by Dan Latus
‘Up to you,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Anything you want to know, just ask.’
I soon found that the main virtue of the cabin in a defensive sense was that without good information, it would be hard to find. What I didn’t know was whether or not Petrov had that information. Perhaps not, but it was best to assume he did.
Presuming that was the case, how well could the cabin be defended?
The walls consisted of solid logs, two-deep with sawdust filling the cavity. The windows were small, and there weren’t many of them. The roof was shingles, or shakes, probably with felt underneath. Not particularly strong, but steep-pitched in order to get the winter snow off fast.
Some of that was good. I reckoned that with the weapons I knew Harry possessed, we could probably hold off an attack with explosives and assault weapons for a few minutes. Not much more though. Still, it would give us time to call for help from whoever the authorities were in these parts.
It would have been longer if it weren’t for the roof. The shingles would be highly combustible, however damp they were from the incessant drizzle. A couple of petrol bombs would soon bring that lot down on top of the defenders — Harry and me, in other words. Then, of course, you would have a big blaze in a building that was entirely made of wood. Not good. An experienced attack force would soon spot that weakness.
But it wasn’t the strength or durability of the cabin that worried me most. What I was more concerned about was our isolation. If attackers came with sufficient numbers and determination, I doubted we would be able to hold them off until help arrived. How long would it take the forces of law and order to even find the cabin?
I continued with my appraisal and wandered around the perimeter of the clearing, confirming some of the thoughts I’d had when we first arrived. Realistically, there was only one way in, and that was the track from the highway. Although there were faint suggestions of little paths into the forest, it looked as though they had been made either by animals or by Harry and his lady friend. An attack force wouldn’t come in that way, especially at night. They would come along the main track.
I made my way back indoors, knowing my judgement was correct, but also knowing it was going to be a hard sell.
Harry was putting away the pots and pans. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What’s the verdict?’
‘We need to move,’ I told him. ‘The cabin is no good defensively.’
Unsurprisingly, Harry shook his head. ‘No way! I’m staying right here. What’s the problem?’
I was tired of listening to Harry politely. By now, I had come to the conclusion that although he might be a hotshot in his world, there were things I knew more about than he did.
‘We’re too far from help, for one thing,’ I said bluntly. ‘If we have to call the police, we’ll be dead by the time they get here. I don’t even know how they would ever find us! Second, the cabin is pretty strong as a building, I give you that. It would take heavy artillery to blast a way through the walls, but smart attackers wouldn’t even bother trying. They would just toss a petrol bomb on the roof. Those shingles, shakes, or whatever you call them, would burn off in a few minutes — and so would we underneath them.’
Harry’s face was set in a stubborn expression that told me he didn’t agree.
I continued. ‘Any attack would almost certainly come on foot from along the main track. Our problem is that we can’t see very far along it. They could get within thirty yards of us before we even knew they were coming. Finally, we’re so remote here that any attackers would feel free to do whatever they liked. No nosy neighbours or local dog walkers to see what they’re up to. No danger of them being reported. In short, Harry, we’re out on a limb here. There’s no alternative but to move.’
Harry shook his head. ‘You go if you want to, but I’m staying put. This is my home. I’ll make my stand here, if I have to. But I don’t believe it will come to that. Nobody knows about this place.’
‘Harry, for chrissake! Think! Be reasonable.’
But I could see that his mind was made up. I wouldn’t be able to move him. To be fair, I would probably have felt the same way if we were facing a similar threat at my place at Risky Point.
‘OK, Harry,’ I said with a sigh, trying to swallow my misgivings. ‘I’m not going to abandon you. We’ll try to stick it out here. Let’s just hope you’re right, and they can’t find us.’
Harry assembled the weapons he had available. There were several handguns, including a Glock pistol. ‘This will do for me,’ I told him. ‘I’m used to it.’
‘Not in Cleveland, surely?’
‘I do travel, Harry. Sometimes I visit dangerous foreign places, like London.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ he said with a grin. ‘You might come in useful, after all.’
I let that one go over my head. I wasn’t really in the mood for joking.
‘What else have you got, Harry?’
There wasn’t a lot. Just an ancient hunting rifle, a modern shotgun and an assortment of knives and implements that might be of use in the kind of hand-to-hand fighting I hoped we wouldn’t have to experience.
‘You any good with a rifle, Harry?’ I asked, examining the hunting rifle.
‘Sure. I’ve downed a few deer and elk in my time. Wild boar, and a bear or two as well. And the odd human being I didn’t like much.’
‘That’s comforting. You keep the rifle handy in that case. I’m better with a shotgun.’
Privately, I hoped none of these weapons would get fired. I would much rather dodge trouble than meet it. Compared to Harry, I’d led a quiet life.
Next, we moved some of the furniture and opened a few windows. Then we went outside and looked around.
‘Move the truck, Harry. Can you put it well out of the way somewhere? We don’t want anyone hiding behind it, and we don’t want our only means of transport getting blown up either.’
‘If anyone does come,’ he pointed out tartly.
I didn’t respond. I was a lot less sanguine about the situation than he was. Being back home had made him far too complacent.
As the light began to fade, I studied the roof again.
‘What do you think?’ Harry asked, seeing where I was looking.
‘Well, we couldn’t stop them throwing an incendiary on the roof, and if they did that, we couldn’t stop the blaze. We need an exit plan. We need to figure out our best escape route.’
‘And just leave the cabin to burn to the ground?’
‘Come on, Harry! Think about it. The roof is in flames, and it’s soon going to collapse on top of us. You’re dealing with an attack from one side of the cabin, and me with one from the other. Who’s left to try to put the bloody fire out?’
That shut him up. The imagery was a bit brutal, but contingency planning is a waste of time if you don’t think the unthinkable.
‘The root cellar would be the best way out,’ he said then, accepting I was serious about all this.
‘What and where is that?’
‘A cavity under the cabin. There’s access from the kitchen, and a short tunnel leading outside.’
‘That sounds good. Let’s take a look.’
Harry opened a trapdoor in the kitchen floor to reveal a sizeable underground chamber, accessed by a wooden staircase.
‘Not much in it right now,’ he said as we descended the steps. ‘Just some of my junk. But back in the old days it was where people stored the vegetables they grew.’
‘Useful,’ I said, glancing around at the stone walls revealed in his torch beam. ‘I could do with something like this under my place. Not that I ever grow vegetables.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Where does the tunnel go?’
He opened a door, picked up a torch from a nearby shelf and led the way along a brick-lined tunnel that ended in another door about fifteen yards or so away. We emerged a short distance from the cabin, close to the forest edge. Once, there would have been a kitchen garden here, the tunnel providing a way of avoi
ding tramping mud through the cabin.
‘Do you know your way around in there?’ I asked, looking at the wall of coniferous greenery facing us.
‘Not really. It’s too dense. But there’s a bit of a path I use sometimes to get to a logging road a couple of hundred yards away.’
That sounded good.
‘Let’s park the truck just off the logging road. Then, if anything does happen, we’ll have an escape route.’
He wasn’t keen. He frowned, obviously thinking that none of this was really necessary.
‘Humour me, Harry! I’m not saying I expect anything to happen, I’m just trying to cover the possibility that it might. When you’re right and I’m wrong, you can kick my arse and have a good laugh.’
He gave me a reluctant grin. ‘You can count on that.’
We moved the truck and eased it under the trees, just off the logging road. Then we walked back to the highway and along to the start of the track leading to the cabin.
I wondered if we could rig up some sort of simple warning system to alert us to anyone setting foot on the track. If I’d had the gear with me, and the time, I could have installed a listening device, movement sensors, infra-red CCTV — all sorts of stuff. As it was, the best I could do was set up a tripwire, using cord and a bunch of pots and pans from the kitchen.
‘Satisfied?’ Harry asked with a smirk.
‘Not really.’
‘Don’t worry, Frank. We won’t need it.’
Not long after that, Harry got a text message: ‘We’re coming for you tonight.’
That was when he accepted at last that we had to take the threat seriously.
Chapter Thirty-One
The clock on the wall was ticking like a countdown machine. I glanced at it and then at Harry, and immediately looked away again. Harry’s nerves were showing, putting me on edge too. He couldn’t sit still. Petrov’s text was certainly working.
‘When do you think they’ll come?’ Harry asked, doing a big stretching routine, swinging his arms in circles.
‘They might not come at all,’ I pointed out.
‘That’s true.’
He stopped his stretching and slumped onto a chair at the kitchen table. Immediately, his fingers began dancing on the table top.
‘If they do come,’ I added, ‘it will be when they think we’ve lowered our guard. The early hours, probably.’
‘Yeah. The usual time.’
If he knew that already, why ask me? Something to say, I suppose. One way or another, it looked like being a long night. We were going to have to take turns again sleeping and keeping watch, but it was too early to start doing that yet.
I got up and moved across to a window. Total blackness out there. I could see nothing at all. A combination of forest, night and the dense cloud cover saw to that. The big, old trees surrounding the cabin on all sides, silent and dripping with that eerie Spanish moss made it impossible to see any distance at all.
I didn’t think I could ever get used to this country. Harry had, seemingly, but as far as I was concerned, the sooner we were out of here, the better. I needed to be able to see what was coming at me. Somewhere like this could shred your nerves even without the prospect of an imminent attack.
The cabin had begun to seem oppressive too, more an uncomfortable place to be in than a safe refuge. If it hadn’t been so wet out there, I would rather have been out in the woods. How long, I wondered, until the rain started up again? Not long, that was for sure. Another wet night was pretty much guaranteed.
‘Does it always rain up here?’ I asked after a while, making conversation.
‘Not always, no. But that is rainforest you can see — or not see — out there, and this is the rainy season.’
‘I just came at the wrong time of year, did I?’
‘That’s where you went wrong.’
I returned to the kitchen table and sat back down. Changing places with me, Harry got up and moved over to the window. He peered hard through the glass, but I knew he wouldn’t see any more than I had.
‘How long do we wait, I wonder?’ he asked.
It was a purely rhetorical question. An answer was neither required nor deserved. I gave him one anyway, rather than have us lapse into total silence.
‘This situation will be more your territory than mine, Harry, but my feeling is the phone call and text were intended just to unsettle you. They want to keep you on your toes and wear you down some more. I still think they may not come at all. How the hell can they even know where you are?’
‘Just another sleepless night to lower my resistance further, eh? I’ve had a lot of them.’
I let a couple of minutes go by and then said, ‘Why don’t you turn in, Harry? I’ll take the first watch.’
‘Scared I’ll fall asleep on you again?’ he asked with a wry smile.
I shook my head. ‘It never crossed my mind. I know that’s not going to happen. You’re in a lot better shape now than when I arrived. The sleep in the truck last night did you a lot of good.’
Harry chuckled but he accepted my offer. Before he retired, we spent a few minutes loading a couple of emergency backpacks.
‘Make sure you include anything of a personal nature that’s really important to you,’ I said. ‘Things you would hate to lose.’
He stared at me. I stared right back.
‘As I said, I’m not saying something is going to happen, Harry. I’m saying it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that it might.’
He nodded and turned away to collect stuff he couldn’t bear the thought of losing, whatever that might be.
‘It’s easy for me,’ I called after him. ‘You have more at stake here than I do. It would be the other way around if we were at my place at Risky Point.’
We got it done. I had no idea what Harry had packed. Most of my own personal stuff was in the holdall I’d brought with me from home, which was still in the truck. My backpack contained a bunch of things I mentally filed under the label Survival Gear. It might not have satisfied Bear Grylls, but it was good enough for me.
Just in case the worst happened, and we had to make a run for it, we left open the doors to the root cellar and the tunnel beyond, and placed the backpacks where we could grab them at the gallop. Seconds count in an emergency.
After we had done all that, Harry took himself off to get some rest, if not actual sleep. I settled down to continue waiting, just in case something did happen. I didn’t really expect it to, but we had to stay on guard. It would have been stupid not to.
I couldn’t help thinking that we might have been better off in sleeping bags in the forest, where we’d been the previous night. Sleep might have come easier, not least because we would have been harder to find.
With Harry out of the way, though, I felt a lot better. His agitation had been getting to me and it had been hard to refrain from snapping at him at times.
Later, I stood outside on the porch for a while. Nothing had changed. It was still black and wet and quiet out there. Without a hint of a breeze, let alone a wind, even the trees were motionless. I listened hard without hearing anything more than I could see. It was like being in a vacuum. I shivered at the thought and went back inside.
When the four hours were up, I woke Harry and exchanged places with him.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘Nothing.’
In the morning, I was going to raise again the idea of moving somewhere else — anywhere else. I really didn’t fancy another night like this. I kept the thought to myself.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I came awake even before Harry touched my shoulder or said anything.
‘What?’
‘They’re here,’ he whispered. ‘Somebody is.’
I scrambled to my feet. Harry had already gone back to the window facing the track. I collected the Glock and raced through to join him.
Harry opened the window and turned his head to look at me. ‘Hear that?’
I nodded. Engines. More than one. It sounded like vehicles were assembling in the distance, where the track from the cabin met the highway. We didn’t need the collection of tin pans and plates I had assembled to warn us.
‘Let’s go and see,’ I said quietly. ‘Grab your pack, Harry.’
He nodded and closed the window.
We made our way out through the root cellar and the tunnel, just in case anyone had come up close to the cabin. I closed the doors carefully after us, not wanting to disclose our escape route in case we needed it again.
Once outside, in deep darkness, without any lights at all, we stood still for a while, listening and watching. There was nothing moving anywhere nearby, and I couldn’t sense any human presence in the immediate vicinity.
The vehicle engines had cut out. The noise from them had been faint anyway. Now there was nothing at all, but I was sure they hadn’t left.
I touched Harry’s shoulder and whispered, ‘If it is them, they’ll be on their way along the track now. Let’s take a look.’
Harry tapped me twice on the shoulder to let me know he understood. We set off across the clearing. I wanted to reach the forest edge fast. Whether or not we then defended the cabin was going to depend on how big the attack force was.
One thing I was sure of was that we were safer out here than we had been inside the cabin.
They were using torches. Otherwise we wouldn’t have known how many men were involved. We slipped off the track and under the trees and counted them as they strode past. A group of six men this time, not three. I couldn’t help thinking that Petrov certainly seemed to have plenty of manpower available. Either that or the money to hire a lot of extra muscle when it was needed.
There were too many of them. We couldn’t take on an attack force of six possibly heavily armed men. I sensed Harry was itching to confront them, but it wasn’t on. The odds were not in our favour. He wanted to defend his house, but life is more important than property. I grabbed his sleeve and held onto it.
‘Let’s go, Harry!’ I whispered. ‘There’s too many of them. Let’s make for the truck.’
