by A. D. Winch
The first room they passed was full of old weights and a well-used punch bag. The second room looked like a neglected stable. Another contained a tilted table, pieces of cloth and a hose. Another had nothing but a chair and a bench with a pair of pliers and a box of razor blades upon it. Ursula shivered again and looked back over her shoulder to reassure herself that there was an escape route still available.
They had not gone far when Andrea stopped them outside a door that looked like all the others. The room was dark inside, and they could see nothing through the window.
“This place doesn’t feel right,” whispered Ursula.
“These are cells and rooms hidden away from the international community and outside of any agreed UN convention on human rights. They are used for torture, so, of course this place does not feel right,” Alexander replied, more sharply than he intended.
He placed his fingers around the door handle and was surprised when it opened.
“Go and get Eric,” Andrea instructed Ursula. “We will keep guard here.”
Ursula crept into the room. A faint light came through the narrow window on the far wall. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could make out a figure asleep on the bed.
“Eric,” she whispered. “Eric!”
There was no response. Ursula recalled that he had been a much heavier sleeper than her. She approached the bed quickly and silently on tiptoes.
“Eri…,” she began but never got to finish.
A hand shot out, grabbed her wrist and pulled her onto the bed. Legs wrapped tightly around her and crushed her hips. The other hand clasped her mouth and yanked her head around so hard that she felt her neck was going to break. Her free hand was stuck underneath her, and she was trapped. The door slammed shut.
It had happened so suddenly that Ursula had not even had time to scream or to be scared. Only now, as she lay on top of someone, her chest pointing towards the ceiling and her face towards the floor did the fear grip her.
“You’ve lost me a wager,” an American voice said into her ear.
His breath stank like drains, and if he hadn’t been clasping her mouth, Ursula would have choked.
“I bet that you would never come. We’ve had to stay here because of you. Six of us stuck in this boring place with nothing but monotonous routine for company. And do you know what that routine involves? Let me tell you. It involves one of us every day having to spend twenty-four hours locked up in here like a prisoner.”
The last word was accompanied with spit that hit the side of her face and streaked down her cheek.
“The agents said that you would come but then they left us. ‘They’ll come,’ they said as they drove out of the base and back to their friends and families. We had to stay; we had to be vigilant but as the days turned to weeks, I gotta say that I had my doubts.”
He tightened his grip on her mouth and pulled her face closer to him. His mouth was directly against her ear. His breath was rancid, and Ursula wanted to retch.
“There’s one hell of a load of resentment against you and a whole lot of frustration at being cooped up here. I think you should be aware of this so you can fully understand, and appreciate, what me and my unit are going to do to you. Do you know what I am going to do first?”
He didn’t get to answer his own question. Ursula moved her body enough to free her arm. The soldier responded by letting go of her head in order to try and grab her. The moment he did this, Ursula lifted her head and brought it down onto the man’s face as hard as she could. She felt his nose break under the back of her head and heard the crunch as it did so. It was enough for a soldier to loosen his grip on her and Ursula pounced. She sat up, opened her legs and punched with all her might into the soldier’s groin before jumping away.
The soldier doubled up and swore loudly before stumbling to his feet. When he did, Ursula was waiting and executed a perfect roundhouse kick into his head. He fell back onto the bed and didn’t move.
Ursula ran to the door and tried to open it, but there was no handle. She fumbled around the wall and found the switch. The light came on, and she could see that she was trapped.
Behind her, the soldier groaned. Ursula turned and watched him slide off the bed and fall heavily onto the floor. Next to where he had been lying was a basic remote control with two buttons. Ursula sat on the bed and picked it up. She felt that one of them must open the door. The blue button was worn, but the red one looked as if it had never been pressed. She pushed the blue one down. There was a quiet shhh of air and the cell door opened. Andrea and Alexander ran in.
The groans from the floor were becoming louder, and the soldier was swatting the wall with his hand. He laid his palm on the cold concrete and tried to lever himself up. When he got onto his knees, Alexander pushed him back onto the floor, and Andrea secured him with the gaffer tape from the Santa sack.
“Are you okay?” Alexander asked Ursula.
He touched the back of her balaclava, and his fingertip became red and sticky.
“I’m fine,” replied Ursula though her voice was shaking. “I think the blood is from his nose.”
“Where’s Eric?”
Ursula shrugged her shoulders.
The room was empty apart from the bed, a metal sink and a metal toilet. It had no warmth despite the chunky radiator secured to one of the walls.
Andrea looked at the tracker. According to the screen Eric was on the bed, but in front of her there was only Ursula.
“Get off the bed.”
Ursula jumped down, and Andrea pushed the mattress off the frame. It landed on the soldier and hid him from view.
The bed frame was made of metal and crisscrossed wire. Underneath the wire and tied to it by the shoe laces were Eric’s trainers. Andrea undid the laces and pulled the trainers from under the bed. The three of them looked at the shoes in total silence. At that moment, Alexander’s and Ursula’s optimism vanished and was replaced by fear.
“It’s a trap!” Alexander announced pointlessly.
“Yes, it is,” Andrea replied.
She took the shoes from the bed, removed the tracking device from the soles and crushed them under her boots.
“Time to go.”
The three of them ran out of the cell, back down the corridor and up the stairs. Alexander did not lock any of the doors they passed through. It wasn’t what was behind him that bothered him now but what lay in front.
Mercifully the top corridor was still empty, and they reached the building’s entrance without incident.
The door was shut. Andrea tried to open it, but it would not budge. Alexander pulled the keys from his pocket. He nervously flicked through them, as he tried to find one that fitted, but none did.
Next to the door was a biometric thumb reader; identical to the one outside. He took the soldier’s IDs and shuffled through them until he found Hank’s. In a hopeless attempt to get the door to open, he waved it at the scanner. Nothing happened. He tried the other two IDs he had collected. Again nothing happened. His heart was beating fast, and his hands were sweating.
“We need a thumb print,” said Andrea. “We planned for this and we have the gelatine moulds. Give me the keys.”
Alexander passed her the keys and Ursula found the gelatine mould in the Santa sack. As soon as Andrea had them both, she walked confidently away from them and towards the mess.
“I can’t believe no one is here to stop us,” said Ursula nervously.
“But you knew there wouldn’t be,” Alexander replied curtly. “This is a black site. It doesn’t officially exist. They use as few personnel as possible and only bring in more when necessary. Guarding a pair of trainers does not require an entire battalion.”
“But where are the other two soldiers?” she asked.
Alexander shrugged, “Let’s hope we don’t find out.”
They stood in silence and time slowed down. Every second seemed to last for ten. The silence amplified every small noise and kept them on edge. Water gurgling th
rough a radiator became a platoon of soldiers coming towards them, and the wind outside became a tank arriving. Eventually, they heard footsteps. Alexander took out his pistol and reluctantly pointed it down the corridor towards the sound. Andrea approached, and he lowered his weapon.
She was carrying what looked like a very fat, fried egg - a blob of beige putty surrounded a yellow centre the size of a finger.
“It has not yet set. We need to wait a further minute.”
Once again they waited in silence. Ursula was sure they could all hear her heart beating as it thumped against her chest. She kept her eyes firmly on the corridor and still feared someone would appear.
When they had talked about black sites during the planning sessions, Ursula had expected them to be full of trained, sadistic killers in horrific looking castles. Alexander had told her they would be normal looking buildings with a few normal looking people inside.
She hadn’t considered this until he had said to her, ‘If you wanted to create a secret place to hide people, you wouldn’t want to draw attention to it, would you? You would want it to look normal, so it blended in with your surroundings.’
Even then she was not convinced but right now she believed him. The normal looking doors, normal looking corridors, normal looking soldiers just made this place even scarier to her.
“One minute,” declared Andrea and gently peeled the yellow circle from the beige blob. A gelatine thumb emerged, and she placed it on the thumb reader. Nothing happened.
“These have a success rate of fifty percent,” she said and placed the gelatine thumb onto the reader again.
The scanner beeped an acknowledgment, and there were a series of clicking sounds as the door unlocked. Alexander swung it open, and they were out into the cold and the snow.
Since they had been in the building, it had snowed heavily, and ten more centimetres lay on the ground. Every step they made left a visible footprint in the snow, and sign-posted a route to their ambulance.
Alexander swung open the ambulance’s rear doors and removed a large box wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper. He moved away from the building and placed it in an open space away from the vehicles. A long piece of thick string protruded from one corner of the box, and a box of matches was taped above it.
He waited until Ursula was in the back of the ambulance and Andrea had started the engine and then he lit the string. It caught fire instantly and sparked into life. He ran back to the ambulance; jumped into the passenger seat, and Andrea pulled away.
“It had better be a one minute fuse,” he said.
Andrea gently accelerated and managed to avoid wheel spinning the ambulance.
“The two that I tested previously had one minute fuses. Therefore, this fuse will be the same.”
Alexander crossed his fingers and slid the letterbox window open.
“Are you okay back there, Ursula?”
“Yes,” she shouted as the ambulance skidded on the snow-covered road.
When they came out of the trees, they were only one hundred metres from the base’s entrance. The two large gates were closed, as were the ones beyond them. Standing between the gates were the same four soldiers as before, but this time they were all armed and their weapons were pointing directly at the ambulance.
“What are we going…”
Before Alexander could finish his question, Andrea put her foot on the floor. The rear wheels spun on the snow and then the ambulance lurched forward. Suddenly fireworks zoomed into the sky and exploded above the base in a festival of colour.
The soldiers looked up, and the ambulance closed in on the first gate.
“Get down,” Andrea instructed when they were virtually upon it.
The soldiers did not have time to open fire. They scattered to either side of the gates as they took cover.
The ambulance’s bumper hit the first set of gates and swung them open as if they had rockets attached. It then swerved into the second set of gates but only hit one. The gate came away from its lower hinges as it sprang open and smashed into the windscreen. Thousands of pieces of glass shot into the ambulance and for a moment it looked as if they had hit a blizzard. Andrea just managed to keep control of the vehicle and slalomed through the concrete cubes. The rear of the ambulance skidded outwards and slammed into one block and then another. Inside the back, Ursula bounced off the stretcher and ended up sprawling across the equipment beside her.
The fireworks continued to explode high in the sky and showered the base with multi-coloured sparks.
Ursula could not see the dazzling colours nor appreciate how the fireworks lit up the falling snowflakes, but she could hear the bangs. Amongst the noise, she heard shots being fired and then a window shatter.
“No!” screamed Alexander and the ambulance swerved across the road aimlessly.
By the time Ursula had managed to get to the letterbox window, Alexander was driving. The night had sucked the colour from the world, and Alexander’s face was white. Moonlight glistened off bits of glass embedded in his face and black lines snaked down from his wounds.
Next to him, Andrea was unceremoniously slumped over the chair and the floor. What was left of her head bobbed up and down like a puppet in the shadows. A large, black pool was forming below.
“Put on your motorbike leathers and snow gear,” yelled Alexander. “We go for Plan B.”
Ursula did as she was told, but she had lost hold of reality. Her eyes were full of tears. A strange calm had fallen upon her, and she felt as if she was swimming through the clouds. Alexander continued to shout instructions to her, but his words sounded muffled and meaningless.
Ursula put on the white snowsuit over her clothes and also her matching helmet. She felt as if she was in a dream or a nightmare. It wasn’t her conscious mind leading her anymore; her subconscious had taken control. The need to survive was pulling her through. She removed the sheet from the equipment beside her and revealed her motorbike. It was no longer red. White, plastic sheets had been placed over the metal to ensure that it did not stand out in the snow. The tyres had also been changed, and snow studs had been screwed into the new ones. A GPS device had been secured to the handlebars.
When the ambulance skidded to a halt, Ursula didn’t notice. When the doors opened all, she felt was the cold. Alexander pulled her out and stood her beside the road. They were surrounded by tall, dark trees so covered in snow that they blocked out most of the moonlight. She looked up at the victorious snowflakes that had made it through the maze of branches. Besides her, Alexander struggled with the motorbike but managed to get it onto the road.
He started it up, put Ursula upon it and then spoke to her in rapid, rushed sentences. She wasn’t paying any attention. All she heard were snippets and random words, ‘Belarus,’ ‘sister,’ ‘Gdansk,’ ‘rendez-vous,’ ‘return’ and then ‘go!’ He said more, but it just didn’t register.
Automatically she kicked away the bike stand, put the motorbike into first gear and turned the throttle. Before she knew it, she was riding through the trees away from the road. Her instincts kicked in, and she swerved through trees as they appeared in front of her. Time no longer had any relevance, and she was overcome with tiredness.
The moon gradually fell in the sky and night became darker as dawn neared. The trees were increasing in number and came thick and fast. After avoiding so many, she zipped past one only to be confronted by another right in her way. She braked but swerved into the trunk and hit it side on. The bike dropped to the ground, and Ursula landed in the soft snow beside it. The collision had shaken the branches, and large lumps of snow fell from the tree covering the bike and Ursula. She brushed it away from her helmet and remembered to activate the heated body suit. She had no to desire to move.
As she looked at the snowflakes falling from the sky, her eyes started to close. Before she fell asleep, she tried to comprehend what had happened but all she could think was, ‘it’s Christmas Day.’
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Chapter 38 – Happy New Year
The snow continued to fall lightly throughout the day and into the evening. Ursula remained deeply asleep in her soft winter bed. By the time the sun had fallen, it was impossible to see that anything out of the ordinary had happened. There were no tyre tracks; the snow had built up on the branches again, and there were no signs of the events from the previous evening. Someone could have walked right past without noticing a thing.
It was fortunate that Ursula has been too tired to remove her helmet. The hard shell and visor had saved her from suffocation while the snow deepened above her.
Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since Ursula had activated her heat-suit, and the battery was now dead. The residual warmth had disappeared, and the cold penetrated all the way to her skin, causing her to stir. At first she felt disorientated and didn’t know where she was. It was pitch black, and a comfortably heavy weight was keeping her in place. When she tried to move, snow crept under her helmet and onto her neck. The cold shock brought her memories back in a flash.
I am buried alive, she thought.
Overcome by a feeling of panic, she lashed out unconsciously with her arms and legs. A few seconds later, she was free and standing under the heavy branches. Gradually she regained control, breathed deeply and brushed the snow from her ski-suit and helmet. She no longer felt sleepy but physically and mentally she felt drained. All she wanted was to be back with her grandparents in their little apartment in Paris. The more she thought about it, the more upset she became, and she began to cry. She did not fight the tears. Her Mémé had always told her that it was best to let it out. The tears flowed and when they finally dried up, she felt better. Her head was clear; she knew what she had to do and was more determined to get back to Saint-Denis. Only there did she feel safe.
