“Tweenie getting tired?” he asked, and saw an immediate doubling of the effort. Every so often, Kennedy cracked off a bullet down through the branches. Twice, they managed to make out the stone staircase rising beside them, and saw no sign of pursuers.
Voices echoes up to them. “Englishman — Matt Drake.” The ex-SAS soldier heard once, the voice distorted by a thick German accent that his sixth sense told him had to be the man in white. The man he’d seen twice now accepting stolen artefacts.
Another time he heard: “SRT dropout.” The drawl was Milo’s, exposing his past, revealing the unit they kept secret even within the SAS. Who in God’s name was this guy?
Shots splintered the heavy boughs. Drake called a pause to resettle the rucksack with its shifting treasure inside, then spied the wide branch he’d been aiming for. The one that reached almost to the place on the staircase where they’d rested earlier.
“Out there,” he motioned to Ben. “Straddle the branch and move,…fast!”
They would be exposed for about two minutes. Subtracting surprise and reaction time that still left over a minute of extreme danger.
Ben broke cover first, Drake and Kennedy a second after, all bouncing on their hands and haunches along the branch towards the staircase. When they were spotted, Kennedy bought them precious seconds by firing off a fusillade of lead, punching holes through at least one unlucky tomb-raider.
And now they saw that Milo had indeed sent a team running up the staircase. Five men. And the team was fast. They would reach the end of the branch before Ben would!
Shit! They didn’t stand a chance.
Ben saw it too, and faltered. Drake shouted in his ear: “Never give up! Never!”
Kennedy squeezed the trigger again. Two men felclass="underline" one flying off into the pit, the other clutching his side and screaming. She squeezed it once more, and then Drake heard the mag run dry.
Two Germans were left, but now stood facing them, weapons ready. Drake set his face hard. They had lost the race.
“Shoot them down!” Milo’s voice echoed up. “We’ll search through the scraps down here.”
“Nein!” The thick German accent rang out again. “Der Spear! Der Spear!”
The gun barrels didn’t waver. One of the Germans taunted: “Crawl, little pigeons. Come here.”
Ben moved slowly. Drake could see his shoulders shaking. “Trust me,” he whispered into his friend’s ear, and coiled every muscle. He would leap just as Ben reached the end of the bough, his only play was to attack and use his skill-set.
“I still have a knife,” Kennedy murmured.
Drake nodded.
Ben reached the end of the bough. The Germans waited calmly.
Drake started to rise.
Then, in a blur, the Germans flew to the side as if hit by a torpedo. Their bodies, ragged and bloody, slammed off the wall and rebounded wetly down into the pit, cart-wheeling.
A few metres above the bough, where the stairs curved, a massive contingent of men stood, bearing heavy arms. One held a still-smoking AK-5 assault rifle in his hands.
“The Swedish,” Drake recognised the armament as that typically used by the Swedish military.
Louder, he said: “About bloody time.”
THIRTEEN
The room they ended up in — a Spartan twelve-by-twelve with a desk and an ice-rimmed window — took Drake back a few years.
“Relax,” he tapped Ben’s white knuckles. “Standard military bunker, this place. I’ve seen worse hotel rooms, mate, believe me.”
“I’ve been in worse apartments.” Kennedy seemed at her ease, the cop training at work.
“Another boyfriend’s?” Drake raised an eyebrow.
“Sure. Why?”
“Oh, nothing.” Drake counted past ten on his fingers, then looked down as if to start using his toes.
Ben managed a thin smile.
“Listen, Ben, I grant you it was hairy at first but you saw that Swedish guy make the calls. We’re good. Anyway, we need to hang out a bit. We’re knackered.”
The door opened, and their host, a well-built Swede with blonde hair and a hard-as-nails gaze that’d make even Shrek turn white, clipped across the concrete floor. When they’d been captured, and Drake had carefully explained who they were and what they were doing, this man had introduced himself as Torsten Dahl, and had then withdrawn to the far side of his chopper to make a few calls.
“Matt Drake,” he said. “Kennedy Moore. And Ben Blake. The Swedish government has no quarrel with you…”
Drake was disturbed by the accent which wasn’t at all Swedish. “You go to one of them shiny-arse schools, Dahl? Eton, or some such?”
“Shiny-arse?”
“Schools that promote their officers through lineage, money, and breeding. Whilst saying fuck you to skills, proficiency, and enthusiasm.”
“I imagine I did.” Dahl’s tone was even.
“Great. Well… if that’s all…”
Dahl held up a hand, whilst Ben gave Drake an aggrieved look. “Stop being a tit, Matt. Just because you’re a coarse Yorkshire peasant doesn’t mean the rest of us are all Royal inbreds, does it?”
Drake blinked at his lodger in shock. Kennedy made a ‘roll with it’ motion. It occurred to him then that Ben had found something in this mission that had truly hooked him and wanted more.
Dahl said: “I’d appreciate a sharing of knowledge, friends. I really would.”
Drake was all for sharing, but knowledge was power as they say, and he was trying to figure a way to enlist the Swedish Government’s help here.
Ben was already warning up to his tale of the Nine Pieces of Odin and the Tomb of the Gods, when Drake interrupted.
“Look,” he said. “Me and the kid here, and now maybe the gronk, are eight-inch headlines on some kind of Kill List…”
“I’m no gronk, you English asshole.” Kennedy half rose to her feet.
“Impressed you know the word.” Drake lowered his eyes. “Sorry. It’s the lingo. It never leaves you.” He flashed back to Alyson’s parting words: you’ll always be SAS.
He studied his hands, still scarred from tussling with Milo and climbing the World Tree, and thought about his quick and true reactions over the last few days.
How right she’d been.
“What’s a gronk?” Ben wondered.
Dahl sat on a hard metal chair and clomped his heavy boots down on the table. “A female who… umm… ‘enjoys the company of servicemen.’” he said, diplomatically.
“My own description would have been a little coarser,” Drake glanced at Ben, then said: “The Kill List. The Germans want us dead for crimes un-committed. How can you help, Dahl?”
The Swede didn’t answer for a while, just stared out the icy window into the snow-blanched landscape and beyond, at crumbling cliffs that stood desolate and alone against a wild ocean.
Kennedy said, “Dahl, I’m a cop. I didn’t know these two until a couple of days ago, but they have good hearts. Trust them.”
Dahl nodded. “Your reputation precedes you, Drake. The good and the bad of it. We will help you, but first—” he nodded at Ben. “Continue.”