He could recite by heart most of Bakunin’s The Revolutionary
Catechism, especially the definition of the true revolutionary: The lost man, who has no belongings, no outside interest, no personal ties of any sort not even a name.
Possessed of but one thought, interest and passion the revolution. A man who has broken with society, broken with its laws and conventions. He must despise the opinions of others, and be prepared for death and torture at any time. Hard towards himself, The
MUSt. be hard to others, and in his heart there must be no place for love, friendship, gratitude or even honour.
As he stood now in the empty room, he saw himself in a rare moment of revelation, as the man he had set out to become the true revolutionary, and his head turned for a moment to indulge in the vanity of regarding his own image in the mirror screwed to the peeling wallpaper above the iron bedstead.
It was the dark cold face of the lost man, and he felt proud to belong to that elite class, the cutting edge of the sword, that was what he was.
He picked up the canvas grip, and strode through into the kitchen.
“Are you ready? “he called.
“Help me.” He dropped the grip and stepped to the window. The last of the light was fading swiftly, glowing pink and mother of-pearl within the drooping, pregnant belly of the sky. It seemed so close he could reach out and touch it. Already the trees of the unkempt orchard were melding into the darkness as the night encroached.
“I cannot carry her on my own,” the doctor whined, and he swung away from the window. It was time to go again.
In his life there was always the moving onwards, and always the hunters baying hard upon his scent. It was time to run again, run like the fox.
He went through into the second room. The doctor had the child wrapped in a grey woollen blanket, and he had tried to lift her from the bed, but had failed. She was sprawled awkwardly, half onto the floor.
“Help me,” repeated the doctor.
“Get out of the way.” Gilly O’Shaughnessy pushed him roughly aside, and stooped over the girl. For a second their faces were within inches of each other.
Her eyes were opened, half conscious, although the pupils were widely dilated by the drug. The lids were pink rimmed and there were little butter-yellow lumps of mucus in the corners. Her lips were dried to white scales, and cracked through to the raw flesh at three places.
“Please tell my daddy,” she whispered. “Please tell him I’m here.” His nostrils flared at the sick sour smell of her body, but he picked her up easily with an arm under her knees and the other under her shoulders, and carried her out across the kitchen, kicking open the door so the lock burst and it slammed back against its hinges.
Quickly he carried her across the yard to the garage, with the doctor staggering along after them carrying a carton of medical supplies and equipment against his chest, cursing miserably at the cold, and sliding and slipping in the treacherous footing.
Gilly O’Shaughnessy waited while the doctor opened the rear door of the car, and then he bundled her in so roughly that the child cried out weakly. He ignored her and went to the double garage doors and dragged them open. It was so dark now that he could not see as far as the bridge.
“Where are we going? “bleated the doctor.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Gilly told him brusquely. “There is a safe house up North, or we might go back across the sea to England-” He thought of the caravan again, that was a good one, But why are we leaving now, so suddenly?” He did not bother to reply but left the garage and ran back into the kitchen. Always he was obsessed by the need to cover his tracks, to leave no sign for the hunters.
Though he had brought little with him, and was taking that now,
yet he knew the old house contained signs, even if it was only his fingerprints. There was also the single remaining appetite for destruction to assuage.
He ripped the wooden doors off the kitchen cupboards and smashed them to splinters under his heel, piled them in the centre of the wood floor. He crumpled the newspapers piled on the table and added them to the pile, threw the table and chairs upon it.
He lit a match and held it to the crumpled newsprint. It flared readily, and he straightened and opened the windows and doors. The flames fed on the cold fresh air and climbed greedily, catching on the splintered doors.
Gilly O’Shaughnessy picked up the canvas grip and stepped out into the night, crouching to the wind and the rain but halfway to the garage he straightened again abruptly and paused to listen.
There was a sound on the wind, from the direction of the coast.
It might have been the engine note of a heavy truck coming up the hills, but there was a peculiar thin whistling sound mingled with the engine beat, and the volume of sound escalated too sharply to be that of a lumbering truck. It was coming on too swiftly, the sound seemed to fill the air, to emanate from the very clouds themselves.
Gilly O’Shaughnessy stood with his face lifted to the fine silver drizzle, searching the belly of the clouds, until a throbbing regular glow began to beat like a pulse in the sky, and it was a moment until he recognized it as the beacon light of a low-flying aircraft, and at the same moment he knew that the shrill whistle was the whirling of rotors bringing the hunters.
He cried aloud in the certainty of betrayal and onrushing death.
“Why? God, why?” He called to the god he had so long ago denied, and he began to run.
It’s no good.” The pilot twisted his neck to shout at Peter without taking his eyes from the flight instruments which kept the great ungainly machine level and on course. They had lost contact with the other machine.
“We are socked in, blind.” The cloud frothed over the canopy like boiling milk over the lip of the pot. “I’m going to have to climb out,
and head back for Enniskerry before we run into my number two.” The risk of collision with the other helicopter was now real and imminent.
The beacon light throbbed above them, reflected off the impenetrable press of soft cloud but the other pilot would not see it until too late.
“Hold on. Just another minute,” Peter shouted back at him, his expression tortured in the glow of the instrument panel. The entire operation was disintegrating about him, would soon end in tragedy or in fiasco, but he must go on.
“It’s no good-” the pilot began, and then shouted with fright and hurled the helicopter over onto its side, at the same instant altering pitch and altitude so the machine shuddered and lurched as though she had run into a solid obstruction, and then bounded upwards, gaining a hundred feet in a swoop.
The spire of a church had leapt at them out of the cloud, like a predator from ambush, and now it flickered by only feet from where they crouched in the flight deck, but it had disappeared again instantly as they roared past.
“The church!” Peter yelled. “That’s it! Turn back.” The pilot checked the machine, hovering blindly in the chaos of rain and cloud churned to a fury by the down draught of their own rotor.
“I can’t see a damned thing, “shouted the pilot.
“We’ve got one hundred and seventy feet on the radio altimeter,”
his co-pilot called; that was actual height from the ground and still they could see nothing below them.
“Get us down. For God’s sake, get us down,” Peter pleaded.
“I can’t take the chance. We don’t have any idea of what is under us.” The pilot’s face was sickly orange in the instrument glow, his eyes the dark pits of a skull. “I’m climbing out and heading back-“
Peter reached down and the butt of the Walther jumped into his hand,
like a living thing. He realized coldly that he was capable of killing the pilot, to force the co-pilot to land but at the moment there was a hole in the cloud, just enough to make out the dark loom of the earth below them.
“Visual,” Peter shouted. “We’ve visual, get us down!” And the helicopter sank swiftly, breaking out suddenly into the clear.
“The river.” Peter saw the glint of water. “And the bridge-“
“There’s the churchyard-” Colin roared eagerly, and that’s the target.”
The thatched roof was a black oblong, and light spilled from the windows of one side of the building, so they
