“We almost had you.”
“Look what the cat dragged in.”
“The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
“You’re not coming in my lorry smelling like that!”
The flare had been the signal that the exercise had ended. Escape and Evasion, the paras and special forces called it. Cast adrift out on the moor without any means of shelter, food, money or weapons and issued with the most basic clothing, potential recruits were dropped off to be hunted down and captured. Then they would face another two days of intense physical and mental interrogation. Thankfully they didn’t do that with the schoolboys and girls who had passed the tests to get on to this exercise. And they allowed them basic rations and groundsheets for shelter. Only five schools in the country could compete, and Dartmoor High had always had an entrant. All schools wanting to participate had to have competed in the annual Ten Tors competition, administered by the army, where four hundred teams of six teenagers would face the grueling task of marching for two days, anything up to seventy kilometers between the ten nominated Tors. Those teenagers had to be determined and self-sufficient. Backup teams of the army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force were always on hand to help.
But despite the Escape and Evasion exercise taking place in a demarcated area, this challenge was tougher. You were treated as the enemy and hunted down. And the colder it got and the more exhausted the competitors became, the more real it seemed. On the run, in enemy territory. Even hardened soldiers had died out here on the moor, and it was a huge risk for youngsters-they were on their own, no one else in a group to help if they got injured or lost. On the third night, at 2100 hours, the survivors
That was what the mortar flare meant. ENDEX-end of exercise. If anyone was left out there and didn’t report, then a major search and rescue would be undertaken within the hour. But so far all had been captured. Only one boy came in under his own steam.
The last survivor.
Max Gordon.
Stanton and Drew looked through Max’s room while Mr. Jackson stood in the doorway. They made little fuss and barely disturbed anything. The room was small. There was a bed, a small table that doubled as a desk, a bookshelf and a small trunk for bits and pieces. On the shelf were a few artifacts Max’s explorer-scientist father had sent him over the years. A Cook Island figurine, a rock crystal from the Himalayas, an amber teardrop from Russia that was a hundred million years old.
“Do you know where he’d keep his computer?” Drew asked, breaking Mr. Jackson’s thoughts of faraway lands.
“He would have taken it on holiday with him. You said you have already checked Maguire’s emails-is there any evidence that he sent any to Gordon?” Jackson asked.
“No,” Drew said, and gave a reassuring smile. “We just wanted to double-check. We think Maguire might have sent him something in the post.”
“In the post? That’s a bit unusual for his generation. Text, email and network sites are what they all use nowadays. Must say I can’t quite get the hang of it myself.”
“Still, if he had received something in the post, it’d be here, right?” Stanton asked.
“Absolutely. The boy’s been away for a few days, so anything delivered would be on his table or his bed. When might it have been sent, do you think? The last few days? Before, or even on the day of Maguire’s death?”
“Yeah. Probably,” Stanton said.
“Is it a letter you’re looking for? You never said,” Jackson asked.
“A letter? Have you seen one?” Drew queried.
Jackson shook his head. “No, but if poor Maguire took his own life, I was wondering if it might have been a suicide note. Something to explain why he did what he did. Danny Maguire was such an articulate and positive- minded boy-if he was so distressed as to take his own life, I feel sure he would have explained himself. His death really is a shocking mystery.”
The two men didn’t answer right away. Jackson had asked the most obvious question. “No,” Stanton said, “we don’t think it would be a suicide note.”
“But one wasn’t found?”
“No.”
“Nothing on his body?”
“No, we made sure.”
“You were there, then? You examined his body yourself? Or would that have been the police who checked for that? So what is it you’re looking for?”
Stanton hesitated. Jackson had gleaned quite a bit of information without their realizing it at first. He had learned that in all probability, they had had Maguire under observation; otherwise, how would they have identified the fact that he had something to post? They had also admitted to scanning his emails. They might well have been close to the boy at or soon after the time of his death, because had there been a suicide note, they would have found it. Maybe Jackson wasn’t as dithering as the men had thought.
“We’re not sure-maybe a small package,” Stanton said.
“Then it would have been put in here, and as you can see, there’s nothing. But why don’t we go and check the mailroom to make sure?” Mr. Jackson said helpfully.
From his room, Sayid watched Mr. Jackson escort them downstairs.
They moved lightly, their bodies trained for fast reactions. Sayid had seen men like them before and they scared him.
A medic wrapped a space blanket around Max, and an army cook shoved a mess tin full of stew into his hands. Max suddenly realized just how chilled he was. Blowing briefly on each spoonful, he shoveled the food into his mouth as fast as he could. The warmth seeped down to his frozen toes as if someone had turned on a hot-water tap inside his body.
“We need to check your feet, Max, make sure there’s no trench foot,” the officer said. “Then we’ll get you back to Dartmoor High.”
“I know how to look after my feet, sir,” he spluttered through the stew.
“I’m sure you do. But we’re going to check anyway.” The major nodded to the medic, and Max sat down obediently on a haybox, used for keeping food hot in the field, and allowed the medic to haul off his boots.
“They’re a bit mank,” Max apologized for the squelching, black-water-soaked socks.
“Mank? We could use these as a secret weapon, son.” The medic smiled.
A soldier shouted in the background. “Can you go around us, mate? Unless you don’t want to get mud on your nice car!”
Soldiers laughed. Max and the others turned. A black Range Rover had come down the tarmac strip and was unable to negotiate the army vehicles that were reversing and forming up for the return to barracks.
Drew grimaced as he watched the narrow gap Stanton was edging them through. “What the hell is this? Army maneuvers are the last thing we need. They’re not supposed to be in this area,” he said.
Stanton weaved the big 4?4 through the obstructing lorries, Land Rovers and trailers. “Relax, they don’t have weapons. This is something else.”
Max saw the men in the Range Rover give a thumbs-up and nod to the gathered soldiers; then the driver turned the steering wheel and went effortlessly off-road.
“Let him through,” the officer instructed the pockets of men as the beast of a vehicle edged toward them. It passed within a couple of meters.
Stanton concentrated on avoiding the paraphernalia but caught sight of a bog-soaked kid wrapped in a space blanket. He looked as though he’d been pulled out of a sludge pit. Shivering, barefoot and clutching a mess tin of food, the boy looked wretched in the glaring floodlights. Except for his eyes. They seemed to bore straight through him.
“Must have been some kind of rescue operation,” Drew said. “These kids are so dumb. They have no idea how dangerous places like this are.”
