Read Online For Valour by Andy McNab - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    The next time I looked, my pursuer had emerged from behind the flank of the hill. I didn’t have time to take in every detail of his waterproof clothing and equipment, but I didn’t need to. All that mattered was the weapon he carried.
    The largest arms manufacturer in the former Soviet Republic was an