The Evolution of Fear (Claymore Straker #2) - Paul E. Hardisty Page 0,25

made sense if Crowbar had betrayed him for more than just money. The whole thing in the clinic reeked of spite, revenge. Koevoet was a lot of things – arrogant, contemptuous of weakness, hard-headed, autocratic – but until a day ago he had been Clay’s definition of honour. Money was one thing, but revenge?

Before Medved’s killing, Clay had decided to go back to South Africa and testify to Mandela’s soon to be established post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He’d told this to Koevoet, who’d accused him of disloyalty, threatened to terminate their friendship. Clay had sworn, along with the others, never to reveal what had happened that day in Angola, the day Kingfisher was killed. Even during the inquest he’d kept quiet, stuck to the story they’d all agreed. Could Crowbar really have decided to betray Clay to prevent him from testifying? Eben had been there too, that fateful day in Angola, had been one of the actors in that unspeakable tragedy that still haunted Clay’s days and turned his nights into ultramarathons of regret. Was that why Eben had been killed? Eben had been in a coma for ten years, more. He could no more talk about what had happened that day than he could walk out of the clinic.

And so, why the delay? It had been at least four days between Eben’s murder and the appearance of Koevoet’s mercs at the cottage that night. Maybe it wasn’t Koevoet at all. Maybe it was the PSO, the Yemeni Secret Service. The CIA. Maybe the two events – the attempted hit at the cottage and Eben’s murder – were unconnected. Clay shook his head, opened his eyes wide to the wind. Jesus, he was losing it, wasting his energy on an insoluble problem. A problem with too many variables and not enough equations.

Fatigue swept through him, pushing his mind over false peaks, into blind troughs. And as he hurtled through the night, the fears and possibilities merged into a single density, churned by the storm, components irretrievable.

A dull dawn came, revealing towering seas whipped with wands of foam, evil spells of grey cloud. Clay shivered in Punk’s ill-fitting jumper and jacket. He was weak from hunger. Sleep beckoned, whispered to him, tugged at his eyes, luring him to the warmth of her bed. He scorned her, pushed on through the storm. Mid-afternoon the rain relented. Shortly after, the wind dropped a little. It was barely perceptible, perhaps only a knot or two, but he could feel it on his face, hear the change in the rigging. A lull. Clay took the opportunity. He brought Flame head to wind, backed the storm jib, lashed the wheel and with Flame hove to, went below. The little boat tracked into the wind and then fell off, lashed rudder and backed jib nudging her back and forth in a slow, nodding dance that kept her bow into weather but slowed her to no more than a knot. The cabin pitched like a rollercoaster. Bracing himself against the aft bulkhead, Clay ate a tin of cold beans, thought about trying to heat water for coffee but abandoned the idea. He plotted a dead-reckoning position, a best guess, assuming a relatively constant course of SSW at about ten knots for the best part of twelve hours. It put Flame about fifty nautical miles north and west of Ushant, a place of deadly reefs and fickle weather. Beyond, the Bay of Biscay, notorious for its winter storms and big seas. The barometer had continued to fall, sat now at 987. The full power of the storm was still a few hours away.

Clay crabbed his way forward, lay on the main berth and pulled the blanket around his shoulders. He hadn’t slept for two days. He closed his eyes. To the furious cry of the sea, he let sleep come. He’d learned that in the war. Sleep whenever and wherever you can. Days of this to go. It could make the difference between living and dying. That’s what Koevoet had always told them, the young guys just out of school, eighteen and nineteen, wide-eyed, hyped on adrenaline and fear and blood. Sleep, boys. Tomorrow you might not. The ‘short sleep’ he called it. The other sleep was the one you never woke from.

Time strobed as he shuddered between unconsciousness and waking dream. The flow of moments seemed to lurch between crest and trough, and it was as if the sea and time and the ragings of his subconscious