The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET. Scott Mariani

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       Chapter Twenty-Six

       Austria

       The same morning

      The man was solid and powerful. He was an inch under six and a half feet tall and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds-none of it fat. He walked naked to the edge of the springboard, feeling it flex under his weight, and bounced a couple of times. His strong leg muscles hardened. He took a breath and launched himself.

      His body hit the water in a perfect dive, hardly making a splash, and he knifed deep into the pool, then surfaced and swam fast. He forced thirty lengths out of himself, then heaved himself out of the water and walked to the chair, where his clothes were lying neatly folded. He was barely out of breath. Through the windows of the indoor pool, the snow-covered grounds of the estate swept away to the pinewoods in the distance.

      The man scraped back his sandy hair. He reached for a towel, and as he dried himself he admired his trim shape. His muscled arms and torso bore the scars of nine bullet wounds and three knife slashes. He remembered exactly how and where he’d got each of them. Each had its own story. What they all had in common was that none of the people who’d given them to him had lived for more than three minutes afterwards.

      The man was forty-three years old. He was a Londoner by birth and a former British Army soldier. His name was Jack Glass.

      When he was drunk he would sometimes boast about his exploits in the legendary SAS. He even had the regimental winged dagger emblem tattooed on his upper right arm. He liked people to see it.

      The truth was that he’d been rejected for service in the regiment many years before. A psychological evaluation had exposed certain traits that the regimental heads felt would not be an asset. His unsuitability for the Special Air Service had been confirmed when he’d tried to throttle the officer who’d informed him of his failure to make the grade. He’d been returned to his regular unit in disgrace, court-martialled and kicked out of the army.

      He’d drifted around after that, run out of money. Like a lot of army leavers he’d been forced to take on menial jobs for a while. With his court-martial record he couldn’t even get security work.

      One rainy London night he’d been at the bar of a pub when he’d met an old contact who had offered him paramilitary work in Africa. The money was excellent and the work was perfect for Glass. He’d accepted immediately and was on a flight three days later. He’d never returned to Britain.

      In the Congo, Rwanda, Liberia, he’d worked for whoever paid the most. Suppressed anti-government rebels. Burned schools. Destroyed villages. Executed whole families caught up in bloody tribal wars. He did whatever he was told to do, took the cash and asked no questions.

      Liberia was where he’d picked up the scar on his ear. The lobe had been ripped off by a bullet from an AK-47. The person holding the rifle was a black child of nine or ten, a little girl. It was the last round in the magazine of her AK. When she saw him standing there clutching his ear and screaming at her, she dropped the rifle and ran.

      Glass had gone after her. He chased the screaming child deep into the bush. Brought her down, knelt on her chest, pinned her arms over her head with one hand. With the other hand he’d drawn out his bayonet, placed the point against her ribs. When he drove the blade slowly deep inside her little body he felt the struggles diminish and saw the life leak out of her eyes.

      He could still remember it now. Someday, he’d like to do that again.

      After Africa came the Bosnian conflict, where Glass had become involved in gun-running. He quit the battlefields, wore a suit and carried a briefcase instead of an M16. The case was usually filled with banknotes. He discovered you could make more money getting someone else to pull the trigger. Two years later, now a full-blown businessman with a lot of connections and cash rolling in, he’d met and struck up an alliance with an Austrian called Werner Kroll at an arms fair in Berlin.

      At the age of thirty-six, Glass had gone to work for Kroll as a personal secretary and general aide. Glass was used to money by now, but selling Kalashnikovs to warring tribes was nickels and dimes next to the things Kroll was into. He was a little more than just an ordinary businessman. But he took fanatical care to cover his СКАЧАТЬ