For Valour (7 page)

When I was a kid in Bermondsey, one old granddad used to sit outside the corner shop on Tanner Street, letting the dandruff settle on the shoulders of his moth-eaten tweed overcoat. Every time I passed, he’d point at the hoarding around the hole in the ground between two terraced houses across the street and mutter, ‘Doodlebug …’

I had no idea what he was waffling about – until I stopped one day and he told me about Adolf Hitler’s V1 missiles raining down on London in 1944, and how you knew you were safe until the engine cut out. In the silence that followed you just prayed the thing wasn’t going to land on your head.

That was how I felt about the silence now.

11

The leaves and pine needles I was buried in were cold and damp and dank, but I didn’t much mind. Better to be here in the shit than back there in Trev’s blood.

I ran through my options.

I couldn’t go back across the dam, or along the west side of the reservoir. In both cases I might as well have painted a target on my forehead or between my shoulder-blades and shone a spotlight on it.

The fact was that whichever route I chose, running away was out of the question. He’d simply follow, and kill me. If not today, tomorrow. Or some time next week. He no longer had a choice.

I didn’t want to mess around. If this lad knew how to handle himself, I had to bring him towards me, channel him to a place of my choosing, my killing ground, and finish him.

I wouldn’t interrogate him first. That only happened in the movies. I might lose the fight to contain him. And I only picked fights I knew I could win. Besides, I didn’t expect him to be carrying a photographic driving licence with name, address and details of his recent speeding fines, or a wallet full of business cards and restaurant receipts. And even if he knew who’d sent him after Trev – which he wouldn’t – there was no way he’d reveal it with his dying gasp.

I burrowed further inside the coppice until I was in deep enough cover to stand, and made my way back to the hide. I stayed long enough to take a good look through Trev’s Bergen. I was pretty certain I wouldn’t find a weapon. He hadn’t had a pistol on his belt, and if he’d been in the mood to bring one along, he’d hardly have left it in his luggage.

I wasn’t wrong, but it would have been madness not to check.

Trev hadn’t wanted to load himself down any more than I did, so there was nothing much in the forty-litre compartment that I didn’t already have. In the side pouch I’d already spotted, he only had enough rations to keep him going for the next two or three days. Then I unstrapped the other pouch and hit the jackpot: lightweight AN/PVS-7 night-vision goggles complete with eye-cups, single-tube scope and head-strap.

I put the NVGs into my daysack, then added a couple of MRE packs and their flameless heaters. Who knew when I might need them? I wasn’t sure when I’d have my next chance to hydrate either, so I poured half the contents of his water flask down my neck.

I paused for a moment at the edge of Trev’s clearing, slipped off my right glove and sparked up Google Maps on the iPhone to set my bearings. It took a while to work out where it was, then told me pretty much what I already knew. I’d be in cover until I went past the south-western corner of the wood.

I didn’t have to stay close to the trees; despite the rate of incline, I wouldn’t be visible for about the first half of my journey between here and the ridge. Then I’d have to cross about forty metres of open ground, like a rat up a drainpipe, before I could duck below the crest and head right for the gully.

That forty-metre stretch was where things would get complicated. I wanted my sniper mate to spot me, because I needed him to know what path to follow, but I didn’t want to give him enough time to get a lead on me, then squeeze the trigger.

Judging by the mess it had made of his head, the round that had killed Trev had had a lead knocker in its base, or my new best mate on the other side of the valley was using polymer tips.

Stopping power and flatter trajectory, even in a high wind, meant that the polymer option was fast becoming the good old boys’ favourite during the Midwestern hunting season: it could separate an elk from its antlers at three hundred metres. And they didn’t just make them in Nebraska: the Lucznik munitions factory in Radom, a hundred Ks south of Warsaw, kept the Eastern European market well supplied.

Wherever it came from, one of these fuckers wasn’t just going to give me a superficial flesh wound. It would either miss completely or take a big piece of me with it.

I put the iPhone back in my jacket, replaced my glove, visualized the next twenty minutes of my life, and stepped out from beneath the canopy.

By the time I’d got halfway towards the open ground I was beginning to regret having left my Russian tank commander’s hat in the Defender. The temperature had dropped big-time, partly because the day was drawing in and partly because of the wind-chill. My cheeks and the tips of my ears started to burn with cold.

The US Military Field Manual once spread the word that a human being lost between 45 and 50 per cent of his body heat through his head. In truth it was probably closer to 10, but anyone who took comfort from that had probably never been out on the Black Mountains in sub-zero temperatures. The fact remained that driving snow turned your hair rapidly into an iceberg and frostbite hurt like shit, then made bits of you drop off. And since the head was where most people’s brain was located, it messed with your cognitive functions, and thus with your reaction time. So, if I’d just been out on a ramble, I’d have zipped my ears as tightly as possible into the Gore-Tex hood folded beneath my jacket collar. But in a strong wind the fabric rippled as loudly as an America’s Cup jib sail every time you moved, and whenever someone big and ugly was creeping up behind me, I wanted as much warning as possible.

I’d stick my neck out as long as I could bear it.

We were fast running out of daylight by the time I reached the start line of my forty-metre dash, but there was now enough of the white stuff on the ground to give my sniper mate a big green dot to aim at, thermal imaging or not. In these conditions I’d never know how close his misses were, unless they zinged past my ear. But so what? A miss was a miss.

I was no Usain Bolt, but I took off for the ridge good style.

After twenty-five metres I felt I’d hit my stride.

After thirty-five a searing pain wiped out my leading ankle and I was hurled sideways, like a sack of shit.

12

I had no idea whether my ankle could hold my weight, but wriggling the last five metres to the ridge on my belt buckle was not an option. At least I knew it hadn’t been on the receiving end of a polymer tip. If it had, there’d be nothing left of me beyond a soggy stump at the southern end of my gaiter.

All I’d done was hit a baby’s head at a bad angle, and rolled.

As I reached forward to haul myself up, my eyes were still close enough to the ground to see another tussock disintegrate in front of me. It was all the encouragement I needed. Crouching low, I angled right, then left, then right again, scrambling like a prop forward through the opposition on a wet day at Huddersfield. I don’t know if it made me a more difficult target, but it was good for morale, and when I dived over the ridge I felt the kind of elation I guessed a rugby player must have felt when he crossed the try line seconds before the final whistle.

I gave myself a minute or two to catch my breath and flex my ankle. As soon as I knew it was in reasonable working order – no sprain, no snapped tendons – it was time to move on.

Fuck knows why, but I once let a shrink wire me up to some magic piece of machinery – the all-singing, all-dancing version of a lie-detector – and try to put me through the mental wringer. He used every trick in the audio-visual book, from showing me pictures of people being chopped up with machetes to the kind of porn films they screen 24/7 in German hotel rooms.

My vital signs had hardly fluctuated.

In any situation that demanded my full concentration, I routinely tuned out any external interference, but I allowed his conclusion to filter through right now because it always made me smile. ‘You’re a psychopath, Mr Stone. But in a good way.’

Hot on their heels, Anna’s words also echoed in my mind, what she’d said about me not looking for a fight.

Well, I was looking for one now.

I reckoned Sniper One still wouldn’t break cover until he had to. Neither would he be staying where he was on the off-chance I’d suddenly pop back into view like a fairground target and invite him to have another crack at me.

He’d be busy hoisting the weapon’s sling over his shoulder and looking forward to hosing me down at the first opportunity. But now I had two advantages: it was dark, and I knew where I was going. I reckoned I’d have an hour at the Bolthole before he caught up with me.

I tabbed rapidly towards the gully, the gorse scratching against my gaiters. The ankle wasn’t in peak physical condition after my tumble, but the pain was nothing to shout about. The snow was deeper now that it wasn’t being blown straight off the hill, but easy enough to walk through. I had to exercise a bit of caution about the terrain beneath it. I wouldn’t worry about leaving a trail until after I’d prepared my killing area.

There were no straight lines here, so I left the NVGs in my daysack for now, and didn’t waste time and energy looking back over my shoulder. If he’d made distance and closed up enough to take a shot, I’d soon know about it.

The ambient temperature was a few precious degrees warmer in the lee of the ridge, and the further I went, the more my plan came together in my head.

The top of the gully was funnel-shaped, and led to a group of bare rocks the size of standing stones, but more haphazardly arranged. The one on the right was at least twice my height, and stood proud of the hill. The two to its left leaned against each other, as if they were on the way home from a great night out and hoping to bump into a kebab shop. These were the legs of our elephant.

Though it wasn’t visible right now – since snow had drifted across it – the entrance to Trev’s cave lay between them.

13

I unslung my daysack. The white stuff was pretty fresh, so my first task was to make it more compact. I pulled out the shovel, unfolded its handle and shaft and gave the whole area around the base of the stones a good smacking with the blade.

When it was a bit more solid, I dug a nice hole, as low as I could because heat rises, packing the sides as I went, until I no longer felt any resistance. I slid in feet first, dragging the rest of my kit behind me.

I didn’t want to draw attention to my hideaway yet, but fucking about in the dark was going to waste too much time. I shut my dominant eye to avoid completely destroying my night vision, powered up the torch app on my iPhone without looking at it directly with my open eye, and had a scout around.

Nothing much had changed – but, then, I hardly expected the local council to have called the decorators in. There were a few empty Red Bull cans, some discarded food packaging and a pile of slightly charred kindling.

I emptied the daysack and bulked it out with the packaging, cans and some of the sticks. I put the stove and mess tin on the ground, laid out six hexy blocks on each, then piled their waxed cardboard boxes and every bit of kindling I could find on top of them. Hexamine was toxic when it burned, so it wasn’t designed for use in confined spaces, but I wasn’t planning to stay.

I got some more water down my neck along with a power bar to boost my blood-sugar level. Then I put a match to my little hexy bonfires. Once they’d caught, I put my iPhone back in my pocket and brought out the G3. Satisfied that it still had a strong enough signal, I selected its loudest and most irritating ring-tone and left it on top of my daysack, a couple of feet inside the entrance to the cave.

I strapped the NVGs to my forehead but didn’t lower the eye-cups. Like most military kit, the PVS-7 was designed to perform in extreme environments, so a cold night out in the wilds of Welsh Wales wasn’t going to throw it into a spin.

I fastened the crampons to the soles of my Timberlands, grabbed the ice axe and the shovel and crawled back through my tunnel. I opened my dominant eye as soon as I was outside and moved immediately to my left. I didn’t want to be silhouetted against the glow from the snow-hole for any longer than I had to be.

When I’d reached the far side of the tallest of the stones, using what was left of my night vision to smooth over my tracks as I went, I climbed straight up the hill and tucked myself behind it, to prepare for what I hoped might happen next.

14

I put the shovel aside and stamped the snow flat behind the rock until I had a firm platform from which to operate, then pulled down the NVGs, switched them onto infrared and adjusted the focus and intensity of the image.

AN/PVS-7s were standard issue for US land forces, and it didn’t take long to see why. With little ambient light but a dramatic contrast between the snow-covered ground and the shadow of the rocks and trees, it was as if my immediate surroundings had been transformed into a vivid black-and-white movie that someone had washed with green.

Back in the day, the principal problem with these things, apart from their weight, was that any bright flash would trigger a complete whiteout on your retinas. Now anything less than a mega candlepower spotlight would just look like a budget-size UFO. And I didn’t expect Sniper One to be carrying a mega candlepower spotlight as well as a big fuck-off weapon.

I eased the monocle around the inside flank of the rock, until I had as clear a view of the gully as possible without emerging from cover. A roe deer materialized thirty metres away and stood stock still. For a moment, as the flakes danced around her, it was as if she was posing at the centre of her very own snow globe. Then she pricked up her ears, glanced rapidly left and right, and took off towards the ridge. She’d caught either my scent or somebody else’s.

I ducked back out of sight and gripped the shaft of the ice axe with both hands, testing for weight and balance before putting it down within easy reach.