by Andy McNab
Ethan was dropped immediately as his opponent stumbled backwards, rubbing his face. He went to get up, but again his opponent was too fast; a foot caught him hard in the side, flipped him over. Then another foot came in, this one aimed at his exposed neck. Ethan rolled out of the way just in time, using the momentum to get back to his feet. He looked over to his opponent; that last foot aimed at his neck had been a killing move. It would have crushed his windpipe, maybe even snapped his neck.
They were both breathing heavily now. The fight had been going for only a couple of minutes, but Ethan knew full well just how exhausting a real fight was; every part of your body was being pushed to its limits, doing everything it could to survive.
When his opponent came at him again, he was more cautious and Ethan was able to regain his composure. They circled for a few moments, each throwing the occasional punch, deflecting them easily. Ethan went in with a combination left punch, right punch, knee, but nothing connected. His opponent retaliated, but was more lucky, and Ethan didn’t get out of the way quick enough; the fist slammed into his nose and he felt it crunch. Next he tasted blood as the stuff ran down the back of his throat as well as down his face to the floor. For the first time he saw a flicker of a reaction on his opponent’s face; it was a smile. Now they both had smashed noses. Snap.
The punch seemed to give his opponent renewed energy, and for the next few seconds, it was all Ethan could do to keep out of his way. But his luck failed and he slipped to the floor. He caught sight of the foot coming at him just in time to spin out of its way, using the momentum to bring his feet into the back of his opponent’s knees, who dropped to the floor.
Ethan was up. It was the first decent move he’d managed since the fight had begun and he wanted to take advantage of it. He grabbed his opponent round the neck, squeezed, only to find himself flipped over his head to land on his back with such force the wind was thrown out of him like a burst balloon.
A heavy punch landed on his stomach, was quickly followed by another. They were done with such force that Ethan felt puke race up to his mouth. He was too slow to stop all of it and rolling to his side spat the acrid stuff across the cage floor.
Another attack came, but Ethan forced himself to his feet and got out of the way. The way this fight was going, he knew if he didn’t get himself together – and soon – he’d be dead.
They were back to circling each other when something clattered into the ring at their feet. A chill ran through Ethan when he realized exactly what it was: two knives, each with a fixed blade about the length of his hand.
‘To add a bit of colour to the proceedings,’ came the voice again out of the darkness. ‘But please be fair and take one each to begin with.’
Ethan’s opponent was at the knives first, but in his rush to get them both, he managed to pick one up in his right hand and kick the other across the cage floor. Ethan raced to grab it, but it was knocked away.
Ethan watched his opponent start to prowl around him, keeping himself between Ethan and the knife still on the floor.
Staring at the weapon, Ethan willed his opponent to make a move. He wasn’t about to attack himself, being unarmed. He had to wait and hopefully react in time to stop himself being skewered.
With a roar, almost as though he half expected his next move to be the one that won the fight, Ethan’s opponent went in with the knife, aiming it directly at Ethan’s stomach with a wide sweeping slash with his right arm. But Ethan got there first. Blocking the arm with his left forearm, he stepped forward and delivered two fast punches to the face, then sent two sharp kicks to the crotch. As his opponent doubled up and yelled out in pain, Ethan was still aware of the knife and knew then that this had to be the attack to end the fight. He couldn’t risk it turning into a blood bath. So he went in again with another kick, dragging his opponent’s face down onto his knee. His opponent recovered enough to come at him again with the knife, but the attack was slow and badly aimed. Ethan grabbed the wrist mid-flight, then with all the force he could muster, twisted it down, and stepped in, driving it towards his opponent’s own body. He sent another flurry of punches to the face, heard the knife clatter to the floor. Then, to finish off, he grabbed his opponent’s head and slammed his forehead at him.
Ethan stumbled backwards, shoving his opponent away. For a second, the lad stayed on his feet, then he simply dropped to the floor and onto his face like a felled tree.
The fight was over. Ethan heard the cage doors open, was only just about able to make out the silhouettes of men grabbing him, leading him out of the ring, other men grabbing his opponent to drag him out unconscious onto the concrete floor the cage was standing upon. His eyes focused and he saw the state of the cage floor; it was slick with blood. He tried to turn, to see if his opponent was OK, but he was twisted away by strong arms.
‘Forget about him,’ said one of the instructors holding him. ‘Nothing you can do that you haven’t already done. You minced him good. The boss will be pleased.’
‘What …’ muttered Ethan, his smashed lips barely allowing him to speak. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’
He heard the gunshot as he finished the question.
‘Like I said,’ came the voice again, ‘forget about him.’
Ethan’s world swam. He pushed at the instructor, yelled out such a scream that his lungs felt like they were going to burst. The instructor held him, Ethan still struggled, then a backhand slapped him hard across the face. It stunned him to silence, but did nothing to take away the horror of what he’d just been forced to do. And the face of his opponent seemed to burn itself into his mind, forcing Ethan to see him, to know that he was now gone for good.
For the second time in Ethan’s life, it had been kill or be killed. There had been no choice. His opponent would’ve killed him, had been trying to from the moment the bell sounded. There was nothing else he could have done. Nothing!
Ethan yelled out again and another slap caught him hard. This time though, it didn’t just sting, it crushed every ounce of strength he had left, and if the instructor hadn’t caught him, he’d have dropped to the floor like a sack of shit.
Then all he could do was sob. And when he finally stopped, the horror still stalked him and no matter where he hid in his cell, the face of his opponent was still bright in his mind.
Unblinking. Unmoving.
Dead.
22
‘Another few days and Ethan will have been missing for two weeks. And we’re no closer to finding him.’
Gabe was stating the obvious. Everyone knew that. It didn’t make it any easier to listen to.
‘What about your other team?’ asked Luke. He was sitting with the others in the hangar, not liking anything Gabe was saying. ‘The ones who traced the signal for the fight you showed us. Haven’t they found anything?’
Sam chipped in, ‘No. Nothing.’
Johnny leaned forward. He’d been brought back in after doing a full week on the streets. The job was important, but so was his health. He’d checked out fine, as had his sprained wrist.
‘Send me back in, Sam,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to have any chance of getting to Ethan, then we have to put me out there again. They’ll come for me soon, I’m sure of it.’
‘Maybe they will,’ said Gabe. ‘But when? Could be tomorrow, could be next month. We can’t keep this op going on indefinitely. Questions will be asked.’
Kat said, ‘You sound like you’re giving up.’
‘Well, we’re not,’ said Sam. ‘Johnny, get your shit together. You’re going in.’
Ethan was still in shock, wondered if he’d ever be out of it. The violence of what he’d experienced seemed to ring in his ears. No matter what he did or thought about, it forced its way in like a truck through a house of straw. It had shown him something though: the mission was screwed, and of that he was absolutely sure. He had to get out fast. Risking another fight in the cage was suicide. He’d been lucky. His opponent hadn’t been. Next time, the odds c
ould just as easily be reversed.
Trouble was, the thought of escape was a whole lot easier than the act itself. Ethan had been wherever the hell he and the rest of the boys were being kept long enough to realize that the idea of someone trying to escape simply wasn’t an issue for Mr X. And so confident was he, thought Ethan, that he didn’t even bother with security cameras. He’d noticed that almost immediately; security was down to the instructors and locks on all the doors. That was it. But the boys were kept under extremely close watch. Hell, they weren’t even allowed to speak to each other in the canteen. And he knew, because he’d tried. A couple of days ago, he’d managed to get close to Rick for the first time since arriving, sitting opposite him in the canteen. Rick had been head down and troughing the food. Ethan had tried to get his attention, but when nothing had worked and he’d said Rick’s name, a shadow had cast itself over the table and he’d turned to see an instructor standing over them. The look in his eye had been enough to tell Ethan that talking was off limits.
It struck him as just a little bit odd. Considering just how illegal this all was, wouldn’t Mr X want to keep tabs on all his fighters? The instructors were mean, the complex under lock and key, but surely there was still that risk someone would break out, right? Then a thought struck Ethan. He, like the rest of them, had no idea where on earth they actually were. Ethan himself had arrived by helicopter, which kind of suggested that wherever they were, it was pretty inaccessible. And if that was the case, he thought, for all he knew outside the walls lay hundreds of miles of desert or jungle or even sea. Much to his own horror, Ethan began to consider the fact that perhaps escaping from the prison would be the easy part. Whereas getting from it and back to civilization was probably not just horrendously dangerous, but impossible.
He could not let himself think like that, not if he was going to stand a chance of getting back to the team. People were getting to and from where he was. As he’d come in by helicopter, perhaps that was the only transport used. If he could get out and stow away, he’d maybe have a shot. It would be a slim one, but he fancied his chances better doing that than having to enter the ring even just one more time.
From the moment of his arrival, Ethan had been noticing things, not just to gather intel for the team, but in case he could, at the right moment, effect an escape. The importance of everything he’d logged in his mind had now grown tenfold; that moment was now.
Ethan knew that all the locks were accessed using cards the instructors carried with them. And he’d soon learned not only the shift patterns of Chief and the instructors, but the layout of the place. The structure was circular. The cells occupied by him and the other fighters were all on the same floor, lined up along a curved corridor. Each cell was locked by an individual barred door. At night, a single instructor was always prowling, though Ethan had noticed that after a couple of hours the sweeping of cells with a torch would stop. The instructor was still there, of that he was sure; they just lost interest in walking a torch beam up and down.
From this floor they headed through a single door at the end of the corridor to everything else.
Through the door, narrow, rusting spiral stairs led up to the next floor, which contained a small central canteen area. From here two further doors accessed the gym and the shower and toilet block. One other door was on this floor at the far end of the canteen and Ethan had never seen it unlocked. As the other two doors led to rooms which had no other exit, Ethan was sure this had to be the way out. It was also the way their food must have been brought in, because no actual kitchen formed a part of where they were kept. And no doubt it also led to any quarters occupied by the instructors, though he’d noticed that at different times of the week, different instructors were around. He figured this meant they were on some sort of rotation system and dossed down in bunk rooms when working.
As for the location of the cage where the actual fighting took place, Ethan didn’t know exactly; he’d been dragged there hooded up. But it had to be through that door and somewhere else in the complex; there was nowhere else it could be. Much like the server Gabe was so desperate to locate. If it was here at all, then it was also through that door.
With his mind totally committed to getting himself out and back to his friends, Ethan now noticed a chink in the armour of the place that he could exploit. He’d managed to survive another day of training and fighting practice, and he was down in the shower block to get scrubbed clean before being locked back in his cell to sleep. He was just drying himself down, doing his best not to make his aches and pains worse, or knock the tops off any scabs and start bleeding again, when he realized something; it was the only place in the whole complex where you were actually completely alone, as the instructors never bothered to follow you in. And at night, it was the place furthest away from everything else; you could smash up a cubicle or two and no one would ever know who was responsible. This was the first glimmer of hope for Ethan; all he had to do now was get one of the instructors into the block and deal with them without risk of being watched or overheard, nick their door card, and then go for it.
Ethan knew he would only get one shot at this. If he was caught, if it went wrong at all, he was dead. It was as simple as that.
Later on and back in his cell, when the lights were turned out, Ethan went over to the toilet in the wall of his cell. With no camera checking up on him, he knew there would be no one to see what he was about to do, and in less than a minute Ethan had managed to stuff down a load of toilet paper, not just from his own supply, but also from what he’d taken in secret from the shower block earlier. Standing up, fingers crossed, he pulled the flush. For a few breathless seconds, Ethan watched and waited. He pulled the flush again. The toilet overflowed. The first part of the plan had worked. Now for the next – and altogether more risky – bit.
Ethan, aware that whichever instructor was charged with the night watch had stopped doing sweeps of the cells but was still in calling distance, started to moan and stumble around his cell; he wanted it to be as convincing as he could make it that he was ill and in serious need of some assistance pronto. Ethan also hoped that he, like the rest of the boys being trained up, was too valuable an asset to be allowed to go down with a serious illness. This was an expensive operation; no way was anyone going to let it go to shit over a stomach ache.
Increasing the volume of his moaning, Ethan started to bang against the bars of his cell door. Then he started shouting.
‘Help! I need some help here; feel like my stomach’s about to burst. Please, someone …’
It wasn’t long before he heard the night watch approaching. And they weren’t exactly happy.
‘Hey, kid, shut up with the moaning.’
‘My stomach,’ moaned Ethan. ‘It’s killing.’
‘Have a shit, then,’ said the voice at his cell door.
‘Can’t,’ said Ethan, his breaths sharp as though in serious pain. ‘Toilet’s knackered. Isn’t working. Needs fixing. Please, help me.’
For a moment, the voice was quiet, then it said, ‘All right. Stand back.’
A torch beam burst through the cell door. It looked at Ethan, then at the toilet.
‘See?’ said Ethan, coughing and moaning weakly. ‘It’s overflowing. Can’t use it.’
The torch beam flashed back again at Ethan, blinding him.
‘You look fine to me.’
‘Just let me go to the toilet,’ Ethan replied. ‘That’s probably all this is. I need to go. Seriously.’
Then, just when Ethan was beginning to think his plan was already screwed, the cell door opened. The torch light found him again.
‘In front of me,’ said the voice. ‘And move! I don’t want to be hanging around here all night, got it? And you try anything I’ll cripple you. Got it?’
‘I get it,’ said Ethan, and made his way along the corridor and down the spiral stairs into the shower block, wincing convincingly with every step.
Once inside, he gave it a few minutes before he pu
t the next part of his plan into action. And this was the bit that really terrified him. If it went wrong, seriously wrong, he could end up not leaving the shower block alive. His only advantage was the element of surprise. But that was it. This was his only chance.
Ethan got himself onto the floor, half out of the toilet cubicle, half in, to make it look like he’d fallen and smashed his head on the door. Then, after a deep, deep breath, he let out the best agonized cry of pain and shock he could. And lay absolutely still.
Ethan heard the footsteps, but kept his eyes closed, didn’t dare move. Not yet.
‘Oi, kid, get up, you hear?’
Not yet … not yet …
‘Seriously, kid, shift it!’
Ethan felt a boot prod him, but still he didn’t react. Then he heard something being unclipped; the electric prod hanging from a belt.
And that was the signal he’d been waiting for.
23
Ethan grabbed the foot of the instructor and wrenched it hard to the left with a violent twist. It caught him off guard and sent him to the floor with a shout populated only by swear words. As he landed, he lost grip of the electric prod and Ethan watched it clatter across the floor.
Before the instructor could get back up, Ethan was on his feet and stamped down hard on his stomach, heading over to grab the electric prod. But if Ethan thought he was going to get away with this nice and clean and easy, he was very much mistaken.
The instructor rolled left and sprung to his feet with gazelle-like ease. He looked at Ethan and smiled, clenching and unclenching his fists, then balling them up ready to let fly.
‘You’re dead, you know that, don’t you? You won’t be leaving this room till I’m scraping your stupid face off the soles of my boots.’
