Scott Mariani - The Armada Legacy

Serrato raised the Glock, then remembered it was empty with the slide locked back. With his other hand he fumbled in his pocket for another magazine. ‘I’ll kill you, you bitch!’

‘I don’t think so,’ Ben said. He picked up the Brown Bess from where it was propped against a hut wall. The musket was loaded with eighty grains of powder behind a musket ball wrapped in a small square patch of homespun Sapaki cotton, rammed down tightly inside the three-quarter-inch bore. Ben clicked the hammer back on full cock, hefted the long, heavy weapon and peered down the barrel at the lone figure of Ramon Serrato.

Serrato found the magazine in his pocket.

‘Shoot him, Ben!’ Brooke urged.

Ben took his finger off the trigger and lowered the musket. He shook his head. ‘No. I can’t shoot him.’

‘Ha! What did you expect, trying to kill me with that thing?’ Serrato laughed. In less of a hurry now, he began slotting the magazine into his pistol.

‘I can’t shoot him, because I made a promise,’ Ben said.

Serrato’s laughter died. ‘What promise?’

‘One to a friend,’ Ben told him.

Nico had emerged limping from the shadows. His face was covered in blood from where a bullet had creased his scalp. His eyes burned with a hotter fire than the blazing huts in the background.

Ben tossed Nico the Brown Bess.

Nico advanced. Serrato backed away, staring at him. ‘You!’ He raised his pistol. Too slow.

‘Adios, motherfucker,’ Nico said. He shouldered the musket and fired. There was a bright flash as the striking flint ignited the powder in the pan. A fraction of a second later the gun erupted with an ear-shattering blast.

Serrato was blown off his feet. He landed on his back with a fist-sized hole gaping in his chest, twitched twice, and then lay still.

Nico dropped the musket and fell to his knees. Now that they were avenged, he was finally able to weep for his dead children, and tears rolled down his bloody face.

It was over. Ben and Brooke left Nico alone and walked away, hand in hand.

‘We wrecked their village,’ he said sadly, surveying the devastation. The white pall of smoke was drifting high over the jungle, red-lit by the fires.

‘And saved half a million acres of forest from being destroyed forever,’ Brooke said, hugging him tightly.

The Sapaki people were re-emerging from the forest. There were cries of grief over the fallen, but before long they were lost in the victory chant of Tupaq and his warriors. Father Scally, Tica and Kusi began attending to the wounded. Come morning, the villagers would commence the task of rebuilding.

Ben stroked Brooke’s hair. He kissed her face. ‘You ready to go home now?’

She nodded.

‘Yes, Ben. I’m ready.’

Read on for an exclusive extract from Scott Mariani’s new novel, coming from Avon in 2014

Prologue

The Altai Mountains

Bayan-Ölgii Pro

Western Mongolia

The biting wind was starting to whip flurries of snow across the barren mountainside. Soon, Chuluun knew, the winter snowfalls would be here in earnest and it might be a long time before he could venture out this far again in search of food.

The argali herd the teenager was tracking had led him almost half a mile across bare rock from where he’d tethered his pony further down the mountain. Wolves were an ever-present concern, but the curly-horned wild sheep could sense the roving packs from a great way off, and they seemed calm enough, having paused on their trek to munch contentedly on a scrubby patch of heather, to reassure Chuluun that his pony was safe.

There was one predator too smart to let himself be noticed by the argali. Chuluun had been hunting over these mountains for six years, since the age of eleven, when his father had become too infirm to ride long distances any more, and he prided himself on his ability to sneak up on anything that lived, walked or flew. His parents and seven younger brothers and sisters depended almost entirely on him for meat, and in the harsh environment of Mongolia, meat meant survival.

Carefully staying downwind of the grazing sheep and moving with stealthy ease over the rocks, Chuluun stalked to within a hundred metres of his quarry before settling himself down at the top of a rise, in a vantage point from which his pick of the herd, a large male he estimated stood a good four feet at the shoulder, was nicely presented side-on.

Very slowly, Chuluun slid the ancient Martini-Henry into aiming position and hunkered down behind it. He opened the rifle’s breech, drew one of the long, heavy cartridges from his bandolier and slipped it silently inside. He closed the breech and flipped up the tangent rear sight. At this range he knew exactly how much elevation he needed to compensate for gravity’s pull on the trajectory of the heavy bullet.

The argali remained still, munching away, oblivious. Chuluun honoured his prey, as he honoured the spirit of the mountains. He blinked a snowflake from his eyelashes. Gently, purposefully, he curled his finger around the trigger, controlled his breathing and felt his heart slow as his concentration focused on the all-important shot. If he missed, the herd would be off and he couldn’t hope to catch up with them again today, nor this week. But Chuluun wasn’t going to miss. Tonight, his family were going to eat as they hadn’t eaten in a long while.

At the perfect moment, Chuluun squeezed the trigger.

And in that same moment, everything went insane.

The view through the rifle’s sights disappeared in a massive blurred explosion. His first confused thought was that his gun had burst on firing. But it wasn’t the gun.

Chuluun barely had time to cry out as the ground seemed to lurch away from under him and then heave him with terrifying violence into the air. He was spinning, tumbling, sliding down the mountain. His head was filled with a deafening roar. Something hit him with a hard blow and he blacked out.

When Chuluun awoke, the sky seemed to have darkened. He blinked and sat up, shivering with cold and beating the snow and dirt from his clothes, then staggered to his feet. His precious rifle lay half-buried in the landslide that had carried him down from the top of the rise. Still half-stunned, he clambered back up the rocky slope and peered, afraid to look, over the edge.

He gasped at the incredible sight below.

Chuluun was standing on the edge of a near-perfect circle of utter devastation that stretched as far as his keen young hunter’s eyes could see. Nothing remained of the patch of ground where the argali herd had been quietly grazing. The mountainside was levelled. Gigantic rocks pulverised. The pine forests completely obliterated. All gone, swept away by some unimaginable force.

His face, streaked with dirt and tears, contorted into an expression of disbelief. Chuluun gazed up at the strange glow that permeated the sky, like nothing he’d ever seen before. Blades of lightning knifed through the rolling clouds. There was no thunder. Just a heavy, eerie pall of silence.

Suddenly filled with conviction that something unspeakably evil had just happened here, he scrambled away with a terrified moan and started fleeing down the slope towards where he’d left his pony.

Chapter 1

Paris

Seven months later

The apartment was all in shadow. It wasn’t normal for Claudine Pommier to keep her curtains tightly drawn even on a bright and sunny June afternoon.

But then, it wasn’t normal for someone to be stalking her and trying to kill her, either.

Claudine was tense as she padded barefoot down the gloomy, narrow hallway. She prayed the boards wouldn’t creak and give her away. A moment ago she’d been certain she could hear footsteps outside the triple-locked door. Now she heard them again. Holding her breath she got to the door and peered through the dirty glass peephole. The aged plasterwork and wrought iron railing of the old apartment building’s upper landing looked distorted through the fish-eye lens.