At Risk

44

Jean had been driving for twenty minutes when they saw the roadblock. They were travelling at a careful twenty-five miles an hour along a rutted single-lane track, enclosed by high hedges of bramble and elder. According to the map the lane would soon connect with another, which after various bifurcations would lead them southwards between the villages of Denton and Birdhoe. The route had been planned on the basis that they were still driving the Astra, and as the one on which they were least likely to encounter a police car. Given their changed circumstances, there had been an argument in favour of heading for the fastest road out of the area, and attempting to outrun any roadblock, but on balance, thought Jean, they had probably made the right decision by sticking to the original route. Farm roads were slow, but they were discreet.

Beside her, the young man whose car she was driving had subsided into a silent, sulking torpor. His immediate fear of their weapons had subsided, to be replaced by a dull fury at his helplessness and at the liberties taken with his precious Toyota.

Jean saw the blue light at the same moment that he did. They were passing a gap in the hedge, a gap through which the junction with the Birdhoe road, half a mile ahead, was momentarily visible. The blue light had flickered just once-a mistake, Jean guessed. Praise be to God, she thought, for the flatness of this countryside, and then the fear kicked in, hard and painful.

“Police,” the greasy-haired young man murmured fearfully. It was the first word that he had spoken.

“Shut up!” Jean ordered him tersely. Her heart was pounding. Had they been seen? There was a good chance that they hadn’t, given the distance and the height of the hedges.

“Reverse,” ordered Faraj.

Jean hesitated. To drive back past the gap would give the waiting police a second chance to see them.

“Reverse,” repeated Faraj angrily.

She came to a decision. A short way in front of them, to their right, was a narrow track leading to a motley collection of barns and farm outbuildings. No actual dwelling was visible.

Pulling the wheel over, ignoring Faraj’s protests, she swung quietly up the track. As far as the roadblock was concerned, they were invisible. They just had to hope that there were no farm workers about. Thirty yards up the track the ground opened out into a walled yard in which stood a rusted tractor and harrow and a silage heap covered by a plastic sheet and old tyres.

Driving round the far side of the silage heap so that the car was hidden by the road, she came to a sharp stop. She turned to Faraj and he nodded, seeing belatedly that the idea was a good one.

“Out,” Jean said to the youth, into whose fearful eyes a faint spark of hope had crept. “Get into the boot.”

He nodded, and did so, tucking himself deep and fearful into the carpeted space. The rain lanced down, cold against Jean’s face after the warmth of the car. For a moment his eyes met hers, frankly imploring, and then she felt Faraj press the butt of the PSS into her hand and knew that the moment had come. Around her, ghostly and transparent, crowded her fellow trainees from Takht-i-Suleiman, silently yelling and waving their weapons. “To kill an enemy of Islam is to be reborn,” whispered the instructor. “You will know the moment when it comes.”

She blinked and they vanished. Behind her back the PSS was heavy in her hand. She smiled at the young man. His knees were drawn up to his face, covering his chest. A head shot, then. The moment was unreal. “Could you just shut your eyes a moment?” she asked him.

The discharge was soundless and the recoil negligible. The youth twitched once, and was dead. It was the simplest thing in the world. The boot closed with a faint hydraulic whisper, and when she turned to Faraj to return the weapon, she knew that nothing now stood between them.

Wading through the thick brown midden they grabbed a corner each of the plastic sheet and dragged it off the silage heap and over the car. A half-dozen tyres came rolling with it, and they heaved three of these on top of the sheet. The rain poured down on the midden and the silage heap and the rusted tractor. It was the sort of scene you drove straight past.

She was leading Faraj now, across the yard and down to the narrow drainage cut. Their rucksacks were on their backs and their waterproofs zipped to the chin. The biscuit tin containing the moulded and wax-sealed C4 explosive was at the top of Faraj’s pack.

The water in the cut was agonisingly cold as it crept up past her crotch to her waist, but Jean’s heart was still racing with the relief that killing, when all was said and done, had proved to be such a simple thing. She hadn’t given the corpse more than a flicker of a glance; the impact of the shot had told her all that she needed to know and she heard it again now, like the sound of a boot stamping on a rotten marrow.

Reborn, remade.

After a hundred yards they stopped, and peered through the dead foliage bordering the cut. Faraj passed her the binoculars. A flatbed truck was standing at the roadblock, and a policeman was clambering over its load of blue fertiliser sacks. Search on, thought Jean. The Malyah was zipped into her hood now.

“This nullah takes us close to them,” murmured Faraj, scanning the open fields before them. “But the hedges are dead and we will be seen if we try to go across country. We have to assume they have good optical equipment.”

“They’re local police, not soldiers,” said Jean, glancing at her watch. “My guess’d be that we’ve got another twenty minutes to half an hour. After that it’ll be helicopters, dogs, the Army, everything.”

“Go, then.”

They pressed forward through the waist-deep water, rain slashing at their faces and marsh gas erupting around them with each step. It was hard going. The mud sucked at their feet, and in places the rotting vegetation fringing the cut thinned so that they had to proceed at an agonising crouch. The lower half of Jean’s body was completely numb now, and at intervals the scene in the boot of the car replayed itself in her mind. Tiny details began to emerge: the curious sensation of the PSS’s damped internal detonation, and the tiny whipcrack as the armour-piercing round met adult bone. That quarter-second glance had been enough. The image was imprinted on her memory as if on high-speed film.

Ten minutes later-ten freezing, dogged minutes that felt more like an hour-they were at the closest point of the cut to the checkpoint. The watercourse was less than three feet wide in places, and the banks were slick with the muddy run-off from the fields. Jean’s back and hamstrings, meanwhile, were screaming with the dead weight of the rucksack and the stress and tension of their crouching progress. Carefully, as Faraj waited motionless beside her, she scanned the police post with the binoculars. She had kept well behind the bankside reeds so that no lens flash would betray her, and blurred images of this foliage and grey curtains of rain hung between her and the checkpoint. Indistinctly, she watched two officers in fluorescent yellow waterproofs checking a car. Several other vehicles were waiting in line, and the officers were moving in the constricted, hunch-shouldered way of men who were not enjoying their job. Three others, more shadowy figures, were waiting in a white Range Rover with police markings. There were no blue lights in evidence but Jean could hear a faint radio crackle on the wind.

She saw the helicopter before she heard it. It was a couple of miles to the east of them, moving in irregular patterns above the fields and coppices. At intervals, a thin white spotlight beam cut the rain-grey sky.

Soon, her forehead pressed into the mudslicked bank of the cut amongst the rotting bullrushes and flag-iris leaves and beneath the skeleton of an alder bush, Jean could hear the tiny flicker of rotor blades. Beside her, his face inches from hers, Faraj was similarly frozen. The helicopter drew nearer, its pencil beam nosing pensively at a patch of woodland half a mile away.

And then suddenly it was overhead, the heavy pulse of its rotors washing menacingly over the sodden fields. The beam played briefly over the farmyard that they had left ten minutes earlier, and Jean almost wept with relief that they had covered the car with the plastic sheet. It had been desperately close, and the reaction of the police in getting the helicopters up-she was under no illusion that there would only be one of them-had been very fast indeed. And this was just the beginning. There would be tracker dogs soon, and soldiers with rifles. They had to move on, or die.

But the helicopter pilot showed no inclination to depart, and Jean began to shake with the cold and the tension, and her teeth to chatter. Extending an arm around her waist, Faraj pressed her upper body against his chest in an attempt to warm her. The gesture, she could feel, was purely utilitarian; there was no affection in it.

“Be strong, Asimat,” he murmured into the streaming hood of her waterproof. “Remember who you are.”

“I’m not afraid,” she replied, “I’m just…”

Her words vanished in the clatter of the overhead helicopter. Prop-wash shivered the surface of the cut as the spotlight beam moved inexorably towards them. Closing her eyes tightly, willing herself into immobility, Jean began to pray. Over her head, as the hard white light pressed down on them, forcing its way between her eyelids, she could feel the shudder of the stunted alder bush. Were they using thermal imaging? she wondered. Because if so…

And then suddenly the helicopter was gone, banking away westwards as if bored with the whole process.

“Now move,” said Faraj urgently, backing off her. “That won’t be the last of them, and this rain won’t last for ever.”

Relief flooded through her. At the roadblock, she heard several cars drive through in close succession. The policemen, she guessed, had been watching the helicopter. They moved forwards, bodies bent against the sheeting rain and the drag of the muddy water, and soon found themselves a couple of hundred yards beyond the roadblock.

“Another mile, and we’ll hit the village,” said Jean breathlessly, crouching down against the bank. “Trouble is, if anyone who’s just been through the roadblock sees us climbing up on to the road, they’ll just go straight back to the police and report us. They’ll have descriptions by now, and probably pictures.”

Faraj considered for a moment, took the binoculars from her, and narrowing his eyes scanned the surrounding countryside.

“Right,” he said eventually. “This is what we do.”