Each time he tried to see her then he reckoned it was the girl, Rebecca, that he saw.
He didn't know whether Crane had quickened his pace, or whether he himself was slowing. Feeling Jane's body against his skin, seeing Rebecca's body against his skin. That was a bastard, like he was selling his Jane short.
He was struggling to keep pace with Crane, he was struggling to see the soft face, lips, throat, eyes of his girls.
He kicked the stone.
The track was not more than foot wide. There was a sloping black abyss to his right. His left hand was held out to steady himself against the rock slope soaring above him.
He had gone straight through the stone. He had not paused, he had not tested the ground under his leading foot. He had begun to move by instinct.
The loose stone rolled.
The stone slid off the track.
The stone seemed to laugh at him. The stone fell from the track, and bounced below, and disturbed more stones. More stones falling and bouncing and being disturbed.
He stood statue still. The vertigo seemed to pull at him, as if trying to topple the weight of the Bergen pack down into the abyss, after the tumbling stones.
Snap out of it, Holt. Get a grip, Holt. No room in his mind for his girl, any girl. No room for pack strap sores, nor heel blisters. Get yourself bloody well together, Holt. He jerked his foot forward. He rolled the sole of his boot on the ground of the track ahead. Tested it, eased onto it. First stone he had kicked all night. Crane hadn't stopped for him. Crane's shadow shape was smaller, moving away.
All the time the echoing beat of the stones skipping, plummeting, racing, below him.
He was into his stride again when the flare went up.
A thump from below and behind. A white light point soaring… Crane's bible. Trip wire ground level flare, freeze into tree shape and sink ever so slow. High level flare, drop face down like there's no tomorrow.
The moment before the flare burst into brilliance, Holt was on his face, on his stomach, on his knees.
The flare when it burst seemed to struggle against gravity. It hung high. A wash of growing light on the hillside. The epicentre was behind him, but he could sense the light bathing his hands and the outline of his body and his back, and niggling into his eyes. He lay quite still. Ahead of him he could see the exposed soles of Crane's boots.
The flare fell, died.
There was a hiss from Crane. Holt saw the fast movement of Crane's arm, urging him forward. He was half upright, and Crane was moving. He was trying to push back the weight of the Bergen holding him down, and the weight of the Model PM, and the weight of his belt kit.
Crane gone. Blackness where there had been light.
Should have bloody closed his eyes. Shouldn't have let the light into his eyes.
The second flare was fired.
Holt dropped. Eyes closed now, squeezed tight.
Trying to do what Crane had told him, trying to follow verse and chapter of Crane's bible. Nothing over his ears, his hearing was sharp, uncluttered. He heard the voices below. No bloody idea how far below. Voices, but no words.
When the light no longer hurt his eyes he looked ahead. The flare was about to ground. The path ahead was clear. He could not see Crane.
There were two more flares.
There were bursts of machine gun fire against the hillside. The strike of the tracer red rounds on the hillside seemed to Holt to have no pattern, like it was random firing. He had grown to know the jargon. He reckoned it was prophylactic firing. He wondered to hell whether they had thermal imagery sights, whether they had passive night goggles. There was movement below him. He thought he heard the sounds of men moving in the darkness, scrambling on the slopes. He could hear the voices again. Christ, he was alone. His decision, alone, to move or to stay frozen. His decision, whether to reckon he was invisible to the men below so that he could move, whether the firing had been to flush him out into the view of the TI sights and the PN goggles.
Hellishly alone. He could not crawl, if he crawled he would make the noise of an elephant. If he were to move he had to get to his feet, he had to walk upright, slowly, weighing each step.
He lay on his face. He thought of how greatly he depended on the taciturn goading that he had from Crane. He pulled himself up. He listened to the voices and the movements on the hillside. The thought in his mind was of being alone on the hillside, of being discovered, of being apart at that moment from Noah Crane.
The aloneness drove him forward.
There was no more shooting. There were no more flares. The voices faded, the footfalls died.
He tried to remember how far it would be to the next halt position. He tried to recall the map that Crane had shown him before they had moved off. They were now in the sixth hour. Holt had not taken much notice of the map, didn't have to, because he had Crane to lead him.
Alone, Holt resumed his night march.
It might have been five minutes later, it might have been half an hour, he found Crane sitting astride the animal track.
He could have kissed him.
Crane whispered, "Syrian regular army patrol."
Holt spoke into Crane's ear. "Routine?"
"They're not usually out at night. Usually tucked up, holding their peckers."
"Why would they have been out?"
"You're the educated one, youngster."
"Were they waiting for us?"
"You went to university."
Holt hissed, "Tell me."
"Just not certain that one kicked stone was it, but waiting."
"Are we blown?"
Holt saw, in the fragile moonlight, Crane's smile without humour. "They're behind us, there's only one sensible way to go."
They moved off.
He was unaware of his shoulder sores and of his heel blister. Holt was aware only of each single, individual footfall.
They bypassed the sleeping village of Aitanit, and the silent village of Bab Maraa, they climbed high to avoid the village of Saghbine where dogs broke the quiet of the night.
Below him to the east was the moon-draped flatness of the floor of the Beqa'a valley. Holt thought of the valley as a noose.
16
In front of him, below him, in brilliant sunshine, lay the valley.
He could see right across to the grey-blue climb of the far wall. In the soft haze it was hard for him to make out clean-cut features in the wall. Behind the rising ground were the jebels that marked the line of the border between Lebanon and Syria. With difficulty, he could make out the far distant bulk of the Hermon range.
Holt and Crane had reached the lying up position in darkness, and Holt had taken the first guard watch, so that he had taken his turn to wrap himself in the lightweight blanket and tried to sleep under the scrim net while the dawn was spreading from the far away hill slopes. Crane must have let him sleep on beyond his hour. They were above the village of Saghbine. Crane had set his LUP in an outcrop of weathered shapeless rock over which the scrim net had been draped. Holt knew that Crane's bible decreed that they should never make a hiding place in isolated, obvious cover, but there was a scalped barrenness about the terrain around them.
The nearest similar outcrop would have been, he estimated, and he found it difficult to make such estimates over this ground, at least a hundred yards from their position. Lying among the rocks, in the filtered shade of the scrim netting, he felt the nakedness of their hiding place. It seemed impossible to him that they should not be seen should an enemy scour the hillside with binoculars. But Crane slept and snored and grunted, like a man for whom danger did not exist. There was mom between these rocks, under the scrim netting, for the two of them only if they were pressed against each other.