The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

Lumnije looked bereft. ‘I do not know where it is. I no longer know where it is.’

  Hart looked at her. Her eyes were hollow from lack of sleep. Her face was pale and drawn. It was clear that she was only holding herself together through sheer willpower. ‘I’m going to suggest something that you need to do,’ he said. ‘I want you to listen to me, please, and not just reject it out of hand.’

  ‘What is it?’ Lumnije’s face held not even the faintest trace of hope.

  ‘I’m going to cut back down the hill. Then I’m going to ambush him. He has to be in pain. Probably losing blood. He won’t be on his guard. It’s him or us. I want it to be him.’

  ‘And I wait here for you, is that it?’

  ‘No. You continue on your way. You keep on walking until you can’t walk any more.’

  ‘He will kill you.’

  ‘He tried that before. He failed.’

  ‘Through stupid luck. A one in a thousand chance. It will not happen again.’

  ‘But I will have the advantage of surprise. I will hide myself at the side of the track. Up high maybe. With a rock. He will have no chance. He is crippled, remember. Not walking normally. He has to use the track.’

  Lumnije stared at Hart. ‘Why? Why do you have this urge to sacrifice yourself for me?’

  ‘Sacrifice has nothing to do with it. It’s to save myself. Nothing more complicated than that. It’s what I would do if I were alone and he was following me.’

  ‘Don’t you think he knows that?’

  Hart shook his head. ‘I don’t care. A few more hours of this and I won’t be able to ambush him. I’d just topple onto the track in front of him with my legs in the air like a cockchafer.’

  Lumnije laughed again. But this time it was a purer laugh, with nothing held back. It made her look like a young girl. The girl she had been before the Captain came to her village three weeks before.

  ‘So you’re okay with that? I go?’

  She gave him a half nod.

  If he hadn’t been looking out for it he wouldn’t have seen it.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Captain stopped for a moment to inspect the wound in his side. It was only a flesh wound. Had to be, or he would be dead by now. But it hurt like a thousand biting ants.

  He carried morphine on him but he didn’t dare take it. Morphine made you drowsy. And other stuff too. But it was the drowsiness part he needed to avoid.

  Once, eighteen months before, he’d been caught by a ricochet from one of his own soldiers’ bullets. The ricochet had taken him in the shoulder. Torn through bone and muscle. He’d taken morphine for that. Slept for three days. Become claustrophobic. Couldn’t pee. Couldn’t shit. He daren’t risk the same thing happening again. The Anglez would come back and kill him. Hell. He was probably on his way back even now.

  The Captain checked around himself, just as he had done every five minutes into his climb. If anyone was approaching him, he’d hear. Morphine also wrecked your hearing. Gave you tinnitus. It felt like someone was testing a bust loudspeaker inside your head. You couldn’t make out anything inside that din.

  The Captain changed his dressing. Cleaned away the Celox blood coagulant. Threw on some sulphonamide powder. Hoped he wasn’t allergic to the stuff. He didn’t want to get urticaria. Or Stevens-Johnson syndrome. He’d seen both of those in the field and knew how much he needed to avoid them. But the danger of an infection was greater. The bullet had passed through his clothing. Carried chunks of it through his wound. That’s how Reinhard Heydrich had died in Poland in 1942. Not by bullet or by grenade. But by the bits of leather car seat and stuffing the grenade had blown into his wounds. Sulphonamide, the new wonder drug, would have saved him. Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, had advocated its use. But Gebhardt, the asshole Himmler sent out to look after his pet, overruled him, thinking Heydrich was getting better.

  The Captain wouldn’t make Gebhardt’s mistake. When he died he wanted it to be of old age. Extreme old age. There were too many things he wanted to do in this world before then.

  He forced himself to his feet and started back up the trail. He still couldn’t work out how the Anglez had survived his shot. He’d hit him in the back. Seen it clear as day. Surely the bastard wasn’t still wearing his Kevlar vest beneath the rest of his kit? Those things could weigh twenty kilograms. It would have been the first thing he’d have discarded if he knew he was being chased. But maybe this Anglez was a coward? Maybe he feared being shot in the back? But he’d come after the girl, hadn’t he, just as the girl had come after him? Crazy. But then he too had been crazy to leave his rifle back in the clearing, beside the body.

  The Captain caught himself nodding off. He flared his eyes, mimicking wakefulness. He rested his head against a tree but refused to lie down again. The man had been dead. You didn’t suddenly get up after you’d been hit in the spine by a 7.62 mm bullet from an assault rifle. You stayed down. You stayed put.

  But why had he left the rifle behind him after he’d shot the Anglez? Because he’d wanted the girl, of course. Thought he might have to run. Didn’t want to weigh himself down with useless junk. He had intended to go back for the rifle later. You had to make compromises in this life. All the time. You had to make compromises. Nobody was perfect. He’d made the right call.

  The Captain drifted into unconsciousness. Still standing. Still half leaning against the tree.

  He woke up some time later, the sweat dry on his face. You’ve been dozing again, he told himself. Maybe your wound is worse than you think? Maybe you’ve been having a fever?

  He rechecked his watch. No. It was okay. He’d only been out for ten, twenty minutes tops. Not surprising really. One didn’t get shot every day. And by one’s own gun. Bloody stupid. Bloody stupid thing to do. Even though he’d got away with little more than a puncture wound. No vital organs involved. He’d been incredibly lucky. The pair of them could have seen him off, no problem. Silly fuckers not to come and check on him when he fell over the gorge. Scared shitless probably. He’d only landed six feet down. All they’d needed to do was walk to the edge and he’d have been theirs.

  He felt down for his pistol. His skin flashed cold as if the wind had kissed it. Or as if he’d just swum through an icy current out at sea. The pistol was gone. He felt again. Then he straightened up and looked around. Maybe it had jumped out of his holster while he was walking? But it was attached by a lanyard. It would have bobbed along the track behind him until he noticed it.

  He checked the end of the lanyard. It had been cut. Neatly cut. The Anglez then. He must have come along while he was asleep and taken the pistol. The Captain straightened up. He peered round the glade, more in curiosity than apprehension. Did the Anglez have him covered from somewhere? And if not, why not? Why hadn’t the man killed him? The Captain shook his head.

  Insane. These foreigners were insane. The Anglez could have shot him in his sleep. Been done with it all. But here they both were with nothing changed. Nothing fundamentally changed. Except that now he knew the Anglez’s weak spot. The man was a bleeding heart. If it had been the girl who found him first, she would have slit his throat. No ifs or buts about that. And taken his ears as trophies.

  No wonder they said the West was dying. It was emoting itself to death. Like the turgid death scene in some opera, where the heroine lies on a bed and coughs up tiny gouts of blood from behind a handkerchief while the hero sits and weeps into his hands. Inconsolable.

  The Captain shook his head to clear it. Slapped himself on both cheeks. Grinned. Then set off after his quarry again.

  NINETEEN

  ‘I got his pistol. He is disarmed.’

  Lumnije looked at Hart. ‘So he is dead then?’

  ‘Dead? No?’

  ‘What do you mean, not dead?’ Lumnije was staring now. ‘How can you disarm such a man without killing him?’

  ‘He was asleep. Dozi
ng. I crept up behind him and cut his lanyard. Took his pistol.’

  ‘And you did not kill him?’

  ‘There seemed no point. What did you want me to do? Kill an unarmed and wounded man?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you fool.’

  Hart fingered the pistol in his hand. ‘I will kill him if he comes after us. Obviously. But I could not kill him while he was asleep.’

  ‘So why didn’t you wake him up?’

  Hart hesitated. ‘Then I would have had to kill him. Don’t you see?’

  Lumnije made a disgusted motion with her hand. The sort of motion a woman will make when she has decided that a man she had formerly believed in is no longer for her.

  Hart felt the motion bitterly. He had seen the Captain was dozing from the far side of the glade. At first he had thought the Captain was waiting for him, like in a cowboy film. Lulling him into a false sense of security, like Clint Eastwood under his poncho in For A Few Dollars More. But the longer he looked, the more he realized that the Captain had genuinely fallen asleep standing up. Which wasn’t surprising. The man clearly wasn’t the superman Lumnije thought him to be. He was wounded. And he was succumbing to his wound. Like any normal man.

  Hart had taken the opportunity to check the wound out while he was stealing the Captain’s gun. It didn’t look good. In fact it was a miracle that the Captain had travelled so far with it. As Hart stared at it, he had felt almost detached from himself. It was he, Hart, who had caused that wound. He’d shot a man. With no malice. With no forethought. Simply shot him because it had seemed the only sane thing to do at the time. And the result was this.

  Hart looked down at the pistol in his hand. Knock the man out? Should he do that? But the pistol felt heavy and alien. Quite enough to kill someone with if you overdid the blow. Tie the man up? With what? What should he do?

  Hart held the pistol up to the Captain’s head. It would be so simple. No one would hear the shot. No one would witness what would amount to an assassination. A murder.

  Before he knew it Hart found himself walking up the track again, away from his sleeping enemy. There was no way the Captain could catch them any more in the condition he was in. No way in hell. And there was no way Hart could murder a wounded man.

  On his way back to Lumnije, Hart had been tempted to chuck the pistol over the side of the defile next to the track. But then they would have no means of defence. The Captain wasn’t the only soldier in this world and there might be others ahead of them. The possession of the pistol might save their lives.

  Hart checked the pistol out as he walked. Its weight was oddly comforting. There were five bullets left in the magazine. More than enough.

  Now here was Lumnije telling him, in so many words, that he was a coward for not killing a helpless man. A man who had raped and brutalized her. Killed her family. Destroyed her life.

  What the hell was the world coming to? How did a man know which way to turn?

  He and Lumnije continued along the trail, twenty yards between them, like two strangers. Hart wished he had his cameras back. He felt unclothed without them, like someone sent to cover a wedding in only a pair of shorts.

  When next he looked up Lumnije was squaring up to him across the track.

  He stopped.

  ‘Give me the gun,’ she said. ‘I will go back and kill him.’

  ‘No you won’t.’

  She took a step towards him. ‘Give me the gun.’

  There was something so absurd about the situation that Hart was tempted to burst into peals of hysterical laughter. Here was this sixteen-year-old girl. Dishevelled. Beaten down. Brutalized. Deprived of everything that had meant anything to her in this world. And here he was, John Hart, budding photojournalist in the prime of life, freak survivor of a dedicated murder attempt, fortunate denizen of the West and proud inheritor of its fifty-year peace dividend. And here they both were arguing over the possession of a pistol, like children squabbling in a public playground.

  ‘You’re not going back,’ Hart said. ‘I forbid it.’

  ‘You said yourself that he was weak. Badly wounded. That he could not catch us if he tried.’

  ‘Yes. I said that.’

  ‘Then why try to stop me? What do you care what happens to me? Who am I to you? I’m just a weight round your neck.’

  ‘No you’re not. You’re more to me than that.’

  ‘Then give me the gun.’

  ‘No.’

  Lumnije made a lunge at him. It was so unexpected that Hart countered automatically by raising both his arms. The pistol was tucked into his belt. Lumnije tried to grab it. Hart threw her off.

  He hoped that would be enough to dissuade her, but he saw by the set of her face that she was about to come at him again. This was no longer play. Or anything remotely like it. He tried to grab her by the arms and turn her away from him so that she could neither bite, nor gouge, nor kick. He was probably a foot taller than her and outweighed her by five stone. In principle, at least, there should have been no contest between them.

  Lumnije threw herself back against him and the pair of them pitched to the side of the track. Then she carried on over his body, borne by her own physical momentum, and disappeared down the defile.

  Hart watched in horror as she rolled and tumbled down the rocks. He lunged after her but he was too late.

  She came to rest at the bottom of the slope, some thirty yards below him.

  Hart scrabbled down the face of the slope until he fetched up beside her. He tried to disentangle her limbs, fearful of what he might find. The sheer anarchy of her fall had rocked him to the core. Lumnije had flailed and pitched down the incline like a rag doll. Angrily, almost. As if her body relished the punishment it was taking.

  A noise alerted him to the presence of someone nearby. Hart turned round. The Captain was approaching them along the track. He was half running, half dragging his injured leg. By a serial mischance, Lumnije’s fall had brought them down to a parallel trail, maybe a half-kilometre behind their previous position in terms of pure walking distance, and straight into the Captain’s path.

  Hart felt for his pistol. It was no longer in his belt. He looked back up the slope behind him. The pistol had fallen out ten yards above him. He could see it nestling amongst the scraggle and the scree.

  He launched himself up the slope, half aware that the Captain was paralleling his movements twenty yards across from him.

  But Hart wasn’t wounded. He had full use of all his limbs. And the slope was steep.

  He reached the pistol first and turned it on the Captain.

  The Captain watched him, unblinking. ‘You will not shoot.’ The Captain’s accent was faux-American, as if his English had been learnt from a bunch of straight-to-video Steven Seagal movies.

  ‘Are you so very sure?’

  Hart saw the Captain’s confidence falter. He was in pain. The blood from his wound had drenched through his combat overalls, making a darker stain against the original camouflage design.

  ‘Get back down to the track,’ said Hart. ‘I’m covering you all the way, remember? I’m the unwounded one. You can’t get away. If you try to run I shall shoot you. Believe me. This time I will do it in cold blood.’

  The Captain, to Hart’s astonishment, obeyed. Was it something in his face? Had something changed him in these past few hours? From a nominal non-combatant into someone who has finally chosen which side they wish to fight on?

  ‘Now get out your first-aid pack.’

  ‘What first-aid pack?’

  ‘Don’t fuck with me, Captain. All frontline soldiers carry them.’

  The Captain smiled. He was always smiling. ‘I’ve used it all up. How do you think I got here behind you so quick?’

  Hart wavered. But then he saw the Captain’s eyes. Hart had watched many people being interviewed in the course of his five-year care
er. Photographed them even. He knew what their eyes did when they were lying. The micro-expressions that slipped through the net to reveal the liar’s true intentions. The movement to the right that a right-handed person’s eyes will make when they are fabulating. The Captain was maintaining far too much eye contact with him. It was unnatural. There were thoughts and motivations going on behind the impermeable mask. Hidden agendas.

  ‘Throw the pack towards Lumnije. Otherwise I’ll come on over and beat it out of you. After shooting you again first, of course. Where it really hurts. I’d enjoy that.’

  The Captain felt in his left thigh pocket. He tossed a flat black packet onto the path.

  ‘Now lie down. On your front. Arms behind.’

  ‘You’re joking, surely? The girl is dead. Can’t you see that? She’s probably broken her neck, the silly bitch. Whatever set us against each other is gone. I’ve got no quarrel with you. Take the pistol. Take the morphine pack. And piss off. My men will already be following us along the track. They will be coming soon to find me. If you leave me now, I will not follow you. I am badly wounded. Worse than I thought. I’ve got no taste for this any more. Now that the Albanian cunt has finally managed to kill herself you are free.’

  Lumnije groaned. She turned partially over onto one side. For a moment Hart could see the Captain’s eyes widen and become uncertain. If Lumnije woke, there was only one possible outcome to this piece of Grand Guignol theatre they were taking part in, and the Captain knew it.

  ‘Lie down, I said.’

  The Captain made a big thing about being forced onto his stomach. Like a professional footballer who is trying for a foul, everything the man did was thought out and pre-calculated. Hart realized that now. The Captain was a calculating machine. He functioned outside any normal person’s orbit.

  Once the Captain was flat on the ground he craned his head back over his shoulder to look at Hart. ‘Go on. Tell me. How did you survive my shot? It took you in the back. I saw it clear as day. From that distance I don’t miss. You pitched up the track like you’d been kicked by a horse. People don’t survive that. It was Kevlar, wasn’t it? You were wearing Kevlar?’