by White, Gwynn
“Stay here,” Yates-Briggs whispered. “I’m going to cut them off.”
Harry nodded. A classic pincer move. Yates-Briggs got down low in the ditch and crabbed away in total silence. Watching him go, warrior was the word that sprang to mind.
The footsteps drew nearer. Harry climbed out of the ditch, leaving Ayrett in the mud cuddling his pistol, and eased around the cab of the cattle truck. “Ready,” Yates-Briggs said in his earpiece. The footsteps drew level with the truck. Harry burst onto the road. “Hold it right there, don’t fucking move!”
Two men stood before him, cuddie silhouettes in peaked caps and bulky ‘maudie’ coats. They raised their hands. Behind them, Yates-Briggs flipped the lever of his Z4 to automatic. The men’s heads jerked. They knew that sound. They were players.
“Could I see your ID, please?” Harry put a dry spin on the standard query. These two might be sworn to some minor local knight who was betting both sides of the coin, but more likely they were freemen. Left behind by modern times, clinging to some paper right of freehold or traditional craftsman status handed down from antiquity. As such, they were legally required to carry their papers on them at all times.
“Sure it’s dark as a dog’s arsehole, but don’t you recognize me?”
The other player let out a low chuckle. “You’re not as famous as you think you are, Rook.”
Harry lowered his gun and switched on his torch, starting the beam low and moving it up the first player’s body to his face. His night vision would be shot to hell now.
The weathered face and drooping black moustache belonged to Rook Niorlain, one of the IRA gunfathers who had come to the negotiating table a few years back. Since then, ceasefires had come and gone, but Niorlain remained key to the peace process, along with a handful of other older players.
The original tip leading to this operation had come from Niorlain himself.
Alyx O’Braonain, with her dead folk hero father and her audacious claim to the throne of all Great Britain, threatened not only the peace process, but also the IRA’s grip on power in the north. The gunfathers wanted her out of the way as much as the Crown did.
None of which explained what Rook Niorlain and his sidekick were doing here.
Unless it’s all a come-on.
“If your boys are planning a party, you’ll be the first to die,” Harry warned.
Rook lowered one hand to shade his eyes from Harry’s torch. “Switch that thing off. Do you want them on top of us?”
The mist drifted white across the road. Beyond the low stone wall behind the players, it rose as if from a steaming void. Brant patted the two men down. Harry turned off the torch. The players would be left thoroughly dazzled, which was just as well. Even blackened with cam cream, Harry had a famous face. It wouldn’t help matters for him to be recognized.
“Get out of here, Niorlain,” he said.
“It’s the voice of reason that is in the boy,” the second man said.
Rook stood his ground. “What will you do with O’Braonain when you catch her, tell me that?”
“Not your problem,” Brant said.
In Harry’s earpiece Sir Alec was saying, “Bloody hell. Escort them out to the VCP, and make sure they don’t quack.” Harry’s night vision had recovered enough that he could see Yates-Briggs shoving his Z4 into Rook’s shoulder blades, getting him moving.
Rook winced away from the gun. “Throw her in Armagh Jail, will you? You’re making a terrible mistake. Put your commander on the radio, let me speak to him. Give me one of yon fifty-mil guns up on your hardtops and I’ll do the job myself.”
“Don’t you usually delegate that sort of thing to children and mental deficients?” Harry said contemptuously.
Yates-Briggs prodded the players past him. “I’ll give you a shout on the net when we’re clear.”
Harry put out a hand to halt them. None of this made any sense unless Rook was having an acute attack of second thoughts. Was it possible that he’d expected the Wessex forces to assassinate Alyx O’Braonain, doing the IRA’s dirty work for them? Inured to violence, did he actually believe the IRA’s own propaganda that the Crown had a shoot-to-kill policy?
Harry’s rage boiled over, the more so because he’d come face to face tonight with the part of himself that wanted to kill them all, and to hell with chivalry.
“Knights give no quarter in battle, Niorlain. But this isn’t a war, it’s a police action. That’s why we’re fighting you with both hands tied, when we could stretch out our least little finger and slay you all whenever we chose. You’re a gangster, a kidnapper, and a murderer. We know it and you know it—”
“Hold on, this is not about me!”
“—but you are still innocent until proven guilty. Would you have us betray the law of chivalry? You know, the thing that Great Britain stands for?” Emotion choked Harry’s voice. “What am I saying? You never met a law you didn’t try to break, and you’re a warrior without chivalry, which is to say no warrior at all.”
Rook cocked his head. “Saints, you’re a lot of girl’s blouses. Fair play and chivalry, is it? And I suppose you’ve got dainty ideas about nutting women, too. Well, be easy with yourselves: O’Braonain is no woman. She’s not even fecking human. I can’t say clearer than that.”
“They’re invulnerable to bullets, so they are,” the other player exclaimed.
“I was coming to that. You can’t just shoot her, you must cut her body into pieces and scatter it to the four winds. And you must put running water between the parts, lest she gather herself back together—”
Yates-Briggs hit Rook in the back, jolting his teeth together with a clack. “Enough of your bloody croaking.”
Ayrett’s voice rang out. “Contact! Contact! Get down!”
The IRA players dived.
Harry thought: Oh, I see. They were keeping us talking.
A wave of noise broke over the road, falsely reassuring for the first split second, as if he were on the firing range back at home.
He fell.
4
Leonie
At The Same Time. Slieve Gullion
Gav lit his third fag, stinking up the inside of the car. Leonie fanned a hand in front of her face.
“Your sister doing better, is she?” Gav asked.
Leonie didn’t want to talk about Sam. But there was a reason Gav was the only person she’d told about her sister’s illness. He wasn’t prying or teasing, just being kind. “A bit,” she said eventually. “She’s going on pilgrimage to St. Halyson of the Beck next week, actually. He’s supposed to be really good for breathing problems.”
Gav made comical big eyes. “Doesn’t he cost the earth?”
“Yes, but it’ll be worth it if he can sort her out.”
“The problem’s not her, it’s the bloody saints,” Gav said supportively. “Completely useless they are these days.”
“Yeah, well, the way I see it the problem is we’re not paid enough.”
“You can say that again.”
Gunfire rattled, not very far away.
Gav threw his fag out of the window.
Leonie started the Morris’s engine and screamed out of the layby. The car was nothing special, just one of the third-hand rides that the Company went through on a monthly basis, but she could make even a piece-of-shit English engine scream. Her finger found the pressel. “Chimera. I have a contact, about a mile off in the direction of Chicken Coop. I say again, contact!”
“Myxilites on full spray,” Gav said. “I know that sound. It’s the sound of knightly size thirteens sinking deep into the shit.”
“Chimera is mobile towards the scene.”
“Bee Sting is mobile.”
“Contact! Gift is mobile.”
“Zero, acknowledged.” Back in the duty room, Quillon’s voice was calm. The operators in the field always knew better than the ops desk. That was the rule. They were on the scene, Quillon was not.
And although he should have ordered them to s
tay outside the cordon, he also knew that Floyd was somewhere in there. A man they’d all worked with, gotten drunk with, mourned their losses with, and ragged mercilessly for his habit of collecting the N-Ergy bottle caps that had lottery numbers on the inside, even though he never won anything.
The ROCK wouldn’t slow down to help Floyd if he was hurt. Their priority was catching the terrorists. That was as it should be, but it didn’t mean Floyd had to be left to die.
Leonie’s headlights picked up the red stripe on the side of a cuddywagon parked sideways across the road. Pointyheads—constables sworn to the local knight who owned this area—gestured for her to stop. She slung her car pistol under the driver’s seat and jumped out. Gav climbed out his side carrying the PX-80, a funny-looking little machine gun with a folding stock, which fired 7.62mm rounds at a velocity that would stop a berserking mammoth.
“This road is temporarily closed. No thoroughfare.”
“Crown security forces,” Gav said. “Mind our wheels for us, would you?”
They ran, slowing to a jog as the road got steeper. The fog was heavy with the scent of wet grass. Leonie pulled her 9mm out of the front of her jeans and checked the magazine as she ran, racked a round into the chamber, flipped the safety catch off. Then she reached inside the lining of her jacket to switch on her body set. Gav did likewise. “Hunter, come in,” he said. “Hunter, Chimera. Come in.”
Flares painted auroras in the fog. Gav wheezed, out of breath. Leonie took up the chant. “Hunter, Chimera. Hunter, come in.” Automatic fire cracked out again, farther away, with a different sonic signature.
They rounded a curve in the road and hit the farm. A crossbarred gate sagged into the ground in front of a cattle grid. A hundred yards away, a mist-haloed light on the gable end of an outbuilding revealed the corner of a farmyard. The darkness seemed to squeeze that patch of light like a fist, but within it, nothing moved.
They dashed across the gap and cringed into the wet hedge. “Hunter,” Leonie chanted under her breath, holding down the pressel in her jacket pocket. “Hunter, where the fuck are you?”
“Man down,” Floyd said in her earpiece. He sounded weary, emotionless. “Hello, all call signs. Man down. We have had a contact. Man down. Hello, all call signs.”
“Hunter. Chimera. Where are you?”
His voice came alive, breaking. “On the road, level with the corner of the field adjoining the forest. You’ll see the horsebox. Is Gav there?”
Gav cut in. “Don’t move, lad. The pointyheads are all over the bloody shop, shooting at every tree that moves.”
They started running again. Now that she knew Floyd was alive, Leonie could let herself get pissed at him for dragging them into this. Single shots cracked in the distance, but all she could do about the danger of friendly fire was stay in control of herself, and trust that the pointyheads were staying in control, too.
The famous horsebox loomed out of the dark. A torch drew Leonie and Gav around to the front of the mud-splattered estate car hitched to it. Floyd and another man squatted on the ground. The casualty sprawled between them, six feet of ROCK knight breathing with a lung-shot slurp. The other knight pressed on the casualty’s chest with the flat of one hand, barking into his throat mic. Floyd looked up. He seemed strangely calm. “We were ambushed. They were right behind that stone wall all the time. When we stopped in front of them, I expect they couldn’t believe their luck.”
“They won’t get away,” Leonie said. “The pointyheads have the whole area cordoned off.”
Floyd snorted, making his opinion of the pointyheads clear.
Gav said, “Are you hurt, lad?”
“May have got scratched crawling around in that gorse. I went over the wall. There’s two milk churns packed with ampho back there.” He fished in his pocket to show detonator devices: mass-produced digital prayer timers with the backs prised off, trailing wires. “We crashed Rook Niorlain’s party. We were only meant to be his insurance.”
Gav snapped out the stock of the PX-80. He wedged it into his shoulder and traversed the arc of the road, squinting into the night-sight. “Rook Niorlain? What about Alyx O’Braonain?”
“Well on her way to Galway by now, I’d say.”
Leonie switched her attention to the ROCK casualty. He needed a miracle and he needed it now. Before the current sanctity crisis, every soldier used to carry holy relics in a combat feretory. There just weren’t that many puissant saints anymore. Her hand went to the vial of holy dust she wore around her neck. That would be like offering a single boiled sweet to a man dying of hunger.
The other knight looked up, his face cam-creamed black. “The round’s still in him. Get on your knees.” A bloodstained glove grabbed her wrist, guided her hands to the casualty’s side and shoulder. His smock had been slashed open. His face looked swollen. When the knight snatched his hand away, the entrance wound in his chest farted a vapor of blood and air into Leonie’s face, making her flinch. “Roll him, now!” They heaved the man onto his side. Blood gurgled out of the wound, draining from the punctured lung. The knight gently lowered the casualty onto his back again. “Hold the seal.”
Leonie slid her bare hand over the wound, flattening snails of bloody chest hair. It seemed pointless. But it was all they could do. The young man hitched a breath, his lungs sucking at her palm. She willed him to fight for his life.
The other knight jumped up and scanned the blackness overhead. “Fuck the weather! I want that fucking heli on the ground now!”
“We can evacuate him by car, sir,” Leonie said. “We’ve got a car right here. He might have a chance.”
“Might have a chance? Do you know who he fucking is?”
“Oh fuck,” Gav said. “It’s not. Saints help us, it is.”
Leonie felt dizzy. She took a second look at the young man bleeding out under her hands. This time she recognized him. Idiotically, she thought: Well, it’s going to be all right then. Prince Harry can’t die, they won’t let him, that would be absurd …
...but of course, he could die. The absurd thing was her thinking he couldn’t. They? There was no ‘they’ here. No officers, no nobles, no saints. Only her and Gav and Floyd and this ROCK knight who could do nothing for his mate, his prince, except rave at people who were too far away to help …
She realized she’d been holding her own breath since the last time Harry breathed. She gasped for air, and on her own rolled the prince again, draining yet more blood that had pooled inside his lung.
Suddenly the other ROCK knight went calm. “Movement on this side of the farmhouse,” he relayed to them. “Looks as if the fuckers are trying to sneak up on us. You, get on that side of the hedge and cover the arc.”
“Oh, this is a bloody nice day out,” Gav said. “Yes, sir.” He pulled himself through the hedge and was gone.
Leonie saw there was a relic strapped over Harry’s chest. She’d thought it was just his rucked-up chest harness, but the glint of the Halidom tag told her it was the mummified heart of some holy ancient in a custom webbing. Relief flooded her. Of course they wouldn’t let the crown prince out as far as the corner store without giving him some protection to carry. And undoubtedly it was the heart of a really useful saint, a king or queen of House Wessex with millions of documented miracles to their name. That was why he wasn’t dead yet. The saint was battling the mortal wound in his chest. He had a chance! “Hold on,” she whispered. “Just hold on, Your Highness, they’re coming for you …” Her head popped up. “I can hear the heli.”
“They’re going to land in the field!” The other ROCK knight had to yell over the renewed noise of gunfire from the direction of the farmhouse. His mates must be clearing the landing area. After the shooting stopped, the clamor was kept up by dogs barking and cows mooing in alarm. “We’ve got to get him over the hedge!”
“Sir, I don’t think we should move him!”
“We have to. Every second counts.” The knight glanced around, then drew his handgun and shot out
the nearside tyres of the horsebox. The box tilted, tipped over, and crashed into the hedge, flattening it. “Help me. Hold the seal.” The knight scooped Harry into his arms. Leonie did her best to keep her palm pressed over the wound in his chest. They shuffled through the ditch, trampled around the horsebox where it had flattened the hedge for them, and hurried awkwardly across the grass on the other side, slipping in cowpats. The helicopter sounded as if it were right on top of them.
Light suddenly drenched the field. In stark black and white, Leonie saw the carousel of a cattle feeder, terrified livestock bunched behind it.
A knight burst out of the farmyard gate, running, stopping to fire back at the farmhouse.
The helicopter descended with its nightsun on, its backwash blowing Leonie’s fringe off her forehead. It was a Dragonet out of the army base up on Mount Synge. Soldiers jumped out almost before the skids touched the grass and ran towards Leonie, carrying a stretcher. Another soldier crouched in the helicopter’s door, shooting at the men who were now dashing out of the farmyard after the knight.
The IRA.
The boyos converged on the helicopter, running so fast that their movements looked comically jerky. They fired their Myxilites from the waist without stopping. They were charging straight into the gunfire from the chopper. Why weren’t they going down?
Leonie fell back to let the stretcher crew get to Harry. She flung herself full length and rolled into the nightsun shadow behind a tussock. Bracing her elbows, she fired her 9mm at the three boyos closing in on the Dragonet. She might as well have been shooting spitballs.
Lying near her with the backwash whipping his long hair out of its knot, the other knight fired, changed magazines, kept firing. The barrel of his Z4 must have been red-hot. Yet not one of the boyos fell.
The stretcher was aboard.