by Ian Rankin
Even when planning their escape route and emergency rendezvous they had not spoken, but had lain head to head with the map on the ground in front of them. Reeve had pointed to a couple of possible routes—if they were forced to withdraw from the OP in the midst of a firefight, chances were they’d be split up—then had tapped the map at the ERV. Jay had then traced a line with his unwashed finger from the ERV to the Chilean border, leaving no doubt what his route would be after the ERV.
Reeve wasn’t so sure. Would the Argentine command expect them to make for the border or for the coast? They were still a lot closer to the coast than the border, so maybe the border was the best plan. Besides, there was no point reaching the coast if no ship had been alerted of your plight. They wouldn’t be able to radio that message in the middle of brassing up, and if forced to retreat they would lighten their load, which meant leaving the rucksack and very probably the transmitter. Reeve had already mentally checked off the contents of his rucksack and had decided he needed nothing out of it but a few more rations. It was because he was thinking along these lines that he knew the mission was at an end. There’d be time later to wonder where and why it had gone wrong, always supposing he was still alive at the end of it all. The coast was closer; Reeve couldn’t get that idea out of his head. He had an emergency beacon with him. If they could find a boat and head out to sea, they could switch on the beacon and then pray someone would pick up the signal. The problem with that was, it was as likely to be an Argentine plane returning to base as anyone else.
The sky turned pink again and started to fizz and crackle as the flare started its gentle parachute-borne descent. Reeve could see a four-man patrol five hundred yards off to his right. Reeve and Jay were lying beneath netting and local foliage, and the patrol would have to get a lot closer to see them, even with the help of the flare. There was a sudden shrill whistle, like one of the old tin-and-pea jobs football referees use.
“Half time,” Jay whispered. He’d broken the code of silence, but he’d also broken the tension. Reeve found himself grinning, stifling laughter which wrenched itself up from his gut. The way Jay’s feet were quivering, he was laughing, too. It became almost uncontrollable. Reeve took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. The patrol was moving away at speed—and there was nothing funny about that.
Then the first rocket thudded into the ground several hundred yards to Reeve’s left. The earth beneath tried to buck his body into the air, and his face slammed down hard into the dirt.
“Shit,” Jay said, not caring who heard him. Not caring because he knew, like Reeve knew, that there was no one around to hear: the patrols had been signaled to evacuate the area.
Another rocket landed, farther away this time. Then another, and another. Finally, a flare went up. Two blows on the whistle. Reeve guessed patrols were being sent into the freshly bombed area to look for bodies or fleeing survivors.
“What do you reckon?” Jay whispered.
“Lie doggo,” Reeve said. His mouth felt strange when it worked. “A rocket’s as likely to hit us up-and-running as lying still.”
“You think so?” Jay sounded unsure. Reeve nodded and resumed watch. There was sweat in the hollow of his spine, trickling down towards the trouser line. His heart was beating ever more loudly in his ears. Then he heard a distant megaphone, a voice speaking heavily accented English.
“Surrender or we will kill you. You have two minutes to decide.”
The two minutes passed all too quickly. Reeve flipped open the cover on his watch face and followed the sweep of the luminous dial.
“Very well,” the megaphone said. Then another single blow on the whistle. Reeve could feel Jay trying to burrow deeper into the scrape, pressing himself hard against the ground.
Rockets whistled past to their left and right, causing deafening explosions on impact. Great clumps of earth fell on both men. More missiles, more gut-wrenching explosions. Between impacts, Reeve could hear nothing but a loud buzzing in his ears. He’d been too late putting his hands over them, and was now suffering the consequence. He felt fingers tapping his leg, and half turned to see Jay starting to rise onto his knees.
“Get down!” Reeve hissed.
“Fuck this, let’s go!”
“No.”
More explosions caused them both to fall flat, but Jay scrambled up again straight after, dirt and grass and bits of bark falling like heavy dollops of rain.
“They send a patrol out to check this grid, they’re bound to spot us,” he spat.
“No.”
“I say we go.”
“No. We can’t lose our bottle now.”
The flare went up, the double whistle sounded, and Reeve pulled Jay to the ground. Jay started to struggle, giving Reeve two options: let him go, or slug him. Jay came to his own decision first, catching Reeve on the side of the head with his rifle butt. Reeve snatched at the rifle, letting go of Jay in the process, and Jay got to his feet, pulling the rifle out of Reeve’s hands.
Reeve risked a glance around. The patrols would be on their way. Smoke was being blown all around them, but when it cleared they’d be as visible as targets at the fairground.
Jay was pointing his M16 at Reeve, finger just shy of the trigger. He was grinning like a monkey, his face blackened, eyes wide and white. Reeve noticed that there was a 40mm missile in the 203 grenade launcher. Jay raised the rifle above Reeve’s head and fired the grenade into the sky. With the 203 there was no explosion or recoil, but a loud pop as the grenade was launched.
Reeve didn’t use up precious seconds on watching the gre-nade’s trajectory. He was up and moving. Jay had done it now; he’d let the enemy know they were there. They were fair game now for anything the Argentines threw at them. Reeve left his rucksack. He didn’t care whether Jay left his or not, or even if he left the transmitter. It was time to move—and quickly. Behind them, the grenade made impact and exploded.
With his rifle carried low in front of him, Reeve ran.
“Where are you going?” Jay yelled at him, pouring bullets from his M16 towards where the enemy would be hunkered down, waiting for him to expend the lot. Reeve knew his partner had cracked. He’d never been sure of Jay in the first place, and now his worst fears were being realized. Everything Jay was doing was against the standard operating procedure . . . or any other procedure. Reeve wondered if he’d be justified putting a bullet into Jay himself. He dismissed the thought in less than a second.
“See you in Chile!” Jay yelled. Reeve didn’t look back, but he knew from Jay’s voice that he was moving too, taking a different line from Reeve.
Which suited Reeve just fine.
He knew the first few hundred yards, could have run them blind. He’d been staring at the route for the past twelve or so hours, since switching directions with Jay. They’d changed position so they would stay fresh and alert. Staring at the same spot for too long, you could lose your concentration.
But Reeve had focused his mind on the route, his escape route. He didn’t know what was over the next rise, but the next rise was shelter from gunfire and night sights, and that was his primary objective: shelter. He knew from an earlier compass reading that he was running northeast. If he kept going, he’d reach the coastal road north of Rio Grande. He was taking a risk, since this direction meant he would have to skirt the northern perimeter of the airfield. Well, they wouldn’t be expecting him anywhere near there, would they? More crucial, he had two ob-stacles to cross: a main road and the Rio Grande itself.
He didn’t know why he’d set his sights on the coast, and if Jay was headed for Chile so be it. Jay would wait for him an hour or so at the ERV, then move off. Bloody good luck to him, too.
The bastard.
Reeve went over the rise on all fours, keeping low in case there were any nasty surprises waiting for him. But the Argentine bombing had done him a distinct favor by clearing out all the patrols. He scurried down the other side of the escarpment, sliding over loose rocks and pebbles. It didn’t se
em to be man-made. It wasn’t a quarry or a dump for unwanted stone and shale, it was more like the scree Reeve had come across on the glacial slopes of the Scottish mountains. He ended up going down the slope on his arse. Just when he thought there was no end to the drop he found himself on a road and crossed it hurriedly, remembering to turn around first, in case they came hunting him with flashlights. His footprints led back the way he’d just come. The other side of the track, he turned on his heels again, hit another uphill slope at a run, and powered his way to the summit. There was gunfire behind him, gunfire and rockets and grenades. The sky was full of pink smoke, like a fireworks display. Gunpowder was in his nostrils.
That stupid bastard.
There was someone over to his right, about seventy or eighty yards away. It looked like Jay’s silhouette.
“Jay!” Reeve called.
Jay caught his breath. “Keep going!” he said.
So Reeve kept going. And the sky above him turned brilliant white. He couldn’t believe it. Jay had let off a WP grenade. White phos made a good smoke screen, but you didn’t use the stuff when you were already on your way out of a situation. Then Reeve realized what Jay had done, and his stomach did a flip. Jay had tossed the phos in Reeve’s direction, and had headed off the other way. He was using Reeve as his decoy, bringing the Ar-gentine troops over in Reeve’s direction while he made his own escape.
Bastard!
And now Reeve could hear whistling, a human whistle. A tune he recognized.
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream . . .
And then silence. Jay was gone. Reeve could have followed him, but that would mean running straight through the smoke into God knew what. Instead, he picked up his pace and kept running the direction he’d been going. He wondered how Jay could have set off one way yet come back around to meet up with Reeve. It was crazy, Jay’s sense of direction wasn’t that bad . . .
Unless . . . unless he’d come back on purpose. The enemy had heard only one yelled voice, come under fire from just one rifle, one grenade launcher.
They didn’t know there were two men out here!
Reeve saw it all. The safest way out of this was to lie low and let the enemy catch your partner. But that only worked if your partner was caught. Jay was just making sure. Back at Hereford, it would be one man’s word against the other’s . . . always supposing they both made it home.
Over the rise the ground seemed to level out, which meant he could move faster, but also that he could be spotted more easily. He thought he could hear rotors behind him: a chopper, maybe more than one, probably with searchlights attached. He had to reach cover. No, he had to keep moving, had to put some distance between himself and his pursuers. Relieved of his rucksack and most of his kit, he felt as though weights had been taken off his ankles. That thought made him think of shackles, and the image of shackles gave him fresh impetus. His ears still seemed blocked; there was still a hissing sound there. He couldn’t hear any vehicles, any commands or gunfire. Just rotors . . . coming closer.
Much closer.
Reeve flung himself to the ground as the helicopter passed overhead. It was over to his right and moving too quickly to pick him out. This was a general sweep. They’d carry on until they were sure they were at a distance he couldn’t have reached, then they’d come back, moving more slowly, hovering so the searchlight could play over the ground.
He needed cover right now.
But there was no cover. He loaded a grenade into the launcher, got up, and started running again. The rifle was no longer in both hands and held low in front of him: now it was in his right hand, the safety off. It would take him a second to swing the barrel into his other hand, aim, and fire.
He could see the beam of light ahead of him, waving in an arc which would pick him out when the chopper was closer. Reeve dropped to one knee and wiped sweat from his eyes. His knees hurt, they were stiff. The chopper was moving steadily now, marking out a grid pattern. They weren’t rushing things. They were being methodical, the way Reeve would have done in their situation.
When the helicopter was seventy-five yards in front of him Reeve took aim, resting one elbow on his knee to steady himself. As soon as the helicopter went into a hover, Reeve let go with the grenade. He watched the bomb, like an engorged bullet, leave the launcher and head into the sky, but he didn’t wait to see the result. He was running again, dipping to a protective crouch as the sky overhead exploded in a ball of flame, rotor blades crumpling and falling to the ground. Something hot fell onto Reeve’s arm. He checked it wasn’t phos. It wasn’t—just hot metal. It stuck to his arm, and he had to scrape it off against the ground, taking burning flesh with it.
“Jesus Christ!” he gasped. The helicopter had hit the ground behind him. There was another explosion, which almost toppled him. More flying metal and glass hit him. Maybe bits of bodies were hitting him, too. He didn’t bother looking.
His arm wasn’t sore; the adrenaline and fear were taking care of that for the moment, the best anesthetics on the planet.
He’d been scared for a second, though, and what had scared him most was the fear that the heat on his arm had been white phos. The stuff was lethal—it would have burned straight through him, eating as it went.
Well, he thought, if Jay’s smoke screen had hinted I was here, the helicopter was an open fucking invitation.
He heard a motor, revving hard: a Jeep, probably on the track he’d crossed a few minutes back. If it unloaded men, then those men would be that few minutes behind no more. No time to stop, no time to slow. He didn’t have time to pace himself, the way he knew he should so he’d have some idea how far he’d traveled when he got a chance to stop and recce. You did it by counting the number of strides you took and multiplying by length of stride. It was fine in training, fine when they told you about it in a classroom . . .
But out here, it was just another piece of kit to be discarded.
He had no idea where Jay was. The last he’d seen of him was vanishing behind all that thick white smoke, like a magician doing a disappearing trick. Magicians always had trapdoors, and that’s what Reeve was looking for now—a door he could disappear through. There was a small explosion at his back. Maybe it was the helicopter, maybe Jay launching another grenade, or the enemy redoubling its bombardment.
Whatever it was, it was far enough behind him to be of little concern. He couldn’t hear the Jeep anymore. He wondered if it had stopped. He thought he could hear other vehicles in the distance. Their engine drones were just the right timbre to penetrate his blocked ears. Heavy engines . . . surely not tanks? Personnel carriers? He couldn’t see any other searchlights. There had been only the one chopper. They might be ordering another from the airfield, but if the crew was sensible they would take their time getting here, knowing the fate of their comrades.
Reeve was thinking about a lot of things, trying to form some structure to the chaos in his mind. Above all he was trying to think of anything but his own running. On a grueling route march you had to transcend the reality. That was the very word his first instructor had used: transcend. Someone had asked if he meant it as in transcendental meditation, expecting to raise a smile.
“In a manner of speaking,” the instructor had said in all seriousness.
That was the first time Reeve got an inkling that being a good soldier was more a state of mind, a matter of attitude, than anything else. You could be fit, strong, have fast reflexes and know all the drills, but those didn’t complete the picture; there was a mental part of the equation, too. It had to do with spirit, which was maybe what the instructor had been getting at.
He came suddenly to the main road which ran from Rio Grande on the east coast all the way into Chilean territory. He lay low, watching army trucks roar past, and when the route was finally clear scuttled across the road like any other nocturnal creature.
His next obstacle was not far away, and it gave him a choice: he could swim across the Rio Grande—which
meant ditching more equipment, including maybe even his rifle—or he could cross it by bridge. There was a bridge half a mile downriver, according to his map. Reeve headed straight towards it, unsure whether it would be guarded or not. The Argentines had known for some time now that there were enemy forces around, so maybe the bridge would be manned. Then again, would they have been expecting Reeve and Jay to make it this far?
Reeve’s question was answered soon enough: a two-man foot patrol guarded the two-lane crossing. They were standing in the middle of the bridge, illuminated by the headlights of their Jeep. At this time of night there was no traffic for them to stop and check, so they were talking and smoking cigarettes. Their eyes were on the distance, the direction Reeve had just come. They’d heard the explosions, seen the smoke and flame. They were glad to be at this safe distance from it all.
Reeve took a look at the dark, wide river, the cold-looking water. Then he peered at the underside of the bridge, and made up his mind. He clambered down to the water’s edge and made his way underneath the bridge. It was an iron construction, its struts a crisscrossed series of spars forming an arch over the water. Reeve slung his rifle over his shoulder and gripped the first two spars, pulling himself up. He climbed slowly, quietly, hidden from land but all too visible from the river, should any boat with a spotlight come chugging along. Where he could, he used his feet and knees for purchase, but as he climbed higher, he found himself hanging over the water below by his hands, moving one hand at a time, his legs swinging uselessly in space. He thought of training courses where he’d had to swing this way across an expanse of water or mud—but never this distance, never under these conditions. His upper chest ached, and the rusty metal tore into his finger joints. He thought his arms would pop out of their sockets. Sweat was stinging his eyes. Above him he could hear the soldiers laughing. He could pull himself up onto the bridge and open fire on them, then steal their Jeep or cross the rest of the bridge on foot. But he knew if he opted for this kind of action, he’d leave traces, and he didn’t want that, he didn’t want the enemy to know which way he’d come. So he kept swinging, concentrating on one hand, then the other, squeezing shut his eyes and gritting his teeth. Blood was trickling down past his wrists. He didn’t think he was going to make it. He started to fantasize about letting go, falling into the water, about letting the river wash him all the way to the coast. He shook his head clear. The splash would be heard; even if it wasn’t, what were his chances? He had to keep on moving.