The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Sixty-Two

Wolf Schilling dropped his radio and ran along the corridor to the rec room where Dominik Baiza, Riccardo Cazzitti, Silvain Chavanne and Stefan Ringler were stretched out on sofas and armchairs watching a favourite post-apocalyptic thriller movie on the fifty-inch Panasonic.

‘Where are the others?’ Schilling said, standing in the doorway.

Baiza looked up from the sofa. ‘Zwart’s taking a shit. Lindquist’s still in the lab. As for Wokalek, he was working out in the gym last time I saw him. Hannah’s off somewhere, doing what Hannah does. What’s up?’

‘Situation. I’m picking a four-man team to join me out there. You guys are elected. C’mon, on your feet. Work to do.’

‘Watching the movie, man,’ Ringler groaned.

Wolf Schilling clapped his hands. ‘Shift your arses, people. Go, go, go. Cazzitti, run to the armoury and break out the MP5s. You should be pleased, Ringler. Faban’s back and you get to do what you want with her. Let’s move it!’

Once they were fully tooled up, the hit squad raced through the tunnels in three electric buggies and came out through the hangar. The boss had reset the six-digit bunker entry/exit code again that morning. It was hard to keep up with all his frequent changes.

Inside the hangar, the five jumped out of the buggies. Wolf Schilling activated the control to lock down the bunker, then aimed the remote towards the steel shutters and stabbed the green button. With a jerk of steel cables followed by an electric whirr, the lower sill of the shutter rolled up just far enough for them to slide under, scraping their weapons as they went. The shutter whirred down behind them.

Keeping close to the building, they darted around to the far side to cut across the grass unseen from Perimeter Gate 17. They ran to the fence and Schilling undid the padlock on the nearest gate, allowing them access to the surrounding ring of woodland. The intruders were nearly a quarter of a mile away on the far side of the perimeter, so they had to move fast.

Wolf Schilling unslung his Heckler & Koch MP5SD submachine gun. It was the sound-suppressed version with the fat silencer that completely shrouded the barrel, one of the specialised military items provided for the Parati by their old pal Miki Donath. The four other men were carrying the same model, all fully bombed up with EOTech red dot optics and C-Mag hundred-round magazines, enough to start and finish a small war. They moved through the trees at a loping stride, their footsteps silent on the mossy ground, and covered the quarter mile in just under four minutes.

As they approached Perimeter Gate 17, they spread out. Riccardo Cazzitti had learned more than just chopper mechanic skills in the Italian Parachute Infantry Brigade. He prided himself on being able to sneak up on anything that lived and breathed. Taking the outside flank, his alert gaze darted to left and right, the fat muzzle of the H&K moving instinctively wherever he looked and his trigger finger optically connected to his brain, so that all he had to do was lock eyes on his target and it would go down in a silenced purr of machine-gun fire. Fifteen metres to his left crept Dominik Baiza, who was strictly more of a vehicles man and less comfortable on combat detail. Fanning out from Baiza’s left, Schilling and Ringler and Chavanne spanned the remaining woodland. Nothing could escape them as they combed through the trees.

Chavanne reached the point of the fence where the intruders had been sighted. He gave a low whistle. Nada. Maybe the boss had been dreaming. Maybe this was just some drill he’d concocted to keep them from getting fat and dull watching movies all the time. He grinned at the thought.

Then something impacted the back of his neck very hard and his vision exploded white like a magnesium flare. He barely registered hitting the ground, and didn’t register the cold steel blade slipping between his ribs as more than a momentary flash of agony.

Then he knew nothing at all.

Stefan Ringler caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to his left, frowning hard and pointing his weapon in the direction of where Chavanne had been just a moment ago. He couldn’t see him any more. He changed course, cutting ninety degrees towards the fence. The trigger pull on his MP5 weighed in at about six pounds, and he had about four pounds of pressure on it as he stalked through the trees.

Two metres closer. Still no sign of Chavanne.

Three metres closer. Where the hell was he? This was no time to nip behind a pine trunk for a slash. He opened his mouth, but knew he had to stay silent.

Stefan Ringler stayed silent for the rest of his life, which lasted less than four seconds. Technically, long enough to yell out and alert his teammates, but the black-clad forearm that whipped around his neck from behind and locked itself in a boa constrictor grip around his throat made any kind of sound impossible, apart from the thrashing of his legs as he was swiftly dragged to the mossy ground and the life choked out of him. Then, a terrible pain as his neck was twisted left and right and something snapped deep inside, and the lights went out.

Ben let the body fall limply away from him and got back on his feet. Silvie Valois was just a shadow among the trees, five metres away. He tossed Ringler’s MP5 and the shadow reached nimbly out and caught it without a sound. He pointed at her, then motioned past her through the trees, then tapped his watch and held up five fingers, and the shadow nodded imperceptibly in reply. He crept along the line of the fence as Silvie moved silently at a perpendicular angle away from him and curved round to her left to come up behind the wing man on the far side.

Ben counted down the last of the five seconds, heard the sharp metallic purr of suppressed gunfire twenty metres away through the trees, and then opened up with the submachine gun he’d taken from the first dead guy. The Heckler & Koch Maschinenpistole was even more familiar to him than the Browning Hi-Power. He’d carried it in deserts and jungles and urban war zones, fired it in snow and underwater and in total darkness. He was as proficient with it as it was possible to be.

But even for a novice shooter, the enemy were too close and distinct to be missable. That was all they were in that moment: the enemy. Not men, not people. Three remaining, and none of them had the slightest inkling what was happening until the angled crossfire of two shooters mowed them down, left to right, right to left. The MP5SD silencer was highly effective. He felt the gun judder in his hands and the muzzle try to climb under the combined recoil of fifteen nine-millimetre Parabellum rounds a second. Five solid seconds of automatic fire. A combined total of one hundred and fifty copper-jacketed bullets zipping through the foliage and clipping leaves and punching through vital organs and bone and soft tissue as the men crumpled and fell amid almost eerie silence.

Ben would never know their names or care one way or the other, but Dominik Baiza, Wolf Schilling and Riccardo Cazzitti all died within five seconds of one another. Which was a far shorter and more merciful interval than Streicher’s victims at Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux had had to endure.

It would have been more like two seconds, but Wolf Schilling didn’t die right away. Ben walked over to the fallen man as he twitched and kicked face down on the mossy ground. He stepped on the submachine gun still clenched in the man’s hand. Crouched down and drew the SOG once more. He slipped it up into the soft spot behind the man’s ear and buried it deep inside the base of his brain. The blade found its mark with surgical precision and the kicking stopped.

Ben withdrew the knife, wiped the blade on the dead man’s sleeve, then sheathed it and stood and stepped away, feeling nothing much except the quiet knowledge that every opponent no longer walking equalled one less obstacle between him and the end of this.

He looked over at Silvie as she stepped out from between the trees. She had her rifle slung over her back and the submachine gun cradled in front of her, a wisp of smoke still curling up from the muzzle of the hot silencer. All the ugly black hardware dangling from her body made her look smaller and slighter than she was.

Ben said, ‘Okay?’

She nodded, pale but handling it. ‘I’m fine.’

He studied her face for a moment and believed that she wasn’t about to start shaking and collapse in shock.

‘I guess they know we’re coming now, don’t they?’ she said.

‘I would imagine so,’ he said.

She gazed down at the bodies. Liquid sadness in her eyes, the wistful expression of a young veterinarian who’d been compelled to euthanise a litter of kittens. ‘You’ve done this before,’ she said, turning the look on him.

He nodded. It would get worse from here on in, he thought. But he didn’t say it.

‘Not me,’ she said. ‘Not like that. It was self-defence, those other times.’

Welcome to my world, Ben thought, but didn’t say that either. He switched his submachine gun for a fully loaded one from one of the dead men, then started frisking the bodies. Nothing on the first two, apart from a stick of gum and some cigarettes, loose change, a Bic lighter. He moved to the third and rolled him over. Like the others he was a white European, late thirties or so, short brown hair, ruddy features. Ben found a remote-control handset in his pocket. Some kind of custom-produced unit, with no maker’s name anywhere on it. It had a keypad and two coloured buttons, one red, one green. Ben didn’t know what to make of it.

The dead man’s right arm was draped limply across his chest. Ben brushed it aside so he could check the rest of the pockets. The dead arm flopped to the ground, the fingers slightly clawed. Ben noticed a stain on the palm of his hand, like oil, or smeared ink. He picked up the limp hand and uncurled the fingers.

It wasn’t a stain. It was the sweat-smudged remnants of a six-digit number hastily scribbled on the dead man’s palm in biro.

Ben looked at it, then at the remote, and realised what he was seeing. The kind of raging paranoiac Streicher was would spare no effort in constantly changing passwords and numbers for everything he did, just like he kept issuing new phones to his people. Security numbers would be no different. Or the passcode to open an electronic lock. He’d reset them so often that even his closest aides couldn’t keep track.

Unless they wrote them down. Human error. The fallibility principle. No matter how secure the system, there was always a weak link somewhere.

‘I think we just found our way inside,’ he said to Silvie.