Authors: Paul E. Hardisty
‘Steady,’ said Crowbar.
The gun in Clay’s hand now, behind his back.
The curator nodded. ‘
The Ladder of Divine Ascent
,’ he said.
Either the bastard had lied to them at the museum, or he was lying to Medved now.
‘The one and only,’ said Crowbar, exhaling, looking straight at the curator. ‘Isn’t that right?’
The curator shuffled his feet, cleared his throat. ‘Yes, of course. It is completely unique.’
Medved sighed. It sounded like methane escaping from a bloated corpse. She nodded to the curator, who set the case on the ground next to Crowbar and stepped aside. Then she looked at Uzi, inclined her head.
Uzi raised his weapon, and before Clay or Crowbar could react, let go a short burst. The curator slumped to the ground, riddled with holes.
‘
Kak
,’ said Crowbar.
Uzi smiled, lowered his weapon.
‘Take it,’ said Regina Medved. ‘Ten million dollars.’
Crowbar glanced over at the curator’s motionless body, then kicked the case away with his foot.
‘You will take my money, mercenary, you will give me this Judas, and you will go.’ Medved nodded to the driver, who shouted something to the man by the wire. He lowered his weapon, took a step away from the wire. ‘Take the whore. She is nothing.’
The words sent dopamine surging through Clay’s veins. They still had to get her out of the minefield, but at least they weren’t going to be shot at while they did it. He slid the Beretta back into his belt, stared hard at the ground, willing his eyes dull and resigned.
Crowbar pulled the bag’s strap from his shoulder, zipped it closed and threw it into the van. The bag landed at Medved’s feet, only the glass now separating her from it. She called out something in Russian. The driver appeared, grabbed the bag, disappeared back into the van, and handed her the icon on the other side of the glass. She held it in both hands, the splinters of her fingers searching over the wood, caressing, fondling, finding the nail hole, penetrating. She looked up. Her eyes were aflame, feverish. She gasped, closed her eyes. Then she reached back behind her and flipped a switch. Dialysis lights flickered and died, pumps spun down, fluids stalled in tubes.
‘The Judas who killed my brother,’ she said. ‘Give him to me. Two million as we agreed.’
Clay hung his head. Money being thrown around like empty beer cans at a Battalion piss up.
‘Keep it,’ said Crowbar, grabbing Clay by the hair, pulling his head back, putting the Beretta’s muzzle cold against his temple. ‘Let
me
have him.’
Uzi was to Clay’s right, the shooter just beyond, still at the wire, but facing them now, watching them, the muzzle of his rifle pointing away from Rania.
Medved sat fondling the icon, staring out at them from across
the glass. Clay kneeling in the road, Crowbar’s handgun pressed into the side of his head, Rania still out there, blind and unable to move.
Then Medved coughed into a handkerchief, gazed down for a moment at the issue and raised her eyes. ‘No,’ she said, voice like iron on old splintered wood. ‘No.’ Then she twisted her head and faced the driver. The movement was surprisingly quick. ‘Kill her,’ she said.
Evolution never stops. Its time is measured not in seconds or centuries, but in generations – sex and death the blind and ruthless levers. Can a man evolve, or can he only put his hope in those that follow him, in those that he may cause to follow?
As Claymore Straker knelt in the pale illumination of the headlights, his fingers reaching for the grip of the loaded Beretta hard and clean against the base of his spine, hearing Regina Medved’s muffled words projecting through the cool night air, watching the van’s driver register those words and turn his head towards his colleague standing by the wire at the edge of the minefield, the moon pale and thin above the Pentadactylos in the distance, he knew that in himself evolution was retrograde. Inside him, a lower order had emerged, purer, shorter-lived.
The man by the wire turned to face Rania, started to raise his rifle.
The gun was in Clay’s hand now, coming forward. Uzi had seen what was happening and had started to react, was raising his weapon. Koevoet, too, was moving, bending into a crouch, his Beretta coming up, Medved there behind her ballistic polycarbonate laminate, fondling that amputated arm-end of crucifix, finger-fucking the hole, those eyes burning with a fervour almost divine, anaerobic, watching all of this unfold before her like some
Macbeth
of the mind.
Clay fired first. The shooter by the wire spun, fell just as Crowbar’s 9mm erupted behind Clay’s right ear. Uzi piled into the ground, a gaping hole in his chest. Clay was already on the move, sprinting towards the wire. Behind him, the muffled sounds of gunfire, the bark of an AK, car doors slamming, tyres spinning on gravel, headlights
jerking across the road, over the fallow minefield. The second car, the Mercedes, was backing away now, engine screaming. Someone was leaning from the passenger window firing a handgun. Clay could hear the pop-pop-pop, see the muzzle flashes, was even aware that the bullets were intended for him. But he was indifferent to it all. He was at the wire now, the shooter immobile on the ground, the AK’s muzzle hanging oblique on the lowest strand of wire. Rania standing dark in the empty, moon-grey field, thirty metres away. More firing now, Crowbar banging away at the retreating vehicles, muzzle flashes in the darkness. A round pinged from the steel fencepost beside him. And then, from the far side of the buffer zone, a loud whoosh and a thin line of grey smoke rising into the night sky.
‘Rania,’ he shouted. ‘It’s me, Clay. Crouch and hide your eyes. Now.’
It was all he had time to say before the flare ignited. Clay crouched, the phosphorous burning above him. The ground at his feet lit up white, shadows lurching and tottering like drunks across the barren landscape. He scanned the ground for footmarks, any sign of the path Rania had taken as they’d forced her through the minefield, but there was only the hummocky ground scattered with thousands of jerking shadows. And then, from the Turkish lines, the flash of tracer, red and slow and fast, arcing towards and above and past him, followed by the thunk thunk of a heavy machine gun. Rania huddled close to the ground, illuminated by the flare, in clear view. Clay rose, took a bearing, trod on the lowest strand of rusty wire, pried the next up with his hand, crouched low and stepped into the minefield. Then he took a deep breath and started running.
If the Turks and Greeks had laid anti-personnel mines as the Cubans had taught FAPLA and SWAPO to do in Angola, they would be randomly spaced within bands of variable density running orthogonal to the expected direction of movement of enemy troops. No straight lines, no patterns, nothing remotely mathematical or predictive that you could use. It had been a Russian-made PMN antipersonnel mine that had blown off Bluey’s legs that day outside
Mavinga, a steel casing wrapped around 250 grams of trinitro-toluene, about the size of a can of tuna. That’s all it took. One minute you were walking through the tall grass of the
chana
, waving the flies from your eyes, watching the late-afternoon sun slanting shadows across the wind in the grass, the next you were on the ground staring wide-eyed at the charred stump of bone where your thigh use to be. This minefield was laid twenty years ago. Clay could only guess at the tactical circumstances of the time. And even if any of that could be known or deduced, there was no time.
Clay moved fast, kept his stride long. Twenty footfalls between them now, the calculations automatic, unwanted, each kiss of the ground a Poissonian process, independent of the one before, mine or no mine, anywhere from a one-in-twenty to one-in-thirty chance, he figured. The closer he got to her, the better the odds, the past of no statistical bearing on the future. Tracers flashed above his head, swip swip. Close. The sound of the machine gun hammering. He was fifteen metres in now, halfway, still going, limbs still intact. In the flarelight he could see her struggling with the blindfold, trying to push it from her eyes with her shoulder. Only ten metres from her now, Clay moving fast, feet barely touching the ground.
‘I’m coming Rania,’ he shouted. ‘Straight line from the dead guy by the wire. Stay low.’ Blindfolded, she would have no way of knowing which way she had gone in. Another burst of tracers, closer now. Last warning.
She looked up in his direction just as the flare died. Darkness enveloped them. Silence. A few more strides now only, flying over the ground as if he could somehow minimise contact, skim over its surface. He was going to make it. They were going to make it.
And then, behind him as his trailing foot left the ground, a click. He knew that sound, knew what would come. His stomach contracted, anticipating the blast. He was moving fast, almost to her now, would shield her from the blast. She could walk back out, follow his line, step where he’d stepped. Koevoet would be waiting for her, would talk her through it. Down, he yelled to her. His body
tensed, started curling, instinctively minimising surface area. A second passed, another. Seconds? Fractions? Time playing tricks on him now, slowing to a near stop, his demise witnessed in absolute clarity. But no, a second. Another. Jesus, a dud. Can you believe it? After twenty years in the ground, yes, a dud. Thank Christ. Still nothing. Some luck. He smiled, Rania there now, close. He slowed and spoke her name.
The force of the blast ripped into the back of his legs, lifting him and hurling him into her.
This proximity, dreamed of, so long anticipated. The feeling of her close to him, their bodies pressed together so that he could not tell which was her and which was him, arms and legs and lips and hair, short, fast breaths and fingertips and hearts going hummingbird-fast, so close each to each, and he could smell her hair and that smell of wild veldtgrass and lemon blossom that would always be her, and the other too, freshly opened earth, that spade-cut, brown-wet clay smell, like a trench or a grave, and the flint-spark sharpness of detonation, the drifting cordite from the Turkish lines, and now, sweet and heavy, the smell of blood.
As his head cleared he reached for her, opened his eyes. He’d been thrown into her and he’d hit her hard. She was pinned beneath him. He reached out with his stump, pushed himself up, rolled off her onto his side, facing her. Pain shot through his legs, a searing that spread from the backs of his knees to just above his tailbone where the shrapnel had caught him, and the familiar wet-glue feeling of blood on skin.
She lay on her side, knees to her chest, head to her knees, unmoving.
‘Rania.’ He reached over and pulled off her blindfold, untied her hands. Her face was streaked with mud, tear tracks through the earth.
She opened her eyes.
His heart stopped.
‘Claymore.’ Her voice was wire thin.
Shouts from the Turkish line, scattered rifle shots. At the wire, the dark shape of the man Clay had killed. Beyond, the gravel track and
three other bodies prostrate and dark on the silver gravel. Medved’s van and the Mercedes were gone. There was no trace of Crowbar or the Pajero.
Clay pushed himself up on one elbow, looked back to the dark, low ridgeline that marked the Turkish line. There had been no more flares, no more shooting for a couple of minutes now. They would have seen the vehicles depart, seen and heard the mine go off. It wouldn’t be long before the Greek Cypriot Army would be on the scene, or the UN. The nearest post couldn’t be far.
Silence reigned, the quiet of violence having been done.
‘We’re going to get out of here,’ he said.
‘
Mon dieu
,’ she gasped. ‘You are hurt.’
Clay tried to move his legs. It hurt like hell, but they were working. He got to one knee, bit back a groan, let the coarse deluge flow through him. He looked out over no-man’s land.
‘Okay, Rania. Here we go. Just take my hand, follow me close. Walk in my foot marks. It’s going to be
lekker
.’
He reached for her hand. It was cold, her grip weak.
‘Here we go,’ he said.
He stood, stayed in a crouch, pulled her gently up.
She gasped, hissed between clenched teeth, stood doubled over at the waist, her hands over her abdomen, legs trembling.
‘Rania, what’s…’
She sank to her knees, cramped over.
Clay knelt beside her, pulled one of her hands away from her abdomen. It was covered in blood, thick and viscous.
She collapsed into him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, and then she was gone.
There was no time, there were no options. Clay reached his good hand behind her shoulders, levered her body up, slipped his stump under her legs, cradled the backs of her knees in the crook of his elbow, pushed himself to his feet and started towards the road.
If the Turks had seen them, and he had every reason to believe that they had, silhouetted in the moonlight on that barren field of
fire, staggering a few steps, resting, another step towards the wire and the road and the edge of the buffer zone, then they had decided they were not a threat. They would have the high-powered night vision lenses on them now, would see that they were unarmed and injured.
Clay swayed, rebalanced, stepped long for the next footmark. Blood squeezed between his toes as their combined weight compressed his boots. Sweat ran cold down the gutter of his spine. Voices drifted from the Turkish emplacements as he carried the only person he’d ever truly adored, limp and so pale in his arms like a new bride, her head thrown back, her long hair swaying with each stride. Another step, her delicate, powerful, beautiful, damaged body heavy through his legs. One more. Again. Two more steps. Almost there. He could see Crowbar now, standing on the other side of the wire, urging him on. The Pajero was there behind him, lights extinguished.
By the time he reached the wire, Clay’s arms were wet with Rania’s blood. He collapsed his weight into the top strand of the wire and passed Rania over to Crowbar. The barbs cut through his jacket, dug into his abdomen. Crowbar carried her to the Pajero and lay her in the backseat. Clay scrambled through the wire. In the distance now, a flash of red and blue lights, police or military approaching.
Clay staggered into the Pajero, squatted on the floor beside Rania, felt the shrapnel dig into him. Through the encroaching pain he could see Katia and Alexi staring up at him with wide eyes. And then they were moving, Crowbar speeding the Pajero through the night.
Clay touched Rania’s face. She was still breathing, but unconscious. He pulled open her blouse and exposed the wound, a puncture no bigger than a milk tooth just below the base of that fine rib cage. He reached around behind her, moved his hand along the smooth silk of her back, could feel no exit wound. Not a bullet. She had been facing him when the mine had exploded. He hadn’t taken it all. Somehow a piece had reached her.
‘Shrapnel,’ he shouted over the din of the engine.
‘
Moeder van God
,’ said Crowbar. ‘Hold on.’
Clay could feel himself drifting away, the pain in his legs dominant now, crowding out any control he had left. ‘Get her to a hospital,’ he managed. ‘Keep her safe, Koevoet.’