Read Online The Hostage by Duncan Falconer - Free Book Online Page B

him. He was the one. It did not seem possible, even as he lay there. They had talked about it, the recruits together, during breaks in training, or at night in their beds, and sometimes at the bar in the camp after a few beers. It was like a ghoulish fairytale, the kind of horror that could only happen to someone else.
    Spinks started to cry. His life flashed in front of him, with plenty of time to see the details. Life was not so meaningless, even the old days, the boring pointless days of his youth. He wanted to live. And he would, for quite some time he expected. But every second of that would be horror. The stories of what they did to captives were unthinkable. If they could slowly torture to death one of their own, what would they do to him, a British spy, a hated undercover man?
    Tears rolled off his face into his ears. His chest shook with painful heaves as his fear took hold. He scratched the top of his coffin. His nails broke. He didn’t care. He scratched and pushed with his feet as he cried. But it was no good. His coffin was too strong. He gave up the effort and just cried. He wallowed in his nightmare for a few moments more, and then even that was too exhausting to maintain. He eventually lay there, quietly, listening to his breathing above the sound of the engine. He moved a hand to touch the burning pain below his shoulder. It was wet. He felt under his shirt and found a small tender hole in his flesh. Images of his run and fall came back to him. He could see the scene more clearly now than when it happened. He was in Dungannon. They were still in the North. Then he remembered his ace.
    Despite the intense pain in his chest, Spinks twisted himself in the confined space so that he could manoeuvre his arm down into his underpants and between his fatty legs. He reached under his balls to where it had moved and felt its hard plastic edge. Brennan had thoroughly searched for it but had stopped short of Spinks’s most dank nether regions. Had it remained where Spinks originally placed it, loosely in the front of his undies, Brennan might have found it when he pulled them down. He gripped the miniature transponder in his fingertips and carefully pulled it out.

Chapter 4
    The Gazelle left Lough Neagh behind and headed south-west for the border. It climbed just high enough to pass over a line of high-tension power cables then dropped majestically to rooftop height again, still going flat out. The pilot was concentrating too hard now to be distracted by the rollicking he had received from the thug beside him and Camelot’s commanding officer. He was doing what he had been trained to do for all those months in Germany not more than a year ago. Fast and low. He was good at it too. Had Stratton not been so rude and perhaps stroked him a little he might not have been so wet about it. He decided to show this brute a thing or two about flying.
    Stratton checked the map even though he knew the area well. After following the M1 for a short distance they cut a line for Aughnacloy, leaving Dungannon a few miles to the right of them.
    ‘Give me five hundred feet,’ Stratton ordered. The pilot mumbled something that sounded like ‘five hundred’ and complied, adjusting the pitch just a little and the framework shuddered and the thud of the rotor-blades deepened as they took a larger bite out of the air. The increased g-force was perceptible as the slender craft ascended then levelled out.
    ‘That’s the border, along there,’ Stratton informed the pilot, making sure he knew exactly where they were.
    ‘I’m aware exactly where the border is,’ the pilot replied curtly.
    I’ll bet he is, thought Stratton. Air Corp pilots from his unit had inadvertently crossed it on a number of occasions. One idiot had even flown to the town of Monaghan, ten miles inside the Republic, thinking it was the Northern Irish town of Armagh. He actually landed on the heli-pad of the police station and climbed out and waved at some officers