The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Forty

Ben had a mixed attitude towards self-knowledge. In many ways he was a mystery to himself. He often had little clue why he acted the way he did in his everyday life. He’d spent more sleepless nights than he could begin to count, staring up at the dark ceiling and trying to analyse his own behaviour, wondering who he really was, what it was he really wanted from life, where he was going and where he’d end up.

In paradoxical stark contrast were those areas of absolute rock-solid certainty. Aspects of his personality and behaviour that presented no mystery whatsoever. Qualities in himself that he could trust and rely upon with utter confidence and unshakable self-belief. And one of those things was his ability to remain ice-cool and focused in moments of extreme danger that would reduce most men to a mewling sack of jelly. He’d simply been born that way, with a natural ability that his SAS instructors had recognised in their young recruit right from day one, and trained up to off-the-charts levels of perfection even before years of experience had honed and refined it still further. He’d confounded army doctors in medical tests by showing an actual decrease in heart rate and blood pressure during simulated combat situations. At times like these, his mind was able to compress seconds into milliseconds, so that what seemed to a normal person like a sensory overload of frantically speeded-up film, he experi-enced in frame-by-frame slow motion, allowing him all the time he needed to think and act. Calm and smooth and controlled. Evaluation. Observation. Analysis. Decision. Execution. No stress. No panic.

Not like the six men in whose field of fire he was standing at this moment. Facing an opponent like him had each of them exploding with supercharged nervous tension, a tidal wave of adrenalin threatening to drown them at any instant. He could see it in their bulging eyes and their terror-white faces. This was a first time for them.

He’d evaluated the situation. Now it was time to make his move. Which he did in a heartbeat. He swung the rifle muzzle a few degrees left, pulled the trigger and the FAMAS rattled off a three-shot fully automatic burst that stitched the ground at the feet of Cops One and Two and sent them flying backwards for cover. One of them fell to his knees and scrambled and rolled under the train. The other collapsed on his face as if he was trying to press himself into the gaps in the gravel.

By then the FAMAS muzzle was already swinging to the right and Ben’s finger was squeezing another burst out of it. The windscreen of the Citroën crumpled, its side mirrors exploded into shards of plastic and glass. Cops Three and Four dived around the back of the car. Ben paused momentarily to flip the fire selector switch to full-auto, pulled the trigger again and held it. The FAMAS spewed a deafening stream of copper-jacketed lead into the Citroën that perforated and crumpled the bodywork like paper and blew out the rest of the windscreen, shredded the plastic radiator grille, blasted the headlights apart. The front left corner of the car sank down on a shredded tyre. Then the right.

Then his gun was empty, the bolt locked back, smoke trickling from the open breech. The cops were cringing behind their cars. Not a single shot fired. Ben stood his ground in the open. Calmly dropped the empty twenty-five-round magazine from his rifle and inserted another from the holdall. Released the bolt with a smack of his palm and fired another sustained burst that chewed up the Citroën’s left flank and blew out the rear tyre, weaved a snaking line of bullet strikes up the road and drove Cops Five and Six in a jittery panic away from the cover of their Subaru.

‘Weapons on the ground,’ he said in a strong, clear voice. The cops barely hesitated. Six clattering sounds, muted in Ben’s ears after the heavy gunfire, as their pistols hit the dirt. He swept the rifle muzzle in a ninety-degree arc, left to right, covering them all. ‘Out where I can see you. Nice and easy.’

The cop hiding under the train crawled out. The one lying in the gravel pushed himself up on to his knees. The two cringing behind the shattered Citroën emerged tentatively, arms raised submissively, eyes cowed. The two who’d made a break from their Subaru put their hands on their heads and walked slowly back towards the road.

Silvie was staring at Ben as if she’d never seen him before. In the background he faintly registered noises of alarm and chaos from the train as the traumatised passengers witnessed the spectacle taking place.

Ben herded all six cops together into a ragged line next to the train. Keeping the rifle trained on them he collected their fallen weaponry. Five of the cops’ pistols were the ubiquitous ugly but functional Glocks. The sixth was an old Browning Hi-Power. Ben’s favourite personal defence weapon from years back. He dropped all six in the bag.

‘Phones and radios on the ground in front of you,’ he told the cops. ‘Drop your trousers. Then get down on your knees.’

Hostile, glowering looks, but no resistance as they obeyed. First the radios and phones. Then they started undoing their belts and unzipping themselves and revealing an array of briefs and boxer shorts. One by one they knelt down gingerly on the stony ground with their trousers around their ankles, furious and humiliated.

Ben jerked the rifle brusquely at Silvie, the way he’d have done with a real hostage. ‘You, pick that lot up and put it in the bag,’ he commanded, and she nodded and meekly hurried over to collect the mobiles and radio handsets from the ground in front of the line of kneeling officers. She dropped them in the green bag.

‘Now get in the car,’ Ben told her, motioning towards the blue Subaru. Silvie hurried across to it and got into the passenger seat. The rifle trained on the cops, Ben picked up the holdall and walked over to the Subaru and slung it on to the rear seats. He walked back and did the same with his green bag, then tossed the rifle in after it. Quickly pulled Eriq Sabatier’s Beretta from his belt and pointed it at his angry prisoners, in case they got any clever ideas as he stepped around to the open driver’s door. The Citroën looked like wreckage from a war zone, but the Subaru was untouched. Exactly as Ben had intended.

He slid in behind the wheel next to Silvie, slammed his door, waved bye-bye to the cops through the window, twisted the key, and the engine burbled into life with a note that promised all the performance he could have wished for. He steered around the remains of the Citroën, then stamped on the accelerator. The Subaru’s tyres squealed and spun, then dug in ferociously and the car took off with a roar, pressing them hard into their seats.

‘Maybe you’ll listen to me next time,’ he said to Silvie as they sped away. The immobile train shrank in the mirror, until the road peeled off its parallel course with the railway tracks and Ben threw the Subaru into a series of bends that cut the train from sight.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Okay, so that might have been a slight tactical miscalculation on my part.’

Ben fell silent and concentrated on driving. The Subaru was some kind of souped-up police interceptor, all right. The suspension was stiff and responsive, the steering quick and agile. It surged forward aggressively at the slightest touch of the throttle and stayed glued to the road no matter how recklessly he hurled it into the twisty bends. Scenery people would pay to see flashed past the windows in an invisible blur. The throaty roar of the turbocharged engine filled the cockpit.

But not quite loudly enough to drown out the thump of rotor blades overhead. Ben glanced upwards and glimpsed the dark shape of the chopper swooping down on them out of a sky that had been empty moments earlier, GENDARMERIE painted in bold white letters on its fuselage.

‘Shit,’ Silvie said again.