The Heretics Treasure

Chapter Ten

Thierry dropped them off back at the jetty. Ben took out his phone to call for a taxi, but then saw one waiting on the quayside. ‘I think that’s for us,’ he said to Kerry.

‘They’ve thought of everything, haven’t they?’ she replied.

‘They certainly have.’

The cab took them into the heart of San Remo, and dropped them outside Kerry’s hotel. Ben walked her to the entrance of the lobby.

‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ she said. ‘I’m just so grateful you were there, and that you helped me the way you did.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ Ben said. He took out his wallet and gave her one of the business cards he carried with him. ‘My mobile number’s on here. I don’t think you’ll need to call me, but don’t hesitate if there’s anything I can do. Promise?’

‘Promise.’ She flushed a little, then went up on tiptoe and pecked him on the cheek. With one last look, she turned and pushed through the lobby door into the hotel.

He started walking, and thinking back to what had happened on the beach. But, as he wandered back through the narrow, busy streets in the direction of his own hotel, he soon forgot about Kerry. There were more pressing things to think about. Of the two things that were weighing on his mind, he didn’t know which worried him most.

The more he replayed Paxton’s request in his thoughts, the more it made his head spin. He felt trapped by it. What was he going to do?

The other thing on his mind troubled him a great deal. It was something he’d never imagined could happen.

Every time he let his thoughts drift, he kept seeing Zara Paxton’s face in his mind’s eye. The sun on her hair and the sparkle of her eyes. He kept replaying their short conversation, the sound of her laugh. The warm softness of her hand on his. Kept thinking about the way he could have stood there on deck all day long with her, just talking, just being near her. And remembering the ugly little pang of annoyance he’d felt when Paxton had interrupted their brief conversation and he’d had to leave. Now all he could think about was that he was going to see her again that evening, in just a few hours.

He caught himself. What the hell are these thoughts? What’s wrong with you?

Ben was furious with himself by the time he reached his hotel. He stormed straight up to his room, flopped on the bed and lay there for a while, his mind choked with conflicting emotions. They washed over him, pierced his skull, tormenting him. Feelings he’d thought he would never have again in his life. Not since losing Leigh.

He sat bolt upright on the bed.

You’re lusting after the wife of the man who saved your life.

No, he thought, it’s more than that.

Gritting his teeth with frustration he jumped up, strode over to the mini-bar and wrenched it open. There were some miniature bottles of whisky inside. He pulled them all out, gazed at them for a moment, then shoved them back inside. He didn’t even feel like drinking. He didn’t know what he felt like. It was all just confusion.

He slumped back on the bed. Fought to squeeze Zara from his thoughts-but all his mind did was race back to thinking about Harry. What am I going to do? he asked himself again.

Just when he’d thought he was out of it-out of that whole ugly world, done with field work and violence forever-fate was dragging him back in. This man wanted him to do murder on his behalf.

And yet Ben only had to cast his mind back to the events of May 14th, 1997, to remind himself just how much he owed Harry Paxton.

A day he’d never forget. There’d been a time, years ago, when the memory of it used to fill his dreams almost every night. Now the nightmare visited him only sporadically. But he’d never thought it was going to return to haunt him like this. He closed his eyes, and suddenly he was reliving the events as though it had happened yesterday.

For the entire decade of the nineties, the West African country of Sierra Leone, one of the most deprived and corrupt nations on the planet, had been consumed in violent civil war. Atrocities were committed wholesale-burnings, machete hackings and mass executions became commonplace. Towns and villages were razed to the ground as brutal gangs of self-styled rebels rampaged through the countryside, murdering and raping everyone in their path. Among the rebel fighters were child soldiers as young as eight, drugged and brainwashed into a state of zombie-like inhumanity, who had been handed automatic weapons and commanded to kill, kill, kill. Which they did, ruthlessly and without compunction.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world watched with little interest. Just another African tribal war. Just another Congo. Just another Rwanda. To the cold Western political mind, African lives were cheap, generally not worth intervening over. So the suffering and bloodshed went on unabated, and men like Ben could only watch and wait and hope that one day they’d be given the order that could help make a small difference to those innocent victims.

The worst of the rebel groups operating in Sierra Leone at that time had been a vicious militia force, several hundred strong, calling itself the Cross Bones Boys. Its thirty-year-old leader was a psychopathic despot known as The Baron, whose idea of amusement was to order the limb-hacking, followed not too quickly by the beheading, of entire village populations. Under his command, the militia was cutting a swathe of death through the country. Whatever political or idealistic motivation it might have started out with when war had first broken out had long since been perverted. For years, they’d been left pretty much to their own devices as civil war tore the country apart. There was so much blood soaked into the soil that it seemed nobody even cared any more.

But in May 1997, six years into the war, the Cross Bones Boys broke the unwritten rules by daring to kidnap, and then butcher, three Western aid workers. At that point, orders had come from on high that reprisals be carried out against The Baron and his militia. Ben’s SAS squadron, headed up by Lt. Col. Harry Paxton, had been flown into the country aboard a UN aid aircraft and stationed clandestinely at the British Embassy in Freetown.

Officially, the SAS were never there. Unofficially, the mission objectives were simply to capture or kill as many of the Cross Bones Boys as possible, including The Baron himself, and chase off the rest. In theory, it was the kind of job the SAS were born for.

It hadn’t been that easy in practice. With the whole country locked down in terror and suppression, MI6 intelligence agents struggled to gain any leads as to the whereabouts of the Cross Bones Boys and their leader. For two weeks the SAS squadron had waited on standby, ready to move at a moment’s notice. It had been a frustrating, tense time.

Finally, agents had received a tip-off. The news was promising. In two days, The Baron and his second-in-command, Captain Kananga, would be passing through a Catholic mission on the banks of a river delta called Makapela Creek. The building complex had been deserted since back in 1992, early in the war, after the resident nuns and priest had been brutally slaughtered by another marauding rebel group. It was exactly the kind of place the Cross Bones leadership might hole up for a day or two and, according to the intelligence source, The Baron and Kananga would only have a light force of men with them.

An eight-man SAS team were quickly assembled and tooled up. A Chinook from RAF Special Forces 7 Squadron had flown them deep into the jungle. From the Landing Zone they’d trekked through the damp greenery and stifling heat. Reaching the Makapela Creek mission after dark, they’d got into position for the assault. It was meant to have been swift, surgical and decisive.

It hadn’t quite turned out that way.

As the assault got underway, it quickly became clear that there was a much greater enemy force in the area than the intelligence reports had led anyone to believe. Militia soldiers suddenly burst out of hidden positions in the trees.

Hundreds of them. A rag-tag army swathed in cartridge belts, fired up with bloodlust and crack cocaine, heavily armed and running at them like demons.

Before anyone knew what was happening, a wild firefight had erupted across the whole mission complex. It had been mayhem, fast and furious and deadly. The jungle was lit up with the muzzle flashes of automatic weapons as the enemy started closing in. Gunfire exploded from everywhere. Within minutes the SAS team had found themselves encircled and cut off. They’d established positions in and around the buildings and fought back ferociously as bullets pinged and zipped all about them.

But they were massively outnumbered and, however many bodies piled up in the killing ground around the mission, more screaming Cross Bones Boys kept pouring out of the jungle. The SAS squad were in real trouble, and they knew it. Once they’d run out of ammunition, the militia rebels would close in to take them alive. The ensuing machete party would provide hours of macabre entertainment for The Baron.

One by one, Ben watched his teammates go down. Milne and Jarvis were blown to pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade round that ripped through the building they were firing from. Clark, the radio operator, had been crouched right next to Ben in the roofless wreck of the old chapel when he’d taken a.50-calibre machine gun bullet that left his head like a scooped-out walnut shell.

Ben had used his last grenade to destroy the concealed machine gun emplacement from where the shots had come. Moving low through the insane torrents of gunfire, he’d clambered over Clark’s corpse and used the radio to call in air support. At that moment, he’d felt the hot punch of a bullet take him in the shoulder. He staggered, but stayed on his feet.

After that, Ben’s memories were hazy. He remembered the searing heat of flames tearing through the mission buildings. The constant frenzied chaos of gunfire. The screams that pierced the night. The bodies of his comrades lying slumped where they’d fallen. The blur of shapes darting between buildings as the enemy kept on coming. His teammate, Smith, crouching a few yards away with his rifle tight against his shoulder, firing right, firing left.

Suddenly the sky had been filled with roaring thunder as the air support came storming in out of the night-two Lynx helicopters, spotlights sweeping the jungle, flame blazing from their miniguns. Trees snapped and fell, enemy soldiers were mowed down as others ran in a panic. The downdraught of the choppers blasted dust and vegetation into the air, tore the tin roofs from what was left of the mission buildings.

As Ben glanced up at the hovering aircraft, he was suddenly pitched forward on his face by a second bullet. His vision went dim. He fought to stay conscious, struggled to get to his knees. Tried to twist around to see who had shot him. He could feel hot blood spilling out of him.

He remembered rolling over onto his back. Through the haze of his fading senses, hearing another shot and seeing Smith crumple into the dirt nearby.

Out of the shadows stepped a man, silhouetted against the flames. He was holding a gun. Ben watched, dazed, as the man came closer and pointed the gun right at his head.

He remembered seeing the man come closer, step into the flickering firelight. The gun steady in his fist, ready for the killing shot. Behind the gun, the eyes in the black face wide and staring at him through the sights. Ben would never forget those eyes, bloodshot and wild, full of hate. They were burned into his brain forever.

After that, there had been a flurry of shots.

Then nothing. Just darkness and empty silence.

He was dead.

But suddenly, amazingly, he wasn’t.

His next memory was of waking up in a soft bed in a military hospital. The first thing he’d seen when he opened his eyes was Harry Paxton sitting by his bedside, anxiously watching over him like a father with a sick child.

Eight men had gone in that day; only two had come out.

And if it hadn’t been for Paxton, it would have been Ben inside one of the bodybags that had been choppered away from the smoking ruin in the aftermath of the firefight.

Harry Paxton, last man standing. It was one of those tales of heroism that was destined to become enshrined in regimental legend. For a long time afterwards, men had retold the tale-maybe they were still telling it now, years later. How Kananga, the Cross Bones militia captain, his forces scattering under air attack, had murdered Sergeant Smith and been just about to execute the injured Major Hope with a bullet to the head when Paxton had stepped in to save him. How the Lieutenant Colonel had selflessly got in the way of the bullet meant for the Major, before shooting Kananga with the last round from his pistol.

The rest of the story had come together gradually as Ben recuperated in the hospital over the next couple of weeks.

By the time the reinforcement squad of paratroopers from 1 Para had arrived, it had all been over. Paxton’s unit had accomplished its objective. The Cross Bones Boys were largely wiped out. Nobody ever knew what happened to The Baron. He’d either managed to escape, or never been there in the first place-but that didn’t detract from the victory, and in any case he was never heard of again.

It had been one of the gravest losses of life in the regiment’s history. Back in Hereford, the fallen had been laid to rest with full military honours. Amid the grief, Harry Paxton, arm in a sling from his bullet wound, was the hero of the hour. Plaudits and decorations had been heaped upon him, and soon afterwards he’d been given the promotion to full colonel.

As for Ben, nothing in his military experience had ever quite moved him the way Paxton’s actions had done. He’d sworn he would do anything to return the favour to the man who’d saved him. Nothing-nothing-was ever going to stand in the way of that.