HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three

by Zoe Sharp

  The Manor’s CQB range had been built in a small gully in the woods with banks that rose to provide natural cover for wild shots on either side. All told, it was about two hundred metres long and affected by a stillness that was unnerving.

  Regular gunfire obviously kept the animal and bird population at bay. The lack of lifesigns gave the ground a contaminated feel to it. Even the weak pale sunshine seemed reluctant to climb over the banks and wash down onto the floor of the gully. It was a place shunned by nature and to be avoided.

  Trying to suppress a shudder, I walked on. I concentrated on keeping my shoulders easy, keeping my breathing light. Rebanks walked a careful distance behind me, keeping score.

  The second target had been placed low and left. It burst upwards out of a pile of pine needles less than three metres away, with a suddenness that took me by the throat.

  I just had time to put another two rounds into the head before it fell away as though responding directly to the hit.

  Rebanks had explained to us at the pre-shoot briefing that there would be six targets, appearing at a variety of distances, and for random periods ranging from four to eight seconds.

  He’d been lying.

  Whatever they’d been doing for the others, I knew damned well that for me they were only holding their upright position for a two-second maximum. I wondered why that should surprise me. I should have expected special treatment.

  All right then.

  There was an old tree fifteen metres away to my right. The bark of its trunk was lacerated with pale scars. When the next target started to flip out from behind it I was already twisting into position. Even before it had locked flat I punched the first round through at an angle, raking out a two-inch splinter from the back board. Instinct told me the second was a clean hit, but the target wasn’t around long enough for me to check.

  Three and four came up so close together in time and range I nearly didn’t get to them, but I was dialled in now. Utterly focused. And damned determined that they weren’t going to beat me at this game. The SIG wasn’t just in my hand, it was part of my hand, an extension of my arm, part of me.

  By the time the targets dropped, Rebanks had another pair of kills to add to my total.

  Kills. Somewhere out in these woods Kirk had been killed. Mown down either just as his back was turned, or when he’d already started running.

  Running for his life.

  Who shot you, Kirk? What did you see, or know, or do, that made you an unacceptable threat to them? My feet carried me forwards while my mind reached back, trying to understand the motivation of the men who’d gunned him down.

  Target number five was a sneaky one, tucked away at the bottom of a log pile. I was almost at the far end of the range before six came up, a long walk designed to stretch and snap the nerves. This one didn’t drop away after I’d slotted it, but remained upright and quivering, signalling the end of the run.

  I lowered the gun, but kept the muzzle pointing straight down the range, aware for the first time of the buzz of tension in my neck and upper arms. I hunched them, hearing my vertebrae click and pop as they settled.

  Rebanks came up on my right with a peculiar little smile on his face. He made a couple of marks on his clipboard and started to turn. As he did so, I saw the alarm bloom in his face.

  “Look out, look out!”

  He grabbed for my shoulders, started to pull me over to the side towards him. I ended up falling onto his legs in a tangle, taking him with me. I twisted as I went down, keeping the SIG level. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the outline looming in from the left, recognised the threat as another target. Number seven of a supposed six. Another of their mind games.

  The sun was in my eyes, making the target little more than a dark silhouette. I aimed by instinct as I went down, but in that split-second before I fired I realised there was something different about that target.

  Something wrong.

  I fought to twist my hand even as my finger tightened irrevocably on the trigger. The SIG twitched as it discharged with a force that jarred my whole arm. The moving parts locked back on an empty magazine.

  Rebanks rolled out from under me and climbed to his feet without speaking. He batted the wet earth off his camouflage trousers before he glanced down at me.

  “Congratulations, Charlie,” he said then, his voice ironic. “Weren’t you paying attention when we told you there’d only be six targets? That was your principal you’ve just hit, running to you for help and protection.”

  He waved towards the target. Still lying on the ground I turned my head looked at the cut-out figure, less than four metres away.

  I could now tell it was a fairly realistic picture of a frightened-looking young girl with long hair. She was not holding a weapon and did indeed seem to be running directly towards me, frozen in mid-stride.

  The weak winter sunlight streamed through the hole I’d shot high in her right shoulder.

  ***

  Nobody else managed to shoot the principal during the CQB exercise. Mind you, hardly anyone managed to hit all the other targets either, even though they stayed up for what seemed to me to be half an hour a go.

  Declan was the last man down the range. His shooting was so wild that Rebanks stuck to his back like an overcoat in high summer, leaving no chance that the Irishman was going to swing round and clip him by mistake. Even Declan didn’t manage to hit the girl at the end, although that was more by luck than judgement. He fired at her when Rebanks jumped him, but he missed.

  Afterwards, O’Neill collected up the SIGs and he and Major Gilby climbed into one of the Audis and disappeared back towards the Manor without any comments about our performance. Or lack of it.

  The rest of us got to walk back. I trudged along at the tail end of the group, a dark cloud of gloom settling over me. They’d set me up and I’d fallen for it. The thought sat badly on my stomach like a heavy meal.

  “They weren’t being fair on you,” said a voice to my left. I turned my head to find Elsa walking alongside and watching me. I remembered my last conversation with Sean. Was Elsa the German security service plant?

  I forced a shrug. “You try and stick your head above the parapet,” I said, “you shouldn’t be surprised when people try and blow it off.”

  “The targets stayed upright for much longer for everyone else,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken, her voice thoughtful. “They weren’t being fair on you,” she repeated. “Yet still you managed to hit them all.”

  “Yeah,” I said, casting her a tired glance, “even the one I wasn’t supposed to.”

  “When that last one came up at the end for me, Rebanks just nudged my arm. He didn’t grab me and pull me over.” She was frowning now. “You never stood a chance of seeing that it wasn’t the same as the others. They expected you to fail – but you know that, don’t you?”

  “They wanted me to,” I said, managing to find half a smile from somewhere. “But I don’t always do what people want.”

  “They’re going to make it harder for you next time,” she said, her face serious. “What have you done that they’re trying to trip you up all the time?”

  Now, there was a question. Did Gilby’s men know about my dual role, or did they just not like it when they came across a woman who showed a spark. And why was Elsa so interested all of a sudden?

  “I’m not the only one who’s trying to make life difficult for themselves,” I said, keeping my eyes on the needle-coated path in front of me.

  I felt her stiffen. “What do you mean?”

  “That lecture,” I said, glancing at her. “You must have known Gilby was going to take it badly.”

  Either the German woman was a better actress than I’d given her credit for, or I’d genuinely thrown her off balance. She looked sincerely confused. “Why should he have done?” she demanded, and there was defiance in her lifted chin.

  I stopped for a moment, staring at her, but could detect no hint of guile.

  “You r
eally don’t know, do you?” I said slowly.

  “Know what?” she said. Bewilderment gave way to frustration. “Charlie, please explain.”

  I turned and started walking again. We’d fallen a little way back from the rest of the group by now, and I felt safe to launch into the details Sean had given me about Heidi’s kidnap, and the Major’s involvement with the team who were guarding her. The trees had a convenient muffling effect, but I kept my voice low, all the same.

  I suppose I should have been more wary about giving her the information, but I figured if she was secret service, she already knew it all anyway and if she wasn’t, well I probably needed all the help I could get.

  Elsa was silent while I spoke. It was only when I’d finished and checked out her face that I saw the closed-in anger there.

  “Dumb fuck,” she bit out quietly, and went on in German along what I gathered from the tone were similar lines. Her hands were balled into fists by her sides. “I knew I never should have trusted him.”

  Now it was my turn for confusion. “Trusted who, Elsa?”

  She took a breath and made an effort to loosen up, even flicking me a short smile that didn’t reach behind the lenses of her glasses. “One of my ex-colleagues,” she said, with no small amount of bitterness. “One of my ex-husband’s colleagues, also. Someone I thought was still a friend.” She gave a derisory snort, shaking her head. “Obviously not.”

  We walked on another minute or so while I assumed she ran through a mental list of things she was probably going to do to her ex-colleague – not to mention her ex-husband – when she next got her hands on him.

  “What did he tell you?” I asked then.

  She sighed. “He told me he knew people who’d been on this course, that we would be asked to present such a lecture and he gave me the details of the Krauss case from the police file. He told me it was because he felt bad about how my husband had treated me and he wanted to help me. Now I realise he was just trying to make trouble for me. To make sure I failed. So they could all laugh behind my back.” She spat out another word in German that I didn’t understand, but it sounded like a useful piece of abuse. I stored it for later. “Bastard.”

  “Elsa,” I said carefully. “When I came back to the room yesterday, someone had been searching my stuff.”

  She frowned, distracted from her thoughts. “That’s strange,” she said at last. “I thought someone had been through my things, also. Nothing was missing, but some items were not quite as I remembered leaving them. Has anything been taken from you?”

  I thought of the 9mm Hydra-Shok, tucked safely under Shirley’s bed. “No,” I said, “but you didn’t see anyone hanging around our rooms did you?”

  She shook her head. “No, only you, me, and Jan. No one else. Do you think we should speak to the Major about this?”

  “I don’t think there’s much point,” I said, giving her a tired smile. “If it wasn’t any of us, who do you think that leaves?”

  ***

  I don’t know if Major Gilby realised we were starting to go stir crazy by the end of the fifth day, but he announced over that evening’s meal that transport had been arranged to take us into Einsbaden village to visit the local bar, if anyone was interested? He took our unanimous loud vote of approval with something akin to disappointment. As though he hadn’t expected better of us, but had hoped for it, nevertheless.

  They rolled out the same canvas-topped trucks that had picked up Declan, Elsa and me on our arrival. Was it really only five days ago? We all began piling into the back.

  Figgis and O’Neill were driving and the other instructors commandeered the comfy seats, leaving the rest of us with cattle class. Just as we were loading up Blakemore appeared in his leathers.

  “You not riding with the rest of us then?” Declan called across to him.

  “Nah, I’m riding in style, mate,” Blakemore said, grinning at him through the open visor of his helmet. He threw his leg over the FireBlade like it was a cavalry charger, hit the electric start and short shifted his way across the gravel. I admit to a pang of envy before that rorty exhaust note was drowned out by the asthmatic rattle of the truck motor cranking into life.

  It was only a relatively short trip into Einsbaden. It was too loud for conversation in the back of the truck. We sat and swayed and stared at each other in the dim light from the single flickering light bulb without attempting to speak.

  The guys had that scrubbed-up look about them. Freshly showered hair still gleaming wetly, designer shirts, and an air of hopeful anticipation. The mingling aromas of their liberal dousings of aftershave would have felled an anosmic ox at a hundred paces. It wasn’t doing much for me, that’s for sure.

  The trucks rumbled into the village square like the advance party for an invasion force. If the locals saw us coming they certainly didn’t hang out flags of welcome. When we’d rolled to a halt outside the one local drinking hole there was a stampede to be first to the bar which I didn’t try to compete with.

  As they burst noisily through the main doors, though, my fellow pupils discovered that, not surprisingly, Blakemore had beaten them to it. He was sitting at one end of the bar, looking very much at home, with a beer by his elbow and an open paperback on his knee. He grinned smugly at us when we came in, sliding a marker into the book and setting it pointedly aside as if to say, what kept you?

  “What’ll you have, Charlie?”

  I turned to find Craddock had muscled his way through to the front and was standing at the bar holding a euro note in his hand. I hesitated briefly, but there was nothing devious about the Welshman.

  “A beer would be great,” I said. “Whatever they have is fine.”

  The landlord was on nodding acquaintance with the instructors, although he seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see his customer numbers so vastly swelled for the night. He greeted the few locals who ventured in with the same stolid lack of hospitality.

  The original decorators of the place had gone for an alpine tavern look, all rough cut timbers, old-fashioned wooden skis, and cow bells. I snagged a table in a corner. It had ornately carved heavy wooden chairs at each end and rustic benches along both sides that had been polished smooth by the passage of years of hutching bottoms. I sat at one end of a bench, where I had my back to a wall and could watch the rest of the room.

  Craddock returned from the bar with two bottles of lager and no glasses. Declan was with him, and we were soon joined by Jan, Elsa, and a couple of the others whom I didn’t know well enough to confidently put names to. They all sat and we tilted the bottles.

  “Ah, but that hits the spot,” Declan said, his tone almost reverential.

  The rest of the Manor crew, once they’d found there were no local women under the age of sixty to receive the benefit of their collective charms, lost their predatory boisterous edge and seemed to settle, mentally downgrading the evening from possible pulling session to night out with the lads.

  I watched the change come over them and felt the tension ease out of my shoulders. I could almost hear the hiss as the steam escaped from my system. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been holding it in.

  The evening progressed better than it had any right to, given the circumstances. Declan bought a second round, then one of the other lads got a third in. A suitable while later, I got to my feet and waved a hand at the empty bottles cluttering the table top.

  “Same again?” I asked. Nobody came over all chivalrous on me, so I headed for the bar.

  When I returned, clutching two handfuls of lager bottles, I found O’Neill was in my place.

  “She double-tapped the lot of them, just like that?” Declan was asking. “Now that I would have liked to have seen. Why the feck couldn’t I have been one of the ones to go before her?”

  I didn’t have to ask what he was talking about. I put the beer down on the table top with more of a sharp click than I might otherwise have done. O’Neill looked up at me then and winked. He slid out of my seat and gestured
for me to regain it with exaggerated courtesy.

  “Please, be my guest,” he said, grinning. “I make it a rule never to start a fight with a lady who could kill me just as easy with either a nine-mil or a telephone.” But as he made to move past me I put my hand on his arm and stopped him.

  “Why did Rebanks do it?” I asked him quietly.

  O’Neill had the grace not to play dumb with me. He glanced across the room to where the weapons’ man was sitting, and leaned in close. The move sent a waft of beer breath gusting over me that almost made me flinch.

  “Because he didn’t think you’d got a hope in hell of hitting them,” he said, blunt with the truth of it. There was a certain amount of smug satisfaction in his voice, too. No love lost there. “I doubt he would have maxed out that one himself and he knows the position of those targets in his sleep.”