For the Good of the State (41 page)

Like Sadowski, he wasn’t protecting his man now, so what the hell was he doing?

There was a gap just ahead, at last—

There was something very wrong here: he had promised Henry Jaggard implicitly, and Cathy Audley explicitly, not to do what he was doing; and he was risking his own life in breaking those promises. But, in the midst of what was now a huge disaster, David Audley had given an order, because his instinct was to fight disaster, to the last gasp and the last bullet—and—and by sweet Jesus Christ!—that was his own Polish instinct, too!

Now there was the gap in the wuzzy—a gap where a summer-fire had burnt it back long ago, to let the heather and the bracken get a stronger foothold for a time until it could re-establish itself—so that was the way he would go—

The dead wuzzy and heath and bracken gave place suddenly to a crumbling stone wall, reinforced by a sheep-proof wire fence.

Over the wall and the fence: there was smooth hillside grass now, liberally sprinkled with sharp-focused sheep-dung and smaller rabbit-droppings, with the curve of the headland above him and the full fury of the wind at his back, driving him upwards towards the crest; indeed, even as he let the wind drive him, he saw real sheep away to his left, huddled against the inland line of the wall, and also the white danger-signal tail of a rabbit bobbing off to his left, into a square wall of windswept gorse—

But there was no other living thing, either ahead or left-and-right, as he came towards the high point, with the whole coastline behind him fully revealed and stretching into far rain-mist:
this, almost to the very yard, where that dimpled trench-line marked the edge of the gorse square, must have been where the old Romans had built their signal-station, with this superb view of any Irish raiders sailing up the Bristol Channel—although in this bone-cutting wind it must have been more a punishment-posting than a mere watch-keeping duty—

Another ten yards, and he would be at the high-point of the ditch, where the ancient palisaded-and-revetted gateway must have been, with a high watchtower somewhere inside that wuzzy, all built with timber brought up from distant inland wooded valleys with great labour and organization far surpassing anything Ranulf of Caen and Gilbert of Mountsorrel could have managed more than a thousand years later, in a less efficient age of the world—

And then he saw them: and saw them both together, on the corner of another sheep-wall-and-fence inwards from the Roman signal station, but not in those other ages of Romans and Normans safely dead, but in his own now, with his own death shouting —

Which way?

They saw him almost in the same instant, perhaps by chance, or perhaps because they were being properly careful: it didn’t matter, because in his own age, if he gave that damned
Green Machine
rifle a clear sight, he was dead now—and the odds against him clogged his throat with fear even as he tried to make a decision—

Which way? Because if he went back the way he had come, the curve of the hillside would still give them a clear view as he reached the stone wall again, which was higher on this side, so that he would have to climb up it—

The thought became its own decision: there was a narrow band of grass between the gorse-wuzzy of the Roman fort and the steep bracken-and-heather below him, and his legs were already anticipating his brain’s instructions, already running him where he needed to go, automatically twisting and jinking him like that frightened rabbit which had itself showed him how to take cover in the wuzzy.

But he wasn’t going into the wuzzy like the rabbit: the gorse was old and thick on both sides of him, and even if he could break through it (which he didn’t think he could, anyway), it would slow him down too much—or it might even stop him altogether. And that was all the man with the rifle needed—

(‘The Green Machine’, Audley had called it, of course: ‘They had a break-in and lost a couple—’: and they had one in the car now—but the other was up there on his flank somewhere! Damn, damn damn!)

He had to keep moving: so long as he was moving sideways—then he had a chance. Not even the best marksman liked deflection shooting: marksmen liked sitting targets—

But the damned wuzzy was still too high on either side, and he could feel the land falling away under his feet with each rabbit-bound. So what he was doing now was running back the way he’d come, parallel to the invisible path below him and the great grey sea itself. So this route would trap him on the very point of the high ground, on that last straight stretch after the zig-zags had brought them up from Brentiscombe meadow. So …
he must bear right—must take the risk that they were on an interception course above him: once down in that heather-and-bracken, among the stone outcrops, then he’d have a chance as they came over the skyline in their turn, because he still had his gun—

Even as he changed direction the slope in front of him seemed to drop away and the whole combe sprang into view far beneath him, with its tiny houses huddled under foreshortened trees and the line of model cars parked beyond them. But in the very instant that he saw the combe a bullet cracked viciously—cracked and double-cracked—the sound was above him, yet also somehow behind him and ahead of him too in the same fraction of time before the howling wind carried it away.

As Tom threw himself forwards he already knew that he could never keep his feet on such a descent, but he managed an impossible succession of downward rabbit-leaps towards the nearest outcrop before the ground slipped from under him on the rain-sodden bracken. Yet even then, by some acrobatic miracle, he contrived to control his slide for another twenty yards, first on his bottom and then on his back, until one foot suddenly snagged in a deep-rooted patch of heather, twisting him sideways with an explosion of pain. And then earth and sky whirled, and he was rolling and tumbling helplessly, grabbing—
grabbing—

Christ Jesus! He’d lost the gun!

Heather and bracken tore his hands as he tried to slow his descent, but then the hopelessness of recovering the weapon opened them again, even though he felt that it was like letting go of life itself as he slid and tumbled the last few yards to drop over a miniature cliff on to the path below.

The fall jarred stars in front of his eyes for a moment—red and yellow stars, seen hazily through blurring rain and sweat. But then they weren’t stars at all: they were a huge red-and-yellow kite, straining to escape from their owner up the path, a few yards away.

‘Get away! Get away!’ Tom screamed at the boy as he tried to struggle to his feet. ‘Get away!’

The kite and the boy parted company: the kite soared upwards and outwards, and the boy seemed to disappear outwards and downwards, over the edge of the track. And Tom cried out in anguish as his ankle grated and gave way under him.

He fell on his side, and for a second he wanted only to curl up into a ball and disappear. But then his brain ordered
hands and knees—hands and knees if not feet, Tom
!

He heard himself cry out again in agony as he righted himself and the broken bones of his ankle screamed at him. And then it was too late.

It seemed hugely unfair that Major Sadowski had made the same descent somehow intact: the Major should have fallen too, and lost his gun, and even broken his bloody neck, thought Tom angrily. But Sadowski hadn’t. And neither had the man in the combat jacket, who swam into view—unfocused and then focused—with the white eyes in the blackened face and the rifle in his hands. And that was unfair, too.

In fact, everything was unfair—even being killed on his hands and knees on a muddy path was unfair. And his ankle hurt like hell, too—

He wiped his sweaty face with one hand, hypnotized by the muzzle of the gun in Sadowski’s fist, which was pointing at him. But then, inexplicably, it wasn’t pointing at him as the man in the combat jacket said something—or started to say something as Sadowski shot him at close quarters, spinning him clear off the path.

Tom frowned uncomprehending at Sadowski, watching him replace the gun methodically in its holster. Then the Major took three steps and started to reach down for the rifle, which his murdered comrade had so suddenly relinquished.

‘
Leave it
!’ shouted a shrill voice from far behind Tom.

The Major froze for a second, his hand halfway to the rifle. Then his head moved slightly, so that he was staring past Tom, up the path towards the sea.

The urge to turn himself in the direction of Sadowski’s stare and towards that weird far-off imperious voice, yet at the same time keep his eyes on the Major himself, was too much for flesh-and-blood: wishing to do both taxed Tom’s enfeebled powers of decision so that he attempted to do both, and ended up by doing neither as he exerted pressure again on his smashed bones and was facing uselessly into space across half an empty mile, towards the zig-zag path on the hillside on the other side of the combe, as the blinding pain and the explosive chatter of a machine-pistol confused his senses.

The distant hillside blurred and the treacherous wind took the noise and spread it into infinity, so that the echo was only inside his head instead of reverberating up and down the combe and far and wide over the high empty Devon coastline. But it froze him nevertheless, just as the strange shrill voice had held Major Sadowski for that lost moment in the past, before he had come to what Tom knew—
knew without needing to understand
—had been his final and inevitable decision, because that had always been the Major’s game—

Kill, or be killed!

The far hillside became crystal-clear, so that Tom could observe with detached interest that it was steeper than his own, with less vegetation and with avalanches of rocky scree; and thought (light-headedly)
that if Major-General Gennadiy Zarubin
(who was dead)
had climbed that way, then maybe Major Sadowski
(and maybe the man-in-the-combat-jacket, with the black-face-but-white-eyes)
wouldn’t be dead; but he hadn’t, and they were—he was, and they were
…
so now Tom Arkenshaw—so Tom Arkenshaw, against all the odds—

He lifted his bad ankle again. And, though it still screamed out at him, he was almost grateful for the pain’s reassurance that he was still in his own world, the world of the living, as he contrived to look over his shoulder at last—

He saw the child’s push-chair first, on the bend in the patch where it turned to follow the coastline a dozen yards away, almost on the very spot where he said ‘I shall resign’ to Audley, five hundred feet above the great grey angry sea, so very recently—so very recently and so long ago for Zarubin and Sadowski and the camouflaged man … for them, in fact, it had been the rest of their whole lifetimes—

The head-scarfed mother detached herself from the overhang, still holding the machine-pistol stiffly at the ready, ignoring him and her empty push-chair equally as she sidled step-by-careful-step across the path—the old professionally well-balanced step, ready for anything: he had seen that before, the fluid careful body, the steady gun and the watchful eyes! But he had never really been in that class, in which preservation was not a sequence of precautions, but a violent pre-emptive action against the terrorists—

She reached the edge of the path, and took one quick up-and-down glance over it, only to confirm what she already knew while hardly taking her eye off the path over Tom and beyond him, just in case (and
just in case
was another hallmark of the pro)—

But now, at last, she looked at him, and advanced towards him. And, just as he was testing the idea that maybe she wasn’t a woman after all, she smiled at him, and he knew that she was, of course: it wasn’t just that remembered voice, and certainly not the smile, it was everything about her which made her a woman.

‘Hi there, Sir Thomas.’ She was late-thirties at close quarters, but not noticeably hard-as-nails. ‘I’m Shirley.’

Tom felt at a disadvantage. ‘Hullo … Shirley.’ Part of the disadvantage was a feeling of intense gratitude. Which, because she had only been doing her job, made him also feel foolish. But there was also the fact that he couldn’t stand up: as she moved cautiously past him and he tried to keep her in sight his broken bones reminded him painfully of his fall. ‘I’m afraid I’ve broken my ankle.’

‘Is that a fact?’ The path was empty except for the rifle which Sadowski had reached for in vain. But she wasn’t interested in that. ‘Is there anyone else up there, Sir Thomas?’ She watched the hillside as she spoke.

‘No.’ The pain made him catch his breath. ‘There were just the two of them.’

Two?‘ She shifted her attention to the outside edge of the path. ’Hmm … well that surely makes two.‘ She studied what he couldn’t see for a moment, then she peered further back. ’You can come on up, Wilhemina.‘

Tom’s disadvantaged feeling expanded into embarrassment. He should have known, of course—children, clogs or kites, none of them were Willy’s scene. But chiefly it was obstinate disobedience which came naturally to her.

‘Wilhemina!’ This time Shirley shouted the name. ‘Come on up!’

‘I’m coming—I’m coming!’ Willy sounded angry, rather than scared, in the distance. ‘I fell halfway down the hill, darn it, Shirl!’

Tom sat up with difficulty, holding his injured leg with both hands unsuccessfully. Not that he was about to regain much dignity, with his knuckles skinned and bloodied by his fall through the gorse, and his face not much better, by the feel of it.

‘Hmm … ’ Shirley stared down at him. But there was a surprising lack of disdain in her expression. ‘You got the other one, huh?’

Tom hid his surprise beneath his pain. But then he realized that she must have been round the point of the path when Sadowski had killed his comrade: she must have been covering Audley when the freak wind had carried the sound of Sadowski’s shot—or one of the shots—back to her; and Willy had been behind her, and therefore been closer to this point; so Willy had arrived here first—was that it?