Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

They were her Dome's people, damn her.

It was a warm spring evening. A long valley, and the trees from the woodland threw broad bold shadows on the grassland. It was an idyllic setting. A father inserted a fishing hook into a writhing worm and cast the line into the hidden darkness of a slow pool, and handed the rod to his child son. It was a place of calm, of peace. They had worked the plan through when they had still been in the tree line of the wood, how they would shatter the evening, break the idyll, crack the calm and the peace. They had talked it through coldly, and Penn had said what he would do, and Ulrike had agreed the plan. He took off his trousers, and she unzipped her jeans and kicked them off over her boots, and there was no shyness between them, nor any humour. It was a small part of the plan that it would be better for them when they crossed the stream to keep their trousers dry. It was part of the plan, methodical and point by point, that it would be better for them when they fled with the prisoner to have dry trousers. They heard the excited squeal of the child and saw him arc his rod up, but there was no fish. It was a good moment for Penn to go. He saw the father bent over the grass and the man, Milan Stankovic, the man who was the killer of Dorrie Mowat, would be searching in a tin or a jar for a fresh worm to thread onto the hook. Penn had such confidence in her, he did not feel the need to look back at her for reassurance. He left the tree line, and as he ran across the weeded and untended grassland of the field towards the stream, he could see the hunched low-set shoulders of the man and the child. He took a line towards a mess of fallen willows that were up the valley from the deep pool where they fished. He was running blind, because all of his attention was on the lowered shoulders of the man and the child, and the skin of his shins and thighs was nicked by the old thistles of the field that had not been worked since the fall of Rosenovici, since the death of Dorrie Mowat… He saw the man straighten, and the child was pointing to where the fish had taken the worm and was trying to wrestle the rod back from his father so that he might cast again more quickly. Penn had dived to the ground, fallen among nettles that pricked at the bared skin of his legs. He was crawling towards the bushes of willow.

The worm was in the water. They were both of them watching the line.

Penn hesitated when he reached the willows' cover.

There was a high bank to the stream, cut deep by the winter's flow, where the willow branches fell into the water. Penn looked up into the closing dusk and he saw far away that the tractors were retreating towards the dulled blossom of the orchards and the climbing smoke of the village. It was so quiet… He slid down the bank. He dropped into the pressure power of the current. It was shallow water above the pool, going quickly. They were both of them, man and child, rapt and staring into the dark water in front of them. It was the chance that he must take. His body was bent so that the water broke against his chest as he took chopped strides on the smoothed big stones of the stream's bed. He made the crossing. He came to the far bank and grabbed at a root and dribbled the stream's water from his mouth.

Penn came up the bank.

He lay in the grass and he felt for the soaked fine rope that was a part of the plan, and for the torn cloth strip from the tail of his shirt.

He was forty yards, perhaps fifty, along the bank of the stream from the man and the child.

There was a shout.

The happiness of the child gave a moment of opportunity to Penn.

He was behind them, going cat quick, closing on them.

The rod was arched above them. They were both clinging to the rod, and the child was yelling and the father was trying to calm him.

He had the opportunity.

Penn came on them. When he was close, when he was a stride away from them, the father turned. When his hand was raised for the blow, Milan Stankovic saw him. When he had the heel of his hand high, the killer of Dorrie Mowat gazed at him in bewilderment. Penn hit him. Penn hit the neck of Milan Stankovic, defenceless because his hands were still clasping the rod, above the shoulder and below the ear. It was not a blow that would have felled a readied man, but Milan Stankovic was in bewilderment, and his hands came off the rod and he went down. So fast… The man on the grass of the field, and Penn rolling him onto his stomach and driving his knee down into the man's back, and snatching clear the pistol at his waist, and dragging up his right arm as if to break the socket at the shoulder. The child held the curved and quivering rod, and for that moment did not understand. He saw Ulrike break the cover of the trees and she was running, whitened legs pumping, to the far bank of the stream. He had the noose on the wet rope around Milan Stankovic's right wrist, and then he was pulling the left arm back to meet the right wrist, and binding the wrists together. It was about advantage… and the advantage of surprise diminished. Milan Stankovic shouted in his fear, and he heaved with his hips, his buttocks, to throw off Penn. With the fear was recognition… It was the struggle of the animal that senses, in fear, the open doorway of the abattoir. She was coming dripping along the stream's bank, hurrying to him, and the child had thrown down the rod. They came together at Penn, Ulrike and the child.

He pulled Milan Stankovic upright.

The child clung to his father's legs.

He hit Milan Stankovic hard across the back of the skull with the barrel of the pistol, to hurt and to stun.

The child beat at Penn with small clenched fists.

Penn had one hand on the roped wrists of Milan Stankovic, and the other hand held the pistol under the chin of the man who had killed Dorrie Mowat, and he was trying to propel Milan Stankovic away and back towards the fast spate waters above the pool, and he could not move him because the child held at his father's legs and punched and kicked at his father's attacker. Ulrike was there. Penn saw the cold in her eyes. Ulrike had said that he would have to be cruel. She caught the child, she broke the child's grip. She threw the child down, viciously, onto the grass of the field.

Penn and Ulrike ran on the bank to the upper end of the pool, and they had the weight of Milan Stankovic between them. They scrambled him down the bank, and into the flow of the stream. He slumped once between them, his feet slipping, and he was doused over his head and was spluttering water when they pulled him up. Just before they reached the tree line Penn swung to look behind him. He saw the rod sliding away into the pool. Ulrike, amongst the trees, retrieved the backpack. He saw the child running, demented, across the empty fields and back towards the village and the smoke and the blossom dull in the dusk. Evica shook him, shook her Marko. She shook him hard to kill the hysteria in her son, and then she held him against her until the panted sobbing subsided, until he could tell her.

She ran fast down the lane of the village, punishing herself, carrying the weight of her son.

She had pulled her coat from the hook on the door, she had left the dog in the kitchen, she had swept the food cooking in the pots off the stove. Fleetingly, she saw the Priest sitting bowed at his window table with the oil lamp lit and the chessboard laid out. She saw the wife of the Headmaster sitting hunched near to the barred window.

She ran through the stillness of the village, in the greying light, past the garage where gasoline used to be sold before the war and the sanctions, past the shop where food could be bought before the war and the sanctions. She ran through the silence of the village, her feet clattering the quiet.

She ran until she no longer had the strength to carry her son, and then she dragged him, his stumbling feet slipping in the potholes of the lane. She came to the building, used now by the Territorial Defence Force of Salika village, that had been filled with agricultural stores before the war and the sanctions. She went across the yard and past the barns where the big agricultural plant was kept, idle because it was impossible to obtain spare machinery parts and tyres and fuel. She burst into the office area. She saw the guns of the killers, and the playing cards, and the bottles heaped on the table of the office area. She was the acting headmistress of the school, and she was the woman who had been to university in Belgrade, and she saw the dislike of her in the faces of the killers.