Toll for the Brave. Jack Higgins

walk to my bed was an effort.

      But the straw mattress seemed softer than anything I had ever known, the sensation of easing aching limbs almost masochistic in the pleasure it gave. I closed my eyes, poised on the brink of sleep and started to slither into darkness, all tension draining out of me. A bell started to jangle somewhere inside my head, a hideous frightening clamour that touched the raw nerve endings like a series of electric shocks.

      I was aware of St Claire’s warning cry and the door burst open and the young officer who had delivered me re-appeared, a dozen soldiers at his back and three of them with bayonets fixed to their AKs. They pinned St Claire to the wall, roaring like a caged tiger. The others were armed only with truncheons.

      ‘Remember what I told you, boy,’ St Claire called and then I was taken out through the door on the run and helped on the way by the young officer’s boot.

      I was kicked and beaten all the way along the passage and down four flights of stone stairs, ending up in a corner against a wall, cowering like an animal, arms wrapped around my head as some protection against those flailing truncheons.

      I was dragged to my feet, half-unconscious, the clothes stripped from my body. There was a confusion of voices then an iron door clanged shut and I was alone.

      It was like those odd occasions when you awaken to utter darkness at half-past three in the morning and turn back fearfully to the warmth of the blankets, filled with a sense of dreadful unease, of some horror beyond the understanding crouched there on the other side of the room.

      Only this was for always, or so it seemed. There were no blankets to turn into. Three weeks St Claire had survived in here. Three weeks. Eternity could not seem longer.

      I took a hesitant step forward and blundered into a stone wall. I took two paces back, hand outstretched and touched the other side. Three cautious paces brought me to the rear wall. From there to the iron-plated door was four more.

      A stone womb. And cold. Unbelievably cold. A trap at the bottom of the door opened, yellow light flooding in. Some sort of metal pan was pushed through and the trap closed again.

      It was water, fresh and cold. I drank a little, then crouched there beside the door and waited.

      I managed to sleep, probably for some considerable period, which wasn’t surprising in view of what I had been through and awakened slowly to the same utter darkness as before.

      I wanted to relieve myself badly, tried hammering on the door with no effect whatsoever and was finally compelled to use one of the corners which was hardly calculated to make things any more pleasant.

      How long had it been? Five hours or ten? I sat there listening intently, straining my ears for a sound that would not come and suddenly it was three-thirty in the morning again and it was waiting for me over there in the darkness, some nameless horror that would end all things.

      I felt like screaming. Instead, I started to fight back. First of all I tried poetry, reciting it out loud, but that didn’t work too well because my voice seemed to belong to someone else which made me feel more alarmed than ever. Next, I tried working my way through books I’d read. Good, solid items that took plenty of time. I did a fair job on Oliver Twist and could recite The Great Gatsby almost word-for-word anyway, but I lost out on David Copperfield half-way through.

      It was about then that I found myself thinking about St Claire for he was already a kind of mythical hero figure as far as the American Airborne forces were concerned. St Claire and his history were as much a part of recruit training as practising P.L.F.s or learning how to take an M16 to pieces and putting it together again blindfold.

      Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, himself alone from the word go. Son of a Negro millionaire who’d made his first million out of insurance and had never looked back. No silver spoon, just eighteen carat gold. Harvard – only the best – and then he’d simply walked out and joined the paratroops as a recruit back in nineteen forty-one.

      Captured in Italy in forty-three, as a sergeant, he’d escaped to fight with Italian partisans in the Po marshes, ending up in command of a force of four hundred that fought a German infantry division to a standstill in three days. That earned him a field commission and within a year he was captain and dropping into Brittany a week before D-day with units of the British Special Air Service.

      He’d earned his Medal of Honour in Korea in nineteen fifty-two. When a unit of Assault Engineers had failed to blow a bridge the enemy were about to cross in strength, St Claire had gone down and blown it up by hand, himself along with it. By then no one in the entire American Army was particularly surprised when he was fished out of the water alive.

      And his appetite for life was so extraordinary. Women, liquor and food in that order, but looking back on it all now, I see that above all, it was action that his soul craved for and a big stage to act on.

      God, but I was cold and shaking all over, my limbs trembling uncontrollably. I wrapped my arms around myself and hung on tight, not that that was going to do me much good. I think it was then that I remembered what St Claire had said, recalled even a line or two of some Taoist poem he had quoted. In motion, be like water, at rest like the mirror.

      I had nothing to lose, that was for certain, so I sat crosslegged and concentrated on recalling every step of the breathing exercises he had described to me. His method of developing this mysterious ch’i he had talked about.

      I tried to relax as much as possible, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. I closed my eyes, not that it made much difference, and covered my right ear with my left hand. I varied this after five minutes by covering my left ear with my right hand. After a further five minutes, I covered both ears, arms crossed.

      It was foolishness of the worst kind, even if it was a technique a couple of thousand years old according to St Claire, but at least my limbs had stopped shaking and the sound of the breathing was strangely peaceful. I was no longer conscious of the stone floor or of the cold, simply floated there in the cool darkness, listening to my breathing.

      It was like the sea upon the shore, a whisper through leaves in a forest at evening, a dying fall. Nothing.

      They had me in there for eight days during which time I grew progressively weaker. Using St Claire’s technique, I slid into a self-induced trance almost at will, coming out of it, as far as I could judge afterwards, at fifteen or twenty hour intervals.

      During the whole period no one appeared, no one spoke. I never again saw the small trap in the door open although I did discover several more containers of water, presumably pushed through while I was in a trance. There was never any food.

      Towards the end, conditions were appalling. The place stank like a sewer for obvious reasons and I was very weak indeed – very light-headed. And I was never conscious of dreaming, of thinking of anything at all, except at the very end of things when I experienced one of the most vivid and disturbing dreams of my life.

      I was lying naked on a small bed and it was not dark. I was no longer in the Box for I could see again, a pale, diffused golden glow to things that was extraordinarily pleasant. It was warm. I was cocooned in warmth which was hardly surprising for the room was full of steam.

      A voice called, slightly distorted, like an echo from far away. ‘Ellis? Are you there, Ellis?’

      I raised my head and saw Madame Ny standing no more than a yard away from me. She was wearing her uniform skirt and the leather boots, but had taken off her tunic. Underneath, she was wearing a simple white cotton blouse.

      The blouse was soaking up the steam like blotting paper and as I watched, a nipple blossomed on the tip of each breast and then the breasts themselves materialised as if by magic as the thin material became saturated.

      It was one of the most erotic things I have ever seen in my life, electrifying in its effect and my body could not help but respond. She came over beside the bed, leaned down and put a hand on me.

      I tried to push her away and she smiled gently and said, still in that distorted, remote voice, ‘But there’s