by Craig Thomas
The driver's face was lacerated, deep gashes from the shattered windscreen across his left cheek and forehead. Ryan was already assuming he would survive when he noticed the red ring like a clerical collar round the driver's neck, staining his shirt. Then the body slumped against him, and Ryan pushed it away in revulsion. He opened the passenger door and the screaming loudened immediately. The Tesco store was on fire, smoke and flame billowing from the wrecked facade. There were perhaps two dozen bodies on the pavements. A bus had run over one form, and then stopped. There was no driver visible behind the wheel. Someone staggered against the wing of the car, blinded with blood, hands pressed against the face — he could not be sure of the sex — as if preventing the features being dissolved by the flow of blood from the scalp. The high scream did not belong either to a man or a woman, not even an afflicted child or animal.
Ryan was dazed by the occurrence of the explosion and not its force, and by the destruction through which he now had to move. All that concerned him was that he had to regain contact with McBride, must not lose him.
* * *
Moynihan pressed his handkerchief against his cheek to staunch the surprising flow of blood. He imagined the gash in his cheek was longer and deeper than it could possibly be. There was no window in which he could inspect it. He was standing drunkenly where he had been when the bomb exploded, in a shop doorway well past Tesco's, watching the front of the cafe. Now, all he could do was curse silently the Provisional cell which had planted a bomb in an Eastbourne supermarket when McBride was in the same town, the same street, and know he would have to move before the police and ambulances arrived. Yet he wanted to know that McBride and the woman were safe, unhurt. Some growing sense in him had indicated, as he watched the cafe before the explosion, that the woman had something to tell him, that perhaps the time was close when Goessler would give them McBride or they would take him. He needed to know.
But, as he heard the first high wails of the sirens, he forced himself to move, hurrying up the street past the rows of empty shop windows, clothes and food and tailors" dummies heaped and disarranged and shattered and glass-stabbed.
* * *
Ryan shook his head, feeling glass prickling the back of his neck and his hands. He was trying to organize his thinking, reject earlier possibilities and form a fresh course of action. McBride would have to be killed now. He rejected that, but it reformed behind the qualification of the woman. Ryan could do little without the driver, and somehow the carnage thrust upon this afternoon street by the Provisional IRA made him deeply angry, made him require action — soon and sudden.
A woman lurched against him as he crossed the street, her face wide and empty with terror. There seemed nothing wrong with her, until he pushed her away and saw the blood running down her leg like helpless urine, into her shoe. The heel had snapped from the shoe, the stocking was torn on the reddened leg, and there was a gash in her skirt. Smart, young, assured. Glass in her belly. Ryan was enraged even as he was sickened. He tripped over a still form, outstretched hand holding a plastic shopping bag with the blazon of the ruined store on it. Glass had cut madly at the back of the dead woman's head, a tonsure of violence. The back of the coat she wore was opened, violated. Ryan regained his feet, his shoes crunching along the glass beach of the pavement, the heat from the frontage of the store flushing his drawn face. A legless torso wailed from the gutter where it had been blown by the bomb, wrapped in the rags of a shop assistant's uniform. A cash register had spilled on the pavement, meaninglessly. Screams and wailing howled like fire-noises from inside the store, before they were drowned by the approaching sirens.
Ryan moved out into the street again, recognizing that he was dazed, unsteady — the situation overwhelming him — and passed the ruined store. Something like butane gas or paraffin exploded at the rear of the store, and flame gushed into the sky, smoke boiling out in pursuit of it. There were few people moving on the street — a lot of bodies, but few people moving. The bus was empty of passengers, or their bodies had slid down below the level of the window-frames. He crunched on through the glass.
He stood beside an open Mercedes that had halted against a streetlamp, and saw people begin to emerge, slowly as into an altered world, from the cafe. Ryan saw at the edge of his vision a child nestling in an imitation-death in the back seat of the Mercedes. Her mother's head was in an impossible position, her body only kept upright by the seatbelt. Glass from across the street had almost decapitated the woman. But he could not understand the child's stillness until he saw the dribble of blood from the back of her head winding slowly round her neck, reaching like a small pet snake into her blouse. He thought the child might still be alive, only stunned, and that made him more angry. He felt the emotion boiling through him, wave after wave; more accurately like a kettle continuing to boil because it could not be switched off or removed from the heat.
He saw McBride mistily, staring around him at the carnage, as the first police cars screamed to a standstill only yards away. The lights of an ambulance flickered up the street, and the wail of the fire-appliances impinged on him. But McBride was the focus of his attention. The woman was hurrying him away, towards the car park where McBride's hire car had been left. Ryan went after them, everything narrowed down to the figures of McBride and the woman. Ryan patted the gun in his shoulder holster. He knew he was acting under stress, that rationality had dissipated in the flood of emotion, but the overriding irrationality of the explosion and the deaths — which might total more than a hundred if the store had been crowded — possessed him. If the IRA could get hold of McBride, if they knew what he knew—
Anger fused the circuitry there, the identification of McBride and the perpetrators of the atrocity. He saw 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.
AIDS rules — OK? sprayed in blue paint on the grey wall, and the CND symbol. MUFC, followed by the comment are cunts. Clapton is God as he went on up the steps, then in red above Gloria does and What? and takes 14 inches, the letters that blinded him, caused him to pause, clench his fists, reach for the 9mm Sig-Sauer P230 and feel the comfort of the butt — Provos, and IRA rules. A mindless youth with a spray-can, non-political, half-literate, meaning nothing.
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.
November 1940
By nightfall they had reached the outskirts of Skibbereen without further con
tact 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
November 1940
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.
"It's no good—" Gilliatt whispered.
"Don't be stupid." McBride took Maureen's hand, and squeezed it. "Come on."
He began running for the trees, and Gilliatt, the MP40 cold and lumpy and uncomforting in his hand, followed them after a moment's hesitation. A cow lumbered into his path, and he ducked alongside it. The animal was disturbed rather than terrified, and was moving aimlessly wherever clear ground presented itself. While it moved towards the trees, Gilliatt moved with it, watching McBride and Maureen and waiting for them to be challenged.
"Halt!" The word was English, almost unaccented. "Who are you?" The cow tried to shake Gilliatt's arm from its flank, its stubby horns waving just in front of his face. McBride and Maureen were just in front of two soldiers, both of whom were unencumbered and whose guns were level on the man and woman.
"I could ask you the same thing!" McBride bellowed in an outrageous brogue, putting his arm around his wife. "This is my farm — what are you doing dropping out of the sky on my dairy herd?" Gilliatt wanted to laugh in admiration of the bluff — which he knew would not work. The cow, startled by the voices, swerved away from the trees, exposing Gilliatt.
"Down!" he yelled, waited for the second which stretched out into danger-induced images of flame and bullets emerging from the two German machine-pistols — he could almost see the bullets in slow-motion, feel his leaden limbs transfixed — then McBride had dragged Maureen below chest-level and he sprayed the two Germans with the MP40 on automatic. They were flicked aside, leaving a gap of ground and the trees where the one dead parachutist hung like an admonition. He ran to McBride even as he heard shouted orders less than fifty yards away for men to spread out, get down, locate the source of the firing—
Panic was on their side now, driving them forward while it dislocated German thinking. Ambush? The Irish army? He hardly paused to haul Maureen to her feet, running on with her arm held in a tight grip into the cover of the trees.
"Where now?" he whispered, his head moving like a clockwork toy, swivelling for sight of danger. There was a crashing through the trees and bushes away to the right, but then a mottled, start
led Friesian burst out near them like a pantomime cow, head up, legs comically uncertain. It crashed through bushes and down into a ditch on the other side. McBride pointed.
"Down there."
"Where then?"
"Towards Liss Ard — a mile, no more. Get on with it!" McBride ushered Gilliatt on his way with the MP38 he had picked up from one of the two newly dead. A thin chattering forestalled the humorous remark that would have followed. Wood chips dusted down on them from the lowest branches. "They know where we are — get on, Peter."
Gilliatt pressed through the bushes, and dropped surprised into the deep ditch, rolling over but saving his ankles. Then he waited until Maureen dropped, catching her and holding her on balance. Then he helped her clamber out of the ditch on the other side. Across the fields from them the few lights of Liss Ard seemed to beckon at one moment, then float unsubstantial the next. There was more firing behind them, then the noises of McBride scrabbling to the lip of the ditch.
"I hope to God they've got something better to do than chase us!" he observed, coughing with effort, as they began running across the first field between them and the lights of the hamlet.
* * *
Drummond sat opposite the German officer who had come ashore from a small U-boat earlier in the evening, wishing that he would now go and consult with the company commanders who had dropped between Timoleague and Kilbrittain, one of the five designated drop-areas for the Fallschirmjaeger which he had originally selected months before.