No sooner had the explosion stunned them all, but the ground under their feet seemed to shake as though from some powerful underground tremor. The surreal thought flashed through Hacker’s mind: earthquake. But it wasn’t. Instants later they felt and heard the crashing impacts of an aerial bombardment slamming into the castle. Plaster dust showered from the ceiling and they all ducked their heads in fear that it was about to cave in on top of them.

‘We’re under attack!’ yelled Meeks, his one eye opening wide.

Everyone stared in horror at Hacker.

Hacker had no idea what was happening, but of one thing he was certain. ‘It’s him. It’s Hope.’

Chapter 60

‘Come an’ see what I found, laddie,’ Boonzie had said, beckoning. ‘I think ye’ll find it interesting.’

And he hadn’t been wrong.

Ben followed, mystified, as Boonzie led him over to the far end of the hut, cupping a hand over the lantern to shade its light away from the windows. In the hours since his escape from the dungeon Boonzie had made himself a little workspace back here, and he’d spent his time productively. The propane heater whose fumes Ben had been able to smell sat beside a rudimentary bench table with an upturned packing case for a chair. On the bench lay two large cardboard boxes and some odds and ends Boonzie had salvaged from the stores inside the hut: an assortment of tools and bits of wiring and tape, a small yellow spray-paint can.

Boonzie picked something off his work surface and pressed it into Ben’s hand. It was a half-pound lump of what looked like pale white clay, the size of a small potato, cold and clammy to the touch. But Ben knew it wasn’t clay, because he’d seen something very much like it before, on quite a few occasions.

‘Is this what I think it is?’

Boonzie nodded with a wicked smile that made his teeth gleam in the semi-darkness. ‘Aye, it certainly is.’

Ben stared at his old friend and asked, ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain to me where you found half a pound of RDX high explosive?’

‘Same place as I found the other thirty-nine an’ a half pounds,’ Boonzie said, pointing at a larger box on a shelving unit. ‘In that other box over there, twenty-one detonators. An’ that’s not all.’

Ben could hardly believe his ears. But then he thought about the stores of building materials inside the hut, and realised. Stuart’s castle was just a rich man’s folly that hadn’t been constructed all that many years ago. The way it nestled into the slope of the mountainside suggested that thousands of tons of solid rock and stone must have needed to be blasted away to level the ground beneath its foundations. Such a major civil engineering project required the unleashing of immense destructive energy.