‘We’ll get to the top. If it isn’t crawling with Goons, we’ll lie up and come down tonight.’
‘Right.’
‘We can go without food, but we can’t without water.’
The terrain grew steeper until, fifty feet below the crest, they were forced to crawl without the aid of their arms. It was the progress of the snake, and by the time they reached the jutting edge above, their cheeks and knees were raw and bleeding, and what had remained of the arms of their uniform jackets had been torn away. Each man had fragments of crust adhering to the corners of his eyes and mouth, and the foul vapour that rose from their clothes under the late sun choked them.
As they wriggled over the lip of the promontory they found that it was only a small, tufted shelf from which, not ten feet ahead, the slope rose smoothly again to another false crest.
‘Oh Christ,’ said MacConnachie.
‘Quite,’ said Ansell, and lay his face in the dirt to rest.
Something had been achieved: looking back, MacConnachie saw that although they had travelled only two hundred yards from the river, their increased elevation had revealed the outskirts of a small fishing village to their left. There was a wooden jetty with one or two native craft lying against it, a handful of villagers in attendance, but, so far as he could see, no sign of danger. He told Ansell to keep watch. Then he settled to examine the cluster of huts. Within moments he had located the village square and, most important, the well. The kid was right. They had to have water. He set his eyes to absorb and fix a plan of the village in his mind. He trusted his eyes, as he trusted every part of his physical mechanism, not to let him down. They were the adjuncts of his instinct; he had no need to think.
After minutes of complete stillness MacConnachie looked at the sky.
‘One hour to sunset. Kid, where’s that camp?’
‘Which one?’
‘The one they were marching us to.’
‘How would I know?’
MacConnachie looked at him sharply.
‘Use your bloody brains! Think!’
‘One hour to sunset? We usually get in about eight or nine. That’s three hours from the top. Not far, the condition they’re in.’
‘They’ll look for us tonight, then.’
‘They might. But with trucks and helicopters, why should they hurry?’
‘Um . . . look.’
MacConnachie nodded towards the village, indicating it to Ansell for the first time.
‘That’s handy.’
‘We’ve got to get higher up. We must see forward before we turn back.’
As MacConnachie levered himself upright, the gun clutched awkwardly behind him, Ansell suddenly hissed,
‘Get down!’
MacConnachie dropped at once.
‘What?’
‘There’s someone coming!’
‘Where?’
‘Up there!’
MacConnachie wriggled quickly along to the end of the shelf, where he could lay his face against the rising ground and look up the hillside. A civilian Goon was hopping sure-footedly down towards them, turned a little sideways to his own line of march and travelling the steep slope on confident, muscular legs: a fisherman, perhaps, from the near-by village. If he kept to his present course he would land beside them. Keep coming, MacConnachie thought; just keep coming.
Ansell came up beside MacConnachie and laid his face close to the big man’s. MacConnachie muttered,
‘If he’ll stop, just long enough, he’s a dead man.’
Ansell looked at the Goon, then back to MacConnachie.
‘Why?’
The man was closing rapidly.
‘Get to the other end of the ledge! Keep hidden!’
There was no time to argue. Stiff with tension, Ansell backed as quickly as he could, never taking his eyes from MacConnachie, one foot against the bottom of the cut to guide him. He saw MacConnachie arch back, drop the gun, and push it out with his foot into the open area of the shelf. MacConnachie then flattened himself into the ground until even Ansell had difficulty in locating his exact position. Ansell did his best to emulate him.
Time passed. They waited. Then they heard the swish of the man’s feet through the low scrub. Closer and closer he came until suddenly the feet fell silent. There was a low mutter of surprise and puzzlement. Silence. And then the man jumped down on to the shelf and stood looking at the gun. Clearly he didn’t know what to make of it. He looked to left and right and back up the hill. Finally, he crouched to touch it.
MacConnachie rose and kicked him in the side of the head. Perhaps the man felt the blow coming for he half turned and, instead of being stunned, had one eyebrow split open. He screamed as the blood spurted from his forehead. MacConnachie kicked again but the man was falling backwards and the blow caught him in the kidney. The third time MacConnachie kicked him in the groin.
‘Come on—finish him!’ MacConnachie shouted.
Ansell blundered out at last to join the fight. The man was screaming repeatedly and now he tried to wriggle forward off the ledge, begging perhaps for mercy. Arms bound tightly behind him, MacConnachie fell awkwardly on top of him, trying to pin the man down by weight alone.
‘For Christ’s sake, kick him!’
Ansell kicked out at the weaving head. It was a poor shot, catching the man low on the cheek, sending his chin awry but otherwise achieving nothing beyond renewed screaming. He tried again. This time he broke the man’s nose and a wild drowning quality was added to the already riveting sounds of his terror. Once more, in sick desperation, Ansell lashed out and caught MacConnachie in the forehead.
‘In Christ’s name, finish him!’ MacConnachie screamed.
Ansell could see that he was barely able to hold the man now, so greatly had pain and the fear of death increased his strength. They were being carried together, in their locked struggle, towards the lip of the shelf. Ansell took careful aim and drove his foot at the head once more; the teeth crumbled inwards under his toe. The man screamed and screamed and would not die. Ansell lost control. He kicked and kicked until, at the third blow, he felt the man’s temple give a little under the impact, and at last he fell silent.
‘Is he dead?’
‘Oh God. Oh sweet Christ in heaven.’
MacConnachie hauled himself upright, calculated the position of the head, and stove in the skull wall with two carefully judged blows from his loaded toe-caps.
‘He is now.’
Ansell wandered off a little, turned, and crouched against the cut of the shelf.
‘I’m going to be sick.’
MacConnachie rocked his head back and forth in outrage and a sort of grief.
‘Messy killing,’ he cried. ‘God, I hate messy killing!’
Ansell found that he had no urge whatever to vomit; nothing came. Roughly, MacConnachie said, ‘Come on.’
Ansell joined him.
Back to back, they dragged the body to the rear of the shelf and stripped it. Under the first layer of clothing they found, tucked into a pouched belt, a fish knife with a thin, sharp, eight-inch blade.
‘That’s why we killed him,’ MacConnachie said. Ansell said nothing. MacConnachie reached behind him, drew out the knife and said, ‘Lean towards me.’
The next moment Ansell’s hands became separated for the first time in days. He turned at once to release MacConnachie. Then they sat, both of them in silence, glorying in the free movement of their arms, caressing their bruised and rope-burned wrists. MacConnachie had actually to peel one section of rope out of his flesh, where it had eaten its way in and embedded itself. This left a raw, shallow channel in the meat.
MacConnachie said, ‘Take the gun. Keep watch.’
As he stood on guard, Ansell glanced every now and then at MacConnachie to see what he was doing. First, he removed the dead man’s belt. Then he rolled his clothes into a neat bundle, tying them together with the sleeves of the native coat. Finally, he went through the pouches of the belt. There was a
slim bundle of notes in the first. ‘About five bobs’ worth,’ said MacConnachie. And nothing in any of the others until he came to the last. He withdrew a tiny object, and said,
‘What the hell’s this? Looks like a chicken’s beak.’
‘Probably a lucky charm.’
‘Well, it didn’t do him much good,’ said MacConnachie, and tossed it aside. Ansell found that he was disturbed by this. He said,
‘We could leave it with him.’
‘He hasn’t got any pockets. What shall I do? Shove it up his jacksi?’
Ansell said nothing. MacConnachie said,
‘He’s coming with us, anyway.’
‘Coming with us?’
‘Watch your front!’
MacConnachie rose, strapped the belt round his own waist, tied the bundle of clothes to it, slipped the knife under it, and said,
‘I don’t want him found before nightfall. After that, we’ll dump him. Till then, he comes too.’
He bent and raised the body with one hand under each armpit until it stood upright. He looked to Ansell and said, ‘Come on. Fireman’s carry.’
Obediently, Ansell crossed, stooped, thrust one arm between the dead legs and, as MacConnachie lowered the weight of the corpse across his shoulders, took hold of a dead wrist with the same hand. MacConnachie then took the gun, leaving Ansell’s other hand free for balance and support. Ansell said,
‘He’s still warm.’
‘He’ll stay that way a long time in this heat. Let’s move.’
They set off up the hill, two men, three bodies.
Just before they left, when Ansell’s back was turned, MacConnachie had crouched, retrieved the chicken’s beak, and returned it surreptitiously to the pouch. Now he led the way forward.
With their arms free, the going was much easier. Although the slope was no less steep, there were occasional bushes to pull upon, and a well-worn path to follow. MacConnachie saw no point in avoiding it. The lie of the land was such that, should anyone appear over the horizon, the encounter would turn on which of them moved first; and MacConnachie was confident that he would. He was quicker to react than anyone he had come against.
Twice he fell back to relieve Ansell, the second time keeping the body, for Ansell had begun to labour badly. He retained the gun also, seeing that Ansell was in no condition to use it. He settled for the watch on their rear that Ansell could still provide.
Three times they struggled up the last slopes of a crest, only to find that the land had deceived them, and they were forced to move on again. MacConnachie said,
‘It’ll be like this. We might as well get used to it.’
On the last occasion Ansell nodded, hunched his shoulders and, with drooping head, trudged across to take up the corpse once more. MacConnachie remained silent; he was himself weary, and to express surprise or admiration was alien to him. They moved on. The sun was low in the sky now and every feature cast a long shadow. The tension of their escape had left them. Whatever they did hurt.
At the next crest they were lucky. They looked down into a gully broad enough to constitute a defensible position. While Ansell sank to his knees, letting the corpse roll off his back, MacConnachie went forward to examine the terrain.
The gully was sixty feet across, its floor split by fissures seven or eight feet deep. Beyond its farther side the hill rose up sharply to a feature so high it could only be the first crest of the range proper. From MacConnachie’s left, a single spar of sunlight pierced a saddle to paint its upper edges in gold. While daylight lingered in the high country it was night already in the valleys, and where he stood the heavy shadows gathered fast. He crossed to one of the fissures and peered down into it.
‘All right, we can chuck him in this one.’
Ansell, who had been staring at the dead face as though to reanimate it, rose, seized the corpse by the heels, and dragged it down to where MacConnachie stood. He was about to topple it over when MacConnachie said, ‘Wait a minute.’
With every appearance of embarrassment MacConnachie fumbled the beak out of the pouch, stooped, and wrapped the lifeless fingers round it.
‘That’s our luck,’ he growled. ‘Not his. Ours!’
And he sent the body over with a short heave. Ansell said,
‘You’re whistling in the dark.’
MacConnachie said,
‘Get stuffed.’
Ansell wandered over to the next crack, and relieved himself. MacConnachie, apparently satisfied that the corpse was sufficiently hidden, did the same.
They settled into a small depression just below the skyline. MacConnachie stripped the gun down and did his best to clean it. After a moment, he said,
‘We must find something to oil this damned thing with, or it’ll rust to hell.’
But Ansell was preoccupied and failed to reply. The night closed slowly about them. Later, Ansell said,
‘It was incredible how long he took to die.’
MacConnachie grunted, his attention fixed on the breech-block. Ansell continued,
‘You get used to killing from farther away. You forget.’
‘It’s not easy to kill a man without a weapon.’
‘No.’
MacConnachie looked at him.
‘If we hadn’t killed him, we’d still have our hands tied behind our backs.’
‘He might not have been carrying a knife.’
‘You pays your money, and you takes your choice. You can’t raid a village with your hands tied up. You can’t rob a man either. You kill him, or you leave him alone. We killed him, and we’re free.’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘That’s right.’
MacConnachie began to reassemble the weapon. Ansell said,
‘What happens now?’
‘We move to a position from which we can see the village. When we’re ready, we go in.’
‘How soon?’
‘Not later than midnight.’
‘That’s too early.’
‘We can’t wait. We’ve got to be in, out, and as far as we can by dawn.’
‘Will we be out of the first box of search by then?’
‘No.’
Ansell took a breath, and asked the question he had hesitated to ask until this moment.
‘How far have we got to go?’
MacConnachie operated the working parts of the gun, clipped on the magazine and rose before he replied.
‘About four hundred miles.’
‘That far?’
‘That far.’
From their new position they could see what few lights still burned in the village. A café of some sort remained open, a fierce glare escaping from its farther side, where a lamp would be hanging at the door. Every now and then a figure emerged to cast an elongated shadow down the street. But apart from this, and perhaps a dozen other isolated glimmers at slatted windows, the village lay dark.
The well was situated in a square that opened out from the main street. The surrounding buildings were all of wood—low, rickety-looking huts. The place had a temporary, tacked-together look, as though it might be abandoned tomorrow to leave a dark, rotting stain on the neat fields that hedged it about, palely glowing in the soft light which transfused the entire area.
MacConnachie said,
‘We’ll go in, one up, one down, along the main track. Anywhere near those fields we’ll show like a shilling on a sweep’s arse.’
‘I agree.’
‘First we want water—and something to carry it in. Then food. Anything small that’ll last. Chocolate, sugar, tinned stuff. Finally whatever we can use. Tools, waterproofs, money—and something to carry that in, too. A haversack, if possible. That’s very important.’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll wear the Goon clothes and carry the knife; you take the gun. Cover me as deep as you can. If anything comes up, I’ll deal with it. Don’t interfere unless you have to. And don’t use the gun unless we start a war.’
‘Ri
ght.’
‘Blacken up now, and tear off any hanging bits of cloth.’
While MacConnachie stripped off his trousers and added them to the bundle at his waist, Ansell scraped up a handful of dirt, mixed it into a paste with spittle, and smeared it over his forehead and cheeks. But when, having torn off two or three strips of dangling sleeve, he made to throw them aside, MacConnachie said, ‘No, put them in your pocket. They may come in useful and I don’t want to leave a trail.’ Finally, MacConnachie pulled the full-length native coat over his jacket and blackened his own face. He still had his boots on and Ansell laughed.
‘You look like a navvy dressed up as a nun.’
MacConnachie’s teeth gleamed for a moment. He said,
‘If you want to pee, now’s the moment.’
Then he handed the gun to Ansell and drew the knife, saying,
‘We’ll r/v at the tree, right-hand bottom corner of the square. You see it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s go.’
‘Good luck.’
In twenty minutes they reached the edge of the fields, MacConnachie walking upright, Ansell tracking him at fifty feet distance. A cool breeze had sprung up. MacConnachie looked back a moment, and smiled. In all this time he had caught no single glimpse of Ansell. The boy didn’t know it, but he had a gift for assimilating natural cover as remarkable as any MacConnachie had seen; he was a born stalker. Of course it was MacConnachie who was the born killer so that, for the moment, Ansell’s gift was supportive rather than assertive. But since MacConnachie appreciated it, and knew how to make use of it, its value was assured.
He turned and walked up the track towards the village.
Ansell followed, somehow remaining, despite the relative brightness of the fields, invisible against their separating banks.
Ten minutes more, and MacConnachie had reached the scrub that bordered the village. He dropped from view. Ansell closed the gap to five yards. He could just make out the figure of MacConnachie ahead of him, lying full length and peering between the huts. He checked once more to their flanks and rear and adopted the same position.
They lay at the point where the track entered the village to become its main street. A hundred yards along this street, the square opened out to the left. The café was on the right, another thirty yards farther up, the glare from its pressure lamp still flaring harshly back against the buildings to the edge of the square. This was a danger they could do nothing about, since to attempt to put it out would create a greater hazard than leaving it alight.
Figures in a Landscape Page 2