their way into it: bleeps, the intelligence cell, the ops officer, the second in command - even the cook, mechanic and detachment storeman had crept in and remained at the back to watch and listen.
Mike leaned over the map board, waiting. The last transmission they had heard was Stratton saying ‘I have’, which simply meant he had the vehicle that contained Spinks in sight, or to be precise, the one that contained Spinks’s transponder. That meant, in Stratton’s case at least, that he was going to do something to stop it. There was no point interrupting him just to ask what exactly. There was nothing any of them could do to help anyway.
‘How close are our cars?’ Mike asked quietly, referring to the other operatives who had scrambled from the camp to get to the area.
‘A good ten minutes away,’ Graham said.
That meant they were well out of the race. Mike tapped the perspex sheet that covered the entire map with his wax pencil, beating out a meaningless rhythm as he thought. ‘How long since his last transmission?’
‘One minute twenty seconds,’ Graham said.
Mike stood up and folded his hands across his chest as if holding himself together, afraid his anxiousness would burst out. But he could not keep control any longer. He picked up the handset and pushed the button on the side of it. ‘Whisky one, zero alpha, sit-rep?’ he said.
Everyone glanced up at the speaker, but it remained silent. ‘Whisky one, this is zero alpha, sit-rep?’
‘I have,’ Stratton said, his voice suddenly booming over the speaker, making the cook jump which in turn caused the mechanic to do the same.
Mike and Graham looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. Stratton had said ‘I have’ a while ago. They wondered why nothing had changed in that time.
‘Location?’ Mike asked, doing his best to contain a tension he had never experienced before.
There was another long silence. Mike suddenly felt uneasy. ‘Whisky one, what is your location?’
‘We’re going into the green,’ was Stratton’s calm reply.
The uneasy feeling rippled through the room.
Mike lowered the handset. The second in command and ops officer watched him, wondering what his next move would be.
Mike thought long and hard on it. It was obvious what was happening. The van was over the border with Spinks in it. He was not about to consider telling Stratton to cancel the pursuit. Even if that were an option, which in this case it was not, Stratton would ignore him anyway. A border excursion was nothing compared to losing an operative. Mike was the kind of officer who stood by his men in a fight. If he was not going to order Stratton back, it therefore meant he supported him. He might as well start right there and then.
‘Get me Lisburn ops,’ he said calmly to Graham. ‘And get Bill Lawton standing by. We might as well start patching this up with the Irish right away.’ All Mike could now hope for was that Stratton tied it up as quickly and neatly as possible and without taking the battle all the way into Dublin.
‘The road, the road!’ Brennan yelled, pointing to a gate in the hedge a hundred yards ahead. Just beyond it was another hedge running parallel that indicated there was a road or track in between. Sean steered a gentle arc, adjusting his angle so that he could crash through the gate and enter the lane without slowing. The gate looked sturdy, but nothing was going to stop them now.
He hit it hard, smashing through it and destroying the headlights, and turned sharply on to the narrow lane, sliding just a little and bashing the far hedge with the flank but without losing much pace.
The Gazelle came on in pursuit like a relentless hunter. It banked hard over and levelled out to the right side of the van, no higher than a goalpost off the ground, and started to push ahead. Sean snatched a glance at it. This was useless, he thought. They were stuck in the lane like it was a bowling alley with nowhere to go but straight ahead.
As the Gazelle inched closer Brennan watched the man in the left seat of the cab leaning out with a rifle in his hand. He could see him more clearly now, his civilian clothes, straggly hair, unshaven features, and he was looking directly at Brennan as he raised the rifle to his shoulder.
‘Pink,’ Brennan said under his breath. ‘Focken Pink!’ Brennan leaned out the window and fired a long burst, almost losing his gun to the hedges crashing past as Sean tried to manoeuvre as best he could in the narrow lane.The two men in the back held on to anything they could as the van lurched heavily, Spinks’s crate sliding from one side to the other. One of the men fell on to his back while gripping his M16 and accidentally loosed off several rounds that ripped along the roof in a line barely missing Brennan’s head. But Brennan was too caught up in the desperation of his position to direct his madness at them.
‘What do we do?’ screamed Sean.
Brennan seemed frozen, watching the man in the helicopter.
‘Brennan?’ Sean shouted.
‘Drive! Just keep driving,’ Brennan shouted back.
‘We could run in four different directions. They couldn’t get all of us,’ Sean said.
Brennan shoved the end of his gun barrel at Sean, glaring at him with manic eyes. ‘You stop this van and I’ll blow you to focken pieces,’ he yelled.
Sean got the message loud and clear.
Stratton held the rifle tightly into his shoulder and looked down through the sights. A bullet skimmed the bottom of the Gazelle. Another creased the glass bubble, causing a crack that spread to one of the corners, but Stratton did not move from his purpose.The pilot flinched but he was more frightened of Stratton’s wrath should he veer off course than anything else.
‘Steady!’ Stratton called out. After a short pause, he squeezed the trigger four times in quick succession.
The first round spat through the windscreen and hit Sean in the chest; the second in his gut; a third passed through his neck; and the fourth flew between him and Brennan and into the crate Spinks was in. Sean slumped forward in his seat like a puppet with its strings cut as a jet of blood from his neck spouted around the cab. It squirted Brennan in the face as he grabbed the steering wheel and shoved Sean off his seat and against his door. The van tilted sharply as it mounted the embankment and scraped along the hedge. Brennan did his best to straighten it out, gripping the wheel with both hands. Sean’s feet were twisted and jammed under the dash, keeping the accelerator full against the floor. Brennan managed to manoeuvre it around a tight corner, hugging the outside hedge, and he might well have completed the turn successfully had it not been for the large boulder jutting from the outside hedge that had without doubt been there many thousands of years and was not about to give an inch to a van travelling at speed. And it didn’t. The front of the van collapsed like a bag of crisps and abruptly stopped but the contents continued on at the same speed. Brennan and Sean went through the windscreen and punched into the hedge as though it were a safety net. The two men in the back flew the length of the van and slammed into the front seats. The crate followed close behind and near flattened one of them between it and the seat, his bones snapping like firewood.
The Gazelle turned sharply close to the ground and the rotors thundered as it circled the wreck tightly.
‘Land!’ Stratton shouted. ‘Quickly!’
Brennan lay in the hedge, dazed and bloody. He fought to regain control and tried to move, but it seemed impossible to get his limbs to obey him. Contact was finally made and he moved his legs in search of firm ground below. He turned in the hedge and saw Sean lying beside him, mangled and very dead. The field was within reach just ahead and he grabbed the thorny branches around him and pulled himself forward. Every part of him ached and he waited for the shot of pain from somewhere in his body that would tell him a part of it was broken. As his senses regrouped he could hear the helicopter and the memories of the most recent events flooded back. He increased his efforts to pull himself on. The pain was dull and all over, but nothing appeared to be broken.
He wiped some blood out of his eyes and reached out of the hedge and down to touch the ground. He dug his fingers into the soil and pulled himself further forward, rolling out of the thicket on to his back and allowing himself a few precious seconds to breathe before forcing himself on. As he turned on to his front to push himself up his hand fell on to something metallic. His sub-machine-gun. He willed himself to his knees and picked it up in his battered, shaking hands, then he winced in pain. His leg. He’d forgotten he’d been shot right through it. But the urge to survive took over and he forced himself to take a step. His leg almost gave way but there was enough
