Scott Mariani - The Martyr’s Curse

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AN ANCIENT CURSE. A SHOCKING MASSACRE.A THREAT TO UNLEASH THE ULTIMATE DISASTER.Could Ben Hope have found peace at last?That’s the question he’s asking himself after his wanderings through Europe have led him to a remote medieval monastery in the French Alps. A haven of serenity, a place he wants to remain.But wherever Ben goes, trouble is never too far behind.When a team of merciless killers invade his newfound sanctuary and slaughter the innocent monks, Ben’s revenge quest quickly draws him into a bewildering mystery of stolen treasure, deception and murder.What is the truth behind the cache of gold bullion apparently hidden for centuries under the monastery? What is the significance of an ancient curse dating back to a cruel heretic burning in medieval times? What are the real ambitions of the enigmatic leader of an organisation of doomsday ‘preppers’ calling themselves Exercitus Paratorum: the Army of the Prepared?As he works to unravel the clues, Ben is confronted with a terrifying reality that threatens to devastate the world and reshape the whole of our future. The race is on to prevent the ultimate disaster, and there’s only one man who can do it.BEN HOPE is one of the most celebrated action adventure heroes in British fiction and Scott Mariani is the author of numerous bestsellers. Join the ever-growing legion of readers who get breathless with anticipation when the countdown to the new Ben Hope thriller begins…

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‘Fuck them,’ Torben Roth said. He snapped another magazine into his Uzi. Hannah raised her pistol. Gröning and Hinreiner looked at each other, then at Guidinetti.

The clatter of small-arms fire filled the compound. Roth held his ground. A burst to the left; a burst to the right. Then he staggered and dropped his Uzi and blood flew and hit the wall behind him. Streicher ducked down low and ran to the fallen man and saw that his face had been ripped open by a rifle bullet. Streicher grasped him by the arms and began dragging him behind cover, helped by Gröning. Hannah kept on firing. Several of the soldiers were down, but now the Russian GAZ Vodniks were advancing and bringing their on-board heavy machine guns into play. The roar shattered the air; 14.5mm bullets ploughed through the parked Jeeps, gouged craters in the buildings, chewed up the concrete.

Streicher now knew beyond any doubt that he’d been right. Things were bad enough already. If they’d stayed inside the building a minute longer, none of them would have made it this far alive.

‘Help me,’ he yelled, dragging the bleeding, disfigured Roth. Between them, he and Wolf Schilling and Miki Donath managed to manhandle the injured man out of the field of fire and between the buildings while the others did what they could to hold back the soldiers.

The firepower coming at them was overwhelming. Hannah fell back when her pistol was empty. Guidinetti was hit in the shoulder and Evers was supporting him as they made their retreat. How so many of them made it back to the hole in the wire without getting shot to pieces, Streicher would never know. Staggering through the undergrowth towards the trees with Roth’s weight slippery and bloody in his arms, he was praying that the soldiers hadn’t already intercepted the waiting helicopters.

Sixty seconds later and the choppers would have been gone anyway. The pilots had heard the gunfire and were quickly powering up their turbines in desperation to get the hell away from here. Their skids were dancing off the ground and the vegetation was being flattened by the downdraught as the surviving team members clambered on board. Streicher, Hannah, Donath and Schilling and the injured Roth on one; Evers and Guidinetti and Hinreiner and Gröning aboard the other.

The soldiers were coming. Flitting shapes among the trees. Muzzle flashes lighting up the shadows of the thick green forest. Bullets cracked off the Perspex screen of Streicher’s chopper.

‘Take it up! Get us out of here!’ he yelled to the pilot.

As the choppers lifted off, the thicket suddenly crashed aside. Like a great scarred green armour-plated dinosaur scouring the jungle for its prey, a Korean People’s Army VTT-323 armoured personnel carrier lurched through the trees, flattening bushes and saplings and anything else in its path. Its twin machine guns swivelled up towards the escaping aircraft. But those weren’t what Streicher was gaping down at from the cockpit of the rising helicopter. It was the turret-mounted multiple rocket launcher that was angling up at them, tracking its targets and ready to fire at any moment.

‘Higher!’ he bawled over the din of the rotors, thumping the pilot on the shoulder. ‘Higher!’

Two rockets launched simultaneously in a twin jet of flame. They streaked through the trees and hit the second chopper and blew it apart in a blinding flash that gave way to an expanding fireball.

‘NO!’ Streicher howled as he saw it go down.

The burning wreck dropped from the air and crashed down on top of the armoured personnel carrier. A secondary explosion rocked the jungle, and then Streicher saw no more as his pilot spun up and away at full thrust, nose up, tail down.

They flew in numb silence over the forest. The green canopy zipped by below. Wolf and Miki were trying to hold down the bleeding, squirming Torben Roth and pump morphine into him from the first-aid kit. Hannah was lost in a world of her own, her face drawn and grim and spattered with someone else’s blood. She made no attempt to wipe it away.

And Udo Streicher was just beginning to contemplate the scale of the disaster. It would be a long time before he was fully able to calculate his losses, both human and financial.

But he’d be back. This wasn’t over. It would never be over. Not until he’d attained his goal. One way or another, the world would know his name before he was done.

It was, after all, his destiny.

Chapter Two

Hautes-Alpes, France

The present day

When they’d found the stranger, at first they hadn’t known what to do with him.

It was nineteen-year-old Frère Roby, the one they affectionately called simple, who’d first stumbled on the camp high up on the mountainside during one of his long contemplative rambles one morning in early October. Roby would later describe how he’d been following a young chamois, hoping to befriend the animal, when he’d made his strange discovery.

The camp had been made in a natural hollow among the rocks, sheltered from the wind, out of sight and well away from the beaten track, only accessible along a narrow path with a sheer cliff face on one side and a dizzy drop on the other. It was like nothing Roby had ever seen. In the middle of the camp was a shallow fire pit, about two feet deep, over which had been built a short, tapered chimney made of stone and earth. The fire was cold, but the remains of a spit-roasted hare showed that it had been used recently. Nearby, almost invisibly camouflaged behind a carefully built screen of pine branches, was a small and robust tent.

That was where he’d found the stranger, lying on his side in a sleeping bag with his back turned to the entrance. To begin with, Roby had been frightened, thinking the man was dead. As he dared to creep closer, he’d realised the man was breathing, though deeply unconscious. The chamois completely forgotten, Roby had dashed all the way back to the monastery to tell the others.

After some thought, the prior had given his consent, and Roby had led a small party of older men back to the spot. It was mid-afternoon when they reached the camp, to find the stranger still lying unconscious inside his tent.

The men soon realised the cause of the stranger’s condition, from the empty spirits bottles that littered the camp. They’d never seen anybody so comatose from drink before, not even Frère Gaspard that notorious time when he’d broken into the store of beer the monks produced to sell. They wondered who this man was and how long he’d been living here undetected, just three kilometres from the remote monastery that was their home. He didn’t look like a vagrant or a beggar. Perhaps, one of them suggested, he was a hunter who’d lost his way in the wilderness.

But if he was a hunter, he should have a gun. When they delicately searched his pockets and his green military canvas haversack in the hope of finding some identification, all they came across was a knife, a quantity of cash, some French cigarettes and an American lighter, as well as a battered steel flask half-filled with the same spirit that had been in the bottles. They also found a creased photograph of a woman with auburn hair, whose identity was as much a mystery to them as the man’s.

The monks were fascinated by the fire pit. The blackened mouth of the stone-and-earth chimney suggested that the stranger must have been living here for some time, perhaps weeks. The way it was constructed indicated considerable skill. They were men who’d been used to a hard, simple existence close to nature all their lives, dependent through the harsh Alpine winters on the firewood they’d gathered, chopped and seasoned themselves. They understood that the fire pit was the work of someone highly expert in the art of survival. That, as well as the green bag and the tent, made them wonder whether the stranger might at one time have been a soldier. Such things had happened before. A Wehrmacht infantryman had been found frozen to death not far from here in the winter of 1942, hiding in the mountains after apparently deserting his unit. As far as the monks knew, there weren’t any major wars happening at the moment, down there below in the world they’d left behind. The stranger was dressed in civilian clothes – jeans, leather jacket, stout boots – and his blond hair was too long for him to have belonged to the military any time recently.

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