Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  Connolly plumped the pillows against the bedhead, building a pile of them to support her. Then he laid her gently back against them, a sitting position, giving her a clear field of view from the window. She looked out into the darkness. Her eyes were very black. She moistened her lips. She had something else to say. Connolly bent close. Her breath was warm on his ear.

  “Have … you …” She closed her eyes, unable to finish the sentence.

  He looked at her. “Phoned?”

  She nodded, smiling, grateful. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “But I will.”

  She closed her eyes again. She was still smiling. “Neat,” she said softly, “real neat.”

  Buddy swam steadily north-east, underwater, at a depth of seven feet. He maintained the depth as accurately as he could, checking the single needle gauge on his wrist, not wanting to go any deeper, to bite into his precious oxygen reserve. At seven feet, in theory, he was easy meat for passing vessels but the harbour had been empty of shipping when he submerged, and if anything big turned up he’d hear the screws long before they became a real problem.

  He swam on, 73 degrees on his compass. The water was colder than he’d expected, taking longer to warm up in the layer between his body and the thick neoprene wet suit, and the visibility was non-existent. At night, of course, that was all he could expect, but when he used the big waterproof torch he’d attached to his weightbelt, he could see the tiny particles of mud and other matter hanging in suspension, clouding the water ahead.

  After ten minutes or so, he paused, checking the flow rate on the circuit valve. The rebreather was working fine, and the oxygen tasted OK, but even so there was something in him, some buried nerve, that mistrusted the whole system. Most of his diving had been surface supply, a big fat armoured hose right there to his helmet, a bloke on the other end who knew what he was doing, all kinds of checks and balances in the system, all kinds of clever strokes the guys up top could pull if he got into trouble.

  This, though, was very different. Instead of a clean supply of gases, he was breathing – at least in part – the output of his own lungs, his own exhaust. Sure, there was stuff in the circuit to deal with that, and Harry’s gear was superb. But if anything went wrong – if he’d misjudged the flow rate, or exceeded the depth, or the Baralyme gave out before it should – then he was stuffed. And if any of those things happened, he knew very well that there’d be no warning, no voice in his ear from the surface, no chance to put things right. You’d simply go funny where it most mattered, in your head, and your body would pack up, and your weights would drag you down, and that would be the end of it.

  That, they said, was what had happened to Buster Crabb, this same harbour, years back. The man had hit trouble with his rebreather. He’d been poking around with a tape measure under the arse of some Russian battleship, and the set had gone wrong, and he’d surfaced to try and sort it out, right there, broad daylight, yards from the watching Commie sailors. Whatever he’d done hadn’t fixed it, and months later they’d found his body down the coast somewhere. Fish had eaten the bits outside the suit. The rest, they said, was remarkably well preserved.

  Buddy finned onwards, carrying the charges, one in each hand, trying to push the thought to the back of his mind, wondering whether bits of water could be haunted. Buddy played with the thought a moment, watching the blackness swirl past his mask, wondering what kind of bottle it took for a man to do this for a living, in peace or in war, confronting the longest odds in the book, natural or man-made. If the tide didn’t get you, he thought, or the depth or the gear or some other rogue factor, then there were a bunch of guys on the surface just waiting for you to make a mistake.

  He shuddered at the thought, trying to scale down the size of his present difficulties, trying to minimize the hazards, trying to pretend it was, after all, a piece of piss. He looked at his watch. He’d been swimming now for eighteen minutes. With luck he should be two-thirds of the way there.

  Miller and Thompson came on the farmhouse by accident, a wrong turning in the dark, a mistake that put them barely two hundred metres from their target.

  They crouched behind an outcrop of rock, peering down. The house was painted white. There were pines across the road. There was a low wall at the front, and a long oblong of turf at the back before the mountain fell away again, towards the valley floor. The house was in darkness. The walls looked thick. The windows were small. Miller could hear running water.

  Thompson tapped him on the shoulder. He looked round. The younger man nodded down, towards the house.

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do we do?”

  Miller said nothing for a moment. The last time he’d spoken to Camps and Venner, they’d been on the mountainside, below the road, advancing on a parallel line. They’d made no contact of any kind. They had to be pretty wet. They could use some action. Miller switched on the radio and muttered their call sign into his throat mike. A voice came back at once, Venner’s, the radio distorting the rich Cornish vowels. Miller asked him where he was. Venner said he could see the house, about six hundred metres away. The ground between them was bare and open. If the cloud thinned any more, and there was moonlight, it wouldn’t be easy. Miller nodded in the darkness, agreeing.

  “Stay where you are,” he muttered, closing the transmission.

  Miller turned to Thompson. “I’m going down,” he said. “Cover me.”

  Thompson looked at him. So far, the evening had worked out nicely. They were three up, away from home, and there were still four hours of darkness left. Miller, he knew, was going for broke. This single operation was his personal answer to the blokes up north who’d been making it so hard for him, to the zombies over in Whitehall who flannelled their way from one disaster to another. What they were doing tonight was the bottom line. They were talking the kind of language the Provos understood. They were giving Charlie the kind of send-off he deserved.

  Thompson eyed Miller a moment longer, then handed him the night glasses. Miller would recce the place, Thompson would listen out on the radio. If Miller wanted him down there, he’d tell him. Otherwise, he’d be back. Miller cocked his head a moment, listening, then disappeared into the darkness. Thompson eased the Armalite, and worked his way left, across the mountainside, looking for the best fire position. He found it in the cover of the pine trees. He lay full length on the damp ferns, spreading his legs behind him, tucking the butt of the gun into his shoulder. From here, he could see the long, exposed flank of the house. It was very dark now, the cloud thickening, a curtain of rain sweeping up the valley. He could hear it pattering on the branches overhead, feel the first cold drips on the back of his neck. He peered down, immediately below him, where he knew Miller must be. He could see nothing.

  In the kitchen of the farmhouse, the man with the Kalashnikov cursed the rain. It drove hard against the window, obliterating what little he could see. Minutes earlier, he thought he’d spotted movement, high on the hillside. He had good night vision. He’d been in these mountains since childhood. He had a quick eye for the wild sheep that haunted the rocky slopes. Only this hadn’t been a sheep. He was sure of it. Wrong colour. Wrong shape. Wrong everything.

  He reached forward and opened the window. A flurry of rain blew sideways into the kitchen. Then it cleared, and there was a sudden lull between squalls, and he strained his eyes, peering out, looking for that tell-tale sign, something human, some small part of the landscape that moved, and gave the game away. For a full minute, nothing happened. He eased his legs from under him, adjusting the half squat he preferred for the longer-range stuff. Then he saw it again, much closer, a place he’d not expected, barely a hundred metres away. There was nothing as precise, as definite, as a face, or an arm, but he knew instinctively that it was human. And that it shouldn’t be there.

  He let the gun settle into his shoulder, and took the shallowest of breaths, the way they’d taught him up in Donegal. He eased the gun a fraction lower,
anticipating the target’s next move, closing on the farmhouse. Then he squeezed the trigger, the gentlest of pressures, a real artist. The Kalashnikov spat flame into the darkness. He’d set the fire control for single shot. He squeezed the trigger again, bracketing the target, punching out an imaginary square where he thought the shadow might be. After four shots, he stopped and withdrew the gun, and stepped back from the window. If there were others out there, now was the time he’d find out.

  Thompson saw the first shot before he heard it, the muzzle flash from one of the lower windows. Three more followed. He inched the Armalite left, sighting it squarely on the window. He could see nothing, just the open window and an oblong of darkness beyond it. He paused a moment, his finger on the trigger. The temptation was to fire, but he knew that these guys were good, that they’d fire and move, that he should look elsewhere, not react too quickly, not simply respond, playing their game, confirming what they wanted to know, that the attack was real. Real guns. Real bullets.

  He eased his position slightly, wondering about Miller, whether he was all right. Overhead, it had stopped raining. The clouds were thinner now, and he could see moonlight puddling the valley to the west. There were three windows on the ground floor of the farmhouse. The firing had come from the window on the left. He brought the Armalite right, across the centre window. The branches began to stir over his head, releasing a shower of drips, and suddenly the moonlight was upon them, spilling over the farmhouse. Thompson blinked. In the centre window, he could see a face. No question. The details were indistinct at two hundred yards, and he cursed the lack of a night sight, but the moonlight had told him, and he knew the moonlight was right.

  Once in a million years, the opposition made a real mistake, a blunder so elementary you found it hard to believe. And when it happened, if it ever happened, the worst possible move was to ignore it, or to mistrust it, thinking that life had somehow set you up. Thompson blinked, his eyes fixed on the window, the oval of face framed by the darkness. No. Life had not set him up. No way. Not tonight. Not with the Guvnor exposed and the man with the big gun eager to empty the rest of the magazine.

  Thompson centred the foresight on the face in the window. He closed one eye. His finger curled inside the trigger guard. He squeezed very slowly, very gently. There was a bang. The face disappeared.

  After twenty-three minutes in the water, Buddy had still not found the carrier. He looked at his watch, convinced that he hadn’t made a mistake. He studied his compass, double checking the course. On both counts, he was spot on. He slowed in the water, long lazy strokes with the big fins to maintain depth, wondering what else might have gone wrong. Unless he was going mad, unless Harry had made some terrible blunder with the gases and he was already half-narcotic, he should by now be through the carrier and half-way across the dockyard. He shook his head and kicked out again. The charges were getting heavy. His legs ached. And he still wasn’t there.

  Less than a minute later, he saw it. For a moment, still swimming, he didn’t understand what it was. Only when he was a foot or so away, and the rivets and the weed had separated from the surrounding murk, did he realize that he’d found the carrier. He transferred one of the baskets, freeing his right hand. He reached out, touching the rough surface of the steel hull and switched on the torch. The hull was painted a dull red. The marine growth was thicker than he’d anticipated. It wasn’t as bad as some of the older rigs he’d worked on – a thick crust of barnacles and tubeworms and colonies of mussels – but there was a lot of soft fouling, green stuff, brown stuff, different kinds of kelp. He shone the torch downwards a moment, seeing the wall of riveted plates extending, limitless, into the murk. Then he switched off the torch and began to swim slowly south, towards the stern. He was there in less than half a minute, recognizing the change in profile as the hull tucked in around the propeller shafts. Somewhere off to the right, deep in the darkness, was the huge blade of the rudder. Buddy congratulated himself, after all, on the course he’d swum. It had taken longer than he’d expected. He had little time to spare. But this, at least, was where he’d been headed. Clever fucker.

  He trod water for a minute or so, loosening the wire ties that closed the mouths of the shopping bags. When he’d got one open, he consulted his depth gauge and headed down, careful to keep the charge inside the bag, following a line of rivets to the point where the plates began to curve inwards, forming the bottom of the ship’s hull. At twenty-five feet, exactly right according to the stencilled markings he’d noted on the ship’s stern, he stopped, swimming south again, looking for the glands where the propeller shafts protruded from the hull. He found them almost immediately. At a range of two feet, they were huge, a structure in their own right. He swam upwards, six feet, and then north again, looking for that point of weakness where the glands were faired into the hull. When he found it, he stopped in the water.

  The magnetic clamps had a surface area about the size of a dinner plate. The shaped explosive charge was attached to the topside of the clamp by a thick plastic membrane. The membrane was penetrated by the detonator, a cylindrical object about the size of a Havana cigar.

  Buddy studied the hull. To work properly, the magnetic clamp had to marry with bare metal. Buddy drew his diver’s knife and began to scrape away at the patch of soft fouling, fronds of greenish kelp attached to the hull by a tough stalk. On the rigs, he’d have had proper tools, a needle gun or a pneumatic wire brush, but the knife was effective enough. The kelp came away in handfuls and soon he’d cleared enough to seat the clamp. Keeping the other bag over his arm, he took the clamp and the charge from the open bag and laid it carefully against the hull. As the clamp neared the bare metal, he felt the pull of the powerful magnets, and winced at the loud, hollow clang of metal on metal. He backed off a moment, inspecting the clamp. It looked obscene, a growth, a cancer. He reached out and tugged it. It was stuck fast.

  Buddy glanced at his watch. Unless he was to surface on the way back, he had barely three minutes left. He loosened the other bag, and looked at it a moment. Then he reached inside and removed the detonator. Without it the charge was useless. He backed off from the hull. Six feet away, it was invisible. Then he let the second charge go, angling the torch downwards, watching it fall slowly into the murk. One day, Buddy thought, some matelot’s going to try his luck over the side. Hook and line. Gash hour to waste on some sunny afternoon. And then? He shrugged, returning to the great red wall of the carrier’s hull, reaching out for the detonator, arming it, ready for the morning. One charge should do, he thought. Two was pure greed.

  He glanced at his watch again. He had a minute left. He took a final look at the clamp, and then switched off his torch, backing away for the second time, turning over onto his belly, free of the charges and the shopping bags, his night’s work at an end. He finned slowly upward, checking his depth gauge, adjusting his heading to hit the right course, keeping his breathing regular, drawing the darkness around him, trying to empty his mind of everything but the rhythm of his legs, and the noise of the rebreather in his ears, and the cold kiss of the water as it sluiced slowly past.

  Connolly lay on his belly on the cold flagstones in the darkened hall. The firing had stopped now, but he’d heard the last shot, the solid thwack of the incoming bullet, and he knew that it had lodged somewhere in Jude’s room, a wall perhaps, or a piece of furniture. Whatever had happened, he knew he had to get in there. The woman was a sitting target, for God’s sake. Literally.

  He crawled along the hall, towards Jude’s door. In the kitchen, he could hear the man with the Kalashnikov changing magazines. He seemed totally unmoved by this terrifying spasm of violence. He seemed to understand it all, this strange new geography, shapes on the hillside, muzzle flashes in the darkness, the cold bark of high powered rifles. He’d already told Connolly to find another window and use the automatic, but Connolly had declined the offer. His flirtation with firearms was over. Charlie had cured him of that.

  Pushing Jude’s door op
en, he checked for a moment before crawling in. The room was tiny. He levered himself up, hands and knees, an untidy half-crouch, alert for the slightest noise, the slightest movement. He looked at the bed. Jude was lying back, across the pillows. There was a small dark hole beneath her right ear. In the moonlight, the pillows behind her head were black with blood.

  Connolly crawled to the edge of the bed and reached up. Jude’s eyes were open and her mouth was budded around some sound or other, a gasp of surprise perhaps, or the beginnings of a question, but when he touched her face she was quite cold. There was no movement, no breath. The bits of her that had survived paralysis, the bits of her he’d got to know and like, had quite gone.

  At the window, a small square pane was shattered where the bullet had torn through, and the wind from the west was chill. He looked at Jude again, pulling the sheet up, over her face, trying to keep his own body away from the window, not wanting another bullet, more glass, his own face, neatly drilled.

  Jude shrouded, Connolly crawled back across the room, and into the hall. He knew now that he must get out. It was an overpowering feeling. He’d done what he could for Jude, sat with her, listened to her, learned about Buddy, the second marriage, the stables, what they’d planned together, the way they wanted their life to go. Sadly, in the time it takes to fall off a horse, it had all come to an end, and there’d been a very different kind of marriage, no less fond, no less intense, but hemmed in by the brutal truths of spinal injury. She’d agreed to go to Boston, she’d said, to please Buddy. It was what he wanted. It was the last big effort he felt he owed them both. But she’d never really believed that it would work. The only real cure, she’d said, was dying. Only then could they both – in their own ways – be released.

  Connolly inched down the hall, hugging the shadows, back on his feet, making for the side door, knowing that this was the real message she wanted him to carry away, the real word in Buddy’s ear, her parting gift. By the kitchen, he paused. John was back by the window, the Kalashnikov propped on a chair, gazing out, into the dark. There was moonlight in the kitchen and Connolly could see that he’d put on an old Sunday jacket against the cold. It was shiny at the elbows. The pockets were too big. Beside him, on the rush matting on the floor, was a plate and a glass of milk. On the plate was a pork pie, half eaten.