Gerald Seymour - Condition black

God, and he loved the boy. Colt's voice was gentle. "Were you happy in France?"

"I had a cause, I had something to fight for."

" Y o u didn't think that then."

"It was right what I did, I knew it was right."

" Y o u never thought about that."

"What do you think I did it for?"

"Because it was freedom."

His freedom had been being hunted, and never believing that he would be caught, tortured, shot, never believing that. Freedom had been making up his own rules, far from the armchair warriors at S.O.E., from the buggers who had never slept in a cave and never stripped a belt-fed machine gun and never run like the wind from a wired shunting yard.

"We're the same, Dad. You have to see that…"

He looked down into his son's face. God, and how he loved the boy.

He said, "Before you go, if you can come again, please…"

The boy kissed his cheek. He hugged the boy.

He stood on the landing and watched his son lope away lightly down the staircase.

The shadows had gathered around him, and his age and his loneliness. As he went back into the bedroom to prepare the night medicines he heard the kitchen door close on his son's back.

A wild and awful night, a night when the badgers moved without threat of disturbance, when the rabbits crushed their bellies against the ground and fed fast, when the fox coughed a hoarse bark to bring a screamed answer from a vixen, when a tawny owl clung with talons extended to the ivy skein of an old oak.

A night on which an Astra car was parked for safety in the driveway of the local police constable in the adjacent village, across the parish border.

The night for a man who gloried in the wild and who would never be trapped. Colt was at home. He was at one with the darkness and the elements. He was as free as the badger and the fox and the owl in the oak above him.

Standing in the black doorway of the pillbox, he did not consider what error of his had brought men from the Security Service and the F . B. I, to the village. In his mind were images of animals transported to the slaughterhouse; of beagles with masks on their heads so that they breathed only nicotine smoke all the way to the first shadows of lung cancer; of a polar bear, its brain damaged by captivity stress, in the zoo at Bristol; of chickens reared in confinement so close that they could not walk nor beat their wings; of a gin trap tight on a bear's leg, and the animal in its pain gnawing at the limb that it might find crippled freedom.

Fran was close to him. With a slow and deliberate movement she pointed away to his right, to the fringe of the wood, to where the wood was directly behind the Manor House. He saw the movements.

T i s a dull sight

To see the year dying,

When winter winds

Set the yellow wood sighing:

Sighing, O sighing!'

" F o r Christ's sake, Bill, shut u p. "

"Edward Fitzgerald, perfectly good poet, didn't hit the big lime like Tennyson, but…"

"You'll wake the whole village. Is that what you want?"

"Just didn't want you to be bored."

They had been in the wood for two hours.

" I ' m going to shift a few hundred yards along to get a clear view of the side of the house. Do you see the corner of the wood?

I'll be there. Sing out if you get lonely. Otherwise I'll be back before daybreak."

"Yeah, okay…"Erlich hoped his regret wasn't plain to hear.

He felt the shake of the bivouac as Rutherford crawled away, and heard the sounds of his body scraping away through the leaves. He heard the wind sigh and whistle after the sound of Rutherford's movement was gone. He heard the ram splatter onto the bivouac. At the house, through his monoglass, he saw nothing.

Rutherford took pleasure in his slow progress along the wood's edge. Knees. Elbow, Knees. Elbows. And all the while. weeping the twigs from his path, stopping every two or three minutes to study the house and sweep his binoculars over the gardens. Me found a patch of leaves, almost dry, under a beech close to the furthest edge of the treeline and shrugged his way down into their cover. He settled into a nightmarish reverie ol long nights of surveillance in Armagh. He wondered what absurd notion had possessed him to leave his flask behind. A gift from Penny's father. This was the last time he'd go on night exercises with windy Americans without his flask. Anyone who talked that much had to be scared. Probably allergic to rabbits.

The scream…

Shit…

The scream was desperation.

He was on his feet. The scream was in the air and in the trees.

Where, where was the scream?

The cry. Had to be Erlich.

The cry was pain and terror.

He charged, blundering through the trees, through the low branches and the brambles. He couldn't see a blind thing, and he ran with his arms outstretched in front of him, barging off trees and fighting and kicking his way through the undergrowth.

Gasping and running, knowing that he had heard Erlich's scream.

A lifetime to where he had left Erlich, through the lashing branches and the catching, tearing bramble undergrowth. And he hadn't a weapon. He had nothing more lethal than a pencil torch in an inner pocket.

He saw them, silhouetted against the fainter light of the night sky, two of them.

He saw the punching and the kicking, the frenzy.

He closed on them. No way that they could not have heard his approach, the bloody elephant's arrival. They must have heard him, and yet had not faltered from the blows and the kicks into the heaving and writhing shape of the bivouac. He had no gun and he had no weapon, and he didn't think about it. He hurled himself forward to get them away from the American, he threw himself at them. His hand flew at an arm, caught a sleeve, rough cloth. The two figures separating. He staggered from a kick to his shin bone. His hand scrabbled to stop himself from toppling, found material, clung to it, and a fist, gloved, smashed at his lace. He was falling, tumbling, out of their reach.

He yelled, "Stand or I shoot… "

And they were gone. Good fucking bluff. He didn't see them go. He was on his back, no shadows above him, no silhouette bodies. They were gone without a sound. He listened for them.

He heard the silence, and the wind gale in the trees and the rain driven around him, the moan of the American's pain.

He found the pencil torch in his inner pocket. He wriggled forward. He pulled back the bivouac cover. He shone the torch on his own face, so that Erlich would see it, know who was with hint, then he swung the torch down. It was a long time since he had seen the face of a man who had been systematically beaten and kicked.

That was Ireland. Not in Ireland now. In the English countryside, for God's sake. Blood all over the face, and an eye closing faster than paint dried. Rain falling on the face. Erlich was doubled up, knees against his chest, and his breath came in sharp hissed sobs.

"It's O. K., Bill, they've gone."

"Thank Christ for the cavalry."

"Anything bust?"

"God knows."

Gently, he pulled Erlich upright. The blood ran from the cut over the American's right eye and from his nose.

The covert stuff, that didn't matter any more. There seemed to be a dog barking in the Manor House as they made their way across the field. Too late to worry about being spotted from the village. He limped from the blow on his shin bone, and because he had the full weight of Erlich on his shoulder. He had Erlich's arm wrapped round his neck and his throat, and the man was solid. They sloshed across the middle of the field and the wind and the rain lashed their faces. They ploughed through a gateway and into another field, and the lights of the pub car park came slowly to meet them. Rutherford's fear and shock gave way to anger that Erlich had let himself be jumped. He had probably been reciting Wordsworth. But greater than anger was his amazement. The man was a wreck, done over fit to break. Why? What in God's name for?