She was leading Faraj now, across the yard and down to the narrow drainage cut. Their rucksacks were on their backs and their waterproofs zipped to the chin. The biscuit tin containing the moulded and wax-sealed C4 explosive was at the top of Faraj’s pack.
The water in the cut was agonisingly cold as it crept up past her crotch to her waist, but Jean’s heart was still racing with the relief that killing, when all was said and done, had proved to be such a simple thing. She hadn’t given the corpse more than a flicker of a glance; the impact of the shot had told her all that she needed to know and she heard it again now, like the sound of a boot stamping on a rotten marrow.
Reborn, remade.
After a hundred yards they stopped, and peered through the dead foliage bordering the cut. Faraj passed her the binoculars. A flatbed truck was standing at the roadblock, and a policeman was clambering over its load of blue fertiliser sacks. Search on, thought Jean. The Malyah was zipped into her hood now.
“This nullah takes us close to them,” murmured Faraj, scanning the open fields before them. “But the hedges are dead and we will be seen if we try to go across country. We have to assume they have good optical equipment.”
“They’re local police, not soldiers,” said Jean, glancing at her watch. “My guess’d be that we’ve got another twenty minutes to half an hour. After that it’ll be helicopters, dogs, the Army, everything.”
“Go, then.”
They pressed forward through the waist-deep water, rain slashing at their faces and marsh gas erupting around them with each step. It was hard going. The mud sucked at their feet, and in places the rotting vegetation fringing the cut thinned so that they had to proceed at an agonising crouch. The lower half of Jean’s body was completely numb now, and at intervals the scene in the boot of the car replayed itself in her mind. Tiny details began to emerge: the curious sensation of the PSS’s damped internal detonation, and the tiny whipcrack as the armour-piercing round met adult bone. That quarter-second glance had been enough. The image was imprinted on her memory as if on high-speed film.
Ten minutes later-ten freezing, dogged minutes that felt more like an hour-they were at the closest point of the cut to the checkpoint. The watercourse was less than three feet wide in places, and the banks were slick with the muddy run-off from the fields. Jean’s back and hamstrings, meanwhile, were screaming with the dead weight of the rucksack and the stress and tension of their crouching progress. Carefully, as Faraj waited motionless beside her, she scanned the police post with the binoculars. She had kept well behind the bankside reeds so that no lens flash would betray her, and blurred images of this foliage and grey curtains of rain hung between her and the checkpoint. Indistinctly, she watched two officers in fluorescent yellow waterproofs checking a car. Several other vehicles were waiting in line, and the officers were moving in the constricted, hunch-shouldered way of men who were not enjoying their job. Three others, more shadowy figures, were waiting in a white Range Rover with police markings. There were no blue lights in evidence but Jean could hear a faint radio crackle on the wind.
She saw the helicopter before she heard it. It was a couple of miles to the east of them, moving in irregular patterns above the fields and coppices. At intervals, a thin white spotlight beam cut the rain-grey sky.
Soon, her forehead pressed into the mudslicked bank of the cut amongst the rotting bullrushes and flag-iris leaves and beneath the skeleton of an alder bush, Jean could hear the tiny flicker of rotor blades. Beside her, his face inches from hers, Faraj was similarly frozen. The helicopter drew nearer, its pencil beam nosing pensively at a patch of woodland half a mile away.
And then suddenly it was overhead, the heavy pulse of its rotors washing menacingly over the sodden fields. The beam played briefly over the farmyard that they had left ten minutes earlier, and Jean almost wept with relief that they had covered the car with the plastic sheet. It had been desperately close, and the reaction of the police in getting the helicopters up-she was under no illusion that there would only be one of them-had been very fast indeed. And this was just the beginning. There would be tracker dogs soon, and soldiers with rifles. They had to move on, or die.
But the helicopter pilot showed no inclination to depart, and Jean began to shake with the cold and the tension, and her teeth to chatter. Extending an arm around her waist, Faraj pressed her upper body against his chest in an attempt to warm her. The gesture, she could feel, was purely utilitarian; there was no affection in it.
“Be strong, Asimat,” he murmured into the streaming hood of her waterproof. “Remember who you are.”
“I’m not afraid,” she replied, “I’m just…”
Her words vanished in the clatter of the overhead helicopter. Prop-wash shivered the surface of the cut as the spotlight beam moved inexorably towards them. Closing her eyes tightly, willing herself into immobility, Jean began to pray. Over her head, as the hard white light pressed down on them, forcing its way between her eyelids, she could feel the shudder of the stunted alder bush. Were they using thermal imaging? she wondered. Because if so…
And then suddenly the helicopter was gone, banking away westwards as if bored with the whole process.
“Now move,” said Faraj urgently, backing off her. “That won’t be the last of them, and this rain won’t last for ever.”
Relief flooded through her. At the roadblock, she heard several cars drive through in close succession. The policemen, she guessed, had been watching the helicopter. They moved forwards, bodies bent against the sheeting rain and the drag of the muddy water, and soon found themselves a couple of hundred yards beyond the roadblock.
“Another mile, and we’ll hit the village,” said Jean breathlessly, crouching down against the bank. “Trouble is, if anyone who’s just been through the roadblock sees us climbing up on to the road, they’ll just go straight back to the police and report us. They’ll have descriptions by now, and probably pictures.”
Faraj considered for a moment, took the binoculars from her, and narrowing his eyes scanned the surrounding countryside.
“Right,” he said eventually. “This is what we do.”
45
The repair hangar at the Swanley Heath Army Air Corps base was impressively vast, and considering its size, impressively warm. At 11 a.m. the Chief Constable of Norfolk had ordered that his deputy, Jim Dunstan, should take over what was now officially an anti-terrorist operation. Dunstan’s first act had been to request that the Swanley Heath base act as host to the inter-service operational team.
It was a good decision, thought Liz. Swanley Heath was halfway between Brancaster to the north and the Marwell, Mildenhall and Lakenheath USAF bases to the south. The operational team was now, hopefully, at the centre of the area through which their quarry was moving. The base was secure, and able to accommodate with ease both the two-dozen-odd personnel involved in the running of the operation and the considerable array of their technical and communications equipment.
By midday, after a scramble of activity and a lot of hard driving with sirens blaring and lights flashing, this was almost all set up. The fifteen-strong police team, headed by Dunstan, and with Don Whitten and Steve Goss in attendance, occupied an area dominated by a nine-metre-square electronic map of the region, borrowed from their Army hosts, showing the deployment of roadblocks, helicopters and search teams. In front of each member of the team was an assortment of laptop computers, landlines and mobiles, most of them in use. In the case of Don Whitten there was also an ashtray.
Beyond them, parked in a ready-to-go line, were the three unmarked Range Rovers of the Norfolk Constabulary’s SO19 Tactical Firearms Unit. Its nine members, all men, lounged on benches in their dark blue overalls and boots, passing round a copy of the Sun, rechecking their Glock 17 pistols and MP5 carbines, and staring blankly up at the distant roof of the hangar. From outside, at intervals, came the distant beat of rotors as Army Air Corps Gazelle and Lynx helicopters lifted away from the tarmac.