Perry, half listening, dozed, with Stephen's warmth against him.
"Letting me sleep when you bloody knew I'd hit him, that's below the bloody belt. How long have you known, you bastard, that I got the shite?"
He could feel Stephen's slight spare bones. For a moment he had thought he lay against Meryl's warmth. He shuddered. The morning's light seeped into the house through drawn curtains and reached into the safe area between the mattresses and the sandbags. Rankin was cocky, bouncing. Paget was behind him with a slow grin spreading. The assembled company didn't see him. He thought he did not matter to them any more.
He heard the lorry drive away.
"I mean, telling me I'd missed when I knew I'd hit, that is a professional slur, Joe. If I say so myself, forty metres minimum and no light, a moving target, that is one hell of a shot. What is it, Joe? Come on, I want to hear you bloody well say it…"
They were all laughing. Blake and Davies had been up all night, but Paget and Rankin had dossed down on the kitchen floor to catch a few hours' sleep.
Perry asked quietly, "If he was hit, why do we need the blindicide screen?"
He had interrupted them. They turned to look down at him and the sleeping child. They were the only friends he had and none of them cared a damn for him, they were strangers.
Davies said, "His name is Vahid Hossein. He fired a single grenade from the launcher. There's a flash at the front and a flame signature at the back. Mr. Paget and Mr. Rankin were going off their duty shift. They engaged him. He ran into the churchyard. Mr. Rankin was presented with a difficult shooting opportunity. He took it, fired twice, but with a handgun at the limit of its effective range. There was no blood and nobody. Mr. Paget assumed that Mr. Rankin had missed his target, that's phase one. Later, a woman walking her dogs on the common starts bawling about "Black Toby". God knows what she's doing out with dogs in the middle of a deluge. She says she saw a lifeless woman and a black-faced man on the ground. She's going on about some nonsense that happened two hundred years ago. Police officers went to the scene and found a young woman raped and dead, but no man. The young woman was a Muslim convert, and the eyes, ears, fetcher and carrier for Vahid Hossein. She was covered in blood but it wasn't hers. The man who raped her, while he strangled her, bled on her from his gunshot wound. Mr. Paget and Mr. Rankin use soft-nose bullets in the Glock, and that is phase two. Phase three is incomplete. He is wounded, Mr. Perry, but he is not dead. Although he'd lost considerable quantities of blood, he was strong enough to leave the murder scene. He is out there, in pain, and still in possession of the RPG-7 launcher. The rain in the night has washed away the chances of tracker dogs finding him. He did not take the convert's car. We do not believe he has tried to leave. An hour ago, an inflatable was launched from an Iranian tanker in the Channel and came to a rendezvous on a beach. He was not there to be lifted out. We had it under surveillance, but took no action. Thus we believe he's still here. The military are beginning a search for him. Now, we classify Vahid Hossein as more dangerous than at any time. You, Mr. Perry, are the cause of his pain, his suffering. If he has the strength, in our assessment, he will make a last attack on your home. That, Mr. Perry, is the reason for puffing up the screen around the house that will prematurely detonate we hope an armour-piercing grenade."
"And is that why you were laughing?"
The wind swept the cloud away, leaving the sun balanced precariously on the sea's horizon.
Geoff Markham thought the young man tolerated his presence on the bench overlooking Southmarsh.
They had dossed down in the car. He had woken at the first smear of light, but Chalmers had slept on, curled in the back seat with his dogs, a baby's peace on his face. Only when he'd woken had the sourness replaced the peace. Once it had been light enough to see the village, the expanse of the green and the high iron poles in front of the house with the close wire mesh netting hanging from them, he had eased out of the car.
Chalmers hadn't spoken, hadn't given any explanation, but had called for his dogs and emptied out the last of the biscuits from his pocket for them. He hadn't said where he was going, or what he intended, but he had walked away with the dogs scampering at his feet.
Geoff Markham, not knowing what else he could do, had heaved himself out of the seat, locked the car, had stretched, coughed, scratched, then went after him.
His shoes sloshed with water, his socks were wringing wet, and his shirt and coat had not dried out in the night. The letter was damp in his pocket. The wind was sharp off the sea, raw on his face. A coastal cargo ship nestled on the sea's horizon line. The birds were up over the beach and over the marsh. He was cold, damp, and his stomach growled for food. Where did the arrogance come from, the belief that his small efforts had changed the movement of events? He wanted to be in bed, warmed, close to Vicky, and ordinary, without responsibility, free from the consequences of his actions. If he posted the letter he would have none of the things he thought he wanted. He slogged on. It would be the supreme moment of conceit if he posted the letter, it would be the statement of his belief that he changed events.
He found Chalmers sitting, very still, on the bench, and the dogs were beside him. Chalmers, never looking at the sea, wouldn't have seen the coastal cargo ship; he was watching the Southmarsh. What disturbed Markham most about him was that the young man seemed merely to tolerate him and feel no need for his company.
The bench was where Geoff Markham had met Dominic Evans, the shopkeeper. It was set high enough for him to overlook the sea, the beach, the sea wall and the marshland where the reed-tips whipped in the wind. The sun, throwing low light shafts, made it pretty. His mother would have liked it there, and his father would have taken a photograph.
Eight of them materialized, in single file, along the path behind the bench where Markham and Chalmers sat in silence.
Buried under the weight of their equipment they marched past the bench and briskly down towards the trees that shielded the shore-line of the marsh from his view. It would have been settled after the death of Meryl Perry. The secretary of state would have bowed to irresistible pressures and taken the control out of poor old Fenton's hands. The military would have stepped eagerly into the void he knew the men, or at least the unit, from Ireland. He knew the kit they carried and the weapons. He had seen the troopers from the Regiment slip away at dusk from Bessbrook Mill and the fortress at Crossmaglen, seen them run towards the threshing blades of the helicopters on the pads in the barracks at Dungannon and Newtown Hamilton. They were the quiet men who seldom spoke, who waited and nursed their mugs of tea and rolled their smokes and moved when the darkness came or the helicopters started up the rotors.
Markham watched the column snake down the path towards the Southrnarsh and the black water where the wildfowl bobbed in the low sun's light. Two carried the Parker Hale sniper rifles. One had the snub 66mm anti-armour launcher, another cradled a general-purpose machine-gun and was swathed with belt ammunition across his torso, one had the radio, the stun grenades and the gas grenades. Three went easily with their Armalite rifles held loosely. They didn't look at him, nor at Chalmers and his dogs. Geoff thought it was the moment that his relevance, and Cox's and
Fenton's, ended. Their faces and hands were blacked up. Sprigs of foliage were woven into their clothes. It was as if, he thought, in bitterness, the job was taken from boys and given to men. He looked obliquely at Chalmers beside him and the very calm of his face abetted the bitterness. Control had gone to the guns of the killing team. Everything he had done was set at nothing, snatched from him by the men with guns who went down into the marshland and the reed-beds. The last one had slipped from his sight.