Gerald Seymour - Rat Run

Now they were going.

Polly Wilkins had once spent a day with what Frederick Gaunt irreverently called 'The Hereford Gun Club'. She had been with three other recent Service incomers to the special forces on the edge of a country market town. There, she had stood under an old clock tower and read the inscription:

We are the pilgrims, Master, we shall go Always a little further. It may be

Beyond that last blue mountain buried with snow, Across that angry or glimmering sea.

She'd thought it naff and self-indulgent, until she'd watched a training session in their Killing Room: she had been deafened and almost frightened to death by the explosions and ricocheting rounds, the smoke and the shouting, and she'd crept back to London in awe of the pace and ruthlessness of the simulated attack. Now men from the Prague police were going into a Killing Room, doing it for real. She wondered how good they were… from Hereford she remembered overwhelming power and speed. Were these men, young Czechs, good enough?

Time to find out. Ludvik strode close to her.

She recalled the last signal from Gaunt: 'Good on you, Wilco. From this distant end we anticipate the capture of a full-blown co-ordinator. We are all ears, Gaunt.' She had always been Wilco to Frederick Gaunt, his little joke. Old RAF slang for 'Will Comply' was 'Wilco'. It was a name that indicated his admiration for her – Polly Wilkins did as she was asked and, more, had the dedication. Other women at Vauxhall Bridge Cross thought it patronizing. She did not, and wore the name like a badge, with pride.

Ludvik said, 'We are going now. As your Mr

Braithwaite remarked, "For fuck's sake, just get on with it." We are, at last, to get on with it. Perhaps it will be spectacular. You have a seat in the best row of the theatre and-'

'Please, Ludvik, shut up.'

It was not meant to wound his enthusiasm. But Polly Wilkins thought it almost obscene that a storm – gun against gun, body against body, faith against commitment – should be treated as theatre by those who would not be a part of it. In the Killing Room at Hereford, as they had come in, she had sensed naked terror and had realized the acute danger created by the assault. The squad was out of her sight, had disappeared through the outer door. She imagined them creeping, soft-footed, up the worn stone steps of the staircase. Behind her, beyond the police cordon, the fire engines revved their engines and made ready, and the ambulances had the doors open and… the attack started.

From the upper window, under the old roof tiles where the dishcloth still hung, came the sound of battering, fast, desperate blows, the strike against the apartment door's lock. Then the shooting. At first, one weapon recognizable by its sharp clatter on automatic.

Then answering gunshots. A scream, shouting, competed with the firing.

She knew, instinctively, that it had already failed.

Half a minute after the first blows on the door high in the building, with a sledgehammer, Polly Wilkins knew it was screwed. By now, if the storm squad had succeeded, there should have been the thunderclap of the flash grenades in the room and the curl of the immobilizing gas swirling from the window. She thought that the bodyguard and the man reckoned by Gaunt to be a co-ordinator, had been ready for them and waiting. More volleys of shots, but not the flash grenades and not the gas canisters.

Ludvik said, 'I think they will be inside very soon.'

'Accept it.' Her voice was cold. 'They're not inside.

Because of the bloody heritage you waited too long. It failed.'

'You cannot call it failure, which is insulting. You cannot, yet, call it failure. They are closed in. They have nowhere to go.'

She said, as if tiredness swept over her, 'What my boss would say. Dead they're hunks of meat, alive they're an intelligence dream. We wanted to talk to them.'

He bridled. 'I suppose you will report we are incompetent.'

'I will report that the heritage of the Old City dictated more fire engines were ordered up, that you had many fire engines but no explosives to blow the door off.'

'They are inside, that is what is important.' He faced her, intense. 'Trapped. I tell you, Polly, I believe you give these people too great an admiration. They will shoot, and they will think. When they have thought of their position they will surrender. They are going nowhere. Give an enemy too much importance and he will dominate you.'

She blinked as the pain of exhaustion caught her.

She looked up the alley. Two casualties were brought out. The one with the face wound had rich red blood dribbling from the mouth in his balaclava and she could hear the choke in his throat. The other was carried by two colleagues and his hands were across his lower stomach, down from the bottom edge of his bulletproof vest, and he howled as they struggled to run with him. She felt small, alone, so inadequate.

And Ludvik, alerted by the beat of the boots and the howl, watched with her.

Polly said quietly, 'I don't give them too much importance.'

They went back to a cafe behind the cordon.

He crawled across the floor towards the half-open window. It was slow going and the pain came in rivers. It was a big effort for him to crawl, and a bigger one for him to locate the grenade's pin and work his finger into it. He gasped, dragged out the pin, then propped himself up on an elbow and tossed it through the window. For a moment it seemed to bounce on the sill and he wondered if it would roll back and drop down beside him, but it did not. Far below he heard it bounce, men's yells, panic, and the explosion.

Muhammad Iyad bought time. Not much time left to him, but time for the man he protected.

The door was barricaded with the cooker and the refrigerator, and with the mattresses from the beds, all wedged between the door and the wall opposite by the table, chairs and the wardrobe from the bedroom.

If they came close on the landing above the staircase, he fired sprays of bullets on automatic above the barricade, then slithered back to a corner where the answering shots could not find him. He was down now to his last grenade and to his last three magazines of bullets.

He lay in a pool of his own blood. It was smeared across the carpet from each time he had manoeuvred himself to the firing position. It came from a chest wound and from his shattered knee. To kill the pain, he had only his faith in God and the image of his wife, and the thought that the man would use well the time given him. It was an hour, more than an hour, since they had last approached the door when he had expended a whole magazine from the machine pistol, and a handful of minutes since he had thrown a fourth grenade through the slit of the open window. Of course he would die in the little room on the top floor in a city far from his home and the family he loved. He had no fear of death. The only uncertainty in the mind of Muhammad Iyad was that he had not given the man the time that was needed.

Before they had come – in the night – before he had heaved the barricade into place, he had cleaned the apartment. With water and soap, he had scrubbed down every surface where the man's fingers might have rested, plates he had eaten off and cups or glasses he had drunk from. The bedding in which he had slept, the clothes from the man's bag, his toothbrush, razor, and spare trainer shoes were piled in a loose heap in the room's centre. They were there because Muhammad Iyad was one of the few in the Organization who understood the power of the enemy. The skill of their fingerprint experts and the quality of their ability to examine for microscopic particles of DNA were known to him. No trace of his man was to remain when the ability to fight – not the will for it – had seeped from Muhammad Iyad's body.