The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (beach read .TXT) 📕

It didn’t do the job.

He punched the tight grouping of bullet holes. Blood colored the water around his knuckles. He punched again. And again. The ice gave, and Ben dug his knees into the silt and thrust his shoulders up against the break. Air brought a new level of cold to his wet skin. He breathed deep, ignoring the spikes it drove into his lungs.

Lying on the shore, Ben stared up at the evening sky. He wanted to stay there—sleep there.

“Get up.”

He spoke the words out loud. Hale had taught him that letting them remain silent in his head siphoned away their power.

“Get up!”

Ben rolled to his knees. The far shore lay four hundred meters from his island, maybe more. Behind him, through the island’s grove of evergreens, the red and blue lights still flashed. Within minutes, more cops would arrive. Hopefully they’d start behind him, not in front, and look for a body, not a fugitive.

His fingers stiffened. His limbs shook. Time was short.

At the slow pace of a low crawl, spreading out his body weight, he’d be dead or delusional from hypothermia before he reached the shore. Ben took the ice at a run, on feet he still could not feel.

Three times, he stumbled and fell. The second time, the SIG went sailing across the ice and he had to fetch it, adding several meters to his path. He couldn’t leave it out there for the cops to find. The third time he fell, the surface cracked. Water seeped up, and Ben scrambled onward on his belly. He crawled the rest of the way, into the setting sun’s last light.

A snow-covered berm separated the shore from a farmer’s field. The quiet voices of Ben’s arctic instructors warned him to sweep away his footprints as he climbed. As if he could. “What do you want from me?” he asked out loud. “It’s not like I brought a broom.”

You making excuses, recruit?

Hale. He’d always been the meanest, the loudest, but always right. For the same reason Ben had chased after the SIG, he needed to cover his tracks now. Pine scrub dotted the shore. He slid down a berm and broke off three small branches, using them to sweep his tracks as he made the ascent again. Too slow, recruit. You’ll never make it now. Why don’t we call this training evolution a fail and run you through the lake again? How about that?

“No, sir. I can finish.” Ben dropped down the berm’s other side and fell with his back against it, hugging his pack, with an empty gun and pine scrub clutched in a frozen grip.

Colonel Hale stood right in front of him, hands on his hips. No breaks, recruit. The colonel leaned in, offering a hand to help him up. Get that sorry corpse moving!

Ben let his mentor pull him to his feet. Did the rules permit such help? Would he still pass the training evolution? He didn’t care. He just wanted it to end.

A shed rose from the white ahead—shelter from the wind, a heat trap. Life. The instructors were never so kind. They’d have a padlock securing the door. Ben knew how to handle padlocks, assuming he could use his fingers.

He walked backward at an agonizing pace, covering his tracks until, without quite remembering how he’d gotten there, he found himself kneeling before the shed’s door. He dug around in his pack. Lock picks were subtle, but not the tool for this job. While other recruits wasted precious time hopelessly fumbling in the cold with rakes and picks, Ben found his compact bolt cutters and ratcheted the teeth down over the lock. Four cranks and the bolt snapped.

Before going inside, he stripped off his coat and rolled his body in the snow.

What are you doing, recruit? Have you lost your mind?

Probably. More than probably. Ben figured his mind was well and truly gone. A minuscule voice deep inside told him hallucinations had set in and set deep. After a few seconds of thrashing about and kicking up powder, he struggled to his feet and beat his chest and legs. Flakes of ice fell away, leaving mostly dry clothes behind. He swept the area with his scrub and ducked inside.

The shed proved a bigger gift than he’d ever imagined the instructors granting. Tarps. Tools. Soil.

Ben tore open five bags of reeking fertilized soil and dumped it on the floor as insulation. The rest he stacked against the door to block as many cracks as possible, supporting his barrier with rakes and shovels.

When he finished, he sat down cross-legged on his heap and pulled a foil bar from his pack—something he’d mistaken for a food ration when the instructors first introduced him to his equipment. He peeled it open to reveal a white chalky stick and planted it in the soil like a baby tree. Now came the hardest and most important part. He had to light it.

The lighter’s striker hurt so much, as if ripping the flesh from his frozen thumb. But the flame came fast and unhindered, the beauty of a wind-blocking shed. The white stick caught with a miraculous dark blue glow, promising to burn long, hot, and smokeless.

As a final step, he crushed three hand warmers, starting the chemical reactions, and shoved them under his clothes. He stuck one in each armpit and one down the front of his pants—ignoble, but vital to recovering his core body temperature. The flame stick would do the rest. Or it wouldn’t, and he’d be dead by morning.

Don’t you fall asleep, recruit.

Why wouldn’t the colonel leave him in peace?

Don’t you do it. You know what happens when we fall asleep in severe hypothermia.

Ben knew. He remembered the academics. “I don’t care, sir. I just don’t care.”

The colonel vanished. Ben tried and failed to make Giselle appear in his place. He sat back against a bag of soil and covered his face with dirty, frostbitten hands,