The Walking Dead

'Safe home, GG, see you next week,' the landlord called to his back…then, quieter, 'Shouldn't take the piss, just because he's soft in the head.'

The door swung shut behind him.

* * *

The two men ran heavily towards the helicopter's open side hatch, their heads ducked below the thrash of the rotor blades. Each carried small cheap bags of clothing, but between them they shared the weight of the Bergen rucksack in which their work kit was stowed.

The hand of the loadmaster reached down and helped up Xavier Boniface, then Donald Clydesdale.

Old thrills surged in each of them, and old habits came naturally. The loadmaster was waved away. They dropped into the bucket seats, slotted the shoulder harnesses across their bodies, fastened the clamps.

'You all right, Xavier?'

'Fine, Donald.'

'It'll be good to see Mr Naylor.'

'A gentleman. It'll be fine to see him.'

The helicopter lifted and yawed in the face of the wind. The engine pitch strove for power and suffocated their voices, then each closed his eyes and they were oblivious to the tossed and thudding flight as they climbed.

They were veterans of campaigns from the end of empire. As young lads in the marines, 45 Commando, they had been assigned in the Protectorate of Aden — forty years before — to guard the life of an officer in the RAF's Special Investigation Branch. They had taken him, Sterling submachine-guns loaded and cocked, most days from his Khormaksar billet across the causeway to Sheikh Othman, then past the roundabout where the concrete block and sandbagged Mansoura picket tower stood, and they had huddled with him between them in a Saracen armoured personnel carrier for the run to the fort where prisoners were held. At first, the initial couple of weeks, they had lounged around the fort's yard, and the officer had been inside the interrogation cells with captured men from the National Liberation Front. Each evening he had emerged in a state of growing frustration: he couldn't get the time of day from his prisoners, and most certainly no intelligence.

Now, inside the helicopter, bucking in the wind and leaving the island's coast behind them, neither could have said which had made the suggestion to the officer, but made it had been: 'With respect, sir, why are you pussyfooting around? There's lives at stake, right? Don't you think, sir, it's time to take the gloves off?' Perhaps it was both of them who had made the offer. They had gone with their officer into the cells the next morning. At first it had been fists and boots, then they had learned a little more of the trade, and water buckets, lights and noise had been employed. Intelligence had been extracted from choking throats, from mouths without teeth. Only the intelligence produced by pain had been written down by the officer — where a safe-house was, where an ambush site was planned, where an 81mm mortar was hidden or a blindicide rocket, where an arms cache was buried. They'd left on the same evacuation flight, one of the last from Khormaksar, as their officer. After touchdown — and he'd kept his new wife waiting a half-hour beyond the arrival doors — he'd taken them to the bar and bought them two doubles each, might have been three, and had promised to be in touch if the need for their skills arose again. The officer, of course, had been Mr Naylor. That had been the start.

When the helicopter's nose dipped and it lost height, both woke. Awaiting them at Glasgow airport was an executive jet, in RAF colours, fuelled and ready to fly them south.

They lived in dangerous times, and such times, they knew, demanded 'taking the gloves off'. Neither Xavier Boniface nor Donald Clydesdale would have said that this call from Mr Naylor would be the last.

* * *

He lay beside her, the scent of the ageing hay bales in his nose. The cottage was only five hundred paces away, but fifteen minutes' walk with the load they had brought across two fields.

The boy slept, breathing heavily, on a bed of fodder they had made for him on the far side of a low wall of bales.

Only the three of them remained. When the house had been cleaned, and the bedding bagged, he had sent away the lightweights — the driver to his mini-cab company in west London, the watcher to his family's fast-food outlet in the north of the capital. The recce man would still be travelling to reach his father's cloth shop in the West Midlands. They all believed his target was Birmingham — as did the kid who had fled. It had been a precaution of Muhammad Ajaq, the Scorpion of a faraway war where the strength of his sting was a legend, to deceive them with a lie, but his survival had always depended on precautions. The barn where he lay beside the girl, on damp, musty hay, was set back from the lane into the village. In an hour, before dawn came, he would make a fire at the back of the barn and burn their bags of bedding.