My company could have paid the fee ten times over, but, listening to my captors, who still hadn’t realised that I spoke a word of Spanish, I concluded that it was unlikely I would live to enjoy the cost-benefit analysis. As they clearly considered me a weak foreign businessman, I played the part, groaning as my shoulder and ankle began to swell against my clothes. It took very little play-acting, for they’d shackled my sprained ankle to the post and very quickly the flesh was pressing against the metal in hot, throbbing agony. Eventually, realising that a dead hostage was a useless hostage, they unshackled me and gave me a crutch to walk on, and a boy, barely fifteen years old, took me down to the nearby stream to wash my face and neck. He had a Kalashnikov, the universal weapon of all budget warriors, but he could barely hold it and I doubted if he knew how to fire the thing properly. I collapsed into the stream and, when he came to check on me, hit him round the side of the head with my crutch, beat him into submission and drowned him beneath the thin, shallow water, sitting on his spine and pressing my elbow into the back of his skull with all the weight and strength I had.
Examining my surroundings and my damaged leg, it seemed unlikely that escape would happen, and I resolved that, since I would almost certainly die in this place, I may as well die by the means of my choosing. So I limped back to the camp, preparing to go out in a blaze of glory. Somewhat embarrassingly, the first guard I came upon was having a piss by some trees and, while my sense of professionalism suggested merely snapping his neck and being done with it, I was, I concluded, not exactly SAS competent. Instead, I shot him in the buttocks, and as he screamed and the others came running, I got down on my belly and shot out the kneecaps of the first man to come into view.
To my surprise, no one else came.
Then a voice called out in broken English, “We do not want fight you!”
I replied in Spanish. “You don’t appear to have a choice.”
A pause while this information settled in. Then, “We’ll leave the map and water–clean water! And food. We’ll leave you the map, water, food. We’ll wait twenty-four hours. That will give you time to get to the truck. We’ll not follow! You take the map!”
I called back, “That’s very kind of you, but really, if you don’t mind, I think I’d rather just slog it out here and now, thank you very much.”
“No, no, no need!” he called back, and really, I was beginning to doubt the commitment of these bandits to their task. “We’ll wait twenty-four hours and go. Won’t bother you again. Good luck!”
I heard the sound of movement between the leaves, of metal things being overturned, footsteps heading away.
I must have lain there for an hour, an hour and a half, waiting for the end. The forest stirred. Ants crawled into my shirt and considered eating me, but I clearly wasn’t their choice of meal, and they crawled on. A snake slithered through the undergrowth nearby but was more afraid of me than I was of it. Dusk began to settle, and there was silence in the camp. Even the man whose kneecaps I had removed was silent. Perhaps I’d hit the femoral artery. Perhaps the pain had become too great to bear. At last, boredom more than anything else and a recollection that death was not my primary concern here pushed me to my feet, and, rifle in one hand and crutch in the other, I limped into the camp.
It was indeed deserted.
A map, water canteen and tin of cooked beans had been carefully laid out on the central table, along with a handwritten note.
The note said, in English,
“Many, many apologies.”
That was all.
I put the canteen over my shoulder, the map in my pocket and began the slow limp back to civilisation.
Whoever the bandit was, he had told the truth. I was never to see him again.
Chapter 54
Regrettably, my escape from the Argentinian forests was not, I suspected, going to be in quite the same league as leaving Pietrok-112. Certainly, the actual leaving of the facility should present no problem, for there was no reason for the guards to suspect my purpose and there is nothing as reassuring as a friendly face, a polite wave and a man heading about his–presumably vital–business. It would be once outside, in the big beyond, that movement would become difficult. Acquiring an easy means of suicide would be vital, I decided, should it seem that capture was likely. The decision which remained was this–did I risk an overland route, striking out through the vast emptiness of northern Russia, using size and space to deceive my inevitable pursuers, or did I follow transport lines and try to lose myself in the Russian transit networks, creeping my way through cities and towns towards the western borders? I was more comfortable with the latter option, but rejected it. There were too few transport networks out of Pietrok-112, too many bottlenecks which could be sealed with a simple phone call, and even were I to somehow make it to a populated area and lose myself in the crowd, I doubted if national borders or state treaties would hold back the search. I knew too much, and was both too valuable and too much of a risk to the secrecy of Vincent’s project.
Overground it would be, surviving to the best of my ability in the tundra. I had experience of living off the land, of both reading the simplest path and hiding my own trail. However, these were not the fertile lands of northern England where I had been raised, but a thousand-mile hostile nothingness. Suicide was still a firm option on the table, but death by starvation was unacceptable.
Did I have time to plan?
Time to prepare a stash, gather together the necessary tools?