Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

Why’s he sitting outside for a fag? Probably some stringent ‘no smoking’ policy inside the bed and breakfast, he decided, answering his own question. Then again, maybe the old boy felt a whole lot safer watching the road outside. After this evening’s run-in, Chris could empathise with that. Right now there was no way he could see himself curling up in a nice warm quilt somewhere and nodding off, not with some armed psychotic nuts out there roaming the town looking for him.

‘Well, that makes our job a whole bunch easier, then. You ready to do this?’ said Mark, his hands firmly gripping the steering wheel.

‘Okay, mate, nice and easy. Let’s not tear up the street and burn rubber in front of him. We’d probably kill him with the shock.’

Mark nodded and had begun to slowly ease the vehicle forward. It was then that Chris spotted something reflective glinting in the darkness towards the other end of the street. ‘Hold the phone, what’s that?’

‘What?’ replied Mark.

‘I saw something,’ said Chris, ‘up the other end.’

It emerged out of the darkness, the light from the streetlamp above flickering across the windscreen. A dark, unmarked van approached them from the opposite end of Devenster Street. Like them, it was rolling forward slowly, with the headlights off.

‘That doesn’t look good,’ said Mark.

‘Fuck it then, just go!’ snapped Chris. ‘I’ll jump out and grab him.’

Mark pushed the pedal down hard, and with a squeal of rubber that robbed the quiet town of its silence, the Cherokee lurched forward down the narrow road towards the old man. The van, still several hundred yards up the street, further away than them, all of a sudden turned on its headlights and accelerated, the driver obviously aware that he had been spotted and casting caution aside.

Mark slammed the brakes on outside the bed and breakfast, the vehicle slewing to a halt. Chris leaped out of the passenger side and up the steps to the porch, taking the gun with him.

‘Wallace! Get up!’ he shouted as he approached the old man. Wallace’s eyes widened with fear when he saw the handgun. ‘What’s going — ?’ he managed to splutter before Chris grabbed him roughly by the arm and pulled him up out of the chair.

The van came to a noisy halt on the opposite side of the street. Chris saw the driver-side and passenger-side doors swing open and the dark shapes of two men emerge. From their profiles, and the way one of them moved, he guessed they were the same two men he had encountered a little earlier. That wasn’t so good, since the older guy with the crewcut hadn’t seemed too worried last time about using his gun indiscriminately.

‘Quick!’ he heard Mark shout from the Cherokee.

Chris started down the steps of the porch dragging Wallace after him, half expecting shots from across the road to already be coming at him.

‘Stop!’ he heard one of the men call out. Both men had their arms raised, and legs spread, both aiming handguns.

Trained firing stance.

The posture was a learned one, Chris noted fleetingly, not the Tarantino posture you see gangsters adopt in the movies. These guys were definitely agency or ex-agency.

Wallace was panicking, struggling, tugging against Chris as best he could. He realised he must have scared the old boy waving the Heckler and Koch in his face.

‘Don’t piss around. Keep moving!’ Chris shouted at him as they hit the pavement. He pulled the back door of the Cherokee open, and then all but hurled the old man across the back seat.

And that was when both men across the road decided to start firing.

This time neither of their guns were fitted with sound suppressors, and the crack of gunfire bounced off the wooden walls down the still street.

Two bullets whistled over the roof of the car as Chris ducked down.

‘ Shitshitshit,’ he muttered.

The kids up the street started yelling in panic and dropped to the ground. The man walking his dog dived into a shop doorway.

Mark ducked down in his seat, as best his big frame could, at the same time reaching into the back to push Wallace’s head down. ‘Just stay low!’ he shouted, as Wallace, still it seemed bewildered by the sudden and rapid sequence of events, tried to sit up.

Chris stuck his gun over the roof of the car, not aiming, and fired the entire clip of twelve rounds towards the van. Both of the men dropped down behind their open doors as several of the bullets thudded noisily into the side of the van, dislodging a shower of paint flecks.

Chris used the mere seconds of time that he had bought himself as both men cautiously waited for any more follow-up shots to come their way before they stuck their heads back up. Chris raced around the back of the Cherokee and pulled open the passenger-side door.

‘Go GO GO!’ he yelled as he hurled himself in.

Mark once more floored the accelerator and the vehicle rode the pavement before swinging back onto the road and down the street. Chris twisted round in his seat and looked back through the rear window to see one of the men aiming his gun at the retreating vehicle, the other one climbing back into the van.

Wallace looked up at Chris, seeing the gun in his hand. ‘What.. what’re you going to — ?’

‘Just shut up a sec,’ he muttered as he watched the van shrink into the distance. It was beginning to turn round, but its size, and the relatively narrow width of the street, meant that it had to do a two-point turn, buying them a few more seconds.

‘Mark, get us onto the interstate and then we’ll take the next turning off. I really don’t give a toss where that takes us!’

‘You got it,’ replied Mark, his trademark demeanour of calm once more returning. Chris was glad that Mark had a cool head in a tight situation, and that it was him behind the wheel right now. If Chris had been driving, they undoubtedly would have hit every street lamp and post box on the way out of town.

He continued to watch the van through the rear window until, turning the corner at the end of Devenster, he lost sight of it. Then he looked down at the old man, still lying prone across the back seat. ‘We ran into those bastards a little earlier. I think they were looking for you.’

Wallace said nothing. Chris couldn’t tell if it was unmitigated relief or abject fear that had rendered the old boy speechless.

Mission Time: 6 Hours, 22 Minutes Elapsed

150 miles across the Atlantic

Max heaved a sigh of relief. The coast of France had been left behind them. The only hint of its presence being a thin, grey line on the horizon, the thick cloudbank that had seemed to end where the Atlantic started. The heavy skies seemed to be for Europe only, blue skies for the rest of the world.

They had been flying on a steady course of two-seventy degrees, due west, at an altitude of 4500 feet, just low enough that they’d been able to do without the oxygen system.

Max was certain that the Americans would have scrambled several squadrons of fighters to deal with them. They surely had to have some stationed near enough to the airfield they’d just left to easily intercept them before they flew beyond fighter range. All of them had kept a silent vigil, scanning the skies behind them intently for the first signs of an avenging Vee-formation.

‘That was bloody hairy,’ said Pieter over the interphone.

Hans was the first to reply. ‘Whose piece-of-shit idea was that?’

‘Well it’s not like we had a lot of choice,’ Max replied wearily. ‘Given the way things turned out, it was lucky we did.’

‘I’m sure there must’ve been an easier way,’ grunted Hans.

Stef’s voice piped up. ‘Sir, I’ve been doing — ’

‘For Christ’s sake, Stef, you can call me Max now.’