I Am Pilgrim(100)
He sprinted for the one twisting alley that would lead him through the broken cordon, momentarily out of sight of a clutch of soldiers thanks to the leaning facade of a ruined house. If the soldiers moved ten feet either way …
He made it through the noose. He passed a crescent moon he’d scratched on a wooden door, hoped to God he remembered well, and started to count. He ran twenty-five paces forward, took three left, successfully skirted a buried mine and saw the safety of the mountains directly in front.
From behind, he heard a soldier yelling at his comrades to hit the ground. He fully expected to hear the deafening rattle of carbines and lose all control of his legs as the bullets hit his exposed back and severed his spine. Instead, the soldier had found a trip wire leading to two grenades hidden in a pile of old oil drums. As his comrades hunkered down, the soldier jerked the wire.
The grenades exploded and, in their brilliant flash, Lieutenant Keating – running forward to try to reseal the cordon – saw the Saracen outside the noose, sprinting for the safety of a group of tumbled-down walls. Keating fell to one knee, slammed the stock of his carbine into his shoulder and fired. He had been trained by Special Forces, so he knew what he was doing: he bracketed three rounds in each burst and panned left to right and back again fast.
A few inches either way – one lucky shot even – and everything would have been different. But that wasn’t in the stars that night – high-velocity rounds blasted stone and dirt all around the Saracen but none put him down. Keating cursed the night-vision goggles and the inevitable disconnect between eye and trigger. The Saracen, of course, thanked the hand of God.
He rounded a corner of three wrecked walls while in full flight, jagged left, swerved hard right and, still clutching his backpack and rifle, slid and tumbled down a steep slope and into the all-embracing darkness of a rock-strewn gully.
A young Australian officer had glimpsed him in the flash of a grenade for a fraction of a second. That was the only time the Saracen was ever seen by either civilian or military authorities. Until I met him, of course.
Chapter Forty
THE AUSTRALIANS DIDN’T pursue the Saracen, which was a mistake, but their mission was to find the three kidnapped civilians, not to chase a lone insurgent. As it turned out, though, in a night dogged by bad luck, there was one piece of overwhelming good fortune: because it was the Australian captain who had taken the round in the thigh, it meant that Lieutenant Keating was in command.
He was only twenty-six years old but he had already done one tour in the ’Ghan, so even at that age his face was full of years. He came from a little town called Cunnamulla – it’s mostly wheat country that far out west, on the edge of what Australians call the never-never, so hot that the locals claimed a pervert was a man who preferred women to beer – but some of the neighbours ran a few sheep so Keating knew from an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease what quicklime was used for.
That was why, when they finally made it into the kitchen and he saw the two discarded bags lying on the floor, he felt as if the ground was shifting under his feet. Quicklime was totally alien to that part of the world, and why would anyone have gone to the trouble of carrying it in? Not kidnappers, surely. He still believed the IEDs indicated that a high-value asset was being protected in the village, but he was no longer certain it was still alive. He immediately told his men to get their flashlights out and start looking for a grave or burial pit.
First they found the charred remains of the stone storage house, and it was while Keating was trying to work out what that meant that an urgent shout rang out.
It was one of the young grunts. Not bothering with his communication headset or correct procedure, he yelled to his mates: ‘I’ve found it – bring me a shovel.’
Keating heard, and he and several of his men came running – carefully because of the threat of unexploded IEDs – to the area behind the headman’s house. One look at the freshly turned soil – deep and wide enough to contain God-knows-what, traces of lime scattered around – and Keating was in no mood for taking any chances.
‘Get back now! Everybody deploy to the LZ. Move!’
One of the sergeants – like all the others, no idea what was going on – turned to Keating. ‘What about searching the remaining houses, boss? Might be more hostiles.’
Keating shook his head. The elaborate IEDs and the fact that nobody had tried to nail the squad made him certain that the village’s only occupant had disappeared into the night. ‘No, Sarge – whatever it is, I think we’ve found it.’
At the landing zone – the wounded being treated, the squad’s lone medic trying to get an IV into the captain’s arm – Keating immediately used the secure communications network to put a call through to their base.