A Line in the Sand

by Gerald Seymour

  "And I'll talk about wine, and downstairs there is a bottle open and waiting."

  "So, you've lost him."

  Cox was hurrying, and for once ignored his habits: didn't go to his office first to shed his coat, smooth his hair and straighten his tie. Straight to the central desk in the work area. He had been called from dinner.

  "Bloody marvelous. What else have you got?"

  He was the man in charge, and he threw the responsibility of failure at his subordinates.

  "Thought there were a few things I could rely on, wrong again, thought I could rely on you not to lose him."

  Fenton, who had already ladled abuse at his own subordinate, Markham, squirmed. Parker kept her head down. The others at the table, white-faced, avoided Cox's eyes, except for Duane Littelbaum, who eased his shoes off the table, and laid down his Coca-Cola can.

  "His advantage is small, and temporary only," Littelbaum murmured.

  "He has to come to the house. If he's moved he'll come tonight. You should relax... We all get scared when it's out of our hands, you're not unique."

  Cox glanced at him savagely.

  "What's he got?"

  Fenton dived for the book on the table, as if it were his saviour.

  "What we think, from the questioning of Yusuf Khan, it's probably an RPG-7, rocket anti-tank grenade launcher. If the indications from that bedside conversation are correct then he has a weapon with a maximum effective range of three hundred metres, particularly useful at night."

  The old warhorse from B Branch snatched the book from Fenton.

  "It has an internally lit optical sight for night shooting, or might have the passive starlight scope. Against tanks, even a deflection shot, it'll put a five centimetre hole through around twenty-five centimetres of armour-plate. At a hundred metres it cannot miss."

  Cathy Parker leaned over the warhorse's shoulder.

  "It can penetrate at least twenty centimetres of sandbags, fifty centimetres of reinforced concrete, and not that it applies well over a hundred centimetres of earth and log bunker..."

  "Christ..." Cox shuddered.

  Littelbaum smiled and swung his feet back on to the table.

  "But it has a signature, flash and smoke discharge. It's best if he fires, then you locate him and you go get him."

  "If there's anyone left alive, afterwards, to get him." Cox left them, in their silence, kicked open his office door, and threw his coat on to the floor.

  "It'll be tonight, he'll come tonight."

  Frank Perry looked away from Davies. He sat on the floor, his body weight against the bottom of the door. Ask a bloody stupid question and get a bloody unwanted answer.

  There was a small, right-angled space, between the hall and the kitchen door, protected by interior walls. The question why had Davies gone upstairs and dragged the double mattress off the spare bed and the single mattress off Stephen's bed and wedged them on their sides against the two interior walls, and made an igloo between the hall and the kitchen door? Why? He sat and cradled a tumbler of whisky, no water. He could have asked Blake and Paget as they heaved in the sandbags they'd filled. The sand and the empty bags had come an hour earlier. There had been a sharp exchange at the front gate because the delivery driver had dumped the sand and said it wasn't on his work docket to stay and help fill the bags. Perry sat with the weight of the vest on his shoulders. Davies was inserting a chair into the igloo space, a hard chair from the dining room, pushing its seat against the kitchen door, and then he draped the ballistic blanket over its back. The sandbags were already in place at the hall end of the igloo. He drank the whisky, which burned in his throat and upper stomach, the third one that Blake had poured him. He thought, pretty soon, he should go and piss.

  It was better that she had gone, with Stephen. He could sense the change in the men's mood, like they'd cleared their decks. While Davies built the igloo, Blake was checking the weapons, and he'd cleared all the rounds out of the machine-gun magazines then loaded them again. There was a box on the carpet, beside his feet, with the big red cross on it and he'd been asked again for his blood group. He'd given it to them a week ago, but they'd said they were just checking and he'd heard them talking hospitals. With Meryl and Stephen gone, what had changed, he thought, was that they no longer had the responsibility for the protection of a human being. Frank Perry was an item, he was baggage, protected because of its symbolic value. He gulped the whisky. Paget and Rankin were in the hall. They were going off duty, the new shift was in the hut. What he didn't understand was that they seemed neither pleased to be going off duty nor reluctant to leave. By the time they were at the door, Paget and Rankin were already muttering about the different brands of thermal socks.

  Davies said, "He's moved. We don't know where he is or where he's coming from. Would you, please, Mr. Perry, go quickly to the lavatory, then settle into the proteded space. Because he's moved we think he'll hit tonight."

  Perry downed the drink, stood and slurred his laugh.

  "Bit overdoing it, yes, bit over the top, yes, for one man with a rifle?"

  "We don't think it's a rifle, Mr. Perry, we think it'll be an anti-tank armour-piercing rocket launcher."

  Ask a bloody stupid question... He used the cover of the stones of the churchyard, those that were beyond the throw of the coloured lights from the church itself.

  Valiid Hossein had the weapon tilted against his shoulder, and the barrel with the two-kilogram projectile loaded, gouged into his flesh. From the churchyard he could watch the lights of cars on the road. It was important to him to find the pattern they made. The slow-moving patrols of security men would be the same here as outside the bases of the Americans in Riyadh or Jeddah. Patrols were always predictable it was what they did. The slow cars came by, going into the village and out of it every nine minutes, with only a few seconds' difference in each journey.

  From the churchyard, he slipped over a wall and into a garden. He crossed that garden, and two more. Often, at the Abyek camp, he had practice-fired the RPG-7, and it was simple and effective. He had fired it in the Faw marshes when the Iraqis had counterattacked against the bridgehead with armoured personnel carriers and the T-62 amphibious capability tanks. He knew well what it could do... He moved across two more gardens. He would have preferred to be close, so that the target man could see the blade or the barrel. It was better when they saw it, and the fear flitted over their faces. Then he felt the excitement in his groin.

  Vahid Hossein was in another garden, crouched and still. A door opened and a dog trotted out into the pool of light. It approached the edge of the light and yapped, but was frightened to move into the darkness. The rain began again. A man stood in the door and shouted for the dog, which knew he was there. Its courage grew because the man was behind it. It was a small dog and it bounced with the ferocity of its barking. If the man came close, he would kill him, a blow to the neck; if the dog came, he would throttle it. He would not be stopped. The rain pattered on him. The man strode towards the dog, towards the place where he crouched, lifted it up, smacked it, and carried it back into the house.

  He moved again.

  She had given him the exact description of the house on the far side of the road into which the target had been moved.

  "A drink, Meryl?"

  She shivered. Stephen was upstairs in the room allocated to him, and had said it was a dump. She'd pulled his lorries out of the case and scattered them on the floor for him, on the bare boards.

  "That would be nice." She grimaced at the cold air. The window was ajar behind the curtains and the wind rippled them.

  "Red or white. They're both from the Rhone valley, Cave de Tain l'Hermitage, it's only a little place but they've been making wine there since the days of the Romans. We're very fond of it. I think the lovely thing about the study of wine is that one is never an expert, always learning. That's a good maxim for life. Which'll it be?"

  "Red, please to put some life into me."

  "Shall do... I'm sorr
y about the window but Luisa likes windows to be open so that she feels the wind, she can't abide to be closed in you understand."

  "Of course." She hadn't noticed it before, but he wore a thick jacket over a crew-necked sweater. She looked at the grate, saw old ash and clinker.

  Simon Blackmore would have seen her glance at the fireplace.

  "Sorry, we haven't got round to cleaning it yet, but we don't have fires. Luisa cannot abide lit fires. They burned her with cigarettes, but some of her friends were branded with a poker from a brazier."

  "I'll get a sweater."

  "No, no, don't." He played the gentleman, took off his jacket and draped it on her shoulders, then poured her wine.

  She was quite touched. It was ridiculous but sweet. She'd ring Frank later and tell him. And if when she telephoned she could not be overheard, she'd tell him they were daft, but lovely, and they lived in a freezer. He said apologetically that he ought to be in the kitchen helping would she excuse him if he left her alone?

  "Let me do that, help Luisa."

  "Absolutely not. You're our guest and need a spot of pampering." There were two bookshelves in the room. She went past the window and crouched to look at the books.

  He had the launcher on his shoulder and his finger on the guard.

  He was down among a mass of garden shrubs. Beyond the hedge and the road was the cottage. He had seen the target's shadow against the moving curtain, then the coat of the man between the gap in the curtains, then the shadow.

  He had the sights set to forty-five metres.

  The car came past, dawdling, its lights brightening the hedge in front of him. He was not concerned with other cars, only with the cars that carried the guns and cruised slowly. The darkness came back to the road and he made his last checks.

  Paget said, "What I always say, you get what you pay for."

  Rankin said, "Fair enough what you pay for but if you want the proper gear then, by God, you've got to pay."

  They were on their way back to their lodgings in the town after the end of their twelve-hour shift. Behind them, in the barricaded and guarded house, the principal was someone else's headache. For twelve hours, they were free of it.

  "When we're out in the bloody boat, this weekend, I want to be warm.

  "Then it's gonna cost you."

  "Daylight robbery as bloody usual."

  "As you said, Joe, you get what you pay- The flash of bright light exploded from behind the hedge on the far side of the road. It illuminated the dead hedge leaves, an old holly tree and the trunk of an oak. Across the road, brilliant in colour, came a line of shining gold thread, going arrow-straight in front of the car's windscreen.

  The flash came, and the thread unravelled in a split moment of silence. The thread-line crossed the road, cleared the opposite low wall, and a small garden and went straight into a downstairs window. It was almost in petrifyingly slow motion.

  The blast from the flash fire behind the hedge hammered into the car as Joe Paget braked, and with it was the whistle shriek of the gold thread's passing.

  The thunder of the detonation pierced Dave Rankin's ears, and he froze. There was a blackness in his mind and he could feel the air stripped from his lungs. This was not Lippitts Hill, nor Hogan's Alley, nor any bloody range they'd ever been on, not any exercise. The wheels had locked when Paget had braked and his sight was gone. They were slewed across the road and Dave Rankin's ears were dead from the blast sound.

  Paget gasped, "It's where she is-' Rankin bawled, "Get there, get there to it where she is-' Paget had stalled the motor. Rankin was swearing at his window, electric, the pace at which it came down. The engine was coughing back to life. Rankin had the Glock off his belt. Paget had the car swerving back on to the centre of the road.

  "Fucking get there, Joe!"

  Paget put the car back into gear and Rankin's head jerked forward and slapped the dash. Paget accelerated. They were coming towards the house. There was just smoke, billowing from the front window of the house, from the black hole where the window had been and curtain shreds, and silence. The reflex for Rankin was to get out of the car, help make the area secure, radio in. He had the door half open when he was thrown back in his seat as Paget hit the pedal.

  "Look, for fuck's sake, Dave, look!"

  Paget's free hand, off the wheel, reached out and caught Rankin's coat front, loosed it and pointed.

  It was a moment before Rankin comprehended, then he saw him.

  There was a high wall of old weathered brick that kept him on the road. The headlights caught him. He was running with an awkward, fast stride towards the end of the high wall and the graveyard beyond. The headlights trapped him. He was in army fatigues but the mud on them blocked out the patterns of the camouflage. As he ran he twisted his head to look behind him. The lights would have been in his eyes, blinding him, and he ran on. The car closed on him.

  Rankin had his head and his shoulders, his arm, out of the passenger side window, the wrong side window. He tried to aim, but couldn't hold steady. The Glock was a close-quarters weapon. Practice on the range, with the Glock, was at never more than twenty-five metres. The Heckler & Koch that he'd carried all day, that he would have given his right ball for, would have done the job perfectly but was back in the Wendy hut with the relief.

  "Brake, Joe, and give me some goddamn light."

  The braking bloody near cut him in two. His back thudded against the door-frame.

  Rankin went out through the window, fastest way, and tumbled on the tarmac. The breath was squeezed out of his body. He dragged himself up, winded and so bloody confused.

  Paget spun the wheel.

  The headlights hit the man as he straddled the graveyard's boundary wall.

  Rankin was down low, kneeling, and saw him. The lights threw huge shadows off the stones. He was at fifteen paces and going fast, but the headlights held him. They didn't practise it at the range, but he knew what to do. Rankin's fists were locked together on the butt on the Glock, and he punched his arms out and made the isosceles. He tried to control his breathing, to hold the aim steady. His finger was on the trigger. Thirty metres, going on thirty-five. He took the big deep breath to steady himself. Forty metres, going towards the shadows thrown off the stones. He aimed at the back of the running man, into the middle of the spine, and squeezed hard on the trigger. The running man was between a cross and the shadowy form of an angel stone. He fired again. The crack belted his ears. He saw the back of the running man as it dropped. Double tap... Rankin shouted, "I got him I fucking got him, Joe."

  The engine was left running.

  "Bloody good, Dave."

  "Had him, I dropped him."

  Paget went over the wall and right, towards the church porch. Rankin covered him, heard the shout, scrambled over and circled to the left. It was what they had endlessly practised, both of them, at Lippitts Hill, until it was routine and boring: two guns, never presenting a target, and closing for a kill. One going forward the other covering, the other going forward and one covering. They closed on the gap space between the cross and the angel. There was a dark place, a little beyond where the shadows of the two stones merged, and beyond it there was clear lit ground. They stalked the space, sprinting between the stones, freezing and aiming, calling the moves to each other.

  "You ready, Dave?"

  "Ready, Joe."

  Rankin's aim was into the shadows. He was behind the cross.

  Paget reached up with his torch from behind the cover of the angel.

  The torch beam wavered through the shadow, and fell on the grass.

  There was no body on the grass, no corpse and no wounded man.

  The beam moved over the grass and there was no weapon discarded there, no blood.

  "I thought I saw him go down..."

  "You thought wrong, Dave."

  "After fifteen bloody years... "Sixteen years, actually, Dave you waited sixteen years and then you fucked up."

  Dave Rankin knelt on the grass wher
e there was no body, no blood, no weapon, and he shook. As a pair they were laid-back, private, superior bastards. They always did well on the range and never had to be sent for a coffee and a smoke to calm themselves before trying again to get the necessary score to pass the reappraisal. They were the best, they were the ones the instructors pointed out to the recruit marksmen. Sixteen years of practice and sixteen years of training no body, no blood, no weapon. He knelt on the damp grass and the energy seemed to drain out of him. He hung his head until Paget pulled him roughly to his feet.

  "In this life, Dave, you get what you pay for. They didn't pay much."

  "I would have sworn I'd hit him."

  "There's no blood, Dave.. . They got us."

  The noise of the explosion had careered around the village.

  It pierced the doors and windows of the houses, the cottages, bungalows and villas, where the televisions blared the argument of the evening's dramas. It split into kitchens and dissolved desultory meal conversations. It hammered into the talk in the bar and silenced them there. It startled a man with a dog on the road, a woman who was in the back of her garden filling a coal bucket, a man who worked at a lathe on the bench in his garage, and a couple making love in the flat above a shop. The blast sounded in the houses, gardens and lanes of the village... and in the barricaded house.

  It murmured its way into the safe area between the mattresses, past the filled sandbags, and Blake swore softly. Davies dropped his hand on to Frank Perry's shoulder, and there was silence. Then the radio started screaming for them... Nobody in the village moved quickly to leave the protection of their homes. There had been the noise, then the silence, then the howling of the sirens. Only after the sirens had come and the quiet had descended again, did the villagers gather their coats, wrap themselves in warmth and come out of their homes to go to look and to gawp.

  The rain had come on heavily.

  Eventually, they came from their corners of the village. Their shuffled steps muted, huddled under umbrellas, the first of them reached the house, lit by arc-lamps, as the ambulance pulled away.

  They gathered to watch.