The Chinaman (44 page)

Morrison burst into the clearing and saw Kerry kneeling on the ground, her head in her hands. At first he thought that she'd been shot but there was no blood and he hadn't heard The Chinaman fire his gun.

‘Go away, go away!' screamed Nguyen. ‘Bomb! Bomb!'

Suddenly Morrison realised what was happening, why The Chinaman had thrown his gun on the ground and why he was now frantically fumbling with the nylon rucksack. Morrison rushed forward and grabbed one of the straps, forcing it down off his shoulder. The Chinaman was gasping for breath, twisting and turning to get the deadly package off his back. The heat from the flare seared Morrison's hands and he saw the hairs on his wrists shrivel and blacken, then he was hit by a wave of pain that made him cry out. The white light was blinding and he closed his eyes as the rucksack pulled away from The Chinaman's shoulders and he slumped to the ground. Morrison swung the burning mass as hard as he could and let it fly up into the air, hissing and spluttering into the trees, and then he dived over to shield Kerry, falling against her and knocking her to the ground, then lying across her and shouting at her to keep her eyes closed and her face covered.

The explosion came within seconds, the blast deafening and vibrating the ground like a small earthquake, followed by a barrage of twigs and chunks of wood that fell like a tropical rain shower and then stopped just as suddenly. The forest was silent, as if the bomb had killed every living thing for miles. Morrison rolled off Kerry and helped her to her feet. In the distance a bird whistled and was answered by another. Short, nervous calls as if they were testing the silence. Satisfied that Kerry hadn't been hurt, Morrison went over to The Chinaman, who was rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his hand, coughing and retching.

‘Thank you,' he said, surprising Morrison with his politeness.

Morrison heard a metallic click and he turned to see Kerry, her hands dwarfed by the big Browning.

‘Move away, Sean,' she said quietly. ‘I've got the bastard covered.'

‘Easy, Kerry,' said Morrison. ‘Put the gun down. He's not going to hurt anyone.' The Chinaman showed no fear. He looked at Kerry, his face expressionless.

‘I'm going to kill him,' she said, her voice oddly flat. Morrison wondered if maybe she was in shock. Her eyes were cold, almost blank, as if she was sleep-walking, but she seemed to have no trouble in keeping the gun pointed at the centre of The Chinaman's chest.

‘It's over,' said Morrison, holding his hand out for the gun. ‘We've found out who the bombers are. We know who was backing them. It's finished. We can all go home.'

‘It's not over!' she hissed. ‘It won't be over until he's dead.'

Morrison looked at The Chinaman. He was standing with his hands loose at his side, his head slightly bowed but his eyes fixed on Kerry's face as if willing her to shoot, as if he wanted her to end it. There was, Morrison thought, a sadness in his eyes, a look that said that there was nothing else they could do to him. Morrison looked back at Kerry, his hand still outstretched.

‘Kerry, he could have shot you. He didn't. You can't kill him. He's not armed, he's not a threat.' He stepped forward and she took half a step back. ‘He had a deal with Liam, and we're going to stick to it. It's over. Give me the gun and we can go home.'

Her finger began to squeeze the trigger and Morrison knew that she was about to fire. Still The Chinaman stayed rooted to the spot. ‘Kerry, if you do this you're doing it for the wrong reason. You're not doing it for Liam Hennessy, or for your father, or for the IRA,' Morrison said. He took another step forward. ‘You're doing it for yourself.' Another step. The gun was almost within reach. ‘It'd be on your conscience for ever. It's not worth it. Trust me, I know. It's not worth it.' He moved quickly, bringing down his right hand and forcing the gun to the side, away from The Chinaman, and then he grabbed it and twisted it out of her grasp. She tried to get the gun back but he held it out of her reach. She yelled in frustration, then drew back her hand and slapped him across the face, hard, and began to sob. He stepped forward and took her in his arms, holding her close but being careful to keep the gun where she couldn't grab it, just in case. She put her head against his shoulder and he could feel her body shudder as she cried. He turned with her slowly, as if they were dancing to a slow song, until he was facing The Chinaman.

‘Go,' said Morrison.

‘You said you had the names?'

Morrison told him the names of the bombers, and the address of the flat in Wapping where they were based, and Nguyen repeated them to himself, imprinting the information on his memory.

‘Thank you,' Nguyen said.

‘Don't thank me. Just go.'

Nguyen turned and walked into the undergrowth, leaving Morrison and Kerry alone in the clearing. She had stopped crying and he could feel her chest rising and falling in time with her breathing. ‘I'm sorry, Sean,' she whispered. ‘I'm so sorry.'

He smoothed her hair and kissed her on the top of her head.

‘It's OK,' he said. ‘Sometimes it gets you like that. The violence. It gets a grip on you without you realising it. It's like a drug, it pulls you along . . .'

She turned her head up and pushed her lips against his, kissing him hard, reaching around his neck with her arms. Her baseball cap fell off and her hair swung free. Her tears wet his cheeks as they kissed and she pressed herself against him. He threw the gun away and then held her with both hands, touching and caressing as her tongue found its way into his mouth, probing, teasing, exciting him until all thoughts of The Chinaman evaporated and he concentrated on her, the feel of her, the smell of her, the taste of her. She pulled him down on to the ground, her hands groping for his belt, her breath coming in small gasps as she said his name over and over again. He made love to her quickly but gently, in the grass, under the trees, next to The Chinaman's gun.

Nguyen couldn't believe that the man would let him go. He was sure that he planned to shoot him as he left the clearing, but there was no gunshot, no thump in the back, he just kept on walking. Once he was sure they really were releasing him he began to run through the forest towards the van. It would only be a matter of time before the four bodies were discovered and when that happened he doubted that Liam Hennessy would be as generous. Nguyen wasn't surprised at how easy it had been to kill the men, he'd always been good at it, all that was required was the mental switch. He'd fought against it when he first started out, but now that he'd killed he knew that he would follow it through to the end. He would avenge his family, he knew that with a diamond-hard certainty. He would do whatever it took, and there would be no remorse, no guilt. Afterwards, when he'd finished, then he'd worry about his own future, but at the moment he could look no further than the flat in Wapping and the IRA bombers.

He opened the back door of the van and quickly threw out all the supplies inside. He stripped off his camouflage gear and changed back into jeans and a pullover, checked that his money was still under the front seat with his passport, and then he drove the van back down the track and on to the main road and headed for the airport.

They travelled in three Range Rovers with a police motorcycle escort, roaring down the outside lane of the M40 at more than ninety miles per hour. The flashing blue lights and the howling sirens forced a clear path through the early afternoon traffic on the motorway, though there were plenty of resentful looks from the company reps in their Sierras and Escorts as the men in the unmarked Range Rovers went by. Pulling over for fire engines and ambulances was second nature, but nobody liked to move out of the fast lane without knowing why, and there was nothing about the vehicles that identified the men inside as belonging to the SAS.

There were four men in each vehicle, tough-looking men with broad shoulders, but as they hurtled towards London they were laughing and smiling and looked no more threatening than a group of miners on a coach trip to the coast. Mike ‘Joker' Cramer was in the front passenger seat of the first Range Rover, laughing at a particularly foul joke that the driver, Pete Jackson, had spun out over the last two miles. The men were tense as they always were when going into action, but they used humour to keep themselves from worrying.

In the back seat were Sam ‘Bunny' Warren and Rob ‘Ginge' Macdonald. Bunny was tapping the back of his hand against the window and he wasn't as quick to laugh at Jacko's joke as the rest were.

Joker, the assault-team leader, was the leanest of the four men, well over six-foot tall, with a thin face that always appeared haggard no matter how much sleep he got. He looked over his shoulder at Bunny, a swarthy, stocky man with piercing green eyes. ‘Is that Morse code, or what, Bunny?' he said.

Bunny stopped tapping. ‘Sorry, Joker. Habit.'

‘You want some gum?' Joker asked, holding out the packet of Wrigley's which he always carried with him now that he'd given up smoking.

‘Cheers,' said Bunny, taking a piece. ‘We nearly at the RV?'

‘Not far,' said Joker. He leant forward and picked up the A to Z map of London. The Colonel had called from London and given them an address in Rotherhithe Street, alongside the Thames, where they were to meet. The convoy left the A40 and they motored along Marylebone Road, along Euston Road past King's Cross and then they followed City Road to the Thames. The motorcycle riders worked in teams, rushing ahead to hold up the traffic whenever the lights weren't in their favour, then remounting and following up behind like pilot fish busily swimming around prowling sharks. When they reached the river the motorbikes peeled off by arrangement, leaving the three Range Rovers to make their own way across London Bridge to Bermondsey and then left along Jamaica Road to Rotherhithe.

They drove by new wharf-style blocks of riverside flats and then came to the building where the Colonel said they were to meet.

‘This is it,' said Joker. The three vehicles pulled up at the pavement. Joker climbed out and looked up and down the road. There were no signs that an operation was under way, no police cars, no ambulances, no nothing, just the sound of the Thames lapping against the banks.

The men got out of the cars and stood on the pavement. They were, Joker had to admit to himself, a motley crew. The one thing they had in common was that they were all in the peak of condition and trained to kill. I don't know what they'll do to the enemy, thought Joker, but they scare the shit out of me. He tried to remember who'd said that first, whether it had been Wellington or Napoleon, because he was sure he'd heard it somewhere. Whatever, that's exactly how he felt about the eleven men who began pulling their kit-bags out of the back of the cars.

‘Where do we go?' asked Reg Lawrence, another assault-team leader.

‘Fifteen B,' said Joker. ‘This one here.'

He pushed the button by Fifteen B and a light clicked on. There was a television camera behind a glass panel and a red light came on above it and then he heard the Colonel's voice tell him to come up. The door buzzed and Joker pushed it and the men filed through and followed him upstairs to the third-floor flat.

An intelligence officer in his distinctive green beret had the door open for them.

‘The green slime gets here first for a change,' jeered a voice from the back, but when Joker looked to see who it was he was met with blank, innocent faces.

The flat was spacious, white-painted walls and ceilings and polished wood floors, a fully fitted kitchen but no furniture, and there was a ‘For Sale' sign in one of the bedroom windows overlooking the street.

The Colonel was in the lounge looking through a powerful pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod. A large blackboard was leaning against one wall and, as the men stood around, the intelligence officer began drawing a map of the flat under surveillance in white chalk. The Colonel looked up and nodded at Joker. ‘Fancy a look?' he asked.

The binoculars were trained on a modern wharf on the north side of the river and when Joker looked through them he saw a large french window and a lounge beyond it, a rectangular room with three men sitting around. The television was switched on but Joker couldn't see what was on the screen. In front of the window was a balcony, twelve-feet square, with a couple of white chairs and a circular table. Joker moved the binoculars sideways. The building was mainly featureless brick wall and double-glazed windows, but two-thirds of the way along the architect had obviously decided to introduce a little variety and he'd staggered the flats so that the one to the left of the flat under observation was about twelve feet further back and the one to the right was an equal distance closer to the river. While it made the building easier on the eye it made it impossible to enter the balcony from either side. There was no flat above the one under observation, but the architect had built a penthouse flat at the right-hand side of the building and its extra-large balcony overlooked it. It was immediately apparent to Joker that the penthouse was the way in. It would be a simple matter to jump down to the balcony below, they wouldn't even have to abseil.

The buzzer sounded from the hallway and the intelligence officer went to open the front door and let in two men from D11, the Metropolitan Police firearms team. They stood at the back of the group of the SAS men, their rifles slung over their shoulders. The Colonel nodded a welcome and went over to the blackboard, chalk in hand.

Woody panicked a little when he opened the door to his bedsit. Clothes were strewn all over the floor, a week's worth of newspapers were piled up under the room's one window, and there was a collection of empty lager cans and a three-quarters empty bottle of Bells by the side of the bed. It looked as if a burglar had wreaked vengeance on the place after finding there was nothing worth stealing, but Woody knew it had been in exactly the same state when he left that morning. He rushed around picking up the rubbish, putting the cans and the papers into an old carrier bag, and was just about to carry them downstairs to the dustbin when there was a knock on the door. He cursed and shoved the bag under his bed and smoothed down the quilt. The knock was repeated as he popped into the alcove where there was a mirror above a small wash-basin. He gave his hair a quick comb and then opened the door. It was Maggie in a dark-green suit, her red hair tied back in a ponytail. She was carrying a black leather briefcase and could indeed have been there to sell him insurance, except the smile she gave him wasn't the professional ‘have I got the policy for you' type, it was warm and genuine.