The Lost Relic. Scott Mariani

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       Chapter Three

      Italy

      Six days later

      Ben Hope glanced at the roughly drawn map clipped to the dashboard and steered the four-wheel-drive in through the gate. The track ahead traced a winding path through the sun-bleached valley. He couldn’t see the house but guessed it must be beyond the rise about a kilometre away.

      He’d had a feeling that old Boonzie McCulloch could be trusted to pick a spot that was fairly inaccessible, and was glad he’d had the instinct to hire the sturdy Mitsubishi Shogun for the drive out here. Mid-afternoon, and it was hot enough to need all the windows wound down, even up here in the hill country near Campo Basso. Ben gazed around him at the scenery as the car lurched along the rutted, rocky track.

      Beyond a stand of trees, the little farmhouse came into view. It was pretty much exactly what he’d expected, a simple and neat whitewashed block with shutters and a wooden veranda, red terracotta tiles on the roof. Behind the house stood a cluster of well-kept outbuildings, and beyond those was a sweep of fields. Sunlight glittered off a long row of greenhouses in the distance.

      Ben pulled up, killed the engine and stepped down from the dusty Shogun. The chickens scratching about the yard parted hurriedly as a Doberman came trotting over to investigate the visitor. From somewhere round the back, Ben heard a woman’s voice call the dog’s name. It paused a second to eye him up, then seemed to decide he wasn’t a threat and went bounding back towards the house.

      The front door opened, and a tall man in jeans and a loose-fitting khaki shirt stepped out onto the veranda. His gaze landed on Ben and the moustached face cracked into a grin.

      ‘Hello, Boonzie,’ Ben said, and he was transported back nearly seventeen years to the day they’d first met. The day a young soldier had turned up at Hereford with over a hundred other hopefuls dreaming of wearing the coveted winged dagger badge of the most elite outfit in the British army. The wiry Glaswegian sergeant had been one of the stern, grim-faced officers whose job it was to put the fledglings through unimaginable hell. By the time the selection process had done its worst and Ben had been one of just eight tired, bruised survivors, his gruff, granite-faced tormentor had become his mentor, and a friend for life. The Scotsman had been there, grinning like a proud father, when Ben had been awarded his badge. And he’d been there, calm and steady and dependable, when Ben had experienced his first serious battle.

      They’d served together in the field for three years, before Boonzie had moved on to training recruits full-time. Ben had sorely missed him.

      It had been four years after that, Ben now an SAS major stationed in Afghanistan, when he’d heard the unlikely rumours: that mad Scots bastard McCulloch had cracked. Gone soft in the head, found love, quit the army and set up home in the south of Italy, milking goats and growing crops. It had seemed bizarre.

      But now, looking around him and seeing his old friend walking down the steps of the house with a warm grin and the sun on his tanned, creased face, Ben understood perfectly what had drawn Boonzie here.

      The man hadn’t changed a great deal physically over the years. He had to be fifty-eight or fifty-nine now, a little more grizzled but still as lean and wiry as a junkyard hound, with the same work-toughened look of a man who’d spent most of his life doing things the hard way. Something inside had softened, though. Those hard grey eyes had a diamond twinkle to them now.

      ‘It’s grand to see ye again, Ben.’ Boonzie was one of those Scots who could go the rest of his life without ever returning to the old country but would go on wearing his accent proudly like a flag until the day he died.

      ‘You look good, Boonzie. I can see you’re happy here.’

      ‘You wouldn’t have believed this dour auld fucker could find true bliss, would you?’

      ‘When did I ever call you a dour old fucker?’

      Boonzie’s grin widened an inch. ‘What brings you all the way out here, Ben? You didn’t say much on the phone. Just that you wanted to talk to me about something.’

      Ben nodded. He’d wanted this to be face to face. ‘Here, come in out of the sun.’

      The house was as simple inside as it was out, but it was homely and inviting. As Boonzie ushered him through to a sitting room, a door opened and Ben turned to see a deeply tanned Italian woman walking into the room. She stood only chest-high to Boonzie, who put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed her affectionately to his side. The smile she flashed at Ben was broad and generous, like her figure. A mass of curly black hair with just a few silver СКАЧАТЬ