The two spotters had heard it all, and they grabbed Greenburg under the arms and dragged him to the van. He was already dead – the bullet to his chest had fragmented when it hit his ribs and the splinters took out so much of his heart and lungs he never really had a chance.
In the shallow hollow I had done what I could to stop Mack’s bleeding. He was a well-built guy, but somehow I managed to throw him over my shoulder and get him into the passenger seat of the van. I laid the seat back, grabbed my jacket and bound it round his waist to try to further stem the loss of blood. He was still conscious and he saw the tag inside the jacket. ‘Barneys?’ he said. ‘What sort of fucking bluesman shops at Barneys?’
We laughed, but we both knew he didn’t have a chance if we didn’t get him medical help soon. I swung behind the wheel and hit the gas, fishtailing through the parking lot, sending revellers scattering, while the spotter directly behind me was already on his cell, speaking to Control on what we all hoped was a sufficiently secure line.
As I turned hard on to the blacktop, the spotter hung up and told me I was to drop him and his buddy at the marina in Bodrum, as planned. They had to get out before everything went into lockdown: Turkey was a proud country and the Turks wouldn’t react well to people being executed under their noses. The spotters would take Greenburg’s body on board with them while I got Mack to the doctor who was on standby. Hopefully, he would stabilize the wounds and buy time for a stealth chopper from the US Mediterranean Fleet to come in low over the coast and extract us both. The chopper, with a doctor and two medical specialists on board, was already being scrambled and, once it had picked us up, it would head for the fleet’s aircraft carrier, where there were operating theatres and a full surgical team.
Mack had a chance, and I drove even faster. It was a wild ride, and I don’t think anyone in a mini-van shaped like a brick had ever covered the distance any quicker. We arrived at the marina and, in a stroke of good fortune, found it virtually deserted – it was Saturday night, and all the boats were either partying at the ruins or moored near Bodrum’s scores of beach-front restaurants.
I backed along the dock, helped the spotters transfer Greenburg’s body on board and then got back behind the wheel. We had a bad road in front of us and a world of trouble behind.
Chapter Thirty-five
WE SANG. MACK and I sang ‘midnight special’ and all the old Delta blues standards as we barrelled south through the deepening night, down roads I had only travelled once before in my life, terrified that I would miss a turn or take the wrong fork and finally cost him his life just as certainly as I had cast it into the balance up on the clifftop.
We sang to keep Mack’s creeping unconsciousness at bay, we sang to thumb our nose at death, our unseen passenger, and we sang to say that we were alive and we loved life and that nobody in that vehicle was going to be taken easy or without a fight. It started to rain.
We had driven south, moving fast into an increasingly remote area with only the scattered lights of small farms to tell us where the land ended and the sea began. At last I saw the turn-off I was looking for, took it in a shower of gravel and started a long descent towards a secluded fishing village. We came round the tip of a headland, met the rain full on and saw lights huddled together at the water’s edge. I reached the village and found a narrow street which looked familiar.
Mack had slipped into a kind of half-world, my jacket was soaked with his blood – and I drove one-handed, constantly trying to keep him awake and fighting.
Hoping to hell I hadn’t made a mistake in my navigation, I turned a corner and saw a communal water fountain surrounded by dead flowers and with an old bucket tied to a rope and knew that I was close. I drew to a stop in the darkness, grabbed my flashlight from my key chain and shone it on the front gate – I didn’t want to have a half-dead man over my shoulder and knock at the wrong door.
The beam of the flashlight picked out a brass plaque on the gate. Unpolished and faded, written in English, it gave the occupant’s name and the details of his degrees – in medicine and surgery – from Sydney University. In light of the nature of the guy practising there, it probably wasn’t the best advertisement for that august institution.
I opened the passenger door, lifted Mack on to my shoulder, kicked open the gate and headed towards the front door of the rundown cottage. It opened before I got there – the doctor had heard the car stop outside and had come to investigate. He stood on the threshold peering out – a face like an unmade bed, skinny legs in a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt so faded that the stripper bar it advertised had probably closed years ago. He was in his early forties but, given his love of the bottle, if he made fifty it would be a surprise. I didn’t know what his real name was – thanks to the plaque on the gate, all the Turks in the area knew him simply as Dr Sydney – and that seemed to suit him fine.