Hard Knocks tcfs-3

by Zoe Sharp

  It went to show, I thought grimly, that he hadn’t really believed a woman capable of inflicting Rebanks’s injuries. The bile climbed up the back of my throat, burning brightly when I swallowed it down again.

  Todd was in charge of phys, as usual, but for once he didn’t push us to our limits, which was unusually lenient of him. I suppose what had happened to Rebanks, coming on top of watching Blakemore die down in the ravine the day before, was an experience that would have a subduing effect on anyone.

  Or maybe he was taking it steady because he had O’Neill out with him. The scarred instructor ran with a grimace of stony determination twisting his face further out of kilter. Every now and then I caught him with a hand to his ribs, like he’d got a stitch. But when Todd jogged back and threw him a single enquiring glance, it was met with an angry glare.

  “So, what do you reckon’s gone on then?” said a panting voice by my shoulder, and I turned to find Declan running alongside me.

  I shrugged. It required less breath than speech.

  “Old Gilby was going spare last night,” he went on. “I don’t know what’s happened to Rebanks, but it can’t be good if he can’t even describe who clouted him, can it?”

  “No,” I managed, “I suppose not.”

  Declan paused. “You know, of course, that Hofmann was outside last night.”

  That broke my stride. “Hofmann? What on earth was he doing?”

  “Said he’d gone out for a last cigarette,” Declan gasped. “But he came bolting in when those alarms went off, I can tell you.”

  We ran another dozen strides or so in silence while I let that sink in. Then I ventured, “How did Gilby react to that?”

  Declan grinned at me. “Ah now, girl, d’you think we’d rat on the man?” he demanded, adding, “Even if he is a big numb German.”

  This morning, Todd didn’t put us through any extra tortures on the dew-misted grass in front of the house. Instead, when we got back we were allowed to fall back to a walk and trudge wearily straight across the gravel to the main doorway.

  My eyes searched for Hofmann’s broad figure and found him almost immediately. As if aware of my scrutiny, he glanced round, his gaze sweeping across me as he did so. Surely, if it was Hofmann who’d been watching outside and who’d followed me into the armoury, he must have seen enough to know my identity, mustn’t he? But there was no hint of recognition on his face.

  Then I remembered that flash of cunning I’d seen in him after I’d confronted McKenna, and I couldn’t be sure.

  Major Gilby was waiting for us inside the hallway. Waiting and watching. He didn’t move at our approach, so we were forced to part and flow round him, keeping our heads down, trying not to be noticed. He was like a stockman eyeing up the herd for the weak and the slow.

  There was that stillness to him again, that single-minded ruthlessness unveiled now. I could well believe that here was a man who’d marched his prisoners across a minefield without a second thought and had satisfied himself that it was the logical thing to do.

  As for me, I daren’t make eye contact. I had a nasty feeling that I wouldn’t be able to hide what he might see written there. The urge to break down under that scrutiny and confess what I’d done was almost overwhelming.

  ***

  Breakfast was a solemn affair. The students were still shell-shocked from the events of the last couple of days. Rebanks’s abrupt and apparently unexplained departure was just the latest in a catalogue of events designed to make even the most dedicated trainee bodyguard begin to doubt his or her calling.

  None of the depleted group of instructors was any more chatty. I noticed that the dining hall staff had used a smaller top table, so the two empty places were not so glaringly obvious.

  When the Major came in with amendments to the day’s schedule, he couldn’t help but take in the lack of focus within the group. The apathy was coming off everyone in waves.

  “This morning we’ll be doing a little team building exercise on the assault course,” he announced. “You’ll need to present yourselves at the front entrance at oh-eight-hundred.” For a moment he looked about to say more, but he closed his mouth with a snap and stiffly left the room.

  I knew that I should really have used the intervening time to call Sean and update him on the latest events before we went out on the assault course, but when the Major’s deadline rolled round I hadn’t plucked up the courage to do so. How could I tell him what I’d done now without also having to reveal what had gone before?

  Besides, I don’t know if Jan and Elsa had made a pact between them to stop me getting into any more trouble, but one or other of them seemed to be there whenever I turned around.

  Todd, O’Neill and Figgis were all waiting for us on the gravel when we went back outside, but for once they didn’t give us a hard time for being late. It wasn’t hard to understand why.

  Pulled up just about where the Major’s new car had been delivered was another transporter, but this held a very different load.

  The remains of Blakemore’s FireBlade had been retrieved from the site of the accident and had been brought to Einsbaden Manor. For what purpose I can only guess. I don’t know how the police work in Germany, but I would have expected them to want to hang on to the wreckage of the bike to examine it for evidence of another vehicle’s involvement in the crash. Looks like the Major had managed to successfully fudge the verdict to suit his own purposes.

  We watched in silence as the driver dragged out the ramps and removed the webbing straps that had held the bike’s carcass onto the load bed. Not that it was going anywhere. The buckled front wheel was bent right back into the radiator, the forks twisted well out of true.

  Gilby appeared at this point, rapping out sharp commands in German that the driver should drop his load off in the car park at the rear of the building. With a sigh the driver lifted the ramps again, muttering that the bike would not even push, he’d had to winch it on to the truck, and he would need a hand to unload it.

  The Major hesitated, as though he realised that using any of the students for such a task wasn’t in the best possible taste, but he had little choice. He commandeered Hofmann and Craddock, the biggest of the lads, to help the instructors assist the driver.

  We didn’t need to, but the rest of us followed round to the rear parking area to watch the process. The driver had been right about the immobility of the bike. The clutch and gear levers were gone, snapped away, so there was no way to free up the transmission which was locking the rear wheel tight.

  The men had to practically carry the dead Blade off the truck and over into the corner with the damaged Audis. Todd even tucked a corner of the tarpaulin over it, like a shroud. He turned away, wiping his hands, and caught sight of me.

  “So, d’you still think those bastard machines are better than a car then, Charlie?” he demanded with surprising bitterness.

  I shrugged, aware I had the attention of the others, but pride was at stake. I’d ridden bikes for enough years to know the risks. Blakemore would have known them, too, but that wasn’t what had killed him.

  “Well, everybody’s birth certificate expires sometime,” I said. Yeah, but sometimes it’s earlier than they expected . . .

  Todd shook his head in disgust and came stalking past me. “You’re one hard-faced bitch,” he said under his breath. “That attitude’s going to win you no friends here.”

  The instructors had been expecting us to be spending the morning in a nice warm classroom and they hadn’t looked too happy about the change of plans. Maybe that partly accounted for Todd’s sour mood. What the hell, he’d never liked me anyway.

  By way of retribution they fast jogged us the half-kilometre or so through the forest to the assault course location. It turned out to be not far from the CQB range, out of sight of the Manor house itself.

  We were split into four teams of four, which accounted for all the survivors of the course so far. I remembered the number who’d started out, and wondered how ma
ny more we were destined to lose before the full fortnight was up. Only a few days to go now. I’d found out plenty of answers in the time I’d been here, but I realised I just wasn’t sure I knew what the questions were.

  Todd split the three women up between the teams. I ended up with Craddock, Romundstad, and Declan. Hofmann was in the one team without a female constituent and looked smug at the prospect of not being lumbered with such a weak link. That self-satisfied air didn’t last long, though, when Todd explained the purpose of the exercise.

  “You will designate one team member as your injured principal,” he announced. “They are unconscious and must be carried to safety over the assault course.” He grinned nastily at our consternation. “Preferably without causing them any further injury. If we spot any of them lending a helping hand, or generally not behaving like dead weights, you go back to the beginning and start again.”

  Three pairs of eyes swivelled in my direction.

  “Now hang on a moment, lads,” I protested, backing away. “Declan’s skinny. Why can’t we carry him?”

  Craddock smiled and swept me up easily off the ground. He didn’t even grunt with the effort, which was kind of flattering, I suppose. “He is,” he agreed, “but he’s not nearly so much fun.”

  “OK,” I muttered as he set me down again, “but I warn you now, boys, if I feel anybody’s hands where they shouldn’t be, you’ll get them back minus a few fingers, all right?”

  Todd was setting the teams off at two-minute intervals. We watched Jan’s lot go first, getting themselves well knotted up in the climbing net. They bundled her over the six-foot wall like she was a sack of potatoes. For an unconscious VIP her language was loud and colourful. Then Elsa’s team was away.

  By dint of the fact that Elsa was what might politely be termed statuesque, a smaller bloke had been designated as the principal. Even so, they were struggling by the time they reached the rope swing.

  Hofmann’s mob made a better job of the net. He was clearly the powerhouse of the team and even though his principal was much bigger than the others, he seemed to be managing to carry him without immediate danger of herniating himself. Or maybe he was and it was just taking a long time for the message to fight its way through the muscle to his brain.

  An image of Kirk sprang to mind. He’d had been blessed with that same casual strength. It had made him inclined towards bravado. He’d had a tendency to show off, carrying more and more weight in his bergen for cross-country runs, completing high numbers of one-handed or even one-fingered press-ups. Stupid stuff that had made us all laugh.

  “If you’re quite ready, Miss Fox?” Todd’s voice snapped me back to the present. We stepped up to the start line. Craddock hoisted me over his shoulder and held me steady with a meaty hand perilously high up the back of my thigh.

  I reached down his back and grabbed hold of a fistful of the elasticated waistband of his jogging trousers, then pulled up, twisting hard.

  “Let’s not hurt each other here,” I hissed.

  The Welshman’s hand immediately dropped six inches further down my leg and I let go cautiously.

  “OK, go!” Todd shouted, clicking his stopwatch, and we were off.

  Being carried over someone’s shoulder in a fireman’s lift is not only extremely undignified, I discovered quickly, but it’s also bloody uncomfortable, particularly when they’re running. Fortunately, Craddock had big shoulders, coated with slabs of muscle, but even so it wasn’t long before the pressure set up a dull ache in my sternum, making it difficult for me to catch my breath.

  I didn’t have to feign helplessness as Craddock bundled me over the net and rolled me down the far side where Romundstad and Declan were waiting to slow my descent.

  As we progressed further round the course, over the six-foot wall and across the rope swing, the pain in my chest increased. I bit down on it, forced myself not to make any sound of complaint. We were catching up the people ahead of us. The rest of my team would not have appreciated any request to slow down or take things easier. Besides, the end was in sight.

  I nearly made it, too.

  It was the final obstacle that was my undoing. A single-piece rope bridge stretched between two sections of scaffold, nearly four metres off the ground. How to get a supposedly unconscious principal across this gap had caused discussion and disagreement between the other teams. Nobody had come up with the definitive answer.

  If you left it to the strongest member to simply carry them across, he couldn’t hold on to both the principal and the guide ropes at either side. It was a precarious operation, and it seemed much further down from up there than it had from the safety of the ground.

  Jan’s team only managed to hold onto her by the skin of their teeth. By the time they reached the other side she was dangling precariously by her wrists and cursing her team’s cack-handed technique.

  Hofmann went for the brute force approach, hoisting his principal and muscling his way across, leaving his two team-mates to struggle after him. He made it about halfway before his grip and his balance both failed him. I was right about it being a long way down. They were both lucky to escape injury.

  Elsa, who seemed to have taken charge of her team, solved the problem by having one person carry their burden draped over their shoulder, holding on to the guide ropes with both hands. The other two, one in front and one behind, held on with one hand only, steadying the principal with the other. It was probably safer, but it was numbingly slow.

  By the time they’d inched their way to the other side we were the only team left and everyone, instructors included, was waiting under the bridge to watch our crossing.

  “What d’you reckon?” Craddock asked. “Mad dash or slow but sure?”

  I was in enough pain by this time to favour a mad dash, just to get it over with faster, but the other two voted for the other alternative and I had no choice but to go along with it.

  With Declan in the lead and Romundstad bringing up the rear we edged out across the void. Dangling over Craddock’s shoulder all I could see where the back of his legs and Romundstad’s feet that came nervously after. Below them, it was a hell of a long way down.

  Every now and again their collective movements would set up a swaying motion on the rope and they’d have to freeze until the lurching subsided. It was painful progress in every sense of the word and a good job, I contemplated tightly, that I wasn’t seasick.

  Then, when we were just over one-third’s distance, I felt Craddock slip slightly to one side. It was enough for me to start slithering off his shoulder. I waited a heartbeat for Romundstad to grab hold of me, but he must have had his own balance to worry about. I didn’t want to be the one who incurred a forfeit from the ever-watchful Todd, but I didn’t see I had much option.

  In the end, I left it too late to save myself anyway.

  Craddock’s boot slipped off the rope entirely. With a bellow that could have been anger, or could have been pain, he managed to get a fistful of guide rope with his left hand, but I tumbled off his shoulder and started heading for terra firma at a nastily accelerated rate.

  For a split-second my vision was a cartwheel of ground and sky, then I thumped down hard, mainly head first, and landed on my face in the dirt.

  The impact left me stunned and sick. For a few moments I lay there, disconnected from myself, watching with vague interest as numerous pairs of booted feet congregated around my head. Eventually, I was rolled over onto my back. The rope bridge seemed miles above me in the sky. Had I really fallen all the way from there?

  Figgis’s long mournful face appeared. “Charlie,” he said, slowly and carefully, “can you move your hands and feet for me?”

  I obligingly wiggled my limbs to show my spinal cord was still attached, but when I sat up it was like I’d been punched in the chest. I wrapped my arms round my ribs, gasping.

  “Steady, girl,” Figgis said. “Take a minute. You might have cracked a couple of ribs.”

  Light-headed, I gave a wheezy la
ugh and muttered, “Been there, done that.”

  Somebody snorted and when I looked up I found Todd staring down at me. “This is why female bodyguards are a waste of space,” he stated, his voice acid with contempt. “You just haven’t got the physical strength to get the job done.”

  “I’m plenty strong enough when I’m fully fit,” I threw back at him, and regretted the words almost as soon as they were out of my mouth. There was a long pause.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” he demanded.

  I tried to think of an excuse, but none came. The throbbing in my chest was making it difficult to think much. In the end the truth just came dribbling out.

  “I fractured my sternum two months ago,” I said, part shamefaced, part defiant.

  “And you still came on the course?” O’Neill asked, and I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he thought I was a hero or a fool.

  I shrugged. “It’s supposed to be mended.”

  Figgis held his hand out. For a moment I stared at it stupidly, as though he was offering it to shake. Then it dawned on me that he was helping me up.

  I got to my feet. The other students moved back silently to give me room. The whole of my ribcage felt tight, like I’d been crushed by a snake. I tried a couple of deep breaths, with varying degrees of success.

  Todd stood and looked at me with his hands on his hips. “I think you’d better get back to the Manor,” he said, dismissive. “Talk to the Major. He’ll arrange you a flight home.”

  “Hang on,” I protested. “You can’t just chuck me out.”

  “I think you’ll find we can do anything we like, Miss Fox,” he said with a grim smile. “Injury is one of the commonest reasons for people failing this course. It’s against school policy to let you continue. Like it or not, you’re out.”

  Nineteen

  It was a long way back to the Manor, and nobody offered to walk with me. Before I was even out of earshot I could hear Todd resuming the lesson, sending the students off round the assault course individually. O’Neill and Figgis were shouting insults and encouragement.