Gerald Seymour - Condition black

She picked up the dog. She picked it up like it was a sheep, or a dead deer. It must have weighed 40 kilos. She slung it across her shoulders, and the blood from the dog's mouth dribbled down her jacket.

She looked at him then, and he felt the hate in her.

She walked away, back into the depth of the wood.

He was crouched, he aimed at her all the time that the torch brain held her.

The sounds carried over the fields where the light frost was gathering. He heard all of the shots fired.

He had only slept fitfully since his son had last sat with his wife, held her hand. Not a poacher's shotgun, not a hunting rifle.

He had recognised the full chamber of a revolver discharged.

There were no revolvers in the village, none that he had ever heard of. Revolvers were for soldiers, and for armed policemen.

He lay on his back in the cold and companionless bed.

A man had told him once, a friend of his father, a man who had shot game in Tanganyika between the wars, that the most dangerous animal in the bush was the leopard. The man had said that a leopard was only safe when its head had been sliced off.

He thought that the American at the Reform Club would have thought of his boy as a leopard. And if the bruises on the man's face were anything to go by and the screams in the wood in the night a week ago, then the American was right about the leopard.

And six shots were for killing. Six shots were what he would have fired, nearly 50 years before in France, for killing.

He lay on his back, he stared up at the darkness of the ceiling.

He would be told, they would come to tell him. He listened for the scratch of car wheels on the gravel of the drive.

The shots were heard all around the village.

Every living soul fed from the gossip that Colt had been home, that a car had been stripped of its tyres, that an American had been savaged until he screamed for his life in the high copse behind the Manor House, that Colt was watched for.

Billy and Zap and Charlie and Kev and Dazzer and Zack and Johnny, and the bank manager from Warminster, and the solicitor from Shepton, and the District Nurse, and old Vic in the pub, and the woman above the Post Office, and the tenant of Home Farm, they all heard the shots, and they all thought of Colt.

When Fran reached her home, the cottage on the dirt track past where the church bad once been, old Brennie was in his chair beside the stove. Fran stood in the doorway with the dog, her Rocco, on her shoulders and she saw the anger that he shared with her. They took a spade, and the flash that he used for pinioning rabbits in their fear, and they went to the old tumbled stone wall that marked the edge of the disused cemetery of the church. There had been enough rain to make it easy for deep digging. They took their turns, they dug in silence.

To Erlich it was pointless that they should stay, but he wasn't going to be the first to call a halt. He had picked up the cartridge cases, they had scraped leaves over the dog's blood, they had moved a hundred yards east. It was still just possible to see the kitchen door of the Manor House, and most of the driveway.

At the first grey dawn smear Rutherford broke the long silence between them.

"Where did you get that thing?"

"I got it, and I'm keeping it."

"It's a miracle half the county's police aren't scouring the woods for you. Perhaps they are. They won't make a hundredth of the noise you made."

"What would you have had me do?"

"Bloody good covert surveillance, a real A-team."

"Don't piss on me. I'm not some Rambo kid out of the mountains.. . "

" N o, indeed."

"You'd have had me use a kitchen knife? That monster would have had my throat."

"I was merely observing that we have gone rather public."

Erlich said, "But there's nowhere else."

Rutherford said, "That's the pity of it. It's where we have to stay."

"Every goddam night till he comes…"

She didn't have to look so damned surprised. He had only said that he would take the boys to the school gate, drop them, and then drive to the Establishment. She didn't have to look as though he had suggested running naked round Buckingham Palace.

It was Frederick Bissett's decision to take the boys to school and to arrive 15 minutes later than usual at the Establishment.

He would decide when he should telephone Colt. He would decide whether or not he would accept their offer of employment.

For once she didn't argue with him. Just that once she didn't dispute her husband's authority. She wasn't going to dispute anything when he was head of a department, when he was running a research unit, when he was rich and respected.

He drove the boys to the school gate. He did his best. He talked about the Liverpool team, and their new striker. He talked about the cricket side for Australia. He stopped at the newsagent on Mulfords Hill and he bought them each two comics…

They'd settle, they'd work it out. Plenty of families went abroad to work and took their children with them. It was their future that he was concerned with, their future and Sara's.

He dropped the boys. They didn't kiss him. He would have liked them to show him affection. They ran from the car and into the school playground… There was one thing he'd miss, by God, he'd miss it: the chance to see the faces of Reuben Boll and Carol and sickly little Wayne and the Security Officer when they discovered where he had gone.

On the first floor of a decaying building in the ancient Old City, the part of Baghdad settled twelve centuries before by Abu Jafar al-Mansur, the radio transmitter was found. It was the discovery of the transmitter in the room where he lived, alone, that re-doubled the torture inflicted on the Kurd, and doubled, too, the number of officers who now involved themselves in the investigation.

With the arrival of each new officer at the Department of Public Security's interrogation cells, so the demand for confession grew, so the screw was turned.

By the time that the Colonel reached the basement cells, the Kurd, and it was all he prayed to his God for, was close to death.

The Colonel had seen the carnage inflicted by the traversing machine guns on the human waves of the enemy outside Basra.

He had seen the heads of men blown apart by revolver fire; he had seen the kicking death throes of those hanged from make-shift gallows. But even the Colonel was nauseated, felt the bile rise in his throat, when he saw what had been done to the Kurd.

They had taken the fingernails from his hands, the toenails from his feet. They had beaten the soles of his feet with rubber truncheons. They had used the al-mangana, the clamp on his toes that was tightened. They had torn off one of his ears. They had pounded his penis to a bloodied prune. The cell echoed with the Colonel's fury. He had the Kurd taken down from the manacles that suspended him from the ceiling. He demanded that the doctor be brought immediately. He had no feeling for the Kurd, but he had uncontrolled anger for those who had supervised an interrogation that had lost them their suspect.

The Kurd had not talked. And even as he was lowered from the ceiling, his prayer was answered and, sinking deeper into wave after wave of pain, he died. It was 21 hours since his arrest.

The Colonel demanded continued discreet surveillance of the post-restante box. It was all they had. He promised a charge of treason for any man who failed in his duty.

There was a knock. His door opened. It was Boll in the doorway.

" A h, Frederick, you have a moment?"

Funny, but actually he wasn't frightened of the man any more.

They would make him suffer when it was discovered that he had lost a Senior Scientific Officer.

"What can I do for you, Reuben?" He heard the coolness in his own voice. There had been times when he had stood up when Boll came into his room.