The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Sixty-Seven

No air had ever tasted sweeter than the gentle breeze that wafted into the hangar as the shutter door cranked open. Streicher filled his lungs and looked out at the evening light settling over the trees. The moon was out, the night’s first stars appearing against the darkening blue. So beautiful. He laughed out loud and walked back to the chopper.

Within a couple of minutes, the turbine was powering up. He engaged the undercarriage gears and gently taxied out through the open shutter. The rotors began to turn, slowly at first but quickly gathering speed. He’d soon be out of here. The rest would be history.

Turning away from the controls, he made sure that his priceless payload was securely tied down and that none of the twelve canisters could roll or fall out of their crate. Everything was looking good. He turned back to the controls. Here we go, he thought. Freedom and victory. It was a wonderful feeling.

The rotor was almost at full speed now.

As an afterthought, Streicher reached into his pocket and took out the little cocaine bottle. Tapped some out on top of the dashboard, poked it into a crooked little line with his finger, then lowered his face to the dash and snorted the powder up. He gasped and threw his head back, closed his eyes and had never felt so elated and happy in his life.

He opened his eyes.

A figure was standing in front of the chopper. Ragged and bloody and unsteady on his feet.

‘You,’ Streicher breathed.

The weight of the ex-Soviet rocket-propelled grenade launcher over his good shoulder was almost more than Ben’s weakening legs could bear. The wind from the chopper’s rotors was like standing on a mountaintop in the middle of a storm. He swayed, then blinked and righted himself. The weapon was angled over his shoulder and pointing straight at the helicopter’s cockpit. At this range, he wasn’t going to need the flip-up sights, even if he’d been able to see them. His vision was badly blurred and darkening around the edges.

Streicher clambered out of the chopper and jumped down on the concrete apron, staring at Ben with an incredulous grin and crazy eyes. His nose and upper lip were dusted with something white.

‘You’re going nowhere, Streicher,’ Ben shouted. The effort it cost him to speak was enormous.

‘You fool!’ Streicher yelled over the din of the rotors, his shirt crackling and hair whipping in the powerful draught. ‘Fire that thing and you’ll blow the canisters. You’ll release the plague anyway.’

Ben was beginning to shake with the feverish cold that was spreading through him and the wind that was chilling his blood-soaked clothes against his flesh. He knew that Streicher was right. Not even an RPG blast at close range could be guaranteed to incinerate all the disease agent. He could visualise the unburned bacteria whipped up and carried high in the smoke from the explosion before slowly dissipating to drift gently on the evening breeze, with nothing but a prayer to stop them from carrying to nearby farms, villages, towns.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I can’t use this thing.’

He let go of the RPG and it slid off his shoulder and hit the ground with a dull metallic thud.

Streicher laughed again.

Ben felt himself losing balance. The darkness was encroaching further around the edges of his vision. He wobbled on his feet and managed to stay upright, the pain getting bad now. Getting worse than anything he’d ever felt before.

‘I’ll just have to use this,’ he heard himself say.

He saw Streicher’s expression change. The man took a step away. Then another, ducking back towards the helicopter.

As if in a dream, Ben felt his good arm reach back to that familiar place behind his right hip and his fingers close on the chunky grip of the Browning Hi-Power. Felt the steel clear the holster, registered the gun appearing in front of his blurring vision as he thrust it out one-handed, barely aware of it except as just an extension of his arm.

The sound of the report was half-drowned by the rotor blast, but Ben might not even have heard it otherwise. He was only dimly conscious of the snap of the recoil in the palm of his hand, and of Udo Streicher’s brains blowing out against the fuselage of his own chopper, and of the man’s knees folding and twisting under him as he went straight down like a sack of laundry, twitched once on the ground and then lay still with blood and pulped cerebral matter spilling over the concrete.

By then, Ben was already falling, falling, backwards off the edge of a cliff and tumbling for ever into nothingness.