Andy McNab - Payback

Danny tried to stay calm as she told him what had happened outside Foxcroft:’… and he’s got no money, Danny, and he shouldn’t be in the country. He’s more of a danger running around on his own than if he’s with us. If that woman finds him, she’ll-’

‘Us? What d’you mean us? You’re not staying with us.’

‘I am, Danny. For tonight at least.’

‘Elena-’

‘Where’s your granddad?’

‘Miles away. I had to leave him.’

‘And how are you planning on getting back?’

‘I dunno. I could maybe get a taxi after we’ve bought all the stuff we need.’

‘We’ve got a car.’

‘What?’

‘We hired it in London – it was quicker than getting the train, specially on a Sunday. It’s in the car park.’

Danny had been trying to figure out how he was going to explain to a taxi driver that he wanted to be dropped in a lay-by with a whole load of shopping. ‘Yes, but-’

‘You need me, Danny. And my dad can be useful. We don’t have to tell him what’s going on.’

Danny nodded. Nothing with Elena was ever simple.

‘Let’s go and buy what you need,’ she said. ‘Dad’s all right for a while – I’ve given him some cash.’

They walked off in the direction of the superstore.

‘My granddad will go mental.’

‘I seem to remember being in a situation like this once before, darling,’ said Joey, taking a drag on one of his favourite foul-smelling cigars and blowing the smoke out through the hire car’s window towards the brooding mass of Pen y Fan.

Dark clouds were gathering over the mountain and the fir trees were swaying and rustling. The rising wind swept the first drops of rain and most of Joey’s cigar smoke back into the car. Joey ignored it. ‘Last time, we went to meet Danny’s dad; now it’s his grandfather. Any more members of the family lurking out there in the mountains?’

‘No,’ said Elena, staring into the trees and wondering why Danny was taking so long.

‘Mmmm. And how is the vicar, anyway?’

Elena turned and stared at her dad. ‘Who?’

‘You told me Danny’s dad was a vicar, moving to a new parish or something. So who’s his granddad – the bishop?’

Joey was feeling a whole lot better. Being needed was good for his battered ego, and his old swagger and confidence was returning by the minute. But however much his ego had suffered, his memory appeared to have survived intact. What he said was absolutely true. Elena had invented a spur-of-the-moment story about Danny’s dad being a vicar when she’d bribed Joey into driving her to Norfolk six months earlier, just before Fergus’s rescue. The man Joey had met was the journalist Eddie Moyes, who’d been dumbfounded when this stranger started calling him Reverend.

‘Actually, Dad, the man you met wasn’t Danny’s dad, and he wasn’t a vicar.’

‘No? You don’t say.’ Joey was starting to enjoy himself. ‘Listen, darling, you’re a wonderful daughter and I’m real proud of you, but you shouldn’t tell lies to your old dad. Haven’t I taught you to always be honest and truthful?’

It was more than Elena could take. ‘Eddie’s dead! And he was a good bloke! And don’t you dare start talking to me about telling lies!’

Joey took another puff at his cigar and threw the stub out of the window. ‘I’m sorry, babe,’ he said softly. ‘Look, don’t you think you ought to tell me exactly what’s going on?’

‘Probably. But I can’t. We have to wait and see what Fergus says.’

‘And this Fergus, he’s Danny’s real granddad?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I reckon the boy should be ashamed of himself.’

Elena stared at her dad. ‘Ashamed? Why?’

‘Bringing an old man into this wild countryside and allowing him to fall and injure his leg. It’s not right. He should be at home, watching the television, putting his feet up, taking it easy.’

Elena smiled. ‘He’s not that sort of granddad.’

‘No? So what sort of granddad is he then?’

‘Well he’s… he’s fit and strong usually, and he’s… Oh, I don’t know, you’ll see for yourself when you meet him.’

‘When,’ said Joey with a sigh. ‘What’s keeping them?’

What was keeping them was that Danny was having to re-dress his grandfather’s wounds, as well as trying to explain exactly why he’d turned up with reinforcements.

Fergus took the news a lot better than Danny had expected, partly because the loss of blood made him too weak to put up much of a protest. But he could also see the logic of having someone, even someone as unreliable as Joey, driving them back to London. It would be a lot less complicated than struggling with buses and trains.

Danny had managed to locate most of the items Fergus had told him to buy, and following his grandfather’s instructions he set about patching up the leg as well as he could.

He cut off Fergus’s jeans by running a sharp pair of scissors up the outside of each leg and then peeling back the blood-soaked denim. Next he poured a whole bottle of mild antiseptic fluid all over the makeshift sweatshirt dressings still wrapped around the leg.

‘Use another bottle,’ said Fergus, flinching as the liquid soaked through the material and onto the wound itself. ‘It’ll moisten everything up, and stop any flesh scabbed onto the material from ripping when you pull it off.’

Danny took a deep breath: that was the bit he wasn’t looking forward to, but he knew it had to be done. Gently and slowly, with Fergus catching his breath and grunting in pain, Danny pulled back the pieces of sweatshirt to expose the wounds.

It looked bad: the round had passed through the thigh but had fortunately missed the bone, leaving entry and exit wounds on the front and side of the leg. The flesh was a dull red and small pus spots were forming around the edges of both wounds. Danny stared in fascination, moving his head closer to inspect the damage, like a surgeon preparing for an operation.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ hissed Fergus. ‘Get on with it, will you!’

‘Sorry,’ said Danny, grabbing more of the antiseptic fluid and a roll of cotton wool. Tentatively he cleaned away the dried blood and grass and mud stuck to the skin. But it was hurting Fergus a lot, and Danny decided that talking might at least help take his grandfather’s mind off the pain.

‘Me and Elena have a plan.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Fergus, picking up on Danny’s line of thought. ‘So tell me about it.’ At that precise moment he didn’t care what Danny had to say – anything that distracted his brain from the gnawing agony would help.

‘Joey gets us back to London, drops us off at a hotel or B and B – anywhere we can get you in without drawing too much attention to ourselves. Elena’s gonna try to contact someone on the Deep Web, like she did before. Maybe some real hacker will have a program that can get us into the Northwood mainframe. And if there’s proof there about you being a K, she downloads it onto her PC. Then we’ve got it. For good.’

Beads of sweat were standing out on Fergus’s brow. He let his head fall back so that the raindrops dripping from the firs could fall onto his face. And while the rain soothed his brow he focused on what Danny had said and attempted to concentrate on the bigger, fuller plan that had to be formed and fixed.

Danny worked slowly. His grandfather’s biggest worry was that without antibiotics to fight off infection, the wounds could go septic. Once Fergus was satisfied the flesh was clean, he talked Danny through the process of placing gauze dressing over the damaged areas and then evenly wrapping 100mm bandages around the leg.

Finally he carefully pulled on the pair of loose-fitting tracksuit bottoms that Danny had bought from the superstore, while Danny changed into his own new clothes.