Baz heard the corporal on the radio, and the staccato response that the section should work their way back, use the route they'd taken. There was a shortage of manpower at HQ, but they were trying to put together a response, and at the end: For God's sake, how have you lost him?' They left the school and came back round the rear of the mosque, then along the narrow street they'd used to get clear of the ambush and on to the main route into the square. The ambulance came past them, the back door flapping open to show the feet on the stretcher. Baz caught a glimpse of the blood staining the robe. They checked doorways and alleys, behind and under cars. Then the lead Jock yelled out and crouched in a gutter beside a dropped helmet.
A hundred yards on the flak jacket was lying in a heap of goat shit.
When they saw him, he was on the embankment.
He was shambling back towards Bravo's HQ and behind him was a gang of small children. The jeering laughter of the kids came back to them, and Baz saw that some, the boldest, ran to within a few yards of him and threw stones at him, trying to hit his bare head, but missed. And Baz saw the hands, hanging loose, not holding a personal weapon.
He heard the corporal mutter, 'The idiot, he's lost his gat.'
They ran to him, heaving for breath, and the feckin'sun beat down on them. Baz's mind worked hard, where he had been and what he had said. He would have died for his section, gone to his Maker for his platoon – not for an outsider. They reached him as a personnel carrier came in a dust storm from the gates of Bravo. He seemed to stare straight ahead and there was no recognition in his eyes for those who gathered round him, and no response to the corporal's repeated and ever more frantic questioning. Was he OK?
What had happened to him? Where was his weapon? He just walked on.
Baz took the moment. 'He couldn't feckin' hack it, Corporal. He ran. He dumped us and ran. He chucked his helmet and his jacket, and his gat. That's yellow, Corporal.
He's a feckin' coward. Couldn't do the business. He legged it. Look, there's not a mark on him… A feckin' piece of wet shit – what he is, look at him, is a lurker or a skiver. A bloody coward, that's what he is.'
If it had been the same van, still the green one, Muhammad Iyad would not have noticed it. They had eaten bread, salad and goat's cheese, and later he would pack, in good time for them to be ready to move as soon as the car pulled up at the street door.
Before that he would sleep, so that for the journey through the night he would be alert, his senses sharpened by rest. It was not the same van.
It was smaller, black-painted and newer. When he stood at the far side of the window, under the eaves of the building, he could just see the top of the no-parking sign covered with sacking held by twine. His mind turned on the problem… Kostecna, in the oldest part of the city, churned with traffic. It was forbidden to park on Kostecna. Permission might have been given for one vehicle, perhaps, to park while urgent work was done in a building. There was no sign of work. No artisans came with equipment to and from the van. Muhammad Iyad had a mind that bred suspicion. The position of the van was perfect: the view, except that it had no windows, from the centre of its side, gave direct access to a watcher down the alley. He heard a belch behind him, then a murmured question: what did he see?
Not taking his eyes from the window, Muhammad Iyad asked to be passed his binoculars, a pocket pair, from his black bag. He held out his hand behind him, and when the binoculars touched his fingers he snatched them. With them at his eyes, whipping at the focus he began minutely, inch by inch, to examine the sleek, shiny side of the van. For a moment he was not aware, as he strained to find what he searched for, that the man, Abu Khaled, was behind him and had wriggled against the wall to look over his shoulder, see what he saw. Suspicion had kept him alive. In Sana'a, Riyadh, Amman or Damascus, if it were not believed he could be captured he would have been shot on sight. He would not be captured, never would be. A little hiss of anger slipped his lips because the traffic on Kostecna had log-jammed and a high lorry obscured his view. His eyeline had been on the indentation in the van's side where plate sheeting could have been removed to make way for windows.
There was rare sunlight that afternoon in Prague and it fell on the van, highlighting the indent. He squirmed to better his position.
The lorry moved on. His gaze moved over the paintwork, then slipped back to the indentation.
The breath of the man was in his ear. He would have sighed his satisfaction. He saw the machine-worked hole, the size of a single Yemeni riyal coin or one Syrian lira, drilled but not punched in the way a . 45-calibre bullet would have done. He had found it.
With almost savage strength, Muhammad Iyad propelled the man away from him. He heard Abu Khaled stumble back, trip, fall to the floor, and then his oath.
He stepped back from the window, saw the man he guarded lying on his back and scrabbling with his hands and feet to stand. Sweat was clinging to him. In all the days and nights they had been in Prague, Abu Khaled had never been out of the third-floor apartment. It had been his cell. The mark of his importance was that he should never leave the building, for fear of being identified by a camera or a security official.
Five nights and most of six days he had been shut away from sight – now the alley and the street door were watched. Sweat clung to the bodyguard because he remembered her words, passed to him: 'Gift received. Love, gratitude and always my prayers.'
Quietly, matter of fact – because panic was never his
– Muhammad Iyad said, 'We are watched. They have observation on us.'
'Did you get it?'
'I did.'
She had heard the rattle of the camera's shutter. He eased the camera down from the aperture. It was on his lap and she strained forward to see the screen. The images flickered.
'What do you think happened up there?' Polly asked.
'First he was looking down the street, then he had binoculars. I think he was studying us. Then another man came – look, there is the second man, difficult to identify. Then movement, and both are gone.'
'It's a bastard, isn't it?'
'Any show-out, Polly, is a bastard.'
'I think, Ludvik, that we should back off.'
He raised his eyebrows high. 'Because you want to piss, or you do not like Czech cigarettes, or because we have shown out?'
She punched his arm. Polly Wilkins shared the interior of the black van with Ludvik, who was middle-ranking, mid-thirties, middle ambition and opinions, in the Bezpecostni-Informacni Sluzba. He fancied her. No way was she going to get herself involved in a relationship, on the rebound, with a Czech counter-intelligence officer, even if she had been dumped by email. And this was not a place for a relationship to flourish. She was desperate to pee but there was no bucket in the van. No bucket, but a mountain of squashed-out cigarette butts between their feet. Relationships had not been on her mind since she had received Dominic's new year email.
'I think we should get out. Leave them undecided, not sure.'
'You are the boss, the representative of the expert in such procedures.' He seemed to laugh at her.
As well he might. Polly Wilkins was big on Iraq, could have bored to gold-medal standard on weapons-of- mass-destruction evaluation, but was now on a fast learning curve on the Czech Republic, people-trafficking across porous borders, Albanian criminality and al-Qaeda movement. There weren't enough hours in the day, or the night, to satisfy the steepness of the curve – which was good, meant Dominic's bloody email, the hurtful bastard, from Buenos Aires was getting to be history. She reckoned Ludvik laughed at her because he thought she was wet behind the ears and knew precious little of nothing about stake-outs and surveillance, and what would happen next.
'And I want the pix printed up.'
He wriggled into the front. She looked back a last time, through the hole, at the upper window and a dishcloth now hung from it, as if to dry – but there was rain in the wind. He drove away fast, leaving her to fall about in the back and cling to the camera. She told him about the dishcloth and he swore. Down Kostecna he was shouting into the microphone of his headset.
God! Did the daft, dumb, sweet boy never look at the traffic in front of him? He had turned to her, teeth shining as he grinned. 'That'll be the signal. People who would never, pain of death, use a phone. A signal that they are threatened. We have the squad readied, we'll go tonight. You want to watch, Polly, want to be there?'
'Thank you.'
