The Hostage (6 page)

‘How do you know her name is Mary?’ asked Tommy, looking confused.

‘I don’t.That’s just the name I’ve given her.’ Healy adjusted some controls on his panel. ‘And by the signal strength I’d say she was getting closer.’ He then checked his watch, curious about something. ‘There’s one element missing,’ he said, more to himself.

‘What’s that?’ asked Tommy.

‘I’d have thought it would be up by now. A bit slow. Which is good, I suppose.’

‘What’s slow?’ Tommy asked, a little annoyed at being ignored.

Healy looked at him as if just remembering Tommy was in the van with him. ‘The helicopter,’ he said.

 

Stratton drove at speed along the airbase access road and arrived at a collection of long, narrow single-storey buildings on the edge of an airfield. He screeched to a halt, drawing the attention of the handful of mechanics and service engineers lounging outside on a smoke break. He climbed out with his bag and rifle, passed the servicemen, who watched him curiously, and headed towards a Gazelle jet helicopter parked alone on the grass fifty yards away. There was no sign of the pilot or ground crew.

He opened the passenger door of the sleek four-seater, dumped his bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and looked toward the Air Corps buildings. The pilot casually stepped out, wearing the standard green one-piece flying suit, a helmet and pulling on his tight leather gloves. Stratton took off his jacket, removed a shoulder holster from his bag and pulled it on, clipping the tail to his trouser belt. The pilot did not acknowledge Stratton as he walked around the other side of the cab and climbed in with the urgency of someone preparing for a Sunday drive. Stratton had a problem with him already.

‘Do you know what an op Kuttuc is?’ Stratton asked.

The pilot was a young, cocky lieutenant fly-boy with a condescending smile he reserved specifically for those he considered to be of an inferior class. He had placed Stratton in that category the moment he laid eyes on him.

‘Yes,’ he replied. It was one of those long, irritating ‘yeses’ that went up at the end, suggesting the question was childishly obvious. ‘One of your chaps has been kidnapped,’ he said as if he had been watching too many old Brit war movies. Stratton watched him climb in.The man was digging his own grave, completely ignorant of it.

Stratton checked his pistol and slid it into his holster. ‘This kite should’ve been turning over by the time I got here.’

‘I was here as soon as I got the word,’ the pilot replied tiredly.

‘You’re the standby pilot, right?’ Stratton asked.

‘Obviously,’ the pilot said as he flicked switches and pushed buttons in the order on his checklist.

‘That means you standby in your kit, helmet at your side, and when the bell goes you sprint like the Battle of Britain.’

The pilot continued checking his instruments, ignoring Stratton. Stratton reached over and took his arm in a vice grip. ‘Do you understand?’

The pilot stopped and looked at him, quite horrified by the physical contact.

‘Now get this fucking thing airborne,’ Stratton continued, releasing the pilot’s arm to pull on his heavy jacket.

The pilot continued to check off instruments, glancing at Stratton, unbalanced by his attitude. He was certain Stratton was not an officer and no matter what the urgency he had no right to talk to him in that manner, let alone physically grab him. He decided not to make an immediate issue of it as there obviously was some urgency, but he would certainly bring it up with his CO when they got back. He couldn’t give a fig if this ruffian was from Special Forces. Long hair and dirty clothes did not give him the authority to be insolent.

The pilot started the engines while Stratton climbed inside and pulled his door closed. Stratton fastened his seatbelt web, pulled on his headset and plugged the giro-steady device attached to the rifle into the power source on the instrument panel. He placed a full magazine into the magazine breach, rested the end of the barrel on top of the instrument panel and pulled back the cocking leaver, loading the weapon loudly. The pilot glanced at him and the rifle, aware the rifle should have been loaded outside the helicopter and in the sandbagged loading bay as standing orders demanded. He wondered why these people acted as if they could break any rule that suited them.

 

Aggy flew down the lane in more doubt of her driving skills than ever.The speedometer was hovering around eighty mph. She leaned into a smooth left hand-bend and barely kept her nearside wheels on the road. If another vehicle had been coming the other way the chase would have been over. Ed had squeezed permanent indentations in the base of the seat with his fingers and was fast reaching his breaking point. He pulled on his seatbelt, a defining act since operatives always declined to use seatbelts because it slowed their escape from vehicles if they came under fire.

‘We’ll do ’im no good if we kill ourselves!’ he shouted.

The way Aggy saw it they had no choice. She was not about to give up trying and if she went any slower she might as well stop.

‘Crossroads!’ Ed suddenly screamed.

She tore right through it without slowing or even looking either way.

‘Fookin’ ’ell,’ Ed exclaimed. ‘This is fookin’ mad!’

‘That was blue six,’ she said, trying to sound as calm as she could. Ed only had eyes for the road. ‘Blue six, towards green three. Tell ’em!’ she shouted.

Ed found the send button and pushed it.

 

Healy listened to the jumbled communication and checked a device. ‘You’d better get ready.Your boys are close,’ he said to Tommy.

Tommy ditched his cigarette, craned forward and scanned the empty lane.

 

The Gazelle raised off the pad a few metres, dipped its nose and accelerated forward, rising at a gentle angle as it gained speed. Stratton adjusted his headset and pushed his mouthpiece close to his lips. ‘Straight over the Neagh, south-west. Got that?’ he said.

The pilot nodded. Got that, he said to himself. Whatever happened to ‘sir’?

‘When I give you an instruction, you say understood, or otherwise if you didn’t. If you say nothing, I don’t know if you’ve heard or understood.’

The pilot sighed. ‘Understood,’ he said, making an attempt to convey to Stratton he was not merely a taxi driver.

Stratton pressed a button on the headset cable. ‘Whisky one, airborne.’

In the ops room, Graham pushed the transmission button on the desk. ‘Whisky one is airborne,’ he confirmed. ‘One three kilo still has from blue six towards green three.’

‘Blue six to green three, understood,’ Stratton said. ‘Any tracking located? I’m too far to pick up anything yet.’

‘No. We won’t have anything else in the area to pick up the signal before you get there anyway,’ Graham said. ‘It’s gonna be up to you.’

‘Roger that,’ Stratton said as he pulled out his map book and studied it.

The Gazelle flew at three hundred feet as it left the land to cross the cold, grey waters of Lough Neagh. Stratton looked below to the water then at the pilot with irritation.

‘How long’ve you been flying, pal?’ Stratton asked.

‘It’s Lieutenant Blane to you. Not pal, understood?’ the pilot said, becoming very vexed indeed.

‘I asked you how long’ve you been flying?’

‘Long enough.’

‘Then get your nose down, drop to ten feet above the water and red line this fucking crate. There’s easily another twenty knots in her right above the water.’

‘Now don’t you start telling me how to fly too!’

‘They teach you ground effect in school?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got a team-mate right now being driven to his funeral and we’re his only hope.’

‘It’s dangerous to get too low over these waters.The winds are treacherous.’

Stratton cut him off and talked into the radio. ‘Whisky one, I’ve got a chicken shit pilot here. Can you put Mike on.’

There was a silent pause, then, ‘Wait one,’ came Graham’s voice.

After another short pause Mike’s refined voice came over the air. ‘This is the CO of Camelot. Can you hear me Lieutenant . . . Blane, is it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the pilot replied, suddenly a little cautious.

‘I’ll make this brief and easily digestible. There are only a handful of people between myself and God in this chain of command. If you don’t do exactly what the man beside you tells you, and that includes flying underwater if he asks, I promise I will use my considerable power to see you are court-marshalled for disobeying a direct order from me and therefore the Commander-in-Chief. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the pilot replied, already going red in the face.

‘Out,’ Mike finished.

Stratton looked at the pilot for the real confirmation that he fully understood. ‘Well?’ he said.

The pilot could not believe this was happening to him. He had only been in the province two months. So far, all he had been required to do was ferry senior officers to various barracks and carry out the occasional spy in the sky job for one of this lot. Like the rest of his colleagues, he knew the gang from the ‘funny farm’ were at the sharp end of intelligence gathering, but he regarded them as overrated and that they fancied themselves a bit too much. However, he was also aware they had a lot of clout and that he would be a toilet roll in a napalm fight if he so much as squeaked a word of dissent at them. He firmed his grip on the joystick and pitch controls, dropped the nose and accelerated toward the lapping water.

Graham lowered the handset from his mouth as Mike stepped in from the intelligence cell, reading a file. ‘A tad over the top,’ he said without looking up from his file. ‘And I would never put myself before God . . . Tell Stratton to head for Aughnacloy.’

The two standby bleeps smirked at Graham and received a wink back from him as he picked up the handset. ‘Whisky one,’ he said into it. ‘Head for black seven.’

‘Black seven,’ Stratton said, his voice, mixed with the thud of the helicopter rotors, boomed over the speakers.

 

A satisfied grin slowly spread across Healy’s face as he listened to the scrambled message. ‘Now there’s a resonance even you would recognise if you heard it more than a couple of times.’

‘That your helicopter?’ Tommy asked, his eyes fixed up the lane.

‘Very good. That was the helicopter. But I refer to the voice,’ Healy said as he adjusted some dials. ‘It was a man’s voice.’

‘You know his voice too, do you?’ asked Tommy, somewhat sceptically.

‘Oh, yes. I call him Achilles.’

‘That’s a grand name you’ve given him.’

‘He’s someone you wouldn’t like to cross swords with in a hurry.’

‘That a fact?’ Tommy said contemptuously.

‘I’ve heard his voice only a handful of occasions. On two of them someone died . . . two of yours.’

Healy hit a replay button on a tape recorder and played back Stratton’s last transmission a couple of times.The garbled sounds echoed through the van. ‘Yes, that’s Achilles all right.’

Tommy glanced over at Healy, disliking him even more following his reference to the dead as ‘yours’ and not ‘ours’. A car zoomed down the lane like a jet, passing in front of the van from right to left, the tail wind rocking the lower branches of the trees that reached over the road.

‘That was Sean,’ Tommy said quickly.

‘Mary is not all that far behind,’ said Healy.

Tommy started the engine and craned to look back up the road in the direction the car had come from. He tapped the steering wheel with his fingers, a little nervous about this next phase, but anxious all the same to get it done.

He suddenly saw Aggy’s car no more than a couple hundred metres away, the bushes whipping in its wake. ‘Here she is,’ he said as he put the engine into first gear and nudged forward a little, the nose of the van just poking from the small clearing in the wood. He needed to time his move perfectly. He could not afford for her to ram him and put him out of action. His orders were to get away and over the border as soon as possible. More to the point, he had to get Healy and his equipment back into the south.

When Aggy’s car was eighty yards away Tommy gunned the van forward and forced the creaky old vehicle on to the lane to show her his rear. Healy watched anxiously out of the dirty back window as Aggy’s car slammed on the brakes but continued to close at a rapid rate of knots, fishtailing in the narrow lane. He grabbed hold of the seat in case she hit them.

It was obvious to Aggy and Ed the instant they saw the van pull out that this chase was over for them. The instantaneous subconscious question for Aggy was: how badly was it over? Ed already foresaw the absolute worst.Aggy’s mind raced to process what little information she had. Her hands turned the wheel just enough so as not to cause them to roll immediately. They missed the back of the van on Ed’s side by inches and headed at an angle for the hedge.The slight verge served as a ramp to tip the front up and the car left the lane. It hit the hedge halfway up, punching out a chunk of it and shattering the headlights as they sailed through. The car was airborne for a few seconds before nosing hard into a freshly ploughed field. The frame bent on contact and the windscreen cracked all over. Aggy locked her arms on the steering wheel and rocked like a crash dummy on contact with the earth, her face enveloped in the airbag. The rear wheels hit earth and the car slid sideways for a short distance, shuddering over the ruts to finally come to a steaming stop.

Healy looked back at the car as they drove down the lane. He watched it until they were out of sight. ‘Bye bye, Mary,’ he said.

Tommy glanced at him and shook his head.

Aggy and Ed sat for a moment without moving. Ed had his hands over his eyes as if refusing to look, or perhaps he was praying.

‘You okay?’ she asked.

‘Fuck off . . . Don’t speak to me for a moment, okay?’