by Andy McNab
She shuffled away from the hatch, along the mound that covered the outer skin of the conduit, and looked around. The stark geometry of the pipeline had been landscaped to blend in with the hillside. It was camouflaged by squares of grass interspersed with gravel drainage beds filled with lumps of flint, the size of Stone Age tools, that glistened wetly in the sunlight.
She was on high ground, above the tunnel system. The breeze ruffled her hair, carrying the smell of gas towards the maze of rail tracks, sidings, platforms and gantries that surrounded the French end of the tunnel.
Police and military vehicles and fire appliances crowded around its mouth. She was standing beneath a cluster of power lines that sloped down towards an electrical sub-station a few hundred metres below them. Ahead and to either side of her lay a patchwork of fields and copses, and in the distance, just inland from the cliffs flanking the Channel coast, she could see the grey stone spire of a church and a handful of red pantiled roofs of a tiny village. Escalles . . . Of course. She heard Sambor’s voice in her head: ‘That is still safe? Escalles?’
Laszlo turned his back to her as he closed the hatch. His day-sack was looped across his oxygen set, the straps as loose as they could go. She knew that it contained whatever he needed to detonate the pile of rancid explosive beneath the gas pipe. She had a sudden dreadful premonition of the fireball that would surge along the pipeline, destroying everything in its path. And engulfing Tom . . .
She stooped low, scooped up a handful of flints, and hurled herself towards him. When she was still a metre away, Laszlo began to turn. She focused on the shape of his head as she leaped at him, swinging her body to the left, her right arm crooked, the flints protruding from between her fingers like Stone Age arrow-heads.
She didn’t care where they connected, so long as they did. Laszlo gave a loud groan and a sigh, like air leaving a balloon. She didn’t feel the stones tearing the flesh above his eye, just the pressure of her arm being stopped dead as the rest of her body carried on swivelling.
He spun round, propelled by the momentum of her onslaught. She swept her left hand, also bunched and loaded, towards its target. This time she could feel the hardness of his skull beneath the blow, felt it scrape across the contour of his head as he sank to his knees. He moaned again, more loudly and with even greater anguish.
She brought her right hand down hard on the top of his head. The flint edges, sharp as blades, cut deep, hitting bone and stripping back the skin. She gouged a thick furrow from his scalp; the flint held its line for a couple more inches and then veered free.
Laszlo slumped to the ground. His hands scrabbled to protect his head, then fell away and he lay still. He was still breathing, but he must have gone into shock.
Delphine didn’t have time to draw breath. He wouldn’t stay like that for long. Dropping the flints, she rolled him over onto his stomach, loosened the straps of the day-sack and pulled it from his shoulders.
Laszlo groaned.
She fumbled for the zip. She could see the loop of nylon cord attached to it, but her fingers didn’t seem able to follow her brain’s instructions. Finally she managed to hook a finger into it and peel it back.
Her mind was filled with the image of Tom on the train, confronting Laszlo and Sambor, the battery in his hand, the two leads connecting it to the detonator on his chest. The plastic square separating the jaws of the crocodile clip that would complete the circuit . . . His other hand tightening the wire that would wrench the insulator away . . .
Somehow she’d expected to find something similar inside Laszlo’s precious bag: wires, clips, batteries. A box with a plunger, maybe, or a tangle of different, brightly coloured wires attached to a ticking clock, like in a Hollywood movie.
All she unearthed was some kind of walkie-talkie, a military olive green, with a stubby aerial, a numerical keypad and a red dial, graduated from zero to twelve. At the moment it was set to zero. Alongside the dial was a flick switch, and beside it a small graphic of a lightning bolt that told its own story.
She stared at it, puzzled.
But of course . . . The device she’d seen strapped to the pipeline would hardly be connected to the day-sack by a long wire. It must be activated by a radio signal.
Laszlo stirred.
She remembered his chilling words: ‘I’ve bet my brother that the blast will be powerful enough to fracture the rock overhead . . .’
She stared at the radio. What could she do? What would Tom do?
She thought of him again, the battery in his hand, the two leads connected to it . . .
The battery . . .
Without a battery, a radio couldn’t function.
She flipped it over, pressed down on the cover and slid it open. Inside sat a square power pack. She lifted it out with trembling hands and disconnected it.
Laszlo’s fist smashed into the side of her head. She went down hard. Another blow glanced off her cheek and flipped her over. Laszlo pulled the knife from his belt. Blood bubbled from his almost-closed right eye.
‘Give it to me.’
‘I don’t have it.’
‘Give it to me!’
She opened her hand. ‘Here.’ She sat up, appeared to be about to hand it to him. Then she hurled the battery as far as she could, down the hill and into the long grass, and smashed the radio casing on a nearby rock.
She watched, fixated, as the sun glinted off the blade of the knife arcing, in slow motion, towards her throat.
‘Killing me and my baby won’t stop him,’ she rasped. She kept her voice taut, determined not to give him the satisfaction of hearing her fear. ‘He will not rest until he finds you. Then he will kill you. I’d want that. I’d want it to happen slowly . . .’
She felt the cold metal on her throat and a warm trickle of blood ooze down her neck. Her breathing was fast and shallow. As she stared at him, unable to move, everything seemed to freeze. She could feel the breeze in her hair, the sun warm on her skin. She could hear the song of a blackbird in the nearby wood.
It seemed so cruel to be murdered in bright sunlight, with birdsong in her ears and a child in her belly that had never experienced those joys; a boy child who didn’t even have a name.
There was a sound from the hatch, almost like the beating of a gong. She felt the pressure ease on her throat. Laszlo withdrew the knife, but held it for a moment in front of her face. She saw the reflection of her darkly terrified eyes in its blade.
‘You’re right, of course. He comes for you. And if you are not here, he will come for me.’
He drew back the knife and ran its blade down her body, towards her stomach. His good eye stared deeply into hers.
The blade stopped. She could feel its tip starting to pierce her skin. Then he seemed to change his mind. He lifted it away once more and plunged it deep into her right thigh.
‘I really do hope that Tom manages to keep you alive.’ He nodded down at her stomach. ‘And to lose a child is never easy . . .’
Delphine felt no pain at first, just saw the crimson fountain spurting from the gash in her jeans.
She pressed her fingers against the wound, but was unable to staunch the blood gushing from her severed femoral artery. Faintness swept through her in waves. She felt her hand slide helplessly away, and fail somehow to break her fall.
Her head smacked against the still wet grass, and the light inside it seemed to dim, as if a cloud had drifted across the sun. She could no longer feel its warmth. She heard ringing in her ears. All other sounds now seemed to be coming from a very great distance away.
Laszlo moved swiftly to the two zip-wire harnesses – with a loop of rope at each end and a plastic wheel at its centre – that Sambor had secreted beside the hatch.
He shoved one into his pocket and hooked the other over the nearest power line, slid his hands into the loops and accelerated down towards the sub-station.
115
TOM DRAGGED HIMSELF out of the hatch in time to see Laszlo release his hold on his makes
hift zip-wire and drop like a paratrooper onto the lower ground. He rolled, sprang to his feet and began to move away.
Delphine’s crumpled body was lying beneath the power cables, the shattered shell of a VHF transmitter beside her. Blood spurted onto the grass with every pump of her heart.
Her eyelids fluttered and her chest heaved as he knelt and cradled her head. ‘Stay with me, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Stay with me . . .’
He undid his belt and looped it around her thigh, above the wound, then yanked it tight and twisted it tighter still. The leather squeaked as it bit into her flesh.
‘Speak to me, Delphine . . . Speak to me!’
This time, she registered his voice. Her eyelids flickered.
‘Come on, sweetheart. You’re still breathing. You’re still winning!’ He gave her cheek a stinging slap and her eyes fluttered open. ‘Keep still. The more you move, the more you’ll bleed.’
With the belt, twisted as tightly as possible, in his left hand, he tore at the blood-soaked cut in her jeans with his right. There was no point in trying to be gentle with casualties in the field. You just had to grip them and get on with the job of keeping them alive.
‘This is going to hurt, but I want you to stay as still as you can.’
He took a deep breath and pushed his fingers into the wound, probing for the artery. Delphine lurched upright, howling with pain. He ignored it. If she was screaming, she was breathing.
‘Lie down. Get back down!’
With her cries echoing in his ears, he kept groping inside the wound, probing with his fingertips among the torn flesh and gushing blood for the severed end of the artery. At last he found it, like a slippery rubber tube, and tried to pinch off the blood flow. But the wound was too narrow. The muscle around it had tightened. Delphine’s body’s natural defences were doing their best to apply the necessary pressure to stop the life cascading out of her. But Nature wasn’t working.
‘Stand by for more screams,’ he yelled. ‘Keep them coming!’
He saw her eyes widen as he pulled Sambor’s knife from his jeans. Her screams redoubled as he inserted the blade into her wound and cut the flesh longer and deeper. The gash opened like freshly sliced meat on a butcher’s slab. He went back to work with his fingers until he felt the twitching mouth of the severed artery. He seized it and held it firm, clamped between his thumb and forefinger.
He saw her chin sink towards her chest. ‘Don’t fucking flake out on me now, Delphine. We’re nearly there. Keep screaming!’
Weak and trembling, her face white and shiny with sweat, she gave an exhausted nod. Tom released his grip on the belt, stooped to cut a six-inch length off his bootlace and used it to tie off the artery.
‘Lovely job.’ He touched her cheek lightly with his blood-slicked fingers and gave her an encouraging smile. ‘But keep still. The show’s not over yet . . .’
He fished out the old man’s mobile, dialled Gavin and held it to his ear.
Where the fuck was he?
The flat, continuous ‘unobtainable’ tone drilled its way into his head.
Next, he dialled 112, the EU emergency number, and spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece.
‘They’re on their way, Delphine. They won’t be long. They’re just down the hill.’
Tom checked her wound. It still glistened in the sunlight, but the haemorrhaging had stopped. He cut the cleanest strip of material he could find from his shirt and used his belt to bind it over the gaping hole in her flesh.
Delphine fought for breath. ‘Laszlo . . .? Tom . . . Laszlo . . .?’
He shook his head. ‘Laszlo’s gone.’ He nodded at the remains of the initiation device and its empty battery compartment. ‘It’s over.’
She put a hand on his arm, gripping it tight. Her eyes burned into his. ‘No . . . Until he’s dead, it’ll never be over . . . Go . . . Go and get him . . .’
Tom gestured towards the now deserted sub-station and the empty fields around it. ‘I don’t even know which way he went.’
‘But—’
‘Just lie still.’ He rested his hand on her arm, calming her. ‘You’ve lost a lot of blood.’
‘But I know . . . I know where . . .’
‘Delphine—’
She pushed his hand away. ‘Listen . . .’
Tom closed his mouth.
‘Escalles . . . that village . . . over there . . .’ With the last remnants of her strength she lifted an arm and pointed towards the cluster of rooftops just visible among the trees.
‘How do you know?’
‘I do . . . Now go . . . Go and kill him.’
Tom paused long enough to take a bearing on the village and check behind him that the approaching trauma team were on their way.
Then he checked he still had Sambor’s fighting knife and jumped off the mound.
116
HE WATCHED THE ground rush up to meet him, waited for the agony to return as he rolled to take the landing, trying to protect his injured leg as he did so, but without much success. He got to his feet, wincing with pain, and began to hobble towards the electricity sub-station.
From his landing point, Laszlo had left a trail in the wet grass. Tom took one last look back over his shoulder. Three or four figures in hi-vis vests were lifting Delphine onto a collapsible stretcher.
In heavy limping mode, with his half-laced boot flapping at every step, he began moving across the field and through the small wood where drifts of beechnut covered the ground.
He clambered over a barbed-wire fence and vaulted across a stream. Dairy cows, grazing on the browning grassland or chewing the cud in the shade beneath the trees, watched him impassively as he broke into a halting run across the open pasture.
He heaved himself over another barbed-wire fence and cut a swathe through a field of crops, trampling the stalks underfoot. He was about halfway across when he heard a furious shout. Face puce with rage, a farmer was running along the track at the furthest edge, intent on cutting him off. Tom neither changed his course nor slackened his pace, stumbling on with the same relentless, ground-devouring stride.
‘Vandale! Voleur!’
The farmer’s torrent of abuse died on his lips as his gaze took in the blood-soaked bandages around Tom’s leg, his battered and bloodied face, the knife in his hand and the murderous look in his eye. Muttering apologies, he began to back rapidly away.
Tom didn’t spare him another glance, kept ploughing on in the same straight line, indifferent to crops, contours or obstacles. The rolling fields dropped away into a shallow valley to his left, but he kept to the ridge leading towards the village. The roofs now seemed tantalizingly close.
He crossed another muddy track and found himself slipping and sliding through the turned earth, wet mud and churned-up tractor tracks of a recently harvested field. He managed to maintain much of his pace as he crossed it, but he felt the gruelling conditions underfoot sapping his last reserves of strength.
He speeded up again, crashing through a field of sunflowers, their stalks brown, heads blackened and drooping. Dust, pollen and leaf fragments stuck to his skin as he forced his way past them, and clouds of flies buzzed around his head, attracted by the blood and salt sweat on his skin. He paid them no attention, his every sense straining to catch the least sight or sound that might lead him to his quarry.
117
SAMBOR HAD RENTED the farmhouse on the edge of the village for the Black Bears to gather and prepare themselves after their individual journeys across Europe. The narrow, winding road outside was deserted; the only sign of life was the barking of a dog chained in a neighbouring yard.
The windows of the farmhouse were cracked, cobwebbed and dusty. The yellowing, tattered curtains, the weed-choked garden and the general air of dereliction suggested that it had been some time since anyone had lived and worked there. A perfect base from which to launch an attack.
The cobbles in the yard were almost invisible beneath a blanket of moss and leaf mould. Laszlo ran across them,
making for a barn set apart from the main farm building. Its timbers were blackened and ancient. The roof sagged where a beam had given way. There was a clatter of wings as he approached. Two pigeons flew out of a gaping hole where the tiles had cracked and slipped off their battens.
The barn doors were not locked, merely held shut by a stout plank suspended between two wrought-iron brackets. Laszlo lifted it clear and threw it to one side. The hinges creaked and protested as he swung the doors wide open, allowing light to stream into the dark interior.
Motes of dust and pollen danced in the shafts of light as he hurried inside. Bales of mouldering straw and hay were stacked at the far end of the building and rusted farm tools were propped against the walls. A selection of smaller hand tools lay on a bench among a jumble of jars, tins and packets, with cracked and faded labels.
Laszlo kicked and dragged seven or eight heavy straw bales off the edges of a dirty green tarpaulin in the middle of the floor. Beneath it was a blue Peugeot Tepee MPV. Nothing about this vehicle invited a second glance: the French roads were full of them, either crammed with families and loaded to the gunwales, or stacked with agricultural produce on the way to market.
Laszlo crouched down beside the wheel arch by the driver’s door and felt along the top of the tyre until his fingers closed around a key-fob. He pulled it out and pressed the button. An answering beep and flash of lights was followed by the click of releasing locks.
He walked round to the back and opened the hatch. Two small Samsonite suitcases stood inside, each containing a neatly folded set of clothes – the sort of middle-of-the-road, department-store casual shirts, trousers, pullovers and shoes that would pass without notice almost anywhere.
His jaw clenched as he ran his hand along the second suitcase and thought of his brother. Laszlo had made a promise to Sambor, a promise he still intended to fulfil. The havoc wreaked by the SAS man and the girl was just a setback: Laszlo would return to kill the country.
