Carver

52

Carver spun the car round, put the pedal down, and raced out of the farmyard. When he hit the lane he did a handbrake turn to wrench the car through ninety degrees, then accelerated again as he drove towards the refinery. Up ahead the sky itself seemed to be ablaze, as the entire horizon filled with night-black smoke pierced by geysers of yellow, white and orange flame.

It took him forty seconds to reach the road that ran alongside the refinery’s main security fence. He was met by a scene of total carnage and devastation.

The field where the VIPs were supposed to land held the smouldering wreckage of the blown-up helicopter and the bodies of those who had died in it, or been hit by pieces of falling wreckage. Survivors were standing in small dazed groups: shadowy figures who were visible for a moment or two before being swallowed up again by the drifting, choking smoke. A man was striding up and down, jabbering at people and pointing towards the refinery as if giving orders, but no one was paying him any attention. Two uniformed security men were standing like lovers, one hugging and consoling the other, who was weeping at the horror of what he had seen. A TV cameraman was looking at the nightmare in front of him, his camera held uselessly down at his side. There was no point in him filming anything: the rest of his team, and the truck in which they’d come to Rosconway, had been obliterated. A solitary outside broadcast van painted in BBC livery had pulled up on to the grass and a female reporter was speaking to camera, turning back every few seconds to look at the scene she was attempting to describe. She started at the sound of another explosion, and cowered for a second, before pulling herself together, straightening up and looking at the camera again.

Carver drove as close to the conflagration as he could, then got out of the car. On foot he made his way towards the fire, surrounded all the way by dead and wounded people, abandoned vehicles, and random bits of torn and twisted metal, blown or fallen from who knew where. Holloway, Tyrrell and Schultz had been somewhere in there, and were now almost certainly dead. If he had got to the van sooner, they might still be alive. He stared at the volcanic fury of the blaze, feeling overawed and utterly insignificant in the face of its sheer scale.

Then Carver caught a glimpse of a familiar silhouette, outlined against a wall of fire. Schultz was alive. He was staggering out of the inferno, and there was someone over his shoulder. Carver saw the big man stumble, overcome by the heat and the smoke. Schultz took a few more paces, and then his knees buckled beneath him and he toppled to the ground, letting go of whoever he was carrying, so that their body rolled off his shoulder and fell helplessly, defencelessly, on to the tarmac.

Carver ran towards the two prone bodies, ignoring the terrible, roasting heat and the poisonous rasp of the chemicals in the air. He found Schultz apparently unconscious on the ground. A woman was lying beside him, her face bloodied, her leg broken. Carver knew that he would be able to carry her away to safety, but Schultz was another matter. He weighed sixteen or seventeen stone: too much for Carver to drag with one arm if he was holding the woman with the other. Desperately, Carver grabbed Schultz’s chest and shook him. Then he gave his face three or four stinging slaps. Schultz blinked, groaned and tried to focus his eyes on Carver.

‘Get up!’ Carver shouted, his throat burning with the effort, still so deafened by the earlier explosion that he could barely hear his own words.

Schultz just looked at him uncomprehendingly.

‘Get up, Sergeant Major!’ Carver repeated. ‘That’s an order!’

The air was getting even hotter, if such a thing were possible, and Carver could barely breathe. He felt dizzy, there was a rushing sound in his ears, and his vision was blurring.

He could just make out the blurred outline of Schultz’s body as the SBS man tried to get up. Carver got down on one knee, reached for the woman and lifted her over his shoulder. It took every ounce of strength and concentration he still had to be able to push up with his legs and get to his feet again. Then he reached out for Schultz.

‘Grab my hand!’ he croaked, his parched vocal chords now barely able to summon the means to speak.

Carver felt Schultz’s hand grip his wrist. Somewhere in the distance he heard the tortured scream of failing metal, and the remnants of a distillation tower appeared out of the flame, loomed over the three stranded humans, and toppled towards them with the slow, stately, but crushing inexorability of a felled redwood tree.

Carver wrapped his fingers round Schultz’s arm and pulled him upright. The two men broke into a ragged, shambling run as the top of the distillation tower crashed down, smashing into the road at exactly the point where they had been huddled less than ten seconds before.

Carver kept moving, driving himself forward, one desperate step after another. In the near delirium of overpowering heat and oxygen starvation, he felt as though he had been transported back a quarter of a century to the beastings he’d endured as he fought for selection to the SBS: forced marches with full packs in which every man had to complete the course, even if his mates had to drag him over the line. Back then his enemies had been the cold, the rain and the biting wind of the Brecon Beacons, the very opposite of the forces tormenting him here. But the principle was the same. You kept going when every fibre of your body was screaming at you to stop. You kept going when you thought you would die if you took a single step more. You kept going until you got to the end.

And suddenly Carver was aware that the air was a fraction cooler, and that the smoke had cleared away. He came back to reality to find himself back out on the road beside the refinery. Schultz was standing next to him, coughing and dry-retching. There was a small patch of cool, green grass a few metres away, so Carver walked over to it and laid the woman down. He took off his tie and wound it around the woman’s broken leg to give the shattered bone some small degree of support. He noticed she still had her name badge pinned to her jacket. It read, ‘Nicola Wilkins, Cabinet Office.’ Carver put his finger to her throat, just below the jawbone, and felt a faint, fluttering pulse.

‘Congratulations,’ he murmured. ‘You survived.’