‘Where’re your tools?’ he growled.
The men pointed to a sack on the floor.
‘What focken’ good are they there? Put ’em in your hands, you stupid bastards.’
One of them picked up the sack and pulled out two American M16 assault rifles. He handed one to his pal.
‘Load ’em and put the safety-catches on, for Christ’s sake! Don’t they teach you morons anything at that school?’
‘Army,’ Sean suddenly warned. They all instantly looked ahead through the dirty windscreen.
A convoy of four army Landrovers headed towards them on the other side of the road. They passed by at speed, each loaded with soldiers. Sean kept an eye on the wing mirror, watching until they were out of sight.
‘Anyone catch what regiment that was?’ Sean asked.
‘Who gives a fock.Take the next right,’ snapped Brennan.
Sean turned right into a small lane. ‘About a mile to go,’ he said, wondering if that, too, would offend Brennan. But Brennan was concentrating too hard on the road, fields and sky to take any more notice of what Sean had to say.
‘Only thing we need to worry about from here on is a foot patrol,’ Brennan said.
‘Or an eagle flight,’ added Sean, referring to a common army practice of dropping patrols off in the countryside using helicopters.
‘There’s the gate,’ Brennan said, pointing up ahead. Sean slowed, turned and stopped in front of a five-bar wooden gate that led into a field. Brennan hopped out and opened the gate. Sean drove through, stopping long enough for Brennan to leap back in.
‘Stay on those tracks. Come on, come on, move it,’ Brennan said, getting impatient.
Sean set off again, following a pair of tractor ruts across a lumpy field. Brennan sat forward in his seat, looking in every direction. They passed through a gap in a hedge into another field. ‘Two football pitches and we’re home,’ he said.
Everyone could see the spindly hedgerow up ahead that was the Irish border. The van dipped and creaked in the ruts and when Sean skidded and slid a little he braced himself for a bollocking but instead it seemed Brennan was already in a celebratory mood. ‘Don’t break the van after all that, Sean me lad,’ he said in a fatherly tone. ‘Easy does it now.’
Sean dropped down a gear and drove with more care, composing himself in readiness for the victory cheer as the border inched closer.
Sean was the first to think he heard it, then Brennan detected a dull throbbing sound. About the same time they knew their ears were not deceiving them, a helicopter thundered in an arc across their front, low to the ground, its rotors facing them, pulsating loudly as it banked steeply to head around to their rear. Sean swerved hard in reaction, the van’s tyres digging into the soft earth. Everyone was ramrod straight with tension. Brennan grabbed Sean’s collar violently as he yelled: ‘Go! Go for it, you focker! Go!’
Sean lost traction as he hit the accelerator too hard and the van fishtailed. He brought it under control and drove over the ruts and dips towards the spindly hedge now a football field away.
As the helicopter came around the rear of the van, Stratton looked down on it like a hawk eyeing a rodent scurrying for its life. He grabbed a thin wire that ran across the cabin door, the emergency release cable, and yanked it hard as he booted the bottom of it. The door flew off its hinges and flapped to the ground in the downdraught and the wind tore inside the cab. Stratton turned in his seat so that he was facing outside, rested a foot on the skid below the edge of the door, and hung as far out as his seatbelt would allow so that he could comfortably fire the rifle down at a steep angle.
He gripped the SLR tightly into his shoulder and shouted into his mic, competing with the downdraught from the rotors. ‘Keep my side facing the van! . . . Did you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ the pilot replied, although he was distracted by something else that greatly concerned him.
‘Move up. Keep just ahead of the van!’ Stratton continued as he raised the barrel so that he could look along its length and sit the target on the end of it.
The pilot dropped the helicopter’s nose a tad, lost some height, putting it at house-top level, and moved up alongside the van.
‘Ahead, ahead!’ Stratton called out, indicating with his right hand to push forward. He wanted to be further in front to get a clear shot backwards at the driver, but the pilot was not moving the way he wanted him to. ‘Ahead I said, damn it!’
The pilot inched the Gazelle forward, bringing the front windshield of the van into view. Stratton brought the weapon site to his eye and aimed, the gyro-steady device helping to keep it almost magically solid in his hands.The van suddenly swerved and headed on a course beneath the chopper, the steeper angle making it difficult for Stratton to get the shot. ‘Right, damn it! Right!’ he shouted.
The pilot pulled steeply to the right and then banked left to expose the front of the van to Stratton once again, but his agitation was growing. ‘What if you hit your own man?’ he shouted.
Stratton composed himself to shoot.‘Not unless he’s driving, ’ he muttered as he took first pressure on the trigger. Stratton could clearly see the two men in the front. The driver glanced up at him. ‘Steady,’ Stratton said.
Sean took his eyes off the gap in the hedgerow he was aiming for to snatch a look at the man hanging out of the helicopter aiming the rifle directly at him. He swerved left and right, but his options were limited if he wanted to get into the South.
‘Go for the gap!’ Brennan yelled, anxious to be over the border.
‘Shoot him!’ Sean yelled back.
‘You’re nearly there. Drive, you bastard!’
Stratton held the sight on his target.The instant he squeezed the trigger and fired the helicopter banked hard over and turned away. Stratton couldn’t believe what had just happened. He snapped around expecting to see some catastrophic reason why the pilot had changed course, but there was nothing.
‘Why’d you turn away?!’ he shouted.
‘That hedge was the border.’
‘What?’ Stratton yelled in utter disbelief.
‘I’m not going over the border,’ the pilot said firmly. He had lost every fight with Stratton till now. But this time he had the law on his side, both international and military.
‘Get back in pursuit of that van,’ Stratton said dangerously.
‘I will not.’
‘You will not be held responsible.’
‘Who do you think you are?’
‘You’re sending a man to his death because of a piece of airspace?’
‘Call it what you want. I can’t go over that border and that’s final.Those are my standing orders and I suspect they’re yours too.’
‘Do you have any idea what they will do to that man?’ Stratton said, disgusted with the pilot.
‘You won’t win this one and there is no one with the authority to make me cross it, not you or your god of a commanding officer.’
‘If it’s games you want to play we can do that,’ Stratton said as he pulled his pistol from his holster, shoved it between the pilot’s legs, and casually fired.The bullet smashed through the seat and into the bulletproof sheet that lined the floor. The pilot’s heart leaped into his throat and he might have jumped out of his seat had he not been strapped into it. Somehow he managed to keep hold of the pitch and joystick as the helicopter lurched and dipped. Stratton maintained his enraged gaze, waiting for the pilot’s decision.
‘You’re crazy!’ he yelled.
‘And you’re gonna be dickless in five seconds and it won’t end there, trust me,’ Stratton said as he moved the end of the pistol into the pilot’s crotch making him flinch.
‘You’re truly insane,’ the pilot screamed, as much in pain as in horror.
‘If it helps . . . The guy in that van is worth a dozen of you. I’ve been in enough of these crates to know I don’t need you to land it.’
‘You’d go to jail for the rest of your life!’
‘Why? We g
ot shot down and you got burned to a crisp.
Why would I go to jail? No more talking. You have three seconds to turn in pursuit of that van. Two . . . one . . . ’
When the high-velocity bullet smashed through the windscreen just as the helicopter peeled away, Sean thought he was a dead man, until he heard Brennan scream and saw the blood shoot from between his fingers where he was holding his leg. It had passed cleanly through, missing the bone, but had taken a fair bit of meat with it. It took a second for the pain to reach Brennan’s brain and tell him that he was in fact the one who had been shot.
When the others realised the chopper had pulled off they couldn’t believe it at first. Brennan was too distressed to notice until they tore through the hedge and were over the border. Sean was shouting that the Gazelle had gone and the others looking out of the back window acknowledged it. Brennan found the Gazelle in his wing mirror still in the North and turning away from them. Despite the ferociously burning pain in his thigh he grinned as the others broke into a rapturous cheer.
‘The bastards are staying in the North! The bastards are staying in the North!’ he shouted, not quite believing his own eyes. He tore several strips of cloth from his shirt and bound his leg tightly to stem the flow. The sight of their powerful enemy held at bay from the chase as if by an invisible barrier was anaesthetic enough. They screamed obscenities at the helicopter and celebrated, clapping their hands, stamping their feet, and banging on the crate that Spinks was inside as if it were a drum.
Sean beamed as he swerved the van from side to side in the field. Brennan patted his shoulder with a bloody hand. ‘Well done, laddy. Well done! That was fantastic driving. Focken fantastic driving. You’ll go down in bloody history today, fellah, that’s for sure. You all will,’ he shouted.
Sean stuck his finger in the bullet hole in the windscreen. ‘That was focken close.’
‘Focken close? It got me, didn’t it, you bastard,’ Brennan said.
The others burst into laughter, a release of tension more than anything else. Even Brennan saw the funny side and laughed.
‘I knew they wouldn’t jump the border,’ Brennan said. ‘I focken knew it. That’s why I pushed you to drive on, me lad. I knew they wouldn’t come over, the chicken shit bastards.’
‘For a while there I thought it was a focken Pink,’ Sean said.
‘Fock ’em if it was or it weren’t,’ Brennan said. ‘We’ll take on the Pinks, the SAS, whatever they want to throw at us. They’ll have to come over the focken border to get us now though. And good luck to ’em.’
Everyone cheered the statement. Brennan grinned as he kept a wary eye on his wing mirror. He was too long in the tooth not to know that they were home free only when they got to the rendezvous and the Pink in their trunk was handed over. Not a moment before. He reached out of the window and moved the wing mirror around until he found the helicopter, no more than a tiny black splodge flicking in and out of the mirror as the van bounced along. While the others laughed and relived the last hour he suddenly felt there was something not quite right about the image. It didn’t look as if it were getting any smaller. Perhaps it was just hovering. His smile started to wane as the image appeared to be growing larger, little by little, second by second.
He leaned forward to get a closer look at the mirror, praying he was wrong. But he was not. The helicopter was coming on, full bore towards them, nose tilted down like a raging bull at full charge.
Brennan stuck his head out into the wind to look back. The others continued celebrating, unaware, except Sean who sensed the change in Brennan and saw him looking back. He glanced in his own wing mirror and his smile quickly dropped from his face.
‘It’s coming back,’ Sean said. The two singing men in the rear did not hear him. ‘It’s coming back!’ he shouted at them as he put his foot down and the van accelerated across the field towards a distant hedgerow.
The silence in the operations room was almost painful. Everyone in the detachment’s small camp had found their way into it: bleeps, the intelligence cell, the ops officer, the second in command - even the cook, mechanic and detachment storeman had crept in and remained at the back to watch and listen.
Mike leaned over the map board, waiting. The last transmission they had heard was Stratton saying ‘I have’, which simply meant he had the vehicle that contained Spinks in sight, or to be precise, the one that contained Spinks’s transponder. That meant, in Stratton’s case at least, that he was going to do something to stop it. There was no point interrupting him just to ask what exactly. There was nothing any of them could do to help anyway.
‘How close are our cars?’ Mike asked quietly, referring to the other operatives who had scrambled from the camp to get to the area.
‘A good ten minutes away,’ Graham said.
That meant they were well out of the race. Mike tapped the perspex sheet that covered the entire map with his wax pencil, beating out a meaningless rhythm as he thought. ‘How long since his last transmission?’
‘One minute twenty seconds,’ Graham said.
Mike stood up and folded his hands across his chest as if holding himself together, afraid his anxiousness would burst out. But he could not keep control any longer. He picked up the handset and pushed the button on the side of it. ‘Whisky one, zero alpha, sit-rep?’ he said.
Everyone glanced up at the speaker, but it remained silent. ‘Whisky one, this is zero alpha, sit-rep?’
‘I have,’ Stratton said, his voice suddenly booming over the speaker, making the cook jump which in turn caused the mechanic to do the same.
Mike and Graham looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. Stratton had said ‘I have’ a while ago. They wondered why nothing had changed in that time.
‘Location?’ Mike asked, doing his best to contain a tension he had never experienced before.
There was another long silence. Mike suddenly felt uneasy. ‘Whisky one, what is your location?’
‘We’re going into the green,’ was Stratton’s calm reply.
The uneasy feeling rippled through the room.
Mike lowered the handset. The second in command and ops officer watched him, wondering what his next move would be.
Mike thought long and hard on it. It was obvious what was happening. The van was over the border with Spinks in it. He was not about to consider telling Stratton to cancel the pursuit. Even if that were an option, which in this case it was not, Stratton would ignore him anyway. A border excursion was nothing compared to losing an operative. Mike was the kind of officer who stood by his men in a fight. If he was not going to order Stratton back, it therefore meant he supported him. He might as well start right there and then.
‘Get me Lisburn ops,’ he said calmly to Graham. ‘And get Bill Lawton standing by. We might as well start patching this up with the Irish right away.’ All Mike could now hope for was that Stratton tied it up as quickly and neatly as possible and without taking the battle all the way into Dublin.
‘The road, the road!’ Brennan yelled, pointing to a gate in the hedge a hundred yards ahead. Just beyond it was another hedge running parallel that indicated there was a road or track in between. Sean steered a gentle arc, adjusting his angle so that he could crash through the gate and enter the lane without slowing. The gate looked sturdy, but nothing was going to stop them now.
He hit it hard, smashing through it and destroying the headlights, and turned sharply on to the narrow lane, sliding just a little and bashing the far hedge with the flank but without losing much pace.
The Gazelle came on in pursuit like a relentless hunter. It banked hard over and levelled out to the right side of the van, no higher than a goalpost off the ground, and started to push ahead. Sean snatched a glance at it. This was useless, he thought. They were stuck in the lane like it was a bowling alley with nowhere to go but straight ahead.
As the Gazelle inched closer Brennan watched the man in the left seat of the cab leaning out with a rifle in his hand. He cou
ld see him more clearly now, his civilian clothes, straggly hair, unshaven features, and he was looking directly at Brennan as he raised the rifle to his shoulder.
‘Pink,’ Brennan said under his breath. ‘Focken Pink!’ Brennan leaned out the window and fired a long burst, almost losing his gun to the hedges crashing past as Sean tried to manoeuvre as best he could in the narrow lane.The two men in the back held on to anything they could as the van lurched heavily, Spinks’s crate sliding from one side to the other. One of the men fell on to his back while gripping his M16 and accidentally loosed off several rounds that ripped along the roof in a line barely missing Brennan’s head. But Brennan was too caught up in the desperation of his position to direct his madness at them.
‘What do we do?’ screamed Sean.
Brennan seemed frozen, watching the man in the helicopter.
‘Brennan?’ Sean shouted.
‘Drive! Just keep driving,’ Brennan shouted back.
‘We could run in four different directions. They couldn’t get all of us,’ Sean said.
Brennan shoved the end of his gun barrel at Sean, glaring at him with manic eyes. ‘You stop this van and I’ll blow you to focken pieces,’ he yelled.
Sean got the message loud and clear.
Stratton held the rifle tightly into his shoulder and looked down through the sights. A bullet skimmed the bottom of the Gazelle. Another creased the glass bubble, causing a crack that spread to one of the corners, but Stratton did not move from his purpose.The pilot flinched but he was more frightened of Stratton’s wrath should he veer off course than anything else.
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