The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Eighteen

If she leaned her head close to the window and peered downwards, Hannah Gissel could see the shadow of the Bell 429 flicking and rippling over the picture-perfect pastureland below them as they flew northwards towards their destination. The roar of the rotors was muted in her radio headset. She turned and smiled at Udo Streicher, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder alongside her in the pilot’s seat, and gazed at him for a few seconds with a secret look of admiration. His face was set in an expression of concentration, his eyes hidden behind his aviator shades. He appeared outwardly calm, but Hannah could tell from the way he held himself that there was a bright twinkle behind those dark glasses, and that inside he was bursting with glee and leaping about like a lottery winner, pumping his fists in the air, roaring with laughter. She felt exactly that way herself, though like Udo she was far too restrained to let it show.

In fact, her heart was thumping almost as fast as the helicopter rotors. They’d done it. They’d damn well done it. Even after the devastating setback of the failed North Korean attempt, she’d never doubted her man’s ability to pull this off. Now they were almost home and dry. Ready for the next phase to begin.

Then things would really start to get interesting.

Hannah twisted further around in her seat and looked at the eight white oblong containers secured inside the passenger space behind them. Securely locked, carefully strapped down to prevent them from tumbling about in flight. Their shiny white super-tough plastic shells gleamed in the bright morning sunlight that filled the cabin. The fruit of years of planning and sacrifice. Theirs at last.

Oh, yes, things were definitely going to start getting interesting from here on.

Before too long, the chopper overflew the twisting blue river that marked the western boundary of the hundred-acre organic dairy farm. Streicher gave a little smile of satisfaction as they entered what he considered his own airspace. Like all his real estate holdings, he owned this land in a company name that could never be traced back to him personally. It had been the best investment he’d ever made, even though he had absolutely no intention of ever selling it, and even less interest in organic dairy farming. All but a ten-acre chunk of the land had been leased for the last twelve years to a reliable, hard-working couple named Lili and Jens Mosman, who employed enough hands and did a good enough job of the day-to-day running of the farm to turn a reasonable profit. The Mosmans enjoyed a harmonious rapport with their landlord, whom they knew only as ‘Herr Schumann’, and who left them alone to do their thing, never interfering, seldom seen, and then only from afar. The one time they’d actually met face to face was to sign the lease on the farmland, years ago.

In return for Herr Schumann’s generosity and fairness towards them, the Mosmans never expressed curiosity about, and gave a wide berth to, the ten-acre patch that he kept for himself, circled by trees and securely fenced off from the rest of the spread. As far as they were concerned, it was just a convenient location for their colourful landlord to keep his helicopter and a few other of his possessions.

Which, as far as that went, was no word of a lie. At the heart of the ten-acre patch was the large hangar that housed the Bell when it wasn’t in use. A private road ran through the trees and between fields along the edge of the farmland; now and again the Mosmans might catch a distant glimpse of Herr Schumann and his wife, to whom they’d never been introduced but whose name they’d been told was Ulrike, zapping off in one of his collection of expensive motor vehicles. It was no longer much of a topic for discussion in the Mosman home. Herr Schumann was obviously wealthy and possibly slightly eccentric in his ways, but hardly nuts enough to warrant much in the way of speculation, let alone gossip. In any case, the Mosmans were not the most imaginative of folks, and generally too busy with the running of the farm to think about much else.

The chopper rattled over well-kept farm buildings and neatly fenced green pastures dotted with grazing cattle. Jens Mosman’s bright red tractor was cutting across one of the lower fields, looking like a shiny toy from high above. Soon after, Streicher dropped altitude as the circle of pine forest surrounding his personal acreage came into view. At its centre, the big hangar with its wood cladding and pitched roof looked archetypally Swiss. It was surrounded by an apron of concrete, connected to the perimeter fence and high gates by the private road.

Streicher activated the landing-gear controls. The helicopter sank gently downwards, treetops blotting out the view of farmland all around. It touched neatly down on the concrete apron and taxied towards the huge steel shutter that was the only entrance to the hangar.

Hannah pointed a small, custom-made remote control. It had a ten-digit keypad, and below it two coloured buttons, red on the right and green on the left. She pressed the green button with a manicured nail and the shutter instantly began to wind open. The rotors slowed from a roar to a lazy whoop-whoop-whoop and the whine of the turbine deepened in pitch. Streicher waited until the shutter was fully elevated, then taxied inside the wide rectangular entrance. Hannah pressed the remote again and the door began to close behind them.

Lights came on automatically, filling the huge hangar with brightness. The concrete floor was gleaming red. The walls were dazzling white. Parked tight against one wall, taking up less than half its length, was the Volvo articulated lorry that Dominik Baiza had driven back alone. Baiza was one of very few people trusted with access to the hangar. As instructed, before leaving he’d unloaded the Lenco BearCat from the trailer and parked it neatly to one side. Across the hangar were a few of Streicher’s more leisure-orientated vehicles: his classic Benelli six-cylinder motorcycle, his fully dressed Honda Gold Wing Aspencade, his Harley, and the impossibly low, sleek shape of the Pagani Zonda supercar that looked more like a carbon-fibre space fighter than an automobile.

Streicher finished taxiing the Bell into its designated space, which was marked out in neat white paint lines on the floor. He and Hannah waited a few moments until the rotors had slowed to a standstill, then he disembarked first and stood by the hatch as she carefully passed out the white containers one by one. With equal care, Streicher laid them in a neat row on the carry rack of a specially adapted electric golf buggy. When the eighth container was securely in place, the two of them clambered aboard the open-sided buggy. Streicher pressed the accelerator pedal and the little vehicle whooshed off silently across the shiny floor.

An intruder peering in through the window would have been baffled by the sight, because there was apparently nowhere inside the hangar for the golf buggy to ferry its cargo to. No storage facilities of any kind, no other visible rooms. It was just a vast open rectangular space, like an enormous garage.

Until Hannah produced the little remote handset she’d used to open the shutter doors. She entered a six-digit combination code and pressed the red button.

Nothing happened for a few moments.

Then the near-invisible hairline seam that traced a ten-metre square in the floor began to widen to the whoosh of hidden hydraulic gears, and the secret trapdoor opened up in front of them.

Finally, now that he was truly home and dry, Streicher allowed a wide grin of triumph to spread across his face.

‘We did it, Udo,’ Hannah said. It was a rare thing for her to show emotion, but at that moment she could have cried.

‘We did, didn’t we?’ he replied with a chuckle, and directed the silent vehicle down the ramp into the underground domain below that virtually nobody else in the world knew existed.