Crossfire

11

I woke in agony. And in the dark, pitch-black dark.

Where was I?

My arms hurt badly, and my head was spinning, and there was some sort of cloth on my face, rough cloth, like a sack.

What had happened?

It felt as if I was hanging by my arms and my shoulders didn't like it, not one bit. My whole back ached, and my head pounded as if there were jackhammers trying to break out of my skull behind my eyes. I felt sick, very sick, and I could smell the rancid odor of vomit on the cloth over my face.

How had I got here?

I tried to remember, but the pain in my arms clouded every thought. Being blown up by an IED had nothing on this. My upper body screamed in agony, and I could hear myself screaming with it. Whoever thought too much pain brought on unconsciousness was an idiot. My brain, now awake, clearly had no intention of switching off again. How much pain does it take to kill, I wondered. Surely it was time for me to die?

Was this just another bad dream?

No, I decided, this was no dream. This agony, sadly, was reality.

I wondered if my arms were actually being pulled from their sockets. I couldn't feel my hands, and I was suddenly very afraid.

Had I been captured by the Taliban? The very thought struck terror into my heart. I could feel myself coming close to panic, so I put such thoughts back in their box and tried to concentrate solely on the locations of my pain and its causes.

Apart from the ongoing fire in my back and arms, my left leg also hurt-in particular, my heel. "Concentrate," I shouted out loud at myself. "Concentrate." Why does my heel hurt? Because it's pressing on the floor. Now I realized for the first time that I wasn't hanging straight down. My left foot was stretched out in front of me. I bent my knee, pulled my foot back, and stood up. The searing agony in my shoulders instantly abated. The change was dramatic. I no longer wanted to die. Instead, I became determined to live.

Where was I? What happened? Why was I here? And how did I get here?

The same questions kept rotating over and over in my head.

I knew that I couldn't have been captured by the Taliban. I remembered that I was in England, not in Afghanistan. At least, I assumed I was still in England. But could I assume anything? The world had suddenly gone mad.

I felt dizzy. Why couldn't I stand up properly?

Then I remembered that too.

I reached down to the floor with my right leg. Nothing. My prosthesis was missing. I could feel the empty right trouser leg flapping against my left calf as I moved my leg back and forth.

Standing up, even on one leg, had vastly improved the pain in my back and shoulders, and feeling was beginning to return to my hands with the onset of horrendous pins and needles. But that was a pain I could bear. It was a good sign. In fact, it was the only good sign I could think of at the moment.

My head went on throbbing, and I continued to feel sick.

I turned my head from side to side, which did nothing to improve my nausea. Not a chink of light was visible at any point through the hood. I heel-and-toed myself through half a revolution and looked again. Still nothing.

I was at home in darkness, but even so, I closed my eyes tight. I had discovered many years ago that with my eyes firmly held shut I could somehow switch off that part of my brain that dealt with visual images and increase the concentration on my other senses.

I listened but could hear nothing, save for my own breathing inside the hood.

I smelled the air, but the overpowering stench of vomit clouded out almost everything. There was, however, a faint sweet smell alongside it. Glue, perhaps, I thought, or something like an alcoholic solvent.

With my now recovered and responsive fingers, I searched the space above my head. My wrists were tightly bound together by some sort of thin plastic, which was in turn attached to a chain. I followed the chain along its short length until I came to a ring fixed into the solid wall. The ring was set just over my head height, six-feet-six or so from the floor, and was about two inches across. I could feel that the chain was secured to it by a padlock.

I leaned forwards against the wall. There was something running horizontally that was sticking into my elbows. I couldn't quite get my hands low enough to feel it, so I used my face through the cloth. The horizontal bar ran in both directions as far as I could feel, with a small ledge above it. I banged on the wall with my arms, and suddenly I knew where I was.

I was in a stable. The horizontal bar and ledge that I could feel was the top of the wooden boarding that runs around a stall to protect a horse from kicking out at the unforgiving brick or stone. And the ring in the wall was there to tie up the horse, or to hang a hay net.

But which stable was I in? Was it in my mother's stable yard? Was Ian Norland asleep upstairs?

I shouted. "Can anyone hear me? Help! Help!"

I went on shouting for ages, but no one came running. I don't think the hood helped. My voice sounded very loud to me inside it, but I wondered if the noise had even penetrated beyond the stable.

I was pretty sure I wasn't at Kauri House Stables. When I stopped shouting to listen, it was too quiet. Even if there had been an empty stall in my mother's yard, there would be horses nearby, and horses make noises, even at night, and especially if someone is shouting their head off next door.

I was beginning to be particularly irritated by the hood, not least by having to breathe vomit fumes, even if it was my own vomit. I tried to hold the material and pull it off, but it was tied too tightly around my neck and I couldn't reach down with my hands far enough to untie it. I would just have to stand the irritation. It was nothing compared to the previous pain in my shoulders.

I stood on my one leg for a long time. Occasionally I would lean back against the wall, but mostly I just stood.

I wondered how long I had been here before I woke, and how much longer I was to remain. But that decision wasn't mine.

Night turned into day. I found that I could tell because a very small amount of light did penetrate the dark cloth of the hood, and if I turned my head, I could just tell that there was a window to my left as I stood with the wall behind me.

The day brought nothing new.

I went on standing for hours.

I was hungry and thirsty, and my leg began to ache. And to make matters worse, I desperately needed to pee.

I tried to remember how I had come to be here. I could recall the inquest and speaking to Mr. Hoogland. What had happened after that?

I had walked back to my car in the multistory parking lot. I could remember being annoyed that someone had parked so close to my Jaguar on the driver's side. I had purposely parked it on a high level, well away from any other cars, and it was not just because I didn't want to get my paintwork scratched. The attaching system for my prosthetic leg meant I couldn't bend my right knee through more than about seventy degrees, so getting into my low sports car was not as easy now as it had once been.

My annoyance had stemmed from the fact that the particular level of the parking lot was still almost empty, but nevertheless, someone had parked within a foot of the off side of my car. I remembered wondering how on earth I was going to open the driver's door wide enough to get my arm in, let alone my whole body.

But I had never reached the door to try.

Something had knocked me down, and I remembered having a towel wrapped around my face. The towel had been soaked in ether. I had known immediately what it was. The boys from the transport pool had used ether in Norway when the battalion had been there on winter exercise. They'd injected it straight into the engine cylinders to get the army trucks started when the diesel fuel was too cold to ignite. All the troops, including me, had tried to sniff the stuff to get high. But ether was also an anesthetic.

And the next thing I'd known had been waking up in this predicament.

Who could have done such a thing?

And why had I been so careless as to let it happen? I'd been off my guard, thinking about the inquest and my conversation with the lawyer, Mr. Hoogland. I had stuck my head up over the parapet, but I hadn't been shot, I'd been kidnapped.

I wasn't sure which was worse.

As time passed, I became hungrier and the pain in my bladder grew to the extent that in the end, I had to let go, the urine briefly warming my leg as it ran down to the floor.

But it was the thirst and the fatigue that were becoming my greatest problems.

In the army, soldiers were used to standing for long periods, especially in the Guards regiments. Lengthy stints of ceremonial duty outside the royal palaces in London taught all guardsmen to stand completely still for hours, unmoved and unamused by the antics of camera-wielding tourists or little boys with water pistols.

I had done my time there as a young guardsman, but nothing had prepared me for the hours of standing on only one leg, unable to go for a march up and down to alleviate the pain, and especially the cramp that started to appear in my calf. I tried rocking back and forth from heel to toe, but my heel was still sore and it didn't do much good. I tried resting my elbows on the ledge at the top of the wooden paneling to relieve the pressure. But nothing helped for long.

I bent my knee and allowed some of my weight to hang once more from my hands, but soon the pain in my shoulders returned and my hands started to go numb once more.

I spent some more time shouting, but no one came, and it just made me even thirstier.

What did the people who did this want from me?

I would gladly give them everything I owned just to sit down with a glass of water.

Values and Standards of the British Army stated that prisoners must be treated with respect and in accordance with both British and international laws. International Law is based on the four Geneva Convention treaties and the three additional protocols that set the standards for the humanitarian treatment of victims of war.

I knew; I'd been taught it at Sandhurst.

In particular, the conventions prohibit the use of torture. Hooding, sleep deprivation and continuous standing had all been designated as torture by case law in the European Court of Human Rights. To say nothing of the withholding of food and water.

Surely someone had to come soon.

But they didn't, and the light from the window went away as day turned into my second night in the stable.

I passed some of the time counting seconds.

Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Mississippi three, and so on… and on… and on. Mississippi sixty to one minute, Mississippi sixty times sixty to one hour. Anything to keep my mind off the pain in my leg.

Eventually, sometime that I reckoned, from my counting, must be after midnight, it dawned on me that my kidnapper simply wasn't going to arrive with food and water for his hostage. If he had been going to, he'd have come during the daylight hours or in the early evening.

I faced the shocking reality that I wasn't here to be ransomed, I was here to die.

In spite of the pain in my leg, I went to sleep standing up. i I only realized when I lost my balance and was woken by the jerk of the chain attached to my wrists. I twisted around so I was facing the wall and stood up again.

I was cold.

I could tell that I was only in my shirtsleeves. I'd been wearing an overcoat when I walked back to the car from the Coroner's Court, but it had obviously been removed.

I shivered, but the cold was the least of my worries.

I was desperately thirsty, and I knew that my body must be getting dehydrated. My kidneys had gone on making urine, and I had peed three times during the day, losing liquid down my leg that I could ill afford. I knew from my training that in these cool conditions, human beings could live for several weeks without food but only a matter of a few days without water.

The knowledge was not hugely comforting.

I thought back to the survival-skills instructor at Sandhurst who had told me that. The whole platoon had sat up and taken special notice of the attractive female captain from the Royal Army Medical Corps who had taught us about the physiological effects of the various situations in which we might find ourselves.

Sadly, there hadn't been a lecture on how to stand forever on one leg.

But the captain had turned out to be more than just an army medico who knew the theory, she was a get-up-and-go girl who had put it into practice. She was the female equivalent of Bear Grylls, spending all her army leave on expeditions to remote parts, and she could count both poles as well as the top of Everest in her resume.

"If you're in a bit of a spot," she had said, grossly understating some of the "spots" she had described from her own experiences, "never just sit and wait to be rescued. Your best bet for survival is always to evacuate under your own steam if that is humanly possible. There are well-documented occasions when people with broken legs, or worse, left for dead high up on Everest, have subsequently turned up alive at Base Camp. They crawled off the mountain. No one else was going to save them, so they saved themselves."

I was definitely in a bit of a spot.

Time, I thought, to save myself.

First things first. I had to get myself disconnected from the ring in the wall. It sounded deceptively easy.

I reached up with my hands to where the chain was attached by the padlock. The ring stuck straight out from the wall as if it had been screwed in as a single piece. I grabbed hold of it with my right hand and tried to twist it anticlockwise. It didn't budge an iota.

I went on trying for a long time. I wrapped the chain around the ring and put all my weight on it. I then tried to twist the chain, rotating my body around and around, back and forth, hoping that I would find a weak link to snap. Nothing.

Next, I tried turning the ring clockwise in case it had a left-hand screw thread. Still nothing, other than sore fingers.

I jerked it with the chain, on one occasion throwing myself off balance and back into the hanging-by-shoulders position. But still the damn ring didn't shift. If I couldn't detach myself from the ring, then I would simply hang here until I died of dehydration, and the exertions of trying to escape would reduce the time that would take.

"Always to evacuate under your own steam if that is humanly possible." That's what the lady captain had said. Maybe freeing myself from the ring wasn't humanly possible.

I felt like crying, but I knew that would be another loss of precious fluid.

And I desperately needed an evacuation of a different kind.

How degrading bodily functions could be when they occurred in the wrong place at the wrong time. At least in the hospital, when I'd been bedridden and incapable, there had been bedpans and nurses close by to assist. Here I was, standing on my one very sore leg, imprisoned in a stable, unable even to remove my trousers, let alone to squat or sit on a toilet.

Who was the bastard who would force me to shit in my pants?

I was angry. Bloody angry.

I tried to channel my anger into a resurgence of energy and strength as I once more gripped the ring and tried to turn it. Again it resisted.

"Come on, you bugger, move!" I shouted at the ring. But it didn't.

I rested my head in frustration on the ledge at the top of the wooden paneling. So fed up was I that I bit through the cloth of the hood into the wood.

It moved.

I thought I must be imagining it, so I bit the wood again. It definitely moved.

I felt around with my face. The ledge on the top of the paneling was about an inch and a half wide, with its front edge curved, and it was the curved edge that had moved. It was obviously a facing strip that had been glued or nailed to the front of the ledge.

I bit into the wood again. Even through the hood, I found I could get my front teeth behind the curved beading. I bit hard and pulled backwards, using my arms to press on the wall. The curved beading strip came away from the ledge far enough for me to get my mouth around it properly. I pulled back again and it came away some more.

I was pulling so hard with my mouth that when one end of the strip came completely free, I again lost my balance and ended up hanging from the chain.

But I didn't care.

I pulled my knee back under me and stood up. The beading was flapping, with one end free and the other not. There had obviously been a join in the wood just a little way to my left.

I held the wood in my mouth and twisted my neck to the right, making the free end bend upwards. I could feel the free end on my arms, and finally, after nearly twisting myself again off my foot, I was able to grasp the strip in my hands.

I now bent myself to the right, folding the strip back on itself.

It snapped with a splintering crack, leaving me holding a free length of the beading. I couldn't see how long it was, but I carefully fed it through my fingers until I reached the end. This I put through the ring, and then I used it like a crowbar.

Still the ring resisted, and I again lost my balance and ended hanging by the chain as the end of the wood broke off. But I didn't let go of the rest of it.

I stood up once more and passed the broken end back through the ring.

This time I turned the wood through ninety degrees so that it was edge on, and hoped it would be more difficult to break. Then I leaned on it with as much weight as I dared.

The ring moved. I felt it. I leaned again. It moved some more.

I was so excited that I was laughing.

The ring had almost moved half a revolution. I put the wooden strip into my mouth to hold it, almost gagging on the vomit-tasting cloth. I then reached up and tried to turn the ring with my fingers. It was stiff, but it turned, slowly at first, then over and over until I could feel it part company with the wall.

I could lower my arms. I was free of my shackle. What bliss!

I quickly hauled down my pants and underwear, and then crouched against the wall to defecate. I could remember from my boyhood that my father had often described his morning constitutional on the lavatory as his golden moment of the day. Now, at long last, I knew what he meant. The relief was incredible. So much so that I hardly cared that disengaging myself from the wall was only the first step in my escape.

I pulled my pants up and then heel-and-toed my way along the wall until I found a corner. With difficulty, I sat down on the floor. I still had my wrists tied and I was still wearing the hood, but the joy of not having to stand up any longer was immense.

Stage one was complete. Now I had to remove the hood and free my wrists. No problem, I thought. If I could get away from that wall, everything else must be a piece of cake.

I lifted my hands to my neck and found the drawstring of the hood. With my hands still bound together at the wrists, it was not easy to untie the knot, and I'd probably tightened it with all my earlier tugging. However, I finally managed to get the string free, and I gratefully pulled the oppressive, fetid cloth over my head. I breathed deeply. The atmosphere in the stable may not have been that fresh, for obvious reasons, but it was a whole lot better than the rancid, vomit-smelling air I'd been breathing for the past thirty-six hours.

I shook my head and pushed my fingers through my hair.

Stage two complete. Now for my hands.

It was too dark to really see how they were tied, but by feeling with my tongue, I worked out that my kidnapper had used the sort of ties that gardeners use to secure bags of garden waste, or saplings to poles. The loose end went through a collar on the other end, and was then pulled tight, very tight, one tie on each wrist inter-looped both with each other and with the chain.

I tried biting my way through the plastic, but it was too tough and my efforts ended with me still tied up, but now with a sore mouth where the free ends of the ties kept sticking into my gums.

I looked around. It may have been dark, but there was just enough light entering for me to see the position of the window. I thought that if I could get outside, I might be able to find something to cut the plastic. But how was I going to get outside with only one leg, and with my wrists tied up?

How about the glass in the window? Could I use that to cut the plastic?

If getting down to the floor had been difficult, it was nothing compared to getting up again. Finally, I was upright, but a cramp in my calf had me hopping around to try to ease it. I leaned on the wall and stretched forwards, and the cramp thankfully subsided.

I hopped along the wall to the window.

It wasn't glass, it was Plexiglas. It would be. I suppose the horses would break glass. The window was actually made of two panes of Plexiglas in wooden frames, one above the other, like a sash window. I slid the bottom pane up. The real outdoor fresh air tasted so sweet.

But now I discovered there was another problem.

The window was covered on the outside by metal bars set about four inches apart. I'd had no food for two days, but even I wasn't yet slim enough to fit through that gap. I rested my head on my arms. I could feel the panic beginning to rise in me again. I was so thirsty, yet I could hear the rain. I held my arms out through the window as far as they would go, but they didn't reach the falling water. There was just enough light for me to see that the roof had an overhang. I would have needed arms six feet long to reach the rain. And to add insult to injury, it began to fall more heavily, beating like a drum against the stable roof.

"Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink."

More in hope than expectation, I hopped farther along the wall to the stable doors. As expected, they were bolted. I pushed at them, but unsurprisingly, they didn't shift. I would have stood and kicked them down if only I'd had a second leg to stand on while I did so.

Instead, I slithered down in the corner by the door until I was again sitting on the floor. Wiggling myself into position on my back, I tried to use my left leg to kick the lower section of the door. I kicked as hard as I could, but the door didn't budge. All I managed to do was to slide myself in the other direction across the stone floor.

I gave up and went to sleep.

It was light when I woke, and I could see my prison cell properly for the first time. It was nothing extraordinary, just a regular stable stall with black-painted wooden boarding around the walls, and timber roof beams visible above.

I worked myself back into the corner by the door and sat up, leaning against the wall, to inspect the bindings on my wrists that were beginning to really annoy me.

The black plastic ties looked so thin and flimsy, but try as I might, I couldn't break them. I twisted my wrists first one way then the other, but all that happened was that the plastic dug painfully into my flesh, causing it to bleed. The damned plastic ties seemed totally unaffected.

The length of chain was still attached to the ties. It was gray and looked to me like galvanized steel. There were fifteen links in all, I counted them, each link a little under one inch long with a shiny brass padlock still attaching the end link to the now-unscrewed ring. The chain looked brand-new. No wonder I hadn't been able to break it.

I tried to use the point of the ring to cut through one of the ties, but I couldn't get a proper grip on it and only managed instead to cut through the skin at the base of my thumb as the point slipped off the surface of the plastic.

I looked around the stable for something sharp, or for a rough brick corner, anything I could use to saw my way through my bonds. Up on the wall opposite the window was a salt-lick housing, a metal slot about four inches wide, seven high and one inch deep, into which a block of salt or minerals could be dropped so that, as the name suggested, the horse could lick it. The housing was empty, old and rusting.

I struggled up from the floor and hopped over to it. As I had hoped, the top of the metal slot had been roughened by the rust. I hooked the plastic ties over one of the edges, with a wrist on either side, and sawed back and forth. The plastic was no match for the metal edge, and the tie on my left wrist parted quite easily. Wonderful!

I massaged the flesh, then set about ridding myself completely of the remaining tie around my right wrist and the chain that still hung from it. That task proved a little more difficult, but after a few minutes, I was finally free of the damn things.

Stage three was complete. Now to get out of this stable.

Stable doors are always locked from the outside, whether or not the horse has bolted first, and this one was no exception.

I could just see the locks from the window. The metal bars were bowed away slightly from the frame, and by turning sideways I could use my left eye to see the bolts, top and bottom in the lower door and a single bolt in the upper. All three had been slid fully away from me, and then folded flat.

I took the window bars in my hands and tried to shake them. Not even a quiver. It was as if they were set in concrete.

So there was no easy way out, but I'd hardly expected there to be. No one was going to go to the trouble of shackling me to the wall with a chain and padlock only then to leave the door wide open.

The way out, as I saw it, was to go up.

I could see from the window that the stable where I was imprisoned was just one in a whole line of them that stretched away in both directions. The walls between the individual stalls did not go all the way to the pitched roof; they were the same height as the walls at the front and rear of the building, about nine feet high. So there was a triangular space between the top of the wall and the roof. A wooden roof truss sat on top of the wall, but there was still plenty of room for someone to get through the gap from one stall to the next. All I had to do was climb the wall.

Easy, I thought. There had been walls much higher than this on the assault course at Sandhurst, walls I had been forced to cross time and time again. However, there were some big differences. Either there had been a rope hanging from the top of the wall or there'd been a team of us working together. And I had been much fitter and stronger when at Sandhurst, and, of course, I'd had two feet to work with.

I looked at either side of the stable. Which way should I go?

In the end, the decision was simple. In the corner opposite the door was a metal manger set across the angle. It was about four feet from the floor. I may have had only one foot, but I had two knees, and I was soon using them to kneel on the edge of the manger while reaching up with my fingers for the top of the wall.

All those hours of trying to break the battalion record for pull-ups finally paid off. Fueled by a massive determination to free myself, together with the all-consuming craving for a drink, I pulled myself up onto the top of the wall and swung my legs through the gap in the truss and into the next stall.

Dropping down was less easy, and I ended up sprawled on my back. But I didn't care; I was laughing again. I turned over and crawled on my hands and knees to the door.

It was locked.

My cries of joy turned to tears of frustration.

OK, I thought, getting a grip on things, how about the window?

More bars. Squeezing myself up against them, I could see that there were bars on all the stable windows.

OK, I just have to keep going. One of these damn stables must have a door that's open.

Having done it once, it was easier the second time. I even managed not to end up horizontal on the floor. But the next door was also locked.

What if they were all locked? Was I wasting my energy and, worse still, breathing out precious water vapor in a fruitless attempt?

I clambered onto the manger in the corner and went over the next wall. The door to that stall was also locked. I sat in the corner and wept. I realized that I must be dehydrated, as I wept without tears.

What would happen, I wondered, when the lack of water became critical? I'd been thirsty now for so long that every part of my mouth and throat was sore, but I didn't feel that I was dying yet. How would my body react over the next day or so? What would be the first sign that it was shutting down? Would I even realize?

I thrust such thoughts out of my mind. Come on, I told myself. Maybe the door will be open in the next stall.

It wasn't.

My fingers hurt from pulling myself up, and on that occasion, I had twisted my ankle when I dropped down. Thankfully, it wasn't a bad injury, but it was enough to send me into another bout of despair. Was this how it would happen? Would I become an emotional gibbering wreck? Would I eventually just curl up in a ball in a corner and die?

"No!" I shouted out loud. "I will not die here."

Willpower alone pulled me up over the next wall. Beyond it I found not another stable but an empty and disused tack room at the end of the row. I used the saddle racks to ease my way to the floor and save my ankle from further punishment.

The tack-room door was locked. It would be.

And I could see there was nowhere else to go. The far wall of the tack room went all the way to the roof. It was the end of the building, the end of the line.

The door had a mortise deadlock, I could see through the keyhole. Why, I wondered, had someone bothered to lock an empty room?

I leaned against the locked door in renewed frustration. For the very first time I really began to believe that I would die in this stable block.

My stomach hurt from lack of food, and my throat felt as though it was on fire from lack of water. I had expended so much of my reserves just getting to the tack room that the thought of going all the way back to where I'd started, and then beyond, filled me with horror. And there was no saying that I would be able to. The mangers would now all be on the wrong side of the walls.

I looked through the small window alongside the door. The light was beginning to fade as fresh, delicious, glorious rain fell again into puddles that were tantalizingly out of my reach. It would soon be dark. This would be my third night of captivity. Without water to drink, would I still be alive for a fourth?

Suddenly, as I looked through at the gloom and rain, I realized there were no bars on this window. The bars had been placed over the stable windows to keep the horses' heads in, not to keep burglars out. There were no horses in the tack room, so no bars.

And the single pane of this window was glass, not plastic like the others.

I looked around for something with which I could break it. There was absolutely nothing, so I sat on one of the saddle racks and removed my shoe.

The glass was no match for a thirsty man in a frenzy. I used the shoe to knock all the glass from the frame, careful to leave no jagged shards behind.

The window was small, but it was big enough. I clambered through headfirst, using the end of my stump to stand on the frame while I pulled my complete leg through to stand up on the outside of the building.

What a magnificent feeling. Stage four was complete.

I hopped out from under the overhanging roof to stand in the rain with my head held back and my mouth wide open.

Never had anything tasted so sweet.