For Valour by Andy McNab Read Free Book Online Page A

the walkway and into the wind. The blockhouse at the halfway point seemed empty. I wasn’t surprised. I guessed that most of its functions were automated now. I stopped beside it and looked over the rail, as you do when you’ve come to admire the view – first at the reservoir stretching back the way I’d come then down the almost vertical drop on the opposite side, where Tiggy Legge-Bourke and the princes had come to have some fun.
    I didn’t have to pretend to be impressed. The water spilled through the arches at my feet, sluiced down the century-old stonework and boiled white when it rejoined the river a hundred and fifty feet below.
    I moved out onto the track on the far side of the dam, aiming half left. A loop right about a mile further on would take me into the gully that ended at the Bolthole. The snow was heavier now, but the light was still good. I slipped off a glove, unzipped the breast pocket of my Gore-Tex jacket and took out my iPhone. I wanted to check how much time I had before my RV with Trev.
    I hadn’t even sparked it up before a voice said, ‘Stoner, you dickhead, I thought I’d told you to leave that fucking thing behind.’

8

Grwyne Fawr Dam, Powys
    Wednesday, 25 January

14.00 hrs
    The voice came from the shadow of the trees to my right.
    I kept eyes on the screen, not on the place I thought Trev might be hidden. ‘I wouldn’t need it if I was tucked up somewhere nice instead of out here playing hide and seek. What’s all this about?’
    He told me to make like I was checking out Google Maps for a minute or two, then keep walking uphill, around the western edge of the coppice, until I reached a clearing. He’d meet me there.
    We finally met up twenty minutes later. Trev looked like he’d rewired his brain and gone feral. He was in full-on Rambo mode – field parka bristling with pockets and pouches, cam cream from the neck up, the lot. I felt like a shop-window dummy alongside him.
    ‘So, is this a change of plan, or was this always the plan?’
    His brow rippled like corrugated iron. ‘As you may have noticed, Stoner, when you were mincing around on the parapet, the weather is closing in. And the more I thought about it, the less I fancied the idea of spending another night cuddling up to you in a snow hole.’
    He clapped me between the shoulder-blades and guided me back, under cover of the canopy, to a hide that was so well concealed among the interwoven branches of a cluster of firs that you’d have needed an infrared camera to find him.
    ‘And this, ladies, is something I prepared earlier …’ He ushered me inside a cross between an A-frame shelter and a tepee. The braces were tied in place with twine and sheathed in cam netting. A mixture of twigs, pine fronds, leaves, undergrowth and moss gave it the kind of haphazard appearance that deceived the eye until you were almost standing on top of it. It must have taken him ages to construct.
    ‘Fuck, Trev, how many weeks have you been out here?’
    ‘I’m not staying anywhere long right now, Stoner. Must be the hedge monkey in me.’
    I cracked a smile. ‘Join the club.’
    He was doing his best to make light of it, but the strain showed if you knew where to look. Trev was a big, tousle-haired bear of a man with sideburns that were still stuck in the seventies and in no hurry to leave. He didn’t change his style for anyone. Never had done. But if things began to get to him, he’d rub the pad of his thumb rapidly across the stubble under his chin. It made him the world’s worst poker player. And he was doing it now.
    ‘Well, we’d better not hang around, then, eh? You can start by telling me why you’re up here playing Grizzly Adams.’
    ‘Mate … I could really use your help. I don’t know what you’ve heard on rumour control about what went down at Credenhill, but there’s been a drama …’
    ‘All I know is what God’s messenger told me: man found dead in Killing House.’
    He gestured towards a couple of