Brute Force

by Andy McNab

  Stars exploded behind my eyes. The box-cutter fell from my hand and I followed it onto the ground and he came down on top of me. Blood from his face splashed onto mine.

  I knew I had to keep on twisting. I kept my arms above my head. I tried to kick, buck, head butt, anything to get out of the move. He knew exactly what he was doing. Like a skilled wrestler, his body moulded onto mine. The stubble on his cheek ground against mine. His breath stank of tobacco and greasy food.

  His hands shot up and clutched at my throat. His saliva sprayed my face as he rammed his thumbs into my Adam's apple. He was on a mission to crush the life out of me.

  I struggled to get my hands around his throat too, but he just tensed his neck muscles and breathed between his teeth.

  My head swelled to bursting point.

  I was going to black out.

  He had me, elbows out wide as he tightened his grip. I couldn't move my arms. I writhed and kicked and flailed and knew it wasn't working. There was nothing else I could do.

  I felt him suddenly go rigid. He moaned and his head jerked back. Air gushed out of him like a punctured balloon and I rolled clear.

  The shaft of the garden fork that was sticking out of his back thudded against the concrete as he fell. He thrashed about on the ground like a game fish under a harpoon.

  Lynn stood above us, ripping the shirt from his mouth, gagging for air. I could see his silhouette against the lights that now shone from the house. I could hear shouting and it definitely wasn't English.

  I staggered to my feet and grabbed him. I dragged him by his pyjamas out onto the road and into the field. I pushed him down onto the frost-hardened mud, maintaining my grip on him as I fought to fill my lungs with oxygen.

  My Adam's apple felt like it was still in a vice.

  'Nick—'

  'Shut the fuck up – not now!'

  We needed transport, and theirs was the nearest.

  More shouts came from the house. Screams of anguish filled the air from the growing sheds.

  'Come on, keep up.'

  I powered up the binos and moved towards the road at the base of the triangle. Their cars had approached from either side of the house. They were probably parked up behind it.

  We moved as fast as we could over the frozen mud. Lynn was finding it hard in his bare feet. I had to keep pulling him forward, then stopping to scan through the binos for the shape of a car on the road or beyond the trees and bushes that lined the fields.

  We were about twenty from the base of the triangle. The house was immediately to my right. Still no sign of a vehicle.

  A figure appeared from the rear of the house. Lights sprang on a few seconds later, reversed a short way along the base road, swung back up the drive, then turned back towards us.

  'Keep the fuck down!'

  I had another squint through the binos. Two guys were carrying the body and a third was helping the other casualty to the road.

  I ripped off my day sack and fumbled inside the flap as the car drew level with the first cooling shed.

  It stopped when I was still about seven or eight metres from the road.

  I sprinted for it, not bothering to check if Lynn was behind. I got to the driver's door. The window was down. He'd been shouting to the others with the engine still running.

  I pulled open the door and swung the screwdriver down hard into the top of his shoulder.

  He roared like a wounded bull and made a wild grab for it. He looked up at me. I could see his face in the lights of the dash. It would have looked perfectly at home on the front seat of Little Miss Camcorder's BMW.

  I grabbed a handful of hair, yanked him out onto the road and kicked him down.

  'Come on, get in there!' I yelled at Lynn. 'You drive.'

  The lads were streaming towards us from the cooling sheds. I threw the day sack over the roof at them, not that it was going to slow them down much, then pulled the bino strap off my neck and threw them too. As the closest one dodged to avoid them I dived into the back seat. 'Go! Go! Go!'

  Lynn put his foot to the floor and mounted the verge. We bounced back down onto the tarmac and nearly stalled.

  'Calm down! Put it in first – let's go! Let's go!'

  As we fishtailed up the road, Mr Norfolk Country Pursuits' binos bounced off the rear window.

  We drove up to the fork and then on towards the coast.

  The Merc was going to have to find its way back to Mayfair on its own.

  39

  Our next objective wasn't complicated: to get the fuck out of the immediate area before they cordoned it off, or night was turned into day by searchlight-toting helicopters.

  I wiped the blood from my face as the car weaved with the road.

  I sat up as it began to narrow. Lynn made few concessions. I caught sight of his expression in the glow of the dashboard: eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, concentrating with every fibre of his being on the tunnel of light thrown by the headlamp beams and framed by the high hedges either side of the road.

  The rev counter gradually fell from the red. Without as much as a sideways glance, he smiled for the first time. Fuck me, I was sharing a getaway car with Stirling Moss in stripy pyjamas.

  'Where's the nearest ATM?'

  'Holt. About fifteen minutes away.'

  Life had to change now. I could no longer leave a trail behind me. With every new direction I took, I needed to shed my skin. First job was to draw the max from my two accounts, then bin the cards. No more money trail. Then we had to get some clothes and get the fuck out of the land of Country Pursuits.

  The lane became a blur as Lynn forgot to relax his right foot again. I checked behind and saw no lights.

  'Bit slower . . .'

  I didn't want to end up in a ditch now we'd got this far.

  Despite the gash I'd left on his pate and the streaks of mud on his dressing gown, he was completely unruffled, and so typically English it was as if we were slightly late for dinner.

  'Who are they, Nick? Anyone we know?'

  I shrugged. 'The Firm's still top of my list, though that doesn't totally explain the leatherwear. I was in Ireland yesterday. A device was shoved under my car. By them, I reckon; that's why they had no weapons. We've all come straight off the ferry.'

  Another corner was coming up fast. He dipped the lights to check if anything was coming the other way, then switched back to full beam.

  My feet kicked against some shit in the foot well. I looked down and saw a sliver of light. I reached down and recovered a laptop with a mobile phone connected to it by a cable. Sellotaped to the lid was a sheet of A4, a printout of a video grab. It was a close-up of my face from Pete's Basra footage. Would the Firm need to rely on that? They'd have far better mug shots of me on file – but maybe none that were quite so up-to-date.

  I opened the top and tapped the keys to take it out of screensaver. A Google Earth map came up. The cursor hovered on the road where I'd parked the Merc, at more or less exactly the location of the lay-by.

  'Has to be the Firm . . . The device wasn't the only thing they put in my car.'

  'Tracker?'

  I nodded. They'd probably slipped it behind the Merc's bumper or under the chassis, held in place by a strong magnet, maybe even connected to the car battery. Fuck it, who cared? Lynn, maybe – it meant both of us were targets. They were trying to kill him as well.

  I pulled the mobile away from the laptop and threw it out of the window as Lynn missed the apex of another bend, confirming that the only thing he really knew how to drive was a desk. My own mobile swiftly followed.

  I asked him about the Leptis message, but all I got was a blank stare. 'Why would Vauxhall Cross need to use you to lead them here? I draw a pension; they know where I live. So why not just hit you and me separately? Why the message?'

  We screamed through another village. I couldn't stop myself doing some phantom braking as he narrowly missed a couple of parked cars.

  A sign for Holt flashed by. The dashboard clock said
nearly 2 a.m. Lynn went straight across a raised roundabout on the edge of town.

  'OK, slow down. We're out of the shit, at least for the time being. Drive normally now. I need an ATM, not a fucking ambulance.'

  40

  We reached Holt and parked up outside Lloyds on the main street.

  'Wait here, engine on.'

  It was a nice, well-to-do town: lots of candle shops, cafés and estate agencies. That meant people around here probably liked to be nice too.

  I got £400 out on both my cards and was back in the car asap, now in the front passenger seat. I snapped my cards in half.

  'Where's the charity shops?'

  We went down the High Street and into a small square. Lynn drove slowly while I ran backwards and forwards between the car and the shop doorways and threw the nice people's bags of cast-offs into the back of the car like it was a rubbish cart. I didn't care if any CCTV saw us. We'd be shedding another layer of skin soon.

  'OK, out of town now, towards Norwich – and slowly. How far is that?'

  'About twenty miles.'

  As we headed back into the darkness I hit the interior lights and ripped open the bin-liners.

  'What about your family? You'd better phone them and get them out of the way.'

  He shook his head and a muscle twitched briefly in his jaw. 'No need.'

  'OK. So now we get dressed and cleaned up. Then we dump the car and train it to London.'

  'I don't know what we can—'

  'Need to know, Colonel, remember?' I grinned. 'And you don't need to know anything until you need to know it. Don't want you giving away the game plan.'

  I gave him the once-over. The blood on his head had dried a little and the swelling had begun. It wouldn't have been that noticeable if he'd had any hair to cover it. 'Right now we need a nice quiet stretch of river so we can clean ourselves up, then we're going to need to find you a hat.'

  He seemed to relax again and pointed at the rear-view. 'You're no oil painting yourself, Stone. If I need a hat, you need the full shemagh . . .'

  His foot went back on the pedal.

  'And slow down,' I yelled. 'We don't want to get stopped.'

  We had to dump the car once we got into the city – somewhere it wouldn't stick out and get pinged too quickly. Main streets and multi-storey car parks were out, because of the CCTV, but we couldn't leave it anywhere too isolated either – it would stick out like a sore thumb.

  'When's the first train?'

  Lynn finally lifted his foot off the gas.

  'Not sure; it used to be some time before six – to get into London for the start of the working day.'

  The clock on the dash read 02.38.

  41

  Norwich

  0334 hrs

  I kept about two hundred behind Lynn as we walked into the city centre. It was bitterly cold. His breath hung in clouds behind him. The streets were well lit, so it was head down all the way, hands in pockets. My ears and nose were numb, and my hair was still wet from the river. It would have nudged me into hypothermia if I hadn't kept moving.

  I must have looked pissed. The shoes the Red Cross shop had provided were plastic, and skidded on the icy pavement. Their jeans were two sizes too small; the zip only did up halfway. At least the jumpers fitted. I had two of them on over a T-shirt, and a shabby black raincoat.

  There'd only been one hat, a fake-leather Russian thing with ear muffs which I'd given to Lynn.

  Now that we'd shed another skin – the car – we needed to get out of here asap. We'd parked it near some council houses, opposite the entrance to the city airport. I'd left the keys in the ignition. With luck, it would be nicked. It was only about a mile to the station, but each step felt like Scott pushing for the Pole.

  The roads narrowed as we got closer to the city centre. Lynn had suggested we RV by the skips behind the Big W, the warehouse to a general store a couple of hundred from the station. He said I wouldn't be able to miss it.

  He wasn't wrong. The massive metal and concrete block had the world's biggest yellow W shining out over a stadium-sized car park it shared with Morrisons.

  The recycling area was piled high with folded cardboard boxes and overflowing skips. Lynn wasn't the only one to suggest it as an RV. Crushed beer cans and empty vodka bottles were strewn across the greasy concrete. The smell of vomit and cigarettes probably meant it was a hang-out for kids rather than dossers.

  We each stood on a folded box to insulate ourselves from the ground. If anything, my plastic shoes were conducting the cold. I swayed from foot to foot for a moment, then grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him against the wall. He didn't see it coming.

  'What the fuck's happening?'

  He looked genuinely shocked.

  I realized I liked shoving him about. 'It's the Firm, isn't it? Who else has the resources to track me over the water, plant a device, and follow me all the way to your stately fucking home when it doesn't detonate?'

  My breath billowed across the narrow gap between us.

  'Then I get a message that Leptis has the answers.'

  He was getting really scared. I didn't blame him. He'd seen my handiwork with the box-cutter.

  'Now, only you, me and your old mate Mansour know about Leptis – and a bloody great filing cabinet in Vauxhall Cross.'

  'Maybe they want both of us . . .'

  'There are fucking easier ways, don't you think?'

  'Maybe they wanted you to find the device . . .' He started to calm down again. He'd sensed he wasn't in danger; that I was just pissed off.

  'It was a pretty serious chunk of Semtex.'

  'But the battery was flat.'

  'What about Liam Duff?'

  I released my grip a little and he shrugged. 'You said you were in Ireland. I was wondering if that was down to you.'

  'You're a fucking nightmare.'

  'You made pretty short work of those men at the farm.'

  He needed another shove. 'I don't fucking believe it! You were quite happy to order shit like that from the comfort of your air-conditioned office, but seeing it up close is a whole different ball game, isn't it? Get real, Lynn. What the fuck do you think I did to Ben Lesser on the Bahiti – cuddle him to death?'

  'I just think that you could have shown some restraint, reasonable force . . .'

  'The only way to stop being on the receiving end of that shit is by being on top; being as violent and quick as you can. Get them before they get you. What do you call that trick with the fork? A spot of gardening?'

  It was falling on deaf ears. There was the same look of disdain on his face as he had always given me.

  'Fuck it. Just listen. Get a ticket to Liverpool Street.'

  Lynn was busy tying the flaps under his chin.

  'Use a machine. Here.' I gave him £100.