‘She ran out on him when the farm started to collapse. She’s always been a survivor.’
Miles nodded slowly. Collins was still shaking his head and grinning.
‘Me the son of Champ,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I’m not even a Catholic.’
There was smoke in the distance. But the chaff had already been burned, hadn’t it? Collins had seen it too, puffing into the air, growing ever nearer as though carried on the wind, though there was no wind.
‘Collins—’
‘It’s Champ!’ Collins was already reaching into his waistband, producing the handgun that Miles had not seen since the night of their escape. Looking up the winding farm road, Miles saw Champ’s car veer sharply and take the last hundred yards or so of track as though heading toward a finishing line. The car, dust enveloping it, slid to a halt in front of them. Dust, thought Miles, that’s what it is, not smoke.
‘What’s the hurry, Champ?’ shouted Collins, his eyes still fixed on the track.
‘Being followed!’ Champ bellowed back at him, lurching out of the car. ‘Get in!’
Miles had no choice. Collins pushed him into the driver’s seat, then ran around to the passenger side, hauling himself in. There was blood on the steering wheel.
‘Champ’s hurt,’ said Miles.
‘Never mind Champ. He’s indestructible. Get us out of here.’
‘Same way we came?’
‘No, around the side of the barn. There’s an old track there through the fields.’
‘That’s never wide enough—’
The barrel of the gun stuck its cold, probing tongue into Miles’s neck.
‘Drive,’ said Collins.
Taking the car in its circuit around the farmhouse, Miles had time to glimpse the other car heading down the main track toward the farm. Oh, he’d recognize that car in his dreams, in his waking nightmares, and he had no doubt that Six and One would be in front, the one driving, the other angling his gun out of the window.
He drove.
Champ had gone into the farmhouse. It struck Miles that he would be reaching into the old tea caddy, searching for his own weapon, the weapon with which to protect Marie and himself. Oh, God...
‘Just drive!’
He had pulled the car out of one rutted ditch, foot hard down on the accelerator, and now pushed it through the tortured track, no more than a walkway, while the fields complained all around him and the motor whined its plea for a third gear change.
‘It’s them!’ he shouted.
‘Well I didn’t think it was Christian Aid,’ Collins called back as the first hollow bang told them both that bullets were angling toward them.
The fields, once pockets of green, now seemed huge and barren. Miles knew that one slip would plunge the car into another, larger ditch. He had to keep his hands steady, steady despite the smear of blood on the steering wheel, despite the sweat pouring down his face.
Collins slid into the backseat and smashed the window with the butt of his gun. Another whine, as of a blacksmith’s hammer, came and went, and Miles was still alive. There was the terrible sound of sudden thunder as Collins tried his luck. As his ears cleared, Miles risked a glance in the rearview mirror. The car behind had slowed.
‘They don’t like that!’ Collins shouted.
Then Miles found the ditch.
The car plunged in, its back wheels leaving the ground and remaining suspended. Collins was screaming at him.
‘I need your weight on the boot,’ Miles said, feeling a sudden calm, the tranquility of the doomed. The other car stopped abruptly as Collins scrambled out of the back window frame and landed on the large boot, still firing off bullets like a man possessed. Miles was no race-car driver, no stock-car expert. This was instinct, nothing more. He put the car into reverse, waited until Collins had hammered the back wheels onto the dry clay soil, and let the engine go with everything it had. The unrestrained clamor of machinery filled the air, and the car jolted back, climbing onto the road again, sending Collins tumbling into the backseat, where he whooped and sent a shot through the roof of the car.
Nothing to lose, thought Miles. In fact, it’s inspired. He kept his foot down hard on the accelerator, yelling to Collins to watch out, and sent the car screaming back into the Cortina, where it crumpled the bonnet. Collins, ready, sent four or five shots into the intact windscreen from a range of three feet, while Miles found first gear and prayed that their own car had not been damaged in the collision.
They flew, while the wrecked Cortina let off steam, no bodies apparent in its interior. The windscreen was still intact.
Reinforced glass. Very. He’d seen it before. The thing was a veritable tank.
None of which worried Collins, who gave several more victory whoops as he climbed back into the passenger seat.
‘We showed them,’ he said. ‘We showed the bastards where to get off.’
But Miles doubted that.
‘What exactly,’ said Miles, ‘did you mean back there?’
The fields had opened into a lane, and the lane had opened into a two-lane highway. Miles, getting to know the car’s whims, had relaxed a little, but still felt queasy.
‘When?’ Collins was reloading, picking bullets out of his pockets and pushing them into the ammunition clip. Cordite was all around.
‘When you said you’re not a Catholic.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Then why do you fight on their side?’
‘Jesus, you can ask that? When you just saw what the other side looks like?’
The car coughed, reminding Miles that it was old and rusty, as unused to any of this as he was. It was the kind of car you would steal only if contemplating a one-way trip.
‘I’ve heard,’ said Miles, ‘that even the Eire government isn’t in favor of the IRA or their methods.’
‘You’re not seeing, are you? You’re still blind. Those men back there have been hunting us for days, they’re madmen. And they’re the supposed security force. Now do you see? Your government’s put this country into the hands of the insane, and then gone and torn up the rules to boot.’
‘It doesn’t explain how you come to be in the IRA.’
‘Turn left here.’ Collins slipped the gun back into his pocket and rested his feet on the dashboard. ‘When I was a teenager there was a big recruitment drive for the UDA and UVF. They were coming out of the woodwork like rot. I joined. Once you joined, though, it was hard to get out. I’d killed a man before I was twenty, Mr. Flint. I was a good soldier.’ He turned to gauge Miles’s reaction. His teeth were bared, and the words came out like slashes from a bright blade. ‘I took my orders and I did what I was told to. For thirteen bloody years, working for men like those ones we just left.’
‘So what happened?’
‘You wouldn’t believe it. You’d laugh.’
‘Try me.’
‘I don’t see why I should.’
‘Because of what happened back there? Because you need to?’
‘Maybe.’
‘So what happened?’
‘What happened?’ mimicked Collins. ‘I found myself crying for Bobby Sands, that’s what happened.’
They needed petrol, and decided to eat at a café behind the pumps. Miles’s senses were sharp now, and he examined the lunchtime customers for gun-toting executioners while Will Collins wolfed down fried potatoes and eggs.
‘I’ve got something to tell you, too, Will,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘But I’m not sure yet where to begin. Meantime, what about your story?’
Collins patted his shirt, signifying this time that he had eaten well. He lifted the mug of tea to his lips, still chewing, and studied Miles over the discolored ceramic rim.
‘Where was I?’
‘Crying over Bobby Sands.’