The impact stunned him for an instant. There was ringing in his ears and the taste of blood on his lips. He was upside down, wedged against the steering wheel with the buckled roof pressing hard on his shoulder.
Running footsteps, a cracking of twigs. Voices. A cry of ‘Down there!’
He kicked against the dashboard, forcing his body out through the buckled window. He somehow managed to get himself twisted round, and crawled out of the wrecked car. Then he reached back inside the window and grabbed his bag and the empty Linebaugh. An unloaded gun was still a better weapon than bare hands.
He was in dense thicket, tangled thorn bushes sprawling all around him like coils of barbed wire, tearing at his hands and face as he struggled to get away. He broke free of them, staggered to his feet and glanced around him, breathing hard, heart pounding, forcing his brain to focus after the numbing impact of the crash. Trees and bushes blocked his view in all directions. He could hear voices through the screen of vegetation behind him. He slung the bag over his shoulder and broke into a sprint, ripping through the scrub and darting through the narrow gaps in the trees.
He beat back a low branch and suddenly there was an agent standing there, gun raised. Ben didn’t slow down. He slid to the ground and skidded through the dirt with his right leg straight out in front of him. His foot caught the man’s knee and brought him down. The 9mm pistol in the agent’s hand went off, the shot going wide. Then Ben was on top of him, and clubbed him hard over the head with the butt of the empty revolver. The agent went limp in the dirt, still clutching his pistol. Ben tossed the hunting revolver into the bushes and ripped the 9mm from the guy’s fingers. The magazine was full. The ugly black steel was comforting in his hand.
But now the echoing report of the gunshot over the treetops had drawn the others. He could hear the voices converging on him, and the crackle and rustle as they came chasing through the bush. They were close.
He ran on. The dry red earth underfoot turned to slippery mud as he stumbled into a stream. He leaped over rocks and scrambled up the opposite bank, fingers raking in the dirt.
The woodland was thickening now. He clambered over fallen trees and through sprawling thickets of thorns. Then the foliage parted and he could see a grassy rise up ahead. He made for it, away from the voices. There was still a chance of escape.
The thump of his heart was met by the deafening chop of rotor blades. A helicopter burst out from over the knoll, banking steeply, only twenty feet from the ground. It roared in towards him like a bird of prey, nose down and tail up, the wind from the blades tearing at his hair and clothes and flattening a wide circle of grass. A pair of shooters hung out of its open sides, wedged in tight with automatic rifles trained on him. Gunfire ripped a swathe of earth at his feet. He turned and ran back the other way, threw himself behind the husk of a fallen tree and rattled off three double-taps at the helicopter as it roared overhead, punching a line of holes in the black fuselage. The blasting wind of the rotors blew up dust, tore up vegetation debris and made his eyes water. The chopper veered sharply up to avoid the tree line and began banking to come in for another pass.
A 9mm pistol was no kind of weapon against aircraft and military rifles. But it was all Ben had. He squared the sights on the advancing helicopter and loosed off five more rounds. Nothing happened. The chopper kept coming. The shooters were bringing their weapons back up to aim. He saw the red dot of a laser sight rake across his leg, and he jerked it away just in time. A storm of splinters flew up from the tree trunk before he even heard the shots. He hauled himself to his feet and ran for the cover of the bushes as bullets tore up the ground in his wake. The chopper passed overhead. He ran fast and blind through the thicket, leaping over rocks and ruts. Twice he stumbled and almost went down. Thorns tore at his hands as he swiped them out of his way, and then he was suddenly in a grassy clearing.
But he wasn’t alone there. Two agents had headed him off. They were fifteen feet away, yelling at him to freeze, a pistol and a twelve-gauge pointed right at his head.
For a moment it was a standoff. He kept the gun trained on them, wavering it from side to side. His mind was racing. Shoot the one with the shotgun first. The guy with the pistol would probably get off a round, but a single bullet was more likely to miss than the devastating hail of pellets from a short-barrelled scattergun at this range.
But a second later the odds were climbing fast as more of them stepped out of the bushes. The woman was to his right, at three o’clock. Jones was at ten o’clock. Then another guy appeared behind the first two. Five on one. With a circle of guns trained on him, there was nowhere to go and no other choices.
He tossed his weapon and put up his hands.
The woman was frowning at him down the barrel of her gun. The look in her eyes seemed to be telling him he’d made it worse for himself by running. That seemed to matter to her. He didn’t know why, but he somehow knew she didn’t want to be there, and she wished this wasn’t happening.
Jones’s eyes burned furiously in the mess of blood that was his face. He gave a garbled command, and two agents grabbed Ben’s arms and flung him down on the leafy ground. He felt the bite of a plastic cable-tie around his wrists. A knee in his back and the hard steel of a gun against his head. Then a sharp prick as someone jabbed him with a needle.
‘You’re going sleepy-bye for a while, motherfucker,’ he heard Jones say through smashed lips.
After that, Ben was diving down into a black pool and the voices around him became echoes and died away to nothing.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
After what seemed like a thousand years drifting through a hazy universe of disconnected dreams and nightmares, Ben was jerked awake by the sound of voices. He sat bolt upright and the first thing he realised was that he was sprawled on a bare mattress in the corner of a dingy room. The next thing he noticed was that his wrists were chained to the wall. He stared down at the steel cuffs biting into his flesh. Followed the line of the long chain from his left wrist, up the pitted wall and round a sturdy metal pipe, then back round to his right wrist. He tugged. The pipe was solid.
The time on his watch was 8.36 p.m. Five and a half hours since his capture. Where the hell was he?
He began to orientate himself as his mind cleared. His prison looked like some kind of old meat locker. It had no windows, and a single door made of riveted sheet aluminium. But it had been a long time since it was last used for storage. The floor was thick with dust, and cobwebs hung from the walls. The place had the musty, mousy smell of a building that had been lying empty for years.
The voices outside grew louder. Footsteps. Shadows in the strip of light under the metal door. There was the rattle of a padlock, then the door clanged open and two big men strode into the room. One was thin and wiry, with veiny, clawed hands, his greying hair in a crew cut. The other man looked like a failed weightlifter who spent as much time on cheeseburgers as he did on the bench press, three hundred pounds of lardy muscle underneath a tiny bald head with a black goatee beard.
Both of them were wearing dark suits, white shirts, sombre ties. They weren’t taking any chances. The wiry one stood back a few yards and aimed a pistol at Ben’s head while the muscular guy approached him, bent down cautiously and unlocked his left cuff.
‘The room service in this place is terrible,’ Ben said.
The chunky guy gave a minute smirk. Without a word he yanked the bracelet harshly off Ben’s wrist and dragged it out on the end of its chain through the gap between the wall and the pipe.