Children of War (19 page)

‘Get any names from the boy?’ Bruno asked.

‘He says he won’t say a word until he sees a lawyer, must be a hardened criminal,’ she replied, her tone mocking. ‘I called the social department but it will be an hour or so before they get here from Bergerac. We have to wait inside. Can’t take the little dears to the Gendarmerie.’

‘Don’t let the two kids talk to each other,’ said Bruno, and used his mobile phone to photograph each boy. ‘One should stay inside, the other in the van. Was yours carrying anything in his pocket?’

‘Forty euros, a Toulouse bus pass and those glasses are prescription,’ Françoise replied. ‘There’s an ID number on them so we’ll be able to trace him through the optician.’

‘Attempted arson is serious stuff, even for a minor,’ Bruno said, loud enough for the boy to hear him. He opened his phone and called the Brigadier to pass on the news. As he put the phone away, he saw a military jeep draw up with an army driver and two men in camouflage uniforms. One carried a sniper’s rifle and the other a Heckler & Koch assault weapon. This would be the Brigadier’s security team. He went across to shake hands and brief them.

‘You know about the kid, Pierre, not yet two, can barely walk?’ he asked.

‘The Brigadier briefed us and said you’d tell us the rest,’ said the sniper. ‘I’m Marcel and this is Raymond. The driver
is Jacquot. I’ll need to talk to Gaston and Robert. Who’s the woman?’

Bruno explained and then left Yveline in charge at the café as he and Nancy climbed back into the Land Rover. He took the side street past the rugby stadium to get onto the road to Audrix and take the back way to St Chamassy. He handed Nancy his phone and asked her to call the Brigadier. The line was busy so Bruno left a message about the black Toyota and its licence plate. Then he asked Nancy to look up Gaston on the address book.

‘This is like Isabelle’s phone,’ she said. ‘One of the special ones.’ She handed it back to him when she heard it start to ring at the other end.

‘It’s Bruno,’ he said. ‘Have you heard from the Brigadier?’

‘Yes, and we’re ready,’ Gaston replied. ‘I’m in the pigeon tower on lookout, Robert is in the courtyard. No sign of them yet.’

‘They don’t know the area, they’ll be looking. They’re in a black Toyota four-by-four.’

‘They may have another car.’

‘I know. I’m coming in from the north-east in my Land Rover, from a village called Audrix. I’ve got a good rifle and a partner with a FAMAS and two of your friends, Raymond and Marcel. They’re in a jeep. From the direction the Toyota took, you should expect the bad guys to arrive from the west, through the village of St Chamassy.’

‘Got it. I’ll call if we see them and you call me when you’re in position.’

As Bruno turned off through Audrix, the Brigadier called him back. A white Peugeot 206 had been seen leaving the
Toulouse mosque that morning with two boys in the back seat. The driver was identified as one of the mosque’s security team and an alert had been placed on the car’s number plate. Bruno scribbled down the registration.

‘The driver must be getting worried about the boys,’ Bruno told him. ‘Probably he’ll have chosen somewhere central to pick them up. There can’t be many places in town. I have photos of the two kids, you might be able to identify them from the surveillance cameras at the mosque. We’ll email them now.’

‘Who’s we?’ the Brigadier snapped.

‘Our American ally,’ said Bruno, closing the phone. Nancy grinned at him as she sent the two photos.

*

Bruno took his rifle from the locked box in his Land Rover and left the vehicle at the last bend in the single-track road before Le Pavillon came into view, perhaps five hundred metres away. He approached the jeep and then called Gaston to tell him, and heard there was still no sign of the black Toyota.

‘Le Pavillon isn’t easy for strangers to find,’ Bruno said. ‘We are now on foot. Marcel and Raymond will set an ambush from the treeline, as close as we can get to you. They’ll be to your east. I know the country so I’ll be on open ground to your south, trying to get them in a crossfire.’

‘Got it. I’ll call you and them when I see the Toyota. Make sure your phone’s on vibrate.’

Bruno heard an echo of Gaston’s voice from the small radio clipped to Marcel’s collar. The security men had their own communications link.

‘Are you OK with the plan?’ he asked Marcel.

Marcel nodded. ‘The Brigadier said rules of engagement are
open, just save the kid and leave at least one wounded prisoner to interrogate. We’d better let them out of their vehicle first. We don’t want to leave one of them inside with the boy.’

‘The driver stayed inside at the café, so maybe they’ll leave him with the car.’

‘If so, I’ll take him out first, then immobilize the vehicle.’

‘What if they have run-flat tyres?’

‘This is a twelve point seven calibre,’ he said, patting his heavy rifle. ‘It’ll blow the wheel hubs off.’

A crackle from Marcel’s radio told them the Toyota was in sight, advancing slowly from the west.

‘Showtime,’ said Marcel, and trotted along the treeline, Raymond following.

‘So I come with you?’ Nancy asked.

‘I’d prefer you to stay in the Land Rover. We might need to give chase and it’s the best cross-country vehicle. If you have time when you’re chasing, pick me up.’

She nodded and he took the PAMAS handgun she held out him, made sure the safety was on and stuck it into the belly pocket of his tracksuit. Rifle in hand he headed, crouching, onto the plateau. He picked up some dirt from the ground as he trotted, spat onto it and rubbed it into his cheeks and brow. He kept moving north towards Le Pavillon and west toward the Toyota. It was still out of sight, visible only to Gaston in the pigeon tower.

The plateau’s ground was uneven. There were folds and small hillocks and he headed toward the furthest north of these and ducked behind it. He was perhaps two hundred metres from Le Pavillon when his phone vibrated. It was Gaston to say he had Bruno in view. The Toyota was heading at crawling pace
over the rough ground toward Le Pavillon and was no more than a hundred yards to Bruno’s ten o’clock. Gaston added that Marcel had the Toyota in his sights.

‘Keep this line open.’ Bruno said, and peered carefully around the side of the hillock.

‘It’s stopped,’ Gaston said.

‘I see it,’ Bruno said. Apparently confident that it had not been spotted, the Toyota began moving again slowly. There was a driver and one man in the front, another man in the rear, who suddenly opened his door and stood, feet still inside the car, his right arm wrapped around the bars of the luggage rack, his gun pointing at Le Pavillon.

Suddenly everything happened at once. The Toyota revved its engine and surged forward, stopping just to one side of the arch that formed the entry. The passenger door opened and a man jumped out. Looking bulky, as though wearing a rucksack under his jacket, he sprayed bullets from his assault gun at Le Pavillon as he ran. The sniper rifle crashed and the windows of the Toyota shattered The man leaning out of the Toyota began firing at the pigeon tower and Bruno sighted carefully and fired once, then a second time, and saw him slump.

The sniper fired again and the Toyota sagged, a front wheel collapsing. Gaston was firing from the pigeon tower and Bruno switched his aim to the bulky man who was running toward the courtyard. He fired twice without success and then the man jerked and spun at Bruno’s third shot. But he limped on and ducked inside the arch, careless of the gunfire.

The gate seemed to disintegrate as a large explosion took
place and Le Pavillon disappeared in an eruption of flame and black smoke.

A suicide bomber, Bruno realized, cursing. He should have thought of that. He began running toward the Toyota, shouting into his phone for Gaston as he ran. There was no reply. He pulled the handgun from his belly pocket as he reached the Toyota, partly sheltered from the blast by the stone wall around the building but with loose stones strewn across its roof and hood.

Carefully, he peered under the car, the gap narrowed because the sniper had destroyed one of the front wheels. The man he had shot was slumped on the earth beside the Toyota, not moving and no weapon in his hands. The driver had been blown off his seat by the heavy sniper’s bullet and his body was crumpled in the foot well of the passenger side. There was not much left of his head and the whole interior of the Toyota seemed to have been sprayed with blood. He could hear Pierre screaming from inside the vehicle.

Bruno opened the rear door, scooped out Pierre from where he lay on the floor behind the front seats. Quickly he examined his limbs and Pierre stopped his shrieking and began sucking in great gulps of air that turned into sobs. None of the blood on the child seemed to be his own. Bruno held him tight against his chest, trying to murmur words of comfort, and suddenly Nancy was there with the Land Rover. He handed the child to her and told her to take the boy back to the jeep and then come back.

He checked the man sprawled half in, half out of the Toyota. He’d been hit twice in the shoulder but was still alive. His gun
was on the ground out of reach, a large stone on top of the breech. It was too heavy for Bruno to move, so he thought the wounded man would be unlikely to free it.

Bruno tried Gaston again but still got no reply. The smoke was clearing and the pigeon tower’s roof and the window where Gaston had been on watch had both gone. He crept into the courtyard and saw complete devastation. The front wall and roof of Le Pavillon had disappeared and the courtyard was a mass of stones and roof tiles. What was left of the house was burning fiercely. A crater close to where the main door had been was all that remained of the suicide bomber.

Bruno half-ran, half-jumped across to the pigeon tower, picking his way between the loose stones that covered the steps. He clambered up to where Gaston had been. Gaston was slumped below the window, unconscious, with blood on his face and his limbs slack. But he had a pulse. Bruno slung him over his shoulder and carried him down to the courtyard, staggering under the weight and the obstacle course beneath his feet, and out to the Toyota. Nancy was coming back in the Land Rover, followed by the jeep with the driver and the other two security men aboard.

They loaded Gaston into the back seat of the Land Rover and the wounded terrorist into the rear.

‘The kid can go on your lap in the front seat,’ Nancy told Bruno. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Just one moment,’ he said, and turned to Marcel. ‘We’ll take them to the medical centre in St Denis. Can you stay here, see if there’s any trace of Robert and report in to the Brigadier? And ask him to tell the
pompiers
to hold off until we can clear away the Toyota and the weapons.’

Marcel nodded dully, his eyes on Gaston in the back seat.

‘If only I’d thought, I could have stopped that bloody Toyota long before it got close enough …’

‘Then we’d have lost the kid,’ Nancy said. ‘Pull yourself together, man, we’ve got to get your guy to a doctor.’

Pierre shocked and silent in his arms, Bruno jumped in beside her as she let in the clutch and bounced away over the rough ground to the track. A thick plume of dark smoke was rising and drifting slowly to the east, visible for miles. Bruno called Yveline to see if she could spare any Gendarmes to keep curious locals from driving up to see the source of the explosion and the smoke. Then he called Karim to say Pierre was safe.

He was trying to call the medical centre to warn them he was bringing two gunshot wounds when Nancy said, ‘Don’t.’

Bruno glanced at her in surprise.

‘Brigadier’s orders. We’re taking them to the château. The French army have a better-equipped medical team there, with more experience of gunshot wounds. And it’s secure.’

Bruno closed his phone with a sigh. ‘He can’t keep an explosion like that secret. If only I’d thought …’

‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Nancy. ‘I didn’t think of a suicide bomber either. And the little boy is fine.’

Bruno looked down at the child now sleeping in his arms. As soon as they’d delivered the wounded men to the medical team at the château he would drive Pierre home to his parents. Perhaps he’d better try to clean him up first.

As Nancy turned into the lane that led to the château, Bruno’s phone rang. It was Yveline. The white Peugeot had been spotted at the Intermarché car park. The driver was under
arrest and had been taken to the Gendarmerie. In the car was a receipt from a filling station just outside Cahors for a full tank of petrol and an extra five litres plus a plastic can. He’d paid cash but the car’s
carte grise
showed it was registered to the welfare department of the Toulouse mosque.

The story broke the next day, in a wire report from Agence France-Presse in Kabul. Quoting NATO sources, it said simply that in a dramatic coup for French intelligence, the expert terrorist bomb-maker known as the Engineer had been found by French troops in Afghanistan in the course of a special operation and was now in French custody.

This was followed within minutes by Associated Press, datelined Washington, which said that U.S. officials were liaising with the French authorities over his fate. Reuters from London, in a story titled ‘The most wanted man in the world’, then reported that the Engineer had been secretly smuggled out of Afghanistan in a French military plane and was now being held in an unknown location in France.

Within minutes, United Press International was quoting senators and congressmen in Washington demanding that the Engineer be delivered to American custody. One senator called him ‘a mass murderer of American boys’. Then Deutsche Presse-Agentur filed a story from Berlin that a European arrest warrant would be sent to the French government, asserting that the Engineer had been responsible for the deaths of at least four German soldiers, and requiring him to stand trial in Germany.

Soon the official spokesmen and politicians were all over the TV screens, and the press secretary of the European Union’s commissioner for external relations launched a new angle. In response to a question from a reporter from Holland’s
De Telegraaf
, he agreed that it would be against European law for any suspect to be handed over to American jurisdiction if there were any prospect of the death penalty.