well have tried to take cover in a cardboard box. The strong steel walls and roof were torn into smoking shreds around him. A solid steel support girder snapped in half and its pieces crashed to the floor. He hurdled over them, almost dropping the rifle, and sprinted on through the destruction, half a step ahead of the pummelling 30mm shells. He dived out through the back of the building seconds before the whole thing folded in on itself with a screech of rending metal.
Ben could imagine Spartak Gourko laughing to himself as the helicopter roared overhead. He was sent sprawling on his face by the downdraught. Still clutching the rifle, he scrambled to his feet. The Black Shark was banking steeply for another pass, coming in faster and tighter than any combat chopper he’d ever seen before.
He desperately needed cover. There was none.
Unless . . .
It was crazy. Suicidal. But it might just work.
Ben took off towards the nearest wall of the quarry. A desperate, heart-pounding, breathless two-hundred metre sprint with the dead weight of the anti-materiel rifle in his arms. The Black Shark hovered in the distance, as if anticipating its prey’s movements. Then its tail rose up and it came back in for the attack.
Gourko was having fun.
With a whooshing scream that froze Ben’s blood in his veins as he kept on running, two rockets detached themselves from the Black Shark’s bristling payload and snaked after him. Ben threw himself flat. The rockets roared overhead, scorching him with their jets, and impacted against the steep rock wall ahead of him. Stones and debris rained down. Ben looked up, coughing, half blinded by the massive dust cloud that was rising up all around him.
The dust cloud was just what he wanted. If it could cloak him for just long enough . . .
He dashed the rest of the way to the foot of the cliff and started clambering wildly up the loose rocks, dragging the butt of the rifle behind him. As the dust cloud began to settle, he could make out the dark shape of the helicopter hovering ominously about three hundred metres away. He threw himself down in a hollow between two large rocks, planted the rifle bipod in the dirt and quickly loaded the last four of his shells into the magazine.
The Black Shark saw him and came roaring in for the kill, hard and fast, looming up like an express train. Except that express trains didn’t come loaded with ordnance capable of flattening a mountain. There was nowhere to hide from it now, nowhere to run.
The Black Shark kept coming.
Ben ripped the bolt back, rammed it forward, fired again.
Nothing. The machine was less than two hundred metres away now.
Two rounds left. Ben fired again. Saw the sparking flash of his impact on the armour plating just a hand’s breadth away from the only weak point the impregnable machine had – the thick plate glass of the cockpit was resistant to normal small arms fire, but not to anti-materiel rounds.
One hundred and fifty metres and closing.
Ben ejected the hot casing and slammed shut the bolt for the last time. He sucked in a breath. The target was wobbling crazily in the crosshairs of the scope.
He squeezed the trigger. Just before the recoil tore the sight picture away, he thought he saw a small black hole appear in the corner of the cockpit screen.
The Black Shark kept coming, undeterred. One hundred metres.
Ben ripped open the bolt and stared at the empty breech. That was it. He’d given it his best shot.
The readout on Gourko’s console told him his missile systems were armed and ready to go. He had his thumb on the fire button, but he wanted to wait until the final instant. He wanted to see the last look in Ben Hope’s eyes just before the rockets pulverised his body across a hundred metres of rocks. Who was this man who thought he could shoot him down with a puny little rifle?
Gourko watched the magnified figure in his viewfinder.
Hit it again. Nothing happened.
The rockets didn’t launch.
The quarry wall was looming up fast. Gourko yanked on the stick to peel off for another pass.
That was when he realised something was dreadfully wrong. The controls were no longer responding. For the first time in his life, Spartak Gourko experienced the cold tremor of fear. Twisting in his seat, he saw the smoke and flame pouring from the banks of electronics behind him, where he now realised the bullet had hit.
Malfunction. Systems meltdown.
The quarry wall was racing towards him.
Gourko had only one option. The Ka-50 was just about the only combat helicopter in the world with an ejector seat. He reached for the control, armed it, braced himself. His fingers closed on the lever. He yanked, hard.
And in that terrible fraction of a split instant of time that seemed to last forever before the rockets ignited under his seat and fired him to safety, he understood that the electronic safeguard that would blow out the rotor blades from the turret a flash before the ejector system kicked in . . .
Wasn’t . . .
Working . . .
From where Ben was crouching among the rocks, clutching his empty rifle and unable to do anything but wait for death, he saw the pilot’s overhead canopy burst open. In the next instant, Spartak Gourko was launched like a human cannonball from the cockpit.
Straight up into the concentric rotor blades.
There wasn’t time to look away. From seventy-five metres, Ben could almost see the man’s mouth opening in a scream – and then his body disintegrated into a red mist as he was minced into nothing by the spinning blades.
The Black Shark’s nose, sprayed with blood and gore, dipped as the aircraft began its terminal descent.
Straight towards Ben’s vantage point.
Ben let the rifle clatter away. He scrambled desperately up the quarry wall.
The aircraft impacted with the force of an earthquake. Its rotors shattered and its armoured fuselage crumpled and blew apart. Wreckage tumbled down the quarry face, flew a hundred metres in the air. Ben flattened himself against the rocks. For an instant he thought the fireball that engulfed the slope was going to roast him where he lay; then the hot breath of flames receded suddenly, and the next thing he was engulfed in choking, blinding black smoke. Racked with coughing, he kept climbing and climbing until finally he reached the top and stumbled over the lip.
He glanced back down at the quarry. The smoke was rising high into the sky from the burning helicopter.
‘Maybe not so hard to kill, then,’ he muttered.
He turned away.
He could see the lake in the distance, and Shikov’s house, as peaceful as if nothing had ever happened there. He started walking towards it.
‘You utter, absolute bastard.’
Ben smiled to hear the sound of her voice on the other end. ‘Hello, Darcey.’
