blonde hair sticking out from under the rough sacking cloth. Their clothes were torn and grimy.
The six men quickly covered the room with their weapons. There was no sign of the rest of the kidnappers. The silence in the place was total. Just the wind in the naked branches outside, and the cawing of a crow in the distance.
The team leader strode up to the children, holstering his weapon.
He was just three steps away from them when he saw it. By the time his brain had registered the device attached to the girl, it was too late.
The flash was blinding. The team members instinctively covered their faces, mouths dropping open in shock.
The incendiary device was small but potent. The children burst alight, their bodies twisting and tumbling, the flames curling around them, melting their clothes. Beneath the flaming hoods, their hair burned and shrivelled. The sackcloth dropped away to show the white, staring eyes in the blackening faces.
The room was filled with smoke and the acrid stench of melting plastic as the burning mannequins collapsed onto the mattress. Fire pooled all around them.
A door flew open, and a blond-haired man walked into the room. He was tall, just under six feet, dressed in black combat trousers and a black T-shirt with the word ‘INSTRUCTOR’ spelt out in white lettering across his chest.
His name was Ben Hope. He’d been watching the trainee hostage rescue team on a monitor as they’d approached the purpose-built killing house he used for tactical exercises.
The team lowered their weapons and instinctively flipped on their safety catches, even though every pistol in the room was loaded with blanks. One of the men stifled a cough.
Behind Ben, another man came into the smoky room carrying a fire extinguisher. He was the simulated kidnapper the team leader had shot earlier. His name was Jeff Dekker, and he’d been a captain with the Special Boat Service regiment of the British Army before coming to work as Ben’s assistant at the tactical training facility.
Jeff walked over to the burning mattress and the two half-melted dummies and doused the flames with a hissing jet of white foam. He looked up and grinned at Ben.
‘Thanks, Jeff.’ Ben reached into the pocket of his combat trousers and took out a crumpled pack of Gauloises and his battered old Zippo lighter. He flipped the lighter open, thumbed the wheel. Lit a cigarette and clanged the lighter shut.
Then he turned to the team. ‘Now let me show you where you went wrong.’
Chapter Three
Two hours later the session was over and the weary trainees filed back along the dirt track through the woods to the main buildings. The rain had stopped, and the sun was coming out.
Ben glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better get moving. Brooke’s plane will be coming in.’ It was a twenty-minute drive to the airport. He reached for the Land Rover key in his pocket.
‘I can go pick her up, if you want,’ Jeff offered.
‘Thanks. But I’ve got to go and fetch some crates of wine on the way back. We’re getting low.’
Jeff grinned. ‘And we can’t be having that.’
As the trainees wandered off to get a shower and a change of clothes, Ben left Jeff at the squat block-built office and walked across the cobbled yard to the battered green Land Rover. Storm, his favourite of the guard dogs, came running over from his kennel. Ben opened the back for him, and the big German Shepherd leaped inside, claws scrabbling on the metal floor. Then Ben swung up inside the cab, fired up the engine and steered the Land Rover off down the bumpy track through the gates, turning out onto the main road.
As he drove down the winding country lanes, he thought about the last few months, and how much they’d changed his life.
He could barely remember the young man he’d once been, the youth who’d given up his theology studies to join the British army at the age of twenty. He’d had the devil in him in those days. His relentless pursuit of perfect physical and mental fitness, his torturous determination, had seen him qualify for the super-elite 22 SAS regiment while still in his early twenties. He’d seen bloody conflict in theatres of war around the globe. Over the eight years that followed, he’d battled, sweated and bled his way up to the rank of Major.
But by then he already knew that his time fighting dirty wars for the benefit of shadowy figures in the corridors of power was over. When he’d finally run out of illusions, he walked away from the regiment forever and turned his skills to a higher purpose.
Crisis response consultant. That was a neat euphemism for the freelance work he’d become involved in for the next few years. The type of crisis he responded to was the havoc caused by a criminal industry that continued to grow worldwide at an alarming rate. From South America to Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia-wherever there were people and money, the kidnap and ransom business was booming more than ever before.
Ben hated it. He loathed nothing more than the kind of men who exploited the emotional bonds between innocent people to create suffering and hard cash. He knew their ways and how they thought. He understood the hardness of their hearts, that they regarded human lives as nothing more than a commodity to be traded on.
And in the modern world, everyone was at risk. The predators out there had their pick, and you didn’t have to be rich and privileged to get the call informing you that your loved one had been taken. The trade was so lucrative and so easy to operate that in many countries it had become bigger than drugs. In some cities, even moderately affluent families were foolish not to take precautions to protect their children from the grasp of the kidnappers. The problem was, the payouts available from insurance companies helped only to fuel the flames. It was a situation spiralling out of control. Everyone knew it, but as long as the kidnappers and the insurance companies kept raking in the money, there was little protection for the people that really mattered-the victims.
That was where Ben came in. When people went missing and their loved ones despaired of ever getting them back-when ransoms were paid and kidnappers reneged on the deal, or when the police screwed things up as they often did-that was when those people in need had a last line of resistance they could call on. He knew he’d helped a lot of people, saved lives, brought families back together.
But it hadn’t been an easy life for him. Those years had been a time of sacrifice and pain, driven by the horror of what would happen if he failed to deliver the victim home safe and sound. It had happened to him only once-and it was something he could never forget.
He’d been forced to kill, too. Every time he’d done it, it sickened him so badly he’d sworn it would be the last- but it never was. What tormented him most of all was that he was so good at it.
So many times he’d wanted out. So many times he’d sat on his little stretch of beach near his rambling home on the west coast of Ireland and prayed for a normal life.
But how could he retire from it all and still sleep at night, knowing that people out there were in need of his help? It was both a calling and a curse, and for a very long time he’d felt as though he was simply destined to sacrifice himself to it. He’d tried to walk away-but every time it would call him back, drag him back in, and his heart wouldn’t let him say no. Stability, happiness, relationships, any chance of a normal existence: he’d given up everything for it.
And it had cost the life of the one person he’d loved more than anyone. His wife, Leigh, had been murdered by a man called Jack Glass. A man he should have killed. He’d failed. She’d died.
For a long, long time, that had brought Ben to his knees. For a long time, he wanted to die himself.
Then, one night in Ireland a few months ago, while sitting alone on the empty beach, he’d had the idea that changed everything. More than a brainwave, it was like a miracle vision that had kept him awake all night and seemed to breathe life into him. By the next morning, his plans were already coming together.
It was a vision of a special training school, a place dedicated to passing on the skills that he’d acquired through hard experience. There was so much he could teach. As the demand for specialised kidnap and ransom insurance for high-risk business personnel rocketed higher each year, so did the need for trained negotiators to bargain with abductors and help bring people back safely. And, as the ruthlessness and organisation of professional kidnappers soared to overtake that of even the worst of the drug lords, increasingly expert training was necessary to help law
