by Crossfire
We reached the passageway door, and I swung it open, pushing her through it ahead of me, both of us nearly falling over the blue plastic drum.
“Mum, please,” I said loudly to her. “Go through the passage and out the back. Then hide.”
But she wouldn’t let go of my arm. She was simply too frightened to move. Conditioning young men not to freeze under fire was a common problem in the army, and one that wasn’t always solved, so I could hardly blame my mother for doing so now.
Another shot rang out, and some of the wood of the door splintered behind us. That was a bit closer, I thought—far too close, in fact. The shooter had now closed to within killing range. Maybe I’d been wrong about them wanting the million dollars returned before they’d kill me. Another shot tore into the wooden roof above our heads.
“Come on,” I said to my mother as calmly as I could. “Let’s get out of here.”
I firmly removed her hand from my arm and then held it in mine as I almost dragged her down the passageway and out into the space behind. I could hear shouts from the stable yard as someone was directing his troops around the end of the building to find us. However, the man who was doing the shouting stayed where he was, in the yard. He obviously didn’t fancy walking into the dark passageway, in case I was in there waiting for him.
I pulled my mother around behind the muck heap. There was a tall, narrow space between the rear retaining wall of the heap and a hay barn beyond.
“Get in there,” I said quietly, in my best voice-of-command. “And lie facedown.”
She didn’t like it, I could tell by the way she kicked at the wet ground, but she couldn’t protest, as the tape was still over her mouth. She hesitated.
“Mum,” I said. “Please. Otherwise, we will die.”
There was just enough light from the stars for me to see the fear in her eyes. Still she clung to me, so I eased up the corner of the tape over her mouth and peeled it away.
“Mum,” I said again. “Please do it now.” I kissed her softly on the forehead, but then I firmly pushed her away from me and into the gap.
“Oh God,” she whispered in despair. “Help me.”
“It’s all right,” I said, trying to reassure her. “Just lie down here for a while and it will all be fine.”
She obviously didn’t want to, but she didn’t say so. She knelt down in the gap and then lay flat on to her tummy, as I’d asked. I pulled some of the old straw down off the muck heap and covered her as best I could. It probably didn’t smell too good, but so what? Fear didn’t smell great, either.
I left her there and went back to the end of the passageway. Whoever had been shooting had still not come through, but I could see that the car was being driven around the end of the stable buildings so that its lights were about to shine down the back, straight towards where I was standing.
I stepped again into the passageway.
The car’s headlights were both a help and a hindrance. They helped in showing me the position of at least one of my enemies, but at the same time, their brightness destroyed my night vision.
Consequently, the passageway appeared darker than ever, but from my previous visits, I could visualize the location of every obstruction on the floor, and I easily stepped silently around them. I pressed my eyes up against the gaps between the door slats and looked out once more into the stable yard beyond.
There was plenty of light from the still-maneuvering car for me to see clearly. Jackson Warren was standing in the center of the yard, talking with Peter Garraway. They were each holding a shotgun in a manner that suggested that they both knew how to use them. What was it that Isabella had said? “The Garraways always come over for the end of the pheasant-shooting season—Peter is a great shot.”
I think I’d have rather not known that, not right now.
As I could see Warren and Garraway in the stable yard, it must be Alex Reece who was driving the car.
“You go round the back,” Jackson was saying to Garraway.“Flush him out. I’ll stay here in case he comes through.”
I could tell from his body language that Peter Garraway really didn’t like taking orders. I also suspected that he didn’t much fancy “going round the back” either, good shot or not. “Why don’t I wait here and you go round the back?” he replied.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Jackson, clearly annoyed. “All right. But keep your eyes fixed on that door and, if he appears, shoot him. But try to hit him in the legs.”
That was slightly encouraging, I thought, but the notion of being captured alive was not. I had already experienced their brand of hospitality in these stables, and I had no desire to do so again.
Jackson Warren walked off towards the car, leaving a nervous-looking Peter Garraway standing alone in the stable yard.
Yet another Sun Tzu quote floated into my head. “In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.”
Peter Garraway was weak. I could tell by the way he kept looking towards the car and in the direction that Jackson had gone in the hope of being relieved, rather than towards the door to the passageway, as he’d been told. He obviously didn’t like being left there alone. And shooting pheasants was one thing, but shooting a person would be quite another matter.
Reece had finally managed to get the car around behind the stables, and I could see the glow of its lights at the back end of the passageway. That was not good, I thought, as my position was becoming outflanked and I would soon find myself liable to attack from opposite directions.
I looked at my watch. It was only five-seventeen. Just twelve minutes had elapsed since Ian had sounded the car horn, but it felt like so much longer, and there would still be another hour of darkness.
I took another quick glimpse through the slats at Peter Garraway in the stable yard. He was resting his double-barreled shotgun in the crook of his right arm, as someone might do while waiting for the beaters to drive pheasants into the air from a game crop. It was not the way a soldier would hold a weapon—and it was not ready for immediate action.
I threw open the passageway door and ran right at him with my sword held straight out in front of me, the point aimed directly at his face, like a cavalry officer but without the horse.
He was quite quick in raising his gun but nowhere near quick enough. I was on him so fast, and as he swung the barrels up, I struck his right arm, the point of my sword tearing through both his coat and the flesh beneath. In the same motion, I hit him full on the nose with the sword’s nickel-plated hand guard. He immediately went sprawling straight down onto the concrete floor, dropping the gun and clutching at his bleeding face with both hands.
I stood over him with my sword raised high, like a matador about to deliver the coup de grâce. Garraway, meanwhile, curled himself into a ball with his arms up around his head, whimpering and shaking like a scolded puppy.
I aimed at his heart, and my arm began to fall.
“What are you doing?” I suddenly asked myself out loud, stopping the rapidly descending blade when it was just inches from his chest.
Values and Standards of the British Army, paragraph sixteen, states that soldiers must treat all human beings with respect, especially the victims of conflict, such as the dead, the wounded, prisoners and civilians. All soldiers must act within the law. “Soldiering,” it says, “is about duty: so soldiers should be ready to uphold the rights of others before claiming their own.”
Killing Peter Garraway like this would certainly not be within the law, and would definitely be a breach of his rights as my unarmed and wounded prisoner. I would simply be taking revenge for the pain and suffering that he had inflicted on me.
I noticed that he had peed himself, just as I had done the previous week in the stable, although, in my case, it hadn’t been from fear. Maybe that would have to be revenge enough. I leaned down, picked up his shotgun and left him where he was, holding his face and arm, and quivering like a jelly.
I went quickly across the yard and
out towards the house with the gun in one hand and my sword in the other. But the sword had now outlived its usefulness. I tossed it into the shadows at the end of the stable building and put both my hands on the gun—that was better.
I had no real plan in mind, but I knew that somehow I had to draw Jackson Warren towards me and away from my mother.
I broke open the shotgun. There was a live cartridge in each of the two chambers, but I cursed myself for not having looked for more in Peter Garraway’s pockets. I could hear him behind me, calling out pitifully for Jackson, so I reckoned it was too late to go back and find them now.
So I had only two shots. I would need to make both of them count. I closed the gun once more and pushed the safety catch to off.
If I wanted to draw Jackson and Alex away from my mother, I would have to reveal my position, something that was utterly alien to any infantryman.
The headlights were still shining brightly down the back of the stables towards the muck heap, but I wasn’t there anymore. I was about forty yards away, where the driveway met the turning circle near the house. I could see the car clearly from where I stood; at least I could see the headlights but from side-on.
How could I attract attention to myself?
I lifted the shotgun to my shoulder and fired one of my precious cartridges at the car. At this range the shot wouldn’t penetrate the vehicle’s skin, although it might just break a window. However, one thing was for sure, Alex Reece in the car would certainly know all about it.
I could hear Jackson shouting. Perhaps he had been too close to the shot for comfort. But did I care? Now they would know exactly where I was, and the car was already turning my way.
I purposely lingered a moment too long, just long enough, in fact, for the headlight beams to fall on my departing back. I weaved in the light for a split second before diving once more into the darkness down the side of the house. A shot rang out, but I was already safely protected around the corner.
I moved swiftly, grateful that I had made an extensive reconnaissance here the previous Thursday. I knew that the concrete path alongside the exterior walls ran completely around the rectangular building, the only obstacle being a small gate at one of the back corners.
In no time, I had completed the circuit and approached the front of the house again, but now I was behind the car, its headlamps still blazing towards where I had been just seconds before. In the glow I could see Jackson creeping forwards towards the corner, his gun raised to his shoulder, ready to fire.
The driver’s door of the car suddenly opened, and Alex stood up next to the vehicle, facing away from me, watching Jackson intently.
I moved slowly forwards, being very careful to be as silent as possible in my basketball boots on the loose gravel. Alex would have certainly heard me if the engine of the car hadn’t been left running. As it was, I was able to approach him completely undetected.
He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and a large woolen cap.
I lifted the shotgun and placed the ends of the barrels firmly onto the bare skin visible just beneath his left ear.
“Move an inch and you will die,” I said to him in my best voice-of-command. But he immediately disobeyed me and turned around. But when I saw his face I realized I’d been so wrong, the car driver wasn’t Alex Reece, as I’d thought.
“Hello, Tom,” said Isabella.
I was stunned. I lowered the barrels.
“But why?” I asked.
“I’m so sorry,” she said in answer.
“Was it you who unlocked the gates?” I asked her.
She seemed surprised that I knew, but she nodded. “Jackson was in Gibraltar.”
It had been a VW Golf that I had seen that night. Perhaps I had been subconsciously convincing myself ever since that it hadn’t been Isabella’s car, but it had.
“Why didn’t you come and help me?”
All the misery of those three days in the stable floated into my mind.
She looked down at her feet. “Because I didn’t know that you were there, not last week. I only found out tonight when I heard Peter talking about it, and how he couldn’t believe you’d managed to escape.” She gulped. “Jackson just phoned home on Thursday and asked me to unlock the gates.”
I wanted to believe her, but then why was she driving the car here tonight? She couldn’t claim now that she didn’t know what was going on, not with Warren and Garraway running around with guns.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”
She looked back up at my face and then towards Jackson. “Because I love him,” she said. It was almost an apology.
I too looked at Jackson, who was still inching carefully away from me towards the corner of the house, oblivious to the fact that I was standing behind him next to the car. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to shoot him, to kill him in revenge for what his greed had done to us all. And he was not a prisoner but an armed enemy combatant. There were no Value and Standards concerns here. I lifted the gun and aimed.
“No,” Isabella screamed, grabbing the barrels.
Jackson turned towards the noise, but he would have been unable to see anything, as he would be looking straight into the headlights. But he started to move back towards the car.
I threw Isabella to the ground and again raised the shotgun towards Jackson, but I hadn’t bargained on Isabella’s panic-driven determination. She grabbed my knees like a rugby player and pushed against the car, forcing me backwards over onto the gravel.
One of the huge disadvantages of having an artificial leg is that it seriously hampers recovery from a horizontal position, as it’s impossible to bend the knee sufficiently. I rolled over on the gravel to be facedown and drew my good leg under me, but Isabella had been quicker.
She was already on her feet, and she wrenched the shotgun from my hand, stamping on my wrist for good measure.
How embarrassing, I thought, to be disarmed by a woman. Perhaps the major from the ministry had been right all along.
But Isabella didn’t turn the gun on me, she simply ran away with it while I struggled to my feet, using the car door handle to pull me up.
A shot rang out. It was very close.
I turned quickly to see Jackson running towards a figure lying very still on the ground in the light from the headlights, a figure whose hat had come off, revealing long blond hair, hair that was already soaking up an ever-increasing pool of bright red blood.
In another incident of what the military euphemistically call “friendly fire,” Jackson Warren had killed Isabella.
He sank down onto his knees beside her, dropping his gun onto the gravel alongside the one that Isabella had been carrying. I walked the few yards from the car and picked up both weapons. I unloaded their second barrels, placing the unfired cartridges in my pocket. There had been enough shooting for one night. In fact, there had been far too much.
Jackson turned his head slightly to see me.
“I thought it was you,” he said. He made it sound like an excuse, as if shooting me would have been acceptable. He turned back and cradled his wife’s lifeless head on his lap. “I’d told her to stay in the car. I saw someone running with a gun.” He looked up at me again, now with tears in his eyes. “I just assumed it was you.”
He should have checked.
EPILOGUE
Three weeks later, Pharmacist, this time with no green potato peel-induced tummy ache, romped up the finishing hill to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup by a neck. It was the second Kauri House Stables success of the afternoon, after Oregon had justified his favoritism to win the Triumph Hurdle. My mother positively glowed.
In the post-Gold Cup press conference, she stunned the massed ranks of reporters, as well as the wider public watching on television, by announcing her retirement from the sport with immediate effect.
“I’m going out on a huge high,” she told them, beaming from ear to ear. “I’m handing over the reins to the next generation.”
I s
tood at the back of the room, watching her answer all the journalists’ questions with ease, making them laugh with her. Here was the Josephine Kauri that everyone knew and expected: confident and in control of the situation, in keeping with her status as National Woman of the Year.
I believed that she was as happy that day as I had ever seen her. It had been a somewhat different matter when I had returned to her hiding place that night at Greystone Stables to find her frightened, exhausted, bedraggled and to the point of complete mental and physical collapse.
But much had changed since that dreadful night, not least the removal of the imminent threat of public disgrace, and the prospect of being arrested for tax evasion. Not that the senior inspector from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs hadn’t been pretty cross. He had. But nowhere near as cross as he would surely have been if we hadn’t arrived to see him with a check for all the back tax.
Martin Toleron had worked some magic, producing a team of accountants to sift through the shambles and to bring some order and transparency to my mother’s business accounts. It had been quite an undertaking.
“It’s the least I can do,” Martin had said, happily agreeing also to pay the accountant’s bill.
So the previous Monday, my mother, Derek and I had arrived by appointment at the tax office in Newbury, not only with a check made out for well over a million pounds of back tax, but with a set of up-to-date business accounts and a series of signed and sworn affidavits as to how and why the tax had not been paid at the correct time.
We had sat in the senior inspector’s office for more than an hour as he had silently scrutinized our documents, never once putting down the check, which he held between the index finger and thumb of his left hand.
“Most unusual,” he’d said at some length. “Most unusual, indeed.”
Then he had returned to his reading for another hour, still clutching the check.
I didn’t really think the inspector knew what to say. The accountants had calculated not only the tax that was overdue but also the amount of interest that should have been levied for its late arrival.