Running Blind / The Freedom Trap (11 page)

I turned as though to speak to Elin and then turned back quickly, glancing upwards as I did so. There was no one to be seen but I was rewarded by the glint of something—a reflection that flickered into nothing. It might have been the sun reflecting off a surface of glassy lava, but I didn’t think so. Lava doesn’t jump around when left to its own devices—not after it has cooled off, that is.

I marked the spot and went on, not looking up again, and we came to the base of the cliff which was about twenty feet high. There was a straggly growth of birch; gnarled trees all of a foot high. In Iceland bonsai grow naturally and I’m surprised the Icelanders don’t work up an export trade to Japan. I found a clear space, set down the coffee pot and the sugar jar, then sat down and pulled up my trouser leg to extract the knife.

Elin came up. ‘What are you doing?’

I said, ‘Now don’t jump out of your pants, but there’s a character on the ridge behind us who just shot a hole in that tyre.’

Elin stared at me wordlessly. I said, ‘He can’t see us here, but I don’t think he’s worried very much about that. All he wants to do is to stop us until Kennikin arrives—and he’s doing it very well. As long as he can see the Land-Rover he knows we aren’t far away.’ I tucked the knife into the waistband of my trousers—it’s designed for a fast draw only when wearing a kilt.

Elin sank to her knees. ‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m positive. You don’t get a natural puncture like that in the side wall of a new tyre.’ I stood up and looked along the ridge. ‘I’m going to winkle out that bastard; I think I know where he is.’ I pointed to a crevice at the end of the cliff, a four-foot high crack in the rock. ‘I want you to get in there and wait. Don’t move until you hear me call—and make bloody sure it is me.’

‘And what if you don’t come back?’ she said bleakly.

She was a realist. I looked at her set face and said deliberately, ‘In that case, if nothing else happens, you stay where you are until dark, then make a break for the Land-Rover and get the hell out of here. On the other hand, if Kennikin pitches up, try to keep out of his way—and do that by keeping out of sight.’ I shrugged. ‘But I’ll try to get back.’

‘Do you have to go at all?’

I sighed. ‘We’re stuck here, Elin. As long as that joker can keep the Land-Rover covered we’re stuck. What do you want me to do? Wait here until Kennikin arrives and then just give myself up?’

‘But you’re not armed?’

I patted the hilt of the knife. ‘I’ll make out. Now, just do as I say.’ I escorted her to the cleft and saw her inside. It
can’t have been very comfortable; it was a foot and a half wide by four feet high and so she had to crouch. But there are worse things than being uncomfortable.

Then I contemplated what I had to do. The ridge was seamed by gullies cut by water into the soft rock and they offered a feasible way of climbing without being seen. What I wanted to do was to get above the place where I had seen the sudden glint. In warfare—and this was war—he who holds the high ground has the advantage.

I set out, moving to the left and sticking close in to the rocks. There was a gully twenty yards along which I rejected because I knew it petered out not far up the ridge. The next one was better because it went nearly to the top, so I went into it and began to climb.

Back in the days when I was being trained I went to mountain school and my instructor said something very wise. ‘Never follow a watercourse or a stream, either uphill or downhill,’ he said. The reasoning was good. Water will take the quickest way down any hill and the quickest way is usually the steepest. Normally one sticks to the bare hillside and steers clear of ravines. Abnormally, on the other hand, one scrambles up a damned steep, slippery, waterworn crack in the rock or one gets one’s head blown off.

The sides of the ravine at the bottom of the ridge were about ten feet high, so there was no danger of being seen. But higher up the ravine was shallower and towards the end it was only about two feet deep and I was snaking upwards on my belly. When I had gone as far as I could I reckoned I was higher than the sniper, so I cautiously pushed my head around a pitted chunk of lava and assessed the situation.

Far below me on the track, and looking conspicuously isolated, was the Land-Rover. About two hundred feet to the right and a hundred feet below was the place where I
thought the sniper was hiding. I couldn’t see him because of the boulders which jutted through the sandy skin of the ridge. That suited me; if I couldn’t see him then he couldn’t see me, and that screen of boulders was just what I needed to get up close.

But I didn’t rush at it. It was in my mind that there might be more than one man. Hell, there could be a dozen scattered along the top of the ridge for all I knew! I just stayed very still and got back my breath, and did a careful survey of every damned rock within sight.

Nothing moved, so I wormed my way out of cover of the ravine and headed towards the boulders, still on my belly. I got there and rested again, listening carefully. All I heard was the faraway murmur of the river in the distance. I moved again, going upwards and around the clump of boulders, and now I was holding the cosh.

I pushed my head around a rock and saw them, fifty feet below in a hollow in the hillside. One was lying down with a rifle pushed before him, the barrel resting on a folded jacket; the other sat farther back tinkering with a walkietalkie. He had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth.

I withdrew my head and considered. One man I might have tackled—two together were going to be tricky, especially without a gun. I moved carefully and found a better place from which to observe and where I would be less conspicuous—two rocks came almost together but not quite, and I had a peephole an inch across.

The man with the rifle was very still and very patient. I could imagine that he was an experienced hunter and had spent many hours on hillsides like this waiting for his quarry to move within range. The other man was more fidgety; he eased his buttocks on the rock on which he was sitting, he scratched, he slapped at an insect which settled on his leg, and he fiddled with the walkietalkie.

At the bottom of the ridge I saw something moving and held my breath. The man with the rifle saw it, too, and I could see the slight tautening of his muscles as he tensed. It was Elin. She came out of cover from under the cliff and walked towards the Land-Rover.

I cursed to myself and wondered what the hell she thought she was doing. The man with the rifle settled the butt firmly into his shoulder and took aim, following her all the way with his eye glued to the telescopic sight. If he pulled that trigger I would take my chances and jump the bastard there and then.

Elin got to the Land-Rover and climbed inside. Within a minute she came out again and began to walk back towards the cliff. Half-way there she called out and tossed something into the air. I was too far away to see what it was but I thought it was a packet of cigarettes. The joker with the rifle would be sure of what it was because he was equipped with one of the biggest telescopic sights I had ever seen.

Elin vanished from sight below and I let out my breath. She had deliberately play-acted to convince these gunmen that I was still there below, even if out of sight. And it worked, too. The rifleman visibly relaxed and turned over and said something to the other man. I couldn’t hear what was said because he spoke in low tones, but the fidget laughed loudly.

He was having trouble with the walkie-talkie. He extended the antenna, clicked switches and turned knobs, and then tossed it aside on to the moss. He spoke to the rifleman and pointed upwards, and the rifleman nodded. Then he stood up and turned to climb towards me.

I noted the direction he was taking, then turned my head to find a place to ambush him. There was a boulder just behind me about three feet high, so I pulled away from my peephole and dropped behind it in a crouch and took a firm
hold of the cosh. I could hear him coming because he wasn’t making much attempt to move quietly. His boots crunched on the ground and once there was a flow of gravel as he slipped and I heard a muttered curse. Then there was a change in the light as his shadow fell across me, and I rose up behind him and hit him.

There’s quite a bit of nonsense talked about hitting men on the head. From some accounts—film and TV script writers—it’s practically as safe as an anaesthetic used in an operating theatre; all that happens is a brief spell of unconsciousness followed by a headache not worse than a good hangover. A pity it isn’t so because if it were the hospital anaesthetists would be able to dispense with the elaborate equipment with which they are now lumbered in favour of the time-honoured blunt instrument.

Unconsciousness is achieved by imparting a sharp acceleration to the skull bone so that it collides with the contents—the brain. This results in varying degrees of brain damage ranging from slight concussion to death, and there is always lasting damage, however slight. The blow must be quite heavy and, since men vary, a blow that will make one man merely dizzy will kill another. The trouble is that until you’ve administered the blow you don’t know what you’ve done.

I wasn’t in any mood for messing about so I hit this character hard. His knees buckled under him and he collapsed, and I caught him before he hit the ground. I eased him down and turned him so that he lay on his back. A mangled cigar sagged sideways from his mouth, half bitten through, and blood trickled from the cigar butt to show he had bitten his tongue. He was still breathing.

I patted his pockets and came upon the familiar hard shape, and drew forth an automatic pistol—a Smith & Wesson .38, the twin to the one I had taken from Lindholm. I checked the magazine to see if it was full
and then worked the action to put a bullet into the breech.

The collapsed figure at my feet wasn’t going to be much use to anybody even if he did wake up, so I didn’t have to worry about him. All I had to do now was to take care of Daniel Boone—the man with the rifle. I returned to my peephole to see what he was doing.

He was doing precisely what he had been doing ever since I had seen him—contemplating the Land-Rover with inexhaustible patience. I stood up and walked into the hollow, gun first. I didn’t worry overmuch about keeping quiet; speed was more important than quietness and I reckoned he might be more alarmed if I pussyfooted around than if I crunched up behind him.

He didn’t even turn his head. All he did was to say in a flat Western drawl, ‘You forgotten something, Joe?’

I caught my jaw before it sagged too far. A Russian I expected; an American I didn’t. But this was no time to worry about nationalities—a man who throws bullets at you is automatically a bastard, and whether he’s a Russian bastard or an American bastard makes little difference. I just said curtly, ‘Turn around, but leave the rifle where it is or you’ll have a hole in you.’

He went very still, but the only part of him that he turned was his head. He had china-blue eyes in a tanned, narrow face and he looked ideal for type-casting as Pop’s eldest son in a TV horse opera. He also looked dangerous. ‘I’ll be goddamned!’ he said softly.

‘You certainly will be if you don’t take your hands off that rifle,’ I said. ‘Spread your arms out as though you were being crucified.’

He looked at the pistol in my hand and reluctantly extended his arms. A man prone in that position finds it difficult to get up quickly. ‘Where’s Joe?’ he asked.

‘He’s gone beddy-byes.’ I walked over to him and put the muzzle of the pistol to the nape of his neck and I felt him shudder. That didn’t mean much; it didn’t mean he was afraid—I shudder involuntarily when Elin kisses me on the nape of the neck. ‘Just keep quiet,’ I advised, and picked up the rifle.

I didn’t have time to examine it closely then, but I did afterwards, and it was certainly some weapon. It had a mixed ancestry and probably had started life as a Browning, but a good gunsmith had put in a lot of time in reworking it, giving it such refinements as a sculptured stock with a hole in it to put your thumb, and other fancy items. It was a bit like the man said, ‘I have my grandfa-ther’s axe—my father replaced the blade and I gave it a new haft.’

What it had ended up as was the complete long-range assassin’s kit. It was bolt action because it was a gun for a man who picks his target and who can shoot well enough not to want to send a second bullet after the first in too much of a hurry. It was chambered for a .375 magnum load, a heavy 300 grain bullet with a big charge behind it—high velocity, low trajectory. This rifle in good hands could reach out half a mile and snuff out a man’s life if the light was good and the air still.

To help the aforesaid good hands was a fantastic telescopic sight—a variable-powered monster with a top magnification of 30. To use it when fully racked out would need a man with no nerves—and thus no tremble—or a solid bench rest. The scope was equipped with its own range-finding system, a multiple mounting of graduated dots on the vertical cross hair for various ranges, and was sighted in at five hundred yards.

It was a hell of a lot of gun.

I straightened and rested the muzzle of the rifle lightly against my friend’s spine. ‘That’s your gun you can feel,’ I
said. ‘You don’t need me to tell you what would happen if I pulled the trigger.’

His head was turned sideways and I saw a light film of sweat coating the tan. He didn’t need to let his imagination work because he was a good craftsman and knew his tools enough to
know
what would happen—over 5,000 foot-pounds of energy would blast him clean in two.

I said, ‘Where’s Kennikin?’

‘Who?’

‘Don’t be childish,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask you again—where’s Kennikin?’

‘I don’t know any Kennikin,’ he said in a muffled voice. He found difficulty in speaking because the side of his face was pressed against the ground.

‘Think again.’

‘I tell you I don’t know him. All I was doing was following orders.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You took a shot at me.’

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘At your tyre. You’re still alive, aren’t you? I could have knocked you off any time.’

I looked down the slope at the Land-Rover. That was true; it would be like a Bisley champion shooting tin ducks at a fairground. ‘So you were instructed to stop me. Then what?’