BlindFire (23 page)

  A sort of guttural sound came from Charles
;
he buckled, and then fell to his knees.

  "Silencer!" 
T
he Major
shouted at the top of his voice
. 
"He’s using a silencer..! Take cover
!"

***

Jack fired again, this time a fatal shot straight between the eyes of McCaughey. The other two targets ran for cover.

  "Not so fucking clever now, are you Charlie boy?"  Jack
shouted
. Then emptied the rest of his magazine into the already dead man.
“Send boys to do a mans job will yer’ Charlie? Who’s the dead one now?”

  As soon as he changed magazines, he climbed out of the old pickup. He knew where they were, they wouldn't have the guts to leave the relative safety of the shadows. Firing as he ran, he suddenly saw something off to his left. It was a man bringing a huge gun into the aim.

  "Fuck..."  He screamed, diving for cover behind an old excavator bucket just as the ground exploded behind him.

  "Jesus Christ, what
the hell
is that?" In a second he was on his feet sprinting for more cover as the ground shook and exploded all around him. A stray round tore into the fuel system of an old scrap car, exploding into the night sky. Debris shooting in all directions through the flames and billowing black smoke.

   Danny
reloaded from the belt around his chest as he strode out into the open.

  "That way!" Shouted the Major and set off running.

  Danny
followed, tearing his long coat from his shoulders as he ran. He soon caught up with the Major then overtook him.

  Further down the row of twisted metal and scrap there was no sign of

Jack,
he must have hidden thought Danny
and doubled back.

  He found the Major leaning up against an old bus breathing deeply.

  "Did you get him?" He asked.

  Danny
shook his head.  "He's here somewhere... hiding."

  There was a sudden clink as bullets bounced off metal above the Majors head. In the same second he was catapulted back against the bus clutching his stomach.

  Danny
grabbed him, dragging him down to the floor as more bullets clattered above their heads. Then
he
retaliated pumping round after round into the hostile darkness, sparks spraying off the metal as cars exploded and collapsed from their precarious heights.

  "How bad is it?"

  "I don't... I don't know."  Rasped the Major painfully, inspecting the blood on his hands.

  "OK, I'll stay with you. Just keep pressure on that wound."

  The Major coughed, then winced in pain as a trickle of blood started its final journey down his chin. "No... Get him. This may be your last chance."
A c
ertain finalit
y and blood tainted his voice,

 
Danny ignored him and
kept guard. It was only two minutes until Beth and Gunter swung around the corner in the car, but it felt like hours.

  "Hurry up!"  Shouted Danny
.  "He's passed out; I don't think he's going to make it."

  Gunter gently pushed the Major into the car, laying him on the back seat. "Go Beth!"  He shouted closing the door. The engine revved and she was gone. They listened to the sound of the car fading in to the distance and soon they were once again alone in the dark.

  Gunter drew his pistol. "Where did the shots come from?"

   "D
on't know... The bastard's got a silencer."                                                                                                           
                

 
Gunter suddenly see
med angry.
"That's cheating."
He growled

  He studied the bullet holes left on the bus, then walked away turned and studied them again. "Where was John standing?"  He asked.

  "Here against the bus, slightly facing me."

  Gunter took up the position by the bus. "Like this?"

  Danny
nodded.  "Maybe more this way."  He grabbed Gunter and tugged him slightly. "Yeah, that's more like it because this is where we fell."

  "So the only place he could have fired from is somewhere over by those old washing machines."

  "Let’s go."  Danny
said and led
the way. They saw the blood straight away smeared all over the side of a once white tumble dryer.

  "That should slow the bastard down."  Said Gunter.  "Maybe now we can finish this madness."

  Danny
thought he could hear something in the distant. He couldn't put his finger on it, but it sounded familiar.

  "Can you hear that?"

  "Yes."  Gunter
replied
, straining to listen. "But I don't know... Yes of course, its McKay lets go."

  "What is it?" Danny said
, jogging beside Gunter.

  "He's piling metal up against a chain link fence."

  Danny
suddenly realised. "He must be so injured that he can't climb."

  A trail of thick concealing blood took them all the way to the fence. They soon found where he had used rusty old angle iron to help him get over to the road.

  "There!"  Shouted Gunter.  "He's limping badly."

 
They were over the fence in a second, sprinting down the street.

  Jack turned, in panic he threw his empty rifle at them and drew his pistol. Hobbling in to the middle of the road, he waved his arms as a car screeched to a halt.

  "Get out!"  He screamed. A young woman grabbed her baby and ran sobbing to the side of the road as Jack sped away into the night.

  Danny
fired twice from the hip but missed. "We need a car, or he's going to get away."

  "Look there's something coming."

  "It’s
a
d
ustbin wagon."  Danny cried
.

  Gunter stepped out into the road and stopped the vehicle. Then he
opened the driver’s door.  "You see that car up ahead?"

  The man looked and nodded.

  "Can you catch it?"

  He smiled. Danny
and Gunter hopped onto the footplates mad
e for the refuse collectors,
the
engine revved hard and the
truck began its climb in speed. Soon they were having trouble hanging on as the driver
relished in taking
c
orners at high speed and completely ignoring
speed ramps signs.

  "Can't you go any faster?"
Gunter
shouted
.

  There was no need for an answer as the truck suddenly lunged forward
. Danny
slipped, bringing his knees to within a centimeter of the spinning wheels. The thought of going under them gave him all the strength he needed to drag himself back up.

 
"He's headed for the town centre." 
T
he driver
shouted
.  "I know a quicker route and besides there's an Army road block down
t
here tonight."

  Gunter nodded and clung on tight as the driver tore down one way streets the wrong way and took corners so fast, that the truck went up on two wheels at one point.

***

  Jack pressed the wound on his thigh, it was still bleeding badly. The mirror told him all he had to know the idiots had turned off down a side street
, he was home and dry.

  He slowed slightly as the pain in his accelerator leg was unbearable. By the time he saw them
it was too late. Oil drums and flashing blue
lights meant only one thing in
Belfast
, a checkpoint. Speeding up he hit the soldier at forty miles an hour, then smashed through the barrier.
With t
he
screaming
soldier still clinging to his windscreen wipers, he sped off then braked sharply tossing his passenger twenty meters in front.

  The body stirred on the road, he could hear
the reports of weapons as his men shot
wildly at the car. He looked u
p the car was
sitting there revving his engine. He guessed the rest and closed his eyes; there was no point in trying to move both his legs were already broken.

  Jack revved the engine until it screamed and then drove straight for the injured soldier, only turning at the last second. There was only one thing better then killing an enemy and that was scaring the shit
e
out of them. He drove off laughing, until the pain in his leg stopped him. The car shuddered and lurched forward
,
then lost power. Jack spat as he looked at the fuel gauge reading empty.

***

"Slow down!"  Shouted Danny
.  "We could miss him!"

  The driver grimaced this was the most fun he had had in years, but he did as he was told anyway.

  It was him that saw the car
first, after working nights for all these years he had a way of noticing things out of place. He had seen it all, from car bombs to snipers taking up positions. Pulling up behind the car, his two passengers jumped off and slowly approached it.

  "Gone." said Danny
.

  "He ran out of petrol."

  There was no sign of their quarry in any direction, but
they found
traces of blood
both north and south of the car.

  "He's clever..! I think he’s t
rying to confuse us."

  "Let’s split up, which way do you want to go?"

  Danny looked in both directions and then
pointed south with the Spas.

***

   Beth
anxiously
ran her fingers through her hair again. Why wasn't anyone telling her anything? It had been ages since she brought him in, unconscious but at least
he was still
alive.

  They had simply put him on a stretcher a
nd rushed
down the corridor sticking pipes in all over him. Beth had
only
been able to go so far
and
was then asked to go to the waiting room
.

 
He had lost a huge amount of blood and looked ghostly pale slumped on the back seat of the car that s
he
had
thou
ght he was already dead
. Seeing that face of death really brought it back to her, the bits she had tried to block out all those years. Being raped by that monster, of course she remembered the absolute terror that had torn her emotional mind to shred
s and the physical pain as he tortured her
. But that was nothing compared to being forced to watch your own brother begging
for his life
. She remembered how McKay seemed to prefer her brother, throughout the ordeal he had called him boy and kept him naked. Beth thought of the deep feeling of relief when he died, she was happy for him at least his pain was over.

  She felt the suddenly felt the need for nicotine as the
smell of coffee dr
ifted past on its way down the corridor
.
She found herself tracing its source to
a small cleaners store room.

  Quietly swinging the door open she waited for some cleaner to
start shouting at her to get out. Apart from a selection of brushes, buckets and mops there was no one inside
. A percolator sat
bubbling on a cupboard by a window
, half full of hot coffee
. P
robably been sat there all day
she
thought
and lit a cigarette as she filled an old chipped mug with the black liquid.

 
He cravings subsided she
returned to the waiting room and immediately saw
a
whit coated
Doctor striding down the corridor towards her.

"Excuse me Miss."

  Beth smiled

"Hello."  He said sounding serious. "I believe you brought in th
e chap with the gunshot wound?
"

  Beth took a much needed sip of coffee. "Yes."  She
said and
nodded.

  "I need some details."

  "But I really don't know him, I found him
lying
by the side of the road."