Then I must have yelled, because I was a mile high, looking down on the sierra enveloped in creeping shrouds of smog. Here and there in the hills I could see electric flashes of gunfire, artillery and bombs exploding. And gradually I became aware that I was in a glass sphere, drifting in the air. Sinead was there, next to me, talking without opening her mouth, like a ventriloquist, and it was like I had woken up halfway through a lecture. “The Conscious Ones, who bred the snake with the goat to make the seraph human, have been called so many things over the millennia of the millennia—daemons, angels, devils, elves, gods—and the power is always the tides of the human mind’s experience in three dimensions, to make the visual and the auditory, kinesthetic—real. You ask me how I do it. I don’t. You do. Like all the men and women before you.”
I turned to her. “Who is speaking? You or me?” I could hear her in my mind but her mouth wasn’t moving.
She smiled.
I asked, “Why? Why are you doing this? Why are you making me do this?”
She gazed out at the battle far below, and her mind said, “We cannot feel the way you feel, in three dimensions. It gives us great clarity of mind, but everything has a price, Liam, and our loss is that we cannot love or hate or grow, the way you do. We would like to feel, like you, with the physical intensity that you do.”
Then we were higher, in space, looking down on the small planet, and I could see the icecaps melting, tsunamis welling and surging, the sun scorching the fields, crops failing, wars raging over the continents and the smoldering ruins of the cities, and famine spreading like a black pestilence over the globe. Her mind said, “The game is huge. You must play your part.”
“What about Mary-Jane? What about you and Mary-Jane?”
Her head seemed to tilt on its side, and for a moment I saw her eyes as they really were—great, deep black almonds. There was a compassion that was beyond my understanding.
“And Catherine Howard?”
“Yes.”
“Help them to be free. Free of each other. I will find them in freedom.”
“Who are you? What are you? What did you do to Strickland?”
She said, “I am Sinéad. I am Seraphina. I loved Strickland—and Hugo before him. And now you.” She smiled. “You live in a storm of emotions. It is so hard for you to understand so many things. You cannot understand, Liam… Your feelings make you blind. But now you had better move.” And she reached out with her long arm and touched my face.
There was something hard on my face, which I slowly realized was a terracotta tile. It was very dark and I was confused at the angle of the door in front of me—which also seemed to be above me—but it all began to make sense when it dawned on me that I was lying on the floor. I swore profusely under my breath then froze. There were voices and footsteps.
The voices were male and Spanish, and I knew who it was. I lay on the floor and watched the handle of the door rattle. It hadn’t been locked when I came in, but it was locked now. I carefully felt along my waistband for my Smith & Wesson, and remembered I’d left it with the colonel’s .38 in the glove compartment of the Land Rover. I cussed again and dragged myself toward the kitchen. As I did, I heard footsteps and voices moving to the back of the house.
For me it was pretty much a straight line. For them, they had to circumvent the house, so I got to my feet, scrambled fast through the door and made for the block of kitchen knives by the cooker. I pulled out the biggest of them and flattened myself behind the back door. Then I unlocked it quietly as the voices and the footsteps approached. I made it two men.
I watched the handle turn gently, pause, then the door opened. One figure stepped in. At first it was just a dark shape, but as he took a step, I recognized one of the guardia from the airport. I waited for him to move forward. He wasn’t my target. He took another step and his partner stepped in behind him. I could just see his shoulder and part of his head. The first guy took another two steps and my target took one more. It was the last step he ever took.
My left hand went over his mouth and with my index finger, I sealed his nose. Before he could make a noise, the kitchen knife had sliced clean through his carotid artery and his windpipe. The blood sprayed like a hose under pressure and he jerked like crazy. I let him go and kicked the door real hard so it slammed like a bomb in the silent house. His partner was turning, his eyes wide and his mouth open. As he did it, I stepped forward and laid my palm on the barrel of his automatic, gripped and levered it down out of his hand and into mine. At the same time, I slipped the kitchen knife into his solar plexus and heaved up. With his diaphragm split, he couldn’t compress the air in his lungs to scream, so he died in silence.
The sound of the door slamming had brought another pair running to the back of the house. At the same time, I heard a loud crack at the front and knew the remaining two had shot out the lock. I had to act fast. I sprinted two steps, dropped to the floor and, using the fallen guard’s gun, I put six shots blind into the two hulking shadows framed in the open doorway. They both went down screaming. I scrambled to my feet and jumped over them and out onto the veranda. I could have run. I could have taken their Ibiza, but there’s something about having killers on my tail that makes me uncomfortable. I’m always happiest doing the chasing. So I made a five-second dash around the back of the house and came up behind the remaining two guardia, just as they were peering into the kitchen.
One of them was the lieutenant. I don’t often miss, but I was exhausted and probably in shock. I aimed, held my breath and squeezed. As I did so, he stepped in, and his second stepped into my line of fire. Shit happens. The bullet went in through his right side and must have punched a hole right through his heart. He staggered then dropped.
I stepped forward to take down the lieutenant, but in that moment he stepped back out, saw me and leveled his automatic. He fired as I dropped and emptied my magazine at him. I may have winged him, but he fell inside the house. I got to my feet and ran. I made the Land Rover as he was coming around the veranda. He squeezed off two shots that went wide and I reversed like crazy toward the road. Through the lifting mist, I saw him talking on the radio. That was exactly what I’d wanted to avoid. As I hit the gas, I was swearing profanities that hadn’t been invented yet.
I hit the road in reverse. Made the brakes scream, slammed in first, second, third and fourth, burning rubber toward Çalares. As I drove, I found the two revolvers in the glove compartment and forced myself to think. What’s my plan? What now? What the hell do I do now?
Really, it was simple. There was only one possible plan. Head north and try to get across the lines into Spain. That was the plan. Head north.
The mist was lifting slightly, but the rain was getting heavier and the roads were like rivers. The four-by-four gripped the road like it had claws, but I knew as I pushed toward La Maroma that I couldn’t keep up the speed. I climbed steadily, cutting the corners, still reckless as to what might be coming the other way, and shaving the edges, inches from the deep, fog-filled ravines. I met no traffic, but the sound of the jet bombers screaming overhead toward Almeria was a steady, constant rhythm of death.
Then, after maybe an hour, I heard the choppers. And I knew they were hunting for me.
With the heavy fog and rain in the region of La Rahige, I knew I could stay out of sight. But I also knew that as I approached the Zafaraya Pass, I would be right out in the open and totally exposed. I pressed on, trying to plan. As long as I was in the steep mountain ravines, with the pine woods and the dense cloud offering some protection, I could push the Land Rover to its limits. When I reached Canillas, I hit the roundabout at sixty miles per hour and almost came off the road. But then I started the descent toward Velez.
I knew once I reached the bottom I would lose my cover. I’d be exposed for maybe ten miles in the wide open ranges, before I found the safety of the mountains again, as I started climbing toward the pass.
Overhead I could hear the steady thud of the choppers above the clouds. Then,
suddenly, they broke through, three of them, like giant black dragonflies against the leaden sky. They banked and dived, scanning the valley below. They knew, like I did, that sooner or later I was going to have to come out into that valley. The last camouflage I would have would be the avocado plantations that stretched along the river Cagaoro that flowed down from Zafaraya. After that it was a long, open road, where the only traffic aside from me would be military convoys. I’d be a sitting duck.
I pulled over in the cover of some trees, climbed out of the cab and looked down at the open valley. The main road snaked away north, toward the front line and the border with what was left of Spain. I lit a cigarette and smoked, watching the three black choppers crisscrossing the valley, following a search grid. The Land Rover would be like a neon sign on that road.
There was only one way for me to get out—and it wasn’t the road.
I stared away to the north. It was a hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies to the front line—nine or ten times that distance over mountains and dirt tracks in the rain and the mud. On foot. I’d never make it. But I’d go down trying.
I climbed back in the cab, slammed the door and drove fast down to the bottom of the valley. There I found a T-junction, and across the road a bank that dropped steeply toward the river, deep in the gully. I dumped the Land Rover in a grove of eucalyptus trees by the side of the road, sprinted across, hunched against the rain, and scrambled down among the avocados to the swollen Cagaoro below. There I found a secluded spot, curled up as small as I could in the mud and looked at my watch. It was closing on six p.m. I figured I had three hours before dark, maybe less in this weather. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
I dozed fitfully, dreaming of Maria, her kisses and her eyes looking deep into mine. Then the pulsing buzz and throb of the choppers would invade my sleep as they approached and receded, suddenly swooping overhead, wrenching me back to harsh reality. I was drained of all energy. I ached in parts of my body I never knew I had and the damp was seeping into my muscles and my joints. If it had been up to me, I would probably have given up there and then and consigned my soul to Valhalla. But I couldn’t go without first getting even with del Roble. I owed him, and I never welch on a debt. Finally, the dark started closing in. I dragged myself to my feet and for the next four hours I trudged through the swollen stream, the mud and the rain, climbing steadily toward the Zafaraya Pass. The name of the river translated to English as, literally, ‘Shits Gold’. I was having trouble seeing the gold.
Occasionally a chopper would swing overhead with its glaring spotlights sweeping the undergrowth, and I would dive for the bulrushes or the sugarcane that lined the river. Once, there was no cover, so I had to plunge under the water, and the growing current dragged me thirty feet back down the slope I had just climbed. If I’d had the energy, I might have wept then, like a child. Instead I picked myself up and trudged on, sinking into a kind of numb delirium.
By midnight I had managed to make the foothills of La Maroma. The terrain leveled out some, and the current of the stream eased up a little. I scrambled out of the river and staggered toward the shelter of the pinewoods that swarmed down the slope. The temperature had dropped drastically with the altitude, and I was saturated and shivering with cold. Occasionally I still heard the choppers, but they were more distant now. Probably they still expected me to break cover from Canillas and make a dash for it along the road, because their activity remained around the valley and the villages down there.
I was maybe halfway to the pass by now, and my choices were two—either follow the river west, away from Zafaraya and into the woods then climb the mountains at their highest point, or risk cutting through the pass itself, through the town, on the main road. The smart thing would have been to lose myself in the mountains and the woodlands, but I was thinking I had done maybe fifteen miles, if I was lucky. Half that, as the crow flies. I still had one hundred and fifty to go and twenty-four hours to do it. I was beginning to feel like I wasn’t going to make it. I had nothing to left to lose and everything to gain by going for broke.
Desperation can make a hero out of a loser, and I thought if I sneaked in to this remote mountain town at midnight, with war raging on the northern and eastern frontiers, no one would notice if I stole a car and drove away into the night. So I made the wrong choice and headed for the pass, staying close to the tree line, but close to the road too.
By two a.m. the rain had eased, but there was still a heavy ceiling of low cloud. I was perhaps two hundred yards from the pass and the village that lay just beyond it. There was a roadblock and I could make out four guards—one at the barrier in a big, waterproof cape and three who’d sought refuge in the wooden guard’s hut.
At two hundred yards in the dark with shivering hands, I didn’t fancy the shot with a handgun. I weighed a number of options, but none of them was an option. In the end I lay on my belly in the water-filled ditch and began a slow crawl toward the checkpoint. Several times I stopped, rested my head on my arms and closed my eyes. I desperately wanted to sleep, and even the thought of getting even with del Roble was beginning to wear thin and lose its motive power.
The sound of the rain covered the sound of my dragging body in the ditch, and after fifteen or twenty minutes, I was up behind the guard’s hut at the roadblock, wondering what the hell I was going to do next. There was a Jeep parked ten paces from the hut, and I thought for a moment of making a run for it. But the guard at the barrier was holding an AK-47, and two got you twenty the three guys in the hut were sporting the same hardware. By the time I’d got to the Jeep and fired her up, I’d look like a Gruyère cheese with woodworm. In the end I did the only thing I could.
I pulled the Smith & Wesson from my waistband. I stood and walked to the side of the hut. The guard at the barrier was looking down the road, smoking, and concentrating on trying to keep his cigarette dry. He was twelve or fifteen feet away. I could make the shot. I leaned on the hut to steady my shivering hands, took careful aim and blew his head clean off. Everything Dirty Harry said about the Smith & Wesson 26 is true.
While the guys inside were still looking at each other in surprise, I turned and emptied the remaining five rounds through the wood into the hut. There isn’t much room in a portable guard hut, and they never stood a chance. But, for the sake of completeness, I pulled the .38 I’d taken from the colonel and poked my head around the door. They all looked very surprised, but they also looked very dead. I fished in their pockets till I found the keys and walked to the Jeep. As I was climbing in, I noticed lights coming on in the houses near the roadblock, and I knew I had trouble. I spun on a dime and hightailed down the main street out of the village, still heading north.
They must have been waiting for the call, because it was only fifteen minutes before I heard the choppers closing in behind me. I was doing nearly eighty on the mountain roads through the rain, and it was a miracle I didn’t kill myself.
When I heard the choppers, I looked over my shoulder. There were three Sikorsky Hawks ranged in a line across the road with their spotlights glaring, thundering down on me. I was on a straight stretch of road running through flat highlands and I floored the pedal. But the Jeep was no match for the choppers. Pretty soon two of them had drawn level and one buzzed me maybe six feet over my head and took a position in front of me. I knew the next thing would be to riddle the Jeep with machine gun fire, so I figured I had nothing to lose and swung the wheel left and careened into the field under the left-hand chopper.
I had no idea how far I’d get, but I knew I wasn’t ready to go down yet, so I hurtled across the mud toward the tree line, spraying dirt all over the windshield. The Hawks were behind me now, jockeying for position. I thought I’d make it difficult for them and hurtled into an olive tree plantation, doing forty and swinging left and right to miss the trees. I kept zipping in and out of the spotlights and occasionally I heard a crack and a whine, and the hammering of automatic fire. I’d been pretty sure del Roble wanted me alive,
but I wasn’t sure how well these boys understood that.
Then suddenly I was at the crest of a hill, and next thing I was in the air. I smacked down hard with a jolt that rearranged several of my vertebrae then I was skidding and tumbling down a steep mudslide. I managed to miss five trees, but the sixth one got me. It hit the Jeep amidships and I took a twelve-foot dive through the air. Fortunately, it was mud and I managed to roll. But it knocked the wind clean out of me. I lay a few seconds gasping then slowly struggled to my feet. Then I was blinded.
I was standing in the full glow of three spotlights, and two of them started to descend. I guessed they were dropping foot soldiers. I turned and ran. Running through plowed mud is hard. My back was screaming with pain, and my legs felt like agonizing clay. I kept telling myself, if I could disappear into the undergrowth and the wilderness, I might be able to sneak to the border. But for all the painful progress I’d made that day, the border was still a hundred and fifty miles away. I was running and staggering, dragging my legs forward every step, and I was aware that I was running and staggering in a circle of brilliant light. Whatever I did, if I dodged left or right, or fell and rolled, I was moving so slowly by now, the spot seemed to be nailed to me. I couldn’t shake it. And over the thud of the rotors, I was beginning to hear voices. Men’s voices, shouting and calling, closing on me.
I came to a bank and leaped into the darkness. I managed to lose the light and fell, scrambled and rolled down the slope. As I went, tree trunks and rocks rammed me and dug into my bruised ribs and limbs. Then I hit the bottom. There was water and mud. I staggered to my feet. My throat was raw with panting and gasping for air. I staggered a few more feeble steps and the ground started to rise. I was trying to run uphill through sodden mud, but I wasn’t running anymore. I was pushing with one screaming step after another, forcing my legs with my hands. I could hear the thud of the Hawks behind me again. I looked and saw the three glaring spots approaching over the treetops. I could hear the voices shouting, calling instructions, encircling me. Then the black top of the hill came into view. For a moment I thought, if I could get over the top and roll down the other side before the got me, I might be able to hide. Dig in to the mud. I might just make it.
A Love to Kill For Page 21