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

by Giles O'Bryen

  I hustled him out to the yard. Zeb had the bonnet of the fancy pickup raised and was admiring the monstrous V8 engine, which was grumbling away like it had a throat full of phlegm to clear. Toyota Invincible it said on the tailgate.

  ‘The Lone Ranger drives. Zeb, get the gates open. Phil, four of those in the back.’ He pointed to a trailer full of jerrycans in a corner of the yard. People were already hoarding petrol, especially those who could bully others into parting with it for free.

  I bundled the cowboy into the driver’s seat, thinking that TJ was taking a risk by putting a drunk behind the steering wheel. But what with being slapped awake by some kind of diminutive tyrant and then punching himself in the face, the cowboy seemed to have sobered up. TJ climbed into the passenger seat, I sat in the row of seats behind him and Zeb, Phil, Peanut and Ollie rode in the rear. The interior was upholstered in black leather and the courtesy lights had been kitted out with red bulbs, making TJ’s face look unnervingly fiendish. The cowboy manoeuvred the pickup through the gates and we rolled down to the main road.

  ‘Tell him to go after his Bura brothers,’ said TJ. ‘He won’t object.’

  I pulled out the photo again and thrust it in front of the cowboy’s face. ‘Which way?’ I said, pointing left then right. He nodded eagerly and pointed right. We headed west out of town, accompanied by a frustrated burbling from the Toyota’s V8 – frustrated because TJ wouldn’t let the Lone Ranger drive any faster than thirty. As soon as we left the streetlights behind, he started watching the road ahead intently, tapping the cowboy’s arm when he wanted to slow further so he could inspect the dense woodland that hemmed us in on either side. The road climbed out of the valley. After a few minutes, TJ spotted a logger’s track and made the cowboy pull over.

  ‘Drive,’ he said, pointing up the steep track into the black depths of the forest.

  The cowboy looked frightened now: no doubt he had experience of the kind of things that may get done in dark woods at dead of night. But he did as he was told. After a couple of hundred yards we came to a clearing. There was a stack of corded timber, a mound of sawdust and a small truck equipped with a heavy-duty block and chain swinging from a steel gantry.

  ‘Perfect,’ said TJ. ‘Out we get.’

  We assembled at the front of the Toyota.

  ‘Jimmy’s our bait. He waits at the roadside with the pimp-wagon. Soon as the mighty Bura see him, up the track he flies with the mad dogs on his tail like he’s a bitch on heat.’ He turned to me. ‘Soon as it’s on, radio in. Keep the lights on and the engine running. You’re driving the big chief’s wheels, so they won’t shoot you up. Bring it up close to that timber-stack, then bail out. Work your way round to the sawdust pile. I want you there in less than ten seconds, so no standing around stroking your chin.’

  I nodded. I’d probably have nodded if he’d told me to stand in the road and see off the Bura dog-pack with a handful of well-aimed stones. I was in a state of bristling delirium, surges of blood pounding through the arteries of my neck. I felt as if I could uproot a tree and fight with that.

  ‘Peanut, you’re with me. Phil, find an RV point three hundred yards uphill from here. Ollie, Zeb, set yourselves up at the neck of the track. This fucking well ought to be regular army business but it isn’t. Anyone got anything that can ID them?’

  No one did. The three last-named stepped out of the brilliant cones of light from the Toyota’s headlights and disappeared.

  ‘Jimmy, get the fuck out of it,’ said TJ. ‘They’ll be here in ten.’

  How did he know? I swung myself into the cab and powered the big pickup in a wide semi-circle, leaving the clearing in darkness. Because he’d consulted his map, of course, worked out what villages they might be looting and how quickly they could get back from the one nearest to Kric. The Toyota handled badly: its bloated tyres were too wide for the axle so the front wheels fought each other at the slightest turn, and the automatic gearing was too low to keep the ridiculous power of the V8 in check. I slithered and bucked down to the road, then backed up and turned so the vehicle was facing up the track.

  After a few minutes alone, I began to feel nervous. I was sitting in the Bura chief’s pride and joy, lit up like a funfair ride. The words TJ had used came back to me. Bait. Bitch on heat. Well, hadn’t I predicted the previous night, when I’d insisted on rescuing the frozen girl, that he’d find a way of getting his own back? Filing a report that declared me unfit for SAS assignments evidently wasn’t enough.

  The engine fan came on, a loud, hectic whirr. I turned the aircon off and the cab thermostat up full to help draw the heat from the engine. Why did TJ think the Bura were going to fall for this? They weren’t callow criminals but men who’d chosen violence as a way of life. TJ had gambled that when the Lone Ranger had made the call to his boss, he’d have had time to say only that he’d been attacked – and not that his attackers had ordered him to make the call, nor how many there were, nor that this was a trap. Well, TJ was probably right: the cowboy was drunk and in a state of shock. If he was wrong, I’d be the one to pay for it.

  Focus, I told myself sternly. I stepped out of the cab and took several deep breaths of the cold, pine-scented air. They might see me before I saw them and approach on foot, surprise me. I pictured them in the photograph, the hunter’s poses and death tattoos. Christ on his cross and a cupboard full of tools. Did having Jesus on your desk make it OK to dangle your victim’s balls over the jaws of a sprung bear trap? Was that why they’d cut the seat out of the chair? I got back into the cab and locked the door. Adrenalin scratched at my armpits and I felt afraid – afraid for my life, afraid that the jolly farmers and their Bura mates would get me into the boss’s room and torture me in some way I hadn’t even thought of.

  Hot air was belting through the heating vents. Maybe this was the trick I’d been anticipating: TJ and the rest had already gone, up over the hill and half way to the border. . . A test, an initiation. Could I survive the Bura strike and make it back to base without them? I trusted them even less than they trusted me, I realised. I had no idea how far the act of going to Azza’s aid in the farmhouse loft had overcome either their institutional prejudice against officers in general and intelligence officers in particular, or their instinctive hostility to outsiders. I was pinned here, the means by which two gangs of habitually violent men would be drawn into combat.

  I sat in the hot, trembling vehicle, my mood oscillating between wild bravado and sickening fear – and I will never know whether the next few minutes would have seen me run away or stay and fight, because the rear window of the Toyota gave a sudden flash and a sequence of curved shadows slid slowly around the interior of the car like revolving blades.

  Headlights. Two vehicles. They dropped out of sight, and a pale, silvery evanescence crept like a cold flush over the undersides of the trees. Twin shafts of light poked at the sky as the lead vehicle climbed out of the dip, then flipped down as it crested the rise.

  I thumbed the call button and TJ was there.

  Report.

  ‘I see them. Two vehicles. Four hundred yards, closing fast. Over.’

  Sure it’s them?

  ‘No. Over.’

  Stay on. Keep talking.

  ‘Stopped, less than fifty yards away. A pickup and a small truck. Two men are out, doing something to the front of the truck.’

  Can they cut you off? Can they get past you onto the track? Over.

  He was right, they could. I put the Toyota into gear and eased it a few yards up the track.

  ‘Not now.’

  I looked back over my shoulder. The shadowy mass of the unlit truck was moving towards me and I thought I saw men running beside it.

  Stay on, Jimmy. Talk to me.

  ‘Looks like we’re on.’

  Just be sure they’ve taken the bait, Jimmy. Don’t let me down. Out.

  The truck was suddenly at my rear fender, smoking and shuddering in the red haze of the tail lights. The driver gunned the engine hard, hol
ding it on full for a few seconds. I heard a bang from my tailgate and in the side mirror saw three or four men coming my way. Time to go. The door handle rattled beside me and I turned to see the muzzle of a handgun aimed at my face – behind it, a shaven head, staring eyes and a mouth stretched open, screaming abuse.

  I hit the throttle harder than I’d meant to and the wheels spun viciously, clumps of earth flying from the tyres. The Toyota rocked sideways and the man stepped back from the window. Then the huge wheels gripped and the vehicle shot forward.

  I got twenty yards up the track and slammed to a halt as if I’d hit a brick wall. The axle must have snagged on something. I let the Toyota roll back before stamping on the accelerator again. The great brute leapt forward, then rocked to a standstill.

  I hammered the revs. The V8 howled, bonnet weaving from side to side. I got about two feet before the wheels lost grip and the engine whizzed up into the red zone. Ease off, check the rear-view mirror. They were climbing up the muddy track, gun barrels gleaming. One of them stepped gingerly over something directly behind the vehicle.

  Hawser. Taut, vibrating. They’d got me hooked up to their truck and I was held fast.

  I hit the throttle again, but the Toyota was going nowhere. Diff lock? I stared down at the transmission controls, but if there was one I couldn’t see it, and I didn’t have time to consult the handbook. The Toyota’s V8 should have been able to outmuscle the truck, even on an uphill track, but when I turned and peered into the gloom I saw that they’d jammed one of its front wheels up against a tree stump. The hawser would be braided steel, it wasn’t going to snap.

  The guy with the shaven head was back at my window. He wasn’t screaming now, he was leering, sticking his tongue out and waggling it from side to side, making like the savage after his blood-feast. Below his jaw was a tattoo of a snake, pulsing like a huge distended vein. There was a thump above my head and then another face hung down over the windscreen – one of the farmer types, pressing his cheek against the glass so it looked like a stubbled pancake.

  One thing in my favour: TJ was right, no one was going to shoot up the boss’s toy or smash the glass with the butt of a shotgun. Why do that when, anyway, they had me cold?

  I flipped into reverse and sent the Toyota bouncing back through the deep ruts left by my wheelspins. The guy on the roof slid down to the bonnet and tumbled off. I picked up speed and careered towards the truck at the foot of the track. The driver bailed out just as the Toyota’s rear bull bars crashed into the winch mounted on the front of the truck. I pumped the throttle and powered on, shunting the truck back off the tree stump in a cacophony of scraping steel. Once clear of the neck of the track, I swung hard round and reversed down the road.

  The hawser now ran forward from the Toyota’s rear axle and along the length of the chassis, emerging beneath the front bumper. As it tautened, my front wheels lifted, making the big vehicle impossible to steer. There wasn’t enough space to turn it round, so I straightened up and tried again. Eventually I managed to wrestle the truck out into the road and drag it another hundred yards downhill, tyres squealing in protest. Finally, the old truck tipped ponderously into the ditch. I drove forward a couple of yards to release the tension in the hawser, then threw myself out of the door and rolled under the back of the Toyota.

  It was hot and dark down there, the exhaust sizzling from the high-revving battle with the hawser and the mud. I took it step by step, following the cable with my hands, feeling for the hook that must be latched onto the rear axle. The steel braids were twisted and chewed and my knuckles were getting barked and burned and I couldn’t see a thing. The voices of my pursuers were stifled by the grumble of the engine and sounded far away, but when I heard boots on tarmac, I’d have five seconds to get back in the cab or make a run for it. There! A lump of forged steel, hooked over the axle just by the diff. I gave it a bang and worked it from side to side. It shifted a little, but wouldn’t come free. I worked it into a position that would let me get a boot to it, then rolled onto my back and spun round, felt for the block with my heel, drew back, braced. . .

  I gave it a kick so violent it would have broken every bone in my leg if it hadn’t at last dislodged the steel hook that was making such a desperate farce of TJ’s best-laid plan. I heard it clunk onto the tarmac just before the first shotgun blast came booming down the road between the trees.

  Another blast, pellets skittering along the tarmac. I pulled the Browning and loosed off four rounds in an attempt to persuade them to keep their heads down. It worked for just about long enough to get me to the driver’s door. I pulled it open and reached across the seat to yank the gear lever into drive. The glass shattered above my head, little gritty cubes of the stuff cascading down the back of my neck. I’d written off the boss’s pride and joy and it was open season now. Keeping tucked in behind the open door, one hand on the bottom edge of the window frame, the other on the steering wheel, I swung my leg into the footwell and rammed my boot against the accelerator pedal.

  The Toyota belted up the road. I rode the running board and felt glad that the thing was so grossly overpowered. I liked the fact that the treads on its tyres were four inches deep. I liked it that the truck had slid into the ditch, because I didn’t have to steer past it. And I wish I could say I’d planned it so the Buras would be shooting at me from the wrong side of the vehicle, but that was just good luck.

  When I judged I was close to the logger’s track, I hauled myself into the driver’s seat. Shotgun lead and rifle rounds clanged into the vehicle’s once-smooth flanks. One headlight was out and I almost drove straight up the bank as I swung hard into the turn, but I got round without rolling or having to do an ungainly and probably fatal three-point turn. The headrest on the passenger seat abruptly disintegrated, leaving only two steel prongs as clean as picked bones. I ducked down and pressed on blind. Both tyres on the passenger side had been shot out and I might have been steering a brick mounted on slices of Swiss roll. A thump behind me and I felt the chassis jolt. They’d burst the other rear, too. But there was so much rubber on those tyres that they still found traction and the Toyota powered uphill at an impressive lick.

  The gunshots died away. I picked the radio off the floor and called TJ.

  ‘On my way up, twenty seconds.’

  You taking fire?

  ‘Plenty. Out.’

  What he really wanted to ask was, What the fuck have you been doing, you shit-eating motherfucker, why did I trust. . . And so on. But TJ was a pro and it could wait. I rumbled into the clearing and manoeuvred the stricken Toyota alongside the wood-stack as accurately as its shredded tyres would allow. As I ran for cover, my nostrils filled with the thin, corrosive smell of evaporating petrol.

  TJ was waiting for me.

  ‘How many?’ he asked, handing me a rifle and spare clip. ‘And why aren’t they following you?’

  ‘At least eight. I took out one of their vehicles. Rest are in a pickup, maybe some on foot.’

  He radioed the others and told them, then flicked on a torch and pointed out our positions on a diagram he’d drawn: Zeb and Ollie covering the exit track, Big Phil and Peanut in the undergrowth on the far side of the clearing. ‘Any that head this way have got my name on them. Or yours, if you’re quick. RV is a cave at the eastern end of an escarpment, here, just over half a k south. Where’s your radio?’

  ‘Shit. . .’

  ‘Your problem. We leave at two-twenty sharp.’

  I heard the grinding of the Bura pickup now, saw its lights sweeping the track. Despite having air in all four tyres, it was making heavy weather of the hill.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ I asked, and immediately regretted voicing such a naive question. Anything I needed to know, TJ had already told me.

  ‘It’s like this, Jimmy,’ he said, in the phlegmatic tone of voice he had made his trademark. ‘There’s a gang of Serb militia who call themselves Bura, and we’re going to kill them.’

  The pickup bounced into view at
the neck of the track. I put the rifle to my shoulder. TJ pushed the barrel down. ‘No one fires until I do.’

  The pickup stopped. Two men in front, their hunched forms picked out by the cab lights. They were suspicious now. No one was getting out to reclaim the Toyota. The driver killed the lights but left the engine running. I looked for TJ, but he had gone. I inched round behind the mountain of sawdust and saw—How had I missed it? The Lone Ranger, trussed up and hanging by the ankles from the winch on the back of the logger’s truck, mouth open improbably wide. . . No, it wasn’t his mouth, but his neck, the gaping lips of the wound pale above the treacly red mask of his face. His body spun slowly, one way, then the other.

  I looked over at the pickup. By now they must have known they’d been ambushed, yet they seemed transfixed. Six or seven of them in the back, moving around uneasily, readying their weapons and staring into the dark undergrowth. The old diesel clattered away. A pocket of life, surrounded by purveyors of death. At last the driver threw open his door and dived out, did a neat roll and came up running for the cover of the wood-stack. The man who’d been sitting beside him followed, but he was fatter and not so agile or quick. A single shot rang out and his head jerked back.

  I turned and there was TJ standing in the middle of the clearing, sideways on to the Bura pickup, rifle at his shoulder. The men in the back were piling out. One went for the wood-stack, three got down behind their pickup, two more sprinted for the far side of the clearing. Rifle fire erupted from the undergrowth ahead of them. The first staggered on for a few paces, veered away from the place where Phil and Peanut were concealed, then collapsed at the edge of the clearing. The other sprawled face down in the dirt, then curled in on himself and lay still.

  TJ hadn’t moved from centre stage. The barrel of his rifle swung round and three shots cuffed the base of the wood-stack. An unexpected clang, then the whump of oxygen being sucked from the air and a roaring, sooty flame slashed thirty feet into the sky, smoke boiling from its core. The man who had just run there doubled over behind the Toyota, hands shielding his head from the air-crumpling heat. The Toyota blew up and he tumbled backwards, rolled into a flailing ball by the flash of exploding gas.