Adolfo parked in his usual place but left the car facing the house, his driving style betraying the ugly mood he was in. That was all to the good; the angrier he was, the less likely he’d be to think before acting. He strode up to the house the same way he’d been driving: fast, jerkily and staring straight ahead. He unlocked the front door, wrenched it open, stepped inside and closed it behind him.
The first thing he must have noticed was that the lights didn’t come on when he flicked the switch. The heavy shutters let in very little daylight, and when other lights also failed to work I was relying on him going down to the basement to check the main isolator.
Running out of my hiding place and ducking low, I went to the front door and locked it with the spare key I’d found in the study. I left it twisted in the lock in the knowledge that he should now be unable to open it from inside. I had to trust that he didn’t carry keys to any of the other doors with him, and all the spares I could find in the house I’d thrown under a hedge. Then, with my heart in my mouth from the fear that he’d see me through a window and start shooting, I turned my attention to the car.
Given how tightly the windows of the house were shuttered, I’d have had to be very unlucky for Adolfo to catch sight of me. And in fact he was down in the cellar at that very moment, throwing the switch on a fuse-box that I’d shorted out with a stout woodworking nail. I know that for certain, because just as I finished with the car a wisp of smoke seeped from the shutter of one of the upstairs rooms. Then a second window began leaking, and as glass shattered clouds of dense smoke billowed out with tongues of fire flickering through the slats. A moment later I heard someone vigorously rattling the front door handle.
In Adolfo’s place, I’d have known at this point that I was trapped. As the power came back on, jury-rigged devices connected to the mains had ignited patches of petrol-soaked bedding, soft furnishing and timber all over the house. I heard several of the shutters shaking in turn as he pushed at them, and even a couple of desperate gunshots, but the catches held and I’d done my best to ensure that he would have nothing available with which to open the padlocks or to break their hasps. There were only two courses of action left open to him: either to stay in the house and choke to death, or to leave by the one route I’d kept clear of flames.
I waited with my back pressed against the wall to the side of the broken window, and soon I heard a hacking cough as he headed across the room. In my hands I held the heavy wrecking bar with which I had forced my way into the house, and my intention was to hit him as hard as possible as he came out of the window—on the head if possible, but in the knees, kidneys or arms if that was all he presented to me. But then I ran into a terrifying problem.
In my mind’s eye, I’d seen Adolfo pushing the shutters fully open so that they were flush with the wall. And I’d imagined him crawling out backwards the way I would have done. But he was much too experienced for that. Careful not to expose himself, he first of all opened the shutters just a crack. Then he pushed them open at ninety degrees from the wall, so that they stuck out like parallel shields and obstructed me from getting a clear swing at him. Finally he emerged from the window, but not climbing slowly out, not exposing his head or legs or kidneys to attack. Rather, he shot out like a bullet, head first, rolling as he hit the ground. He sprang to his feet facing back the way he’d come with the gun held in his outstretched hand. In a split second he’d adjusted his aim and the pistol was pointing at my chest.
“Good evening, James,” he said calmly. “There are some things I’d like to talk to you about. Will you please lead the way to the car? This meeting place is not all it’s cracked up to be. We will go somewhere more welcoming to talk about my three late friends, one of whom leaves two young boys to whom I am godfather.”
It wasn’t until later that I thought about the plume of smoke I’d seen as I left Guadix. For the moment I was baffled by his comment, and I simply kept silent. “I presume you know how to drive,” he said as we reached the car. “I’ve heard that all little British boys learn to drive.”
I climbed into the driving seat and he walked round to the passenger side, keeping the gun trained on me all the way. I made a point of fastening my seatbelt, and he did the same.
“We must keep ourselves safe for our meeting, mustn’t we?” he crooned as he handed me the keys. “Drive now, and follow my instructions exactly. I don’t promise you a long life, but I promise that if you do anything else to anger me it will be a lot longer than you would like.”
I started the engine and moved off as smoothly as possible, making no attempt to engage him in conversation or plead with him. But my mind was racing with feverish calculations, and the endgame unfolded as we passed a row of shops and offices on a quiet stretch of road just outside the city. A familiar SEAT ‘600’ pulled up at traffic lights alongside us and revved its engine. I looked across casually at Juantxo in the driving seat, and it seemed quite natural to let such an impatient driver go ahead. As he did so, he raised his hand in the kind of acknowledgement calculated not to arouse suspicion in my captor. And as he pulled away, I saw in my mirror that a second car had come up behind us: a vehicle with one headlight out of action but a spotlight mounted on the bumper to compensate.
I accelerated smoothly away from the lights. Then, judging the speed to the best of my ability, and afraid of the consequences if I was a touch too fast or too slow, I flicked the steering wheel to the right and slammed into the rear of a line of parked vehicles. The wheel buckled in my hands, but the seat belt stopped me before my ribs made contact with the steering column. Adolfo was also flung forward into his seat belt, but the section I had earlier sawn almost through with a knife parted company, leaving him free to continue his trajectory headfirst through the windscreen. He came to rest with his abdomen over the dashboard and his pelvis and legs still inside the car. He was alive as it turned out, but unconscious and surely suffering from severe internal injuries.
I was more shocked by the impact than I’d expected. By the time I came to my senses, Juantxo’s car was stationary alongside us with the driver’s door open and the engine still running. He had already relieved the unconscious Adolfo of the gun still clenched in his fist, and as soon as I was fully aware he checked me expertly for injuries before helping me out of the wreckage.
Seeing the two men from the second car at close quarters, I recognised one of them from the planning meeting; he walked with a pronounced limp and I knew he was the chief. The other man was just a chauffeur and bodyguard; he and Juantxo manoeuvred Adolfo into the back of the larger car, where the injured killer slumped sideways across the bench seat in a welter of blood. The chief was trying to haul him upright again in order to make room for me, but I said not to worry as I’d rather travel with Juantxo.
Juantxo wasn’t listening to this exchange; he’d already gone to his car. He came back a moment later with a can of petrol, emptied some of it on the seats of Adolfo’s ruined SEAT and then threw the remainder inside. He told me to get into the ‘600’ quickly. I ran to the vehicle, and just as I was climbing in there was a whoosh of igniting vapour. As I pulled the door shut a wave of heat and light overtook me. A moment later Juantxo thumped into the driver’s seat, engaged gear and pulled away. Soon we were heading south through the Amara tunnel.
“You are honoured, I think,” he said over the noise of the straining engine as we headed into the hills. “You’ll be very surprised when you see where we’re going. The chief says we don’t need to keep it a secret from you any more.”
“I’m honoured that you trust me,” I answered from the depths of my anger and exhaustion. “But why the hell should I care where a gang of terrorists have their hideout? I’ll respect your confidence, but I know something about ETA—isn’t that who you are? I love this country and its people. I hate the way you’ve been treated by Franco’s government. But how many innocent people have you killed? What makes you think you’re any better than Adolfo and the Condor Legion?”
Rant over, I fell quiet. Juantxo drove in silence for a good quarter of an hour, and I felt pleased with myself for getting him on the defensive. Then, without so much as glancing at me and with a hint of anger in his voice, he answered me: “If we were ETA, you’d be dead already.”
“So you call yourselves something different. Who are you? No, don’t tell me. The Basque Popular Front? The Basque Liberation Army? No? So what do you call yourselves?”
But Juantxo wasn’t listening to my drivel. “Keep your mouth shut, you idiot, and do exactly what I say,” he snapped. “Otherwise we’re both going to die. There’s a bag on the floor down there. Take out what’s in there and hand it to me.”
With no safety belt in this car to undo, I leaned forward and retrieved a brown canvas bag with a drawstring round the neck. I was just about to open it when Juantxo saw a gap in the heavy traffic and pulled away with a jerk. My shoulder hit the door hard as he pulled the under-powered and poorly balanced car round in a juddering U-turn.
As soon as we were travelling back towards the city in a straight line, I opened the canvas bag, took out a chunky automatic pistol and began to examine it. “Hand it to me, now!” shouted Juantxo.
“What’s the panic?” I asked as I handed him the weapon.
“Listening to your rubbish, I took my eye off the chief’s car. They were behind us at the last road-junction. They’re not there now.”
I was embarrassed into silence and peered into the darkness ahead, trying to make amends by spotting the car before he did. Suddenly my pulse-rate leapt as I saw the car with the one-up-one-down headlights. It was parked facing us on the forecourt of a dimly lit petrol station, over on the southbound side of the road.
“There,” I shouted, although he was going too fast to make the turn. “The garage.”
“I see it,” he acknowledged, driving straight past. “And I see something else. We must be careful.”
He continued northwards for nearly half a mile before turning across a gap in the oncoming traffic and heading slowly back towards the garage. Well before we reached it, he pulled onto the shoulder of the road and killed both the lights and the engine.
“He’ll be expecting us, but it would be stupid to let him know we’re here,” he explained.
“What’s going on? Why don’t you want to let your chief know you’re here?”
“Not the chief. Adolfo.”
“Oh God! You think he’s…”
“No other reason they’d have stopped. Wait here. I’m leaving the keys. If I’m not back in ten minutes, find your way to the monastery at Alzaibar. Ask for Brother Agostino or Brother Bonifacio. Don’t talk to anyone else. Either of them will get a message to my superiors.”
“I still don’t know who you are.”
“There’s not time. We’re the good guys. Well, mostly good. Better than the other guys. Just wait here for ten minutes like I said. And don’t go any closer to the garage.”
He actually smiled at me for the first time, and then he was gone. I waited for several minutes, then I heard the unmistakeable sound of a gunshot—not the flat crack of Adolfo’s favoured weapon but a sound I associated with larger calibre police and military handguns.
My heart sank, and I nearly got into the car and drove off. Only that last smile of Juantxo’s, the parting smile of a friend, stopped me from leaving. I remained in the car for another minute, then got out and cautiously inched forward on foot. I only had to go a few metres to see that the car had gone, and disregarding Juantxo’s instructions I broke into a run.
The floodlighting over the forecourt was weak, but still clear enough to reveal two dark masses against the pale concrete surface. One of them was the chief. His heart must have stopped beating well before he was dragged out of the car, because there was a minimal amount of blood around him. The other was Juantxo. He was still alive, but he’d already lost a lot of blood. A ghastly rhythmic sound – hissing and spluttering – was coming from his chest. If I’d gone for help he’d have bled out or asphyxiated before it arrived.
I had no proper first aid training, but I had some idea how a tourniquet worked and fashioned one out of his canvas belt to slow the bleeding from his thigh. Then I tore open his shirt and nearly gagged at the pinkly frothing slit between his ribs. His face was white, his lips were turning blue and he was shaking like someone with a high fever.
Marvelling that a garage was open so late in the evening, I ran into the office looking for something to stop the catastrophic leak of air from my friend’s lungs. There was no one at the till, but as I reached across the counter to take a couple of puncture repair outfits off the shelf I noticed a small, fat man hunched down behind it.
“Please…” he began.
“No time!” I hissed. “For the love of God telephone the hospital. My friend is badly wounded and could die.”
“The shooting…”
“It’s over. He’s gone. Quickly, the hospital.”
Running back outside, I patched Juantxo up. Drying the wound the best I could with tissues from my pocket, I smeared rubber cement over one of the patches until it was almost dry and very tacky. I pressed it on the wound for three or four minutes while the glue bonded, and was relieved to see his breathing improve immediately. I repeated the drill with more patches, arranging them so that they overlapped the first one and adhered to a wider area of skin.
I was still worried whether he’d survive, but I had another concern now. Adolfo had got away. Even if I had a car of my own, he was long gone and I thought the driver would only live long enough to take him where he wanted to go. I asked myself where that would be, and sensed that the killer knew his time was running out. What would he want to do? Where would he force the driver to take him?
Take me to your leader. The cliché echoed in my head. Would the driver be gutless enough to take the enemy into the heart of his own camp? I ran into the office again. “Have you got a car?” I asked the cowering attendant.
“No car. I get the bus.”
“For God’s sake, help me,” I groaned. “I have to catch that man.”
“You should let the police earn their wages, my friend. They’ll be here soon.”
“Have you called the police? I said the hospital.”
“I called both. The police would have come anyway, once the doctors knew there was shooting.”
“Oh no! My friend out there is an innocent man, and he’ll probably be arrested.”
The little man shrugged, but he eyed me warily, perhaps afraid that I’d cut up rough. “I’m sorry, but it’s done. I’m no lover of the police, but I think it’s for the best.”
Desperate, I ran out onto the forecourt again. Juantxo looked at me, awake now. His lips were moving, and I knelt down beside him.
“You mustn’t try to speak,” I warned him. “There’s only a piece of rubber keeping you alive. Lie still.”
He spoke again. I had to strain my ears to hear him over the traffic noise: “…. Gun… Pocket.”
I went over and felt the dead man’s clothes. There was a heavy lump in the right-hand pocket of his trousers. I reached in and felt the grip of a pistol; I went to pull it out but I couldn’t free it. I tugged repeatedly, hard enough to tear any normal fabric, but without success. In the end I had to unbuckle the waistband – it felt horrible and unreal undressing a corpse – in order to find what was snagging the barrel. The fabric was wet with blood and urine, and I was even more shocked to find that he had only half a leg. The long gun barrel had been forced through the pocket lining to make it fit, and the steeply raked front sight had snagged under the leather harness that held his prosthetic limb in place. As soon as I’d freed the sight and pulled the gun clear of the pocket, I recognised it as Adolfo’s.
The weapon was unfamiliar, and in the poor light I couldn’t make out the maker’s insignia, but it was easy enough to work out which lever did what. I ejected the magazine and used my thumb to push the bullets out.
There were three of them. I
fed them back into the magazine, and was about to pull the breach back to chamber a round when Juantxo managed to attract my attention. I knelt down beside him again, as he whispered, “Four bullets. One already in...” I got the message. The semi-automatic pistol had been fired since it was loaded, and there was already a round in the chamber ready to fire. I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t pulled the trigger, and hastily ejected the unspent cartridge before picking it up off the ground and loading it into the magazine.
I tried to slide the barrel into my waistband, movie-fashion, but it was very uncomfortable and felt as though it would fall out the first time I moved. In the end I did what the chief had done, pushing it into my trouser pocket hard enough to pop a short length of stitching. The barrel was unpleasantly cold and hard against my unprotected skin. “Where are your headquarters?” I asked Juantxo.
“You already know,” he whispered. “Where we were going. Where I told you to go for help. The monastery.”
I stood up, aghast at the cataclysm about to fall on that beautiful place. Then all of a sudden, a wave of relief spread over me. “His gun,” I said jubilantly. “We’ve got his gun.”
Juantxo twitched, and I realised that he was trying to make his whisper heard above my voice. “He’s got mine,” he managed to gasp. “And a knife.” He slumped back, worn out by his efforts, and at that moment I heard sirens coming down from the north. “Go!” he mouthed at me.
I lurched back across the forecourt towards his car with the intention of driving off in pursuit, but at that moment another vehicle pulled up behind it, silhouetting the SEAT in the glare of headlights. Quickly I dodged to my left to take cover behind a foul-smelling toilet cubicle, and the attendant mercifully chose that moment to kill the floodlights. Taking advantage of the near-darkness, I stumbled back to the carriageway and began to walk south along the shoulder.
There was no traffic coming down from the north, and I guessed that the road had been closed off. It was a relief not to have to conceal myself from passing vehicles, but I was knotted up with frustration. I could walk all night and all the next day without reaching the monastery. I had to keep going, but for the moment my only objective was to take myself far away from the garage whose position in the distance was now marked by a cluster of flashing lights.
THE ENGLISH WITNESS Page 19