Nobody was going to be straining the spirit of mercy on account of the animals who had roamed the streets of the Citadel, Rabat and half-a-score of other towns and villages murdering women, children and unarmed men and boys.
Rosa extricated herself from the older woman.
She straightened, smoothed down her dress.
She sniffed, brushed aside her tears.
“Tomorrow morning I will be free of that man.”
Chapter 84
Seamus McCormick knew he was a dead man when he heard the thrumming of the approaching helicopters.
Frank Reynolds and Sean O’Flynn must have carried out their ‘demonstration’ at Brize Norton. Now the bastards were clearing the air corridors into and out of RAF Cheltenham.
“Shit!”
He had had to booby trap the Bedford lorry and move up to the northern end of the wood — maybe two hundred yards away — just in case the truck was spotted. He had planned to go back and retrieve the second Redeye but by the time he had wrestled the first one up to the firing position he had selected around dawn there was a patrol parked up among the farm houses below the wood.
A ‘ready to fire’ Redeye and its M171 launcher weighted over thirty pounds and if he had attempted to move both at the same time, if discovered or disturbed, he would have had no chance of getting away with one under each arm or over each shoulder.
The helicopters were closer now.
Fuck it! He had not come all this way just to take down a fucking chopper! Any idiot with an assault rifle could take out a helicopter if it came close enough!
He had rigged the driver’s door of the Bedford to a tripwire attached to eight ounces of plastic explosive positioned behind the truck’s fuel tank so if the guys in that patrol he had seen found the lorry he would know all about it at exactly the same time they did.
Above the thrumming of the helicopters he heard another sound.
The distant, unmistakable whistling thunder of multiple jet engines.
Chapter 85
Peter Christopher looked over his wife’s head through the window of the jetliner. The Hawker Hunter floating fifty to sixty yards beyond the de Havilland Comet 4’s port wing tip had turned on its navigation lights.
For the first time he began to think about all the things which had happened to him since HMS Talavera had departed Portsmouth four-and-a-half months ago after a long, soul-destroying period tied up in Fareham Creek. He remembered — as if thinking about a different age — his fear that he might never meet Marija. Could it possibly be only November last year that Talavera had slipped her moorings and steamed out into the English Channel?
So much had happened to him that he half-suspected that if he met himself as he was back in late November of last year he honestly wondered if he would recognise that man. The last time he had seen England was when Talavera had taken on ammunition in Portland Harbour while channel gale blew the other side of the breakwater. He had been the Talavera’s technical whizz, the man who had spent most of last year training the crews of ships hastily brought out of reserve how to make their radar and communications suites work. Finally, in late November Talavera had gone to sea, and soon afterwards, to war.
Talavera had led the gun line off Santander and within the day been reduced to a crippled wreck fighting for survival in the teeth of a North Atlantic winter storm off Cape Finisterre. The scars from that action had barely healed by the time Talavera was in the thick of it again at Lampedusa. Somehow he had gone from being the ships ‘radar expert’ to being her second-in-command and then her commanding officer when David Penberthy had been struck down. His friend Hugh Montgommery, Talavera’s Executive Officer had died in the battle of Cape Finisterre; there had been no body, just a spray of bloody viscera after two unfired GWS 21 Sea Cat missiles had exploded and the two A-4 Skyhawks that had left Talavera dead in the water after the first bomb run had strafed the helpless destroyer with their twenty-millimetre cannons.
The Battle of Lampedusa had been Talavera’s last action before he had stepped ashore on Malta. That had been an odd thing. He had expected to find Marija waiting for him on the shore; and dreamed of such, but she had been nowhere to be seen. He had never met Marija and Alan Hannay’s friend Jim Siddall, the Redcap who had been killed by Samuel Calleja’s booby-trap in Kalkara. In retrospect he had known little and understood less about the love of his life than he had imagined. It was Margo Seiffert who had brought him to his senses; in hindsight his father had probably played his part also in finally bringing him together with Marija. Once together they would never be apart again, that was the way of it and he had been too stupid to understand as much until it had happened.
By rights they ought all to be dead now.
Red Dawn, the Soviets, whoever the real enemy was, had fired nuclear missiles aimed at Malta in February. Those ICBMs ought to have killed them all. Instead, he had unhesitatingly followed Captain Nick Davey’s HMS Scorpion into the wake of and under the burning stern of the USS Enterprise. Afterwards he had emerged an even bigger hero; notwithstanding he had only been doing his duty.
That was all he had done last Friday.
His duty…
God, was that only three days ago?
What was duty if it was not protecting the ones you loved?
The Comet was shaking and bumping through the turbulent air rising off the Cotswolds as the pilot bled off speed and lined up for the runway at Cheltenham.
Peter sensed Marija’s terror.
He bowed his head, kissed her hair.
“It will all be over in a few minutes, sweetheart,” he whispered.
She reached up to her shoulder, seized his hand for comfort and held onto it like her life depended upon it.
Chapter 86
What he had thought was the approach of two big jets was a single Comet and a pair of fighters. The jetliner was flying higher than the big aircraft he had seen landing that morning but well within the kill range of the Redeye resting heavily on his shoulder.
One of the helicopters — a Westland Wessex — which had over flown the wood a few minutes ago had swung around and was hovering somewhere a few hundred yards to the south.
The bastards must have spotted the Bedford truck parked in the woods.
It did not matter, it was too late.
He stepped out of the tree line.
Track the target, let it go past, lead it by a few degrees and let the bird fly…
It all seemed so straightforward in theory but right now Seamus McCormick felt as if the whole World was pressing in around him, crushing the life out of him. His mind kept racing, every movement required almost superhuman strength as if he was pushing back against some invisible wall. The M171 launcher might have weighed a ton not thirty pounds.
WAIT! Wait! Wait!
Shoot too soon and the Redeye will fly harmlessly into space, fire too late and the same thing will happen and I have got only the one bullet!