hammering shellfire. Billowing clouds of dust were churned into whirling spirals by the downdraft of the rotors as the choppers roared over the devastated scene. As the clouds slowly settled, the plot that the shack had once stood on now looked like a ploughed field.
Whatever remained of the three men, come nightfall the wild animals would soon claim it.
The man watching from behind the black-tinted, bulletproof windows of his Humvee lowered his binoculars and smiled in satisfaction at the climbing wisp of smoke across the valley. His eyes narrowed against the sun, following the line of the choppers as they banked round to head back to their secret base. Back to where they’d be well hidden from their original owners.
The man’s name was Grigori Shikov. They called him ‘the Tsar’. He was seventy-four years old, grizzled and tough. For half a century his business ethos had been based on practicality. He liked things kept simple, and he liked loose ends to be tied up. Three of them had just been tied up permanently. That was what happened to men who tried to conflict with Grigori Shikov’s interests.
Shikov twisted his bulk around to stare at the camcorder operator in the back seat. ‘Did you get that?’
‘Got the whole thing, boss.’
Shikov nodded. His clients were people you didn’t want to disappoint – but not even they could fail to be impressed. He was sure they’d find their own uses for their new toys, once the deal was wrapped and the goods changed hands. The negotiations were in the closing stages. Everything was looking good.
‘OK, let’s go,’ Shikov muttered to his driver. At that moment his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he reached for it. He insisted on having a new phone every few days, but disliked this latest piece of tin. It was too small for his fist and his fingers were clumsy on the tiny keys. He answered the call with a grunt. He rarely spoke on phones: people told him what he needed to hear and he listened. His unnerving way of remaining silent was one of the things he was known for. Like never sleeping. Never blinking. Never hesitating. No regrets and no apologies, never once, in a lifetime spent climbing to the top of the hardest business on the planet, and staying there. Challenged, yes, many times. But never defeated and never caught.
Shikov had been expecting a different call and he was about to hang up impatiently, but he didn’t. The caller was a man named Yuri Maisky, and he was one of Shikov’s closest aides. He also happened to be his nephew, and Shikov kept his family close – or what remained of it since the death of his wife three years earlier.
So he listened to what Maisky had to say, and he felt his heartbeat lurch up a gear as the importance of what he was hearing sank in.
‘You’re sure?’ he rumbled.
It was not a casual question. Maisky knew all too well that the boss didn’t waste words on idle chat. There was a tinge of a quaver in his voice as he replied, ‘Quite sure. Our contact says it will be there, no question. It is definitely the one.’
The old man was silent for several seconds, holding the phone away from his ear as he digested this unexpected news.
Then he spoke again, quietly and calmly. ‘Where is my son?’
‘I don’t know,’ Maisky said after a beat. The truthful answer was that Anatoly’s whereabouts could be narrowed down fairly accurately to any one of three places: he’d either be lounging drunk on the deck of his yacht, gambling away more of his father’s fortune in the casino, or making a pig of himself in the bed of some ambitious hottie somewhere. It was wiser to lie.
Shikov said, ‘Find him. Tell him I have a job for him.’
Ben Hope glanced at the roughly drawn map clipped to the dashboard and steered the four-wheel-drive in through the gate. The track ahead traced a winding path through the sun-bleached valley. He couldn’t see the house but guessed it must be beyond the rise about a kilometre away.
He’d had a feeling that old Boonzie McCulloch could be trusted to pick a spot that was fairly inaccessible, and was glad he’d had the instinct to hire the sturdy Mitsubishi Shogun for the drive out here. Mid-afternoon, and it was hot enough to need all the windows wound down, even up here in the hill country near Campo Basso. Ben gazed around him at the scenery as the car lurched along the rutted, rocky track.
Beyond a stand of trees, the little farmhouse came into view. It was pretty much exactly what he’d expected, a simple and neat whitewashed block with shutters and a wooden veranda, red terracotta tiles on the roof. Behind the house stood a cluster of well-kept outbuildings, and beyond those was a sweep of fields. Sunlight glittered off a long row of greenhouses in the distance.
Ben pulled up, killed the engine and stepped down from the dusty Shogun. The chickens scratching about the yard parted hurriedly as a Doberman came trotting over to investigate the visitor. From somewhere round the back, Ben heard a woman’s voice call the dog’s name. It paused a second to eye him up, then seemed to decide he wasn’t a threat and went bounding back towards the house.
The front door opened, and a tall man in jeans and a loose-fitting khaki shirt stepped out onto the veranda. His gaze landed on Ben and the moustached face cracked into a grin.
‘Hello, Boonzie,’ Ben said, and he was transported back nearly seventeen years to the day they’d first met. The day a young soldier had turned up at Hereford with over a hundred other hopefuls dreaming of wearing the coveted winged dagger badge of the most elite outfit in the British army. The wiry Glaswegian sergeant had been one of the stern, grim-faced officers whose job it was to put the fledglings through unimaginable hell. By the time the selection process had done its worst and Ben had been one of just eight tired, bruised survivors, his gruff, granite-faced tormentor had become his mentor, and a friend for life. The Scotsman had been there, grinning like a proud father, when Ben had been awarded his badge. And he’d been there, calm and steady and dependable, when Ben had experienced his first serious battle.
They’d served together in the field for three years, before Boonzie had moved on to training recruits full-time. Ben had sorely missed him.
It had been four years after that, Ben now an SAS major stationed in Afghanistan, when he’d heard the unlikely rumours: that mad Scots bastard McCulloch had cracked. Gone soft in the head, found love, quit the army and set up home in the south of Italy, milking goats and growing crops. It had seemed bizarre.
But now, looking around him and seeing his old friend walking down the steps of the house with a warm grin and the sun on his tanned, creased face, Ben understood perfectly what had drawn Boonzie here.
The man hadn’t changed a great deal physically over the years. He had to be fifty-eight or fifty-nine now, a little more grizzled but still as lean and wiry as a junkyard hound, with the same work-toughened look of a man who’d spent most of his life doing things the hard way. Something inside had softened, though. Those hard grey eyes had a diamond twinkle to them now.
‘It’s grand to see ye again, Ben.’ Boonzie was one of those Scots who could go the rest of his life without ever returning to the old country but would go on wearing his accent proudly like a flag until the day he died.
‘You look good, Boonzie. I can see you’re happy here.’
