‘Whatever battle I have to face I can’t ask you to fight it for me,’ Williams said.

‘You’re not asking,’ Knox managed to say.

‘I know,’ Williams replied.

Neither Bennett nor Laing had heard Knox and Williams’s exchange, and both looked confused as Williams started to walk past Laing towards Bennett.

He was a foot beyond Laing when they all heard the gun go off.

Chapter 36

Chapter 36

Laing’s body spun as he fell to the ground. The bullet had ripped through his left thigh, the force of it kicking his leg out from under him. He landed hard on the tarmac, and the sound of his head smacking against it before his neck had a chance to tense and protect it was almost as loud as the gunshot.

Knox and Bennett instinctively ducked behind their cars. Then after a split second spent checking they hadn’t been hit, they both looked at Laing, dazed and lying exposed in the gap between the Consul and the Jaguar, and Williams, who was bizarrely still walking towards Bennett. He’d slowed down, but he looked completely unaware of what had just happened, or the danger he was in.

‘Jack,’ Knox shouted. ‘Get down!’

But Williams ignored his instructions, and just kept slowly walking further away from him.

Knox had to stop himself from launching out from behind the Jaguar. Instead he raised his head to peer through its side windows at who was attacking them.

He could see the two birdwatchers standing behind a low rusted metal locker next to one of the huts. The man had his binoculars held up to his eyes, and the woman was kneeling against the locker, her rucksack resting on the top of it, fluttering in the growing wind, and a folding sniper’s rifle in her hands.

If this had been a movie, Knox would have shuffled back to the open driver’s door, reached into the car, pulled out a hidden revolver, and come up firing, But this wasn’t a movie, and Knox had no gun.

He heard Laing groan and looked over at Bennett, who had also shifted along the MG and was crouching behind its back wheel, tentatively looking through the car’s rear windows at their attackers.

‘Get behind the car, Simon,’ Knox said, hoping the still-high wind would stop his words travelling to the birdwatchers’ ears.

Laing moaned in response and reached out his arm to drag himself behind cover. The response from the birdwatchers was immediate—one bullet into the Consul’s headlight that showered Laing in glass, and another into its bonnet that started petrol dripping onto the road a foot from him.

Williams was now between the Consul and the MG, completely exposed again. Knox needed to get him to safety, but he needed to help Laing too. He edged forward, daring to lean his head out past the Jaguar’s rear bumper.