McBride turn into the entrance of the multi-storey car park, and hurried across the street after him. His knee pained him. He must have bruised it without realizing, perhaps against the bodywork of the silver-grey Mercedes.
The images of the car brought a nauseous bile to the back of his throat as he went up the first flight of the musty-smelling concrete steps. He paused, hearing footsteps above him, then the sighing open and shut again of a door. Next level. He hobbled up the steps, holding onto the iron rail, pausing while an elderly couple negotiated the turn in the stairs, squeezed past him, walking-sticks and old thin legs suddenly untrustworthy, betraying. A shopping-basket on wheels bounced down each step behind them, hurrying them rather than under their control.
And the dead in the street, the glass like a flung-down beach, the perspective changed, the town changed.
He heard as he opened the door a car engine fire, and without thought he yelled McBride's name with all the force of his lungs and throat. Red lights flicked on. The Nissan was backing out from behind a concrete pillar, and he could see the woman in the passenger seat. He ran towards the car, yelling for McBride to stop, the Sig-Sauer in his hand now, but not levelled. The woman was in the way. The Nissan had stopped, and he ran round to the driver's window. McBride was already winding it down. The man's face looked dazed and innocent, and infuriated Ryan. He raised the gun—
The woman had removed the small Astra 300 from her shoulder-bag, pointed it quickly, and fired twice into Ryan's face. He felt each of the bullets, sensed flesh opening and dissolving round the lead, sensed teeth being smashed, almost the exit of each bullet as his head lifted away from the car and he saw the grey concrete roof above him become fuzzy and unformed and dark.
By nightfall they had reached the outskirts of Skibbereen without further contact with the pursuit. A cottage just on the edge of the village provided food and water — cheese and rough-hewn bread sticking to their palates, washed off and down into empty stomachs by the water. McBride knew the cottager, a slight acquaintance which would not prevent the old man answering any questions put to him by their pursuers. To prevent any useless bravery, he gave the man permission to answer any questions — time, condition, even direction.
They left the cottage under a cloudy night sky that suggested a moonlit night to come. The rain had petered out before darkness. McBride took them half a mile north of the village, up the bank of the River Hen, then doubled back, skirting Skibbereen to the west and taking footpaths and bridleways through the easy farming country to the southwest of the village. The moon emerged from the last rags of cloud around ten o' clock, and the landscape was lumpy with clumps of trees and small copses, horizoned by hedges, rendered amusing and safe by the occasional disturbed lumps of sleeping cattle.
They left the lights of a hamlet behind them, navigating by the bulk of Lick Hill a mile or so ahead of them, black and humped against the stars. They walked close together as if to re-establish some community that had been lost in the grey daylight. McBride walked with his arm round Maureen, and she held Gilliatt's hand on her other side.
McBride was heading for a farm that lay snugly beneath Lick Hill, where they could sleep an undisturbed sleep in one of the barns. The farmer would know nothing of their presence. At least, that was how McBride envisaged it. Holding the farmer hostage at gunpoint might become necessary if they were disturbed, but in that event there was nothing to consider. Guns required no forward planning.
Gilliatt heard the approaching planes first — the higher, lighter feminine note of the fighter escort above the deeper rumbling of the three-engined Junkers Ju52s. The Messerschmitts he knew by sound, the other aircraft he only recognized from their blacker silhouettes against the stars when they were almost overhead. All three of them stood, heads upraised as if in supplication or wonder, immobile as the lumbering Junkers laid strings of blooming white eggs from their bellies and the paratroopers — the Fallschirmjaeger — swung and straightened and descended all round them. A stream of blown dandelion clocks, closing on them, dropping into the fields on every side of them. Hundreds of them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Decision
The deception of a summer night dissipated. The swinging, weighted parachutes were being jostled by a cold November wind, and the winter stars were hard and frosty. Each of them was chilled, fixed to the spot, compelled to remain in the middle of the landing ground. The Junkers and Messerschmitts droned away northwards, then banked away to the west, returning a threatening, rustling silence to the wind-soughed darkness.
The first Fallschirmjaeger landed perhaps a couple of hundred yards from them, rolling, getting up and hauling back the 'chutes that billowed and tugged them into a trot. Then others were swinging directly above their heads, and a canister thumped into the earth twenty feet away, rolling ominously towards them. It seemed to galvanize McBride. He grabbed Maureen's hand, pulling her off-balance away to their left, towards a straggling copse where already one parachutist had become entangled in a gaunt tree and was not straining to free himself but hanging limply from his harness.
'Come on!' McBride whispered fiercely, and Gilliatt broke into a run behind them.
They were running through a field of ghosts, through strange, marsh-lit spirits that appeared and rolled and moved on every side. McBride caught one parachutist in the back, bowling him over as the man dropped directly in front of him. He stumbled on the treacherous footing of the silk, skipped a few steps, almost catching his feet in the cords, all the time with one arm steering Maureen away from the billowing white mass in their path. For a moment, whiteness seemed all around them and over them, then the bustling wind whipped the 'chute into a thin, deflated fold and away from them. The small, leafless copse seemed farther away than before.
Gilliatt cried out, muffled. McBride whirled around, his hurried glimpse of the field behind them one of puffs of white mist rising and boiling from the ground and the last few dandelion clocks floating down to earth. Gilliatt was caught in the folds of a parachute that had descended on him, around him. The parachutist was regaining his feet, becoming quickly aware and dangerous. They postured, still for a half-second, like two gladiators. The net-and- trident man had his opponent enmeshed and at his mercy.
McBride avoided the embrace of the shroud, drawing his pocket knife and opening the blade. The German soldier was punching at the harness lock in the middle of his chest while his other hand brought the MP40 machine-pistol to bear on the wriggling, entangled figure on the ground who was not in uniform under the hard moonlight. Then the German saw McBride approaching, perhaps even the gleam of the knife-blade, and the harness drifted away from his shoulders and chest but caught on the MP40 as it swung towards McBride. McBride elbowed the man off-balance clumsily and as hard as he could, then knelt on top of him. The face was very young, dazed and not yet frightened. He clamped his hand over the man's mouth, and drove up beneath the breastbone with the knife. The body went rigid in its coitus with death, then suddenly limp and sack-like. McBride wiped the blade, then began chopping at the cords of the 'chute, freeing Gilliatt.
They stood up together. McBride slipped the strap of the machine-pistol from the dead man's arm and passed the MP40 to Gilliatt.
'Come on.'
Figures were moving now, all around them. The last pleasantry of falling parachutes had vanished. Only the heavy, bulky images of troops rising from the ground, of folded silk, of guns and men collecting into units. They were fifty yards from the trees, and there were Germans rolling up their white parachutes between them and cover. The cut 'chute billowed and ghosted away with the wind, attracting attention.
