The Secret of Excalibur

‘Yours.’

Chase hated himself for what he was about to do, but knew it was the only chance of saving himself and his niece. ‘Holly,’ he said in a loud whisper. ‘When I say now, very quickly stick your hand out from the end of the log and then pull it back again. Okay?’ Although confused and scared, she nodded. ‘Okay! Ready, set, now!’

Holly thrust her hand out into the open.

Chase was already moving even as she pulled it back into cover, bursting out from behind the log towards the tree. The thwack! of the bullet striking wood and the soft clack of the rifle reached him simultaneously. Holly screamed as smashed bark rained over her.

‘Stay down!’ Chase yelled. Even the best snipers in the world needed a moment to reacquire a target after the jolt of firing, and the flash of his movement between the trees would force the other man to change his aim, slowing him further.

But not by much.

Chase slammed against the next tree a split second before a bullet did, broken wood spitting at his face.

‘Forty seconds,’ Alderley announced, voice tense.

‘Where is he?’

‘Five o’clock from you, about forty metres,’ Mac told him. ‘Aiming at your cover.’

‘Left or right side?’

‘Left.’

Gun raised, Chase jerked to the right, exposing his arm and shoulder and drawing the sniper’s aim, then immediately lunged back to fire two shots round the left side of the tree. Another rifle bullet smacked into the trunk, his adversary thrown off by the return fire, just as Chase had hoped.

He sprang from cover once more, this time not stopping. The undergrowth crunched beneath his feet as he ran between the trees, curving round towards the sniper’s position—‘Thirty seconds!’

‘He’s moving, you’ve spooked him!’ Mac cried at the same moment. ‘Going right from his original position, crawling - no, he’s up, he’s on his feet.’

Chase reached another tree, throwing himself against it. ‘Position!’

‘Four o’clock from you, still moving right, still moving - shit! Eddie, he’s going for your niece!’

‘Twenty!’ Alderley said. ‘Chase, move it!’

Chase risked a look. He could see nothing moving in the unreal half-light from the car’s headlamps. ‘No visual! Where is he?’

‘Coming up to your three o’clock, still moving - no, he’s dropping, taking aim—’

‘Shit!’ He ran directly for the still unseen sniper, gun held out ahead. ‘Guide me in!’

On the radar image, his outstretched arm would act as a pointer, letting Mac direct him towards his target - if he was fast enough. ‘Left!’ snapped Mac. Chase turned slightly, trees flicking past. ‘Left, left - straight, straight!’

‘Ten seconds!’

Chase fired, and kept firing into the undergrowth ahead.

No hits, and he was running out of bullets and time—

‘He’s moving!’ Mac said. ‘Changing aim, changing aim!’

No need to ask who the new target was. Chase was down to three bullets, two, one—

‘He’s hit!’ shouted Mac. No triumph, just an immediate warning. ‘Gun, gun, gun!’

At close range a sniper rifle was a liability, but it wasn’t the man’s only weapon. Chase saw a flicker of movement ahead, a bush that wasn’t a bush shifting, a glint of light catching dark metal—

He fired his last shot.

‘Contact lost!’ Alderley almost gasped. ‘Chase! Did you get him, did you get him?’

‘Yeah, I got him,’ Chase announced, kicking the pistol out of the sniper’s hand. But there was no threat: his last bullet had hit the man in the neck, tearing out a ragged chunk of muscle and tendons that now hung gelatinously by a flap of skin, blood gushing blackly over the camouflage. He was still moving weakly, but he would be dead within a minute or two even if Chase had been inclined to do anything to save him.

There was an audible exhalation of relief through the earpiece. ‘In that case,’ Alderley said after a moment, ‘you can expect a bill from Her Majesty’s Government for the satellite time. Should only be about, oh, a million pounds or so.’

‘They can knock it off the reward for recovering Excalibur,’ Mac said. ‘Eddie, are you all right?’

‘Fine,’ Chase replied, turning his back on the dying sniper and hurrying back to the clearing. ‘Holly, are you okay? Holly?’

He found her still lying by the log, trembling. ‘Holly,’ he said, crouching to take her hand, ‘it’s okay. Are you all right?’

She slowly looked up at him, tears running from her wide eyes. ‘Uncle Eddie?’

‘Hi.’ He managed a smile. ‘Come on, love. Let’s get you back home to your mum.’

He lifted her carefully to her feet. She hugged him and pressed her face into his chest, sobbing.

‘It’s all right,’ he assured her. ‘It’s over.’

But he knew it wasn’t.

‘I take it the sniper’s not talking,’ Mac said in his ear, following the same line of thought. ‘Peter and I can deal with the local police for you, but how are you going to find Nina now?’

Chase guided Holly to the car, face set. ‘There’s still someone else. I’m going to have words.’

Hector Amoros jolted awake, sitting upright and reaching across to switch on a lamp.

‘Ay up, Hector,’ said Chase coldly from the chair he had pulled up beside the bed. He had a gun in his hand, not aiming it directly at the director of the IHA, but needing only the smallest movement of his wrist to do so.

‘Eddie!’ Amoros exclaimed. ‘What are you - how did you get in here?’

‘Ways and means. I wanted a chat while you were still in London. About your mate Jack Mitchell.’

Amoros’s expression tightened a little at the name. He looked more closely at Chase as his eyes adjusted to the light of the hotel room. ‘My God! What happened to you?’

Chase indicated the cuts and bruises on his face. ‘Like I said, Jack Mitchell. Turns out he wasn’t what he said he was.’ Now the gun pointed at Amoros. ‘But you knew that, didn’t you? Right from the start.’

‘I don’t know what you—’

‘Don’t! Don’t even fucking try to deny it. Jack set this whole thing up, getting the IHA involved so that he could find Excalibur before the Russians did. And with him being a navy man, and you being a navy man, you were great mates right off the bat. You’d do anything to help each other out, right?’

‘That’s not what happened,’ Amoros said firmly. ‘I might be retired from the navy, but if the Pentagon asks for something it’s still my duty to give it to them. Most of the IHA’s funding comes from the United States. You know that.’

‘He who pays the piper, right?’ said Chase with a sneer. ‘Well, you know what tune he’s playing now? It’s called “I’ve kidnapped Nina and stolen Excalibur so I can build a big fuck-off WMD”.’

Amoros sat straighter, shocked. ‘He’s kidnapped Nina? What are you talking about?’

‘Kidnapped Nina, tried to kill me - and my niece. Because he didn’t want to leave anyone alive to talk about this black-ops superweapon he’s built.’

‘And you think I had something to do with it?’ Amoros asked.

Chase regarded him with flint-hard eyes. ‘If I did, you’d already be dead.’ Amoros tensed, knowing he meant it. ‘But you know more about Jack than you’ve let on. I want to know where he is.’

‘All I knew about Mitchell was that he was ex-Special Forces intelligence, now supposedly working for DARPA, and that I’d been told to give him total co-operation in the interests of national security. That came from the highest level at the Pentagon.’

‘Well, it seems Jack doesn’t take his orders from the Pentagon. Seems he doesn’t take them from anybody. He’s got his own little black operation, and he tells the Pentagon what to do.’

‘What do you mean?’