Road Kill

Twenty-seven

We were just on the outskirts of Dundalk, less than ten klicks from the border, when we finally caught up with the van that had taken Jamie. If it hadn’t been for Isobel’s information, I would have begun to believe we were heading in totally the wrong direction long before then.

As it was, William and Daz voiced their doubts several times during the frantic ride north. When they had the breath to do it, that is. It made no difference to the pace Sean set. He’d abandoned his previous laid back style and was going like a lunatic. I tried to work out where the rustiness had worn off his riding abilities. Somewhere between the ferry to Belfast, and here, Sean had shed his inhibitions like a second skin.

Now he went for hairline gaps in traffic that made me wince, surviving on gut instinct and sheer brass neck. The rest of us followed him with a kind of reckless faith that where he could get through, so could we.

Nevertheless, all I could hear in my ear-piece was Daz swearing as he missed yet another collision by fractions. Paxo was probably being quite vocal with his opinion, too, but nobody could hear him. He’d given Sean his headset and radio before we set off.

“You’re going to need this more than I am,” he’d said, dumping the whole lot onto the seat of the Blackbird. Jamie’s headset had been still in his helmet, but the radio itself was missing, otherwise we would have had a spare.

Sean had looked up from carefully packing the bottles we’d prepared into his tank bag. We’d loosely wrapped them in more towels filched from the hotel bathroom to stop them clashing together.

“You’ll need this, too,” Paxo had said and handed over his Zippo lighter. “And it’s my favourite, so don’t lose it, all right?”

“Thank you,” Sean had said, and meant it. “I won’t.”

Paxo had nodded and rammed on his helmet, cutting short any further talk. He’d slotted the Ducati in behind me as we roared out of the car park. I’d glanced up at the hotel just once as we’d ridden away past the front of it.

Gleet had said he’d give us a half-hour head start before he called the cops. As we howled round the outside of Dublin and headed north, that time seemed to be trickling away. And the further we went without any sign of the Merc van, the faster the minutes seemed to be running out on us.

Unless you wanted to go the scenic route, the only clear way from Dublin up to Newry was the N1, the same road we’d taken on the way down. It was largely fast and open and what little traffic there was on a Sunday was moving quickly on it.

“That’s the one!” Sean’s voice sounded loud in my ear, edged with triumph as he recognised the registration number Gleet had given us. “Just overtake and don’t look at it too much,” he warned. “We need to get ahead of him and we don’t want to tip him off.”

The Merc driver was doing a steady sixty-five and not looking as though he was pushing hard to keep that up. We slipped past trying not to give the van more than casual attention and accelerated away hard afterwards, putting some distance between us.

I couldn’t resist a brief glance sideways into the cab as I drew alongside, taking in an almost subliminal flash of three figures spread across the front seats. None of them were Jamie.

The driver was in short sleeves and had a chunky gold bracelet around the hairy wrist nearest to the window. He had the glass wound halfway down and he was smoking. He didn’t look at all like a man who’s just been part of kidnapping, theft and murder.

We’d already been cruising in bursts over a hundred but Sean stepped it up for the next few miles, then eased off as we passed the signs for a lay-by coming up.

“That should do it,” he said. “We’ll stop up ahead.”

We all backed off accordingly. Paxo overshot me before he got the idea, braking hard to make it into the lay-by itself.

The road was almost straight at this point, slightly raised up on an embankment that dropped away sharply at either side to a stout post-and-rail fence and then into grassland. For our purposes, it couldn’t have been better.

The only worrying factor was the wind. There was no sign of the rain that had dogged us at Mondello, but the wind had picked up and was gusty, particularly over the exposed piece of road. It was going to make things that bit more tricky.

There were no other vehicles parked up but, even so, Sean checked round before he unzipped the tank bag and handed out the three bottles containing the gloss paint William had found in the hotel basement. They were the bottles without lids, so we’d smothered the top of the necks with packing tape.

“Now, you all know what you’re doing?” he said in that calm, almost soothing voice he’d always used to inspire confidence in terrified new recruits on their first live-firing exercise. The Devil’s Bridge Club members nodded, keyed up and anxious. “Switch your lights off so you don’t attract his attention as you’re coming up behind him. You’re going to have to fling these things pretty hard to get them to break, all right? Glass is amazingly tough stuff. It’s not like you see it in the movies. Aim for the windscreen if you can. The gloss will smear better than emulsion and they won’t be able to clear it, OK?”

“What then?” Daz said, giving up trying to wedge his bottle somewhere into the Aprilia’s fairing and carefully stuffing it down the front of his leathers instead. Paxo and William did the same.

“You get the hell out of Dodge,” Sean said sharply. “Trust me, Charlie and I will be right behind you.” He handed one of the other bottles across to me. I stood it in the top of my tank bag, making sure it was packed upright so as not to spill, but accessible enough to retrieve easily when the time came.

“What about afterwards, if – when – the van stops?” Daz said.

Sean flicked his eyes to me and I saw the question in them. Are you ready for this? I nodded, just once. As I’ll ever be.

“I think you’d better let us worry about that,” he said. “Just get far enough ahead not to get caught up in anything, then pull over and wait for us there. You’ve got Jamie’s helmet? Good. With any luck, he’ll need it soon.”

Paxo had been staring back over his shoulder, waiting for the van to catch us up.

“Here they come!” he said now, his voice high and strangled. “Let’s do it, yeah?”

As soon as the van flashed past our position, the three of them launched out of the lay-by, gunning the bikes up to speed in seconds. A moment later, Sean and I followed.

We hung back behind the others, keeping station while we waited for the boys to do their stuff. If they failed there was still a chance we could stop the van but Eamonn’s men would be ready for us and things would be so much more difficult.

I felt the nerves knotting my stomach into a tight hard ball. I swallowed, tried to breathe evenly, but that only seemed to make things worse. Reacting to circumstances was one thing, I realised. I could do that without a qualm. But actually instigating an attack was something different again. And especially with such untrained troops. I felt the enormous weight of the responsibility for their safety lying on me.

Does Sean feel the same? I glanced sideways, noted the tension in his arms, the stiff set of his neck as he kept his eyes riveted on the events unfolding ahead. Of course he does.

The FireBlade was a reassuringly solid presence under me, with the Super Blackbird keeping easy pace alongside, like two cavalry horses picking up to a canter before the final charge. Into the valley of death rode the five . . . well, let’s hope not.

I glanced ahead and saw the boys tight up behind the Merc. They’d clustered together where they would be almost out of sight of the van’s mirrors, hiding in his blind spot.

I saw them nod to each other, their signal. Almost as one man, they reached into their leathers and pulled out their bottles full of paint.

Paxo went first, shooting up the left-hand-side of the van. He flung the bottle awkwardly back over his right shoulder with his left hand as he drew level.

The bottle hit the front end somewhere without breaking and bounced up over the roof-line to land twenty metres behind the rear bumper. There it did finally smash, splattering pure brilliant white gloss paint all over the road. Sean and I had to swerve to avoid it.

Daz and William spurted up the right-hand side of the van as soon as Paxo began his run. But, as the first bottle hit, the Merc driver braked hard enough to lock one wheel, sending up a puff of smoke. The van lurched to the right, forcing the other two bikers to swing wide.

William was just at the point of his pitch and the sudden change of direction threw his aim out completely. The bottle landed hard enough to break this time, but too low and to the left.

“Shit!” I heard him shout. “Direct hit on the radiator grille, but nothing on the glass. Sorry guys.”

The van straightened as the driver fought with the wheel, the high back rocking violently. As William pulled away, Daz glided in almost close enough for van and bike to touch, controlling the big Aprilia with delicate precision. I held my breath as he seemed to keep it there for an eternity. The slightest sideways twitch from the Merc, or heavy gust of wind, and he was going to be history.

Then Daz stood up on his footpegs and backhanded the bottle he was holding straight down onto the windscreen directly in front of the driver, like he was christening a battleship.

Even from our position, we saw the paint spray up.

“Bull’s-eye!” I heard Daz yell. “He’s all yours!”

The Merc had began to snake wildly, scrubbing off speed until it was down to less than fifty. We dropped our own speed back to match and I held my breath hoping the van would stop of its own accord. After a few seconds it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. They must have known this was an ambush now, and their only chance to avoid disaster was to keep moving.

“Looks like we’re going to have to do this the hard way,” Sean’s voice said in my ear. “You ready?”

“Lead on,” I said, terse.

Sean ripped away the tape holding Paxo’s Zippo lighter to the headstock of the Blackbird. He already had a row of the mini sparklers we’d taken from the hotel dining room jammed in around the bike’s clocks, where the rake of the fairing would keep them more or less out of the buffeting wind.

In this comparatively sheltered zone, Sean persuaded the Zippo to hold a flame at the third strike. He thrust his hand in among the forest of sparklers and kept it there until half a dozen of them had fizzed into life. We’d timed them back at the hotel and knew you got an average twenty-second burn out of each of the magnesium-coated rods.

He swung his bike in on my right, close enough to hand over two of the lit sparklers. I leaned across to grab hold of the stems with my left hand. Even though I knew it was just about impossible for the wind to extinguish them, I ducked my hand into the shelter of the ‘Blade’s fairing, just in case.

“OK,” Sean said, seemingly right inside my head. “Remember Charlie, eight seconds maximum, OK?”

“OK,” I repeated.

“Sure?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Sean,” I growled, “let’s just do this thing and go home, all right?”

I glanced sideways as I spoke and realised he was grinning at me. In spite of everything.

I grinned back and touched the burning end of the sparkler in my hand to the one poking half out of the bottle top in my tank bag. For a moment nothing happened, then it flared and caught in a glittering shower of tiny shards of light.

One thousand, two thousand . . .

I grabbed the bottle and yanked it free with my left hand, snapping the power on with my right and shifting my bodyweight to guide the FireBlade up the passenger side of the van as I did so. I felt rather than saw Sean doing the same on the driver’s side.

Four thousand, five thousand . . .

As I pulled alongside the cab window, I could see through it to the smeared mess that was the front screen. The guy nearest me turned to stare as he caught the high rev of the ‘Blade’s engine, his mouth rounding in panic as he saw what I was holding.

Seven thousand, eight thousand . . .

I pulled past, twisting in the seat to lob the bottle clumsily over my right shoulder as I did so, in much the same way that Paxo had done. The difference being that I wasn’t relying on the impact to shatter the glass.

We’d pushed the sparklers halfway down inside each bottle, which we’d filled to about the two-thirds level – partly with petrol drained from Gleet’s Suzuki, and partly with the sugar Sean had appropriated from the hotel kitchen.

Petrol in liquid form doesn’t burn easily. It’s the vapour that’s highly inflammable and we’d left a good-sized air gap at the top of each bottle to allow it to build up. The long ride up from Dublin, sitting on top of a hot motorbike with the sun on it, had done the rest.

As soon as the sparks from our improvised fuses dipped under the taped-down caps, the petrol fumes went up. A fraction of a second later, the burning vapour ignited the liquid fuel, creating an unstoppable twin-stage explosion of dramatic proportions. The sugar helped, of course. It made the petrol burn hotter and faster, which was part of the reason we’d added it.

Both bottles detonated with a thunderous incendiary clap, the second coming almost as an echo of the first.

Mine went up first. It had already hit the left-hand side of the front end when it disappeared in an instant supernova of heat and light. I felt the concussive blast at my back, even as I whacked the ‘Blade’s throttle right round to the stop and catapulted out of the way.

Despite his own instructions, Sean had held onto his bottle a second or so longer. The modified Molotov cocktail went up, still in the air, less than a metre from the driver’s side of the front screen. The deadly mixture was already a scorching boiling mass when it plastered itself onto the glass.

I held the FireBlade at full chat for another two seconds, peripherally aware that the front end of Sean’s bike had popped up level with my knee. It was only then that I backed off long enough to risk putting my head into the vicious slipstream to glance in my mirrors.

The Merc van was on fire. The whole of the front end seemed totally engulfed in dirty orange flame, even the tyres. That was the other reason for the sugar. It glued the blazing petrol to whatever it touched, like napalm.

As I watched, the van swerved violently onto the other side of the road, into the path of a truck heading in the opposite direction. The truck locked up and the trailer stepped out, narrowly avoiding a jack-knife.

The Merc locked up, too, broadsided, skidding back across to its own side of the carriageway and carrying on without stopping. It shot straight across the hard shoulder and bounced violently down the short embankment, crashing through the wooden fence at the bottom and ripping out half its front suspension in the process. It finally came to rest, still on fire – and, remarkably enough, still on what was left of its wheels – about a hundred metres into the field.

As soon as we saw the van was going to crash, both Sean and I had grabbed for the brakes. I’d always thought the cross-drilled discs on my Suzuki had been good until I’d found out just how amazing the FireBlade’s brakes were. I felt the compression in my arms as the front forks dived, my belly wedging hard against the back of the tank.

The road was wide enough to swing round, even on a modern sports bike with no steering lock to speak of. We flashed back to the point where the van had left the road, pulling the bikes to a jerky stop on the hard shoulder. A car had already stopped there and the elderly man inside was just climbing out as we roared up. He asked us something but we didn’t stop to find out what it was.

The embankment was steep enough that Sean and I had to slide and slither our way down it, vaulting the fence at the bottom and breaking into a flat run across the field. Sean outstripped my pace easily, unbuckling his helmet as he went, yanking the radio wire out of his leathers and stooping to place rather than throw it down onto the ground. I followed suit.

The front of the Merc van was still ablaze. It was surface burn, not close to touching the inside of the engine bay or the fuel system, but Hollywood has implanted the idea that any vehicle on fire is likely to explode at any moment. I could hear shouts and screams from the men inside.

Just as we reached the van the driver’s door was flung open and a burning apparition lurched out, bleeding from a dozen deep shrapnel wounds. I realised to my horror that, when Sean’s Molotov hit, the driver must have been partially leaning out of the window, possibly trying to see round the obscured windscreen.

Now, he was coated in flaming petrol that, as it was intended, had welded itself to his skin as it burned. The stench of his flesh and hair on fire almost made me gag. He rushed at us, flailing his arms and shrieking like the damned.

Without the faintest hesitation, Sean pivoted on one leg and kicked the Merc driver high in the chest. The man’s legs swept out from underneath him with the force of the blow and he landed hard on his back on the ground. Sean immediately stripped off his own leather jacket and smothered the flames, pinning the man down as he put him out.

As he did so, one of the other men from the front of the van appeared through the smoke billowing round the bonnet. He barely glanced at me as he came past, dismissing whatever threat he thought I might present, all his focus on Sean.

Sean was crouching by the driver, still stifling the flames as the man thrashed and screamed. I knew I couldn’t let the driver’s accomplice get to him in such a vulnerable position.

This new player was smaller than the driver, thin and wiry, with dark hair and a couple of days’ beard growth. He didn’t quite fit Gleet’s description of a bouncer type but, when he reached inside his jacket, I saw why he didn’t need to rely on muscle to get the job done for him.

His right hand came out of his pocket holding a baton like the one Eamonn had used, in the closed position. He moved around me, still advancing, and snapped his arm down and back and away from his body to telescope the two inner segments of the baton into place.

I darted sideways, eyes on the hand that held the weapon. I jerked up with my left hand behind the man’s wrist as I punched down hard with my clenched fist on the back of his elbow joint.

Normally the elbow is one of the strongest joints in your body because it’s well protected by the surrounding muscles, but not this time. The man’s arm was straight to the point of hyper-extension from the action of opening out the baton.

I heard the splintering crack of his elbow joint popping apart, even over the driver’s cries.

His arm seemed to instantly disconnect from the rest of his body, taking on a dead rubbery quality. The baton dropped from fingers he suddenly had no control over. He had time to turn his head in my direction, eyes wide with a kind of hurt surprise, as though I’d cheated somehow.

I didn’t give him time to get used to the idea.

I snatched up the baton on its second bounce, reversed it into my hand and slashed at his right kneecap with it, putting him down and out of the fight.

Aware that there had been three men in the front of the Merc, I spun round, tensed, the baton gripped tight in my fist, to find William, Paxo and Daz staring at me from about ten metres in front of the van. The third man was slumped on the grass at their feet. There was enough blood on his forehead to suggest he’d knocked himself about in the crash and they’d just dragged him clear.

I shut my mind to the horrified fascination on their faces.

“Don’t just stand there,” I shouted, my own shame making my voice harsh. “Jamie’s still in the back. Get him out!”

There was a second’s immobility, then Paxo broke it, making quickly for the rear of the van. The others were close behind him, wrenching the doors open just as I reached them.

Inside, the back of the Merc had been panelled out to make a flat-sided plywood box. Jamie lay crumpled in one of the front corners, hard up behind the cab. His hands were roughly tied behind him and to his ankles, so his knees were bent right back.

The fear on his face when the doors were thrust open took a moment to change to relief as he screwed up his tear-riven eyes against the sudden flood of light.

“Christ,” he said on a gasp that was almost a sob. “Oh, thank Christ.”

I jumped up into the back, unzipping my jacket pocket and pulling out my faithful Swiss Army knife to slice through the packing tape they’d used to secure him. They must have got through half a roll of it, wrapped round and round his limbs until it had become one twisted sticky brown band.

“What about his bike?” William asked as we cut the last of the tape free and Jamie unfolded himself with a grunt.

The little Honda had been shoved into the back of the van and lashed to ring-bolts at one side. It was leaning precariously but the webbing straps they’d used had held. Good job too, or the bike would have toppled right on top of Jamie during the crash.

“Forget it,” Sean said from the rear doorway. He jerked his head in the direction of the road. “We’d never get it back up the embankment and we’ve attracted too much attention as it is.”

Jamie was too shaken up even to protest about abandoning his ride but he had other things on his mind. “Hey, what about the money and the stones?”

“Leave them – leave them all,” I snapped as Daz and William half-dragged, half-carried him out of the back of the van, the blood-flow to his legs still fighting the constriction.

The driver was out, in both senses of the word. Wisps of smoke still rose from his skin and clothing, but there were no actual flames. Sean had left him in a semi recovery position sprawled on his side in the grass. The man the others had rescued was still unconscious, too, but the one I’d hit was sitting up a few metres away, clutching his broken elbow in a way that reminded me sharply of Gleet.

And suddenly I had a series of vivid mental images, not just of Gleet with his shattered arm, but of the diamond courier sitting propped on the dirty toilet with the gaping wound in his throat, robbed of his dignity along with his life. And of the fear captured immobile on Tess’s face as she lay dead in the hotel bathtub. The driver might or might not survive his injuries, but he was a casualty of battle. The others had been little more than executions.

I stopped briefly alongside the man with the broken elbow. He looked up at me with a dull hatred in his eyes that only served to fan my anger.

“Tell Eamonn this ends here,” I said, my voice cold. “But if he wants to take it further we will finish it – and him. Understand?”

The man paused, not wanting to give me an inch. Then his gaze flicked round the faces of the others, all silently intent on him, and the precariousness of his position seemed to dawn on him. He nodded, not meeting my eyes. I leaned in close. He struggled with himself not to lean away from me.

“And if you should think about changing your mind later,” I added quietly, “I swear I’ll come back and break your other arm.”