Red Notice

81

Tom tried to protect his head as the right side of his body took the brunt of the fall. All the wind was driven from his lungs. He just wanted to lie there, re-oxgenate and take the pain, but he knew that couldn’t happen.

As the adrenalin ebbed, the wound in his thigh began to throb. Shouts and screams of anger and command echoed from the carriages above. He rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled under the train, out of the line of fire, then started crawling back towards Coach Eight.

He reached the bullet-smashed remains of the toilet bowl and septic tank, and stopped to listen. Hearing nothing, he positioned himself diagonally beneath the hole in the toilet floor, raised his arms and eased himself upwards. Once his head was above the parapet and his elbows were resting on the hard surface, he stopped to listen again.

Still nothing.

He levered his torso and legs into the cubicle, then crawled across to the doorway. A pair of boy’s trousers and pants, soiled with shit, packed one hell of a punch, but he left them where they were. No one without a respirator was going to come anywhere near this place unless they absolutely had to.

He craned his neck around the frame and checked that the carriage was empty. A kid’s sweatshirt had been deposited across the arm of a nearby seat. Using the cover of the luggage rack he grabbed the sleeve, took it back into the cubicle and locked the door.

He fished the remaining PE out of his jacket and put it on the floor. It wasn’t going to waste. He just had other things to attend to first.

He undid his jeans, sat down, and peeled them past the glistening crimson wound on his thigh. The round had missed the bone, but had gouged a three-inch deep crevasse through the flesh. It had to be sorted, and quickly. The pain wouldn’t go away, Tom knew, and infection would soon follow. But until he had a decent cocktail of the right kind of drugs, he just had to accept that and carry on. What mattered right now was stemming the loss of body fluids.

He tore the sweatshirt into strips and began to pack the crevasse. If he didn’t, it would just keep bleeding. His head began to swim: he clamped his eyes shut and took a couple of deep breaths to clear it. The sight of his traumatized flesh wasn’t helping. And neither was the PE. It was almost as bad for human beings as it was for pipelines. It wouldn’t kill you when you handled it, but you were guaranteed the mother of all migraines if it was absorbed into the bloodstream, or if you worked with it in a confined space.

He tried to distract himself by remembering the looks on the gunmen’s faces when he’d pulled his stunt with the sugar. Most fine organic substances suspended in air could be ignited. That was why mills and coal mines needed to be well ventilated. And so did outbuildings, if flour bombs were part of your afternoon fun: at Tom’s eleventh birthday party he’d accidentally torched his mother’s stable block, and burned it to the ground.

Once the cavity was packed, he squashed the edges of the wound together and bound it with the remaining strips of material, like a butcher tying a beef fillet. He needed to keep up the pressure if he was going to stop it leaking.

He checked his handiwork and sat back against the toilet wall. His thigh was burning now, but he couldn’t tell if the pain was making him gag, or the PE, or the stench of the soiled clothes. Jesus, did all little boys’ shit smell that bad?

If he and Delphine managed to get through this, he guessed he’d soon find out.

Fuck, he was going to be a dad…

Excitement, fear, and then a wave of happiness overcame the pain. He suddenly realized he was grinning like an idiot. He was going to be a father. And if he could persuade Delphine to stick around, he might even be able to make a better fist of it than his own emotionally retarded, gin-soaked parents had.

But first he had to sort this shit out. The pain surged back as he thought about what might be happening to her now.

He was pretty sure Laszlo would keep her alive, at least for the time being. Since discovering their connection, X-ray One had known Tom would be coming back for her. And coming back for her was top of his list of priorities.

A plan was beginning to form in his fevered mind.

After his exploding window trick he still had two slabs of PE, but no detonator. He’d bitten a small lump of PE off one of the slabs and, wincing at the taste, chewed it until it was sticky and pliable, then folded it around the detonator and reconnected the battery.

After slapping it on the glass, he’d flattened himself against the side of the carriage and pulled the square of plastic from the crocodile clip. The det alone would have shattered it; the PE gum stuck it to the target and made an even bigger bang.

Budget-quality PE had plenty of drawbacks, but some distinct advantages. The high nitroglycerine content made it extremely sensitive to shock and heat.

Tom hauled himself to his feet, unscrewed one of the light-bulbs in the ceiling of the cubicle and ripped away the wiring behind it. He stripped off the plastic sheathing with his teeth and got busy with the fuse.

PE combusts like paper — but with much greater intensity. Its chemicals burn at such a rapid rate that a vast amount of energy escapes immediately. The detonator is the match. And this stuff was so inferior that all it would take to get it burning was the heat of the bulb.

He took the two slabs of PE and inserted the fuse between them like the filling in a sandwich. He moulded the material to make a device the size of a small loaf of bread, then twisted the two leads from his makeshift detonator together to avoid them acting as an antenna. Finally, he zipped up his jacket and shoved the device inside to keep it secure.