The Nemesis Origin

VII

‘Your target is a Caucasian male, approximately forty years of age and with extensive military experience. He has a one-hour head start and is considered highly dangerous. Do not attempt to apprehend him on your own: locate, identify and report in for reinforcements.’

There were some forty infantry soldiers standing in the light drizzle that fell from low scudding clouds obscuring the peaks of the Cairngorns. A broad valley bordered the bitter waters of a river that flowed it seemed from a wilderness untouched by human hands, bleak and steep hillsides of black granite and windswept grass. All of the soldiers were dressed in disruptive pattern material and heavy black boots, and they cradled SA-80 rifles in their gloved hands. Before the infantry stood their commanding officer, a major of the regiment who gestured to the barren hills around them.

‘Your target has extensive survival experience and is known to be capable of enduring in even the harshest environments for weeks on end. He is able to fashion weapons from the barest minimum of resources and is a highly disciplined expert in camouflage and concealment. For his age, he is known to be in impressive physical condition and is possessed of a high degree of tenacity. He will not surrender even if found, and has a temperament that will likely result in him physically defending himself if cornered. You have forty eight hours to find him.’

The major surveyed his men one last time and then saluted. ‘Good luck, dismissed!’

The forty soldiers turned and jogged away in formation, leaving the asphalt road and the sound of their thumping boots becoming dull and muted as they journeyed out across the sodden landscape with a pair of sergeants leading them.

The major watched as the small platoon followed the faint trail left by their quarry barely an hour before, and wondered if indeed they would be able to track him down. His regiment had spent much time training in the art of camouflage and concealment as well as the complex skills required in tracking and trapping fugitives. The entire objective of the new training regime was designed specifically to give the British Army the ability to track down terrorists and other undesirables who may decide to hunker down in the most remote and inaccessible regions of the British Isles, a new and interesting tactic deployed by enemies of the state wishing to avoid detection.

For some time, the greatest fear of governments worldwide in the Western world had not been the massive terrorist organisations such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State, but rather the actions of so-called lone wolf terrorists, those that were impossible to track, invisible to detection by the sheer nature of their status. Living mostly off the grid, without cell phones or access to the Internet or bank accounts and driving licences, a true lone wolf could strike almost at will and disappear just as quickly if they were possessed of the will and intelligence to plot and execute an effective terrorist attack. It was Major Jonathan Wilkinson’s job to train British infantry to track down that lone terrorist and finish him off before he had the chance to strike.

A squall of bitter rain splattered against the Major’s combat fatigues and he pulled his beret down a little tighter about his head as he walked back towards the four ton vehicle parked nearby. He reached the door and opened it to a billowing cloud of welcome warmth coming from the interior of the cab as he climbed inside and slammed the door shut. The driver, a regimental Corporal, sat behind the wheel and waited patiently as the major picked up a folder he had left on the dashboard and opened it.

‘From what I gather, this chap has never been found in any of the seventeen exercises he has run with us. Not bad for a damn Yankee, I’ll give him that.’

The corporal nodded but said nothing as the major scanned down the pages of the file and tutted to himself. ‘A former United States Marine, apparently. Well, we can’t have Yanks running around making fools of our boys, eh?’

The corporal smiled and nodded, and the major rubbed his hands together as he peered through the rain splattered windscreen at the now very distant platoon of soldiers as they broke up into smaller groups, barely visible against the rough terrain.

‘Rather them than me,’ he said, more to himself than to the corporal next to him. ‘Bloody freezing out there, and there’s a depression coming in. I wouldn’t be surprised if it snows tonight, bloody awful conditions to be out hunting for some damned confederate escapee.’

The corporal nodded once more and the major looked across at him. ‘You’re bloody quiet, considering you’ve landed the easy job of driving me around. I’d have thought you’d be been a bit more cheerful?’

The corporal turned to look at the officer, a pair of cold grey eyes fixing upon his as with one hand he drew a pistol from beneath his combat jacket and nudged it against the Major’s flank.

‘Rather them than me,’ he drawled in an American accent.

For a moment the Major thought that he was in danger of losing his life as an image of newspaper headlines documenting the shooting of a senior army officer by an unknown lone wolf terrorist flashed through his mind. Then the corporal winked at him and the Major’s fear turned to anger.

‘Bloody hell!’ he blustered with indignation as he pointed out of the windscreen ahead of them. ‘I’ve just dispatched forty men to find you Warner, and you’re sitting here in the cab of my bloody truck! What the hell have you done with my driver?’

‘He’s taking a nap in the back,’ Ethan Warner replied with a casual smile as he indicated the back of the truck with a nod of his head.

‘You’re supposed to be evading and escaping my men!’

‘I know, but it’s bloody awful out there,’ Ethan replied as he mimicked the Major’s accent.

‘The British government is paying for you to educate my soldiers,’ Major Wilkinson uttered in disgust, ‘not sit here talking to me.’

‘Your troops are being educated,’ Ethan insisted. ‘If they are stupid, they will follow the trail that I left leading out into the wilderness yesterday. It will be a very long walk with very little at the end of it. If they are smart, they’ll notice the slightly newer trail that I left one hour ago that loops around the edge of those hills and comes right back here.’

Major Wilkinson looked at the row of low hills obscured in cloud and tutted again. ‘This is not what I had in mind when I agreed to you training my men.’

‘Good,’ Ethan replied as he put his pistol away. ‘Tracking people down is not a business of following them from A to B to C. You have to expect the unexpected, be prepared for anything, including outright deception. If your boys track me down in the next hour, they get the night off for doing a good job, and given that they are battle-hardened British infantry I fully expect them to achieve that. If they don’t, they’ll have learned a valuable lesson: don’t follow an old trail when a new one presents itself.’

‘I’ll let you present that explanation to the Ministry of Defense when they summon you to explain why you’re not out there hiding in a bloody bush somewhere getting wet like my men.’

‘Because I’m not stupid,’ Ethan said with a cheerful smile. ‘Now, in the interests of you not running after your troop and informing them of my deception, I’m afraid I’m forced to place your comfort into the hands of the competence of your NCOs and infantry.’

Major Wilkinson looked to Ethan with sudden consternation writ large across his features.

‘And what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?’

Ethan liked the silence, especially after Major Wilkinson’s prattling had been silenced by a gag and Ethan had placed him in the back of the truck along with his hapless corporal. With both of them fully bound, they would either be spending a few very cold hours in the back of the truck until they could work themselves free or their faithful troops would return having seen through Ethan’s deception and would be able to relieve them of their suffering.

Ethan pushed the back of the truck closed and then pulled his hood up against the icy rain tumbling from the clouds scudding low overhead.

Time to disappear.

Ethan set off at a brisk walk in the opposite direction to which the infantry troops had disappeared, again a pre-planned diversion. Ethan, having plenty of experience of the brutality of a Scottish winter weather, had had no intention of spending two nights out in the wilderness when storms were blowing in from the north-west. While the troops were trying to figure out what had happened to him he fully intended to be sitting at home with his feet up, and that home was over five miles away across the rolling hills, nestled deep in a valley high in the Cairngorms and far from a civilization he had long grown tired of.

Ethan moved quickly, using every feature of the ground beneath his boots to help conceal his passage. Where possible he hopped from rock to rock, avoided leaving tracks in the damp soil and thick grass that would betray his passing. He changed direction frequently and occasionally backtracked on purpose by fifty yards or so before setting off on a new course. He used river courses routinely, knowing that although dogs could detect the scent of his trail through the water downstream, by moving from rock to rock when those rocks were just below the surface of the water his scent would be washed away by the flow within minutes. Likewise, whenever joining a river he first moved in the opposite direction intended before reversing his course, giving the impression that he was travelling downstream when in fact he was moving upstream.

At other times he would seek to cover large areas of ground extremely quickly, striding forcefully up steep hills and running down the other side in order to put the maximum amount of distance between himself and the British troops. Likewise, he would also follow popular tracks used by ramblers and dog walkers in order to conceal his own path amid those of others. Within an hour he was revelling in the silence four miles away from the lonely road where Major Wilkinson and his driver were, if they were lucky, being discovered by the troops.

The Scottish Highlands had been the remotest place that Ethan had been able to find work while still remaining out of sight of society at large. His past with the 15th Expeditionary Unit, Fourth Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan and his extensive experience in both tracking lost souls and capturing bail runners in Illinois had provided him with the necessary credentials to obtain employment as a survival instructor. Before coming to the British Isles he had worked in Nevada and Arizona, often spending days or even weeks alone in the desert with small groups of highly trained former soldiers, dedicated survivalists and even preppers, those who believed that the apocalypse was coming and sought to sharpen their survival skills before the supposedly imminent collapse of civilization. But remaining in the USA had still from time to time put him into contact with people he no longer wished to speak to, and therefore he decided that the best place for him was anywhere but America.

Ethan descended the side of a steep hill toward a lone cottage that sat perched on a narrow precipice overlooking a vast valley. The tumbling clouds above split briefly to allow bright sunbeams to sweep the valley floor and glitter on the creek that ran through the middle. Dense pine forests dressed the valley, and not for the first time Ethan paused and surveyed the extraordinary landscape.

Ethan had no television in the cottage, no Internet and no cell phone. Instead, he employed a small private accountancy business in the nearby town of Inverness to maintain his bank account and take any mail or calls that he might receive. Once a week, Ethan would make the journey into the town to shop for food and to pick up any messages before disappearing again into the wilderness. Thus had his life been for the past six months and he had absolutely no intention of changing it.

Ethan had modified the cottage somewhat since acquiring it, insulating it against the bitter Scottish weather and improving its fuel-oil efficiency while stockpiling stores of water and tinned food. He discovered that beyond the reach of the rest of the world came a peace that he had not felt for many years, perhaps since his childhood, and that peace was far preferable to the rush and bustle of a major city, the crime, the expensive of living and the hassle of enduring those around him. Ethan had always been something of a loner, and now instead of fighting that feeling he was embracing it like never before and wishing he had done so decades ago.

Ethan strode to the front of the cottage and glanced briefly at the very top corner of the door, where he had placed a tiny pebble between the door and the jam, an indicator and a warning in case anybody had attempted to enter the property while he had been away. The pebble was still in place as he unlocked the door and walked in.

The cottage had only a small lounge, an equally tiny kitchen and a downstairs bathroom, the water for which was gravity fed from a tank in the attic. Two bedrooms upstairs, and an en suite in the main room completed the property and provided Ethan with everything that he needed and nothing that he didn’t. Warm, compact and filled with a library of books stacked on every available shelf and in mountainous piles in corners of the rooms. Fiction, non-fiction, photography books, National Geographic magazines, New Scientist: everything and anything that fascinated Ethan.

Adorning the walls were small number of photographs, mostly of Ethan’s parents and his sister Natalie. Only one other stood in one corner of the room, an image of Ethan standing with an attractive, olive skinned woman with a bright smile and a mercenary glitter in her eyes. Ethan glanced at the picture of Nicola Lopez as he shrugged off his jacket and tossed it onto the nearest couch, then he made his way into the kitchen.

Living in the silence of the open wilderness had attuned Ethan’s ear to any new sound with remarkable rapidity, and thus Ethan’s hand froze in motion just before he switched the kettle on as a distant but unfamiliar noise reached out to him. Ethan stared into the middle distance and closed his eyes as he let his ears focus on the noise: a faint crunching and a vague hum that ebbed and flowed with each blustering of the wind outside. A vehicle, probably a mile away and upwind, the tires crunching against the crumbling gravel of the old track that led to the cottage. The wind was funnelled down the valley outside from the west, giving advance warning of any approaching vehicle.

Ethan turned and without hurrying he walked back into the living room and reached up to the old beams that lined the ceiling. There had been eight when Ethan arrived at the property, supporting the upstairs bedroom floor. The cottage itself was over two hundred years old and built the old way. Now, there were ten beams, two extra ones installed by Ethan himself to look as much as a part of the building as the rest but each hollowed out, hinged and containing a variety of weapons. Ethan reached inside and pulled down a 9mm pistol in its case along with two magazines, each with fifteen rounds. Within ten seconds the pistol was out of its case, the magazine installed and Ethan was moving toward the rear of the house.

As he opened the back door and slipped outside he could clearly hear the vehicle approaching the cottage. Nobody knew where he lived and nobody had any business coming out here.