Highlands, Scotland
Logan awoke when he felt pressure on his wrists. He opened his eyes, slowly at first, but then was suddenly alert when he saw the men crowding around his bunk. He tried to jump up, only realising then that his wrists and ankles were shackled with ropes. Each was wound tightly and held firmly by the four men hovering over him. A fifth man, standing right next to Logan, half-smiling, half-snarling, was the leader of the pack of army grunts: Fleming.
‘Wakey-wakey,’ Fleming cackled. ‘If it isn’t the boy wonder. Do you fancy heading out to the mess for some chow or are you a bit tied up?’
Fleming’s men laughed at the lame joke. Logan’s tense limbs relaxed some and he laid his head back down on the bed. He wanted to fight back, but he knew that with the position they had him in, there was little he could do.
‘Okay, lads, get him off the bunk.’
The two men to Logan’s right tugged on their ropes with force and hauled Logan from the bed. He landed on the cold, hard floor with a heavy smack that sent a shock all the way up his spine. The two men on the other side climbed across the bunk, and once in position, all four men pulled tight on the ropes, stretching Logan’s limbs out like he was performing a star jump.
Fleming walked up to Logan and stood right over his face.
‘You still want to be one of us?’ he said, smiling but with anger in his voice. He unzipped his trousers. ‘Then drink up, soldier boy.’
‘No. Come on, please!’
Warm, thick urine cascaded onto Logan’s face and he spluttered and then squeezed shut his eyes and his mouth. The other men groaned in mock disgust and then laughed and then groaned as Logan was covered in the sickly yellow liquid. He held his breath but the ammonia stench still got through, making him gag and retch.
‘You want to be just like us?’ Fleming shouted. ‘Then drink my fucking piss, you piece-of-shit civvy!’
Logan began to writhe, his torso bucking up and down, his head lolling from left to right. Moving his arms and legs was impossible; each was outstretched and secured in place by the strength of a fully grown man. It was hopeless. He simply had to lie there and take it, the ghastly sound of the men’s laughter filling his head.
When it was finally over, Logan opened his eyes. He saw Fleming zipping up and immediately took a deep breath, filling his starved lungs with air. Urine on his face rolled into his mouth and he coughed and spluttered, trying to force it back out, much to the amusement of the men.
‘Get your shit together, Logan,’ Fleming said, turning away. ‘We’re heading out in fifteen minutes.’
The four men let go of the ropes and Logan’s arms and legs slumped down. He instinctively rolled onto his side, curling his legs up into his chest, still coughing, trying to remove the foul smell and taste from his nose and mouth.
‘Yes, Captain,’ he choked.
Twenty minutes later, the six men were flying in a Westland Puma helicopter high up above the Scottish Highlands. Logan hadn’t uttered another word to the men since the latest hazing incident.
Was it really hazing, or just outright bullying? He wasn’t sure anymore.
He did know that he’d been made about as welcome as a rat in a kitchen. For the past month, he’d been teamed up with the small patrol of SAS men, taking part in their gruelling exercises. He’d expected a frosty reception from the army men, but in fact what he’d had was even worse – he was, after all, an outsider being let into their secret world on the say-so of some unseen person they knew nothing about.
They had no idea who Logan was, what his life had been like as a troubled teen, or what he was now being trained for at the JIA. All they saw was a civilian, a young man some ten years their junior, someone who’d never seen war or combat and who didn’t understand the first thing about the military, being thrust into their world to be trained up just like them. And they resented him. Resented who they thought he was.
The men had been staying at the remote base camp in the far north of the Highlands for two weeks, carrying out various exercises and training missions, building up for the final escape and evasion exercise that would last for the next five days.
The five army men were already fully fledged members of the UK’s most prestigious special forces unit, the SAS. They were there to keep themselves fresh in between active missions. Logan was an early twenty-something civilian with plenty of recent combat training but zero real-life experience.
He’d been thrown in with the sharks.
Logan had already been around the world to train in various skills – survival, combat, arms, interrogation – and on many of those stints, he’d been teamed up with battle-hardened military men. The JIA was a small operation and ran few training centres of its own. For virtually all of the long and tiring training period, the JIA shipped recruits out to a combination of the army and the mainstream intelligence agencies, the mix depending on the exact skill set and training regimen of the particular candidate.
So far in Logan’s experience, few of the groups he had been sent to had welcomed him, the outsider. But none of them had been so filled with hate and anger as Fleming and his grunt patrol.
Logan guessed Fleming was in his late thirties. He was six inches shorter than Logan and not as thick in his frame, but he had the grizzled appearance of an experienced warrior and he was lean and strong, fast and agile: everything he needed to be to carry out his gruelling job. There was a lot that Logan admired about the man – his skills at least – but absolutely nothing that Logan liked or respected.
Fleming was a captain, a commissioned officer. The other four men were sergeants and corporals. They obeyed Fleming’s every word, his every command. They were like his little pets. Even when Fleming wasn’t in the room, Logan had never heard one of the others say a single derogatory word about their captain. Logan hadn’t yet figured out whether that was because Fleming had somehow won them all over or because they were simply so shit-scared of him that they didn’t dare say a bad word about the man even when he wasn’t there.
While training with the men, Logan was supposed to act and live like them. But Logan wasn’t in the army. They could give him a hard time while he was with them, but after next week he would no longer have to abide by their outdated hierarchy and petty rules. And there was only so much bullying he would take before he snapped.
Logan guessed this was one of the reasons he had already completed extensive mental conditioning. A few months ago, he would have tried to tear Fleming’s head off the first time the captain laid a finger on him. Logan was headstrong and seldom scared of anyone or anything. And while on the outside he was mostly calm, placid, almost emotionless, an angry outburst was always bubbling under the surface.
Since the training had started, he’d become more in control of his fiery temperament. Even though he could still feel the anger boiling inside him day by day, he had so far kept it under wraps, playing along with Fleming’s hateful games. But he hadn’t forgotten any of the torment, and he enjoyed thinking of the different ways he could wipe the smirk off Fleming’s face for good.
All he had to do now, before he left this rotten place for good, was make it through the final exercise. Five days stranded and cut off from life in the frozen Highlands of Scotland.
A foreboding and deathly place.
A place where all sorts of accidents could befall even the most experienced survivor, mountaineer, orienteer. Where even the smallest slip could cost someone their life.
‘You ready for this, Boy Wonder?’ Fleming shouted over the din of the helicopter’s rotor.
Logan gave him a cold, hard stare.
‘Yes, Captain. More ready than you could imagine.’