Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

Penn, in sight of the break of the tree line, coming to the open greyness of the field, saw the cat.

There had always been cats at the tied cottage, semi-wild and only fed in the worst of the winter. Penn knew cats.

It was a big brute with nothing handsome about it.

The cat was black-coated but the white flash at its chest alerted Penn to its advance.

Penn stopped. The cat was a distraction. Couldn't help but watch the cat, and if he was distracted by the big brute then he might blunder in the dropping light against the fine khaki wires that were the antennae. He stopped and the antennae wires, motionless, were squared about him. The big brute came fast towards him. The throaty growl of the cat called to him. He could see its ribcage.

The cat crossed open ground, a dozen paces from him, and at the centre of the open ground was the spike of the antenna's wire. Penn reckoned the cat would have been a household pet or a farmyard ratter, and the cat had been abandoned in the flight from the village, perhaps by one of those who now lay as skeletons deep in the woods.

The big brute hesitated because Penn stood still. He could see the knots and the burrs in the cat's coat.

The throated growl had become a purring roar. Penn knew cats… On the carpet floor of dead leaves there were no stones for him to throw at the cat. Unless he moved past an antenna wire he would not be in reach of a dried branch to throw at the cat. He could not shout at the cat, he was too close to Salika, down through the trees and across the river, he could not shoot the cat with his Browning 9mm automatic pistol. Penn knew the way of an abandoned cat that had found a friend.

The cat arched its back. The purr riddled the wood. A cat with a friend always wanted to show its pleasure by arching its back, then finding a surface to rub against, and the surface nearest the cat was the needle-thin antenna of the mine.

Penn cooed at the cat. The back of the cat was against the antenna. Penn slipped to his knees, and stretched out his hand and he murmured his love for the cat. The antenna wavered as the vigour of the cat was arched against it. Ten pounds of high explosive in the mine below the antenna, maybe twelve pounds, enough high explosive to take the wheel off an armoured personnel carrier, enough to immobilize a tracked vehicle. Penn urged the cat, gently, to come to him. The cat left the antenna and the wire swayed like a dying metronome. Penn's heart pounded. The cat, wary, circled Penn, and there were antennae on either side of him, and an antenna wire behind him. He cooed, murmured, urged the cat to come to him. Again the high arch of the back, again the fur bedded against the wire, to his right…

The cat came to him.

One movement…

The cat was against his knee.

One chance…

The cat howled its pleasure.

If he missed the one moment, the one chance, Penn thought the cat would sc udder out of his range and find an antenna wire to snuggle against.

Penn grabbed the cat with two hands. No friendship, no love, he held the cat tight. The cat bit at his wrists and its back claws slashed at his upper arms. Penn held the cat as if his life depended on it, as if his life rested on an antenna wire not being bent over. He tramped in the last light past the antennae, through the final trees, going towards the field with the cat hacking and spitting at him.

He was through the minefield.

Penn threw the cat hard away from him.

He stepped over the barbed wire strand.

The cat snarled, as if its friendship had been betrayed, and stayed back from him, and there were no antennae for the cat to arch against.

"All right, you old bugger, I'm sorry. Please, don't do that to me again, but I apologize."

The cat watched him. He took a slice of ham from the paper bag in his backpack and tore it into quarters, and flipped the meat towards the cat.

The cat dived for the food.

In front of Penn was the field. He could see the small wall of earth in the corner of the field. He could make out, just, the outline of the broken roofs of the village and the jagged rise of the church's tower.

It was what she would have seen, where Dorrie had been…

It was warm for the late afternoon.

Benny Stein sweated.

It was hard going, getting the sacks of seed out of the back of the Seddon Atkinson lorry, but best to be in there with the local Knin 'coolies' because that way their sticky fingers couldn't pilfer so bad. Best not to make it easy for them.

A pretty little town, Knin, pity about the people, and when they'd done the unloading then he'd try to find the energy to climb the long zigzag road from the warehouse by the football pitch down on the river and get up to the old fortress above the town. He was good at photography, prided himself, but the Canon with the 125mm lens was back at the hotel in Zagreb, and if he'd pulled out a camera up by the old fortress then the guns would have been raised and they'd have been bawling. It was the people that spoiled Knin, and the people didn't seem to him to have any bloody gratitude for him hiking down their way with his lorry and fourteen others.

He sweated, he heaved a sack of seed. He brought it down from the tail of the Seddy. He carried it to the trailer. They were good guys who worked with him, good crack.

Sweating, gulping, "Heh, wasn't that the Hun Frau at Turanj? Wasn't that the Frau there?"

A good guy, packed in stockbroking to make five hundred quid a week driving a lorry into Sector North, "Too old, Benny, you are, for looking at skirt…"

"Too bony for me, the Frau. What was she there for?"

A good guy, a banker who had dropped out of gilts, taken a money cut to run a truck into Sector North, "Getting fruity, Benny? Getting the hots? She was waiting for a refugee bus…"

"You know what? She had that look, a lot of broads give me that look. Half Hackney's broads, most of Palmers Green's, they have a sincere romantic problem 'cause of me. I take cold baths, I walk away from it, too bloody complicated for me, but she had love. You know the Argie one…?"

The tickle of laughter from the one-time banker and the onetime stockbroker. Benny recited,

'… An Argentine gaucho named Bruno,

Once said, "There is something I do know:

A woman is fine

And a sheep is divine,

But a llama is Numero Uno!"

'… Well, you know what I mean… Perhaps she's got a big fellow, a big NigBatt guy, and she's pining. There's not a refugee bus scheduled through today… that's all."

He knew when the refugee buses came through. Refugees were something from Benny Stein's past. He'd had his little laugh from the Frau, and he thought her the grandest woman he had ever met, and when they were not driving, nor doing maintenance, then he would hitch a ride down to Karlovac and head for the Transit Centre, and his last project had been carpentry for the little desks and low stools of the kindergarten… He understood about refugees because his grandparents had walked out of Czechoslovakia fifty-five years before and his father had walked with them, and all they had owned was stacked in an old pram that they had pushed as they had walked. He'd thought, looking at the Frau's face, that it wasn't just a bus arrival she waited for.

He had walked into a gate, and he had ripped the shins of his trousers on fallen wire, and he had cracked his knee on a dropped gravestone, and he had been in the ditch.

It was black dark in the village and Penn had a little chat to himself, waspish.

It was imbecile to be padding about the ruin of the village in the black dark, and he should get a better grip of himself, slow down, stop the charge. Do it like he had done it as a child, when he had gone early in the morning into the top copse where the keeper bred the pheasant chicks in the summer, and sat under the widespread oak and waited for first light when the sow brought her badger young from the sett. Going back to the basics of his life… The only course where he had beaten the graduate intake into Gower Street had been the rural surveillance course and crawling up in the wood's night, so quiet, that when he had put his hand from behind over Amanda Fawcett's mouth she had squealed and wet her jeans. The only time he had won an instructor's praise, and Amanda Fawcett, stuffy bitch with a 2.1 out of Sussex, had had to wear her shirt tails outside her trousers for the rest of the morning, and a fucking malicious grin she'd given him on his last day, coming out of Administration when he'd given in his ID. And Amanda bloody Fawcett, graduate, General Intelligence Group, paper pusher, wouldn't have made it a hundred yards off the river bank