Red Notice

116

He watched the ground rush up to meet him, waited for the agony to return as he rolled to take the landing, trying to protect his injured leg as he did so, but without much success. He got to his feet, wincing with pain, and began to hobble towards the electricity sub-station.

From his landing point, Laszlo had left a trail in the wet grass. Tom took one last look back over his shoulder. Three or four figures in hi-vis vests were lifting Delphine onto a collapsible stretcher.

In heavy limping mode, with his half-laced boot flapping at every step, he began moving across the field and through the small wood where drifts of beechnut covered the ground.

He clambered over a barbed-wire fence and vaulted across a stream. Dairy cows, grazing on the browning grassland or chewing the cud in the shade beneath the trees, watched him impassively as he broke into a halting run across the open pasture.

He heaved himself over another barbed-wire fence and cut a swathe through a field of crops, trampling the stalks underfoot. He was about halfway across when he heard a furious shout. Face puce with rage, a farmer was running along the track at the furthest edge, intent on cutting him off. Tom neither changed his course nor slackened his pace, stumbling on with the same relentless, ground-devouring stride.

‘Vandale! Voleur!’

The farmer’s torrent of abuse died on his lips as his gaze took in the blood-soaked bandages around Tom’s leg, his battered and bloodied face, the knife in his hand and the murderous look in his eye. Muttering apologies, he began to back rapidly away.

Tom didn’t spare him another glance, kept ploughing on in the same straight line, indifferent to crops, contours or obstacles. The rolling fields dropped away into a shallow valley to his left, but he kept to the ridge leading towards the village. The roofs now seemed tantalizingly close.

He crossed another muddy track and found himself slipping and sliding through the turned earth, wet mud and churned-up tractor tracks of a recently harvested field. He managed to maintain much of his pace as he crossed it, but he felt the gruelling conditions underfoot sapping his last reserves of strength.

He speeded up again, crashing through a field of sunflowers, their stalks brown, heads blackened and drooping. Dust, pollen and leaf fragments stuck to his skin as he forced his way past them, and clouds of flies buzzed around his head, attracted by the blood and salt sweat on his skin. He paid them no attention, his every sense straining to catch the least sight or sound that might lead him to his quarry.