Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

He tried to think of his Karen. It was always best when he closed his eyes and thought of Karen. But he could not find her in his mind. The pillow sunk below his head. She felt for him, opening his trousers. He could not find Karen in his mind. He saw the thin and faded wallpaper of the room on the sixth floor of the block on Mihovilica that was away from the old walls of Karlovac and near to the river and the bridge that carried the main road to Zagreb, and there was a narrow framed picture, not straight, of the crucifixion, and there were a child's plastic toys on the floor near to the chair where discarded clothes had been dumped. The bed heaved as she worked harder with her fingers. Couldn't help her, couldn't respond to her, couldn't think of Karen. Because the bed heaved, iron springs screaming, the child behind the closed door cried out again, and the woman ignored her child. Her face was above him, she had the waist of his trousers down to his knees, and his pants pulled back, and he could not respond to her. There was contempt at the woman's mouth. She had already been paid, and her interest was going.

Couldn't think of Karen.

He could only think of Penn.

He, had checked at the operations centre before going out of the barracks in the old police station. Casual questions. Was it all quiet over there? Any balloons going up over there? Bored answers. It was all quiet over there, just a sniper, two rounds, near the milk factory that was across the river where they had the salient, nothing else. He was thinking of Penn, and Penn should now be at the end of the map because that was the schedule drawn for him, and Penn should now be holed up in the woodcutters' hut. The shiver came to him, and he thought of Penn who was alone, and the thought shrivelled him. The big mouth with the thick lipstick rim hovered above Ham, and he could not turn the face and the bagged eyes and the grey-flecked hair into the face of his Karen. And the big mouth with the thick lipstick rim curled at him in disgust because he could not respond. He hit her. He smacked with a closed fist into the side of her face. Faces replacing the pain in hers. The face of the barman that he had punched in the bar at Cullyhanna because the barman had back-chatted the patrol. He was hitting her with both fists, belting feverishly into the flab lines of her stomach. The face of the Irish sales representative who had jogged his arm, spilled his pint, in the pub in Aldershot, put on the floor with the fag ends and the beer puddle and kicked. She was off the bed and whimpering in the corner, crouched among the clothes she had dropped. The face of Karen, when he had belted her, when she'd cried, when she'd packed, when she'd gone out of the front door with her bag and his Dawn. All the faces, fleeting, gone… Penn's face stayed. He pulled up his pants and his trousers. Ham left the door of the bedroom open behind him, and the door of the apartment, and the woman whimpered and the child cried. He jogged down the stairs. Ham thought only of Penn, and his fear. The compliment, that Benny Stein would not have recognized, was that he was the most popular, the most revered, the most talked about driver in the aid convoy team sponsored by the British Crown Agents. Going off through those bloody awful people, through their bloody awful villages, was not worth thinking of without Benny Stein to humour them along. The Seddon Atkinson, his lorry, was loaded full, eight tons of wheat flour, yeast, sugar, and seed.

And now the damn tricky girl was playing up on transmission, the only one of fifteen Seddon Atkinsons in the lorry park that was contrary. Two engineers worked with Benny Stein to get the tricky girl road worthy for the morning, and two more of the drivers had come back after their hotel dinner to the lorry park out by the Zagreb airport to see if the tricky girl would ride in the morning across the Turanj crossing point and down through Sector North and on into Sector South.

If it had stood up and slapped his face, Benny Stein would not have recognized a compliment, but it was one hell of a big compliment to him that two engineers were prepared to work as long as it took through the night to get the tricky girl road worthy and two of the other drivers had come the long drag out of the city centre to check how they were doing.

Past midnight, and the convoy manager had joined them to peer down into the exposed engine space, and leaning forward behind the convoy manager was the convoy administration manager, quite a crowd to get the tricky girl road worthy Not that Benny Stein, long-distance lorry driver, overweight, middle-aged, stubbed height, shiny bald head that was alive with oil smears, would have noticed. An aid convoy going down through Sector North and on into Sector South might not be safe if Benny Stein wasn't in the line, might not be fun. When the transmission was fixed, when he'd gunned the engine, when he'd driven round the lorry park lunatic fast, when he'd crashed the gears, done the emergency stops, when he'd put the tricky girl through the hoops, Benny Stein pronounced himself satisfied.

He tried not to think of the past, but to concentrate on the present.

The image of the fox was the past.

Penn's present was each footfall of ten strides, then the listening and the silence, then the moving again. He could not kill the image of the fox. The present was going forward in the dawn and he had slept too poorly to have wanted to eat before there was enough light for him to leave the timber men's hut, and he counted himself lucky that the rain showers that had beaten on the tin roof of the hut had been cleared by the wind. Ham's map was finished, and the map bought in the shop in Karlovac was too small a scale to help him with much beyond the lines of the roads. He could get a rough bearing from the early movement of the sun and that was sufficient to guide him. He was deep in the woods and going well, but always there was the prickle of nervousness at his back.

The past was the image of the fox.

There had been chickens inside a walled and roofed wire cage at the bottom of the tied cottage's garden. It had been his job through his childhood, each evening, to feed the chickens and to collect the eggs. It was easy enough for a fox to approach the cage, to sniff the wire mesh of the cage. But approaching the cage, sniffing the cage, didn't fill the gut of the fox. The fox had to find a way through the wall of the cage, scratch back the loose seams of the wire, dig frantically under the wire, chew at the frame of the door, if the fox were not to go hungry. And scratching, digging, chewing, aroused the frightened screams of the chickens. It was easy enough to get close but the bloody awful bit, for the fox, was doing the business. With the cackle of the chickens came his father with the shotgun, and the dogs from the shed and the big flashlight from the shelf beside the kitchen door. Three foxes were killed near the chickens' cage during his childhood, two shot by his father when caught in the flashlight, one trapped by the dogs against the panel fence by the fruit bushes. One fox had made it in. It was the night when his father and his mother had taken him to the pantomime in Chippenham, a foul wet night, and before the expedition to Chippenham he had fed the chickens fast under the rain and not latched properly the gate frame, not hooked the chain onto the bent nail. Penn couldn't count on it, that the frame door to Rosenovici would have been left open. It was easy enough for him to get there, but when he roused the chickens… But he was trying not to think of the past.

Penn could hear the sounds of tractors.

He had been going along the side of a hill that was close set with trees. He had no path to guide him, no trail. He could move well and quietly on the mat of damp leaves. He was drawn forward towards the engine sounds of tractors.