Toll for the Brave. Jack Higgins

unfastened the zip at the side of her uniform skirt and slipped out of it. Underneath she was wearing a pair of cotton pants as damp with steam as the blouse. She took them off with a complete lack of concern, then sat on the edge of the bed and unbuttoned the blouse.

      Her breasts were round and full, wet with moisture from the steam, incredibly beautiful. I was shaking like a leaf in a storm as she reached out and pulled my face against them.

      ‘Poor Ellis.’ The voice echoed into the mist. ‘Poor little Ellis Jackson. Nobody loves him. Nobody.’ And then she pushed me away so that she could look into my face and said, ‘But I do. I love you, Ellis.’

      And then she rolled on to her back, the thighs spreading to receive me and her mouth was all the sweetness in life, the fire of my climax such a burning ecstasy that it had me screaming out loud.

      I came awake to that scream in the darkness of the Box again, the stench of the place in my nostrils and for some reason found myself standing up straight and screaming out loud again, a blank defiance at the forces ranged against me.

      There was a rattle of bolts and a moment later, the door opened and a great shaft of yellow light flooded in.

      They were all there, the young officer and his men and Colonel Chen-Kuen, Madame Ny at his shoulder, very correct in full uniform including a regulation peaked cap with a red star in the front. She looked white and shocked. No, more than that – distressed, but not Chen-Kuen. He was simply interested in how well I’d stood up to things, the complete scientist.

      I stood swaying from side-to-side while they busied themselves with a door next to mine. When it swung open, there was only darkness inside and then St Claire stepped out.

      He had a body on him like the Colossus of Rhodes, hewn out of ebony, pride in his face as he stood there, his nakedness not concerning him in the slightest. He caught sight of me and his eyes widened. He was across the passage in two quick strides, an arm about me as I reeled.

      ‘Not now, Ellis – not now you’ve got this far,’ he said. ‘We walk to the medical centre on our own two feet and shag this lot.’

      Which gave me the boost I needed, that and the strength of his good right arm. We made it under our own steam, out through the main entrance, crossed the compound to the medical hut through a thin, cold rain falling through the light of late evening.

      Once there, they parted us and I found myself alone in a small cubicle wrapped in a large towel after a warm shower. The old doctor appeared, gave me a quick check, then an injection in my right arm and left.

      I lay there staring up at the ceiling and the door clicked open. It was a day for surprises. Madame Ny appeared at the side of the bed. There were tears in her eyes and she dropped to her knees beside the bed and reached for my hand.

      ‘I didn’t know they would do that, Ellis. I did not know.’

      For some obscure reason I believed her, or perhaps it didn’t really matter to me any more, but in any event, I have never felt comfortable in the presence of a woman’s tears.

      I said, ‘That’s all right. I made it in one piece, didn’t I?’

      She began to cry helplessly, burying her face against my chest. Very gently, I started to stroke her hair.

      The weeks that followed had a strange, fantasy air to them and things dropped into a routine. I still shared the room with St Claire and each morning at six o’clock we were taken together to the Indoctrination Centre. Once there, we were separated to sit in small, enclosed booths in headphones, listening to interminable tapes.

      The indoctrination stuff was mainly routine. Marx and Lenin to start with, then Mao Tse-tung until the old boy was pouring out of our ears. None of it ever really got through to me although I have noticed in later years that I have a pronounced tendency to argue in most situations using Marxian terminology. St Claire was a great help to me in this respect. It was he who pointed out the real and tangible flaws in Mao’s works. For example, that everything he had written on warfare was lifted without acknowledgement from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War written in 500 B.C. As the Jesuits have it, one corruption is all corruption and I could never again accept any of the great man’s writings at face value.

      Five hours a day were devoted to learning Chinese. In one of many interviews with me, Chen-Kuen told me that this was to help promote a closer understanding between us, an explanation which never made much sense to me. On the other hand, languages were something I’d always been good at and it gave me something to do.

      Each afternoon I had a long session of ‘instruction’ with Madame Ny which St Claire made me report in detail to him each night, although that was only one of our activities. He taught me karate and aikido, subjected me to lengthy and complicated breathing exercises, all designed to make me fit enough to face up to the day when we were going to crash out of there, his favourite phrase.

      But he was the original polymath. Philosophy, psychology, military strategy from Sun Tzu and Wu Ch’i to Clausewitz and Liddell Hart, literature, and poetry in particular, for which he had a great love. He insisted that we talked in Chinese and even gave me lessons on his guitar.

      Every minute had to be filled to use up as much as possible of that burning energy. He was like a caged tiger waiting his chance to spring.

      I once tried to sum him up and could only come up with words like witty, attractive, brave, totally unscrupulous, amoral. All I know, and still believed at the end of things, was that he was the most complete man I have ever known. If anyone ever lived with total spontaneity, bringing it right up from the core of his being, it was he.

      My relationship with Madame Ny was perhaps the strangest part of the whole affair.

      I was taken to her office in a room on the second floor of the monastery each afternoon. There were always two guards in the corridor, but inside, we were quite alone.

      It was a comfortable room, surprisingly so, although I suspect now that was mainly by design. Chinese carpets on the floor, a modern desk and swivel chairs, a filing cabinet, water colours on the wall and a very utilitarian looking psychiatrist’s couch in black leather.

      It became very plain from the beginning that these were psycho-analytical sessions. That she was out to strip me to the bone.

      Not that I objected, for it quickly became a game of question and answer – my kind of answer – that I rather enjoyed playing and the truth is that I wanted to be with her. Looked forward to being in her company.

      From the beginning, she was calm and a little remote, insisted on calling me Ellis, yet never by any remark or action, referred to that emotional breakdown at my bedside on the evening they had released me from the Box.

      What I could not erase from my mind was the memory of that strange dream, an erotic fantasy so real that to see her simply get up and stretch or stand at the window, a hand on her hip, was enough to send my pulse up by a rate of knots.

      A great deal of her questioning, I didn’t mind. Childhood and my relationship with my grandfather, schooling, particularly the years at Eton which seemed to fascinate her. She seemed surprised that the experience hadn’t turned me into a raving homosexual and asked searching and vaguely absurd questions about masturbation which only succeeded in bringing out the comic in me.

      We spent a month in this way and it became obvious to me that she was becoming more and more impatient. One day she stood up abruptly after one particularly feeble joke, took off her tunic and walked to the window where she stood in the pale sunshine, angrier than I had ever seen her.

      From that angle, half-turned away from me, it became obvious that her breasts managed very well without the benefit of such a western appurtenance as a brassière and I could see the line of them sloping to the nipples as the sunlight filtered through the thin cotton.

      ‘All men are at least three people, Ellis,’ she said. ‘What they appear to be to others, what they think they are and what they really are. Your great fault is to accept people at face value.’

      ‘Is