The Hostage (18 page)

It soon became clear nothing was going to happen while they remained in their current position. Clemens depressed the clutch and eased the engine into gear. ‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘Let’s go ’ave a look.’

They moved off and slowly approached the wreck. ‘Something’ll happen here, you know that, don’t you?’ Clemens said, more to himself, licking lips that had suddenly gone dry.

As they drew closer they could make out two bodies lying in the grass beside the car. It looked like a man and a woman. They were face down and motionless.

Clemens stopped the car as they drew alongside the upturned wreck, keeping the engine in gear and a foot on the clutch, ready to speed off if a threat showed itself. They maintained their vigilance in all directions, but the two bodies were of the greatest interest. Clemens could make out bloodstains on the woman. Then the man suddenly moved, slowly, and groaned as if in great pain.

‘He’s moving,’ Clemens said.

Hank craned to get a look past Clemens. ‘Shouldn’t we see if they’re okay?’ he asked.

Clemens was in a quandary, checking in every direction and then returning to the bodies. ‘I don’t know.’

The injured man made an effort to crawl but did not have the strength. ‘We either check ’em out or we move on,’ Hank said.‘Seems kinda strange to just drive on though.’

‘Okay,’ Clemens said, coming to a decision. ‘I’m gonna get out and take a look,’ He padded his gun in its holster through his jacket as he opened the door to make sure it was there, placed his feet on to the dirt track and stood up, every move preceded by a quick check around.

Hank felt vulnerable in the car alone and climbed out his side leaving the door wide open in case he needed to dive back into it. Clemens took a cautious step towards the bodies that were in a slight dip. Hank walked around the back of the car where he could get a better look at the bodies, still checking in all directions as he moved. He touched the butt of his gun inside his jacket to remind his hands where to go quickly if need be.

Just as Clemens leaned over the injured man to get a look at him, three men with balaclavas over their heads and aiming sub-machine-guns leapt from the trees right in front of them. ‘Don’t move! Don’t move!’ they shouted. At the same time the injured couple sprang to their feet holding pistols they had concealed under their stomachs. The woman was a man in disguise. Three more hooded men charged from the trees the opposite side of the track to close the trap.

Hank jerked around to face them. A shot of adrenaline rushed through him as the screaming ambushers closed in aggressively. His overriding personal directive to be proactive took charge and he went for it, his hand jerking under his jacket towards his holster, but a burst of machine-gun fire ripping up the ground at his feet froze him, the loudness and impact a warning of the sheer destructive power of a bullet.

‘Move and you’re focken dead! I’ll focken kill you, you bastard!’ the man who fired yelled. Hank put all further thought of movement out of his head.There was something chillingly real about this.

‘On your knees! On your knees!’ Another shouted, prodding Clemens with his gun barrel. They were talking with Irish accents.

‘On your knees!’ one of them yelled with finality and levelled his gun at Hank’s head.

Hank and Clemens lowered themselves on to their knees where they were then harshly pushed to the ground, their backs knelt on, and weapons jammed into their heads. Hank was unprepared for the level of brutality. A hand grabbed the hair on the back of his head and rammed his face into the dirt.

‘You fockers are dead,’ one of the men standing between Hank and Clemens growled. He placed his foot on Hank’s back and put his weight on it. ‘You hear me, Yanky? Your focken goose is cooked.’

The wet soil chilled Hank’s face. It was an effort to breathe with the weight of the boot on his back. The attackers then became silent and motionless, as if they were robots at the end of their current program and waiting for their next command. Hank heard someone step from the bushes and trudge through the grass to stop close by his head.

‘Let ’em up,’ said a man. Hank thought he recognised Stratton’s voice. The boot and hand lifted off him and he could take a full breath.

Hank got to his feet wiping his face and spitting dirt from his mouth. He glanced at Stratton, then at the others, who kept their balaclavas on. Clemens got to his feet, looking annoyed but kept his glaring eyes aimed at the ground.

Stratton nodded to the ambushers and they stepped back and cleared their weapons.

‘Hank,’ Stratton said, as if nothing of any consequence had happened. ‘Your turn to drive. Continue the route. Get going.’

As Hank walked around to the driver’s door his jaw throbbed and he wondered if he’d cracked it. He climbed into the car and moved his mouth from side to side. If it wasn’t it was badly bruised, but he could live with it. He wouldn’t show these guys he was in any pain if he could help it.

‘On you go, Clemens,’ Stratton said.

Clemens gritted his teeth, ignored the dirt stuck to his face and walked around to the passenger side. He climbed in and slammed the door. Hank started the engine and drove slowly away from the scene. He adjusted the rear-view mirror and watched Stratton talking with the ambushers.

Clemens wiped the dirt from his face and spat some out of his mouth.

‘Who were those guys?’ Hank asked.

‘SAS fucks,’ Clemens said angrily.

‘I guess we were meant to ignore the accident and drive on through.’

‘Hindsight’s a beautiful thing,’ Clemens said curtly. ‘Act like poxy internal security officers is what he said.That’s what we were supposed to be, right? So you don’t drive past a bleeding traffic accident with people lying half-dead in the bleeding road, do you? A load of bollocks, that’s what it is!’

‘What were we supposed to get from all that?’

‘Fucked if I know,’ Clemens said.

Clemens sat back and stewed in his anger, staring down at his feet like a kid who wasn’t going to play any more. Hank decided to leave Clemens to himself. If something else happened on this little adventure it would be in Hank’s hands anyway. He assumed that was why Stratton told him to drive.

The track curved gently to the left along the wood. Hank checked the mirror and caught a last glimpse of Stratton walking away from the SAS ambushers until the wood blocked any further view.

Hank concentrated on the road ahead. They arrived at a junction and he stopped the car. Clemens still looked too irritated to get involved, so Hank reached down beside his feet and picked up the map. After comparing it to the surroundings he took the right turn.

Hank felt surprisingly relaxed as he drove, not as nervous as he was at the start, as if being thrown to the ground and stomped on had cleared the tubes a little.

The track turned the corner of a wood and crested a slight rise. As they headed down the other side a small town appeared in front of them. It looked strangely out of place, as if a large square had been neatly carved out of the centre of a city - streets, buildings, the lot - airlifted, and then deposited in the middle of the countryside. The sight was enough to make Clemens snap out of his gloom and sit up and stare at it. It was surreal. There was no sign of life in the town. It was grey and characterless, a dense urban block in the middle of open countryside, unloved or cared for.

‘Toy town,’ Clemens said. ‘I didn’t know they had one here.’

‘What’s a toy town?’ asked Hank.

‘It’s usually used for troop training - a city environment. Purpose built. There’s a huge one in Thetford the army uses before going over the water. They put on riots and snipers, stuff like that . . . The regular army doesn’t come in here so this is obviously for SF only. You’d better slow a little.’

Hank slowed to a crawl as they approached the edge of the town and the first few buildings. The dirt track turned into tarmac and widened to the width of the main street that ran down through the centre of the collection of concrete and brick structures on either side. Clemens was back to full alert now. He pulled out his gun and checked it.

‘We can expect to come under fire,’ he said. ‘Look out for pop-up targets in windows and doorways. If we do, stop the car, get out, find cover, and then we’ll cover each other to a safe location. Watch out for friendly targets, woman carrying babies, stuff like that.’

Two-storey houses lined both sides of the street, interspersed with the occasional local shop. It reminded Hank of an ugly version of Disneyland in so far as everything one expected to find in a town was there but superficially. There were signposts, a phone booth, lampposts, dustbins and a bus stop. The street and pavements were littered with bricks, chunks of concrete and broken bottles. Several cars were parked sporadically along both sides of the road, all wrecks, and many burned out and without wheels. It looked as if a serious riot had recently taken place.

‘Your gun cocked and loaded?’ Clemens asked.

‘Yep,’ Hank replied, his hands tense on the wheel. He steered carefully along the main street, nice and easy, eyes everywhere, avoiding the larger lumps of rock and concrete. It all felt so confined. The street seemed narrow even for English towns and the houses appeared to be closer at the tops as if they leaned in over the street. An attack could come from just about anywhere.There were dozens of doorways and windows, most of them broken or missing altogether.

Fifty yards into the town a bottle floated through the sky as if out of nowhere and smashed on the street beside the car. Hank maintained the steady speed. Seconds later another bottle smashed close by followed by several more.They flew from the buildings either side of the car as it passed. One hit the car and Hank speeded up. Bricks and lumps of concrete then joined the bottles. Hank drove faster as they headed towards a collection of wrecked cars arranged like a chicane, forcing him to swerve in between them.

Several men appeared, running from the houses, and pelted the car with stones and pieces of wood. A couple ran up and whacked it with sticks and kicked it. Hank drove as fast as he could, threading the obstacles in the narrow street without hitting them. A Molotov cocktail struck the road beside the car and flames splashed against its side. More rioters appeared up ahead.There must have been thirty or forty, shouting and yelling and hurling missiles.

As Hank screeched out of the chicane he put his foot fully down. The flames bubbled the paint on the car before they extinguished. Then several yards ahead Hank saw a woman running down the pavement pushing a pram. She looked panicky, as if trying to escape the riot herself. The final obstacle was two cars parked either side of the road leaving a narrow gap for him to squeeze through. As he closed on the gap, the woman running down the pavement suddenly tripped and fell and the pram wheeled from her grasp and on to the road. It rolled straight into the gap between the parked cars. Hank took his foot off the accelerator as his mind considered his choices: swerve and go down the right pavement and hit a bus stop, take the left pavement and try to squeeze past several lampposts, which looked unlikely, or slam on the brakes and hit one of the parked cars. The problem with all of those options was that they meant coming to a stop, and that meant having to deal with the rioters.

There was of course another option, an unthinkable one at any other time and place. But somehow this was all so different. He was supposed to be an undercover agent. His life was in danger, and the life of his partner. Ahead was a pram with supposedly a baby in it. Self-preservation meant something else. It was not just about one’s life. It was war.

Hank ran out of decision-making time and slammed his foot down hard on the accelerator. The car bore down on the gap. Clemens instinctively reached for the dashboard and sunk in his seat. Hank hit the pushchair square on and it left the ground like a football in a penalty kick. Something flew out of it and arced back towards the windshield. It was flesh-coloured.A baby. It slammed into the windshield, cracking it, then rolled over the roof. Hank kept his eyes on the road ahead. Clemens looked back to see the doll bounce on the road and its head fly off. A few seconds later they emerged from the grey, desolate structures back into the countryside and on to a dirt track once more as if it had all been a bad dream.

Clemens exhaled deeply and relaxed in his seat as the worst of the tension left him. ‘Nice one,’ he said. ‘Notch one dead baby up to Hank.’

Hank was in a kind of mental limbo. For a split second back there, just after the collision, he thought he had done the right thing, and now it seemed all so completely wrong. He wondered what he could have been thinking choosing the pram. This wasn’t a war they were in, not really. Stratton said they were effectively police officers. Cops don’t plough through babies to get away from rioters. ‘Shit,’ he mumbled to himself.

‘I reckon that just about sums up our day,’ Clemens said, sounding relieved that he was not the only one who had cocked up.

 

Hank stood under a pair of old oaks watching the horizon, behind which the sun had long since dropped, leaving only a faint glow. It had turned colder with the coming of darkness but he could not be bothered to go to the room and put on a sweater. The day’s events continued to eat at him. He looked back at the building that served as the galley. The lights were on and the moving silhouettes behind the opaque windows told him supper was being dished up. He didn’t feel particularly hungry and he was in two minds whether or not to eat anything at all. He remained confused. There had been no debriefing from Stratton at the end of the exercise. They had returned to the huts after the serial without so much as a hint of what the point of it all had been. If he was wrong he wanted the chance to explain why he had done it, or at least hear what he was supposed to have done.

Hank began to doubt if these guys were all they were cracked up to be. Then again, maybe he was taking it more seriously than he was supposed to. Maybe they would find out later. He decided to eat and trudged back across the track towards the galley.