neck and plastering his grimacing face with wet kisses.
The large mess and the hallway outside were crowded with a couple of hundred of the community’s members; those that had put a must-have on the list and turned up in the hope that there was something for them to collect. It was a deafening convergence of overlapping voices raised with pleasure and surprise or groans of disappointment.
Jacob extracted himself from Hannah’s clinging embrace. Leona thanked him with a squeeze. ‘Thanks, bruv. Two treats today, she’s being spoiled.’
He shrugged. ‘I used to love Playmobil stuff. It was proper cool. Those things don’t ever break.’
She smiled. ‘I remember. You had the Viking ship and all the Vikings in your bedroom, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘So, I umm . . . I treated myself to a present as well . . .’ He reached into his bag and pulled out a small pristine cardboard carton. ‘Viking captain,’ he smiled, opening the box and pulling out the plastic figure. He turned it over in his hands, his fingers stroking the smooth contours of plastic, his eyes drinking in the bright unblemished colours. For a fleeting moment - like a dormant memory stirred by a smell - he was back home in his bedroom, seven once again, sitting cross-legged on the blue furry rug that looked like an ocean, and steering his ship through a stormy furry sea. Beams of afternoon sun warming his face through the window; the reassuring sounds of mum in the kitchen, dad in his study watching the news on his laptop, Leona playing music in her room. A very ordinary Saturday afternoon . . . from another time, another life.
‘The arms and legs can move,’ he added thoughtfully, adjusting them in his hands.
‘I know, little brother, I know,’ she smiled.
He looked up and saw amongst the animated faces others like him, staring wistfully at mementos from the past, lost in a fog of nostalgic delight.
‘So, there were some men, I heard,’ said Leona.
He nodded. ‘A couple of them.’
‘Chasing the guy you saved?’
Jacob was reluctant to talk it out right now. It was still way too easy to conjure up an image of the Y-shaped splatter of blood and brain tissue across the concrete.
‘We had to shoot them. Otherwise they would have killed the other man,’ was all he wanted to offer just then. Leona was going to press him for more details, but Hannah was yanking impatiently on her hand, keen to show her the princess and pony. Leona relented and squatted down to her level and Jacob watched and smiled as his sister and niece cooed at the marvellously preserved plastic figurines.
Two men with guns.
Is it really safe ashore?
The question annoyed him, made him feel angry and his stomach lurch unpleasantly.
See . . . if you really want to go ashore, Jay, if you really insist on going ashore and exploring, then that’s what you might be up against. Nasty men. Big guns. You ready for that? You a big enough boy to look after yourself now?
‘Yes,’ he muttered under his breath. A gun was going to be just as deadly in his hands as some wild-eyed thug playing fox and hounds.
‘What’s up, bruv?’ asked Leona looking up.
He shook the Y-shaped splatter from his mind and smiled. ‘Oh, nothing.’
Chapter 10
Crash Day + 1 11 a.m.
Suffolk
Adam looked out of the open canopy of their truck as it rumbled south along the A11’s slow lane, towards London. The rest of the squadron’s gunners, inside, were trying to listen to a small radio attempting to compete with the deafening snarl of the RAF transport truck’s diesel engine.
Today, the second day of the crisis. The situation seemed not to show any sign of abating. On the contrary, the news seemed to be getting worse by the hour. The last soundbite Adam had managed to catch from the radio was that the American military forces in the region had begun redeploying en masse in Saudi Arabia. Although no one from the US Defense Department had made a public statement on this large scale rapid movement of muscle, it was obvious that the troops were being sent to defend critical installations in the Ghawar oil fields, an area that had yet to be wholly incapacitated by the widespread rioting.
The Middle East was sounding like one big battlefield, the fighting now not just between Sunnis and Shi’as, but between rival tribes, between neighbouring streets, seemingly in every city and town in many of the Arab nations; a