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.