Battle Sight Zero

Chapter 10

Andy Knight slept in. Might almost have found a sort of peace.

The hard part of what he did – and Phil and Norm – was in the first stage of the infiltration. This time round was when he had charged down the darkened street and launched at the guys who were dealing out grief to the girl. They had, all three of them, been well briefed and had known not to hurt her but only frighten her, and had known that they’d take a bit of a slapping… had been owed an apology, not least the one who had taken her kick in the groin, where it hurt bad and where he might have suffered some real damage… and then the next step in turning up at the Hall of Residence. She would have talked to the people who controlled her, and would have told them of this guy – simple and unsophisticated and politically vacuous – who ate from her hand, was a pigeon in a park. It had worked well, the great idea, that she would get him to drive her back from Marseille and the promised reward was a shack-up night or two in a crap hotel, maybe without clean sheets – which was a difficulty. He was out to the world in his car, had the seat tilted back.

The other hard bit, potentially, was what Phil and Norm had endured; suspicion, and violence chucked at them. But Andy Knight was clear of that. The life and death moment was sidestepped. He slept deep. Had he dreamed, which he did not, it would only have been as a witness of the final curtain being drawn. If he were there to see, then he’d be hunkered down in the back of a police wagon and would have a vantage-point through a smoked glass window. It would be messy if it were done at the university, inside the Hall of Residence or on campus or in the Students’ Union, and they were more likely to have chosen her home, Savile Town. Not necessary to break down the door, just a ring of the bell and a middle-aged man opening it and seeing a street filled with uniforms, some with firearms, and a bare word of politeness before they surged past him. She would be taken out fast, handcuffed, and then, after she had been driven away, the search team would arrive. She would not see him. It would be the intention to lift the whole nest of them, all of the cell, and to take back the weapon with the bug embedded into the cleaning kit hole in the stock. She would be in shock and whipped into a custody suite and the questions would come flying before she’d the wit to gaze up at the ceiling and break her silence to demand legal representation. He might see Pegs and Gough one last time, might not. He would slip into Prunella’s office and they’d offer him leave, indefinite, but expect to keep a hold on him… It would probably be for the last time, but he’d not share his future intentions with her. Was not for ever, was it? Not pensionable employment – fast burn-out with hefty premiums. Prunella would blow him a kiss when he went out through the door with his grip, all that he owned, what he had cleared from the Manchester bedsit, and he would take a train to anywhere or drive to anywhere. ‘Anywhere’ was a place where he was not known, had never worked. There would be a court case, but not for at least a year, water under the bridge by then, fast flowing.

It mattered where he slept, whether he slept with her. Mattered that the discipline of a serving officer stayed firm. Mattered where he was, her bed with her, or his bed and alone. A psychologist had talked to them once: had grinned, then prefaced his lecture – ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’… ‘When you’re on the plot and you start getting close to one of the women there, and she close to you, don’t ever think it is about true romance, won’t be. It is need. You, for all your training, are vulnerable. So is she. It is a way of sharing the burden for both of you. You are both on the edge, nerves frayed to breaking point… not love, just something animal. If you can avoid it, then all well and good; if you can’t, then don’t think any the less of yourself. It’ll be, given certain circumstances, difficult to avoid…’ And he’d shrugged like there was nothing more to say.

But the hard part of it was done, dusted, and the sleep was good and he felt safe: should have realised that was dangerous at worst, foolhardy at best. Stress leeched out of him and the traffic on the Highway to the Sun swept past the service station, and the sun would be high before he woke, went for a wash, took breakfast, hit the road to where they would meet.

Zeinab was awake.

The New Zealand boy had slept, his head had lolled against her shoulder and his first snore had erupted, and she had kicked his ankle – not as hard as when her toecap had hit the thief’s privates. Firmly enough for him to grunt and flail with an arm, and take a moment to realise where he was. He had the grace to apologise. She did not have another opportunity to sleep because the boy had called his mother. His mother was on the South Island of New Zealand. He told her where he was, where he had been for the last two days; said that she should not worry about him, that Paris was well protected and those goddamn terrorists were kept far away from the main tourist haunts. He was fine, he was safe. They talked a quarter of an hour and he seemed interested in the rest of his family.

Did she want chewing gum? She did not.

Then called his father; his father was somewhere else but also on South Island. She had no option but listen. She did not sleep.

‘What, Dad? The terrorists… No, I’ve had no scares. They have troops and police out, all the public places are guarded, and Germany, I feel very secure… was talking to a guy yesterday, French. You want to know what he said? He said they need decapitating, the terrorists do. He said they were vermin – that’s the terrorists – they had different governments in the past, but now they’ve toughened up. And, Dad, you there, Dad?… In Germany they reckon they’ve too many migrants, don’t know who they are, and everything had gotten too liberal. Should be stamped on… Lyon, Dad, that’s where I am going. Good to speak, Dad… The baby is okay? You are a bit of an old goat, Dad, don’t mind me saying it. Yes, I’m safe, I’m good. They say, Dad, you can smell these people, the terrorists, and see it in their eyes, animal eyes, sort of dead eyes: I met a sociology guy in Berlin. He said that. Oh, Mum sounded good. This guy, Berlin, he said they can’t hide. What? You have to go?… Night, Dad.’

She might sleep after Lyon, his destination, if her anger allowed it.

Light reflected off an opening window. A street-light caught the angle of the glass on a first floor and almost opposite, across the street, from the overturned scooter and the two intertwined bodies underneath it.

Pegs saw the moment the light hit.

She had been alongside police professionals all her working life. She was also, irrelevant to a woman of 47 years, a disappointment to her parents who had chucked money at her education – wasted. She had arrived in the secretive offices off Wyvill Road by chance: a ’flu virus rampant and desk staff dropping like sprayed flies. An impression had been made, doors had opened, an offer of extended work had become a posting, and within a year she had moved quietly, discreetly, into both Gough’s office and his life, had turned her back on Hackney, and a civilian job collating burglaries, knifings. The position was not abused and she had become fiercely loyal, would stay with him until he dropped, was axed, or retired. She had perception, wheelbarrow loads of it – what she called ‘simple bloody common sense’ – and was blessed with a good eye.

It was the third window onto which light from the street lamp had bounced.

All the time that the boy under the scooter had yelled increasingly dire threats, she had watched the movements of the officer they called Samson. There had been one in London, as she remembered – right place at the right time, or the opposite – who had notched up more kills than any other. It would be interesting to see his work at close hand, had no doubt in her mind that was how it would end. The man had eased down the street and had kept his rifle against his leg so that it would not be obvious, had tried shop doors and found them locked but then had come to a darkened alley between two buildings, barely wide enough for his shoulders, and had disappeared into it. She had seen the first window nudged open, then closed and presumed the alignment could be bettered, and then the second window. The third had opened, left ajar.

Because of her good vision – Gough would not have noticed it and she had not yet alerted him – Pegs had seen the protruding tip of a rifle barrel.

The wound on the leg, where the broken bone had split the skin, would have hurt as bad as Pegs could imagine. She had been through childbirth once, had not enjoyed it nor thought the end product worth the effort, and she had suffered a broken nose – straightened skilfully in Casualty – when mugged in east London, but had not known the sort of pain the kid suffered. He would be irrational, unpredictable, and several times she saw the pistol jerked so hard into the hostage’s neck that the head was tripped sideways… it would be a matter of judgement. She liked that, the thought of a decision being taken. Where she worked, a pace behind her mentor, Gough, decisions had to be made on the hoof, not with a committee to refer back to… A decision would be made here, perhaps already had been. Time to stir Gough? Probably. Away to her right, she could see the Major intent and listening on his phone. She nudged Gough. She did not point, did nothing to attract attention, just spoke quietly in Gough’s ear and he nodded when he’d seen the rifle at the slightly opened window.

Gough said, a whisper, ‘You wouldn’t envy him. The bad boy shoots first, and who cares about him being taken down a second later. The operation fails. The marksman shoots and the bullet does the necessary damage to the bad boy and then hits a hunk of bone and is diverted into the good boy’s upper chest. It fails. He cannot be told what is the right time has to make his own judgement, is alone… I am thinking, Pegs, of our own man, and we don’t share the weight of his burden, cannot: he is equally alone.’

There was another shout, and the voice was hoarse, like it came from deep in the throat, way into the chest, and the pain must have climbed. She told Gough that it seemed like an end-game. That he’d shoot his prisoner and it would be the same as a suicide. No overdose and no rope slung over a garage roof beam, but a cop doing the job.

‘It has to be now,’ Pegs said. Has to be…’

The shot, breaking the screaming insults of the bad boy, cut her off. The report made less noise than she’d have imagined. She looked, not at the target, but at the window. The barrel tip was motionless and protruded no more than a foot from the sill. No emotion, no stress.

And the hit? Hard to tell. The scooter had shifted, was lifted higher. Pegs saw what should have been the head of the target but only half of it and was confused and her hand came up to her mouth. The second head, which had been underneath, was clear to her, and blood spattered, laced with brain tissue. She felt the vomit rising in her throat. She was supposed to be the hard woman, no tears and no fuss, and no visits to the shrinks – and the sight of an agent pulled from a canal, too young and too fresh and too eager to survive, but shoved into harm’s way because it had seemed important, had not turned her stomach. There was a violent motion and one body was pushed and then heaved and it flopped aside.

It had been, she assessed, a dramatically good shot. With the rise of the vomit was a great gasp in her throat. She swallowed. Death handed down. Quick and clinical, like an executioner would have done it. One down and one standing. She did not know his name, his significance if any. A feeble young guy and blood loose on his face, and his clothing messed with it. The street was silent, the shouting over.

He moved like a rat. A satchel bounced on his hip. He was bent low, squirming, and had his hands on the scooter and pulled it up. It was a cheap scooter, an old one, what a teenager would have owned while dreaming of something better, faster, something with style. He had been prone on the tarmac for a long time, had moved hardly at all, had had the weight of the other boy on top of him, and the scooter’s, and now he went fast – and had had a pistol pushed against his neck. Showed no sign of an ordeal – Pegs thought him a street fighter, and marvelled.

The scooter was upright. A leg went over the saddle bar. The key was still in the ignition slot. A twist of it, a wrench on the handle. And again, and… The engine coughed, spat out fumes. A body with only half a head was left behind. The scooter charged the police line and the satchel was thrown back to the extent of the strap, like hair in the wind… How should it have been? Should have been police with guns going forward and waving the medics to follow them, and then a priest, and afterwards the whole paraphernalia of care consuming the boy who had been a hostage and close to death and unable to intervene for his own life. The boy should have been wrapped in blankets or in tin foil as if he were a disaster victim and in shock and nurses close and a doctor working on him.

He drove towards the police line and guns were raised but not fired. An opening appeared – a Red Sea moment. He was not stopped and was accelerating into the gap. She supposed a juvenile rat would have fled as fast if it had been freed from the claws of a household cat. The scooter engine was not tuned and the carburettor was in need of cleaning out, and its noise was raucous. It disappeared from her sight. Not like anything she had experienced. All that was left in the street were a pair of feet in trainers and they stuck out under a strip of canvas that now covered the body. The police protected the immediate scene but the road was opening and the first cars were coming through slowly. She knew her motorcycles, they’d been her former husband’s delight and fantasy, and when she had tried to please – not often – she had brought home a magazine for fanatics. The rumble of sound was from a Ducati Monster with a helmeted rider who had his visor down.

‘What are you thinking?’ Gough asked her.

‘That I’d expected this would be all marinas and five-star dossers, a place for tacky celebs… and maybe we’ve had a better view of where we are.’

‘I think so.’

The Major walked towards them.

The body was carried past. Cigarettes were lit. They seemed to him to be as cold and as hungry and as out of place as refugees.

The Major said, ‘It was interesting, no more. A criminal steals from a criminal. The profits from narcotics trafficking are being taken to a bank – I do not know which one – or where. Another group from another area, had lost the money it needed to pay for a shipment already received, they have to steal, find a ready source of cash. I thought it would be interesting for you to see the city into which you plan to plant your Undercover… not always a pretty place.’

It was late and he wanted to be home; Simone would have a meal for him to be heated in a microwave, and the children would be asleep, but he would not be returning to the apartment on the Rue d’Orient tonight because the paperwork would not wait until the morning.

‘You believe that a new route for the movement of firearms is planned by a terror group in your country. Very possible. So, firearms come into Marseille; they are not brought here by UK nationals, but by local entrepreneurs, gangsters, those beyond the law. They are not legitimate business people involved in simple import/export, they are not spinster aunts who dabble in something of this and something of that, they are not bankers who see an investment turning out a satisfactory profit… They are thugs. They know the market-place and where we are vulnerable, how to move around us. Criminal thugs have risen to eminence through violence. No other way to measure them. The higher they have risen, the greater their realisation that violence, its certainty, should determine their actions.’

Within his first six months in Marseille, men had sidled up to him: lawyers, accountants, guys from the Chamber of Commerce, local government officials, had talked in soft voices of the advantageous of mutual cooperation. Coldly, sternly, politely, he had declined the ‘advantages’ they offered.

‘This is a dangerous city. If you manoeuvre an agent that you employ on to these streets, close to the sources of violence, you take a great chance. A chance with your agent’s wellbeing… but, that will have been evaluated. Of course.’

Most weeks he did the equivalent job of sweeping up the detritus left on the north of the city: bodies carbonised in cars, corpses slumped in cafés with multiple Kalashnikov bullet wounds, cadavers abandoned in the hills above the projects. Few palliatives to the frustration, and few arrests.

‘We are stretched very thin. We are under-resourced. You breeze into our city and require a team from the “intervention force” and want them to sit on their backsides and wait around, and be ready to help your agent, and then another team, then another. Three shifts… I regret that it cannot be done. You have the right to go to my superiors and request that I am bypassed, and the likelihood is that you would be escorted to the airport. You could contact the Ministry in Paris and they would request a written communication as to your aims, and perhaps you will receive a suggestion that you come back in a couple of months or three.’

He had one weakness, and knew it. His wife would be in bed having prepared his dinner and would have made sure there was a beer in the fridge, and his children would have wanted to talk to him about football or dancing or… No other officer from L’Évêché had been invited to his home, had met his family. It was a small measure of security, about all he could do. It was his heel, where he was vulnerable, and he knew it.

‘You were fortunate to have contacted me. This is a dangerous city, it is also a corrupt city. There are officers, investigators, who have sold out, and it would be advantageous for any of them to pass your names, your hotels, your mission – what you call Rag and Bone – to interested parties. Myself, I trust very few – Samson, yes, I trust him, would give him my life for safe keeping. Not others.’

He hoped they would appreciate his frankness. Their bags were still in the wagon they had travelled in. He would have the couple dropped at their hotel, then return to work.

‘I give you my mobile. You ring that number. Wherever I am, it is with me. We will come. We will be there as quickly as is possible… I do not know what you expected, but you should not have travelled here and should not have permitted your man to journey, naked, to Marseille. For one rifle, for a handful of rifles, a trifle. You should withdraw him… My phone is the best I can do.’

‘You all right?’

‘I’m good.’

‘It was delivered?’

‘It was.’

Karym had washed himself in a fountain in a little square off the main road coming down the hill from the police blockade. It was the evening when the Credit Union stayed open late, when men came to bank their wages – those with work – to save up for the annual pilgrimage to the family in Tunisia or Morocco, or any fucking place that people who lived in La Castellane had come from. He had crouched over the stagnant rainwater in the fountain’s bowl and had rinsed his face, had seen the blood stain the water. He had lodged the cash. The girl behind the secure barrier had not queried why a kid with water dripping from his hair, who had wild eyes, filth on his clothing, should bank that sort of sum, but had counted it and had given him a receipt. He had left the building, had sat astride his scooter and had begun to shake. Could feel the pressure of the pistol barrel on his throat, and the warmth of the blood on his face. Stiffness trapped his legs, his hands trembled. He could not have steered the Peugeot scooter. He had heard the growl of the Ducati’s approach. His brother had found him.

‘I need to ride with you.’

‘Is your bike broken?’

A hesitation… he had asked often enough for his brother to buy him a new scooter, the Piaggio MP3 Yourban would be the best, with the tilting front wheels… he would not have dared to lie to his brother. ‘Just that I do not feel well.’

‘You ride with me. I’ll send kids down for the Peugeot. Good that it is not broken. Okay, we move, we are missing trade.’

He sat behind his brother. The wind scoured his face, where the blood had been. He was not thanked, not congratulated, not praised for his effort in getting clear of the site so that the police did not take possession of the satchel. They went back, fast and noisily, to La Castellane. Only when they were near to the project did his brother slow the bike and tilt his head back so that he could speak, so that Karym could hear him.

‘It was Samson who killed the thief. You were lucky. Anyone other than Samson and you, too, would be dead. He is formidable. You do not want, ever again, to be in the sights of Samson’s rifle. Never again.’

Karym heard the squeal of laughter, and the engine was gunned and they made an entry back into the estate, like it was just another evening, and trading had already started, and they were late.

‘Welcome to my distinguished friend.’

‘Greetings, my old cocker.’

‘You look grand.’

At the Arrivals gate, hugging him, Tooth laid kisses on each of Crab’s cheeks. Not that Crab was tall, but Tooth needed to be up on his toes to do it. Crab did not respond with his lips, but held his friend fervently.

‘Don’t deserve to be. It’s been a journey from hell and back and hell again. Good to be here.’

Many hours late, Crab had arrived. First, the late arrival of the aircraft in Manchester, then the rostered crew being out of hours, then a light flashing when it should not have, then a delay with one passenger’s baggage and the need to offload everything in the hold. It had been a litany of disaster. Crab had suffered. He did not read, nor listen to music, did not drink, and the hours had gone slowly, then a storm over central France, then big crosswinds coming off the sea when they were on the final approach and being tossed… Tooth would not want to know.

‘But you are here.’

‘I am here. I cannot imagine anyone and anywhere, Tooth, that I’d prefer to be, to be with… On course, our little matter?’

They were walking towards Tooth’s car, predictably a Mercedes, and Crab pulled behind him the case that Beth had packed.

A quiet reply, lips barely moving. ‘I assume. What I have heard. All sick as dogs in the weather out there, but keeping to the schedule.’

‘Like being back in harness, Tooth, waiting for a freighter. Doesn’t matter what it’s carrying, just that it’s coming. Keeps the blood running in those old veins.’

The keys were flashed, the bag went in the boot, and Tooth walked Crab to the front passenger door, then paused and laid a hand on Crab’s arm. The lights over the parking area showed a fraction of a frown on Tooth’s forehead.

‘You said, “Doesn’t matter what it’s carrying”, you said that. You have no problem, what it’s carrying, no problem?’

‘Business is business, Tooth, no problem at all. Bring it on.’

‘You echo me, my friend – no problem. I’m not a preacher, I just go where the market is.’

‘I think it’s going to go very smoothly. What we call a “piece of cake”… So good to be back with you, Tooth. It’s a good person our customer is sending, well spoken of. Piece of cake, yes.’

The train pulled into the station at Avignon. Zeinab slung her bag on her shoulder. Where it all started, became real.

A few others, half asleep, followed her. She crossed the platform. Had there ever been a chance to turn back? Not now. Turning back was crossing a bridge and going to the far platform and checking the departures and finding the first train heading north, and never going home, where Krait and Scorpion knew her, and never being within reach of the men she had met in the London park, changing her name and changing the whole identity of her life, disappearing. The lights were dimmed inside the station and the magazine stand was shuttered and the fast-food outlet was closed. She went into the night. A police car was facing the main entrance and she saw the glow of cigarettes: the doors did not explode open. A couple of druggie kids were squatting against the outside wall.

She had directions, knew where to go. The main street leading to central Avignon was the Rue de la République, and she had been told that it led to the road and the hotel she was booked into.

Zeinab was shown by the concierge to a first-floor room, minimal furnishing, a double bed and no view, and opened her bag and took out the nightdress… it was where it started.

January 1987

A one-legged boy had positioned himself in the cover of a rock, some thirty metres above the road and not more than fifty metres back from it, where the exchange of gunfire would be extreme. He was already, a couple of minutes after the first land-mine had detonated and brought the convoy to a halt, on his third magazine. In spite of the surprise gained by the mujahideen when the explosion had halted the soft-top trucks after the armoured vehicles had been allowed through undisturbed, the battle in the killing zone remained undecided. Many of the Soviet troops who had spilled out from the lorries had been killed, or were wounded, but none of them who lived – damaged or not – would surrender. Tales of their fate were legion – to have the penis and testicles rammed down a throat while still alive was not a reason to hoist a white flag. The boy, with some expertise, fired an old AK-47 assault rifle, tried to go only for aimed targets and at that range had the sights at their lowest point, what he had been told was called Battle Sight Zero, a phrase it was said, taken from old British army sergeants, who had fought and been defeated here. He had some hits and had some misses – he was always with this tribal group when they went forward, across the mountains on narrow paths, into defiles, along river-beds, and hunted for convoys… and had not long to do the job.

He was, he thought, twelve years old. He could not ask his mother because she had been killed, decapitated in a rocket attack, and could not ask his father because he had been injured, fatally, when a Hind helicopter had turned its awesome firepower on a small caravan of mules. Could not ask his brother who had been shot in the leg and could not be carried and had been finished by his own people. But the brother’s weapon had been snatched, taken away, and given to this child, who had one natural leg and one of crudely carved wood.

The boy’s left leg stopped just below the knee. The lower leg had been shattered by a personnel mine scattered randomly in a dried watercourse. No chance of proper medical attention, of hospital care, of anaesthetic, and the surgery had been as brutal and as immediate and as successful as that performed on the injured more than a century before – told among the mujahideen when camping at night – when the fight was against British occupiers. A wad of leather to bite on. Men showing harsh kindness in holding him down as an older leader hacked with a blunt knife. Fire to seal the wound. A length of dried birch wood had been carved and whittled into the necessary length for a limb, with a place padded by leather and cloth for the stump to nestle in, and straps attached that could be knotted round the fragile child’s waist to hold it in place. There were days of heavy marches when the tears ran on the boy’s face as he fought to keep up with the speed of advance, but he would not cry out, nor would any man diminish him by helping: there would be blood seeping from the wound after excessive friction, and it would be washed in a stream, and they would go on. The child had his elder brother’s rifle. The child slept with it, ate with it beside him, marched with it, and used all his skills and hatred to kill with it.

He had already scratched notches on the stock. Had added more to those cut out by his brother, and further scrapes in the wood would be made that evening after they had retreated from the ambush site, at least three more. They should hurry, do the killing business fast because by now the armoured vehicles, with their radios, surviving the attack, would have called up to the Jalalabad airbase, and the helicopters would soon be in the air, coming as fast as eagles.

Others in the mujahideen, fit and strong and lithe, would move their firing positions, never permit the loathed Soviets from fixing their location – which gully they were in, behind which rock, in which crater where a tree’s roots had been taken out by the winter gales. The boy did not move. There was a sharp whistle behind him. The older fighters thought of the boy as a talisman of good fortune, were loath to lose him, watched for him and cared for him. It might have been that the noise of gunfire obscured the shrill sound of the whistle, or it might have been that he cared not to hear the summons to fall back. He did not move. He did not know that a corporal of the mechanised infantry battalion had hunkered down in a ditch that carried rainwater off the road and had seen a point of fire, and a small head that peeped around a rock to search for targets. The whistle was louder, fiercer… A new magazine was slapped into the underbelly of the old rifle.

It was realised the child was a sure shot. That he detested the Soviet invaders who had taken his family to paradise, would kill at any opportunity, and dreamed of coming close to the wounded and the helpless and having the knife in his hand. He fired, and fired again, and did not hear the whistle, nor the bellow of anger, nor his name called. But might have heard, different to the close-combat thunder, a softer and more gentle sound, but did not yet recognise it as helicopter engines. Like that of a bee homing in on the heart of a flower, there to make the finest honey. The child was not aware of the approach of the gunships, always flown in a pair; not aware of rockets slung on pods and a gunner controlling a machine-gun and a four-barrelled Gatling type weapon: devastating fire-power. The child was caught up in the elation of combat; small hands gripped the rifle, and the stock rested against a small shoulder, and his eyes searched for a target. He stood.

He stood because he no longer had a target, and would not be denied one. The child did not see the corporal in the rainwater ditch, nor the RPG-7 launcher. The weapon carried an effective range of 300 metres, was expected to hit and kill at that distance, but the corporal lined up the sights on the small body of the child who was well inside that area of limitation.

A flash of light and a storm of dust and the projectile hurtled towards him. Too late to turn and duck away behind the shelter of the rock, too late to identify the engines of the hurrying helicopters, and no chance to respond to the calls of an older man.

Debris was hurled in every direction clear of the impact point. A piece of rock the size of a football – not that the child, before losing a leg or after, had ever kicked a football – speared away from the main body of the rock and careered into the child’s stomach. He had no protection.

He was swept up. Still breathing, and with ferocious pain in his stomach but not crying out, and with a pallor settling on his cheeks, the child was taken as fast as sandalled feet could go over the rock and stone. The helicopters’ engines came closer and the surviving troops put down a barrage of firing, but the tribesmen melted. He was carried to the next valley, and among the stones of the next river-bed, and up a track that only goats and the most sure-footed mule could have managed. His life had passed by the time they rested and no longer heard the sound of the helicopters.

It was done gently, but needed the strength of a grown man. The child’s grip was broken, his fingers prised back, and the old rifle was taken from him. It was thought reasonable to assume he had been responsible for two more fatalities, and those notches were cut with a bayonet’s point. A brief prayer was said and the body laid under a cairn of stones so that a wolf or a hyena or a fox would not be able to feast off the child, nor a vulture ravage the carcase. The rifle, with its much scarred stock was kept; the tribal group regarded it with pride, would hand it on.

A nondescript freighter ploughed through a gathering swell.

A detective chief inspector and a civilian analyst who was his bag carrier – both from the national Counter Terrorist Command – arrived in the tourist city of Avignon, checked into their hotel, did a reconnoitre walk of what was billed as the rendezvous point for Operation Rag and Bone, and looked for their target, spotted her, checked her clothing, went for lunch.

A major of the Marseille city police laboured over paperwork following an overnight killing, and eyed his mobile that rested on his desk and that rang frequently but not with a panic in the caller’s voice.

A marksman from the GIPN spent the day in his apartment, alone because his wife was working, and he watched a succession of wildlife films and dreamed of being there, seeing those creatures of beauty and feral magnificence.

It was a good day, and the sun shone – and two old men lay on recliners with tweed rugs covering them and gazed out to sea, bathed in nostalgia.

New supplies arrived in the projects, including La Castellane, and one boy with a withered arm was, for a few hours, the centre of attention.

The car hammered the last kilometres on the A7 before the turn-off to Avignon.

He parked by the river.

Near dusk and, had it been the season, Andy Knight would not have had a prayer of getting into a car park. But the tourists would not be here for another two months, would start arriving for the Easter holiday. He saw the bridge that stretched out into the river, then seemed to have been snapped off. Everybody knew about the bridge at Avignon. He looked for her, and did not find her.

Somewhere close by would be the two people to whom he reported. He assumed they’d the sense to stay out of sight. There had been an awkward atmosphere last time they had spoken and he sensed their increasing stress that he was easing away from their control. He did not see them – nor did he see her.

The river was wide and high, and occasional tree trunks were washed down in the force of the flow. If she had acquired sufficient tradecraft then she also would be in a vantage-point and would be scanning the parking area, looking for a tail car, and they might have sent foot soldiers who had such skills and they’d be watching him, hawk-eyed. She would have trusted him, he thought, not those who directed her. He locked the car and strolled across damp grass towards the river. Behind him were the old city walls. He shivered; the wind came hard up the river and he was jostled by its strength. He thought it natural, after the long drive south from the service station, to stretch and touch his toes and arch his back and roll his neck. He no longer smoked: Phil had, and Norm, and a Marine far back and forgotten, almost… and he saw her.

There was an opening in the tower built into the wall across the road from him.

What came fast in his mind was that she was short of tradecraft. Should have spent longer studying him and the area, but she came towards the road, started to quicken, hardly looked for traffic, walked straight across. She looked bloody good. He was trained to see small things… she had been to a hairdresser, had her hair cut and it feathered out behind her. He pretended he had not seen her, looked away and saw a tree branch snag on a pillar in the truncated bridge, then work free. Her coat was open and he could see her blouse: scarlet and navy stripes bold for her, as if she was far from Savile Town. He turned back, faced her, feigned surprise. She did a hell of a smile, wide and open and trusting… was she acting? Was she just pleased, far from home – and marginally scared – to see him? His arms out, and hers. They locked, her tight against him, and hugged and held each other. And kissed… If she acted then she did well. And Andy Knight would not have said what he was going to do about the edict laid down to Level Ones by the commanders of SC&O10 about the development of relationships between officers and targets… It was a great kiss. Not a moment for an evaluation of rule books and manuals – might be later, not then.

Nothing to say, just held each other.