The Prague Ultimatum Read online

  The Captain ran over to her, holding his hands up to further block her movement.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?!” He bellowed at Svobodova who stared defiantly back at him, un-intimidated by the voice which had frozen troops and halted enemy in their tracks.

  “I came to help!”

  “By getting yourself killed? You shouldn’t be here!”

  “My place is with my people,” she exclaimed, every bit as forcefully as he, “I’m going nowhere!”

  As she spoke, a fresh hell ripped forth from an ignored dustbin across the square, sending debris far and wide and consuming the closest bystanders in its flames. A twisted piece of jagged, hot metal skimmed between the Captain and the Prime Minister, slicing slightly but painfully across the military man’s temple, causing him to clasp his hand to the wound and curse, his profanity lost in revived chaos and renewed screams.

  “Wrong!” Stone’s voice was authority itself, invested with years of command, “Rado!”

  Almost as soon as the explosion had sounded, the operative and his team had thrown their bodies around Svobodova, shielding her from any possible injury, and on Stone’s word they bundled the defiant and still protesting politician back into her waiting car which sped immediately from the scene.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Stone wiped the blood from the side of his head, catching a glimpse in his eye of a man. Standing outside the cordon, grey hair straggled across his wrinkled face and hawkish eyes stared silently and directly into his own. Stone knew him immediately as the man from the tube station, the man who had saved his life. The view was blocked, only for an instant by a fleeing victim, but it was long enough for the stranger to have slunk from the scene. Stone cursed but knew he could ill afford to give chase now. Looking around to take in the new terror before him and, with a soldier’s courage, he turned and ran straight and steady into the midst of chaos.

  The trickle of blood had long since dried, etching a stubborn path through the caked cement dust sticking to, and crudely contrasting with the exhausted Stone’s flesh. He had lost count of the minutes since the fire crews took control of the blaze and the police sealed the scene, leaving him faced with the gruelling walk back to his apartment far away on the other side of town. The further away from the scene he walked, the more casually news of the event was being taken, the minds of the people reluctant to be rescued from the drink, drugs and dancing they had paid good money for if the threat wasn’t immediately in front of them. Retreating into the closed fortress of his mind, Stone ploughed on, almost ready to fall as he stepped through the lobby and into the glass lift, barely able to wave an acknowledgment to the concerned night porter at the desk.

  As the lift pinged and the glass slid back, the sight of the woman crouched, shivering outside his door dragged alertness back to his mind, and he stepped out to see Natalie staring up at him, her eyes puffy and red.

  “Did you take care of it?”

  “I did what I could, it wasn’t enough. It never is.”

  He slid and sat on the floor alongside her, their backs against the white painted wood of the door, both looking straight ahead into nothing.

  “And what about you?” He asked.

  “I started to go back to the hotel, but then I heard the other explosion and I realised...”

  “Realised what?”

  “you,” she said. “You were running in and out of burning buildings, rescuing people, ‘taking care of it’, but who takes care of you?”

  Stone had no answer. He turned to face her, meeting her eyes and gently shaking his head.

  “The only person I need is back home and calls me ‘Dad’, there’s no-one here or now that I need,” he whispered.

  “Everyone needs someone, even if just for right here and now.” She reached up her arm, brushing his cheek with a dusty, dirty thumb.

  “Let me take care of you tonight.”

  She took his hand and pulled him up to open the door, leading him inside to the bathroom. Utterly drained and somehow standing through his exhaustion, he offered no resistance as she delicately and carefully unbuttoned and unzipped him from his clothes before joining him in nakedness and stepping into the hot shower, pulling him gently by the hand behind her. He closed his eyes in surrender to the tenderness of her touch as her graceful fingers wiped away the grime and dirt from his tired, aching body, as soothing and relaxing as the flow of hot water streaming over them. While his body relaxed, the tension in his mind rose, his eyes squinting tightly closed until she moved her thumbs to them, lightly opening his lids, inviting him to accept her naked vulnerability.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as though close to tears, “this isn’t me, I don’t do the whole ‘one night thing’, I shouldn’t have taken advantage…”

  She pressed her finger gently to his lips, the water running sensually down her arm.

  “You didn’t,” she smiled. “And who said it was for one night?”

  The shower water masked the tears beginning to form in his eyes and he smiled joyfully at the beautiful woman before him, taking her hand from his lips and kissing it, and surrendering once more, wholly now, into her warm embrace.

  EIGHT

  LATER, THEY LAY TOGETHER in the dark, his arm protectively around her as she nuzzled into him.

  “I don’t understand,” she mused, delicately running her fingers across his chest.

  “Understand what?”

  She perched herself up on one elbow, looking into him, her face concerned.

  “Tonight you ran into a burning building, again and again, dragging people to safety before running back in and searching for others you couldn’t even be sure were there. And your service history, the VC in the Falklands, the CGC in Iraq; how could anyone ever suspect, let alone accuse you, of cowardice?”

  The question was unexpected and Stone at first worried how to answer, but the ease and comfort which his new partner exuded was enough to dispel his concerns.

  “Something happened a few years back, after Kosovo.” He sighed, moving his eyes to the ceiling, as though the white plaster was a screen upon which his memories played out.

  “When I returned from my tour, I wasn’t well, it was like I couldn’t process it all as easily as before. I’d seen plenty of conflict before then, too much some would say, but there was something different that time. Some of the things I saw… it was as though I brought it back home with me, I just couldn’t disengage in the way I’d done before. And it affected me I think, affected the way I was with people, I had trouble sleeping for a while. I wasn’t exactly waking up screaming every night but the nightmares were so real, so vivid, it was as though I was still there.”

  Natalie stroked his cheek in loving concern.

  “It must have been terrible,” she said. “Did you get help?”

  Stone laughed quietly. “I was never exactly of that generation,” he said, “I thought that given time I’d get over it and things would be back to normal.”

  “And were they?”

  “Eventually,” he answered. “But some people noted the change in me and others saw the chance to spread a few rumours, tried to put it about that I was burning out, that my combat days were behind me.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Those ‘political reasons’ again,” Stone shrugged. “There’d always been one or two who thought I was the token minority soldier, pushed through the ranks into Officer class and handed gongs because of what I looked like rather than what I’d done.”

  “Arseholes,” Natalie spat.

  “Quite,” Stone grinned, “It’s ok, I learned a long time ago not to let that shit trouble me. But still, that was the first time they offered to make me Major and assign me elsewhere, away from combat. I refused.”

  “And went on to serve in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria…”

  “Exactly,” Stone nodded. “Sometimes I wonder if I kept volunteering just to keep proving to myself, to everyone, that I could still do it, that I hadn
’t grown soft and I could still do my duty.”

  She leant forward and kissed his brow, he tenderly caressing her back in response.

  “Looking back, I made the wrong choice,” he mused. “It’s only now I realise what was going on with me and it was the people around me who suffered, my boy especially. I’d take out all of these emotions I couldn’t handle on him, my punishments got more severe, I was shouting at him as though he were one of my troops, bellowing at him for the slightest infraction… I think that was the seed of what was to come. And it wasn’t helped that by me gallivanting off to fight in every war declared on some kind of ‘mission’ to prove myself, when I should have been at home, fighting for my relationship with him.”

  Another kiss from the gentle woman alongside him, another stroked cheek.

  “I’m sure he understood, forgave you,” she offered, meeting another soft laugh in response.

  “Maybe,” Stone answered softly. “As he got older he started hating military actions, joining in some of the protests against them, Iraq in particular. As I was leaving to go on my tour there he told me he hated me for being a part of it. I justified it with the WMD threat and tried to explain that I was fighting to help make a better, more peaceful world. Look how that turned out…”

  He let his eyes flick across the ceiling, jumping forwards to new memories on the reel of his life.

  “It got better,” he said, his voice suddenly optimistic. “We really started to turn a corner and when I got back from Syria, he was the only one to really have my back. It was as if being scapegoated by the government brought me back from beyond the pale in his eyes. Then there was the attack... but I’m fine though now, I’m fine.”

  The cheer disappeared from his voice as instantly as it had arrived, replaced with gloomy melancholia. He felt her embrace tightening in response, enough to break his stare from the ceiling and look into her wide, beautiful eyes. It had been so very long since he had seen that look in a woman’s face and it amazed him at least as much as it must her that they had met only that very morning; two damaged strangers thrust together into a strange land and who now clung to each other as if they offered some mutual best hope of getting out of this bizarre situation in one piece. And while the rational strategist in his head warned him of the dangers of this kind of battlefield romance, for once, Stone preferred to follow the yearnings of his heart. He lowered himself back alongside her in the bed and cupped her face in his strong hand.

  “I’m more than fine.”

  Stone awoke early the next morning to an empty space alongside him and the smell of frying eggs and grilled bacon drifting in from the kitchen. Throwing his dressing gown around him he stepped through the bedroom door to find Natalie at the cooker, her hair tied back into a loose ponytail and dressed in Stone’s own jogging bottoms and T-shirt which hung voluminously on the attractive young woman.

  “Morning sleepy head,” she said over her shoulder, the Welsh tint in her voice by far more appealing this morning than it had sounded when she’d rung his bell the previous day. “I hope you don’t mind me nicking your togs but I didn’t think a dirty cocktail dress was appropriate attire to go buying essentials in. Sit down.”

  Stone obeyed, sitting at the adjacent wooden dining table and watching her as she plated up their breakfasts.

  “Where did you go for it?

  “Shop just outside,” she answered. “I’m not sure I’ll be going there again mind, the girl at the counter was rather keen on giving me her opinions on gypsies.”

  “Oh, so you’ve met our local charmer then?”

  “That’s one word for her!”

  Natalie placed the plates on the table and slid into a chair alongside him.

  “Are you ok?”

  Her voice was soft and a little uncertain, as though conveying the natural awkwardness that typically greeted such ‘morning after’ conversations, and Stone felt compelled to offer reassurance.

  “Absolutely,” he replied just as softly. And, he silently realised, he was ok, absolutely ok. He’d had so long dwelling on the tragedies and catastrophes of his recent past that he hadn’t registered just how miserable and insular he had allowed himself to become until the woman next to him had coaxed him from his shell. He reached across and placed his hand gently on hers, giving it an affectionate squeeze.

  “I promise.”

  His gesture seemed to satisfy her and she returned quickly to the matter in hand, her customary confidence returned to her voice.

  “They didn’t have any sausages other than chorizo,” she chirped, “and I didn’t really fancy the sound of that this early in the morning, and I’m not too sure about this bacon either to tell you the truth, but you can’t go wrong with eggs, beans, tomatoes and toast.”

  She tucked ravenously in, speaking the last words through a half-full mouth, Stone grinning in response.

  “How do you stay so thin?” he joked.

  “Gym twice a week and a metabolism like a furnace,” she grinned back, “Oh, there’s no HP either.”

  “I’ll live.”

  Stone started work on his own plate as his thoughts returned to the horrors of the previous evening. Reaching for the TV remote on the table he flicked on the news and spent a few moments taking in what he could of the reports.

  “We’ll need to see Svobodova today, as soon as we can,” the Captain said. “Myska is bound to make capital out of last night and she needs to move quickly to get ahead of the game.”

  “I’ll advise her to get to the hospital to see the victims and visit the scene as soon as the police say it’s safe to do so. She’ll need to get working on a way to counter whatever response Myska makes… I’d hate to be part of the refugee community this morning, that’s for sure; his followers will be like caged animals right now even if he plays the Statesman himself.”

  “Yeah, and for what it’s worth, I think their rage will be misdirected…”

  “What do you mean?”

  Stone flicked the TV off and turned back to Natalie.

  “Something’s bothering me about last night,” he said. “The first three detonations were suicide, one inside the theatre entrance itself, the other two in the crowd as they ran for safety. That’s a familiar pattern, it sits comfortably with established modus operandi in attacks of this kind, but the fourth…”

  “The bomb in the bin?”

  “Exactly, where I got this beauty,” he tapped the fresh scar on his temple. “Suicide bombers walk into a crowd, they try to spread fear and panic, to take as many people with them as possible. Leaving a timed explosive in a bin to go off after they’d killed themselves just doesn’t fit the profile; they’d have no way of knowing if anyone would be near it when it went off, let alone if it would kill anyone...”

  His voice began to tail off and he pulled himself back to the present before his mind could surrender to preoccupation, turning back to Natalie who sat, looking at his plate with a smile on her face.

  “That is a work of art,” she laughed.

  Looking down, Stone realised he had obliviously piled the food on his plate onto an enormous sandwich which he now held a few inches from his mouth, the odd bean dripping from it back to the plate.

  “Another of those Regimental traditions,” he grinned back at her and took a big bite.

  From the bedroom, a muffled mobile phone ring tone began to sound, causing Natalie to scramble to her feet.

  “Shit, that must be yours, I forgot to give it back to you last night.”

  “Did you ring my boy? What did he say?”

  “What?” She shook her head in confusion, “No, I…”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Stone reassured without irritation. He reached out his hand for the phone and she passed it to him. He frowned at the name on the display and swiped it with a greasy thumb.

  “Yes, Prime Minister?”

  A short time later, after a brief detour to Natalie’s apartment to allow her to change her clothes, the pair stood outside Svobod
ova’s office door, before they were directed downstairs and into a waiting limousine which swept them instantly into Prague’s busy and still recovering streets.

  “Good morning to you both.”

  Svobodova’s words were business like and devoid of the warmth and charm which had typified their meeting the previous day, instead infused with an exhausted irritability.

  “I apologise for my short sightedness last night,” Svobodova said, addressing Stone. “You were right of course that my presence was inappropriate. It’s just that it is important to me that my people should not face any danger that I myself shy away from.”

  “And I apologise for my rudeness,” Stone reciprocated, “I congratulate you on your country’s extremely well trained emergency services, they did you and your people proud.”

  The niceties over, Stone acknowledged to himself how the tiredness in Svobodova’s eyes seemed to have doubled since the previous day.

  “Where are we heading?” Professor Abelard asked, her voice at its most polished.

  “The Rudolfinum.”

  “The police have declared it safe?”

  “I’ve no idea, we’re going anyway.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” Stone queried, the Professor leaning forward in support.

  “Maybe a visit to the hospital would be more prudent until the area is secure…”

  “I’ve already done that,” Svobodova snapped, “last night.”

  The Captain looked closely at her in her seat across from them, with a mixture of admiration and frustration. She was clearly exhausted, drained even, the warmth in her face from the previous day gone entirely and her eyes a tell-tale red.

  “You haven’t slept in a long time,” Stone said softly, a statement rather than a question.