“Your father’s here, Rickie. He’s come to take you away.”
Rickie backed into the candlelit room and I saw just how pale and sick he looked. His one good eye was bloodshot and there were flecks of dried blood at his nostrils. A pulse was racing at his neck. He backed further from me, stopping at a table on which he sat as limply as a puppet loosed of its strings.
“You shouldn’t be here!” he whimpered, and he held his hands towards the walls as though feebly trying to protect the room’s contents, and the odd gesture made me realise just what was being stored in the big, high-ceilinged chamber.
It was the new riches of the Americas.
I was standing among the new gold that flowed to corrupt old nations; the new white gold of cocaine. I was in a room filled with cocaine; a room crammed with plastic-wrapped bales that must have been stuffed with the white crystalline powder. So much powder that I was crunching it beneath my boots because someone, I assumed Rickie, had slashed open one of the bales to pluck out a noseful of heaven.
There was money on the table behind Rickie, and a machine for counting banknotes, and there was also a knife. Rickie picked up the blade and held it towards me, but his threat lacked menace. It was merely a dutiful gesture, and it was no trouble to pluck the blade from his nerveless fingers. He shivered, perhaps thinking that I would attack him with the knife, but instead I went to the piled bales and slashed at their plastic wrappings. I sliced again and again, each cut of the blade spilling more wealth than had ever filled the hold of a galleon sailing from the Spanish Main. The cocaine glittered as it cascaded to the floor and covered the carpet in glinting drifts. I ripped open more of the bellying plastic sacks, burying my hand to its wrist in a flood of pure cocaine. Rickie, watching me, suddenly began to giggle, then to choke, then to laugh. “You’re Nick,” he said at last.
“That’s right.”
“They said they were going to kill you.” He spoke like a small child who had trouble remembering exactly how the syllables should be joined together.
“They tried,” I said, and I slashed into another bale and yet more cocaine hissed and seethed down to the floor. “Where’s Ellen?” I asked.
“Ellen’s pretty.” Rickie was staring with awe at the cocaine that silted the carpet.
“Where is she, Rickie?”
“I have to tell them you’re here, so they can kill you,” he said in a very matter-of-fact voice.
“Of course you do.” I stabbed at plastic, wrenched the blade and watched the powder fall. “But first tell me where Ellen is.”
“You’re a ghost! You’re dead!” Rickie sounded suddenly alarmed, and he began to make curious weaving motions with his hands as though he was trying to ward off my unquiet spirit. His nose had started to trickle blood, and he was crying. He seemed to have disappeared into a private misery of hopeless despair. “You’re dead! Dead!” he screamed at me, spitting sputum and flecks of blood that stained the snow-white powder drifts on the floor. “You’re fucking dead and I hate you!” He hated himself, and he hated me, and he spat at me with pure loathing before shrieking at me to go away.
I dropped the knife into the cocaine, then fired the Kalashnikov. I aimed above and to one side of Rickie’s head. The green fire of the bullets chewed into the wall and the gun’s shattering noise echoed cruelly in the room. Rickie howled and covered his ears, then cowered down to the floor that looked as if it was covered with a new clean fall of snow. His blood was very bright on that new snow.
When the gun stopped firing he looked up at me, wondering whether I was going to kill him or, worse, perhaps hoping that I would.
“Where’s Ellen?” I asked again.
“They’re all next door,” he said in a voice that was as close to madness as any I had ever heard from a human being not on the stage. His words made perfect sense; it was the timbre of his voice that was insane. It was a whining and choking sob from the pits of despair. “All the women are next door in Billingsley’s house. They were put there to keep them safe. I don’t like Billingsley. I really don’t like Billingsley, and he doesn’t like me. No one likes me.” Then he began to weep again, but I no longer cared. I was going next door.
I locked Rickie in the room with his fortune of cocaine, then I walked down the book-lined corridor, across the elegant and perfumed room with its antique prints, and so on to the moon-washed terrace. I climbed over the terrace’s balustrade and edged warily down a steep grassy bank to a strip of sandy ground that separated the northernmost house from Deacon Billingsley’s. The policeman’s house formed three sides of a courtyard that faced towards the sea. The interior of the court was a swimming pool.
I ran up to Billingsley’s terrace, but as I reached the top of the bank a match scraped and flared. I froze. I could smell cigarette smoke, then an armed guard strolled casually from within the courtyard to stand at the far side of the terrace. He did not turn towards me, but instead stared southwards at the flames which were now leaping high above the radar aerial on the tower of the big house. The man had a sub-machine-gun slung from his right shoulder.
He drew on his cigarette, then unzipped his fatigues and began to piss into an ornamental urn where a small shrub grew.
“Drop! Now!” I snapped.
The man turned, still pissing, and scrabbled for the Uzi that was slung on his shoulder, but I was holding the Kalashnikov high and the big gun was aimed directly at the guard’s chest and it slowly dawned on him that if he tried to use his small submachine-gun he was very likely to catch a bad case of bullet wounds, so he began to make calming motions at me with his hands and to utter small whimpering noises.
“Get down,” I said, motioning with the big gun, and the man dropped to his knees. He wanted to zip up his fatigues, but when he dropped his hands I shouted at him to raise them again. He disobeyed me, but only to make the sign of the cross. He was shaking.
“Down!” I said again and he dropped flat on his belly. He was still making the small whimpering sounds. He lay just twenty feet away from me, his Uzi close to his right hand. To reach and disarm him I would have to walk in front of the open courtyard and, if any other guards waited in that courtyard, I would be dead.
Yet surely, I thought, the narcotraficantes would not have spared more than one man to guard their women? And I needed to disarm this one man if I was to go inside the house. “Throw your gun in the pool!” I ordered him, but he did not respond except with a quick burst of speech that sounded like a prayer. I supposed he spoke nothing but Spanish, a language I did not speak at all.
“In the pool!” I hissed at him, and made a motion with my own gun to show him what I meant, but he was lying flat and he could not see me properly, and so he did nothing. The Uzi was lying very close to his right hand, too close.
I edged to the corner of the courtyard, peered round, then dodged quickly back. No one had fired at me and I had seen nothing threatening in the deep shadows about the pool. The man on the ground had not tried to retrieve his gun.
I peered round again, this time pausing longer and sweeping the darkness at the pool’s edges with the Kalashnikov. Nothing moved. The man on the ground, clearly terrified, did not move either. I felt the tension ebb out of me. The man was alone.
So I walked across the open flank of the courtyard. The man on the ground was shaking, expecting a bullet in his back, but all I did was to kick his Uzi away from his hand, then I kicked it again so that the weapon splashed into the swimming pool.
And just as it splashed into the pool, so the other gunman, the one who had stayed hidden in the shadowed courtyard, opened fire with another sub-machine-gun. And at that range, even with an inaccurate gun, the second gunman could not miss.
Six bullets struck me. I was standing with my left shoulder towards the house and the bullets whipped across me at chest height.
Five of the bullets struck my rib cage. Or rather they would have struck my rib cage, except that the bullet-proof vest stopped all five. The sixth bullet broke m
y upper left arm.
It was like being kicked by a carthorse, and I went down like a stunned calf. I gasped once with the shock, then there was a silence until the man who had shot me chuckled softly. Then I heard the click as he changed magazines.
There was no pain at first, just the astonishment of knowing I had been hit. The guard on the ground beside me was scrabbling away from me as though I might bring him bad luck.
I had fallen on top of the Kalashnikov. I rolled over and almost fainted from the pain that slashed at my arm and up into my left shoulder. The Scorpion had been hanging from that shoulder and I tried to reach it with my right hand, but then the man who had shot me was standing at my right side, towering over me, and he contemptuously kicked the little Scorpion away.
“You’re a fucking clown, Breakspear,” the gunman said in his easy, lazy southern voice, “and I hate clowns.” Then he aimed his Uzi right at my forehead and I saw that my death was to be at the hands of Jesse Isambard Sweetman who was still clothed in his dramatic black outfit. His hair was unbound to hang loose either side of his handsome face.
He saw the recognition dawn in my eyes, and that recognition was all he needed to make his victory sweet and complete.
“Where’s Ellen?” I asked him, and could not keep the pain from my voice.
He hesitated, then he smiled. “You’ll never know, will you?”
“Please,” I said.
“How very careless of you to lose her.” He paused, watching me, then laughed softly. “I made her cry out in bed, Breakspear. She wanted it so badly that she cried out for it.”
“Bastard—” I tried to heave up at him, but he stepped back and he levelled the gun again, and still he smiled.
“Carry a message to heaven for me. Just say no.” And he pulled the Uzi’s trigger and the small bullets flicked off the terrace by my left ear and slowly moved away from me because Sweetman had grown a third eye, a black and wet third eye, and he was falling backwards as he squeezed the trigger, and I stared up to see a jet of black glistening blood spurt from that third eye in his forehead.
The blood spurted to fall on me. The guard I had disarmed was scrambling to his feet, calling to the Virgin Mary for aid, but the M16 fired again from my left and the guard pitched forward to fall into the swimming pool.
“Ever since I got this damned gun wet,” the Maggot said, “it won’t fire in bursts.” He climbed up from where he had been hidden by the bluff which edged the beach. “I thought you were coming to join us on the boat!”
I tried to kneel upright, but could not. I was feeling sick and dizzy. I wanted to tell the Maggot that the M16 was a notoriously unreliable weapon and that he should have used a Kalashnikov instead, but I suddenly could not speak. There was vomit in my throat and tears in my eyes. Ellen, Ellen, Ellen.
Then the Maggot was beside me and pulling me to my feet. He thrust the Scorpion into my right hand and took the belt of ammunition from around my neck. He tossed his M16 away and scooped up the Kalashnikov. “I’ve got to get you out of here, Nick.” He turned me gently towards the sea.
“No.” I jerked myself away, then almost screamed because of the bolt of pain that seared up my left arm. I began walking towards the house.
“Nick!” the Maggot called.
“No!” My left arm was useless, and beginning to throb with a hellish pain. Blood was trickling inside my sleeve to drip off my fingers, but I did not care how much blood I lost or how much the wound hurt, just so long as I could get inside Billingsley’s house where Ellen was. By the light of a flare I could see the dead gunman’s blood spreading in dark wandering tendrils through the swimming pool. “I’m going in there,” I explained to the Maggot and pointed towards the policeman’s house.
“We got the boat’s radio working,” the Maggot said, “so it’s OK! Help’s coming.”
“Sod your help,” I said groggily, then I heard voices shouting from the next-door house, and I turned southward to see three men running towards us across a tennis court that lay between the house and the sea. I tried to raise the Scorpion, but the Maggot was much quicker than me. He used the Kalashnikov to sweep a green hose of fire across the court to drop all three men flat. One man stayed down, while the other two scrambled away. They were shouting for help and, even if I had been minded to take the Maggot’s advice and retreat to the boat, it was now too late because we were cut off from the beach.
“Come on!” I shouted at the Maggot. He ran towards me. I could hear the bullets flicking overhead, then we were both in the shelter of the small courtyard. But we would not be safe for long, for our enemies now knew where we were.
A screen door in Billingsley’s house was open. I stepped over the sill to see, across the room, and beyond an arch that led into a hallway, a sliver of candlelight showing under a door.
Behind me the Maggot’s machine-gun began firing. He had his back towards me and I guessed that the men from the neighbouring house were swarming towards Deacon Billingsley’s terrace. The Maggot hammered them with burst after burst of fire. A grenade exploded, but the Maggot survived for I could hear the Kalashnikov continue to fire in short professional bursts. How did a football player learn that skill?
I walked towards the slit of candlelight. I went under the archway and found myself in a long central hallway. A door to my right banged open, revealing the outer darkness lit by the fire, and also revealing a tall man standing with a sub-machine-gun. I was in deeper shadow and the man did not see me till my Scorpion fired and its bullets lifted him clean up from the doorstep. The Scorpion had a twenty-round magazine and I fired it all, throwing the man back and cutting off his sudden scream of pain. His blood stank in the warm hallway. Women began screaming beyond the door.
“This is not healthy.” The Maggot cannoned off the archway to join me in the hall. I held the Scorpion towards him and he obligingly took out the magazine, reversed it, and thrust the full magazine home.
“Put it on single shot, will you?” I asked him.
“Sure, Nick.” He turned the selector to the ‘1’, so that now the little gun would not empty its magazine in one blinding burst of fire.
“Now open the door.” I nodded towards the telltale strip of light. I could not open the door myself because I was holding the gun in my right hand and my left hand was hanging bloody and useless.
The Maggot put his hand on the door, paused as he wondered what threat waited on the far side, then he threw it open and I dropped to my knee with the gun facing a candlelit room full of screaming and terrified women. “Shut the fuck up!” I shouted, because I was just as terrified as they were.
“Nick!” a girl called in astonishment.
“Shut up, get your heads down! Down! Down! All of you! Down! Down!” I was screaming the order as I crossed the threshold and searched the room for enemies, but there were no gunmen in there, only a group of women who huddled together for protection. I could see two beds in the room which was otherwise as bare and characterless as a hotel bedroom. I could not see Ellen. It was Robin-Anne who had recognised me. The Maggot was still in the hallway. He began firing the Kalashnikov and empty cartridge cases skittered across the polished wooden floor. Outside the windows I could hear a motor running, and I hoped to God it was not the jeep with its half-inch Browning.
“Grenade!” the Maggot shouted in warning, then threw himself backwards into the bedroom as the grenade exploded in the hallway, then the echo of the bomb’s blast was drowned by the rending noise of the Browning half-inch machine-gun opening fire on us. The shutters and glass of the windows literally disintegrated, turned to splinters and sawdust and shards by the heavy bullets that now sawed at the wall of the house, chopping and chewing through it, even destroying the stone pillars at the edges of the windows. The machine-gunner was firing red tracers, and the fire was streaking across our heads to splinter and pierce the inner walls of the house. The Browning was powerful enough to fire clean through bricks and plaster and timber and sheetrock. The girls were
screaming and sobbing, though the machine-gunner had fired too high and so far no one had been hit. Flakes of plaster and chips of wood rained down on us and the air was as thick as smoke with dust. The candles flickered in the gloom.
I scrambled over the room and provoked a shriek by treading on a naked pair of legs that belonged to a girl who was lying by an open window. She would not or could not move, so I knelt on her thighs as I pushed a fallen wrecked shutter aside to see the jeep standing no more than ten yards away. The machine-gunner, standing in the jeep’s rear bed, was gritting his teeth as he played the stream of bullets back across the house.
He saw my face appear at the shattered window and he began tugging the Browning’s heavy weight to face me, but I already had the little Scorpion resting on the splintered windowsill. I was sobbing and screaming myself with the pain, but I would be writhing in my death throes if I did not aim calmly and properly.
I fired my first shot and the Scorpion’s recoil felt as feeble as a pop gun.
The Browning’s bullets chopped towards me, filling the night with an appalling violence. I fired again. It was like using a peashooter against a cannon. I should have brought my Webley, I thought, then wondered why I had left it behind. The Browning’s big bullets were destroying the night, splintering a whole world, and all I had was the Scorpion’s puny single-shot power. I squeezed the trigger a third time as the plaster and timber of the wall began to explode in powdered wreckage about my ears, then suddenly the Browning’s scarlet tracer jerked upwards to shatter Deacon Billingsley’s rooftiles into thick red shards.
The gunner had disappeared backwards. The Browning’s awful noise stopped dead and in the sudden silence I heard myself whining in agony.
“Nick?” A girl spoke from underneath me. It was not Robin-Anne’s voice, nor was it Ellen’s. “Nick?” the girl said again.
I ignored her. I was watching the jeep’s driver who had taken cover behind the engine block, and I wanted to make sure that the man did not leap up to take over the now silent machine-gun. Behind me the Maggot fired a brief burst into the hallway, then there was an odd silence, except for the throbbing of the jeep engine, the crackle of flames and the moaning of a wounded man.