Hard Knocks

by Zoe Sharp

  Shit! I jerked to my feet and began to make a dash for the doorway into the darkened room next door. I didn’t stop there, but went full-pelt for the exit, hoping shock had gained me enough of a head start.

  I almost made it.

  I was only half a dozen strides from the outer doorway when I felt Rebanks make a grab for the back of my jacket. His fingers closed down hard, and I was caught. In the darkness my capture took on nightmare proportions. I fought down the spike of panic and tried to rely on cool, logical thought.

  He hadn’t seen my face near the cage, didn’t know it was me. It was dark enough in the outer room so if I could escape now, I could get away with this. I hadn’t zipped my jacket up and, all too briefly, I considered jettisoning it. Pointless to leave it behind. It would lead them straight to me.

  Instead, I braked suddenly and dodged sideways. Rebanks had been at full stretch reaching for me. The additional movement unbalanced him. He stumbled, went down onto his knees, but he didn’t let go.

  Using his hold on my jacket to steady me, I locked down hard on his wrist, pivoted on my right leg and kicked him, twice, with my left foot where I guessed his body would be. The first blow landed square in his diaphragm, in the fleshy vee just beneath his ribcage. I heard the explosive whoosh as his lungs were blasted empty. He floundered for air, his grip slackening.

  Even though I couldn’t see any more than a dim outline, I instinctively understood the size and the shape of him. I could map the vulnerable areas of his body. Before he’d recovered enough to shout, my second kick connected to his throat, straight across his windpipe.

  His hands fell away. He dropped backwards and rolled slowly onto his side, making quiet little gasping and gulping sounds that were hideous in their softness.

  I didn’t stop to check how badly I’d hurt him. It was enough to know that I had. At that moment, I really didn’t care.

  I ran.

  I ran out of the building, heedless of who might be waiting in ambush outside, and hared along the concrete path back towards the house. It was the most exposed route, but it was the quickest, too. I’d hoped that the alarm in the range might have been linked to the Manor’s entire system, to add confusion, but there my luck failed me. The only sounds came from behind me.

  I reached the house and flattened against the wall, burying myself into the ivy that clung to the stonework. The alarm was clearly audible across the grounds from there. It must have been wired in to some sort of central control system in any case, because lights had suddenly come on in the centre section of the house. The instructors’ quarters.

  I had to suppress a gasp of shock when a door was thrown open less than four metres from me. Two dark figures rushed out. They pounded back along the path in the direction of the building. The kind of power that sprinters have, born of muscle.

  I waited, silent except for the thunder of my heart, until they’d almost disappeared from view. Then I slipped out of my hiding place and back into the house.

  I resisted the urge to run back to my room. On that floor it would have sounded like a stampede. Mind you, with the amount of noise going on in there anyway, nobody might have noticed.

  I darted up the main staircase, hearing shouting and running feet above and below me. Then I tiptoed along the edges of the corridor until I reached the women’s dormitory. I opened the door as little as I could get away with, and slid through the gap into the room. I closed it quickly and stilled in the darkness that met me. Nothing.

  I crossed to the bathroom, closed the door and stripped down to my T-shirt and knickers. Then I flushed the loo, just in case, washed my hands, and padded back across to my bed, bundling my clothes into my locker as I did so.

  As I lay awake, listening to the far-off noises of panic and disorder, a terrible coldness swept over me. I began to shiver violently, like I was in the grip of a fever. The bedclothes suddenly felt chilled and damp against my skin.

  I told myself, over and over, that I’d only done what I had to. That I’d acted in self defence. I hadn’t hit Rebanks hard enough to do him any real harm. Hadn’t hit him hard enough to kill him . . .

  But I knew I had.

  I went over it again and again in slow-motion replay. The first blow to his solar plexus, I recognised with a sickly taste in the back of my mouth, had winded him, effectively silenced him. It could have been enough to allow me to escape. I should have made it enough. Should have taken that chance.

  The second blow was the killer in every sense of the word. Running down either side of the trachea are the vagus nerves. They control just about everything of importance in the body, from the heart and lungs to the abdominal organs. Hit the vagus nerves hard enough and your victim ceases to breathe, his heartbeat stutters, his nervous system crashes.

  And then he dies.

  I remembered again the dreadful noises Rebanks had made as he’d fallen. I shut my eyes, but it only made the images in my head more vivid.

  I hadn’t hesitated. Not for a second. I was in danger and I’d reacted with potentially deadly force. Perhaps if the army had known what was inside me, what I would eventually turn into, they might not have been so keen to let me go.

  It seemed like I lay there for hours, wrestling with my conscience. According to the red digital figures of my alarm clock, it was actually seven minutes before the door was rammed open and the lights flashed on.

  Elsa sat up almost as a reflex action, with a startled cry. I raised myself up on my elbow and engineered a groggy, just-woken-from-sleep expression onto my face. Jan barely stirred under the blankets.

  Gilby stood in the doorway glaring at the three of us, with O’Neill by his shoulder. They both had faces that should have come with a severe weather warning.

  “All right, let’s have everyone out of their beds and downstairs immediately!” Gilby rapped out.

  With reluctance I didn’t have to feign, I pushed back the covers and swung my legs out of bed, trying to ignore the way O’Neill’s eyes flicked over them.

  “Major, what is the meaning of this, please?” Elsa demanded, her German accent becoming more pronounced as it tended to do, I’d noticed, when she was angry or upset. She groped for her glasses from the bedside table and peered at the clock.

  “We’ve had an incident, Frau Schmitt,” he said shortly. “One of my staff has been seriously assaulted.”

  Elsa gaped at him. “And you think one of us was responsible?” The incredulity was clear in her voice. “When did this ‘incident’ take place?”

  The Major checked his watch automatically. “About fifteen minutes ago,” he said, but his anger was beginning to dissipate into discomfort. Elsa, I considered, must have been a formidable police officer. Jan had come round by this time and was eyeing the intruders with some malevolence.

  “Then you are wasting your time looking here,” Elsa dismissed contemptuously. “We have all been asleep in our beds, as you can plainly see.”

  “All of you?” the Major said sharply. “None of you has been outside?”

  Elsa glanced briefly in my direction, sending my pulse rate skittering. “Both Jan and Charlie have been to the bathroom,” she said solemnly, “but I hardly feel that counts against them.”

  “Nevertheless,” Gilby said, his face hardening as he recognised her ironic tone, “I must insist that all of you are searched downstairs.”

  That suggestion brought a brief, but to-the-point expletive from Jan. Elsa regarded the Major coldly. “I do not think so, Major,” she said. “And if you insist in this matter I will have no alternative but to press charges for sexual harassment against you and your men. I am sure Charlie and Jan will agree with this.”

  We both nodded. It’s difficult to retain any degree of authority when you’re facing someone who’s fully clothed and standing, and you’re lying down in a flannelette nightie, but Elsa managed it with style. And besides, she knew her law. It would have taken a better man than Gilby to have defied her.

  In the end he gave a f
rustrated short nod, his neck rigid, and retreated. His control was such that he didn’t even slam the door behind him. For a few moments after they’d gone there was silence.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” Jan demanded.

  Elsa shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure.”

  There was something in her voice that made me glance towards her. I found her watching me thoughtfully. “If you are going to expect us to cover for you in future, Charlie,” she said calmly, “it would be a courtesy if you would explain to us what it is that you are up to.”

  Eighteen

  I fobbed Elsa and Jan off. Of course I did. Jan in particular scowled as I made excuses about having been outside talking to Sean on the mobile and come rushing back in when I heard the alarm go off. I told them I hadn’t wanted to get into trouble, to get involved.

  If only they knew the kind of trouble I might be in.

  As it was, my lame piece of invention was rewarded by looks of disbelief and even of reproach from both women. Jan would keep asking insistent questions about where exactly I’d been, and what exactly I’d been doing, as if she was deliberately trying to increase Elsa’s suspicion of me. I did my best to ignore them. After all, I had other more pressing things on my mind.

  Eventually we turned out the lights again. I lay awake in the darkness and listened to their breathing soften and slow, but my own sleep didn’t come easy.

  The panic was a trapped beast inside me, thrashing to get out. Keeping it caged took all my concentration as I forced myself to face up to the possibility that I might have killed a man.

  And it wasn’t the first time.

  The first time I’d been under intense pressure, intense threat. It wasn’t so difficult to convince anyone that I’d acted in self defence on the most primitive level. Kill or be killed. I wasn’t quite so optimistic of getting away with the same plea twice. Not in these circumstances.

  The guilt and the sheer weight of what I’d done settled slowly onto me. I could feel it crushing down, layer upon layer. Weight without measure, like rock. I buckled under the force of it.

  The thoughts swam round and round as the digital figures on my alarm clock marched inexorably on, out of one day and into the next. It was only then that I finally surrendered into fitful slumber.

  Hardly surprising then, that I was wasted during the morning run. Mind you, so was everybody else. The ones that hadn’t decided to quit, at any rate. Another two people had taken the night’s events as the last straw. I gathered from a disgruntled Romundstad that Gilby had given them all the third degree in the wee small hours, despite protests somewhat more vehement than Elsa had put forward.

  It went to show, I thought grimly, that he hadn’t really believed a woman capable of inflicting Rebanks’s injuries. The bile climbed up the back of my throat, burning brightly when I swallowed it down again.

  Todd was in charge of phys, as usual, but for once he didn’t push us to our limits, which was unusually lenient of him. I suppose what had happened to Rebanks, coming on top of watching Blakemore die down in the ravine the day before, was an experience that would have a subduing effect on anyone.

  Or maybe he was taking it steady because he had O’Neill out with him. The scarred instructor ran with a grimace of stony determination twisting his face further out of kilter. Every now and then I caught him with a hand to his ribs, like he’d got a stitch. But when Todd jogged back and threw him a single enquiring glance, it was met with an angry glare.

  “So, what do you reckon’s gone on then?” said a panting voice by my shoulder, and I turned to find Declan running alongside me.

  I shrugged. It required less breath than speech.

  “Old Gilby was going spare last night,” he went on. “I don’t know what’s happened to Rebanks, but it can’t be good if he can’t even describe who clouted him, can it?”

  “No,” I managed, “I suppose not.”

  Declan paused. “You know, of course, that Hofmann was outside last night.”

  That broke my stride. “Hofmann? What on earth was he doing?”

  “Said he’d gone out for a last cigarette,” Declan gasped. “But he came bolting in when those alarms went off, I can tell you.”

  We ran another dozen strides or so in silence while I let that sink in. Then I ventured, “How did Gilby react to that?”

  Declan grinned at me. “Ah now, girl, d’you think we’d rat on the man?” he demanded, adding, “Even if he is a big numb German.”

  This morning, Todd didn’t put us through any extra tortures on the dew-misted grass in front of the house. Instead, when we got back we were allowed to fall back to a walk and trudge wearily straight across the gravel to the main doorway.

  My eyes searched for Hofmann’s broad figure and found him almost immediately. As if aware of my scrutiny, he glanced round, his gaze sweeping across me as he did so. Surely, if it was Hofmann who’d been watching outside and who’d followed me into the armoury, he must have seen enough to know my identity, mustn’t he? But there was no hint of recognition on his face.

  Then I remembered that flash of cunning I’d seen in him after I’d confronted McKenna, and I couldn’t be sure.

  Major Gilby was waiting for us inside the hallway. Waiting and watching. He didn’t move at our approach, so we were forced to part and flow round him, keeping our heads down, trying not to be noticed. He was like a stockman eyeing up the herd for the weak and the slow.

  There was that stillness to him again, that single-minded ruthlessness unveiled now. I could well believe that here was a man who’d marched his prisoners across a minefield without a second thought and had satisfied himself that it was the logical thing to do.

  As for me, I daren’t make eye contact. I had a nasty feeling that I wouldn’t be able to hide what he might see written there. The urge to break down under that scrutiny and confess what I’d done was almost overwhelming.

  ***

  Breakfast was a solemn affair. The students were still shell-shocked from the events of the last couple of days. Rebanks’s abrupt and apparently unexplained departure was just the latest in a catalogue of events designed to make even the most dedicated trainee bodyguard begin to doubt his or her calling.

  None of the depleted group of instructors was any more chatty. I noticed that the dining hall staff had used a smaller top table, so the two empty places were not so glaringly obvious.

  When the Major came in with amendments to the day’s schedule, he couldn’t help but take in the lack of focus within the group. The apathy was coming off everyone in waves.

  “This morning we’ll be doing a little team building exercise on the assault course,” he announced. “You’ll need to present yourselves at the front entrance at oh-eight-hundred.” For a moment he looked about to say more, but he closed his mouth with a snap and stiffly left the room.

  I knew that I should really have used the intervening time to call Sean and update him on the latest events before we went out on the assault course, but when the Major’s deadline rolled round I hadn’t plucked up the courage to do so. How could I tell him what I’d done now without also having to reveal what had gone before?

  Besides, I don’t know if Jan and Elsa had made a pact between them to stop me getting into any more trouble, but one or other of them seemed to be there whenever I turned around.

  Todd, O’Neill and Figgis were all waiting for us on the gravel when we went back outside, but for once they didn’t give us a hard time for being late. It wasn’t hard to understand why.

  Pulled up just about where the Major’s new car had been delivered was another transporter, but this held a very different load.

  The remains of Blakemore’s FireBlade had been retrieved from the site of the accident and had been brought to Einsbaden Manor. For what purpose I can only guess. I don’t know how the police work in Germany, but I would have expected them to want to hang on to the wreckage of the bike to examine it for evidence of another vehicle’s involvement in the c
rash. Looks like the Major had managed to successfully fudge the verdict to suit his own purposes.

  We watched in silence as the driver dragged out the ramps and removed the webbing straps that had held the bike’s carcass onto the load bed. Not that it was going anywhere. The buckled front wheel was bent right back into the radiator, the forks twisted well out of true.

  Gilby appeared at this point, rapping out sharp commands in German that the driver should drop his load off in the car park at the rear of the building. With a sigh the driver lifted the ramps again, muttering that the bike would not even push, he’d had to winch it on to the truck, and he would need a hand to unload it.

  The Major hesitated, as though he realised that using any of the students for such a task wasn’t in the best possible taste, but he had little choice. He commandeered Hofmann and Craddock, the biggest of the lads, to help the instructors assist the driver.