

Out of the wall of flames came a human torch, one of the guards who had been too close when the fuel went up. His face and most of his body were invisible behind the flames that were eating him alive. He was staggering like a drunkard, pawing the air in desperation. Ben could feel sorry for a man’s suffering, even when that man would have seen him tortured to death and laughed at the sight. A single round from Ben’s rifle ended the pain for the man and he fell back and quietly burned.

More shapes were flitting and darting behind the smoke as Kožul’s men spread out to counterattack. Sporadic bursts of gunfire crackled out over the roar of the blaze. Ben and Madison fell back to the cover of the carport and returned fire.

With all hell breaking loose, Madison Cahill was ice-cool. She was hunkered down behind the tailgate of a crew-cab Ford Ranger, using the heavy pickup truck for cover as she picked out her targets left, right and centre and engaged them efficiently, methodically, calmly. The old combat shooting instructors had a saying: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Madison was all three.

But the enemy were plentiful and they were determined. The muzzle flashes behind the dense black smoke drifting from the burning hangar looked like galaxies of twinkling stars on a dark night. Ben remembered what Husein Osmanović had told him. ‘You kill five of his, he will only send ten more to take their places.’

So be it. Then they’d just have to keep killing them until nobody was left.

The carport was drawing such heavy fire that the vehicles inside were beginning to come apart. Shattered glass covered the concrete floor like snow. Ricochets were pinging all over the place like angry bees. Bullets splatted the bodywork of the Ford Ranger and forced Madison to slither away from the tailgate and crawl to a safer position behind the wheels of a truck trailer.

Ben kept shooting until his rifle ran dry. Lightning fast, he switched magazines and kept up his steady fire. BAPBAPBAP; BAPBAPBAP. This way, that way. Another shadowy figure went down behind the smoke. Then another.

With typically black military humour Ben’s SAS comrades had used to joke that if they ever found Major Hope dead on the field of battle, he would be sitting in a great big pile of spent cartridge cases. It was getting to be that way now, as fired shells spewed from his weapon’s sooty ejector port and heaped up all around where he was crouching. He could feel the hot brass rolling around underneath his legs and burning him painfully through his trousers. Better than a bullet burning through your flesh. Or a petrol bomb going off in your face. With so many bullets incoming, it was only a question of time before one of them holed the fuel tank of one of the vehicles in the carport. One unlucky spark, and Ben and Madison might suddenly become the main course at the barbecue.

But then the enemy fire was slackening. Ben could see the flitting figures, far fewer of them now, retreating behind the smoke. He reached out and touched Madison’s shoulder, and she tore her gaze away from her rifle sights to look at him with huge intense battle eyes. Her cheeks were blacked with gunsmoke.

He said, ‘Let’s go,’ and pointed ahead, and they advanced from their position to press forward the attack, firing as they went. A couple of Kožul’s men turned to direct retreating fire their way and were cut down. The rest had had enough and were fleeing for the gates. Ben and Madison moved on across the compound, jumping over bodies. His rifle was empty. He dumped it and snatched up a pistol from one of the dead men. Madison did the same. The fight would be close-quarters from here on in.

The smoke from the still-burning hangar and shattered fuel store had thinned and dissipated to become a drifting grey mist over the entire compound, through which they could see the bright red house looming towards them like a surreal apparition as they approached. No more guards emerged from the house to open fire on them. The compound was now silent and empty, just the crackle of the flames and the moan of the wind. The first phase of the attack was over. But unless they’d managed to make their escape during the confusion, Zarko Kožul and Dragan Vuković were still somewhere inside the house. Hiding, or waiting.

This wasn’t over yet.