The Martyr’s Curse

Needless to say, Streicher and his people hadn’t used the main gate to get inside. The hole they’d cut in the wire was a hundred yards along the perimeter fence, on the east side of the compound where the bushes grew closer and the no-man’s-land was at its narrowest. Beyond, a thicket of trees hid the clearing where the team’s two choppers waited on standby to whisk them and their precious spoils back over the border to the RV point on the coast, from where a motor launch would carry them eastwards to the safety of Japan. A chartered jet from Tokyo back home and dry to Europe, and the mission would have been accomplished.

A successful outcome would then have become the start of the next phase in the plan, one that Streicher had dreamed about for a long, long time.

‘We’re clear,’ Roth said, glancing around them. He seemed to be right. The compound was deserted and empty apart from a parked row of Jeeps in Korean People’s Army colours.

‘We’ve taken them all out, that’s why,’ said Hannah. ‘There’s hardly anyone guarding this place. Which means we need to turn around and go back inside and get the stuff. Right now. Before it’s too late.’

Streicher said nothing. He stood still, his head cocked a little to one side as if he was smelling the air.

‘She’s right, Udo,’ Schilling said. ‘We have time. We can still do this.’

‘It’s what we came here for,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s why we chose this place, remember? That’s what you told us. Our best chance. Our only chance.’

Streicher said nothing.

‘I’m up for it. Or else we came all this way for nothing,’ Roth said.

‘And Dieter died for nothing,’ Schilling said.

Streicher said, ‘There’s no time. It will have to wait.’

‘Wait how long? Months? Years?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘No. I want to do this,’ Hannah said.

So did Streicher. He wanted it more than anything in the world. But he shook his head. ‘Listen.’

He’d heard it the moment they stepped outside. It had been barely audible over the sirens, but now the sound was growing. It was the growling rumble of vehicles approaching. Hard to tell how many. Enough to be a serious problem. Enough to have made him absolutely right about getting out of here, this minute.

‘Oh, shit,’ Hannah said, as she heard it too.

Then they saw where the sound was coming from, and suddenly things were very much worse.

The line of military vehicles emerged at speed from the jungle, roaring along the road right for the main gate. Six of them, ex-Russian GAZ Vodnik troop carriers, each carrying up to nine men. The column made no attempt to slow for the gate. The first vehicle crashed straight through, steel frame and galvanised wire mesh crumpling and folding underneath its wheels as it stormed inside the compound followed by the rest of the convoy. The vehicles fanned out and skidded to a halt. Their hatches flew open and a mass of men spilled out. More than fifty fully armed troops. Against nine.

‘Fuck them,’ Torben Roth said. He snapped another magazine into his Uzi. Hannah raised her pistol. Gröning and Hinreiner looked at each other, then at Guidinetti.

The clatter of small-arms fire filled the compound. Roth held his ground. A burst to the left; a burst to the right. Then he staggered and dropped his Uzi and blood flew and hit the wall behind him. Streicher ducked down low and ran to the fallen man and saw that his face had been ripped open by a rifle bullet. Streicher grasped him by the arms and began dragging him behind cover, helped by Gröning. Hannah kept on firing. Several of the soldiers were down, but now the Russian GAZ Vodniks were advancing and bringing their on-board heavy machine guns into play. The roar shattered the air; 14.5mm bullets ploughed through the parked Jeeps, gouged craters in the buildings, chewed up the concrete.

Streicher now knew beyond any doubt that he’d been right. Things were bad enough already. If they’d stayed inside the building a minute longer, none of them would have made it this far alive.

‘Help me,’ he yelled, dragging the bleeding, disfigured Roth. Between them, he and Wolf Schilling and Miki Donath managed to manhandle the injured man out of the field of fire and between the buildings while the others did what they could to hold back the soldiers.

The firepower coming at them was overwhelming. Hannah fell back when her pistol was empty. Guidinetti was hit in the shoulder and Evers was supporting him as they made their retreat. How so many of them made it back to the hole in the wire without getting shot to pieces, Streicher would never know. Staggering through the undergrowth towards the trees with Roth’s weight slippery and bloody in his arms, he was praying that the soldiers hadn’t already intercepted the waiting helicopters.

Sixty seconds later and the choppers would have been gone anyway. The pilots had heard the gunfire and were quickly powering up their turbines in desperation to get the hell away from here. Their skids were dancing off the ground and the vegetation was being flattened by the downdraught as the surviving team members clambered on board. Streicher, Hannah, Donath and Schilling and the injured Roth on one; Evers and Guidinetti and Hinreiner and Gröning aboard the other.

The soldiers were coming. Flitting shapes among the trees. Muzzle flashes lighting up the shadows of the thick green forest. Bullets cracked off the Perspex screen of Streicher’s chopper.

‘Take it up! Get us out of here!’ he yelled to the pilot.

As the choppers lifted off, the thicket suddenly crashed aside. Like a great scarred green armour-plated dinosaur scouring the jungle for its prey, a Korean People’s Army VTT-323 armoured personnel carrier lurched through the trees, flattening bushes and saplings and anything else in its path. Its twin machine guns swivelled up towards the escaping aircraft. But those weren’t what Streicher was gaping down at from the cockpit of the rising helicopter. It was the turret-mounted multiple rocket launcher that was angling up at them, tracking its targets and ready to fire at any moment.

‘Higher!’ he bawled over the din of the rotors, thumping the pilot on the shoulder. ‘Higher!’

Two rockets launched simultaneously in a twin jet of flame. They streaked through the trees and hit the second chopper and blew it apart in a blinding flash that gave way to an expanding fireball.

‘NO!’ Streicher howled as he saw it go down.

The burning wreck dropped from the air and crashed down on top of the armoured personnel carrier. A secondary explosion rocked the jungle, and then Streicher saw no more as his pilot spun up and away at full thrust, nose up, tail down.

They flew in numb silence over the forest. The green canopy zipped by below. Wolf and Miki were trying to hold down the bleeding, squirming Torben Roth and pump morphine into him from the first-aid kit. Hannah was lost in a world of her own, her face drawn and grim and spattered with someone else’s blood. She made no attempt to wipe it away.

And Udo Streicher was just beginning to contemplate the scale of the disaster. It would be a long time before he was fully able to calculate his losses, both human and financial.

But he’d be back. This wasn’t over. It would never be over. Not until he’d attained his goal. One way or another, the world would know his name before he was done.

It was, after all, his destiny.

Chapter Two

Hautes-Alpes, France

The present day

When they’d found the stranger, at first they hadn’t known what to do with him.

It was nineteen-year-old Frère Roby, the one they affectionately called simple, who’d first stumbled on the camp high up on the mountainside during one of his long contemplative rambles one morning in early October. Roby would later describe how he’d been following a young chamois, hoping to befriend the animal, when he’d made his strange discovery.

The camp had been made in a natural hollow among the rocks, sheltered from the wind, out of sight and well away from the beaten track, only accessible along a narrow path with a sheer cliff face on one side and a dizzy drop on the other. It was like nothing Roby had ever seen. In the middle of the camp was a shallow fire pit, about two feet deep, over which had been built a short, tapered chimney made of stone and earth. The fire was cold, but the remains of a spit-roasted hare showed that it had been used recently. Nearby, almost invisibly camouflaged behind a carefully built screen of pine branches, was a small and robust tent.

That was where he’d found the stranger, lying on his side in a sleeping bag with his back turned to the entrance. To begin with, Roby had been frightened, thinking the man was dead. As he dared to creep closer, he’d realised the man was breathing, though deeply unconscious. The chamois completely forgotten, Roby had dashed all the way back to the monastery to tell the others.

After some thought, the prior had given his consent, and Roby had led a small party of older men back to the spot. It was mid-afternoon when they reached the camp, to find the stranger still lying unconscious inside his tent.

The men soon realised the cause of the stranger’s condition, from the empty spirits bottles that littered the camp. They’d never seen anybody so comatose from drink before, not even Frère Gaspard that notorious time when he’d broken into the store of beer the monks produced to sell. They wondered who this man was and how long he’d been living here undetected, just three kilometres from the remote monastery that was their home. He didn’t look like a vagrant or a beggar. Perhaps, one of them suggested, he was a hunter who’d lost his way in the wilderness.

But if he was a hunter, he should have a gun. When they delicately searched his pockets and his green military canvas haversack in the hope of finding some identification, all they came across was a knife, a quantity of cash, some French cigarettes and an American lighter, as well as a battered steel flask half-filled with the same spirit that had been in the bottles. They also found a creased photograph of a woman with auburn hair, whose identity was as much a mystery to them as the man’s.

The monks were fascinated by the fire pit. The blackened mouth of the stone-and-earth chimney suggested that the stranger must have been living here for some time, perhaps weeks. The way it was constructed indicated considerable skill. They were men who’d been used to a hard, simple existence close to nature all their lives, dependent through the harsh Alpine winters on the firewood they’d gathered, chopped and seasoned themselves. They understood that the fire pit was the work of someone highly expert in the art of survival. That, as well as the green bag and the tent, made them wonder whether the stranger might at one time have been a soldier. Such things had happened before. A Wehrmacht infantryman had been found frozen to death not far from here in the winter of 1942, hiding in the mountains after apparently deserting his unit. As far as the monks knew, there weren’t any major wars happening at the moment, down there below in the world they’d left behind. The stranger was dressed in civilian clothes – jeans, leather jacket, stout boots – and his blond hair was too long for him to have belonged to the military any time recently.

Whatever clues they could discern as to his past, it was his immediate future that concerned them. Despite their isolated, ascetic lifestyle, the monks were worldly enough to know about such things as alcohol poisoning, and were afraid that the stranger might die if left where he was. The monastic tradition of helping travellers was just one of the many ways in which they were sworn to serve God. The question was, what should they do?

There’d been some debate as to whether to bring him back to the monastery, where the prior would best know how to help him, or whether to call immediately for outside help. It hadn’t been a hard decision finally. None of them possessed a phone on which to dial 15 for the SAMU emergency medical assistance service.

So they gathered up his things and carried him back along the winding, steep and sometimes dangerous mountain paths to their sanctuary, Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux, where the stranger had remained ever since.

That had been over seven months ago.

Chapter Three

Ben Hope’s awakening before dawn was sudden, as it always was these days. He couldn’t remember ever having slept as deeply and restfully in his life before now. The instant he laid his head down and closed his eyes in the utter stillness of his living quarters, he was falling into a soft darkness where no dreams came to haunt him, and he became still to his innermost core. From that profound, total immersion in the void, one hour before daybreak each morning he snapped into a fully alert state of wakefulness, ready to begin each new day with all the energy and enthusiasm of the last.

This was not a familiar experience for Ben. Things hadn’t always been this way.

His life, until the day the monks had found him half-dead on the mountain and brought him here, had been hurtling towards wilful self-destruction. The events leading up to that point were still just a painful blur in his memory. He couldn’t, and didn’t really want to, recall the exact course that his long period of wandering had taken him on.

He remembered a wet day in London last August, marking his return from a crazy journey that had led him from Ireland’s west coast to Madeira and across the Atlantic to the Oklahoman city of Tulsa. He remembered the terrible emptiness and sense of bitter loss that had struck him like a bullet to the head the moment he’d stepped off the plane into the London drizzle and realised that he was now completely directionless. He had nowhere to go, except straight to the nearest bar to get wrecked. No home to return to, and nobody to share it with if he had. Not any more, not since Brooke Marcel had walked out of his life.

Or more correctly, as he knew too well, since he’d walked out of hers. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He truly hadn’t wanted to hurt her.

But instead, fool that he was, he’d gone his own way, like always. The knowledge that he’d broken the heart of the woman he loved more than anything in the world – that had been just about the worst agony he’d ever had to endure. It had driven him to the very edge. And he’d have let it drive him right over into oblivion.

He couldn’t even remember for how many drunken days he’d hung around in London after getting back from the States. Not long, though. The place held too many memories for him, because it was where Brooke had lived for most of the time he’d known her. He did remember getting thrown out of a couple of pubs – or maybe three – once with blood smeared over his knuckles, stumbling away down the street before the police turned up. It wasn’t his blood. He didn’t know whose it was, or what the fight had been about.

Somewhere along the dotted, meandering trail of bars that followed, one merging into another, people had started talking French at him instead of English. He’d no idea how that had happened, whether he’d crossed over the Channel by ferry or gone under it by rail. Whether he’d drifted back to France because his home for some years had been a former farm in Normandy, a place called Le Val. Or whether he might just as easily have ended up in the Netherlands, Norway or Iceland. None of this entered his mind at the time. All he’d wanted to do was lose himself. Didn’t matter where. Didn’t matter how.

Ben had been a hard drinker for many years, with a preference for single malt scotch when it was available to him. The habit had left its mark on his time in the military, and it had sometimes affected him in the career he’d pursued since. But there was hard drinking, and there was beyond hard; and then there was the kind of wild, insane, hell-bent suicidal self-poisoning where you didn’t even give a damn what you threw down your neck so long as you could keep it coming and it blotted out all thoughts, blotted out everything, slammed down the iron portcullis on the whole world. The more he drank, the more he wanted to escape from himself, the more he needed to get away from other people.

Maybe that was why he’d made his way into the mountains. Or maybe he could have blindly wandered off anywhere. That was what lost souls did, after all.

When he’d woken in his strange new surroundings that evening over seven months ago, reeling and sick from the whisky still in his system, his first impulse had been to escape. If he hadn’t been so dehydrated and weak, he’d have rejected the food and shelter offered by the monks and gone back to trying to kill himself in a new mountain lair – one where this time nobody could ever find him.

That was then. Something in him had changed. He felt strong now. Clean, clear, fit and alive. He hadn’t touched alcohol for one hundred and ninety-three days straight. Today would be the hundred and ninety-fourth, but who was counting?

He wondered where Brooke was right now. Most likely she was still asleep in her bed, with a little while yet to dream whatever dreams were in her mind before her day began. He pictured her lying there. He hoped she was happy, and thinking about her that way made him smile. There’d been so many days when all he could do was think about her and agonise over the love he’d lost and the life he’d walked away from. For the first months he’d been here, the mistakes he’d made still haunted him in the dead stillness of the night, when he’d light his candle and gaze at the photo of her that he’d been carrying for so long in his wallet that it had become frayed and worn. Sometimes it had hurt so much that he couldn’t bear to look at it.

But the rawness of the pain had begun to fade imperceptibly with each day he remained here. He didn’t fully understand why. Just knew that, thanks to this place, he’d slowly begun to discover within himself a strange kind of serenity. A feeling he’d never experienced before. One he’d been chasing all his life and never found. Until coming here.

Yes, he had changed, and he knew that it had been the Carthusian monks of Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux who had guided him on his path. For their friendship, and their trust, he owed them more than he could say.

Ben flipped himself out of his hard, narrow bunk. The stone floor was cold against his bare feet. Without hesitation, he dropped down on to his palms and did five sets of twenty press-ups, pausing a few seconds between sets, savouring the lactic-acid burn, letting the pain build up in his triceps and deltoids until the muscles screamed. Then he hooked his bare toes under the rough wooden edge of the bunk and did another five sets of twenty sit-ups. When he was done with those and his abdominals were cramping satisfactorily, he got to his feet and walked over to the massive stone lintel above the doorway connecting the small bedroom to the rest of his quarters. It had stood strong for a thousand years and could probably have held the weight of an Abrams main battle tank. He didn’t think he was abusing it by using it as a chin-up bar. He jumped up, hung from his fingers with his feet dangling above the floor. Knees slightly bent, he lifted himself up so that his eyes were level with the lintel, then slowly down. He did five slow, painful sets of those before he dropped lightly to his feet and dusted off his hands.

Before the day was done, he’d have repeated the whole routine seven or eight more times. The solitary hours the Carthusian monks devoted each day in their cells to prayer, Ben spent on exercise. The pain of physical endurance was his purification, the endorphin rush his little piece of heaven. He’d never been much good at prayer. Maybe that would change too, with being here. One small step at a time.

Ben slowly washed himself in the stone cubicle that served him as a bathroom. The water was straight from a mountain spring, not much above freezing. It reminded him of the things he’d liked about the army. So did the uniform, although the plain robe of a lay brother was unlike any other garb he’d donned in his life. He was getting pretty used to it now. Something about it seemed to fit. He put it on, tied up the sash belt, stepped into the pair of plain sandals he now wore instead of boots, then left his quarters and went out into the stillness of the monastery to begin another day.

One small step at a time.

He was in no hurry to leave this place.

The magenta glow of the sunrise, shot through with streaks of gold, cast its light through the ancient cloisters as Ben walked the same route he walked each morning to attend to the first of his daily duties. Soon the slow, heavy tolling of the bell would signal Mass, the only sound to break the silence as the arched passages filled with a procession of silent robed figures heading towards the church. Some were young men, still strong and upright. Others were bent and old, on crutches, with long white beards. They must have lived there so long, they’d totally forgotten any other life.

After the first week, Ben had expected the monks to ask him to leave; especially as he’d been so aggressive with them at first, demanding they bring him the remaining bottles from his pack. Their gentle refusal had been like some act of love. They’d gone on serving him his food twice a day, and nobody had said anything about leaving. After two weeks, when he was feeling slightly stronger and the violent craving for alcohol had become more bearable, they’d moved him from the infirmary to a small house just inside the main entrance, which was used as guest quarters. Slowly at first, he’d started to explore the monastery.

Nobody was stopping him from walking out of the gate, but something inside him did. For the first time, he’d felt the power of the place. He’d looked out over the ancient stone wall across the mountainside and the forests down below, and thought there was something special here.

It was so easy to forget that Briançon was just a few miles away, the highest city in Europe, with a population of eleven thousand people. The world beyond, with all its wars and politics and deception and unhappiness, might as well have belonged to another galaxy. It felt to him like an existence he could comfortably leave behind, shut the door on and never return to.

By the fourth week, he’d begun thinking that he couldn’t go on accepting the care of his hosts without giving something back. The winter was setting in by then, and you could smell the snow coming. From his walks about the monastery and its grounds, he could see there was so much work to do. So much he could offer in return, by way of thanks. Nobody had ever asked him, but from that day he’d begun tending to the livestock, the goats and long-horned cattle whose milk the monks drank and used to make butter and cheese. He gathered eggs from the hen houses, chopped firewood, helped out with general manual tasks like carpentry or masonry repairs on the ancient, weathered buildings. The monastery was also home to a small population of cats, employed to keep down less welcome animal visitors. To them, it was permissible to talk, and Ben enjoyed feeding them.

His daily duties brought him into a little more contact with other inhabitants of the monastery. Through looking after the animals, he met Roby, the young man whom he had to thank for being here – for being alive – and each day they spent some time together. Silence was strictly observed even during work hours, but Roby would often have whispered conversations with him. Ben liked him a lot.

Roby wore the short cowl of a first-year novice, over which he put on a black cloak when the community got together. He was nineteen, with a disarming smile and a mental age of perhaps thirteen or fourteen. But what he lacked in quickness of intellect, he more than made up for by his devotion to Chartreuse de la Sainte Vierge de Pelvoux and everyone and everything in it, and he could speak and read Latin nearly as well as he could French.