Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

He turned away.

It was what he had come to find…

The power of the light seared into Perm's face.

His eyes saw only the white brightness of the light. There were excited shouts from in front of him and then all around. The light stripped him bare. He stood in the white brightness. He dared not move. If the fear, the panic, had not been frozen into him in that moment when the light caught him, then he might have tried to duck away or throw himself to the edge of the light, but the fear was in him and with the fear was blindness. The old woman had been behind him. She had been in the pit behind him when he had turned away. With the shouts, with the click of the safety catches, there was a sudden stifled scream, a man's hoarse pain. The light never left Penn. It was what he himself would have done, or what his instructors from far back would have told him to do. "Put the light down, sonny boy. Be close to the light but not on it, sonny boy. "Cause if they're going to put suppressive fire down, sonny boy, it'll be the light they go for…" That is what an instructor would have said, and he realized the angle of the light was low, as if it was on the ground. There was a hammer of shots behind him, semi-automatic on a rifle, and after the shots and the scream there was the sound, briefly, of ripping cloth. Penn did not dare to turn to see whether Katica Dubelj, old woman gone animal, old woman gone eighty years of her life, old woman who had never been on a surveillance or an evasion course, old woman not strong enough to go cross country, had made it clear through the thorn and wire in the hedge beyond the pit. There was a loaded pistol weighting the pocket of his coat. There were four grenades in his backpack. Penn did not dare to reach for either. Very slowly, so carefully that the movement should not be misunderstood, he stretched out his arms, kept his hands open, raised his arms.

He thought he was the prize. He heard behind him, after the bullet volley, nothing of pursuit. Fear seemed to numb the movement of his legs so that they were rigid scarecrow stilts, and to loosen the hold of his guts so that he wanted to piss, crap. The fear trembled the movement of his arms, up high and into surrender. His eyes bunked, uncontrolled, and the water from his eyes distorted the glare of the cone of light.

There was still shouting, but coming closer to him, moving closer and slowly because they could not know the fear that shackled him, as if he was still dangerous to them.

Only his mind was not frozen. In his mind the thoughts raced…

Ham hadn't talked of escape and evasion. The fat-faced little bastard hadn't talked about what to do… He had once been at a Territorial Army depot in Warrington, a marksman's rifle gone missing, a suspicion that it might have been sold to Protestant para militaries from Ulster which was enough to bring in Security Service involvement, and an Escape and Evasion pamphlet picked up off a book shelf. He had been waiting for them to wheel in the armourer, and he had flicked the pamphlet's pages, just from interest. He had read… the first moments of capture offered the maximum opportunity of escape, also offered the maximum opportunity of getting the old head blown off because of the high state of adrenaline of the captors… He had read that it took real guts, big bravery, to antagonize captors by going runabout. His hands were high above his head.

In his mind the thoughts cavorted,..

He was shit scared, frightened, and Dorrie Mowat had been here. Dorrie Mowat, the horrid young woman, had kicked one man in the privates, punched one man in the eyes, spat at the whole goddamn lot of them. Dorrie, the one that all who had touched had loved, had sat in the wet grass where he now stood in surrender, and her arms had been round the wounded man that she had chosen, and she had sat and waited while the bull dozer dug out the pit. She hadn't had the fear. A shape loomed at the edge of the cone of light.

In his mind the thoughts raced…

Jane in the small room, little Tom on her lap, with the television on: "And what's the point of you going there, what's anyone to gain from it?" Failed her. Mary in the kitchen and making the coffee: "I think she took a pleasure in hurting me… and, Mr. Penn, she was my daughter… and, Mr. Penn, her throat was slit and her skull was bludgeoned and she was finished off with a close-range shot… and, Mr. Penn, not even a rabid dog should be put to death with the cruelty shown to my Dorrie." Failed her. Basil holding court to Jim and Henry in the darts bar of the pub round the corner from the launderette: "You know what you are, Penn? You are a jam my bastard." Failed them. The old American Professor of Pathology: "Build a case, stack the evidence'… Maria who was a refugee: "She was an angel in her courage'… Alija who needed the operation to her eyes: "She could not protect herself because she had the wounded fighters to help'… Sylvia who was cloaked in the nervous collapse: "Does anybody care what happened to them, who did it, anybody?"… Failed them.

The blow was at the back of the neck.

Failed them all… The blow was with the stock of a rifle, short swing.

And failed Jovic who had interpreted for him, and Ulrike who had touched his arm to make a talisman for him, and Ham who had given him the map… And failed himself.

He was pitched forward by the blow. They were all around him and the shadows of their bodies masked the cone of white light. He wondered if they would shoot him there, or whether they would take him some place else to kill him, and felt he did not have Dome's courage. He tried to cry out, beg mercy of them, but his voice was suffocated. The fear consumed him. When they had hit him some more times, when he had seen the grinning of cold faces, when he had smelled the foul close breath of them, then they searched him and found the pistol and they skewered his arms back and pulled the backpack off him, then they hit him with the rifle stocks some more.

Penn was pulled to his feet. He could hear the music from across the stream.

Penn (William), Five reject, failure… He was held tight and dragged towards the pin lights of the village across the stream.

They were through Glina.

The convoy was belting. It was not usual for the convoy manager in his Land-Rover to let the fifteen Seddys behind him sniff the wind and belt, but they were all pissed off and Benny who was driving three from the back supposed that the wound on the convoy manager's face had lost its numbness and would now hurt like hell.

Benny wasn't fussed. It did not matter to him that they had been off the main roads, into the ditches, up bloody awful rutted lanes. He'd done the runs into northern Iraq out of Turkey to resupply the Kurds in winter, grinding in low gear down tracks that had never seen a loaded Seddon Atkinson before. He made it his business to know the land, read up on his guidebooks and he wrote twice every week to his wife, Becky, to tell her where he had been and what he had seen. There wouldn't be much to write to Becky about Glina because they had belted through the pretty little town, but he'd think of something to say. He only wrote to Becky about the towns being pretty, never about the people being shit. It was not his way to frighten her, to tell her that most days he wore a pisspot on his head and a flak jacket of kevlar plates front and back across his body, and he didn't tell her that the doors of the cab were armour-reinforced, nor that he had sandbags under his seat as protection from mine blasts. On the main road and belting, perhaps forty-five minutes if they weren't messed again from the Turanj crossing, and the voice crackled on the radio in his cab.

"Guys, there's usually a roadblock between Glina and Vrgin-most. I don't want to spend half the night yammering with some defective on a roadblock. There's a right a few miles ahead, up to a village called Salika, I reckon we can get round the block, then back onto the main heave… OK, guys?"