Two of the team stepped forward and grabbed my wrists. I didn’t make it easy for them, so they didn’t make it easy for me. They plasticuffed them together so fiercely behind my back that my hands started to throb. One frisked me, top to toe, lifted Sam’s Browning and the spare mag, and chucked them into the foliage at the edge of the parking area.
‘Come.’ The boss barked the instruction. I turned to see him walk back along the path towards the range.
His mates bundled me after him. Their dark hair and stubble shone like crude oil and their skin glistened. They weren’t wearing their happy faces, and it wasn’t just because the rain had started again. Everything about their body language, the expressions on their faces and the none-too-gentle way they kept me moving said that this wasn’t a good day out. I was going to pay for fucking them up. I was going to pay big-time.
I ran through my options. It didn’t take more than a nanosecond. All I could do was choose the best moment to leg it and hope for the best – which meant waiting until I was as close as possible to the cover of the treeline before I made my move.
A coil of rope, punctuated at intervals with red and white striped plastic pennants, was looped over a wooden pin on the side of the covered position furthest from the targets. It would have been strung across the entrance when live firing was in progress, but these boys had something else in mind.
The fourth member of the team grabbed it as we passed and began to fashion the trailing end into a noose. He glanced at my neck from time to time, like a tailor gauging his customer’s collar size.
An image flashed onto the screen inside my head: maggot-ridden bodies twisting in the wind beneath trees and lamp posts at the Bosnian roadside.
The boss stood in the shadow of a big old beech on the far side of the range. He’d found what he was looking for: a missile-sized branch launching itself out of the trunk about five metres above the ground. It took them a couple of throws to get the tail of the rope over the top of it and a couple of tugs to get the business end at the right height. Then they shoved me forward and raised the noose.
I dipped my head and shoulder-charged the main man, aiming a fraction above his belt buckle. I wasn’t wildly optimistic about doing him any serious damage – I just needed a moment of confusion to help get me out of this shit.
I didn’t even manage to wing him. He stepped aside as I came through and gave me the good news with his fist on the back of my head. It wasn’t a killer blow, but it was enough to make my deck shoes lose their grip on the leaf mould and take me down.
They dragged me to my feet again, forced the noose around my throat and pulled the slip knot so tight it made my eyes water. The boss watched carefully throughout the process. He didn’t want me to be in any doubt that they had a few scores to settle, and now was the perfect time to do it. He gave the noose an extra tug, to let me have a taste of what I had in store. Then the three grunts gripped the other end of the rope and began to try to separate my head from my shoulders. I wasn’t far from blacking out when the arc lamps at each corner of the range sparked up. As night turned into blindingly bright day, ten lads in combats and cam cream converged on us from all sides, through the trees and across the open ground, SIGs in the aim. One of them barked a set of instructions in warp-speed Serbian.
I was no more fluent now than I had been at the Belgrade Fortress, but I knew Boris’s voice when I heard it.
11
It didn’t take long for Boris’s boys to give the guys in matching leather jackets a set of matching cuffs, and a Mastiff steamed in from the camp to take them off for a sleepover in the detention facility.
I fished the Browning and spare mag out of the undergrowth, then sat and watched from the comfort of Father Gerard’s driving seat, trying to get my breath back. I couldn’t tell whether the Invisible Man was on the squad. If so, he was in good company.
When the business of the evening was completed, Boris came over and joined me. His hair looked like a freshly forked haystack.
‘You’re making a bit of a habit of this, Stone.’
I nodded. ‘So are you. And I’ve finally got my head around why.’
Boris seemed quite pleased about that. ‘DSF never believed that Sam Callard pulled the trigger in the CQB Rooms. When you bounced into view, he thought you might give us the best chance of finding out what that whole nightmare was all about. Fuck knows why.’ He grinned. ‘I gather you were never the sharpest knife in the drawer.’
I told him I’d give the general a full report over tea and biscuits when I’d tidied up a few loose ends.
‘I’ll let him know that.’ His eyes glinted as he treated me to a level stare. ‘Just try not to take too long.’
He stood back and let me shut my door, then leaned in through the window, like he’d done outside the Belgrade Zoo. ‘And sort your shit out, eh? What
do
you think you look like?’
1
Allerdale, Cumbria
Monday, 13 February
I took Boris’s advice about my fancy-dress outfit as soon as I got back to the Premier Inn. It was now in the boot of Father Gerard’s Skoda.
The drive from Andover to Bassenthwaite was a good seven hours, but I didn’t want to be there until last light, so there was no need to rush it. I treated myself to a couple of caffeine and calorie breaks and beat myself up about the things that should have pointed me towards Chastain instead of the Head Shed while I was playing detective.
They both had a fuck of a lot to lose if the Koshtay incident went public, but I now knew the colonel was staring down the barrel of the bigger gun: the destruction of his son’s and his family’s very shiny reputation.
I knew he’d served in Bosnia, and Ken Marabula had confirmed it. The Leathermen were on
his
payroll, not Steele’s. They must have tracked me from Blackwood’s chambers using the Nokia that I should have chucked into the river after I’d called Astra HQ that morning. I hadn’t been spotted by one of DSF’s helis.
Even when Boris and the Invisible Man had done their Seventh Cavalry trick at the Belgrade Fortress, I’d assumed that Chastain was busy being my fairy godfather.
I suddenly remembered the colonel’s Bermondsey reference during our cosy chat in Guy’s boathouse. At the time I’d just assumed he’d pulled it from the depths of his own mental data base – he’d always taken the piss out of my South London accent when I served with him. Now I realized what had brought it to the surface. And that was when he’d seeded the idea of me lifting Sam from Barford.
I caught sight of myself in the rear-view when I got back into the wagon. The bruise from the rope around my neck was developing nicely.
I stopped off at a hardware shop to pick up a roll of gaffer tape. My next target was a biker store. I needed a pair of thin silk gloves and one of those black balaclavas you could fit under a crash hat.
2
Skiddaw ridge dominated the skyline to my right as I drove up the A591, its flanks highlighted by the setting sun. The surface of the lake glistened to my left whenever there was a break in the treeline.
I pulled into the parking area at the back of the Half Moon Inn, two or three miles beyond the end of the wall that enclosed the Ravenhill estate. Knocking on the Chastains’ front door was not an option this time around: I wasn’t going to be treated to tea and flapjacks. The colonel’s foot soldiers would be on high alert, and just pulling up in a neighbouring layby was out of the question.
There weren’t a whole lot of other vehicles to hide behind, but enough for the Skoda not to draw too much attention to itself, and the place wasn’t awash with Stalag Luft III-style arc lamps. I slotted it between a white van and a mud-spattered Volvo with a couple of sit-on-top kayaks strapped to its roof bars. One was a very scary combo of Day-Glo green and yellow and its mate was deep purple and black.
I transferred the Browning from underneath my right thigh to my waistband and zipped up my bomber jacket. The gaffer tape went into my right pocket. The spare thirteen-round mag was in my left.
I exited the Skoda and headed along a lane that Google Maps had told me led to the water. A grass verge lined each side of it, dropping away to a drainage ditch.
Two sets of headlamps bounced up the hill towards me. I slid into the ditch on my left when they were still a hundred and fifty metres away and stayed there until they’d passed – two more estate cars with kayaks on their lids. One turned into the pub car park and the other carried straight on to the main.
I climbed back onto the pitted tarmac and kept on walking. There was a chill breeze from the shore, but the temperature wasn’t freezing. I’d be fine as long as I kept moving.
This side of the lake was pretty much all private land, and even the gates into the fields were padlocked. I vaulted the second I came to and slipped on my balaclava and gloves, partly for warmth but mostly so I didn’t stand out like a Belisha beacon. I tabbed south along the perimeter of a densely planted evergreen wood for about a mile, then ducked into the cover of the trees.
I moved as quickly as I could through the undergrowth, while there was still enough ambient light to avoid snapping twigs and tripping over fallen branches. The closer I got to the Ravenhill boundary, the more I kept eyes on the shadows gathering ahead and to my right, and the open ground thirty feet to my left.
I stopped a hundred feet short of Chastain’s wall, watched and listened. The light was fading fast now and the fir needles rustled in the wind. I stayed stock still, my antennae fully tuned up. A muted cry carried from somewhere across the lake. I hadn’t heard that sound in a while. It was an osprey calling to its mate.
I moved closer to the wall, placing each step with absolute care, toe then heel. When I reached it I stopped again, mouth open, ears on stalks.
There was nothing at first, then movement on the far side. Low voices. Footsteps. Two hostiles. Maybe three. The flash of a torch beam. Why would they bother to try to become part of the night? They were guarding the place, not invading it. And I didn’t need to clamber up seven feet of strongly mortared stone to put them to the test.
Plan A had hit a rock. But Plan B had already started to take shape in my head.
I melted back into the trees and retraced my route.
3
The car park at the Half Moon had become a lot more crowded by the time I got back to it. Light blazed from the pub windows, and snatches of conversation and the steady beat of the jukebox leaked out into the darkness. It wasn’t exactly Saturday-night fever, but if I’d been the landlord I wouldn’t have complained.
The white van had gone home for dinner but the Volvo was staying on. The door from the bar opened and closed, and there was a blast of Rihanna’s ‘You Da One’. I ducked into the shadows while two surfies climbed into a Volkswagen camper van and made for the exit.
The Volvo team had very thoughtfully strapped their paddles onto the roof bars as well as the kayaks. I felt like leaving them a thank-you note. I unfastened the nearest paddle, then liberated the darker of the two craft and swung it down by its grab handle. It was about two and a half metres long, eighty centimetres wide and pretty unwieldy, especially when it caught the breeze, but it wasn’t much heavier than one of Anna’s suitcases. Someone had spent a lot of quality time painting its name across one side:
Smoke on the Water
. I hoped it wasn’t luminous.
I hoicked it to the end of the stretch of gravel that was furthest from the building, then manhandled it over a chain-link fence. Fuck knows what I would have done if the owners had chosen that moment to come out and check their kit, but I made it along the edge of a spiky stubble field and into cover before Rihanna came back for an encore.
A hedgerow skirted the parking area, then paralleled the lane. I kept behind it most of the way to the lake. It took me a good half-hour. No more cars came past, and there were no signs of life in the sailing-club hut or on the hard standing that ran for about fifteen metres along the bank.
I lugged
Smoke
to the slipway, past a line of dinghies on light aluminium launching trolleys. I took several deep breaths then flipped it, hull down, onto the water, soaking my right Timberland in the process.
These craft were built for stability as well as speed through some pretty big waves, so it wasn’t too difficult to get my feet and arse into position on its moulded deck without taking another dip.
I made sure the Browning was still tucked securely into the front of my jeans, then gripped the paddle shaft like a punt pole. There was a grinding noise as I levered myself away from the concrete, then I was clear. I flattened the shaft, dug in with one blade then the other, and started to make headway.
The lake ran north/south, and a series of spits and small treelined bays fringed this side of it, so I aimed to stay fairly close to the shore for the first part of the journey rather than venture straight into open water. The moon was in its final quarter and the sky was overcast, but there were no islands out there I could use as cover, and I didn’t want to announce my presence until I was good and ready.
The osprey gave another cry. Then all I could hear was the water lapping against the hull, and the occasional splash when I misjudged the timing or the angle of a blade as it broke the surface.
I’d done all sorts of insertions and extractions via the ocean over the years, usually in a RIB with a pair of monster outboards on the back, but I’d never spent much of my leisure time with oars or sails. White-water rafting was different: I’d always thought that was more like a combo of freefalling and hand-to-hand combat than messing around in boats. Whatever, I began to get the hang of this, and the kayak glided south, more or less in the direction I wanted.
The cold began eating into my hands. I was only going to use the Browning if everything went to rat shit, but thicker gloves would have made it impossible. My right foot squelched inside its sock every time I pulled the face of my left blade towards me, and that was no fun either. But there was no point in worrying about what I couldn’t change.