The Lost Relic

Chapter Fifty-Three

The rain was pounding down like warm hail as Ben staggered away from the industrial area. The pain in his arm was intensifying, and he tucked his wrist through his belt to keep the limb supported as he ran. He made for the side of a tin building where old pallets were stacked in five-metre-high piles. Ducking in among them, he stripped off his shirt and examined his wound. The blood was oozing out as fast as the rain could wash it away. The bullet was still in there, lodged somewhere up against the triceps muscle. He didn’t think it had struck bone. He tore the right sleeve off the shirt and tied it as tightly as he could around his arm to stem the bleeding. Not much of a field dressing, but it would have to do for now.

He bundled the rest of the shirt out of sight into a gap between the pallets, then peered through the hammering rain to get his bearings. The other side of a wire fence, two hundred metres across a piece of wasteground, was a road. He ran to the fence and scaled it using just his good hand. Dropping down the other side, he crossed the wasteground and walked along the road for a couple of hundred metres, glancing back frequently for the police cars he kept expecting to see bearing down on him at any moment.

None had appeared by the time Ben heard the diesel rumble of a big articulated truck coming his way. He cleared the rain out of his eyes, stuck out his thumb.

The truck slowed and pulled up at the side of the road with a hiss of airbrakes. Ben clambered up into the cab, thanking the driver for stopping and doing his best to hide the bloody bandage with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

‘Travellin’ light, mate,’ the driver said in English with a grin and a strange look as he pulled away and the truck picked up speed. His accent was strongly South African.

Ben looked at the guy in the dim cab lights. Early-tomid-forties, scraggy, hollow-cheeked and unshaven, with greasy sandy hair tied back under a flat cap.

‘Name’s Jan,’ the driver said, putting out his hand. ‘Jan the man.’

‘No comprendo Inglese,’ Ben said. He didn’t take the hand. Jan shrugged and withdrew his hand, then gave another knowing grin and winked exaggeratedly. ‘That’s all right, mate. No hard feelings. You don’t have to pretend with me, know what I mean?’ He laughed, flicked the windscreen wiper lever and the wipers stepped up a notch, batting away the pouring rain.

Ben said nothing.

‘I recognised you right away,’ Jan said. ‘Never forget a face, that’s me.’ He tapped a finger against his temple. The grin was etched on his lips as if someone had carved it with a blade. Maybe somebody had, Ben thought. He wondered whether he could break the guy’s neck and take over at the wheel without needing to stop the truck to do it.

‘Hey, I’m not gonna report you, man,’ Jan said, wrinkling his nose as if this was the most distasteful idea imaginable.

‘No?’

‘Ha! You do speak English. Gave yourself away there, mate. Nah, I’d never shop you to the fuckin’ pigs.’ Jan spat somewhere onto the cab floor. ‘We’re cool, you know? Not enough of us around. See?’ He jerked up the sleeve of his grimy T-shirt and Ben saw the faded, crudely tattooed compass rose insignia on his withered arm. It was the emblem of the South African Special Forces Brigade. It looked fake to Ben. In his experience, the guys who really had been in Special Forces were those who didn’t talk about it.

‘We fear naught but God,’ Jan said, quoting the SASFB official motto. ‘Angola, ’82. I was there, man. We kicked some kaffir arse, let me tell you.’ The laugh again. ‘Those were the days, man. I left South Africa after the fuckin’ kaffirs took over in ’94. Now I have to drive these fuckin’ tractors for a living.’ He gave a loud snort. ‘But hey, man. Imagine you gettin’ in my truck.’ He thumped his fist on the horn, twice. ‘Unbe-fuckin-lievable, eh? Must be fate, or what? You know, what you did back there in Rome was sweet. You ask me, we ought to be droppin’ the hammer on a lot more of these politician bastards. If we’d had more guys like you, guys with bollocks, we’d still have a country back home instead of a fuckin’ zoo, know what I mean? Jesus fuckin’ H Christ.’

Ben sank back in his seat. Maybe tearing Jan’s windpipe out through his mouth would have to wait until he felt a little stronger. ‘You have a first aid kit on board this thing?’

‘I can abso-fuckin-lutely do better than that,’ Jan said, reaching down between his knees for a green moulded plastic case. ‘You catch one back there, yeah? I saw the fuckin’ lights, man. What the fuck?’

Ben took the case and opened it.

‘Jan the man’s personal survival kit,’ Jan said proudly. ‘Just like the fuckin’ old days, eh? Eh?’

There was a tube of codeine pills, a syringe with sterile needles and a vial of broad-spectrum antibiotic, a good supply of bandages, a surgical suture kit and a scalpel. In a separate compartment was a tiny folding stove complete with a cube of solid petroleum fuel and matches, some water-purifying tablets and a packet of dehydrated army rations. Jan must have been reading his issues of Combat and Survival pretty faithfully. Everything a wannabe warrior might need for the day he got to live his fantasy. Ben opened the codeine tube and popped a couple of pills.

‘So where you headed, bro?’ Jan asked.

Ben hesitated before replying. He wasn’t wild about divulging his plans to this guy – but under the circumstances he didn’t have an awful lot of choice. ‘Portugal,’ he said.

He’d been thinking about it ever since he’d escaped the warehouse. Salamanca was just fifty kilometres from the border, and Brooke’s little rural Portuguese hideyhole wasn’t too far on the other side. He badly needed somewhere quiet to lie low, get this injury seen to and figure out what the hell his next move would be.

‘I’m takin’ this load of shit from La Coruña to Seville,’ Jan said. ‘I can drop you right on the fuckin’ border. Be an honour, man.’

Ben’s head was spinning. He popped two of the codeine pills, closed his eyes and felt himself drifting through the void. Jan was still talking on in the background, but he was too tired and weak to care. Once the effects of the codeine kicked in he dozed fitfully, waking every so often to the monotonous rumble of the truck and Jan grinning wolfishly at him. Ben didn’t speak to him. Eventually, he fell into a deep, dreamless and dark sleep.

When he awoke again, the truck was pulled up at the side of a winding road in open countryside. The driver’s seat was empty. Ben checked his watch. It was after three in the morning. He slipped painfully down from the cab and walked around the side of the truck. The rain had stopped, and the stars were bright.

Jan was squatting in the bushes a few metres away, making no attempt to hide what he was doing.

‘Just takin’ a shit, man,’ he called over, grinning broadly.

‘You carry on,’ Ben said, and walked back towards the cab.

‘I was thinkin’, bro,’ Jan called after him. ‘When I’m done here, you let me take a look at that arm. Get that pill out for you. Maybe you’d let me keep it, eh? Little fuckin’ souvenir – what d’you say?’

While Jan was still occupied, Ben took the green plastic case from the truck cab and slipped away over the hill fifty metres beyond the other side of the road. He crouched down in a stand of trees and watched as the South African searched for him, then stamped his foot in anger a couple of times before getting back into his truck and driving away.

Using the stars to set his course westwards and light his way, Ben set off cross-country. After a while, he was pretty sure he’d passed into Portugal. He walked onwards through the night, feeling his strength draining like fuel from a tank, falling back on the old habits he’d learned all those years ago on SAS training marches in the Brecon Beacons. You didn’t think about your destination. You emptied your mind of all thought of the distance still to be covered, and focused instead on an object closer by, like a tree or a hill. Once you reached it, you set yourself a new marker, plodding doggedly from one to the next.

The pain from his bullet wound gradually worsened. He was going to have to attend to himself soon, or he’d end up in an unconscious heap in a ditch for someone to find him and report it to the cops. He used that thought to force himself to keep going.

By the time Ben’s energy was fading to a critical point, the first rays of dawn were cracking the rim of the dark horizon and he could see some farm outhouses in the distance. It was in a broken-down barn that he found the dusty hulk of the old Daihatsu four-wheel drive and climbed in. He dosed himself with more painkillers, lit the little stove on the passenger seat and used it to sterilise the scalpel blade. He then removed his improvised dressing, took a deep breath and set about performing surgery on himself.

A bad hour later, the copper-nosed 9mm bullet was lying wrapped up in a bloody wad of gauze on the passenger seat, and Ben had finished cleaning out the hole and stitching himself up. He injected a dose of antibiotics into a vein, then leaned back in the Daihatsu’s seat and passed out for a while.