Stratton checked the map even though he knew the area well. After following the M1 for a short distance they cut a line for Aughnacloy, leaving Dungannon a few miles to the right of them.

‘Give me five hundred feet,’ Stratton ordered. The pilot mumbled something that sounded like ‘five hundred’ and complied, adjusting the pitch just a little and the framework shuddered and the thud of the rotor-blades deepened as they took a larger bite out of the air. The increased g-force was perceptible as the slender craft ascended then levelled out.

‘That’s the border, along there,’ Stratton informed the pilot, making sure he knew exactly where they were.

‘I’m aware exactly where the border is,’ the pilot replied curtly.

I’ll bet he is, thought Stratton. Air Corp pilots from his unit had inadvertently crossed it on a number of occasions. One idiot had even flown to the town of Monaghan, ten miles inside the Republic, thinking it was the Northern Irish town of Armagh. He actually landed on the heli-pad of the police station and climbed out and waved at some officers before he realised he was very much in the wrong place. Since that day pilots were warned their careers would be over if they so much as skimmed the border.

The pilot turned well before the frontier and cruised north-west and parallel with it. Stratton could see a combined army and police checkpoint forming below on the main road to Monaghan. It was the smaller roads that worried him. He made out an army foot patrol heading across fields toward the border. For the umpteenth time he checked the signal tracking device attached to the craft’s control panel in front of the co-pilot seat. Where the hell was Spinks’s marker?

He clicked up the tiny switch with his nail. A pinheadsized LED light blinked in the darkness. It was working, apparently. He rested it on his chest and exhaled heavily, and as he did so a sharp pain shot through his chest and shoulder to remind him of his injury. ‘I’ve been shot,’ he said to himself, as if fully realising it for the first time. ‘I’ve been fucking shot and kidnapped, shot and kidnapped!’

‘Turn around,’ he said quickly to the pilot. The pilot responded and banked the Gazelle steeply one eighty degrees. ‘Whisky one, I have a signal. I repeat I have a signal towards yellow four.’

The intelligence team hurried in from the int cell just to watch. That’s all they could do now.

The phone rang. Graham picked it up. ‘Ops,’ he said quickly and listened to the voice the other end. ‘It’s Bill Lawton,’ he said to Mike.

Mike was engrossed in the map and allocated a small part of his concentration to the call. ‘What has the Gardaí said?’ he asked.

‘Did you hear that?’ Graham said into the phone. Bill had and rattled off an answer. ‘He said they’re sending as many people to the border opposite Aughnacloy as they can spare,’ Graham relayed.

‘What about London?’ Mike said as Graham aimed the phone at him, then back to his own ear for the reply.

‘The boss took care of that,’ Graham said into the phone.

‘He hasn’t heard anything, as in Bill hasn’t heard anything,’ he said to Mike. ‘Bill thinks they’re going to leave it up to us.’

‘That means they don’t have a clue what to do,’ Mike said. ‘Fine. Anything else?’

Graham listened for a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said and put the phone back into its cradle. ‘No. He’ll be on the end of this phone if and when he’s needed, and he said good luck.’

‘Save it for Spinks,’ Mike muttered as he started pacing a small area, keeping his eyes on the map but not really seeing it now. His ears, and just about everyone else’s eyes, were glued to the speaker on the wall. It was all up to Stratton now.

She walked further out into the field, hoping to see it beyond the trees across the road. It sounded close. When the Gazelle did come into view it was further south along the wood than she expected, the direction and distance of the sound deceiving as always. It was about half a mile away, black against the sky and going like a rocket. She’d heard his voice over the radio and knew he was in it. Perhaps he would see her. It would pass across her front, maybe a bit closer than it was now. He would know where she was and that she was all right. Then she wondered who she thought she was kidding. He wouldn’t be thinking about her, let alone worrying if she was in one piece. It was too much to expect he might even glance in her direction. There was no way of knowing what was on that man’s mind no matter what the situation. Often she caught him looking at her but never once had she seen anything in his eyes that gave her encouragement. A hint of desire or even a thin smile would be nice, but there was never anything remotely like interest, it was just as if he happened to be staring in her direction.

At that moment his only thoughts would be of what he loved most and did best. She wasn’t worried about him nor did she fear for him, not even slightly. Her feelings about him might well be confused but she was sure of one thing: there was hope for Spinks while he was up there. Stratton gave everyone that kind of feeling. When he was part of your team, on an op, when his calm, strong voice came over the radio, you knew you were on a winning team. She wondered if it was nothing more than simple hero worship she felt for him. She would follow him into hell itself if that were where they had to go. He was larger than life and there was no one else she had ever met who made her feel that way.

He checked his map. A line drawn through their location and in their exact direction went above the border, but only just. That meant Spinks was still in the North. He glanced over his right shoulder at a field half a mile away. Near the edge, just beyond the skirt of the wood, was a car a few yards from the road, in a field. A figure was standing alone beside the car, looking up at the helicopter. He watched for a moment longer then went back to the transponder receiver.

‘Straight over,’ said Brennan.

‘I know where I’m going,’ said Sean, aware he was playing with fire. Any backchat to Brennan was to take your soul in your hands. Sean wasn’t even sure why he had said anything other than it was his nature to be outspoken and arrogant. Perhaps the danger had got his blood up and he was feeling like a fight. Brennan wasn’t the only one capable of a bit of madness, especially behind the wheel of a vehicle.

‘I don’t give a fock what you know. Just do as I say, when I say it and without lip,’ Brennan barked. ‘This isn’t a focken test to see if you know your way around. If we were walking through your focken house I’d still be telling you where to go. Lippy focken bastard.’

Brennan was aware he was not as cool as he normally was on a job. He had done a lot worse than this, but he felt more nervous than he could remember. His eyes were everywhere, inside every passing car, in the air, beyond the hedgerows. Every mile closer to the border increased his unease as well as his excitement. But his fear of failing was greater than his fear of battle. That was engraved on his soul from a lesson he learned early in life. He was sixteen when he did his first kneecapping but he had to wait until he was twenty-one before he could carry out his first execution. It was on his birthday and he’d had a few drinks, not that he needed any such courage. The boyos had arranged it as a surprise coming-of-age party.The victim was a sixteen-year-old Protestant they had pulled off the street and driven to a remote rural spot. The teenager was the son of a prominent member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, who was earmarked for persecution and then death.

Brennan would never forget it. Not because it was his first kill but because it wasn’t. He bungled the task, even though he did everything as he had been instructed. He had placed the barrel of the gun in the centre of the boy’s forehead, pulled back the hammer, looked into the boy’s eyes, uttered some farewell piss-taking comment, and slowly squeezed the trigger. Brennan had not been instructed to make such a meal of the pre-shoot chat. Lengthening the agony of his victim with his tormenting banter was a torture he decided on only at that moment. When he pulled the trigger, the gun fired, and the explosion sent the bullet through the boy’s head and out the other side. The feeling Brennan experienced the second the bullet boomed from the barrel amazed him. He felt like a god. When he pulled the pistol away from the boy’s skull he was fascinated by the wisp of smoke coming out of the entry point. Brennan remembered rubbing up some of the black powder burn around the hole with his finger and dabbing it on to the end of the boy’s nose as he said to him, ‘Rest in peace.’ Brennan and his friends then left the boy twitching in the grass and went back to the pub.

But the boy wasn’t dead. The lad was discovered a few hours later by a farmer walking his dog and rushed to hospital. The doctors couldn’t understand how he had survived such a wound, let alone with all of his faculties until they discovered the bullet had been fired at such an angle that it had travelled inside the skull along the bone precisely in the crease that separates the two halves of the brain, and missed the cerebral cortex before popping out the back. Brennan was ridiculed, but it was a lesson he vowed never to repeat.

There was one thing that niggled Brennan about this particular kidnapping, an edge he had not experienced before. He had worked against the Paras, the Marines, the RUC’s Special Branch and had had a brush or two with the SAS, but he’d never come up against Pinks before, although he knew all about them.They made him more nervous than all the other Brit units. The SAS were bad enough but the Pinks were different. If you were going to be ambushed in the middle of a job it would likely be the SAS and every Republican soldier knew that if they walked into an SAS ambush it was pretty much over, and definitely so if there were no RUC around to make sure they didn’t finish you off if you were wounded. The SAS were murdering bastards and carried handcuffs just for show. But the Pinks were worse for one important reason: they were in a unique position to play the game with a different set of rules to all the others - their own rules.

Pinks took the law into their own hands. That or they were under the command of some bastard in MI5 or 6 who gave the orders. It wouldn’t have been directed from the Brit government. The IRA had long since scared that lot into abandoning any kind of unofficial revenge killings.The politicians no longer had the backbone for that kind of game, especially now that they were part of the European Union. The only Brit unit that could plan and carry out an execution independent of any authority, with a high degree of confidence that they would not be discovered, were the Pinks. What made this all the more dangerous for Brennan was not so much that the Pinks could carry out a murder but that it seemed they were only too willing to risk illegally utilising the technology and resources of the Brit army to do so. They worked in a minefield, between the IRA and their own government.An autonomous execution squad. He knew that not all the Pinks were up to playing this high-staked game and that those who did risked their careers. But the fact remained, if you bloodied a Pink it wasn’t over just because you got away with it. You were a marked man for as long as there was one of them around willing to take revenge, and they had a lot of resources at hand to track you down. And Brennan had one of them in a box in the back of the van! Kidnapping one was the greatest wrong you could do them and they would want revenge. Brennan was not over the border yet and could breathe easier only when he was, and even then, afterwards, he would not be safe.

Fuck ’em, he said to himself.This was war. Brennan could handle it.The immediate problem was getting this one home and to the interrogators. If the RUC or army stopped them they could have a bit of a fight if there was the opportunity, and if it looked like Brennan might not win, all he had to do was give it up. The worst that would happen was jail. But if the Pinks got to them before they passed over the border that was a different story. It would be a fight to the end for someone. That made it the most exciting game he had played yet, and Brennan was up for it. If he beat them, if he got one of them home alive, he would be a legend in his own lifetime. He looked around at the two men in the back.

‘Where’re your tools?’ he growled.

The men pointed to a sack on the floor.

‘What focken’ good are they there? Put ’em in your hands, you stupid bastards.’

One of them picked up the sack and pulled out two American M16 assault rifles. He handed one to his pal.

‘Load ’em and put the safety-catches on, for Christ’s sake! Don’t they teach you morons anything at that school?’

‘Army,’ Sean suddenly warned. They all instantly looked ahead through the dirty windscreen.

A convoy of four army Landrovers headed towards them on the other side of the road. They passed by at speed, each loaded with soldiers. Sean kept an eye on the wing mirror, watching until they were out of sight.

‘Anyone catch what regiment that was?’ Sean asked.

‘Who gives a fock.Take the next right,’ snapped Brennan.

Sean turned right into a small lane. ‘About a mile to go,’ he said, wondering if that, too, would offend Brennan. But Brennan was concentrating too hard on the road, fields and sky to take any more notice of what Sean had to say.

‘Only thing we need to worry about from here on is a foot patrol,’ Brennan said.

‘Or an eagle flight,’ added Sean, referring to a common army practice of dropping patrols off in the countryside using helicopters.

‘There’s the gate,’ Brennan said, pointing up ahead. Sean slowed, turned and stopped in front of a five-bar wooden gate that led into a field. Brennan hopped out and opened the gate. Sean drove through, stopping long enough for Brennan to leap back in.

‘Stay on those tracks. Come on, come on, move it,’ Brennan said, getting impatient.

Sean set off again, following a pair of tractor ruts across a lumpy field. Brennan sat forward in his seat, looking in every direction. They passed through a gap in a hedge into another field. ‘Two football pitches and we’re home,’ he said.

Everyone could see the spindly hedgerow up ahead that was the Irish border. The van dipped and creaked in the ruts and when Sean skidded and slid a little he braced himself for a bollocking but instead it seemed Brennan was already in a celebratory mood. ‘Don’t break the van after all that, Sean me lad,’ he said in a fatherly tone. ‘Easy does it now.’

Sean dropped down a gear and drove with more care, composing himself in readiness for the victory cheer as the border inched closer.

Sean was the first to think he heard it, then Brennan detected a dull throbbing sound. About the same time they knew their ears were not deceiving them, a helicopter thundered in an arc across their front, low to the ground, its rotors facing them, pulsating loudly as it banked steeply to head around to their rear. Sean swerved hard in reaction, the van’s tyres digging into the soft earth. Everyone was ramrod straight with tension. Brennan grabbed Sean’s collar violently as he yelled: ‘Go! Go for it, you focker! Go!’

Sean lost traction as he hit the accelerator too hard and the van fishtailed. He brought it under control and drove over the ruts and dips towards the spindly hedge now a football field away.

He gripped the SLR tightly into his shoulder and shouted into his mic, competing with the downdraught from the rotors. ‘Keep my side facing the van! . . . Did you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ the pilot replied, although he was distracted by something else that greatly concerned him.

‘Move up. Keep just ahead of the van!’ Stratton continued as he raised the barrel so that he could look along its length and sit the target on the end of it.

The pilot dropped the helicopter’s nose a tad, lost some height, putting it at house-top level, and moved up alongside the van.

‘Ahead, ahead!’ Stratton called out, indicating with his right hand to push forward. He wanted to be further in front to get a clear shot backwards at the driver, but the pilot was not moving the way he wanted him to. ‘Ahead I said, damn it!’

The pilot inched the Gazelle forward, bringing the front windshield of the van into view. Stratton brought the weapon site to his eye and aimed, the gyro-steady device helping to keep it almost magically solid in his hands.The van suddenly swerved and headed on a course beneath the chopper, the steeper angle making it difficult for Stratton to get the shot. ‘Right, damn it! Right!’ he shouted.

The pilot pulled steeply to the right and then banked left to expose the front of the van to Stratton once again, but his agitation was growing. ‘What if you hit your own man?’ he shouted.

Stratton composed himself to shoot.‘Not unless he’s driving, ’ he muttered as he took first pressure on the trigger. Stratton could clearly see the two men in the front. The driver glanced up at him. ‘Steady,’ Stratton said.

‘Go for the gap!’ Brennan yelled, anxious to be over the border.

‘Shoot him!’ Sean yelled back.

‘You’re nearly there. Drive, you bastard!’

‘Why’d you turn away?!’ he shouted.

‘That hedge was the border.’

‘What?’ Stratton yelled in utter disbelief.

‘I’m not going over the border,’ the pilot said firmly. He had lost every fight with Stratton till now. But this time he had the law on his side, both international and military.

‘Get back in pursuit of that van,’ Stratton said dangerously.

‘I will not.’

‘You will not be held responsible.’

‘Who do you think you are?’

‘You’re sending a man to his death because of a piece of airspace?’

‘Call it what you want. I can’t go over that border and that’s final.Those are my standing orders and I suspect they’re yours too.’

‘Do you have any idea what they will do to that man?’ Stratton said, disgusted with the pilot.

‘You won’t win this one and there is no one with the authority to make me cross it, not you or your god of a commanding officer.’

‘If it’s games you want to play we can do that,’ Stratton said as he pulled his pistol from his holster, shoved it between the pilot’s legs, and casually fired.The bullet smashed through the seat and into the bulletproof sheet that lined the floor. The pilot’s heart leaped into his throat and he might have jumped out of his seat had he not been strapped into it. Somehow he managed to keep hold of the pitch and joystick as the helicopter lurched and dipped. Stratton maintained his enraged gaze, waiting for the pilot’s decision.

‘You’re crazy!’ he yelled.

‘And you’re gonna be dickless in five seconds and it won’t end there, trust me,’ Stratton said as he moved the end of the pistol into the pilot’s crotch making him flinch.

‘You’re truly insane,’ the pilot screamed, as much in pain as in horror.

‘If it helps . . . The guy in that van is worth a dozen of you. I’ve been in enough of these crates to know I don’t need you to land it.’

‘You’d go to jail for the rest of your life!’

‘Why? We got shot down and you got burned to a crisp.

When the others realised the chopper had pulled off they couldn’t believe it at first. Brennan was too distressed to notice until they tore through the hedge and were over the border. Sean was shouting that the Gazelle had gone and the others looking out of the back window acknowledged it. Brennan found the Gazelle in his wing mirror still in the North and turning away from them. Despite the ferociously burning pain in his thigh he grinned as the others broke into a rapturous cheer.

‘The bastards are staying in the North! The bastards are staying in the North!’ he shouted, not quite believing his own eyes. He tore several strips of cloth from his shirt and bound his leg tightly to stem the flow. The sight of their powerful enemy held at bay from the chase as if by an invisible barrier was anaesthetic enough. They screamed obscenities at the helicopter and celebrated, clapping their hands, stamping their feet, and banging on the crate that Spinks was inside as if it were a drum.

Sean beamed as he swerved the van from side to side in the field. Brennan patted his shoulder with a bloody hand. ‘Well done, laddy. Well done! That was fantastic driving. Focken fantastic driving. You’ll go down in bloody history today, fellah, that’s for sure. You all will,’ he shouted.

Sean stuck his finger in the bullet hole in the windscreen. ‘That was focken close.’

‘Focken close? It got me, didn’t it, you bastard,’ Brennan said.

The others burst into laughter, a release of tension more than anything else. Even Brennan saw the funny side and laughed.

‘I knew they wouldn’t jump the border,’ Brennan said. ‘I focken knew it. That’s why I pushed you to drive on, me lad. I knew they wouldn’t come over, the chicken shit bastards.’

‘For a while there I thought it was a focken Pink,’ Sean said.

‘Fock ’em if it was or it weren’t,’ Brennan said. ‘We’ll take on the Pinks, the SAS, whatever they want to throw at us. They’ll have to come over the focken border to get us now though. And good luck to ’em.’

Everyone cheered the statement. Brennan grinned as he kept a wary eye on his wing mirror. He was too long in the tooth not to know that they were home free only when they got to the rendezvous and the Pink in their trunk was handed over. Not a moment before. He reached out of the window and moved the wing mirror around until he found the helicopter, no more than a tiny black splodge flicking in and out of the mirror as the van bounced along. While the others laughed and relived the last hour he suddenly felt there was something not quite right about the image. It didn’t look as if it were getting any smaller. Perhaps it was just hovering. His smile started to wane as the image appeared to be growing larger, little by little, second by second.

He leaned forward to get a closer look at the mirror, praying he was wrong. But he was not. The helicopter was coming on, full bore towards them, nose tilted down like a raging bull at full charge.

Brennan stuck his head out into the wind to look back. The others continued celebrating, unaware, except Sean who sensed the change in Brennan and saw him looking back. He glanced in his own wing mirror and his smile quickly dropped from his face.

‘It’s coming back,’ Sean said. The two singing men in the rear did not hear him. ‘It’s coming back!’ he shouted at them as he put his foot down and the van accelerated across the field towards a distant hedgerow.

Mike leaned over the map board, waiting. The last transmission they had heard was Stratton saying ‘I have’, which simply meant he had the vehicle that contained Spinks in sight, or to be precise, the one that contained Spinks’s transponder. That meant, in Stratton’s case at least, that he was going to do something to stop it. There was no point interrupting him just to ask what exactly. There was nothing any of them could do to help anyway.

‘How close are our cars?’ Mike asked quietly, referring to the other operatives who had scrambled from the camp to get to the area.

‘A good ten minutes away,’ Graham said.

That meant they were well out of the race. Mike tapped the perspex sheet that covered the entire map with his wax pencil, beating out a meaningless rhythm as he thought. ‘How long since his last transmission?’

‘One minute twenty seconds,’ Graham said.

Mike stood up and folded his hands across his chest as if holding himself together, afraid his anxiousness would burst out. But he could not keep control any longer. He picked up the handset and pushed the button on the side of it. ‘Whisky one, zero alpha, sit-rep?’ he said.

Everyone glanced up at the speaker, but it remained silent. ‘Whisky one, this is zero alpha, sit-rep?’

‘I have,’ Stratton said, his voice suddenly booming over the speaker, making the cook jump which in turn caused the mechanic to do the same.

Mike and Graham looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. Stratton had said ‘I have’ a while ago. They wondered why nothing had changed in that time.

‘Location?’ Mike asked, doing his best to contain a tension he had never experienced before.

There was another long silence. Mike suddenly felt uneasy. ‘Whisky one, what is your location?’

‘We’re going into the green,’ was Stratton’s calm reply.

The uneasy feeling rippled through the room.

Mike lowered the handset. The second in command and ops officer watched him, wondering what his next move would be.

Mike thought long and hard on it. It was obvious what was happening. The van was over the border with Spinks in it. He was not about to consider telling Stratton to cancel the pursuit. Even if that were an option, which in this case it was not, Stratton would ignore him anyway. A border excursion was nothing compared to losing an operative. Mike was the kind of officer who stood by his men in a fight. If he was not going to order Stratton back, it therefore meant he supported him. He might as well start right there and then.

‘Get me Lisburn ops,’ he said calmly to Graham. ‘And get Bill Lawton standing by. We might as well start patching this up with the Irish right away.’ All Mike could now hope for was that Stratton tied it up as quickly and neatly as possible and without taking the battle all the way into Dublin.

‘The road, the road!’ Brennan yelled, pointing to a gate in the hedge a hundred yards ahead. Just beyond it was another hedge running parallel that indicated there was a road or track in between. Sean steered a gentle arc, adjusting his angle so that he could crash through the gate and enter the lane without slowing. The gate looked sturdy, but nothing was going to stop them now.

He hit it hard, smashing through it and destroying the headlights, and turned sharply on to the narrow lane, sliding just a little and bashing the far hedge with the flank but without losing much pace.

The Gazelle came on in pursuit like a relentless hunter. It banked hard over and levelled out to the right side of the van, no higher than a goalpost off the ground, and started to push ahead. Sean snatched a glance at it. This was useless, he thought. They were stuck in the lane like it was a bowling alley with nowhere to go but straight ahead.

As the Gazelle inched closer Brennan watched the man in the left seat of the cab leaning out with a rifle in his hand. He could see him more clearly now, his civilian clothes, straggly hair, unshaven features, and he was looking directly at Brennan as he raised the rifle to his shoulder.

‘Pink,’ Brennan said under his breath. ‘Focken Pink!’ Brennan leaned out the window and fired a long burst, almost losing his gun to the hedges crashing past as Sean tried to manoeuvre as best he could in the narrow lane.The two men in the back held on to anything they could as the van lurched heavily, Spinks’s crate sliding from one side to the other. One of the men fell on to his back while gripping his M16 and accidentally loosed off several rounds that ripped along the roof in a line barely missing Brennan’s head. But Brennan was too caught up in the desperation of his position to direct his madness at them.

‘What do we do?’ screamed Sean.

Brennan seemed frozen, watching the man in the helicopter.

‘Brennan?’ Sean shouted.

‘Drive! Just keep driving,’ Brennan shouted back.

‘We could run in four different directions. They couldn’t get all of us,’ Sean said.

Brennan shoved the end of his gun barrel at Sean, glaring at him with manic eyes. ‘You stop this van and I’ll blow you to focken pieces,’ he yelled.

Sean got the message loud and clear.

‘Steady!’ Stratton called out. After a short pause, he squeezed the trigger four times in quick succession.

The first round spat through the windscreen and hit Sean in the chest; the second in his gut; a third passed through his neck; and the fourth flew between him and Brennan and into the crate Spinks was in. Sean slumped forward in his seat like a puppet with its strings cut as a jet of blood from his neck spouted around the cab. It squirted Brennan in the face as he grabbed the steering wheel and shoved Sean off his seat and against his door. The van tilted sharply as it mounted the embankment and scraped along the hedge. Brennan did his best to straighten it out, gripping the wheel with both hands. Sean’s feet were twisted and jammed under the dash, keeping the accelerator full against the floor. Brennan managed to manoeuvre it around a tight corner, hugging the outside hedge, and he might well have completed the turn successfully had it not been for the large boulder jutting from the outside hedge that had without doubt been there many thousands of years and was not about to give an inch to a van travelling at speed. And it didn’t. The front of the van collapsed like a bag of crisps and abruptly stopped but the contents continued on at the same speed. Brennan and Sean went through the windscreen and punched into the hedge as though it were a safety net. The two men in the back flew the length of the van and slammed into the front seats. The crate followed close behind and near flattened one of them between it and the seat, his bones snapping like firewood.

The Gazelle turned sharply close to the ground and the rotors thundered as it circled the wreck tightly.

‘Land!’ Stratton shouted. ‘Quickly!’

Brennan lay in the hedge, dazed and bloody. He fought to regain control and tried to move, but it seemed impossible to get his limbs to obey him. Contact was finally made and he moved his legs in search of firm ground below. He turned in the hedge and saw Sean lying beside him, mangled and very dead. The field was within reach just ahead and he grabbed the thorny branches around him and pulled himself forward. Every part of him ached and he waited for the shot of pain from somewhere in his body that would tell him a part of it was broken. As his senses regrouped he could hear the helicopter and the memories of the most recent events flooded back. He increased his efforts to pull himself on. The pain was dull and all over, but nothing appeared to be broken.

He wiped some blood out of his eyes and reached out of the hedge and down to touch the ground. He dug his fingers into the soil and pulled himself further forward, rolling out of the thicket on to his back and allowing himself a few precious seconds to breathe before forcing himself on. As he turned on to his front to push himself up his hand fell on to something metallic. His sub-machine-gun. He willed himself to his knees and picked it up in his battered, shaking hands, then he winced in pain. His leg. He’d forgotten he’d been shot right through it. But the urge to survive took over and he forced himself to take a step. His leg almost gave way but there was enough muscle left to support him.

He saw the helicopter hovering above the field the other side of the lane and shakily aimed his gun towards it and then lost his balance and almost fell over. He steadied himself, got the gun on aim, and squeezed the trigger. But it wouldn’t fire. He checked the safety-catch, almost dropping the weapon. He pulled out the magazine, checked it for ammunition, and pushed it back home. He cocked it, aimed, and pulled the trigger once again. It fired, and on fully automatic!

Stratton had already unclipped his seatbelt and was leaning well out of the cab as the helicopter pulled up into the hover ten feet above the ground. At the sound of the gunfire he jumped, ripping the giro-steady cable from the consul. He hit the ground and jammed the rifle into his shoulder, searching for a target as the helicopter backed away from the fire.

Stratton saw movement beyond the hedge near the van but he was not about to shoot at anyone he could not positively identify.

The Gazelle landed not far behind him, its rotors remaining on full revs. Stratton ran forward, reached the hedgerow a few yards behind the van, dropped the rifle, and took out his pistol. He eased through a gap in the hedge and stepped down on to the lane. It was all very quiet but for the hiss of steam from the van’s engine. Stratton paused to tune his senses and then cautiously headed to the front of the van. He saw the windshield smashed out and Sean lying in the hedge. In the field just beyond a sub-machine-gun was lying in the grass. Stratton eased forward, eyes everywhere, and reached through the hedge to feel the gun’s barrel. It was hot. He then heard what sounded like a snapping stick some distance away and stood on the front bumper of the van so that he could see over the hedge. In the distance a man was limping heavily away.

Stratton stepped back down into the lane and made his way to the rear of the van. One of the doors had popped open on impact. He looked inside. There was some movement and the sound of strained breathing. Stratton climbed in to find the two Irishmen broken and bloody against the back of the seats. The one sandwiched between the crate and the seat was motionless and judging by the unnatural position of his head, twisted three-quarters of the way around, it looked as if his neck was broken. The other lay in an awkward position unable to move, watching Stratton, his every breath a painful effort. Stratton aimed his gun at the man who was in too much pain to care and remained staring at Stratton. A noise came from inside the crate that was lying on its side. Stratton ignored the broken man and pulled the crate over so that the lid was upright. He noticed the bullet hole in the top and its corresponding exit point in the side. He unlatched the lid and opened it expecting to find Spinks seriously damaged.

Spinks lay tightly inside the cramped space squinting up at Stratton, adjusting his eyes to the light, as frightened as he was hopeful.

‘You okay, Spinks?’

Spinks blinked hard as the images came into focus. He knew that voice.

‘Stratton?’

‘Can you walk?’

‘Stratton,’ he repeated, still afraid it was some kind of hallucination. ‘Tell me it’s really you.’

‘It’s me. Are you hurt?’ Stratton asked, then noticed the blood on Spinks’s jacket and crouched to get a better look. ‘You’ve been hit.’

‘They shot me,’ Spinks said.

Stratton raced through his options if he couldn’t move Spinks, none of which were good. This had all been about saving Spinks and there was no point doing anything that would put his health in jeopardy having got this far.

It was as if Spinks had read Stratton’s mind. ‘Where are we?’ he asked.

‘In the South.’

‘Then we’d better get going,’ he said as he raised his hands, gripped the sides of the box, and started to pull himself up. A pain shot across his chest and Stratton quickly grabbed him.

‘Easy,’ Stratton said.

Spinks took several short breaths. ‘I can do it,’ he said then pulled himself once again until he was sitting upright. Stratton inspected the entry and exit points high on his chest. ‘As bullet holes go, they’re in an okay place.’

‘That’s good,’ Spinks said, attempting sarcasm. He then braced himself for a major effort to stand with Stratton’s help and climb out of the box. His knees almost gave way as they took his full weight but Stratton held him. Spinks pushed them straight. ‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘I’m okay.’

Stratton helped Spinks out of the box beside the broken man lying on the floor of the van, watching them.

‘What about ’im?’ Spinks asked.

‘What’s your name?’ Stratton asked the man.

‘O . . . O’Kelly,’ the man said, catching his breath. Spinks wondered if Stratton was going to kill him. He wouldn’t be in the least surprised if he did.That didn’t mean he knew Stratton well enough to know he’d do it. Quite the contrary. He didn’t know Stratton well at all, but the rumours about him left one in doubt as to his true character.

‘Looks like he’s paid a price for today,’ Spinks said, hoping that if Stratton was into executing the bloke he might change his mind. It wasn’t something Spinks was into, even after what he’d been through. He wasn’t a murderer.

The man’s eyes started to glaze and his breathing suddenly grew shallower, and then it stopped altogether.

Spinks stared at him with no sign of remorse or celebration. It was simply an event.

‘Come on,’ Stratton said and helped Spinks out of the van.They shuffled to the gap in the hedge and Spinks glanced back at the front of the van.

‘Fuckin’ ’ell!’ he said. ‘Good thing I was in that box.’ As Stratton helped him through the hedge he grabbed up his SLR and they made their way across the field towards the waiting Gazelle. The short walk helped Spinks’s circulation and he could almost support himself by the time they reached it.

‘I knew it was you. I fuckin’ knew it,’ Spinks said. ‘Soon as I ’eard the shootin’ I said to myself, that’s Stratton that is. Then we ’it a fuckin’ wall.’ Spinks chuckled until the pain made it difficult to laugh any more.

Stratton helped him into the back and laid him down on the bench seat. As he climbed into the exposed front passenger seat the Gazelle lifted skyward and turned North.

Stratton put on his headset, positioned the mic in front of his lips, and pushed the send button. ‘Zero alpha, whisky one. I have four two Charlie. He has a gunshot wound but he’s gonna be okay. I’m towards your location.’

A cheer went up in the ops room. Mike picked up the handset. ‘Roger that, whisky one,’ he replied. ‘Any other casualties?’

‘Two, possibly three dead, unconfirmed. At least one escaped.’

‘Understood,’ Mike said. ‘See you when you land.’ Mike put down the handset and sat back in his chair, looking a little spent. ‘Send a tow to pick up one three kilo,’ he said to Graham.

‘Already on its way,’ Graham said. ‘Nice one, boss,’ he added, grinning. ‘Not a bad ending, all things considered.’

Mike wasn’t feeling particularly celebratory. His thoughts were elsewhere. There was something he had queried the moment Spinks had been kidnapped but had pushed to the back of his mind. ‘This one is far from over . . . We’ve at least one major problem to figure out now.’

The second in command and the intelligence officer glanced at each other, unsure what Mike could be referring to.

‘If you mean the border excursion, I’d take that any day over a kidnapped operative,’ the int officer said.

‘That’s not what I’m talking about,’ Mike said. ‘This problem is even more serious than Spinks being kidnapped.’

The others looked at each other, unaware what that could possibly be. Mike saw the vacant look in their eyes and lowered his voice so that only they could hear.

‘Spinks’s kidnapping was a set-up from the start. It was elaborate, well planned and executed, and they almost got away with it.You don’t put something like that together in a few hours or overnight even. They knew he was going to be outside the church in the trunk of that car long before he arrived there. We planned that operation less than two weeks ago and it was known only to a handful of members in the detachment and military intelligence. No one in the RUC or regular army units knew about it . . . So how did RIRA find out?’

The ops officer and second in command went thoughtfully quiet.