The Hit List Read Free Page A

you'd be dropped from the team if you mentioned it, thought Slater.
    'I want you in that three-quarter line on Saturday,' he told the boy. 'Now cut along and see Matron -- my guess is she'll put you in sick bay for the night. I'll look in during the evening, make sure you're OK.'
    al-Jubrin looked at Slater, opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. Nodding, he headed
    12
    Chris Ryan
    off towards the track suits piled on the touchline.
    'And while we're at it, I'd like you to report to Matron too, Ripley. Have her take your temperature.'
    Ripley, the son of a Midlands property developer, stared angrily at Slater. At six foot one, he was already two inches taller than the games master.
    'I'm fine, sir. Honestly.'
    'To Matron, Ripley. I'll be checking with her.'
    'Sir, I can't miss this evening's prep. I've got a history project I've got to--'
    'You heard me, Ripley. I want you lean and mean for Saturday.'
    The boy bit his lip, nodded, and loped off. Sometimes, thought Slater, these rich kids had it hardest. Would Ripley - basically a decent lad - be ruined by the privileges that he would undoubtedly inherit? And Reinhardt, he wondered, seeing the American limping towards him. How would he be ten years from now? Would that cheerful sportsmanship survive whatever corporate hell was waiting for him?
    |v 'All right Paul?' " 'Cream-crackered, sir.'
    Slater smiled. If nothing else, an English education had broadened the boy's vocabulary. 'Train hard, fight easy, Paul - who said that?'
    Reinhardt frowned. 'You've got me there, sir.'
    'General Suvorov,' said Slater, and for a moment he saw the words painted on the adjutant's door at the old regimental HQ, smelt the gun-oil in the armoury.
    13
    The Hit List
    'Who was General Suvorov, sir? I'm afraid my modern history's a bit shaky.'
    Slater looked at the boy, at his narrow shoulders and mud-caked knees. God, he thought, they were so young. 'Look him up, Paul,' he said gently.
    Watching the rugby squad trudge back to the school, Slater wondered if he was ever going to find life at Bolingbroke's School normal rather than freakish. On paper his was a good job. Games master to a school like Bolingbroke's was not a position to be sneezed at -- on a good day the 1st XV could give Sedburgh or Ampleforth a run for their money. And the boys were good kids, for the most part. Too bloody rich and too bloody foreign, one of his colleagues had confided to Slater during his first staff tea, but Slater liked them. In many ways, he found the foreign kids - the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Indians easiest to get along with. Away from their overindulgent parents they had a hunger to prove themselves as individuals. They had no real understanding of the British class system, and they treated Slater exactly as they treated the other teachers: with an earnest, if at times joshing, respect.
    Like Slater, the foreigners had started out as outsiders. Unlike Slater, however, they soon discovered that wealth and privilege confers its own insidership. For all the importance attached to rugby and cricket, games masters did not rank highly in Bolingbroke's pecking order. Slater was considered a cut above Jimmy McCracken - the semi-alcoholic
    14
    Chris Ryan
    '"groundsman who tended the pitches and was known to staff and pupils alike as 'Windy' on account of his I, dodgy colon - but well below any of the other i teachers, most of whom were Oxbridge graduates and p former public schoolboys. When he had first arrived at I the school Slater had wondered whether he should jpmitate them, with their leather-patched sports jackets, ftheir polished brogues and their baggy corduroys. He'd idismissed the idea immediately - he'd never get it jtiite right. To carry off that that kind of upper-class abbiness you had to be born to it. And Slater, as was regularly made clear to him, adn't been born to it. He wore civilian clothes - as >ne of the warrant-officers had memorably pointed on the first day of his undercover