Stephen Leather - Breakout

Every instinct would normally have told him not to use such an obvious and visible lying-up place, and instead he would either have pressed on or found a place to lie up out on the mountainside. But Scouse’s condition was now worrying him so much that he felt his only option was to use the shelter the hut would provide to allow him to rest and recover a little overnight. If he was still sick and dizzy in the morning, they would have to find a swift way down from the mountains and hope that they would not find themselves walking in to a sicario ambush along the way.

He ran back along the track and rounded the bend to see Scouse sprawled in the dirt. His heart missed a beat and he sprinted the last few yards and began shaking his friend. ‘Scouse! SCOUSE!’

There was an agonising pause before Scouse opened his eyes and looked up at him. ‘S’all right,’ he said drowsily. ‘Just resting.’

‘I’ve found us a better place to rest up,’ Harper said. ‘Come on, I’ll help you.’

He got Scouse to his feet, put his arm around him and they shuffled along the trail to the hut. It was less than a mile but took them almost an hour to cover the ground. He helped Scouse into the hut and propped him against the wall while he went back outside and gathered a few armfuls of dead grasses from the slopes around the hut. He spread them on the floor of the hut to give a little insulation from the cold stones, and made Scouse lie down on them. The sun was now touching the horizon and the temperature outside was falling dramatically, but their body heat was already starting to make the hut feel a little warmer.

‘I’m going to stand-to outside and keep watch until after dark,’ Harper said. ‘No one will be moving along the plateau or this track after that but while I’m doing that, you just rest up and try to get some sleep.’ Harper fell silent as he realised that his words were superfluous - Scouse was already quietly snoring.

Harper went back outside, closed the door and crouched against the wall, watching the track in both directions until the last glow of the sunset had faded and he could see no more than a handful of yards. Then he went back into the hut, trying to ease the door open and close it again without disturbing Scouse, though he was pretty sure he could have detonated a grenade without waking his friend. He lay down next to him, huddling together for warmth, closed his eyes and slept.

CHAPTER 22

Harper woke before dawn, leaving Scouse still snoring gently, he let himself out of the hut, rubbed a handful of snow on his face to give himself a rudimentary wash and wake himself up, and then settled down to keep watch until dawn. He kept his eyes on the trail and the plateau below him as the skies lightened, and he waited until the line of the sunrise had gilded the snow-covered summits of the mountains and begun inching down the upper slopes before he went back into the hut to wake Scouse. ‘The sun’s up and we need to be moving,’ said Harper as his friend opened his eyes. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Too early to say,’ Scouse said, ‘but better for some kip, for sure.’

‘Okay, neck some water and then let’s see how we go. Don’t be a hero, though. If you start to feel dizzy or like you’re going puke, tell me. People can die of altitude sickness, so let’s not take any chances, right? I’ve not got you this far just to lose you here.’

They set off along the trail and Harper was relieved to see that Scouse was now moving at a reasonable pace without showing any obvious signs of discomfort. ‘Maybe all you needed was a bit of shut-eye,’ he said.

‘Maybe, though what I really need now is a full English breakfast with all the trimmings: bacon, sausage, egg, black pudding, beans, mushrooms, fried bread and a shedload of toast and tea on the side.’

‘Thanks, that’s really helping,’ Harper said. ‘The only thing worse than hearing my empty stomach rumbling is to have to listen to someone telling me all the things I could be putting in it.’ He grinned. ‘Brown sauce or red?’

Scouse laughed. ‘Gotta be HP sauce,’ he said. ‘And being the rebel I am, I often throw on a few picked onions.’

‘You’re an animal,’ said Harper. He kept a constant watch on the track ahead of and behind them, and paused every few hundred yards to rake the plateau and the ridge on the far side of it with his gaze, but there was nothing to worry him as they moved steadily further west. The mountains still spread out to the north and south of them, but they could see the way ahead beginning to open out as they crossed the watershed and the plateau began to slowly dip towards the west. From the map, Harper could see that the Inca Road would soon begin to curve round to the north, following the line of the mountains towards the ancient, far distant Inca strongholds of Cusco and Machu Picchu in Peru, and he was just beginning to think about when would be the right moment to break away from it when he saw a figure moving along the trail towards them. He was too far away yet to distinguish much about him, but he seemed to have an unnaturally bulky outline.

‘We have company,’ he said. ‘And either that guy’s extremely tall and broad-shouldered or more likely, he’s either wearing a bergen or carrying a rocket-launcher on his back.’

‘Let’s hope it’s a bergen then,’ Scouse said, screwing his eyes up as he peered into the distance.

Harper had immediately looked for cover but there was none to be had and in any case, there was every reason to believe that the figure would already have spotted them too.

‘What do we do?’ Scouse said.

‘We just keep walking,’ Harper said, resting his hand on the butt of the Colt in his waistband. ‘If it’s trouble, we’ll just have to deal with it.’

He kept a wary eye on the figure as the distance between them narrowed, but then began to relax as the upper part of the outline resolved itself into the square, boxy shape of a bergen and he saw that the figure looked European and was grey haired, bearded, and wearing hiking shorts. ‘If he’s a sicario ,’ Harper said, ‘he’s not like any I’ve come across before.’ He held up a hand in greeting as the man approached, but kept his other hand on the butt of the Colt, just in case.

‘ Buenos dias ,’ the stranger said, in a thick German accent.

‘ Guten morgen ,’ Harper said with a grin.

The German smiled. ‘ Danke schon , or should I say Thank you and good morning? I was just beginning to wonder if I would walk the rest of the trail and never see another soul and now here you are.’

‘So you’ve not passed anyone else?’ Harper said.

‘Not going your way, no. There were two men just off the trail a few kilometres back but they didn’t look all that friendly, so I didn’t detour to say hello.’

‘Bolivians?’ Harper said, trying to sound disinterested.

The German shrugged. ‘They looked like it, Latinos certainly. I presume they were hunters because they had rifles, though what they’d be hunting up here I have no idea. Perhaps there are some wolves or wild guanaco in the mountains, though I haven’t seen a sign of any.’ He waved a goodbye and continued down the trail.

‘Sorry mate, but we’re going to have to do a bit more climbing,’ Harper said to Scouse as the German walked away. ‘We’ll have to move up to the ridge and work our way around them before we drop down again.’

‘Better that than dying, I suppose,’ Scouse said, though his tone of voice suggested there wasn’t much in it.

‘We don’t know if they’re lying up in ambush or moving towards us, so the first thing to do is get well clear of the trail.’ He scanned the mountainside, searching for the line of the most gradual ascent he could find and then led the way up, pausing frequently to scan the trail and the plateau below him, and to check on Scouse, who was once more labouring up the mountainside in his wake.