Ian Rankin - Knots And Crosses

And I thought of Reeve, who had warned me of this. Big plans indeed. Reeve was the nearest thing I had to a friend in the unit. I wondered if it had been his body dragged across the floor outside my cell. I prayed for him.

And one day they sent me food and a mug of brown water. The food looked as though it had been scooped straight from the mud-crawl and pushed through the little hole which had suddenly appeared in my door and just as suddenly vanished. I willed this cold swill into becoming a steak with two veg, and then placed a spoonful of it in my mouth. Immediately, I spat it out again. The water tasted of iron. I made a show of wiping my chin on my sleeve. I felt sure I was being watched.

‘My compliments to the chef,’ I called.

Next thing I knew, I was falling over into sleep.

I was in the air. There could be no doubt of that. I was in a helicopter, the air blowing into my face. I came round slowly, and opened my eyes on darkness. My head was in some kind of sack, and my arms were tied behind my back. I felt the helicopter swoop and rise and swoop again.

‘Awake are you?’ A butt prodded me.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Now give me the name of your regiment and the details of your mission. We’re not going to fuck around with you, sonny. So you better do it now.’

‘Get stuffed.’

‘I hope you can swim, sonny. I hope you get the chance to swim. We’re about two-hundred feet above the Irish Sea, and we’re about to push you out of this fucking chopper with your hands still tied. You’ll hit that water as though it was fucking concrete, do you know that? It may kill you or it may stun you. The fish will eat you alive, sonny. And your corpse will never be found, not out here. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

It was an official and businesslike voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Now, the name of your regiment, and the details of your mission.’

‘Get stuffed.’ I tried to sound calm. I’d be another accident statistic, killed on training, no questions asked. I’d hit that sea like a light-bulb hitting a wall.

‘Get stuffed,’ I said again, intoning to myself: it’s only a game, it’s only a game.

‘This isn’t a game, you know. Not anymore. Your friends have already spilled their guts, Rebus. One of them, Reeve I think it was, spilled his guts quite literally. Okay, men, give him the heave.’

‘Wait …’

‘Enjoy your swim, Rebus.’

Hands gripped my legs and torso. In the darkness of the sack, with the wind blowing fiercely against me, I began to feel that it had all been a grave mistake.

‘Wait …’

I could feel myself hanging in space, two-hundred feet up above the sea, with the gulls shrieking for me to be let go.

‘Wait!’

‘Yes, Rebus?’

‘Take the fucking sack off my head at least!’ I was shrieking now, desperate.

‘Let the bastard drop.’

And with that they let me go. I hung in the air for a second, then I dropped, dropped like a brick. I was falling through space, trussed up like a Christmas turkey. I screamed for one second, maybe two, and then I hit the ground.

I hit solid ground.

And lay there while the helicopter landed. People were laughing all around me. The foreign voices were back. They lifted me up and dragged me along to the cell. I was glad of the sack over my head. It disguised the fact that I was crying. Inside I was a mass of quivering coils, tiny serpents of fear and adrenaline and relief which bounced through my liver, my lungs, my heart.

The door slammed behind me. Then I heard a shuffling sound at my back. Hands fumbled at the knots of my bonds. With the hood off, it took me a few seconds to regain my sight.

I stared into a face that seemed to be my own. Another twist to the game. Then I recognised Gordon Reeve, at the same time as he recognised me.

‘Rebus?’ he said. ‘They told me you’d …’

‘They told me the same thing about you. How are you?’

‘Fine, fine. Jesus, though, I’m glad to see you.’

We hugged one another, feeling the other’s weakened but still human embrace, the smells of suffering and of endurance. There were tears in his eyes.

‘It is you,’ he said. ‘I’m not dreaming.’

‘Let’s sit down,’ I said. ‘My legs aren’t too steady.’

What I meant was that his legs weren’t too steady. He was leaning into me as if I were a crutch. He sat down thankfully.

‘How has it been?’ I asked.

‘I kept in shape for a while.’ He slapped one of his legs.

‘Doing push-ups and stuff. But I soon grew too tired. They’ve tried feeding me with hallucinogens. I keep seeing things when I’m awake.’

‘They’ve tried me with knockout drops.’

‘Those drugs, they’re something else. Then there’s the power-hose. I get sprayed about once a day I suppose. Freezing cold. Can never seem to get dry.’

‘How long do you suppose we’ve been here?’ Did I look as bad to him as he looked to me? I hoped not. He hadn’t mentioned the chopper drop. I decided to keep quiet about that one.

‘Too long,’ he was saying. ‘This is fucking ridiculous.’

‘You were always saying that they had something special in store for us. I didn’t believe you, God forgive me.’

‘This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.’

‘It is us they’re interested in though.’

‘What do you mean?’

It had been only half a thought until now, but now I was sure.

‘Well, when our sentry put his nose into the tent that night, there was no surprise in his eyes, and even less fear. I think they were both in on it from the start.’

‘So what’s this all about?’

I looked at him, sitting with his chin on his knees. We were frail creatures on the outside. Piles biting like the hungered jaws of vampire bats, mouths aching with sores and ulcers. Hair falling out, teeth loose. But there was strength in numbers. And that was what I could not understand: why had they put us together when, apart, we were both on the edge of breaking?

‘So what’s this all about?’

Perhaps they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security before really tightening the screws. The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’. Shakespeare, King Lear. I wouldn’t have known that at the time, but I know it now. Let it stand.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’ll tell us when they’re good and ready, I suppose.’

‘Are you scared?’ he said suddenly. His eyes were staring at the raddled door of our cell.

‘Maybe.’

‘You should be fucking scared, Johnny. I am. I remember once when I was a kid, some of us went along a river near our housing-scheme. It was in spate. It had been pissing down for a week. It was just after the war, and there were a lot of ruined houses about. We headed upriver, and came to a sewage-pipe. I played with older kids. I don’t know why. They made me the brunt of all their fucking games, but I stuck with them. I suppose I liked the idea of running about with kids who scared the shit out of all the kids of my own age. So that, though the older kids were treating me like shit, they gave me power over the younger kids. Do you see?’

I nodded, but he wasn’t looking.

‘This pipe wasn’t very thick, but it was long, and it was high above the river. They said I was to cross it first. Christ, I was afraid. I was so fucking scared that my legs wobbled and I froze there, halfway across. And then piss started to run down my legs out of my shorts, and they noticed that and they laughed. They laughed at me, and I couldn’t run, couldn’t move. So they left me there and went away.’

I thought of the laughter as I had been dragged away from the helicopter.

‘Did anything like that ever happen to you when you were a kid, Johnny?’