Hot Blood by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online

the room a second man, wearing a ski mask, would stand at the door cradling an AK-47, his finger inside the trigger guard. It was an intimidating weapon, but Mitchell found it reassuring. It wasn’t the sort you’d fire in the confines of a basement: there was a high risk of ricochet, the noise would be deafening and it would be hard to manoeuvre, all of which suggested that the men weren’t as professional as he’d first thought.
    Mitchell paced round the room on autopilot as he considered his options. During his time on the SAS selection course, he’d gone through Resistance to Interrogation training with the Joint Services Interrogation Unit and passed with flying colours. But it had done nothing to prepare him for what he was going through now.
    The training was based on building resistance to physical and mental torture. It came after the Escape and Evasion section of the gruelling SAS selection course – three days of being pursued across the Brecon Beacons by British Army units trying to prove they were every bit as hard as the men who wanted to join the élite special-forces unit. Eventually everyone was caught and handed over to the hard men of the JSIU. The interrogation was open-ended. Mitchell had been grilled for two full days and three nights before he was told that he’d passed and was qualified to wear the SAS badge and beret. It had been sixty hours of hell.
    He’d been beasted by four burly paratroopers before he got to the JSIU, so he was already battered and bruised. He’d been stripped naked and doused with icy water. They’d played white noise through huge speakers for hours. They’d shouted at him in languages he didn’t understand. They’d blindfolded him and made him stand spreadeagled against a wall with most of his weight on his arms. He’d been screamed at, punched and had his face submerged in a barrel of water until he’d come close to passing out. He’d been tied naked to a chair and interrogated for hours. Under the rules of the test, he had been able to give only his name, rank and number. Divulging any other information meant instant rejection. The interrogators had tried everything. Screaming at him. Cajoling him. Telling him jokes. Asking him if he wanted food or to sleep. They’d even produced a bottle of beer and told him there was nothing in the rules about accepting a drink. He’d refused it and they’d put a cloth bag over his head and dragged him across a field telling him they were going to bury him alive. They hadn’t, of course. That was one of the flaws in the test. No matter how convincing the JSIU men were, those they interrogated knew it was an act, that they wouldn’t do any permanent damage, and that at some point it would all be over. In the real world bones and teeth were broken – and worse. On the selection course you’d get a little bruised. All you had to do was keep your mouth shut until it was over.
    Once he’d joined the Regiment, Mitchell had been on more courses with the JSIU. They’d taught him what was likely to happen if he was captured by an enemy who wasn’t bound by the rules of the Geneva Convention. And they’d taught him the skills that would ensure the best chance of survival. But nothing the interrogation experts had taught him had prepared him for what he had been through since he had been brought to the basement.
    His initial capture had been by the book: an AK-47 aimed at his chest, a hood pulled roughly over his head, something hard slammed against his temple, and waking up in the back of a van with his hands and feet bound. He’d been kept tied and hooded for the first forty-eight hours, he figured, though it had been hard to keep track of time. He’d been given water to drink through a straw but no food, and no one had said anything to him. He’d been moved from the van to a place that smelled of diesel oil where he’d slept on a dusty concrete floor, then put into the boot of a car and taken to another location where