A Necessary Hell

by Nigel Price

  “Go!” Harry shouted. They tore away from the water’s edge. There was another shot. Then a long burst of automatic fire. Bark snapped off the nearest of the trunks. Thomas screamed. Ingrid snatched him, pushing him in front so she could shield him with her body.

  Harry had lost track of their direction. They had to keep heading down. Eventually that would bring them off the mountain. The problem then would be how to cross open farmland. The helicopters would spot them easily. Somehow he would have to get hold of another car.

  As they ran, he couldn’t stop thinking about what Jamilla had said. She had to know where the records were. If she didn’t then it was all over. He would get them to safety, but to what purpose? It would be a life on the run.

  They emerged from deep undergrowth into a clearing. A circular meadow stood before them, three hundred yards across. There were more trees on the far side. In the centre sat a helicopter. A Sikorsky S-76. The engine was shut down. Harry couldn’t see the crew.

  “Don’t suppose anyone can fly that thing?” he said. He looked at Thomas. “You?”

  He started across the meadow towards it.

  “Where are you going?” Ingrid called.

  “Come on.”

  She waited a moment then followed. Harry reached it. Still no sign of the crew. He opened a door. A big smile appeared. He lifted out an M16A1 assault rifle. “Now that’s more like it.” Next he found a canvas bag stuffed with fully-charged magazines.

  “Shame about the ride, but this should equalise things. Let them bloody try and catch us now.”

  There was a shot from behind them. A bullet punched a neat hole in the helicopter door beside Harry’s face. He turned to the firer, rifle in the aim, snapped back the cocking handle and fired a neat little burst. Instantly he was back on the ranges. Back in the Afghan hills. He was home.

  The man flung out his arms and was punched back to the floor. Instantly another was beside him. Then another. The one on the left carried a Kalashnikov. He was wearing a shemagh.

  “You again,” Harry muttered. He took aim. Before he could fire, the man had dropped to one knee for a better shot.

  “Get down!” Harry shouted. Ingrid and the two children hit the deck.

  A burst of automatic fire raked the helicopter at Harry’s back.

  “Shit.” He got up and ran, dragging and pushing the others before him. “Get away from that thing!”

  Another burst of fire and the helicopter exploded in a mass of bright orange flame as the fuel tank went up. “Gutman won’t be very happy about that.”

  “I don’t think it’s his,” Ingrid said as they ran for the far tree line. “Look.”

  Skoda Man and Sidekick were coming at them from another side of the meadow. They held MP5 submachine guns. Skoda Man popped off a burst. The bullets snapped close by. Harry didn’t care. His M16 assault rifle outmatched theirs. He dropped to one knee, aimed and fired. The gun hardly moved, its recoil absorbed by the spring housed in the butt. Just the long strange boi-oi-oing that Harry had never got used to with the American weapon. But it did the job. His aim was rock solid. Sidekick went down.

  Skoda Man was advancing. He was out for revenge. For his busted nose. For his dead partner. For all the inconvenience and sheer bloody-mindedness that Harry Brown had thrown at them over the past week. He fired burst after burst. Neat and controlled. At Harry’s back, the helicopter blazed. There was a second explosion as the spare fuel tank went up. The rotor blades spun skywards, circling like great prehistoric birds coming down in a muddle of wings and limbs. Ingrid dived to the ground as the edge of a blade tore up dirt in front of her. The children were already flat on the grass.

  “Give it up!” Harry yelled.

  Skoda Man came on. “You give it up, Harry Brown.” He fired again.

  Harry swore. Aimed and fired. His burst raked diagonally across Skoda Man’s torso. Half a dozen bullets struck him, stitching a neat line of crimson pock marks from lower right hip, to upper left shoulder. In between, he was punched full of holes that drilled through bone and meat and organs. His MP5 went one way, his dead body the other.

  “Go for the trees!” Harry shouted. Ingrid staggered to her feet, grabbed Thomas in one hand and Jamilla in the other, and bolted.

  Harry spun to seek out the Kalashnikov. And there he was. While Harry had been engaging the BKA, Kalashnikov had closed the distance. He was barely a dozen paces away and still coming on. He was holding his weapon at waist height, braced to fire.

  The air around Harry came alive with the rounds. One of them struck his rifle. It knocked it out of his hands, smashing the bodywork in two.

  Harry dived away from the fire, angling at forty-five degrees. He went into a roll, the bullets following him like hornets. As he rolled he dug out the Smith & Wesson. Came out of the roll, cocking and flicking off the safety. He knelt in the aim. And froze.

  Time stood still. Kalashnikov Man came on. Closer still, firing as he went.

  Harry breathed out and held it. Lungs empty. Mind too. Hands and arms locked in position.

  He squeezed off round after round after round, working right through the magazine. The earth around him was alive with dirt as the Kalashnikov wasted its fire, trusting quantity instead of quality.

  Quality won.

  The shemagh turned crimson with a spurt of blood. There was a puzzled expression on the man’s face. He dropped his weapon. His hands went to his throat where a severed jugular was pumping his life-blood like a Formula One winner spraying the bubbly.

  Harry slowly stood for the grand finale. Kalashnikov sank to his knees and toppled forward, face slapping into the grass like a felled pine.

  “That’s for Good Cop,” Harry said. He walked to join the others who had reached the furthest trees.

  He reached them as the sound of another helicopter cut through the forest. A moment later a second Sikorsky skimmed over the treetops from the direction of the dead Skoda Men. The side door was open. It dived for the meadow, seeking out a landing space away from its blazing twin.

  Harry stared hard. Inside he could just make out two figures. One was Berger. The other his old friend Ernst Hafner. Both were armed with submachine guns.

  “Fuck.”

  With his M16 in bits, Harry knew his pistol wouldn’t be a match.

  He grabbed Ingrid and the children and smashed his way into the undergrowth. The forest had thinned dramatically and as he ran he glanced back at the meadow. The new helicopter was disgorging its two passengers. Hafner saw him and pointed. Berger fired off a lazy burst. The shots were nowhere near but showed his intentions. They wouldn’t be taking prisoners.

  The forest was coming to an end. In front Harry could see wide open farmland. They would be fleeing across a billiard table. Hafner and Berger would have uninterrupted fields of fire.

  They burst out of the woodland, the last of the trees at their backs. They vaulted over a stream and headed for a long, tall hedge running from left to right in front of them. There was a stile set into it. Then nothing beyond but the killing ground.

  For a moment Harry considered turning to fight it out. Perhaps that was the best option. He could hold them up while Ingrid and the children got away. It was the best he could think of.

  They reached the stile and started across it. Ingrid went first then turned to help Thomas, then Jamilla. Harry followed. The moment he was over, he crouched behind it.

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll do what I can then follow. Just run.”

  “But—”

  “Run!”

  Hafner broke from the trees. His face was red from the exercise. His MP5 was slung round his shoulder. Berger came after him, half a dozen paces behind. His gun was in his hands. He looked as if he knew how to use it. They looked up and saw Harry behind the stile. Both of them stopped and prepared to fire.

  This was it. The final shoot-out. Harry was outgunned. In the tumble in the meadow he had lost the stolen P7s he had got from the Skoda Men. He had also lost count of
the number of rounds in his own pistol. He checked it was cocked, the safety off, and readied himself. Fuck it, he thought. Bring it on.

  Harry froze. There was a man standing at his side.

  “Not one move.” The voice was calm but firm. “Drop the weapon.”

  “But—”

  “I thought my English was clear enough.”

  He felt the muzzle of a gun against the side of his head. He let his pistol tumble from his grasp. The grass cushioned its fall. In front of him Hafner and Berger slowed to a walk, their faces triumphant.

  “Excellent,” Berger called across. “We’ll take it from here.”

  “You too,” the voice called back. “Drop your weapons.”

  Berger and Hafner stopped. They stood stock still, guns in their hands.

  “I won’t tell you again.”

  “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” Berger shouted. “Do you know who I am?”

  Harry risked turning his head. It was a policeman. His gun was no longer pointing at Harry but across the hedge at the other two.

  “And who are you?”

  “I am Dieter Berger. German Federal Minister for Internal Security. And I order you to surrender that man and his companions to me.”

  “Well, Federal Minister, I’d tell a lesser person to go fuck himself, but to you I will just point out that this man and his companions are in Austria.”

  Harry sank back in the grass and looked up. He noted the uniform. Beyond him, a second policeman had Ingrid and the children by a patrol car parked on the road that ran along the hedgerow.

  “The hedge is the border, so lodge your complaints through the appropriate channels. I’ll leave it to someone higher up the chain of command to tell you to fuck off in the proper diplomatic language. Now run along. Bye-bye.”

  There was an urgent debate between Hafner and Berger which was lost on Harry. All the same he watched it with delight. They were glancing up at the sky. Harry guessed they were hoping reinforcements would come. Gutman probably had other helicopters and other men in the area. They would be on their way. For now, though, the two men across the hedge were powerless.

  They backed away. Berger swore at the Austrian policeman who ignored it but kept his pistol in the aim until both Hafner and Berger had disappeared back into the trees and off towards the meadow and their waiting helicopter.

  “Thank you.” Harry got to his feet.

  “Not so fast. I don’t know what was going on and it’s not for me to ask. That will be for someone higher—”

  “Higher up the chain of command,” Harry finished for him. “I know. But thank you, nonetheless.”

  The policeman sized him up. Then smiled and put his gun away. “I am afraid you are under arrest. You’re not going to give me any trouble, are you?”

  “No. But I suspect you’ll have more from that bastard once he starts making calls to all his friends and contacts.”

  The policeman shrugged. “That’s above my pay grade. I’ll let someone else worry about that. Get in the car please.”

  It was a tight squeeze, the two policemen in the front. Harry, Ingrid and the two children squashed in the back.

  “He’ll still get us, won’t he?” Ingrid said quietly. “He will make calls. He’ll have contacts in Austria. They will send us back to Germany. We’ll be dead the moment we cross the border.”

  “I’ve no idea. I don’t know how long it will take, but it won’t be immediate.”

  It was baking in the cramped car. After the run and the fight Harry was stifling. He shifted his position and slid out of the big coat. Ingrid took off Berger’s jacket. Then Thomas took off Harry’s. He folded it in his lap, crumpling it up, looking for somewhere to put it in the tight space.

  “What’s that?” Jamilla asked.

  Harry looked. The ring bearing the coin of Alexander the Great had rolled out of the pocket where he had put it a million years ago. She bent down and picked it off the floor. She held it up and examined it.

  “That’s yours now,” Harry said. “Your father was wearing it.”

  “I know.” She turned it this way and that, studying it from every angle. Harry already knew every detail. He had stared at it long enough. Only the original markings from when it had been minted. Nothing else.

  “I saw him with this. One evening,” Jamilla said. She frowned, remembering. “He …”

  She put one thumb inside the ring against the back of the coin and pushed hard. The coin popped out of the ring. “He was engraving it.” She held it up to the last of the daylight. Sun had finally broken through the evening clouds. It cast a ghostly golden glow upon the face of the Macedonian conqueror who had travelled to the edge of the known world.

  The girl smiled. “There.”

  All the way around the edge of the thick coin letters and numbers had been cut. Harry took it from her and read.

  Olaf Haas. 1917–1987. Waldfriedhof. Salzburg.

  “Jamilla,” he said. “Your father was a clever, clever man. And he loved you very much.”

  Forty Eight

  Harry sat looking out across the dark tumbled waters of the Möhnesee. He was in his favourite wicker chair, his feet up on the low stone wall, crossed at the ankles. A tumbler of Scotch sat on his lap. Condensation from the ice cubes chinking against the cut glass had left a wet patch on his stone-coloured trousers.

  “You look like you’ve wet yourself,” Ingrid said, leaning across to brush at the water mark.

  “Ha. Ha. Is that the best German humour can do?” He turned to look at her. Then leaned across the short space between them and kissed her. He had been angling for her cheek. Instead she gave him her lips. The kiss started to get serious.

  “Mum, that’s disgusting!”

  “Not nearly as disgusting as things are going to get later,” she said in a whisper. She winked at Harry. To her son she called, “Sorry, dear. It won’t happen again.”

  Down by the short wooden pier, Thomas was showing Jamilla how to rig a sail. Harry had only shown him the week before, but he had quickly got the hang of it.

  The downfall of the great and the not-so-good had been swift and far-reaching. It was still in the balance whether or not the government itself would fall. Neither Harry nor Ingrid cared. They were just relieved that the whole sorry, rotten business was over. Portland Aviation had been shut down, its officers arrested, its records pored over. Soest-Erwitte Airport was under new administration. There had been a whole raft of arrests there too. Harry’s post-exercise report would no longer be the glowing list of superlatives it so nearly had been.

  But it was nothing to compare with the arrests nationwide in all parts of society, business, industry, media, sport, government. The American military too was reeling from the implications of the discovery and publication of Krantz’s second set of records. The old bastard had been thorough to the point of obsessive compulsive. If anything, the second set was the more comprehensive of the two. High-ranking American officers were tumbling like ninepins, from Kabul westwards. Franklin had been small fry. Bigger fish than him were now bubbling away in the deep fat. For Harry it was a delight to watch.

  One by one heads had toppled. New scandals were bursting into the news every day like waves of aftershocks following the initial earthquake. On one news broadcast, Harry had caught a glimpse of his old chum Ernst Hafner. The policeman hadn’t looked quite so cocky. Rather, he had been garbed in a jump suit, chained like Houdini preparing for submersion in a water tank, and being scuttled along by prison guards with little regard for his previous rank and status. Poor old Ernst. Harry almost felt sorry for him. But not quite. He wondered what would become of his Cessna 172. Perhaps it would be going cheap. He had always wanted to fly. This could be his chance.

  Of Heinz Gutman there had been little mention at first. All the news had been of the long hard fall from power of Dieter Berger. First he had been suspended, then arraigned for trial and finally kicked off the cliff edge to which he had clung with deni
als and pleas until someone even higher up had stamped on his metaphorical fingers with their metaphorical boots.

  Finally the whole sorry mess caught up with Gutman himself. He had used every connection, called in every grubby favour, leaned on every reluctant ‘friend’ until his options ran out. His guards had deserted him, leaving him isolated and alone in Schloss Winterberg. The police had arrived to find the drawbridge raised, the gates barred. The simple expedient of a helicopter winch had defeated the medieval defences which, when opened, had admitted the officers to a whole chamber of horrors beneath the luxury living quarters where Gutman had lived his foul existence. Other girls had been found in his cellars. There he kept them, to visit whenever he chose, until he grew tired of them. Whereupon he would sell them on.

  It was said the entire castle would be torn down. Of Gutman there had been no word. At first it seemed that he had escaped in one of his aeroplanes. But then he was found, hanging by a length of telephone cord, strung from the light fitting in a seedy hotel in the filthiest part of Istanbul. He had escaped trial and due process, but at a cost. It was said that he had bodged his own hanging. Death had taken several hours. Alone and helpless. Just as his victims had been. So the police report stated.

  Old man Delaney had remarked that after all the running about, Harry could finally take the leave that had been due to him. Another project was lining up though. Something in China, or Africa, or Patagonia, or wherever. Right now Harry didn’t give a damn.

  Indeed, right now he didn’t give a damn about a lot. Except Ingrid and her son. About Ingrid, he gave one hell of a damn. Her mother had been found exactly where Hafner had put her. She took special pleasure in seeing the crooked cop go down. Now she would take Thomas for the night, as soon as he had finished down by the waterside. She was coming to fetch him. Jamilla too. Her father’s ring had fetched a far better price than Harry had estimated. Not ten thousand, but many times that. She would be well provided for.

  And Ingrid? For her Harry had lots of plans. A holiday at some point soon. They would drive down south as he had said they would, only without Thomas or her mother. Just the two of them. But not to Bamberg. They would head on further to Italy and then along the Amalfi coast to Sorrento. Perhaps across to Capri. The holiday would do them both good. He and Ingrid could kick back and enjoy the break and the ride. The Jag would cruise like a dream.