Bodie and Doyle had been on their way home from an out-of-town assignment and couldn't wait to get on to familiar home territory. The countryside looked bleak and dark at this time of year and this time of evening. However, just as they were about to turn on to the main road, a car slewed suddenly across the road in front of them. The car behind slammed into them as Bodie swerved and hit the brakes to the floor, sandwiching them between the two. The agents rolled out of their car, guns drawn. Fortunately they hadn't been badly injured and were on high alert. Doyle, from his side, saw a boy get out of the rear car and run at high speed towards the river that meandered along the side of the lane. Bullets flew in his direction from the front car but the agents were diverting their line of fire. Doyle heard a yell and a splash and, leaving Bodie to take care of the shop, headed for the child. Despite the cold night, Doyle flung off his jacket and hurled himself into the water after the boy. The sudden coldness of the water left Doyle gasping. He flailed for the lad and saw him struggling in deep water in the middle of the river. Doyle got to him quickly and dragged him to shore. The boy was barely conscious. As Doyle staggered up the bank with him in his arms, he found himself looking down the barrel of a very lethal weapon.
Doyle looked from the gun to the gunman. Neither looked inviting. But something even beyond his immediate situation had got Doyle's attention - Bodie's body sprawled out on the riverbank face down. He wasn't moving at all.
"Put the child down," the man said, never taking his eyes off Doyle.
Doyle did as he was told but kept hold of the lad, more to keep him upright than to stop him doing a suicidal run again.
"Come," the man said, gesturing with his gun towards the cars. The invitation seemed to include both of them and Doyle was forced to step over Bodie's body as he made his way back to the smash, dragging the child with him. Two other men were waiting at the scene. There was a body at the side of the road. Dead, Doyle assumed. It seemed to be the driver of the rear car. The pair of gunmen had separated the three vehicles and it was Bodie's car that Doyle was directed to, the snipers' it seemed was more of a wreck than theirs, with the tyres blown out. One or other of the men had taken the opportunity of smashing the CI5 car radio to bits to avoid any contact with base. However, what they didn't know, couldn't have known, was that they had accidentally tripped the tracker switch situated next to the radio. One of the men dragged the child into the back. Despite being unarmed and outnumbered, Doyle instinctively reached out to protect the boy. He heard a gun being cocked very close to his ear, but it was a bang on the head by a blunt instrument that was his last sensation.
Doyle woke with a pounding migraine. He lay very still and kept his eyes closed until he could deal with the pain and nausea. As he lay there he was aware that it was light, that he was not alone, and that he was freezing cold. He must have been unconscious for several hours. As he listened, he heard birdsong way off and the regular breathing of a sleeper close by. After a while he risked opening his eyes and braced himself to turn his head. The boy was curled up against the door of a small room - too small for a bedroom, perhaps a store-room. There was no furniture, just the palliasse that he was lying on, a bucket and a blanket which was wrapped around the child. There was one window, barred, the weak sunlight making him feel sick. Doyle had no doubt that the door was locked too. He took a deep breath, tensed his stomach muscles and sat up very slowly to give himself time to stop his head spinning. The child didn't stir. Doyle risked getting quietly to his feet. After the room had rocked and rolled for a while, Doyle prised himself away from the wall he was leaning on and looked out of the window. They were on the ground floor and all Doyle could see was a huge expanse of lawn with trees in the far distance. He reflected on the night's events and tried to block off his anxiety for Bodie. He refused to admit to himself that his friend was dead. He'd need to examine his body before he would even begin to believe that. Turning to practicalities, he tried the bars on the windows. Predictably, they didn't shift. That small effort caused more pain and dizziness. He staggered over to the door and, not wanting to disturb the sleeper, tried the handle gently but firmly. That too, predictably, didn't move either. The boy began to stir and was surprised not to see the man where he'd last seen him before he'd drifted off. A pair of legs blocked his view to the window. He sat up quickly.
"Didn't mean to scare you," Doyle started off looking down on him.
"I don't scare easily, sir," he said boastfully as he got to his feet.
Doyle ignored him, taking it as bravado, and introduced himself, asking for a name in return.
"Who was the dead man?" the child asked, remembering the body they'd stepped over by the river and ignoring Doyle's question.
Doyle had an empathy with children but knew also that they could be very tactless. This child was in a master class of his own. Doyle tried to keep his emotions under control. He didn't want to give himself or his new companion false hope that a Bodie cavalry would rise from the dead and rescue them, so he went along for the time being.
"Bodie."
"First name?"
"Mr," Doyle replied sarcastically. The kid was getting up his nose. It was Doyle's turn to ask questions. "Who was the guy in your car?" He hoped it wasn't his father. As the child didn't seem to be overcome with grief, he assumed not. The boy, however, had his own agenda and wasn't going to be diverted.
"You're not my bodyguard. Who are you?"
Doyle raised an eyebrow. "Police," he replied, not having the energy or the interest to explain CI5 to the child.
"You and Mr Bodie had guns. You can't be police."
Don't know everything, do you? Doyle thought smugly to himself. "Some police are armed for special reasons which I can't go into." Doyle was feeling suddenly very tired, but asked for a name again.
"Charles, Charles Hockey." He held out his hand in a very adult way, trying to look more than his 9 or 10 years. Doyle took it.
"What do you need a bodyguard for?" Doyle asked, intrigued despite himself.
"My father is an important man. He runs a diamond mine in Namibia."
Doyle had never heard of the place but wasn't going to show his ignorance. "And the driver?" he asked again.
"My chauffeur. I thought you were the bodyguards up front. He's dead, isn't he?"
Doyle felt that the child was old enough and brazen enough to take the news. "We don't know that for sure, Charles. I didn't have the chance to check him out. He could be." Doyle wondered if the boy ever bothered to find out the names of his staff. He was glad he didn't live in Charles' egocentric world.
"So what are you doing here in England then?"
The child looked at him scornfully. "I can't live there, in Namibia. Father says that it's not the place to raise children. So I live at Radcliffe's mainly."
"Who's that?"
More withering looks. "It's a top boarding school - in this country," the child added in case Doyle was unable to grasp that fact. It still didn't enlighten him about Namibia.
Since Doyle was too weary and in too much pain to engage the child in more chat, and Charles was too high above Doyle's social strata, they lapsed into silence. Charles joined him at the window. Presently they heard a muffled noise.
"Sounds like gunfire," Charles commented indifferently.
"Oh yeah," said Doyle, "know a lot about that do you?"
"I do shoot, you know."
Doyle raised a sceptical eyebrow but said nothing and continued to stare out of the window.
The child resented Doyle's silence. "Grouse and pheasant when in season."
Of course, Doyle chastised himself, what else? He had reflected on the noise himself. Yes, it could have been gunfire but it could have been a lot of other things too.
Charles, again, objected to the silence. "Our guards seem to have forgotten us. I'm starving." At last he was beginning to sound like a normal human being.
"It's late morning," Doyle said, looking at height of the sun, "They may be round with lunch soon." Doyle wouldn't like to have laid a bet on it, but wanted to say something soothing to Charles. He admitted to himself that he was hungry too. He was also getting increasingly light-headed and had started shivering again. The pounding in his head was making any coherent thought increasingly difficult. He knew that he'd be on the wrong end of any hand-to-hand stuff with the kidnappers if he tried it, and racing across that expanse of grass would be beyond him totally in his present condition. He'd have to wait it out, for the moment at least, until any brilliant ideas occurred to him.
"We're not going anywhere at the moment, Charles, so why don't you make yourself comfortable?" Doyle slid down the wall on to his mattress again trying to keep his pain at bay and under wraps. He noticed now that one end of the mattress where he'd laid his head was covered in blood. It didn't make him feel any better.
Charles hunkered next to Doyle, perhaps taking comfort from his adult presence. They had not been sat for more than five minutes when the door burst open and a beaming Bodie planted himself in the doorway looking very pleased with himself. Doyle tried and failed to keep the relief and grin from his face.
"Thought you'd forgotten us," Doyle said trying to sound tetchy and failing flat.
"Who is this?" asked Charles imperiously. Doyle had to hand it to the lad, he didn't disappoint.
"Mr Bodie - the guy you wrote off." Doyle immediately regretted his nastiness, but the boy seemed unfazed. Charles had risen to his feet, shaking hands with a rather surprised Bodie, but Doyle remained where he was.
"Come on Ray," Bodie ordered as a colleague came up behind him. "Chop, chop."
Doyle didn't move and Bodie took in the situation at once. He wasn't going to help his partner in front of Charles - he'd got the measure of the Little Emperor in a moment - so pushed the lad towards their colleague, Jax. As man and child wandered off, they heard Charles ask after his chauffeur. Perhaps he did care after all. Jax told him that the man was badly hurt but likely to recover. Doyle wondered distractedly how the child felt about that. Left alone, Bodie gave a hand to Doyle who took it and allowed himself to be helped to his feet. No words were exchanged, but Bodie's look of worry said it for him.
Outside and out of hearing of anyone, Bodie asked his friend how he really was. Doyle could hear the anxiety in his voice and replied, "Better than you, mate. I had you down as dead. Are you all right?"
"My gun jammed so I had to play possum and hope that I could get into at least one of the cars and follow you here."
"And did you?" asked Doyle, easing himself slowly into the passenger seat, knowing the answer already.
"Er, well, no actually. Couldn't get anything to work."
"So you left me hanging out here by my fingernails, eh?" Doyle tried to be angry but the energy just wasn't there. He was also frightened on Bodie's behalf even though his friend was trying to make light of it. He'd had a gun jam on him in the middle of a battle, too. It aged you several decades in a moment.
"I had to walk miles to the village to phone HQ. They told me our car's tracker was working." Bodie beamed.
"That was very fortunate," Doyle said pointedly, then asked Bodie to pull over. They hadn't gone very far.
"What's up?"
"Your driving!"
Doyle got out, was sick, then fainted before he managed to get back in the car. Bodie bundled him on to the back seat and gunned his car to the nearest hospital.
It was a few days before Doyle was awake again and Bodie could explain where Namibia was.