Mdina Quotes

with more bombs being dropped on Malta in two months of 1942 than were dropped on London in a year. It was a time of fear and fatigue and disease, and jubilation when a convoy, bringing its precious cargo of food and ammunition and fuel, did get through. Now there was nothing here apart from the huts to serve as a reminder of those days. The aircraft pens had gone and the runway, which had been like the long handle of a warming pan, had become a road leading to the National Stadium. For me, searching into the past, there was nothing: this is not the Ta’ Qali that Peter Anderson would have seen. But not everything had changed so drastically. Mdina, the old capital of Malta, would be much as he had seen it, and the barracks where he and Tom had lived were still standing, so the young man at Ta’ Qali had said. There were some things I could see, some places I could visit. My spirits rose. I turned the car around and headed back, past the cemetery, to the roundabout; a signpost pointed to Mtarfa. The road was bumpy and full of potholes; it didn’t look as if it was much used nowadays. It wound up and up, between rubble walls which divided the road from the fields on either side. Over the tops of the walls and through gateways and gaps I could see maize growing, and prickly pears, and huge pumpkins drying on the flat

All the Turkish prisoners were taken out of the dungeons and slaughtered on the ramparts. He sent a messenger to the commander of the garrison at Mdina with orders to kill all his prisoners, but slowly, one a day, every day. Later that day the guns of Saint Angelo opened up. A volley of human heads bombarded the Ottoman camp across the water. There would be no repeat of the chivalrous truce at Rhodes.

* Behind him, Lex’s pursuers held their guns sideways on and low. They kept them down by their hips, hidden in the folds of their jackets. Both of them fired, but even with their specialised training, their shots were off-target by too great a margin. One round blasted a discarded water bottle sitting on a step, the other blew up a puff of rock dust a few inches from the target’s feet. Again, the faces of bystanders started to turn in his direction. ‘He is going to kill himself,’ said the male assassin through the wireless communication node adhered to his throat. This was unexpected. ‘No,’ said the woman, her reply tickling him through his skin. ‘I don’t think so . . .’ The target’s arm came down in a sharp motion, and the object he had strapped to his back snapped open into a blossom of bright orange fabric and fine white cords. The thin material immediately caught the steady breeze and inflated into a narrow rectangle with a kite-like cross-section. ‘A parachute?’ The man disregarded protocol and launched forward, hoping to get to the target before he could step off the ledge. The compact canopy filled with wind, drawing shouts of surprise from the assembled tourists in the square, and the target pushed off the side of Mdina’s battlements and into the air. The woman grabbed her partner by the shoulder and pulled him back. ‘Wait.’ She was already putting her weapon away. He resisted, irritated at the idea of missing the kill. The chute was little better than a gimmick, a toy that would barely slow the target’s descent. If he got to the edge, if the woman covered him, he might still be able to hit the mark. It was galling to think that this civilian would escape them. ‘Both of you stand away,’ said a third voice. ‘I have this.

He caught sight of the church spires and tiled rooftops across Mdina and Rabat. In the tallest of the towers, the light of the sun glittered in reflection. A flare off the glassy eye of a telescopic sight. A moment later, a single steel-cored 7.62mm bullet penetrated Lex’s body a few degrees off his sternum and tumbled violently as it passed through him. In the brief instant it took to enter through his chest and burst out through his back, the round spun and ripped through the tissues of his lungs, and tore open the bottom of his heart. Blood gushed into the ragged void created by the passage of the sniper shot and his body twitched as it went into brutal, fatal shutdown. Lex died as he sank toward the ground, his life ended in an instant. When his corpse finally crashed into a row of vines down in the valley, his clothes and the orange chute were soaked with a wet mess of dark, arterial red.