Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

He could smell the brandy. He wondered if brandy had kept them on their feet and fighting when they had come out of Srebrenica, or faith, or desperation

… and he wondered how it went with Mister and if he had faith to fall back on, or if the desperation grew.

He did not know how it would finish, but he thought he had come near to the end of the road, as he'd pledged. When they had finished with the flask, he reached back, tapped on Ante's arm, pointed to the rifle, and it was given him. He looked through the 'scope sight.

He saw Mister, hunched, still, and then at the extreme edge of the tunnelled vision was a gliding movement that came closer to Mister.

It was a grey-dark shadow on the grey-white field.

The shadow flitted in the moonlight.

It came from behind Mister and skirted him warily.

Not for two years, perhaps more, had there been a fox scavenging in the garden of his home near the North Circular Road. By tripping the beams, the fox set off the security lights and bleeped the consoles in the hall and in the bedroom. Several times Mister and the Princess had been alerted by the bleeps and had stood at the window to watch the mature vixen. A cautious creature, which Mister liked – and without fear, which Mister liked more. Alec Penberthy had said she had a breeding den just inside the fence of the school's playing-fields. At night in the garden she had looked magnificent. He recognized the shadow.

It came by him in a wide half-circle.

It gave him space but did not seem intimidated.

Past three o ' c l o c k… The fox was an escape for him.

He had told himself that at three o'clock, when his wristwatch gave him that time, he would make the decision, commit himself, move. Of course, he would move. He was Mister. He did not know fear. He would splay out his hands, sink them down into the grass, use them to push himself up, and then he would walk, with firm strides, towards the river. He had set himself the deadline – three o'clock – and now the minutes ticked past and the watch hands sidled further from the hour. He watched the fox and that was his excuse not to move. It watched him.

Having come past him, so light-footed and so safe against the danger, it settled in front of him, sat. He could see the silhouette of its shadow. When it moved on he would push himself up. That was Mister's promise to himself. When he made a promise it was always kept; his word was his bond. When the fox shifted, he would go. He told himself, repeated it in his mind, that a few minutes did not matter. The fox seemed to study him, as if he intruded into its space. Then it ignored him and scratched. It lashed, with the claws of its back foot, against its neck then under its front leg. Abruptly, it shook itself, then its neck rose and its nostrils pointed up. It sniffed. To have reached where the fox sat on its haunches, he would have had to push himself up, offer his weight to the ground, then take ten strides. He heard its coarse snorting, then it was up. It trotted away. He thought the ground and the grass under its feet would barely have been pressured. It stopped, sniffed again, and then its back sank low, and it went forward.

The fox had located the Eagle, carrion.

It started to circle him. The shadow glided over the grass, and each circle was smaller. He had shot the Eagle, silenced him. And the voice had boomed at him in the night from the tree-line, and he had squirmed. If it had not been for the voice, taunting him – Arc you going to run, Mister? – he would already have gone, started out on the hundred stride paces to the river. It was what Cann wanted, that he should run. Cann wanted his feet, shoes, his weight, pounding down on the earth and grass of the field. Cann wanted the flash and the thunderclap, wanted to hear the scream. Cann was in the trees, waiting on him, a reminder of the consequences of moving: a footfall landing on the antenna of a mine. The fox was close to the Eagle's body.

He could not drag away his eyes.

The Eagle's body was barely visible to Mister. The fox, he thought, investigated the body. He heard the rending of fabric. The fox had found the wound. It pulled on the torn trouser, then began to worry at the leg. He had no more use for the Luger pistol, no further magazine to fill it. He had the PPK Walther pistol in his belt. He saw the shadow of the fox tug at the Eagle's leg. Mister hurled the Luger at the fox. It might have caught the fox's back leg, or its lower stomach, and it yelped shrilly but did not back off. It gazed at Mister. They stared at each other. If the fox had moved away then, Mister would have planted his hands down in the grass, pushed himself up, and started to run or walk towards the river. It did not back off: instead the shadow darted forward. It was a blur against the grass. Mister saw something thrown up into the night air. The fox caught what it had thrown up, then went skittish and ran in tight squares with something in its mouth.

The fox played with the lower length of the Eagle's leg.

It bounced towards the leg and barked over it, tossed it and jumped back from it. Then it settled.

Mister heard the gnawing and the splintering of the bone. He could not fire the PPK Walther at the fox. He would need all the rounds in the pistol when he ran, when he went to the village where the lights burned to look for a car to take him out, away. A stone… he looked for a stone. He heard every sound from the fox's jaws. He dropped his hand to the grass beside his buttocks. He tore up the g r a s s and scattered it in front of him. He cleared the grass from a patch the size of the handkerchief in his pocket, scratching into the earth with his fingers. He broke his nails and scrabbled deeper. It was soft earth, finely ground. He did not know that soft earth, milled and worked, had been carried by rain streams from the edge of the field.

He burrowed with his hand, moled his way into the earth to find a stone. He was ever more frantic. He would run when the fox had gone, when he had found a stone and driven the fox off the Eagle's leg.

He felt the hard smoothness. The little hole he had excavated was dark, too deep for the moon's light to reach into. He started to scrape at the side of what he'd uncovered, and he felt the symmetry of the shape. He thought that what he touched was the same size as the Bakelite top of the two-hundred-gram jars of coffee powder that the Princess bought. His fingers eased from the side of the shape to its top and he cleared away more of the cloying earth until he felt the first of the six points that made the little star. The mine was nine inches from his buttock, buried under six inches of soil and root. It was where his hand would have gone, where the pressure would have been concentrated as he pushed himself up and readied himself to run.

The voice, cold and without expression, carried to him from the tree line. 'Time is moving on, Mister. I'd have thought, by now, you'd have run.'

When the voice had dissipated in the darkness, Mister was left with the sound of the fox's teeth on the Eagle's leg, and the frost was crisp in his hair.

The first light of dawn came in a soft smear on the hills behind Ljut village.

The low sun gilded the valley. Gold was painted on the hills, and on the bare trees. The lustre fell on the fields and was trapped in the grass and in the dead stems of the thistle and ragwort; it nestled on the vineyard posts and glistened off the wires between them. Brilliant little shimmers of light ruddied the bristly back of a pig that had come out of the trees' cover to snout for food. The softness of the gold was daubed on the fields and the woodlands, and played patterns on the smoke rising from the twin villages.

The smoke turned ochre in the early light as it peeped up from the chimneys and was dispersed. The sun made dazzling reflections in the river where the water ran over shallow stones between the deeper pools.