The Network - Jason Elliot [98]
He raises the barrel of the AK to my chest and pokes it into me, barking another incomprehensible instruction. I raise my hands a little higher. It’s a textbook replay of the very same defensive drills I did with H all that way away in Herefordshire, which does indeed seem a very long way away.
He pokes it into me again, stepping towards me now, and since all good and probably bad things come in threes, I wait for the third time. At the instant he gives another push with the weapon, I bring my left hand down hard and fast onto the barrel and turn my body to the left. He lurches forward and my right hand connects with his chin and drives it up and back, forcing him to try and regain his balance by stepping away from me. But my foot is there to meet his, and as he begins to tumble his left arm leaves the weapon by reflex in the attempt to break his fall. I yank it by the barrel and it passes almost miraculously into my hands. His efforts to scramble to his feet again are put to an abrupt end by the single round I fire into the sand just near his ear.
There’s a scream of fright from Jameela, and then an immense shrieking fills the air as a cloud of birds erupts in a single swarm from the trees behind us. Jameela and her attacker are momentarily frozen in surprise. She breaks free from him, and in an impressive move whacks him squarely on the jaw. He’s about to retaliate, but seeing his friend cringing on the sand has a different idea and sprints for the trees. I fire two rounds by his feet and he gets the message.
We need to leave. Jameela gathers up the bags as I cover the two men, make them take off their shoes just in case anyone feels like running anywhere, and direct them on their knees back to their own boat. I’d rather they didn’t go and fetch any of their friends, so I break off the top of the spark plug of their outboard with the butt of the AK. Having to paddle with their hands will slow them down and have the added advantage of keeping their minds off robbery and kidnap.
Jameela finishes loading the boat and throws a look of contempt at the men.
‘They would have killed us,’ she says in a frightened voice. Then she shouts something at them in what I suppose is Amharic and probably a curse.
‘Want to shoot them? The sharks will be happy if you do.’ I offer Jameela the AK, guide her hand to the grip and the trigger, and point out the foresight for her to line up on her cowering targets.
‘They would have killed us,’ she repeats.
‘Women with guns.’ I shrug my shoulders at them as if the decision is out of my hands. ‘Scary, isn’t it?’
They’re not laughing.
We move out of the shallows and throttle up the engines. The two stranded men are stooping over their boat as we gain distance. Jameela sits next to me, gripping me in silence and looking back from time to time as we race across the water. At the halfway point I pass the AK to Jameela. I’d love to keep the weapon, but it would be hard to explain. She flings it into our foaming wake and returns to my side.
The first moments of intimacy are never really equalled. She hasn’t tidied up the rose petals, and their perfume wraps itself over us as we fall onto the bed and submit to the momentum that feels as though it was set in motion the instant we first saw each other. A frontier rushes beneath us as if we are entering territory new to us both, and where before there has always been restraint, there is now abandon.
Her skin is still salty and smells of the sea, like a mermaid who has miraculously survived the journey ashore. She laughs, weeps and laughs again, grips me repeatedly with unexpected force, then gives way again as if her body has returned to liquid and been reclaimed by the sea.