Scott Mariani - The Heretic’s Treasure

He caught himself. What the hell are these thoughts? What’s wrong with you?

Ben was furious with himself by the time he reached his hotel. He stormed straight up to his room, flopped on the bed and lay there for a while, his mind choked with conflicting emotions. They washed over him, pierced his skull, tormenting him. Feelings he’d thought he would never have again in his life. Not since losing Leigh.

He sat bolt upright on the bed.

You’re lusting after the wife of the man who saved your life.

No, he thought, it’s more than that.

Gritting his teeth with frustration he jumped up, strode over to the mini-bar and wrenched it open. There were some miniature bottles of whisky inside. He pulled them all out, gazed at them for a moment, then shoved them back inside. He didn’t even feel like drinking. He didn’t know what he felt like. It was all just confusion.

He slumped back on the bed. Fought to squeeze Zara from his thoughts-but all his mind did was race back to thinking about Harry. What am I going to do ? he asked himself again.

Just when he’d thought he was out of it-out of that whole ugly world, done with field work and violence forever-fate was dragging him back in. This man wanted him to do murder on his behalf.

And yet Ben only had to cast his mind back to the events of May 14th, 1997, to remind himself just how much he owed Harry Paxton.

A day he’d never forget. There’d been a time, years ago, when the memory of it used to fill his dreams almost every night. Now the nightmare visited him only sporadically. But he’d never thought it was going to return to haunt him like this. He closed his eyes, and suddenly he was reliving the events as though it had happened yesterday.

* * *

For the entire decade of the nineties, the West African country of Sierra Leone, one of the most deprived and corrupt nations on the planet, had been consumed in violent civil war. Atrocities were committed wholesale-burnings, machete hackings and mass executions became commonplace. Towns and villages were razed to the ground as brutal gangs of self-styled rebels rampaged through the countryside, murdering and raping everyone in their path. Among the rebel fighters were child soldiers as young as eight, drugged and brainwashed into a state of zombie-like inhumanity, who had been handed automatic weapons and commanded to kill, kill, kill. Which they did, ruthlessly and without compunction.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world watched with little interest. Just another African tribal war. Just another Congo. Just another Rwanda. To the cold Western political mind, African lives were cheap, generally not worth intervening over. So the suffering and bloodshed went on unabated, and men like Ben could only watch and wait and hope that one day they’d be given the order that could help make a small difference to those innocent victims.

The worst of the rebel groups operating in Sierra Leone at that time had been a vicious militia force, several hundred strong, calling itself the Cross Bones Boys. Its thirty-year-old leader was a psychopathic despot known as The Baron, whose idea of amusement was to order the limb-hacking, followed not too quickly by the beheading, of entire village populations. Under his command, the militia was cutting a swathe of death through the country. Whatever political or idealistic motivation it might have started out with when war had first broken out had long since been perverted. For years, they’d been left pretty much to their own devices as civil war tore the country apart. There was so much blood soaked into the soil that it seemed nobody even cared any more.

But in May 1997, six years into the war, the Cross Bones Boys broke the unwritten rules by daring to kidnap, and then butcher, three Western aid workers. At that point, orders had come from on high that reprisals be carried out against The Baron and his militia. Ben’s SAS squadron, headed up by Lt. Col. Harry Paxton, had been flown into the country aboard a UN aid aircraft and stationed clandestinely at the British Embassy in Freetown.

Officially, the SAS were never there. Unofficially, the mission objectives were simply to capture or kill as many of the Cross Bones Boys as possible, including The Baron himself, and chase off the rest. In theory, it was the kind of job the SAS were born for.

It hadn’t been that easy in practice. With the whole country locked down in terror and suppression, MI6 intelligence agents struggled to gain any leads as to the whereabouts of the Cross Bones Boys and their leader. For two weeks the SAS squadron had waited on standby, ready to move at a moment’s notice. It had been a frustrating, tense time.

Finally, agents had received a tip-off. The news was promising. In two days, The Baron and his second-in-command, Captain Kananga, would be passing through a Catholic mission on the banks of a river delta called Makapela Creek. The building complex had been deserted since back in 1992, early in the war, after the resident nuns and priest had been brutally slaughtered by another marauding rebel group. It was exactly the kind of place the Cross Bones leadership might hole up for a day or two and, according to the intelligence source, The Baron and Kananga would only have a light force of men with them.

An eight-man SAS team were quickly assembled and tooled up. A Chinook from RAF Special Forces 7 Squadron had flown them deep into the jungle. From the Landing Zone they’d trekked through the damp greenery and stifling heat. Reaching the Makapela Creek mission after dark, they’d got into position for the assault. It was meant to have been swift, surgical and decisive.

It hadn’t quite turned out that way.

As the assault got underway, it quickly became clear that there was a much greater enemy force in the area than the intelligence reports had led anyone to believe. Militia soldiers suddenly burst out of hidden positions in the trees.

Hundreds of them. A rag-tag army swathed in cartridge belts, fired up with bloodlust and crack cocaine, heavily armed and running at them like demons.

Before anyone knew what was happening, a wild firefight had erupted across the whole mission complex. It had been mayhem, fast and furious and deadly. The jungle was lit up with the muzzle flashes of automatic weapons as the enemy started closing in. Gunfire exploded from everywhere. Within minutes the SAS team had found themselves encircled and cut off. They’d established positions in and around the buildings and fought back ferociously as bullets pinged and zipped all about them.

But they were massively outnumbered and, however many bodies piled up in the killing ground around the mission, more screaming Cross Bones Boys kept pouring out of the jungle. The SAS squad were in real trouble, and they knew it. Once they’d run out of ammunition, the militia rebels would close in to take them alive. The ensuing machete party would provide hours of macabre entertainment for The Baron.

One by one, Ben watched his teammates go down. Milne and Jarvis were blown to pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade round that ripped through the building they were firing from. Clark, the radio operator, had been crouched right next to Ben in the roofless wreck of the old chapel when he’d taken a .50-calibre machine gun bullet that left his head like a scooped-out walnut shell.

Ben had used his last grenade to destroy the concealed machine gun emplacement from where the shots had come. Moving low through the insane torrents of gunfire, he’d clambered over Clark’s corpse and used the radio to call in air support. At that moment, he’d felt the hot punch of a bullet take him in the shoulder. He staggered, but stayed on his feet.

After that, Ben’s memories were hazy. He remembered the searing heat of flames tearing through the mission buildings. The constant frenzied chaos of gunfire. The screams that pierced the night. The bodies of his comrades lying slumped where they’d fallen. The blur of shapes darting between buildings as the enemy kept on coming. His teammate, Smith, crouching a few yards away with his rifle tight against his shoulder, firing right, firing left.