by Nick Oldham
The taxi sped north on Rosemary Lane, shooting over a bridge spanning the M55, then another over the Lancaster Canal, going towards Catforth.
Flynn kept with him. He could see the driver’s back; he was only steering with his right hand and was holding his mobile phone clamped to his ear with the other: he was making a call.
Flynn’s face set as hard as granite. He accelerated, came up close behind the taxi and touched its rear bumper. This caused the driver to look into his mirror again, set his shoulders – again – and then try to coax more speed out of the machine. And he was still trying to make a phone call.
As the road went into a sharp right hand bend, Flynn clipped the rear of the taxi again and this time a combination of velocity, the change of direction, uneven weight distribution, the swerve of the car and the fact that the steering wheel whipped out of the driver’s hand caused the taxi to spin and suddenly go into a complete 360-degree rotation – and Flynn had a fleeting glimpse of the horrified driver as they came face to face for a fraction of a second before it continued with the circle. Both cars were then as they had been – nose to tail – but the taxi suddenly veered sideways and its nose dropped into the drainage dyke at the side of the road, where it stopped.
Flynn braked hard, but before he could get out, the taxi driver had managed to roll out of his car, scramble up the muddy bank and run at Flynn with a single barrel auto-loading twelve-bore sawn-off shotgun brandished in his hands.
Flynn was half out when he saw the weapon being racked and swinging up into a firing position. The taxi driver’s stubby index finger wrapped around the trigger, pulling it back. He stood at the front of Flynn’s bonnet and aimed through the windscreen as if he was about to dispatch a rat.
Flynn flung himself across the front seats under the line of the dashboard as with a boom the window disintegrated and a million glass fragments and shotgun pellets sprayed across him like pebble dashing, several stinging as they splattered against his cheek.
But the taxi driver had missed.
Flynn rose, the glass fell off him.
Through the missing window he saw the taxi driver rack the weapon again. The used shell casing spun out as the new cartridge was slammed into place.
Knowing he had missed and swearing, the taxi driver shuffled sideways, intending to blast Flynn through the passenger door window. This time Flynn had no cover, nowhere to hide, and was trapped.
Flynn lurched sideways and tried to time it just right – the opening, fast and hard, of the passenger door. Most car doors do not open quickly, as a house door would. Their weight and the mechanism of the hinges make occupants push the door. The only time Flynn had ever truly experienced a car door opening quickly was once when he had been parked in a police car on a stormy Blackpool sea front and, unthinkingly, had opened the door only to have it ripped from his grasp by the storm wind. Not only had it shot open, the door had almost been torn off its hinges, and it never closed properly again.
That was what Flynn wanted to recreate.
He moved fast, pulled back the handle and forced it open, catching the taxi driver with the edge of the door, banging the gun sideways. The man managed to keep hold of the weapon but staggered back, surprised at Flynn’s speed. Almost at once he was recovering and attempting to bring the shotgun round and fire again.
Using the door as a fulcrum, Flynn swung out of the vehicle and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun with his left hand, trying to keep it pointing down and away.
The taxi driver fired the weapon.
Flynn’s fingers were wrapped around the barrel and he kept a tight grip of it, aware of the sensation of the cartridge powering down the barrel and the blast as it left the muzzle in a spray of sparks and smoke – but it fired into the grass.
By then Flynn was completely out of his car. The man tried to tear the gun out of Flynn’s grip, but to no avail. The driver looked a moderately fit person with his tight T-shirt and bulging biceps and six pack, but Flynn was bigger, fitter and, once riled, more dangerous to know.
There was a short push-me, pull-you contest, but Flynn wrestled the gun from him and tossed it down into the dyke, where it landed in a slurp of muddy water.
The man backed off, but he was dancing on his toes with hatred and determination in his eyes, confirmed when his right hand came from behind him with a short-bladed knife in it.
He did not hesitate. No words were spoken.
He came at Flynn, the blade glinting in the rain as it slashed up towards his belly.
Flynn reared backwards. The knife slashed fresh air – but only just – and Flynn eyed the sharp point as it zipped up past his face.
The man backed off again and hunched low, preparing for another assault.
Flynn responded by revealing his own secret weapon from his back pocket. His police warrant card.
‘I’m a cop. Put that down.’ He held out the card between his finger and thumb.
‘Fuck you.’
Two words that meant Flynn was not going to get a deep meaningful conversation from this man just yet.
‘You’d better be very good with that, then,’ Flynn advised him, ‘because you were shit with a shotgun.’ He slid the warrant card away.
He’d hardly said the words when the taxi driver lunged for him again.
The knife slashed up through the air but Flynn was already out-thinking and out-manoeuvring him.
It was an unsubtle, telegraphed and remarkably slow thrust – to Flynn’s eyes.
He sidestepped, deflected the arm with the open palm of his right hand, twisted on his heel and, again with his right hand, grabbed the man’s wrist, stepped in close, hip to hip, turned and slammed the point of his left elbow into the man’s right eye socket while yanking him off balance at the same time.
Flynn pivoted away, still yanking the man forward and down on to his knees, although by that point the taxi driver did not know whether he was picking up a fare or pissed out of his mind; the impact of Flynn’s elbow was the equivalent of the man’s face hitting the rim of a steering wheel in a head-on collision. A stunning shockwave bounced through his head and his vision tripled.
Flynn eased him to the ground carefully.
He left him there and went to retrieve his own mobile phone and made a call.
After that Flynn spoke to the taxi driver, who was just about regaining some clarity in his brain.
Initially he was reluctant to chat.
He changed his mind after Flynn persuaded him.
Flynn picked a sliver of broken windscreen glass casually out of his face and flicked it away. It was the third he had found embedded in his flesh but, checking his appearance in a wing mirror, he guessed there would be no lasting defacement to his handsome features.
‘He says you forced him off the road and then you assaulted him.’
Flynn looked blandly at DI Craig Alford. ‘I say he blasted me with a shotgun, then tried to stab me.’
They were standing by the side of the road next to the ditched taxi. The driver was sitting cuffed in the back of a nearby police van, holding a thick wad of paper towel to his face, refusing to speak any more. A traffic car was at the scene with another section patrol. Jerry Tope had also arrived, together with DS Dave Carver, and DCs Jimmy Blue and Lincoln Bartlett.
‘He was trying to make a call on this.’ Flynn held up the taxi driver’s mobile phone. ‘That’s the problem driving and using a mobile phone. Dangerous. You end up in ditches.’ Flynn waggled the phone. ‘I don’t think he got through, which hopefully gives us a bit of time to get our shit together.’
‘He told you Tasker was holed up in a farmhouse?’
‘Yep,’ Flynn said. ‘Then he stopped being chatty.’
Sleepily, Santiago said, ‘What happened next?’
Flynn’s hands were clasped behind his head.
‘Then it all went tits-up, as they say.’
FOURTEEN
Flynn had once spent two weeks living in the back garden of a house belo
nging to an active member of the IRA in a village on the coast of County Antrim, Northern Ireland. This had been during his time as a member of the Special Boat Service way back in the volatile 1980s in a joint operation run by the SBS, the SAS, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the security services. He had been dinghied ashore from a submarine, sneaked up the beach and into the long, overgrown garden that backed on to the shoreline. He had hidden himself in a thick hedge of bramble and settled in to watch the activity in the house.
That had been one of the easy jobs which concluded when, from his intelligence report, the house was raided and two fairly low grade IRA members were arrested five minutes before they were due to set off and plant a bomb in a shopping centre.
There had been many jobs much more hazardous than hiding out in a garden, but that was the one that came to mind as he put on his grey-green combat jacket from his car boot, pulled on a pair of similar-coloured cord pants and then leapt into a field, keeping low, using all the cover he had available – bushes, hedges, the contours of the land, even a cow – to make his way over to a copse called Many Pits Wood. Beyond that he crept across to another clump of woodland, Cookson’s Plantation, on the far side of which was the dilapidated but habitable farmhouse Brian Tasker had chosen to hide out in. It was called Old Strike Farm.
He arrived five minutes later, crawled through the thorny undergrowth and, keeping three metres back from the treeline, could see the front elevation of the farmhouse.
All appeared to be peaceful.
There was an old Ford Fiesta parked in the yard. The buggy in which Ellie Davenport had pushed the baby with Brian Tasker’s mug was also parked there, just to the right of the old front door.
Flynn settled in and watched patiently.
For five minutes there was no sign of life or movement, bar wisps of smoke rising from the chimney.
Then he saw someone move across one of the ground floor windows. Just a dark shadow, unidentifiable but definitely male.
According to the taxi driver there were three men in total, plus Ellie and the kid. One of the men was Brian Tasker, the other two his bodyguards.
A flicker of a grin crossed Flynn’s face at the memory of the short but effective follow-up conversation he’d had with the taxi guy in the back of the section van.
It had been completely illegal but completely necessary.
Craig Alford had cringed when Flynn had said, ‘I need to encourage him to be more open.’
‘No,’ Alford had insisted. He sounded firm (or firm-ish), but the determined look in Flynn’s eyes made him waver.
‘Tasker might be there but we need to know who else is and whether or not they’re armed. He can tell us.’ He pointed to the van.
Alford’s face suddenly developed numerous nervous tics, but he relented. ‘I do not know anything about this,’ he said, and turned away with a look Pontius Pilate would have been proud of.
Flynn went to the back of the van where the driver, a PC, stood.
‘Chat time,’ he said, and gestured with his thumb. ‘Move.’
The constable’s eyes dropped and he sidled away from the van doors. Flynn wrenched them open, unlatched the inner cage, bent low and climbed in.
The taxi driver’s face rose from behind the paper towel he was holding to stem the blood already flowing from his face.
Flynn grinned at him. ‘Chat time,’ he said again. ‘Quick chat time.’
‘I demand a solicitor.’
‘We’re in the middle of nowhere, taxi guy, and like a tree that falls in the middle of a forest, no one can hear it, or you when you scream.’
On the edge of Cookson’s Plantation, Flynn smiled proudly at his deeply philosophical pronouncement, wondering where he had dug that up from. Normally his approach was less subtle, his philosophy being more bull in a china shop, but somehow the forest analogy seemed to be the right approach with the taxi driver, especially when Flynn added, ‘It’s just you and me and I’ll be accompanying you to hospital with three broken fingers and a dislodged knee cap.’
More movement caught his eye at the farmhouse. An upstairs room, a bedroom, he had to assume as Ellie Davenport appeared naked at a low window, peering out into the day time and stretching languidly as a pair of hands slid around her, one cupping a breast, the other sliding down to her sex. Brian Tasker began to chew at her neck.
‘Confirm Tasker is here. Davenport here and one other male for definite,’ Flynn whispered into the radio that had been provided for him. ‘Tasker is busy with his girlfriend, first floor bedroom. Where are we up to now?’
‘Ready to roll on your say-so,’ Alford said. ‘Half a support unit serial, one dogman, two ARVs and a few section officers for back-up – and us, of course.’
Flynn totted up the numbers. Maybe seven SU, one dogman, four firearms officers (two double-crewed ARVs) and, say, four from section, so possibly sixteen uniforms (four armed) and the Ambush team who had turned out. Alford had done well to muster them all at such short notice.
‘What do we need to know?’ Alford asked.
‘That you’ll be in view all the way up the lane,’ Flynn told him, ‘so you need to move as fast as possible, split two ways, front and back, one ARV each way. Keep in cover, though. We know from the taxi man they have at least two handguns, so best to be safe. Surround the place, then start to negotiate and coax them out on their hands and knees.’
‘Roger that,’ Alford said.
‘I’ll stay where I am for the time being.’
‘Roger that, too.’
‘ETA?’
‘Give us ten minutes.’
Flynn sat on his haunches, began the wait. Ten minutes was a long time, but he was accustomed to it, a skill he had acquired well.
He saw more movement through a downstairs window.
Upstairs, Tasker and the girl had moved away from the bedroom window, presumably back to the bed. Then Flynn’s brow furrowed. Something instinctive told him things were not all OK, mainly because he had seen the shadow of only one other person, not two, through the downstairs window.
So where was the other one the bloodied taxi driver had blabbed about?
He could easily be there; maybe hadn’t moved since Flynn arrived, possibly sitting watching TV, although there was no sign of an external aerial.
So far he had seen one man, plus Tasker, plus the girl.
He wished he’d seen them all, accounted for them all.
Part of himself said not to worry, this wasn’t an exact science; but it was always better if as many items as possible could be ticked off the list.
He tensed.
Perhaps the guy was just having a shit? Shave? Shower?
Flynn glanced down the lane towards the main road, the road he’d seen the taxi turn off not long before, then return after having deposited the woman and child.
He could hear a car approaching.
Then he saw one, an old VW Passat estate, dark red.
He edged forward for a better view: three persons on board.
Always possible it could be someone going to one of the farms further along the track.
To be on the safe side, he radioed Alford.
‘Vehicle approaching the farmhouse, Craig, three on board.’ He paused. ‘Now stopping outside the farm, three males getting out. Stretching their legs. Gone to the back of the car – it’s an estate – opening the door. Shit – Craig?’ Flynn waited for an acknowledgement. ‘Craig, you receiving?’
‘Yes – turning into farm track now,’ Alford responded excitedly.
‘Shit!’ Flynn grunted as he watched one of the men reach into the back of the VW and pass a machine pistol out to one of the others, then another to the third guy. ‘These guys are armed,’ he said, looking down the lane and now able to see the police convoy racing up. The two ARVs were the lead vehicles, followed by the support unit personnel carrier, then the dog van, a couple of liveried Astra patrol cars, then the plain cars driven by the detectives. ‘And they’ve seen you,’ F
lynn added bleakly.
The men had spun around and they panicked when they saw who was approaching.
One shouted something, a warning lost in the wind and rain, but Flynn got the gist: Run.
They split three ways, like a formation flying team, but all of them headed towards the trees where Flynn was concealed by foliage.
Two went either side of him, crashing into the bushes. One came directly at him, charging like a wild animal.
Flynn rose to meet him at the very last moment and the expression of shock horror on the man’s face was a brief moment of delight.
He was going full pelt, tried to dink around Flynn and bring the gun up at the same time to spray him with a hail of bullets.
Flynn swivelled at the hips and brought the chopping edge of his right hand into the man’s throat, stopping him instantly. The gun dropped and the man clutched his windpipe, his eyes bulging like fat red marbles. He dropped to his knees.
Flynn did not waver. He drove his fist into the man’s temple, knowing he had to be put down, out of action. The punch was one he had learned many years before and he hoped he got it right – just powerful enough to pole-axe the man and put him out of business for a couple of minutes without actually causing brain damage or death, just to give him a very sore head.
The man toppled over as his brain went into neutral.
Flynn ripped the gun from him and hurled it aside in two directions – the gun one way, the magazine the other – then hastily rearranged the unconscious man into a recovery position so his airway would always be open.
He glanced up.
The cops had almost reached the farmhouse.
Twenty metres to his right there was the crashing of one of the other men who’d done a runner, as he fought his way through the undergrowth.
Flynn went in that direction. He had half-considered not going for the other two but he thought it could be dangerous not knowing what they were up to. There was a glimpse of the man and his face as it twisted towards Flynn – and another delightful reaction of shock. The man tried to run faster, but his feet were in the dead leaves and branches carpeting the woodland floor.