(1995) By Any Name (29 page)

The village was eerily silent, almost like a ghost town.

They padded quietly down the lane. Half hearted attempts had been made to clear the snow from the backs of some of the houses, but the temperature hovered well below freezing and John sensed it was continuing to plunge. Layers of ice had formed over the paths that had been freed from snow, frosting them with a clear, crystalline ice. He walked unhurriedly to the end of the lane, then he remained in the shadows for what seemed like an eternity to Elizabeth. Finally he rounded the last house warily and beckoned her forward. Together they slipped across the road, heading away from Brecon towards the Beacons and the Storey Arms.

His pace quickened as they left the road for the hills, his senses on the alert for any flash of movement or unusual sound. He had all night to search for a patrol. And he was determined that when he finally met one, he’d greet it on his own terms. Perhaps then, he’d finally find the key to the corpse-strewn mystery of his past.

* * *

Elizabeth had always considered herself fit. No matter how long her shifts in the hospital, she had tried to find time to exercise, but when she followed John down the steep, slippery slopes to the valley floor, every muscle in her arms and legs began to burn, and her chest heaved sluggishly when she struggled to draw air into her beleaguered lungs.

Oblivious to her discomfort West continued to forge ahead, only occasionally turning to check on her progress, and although she was unable to see anything other than his brilliant blue eyes and the small hole that exposed two chapped lips, she sensed that he was growing restless with her inability to keep pace.

He crouched low and waved her down when they came within sight of the floodlit car park of the Storey Arms. Men were piling in and out of trucks and milling around the vehicles outside the Youth Hostel.

‘Ten minute, break.’ He led her towards a rocky outcrop that afforded some, but not much, shelter, hoping that by the time the mass of soldiers in the car park would have broken into separate patrols, he’d have isolated a likely quarry. Squatting beneath the largest of the stones he swung the rucksack from his back, opened it and handed her the bottle of brandy.

She rested her back against one of the icy rocks, feeling almost too exhausted to grip the bottle, but when she sipped it she was glad she’d made the effort.

A welcome albeit weakening warmth coursed through her veins. She returned the bottle to him. Her idea of bliss at that moment would have been to rest long enough to regain her breath, before retracing their steps to the bed and breakfast in Libanus. There, they could have turned on the fire and finished the brandy before wrapping themselves in the blankets and curling up together for the night.

‘Where are we heading?’ She felt that if she had a goal, no matter how remote, it might give her the encouragement she needed to make a greater effort.

‘Wherever they are going. Look, but don’t move more than absolutely necessary,’ he warned as she strained her neck towards the car park. ‘These camouflage suits are good, but any movement is a dead giveaway.’

‘You’re going to follow a patrol?’ She blanched at the thought of trying to keep up with a squad of fit young men.

‘Only until they’re isolated. Then we capture an officer.’ He made it sound ridiculously easy.

‘You think an officer might know who you are?’

‘I know the SAS headquarters are at Stirling Lines in Herefordshire, within easy driving distance of here.

They’re probably using the place as HQ to co-ordinate the search. If I get the officer to take me back there, I might reach the man in charge. If anyone will know my identity, he will.’

‘Do you think they’ll just let you just walk in there?’

‘No.’

‘They’ll shoot you on sight,’ she warned.

‘Not if I’m unarmed.’

‘How will they know you’re unarmed?’

‘The officer who will take me there will know I’m unarmed, because I will have surrendered to him.’

‘He could kill you… ’

‘Officers in the British army don’t generally shoot people if they’re waving a white flag.’

‘They wouldn’t shoot you if you use me as a hostage.’

‘It wouldn’t work.’

‘It did before,’ she reminded.

‘It wouldn’t now.’

‘Because you made love to me?’ she challenged.

‘Because they know you stayed with me willingly.’ He rose to his feet. ‘A patrol is moving up Corn Du. The back marker is slow. Half an hour and he’ll be struggling to keep up. Keep low, and follow in my tracks.’

She rose, her limbs stiff with cold. Pulling down her ski mask, she lowered her head and followed in his footsteps, one grey-white shadow stumbling after another in the snowy wasteland. She considered the neat, sterile life she had organised for herself since Joseph had died. How she had become accustomed to a complete absence of emotion, never feeling much of anything until Dave’s death, and how the last forty-eight hours had set her vapid little world on its head.

They concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other as they climbed for what seemed like hours until she looked at John’s back and realized that a thick mist had descended. He took a step forward and sank to his thighs in a drift. Everything, the valley below, the road cut into the hillside, the Storey Arms, the vehicles in the car park, the patrols – all had been swallowed by fog.

‘Stay still. I’m going to tie a rope to your belt so we don’t lose one another.’

‘Surely the patrols won’t stay out in this?’ she demurred as he pulled at her belt.

‘They have compasses, they’ll carry on.’

‘Do you know where we are?’ She swayed, as a patch of mist swirled away, to expose a sheer cliff plunging giddily below them, only to be veiled moments later as a second cloud moved in.

‘Roughly, there’s a sheltered spot over here.’

Taking her hand he guided her over a ridge. He opened the rucksack, pulled out the hypothermia blankets and the sleeping bags and handed them to her. ‘Get some rest, while we wait for them to come to us.’

She didn’t argue. Emotionally and physically drained, she was too tired to eat the food he offered her. Wrapping herself in a blanket she crawled into a sleeping bag, lay beside him, closed her eyes and slept.

Chaloner had hand-picked his men. Three privates seconded from the paratroopers, who hadn’t finished their continuation training, so were not yet fully fledged members of the Special Air Services Regiment. His sergeant had remonstrated with him to no avail. He had ensured a mix of experienced and inexperienced men in all the four-man patrols except his own. But, as he followed his three men up the mountain side, he realized he hadn’t chosen badly.

The men might be only half way through the fourteen week continuation training, but they had all passed the rigorous selection test, and, judging by the way they handled themselves, they were no strangers to physical hardships or route marches.

The man he had elected as leader was doing well with the compass. He knew because he took the time to double check their position every ten minutes. He had taken the post of “tail end Charlie” which entailed stopping, and looking around every few yards. After the fiasco of being overcome in his own Land Rover, he reasoned he’d be more vigilant than any other man

– and he knew what their target was capable of.

West sat next to Elizabeth and peered into the mist, his mind awash with confused and menacing images.

He didn’t know whether some were real memories, or simply visions created by his overwrought imagination after Elizabeth’s attempts at hypnosis.

He tried to recreate the events since he had been picked up on the motorway in an attempt to sift fact from fiction. He could remember running on the motorway, the feel of the skim of cold water beneath his bare feet, the warmth of the plastic the paramedics had shrouded around his body before putting him in the ambulance. The white suited figures in casualty who had taken swabs from his hands, face and chest.

The “hoovering” of glass splinters from his hair and face. Being taken to a treatment room to be cleaned up, given a gown, having his ankle bandaged… from that point onwards he could clearly recall the sequence of events. So why couldn’t he remember what had happened before he’d landed on that motorway?

Elizabeth had told him – or did he remember running down a street, across a school playing field, vaulting a gate? He closed his eyes and tried to recreate Elizabeth’s hypnosis technique; playing the tape of memory backwards as he floated through the clouds, then downwards to the street of suburban houses, the playing field and back to a house. How did he leave the house? Through shattering glass. He had curled himself into a ball, head down, and thrown himself through a window, not a patio window, but a bay – the front panel of a large bay.

He could see the glass gleaming darkly in the lamplight, mirroring wavering images. Images of what? A leather sofa, himself… he’d looked at the glass, gauging the distance as he lay crouched on the floor, holding the broken, bloody body… whose body? Someone close to him? A relative? His wife?

Had he killed her? Was that why no one had claimed him?

His eyes strained through the fog that blanketed him in then, as though it were hovering in the air before him, he saw the hand holding a gun, the scar running along the thumb – the scar resembling a many legged centipede. He saw it! It was there. That at least had to be real.

‘Bloody pea soup, this… sir.’ The recruit tagged on the ‘sir,’ for Chaloner’s benefit as they reached the top of the ridge. He hadn’t realised the captain was close until Chaloner was standing alongside him.

‘Good Brecon weather isn’t it, sir?’ another private chipped in.

‘Move on in silence,’ Chaloner ordered to discourage small talk. He pressed the button on his watch. Midnight. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lain in a bed. The recruit was right about one thing, this was good Brecon weather – good for survival exercises. If troops carrying full packs could negotiate their way through mist and weather as foul as this to a pre-arranged rendezvous, chances were they were half way towards picking up the endurance skills needed to operate behind enemy lines.

The other skills would be hard won later, he reflected ruefully, thinking of some of the men who hadn’t made it back to base after being out on the Beacons in conditions no worse than this. Men who’d frozen to death with equipment and rations that would have saved them from hypothermia and death, untouched in their packs.

Perhaps that was what had happened to John West.

Perhaps he was lying beside Dr Santer right now, in a hide scraped into the snow somewhere in this desolate frozen wilderness. But somehow he knew John West wasn’t dead. The man had won through too much to die cornered in a hide like an animal. The man who had outwitted him and the highly trained force in the hospital, successfully by-passed police roadblocks, escaped from the flat in Brecon and hijacked him last night wouldn’t allow himself or his hostage to die needlessly. Not without getting what he wanted. The question was, what did this professional who was capable of anticipating and out-manoeuvring every move made against him, want?

* * *

John sat so still in the darkness that a sheep that had escaped the round-ups came and stood no more than three feet away. It dug its nose into the snow in search of grazing. John continued to sit and watch, resisting the temptation to open his bag and give the sheep bread lest the movement alert someone just outside the curtain of mist.

He listened hard but could hear only the wind as it blew down from the hill top. But they’d be here soon.

He knew they’d be aiming for the ridge, just as he knew there’d be four of them. A pathfinder, two in the middle, and a tail end Charlie to deflect and minimise the risk of ambush.

How did he know? Because he had once been one of them, or because he’d studied them so he could outwit them in a fight? He glanced down at Elizabeth curled into her sleeping bag alongside him, her hair hidden beneath the hood, her face covered by the ski-mask. Whatever else happened in the next twenty-four hours he was determined to do all he could to ensure that she survived.

He crawled out of his blanket, crept to the edge of the hollow and listened. He thought he could hear ice cracking as the water trapped beneath the surface of the snow hardened and froze. Already the make-shift comfort of the warm bedroom and bathroom in the empty guest house seemed a lifetime away. He returned to the rucksack, drew out the flask of brandy, took a nip and checked his guns. Both were still dry.

He slipped the ammunition from the Browning. The parts moved freely, the mechanism hadn’t iced up. He reloaded the gun and slid it back into the holster, leaving the flap unbuttoned.

Noting his position he left Elizabeth and climbed higher. His senses told him he was half way up the slope of Corn Du but there was nothing for him to set a fix on. The mist shrouded everything. Perhaps if he climbed down just a few yards?

He had barely gone twenty steps when he heard the unmistakeable tread of footsteps biting deep into iced snow. He knew he’d find no better camouflage than the mist. Dropping to his knees he peered in the direction of the footsteps.

If Sergeant Price had been walking behind Ross Chaloner he would have crowed “I told you so.”

Chaloner’s feet were dragging, a slight, but unmistakeable, sign to an experienced NCO

accustomed to spotting the signs of fatigue in a rookie.

Chaloner watched the men walk into the mist ahead of him, turned and looked around in a routine check. The only sounds he could hear were the men’s footsteps.

He listened to his radio for a moment. It was silent in accordance with the order only to transmit if there was a definite sighting of West. He had chosen this route because he had a hunch that this was where West would be. In a hide that overlooked the sweep of the hillside, the road, the valley and the village of Libanus. He wanted the man so badly his fists ached.

Adjusting his goggles he carried on up the steep slope. Snow-laden air blasted into his eyes. He put his head down and crashed into the man in front. His curse died in his throat. A hand clamped over his mouth. He was lifted off his feet and dragged sideways, as helpless as a sacrificial lamb.