The Vanishing

by John Connor

  ‘The car is certainly covered,’ he said. ‘Covered in leaves and branches, so we can’t see it. Would they do that?’

  He took the gun again, spent another few minutes staring ahead, at the hill this time. ‘The dish is there,’ he said, as if wondering whether she could be right. ‘If it was the Somalis they’d have trashed that, maybe. Just to be sure.’

  But she already knew he was right. Her security people wouldn’t camouflage the car. They were all former police officers from the islands, which meant they were of limited intelligence. The truth was they wouldn’t even come here. If they were nowhere to be seen it was more likely they had taken her boat and fled at the first sign of trouble. She started to get emotional again, and took the gun off him quickly. The fear was like something physical, rising up in her throat. She put the crosshairs on the dish and examined it carefully. It looked intact. She moved to the shed, the windows, the door lock. Everything looked normal. She slid it up to the twin solar panels, then followed the cabling running away from them. Nothing to see. A couple of degrees higher were the cables coming out of the dish. She stared at them. She put the gun down, feeling it flooding over her. She started to cry.

  ‘What?’ he whispered, nervous now. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The wires from the dish,’ she spluttered. ‘They’ve all been hacked through.’

  He checked. Then they both lay there, in silence, breathing too fast.

  ‘They’re already here,’ she said. ‘They’re watching us. They know we’re here.’

  He pulled her back, away from the exposed edge. ‘OK,’ he said, squinting his eyes against the sunlight. ‘Plan B. We can’t call for help. But we must be able to find a boat.’

  ‘All the boats are back by the house,’ she said, trying to think about it. ‘At the dock. But they must have boats too. So even if we could get into one of ours without them seeing, they could follow us out …’

  She watched him chewing his lip, thinking furiously. ‘And you’re sure the pilot was one of those bodies?’ he demanded.

  She nodded. They had carried Philippe out of the house, tossed him on to the ground.

  ‘So they killed him,’ he said. ‘So we can’t use the fucking plane …’

  ‘I can fly the plane,’ she told him.

  He looked startled. ‘You know how to fly?’

  ‘Yes. If we can get to it. Flying it isn’t the problem …’

  ‘You know how to fly and navigate?’ It looked like he didn’t believe her.

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ She had taken a course, two years ago. She had a full private licence, though hadn’t kept her hours up. ‘That’s not unusual …’ she started, then stopped. Not unusual in her world, she thought.

  ‘So why didn’t you say you could fly when we were back at the other end of the island, where the fucking plane is?’

  ‘What good would that have done? They were trying to kill us, remember? They were all over the dock, all over the house.’

  He sighed. ‘Well, we’ve no option now. We have to get to it. We have to try.’ He looked back towards the brow of the hill. ‘We take the Land Rover,’ he said quickly. ‘Drive back to the dock. That way we leave at least some of them here. They will be waiting in a spot that covers the hill, not the car – that’s why they’ve put the branches on it, because they’re not covering it. So we can get to the car and get away, leave them here, on foot. That will be enough of a head start.’

  ‘You think they were stupid enough to leave the keys in the ignition?’

  ‘I can start it without keys. It’s an old Land Rover, right? No security systems?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can handle that. You cover me, from here. I work my way down. I start the car, drive it to the road right below where you are. You run down. We drive off.’

  ‘What do I do if I see someone?’

  ‘Shoot them.’

  ‘Kill them? You want me to kill them?’

  ‘If they’re coming at me and they’re armed. Fuck, yes. Kill them.’

  He was gone before she could object, stumbling quickly to the base of the slope, movements filled with a sudden urgency. She didn’t understand it at all. They had just spent hours laboriously toiling through the thickets just so as to avoid the road, in case it was covered. Yet now he wanted to take a car and drive along it. What had changed? Too much heat, not enough food and water?

  She went after him a couple of steps, hissing at him to stop. He turned back and waved at her, telling her to get going to the top again. He was in a half-crouch, face lathered with sweat. For a moment she wondered whether to chase him, or trust that he knew what he was doing, but he was already cutting left, skirting the thicker bushes to put him on a level with the Land Rover. She would have to shout to slow him, and she didn’t dare do that. In a few seconds he would be past the shoulder of the slope they were on and fully exposed to view. When that happened she had to have the rifle ready, she had to be able to cover him. She started to move quickly back up the slope.

  15

  Rachel could feel it passing. It was leaving her. Same thing every year, the same process she had to go through. The frantic fear – all her nightmare scenarios about what might be happening to Lauren – giving way to a numb desperation. She was in her garden now, standing barefoot, in her pyjamas, at three in the afternoon, staring fixedly at the clematis which completely covered the crumbling brick wall between her property and the next, though without really seeing it. The sun was hot on the back of her head, she had a pounding headache. A bright, clear sky, too warm for the time of year, like it was summer already.

  Behind her John was in the house, still sleeping in her bed. They had gone to bed at eight o’clock this morning. She couldn’t think about that now, couldn’t think about what she was to make of her relationship with him. That would count as dealing with normal life, or what passed for normal these days. John had kept her going through it this year, as he had last year and the year before. Close to her, but not too close. Were they moving into something more intimate? Was that what was happening? She couldn’t even contemplate it. She shook her head to get rid of the thought.

  She remembered that she had stood out here like this twenty-two years ago, two days after Lauren had vanished, and the weather had been the same. Same garden, same sunlight. Same lost hours between. But it was Roger who had been inside the house then. Dealing with things, on the phone, with the police, the press. She had collapsed inside herself, stopped functioning. There had been no sleep at all between the disappearance and some point about seven days later, when she had literally collapsed and been taken into hospital. But before that she had stood out here, as she was now, and as she had every year since, silently staring at nothing, numb. She was caught in an endless behavioural loop. It would never be over. Not until Lauren came back. Or until she accepted it. Accepted what everyone else was convinced was true.

  That day – the first time – twenty-two years ago, it had been worse, of course. Everything had been horrifically overpowering, pushing her under, suffocating her. She hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten. Her digestive system wouldn’t let her eat. She had tried – because Roger had told her that she would need strength – but it had been futile.

  It was the day of the interview, the famous TV interview. The police were behind it, thinking it could only help – to get as much publicity as possible, as quickly as possible. And the only way to really get widespread coverage was TV. So Roger had persuaded her. But before they had all arrived, invading their house (their house – it had still been Lauren’s house then too) with their lights and their cameras and microphones and false concern, before all that she had been out here, sitting on this lawn in her pyjamas, shivering.

  She couldn’t remember all that she had been thinking, fifty-five hours into the nightmare. Not exactly. It was a blur now, the continuous knife edge, waiting and waiting and waiting for news that never came – the impossible, compressing mental tension. She had come out here with th
e thought that she would smash her head on the tree at the bottom of the garden – she recalled that. The tree had been cut down now, but she hadn’t reached it anyway. She had collapsed in the middle of the lawn. Roger had come out and found her, to tell her the TV producers were here already, and she had stood up very unsteadily, looking at him, but hardly seeing him.

  ‘We have to go in,’ he said. ‘We have to get ready for them. It’s important.’ Then he had screwed his face up and looked strangely at her. ‘Christ above, Rachel,’ he had said. ‘What have you done?’

  She had realised only gradually what he was talking about. She had soiled herself. She had sat there on this grass and it had just come out, without her knowing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she had mumbled. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t notice.’

  He had leaned into her and hugged her, tried to comfort her. She had thought, at first, that he was going to shout at her or get angry. But he didn’t. He had just put his arms around her, not caring. Had they cried for a while, standing here, on the lawn, with the TV producers waiting in the living room? Probably.

  The nightmare had been everywhere, including inside her guts. They were living within it. A lifetime of overwhelming emotion expended in a few hours, then on and on and on, with no end. There was nothing left for afterwards, for the rest of their lives. It had sterilised them. That was how she thought of it now. Everything afterwards was seen from a perspective that trivialised the ordinary details of life. Because nothing could match the absence of Lauren.

  She was tired of it. Exhausted. If it could be got rid of, somehow, now, she would do it. But she didn’t know how. Still, twenty-two years later, she didn’t have a clue.

  16

  Tom was functioning on adrenalin. His head was on fire, the headache like a drumbeat behind his eyes, his heart too fast and too loud. He was shaking like he had a fever, sweating, clumsy on his feet. But he had stared through the scope and seen the car. He had spotted it. So his eyes were OK, his brain was still working. He was doing what he had to. They were trapped here. The phone was cut, covered. So there wasn’t another option to consider. If he hung around in the sunlight any longer, without water, waiting for them to find them, he would crack. So he had to act.

  As he came round the slope and started running unsteadily down towards the road all he could think about was that he was running into somebody’s crosshairs. He tripped twice, the second time going down and rolling messily. But as he came up there was still no shot, no movement from the hill in front of him, nothing between himself and the road except a short flat stretch of long grass. He could see where the Land Rover would be. He kept going, gasping for air. He was so unfit. If he got out of this he was going to start training again. For definite. He promised it to himself.

  The grass was stiff and hard, whipping against his face so that he had to flail his arms in front, like he was fighting off some invisible force. Just before the road there was a ditch that he missed. He went down again, jarring his chin on the ground. But still no shooting.

  He was halfway across the road, head down, before he heard the muffled crack of her gun. Or thought he did. He froze, stupidly, skidding to a stop and staring wildly behind him to try to see. Then he saw movement up on the bigger hill, a shape running.

  He started to sprint for the Land Rover again. He could see it now, not twenty paces in front, down a small dip, into bushes. He leapt over the rim of the dip, into the undergrowth, just as a crackle sounded off to his left. A machine pistol. Or something like that – something small. He saw no bullets striking anywhere, heard no whining as they passed close, so kept going. He almost ran into the back of the Land Rover. He pushed through the branches around it, going for the driver’s door. The crackle came again, somewhere behind and above him. This time he heard something snapping through the air, saw the back window of the Land Rover shatter. He hit the ground, flat out, crawled under the car and lay still.

  But it took him only a split second to realise that like that he was certainly going to die. He had to move. To get the car going was their only chance. He pulled himself out and crouched by the front wheel, waiting to see if the bullets started again. Someone had been shooting at him, trying to kill him. He tried to get a proper grip on that thought. His eyes passed across a metallic cluster on top of the wheel. He came back to it and, despite everything, couldn’t stop himself smirking. He wasn’t going to have to mess around with the wiring while some fucker took potshots. He’d found the keys. There were six or seven on a big ring. He moved quickly sideways and yanked the driver’s door open. He was up to his head in long reeds, but still he heard the burst of fire. This time nothing broke. It sounded different. Were they shooting at Sara instead? He climbed quickly inside, chest tight, checked the keys, found the one that looked the best match, held his breath, put his foot on the clutch and tried it. The engine spluttered into life first time.

  Sara heard the engine, but couldn’t look in that direction. She had her eye fixed to the scope and was concentrating all her attention on keeping the weapon steady. Right in the crosshairs was the man’s head. She had the cross right over his temple. She took a long slow breath and listened for her heart, as Jean-Marc had taught her. The man was tall, with long blond hair, pushed back from his face. He was white. Tanned skin, hard face. She could see him very clearly because the scope was first class and very powerful. He had a distinctive, V-shaped scar below his right temple, extending into his cheek. She had seen it yesterday too – though not as clearly – and thought then that she had seen it somewhere before, that she had seen this man before, somewhere. But if she had, then she didn’t know him. He certainly wasn’t Somali. He wasn’t a pirate from East Africa.

  He was crouched behind a boulder with bushes growing near to it. Some of the bushes obscured his body. But not his head. He had run from near to the shed first, then took aim towards the Land Rover and let off a quick burst with some short, stubby weapon. It had jerked all over as he fired and she had thought then – even with her limited knowledge – that he would be lucky to hit Tom. Very lucky. The distance was over three hundred yards. What he was firing with had to be worse than a handgun, in terms of accuracy.

  Nevertheless, she had panicked and her first shot at him had gone so wide she was sure he hadn’t even heard it. But now he had fired again, paused, and as he had taken aim and crouched she had fired another shot. Still clumsy, but it had hit the rock near his body and he had seen it, she thought, or felt it. Immediately he had gone low. But not low enough. He had no idea where she was. She was firing a bespoke Accuracy International Arctic Warfare sniper rifle, with integral suppressor, and she had brought three magazines with her. The magazines were custom-made – five shots instead of ten, to reduce their weight. She was on the last now, and the last two rounds. She had to make them count. She had to remember everything Jean-Marc had taught her. She had hit targets at triple this distance. But she had never been panicking like this. The man wasn’t looking for Tom now, he was looking for her. She heard the Land Rover engine revving. If she was accurate she would kill him now. She knew she could do it.

  The difficulty – shooting alone – was knowing whether you had hit, and if not, how close you’d got, because you couldn’t keep the scope and your eyes motionless through the discharge, so you normally missed seeing the exact location of the hit, especially at short range. Jean-Marc had spent hours on end practising this with her, getting the blind spot down to a minimum. In the army, he’d told her, snipers always had someone else to spot for them. Sometimes he had spotted for her with a special ranged sight. But now she was alone. She settled the crosshairs over the head, about an inch from the neck.

  But suddenly she felt sick with it. She didn’t want to kill this man. She didn’t want to kill anybody. She moved the crosshairs down and placed them over his gun instead. It was resting against the rock he was leaning against. She squeezed the trigger. Blinked through the recoil. Took a breath. Quick adjustment, then eyes back to the scope, as fas
t as she could. As her eyes refocused she saw the man was staggering backwards, the gun out of his hands, out of sight. Had she hit it? She thought she must have. Jean-Marc would have leapt up from beside her and slapped her on the back.

  She could hear the Land Rover moving now, revving too high. She slipped her eyes off the scope and looked right, in time to see Tom spin it round in a cloud of dust, already on the road, then start to accelerate towards her position. She put her eye to the scope again. It took a second, but she could see the man crawling for safety. She placed the crosshairs about two foot from his head and fired a shot into the ground there. Her last round. When she got her eye back on target she could see him motionless, trying to pull his head in. He definitely knew what was going on now. There was blood on his hands – from where she had hit the gun, she assumed. Or maybe she’d hit his arm. She got to her feet, pushed the rifle away and started to run down the slope in front of her, waving towards Tom.

  He was at the base of the slope ahead of her, the truck stopped. He was leaning over, opening the passenger door, the engine going full blast. She dived in and yelled something at him, then he was revving the motor and zigzagging crazily across the road. She pulled the door shut behind her and got her head down. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ she was yelling.

  He drove with his head low and deliberately moved the truck from one side of the road to the other. She was waiting for something to happen, waiting for bullets to start hitting them, or the car to turn over. After a few seconds she risked putting her head up and looked back through the smashed rear window. The road behind them twisted off into the trees. There was no one there. She couldn’t see the hill any more. They’d done it. She started to laugh hysterically. He slowed down and held an unsteady hand up to her, for a high five, a big, crooked grin on his bruised face. She slapped his palm, then leaned over and hugged his arm.