The Hurst Chronicles (Book 1): Hurst (21 page)

He twisted his body, rolling over on his back as his thoughts turned to Jean, the young girl he had come here with. The girl he had put his life on the line to try and protect. Look where that had got him. An idea began to form in his mind, building slowly, a ray of hope, like light at the end of a long tunnel, barely visible, half imagined. Jean and he were partners now, they both shared a common enemy. Seamus would get what was coming to him. He would teach that bastard a lesson. He was suddenly filled with hope. Jean would find a way. She was young but also resourceful. Somehow he had to believe she would get him out of here. He just needed to hold on and stay strong, whatever happened. Right now, hope and faith was all he had left. He had come so far to get to this point. He owed it to Howard.

From the kitchen above, he became aware of raucous laughter and heard a chair scrape back. The door at the top of the stairs swung open on its hinges and he heard the heavy clump of boots coming down the narrow steps towards the cellar. Joe looked back up into the light from the small window shrouded in foliage and whispered a silent prayer, repeating over and over: ‘forgive us our trespasses - deliver us from evil’. 

He rolled over and managed to get himself up into a kneeling position. If only he could get to his feet, he could try something. His legs were numb and unresponsive. The renewed bloodflow caused agonising shooting pains. Footsteps stopped outside the door as he heard the rattle of keys. With a grimace he levered himself into a crouch, using the chair to support his weight. He rocked back uncomfortably on to the tips of his toes and as the door opened he launched himself forward with all his might, catching the person entering completely by surprise, barging him backwards, his head smashing against the brick wall. He rolled over and got his elbow on the man’s neck, throttling him until he lay still. He wasn’t sure if he was dead or just unconscious. It didn’t matter to him.

Joe checked his pockets and found a small kitchen knife. He stopped for a second, listening carefully for any further movement on the floor above. There was silence. After several attempts, dropping the knife on the floor, he held the blade between his knees and moved his wrists backwards and forwards against the serrated edge as the bungee cord began to fray. He freed his legs and stood painfully, braced against the wall. He looked up the stairwell to the kitchen, trying to remember the layout of the floor above him. With the knife in his right hand, he gingerly climbed the stairs looking for Jean.

Chapter forty

It had been a frustrating night for the man in black and his men at the Ship Inn. The weather had deteriorated rapidly in the course of the evening ahead of their attack on Hurst. Their pilot and navigator, a local man named Trevor, had stood on the quay outside, sniffing at the wind, making faces at the darkening sky, where grey clouds were gathering. He reckoned it was blowing a force six, but gusting seven or eight, with a big sea swell to go with it. It was also a south westerly wind which was far from ideal for their intended beach landing on the exposed Needles channel side of Hurst castle.

The man in black and Copper conferred for several minutes in heated debate. They finally gave in to common sense, postponing the attack until the following night, providing the weather improved in the meantime. Copper was impatient. His men were psyched and ready to go. He knew from bitter experience that delays weakened resolve and dulled their edge as a fighting force. They had been cooped up in the pub all afternoon and evening, they were restless and baying for blood.

Copper strode back in with the bad news. “Attack’s off boys.” There was a chorus of disapproval and disappointment. “No, listen he’s right, it’s too dangerous for a beach assault tonight. We wouldn’t be able to land where we need. And with the swell, someone’s going to drown, and I’d rather it wasn’t one of you lot.”

Will was lurking at the back of the pub in the shadows, listening to all this with a huge sense of relief. His wrists were still cuffed behind his back, the plastic ties were biting and chafing horribly. If he sat very still leaning forward, he found the pain was lessened and he could get the blood flowing all the way to his fingers if he wiggled them slowly.

He was racking his brains to figure out a way to get a message to Hurst to warn them of the impending attack. He had been trying to make eye contact with the landlord and his daughter, but they had not looked his way. He was watching them carefully, observing their interactions with Copper and the others, trying to determine how deep their relationship ran, whether their loyalty to Copper was feigned or real.

The daughter came over to the table next to his to clear away some empty bowls from the dinner they had served the hungry men. It wasn’t much, just some soup made from boiled vegetables, followed by apples and grapes, plus a few chunks of chocolate each with raisins and hazelnuts they had liberated from a vending machine. The beer kegs had run dry many moons ago, but they had taken it in turns to pass round a recently discovered bottle of Cointreau the pub chef had once used for cooking. The landlord had been saving it for a special occasion.

When the girl was nearest to him, Will whispered the words ‘Help me’ as loudly as he dared. She looked at him and shook her head very deliberately. “Please,” he whispered. As she approached his table, he noticed she walked with a slight limp in her left leg. She reached across and started wiping the table down with a cloth, even though it looked spotless. She leaned close, looking past his shoulder. Her long brown hair brushed against his right arm. 

“I can’t, they’ll kill me if I help you.”

“And they’ll kill me if you don’t.” He smiled wanly.

She moved on to clean the next table before he could say anything else, but glanced back at him pensively from behind the bar counter. He wasn’t sure if he could trust her, but right now she was his best and only option.

With the attack off for the night, Copper took some of the men on a scavenging mission, more to pass the time than for any real purpose. They already had with them everything they needed and most of the houses round here were long since ransacked and empty. But as Copper was fond of saying, men needed daily exercise each and every day, same as dogs and small children. It didn’t pay to have them stuck in close quarters for hour on end. He had seen too many arguments boil over into fistfights and worse.

Will watched Copper with interest and the way he interacted with the others. His men seemed to respect and like him. Clearly there was more to Copper than the tormentor and dispassionate torturer he had encountered at the hospital. He seemed full of contradictions that kept Will guessing. The former-policeman seemed to defy categorization. Just when Will had him pigeon-holed as an unapproachable bully, keeping himself to himself, grumpy and non-responsive, the next time he saw him he was sharing a joke with one of the men. Will had learned first hand that Copper could be a vicious and vindictive bastard when he put his mind to it. He thought nothing of beating or even killing a man to extract information, but then he noticed Copper chatting amiably leaning on the bar counter passing the time in conversation with the landlord and twice kneeling down to stroke his black Labrador. He couldn’t figure him out. But one thing was very clear. When it came to his interactions with the man-in-black, Will was under no illusions that Copper’s passive-aggressive behaviour betrayed a growing sense of latent frustration with his leader. Beyond the ruthlessness, was the man in black simply a weak bully playing a part, living up to the men’s expectations of him, giving them licence to do his dirty work? Will wasn’t sure, but he suspected the man in black was also not all that he appeared to be.

Will turned his attention to study the rest of Copper’s squad. They were clearly very loyal to him. He had drilled them well, so they worked together as a tight unit. His second in command, the man they called Sarge, like Copper, had served in the local constabulary so he was familiar with police tactics and had some basic training with handling weapons. A couple of them still wore their stab-proof vests underneath other webbing as additional protection. Though all police insignia had been removed. They were barely recognizable as enforcers of the law. Their loyalty was now to Copper, pure and simple. The laws they followed were mostly of their own making. They lived by a code, a mutual respect of each other, of hard work, discipline and determination. That didn’t mean that they had suddenly become bad men, but their frame of reference was somewhat altered. Their filters had been removed and the justice they dispensed was a little more direct and violent. The stab-proof vests exaggerated their size and bulk, but underneath they were fit and lean, through regular exercise and the relative scarcity of food. In their adjusted roles, there was certainly less sitting around drinking coffee and eating donuts.

***

Will managed to get some rest, finding a comfortable position on his right side, lying on one of the padded bench seats under the blacked-out window. He woke after a couple of hours with his right arm numb and tingling. He stood and stretched his legs walking round the slumbering figures laid out on the floor. The dim light from a lone candle cast flickering shadows round the room. Voices from the other room suggested several of the men were still awake, keeping watch.

Behind the bar Will spotted Samantha the landlord’s daughter. He had overheard her father calling for her. She made as if to leave when he approached the counter. He stretched out and grabbed her wrist before she could turn away. She didn’t cry out but made it very clear that she didn’t want anything to do with him or what he had to say to her. He released her hand, and she remained standing there rubbing her wrist but made no attempt to leave.

“You’ve got two minutes. Keep your voice low though. I don’t want anyone to see us talking. Understood?”

Will nodded and started explaining to the girl how he had come to be captured by the man in black and tortured for his knowledge of Hurst and its defences. He told her how they were holding him prisoner against his will, how, in a few hours time, they would launch an all-out attack on his friends in the castle. He needed her help to get a message to them. He begged her. He had to warn them some way, some how, so that they could prepare themselves to repel the attack or get as far away as possible. Their lives were in danger, women and children.

She heard him out, listening dispassionately to his story. Her face was hard to read. She seemed empathetic but was clearly trying to avoid taking sides and being sucked into a fight that wasn’t hers.

“Listen Will, I wish I could help you, believe me I do. You seem like a nice person. But they will kill me and my father if they find out I helped you. It’s too much to ask. I don’t have a choice. If there was another way to get them a message, then maybe, but short of me going there myself, it can’t be done.”

Will knew she was right, but that didn’t stop him from trying, for the sake of his friends. “Then cut me loose Samantha and help me to escape instead.”

Samantha looked uncertain. She was playing it out in her head, trying to figure whether she could help him without compromising everything they had worked so hard for. He persisted: “Is there another way out of here? A back door, a window, there must be some other way I can escape?”

She looked around and checked no one was listening. Samantha was impulsive and liked to trust her instincts. Logic and reason were screaming at her not to get involved, but her gut said it was the right thing to do to help Will. Doing nothing made her complicit in a crime in her eyes. If she could find a way to help him and have plausible deniability when questioned then it became a win-win. A man stirred on the floor, fidgeting in his sleeping bag, then turned over and went back to sleep. She waited until his snoring resumed and turned back to Will, her mind made up. She leaned her head towards him across the bar, their faces nearly touching. Will became powerfully aware of an intoxicating mix of citrus and aloe body wash blended with the warmth of her breath, heavy with the orange-scented fumes of Cointreau.

She spoke quickly, pausing only to check no one could overhear their whispers. When she had finished, he leaned forward and kissed her full on the lips, lingering for a second, enjoying the sweetness of the Cointreau fumes. Samantha kissed him back hungrily and mouthed the words: “Good luck.”

Chapter forty-one

The following morning the wind direction veered to the south and its intensity abated sufficiently for Trevor to consider sanctioning the boats’ departure. It remained a risky venture, but an acceptable, calculated one. There would still be a strong sea swell to contend with, but all things considered, the attack should proceed with all urgency. The attack on Hurst was back on.

Storm clouds hurried across the horizon. The bad weather was further away now, giving way to a milder spring evening in Lymington, overcast and dry. In a couple of hours it would be sunset. The sun was sinking rapidly behind the mainly Victorian houses and cottages that lined the high-street and surrounding roads leading down to the cobbled alleys and quayside of the harbour. It would be dark by seven-thirty. A half moon meant there would be just enough light, giving the attackers a further advantage.

High tide was set for around midnight, so their plan was to cast off and head down the river estuary in the failing light. Trevor had sailed these waters all his life so knew where all the channel markers were to be found on even the darkest of nights. He needed to keep them clear of the shallower waters and treacherous mudflats as they weaved their way out down river towards the Solent main channel heading west towards Hurst. Their arrival was timed to coincide with when they expected most of Hurst’s occupants to be asleep in their beds. Only a nominal force would be protecting what amounted to a very large site with walls stretching over five hundred meters in total. With the intelligence they had extracted from Will, they knew that Hurst’s leaders mistakenly believed that its remoteness and relative inaccessibility, with ten meter high walls, made their home virtually impregnable to an attacking force. Their pride and arrogance would be their downfall.

Yet history was on their side. Hurst’s walls had never been breached in all its near five hundred years. However, never before had Hurst’s secrets been laid bare from inside knowledge, not just of its layout but also of its security protocols, guard patrols and defensive capabilities. Copper knew that Will’s resilience to their interrogation methods could last only so long. In the end, everyone broke, it was only a matter of time. There had been no need for his more experimental interrogation techniques improvised from what they knew of water boarding. In Will’s case they had simply injected him with a cocktail of drugs and viciously beaten him. It was crude but effective. There was no Geneva Convention to protect the many captives they handled on a weekly basis. They had grown pretty good at extracting information. Which all meant that Copper and the man in black now knew everything Will knew and that gave them the upper hand.

***

After Will’s midnight rendezvous with Samantha, the publican’s daughter, the guard shift at the Ship Inn changed and one of Copper’s own men was posted to keep watch on their prisoner. Will was pretending to sleep, his mind racing as he ran through the execution of his plan, step by step. He spent a frustrating few hours waiting for the guard to fall asleep on duty. Copper’s men were professional and stuck to their task, unlike some of the other types without military or police training he had encountered. They were mostly nihilists or thugs with a chip on the shoulder and a thirst for violence. Definitely worth avoiding eye contact with those guys, they tended to have a short fuse and a point to prove.

As dawn broke and the rest of the team from the hospital awoke, he blamed his poor luck and bitterly regretted his failure to act when the previous guard had been on duty. For now, his opportunity was gone. He would need to bide his time and hope a fresh chance or diversion presented itself.

The team spent their day checking and rechecking their equipment. Copper was meticulous about their preparation. He meant to leave nothing to chance. Several of the others made a trip back to the hospital to run errands and get more food and supplies. By mid-afternoon, the weather was still holding fair, scattered clouds and more moderate winds. Their gear was loaded into the boats, weapons cleaned, magazines loaded, rope and grappling hook uncoiled, laid out on the tarmac and then recoiled and packed away. The man in black congratulated Copper and his team. Walking amongst them with his hands on hips, he proudly inspected his foot soldiers. They were as ready as they would ever be. It was now or never, providing the weather held.

By seven, with the light fading and the moon rising behind distant clouds, they started loading up the boats on the quay. Copper would take the lead in the first R.I.B with four of his best men, forming the tip of the spear of the attack. In the larger pleasure craft, a ferryboat with covered main cabin and small bar, Sarge would lead the main force of some ten men. The ferryboat had spent a life time shuttling tourists to the Needles rocks and back so was ideal for their purposes, shallow draft but seaworthy. Sarge would be accompanied by the man in black and their prisoner Will. Last but not least, there was a further back-up team of four men in a second fast inflatable. They would be held in reserve until the drawbridge was down and the main force was inside.

Will was running out of time. With the attack certain to go ahead tonight, he somehow had to escape. Hurst’s future hung in the balance. It was up to him now. Everything depended on him. He could not let his friends down. He reckoned that from here to Hurst on foot would take him at least three hours, going along the coastal footpath that ran along the estuary and marshlands to Keyhaven. If he ran most of the way or was lucky enough to find a bicycle or a boat, then he could probably shave an hour off that. But the thought of running in the tired old working boots he was wearing, having not run for months, was going to be tough. Years of unhealthy living, Cornish pasty lunches and a fondness for Ringwood ale, had left him soft round the middle. The last couple of years living from hand to mouth had done remarkably little to shift that flab. He had at least lost some weight, he was sure of that, just not in the places he tended to pay attention to. The chances of finding transport were slim, but he might get lucky. Lady luck had a funny way of smiling on him, when he least expected it.

With the rest of the men standing outside on the quayside loading the boats, for a few moments, Will and his guard were the only people left in the pub. Will had been immobile, pretending to be dozing. The guard had stopped paying attention to him. He had become distracted by the girl behind the bar. The guard couldn’t take his eyes off Samantha. She had changed into some figure-hugging jeans. Will noticed her adjusting her hair in a mirror, applying some lipstick before provocatively bending down to pick something up off the floor. Was she doing it on purpose? She was certainly drawing attention to herself, whether deliberate or not The guard now had his back to Will. He seized his chance, charging at the man and taking him completely by surprise. His body low like a rugby tackle but with his wrists still tied, he ran at the man making contact with his shoulder, barging him with all his might into the wall. The guard slammed his head hard and fell, knocking over one of the tables. He lay still, stunned. Will had only a few seconds. He glanced back towards Samantha. She waved him urgently towards the back door, getting ready to raise the alarm once he had made his escape.

He wiggled under the hatch way that led behind the bar counter on his knees and backside, rolled on his side and got awkwardly back to his feet. He needed to keep moving fast and stay unseen. He kept low and ducked through the doorway that led to a corridor stacked with boxes. Empty beer kegs lined a wall that was covered with staff notices and fliers fluttering as he hurried past. Stairs to the right led up to where he imagined Samantha and her father lived in a flat above the pub on the first and second floors. Sam had been good to her word. The back door to the courtyard was left ajar, a brick blocking it from closing shut. Outside it was pitch black, but he could just make out the rusting iron gate that led to the car park beyond. He was nearly there.

Over his shoulder he could hear Samantha let out a high-pitched scream to raise the alarm after an agreed short delay. There were raised voices, a glass smashing on the ground, commands given and boots stamping through the pub, searching for Will.

As quietly as he could manage in all the excitement with his blood pumping in his ears, he put his weight against the heavy gate made of rusting vertical iron bars and pushed. He half closed his eyes, expecting a loud scrape or screech of metal on metal, but the gate slid open silently on well-oiled hinges. He found himself in a small staff car park at the rear of the pub. It led to the cobbled alleyway and at the top of a short climb, the high street and roads heading out of town. He was taking a big chance choosing this most direct route, but he simply didn’t have the time to hide or backtrack through gardens or side streets. With a final look over his shoulder he raced up the cobbled hill to the bottom of the high street, panting loudly, his hands still tied behind his back. He darted left and jogged along the narrow lane lined with rows of white washed cottages and town houses on either side. His footsteps echoed along the road that led east towards the waterfront marinas down river. A forest of masts and rigging lay ahead. A boatyard full of yachts and vessels in various states of disrepair, forever waiting for a final lick of paint or their turn for the huge crane to cradle them back into the slow running waters of the Lymington river. Beyond the boatyard lay open fields and country lanes. He craved the darkness and solitude of the asphalt footpath that led back towards Hurst.