Free The Summer Soldier by Nicholas Guild Page A

trying to see just what it was that was so
interesting under the hood of his car. Guinness came down hard on
the back of Hornbeck’s neck, driving home with the heel of his
fist. It worked in the movies, and it worked then—Hornbeck went
down, after first bringing his head down with a thud on the Jag’s
fender.
    But he was still alive; out like a light, but
alive. Guinness put his head on the man’s chest and listened to the
heart beating. After a few panicky seconds of considering what to
do, he took off his coat and pressed it down against Hornbeck’s
nose and mouth. He waited five minutes, the longest five minutes of
his young life, and then once again put his ear down against
Hornbeck’s chest. There was nothing. Hornbeck was dead. Even in the
winter cold he couldn’t bear to put that coat back on. He simply
threw it in the trunk of the Morris and fled. All he wanted in the
world was to get away from there, and in his haste he nearly
collided with a vegetable truck that was carrying a load of
Valencia oranges to the good people of Humberside.
    And now the protectors of all things
democratic and humane had arranged his future for him. First he
would be carefully trained—three months at an unspecified location
in Western Scotland to study weapons, tactics, the personnel and
administrative structures of the other side, everything he needed
to convert him into the finely honed instrument of Her Majesty’s
revenge.
    And there were other things. A part time job
teaching in a public school in London, a school the headmaster of
which MI-6 had in its pocket. And his employers, the ones who
mattered, could be counted on to be generous, generous and
tolerant. After all, he was a valuable property. And all he had to
do was once in a while a little job of work for Mr. Byron J.
Down.
    “You’ll do the work, son. I haven’t a doubt
in the world that you’ll work out just fine. We’re enough alike,
you and I, that I can read you like the lettering on an eye chart,
and this sort of thing is quite your line of country.
    “Oh, you’ll spend a few more weeks feeling
sick and shaky over this little episode—it’s always that way with
the first job—and then you’ll be back.”
    Down leaned toward him over the table, his
fingers digging into the tablecloth like a hawk’s talons into the
flesh of its victim, and his eyes were round and bright.
    “It’s the hunting. Not the killing so much,
even if that is a part of it, but it’s the stalking that takes
possession of you like divine fire and makes you feel like the
master of worlds. You against him, your life measured against his.
It’s what every man on earth was designed specifically to do, and
you more than most. We have you now, boy; you won’t be able to help
yourself. It’s in the blood, you know.”
    And he was right, of course.
    5
    But Creon wasn’t. He wasn’t even close, the
stupid bastard. Down would have loved talking to Creon; he ran so
perfectly to type.
    Apparently Down had had a lot of ugly
dealings with the police and had developed, in addition to the
instinctive dislike everyone in the profession entertained for the
cops, rather settled opinions about how they should be handled.
    “Basically, they all use the a priori
method,” he would say, comfortably crossing and recrossing his legs
as he sat by a half open window after one of his enormous lunches.
He was always much given to theory during that part of the
afternoon. “What they believe to be true is what you have to worry
about, not what they can prove—after all, what do they care about
proof?
    “The policeman will always construct an
initial view of things, sometimes within a few seconds of arriving
on the scene, and the evidence, as it filters through to him, will
be made to conform. God knows what the ingredients of that
marvelous solution are likely to be—how he felt about his mum when
he was five, or the quality of his wife’s conjugal embraces—but the
great thing is to give him