Read Narrow Escape (A Spider Shepherd short story) for Free Online

said. Shepherd took him to be the leader from the way the others deferred to him. ‘All you have to do is tell us where it is and you’re free to go.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Shepherd said. ‘I’m afraid I cannot tell you that.’ He was rewarded with a punch that filled his mouth with blood.
    ‘You can tell us now or later,’ the man said. ‘We have plenty of time, but you will tell us in the end. The only question is how much of a beating you want to take and how many times you want to go back under that water outside.’
    Shepherd was forced to stand in a stress position, on tiptoe, arms outstretched leaning forward against the wall. Any attempt to move or change his position resulted in another beating. As the questioning continued, it became clear that while the leader of them was relatively sophisticated, the other three were mere thugs. Each time he politely refused to answer, more blows and kicks rained in on him.
    Three more times he was hooded and dragged outside. The first time he was hung by his arms from an overhead gantry, the smell of rusting iron strong in his nostrils, and feeling an agonising pain in his arms as they took the full weight of his body. After what might have been an hour or more, he was taken down, interrogated, and then tied face down across a railway line. ‘There’s a train due down this track in a few minutes,’ the a leader said. ‘Tell us what we want to know or we’ll leave you here and you’ll be in three pieces when the train’s passed over you.’
    ‘I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything,’ Shepherd said. He knew that the rails digging into his chest and waist could not be from a normal railway; they were too close together for that. It had to be a narrow gauge track used by the quarry company, and if the explosives magazine was disused, the chances were long odds on that the railway was too. Even the sound of something rumbling towards him along the track, sending vibrations through the rails beneath him did not faze him. There was no other noise, no sound of an engine, suggesting it was just an old bogey wagon being pushed along the tracks.
    The thugs realised that Shepherd had called their bluff and gave him the most savage beating yet before water-boarding him again until he passed out. When he recovered, they started dragging him back inside the hut for further questioning. Whenever they took him outside he was always hooded, but in every conscious moment he had been gnawing at the cloth of the hood and had now succeeded in biting a small hole in it. He slumped down as if passing out again and let his head drop back for a few moments. Squinting through the hole in the cloth, he was able to see enough to confirm his suspicions, he was being held in an abandoned quarry. Just behind the magazine there was a rock face scarred and terraced by decades of stone extraction, and at the foot of it was a sloping mound of fallen rock and quarry waste. He didn’t manage to see  any more of his surroundings before he was dragged the last few yards to the magazine and thrown inside. His hood was removed and the interrogation began again.
    The unease he had felt at the start had now hardened into something else. These men were either genuine SAS and some of the most gifted actors he had encountered, or they were not SAS at all, but something much more threatening: members of the Provisional IRA. If the former, disclosing the whereabouts of the Emergency RV would result in him being RTUed, but if they were Provos, as he suspected, then giving them the information they wanted would merely hasten his death and put more SAS men at risk.
    Even though he was still being beaten, he was thinking more rationally, and he knew that whether they were SAS or Provos, he had to get away. Even if they were well disguised SAS, if he did not escape soon, he was going to miss the final RV and with it his chance of ever joining the Regiment. If they were Provos, whether or not he gave them