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.
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.
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