The Rebel’s Revenge

Her duty done, the slave humbly asked for permission to excuse herself and was dismissed with a cursory wave, whereupon she slipped from the room to attend to the rest of her daily chores. Though if any of them had paid her the least bit of heed, they might have wondered at the enigmatic little smile that curled her lips as she walked away.

Chapter 1 (#u0996fefc-3da0-5fb5-8429-1e493b385096)

Ben Hope had often had the feeling that trouble had a knack of following him around. No matter what, where or how, it dogged his steps and stuck to him like a shadow. If trouble were a person, he’d have felt justified in thinking that individual was stalking him. If he’d been of a superstitious bent he could have thought he was haunted by it, as by a ghost. Whatever the case, it seemed as if at every juncture of his life, wherever he went and however he tried to steer out of its path, there it was waiting for him.

And it was here, pushing midnight on one sultry and thus-far uneventful September evening in the unlikely setting of a tiny backstreet liquor store in Clovis Parish, Louisiana, that he was about to make trouble’s acquaintance yet one more time.

If the most recent round of airport security regulations hadn’t made it more bother than it was worth to carry his old faithful hip flask across the Atlantic among his hand luggage, and if the bar and grill where he’d spent most of that evening had stocked the right kind of whisky to satisfy one of those late-night hankerings for a dram or three of the good stuff that occasionally come over a man, then two things wouldn’t have happened that night. First, there would have been nobody else around to prevent an innocent man from getting badly hurt, most probably shot to death.

Which was a good thing. And second, Ben wouldn’t have been plunged into a whole new kind of mess, even for him.

Which was less of a good thing. But that’s what happens when you have a talent for trouble. He should have been used to it by now.

It was nine minutes to midnight when Ben walked into the liquor store. It was as warm and humid inside as it was outside, with a lazy ceiling fan doing little more than stir the thick air around. An unseen radio was blaring country music, a stomping up-tempo bluegrass instrumental that was alive with fiddles and banjos and loud enough to hear from half a block away.

The sign on the door said they were open till 2 a.m. Ben soon saw he was the only customer in the place, which didn’t surprise him given the lateness of the hour and the emptiness of the street. Maybe they got a rush of business just before closing time.

The entire store could have fitted inside Ben’s farmhouse kitchen back home in Normandy, but was crammed from floor to ceiling across four aisles with enough booze to float a battleship. A glance up and down the heaving displays revealed a bewildering proliferation of beer and bourbon varieties, lots of rum, a smattering of local Muscadine wines and possibly not much else. He was resigned to not finding what he was looking for, but it had to be worth a shot.

Alone behind the counter sat an old guy in a frayed check shirt and a John Deere cap, with crêpey skin and lank grey hair, who was so absorbed in the pages of the fishing magazine he was reading that he didn’t seem to have noticed Ben come in.

‘How’re they biting?’ Ben said with a smile over the blare of the music, pointing at the magazine. The friendly traveller making conversation with the locals.

The old timer suddenly registered his customer’s presence and gazed up with watery, pale eyes. ‘Say what, sonny?’ He didn’t appear to possess a single tooth in his mouth.

It had to be thirty years since the last time anyone had called Ben ‘sonny’. Abandoning the fishing talk, which wasn’t his best conversation topic anyway, he asked the old timer what kinds of proper scotch he had for sale. Whisky with a ‘y’ and not an ‘ey’. Ben had never quite managed to develop a taste for bourbon, though in truth he’d drink pretty much anything if pushed. He had to repeat himself twice, as it was now becoming clear that the storekeeper was stone deaf as well as toothless, which probably accounted for the volume of the music.

Finally the old timer got it and directed him to a section of an aisle on the far end of the store. ‘Third aisle right there, walk on down to the bottom. Hope you find what you’re lookin’ for.’ The Cajun accent was more noticeable on him, sounding less Americanised than the younger locals. A sign of the times, no doubt, as the traditional ways and cultures eroded as gradually and surely as Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.

Ben said thanks. The old man frowned and peered at him with the utmost curiosity, as though this blond-haired foreigner were the strangest creature who’d ever stepped inside his store. ‘Say, where you from, podnuh? Ain’t from aroun’ here, that’s for damn sure.’ Ben couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called ‘partner’, either.

‘Long way from home,’ Ben replied.

The old timer cupped a hand behind his ear and craned his wrinkly neck. ‘Whassat?’ They could still be having this conversation come closing time. Hearing aids obviously hadn’t found their way this far south yet. Or maybe the oldster was afraid they’d cramp his style with the girls. Ben just smiled and walked off in search of the section he wanted. The storekeeper gazed after him for a moment and then shrugged and fell back into squinting at his magazine.

Following the directions, Ben soon found the range of scotches at the bottom of the last aisle, tucked away in what seemed a forgotten, seldom-frequented corner of the store judging by the layers of dust on the shelf. He began browsing along the rows of bottles, recognising with pleasure the names of some old friends among them. Knockando, Johnny Walker, Cutty Sark, Glenmorangie and a dozen others – it wasn’t a bad selection, all things considered. Then he spotted the solitary bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask single malt, one of his personal favourites for its dark, peaty, smokey flavour.

It had been sitting there so long that the bottle label was flecked with mildew. He took it down from the shelf, wiped off the dust and weighed his discovery appreciatively in his hand, savouring the prospect of taking it back to his hotel room for a couple of hours’ enjoyment before bed. The precious liquid had come a long way from its birthplace on rugged, windswept Islay in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, for him to stumble across here in Southern Louisiana of all places. Maybe this was something more profound and meaningful than mere serendipity. Enough to make a man of lapsed religious faith start believing again, or almost.

Ben was carrying the bottle back up the aisle as though it were holy water when, over the blare of the music, he heard raised voices coming from the direction of the counter. As he reached the top of the aisle he saw a pair of guys who had just walked in.

One was big and ox-like in a studded motorcycle jacket with a patch on the back showing a gothic-helmeted grinning skull and the legend IRON SPARTANS MC, LOUISIANA. He was slow-moving and wore a calm smile. The other was a foot shorter, wiry and wasted in a denim vest cut-off that bared long, skinny arms with faded blue ink. He was agitated and angry, eyes darting as if he’d snorted a tugrope-sized line of cocaine.

The pair might have been regular customers, but Ben guessed not. Because he was fairly sure that, even in the Deep South, regular customers didn’t generally come storming into a place toting sawn-off pump shotguns and magnum revolvers.

Great.

The armed robbers were too intent on threatening the storekeeper to have noticed that the three of them weren’t alone. Ben retreated quickly out of sight behind the corner of the aisle and peeked through a gap between stacks of Dixie beer cans.

The hefty ox-like guy had the old timer by the throat with one large hand and the muzzle of the sawn-off jammed against his chest in the other. The storekeeper was pale and terrified and looked about to drop dead from heart failure. Meanwhile the small ratty guy tucked his loaded and cocked .357 Smith & Wesson down the front of his jeans, perhaps not the wisest gunhandling move Ben had ever seen, and vaulted over the counter to start rifling through the cash register. He was yelling furiously, ‘Is this all ya got, y’old fuckin’ coot? Where’s the rest of it?’

The old man’s eyes boggled and he seemed unable to speak. The disconcertingly calm guy with the shotgun looked as if he couldn’t wait to blow his victim’s internal organs all over the shop wall. It was hard to tell who was more dangerous, the little angry psycho or the big laid-back one.

Ben puffed his cheeks, thought fuck it, counted to three.

Then he sprang into action.

Six minutes to midnight, but the evening was only just getting started.

Chapter 2 (#u0996fefc-3da0-5fb5-8429-1e493b385096)

Fourteen hours earlier

It had been Ben’s first visit to Chicago. Now he was sitting in the departure lounge at O’Hare International, counting down the minutes to his flight while gazing through the window at the planes coming and going, and sipping coffee from a paper cup. As machine coffee went, not too terrible. It almost quelled his urge to light up a cigarette from the pack of Gauloises in his leather jacket pocket.

It was a rare thing for Ben to leave his base in rural northern France for anything other than work-related travel, whether to do with running the Le Val Tactical Training Centre that he co-owned with his business partner Jeff Dekker or for the other, more risky kinds of business that sometimes called him away. But when the chance had come to snatch a few free days out of Le Val’s hectic schedule and with no other pressing matters or life-threatening emergencies to attend to, Ben had seized the opportunity to jump on a plane and cross the Atlantic. His mission: to pay a visit to his son, plus one more objective he was yet to meet.

They hadn’t seen each other in a few months, since Jude’s somewhat rootless and meandering life path had led him to relocate from England to the US to be with his new girlfriend, Rae Lee. Ben knew all about rootless and meandering from past personal experience, and while he accepted that it was fairly normal for a young guy in his early twenties to take a few years before finding his feet in life, he worried that Jude had too much of his father’s restless ways about him.

It was Ben’s greatest wish that Jude could instead have taken more after the saintly, patient and selflessly loving man who raised him as his own son all those years when the kid’s real dad was off merrily raising hell in some or other war-ravaged corner of the globe.

Every time Ben reflected on that complicated history, he felt the same pangs of heartache. Years after the event, the deaths of Jude’s mother and stepfather, Michaela and Simeon Arundel, were a wound that would always remain raw. The subject was never discussed between them, but Ben knew the young man felt the pain just as keenly as he did.

Rae was a couple of years older than Jude, the only daughter of a wealthy Taiwanese-American family, and occupied a nice apartment in Chicago’s Far North Side overlooking Sheridan Park, where Ben had stayed with them for only one day before feeling it was time to move on. The brevity of his visit might have seemed unusual to more family-orientated folks, but Ben’s and Jude’s was not a normal father–son relationship and Ben was anxious not to overstay his welcome.

Ben got on cordially with Rae and liked her well enough, but wasn’t completely sure that she was right for Jude. Jeff Dekker, never one to mince words, regarded her as a busybody and a do-gooder – and there was some truth in that. She was a freelance investigative journalist with multiple axes to grind over anything she considered worth protesting about, and seemed to be pulling Jude deeper into her world of political activism despite the fact that he’d never hitherto expressed the slightest interest in politics or causes of any kind. They’d met during one of her trips to Africa to expose the human rights abuses of the coltan mining industry. A trip that had achieved nothing except very nearly lead her to a gruesome end, and Jude with her.

Having had to come to the rescue on that memorable occasion, Ben worried that the next idealistic crusade might turn out to be one from which nobody, not even a crew of ex-Special Forces and regular army veterans ready to do whatever it took, could save them.

Still, if Jude was happy, which he seemed to be, Ben could wish for no more; and even if Jude weren’t happy it was none of Ben’s business to interfere in his grown-up son’s personal affairs. He had said his goodbyes and left with mixed emotions, sorry that he wouldn’t see Jude again for a while, yet quietly relieved to get away. Now here he sat, waiting for another plane – but he wasn’t planning on heading home to France just yet.

At last, Ben’s flight was called, and a couple of hours later they were touching down at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans. Which struck Ben as tying in very well with his other reason for being in the States.

As a dedicated jazz enthusiast, albeit one who was incapable of producing a single note on any instrument yet invented, Ben had for many years been a fan of the venerable tenor saxophonist Woody McCoy. Now pushing eighty-seven, McCoy was one of the last of the greats. He’d never achieved the stardom he deserved in his own right, but had played with some of the most iconic names in the business: Bird, Monk, ’Trane, Miles, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, to list but a few.

Now at long last, after a career spanning six decades, the man, the legend, was hanging up his spurs. But doing it in fine style, taking his Woody McCoy Quintet on a farewell tour all up and down the country. A few weeks earlier, Ben had seen the announcement that Woody was due to perform his last-ever gig in his home town of Villeneuve, deep in the rural heart of South Louisiana, in mid-September.

When the opportunity had arisen to free up the date in his work schedule, and with Jeff’s insistent ‘Go on, mate, you know you want to’ in his ear, Ben had decided that this last-ever chance to hear Woody McCoy play live was not to be missed. He almost never allowed himself such indulgences. But he’d allow himself this one, as a special treat.

Now that he’d cut his stay in Chicago a little shorter than planned, it meant he had a couple of days to explore Woody McCoy’s birthplace, sample the local culture, relax and take it easy.

Ben stepped off the plane in New Orleans and found himself in a different world. Welcome to Planet Louisiana. Though over the years he’d visited more places than he could easily count, his past travels around the US had been limited. He’d been to New York City, toured the coastline of Martha’s Vineyard, spent some time in the rugged hills of Montana, and had a brief sojourn in the wide open spaces of Oklahoma. But he’d never ventured this far south, and had only a vague idea of what to expect.

The first thing that hit him was the humidity. It was so thick and cloying that for a moment he thought he must have fallen down a wormhole in the space-time continuum and found himself back in the tropical furnace of Brunei redoing his SAS jungle training.

He cleared security, strolled through the hellish heat over to the nearest car rental place with his new green canvas haversack on his shoulder and was happy to find that the near-blanket blacklist that bugged him in many other countries didn’t seem to apply here. For some reason, the likes of Europcar, Hertz and Avis objected to his custom on the grounds that their vehicles never came back in one piece, occasionally in several, and other times not at all. But the pleasant young lady at Enterprise breezed through the paperwork and handed him the keys to a gleaming new Chevy Tahoe SUV with a smile like warm honey and a ‘Y’all have a good day, now’ that was Ben’s first introduction to a real-life Southern accent.

The airport lay eleven miles west of downtown New Orleans, amid one of the flattest and most panoramic landscapes Ben had seen outside of the Sahara. He opened all the windows, lit a long-awaited Gauloise with his trusty Zippo lighter, which the airport security guys had scrutinised as though it were an M67 fragmentation grenade, and headed north-west for the South Central Plains with the wind blasting around him and a four-hour drive ahead. He intended to enjoy every minute of his freedom.