Close Quarters

THIRTY

Ed Travis lay fully dressed, staring at the digital read-out in the base of the small television in his hotel room. It said 05.00 a.m. and he was listening to the night sounds — or were they early morning sounds? It definitely looked lighter than it had a while ago, although lack of sleep was doing strange things to his head. He focussed on the individual sounds in the hope that sleep would overtake him. There was the vague hum of the heating system, the occasional buzz of traffic passing by on the road outside, and the coughs and rumbles issuing from occupants of the rooms either side of his.

So far, as a distraction, it wasn’t working. And whatever service the television was supposed to provide seemed to have been switched off and it gave out only a mushy screen of white noise, a frustrating snowstorm against a dark background.

He thought about the old man named Denys, three doors along. They had driven here from Donetsk mostly in silence, Denys steering the car with studied care and observing all the traffic rules. At times his grip on the wheel had become light and Travis had been forced to nudge his shoulder at one point when he thought he was zoning out. It was Denys who had decided to stay the night before moving on to try and get over the sickness that had settled on him. He hadn’t said where he was going, only that he had a couple of people who would help him, old friends from way back.

Travis hoped he was right; he was no expert, but he’d witnessed the way his own father had faced death, and the aura that had settled around him in his final days. Denys had the same grey pall around his shoulders, the same gaunt look that no amount of medicines would put right. Nobody should have to endure that kind of solitary end in the final days of their life without someone to help and care for them.

It made him wonder what the hell he was doing here himself, so far from Beth, his wife, and his two children, Dean and Andrea. After his confinement at Donetsk Airport and being freed by the mysterious American, who had so far remained out of sight, he was now in another building, but just as disconnected from them as he had been before. At least he was free to move around within reason, without having an armed guard outside the door.

But what had he achieved coming to this country that was teetering on the brink of a civil war? He’d spoken to a few self-styled leaders, some clearly extreme in their views, some more strongly committed to real change in their country but by peaceful means. They had invariably been shouted down by others, perhaps not all provably Ukrainian, who were brutally critical of America’s place in the world and demonstrably not happy at Travis’s presence. The latter group were no less convinced that they wanted change, but there seemed to be no limit to what they had in mind to achieve their desired goals.

He knew which ones were doomed to fail, swept under the carpet of change by the gun rather than the political chamber; and it wasn’t those with a soft line in dialogue and a desire to power-share in a new democracy.

The idea depressed him, and he found thoughts of his children laying heavy on his mind. They were too young for him to be off risking his life in foreign lands. But then so were thousands of other kids with parents in the military, or in embassies and missions all around the world, facing daily problems and dangers that could rip them away from their loved ones at a moment’s notice. The temptation to pick up the phone as soon as he’d arrived had been tremendous, but he remembered what the American in Donetsk had told him. In any case he knew the dangers of calls being picked up by monitoring stations and had clamped down hard to resist reaching for the phone.

He closed his eyes, settling his breathing and deliberately trying to ease his family from his mind. If tomorrow was anything like today, he’d need all the rest and energy he could muster.

Seconds later he opened them again and realized that he’d fallen asleep. He sat up. He’d heard a noise, penetrating his consciousness in spite of his exhaustion. It hadn’t been a car or a phone ringing, or the noisy heating. What then?

He heard it again. It was a thumping noise, like somebody hitting a pillow to soften it. He lay back, the explanation easy to take in, and closed his eyes.

Then somebody cried out. Short and sharp, it had the quality of a man in pain … or someone suffering a bad dream. After what he’d seen going on in this country, it would be amazing if some people weren’t troubled by thoughts of what was happening to loved ones, to friends, to their country.

He sat on the side of the bed, now more than wide awake, and wondered if he should check on Denys. The old man was clearly in a bad way, undoubtedly a victim of poor diet and neglect. But the sudden departure from his home in Donetsk and the journey here, expecting all the time to be stopped by police or military roadblocks, had been an additional strain on a tired body already racked by ill-health. He had gone out shortly after arriving, telling Travis to stay inside and not to talk to anyone, that someone would be along in the morning to pick him up for the next stage of the journey.

Since then, nothing.

He got up and checked the grounds outside the window. Nothing moved. A few cars parked in rows, a dog — or was it a fox? — trotting along the road, and the darkness of a section of town without street lights. After what he’d seen in the east, it was oddly peaceful, serene almost.

A door opened and closed; a soft thump in the dark followed by the click of a lock. An early riser hitting the road. He heard the scuff of footsteps in the corridor. They stopped outside his door.

He stepped across the room. Denys. At last. Now he could be on to the next stage of the journey …

But it wasn’t Denys. The man filling the doorway and blocking out the night-light in the corridor was big. Travis caught a glimpse of a bullet head and broad shoulders. The man was pointing at him, his arm encased in a leather jacket giving off a smell of cigarettes and body odour.

‘What?’

He stopped speaking, the words congealing in his throat. The man was pointing but it wasn’t a finger; he was holding the cold metal of a gun barrel against Travis’s forehead.

‘Back inside,’ the man said softly, and prodded Travis backwards until he fetched up against the bed. The man closed the door then dropped the gun into a holster strapped under his jacket against the side of his chest.

‘Where is the other man who brought you here?’ The newcomer’s voice was clear and precise, almost friendly. But what came next was not.

‘I don’t know,’ Travis replied instinctively, and instantly felt a tremendous blow to his stomach that knocked him back on to the bed. He tried to roll away, his knees going weak, but fetched up against the headboard with a sickening bang. A wave of nausea rolled over him, making his head spin.

‘Not the right answer, Mr Travis.’ The man leaned over him and began binding his hands and legs together with a roll of packaging tape until he was immobile. ‘There. That’s better. Now, where is the other man?’

‘I told you—’

Another body punch, this one to the chest, followed by a roundhouse slam to his ribs that nearly lifted him off the bed. He heard something crack and felt his stomach rebel as the pain lanced through him like a bolt of fire. There were other blows, but not nearly so hard, merely a relentless repetition, spaced out around his body, the fists sending waves of pain through him until he nearly passed out.

Eventually the beating stopped. ‘I’ll ask you another question, to see how we get on. Where are you going after here? What address have you been given?’

‘I haven’t been told that.’ Travis braced himself for another blow, knowing that he couldn’t sustain this level of systematic damage for long without something going badly wrong.

But the man didn’t hit him. Instead he leaned closer and whispered in his ear. ‘Your friend, the old man? The one whose car you were in?’

Travis coughed. The movement produced a renewed burst of agony and he wanted to be sick but didn’t dare in case he choked to death. ‘What … what about him?’ This thug evidently knew about Denys, there was no point denying it. Maybe he could delay things in the hope that one of the other guests would alert the management about the noise.

‘He’s dead. See this?’ The man produced a long, slim knife with a sharp point. ‘I asked him the same questions. But he refused to talk so I provided him with an incentive. You know about incentives, Mr Travis?’

Travis couldn’t speak, he was so horrified. Instead he nodded, not wanting to hear more.

‘Good.’ The man smiled. ‘I made a large hole in his side.’ He sighed dramatically, his breath hot and stale on Travis’s face. ‘He was a foolish old man, but a brave one. He had guts — and I saw some of them. But in the end he told me where you were.’ He giggled and placed the knife blade on Travis’s cheek, close to his eye. ‘Now then, where shall we begin, Mr Travis? You like reading? Watching TV? Looking at your pretty wife as she takes off her clothes and gets naked for you, huh?’ He pressed down on the blade without breaking the skin. ‘How would you be able to do that without your eyes, do you think?’

The man suddenly moved away. He picked up the roll of tape and tore off a strip, slapping it across Travis’s mouth. Then he bent and ripped out the phone wires from the handset. ‘I’ll give you a couple of minutes to think it over. Don’t think about running anywhere, will you?’

The man left the room and closed the door and Travis felt himself losing consciousness. Oh, God, he thought, don’t let it end here like this …