experience another day, and many more.
The taller of the two assault shooters made his weapon safe and clipped it back into its holster, then pulled off his mask and goggles and brushed back the thick blond lock that fell across his brow. His haircut definitely wouldn’t have passed muster, back in his SAS days. He walked over to his colleague, who was still trying to scramble to his feet.
Ben Hope held out a gloved hand to help him up. He said, ‘Congratulations. You’re dead, your team are dead, your hostage is dead. Let’s review and start over.’
The second man’s name was Yannick Ferreira and he was a counter-terror unit commander with the elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale or GIGN, here on a refresher course. He’d wanted to hone his skills with the best, and there were none better to train with than the guys at Le Val: Ben himself, his business partner Jeff Dekker, their associate Tuesday Fletcher and their hand-picked team of instructors, all ex-military, all top of their game. Ferreira was pretty good at his job too, but even skilled operators, like world-class athletes, could lose their edge now and then. It was Ben’s job to keep them on their toes.
Ferreira said, ‘What the hell just happened?’
Ben replied, ‘That happened.’ He pointed at the floor, where a length of thin wire lay limp across the rough boards where Ferreira had snagged it with his boot.
‘A tripwire?’
‘You must have missed it, in all the excitement,’ Ben said.
The wire was connected to a hidden circuit behind the wall, which when broken activated the non-lethal explosive device right beneath Ferreira’s feet. Seven million candlepower and 170 decibels of stunning noise weren’t quite the same as being blown apart by a Semtex booby trap, but it certainly got its message across.
‘Devil’s in the detail, Yannick,’ Ben said. ‘As we all know, our terrorist friends have no problem blowing themselves to smithereens in order to take us out with them. It can get just a little messy.’
Ferreira shook his head sourly. ‘I can’t believe you caught me out with a damned flashbang. That was a dirty rotten trick, Ben.’
‘Dirty rotten tricks are what you’re paying us for,’ Ben said. ‘How about we stroll back to the house for a coffee, then we can come back and run through it again?’
‘Keep pouring,’ Jeff said grimly, holding out his wine glass until Ben had filled it to the brim. Jeff downed half the glass in a single gulp like a man on a mission, and smacked his lips.
‘I think I’ll get rat-arsed tonight,’ he declared.
‘Sounds like a brilliant plan,’ Tuesday said dryly. ‘Don’t expect me to carry you back to your hole after you collapse in a heap, though.’
Another busy work day had ended, evening had fallen and the three of them were gathered around the big oak table in the farmhouse kitchen, preparing to demolish a pot of beef and carrot stew that could have fed the French Army and was simmering on the stove. Ben was seated in his usual place by the window, feeling not much less morose than Jeff despite the glass of wine at his elbow, his loyal German shepherd dog Storm curled up at his feet and one of his favourite Gauloises cigarettes between his lips.
While he’d been working with Yannick Ferreira, Jeff and Tuesday had been putting two more of the GIGN guys through their paces on Le Val’s firing ranges. Tuesday had been a top-class military sniper before he’d come to join the gang in Normandy. His idea of fun was popping rows of cherry tomatoes at six hundred yards with his custom Remington 700 rifle, which generally upstaged and occasionally cheesed off their clients. Especially the ones with a tough-guy attitude, who for some reason didn’t expect a skinny Jamaican kid who was forever smiling and ebullient to be so deadly once he got behind a rifle.
Ben had warned Tuesday in the past about the showing off. ‘We’re here to teach them, not embarrass them.’ Still, Ferreira’s guys hadn’t taken it too badly. After class the three trainees had driven off to the nearest town, Valognes, in search of beer and fast food to help soothe their wounded pride and prepare them for another day of humiliation ahead.
Even Tuesday’s spirits were dampened by the gloomy atmosphere around the kitchen table. But the glumness of the three friends had nothing to do with the tribulations of their work. The theme of the dinnertime conversation had been women troubles. Tuesday, who appeared to enjoy a stress-free and uncomplicated love life largely because he was always between girlfriends, had nothing to complain about. For both Ben and Jeff, however, it was a different story.
Ben had recently returned from an unexpectedly adventuresome trip to the American Deep South. There, in between dodging bullets and almost getting blown up and eaten by alligators, he’d met and befriended a lady police officer called Jessie Hogan. They had dinner and went to a jazz gig together, and although Jessie made it pretty obvious that she liked Ben, nothing happened between them. Ben drove back to New Orleans and boarded his flight home without so much as a kiss being exchanged.
But that wasn’t the impression that Ben’s French girlfriend, Sandrine, had formed.
Ben and Sandrine had been together for a few months. It wasn’t love’s young dream. Both of them had been hurt before, and it had been a somewhat cautious, reticent start to the relationship before they fell into a comfortable routine. She was a head surgeon at the hospital in Cherbourg, some kilometres away, whose punishing work schedule meant she didn’t live at Le Val and only visited now and then. It had been on one such visit, a couple of days ago, when the two of them had been hanging out in the prefabricated office building and Ben had needed to step outside for a few minutes to attend to a delivery of some items for the range complex.
While his back was turned, as luck would have it, an email had landed on his screen: Jessie Hogan, saying what a great time she’d had with him and expressing a strong desire to see him again if he happened to swing by Clovis Parish, Louisiana any time in the future. She’d signed off with a lot of kisses.
Sandrine hadn’t taken it too well. Ben had stepped back inside the office to be met with tears and anger. ‘So this is what you get up to on your travels, is it?’
Calmly at first, Ben had protested his innocence. But nothing he could say could persuade her, and after a bitter quarrel and a lot of accusations, Sandrine had driven off in a rage. It was Jeff who’d stopped Ben from going after her. Jeff had been right: following a row with a car chase wasn’t such a good idea.
Ben hadn’t been able to get through to Sandrine on the phone since, and she wasn’t responding to emails. He’d decided to give it a few days and drive up to Cherbourg. But it wasn’t looking good, and her allegations of infidelity had shaken him to the core. It would never have occurred to him not to trust her, if the situation had been reversed. Maybe he was just naïve when it came to these matters.
‘Women,’ Jeff said with a snort. His glass was empty again. He motioned for the bottle. Ben slid it across the table, and Jeff grabbed it and topped himself up, clearly intent on polishing off the whole lot before uncorking another. Tuesday rolled his eyes.
‘Come on, mate, it’s not that bad.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Jeff’s whirlwind love affair with a pretty young primary school
