Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,55

looked like vans of some kind, but as they got closer to the farm she could see that they were in fact four-by-fours. As a matter of principle, Deirdre knew as little as she could about any form of motorized transport. But the sheer intensity of her disapproval of these large, cumbersome, gas-guzzling vehicles, which so profoundly offended her socialist as well as environmentalist instincts, meant that she had absorbed some information about various makes and models. These, she suspected, might be Range Rovers – the worst of the lot, to her way of thinking.

As she watched, puzzled, yet somehow mesmerized by what she was seeing, one of the cars drove past the main house into the farmyard behind it. The other pulled up right in front of the farmhouse itself. Men got out of the vehicles, all dressed in black, their faces invisible behind balaclavas. They fanned out, surrounding both the front and back doors like malevolent wraiths. Each of the men was carrying something, held out in front of him, though Deirdre could not see what it was. She had a horrifying suspicion, however; one that she could not name, but that was tightening her belly and constricting her throat until she could scarcely breathe.

A man walked out of the front door of the farmhouse. From the shock of blond hair Deirdre recognized Tobyn Jansen, her favourite of all the male members of the group. She adored him for his commitment to the cause, his apparently effortless ability to make her laugh, and – though this she found hardest to admit, even to herself – his strongly muscled, golden-haired forearms.

Jansen stood in the open air for a moment, facing the four men who were lined up in a half-circle around him. He seemed to be saying something, though she could not hear what. His gestures, though, conveyed their own meaning: at first conciliatory, then increasingly indignant, and then desperate as Jansen seemed to plead with the men, then threw his hands up in a desperate but futile gesture of self-protection.

Deirdre saw a series of bright flashes. Tobyn Jansen staggered back before falling to the ground, and it was almost at the instant that the back of his head hit the foot of the farmhouse front door that the sound of gunfire reached Deirdre Bull’s ears. And then she started screaming.

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RONNIE BRADDOCK WAS a former paratrooper. He’d done his time in Iraq as a soldier, then again as a private contractor, bodyguarding administrators and businessmen for an American corporation that was less a commercial business than a private army. Now he was running his own crew, and after that Afghan job it was good to be working on home ground for once, instead of some fly-ridden shit-hole filled with stinking ragheads. The assignment had turned out to be easier than expected, too.

Braddock’s lads had come to the farmhouse pumped up, expecting opposition. They’d been told the occupants were members of a terrorist group. That suggested they’d be violent, determined, even willing to die for their cause. In the event, though, the five that they encountered inside the house were almost disappointingly easy to dispose of. They were unarmed, and unable to defend themselves. Even the men failed to put up a fight.

‘Eco-warriors, my fucking arse,’ said one of the attackers, disdainfully kicking a corpse.

‘There’s one missing,’ said Braddock. He didn’t like to see anyone losing concentration, just because it had all been a stroll so far. ‘We were told four men and two women. Well, we took four men down all right. But only one woman. Where’s the other?’

‘Maybe we were given the wrong numbers.’

‘Is that what you want to tell Razzaq? “There was only one woman, so we thought you’d got it wrong?” Fuck off.’

‘What do you want to do, then?’

Braddock snapped out his orders: ‘Take the lads who were in your car. Search the house, top to bottom, every bloody inch of it. Attics, cellars, cupboards, the lot. You know what to do if you find her. The rest of us are going for a little drive. This lot were nature lovers …’ He made it sound like some kind of perversion. ‘Maybe she went outside.’

‘Out there? You’ll never find her. She could be fucking anywhere.’

‘Bollocks. We’re not exactly talking special forces, are we? What we’re talking about is some useless, hysterical bitch who’s wandering round in circles, pissing herself with fear. If she’s out there, she’s as good as dead already.’

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