devastation. Flying plaster and glass and wood and dust and deafening noise filled the air. Only the heavy mahogany desk saved Ben from being blasted into jelly. The shotgun ripped through its thirty-round mag in just over two seconds. Ben saw his chance. He grabbed a big ornamental globe and hurled it through the window. He dived after it through the shattered pane, numb to the glass spikes that lacerated his arms and sides and legs as he tumbled through and hit the ground outside rolling.
He was in the grounds of Shikov’s home complex, a place he’d never seen before. The building he’d just escaped from was some kind of boathouse, right on the shores of a glittering lake that stretched all the way to the distant mountain peaks. The main house was a hundred metres away, long and low and rambling with flower gardens and trees. Between the two buildings was a concreted yard.
The black Humvee was sitting there next to a jacked-up Jeep Wrangler, just fifty metres away from Ben. He broke into a sprint for it. As he reached the parked Humvee, Gourko came storming out of the broken window after him, yelling in rage, gripping the shotgun. Another massive ripping blast chewed up the concrete around Ben’s feet and hammered the side of the vehicle, crumpling the gleaming steel panels as easily as stamping on a beer can.
But Ben had nowhere else to run. He ripped open the door of the Humvee and flattened himself across the front seats as the windscreen blew in and showered him with a hail of smashed glass. He groped for the ignition, praying his fingers wouldn’t find an empty keyhole. His hand connected with the dangling fob of the ignition key. Twisted it. Threw the automatic transmission into drive and kicked down hard on the gas.
The Humvee bellowed into life and charged forward. Gourko fired again, blasting one of its door pillars almost in half and blowing in the side windows. Driving almost blind from below the level of the dashboard, Ben kept the pedal to the floor and twisted the steering wheel hard. The Humvee pulled a tight skidding U-turn, crossed the yard and ploughed through a perimeter fence with a shuddering crash that tore down a ten-foot-high wall of wire mesh supported by concrete pillars. The vehicle bucked and lurched over the top of the wrecked fence and kept going, speeding away over the rough ground towards the forest.
Ben could feel the blood cooling on his skin as the wind roared in through the broken screen. Not all of it was Yuri Maisky’s. He ignored the pain from his cuts and drove faster. He had no idea where he was going. He just knew he needed to get away from Gourko.
In what was left of the wing mirror, he could see the man clambering in behind the wheel of the Wrangler and giving chase.
Ben powered the Humvee up a steep incline, unable to see anything but sky beyond its nose. Then the front of the truck dipped downward violently and he found himself speeding down a steep rocky valley into what seemed to be a huge stone quarry, a kilometre across from one steep wall to the other. It looked as though it had been put out of commission a long time ago and since put to other uses. In its centre, half-hidden behind tall wooden gates and barbed wire, a compound had been built consisting of a cluster of steel prefabricated buildings painted in military olive drab.
Seconds away and gaining fast, the Wrangler cleared the top of the rise and came jolting and bouncing down after Ben on its oversized tyres. Gourko had the windscreen down flat and the shotgun out over the bonnet, holding it with his left hand as he controlled the wheel with his right.
Ben heard the booming shots and felt the impact of the massive twelve-gauge slugs ripping through the body of the Humvee. The downward slope was steepening. Any faster, and the vehicle was going to start getting out of control. Ben jabbed the brakes – and felt no resistance from the pedal. It pressed flat to the floor, and he was still gaining speed. He guessed that one of Gourko’s slugs must have taken out a brake line, reducing fluid pressure to zero.
With no way to stop, all Ben could do was wrestle the steering wheel and line up the harshly bucking vehicle with the wooden gates. The Humvee was doing over eighty kilometres an hour when it hit. Ben was thrown violently forward in the driver’s seat as the Humvee burst through, ripped planks flying up over its roof.
The gates had barely even slowed the heavy truck down. It went speeding across the compound. Ben swerved to avoid one steel building, but the ground was loose and the vehicle went into a skid and smashed into the prefabricated hut next to it. Ben was hurled into the steering wheel and felt a rib crack.
A piece of buckled metal sheet fell to the floor as Ben opened the Humvee’s door and stumbled painfully out into the wreckage of the shed. There were no windows, and the only light in the place was the hole he’d ripped coming through the wall. As his eyes quickly grew accustomed to the dim light, Ben saw the stacks of steel crates – hundreds of them, everywhere around him. The Humvee had knocked over a stack of oblong boxes stencilled in white Cyrillic lettering. Two had burst open, revealing rows of Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifles in their original Soviet armoury packing. The smell of gun oil was fresh and sharp. This had to be where Shikov had kept his little arms cache.
Ben heard Gourko’s jeep screech to a halt outside.
He examined the fallen crates. Some ammunition for the AK rifles would have been handy at that moment, but it was probably stacked away in any one of the hundreds of other crates. He glanced around him, imagining Gourko striding his way with the Saiga shotgun in his hands. He kicked open another crate.
Inside, lying on its belly supported on a heavy-duty bipod, was a piece of equipment that was little more than a massive long steel tube with a crude stock at one end and a bulbous muzzle brake the size of a car exhaust silencer on the other. Nestled in the crate beside it was a webbing ammunition belt that held a row of tapered brass shells six inches long, like cannon rounds.
It was a Russian bolt-action anti-materiel rifle. Something on the side for Shikov’s Taliban friends, maybe. Accurate at fifteen hundred metres. Just the thing for taking out British army light armoured vehicles on patrol in Helmand Province.
Ben felt the strain on his lower back as he hoisted the heavy rifle out of its crate. He slung the ammunition bandolier over his shoulder. If Spartak Gourko wanted to play with big guns, let him get a dose of this.
There was no time to load the magazine. He opened the bolt and fed one of the enormous cartridges into the breech, closed the bolt and locked it. He lugged the huge weapon over to the ragged hole in the side of the shed and kicked through the buckled metal sheets.
The Jeep Wrangler was parked facing away from him between the buildings, eighty metres off. That was point-blank range for the AM rifle. Ben threw himself flat on the ground. Resting the gun on its bipod, he lined the Jeep up in the mil-dot reticule of the scope and squeezed the trigger. The rifle recoiled brutally into his shoulder with a sound like a thunderclap, sending a spasm of agony through his injured side. Almost simultaneously, the Jeep burst into a fireball that rolled up into a mushroom of flame and sent a column of black smoke rising into the sky.
Ben’s ears were singing loudly from the shot. Enough to drown out the sound of his own whistle at the power of the rifle.
But not enough to mask the rapidly rising turbine roar that he could suddenly hear coming from a prefab construction hidden among the other buildings. Ben clambered to his feet, wincing at the pain in his ribs. Staring at the building, he realised that it had no roof. Bad news.
The noise was quickly building to a deafening howl. Ben worked the bolt of the rifle, and the empty casing the size of a small beer bottle fell to the ground.
Before Ben had time to insert another round, the Black Shark had risen clear of the roofless hangar walls, whipping up a blizzard of dust and debris with the blast from its twin concentric sets of rotors. The machine turned with terrifying agility. Nose down, tail up, scanning the ground like a huge mechanical predator seeking out its prey. The 30mm rotary machine cannon slung at its flank made Ben’s sniper rifle look like a boy’s airgun.
As the monster bore down on him, he drew a second shell out of the bandolier, slammed it into the breech and worked the bolt home. Firing at a steep upward angle into the air without the benefit of an anti-aircraft mount, the stunning recoil almost knocked him flat on his back.
In the movies, the helicopter would have exploded into a thousand spinning pieces of shrapnel and come crashing down to the ground.
This wasn’t the movies. Ben’s shell kicked sparks off the armoured fuselage and bounced off harmlessly.
And now it was Gourko’s turn.
Ben sprinted for his life as the rotary cannon blazed into life. Its rate of fire was so high that the sound wasn’t the regular staccato thunder of a heavy machine gun, but a continuous roar. The cannon excavated trenches deep enough to bury a car as Gourko chased Ben across the compound and into one of the buildings. Ben might as
