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piss-up while she was sat with several other operatives across the room.
    Stratton took an old SLR 7.62mm semi-automatic high-velocity rifle from the top shelf and a couple of twenty-round magazines of ammunition. Attached to the rifle was a heavy metal object the size and shape of a grapefruit with a wire coming from it that had an electrical adapter on the end. It was a giro steady system designed to keep the weapon as still as possible inside a moving or heavily vibrating vehicle such as a helicopter. Attached to the ejection port of the weapon was a small canvas bag to catch spent shell cases and stop them bouncing around inside the cab. He headed down the corridor to a set of double doors and pushed through them. Graham watched him go then hit the buzzer outside the operations room door.
     
    Aggy was driving beyond her capabilities along the narrow country road lined with stone walls and hedgerows, which she had already brushed against several times, losing a wing mirror on one occasion. An endless stream of comments came from Ed, most of them in the form of clipped or unfinished shouts: ‘Don’t . . . that!’ ‘Watch for . . .’ ‘Easy, EASY!’ If Ed were honest enough he would admit that even though they were driving to save Spinks’s life he wished she would just stop the car. It was mostly fields beyond the hedgerows on either side of the road. The occasional small wood, farm and row of homes streaked by.They had needed to pass only one car so far, an elderly couple behind the wheel. It had been a tight squeeze, but incredibly they had made it without touching it, although that was when she lost the wing mirror. Ed had raised himself out of his seat as Aggy slipped through the impossible gap between the car and a stone wall.
    Spinks’s car was still far ahead. Aggy had glimpses of it but didn’t feel she was gaining any ground. She was starting to experience that frustrating, useless feeling again. The kind of useless they said she was during the selection course. She knew the constant digs from the instructors were all part of the selection process, designed to test and develop her self-control and ultimately get the best out of her, but she often wondered how true the comments really were. Fast driving had never been her forte. On the course she crashed three cars; in one of those accidents she had cracked a bone in her arm. She was warned that if she wrecked one more car she would be labelled an operational hazard and would fail the course. Her final exercise had involved a high-speed chase deliberately set up by the instructors to test her. She managed to get through it without a mishap but had come close a couple of times. This was the fastest she had driven since that day, perhaps even faster, and she felt much less in control. She kept talking herself through the stages, echoing her fast driving instructor: ‘Brake on the straight before the bend, not in it. Hit the corner just a bit faster than you think you can. Balance the throttle through the turn; keep the tyres biting the road. Accelerate on the apex.’
    ‘Towards orange five,’ she shouted. Ed appeared not to have heard her, his eyes as wide as they could possibly stretch and locked on to the road ahead. She reached for the send button but he pushed her hand away.
    ‘Keep your ’ands on the wheel! I’ll do the bloody comms!’ Ed was the most sedate of all the operatives in the detachment in a dreary way - during relaxed working conditions, that is. But car chases held a special fear for him. He hated travelling fast in anything where the speed was beyond the normal design functions. Four-door cars were family vehicles intended for comfort driving, not screaming along narrow country lanes and especially not in the hands of a girl who clearly had no idea what she was doing. His last car chase had been ten years earlier. He had been the tail-end car in a line of four. It had got so hairy he pulled out letting the others go on without him.