The First Casualty Read Online Free PDF

or European Union port would not require.
    Jason went to the window for another look. The falling snow gave him a view as though through gauze. “There’s a davit on the foredeck but no boat.”
    There was wet sucking sound and the hiss of a struck match. Jason turned to see the harbor master staring disappointedly into the smokeless bowl of the pipe. “I dinna ken where on this island would be more comfortable than that ship,” he observed. “But someone must have come ashore last night.”
    The same conclusion had already occurred to Jason. He reached for the doorknob. “Thanks for your help.”
    The pipe was now issuing a slender tendril of blue smoke. “Anytime, laddie.”
    Outside, wind rattled metal rigging against steel masts. The little harbor’s small boats were rolling from gunwale to gunwale at their moorings, tethered animals trying to break free.
    Jason squinted in a futile effort to keep the blowing snow out of his eyes. Through the white curtain, he saw movement on the land side of the harbor. A second’s concentration and he recognized Mr. Frache and his two-wheel wagon. When he was not tending to his dairy cows, the man earned a few pounds acting as the island’s taxi service, meeting the ferry and picking up fares to one of the half dozen hotels and numerous guest houses.
    Jason waved his arms, yelling. At first, he thought the elderly farmer couldn’t hear over the wind. But then the single horse turned toward Jason and the wagon lumbered over.
    â€œG’day, Mr. Peters.” Frache was looking down at Jason and his suitcase from the driver’s perch. “You’ll be needing transportation?”
    Jason tossed his bag into the cart and climbed in behind it. “Sure do. Stocks.”
    If Frache thought the request to be taken to the island’s finest hotel instead of Jason’s home was strange, he didn’t show it. It offered what little luxury the island could boast. The beamed dining room’s fare—though modest when compared to Le Havre, an hour by hydrofoil from Guernsey—was the best on Sark. Even so, everyone on the island knew the place was closed from New Year’s Eve to mid-­February. Frache didn’t question this, either.
    Stocks was also about a quarter of a mile closer to the harbor than the 300-year-old stone Norman cottage Jason currently called home. Approaching the house on foot would give Jason a number of tactical options not available to an arrival by road. If Jason was the reason the people aboard the Allegro were here, surprise seemed a sensible precaution.
    The two rode in relative silence, the only sounds being the horse’s hooves crackling through the patina of ice that had formed on the dirt road. Sights were no longer familiar in their winter costumes. The fields were a pristine white, their undulating slopes marked only by tracks of animals seeking forage under the white blanket. Snow coated the upper surface of branches of wind-stunted trees as though they had donned starched shirts.
    Only the wind, though far colder than usual, was the same. On Sark, the wind hummed, sang, or screamed. It was rarely silent. Today, it spoke with a white-tinted voice as puffs of talcum whirled across the ground.
    It was a time to marvel.
    And a time to think.
    Jason had come here, what, a year or so ago? It had been what he guessed was an intermediate step in an endless journey that had begun on the darkest day of his life and of his country, a late summer day, September 11.
    The morning had begun like any other. Having announced his retirement from Delta Force, Captain Peters, J., had drawn Pentagon duty for the balance of his enlistment. In less than two weeks, he would permanently exchange his spotless, razor-creased uniform for an artist’s smock. His paintings, acrylic on canvas, were selling very well not only in a gallery in Georgetown, but in New York and Los Angles as well.
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