Free Hunter Killer by Patrick Robinson

Hooks was always our guide. He takes all the school parties up there.”
    “Where exactly did you say he lives?”
    “Heas, it’s called. But it just a few houses with a shop and a church. You go south from Gedre. It’s on the map, on the way to the highest mountains around here. But you could go right past without noticing the village.”
    Savary thanked the boy and gave him another ten-euro note. Two hours later he and General Jobert were driving along a slow, winding mountain road approaching the small town of Gedre along the tumbling Gavarnie River.
    There was only one road out of the town, heading south toward the Spanish border, back into the highest peaks. Savary gassed up the car and noted the signpost, which said: Cirque de Troumouse. Underneath it was written, Heas 6km.
    This was another mountain road even more twisting than the last. All around were great craggy escarpments, hardly any trees. It was grandeur rather than beauty. And this little road would eventually become almost a spiral as it headed up into the astonishing ten-kilometer wall of mountains that formed the Cirque de Troumouse.
    Heas was the last stop before the big climb. The traffic to see the views was such that the French had shrewdly made the last part a toll road up to the edge of the Cirque, in the time-honored Gallic tradition of always making a buck when the chance was there.
    Gaston Savary and General Jobert pulled into the village a little before three o’clock in the afternoon. They inquired at a shop about Monsieur Hooks and were told, politely, that he had gone into the mountains that morning with a coach load of schoolchildren and their teachers. He usually returned to Heas at around 4 P.M . Meanwhile they could certainly talk to Madame Hooks, who had just gone to meet the school bus from Gedre, and would certainly be home in a few minutes…four houses up the street, on the left. Number eight.
    Savary thanked the shopkeeper and bought a couple of bottles of orange juice. He and Jobert sat on a wall outside in the sunlight and drank them, waiting for a lady with two children to come up the hill toward them.
    They did not have to wait long. A slender, pretty woman, late thirties, appeared almost immediately, laughing with two young boys. General Jobert stepped forward with a cheerful smile. “Madame Hooks?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she said carefully. “I am Madame Hooks.”
    “Well, I am very sorry to startle you. But my colleague, Monsieur Savary, and I have come a very long way to see your husband on a most urgent matter.”
    “What about?” she said. “You are looking for a guide through these mountains?”
    “Not exactly,” said the General. “But we have something to tell him that he will most certainly find interesting.”
    Madame Hooks appraised the two men, noting their excellent manners, their well-cut clothes and polished shoes, and indeed the big Citroën government car parked outside the shop. Every sense told her that these were men from the military, but she chose not to betray her thoughts. However, she knew better than to antagonize such people, so she said quickly, “Please come up to the house, and we will have some coffee…this is our son Jean-Pierre and this is Andre.”
    The General held out his hand in greeting. “And this,” he said, “is a very important man from Paris: Monsieur Gaston Savary.”
    They walked up yet another hill, about fifty yards, and entered through a gate into a small walled garden, which surrounded a white stone house with a red-tiled roof, a classic French Pyrenean building.
    The living room was also classic French country style, large with a heavy wooden dining table at one end and a sitting area around an enormous brick fireplace at the other. The kitchen was separate, through a beamed archway, and all the furniture was of a high quality. There were some very beautiful rugs, possibly North African in origin, spread over the oak floorboards. A large framed photograph of