The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Seventeen

It blew with a shattering detonation and a shock wave of expanding superheated gases that instantly vaporised the contents of the cavern, both the dead and the living. The whole mountain rocked with the violence of the blast. First the explosion, then the implosion as the cavern fell in on itself. An avalanche of car-sized pieces of rubble came crashing down. Millions of tons of stone and dust tumbled and poured and slid and obliterated everything as the walls and ceiling gave way under the vast weight that had been bearing down on them for centuries. The neatly blasted-out circular entrance of the cavern collapsed like a giant mouth snapping shut, swallowing up everything that had been inside it seconds before.

Ben just made it through the hole before the roof came crashing down. The shock wave saved him, and almost killed him at the same time. It lifted him off his feet and propelled him out of the exploding cavern, all arms and legs. Tumbled him through the air and cannoned him against the rocky wall of the passage and flung him down on his side, knocking the wind out of him. The dragon’s breath of the blast erupted from the cavern, close enough to sear his skin. Just as it seemed as if the fireball would engulf him, the collapsing ceiling swallowed the explosion. Then, suddenly, deafening silence.

The air was filled with dust and smoke. Scorched, battered, stunned and blinded, barely knowing if he was dead or alive, Ben somehow scrambled to his feet and ran, utterly convinced that the whole rock tunnel was going to fall in and bury him down here for all eternity. But he kept running anyway, feeling the way ahead, blinking dust out of his eyes and coughing up the crap that filled his lungs, stumbling over the uneven ground, scraping his shoulders and elbows against the rough walls as he sprinted like a crazy man through the darkness. Showers of dust and stones rained down on him as he went. He couldn’t tell whether the ground was still shaking, or whether he was just unsteady on his feet.

He kept going. No fear, no restraint. No thoughts at all, just pure animal energy driving him forwards through the darkness, his muscles working like pistons and his heart thudding like a demented thing that threatened to burst out of his chest. And the ceiling didn’t come down to bury him. He made it through the twists and turns of the passage, and then to the fallen gold bar. This time he did trip over it, and tumbled headlong. He landed hard on his hands and heaved himself up with barely a pause, and kept running, upwards and upwards towards the light and the air. Then suddenly he could breathe, and see.

The glare of the sun hit him in the face as he reached ground level. Ben burst out of the doorway, caught it with his shoulder, spun and fell in a wheezing heap in the dirt. It took a few seconds before he fully realised that he’d made it out alive. Or just about. His hair was singed and the skin on his left cheek felt tender where the heatwave of the blast had scorched it, his hands were cut and bleeding and embedded with grit, and every muscle in his body was screaming in agony. He sat up and leaned against a wall, wiped the stinging dust out of his eyes and coughed up more of it that he’d swallowed. All the time, he was thinking furiously.

The killers had used a shaped charge to blow through the cavern wall, only to take what was inside and then plant a second, delayed, much bigger charge to seal the cavern off again.

Why would they do that?

Right now, he had no idea.

He rested five minutes, then another five, until his breathing had settled and he was convinced he had no major injuries. Just dozens of minor ones. Which was fine. He was functional, and that was all he needed to be.

Smoke was drifting from the doorway leading to the underground passages as he gathered himself up, dusted himself off and began walking back down the cloister. He was dizzy and nauseous, and a loud constant whine had set up in his ears from the explosion. He could see in his mind the faces of the dead. Roby, Père Antoine, all of them. He should have been able to do more for them. Many had been his friends, and many more he knew he’d have befriended if he’d been able to spend more time with them.

He couldn’t bury them. It would take him a month on his own with a shovel. The cops would have to deal with the clean-up. Ben felt obliged to call them in, but he didn’t intend to be here to face questioning when they turned up. Nor did he have a lot of confidence in their ability to sort out what the hell had happened here. Generally speaking, and for a variety of reasons that could be more or less summed up as professional differences, Ben and police officers didn’t mix well. It might have had something to do with the fact that he tended to obtain results, when they tended to fail. On occasion, it might also have had something to do with the kinds of methods he employed to get those results, which they didn’t always appreciate.

Ben limped back to his personal quarters, knowing he was seeing them for the last time. The first thing he did was use a rag to wipe down every surface he’d ever touched. Sooner or later, the monastery was going to be the subject of a major crime investigation, and the last thing he needed was for the cops to know he’d been here. With his past record, he was the perfect patsy for frustrated local detectives looking for someone to pin this on. Once he was satisfied that all his prints were erased, he gathered his few possessions and stuffed them inside his canvas bag, then slung it over his shoulder and left with a final glance at the rooms that had been his home.

After that, he headed back to the cloister where the dead shooter was still sitting exactly where Ben had left him, minding the two gold bars. Ben relieved him of them and put them in his own bag along with the rest of his stuff. The extra kilos hung uncomfortably from his bruised shoulder as he returned to the main yard, threading a path between the scattered bodies of the monks. The crow was back, continuing the meal Ben had interrupted earlier. He felt like flinging a stone at it, then reasoned that it had as much right to survive as anyone else.

With a painful effort, Ben hauled himself into the truck’s cab, dumped his heavy bag on the passenger seat and then started up the engine. It sounded quieter than before, but that was only because he was a little deaf after the blast. He forced the gearstick into first, touched the gas and the truck lumbered deeper into the yard. He brought it to a halt, crunched the stick into reverse and twisted the huge ship’s wheel to U-turn right around to face the gates, then straightened up the wheels and turned round in his seat to look out of the rear window as the truck backed up with a nasal transmission whine. He reversed as far as he could towards the buildings, careful not to let the knobbly tyres run over any of the dead monks. Leaving the diesel running in neutral, he jumped down from the cab, walked back to the dead shooter and grabbed him by the collar. ‘You didn’t think I was going to leave without you, did you?’ he said as he started dragging the body towards the truck.

It was a short drag and the guy wasn’t terribly heavy. Ben slalomed him in between the drying blood pools, then when they reached the truck he let go of the dead man’s collar and his forehead smacked limply to the ground. Ben undid the ties holding the tonneau cover down to the truck’s flatbed on one side, then turned back to the body. Rolled him over with his foot, bent over him and grabbed him by both arms to yank him into a sitting position before heaving him upright. The dead man’s knees kept giving way, and Ben supported him like a drunk carried from a wild party. He slammed him against the side of the truck’s flatbed and let his upper body topple backwards through the loose canvas, then bent down and grabbed his ankles and lifted both floppy legs off the ground, one after the other. With some twisting and heaving, he managed to get the body lying flat on the pitted wooden cargo bed.

Ben jumped up next to him. He looked at the rusty old tool locker bolted down behind the cab. Four feet long, two feet wide. The dead man wasn’t a huge guy. Ben raised the creaky locker lid, propped it up and lifted out the removable compartment full of crusty old spanners, which he shunted to the edge of the flatbed and let fall to the ground. The locker was empty now, except for the coil of old rope and the pair of bolt croppers lying in the bottom. But it wouldn’t be empty long.

‘In you go,’ Ben said. If he had to share the truck with a dead man, he’d rather not have the guy stinking up the inside of the cab. Besides, nosy cops had a tendency to spot dead men in the passenger seat quicker than they might check on-board tool lockers. With more heaving and twisting, he manhandled the dead man’s torso into the box, shoulders twisted diagonally, his left arm under him and the right folded across his chest. The guy’s head was up at an angle, as if peering down his body to see what was going on. Ben shoved him down deep inside the box with the heel of his boot. Not a big man, but not a midget either, and his legs wouldn’t fit. They overhung the edge of the locker, no matter which way Ben tried to squeeze them in. Which was easily remedied, by means of three or four judicious bone-crunching stamps to his knees that allowed them to be folded up sideways and crammed into the tight space.

People talked about having respect for the dead. Ben didn’t like having to break the guy’s legs this way. He’d much rather have done it while he was still alive.

Once the body was all tucked in, Ben covered him up with the lid and banged it down tight. Then jumped down from the flatbed, quickly fastened up the tonneau cover and climbed back behind the wheel. He crashed the lever out of neutral and into first, pressed down hard on the pedal and the truck lurched forwards with a dieselly rasp.

He didn’t look back as he steered it across the yard, towards the open gateway. The truck lumbered through the gates. He twisted the wheel to the right, heading in the opposite direction from his route to Briançon the day before. Leaving behind the dead bodies of his friends, and the place he’d called home.

He didn’t know where the road was going to take him. Not yet.

At this moment, he knew just one thing. That whoever had done this wanted blood.

And that blood was what they were going to get.