Aggressor (31 page)

There wasn’t time to laugh.

Ariver of mud ten metres wide sluiced off the hill and hit the wagon broadside, pushing us to where the road fell away to the river below.

I swung the wheel to steer us into the skid, but nothing happened.

‘Charlie, out the wagon!’

The mudslide gathered weight and momentum, and started to spill in through the open windows.

I grabbed the edge of the roof and hauled myself out of the gap.

Bastard was sliding his fat arse towards the passenger door. He could look after himself.

The Pajero was beginning to tip. I wrestled the rear door open and dragged Charlie clear by the shoulders.

He tumbled out on top of me as the vehicle slewed another couple of metres, then finally succumbed to the sheer weight of mud and cart-wheeled down towards the river.

A dozen or so metres away, Bastard struggled to get himself upright.

Charlie blinked as the rain lashed his mud-caked face.

‘Papers and tape?’

Charlie tapped his pocket and nodded.

We both heard a sound like an approaching train.

I looked up, but before I could shout a warning the knee-high surge of mud and debris had gathered Bastard up and swept him over the edge.

PART TEN

1

The Pajero had landed upside down at the river’s edge, five or six metres below us, doors open, windscreen smashed. It bucked and wallowed as water the colour of chocolate pounded against the wreckage. Any second now it would be snatched away and hurled downstream.

Bastard hadn’t been any luckier. The river at this point was around thirty metres wide, and I watched as he floundered, went under, and bobbed up again about halfway across, almost indistinguishable from all the other lumps of debris swirling downstream.

I started ripping off my jacket.

Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘Nothing we can do, lad. Fuck him. Anyway, we got Crazy Dave.’

I shook my head. Later, Bastard could die a slow and painful death, as far as I was concerned, but right now he was here, and Crazy Dave was a million miles away. ‘He’s our route out of this shit! He’s got the contacts; he can get us over the border.’

There was nothing Charlie could do to help. His ankle was fucked, and the rest of him was falling apart. This one was down to me. I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and half jumped, half tumbled down the slope towards the maelstrom.

The water surged past at a fearsome pace, carrying all before it. Huge branches crashed over the rocks ahead of me.

There was a screech of tearing metal as the Pajero finally lost its grip and thundered downstream. I watched it for about a hundred metres, until the river bent sharply to the left and it disappeared.

And that was where I spotted him. The force of the current had carved out the subsoil for a ten-metre stretch along the far bank, exposing a latticework of tree-roots that gleamed white against the mud, like the ribs of a putrefying corpse. Bastard had his arm hooked through one of them.

He didn’t stand the slightest chance of hauling himself up and out of the mud, let alone over the edge of the bank. There was no way I’d be able to either, and I hadn’t spent a lifetime on the Big Mac diet.

I could see he was yelling at me big-time, but I couldn’t hear a thing above the roar of the water.

I scanned the stretch of river between us. He must have fetched up where he was after being catapulted into it midstream. I’d need to enter the water much further up if I was going to have a chance of hitting the bank before I was swept in the wake of the Pajero, and on around the bend.

I scrambled over the mud thirty or forty metres upstream, past the jagged skeleton of a small wooden footbridge that had been unable to withstand the force of the flood.

I plunged in up to my calves and pushed on, fighting the freezing current until I was up to my waist and the sheer weight of the deluge whipped my legs from under me. I kicked and thrashed, but might as well not have bothered. Nothing I could do would stop me going under.

I went with the flow until my lungs threatened to burst and I started taking on water through my nose and mouth, then somehow managed to kick myself back to the surface.

My head spun and my eyes were streaming, but I caught sight of him again as I fought for breath. Like me, he was struggling to keep his head up, clinging to the tree root for dear life.

The water took me under again and I was suddenly more concerned about sucking in air than getting to the other side.

I wrestled my way to the surface once more, and saw that I was now almost at the far side. I could let the current do the rest.

Seconds later, my fingers closed around Bastard’s tree root.

He was cold, disoriented, frightened. He grabbed me, desperate to stay afloat, but only succeeded in pulling me under.

I kicked and jerked my way back up, fighting to keep my grip on the root as the current tore at my legs.

‘
No!
’ I kicked out at him. ‘Compose yourself, for fuck’s sake!
Stop!
’ Down at this level, the roar of water was deafening.

I jackknifed away from him, trying to keep him at arm’s length. I knew he was panicking big-time, and there was no way I wanted us to head to the bottom of this vortex together.

The bank was steeper than I’d thought. There was a chance I could heave myself out, but it would take a crane to lift him clear.

‘We’ve got to swim back across! I’ll help you, but no grabbing . . . We won’t make it if you fucking lose it, OK?’

He stared at me with glazed eyes, his teeth chattering with cold. ‘I can’t swim.’

For fuck’s sake.

I scanned the boiling surface of the water on either side of us. The trunk of a pine tree had lodged itself against a rockslide just short of the bend in the river. Its roots faced slightly upstream, creating a V-shaped breakwater. The aluminium rectangle of Bastard’s carry-on glinted among the debris bobbing in the slower-moving water at its centre.

Bastard was staring at me wild-eyed. He tried to speak but couldn’t.

I let go of the tree root and crashed hard against the fallen pine.

I grabbed the carry-on and flung my free arm over the trunk. I hooked a leg over a branch, but the rest of me still trailed in the river. I let myself be buffeted by the force of the water until I managed to draw breath and heave myself up. I lay there for a moment, my knuckles whitening as I fought to hang on to the handle of the carryon. Then I started to crawl slowly towards the bank.

I hauled myself upright and made my way back upstream.

Bastard saw me coming. ‘Get me out of here, now!’

It was like being accosted by 250 pounds of stranded bull walrus.

‘Hey! I’m here . . .
Here!
What the fuck’s keeping you?’

For a split second I toyed with the idea of cracking him on the side of the head with the carry-on and watching him float away. Then I gave myself a reality check. If we lost Bastard, we lost our broker. I began to lower myself down the bank and back into the water.

‘This is our raft,’ I yelled. ‘Grip the fucking thing as tight as you can and don’t let go. I’ll hang on to you. Now kick . . .
Come on, kick!
’

He nodded obediently but didn’t move. The carry-on bounced up and down in the swell between us.

Bastard was experiencing Fear Up big-time at first hand. He couldn’t bring himself to let go of his anchor. I punched down hard on his hand to get him to release, and we were away.

I locked my hand on the collar of Bastard’s blazer, kicking to propel us out into the current to clear the fallen tree.

Bastard was putting all his energy into keeping his head above water.

‘Get kicking! Fucking help me here!’

The signal finally made it from his ear to his brain and he kicked. The current grabbed us and we thundered past the pine tree. The further we travelled, the closer we were being thrown towards the far shore. It was only a matter of time before my boots hit the riverbed.

I struggled to my feet and half pulled, half dragged Bastard into the shallows. A few moments later, he was lying beside me on solid ground.

I took off my shirt and T-shirt, and twisted as much water out of them as I could. To make the most of what was left of my body heat, I had to get some air into the fibres. That was what I told myself anyway. The rain soaked them as fast as I could wring them, but somehow the whole process made me feel better.

I put the shirt and T-shirt back on, then knelt to take off my boots. I fumbled to undo the laces with numb, trembling fingers. Finally I wrung out my jeans.

Once I was dressed again, I tucked everything in, trying to minimize the number of ways in which the wind could get to me.

A familiar voice boomed down at us from what was left of the road. ‘That was really big of you, lad, but you needn’t have bothered.’

I looked up at Charlie and shrugged.

His eyes twinkled. ‘I could easily have made do with a carrier bag.’

Bastard lay beside me like a beached whale.

I kicked him. ‘Time to move. Check you’ve still got your ID.’

Bastard dug around and pulled out his wallet.

He gave it a squeeze and fished out the laminated card. ‘You really do need me, don’t you?’ He had the faintest of knowing smiles on his face. ‘Well, fuck you.’

2

The mudslide had demolished the road, leaving little more than a trail of boulders and uprooted trees in its wake. Even if we’d managed to hang on to the Pajero, we couldn’t have gone any further.

I slumped down next to Charlie and fought my way back into my jacket. After my
Baywatch
experience, the effort of pushing Bastard back up the slope had almost finished me off. He sat a little way away from us. I hoped he might be suffering from a touch of wounded pride, at the very least, but if he was, he wasn’t going to let us see it.

In a completely futile display of defiance against the still-torrential rain, he had fastened all three buttons on his blazer and pulled up the collar. Amazingly, he’d hung on to both his shoes, and apart from a few bruises, seemed little the worse for wear.

‘I’ve no weapon,’ Charlie muttered. ‘You?’

I shook my head. ‘It was a simple choice: the seven-six-two or you. Fuck knows why, but you won out.’

Charlie grinned, but only briefly. ‘Better not hang about, lad. We need to get a move on. Doubt we’ll make the border before tomorrow, in this shit. The road the other side of town won’t be a pretty sight either. So, first stop Borjomi, sort our shit out, hit the local Hertz kiosk, and crack on, eh?’

‘I reckon we’ve done about a hundred and thirty odd K, so it can’t be much more than twenty to tab. Four or five hours maybe, even with you in Hopalong Cassidy mode.’ I got to my feet and grabbed Bastard by the scruff of his neck. ‘I’ll grip him; you just keep that ankle moving.’

Charlie set off and I manhandled Bastard to his feet. Normal service had been resumed; he was complaining about everything in the universe. I didn’t envy him the next few hours though. Charlie and I were soaked, but at least we had a layer of outdoor wear and, more importantly, we had boots. Bastard was going to have to tab in wet loafers, and they weren’t built for it any more than he was. His feet would be blistered to fuck before we’d gone a thousand metres.

‘Time to get going. We’ve got a little brokering to do, remember?’

Bastard didn’t reply, so I gave him a shove. It was like trying to fast-forward a hippo; he didn’t budge an inch.

‘Time to go, Big Boy.’

‘Fuck you!’ He obviously liked that phrase. It was his default reply.

‘I’m doing you a favour, mate. You’re not going to last five minutes out here on your own in that gear, are you?’

We kept on the road, or what we could see of it. Large cracks had opened across it, and water sluiced through them like they were storm drains. We had to move as fast as we could: not only to get to Borjomi as quickly as possible, but also to keep our drenched bodies warm.

I looked ahead of us. Charlie might have been the cripple, but he was doing a whole lot better than Bastard. His body swung from side to side as he tried to compensate for his swollen ankle, but he’d been in this kind of situation more times than he could count. On a tab, you’ve got to get from A to B, so you just crack on with it. It’s pointless worrying about the weather, your physical condition, or how pissed off you feel. It doesn’t help you make the distance any quicker.

Bastard didn’t get it. I guessed I couldn’t blame him for feeling sorry for himself, but now wasn’t the time or the place. I laid a hand on each of his shoulder blades and pushed.

He was grumbling big-time, but it wasn’t helping him much. Bumping your gums doesn’t get you to where you need to be. The only way you’re going to do that is by putting one foot in front of the other as quickly as you can, and if it’s not fast enough, then someone needs to come behind you with a cattle prod.

It was like being back in the infantry; I had been pushing or pulling flaking bodies since I was a sixteen-year-old boy soldier, trying to keep the slower guys up with the squad. It was all part of the deal. You moved as fast as the slowest man, but you had to make him as fast as you could. You carried his weapon, carried his kit, encouraged him, took the piss out of him – fucking well slung him over your shoulder and carried him if need be, not that I was in any hurry to try that with Bastard.

We’d been going for about an hour, and covered maybe four or five Ks, when Charlie limped off the road and heaved himself under a low fir tree. He lay back on the grass and stretched out his leg.

Bastard and I closed up on him.

‘Thought I’d better hang around for you two lardasses.’ He took a series of short, painful breaths.

Bastard couldn’t even marshal the strength to move off the road; he just fell to his knees instead, and slid towards Charlie in the mud. It was probably the furthest he’d ever walked in his life, certainly in monsoon conditions and dressed in a blazer and loafers. His head slumped forward, displaying a very nice crocodile-clipshaped bruise.