Dick Francis - Crossfire

I stepped back through the post-and-rail fence and climbed carefully and clink-free up the hill, keeping off the tarmac surface to reduce noise, listening and watching for anything unusual. Halfway up the drive, I checked the spot where the previous evening I had placed a stick leaning on a small stone. A car's tire would have had to disturb it to pass by, but the stick was still in place. No one had driven up this hill overnight, not unless they had come by motorbike.

I wasn't sure whether I should be pleased or disappointed.

Even so, I was still watchful as I approached the house, keeping within the line of vegetation to one side of a small overgrown front lawn. The sky was lightening in the east with a lovely display of blues, purples and reds. In spite of being completely at home in the dark, I had always loved the coming of the dawn, the start of a new day.

The arrival of the sun, bringing light and warmth and driving away the cold and darkness of the night, was like a piece of daily magic, revered and worshipped by man and beast alike. How does it happen? And why? Let us just be thankful that it did. If the sun went out, we would all be in the poop, and no mistake.

The rim of the fiery ball popped up over the horizon and flooded the hillside with an orange glow, banishing the gloom from beneath the bushes.

I silently tried the doors of the house. They were still locked.

I went right around the house, across the gravel turning area and back into the familiar stable yard beyond. In the bright morning light it looked very different from the rain-soaked space of the evening before. The stables had been built as a rectangular quadrangle with stalls along three sides, with the fourth open end facing the house.

First I went down to the far end of the left-hand block, knelt down, and carefully picked up all the shards of glass that still lay on the concrete below the window I'd broken. I placed them all carefully back through the window and out of sight. I had no way of replacing the glass pane, but one had to look closely to see that it was missing.

I walked down the row of stalls to my prison cell and opened both leaves of the stable door, hooking them open so that no one could quickly shut me in again before I could react.

I searched around the stall once more, mostly for my watch, but also in case I had missed anything else in the murk of the previous evening. I found nothing other than the small pile of my own excrement nicely drying next to the wall beneath where the ring had been secured. I knew that Special Forces teams such as the British SAS or the American Delta Force, when dropped in behind enemy lines, were trained not to leave any trace of their presence, and that included collecting their own feces in sealable plastic bags and keeping them in their packs.

In the absence of a suitable plastic bag, I decided to leave mine exactly where they were.

I quickly searched the stall next door, the one where I had found my prosthetic leg and my coat. My watch wasn't there, either. Damn it, I thought. I really liked that watch.

I closed and rebolted the stable doors and spent a moment or two checking that the positions of the bolts were precisely as I had found them. Now all I needed was a place to hide and wait.

I thought of using one of the other stables farther along, but I quickly rejected the idea. For one thing, I would have had no obvious route of retreat if things started going badly. And second, I really did not want my enemy to spot that the bolts were not properly shut and simply to lock me in as they passed, maybe even unaware that I was waiting inside. I'd had my fill of being locked in stables for this week.

In the end I found the perfect location.

Across the concrete stable yard, opposite the block of stalls in which I'd been imprisoned, there was a second row of stables facing them. In the middle of the row, there was a passageway that ran right through the building from front to rear. The passage had a door in it, on the stable-yard end, but the latch was a simple lever, not a bolt. The door was made from slats of wood screwed to a simple frame, with inch-wide gaps between the slats to allow the wind to blow through. The door had a spring near the hinge to keep it closed, but that would have not been there as a security measure, merely to keep the door shut so as to prevent any loose horses from getting through and escaping.

I lifted the latch, pulled open the door and went through the passageway. Behind the stables was a muck heap, the pile of soiled straw and wood-chip bedding where the stable staff would dump the horse dung ready for the manure man to collect periodically and sell to eager gardeners. Except that this muck heap hadn't been cleared for a long while, and there were clumps of bright green grass growing through the straw on its surface.

The passageway had obviously been placed there to provide the access to the muck heap from the stable yard. And it made an ideal hiding place.

Out the back, I found an empty blue plastic drum that would do well as a seat, and I was soon sitting behind the door in the passageway, watching and waiting for my enemy to arrive.

I longed to have my trusty SA80 assault rifle beside me, with fixed bayonet. Or better still, a gimpy with a full belt of ammunition.

Instead, all I had was my sword, but it was drawn from its scabbard and ready for action.

I waited a long time.

I couldn't see the sun from my hiding place, but I could tell t from the movement of the shadows that many hours had passed, a fact borne out by the clock readout on the screen of my cell phone when I turned it on briefly to check.

I drank some of the milk, and went on waiting.

No one came.

Every so often I would stand up and walk back and forth a few times along the short passageway to get the blood moving in my legs. But I didn't want to go out into the stable yard in case my quarry arrived whilst I was there.

I began to wish that I had chosen a spot where I could see the gate at the bottom of the drive. From my hiding place in the passageway, I wouldn't have any warning of an arrival before they were upon me.

I went over and over the scenario, rehearsing it in my mind.

I fully expected that my would-be murderer would arrive up the driveway by car, drive across the gravel turning area, through the open gateway into the stable yard, and park close to the stall where he would expect me still to be. My plan was to leave my hiding place just as he entered the stable, to move silently and quickly across the yard, and simply to lock him into my erstwhile prison cell almost before he had a chance to realize that I wasn't still hanging there, dead.

What would happen next remained a little hazy in my mind. Much might depend on who it was. A young fit man would be able to escape over the walls and through the tack room, as I had done. An elderly or overweight adversary would prove less of a problem. I would simply be able to leave them in the stable for a bit of their own medicine. But would I leave them there to die?

And what would I do if my enemy turned out to be more than one person?

It was a question I had pondered all morning. An unconscious man, even a one-legged unconscious man, was heavy and cumbersome to move. Could one person have had enough strength to carry me into the stable and also to hold me up while padlocking me to the ring? If so, he must be a very strong individual, and escape through the tack-room window would be a real possibility.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that there must have been at least two of them. And that put a completely different slant on things. Would I consider taking on an enemy that outnumbered me by two to one, or even more?

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, the father of battle tactics, stated that "If you are in equal number to your enemy, then fight if you are able to surprise; if you are fewer, then keep away."