War Games

by Douglas Jackson

  A bang like a clap of thunder, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass, interrupted Mr Ali’s tirade, followed in quick succession by a second. His face collapsed in a heartbeat from belligerent to bewildered, the flesh falling into place like melting candle wax.

  ‘Down,’ I shouted, hauling him to the floor. I recognised the familiar twin blast of a shotgun and the chances were that the next volley would come through the drawing-room window. ‘And stay down.’

  The shots had come from the front of the house and I wriggled my way across the carpet towards the door, opening it a fraction to check out the hallway and the stairs. Nothing. Slowly, I opened it wide enough to slip through and made my way to the front door. I heard a sob above me and looked up to see Mrs Ali’s terrified face staring down from the landing above.

  ‘Stay where you are, Mrs Ali. Your husband’s fine, and everything’s going to be okay,’ I shouted. ‘If you’ve got a phone up there, call the police.’

  When I reached the door, I stood up, careful to position myself to one side. It looked pretty solid, but I knew what a shotgun could do and I wasn’t taking any chances of getting a bellyful of oak splinters and lead. I felt oddly calm, as if what was going on around me was familiar, which, give or take twenty-five years and a few grey hairs, it was. I laughed aloud and when I looked up again I saw Mrs Ali frozen in position and staring at me as if I was mad.

  A small, lead-beaded window flanked the doorway but when I took a quick glance through it there was no sign of the gunman. Still, I wasn’t taking any chances. I retraced my steps to the other side of the hall and took the passageway through to the kitchen and past Mrs Rennie’s office. When I reached it she had the phone to her ear and her face was set in an irritated frown. ‘No, I will not wait. This is an emergency line, is it not?’ She glanced up at me and mouthed ‘idiots’. I gave her a reassuring smile and she nodded gratefully.

  I opened the back door and scanned the area between the house and the paddock where Mr Ali’s Range Rover sat, along with a red Astra that must have belonged to Mrs Rennie. Gurya’s two horses eyed me curiously but I didn’t see anything dangerous so, staying close to the wall, I made my way to the corner where I could get a good view along the side of the house down towards the artificial lake. It seemed clear, but you never can tell and I didn’t like the look of the trees on the far side the lawn. When I was as certain as I was ever going to be I took a step forward. The crunch of feet on gravel might have saved my life or might not, probably not because no amount of hand-to-hand combat experience is going to stop a shotgun at short range. Fortunately, when I turned round the person behind me was Jimmy, the gamekeeper, and he’d left his shotgun at home, which was good news and bad news.

  The bad news was that the gun would have come in handy if whoever had fired the two shots was still out front with his weapon primed and murder on his mind. The good news was that I felt a lot braver with Jimmy at my side and we slid along the side wall until we could see what was happening out front. What was happening out front was £120,000 of Aston Martin slowly billowing smoke from a fist-sized hole in its bonnet, and from the look of it, the engine block, too. Another, larger hole showed where the gunman had fired through the windscreen just about where the driver would have been sitting and at an angle that would have taken his head clean off. Somebody was sending Mr Ali a message.

  ‘Fuck!’ Jimmy sighed.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘it’ll take a few quid to get that back on the road.’

  He turned to me with the look of a man who’d dropped the cord at his father’s funeral.

  ‘No. I meant fuck, I saw Donnie McLeod across the other side of the paddock about half an hour ago. I thought he was only after a few pigeons.’

  Fuck.

  CHAPTER 24

  The cops took forty minutes to get there, and they came mob-handed and armed to the teeth. Within ten minutes of their arrival Glen Savage was about as popular as a dose of bird flu.

  You’d think Mr Ali would be at least a little grateful for the concern I’d shown for his welfare and the way I’d taken command of the situation, all efficient and soldier-like. Hell, I’d practically saved the man’s life. But gratitude’s a funny thing, it tends to evaporate quicker than holy water and its blood brother is resentment.

  His resentment was fuelled by the fact that I hadn’t mentioned Donnie McLeod in my many discussions with him, which, strangely enough, was also what pissed off the cops. Even before the little bird shoot in Mr Ali’s front yard they’d had Donnie top of their list of suspects and smack in the frame for Gurya Ali’s disappearance, only they couldn’t prove it. The fact that I thought he was completely innocent didn’t interest them at all. They’d spoken to Gurya’s pals in Glendearg, about ten days after I had, and they couldn’t figure out why good old Glen didn’t come marching in and tell them all about Donnie the minute he’d found out about him. When I pointed out that Gurya wasn’t even on the missing persons list at the time, even though her old man was screaming she’d been kidnapped, it only seemed to piss them off even more.

  Mr Ali helpfully explained my theory about Shoaz Ahmad and the Bannockburn killing being linked to Gurya’s disappearance and I thought they were going to slap the cuffs on me there and then. I waited for him to mention the toy soldier but for some strange reason he didn’t. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange. It’s difficult to keep your mind on the conversation when you’re choking with rage because someone has just shown you an internet picture of your former employee on the way to a friendly gathering of card-carrying racists.

  So Mr Ali fired me properly and two burly cops armed with Heckler and Koch machine guns escorted me off the premises. As I walked to the door one of their radios crackled and hissed and I heard a disjointed message that came through in that fractured, half-human mess of sound that only people with experience of using cheap government radio sets can understand. ‘We’ve lozzzzzd him . . . He’s holed zzz zzz his cottage . . . Believed armed . . . Repeat . . . Believzzzzrmed.’

  I stood by the Capri for a few minutes trying to get my head together. It felt as if someone had shoved a bee’s nest inside my skull and the bile rose in my throat at the thought of Donnie McLeod alone in his grubby little cottage, staring out of the steamed-up, dust-caked prism of his living-room window wondering what the hell he’d got himself into. They’d be there now, the pumped-up, shadowy figures in the undergrowth with their deadly packages and deadly intent, and the flak-jacketed bosses trumpeting intermittent messages of threat and reassurance through their bullhorns. I could almost feel his heart beat faster and his breath coming in desperate gasps. Sit tight, Donnie, for fuck’s sake just sit tight until things have calmed down. Why the Christ did I give him the shotgun? I know a good deed never goes unpunished, but this was ridiculous. Sweat ran down my spine beneath my shirt. Did the gun have a serial number or had Robbie filed it off before he gave it to me? Donnie wasn’t the only one breathing in desperate gasps. What the fuck was I going to do? I could drive round to Glendearg, but I knew they’d have the cottage ringed tighter than Buckingham Palace on the Queen’s birthday.

  A couple of cops were still milling around Mr Ali’s Aston with the big holes in it, measuring and recording the shot patterns. Word of my disgrace still hadn’t trickled down to your common or garden flatfoot, and as far as they were concerned I was still one of the family, which gave me a bit of freedom I didn’t expect.

  Jimmy Wilson stood by the pond looking lost and distracted; a good man blaming himself for something he could never have stopped even if he’d known it was going to happen. He noticed me staring and came over with the curious, high-kneed, long-stepping gait that gamekeepers develop from a lifetime of walking through thick heather.

  ‘Mr Savage.’ He shook his head, but I wasn’t sure whether he was mourning Donnie’s predicament or mine.

  ‘Jimmy,’ I said quietly. ‘D’you think you could get me over that hill and somewhere close to Donnie’s cottage without this lot knowing
anything about it?’

  He didn’t even blink. ‘Be dangerous,’ he replied in his slow drawl. ‘Like out on the mountain wi’ a bunch o’ Eyties. They’d as soon shoot you in the arse as not. Aye, and maybe not in the arse either.’

  ‘Donnie’s in trouble. I want to help him. He could get hurt.’

  ‘Trouble’s o’ his own makin’, Mr Savage,’ he said, with the lowland Scot’s self-sufficient certainty. ‘Not o’ yours. He wouldnae be askin’ for your help if I know Donnie.’

  ‘Maybe so, Jimmy, but the one thing I learned in the Army is that you never leave a wounded man behind.’

  He sniffed the air. ‘Aye.’

  We waited in silence, Jimmy studying the hill and me studying Jimmy. It must have been more than a minute before he spoke.

  ‘Ye’ll be getting yer nice shoes a bit clarty.’ He set off for the pheasant pens behind the house and I hurried after him.

  We didn’t go over the hill. We went round it, below the level of the treeline, Jimmy setting the pace and me struggling to keep up with him over narrow deer paths still slick with the grease of the last rains and fallen branches that turned it into a steeplechase course.

  As we walked he threw snatched sentences at me over his shoulder.

  ‘Donnie was going to lose the cottage, ye see . . . Soon as the boss found out he’d been seeing the lass he put the screws on Guthrie, the farmer, to get rid of him. The boss carries a lot o’ weight round here . . . Donnie’s just a wee laddie, really . . . He maybe went a bit daft when he knew what happened.’

  I gasped acknowledgements until we reached a point where he came to a halt by a big oak tree. He turned to me. ‘Be mair than my job’s worth to go any further, Mr Savage,’ he said apologetically. ‘Just keep going and ye’ll hit a wee burn that runs down through the trees at an angle. It’ll take ye close to the cottage.’

  I nodded my thanks and he held out his hand.

  ‘Look after him, sir. He’s no’ a bad lad.’

  *

  It’s easy to say ‘follow the burn down the hill through the trees’, but anyone who’s tried it will know that it makes an Army assault course seem like a ride on a number 47 bus. For a start, the trees grow tight to the side of the gully, so there’s no useable path. That means clambering down a vertical mud embankment until you’re standing ankle deep in the burn itself. Now the path ahead is clear, but unfortunately it alternates between jagged man-trap rock and slimy boulders, either of which will cheerfully break your legs, and deep pools booby-trapped by both of the above. By the time I’d gone a hundred yards I looked like a man who’d played a rugby match in a suit on a wet weekend in December, except it was June and the sweat was running down my face and soaking every piece of clothing I wore.

  I heard the music first: some kind of heavy metal track blasting out as loud as whatever music system it was on could manage. When I crawled over the gully’s edge I was among trees about a hundred and fifty yards from the front of the cottage, to the left of the rubbish dump, and looking diagonally across to where the rutted track from Glendearg reached the farmyard. At first, the only sign of a police presence was a couple of marked cars parked across the entrance just in case Donnie tried to make a run for it on the pushbike leaning against the wall by the front door. But as my eyes adjusted to the light I began to identify the individual marksmen I knew would be staring out from concealment among the trees, just as I was. There were four of them placed at intervals along the edge of the trees; each with a clear arc of fire that allowed them to cover the door and both of the curtained front windows. There’d probably be at least another two at the rear of the building. The closest stood against a pine tree not much more than forty paces in front of me. He had his Heckler & Koch rifle at his shoulder and was scanning the front of the cottage through the optical scope. It was my good luck that everyone around the yard was focused on what was happening in front of them. The way these things worked, there’d be a commander on the scene, working to someone more senior in a control room, probably down in Glendearg, talking to the man ultimately in charge back in police headquarters in Edinburgh.

  The cops looked as if they were ready for the long haul, but that wasn’t what Donnie McLeod had in mind.

  I’d wondered if the relentless heavy metal track was some kind of psychological trick to keep him off balance, but now I realised it was coming from the cottage, with the sound turned up loud enough to rattle the windows. It was only then that I recognised the track and the bottom fell out of my guts.

  The front door slowly opened and Donnie McLeod emerged from the cottage to the raw, driving riffs of Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’. He walked like a man in a dream and like a man trapped in the same dream I watched him come, deprived of the ability to move or speak or do any of the things I wanted to do that might, in some saner universe, save his life. It was as if I was encased in a bubble. Inside, I was screaming at him to stop and commanding my legs to take me to him, but I could feel the tension in the four trigger fingers and I knew the sights of those snipers’ rifles were homed in on Donnie’s thundering heart. Nothing I could do was going to stop what might happen here, but if I did what my brain and my body were telling me, I was sure as hell going to make it happen. Even as the thought floated through my head I knew it didn’t matter any more. Nothing did. Because Donnie McLeod was carrying the shotgun I’d given him cradled loosely in two hands at waist height.

  Donnie’s first few steps were faltering, as if his legs weren’t quite sure what was expected of them, but his strength and his resolve grew with each stride towards the centre of the yard. The voice on the bullhorn screamed at him to drop his weapon and get down on his face. He halted, swaying, and I saw he was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling beneath the thin cloth of his T-shirt. The demands faded away as if no one had any doubt about what would happen next. Donnie would put his shotgun on the hard-packed dirt. He’d get down on his face and we could all go home.

  Only Donnie hadn’t read the script.

  He stood there for a second, blinking in the sunlight – a small, undernourished man-boy dwarfed by his surroundings and even more vulnerable than the last time I’d seen him. I willed him to get down and maybe, somehow, I reached him because his head swivelled slowly and he looked directly at me, his pale eyes unnaturally bright. But his decision was already made. With one movement he swung the shotgun to his shoulder.

  ‘No!’

  Was it me who shouted, or the cop with the bullhorn? I never knew. Or whether we shouted at Donnie or the four men who literally held his life in their hands. It didn’t matter, because none of them were listening anyway.

  I saw him drop before the sound of the shots reached me, like a superfast ripple of firecrackers on Guy Fawkes’ night, sharp and almost harmless until you recognised them for what they were. The Heckler & Koch G36 fires a 5.56 calibre round designed to penetrate body armour, with a muzzle velocity of around three thousand feet per second. Donnie McLeod wasn’t wearing body armour. He was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt, and he went down as if someone had flicked a switch on him. All the power, the life and the energy vanished in a microsecond to leave a boneless heap of nothingness crumpled on the warm earth.

  I’ve seen sudden death more often than is good for me, but witnessing someone I knew having their life taken away in this haven of rural peace drove me to the edge. The shocked silence that followed might have lasted a second or a minute before someone called to bring the ambulance up. I moved before anyone else did, ignoring the shouts to stay where I was and charging past the cop to my front into the wide open space of the yard where he lay.

  ‘Why the fuck did you have to do that? He wasn’t going to hurt anyone. You could’ve shot him in the legs. A recruit in basic training could’ve shot him in the fucking legs from that range. You’ve got baton rounds. Tasers. Christ, he was just a kid. Fuck. Why?’ I roared it out as I ran to Donnie’s side, a garbled spew of words that were a waste of the breath that propelled them.
I knew why. They were obeying orders, and it’s easier to obey orders and kill somebody than disobey them and explain why afterwards. They were the Armed Response Team. They were pumped up. Donnie McLeod wasn’t a living, breathing human being. He was a target. If they thought about him at all it was as a level of threat, and when he’d raised that shotgun – the shotgun I’d given him – the level reached a point where they were obliged to shoot.

  His eyes were closed when I reached him, but he was still breathing. Three insignificant patches of blood on his T-shirt marked where the bullets had hit him in the chest, but as I knelt above him they grew larger, and I knew what I’d find if I turned him over, even without the red stain spreading beneath his body. I took his hand and his fingers gripped mine with a fierce strength. He whispered something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I bent lower and he repeated the word.

  ‘Gurya.’

  A hand took me roughly by the shoulder and I heard the rattle of police handcuffs.

  ‘You didn’t have to kill him,’ I repeated without looking up.

  ‘Get to your feet, sir. You’ve got some questions to answer.’

  ‘Why don’t you look at his gun?’ I grunted in pain as my hands were dragged behind me and the metal of the cuffs bit into my wrists.

  They pulled me away, and a paramedic took my place over Donnie’s body. He was only there for a few seconds before he stood up, shaking his head.

  I heard the sharp click of a shotgun being broken.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s empty.’

  I’d known it would be, but they didn’t, and it didn’t really matter. The cops who’d pulled the trigger hadn’t killed Donnie McLeod.