Hawn looked at him; then at Anna and at Sam Hanak, and at the derelict cafe and at the path leading up to the pier, and at the trees across the still water. He sensed a numb anti-climax, a feeling of futility as though he were the victim of some obscure and protracted practical joke. Yet he was also puzzled. Hanak seemed puzzled too, as well as barely concealing his annoyance. Anna was looking at him for an explanation, but received none.
The only one who showed no emotion at all was Dr Alan Rice — except for feeling the cold. He looked like a man who had thin blood. Hawn turned to him: ‘You knew somebody had been here before us, didn’t you?’
‘I knew nothing,’ Rice replied, with chilling composure. ‘I haven’t been back to this place for over thirty years.’
‘How can you be sure it’s the same place?’
‘The same place?’
Hawn said patiently, ‘There are dozens of little lakes round here. This place has changed — you said so yourself. The cafe hadn’t even been built when you were last here.’ He took a step forward and his foot squelched in the mud; a twig snapped under his shoe. He was standing opposite Rice, facing out across the water.
Rice shrugged his misshapen shoulders. ‘You saw the chain, didn’t you?’
‘I saw a bit of broken chain hanging on a nail. I bet half the islands and jetties round here have got chains or ropes at the end of them for mooring small craft in the summer.’ He took another step forward, until he could smell the hunchback’s breath. ‘Whose orders are you acting on, Rice?’ — but as he spoke there came a crack across the water. It sounded like branch splitting in the stillness, followed by a series of sharp echoes like whiplashes dying slowly round them. He glanced out at the bank on their left, at the wall of trees where the noise seemed to have come from — but saw nothing.
In the same instant he felt Rice’s sloping shoulder lurch against him and the weight of the man’s body collapse like a folding table. Hawn was just in time to grab him round the waist; then he looked into the man’s face. The jawbone and most of one cheek had gone, leaving his eye hanging naked, glaring unseeing into Hawn’s.
Hank had yelled, ‘Down!’ He had already flung Anna flat in the mud.
Hawn was down on his knee, still supporting the inert body of Rice, as though it would be indecent to let it drop. It was Rice, dead, who had saved him.
Hawn now twisted round, holding the body in front and slightly above him, when he felt the impact of a second bullet drill between the man’s shoulder blades, straight into the hump-back, and exit through the collarbone, brushing Hawn’s sleeve with a draught of air, before spending itself against one of the small pines behind them where it sliced a scar in the bark.
Hawn, flat on the ground now, was edging towards Hanak and Anna under cover of the trees. He felt sick rather than frightened. The ground was spattered with slivers of bone and gristle, several teeth; and there was a great deal of blood about, soaked black into the mud.
He was near enough to touch Anna’s hand, when he heard the third crack. This time the whine carried above the echoes. He knew it had been close, but he didn’t know how close. You never did know. He had been shot at many times during his career, in jungle, desert, in cars, planes, helicopters. But it had always been an impersonal sensation: part of the random ritual of war.
This was different. There was a man, or perhaps men, out in those trees, and they weren’t firing on vague orders from above: weren’t firing to preserve some loose map reference or hold that edge of the lake. These were marksmen, shooting at him and Anna and Sam Hanak: and they were shooting single rounds with at least one high-velocity rifle, accurately, to kill.
Hawn realized again Rice’s body remained his sole protection. He glanced quickly, desperately round. Whoever had set this up had done so with expertise. The paltry pines on the island could offer only the most temporary protection: enough for the enemy to adjust their sights, ‘shoot their guns in’.
The path back to the cafe was open ground. One of them might make it, zigzagging, flat-out — then hole up in the cafe. But for how long, unarmed? The pier beyond, and the short stretch of road back to Hanak’s car, would be death-traps. They might as well walk it, hands in their pockets, holding their heads up like clay pigeons.
The question was, how many of them were there? And who were they?
This was alien territory — beyond even the rules of Pol’s game, with his clandestine bank accounts and band of mercenaries. True, Pol had arranged the meeting with the bumptious Dr Wohl — but then Wohl was merely a double-faced go-between, a privileged Party hireling.
Hawn was thinking fast, still lying flat, moving like a reptile towards the trees, wondering if he would feel the bullet, whether it would hurt him, or whether it would be just a blank nothing. Instead, he felt only the slimy chill of the mud. Time became concertinaed, meaningless. How many seconds now since the first shot? They had picked off Rice, and now were just firing at leisure. But who? And why?
The most plausible candidates, of course, were always ABCO; but Hawn doubted that even their arm could reach this far. For this was the other side, the enemy side,
