Bairamov nodded toward him.
“McCoy, Desoto. Take a look.”
CHAPTER 6
The French found Logan floating in the Channel the next morning. He was clinging to the shattered remains of the dinghy’s hull, soaked to the skin, and barely alive in the near-freezing water. His teeth were chattering, his legs felt like ice, his clothes were sodden with salty water, and he could barely feel his hands.
But at least he could no longer feel the pain that had shot through his limbs after the mine exploded and blew the boat apart. That had slowly faded away as the cold numbed his flesh.
He lay half-on, half-off the side of what remained of the dinghy’s hull, with his legs dangling in the sea. He’d clamped his fingers around the torn edge of the wooden planks after the explosion, and clung on ever since, refusing to release his grip for a second even as the sharp edges of the broken wood dug deep into his fingers. After an hour, they’d grown so cold that he couldn’t even feel that pain any more. He’d struggled to keep his eyes open all night, terrified of surrendering to the cold and exhaustion. To close them for a few seconds’ rest, and slip into the sea, into a sleep from which he’d never wake.
Then a dark shape appeared through the thick grey haze of the morning fog, like a cliff sliding through the open sea.
A French corvette, come to investigate the explosion.
The wreck of the dinghy bobbed up and down in the ship’s wake, and the corvette’s searchlights cast bright beams through the fog, as they scanned the floating wreckage on the waves around him. They briefly illuminated the dinghy’s waterlogged sail, the mass of broken wood from the hull, and Logan’s torn bag and its contents. Then moved on.
A drone buzzed in a few meters above him, hovered for a few seconds, then flew away. The ship hove-to nearby, and a rope net fell over the side. Dark shapes clambered down the net, and jumped into the sea.
The world faded into blackness as hands grabbed Logan’s arms. He couldn’t stay awake a second longer.
He remembered little of the trip to shore on the corvette, or the few weeks in hospital that followed. The mine explosion that shattered the dinghy had shattered his body too, fracturing his left arm, both legs, and two ribs. Injuries on that scale took time to heal.
He faded in and out of consciousness for days as the French doctors repaired the damage. Had he been one of their own, a French boy gone sailing in the middle of the night who ran into a roving smart mine, they’d just have left him to die. But a boy from the far side of the Channel?
That was worth investigating.
The French government agents didn’t want to save his life so much as they wanted to know who he was, and what he was doing there. As soon as he could walk again, they dragged him from the hospital to a mouldy cell in the basement of a cold, dark building in the suburbs of Paris.
For questioning.
“Where did you come from?” they asked, in their heavily-accented English.
“Hastings.”
“Why are you here?”
“I wanted to get away from home.”
The interrogator leaned closer to his face, and almost spat as he spoke.
“How stupid do you think we are? Why would you risk your life to cross the Channel, just to get away from home? You are a spy.”
“I just wanted to see what life was like on the other side.”
“Then you are a spy. You will be executed.”
“I’m just a boy.”
“What information were you sent to collect?”
“No-one sent me.”
“Who are your contacts?”
“I don’t have any contacts.”
When the questions failed, they beat him with truncheons.
Not hard enough to break any of the bones they’d just spent so much time repairing, but hard enough to leave his muscles so battered that he was barely able to walk back to his cell, or to sleep that night from the throbbing pain.
Then, the next day, they questioned him again. And beat him again. Still he had no answers to give that would satisfy them. After a few more days with no sleep, he tried admitting to being a spy, just to get a break. But, when they asked for more information about what he was spying on, he could give no answer that would satisfy them.
They beat him again.
They starved him.
They kept him up all night by shining lights in his cell and filling the air with non-stop music.
When that still failed to produce a result, they tried holding his head underwater until he could hold his breath no longer, and they did it again and again. Then beat him. For fun, he guessed, because it no longer had much affect on him. His body had grown used to the pain, and barely complained.
Nothing worked for them, because he had nothing to tell them. And no way even to make up a lie that would convince them he really was the spy they were looking for. After weeks of abuse, he’d have preferred execution.
Finally, they let him go. Put a blindfold on his face, tossed him in the back of a van, and drove him through the streets of Paris. Then tossed him out.
As the whine of the van’s motors faded into the distance, Logan pulled the blindfold from his face, and stared at the garbage-strewn street and dark, dirt-stained buildings all around him. They’d left him alone on the streets of Paris, weak, half-starved, battered and bruised with no status, and nowhere to go. All he knew about France were the few words of French he’d learned by listening to the interrogators talk between themselves over his time in captivity.
Why couldn’t they have just shot him?
It would have been more humane than dumping him on the streets, battered and bruised, with no money and no ID. He’d be dead either way, but, this way, he’d suffer first.
Or maybe that was the idea?
The day was cold and wet, and he shuffled along the street, ignored by the men and women rushing past. He found a charred wooden shed behind a half-collapsed old store with boarded-up windows, and broke the door open. Then fell asleep in the debris on the floor.
He woke in the morning, shivering, with a dry throat, and an empty stomach churning and rumbling. He could hear muffled voices and footsteps outside the shed, and sneaked out as soon as he could, back onto the streets of Paris.
He walked the streets, shivering and cold, begging for money or food, using gestures when he didn’t know the French words. The longer he walked, the more desperate he became. If he didn’t find food soon, he’d have to steal some, or starve.
The Parisians either ignored him, or scowled and passed by.
The further he walked, the more he noticed other young men lounging against the walls, chattering rapidly to each other in French, too rapidly for him to understand more than a few words of what they said. Their staring eyes followed him, like a predator following its prey, waiting for the right moment to pounce. He didn’t try asking them for help, just passed them as rapidly as he could, and kept his eyes on them as he did.
About a dozen girls leaned against the columns and brown stone walls of an abandoned bank, below the smashed windows, beside the thick, fallen doors that lay on the stone steps outside.
Despite the cold wind and drizzle, none of the girls wore more than a few scraps of cloth that passed as blouses and skirts which exposed the bare skin between them to the winter air, and every male gaze that passed by.
The girls smiled and twisted their bodies toward him as he approached, then started yammering at him rapidly in French, fighting for his attention.
“Sorry, I don’t understand,” he said.
That only caused them to yammer more and faster, but, this time, yammering at each other.