The pilot dropped the helicopter’s nose a tad, lost some height, putting it at house-top level, and moved up alongside the van.
‘Ahead, ahead!’ Stratton called out, indicating with his right hand to push forward. He wanted to be further in front to get a clear shot backwards at the driver, but the pilot was not moving the way he wanted him to. ‘Ahead I said, damn it!’
The pilot inched the Gazelle forward, bringing the front windshield of the van into view. Stratton brought the weapon site to his eye and aimed, the gyro-steady device helping to keep it almost magically solid in his hands.The van suddenly swerved and headed on a course beneath the chopper, the steeper angle making it difficult for Stratton to get the shot. ‘Right, damn it! Right!’ he shouted.
The pilot pulled steeply to the right and then banked left to expose the front of the van to Stratton once again, but his agitation was growing. ‘What if you hit your own man?’ he shouted.
Stratton composed himself to shoot.‘Not unless he’s driving, ’ he muttered as he took first pressure on the trigger. Stratton could clearly see the two men in the front. The driver glanced up at him. ‘Steady,’ Stratton said.
Sean took his eyes off the gap in the hedgerow he was aiming for to snatch a look at the man hanging out of the helicopter aiming the rifle directly at him. He swerved left and right, but his options were limited if he wanted to get into the South.
‘Go for the gap!’ Brennan yelled, anxious to be over the border.
‘Shoot him!’ Sean yelled back.
‘You’re nearly there. Drive, you bastard!’
Stratton held the sight on his target.The instant he squeezed the trigger and fired the helicopter banked hard over and turned away. Stratton couldn’t believe what had just happened. He snapped around expecting to see some catastrophic reason why the pilot had changed course, but there was nothing.
‘Why’d you turn away?!’ he shouted.
‘That hedge was the border.’
‘What?’ Stratton yelled in utter disbelief.
‘I’m not going over the border,’ the pilot said firmly. He had lost every fight with Stratton till now. But this time he had the law on his side, both international and military.
‘Get back in pursuit of that van,’ Stratton said dangerously.
‘I will not.’
‘You will not be held responsible.’
‘Who do you think you are?’
‘You’re sending a man to his death because of a piece of airspace?’
‘Call it what you want. I can’t go over that border and that’s final.Those are my standing orders and I suspect they’re yours too.’
‘Do you have any idea what they will do to that man?’ Stratton said, disgusted with the pilot.
‘You won’t win this one and there is no one with the authority to make me cross it, not you or your god of a commanding officer.’
‘If it’s games you want to play we can do that,’ Stratton said as he pulled his pistol from his holster, shoved it between the pilot’s legs, and casually fired.The bullet smashed through the seat and into the bulletproof sheet that lined the floor. The pilot’s heart leaped into his throat and he might have jumped out of his seat had he not been strapped into it. Somehow he managed to keep hold of the pitch and joystick as the helicopter lurched and dipped. Stratton maintained his enraged gaze, waiting for the pilot’s decision.
‘You’re crazy!’ he yelled.
‘And you’re gonna be dickless in five seconds and it won’t end there, trust me,’ Stratton said as he moved the end of the pistol into the pilot’s crotch making him flinch.
‘You’re truly insane,’ the pilot screamed, as much in pain as in horror.
‘If it helps . . . The guy in that van is worth a dozen of you. I’ve been in enough of these crates to know I don’t need you to land it.’
‘You’d go to jail for the rest of your life!’
‘Why? We got shot down and you got burned to a crisp.
Why would I go to jail? No more talking. You have three seconds to turn in pursuit of that van. Two . . . one . . . ’
When the high-velocity bullet smashed through the windscreen just as the helicopter peeled away, Sean thought he was a dead man, until he heard Brennan scream and saw the blood shoot from between his fingers where he was holding his leg. It had passed cleanly through, missing the bone, but had taken a fair bit of meat with it. It took a second for the pain to reach Brennan’s brain and tell him that he was in fact the one who had been shot.
When the others realised the chopper had pulled off they couldn’t believe it at first. Brennan was too distressed to notice until they tore through the hedge and were over the border. Sean was shouting that the Gazelle had gone and the others looking out of the back window acknowledged it. Brennan found the Gazelle in his wing mirror still in the North and turning away from them. Despite the ferociously burning pain in his thigh he grinned as the others broke into a rapturous cheer.
‘The bastards are staying in the North! The bastards are staying in the North!’ he shouted, not quite believing his own eyes. He tore several strips of cloth from his shirt and bound his leg tightly to stem the flow. The sight of their powerful enemy held at bay from the chase as if by an invisible barrier was anaesthetic enough. They screamed obscenities at the helicopter and celebrated, clapping their hands, stamping their feet, and banging on the crate that Spinks was inside as if it were a drum.
Sean beamed as he swerved the van from side to side in the field. Brennan patted his shoulder with a bloody hand. ‘Well done, laddy. Well done! That was fantastic driving. Focken fantastic driving. You’ll go down in bloody history today, fellah, that’s for sure. You all will,’ he shouted.
Sean stuck his finger in the bullet hole in the windscreen. ‘That was focken close.’
‘Focken close? It got me, didn’t it, you bastard,’ Brennan said.
The others burst into laughter, a release of tension more than anything else. Even Brennan saw the funny side and laughed.
‘I knew they wouldn’t jump the border,’ Brennan said. ‘I focken knew it. That’s why I pushed you to drive on, me lad. I knew they wouldn’t come over, the chicken shit bastards.’
‘For a while there I thought it was a focken Pink,’ Sean said.
‘Fock ’em if it was or it weren’t,’ Brennan said. ‘We’ll take on the Pinks, the SAS, whatever they want to throw at us. They’ll have to come over the focken border to get us now though. And good luck to ’em.’
Everyone cheered the statement. Brennan grinned as he kept a wary eye on his wing mirror. He was too long in the tooth not to know that they were home free only when they got to the rendezvous and the Pink in their trunk was handed over. Not a moment before. He reached out of the window and moved the wing mirror around until he found the helicopter, no more than a tiny black splodge flicking in and out of the mirror as the van bounced along. While the others laughed and relived the last hour he suddenly felt there was something not quite right about the image. It didn’t look as if it were getting any smaller. Perhaps it was just hovering. His smile started to wane as the image appeared to be growing larger, little by little, second by second.
He leaned forward to get a closer look at the mirror, praying he was wrong. But he was not. The helicopter was coming on, full bore towards them, nose tilted down like a raging bull at full charge.
Brennan stuck his head out into the wind to look back. The others continued celebrating, unaware, except Sean who sensed the change in Brennan and saw him looking back. He glanced in his own wing mirror and his smile quickly dropped from his face.
‘It’s coming back,’ Sean said. The two singing men in the rear did not hear him. ‘It’s coming back!’ he shouted at them as he put his foot down and the van accelerated across the field towards a distant hedgerow.
The silence in the operations room was almost painful. Everyone in the detachment’s small camp had found
