Stop at Nothing by J. T. Brannan

Author:J. T. Brannan [Brannan, J. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

30

The driving snow was making it hard to see out of the windscreen of the stolen car. Cole had driven the Citroen C9 a little over two hundred miles, and knew he would soon need a new one. He didn’t want to drive too far in a stolen vehicle, for fear that it would attract attention. Changing cars every two or three hundred miles would make the journey a lot safer. There would be one more change before he got to the German border, and then he would leave the vehicle and cross over on foot, only taking another car when he was safely in the new country. He couldn’t take the chance of driving through the border, for fear that the patrol guards might have his picture; he had no idea the extent of the manhunt Hansard would have ordered.

He coaxed the little car on along the highway at a steady hundred kilometres per hour, in quite possibly the worst conditions he had ever come across. The compacted snow under his tyres made grip all but nonexistent, and the snow was coming down so heavily that even with his wipers on at double speed, he could barely see the road ahead.

Even with his concentration on the road, he felt his mind returning to his old master and mentor. Hansard – he still couldn’t believe the man wanted him dead. It was too much to accept, and yet Cole’s experience of the world meant that his views of human nature were essentially somewhat less than optimistic. Cynicism was his watchword, and yet he had never expected Hansard to turn against him. What was the man thinking? He was up to something, that much was obvious; it was also evident that whatever it was, it was big. But, he remembered, Hansard had always had the mental edge; not just over him, but over everyone.

Cole remembered their first meeting, back when he had been Ensign Mark Kowalski with SEAL Team Two during the long, hot summer of 2003 in Iraq. It was only a year after he had fought in the caves of Afghanistan, but he didn’t mind; he loved the action. There was always the fear, of course, but he knew that if he could persevere through the fear, there would be the glorious reward of the supercharged adrenal surge at the other end. Kowalski had learnt early on that there was no more powerful a drug than the adrenaline hit brought on by a real-life fire-fight, with trained men shooting at you, whilst you tried to shoot back. It made everything so clear – movements, sounds, the feel of the air on your skin, the flow of blood pumping around your body – and it was unlike any other feeling Kowalski had ever experienced. The truth of the matter was that he only felt truly alive when his life was in danger. It was a truth that Mr Hansard, as he introduced himself, saw immediately.

Mr Hansard was waiting for him in the operations tent when Kowalski returned from a reconnaissance patrol.

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