Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2)

by Giles O'Bryen

  We crouched low by the Mitsubishi while TJ sent Ollie and Zeb ahead to see if there was a quick way of skirting the building in our path. Shadows moved across the dingy yellow light behind the front door. Azza coughed and a little pink foam appeared at the corner of his mouth. The scouting party returned. It seemed that to the right of the track was dense undergrowth, while to the left the way was barred by the building itself. I watched TJ think it through, fingers tapping on a rung of the aluminium ladder mounted on the rear of the camper van. He’d already announced that he planned to make the border in four hours, and what TJ announced he liked to bring about. Dusk was falling. Azza’s condition was dangerous, and might worsen if he got slung around as we negotiated the steep slope below the building.

  ‘Stick to the track. Eyes down. No talking.’

  As TJ spoke, I felt the Mitsubishi shift on its springs. I looked up and saw the distorted reflection of a child’s face in an oblong of scratched, convex glass – large black eyes and a curved fringe of hair. The face disappeared and again I felt the merest rocking from the body of the vehicle. I was too astonished to move or speak. I focused on the oblong in which I had seen the face and realised it was a reversing mirror mounted on a stalk that projected from the upper rear corner of the vehicle. There was a child inside.

  The mirror was blotted out by TJ’s head. ‘You with us, Captain Palatine?’

  I stood up. It was disturbing to think that there was a child inside the camper van, so close to the scene of slaughter in the farmhouse, but I resisted the urge to investigate further in case I frightened her. Zeb and Peanut were already in position on the far side of the building. Phil and Ollie set off with Azza. We watched them carry him away into the gloom, then TJ beckoned me to follow. As we approached, I saw a figure moving behind the ribbed glass of the door.

  ‘Don’t even look up,’ said TJ quietly.

  I couldn’t help it. The door opened and a man of about my height stepped onto the platform at the top of the steps. It was dusk and there was a light behind him so he was really no more than a silhouette, but I had the impression we were very similar in appearance, though he must have been ten years older. He held out his arm in greeting and said something in Albanian. He was dressed in a clean black suit and grey tunic topped by a white clerical collar. TJ muttered at me and quickened his pace. The man spoke again.

  ‘Can you please look out for one of my children?’

  He spoke English with a regional accent I couldn’t place – mainly I noticed that his voice was somewhat toneless and dispirited. I stopped. TJ glared back at me, without breaking stride. The priest walked down the steps and came over.

  ‘A girl – she ran away about an hour ago, we think. She can’t have got far.’

  ‘There’s a girl hiding in the camper van back there.’

  ‘Not her. She likes to sit in there – in hope of going somewhere, I suppose,’ he said, in his despondent voice. ‘My name is Father Daniel.’ He held out his hand and I shook it. ‘Daniel Cady.’

  He looked back over his shoulder at the open door, then turned and met my gaze. There was something strange in his eyes: You see how wretched I am, they seemed to say, but I cannot tell you why.

  ‘The girl who ran off is twelve or thirteen. An orphan – people leave them here at our refuge. If you find her, will you please bring her back to us?’

  ‘The woman down there was asking for you.’

  ‘Down there. . . You were at the farmhouse? Is she all right?’

  ‘No, she’s not.’

  ‘Dear God. I must go to her.’

  ‘I called you on her phone. You didn’t answer.’

  It wasn’t meant as a reproach, but the priest’s eyes went hollow and his face as white as ash. I wondered whether he’d heard the gunshots. He opened his mouth to speak, but before the words could form themselves he was running down the track towards the farmhouse. I turned to look for TJ and the others, but they had gone.

  I was ignored when I caught up with them ten minutes later. I had undermined TJ’s authority and he would exact his price in due course, but the priority was to get Azza to safety and I was an irritating distraction. I didn’t care. The cold lost its bite and it started to rain, a pattern of stippled grey swirling down the track between the trees. We stripped off our outer clothes and stowed them in dry-sacs, covered Azza with a square of tarp, and marched on.

  The rain became heavy, hissing and clattering in the branches overhead, numbing our hands and making the stones shine beneath our boots. Azza stared up into the darkening sky, raindrops exploding in his eyes and streaming down the creases in his face. TJ scrutinised his route, studied the landscape wherever we broke cover, counted yards. The GPS signal was cutting in and out and the map was cursory: this was a place to get lost in.

  Half an hour later, we took a smaller path that led off the ridge and down into the next valley to the south and found ourselves plunging through sucking, slippery mud, six inches deep and cluttered with fallen branches. Peanut put his foot on a lump of rotten wood that imploded and slid sideways. He grabbed for a handhold in the undergrowth and ended up face down in a thicket of hazel stems.

  That was how we found her.

  It was like coming across a defenceless little woodland animal. Huddled amongst the tree roots, hugging her knees, jet-black hair clinging to her face. So drenched and dirty it was impossible to see what she was wearing, but her feet were bare. She had not reacted at all to the sudden arrival of Peanut’s bony shoulder at her side, but simply stared from wide, blank eyes at the two panting, mud-slicked giants who’d suddenly appeared in front of her.

  TJ ran back up the path to find out what was holding us up. He saw the girl, took her by the arm and pulled her out onto the path. She was so stiff with cold that her legs did not uncurl and he ended up dragging her across the mud on her knees. She was clutching a white plastic bag that contained something about the size and shape of a box of chocolates.

  ‘Go back,’ said TJ. He pointed up the path to the refuge. ‘Back! And be quick about it.’

  I put my hand between her shoulder blades. She was bone cold, beyond shivering. I knew what exposure was. Disorientation. Exhaustion. She’d be lucky to get two hundred yards. In a couple of hours’ time, her wet clothes would start to freeze.

  ‘I’ll carry her,’ I said.

  ‘Carry her where?’ asked TJ.

  They weren’t going to wait while I went back to the refuge. I’d have to find my own way to the border, in darkness, with no map and only intermittent GPS. I wasn’t much of an orienteer even in broad daylight.

  ‘With us,’ I said. ‘She’s an orphan, anyway.’

  I started to lift her up, then realised she couldn’t hook her arms round my neck while still holding the white plastic bag. I tried to take it from her, but she wouldn’t let go. Her large, dark eyes, so unnervingly empty until that point, filled with panic.

  ‘What’s this, pass the fucking parcel?’ said Peanut.

  I picked her up and folded my arms around her small, cold body, trapping the object in the plastic bag between us. She extracted one arm and laid it weakly on my shoulder.

  ‘We lost contact with Captain Palatine at—’ TJ checked his watch. ‘Seventeen forty-three. In view of the urgent requirement to evacuate Corporal Harrington, we were unable to mount a search. I knew he had the skills and equipment necessary to find his way to the border and therefore ordered my unit to continue on our route. It is my opinion that Captain Palatine does not have the levels of fitness and discipline necessary for further assignments with the Regiment. You get my drift?’

  I nodded. This got all of us off the hook. The men of TJ’s unit were immaculately cold-blooded, hand-picked for their aptitude for doling out violent death without experiencing the slightest frisson of distracting emotion; but they also cherished the idea that they were, paradoxically, softies at heart – especially where children were concerned. And perhaps the scene in the farmhouse had left some kind of
mark on their leathery psyches. Either way, no one wanted to leave the girl to die alone at night on this mud-drenched hillside. TJ had steered them through the unexpected moral crisis with unerring nous – and rounded out his solution with a soldierly insult. Everything was just as it should be: the girl would be saved and TJ had settled his score.

  3

  The rain turned to sleet as darkness furled itself around us. I stumbled, slipped and jolted down the steepening path, worrying about the girl in my arms. I wanted to feel her flex and shift and cling, but her limbs were brittle, her breathing weak. I wanted to stop and find something to wrap her in, but TJ wouldn’t wait and if she and I got detached then we were both in trouble. Zeb and Peanut were carrying Azza now, and the others held torches to light the way. I followed the little cones of sleet-streaked light as they danced through the darkness, and the flying slush bit into my face and arms like lashes from a whip. The trees roared around us, and whenever a little moonlight broke through the cloud, I saw branches rearing and shying like terrified horses.

  I kept thinking TJ must call a halt, get us under tarps, at least until the storm blew out. But the survival of a comrade was at stake, and SAS men don’t stop for a little rain. We plunged on down the path, brambles fishing at our faces, icy water sluicing over the tops of our boots. I began to dread that when we finally reached our forward operations base, I would unpick a dead body from my arms. But at last we arrived at the cleft of the valley and turned onto a wider track.

  As soon as I was sure I could see far enough ahead to follow the weaving torch beams for a hundred yards or so, I put the girl down and pulled out a survival bag. I tucked it round her shoulders, put a watch cap on her head, then took the plastic-wrapped package from her hands. I stowed it in my Bergen and she was too far gone to protest. I offered her chocolate, but she couldn’t even take it into her mouth, so I swung the rucksack onto my back and took her up again. It was as well she was so small and my Bergen was only half full, because I guessed I was carrying around forty-five kilos, which was more than I was used to. But I was fit and strong as I’d ever been and, as countless training instructors had told me, the body could perform miracles if only the mind would let it. I held her close and started to run after the others.

  We gained quickly, and when we caught up I kept running, but with shortened strides, pumping my knees, willing myself to work harder and harder, channelling all the strength in my body to the task of generating enough heat to save the life of the creature in my arms. We pounded along the track behind the rest and I felt warmth from my chest begin to seep into her, I felt her arms around my neck pulling herself closer to me, I felt her head lose its awful rigid, lifeless pose. She began to shudder, great spasms that convulsed her slight frame. I shivered too. I wrapped my arms even tighter around her. Then her head fell into the crook of my neck and she sighed.

  I’d saved her from death, and the emotion was like nothing I had known before – proud and primitive and full of joy. It wasn’t just the feeling of being her saviour that so overwhelmed me. Does it sound fanciful to say that the act of carrying her scrunched in my arms through that terrible night released me from the horror I had witnessed in the farmhouse? To me it does not.

  She rested her head on my shoulder and her breaths came soft in my ear, and the images that lay strewn across my mind loosened their baleful hold. A twenty-five-year-old Englishman, rendered insensate by his first experience of the trauma of violent combat, and a desperate, dying Kosovan child had found each other at just the necessary moment and bestowed on each other just the necessary form of salvation. Our fates had interlocked: a coincidence not so much of time or place, but of need.

  I ran and ran and I knew my body would not fail and my mind would find rest and the girl would live. We held each other close as the forest snapped and howled around us and the sleet glittered like flecks of silver against the billowing velvet blackness of the sky.

  We crossed two more ridges, the second ascent so steep that after twenty yards we had to stop and rope up – the unencumbered men anchoring themselves to trees before hauling the stretcher-bearers up behind them. They offered me the rope but I declined. I didn’t need it. I was superhuman, all powerful. With one arm I held the girl I had rescued and with the other reached out into the darkness to grab handfuls of sodden undergrowth and drag us up the next few slippery yards. She clung on, bare feet curled into the gap between my hips and my ribcage. I heard Azza cry out as his porters slipped, heard TJ urge us on like a demented muleteer with a pack of exhausted beasts.

  I don’t know how long it took us, but we were way off the schedule TJ had demanded; and I don’t know what would have happened if, on finally reaching the brow of the second hill, we had not seen the road to Skopje in the valley ahead – dots of streetlight jinking between the dwindling hills and then, in the narrow plain beyond, the steel and tarmac sprawl of the border post at Blace, glowing like an electrical circuit in a cube of bluish, arc-lit air.

  Our FOB was six kilometres beyond Blace, but we couldn’t cross here: the border to the west of the road was fenced and, in theory at least, patrolled. We turned south, following a rutted trail along the fringe of the forested hills, then entered an area of close-shorn uplands that would take us down into Macedonia without too much risk of detection. Out on these exposed slopes the raw, burly wind sucked the breath from our lungs and we couldn’t see more than ten yards ahead for the driving sleet.

  After twenty minutes of this, the storm blew out, the cloud rolling back and the sleet rattling away down the valley. A low, bulbous moon appeared, casting shadows alongside us and turning the wet plains to the colour of polished slate. Water that had puddled in ruts and potholes became oily and viscous as it started to ice. We halted and got out our dry clothes, and I sat the girl on my Bergen, dragged a pair of socks over her feet and wrapped her up in a spare shirt beneath the survival bag. I gave her water to drink and chocolate, which this time she ate. She’d recovered enough to inspect me, the look in her eyes wavering between wariness and astonishment.

  We made good progress from there, skirting the wash of dim light from the border post until finally it lay to the north-east and we knew we must have crossed the unmarked border and entered Macedonia.

  Big Phil got on the radio and called for transport. We hit a dirt track, walked south for ten minutes, and arrived at the spot where we’d been left by a Mercedes people carrier with blacked-out windows two days previously. And there it was again, the yellow cones of its headlights nodding and swaying as it lumbered along the track to fetch us. I checked my watch: five hours and thirty-five minutes since we’d left the farmhouse.

  Zeb bent over Azza, dabbing blood from his lips.

  ‘All right, fella. Nearly home.’

  The injured man didn’t respond. His eyes were open very wide, as if transfixed by something he’d seen high up in the black sky.

  Nobody spoke for a few moments, then TJ said to me: ‘Get yourself out of sight. Wait for an hour, then make the call. We go back in tomorrow at eight hundred. RV at the mess. What you going to do with her?’

  ‘Take her into town, I guess.’

  ‘Get a good price for her in Skopje,’ said Peanut, ‘if yer not that way inclined yerself.’

  I would have broken his jaw if I hadn’t had her in my arms. Peanut was hard as they come, but I had a reputation, too. I might defer to my Regimental buddies in all-round field skills, but put me one-on-one with any of them – TJ excepted – and I’d like my chances. It was one of the reasons (a fractious relationship with authority and general restlessness being the others) why I was skulking around with an SAS unit in Kosovo rather than swapping bogus secrets with Pakistani army colonels in Lahore.

  ‘Stow it, Corporal, or you’ll be shitting teeth,’ said TJ.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ grumbled Peanut. ‘Joke, right?’

  I took the girl into the shelter of a depression fifty yards off the track and watched the others march down to meet t
he transport, outsize frames silhouetted by the approaching headlights. What had my foundling made of the angry voices she had just heard – and the fact that we seemed to have been abandoned? I shifted her weight and found her an oatmeal bar in the pocket of my Bergen.

  They loaded Azza, climbed in after, and the Mercedes performed a laborious turn before lurching off towards the base. When they had gone, I carried her back to the track and started to walk, just to keep us both warm. But before I’d taken even a couple of paces I felt her detach herself from my arms and drop to the ground. She hobbled over to my Bergen and sat down beside it, arranging the crumpled shroud of survival bag beneath her.

  ‘We have to wait for a bit, then we’ll get a ride into Skopje, OK?’

  It seemed unlikely that she would understand, but I talked to her anyway, about how well she’d done and how I would take care of her. The sky had clouded over again and it was too dark to make out the expression on her face, but her eyes shone like an owl’s beneath her tangled black hair. I checked between her shoulder blades again and there was some warmth there, so I thought it would be OK for her to sleep for a while.

  Now that she was no longer in imminent danger of dying from the cold, her wider misfortune came into focus and I felt a surge of pity. I would get her back to the refuge, but then what? She had run away – she was old enough to understand the consequences of getting lost on such a night, but still she had run. She must have had a plan, a destination in mind. Perhaps she believed her mother and father were still alive. She was brave. And there was something about the way she had removed herself from my arms – a gesture of independence, determined and even a little impatient. I didn’t know much about twelve-year-old girls, but I was beginning to sense that she was stronger than she looked. Now she was tapping my Bergen where the oatmeal bars were stowed. I gave her another one, and found a torch. I showed her the switch and she shone it at her feet and started to remove the wet socks. Her feet were bone white. I rubbed them with my hands, alarmed at how hard and stiff they were, then pulled off my boots and gave her my socks, which were scarcely any drier, but at least warm from my feet.