Free The Hostage by Duncan Falconer Page B

of a bit of madness, especially behind the wheel of a vehicle.
    ‘I don’t give a fock what you know. Just do as I say, when I say it and without lip,’ Brennan barked. ‘This isn’t a focken test to see if you know your way around. If we were walking through your focken house I’d still be telling you where to go. Lippy focken bastard.’
    Brennan was aware he was not as cool as he normally was on a job. He had done a lot worse than this, but he felt more nervous than he could remember. His eyes were everywhere, inside every passing car, in the air, beyond the hedgerows. Every mile closer to the border increased his unease as well as his excitement. But his fear of failing was greater than his fear of battle. That was engraved on his soul from a lesson he learned early in life. He was sixteen when he did his first kneecapping but he had to wait until he was twenty-one before he could carry out his first execution. It was on his birthday and he’d had a few drinks, not that he needed any such courage. The boyos had arranged it as a surprise coming-of-age party.The victim was a sixteen-year-old Protestant they had pulled off the street and driven to a remote rural spot. The teenager was the son of a prominent member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, who was earmarked for persecution and then death.
    Brennan would never forget it. Not because it was his first kill but because it wasn’t. He bungled the task, even though he did everything as he had been instructed. He had placed the barrel of the gun in the centre of the boy’s forehead, pulled back the hammer, looked into the boy’s eyes, uttered some farewell piss-taking comment, and slowly squeezed the trigger. Brennan had not been instructed to make such a meal of the pre-shoot chat. Lengthening the agony of his victim with his tormenting banter was a torture he decided on only at that moment. When he pulled the trigger, the gun fired, and the explosion sent the bullet through the boy’s head and out the other side. The feeling Brennan experienced the second the bullet boomed from the barrel amazed him. He felt like a god. When he pulled the pistol away from the boy’s skull he was fascinated by the wisp of smoke coming out of the entry point. Brennan remembered rubbing up some of the black powder burn around the hole with his finger and dabbing it on to the end of the boy’s nose as he said to him, ‘Rest in peace.’ Brennan and his friends then left the boy twitching in the grass and went back to the pub.
    But the boy wasn’t dead. The lad was discovered a few hours later by a farmer walking his dog and rushed to hospital. The doctors couldn’t understand how he had survived such a wound, let alone with all of his faculties until they discovered the bullet had been fired at such an angle that it had travelled inside the skull along the bone precisely in the crease that separates the two halves of the brain, and missed the cerebral cortex before popping out the back. Brennan was ridiculed, but it was a lesson he vowed never to repeat.
    There was one thing that niggled Brennan about this particular kidnapping, an edge he had not experienced before. He had worked against the Paras, the Marines, the RUC’s Special Branch and had had a brush or two with the SAS, but he’d never come up against Pinks before, although he knew all about them.They made him more nervous than all the other Brit units. The SAS were bad enough but the Pinks were different. If you were going to be ambushed in the middle of a job it would likely be the SAS and every Republican soldier knew that if they walked into an SAS ambush it was pretty much over, and definitely so if there were no RUC around to make sure they didn’t finish you off if you were wounded. The SAS were murdering bastards and carried handcuffs just for show. But the Pinks were worse for one important reason: they were in a unique position to play the game with a different set of rules to all the others - their own