Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

by Desmond Bagley

  I was right, and I found out how much he was disturbed pretty damned quick.

  He walked up and looked down at me, and gestured with his left hand. ‘Pick him up and take him over there—to the wall.’

  I was grabbed before I could move. Someone put a hammer lock on me from behind and I was dragged from the chair and hustled across the room. As I was slammed against the wall, Slade said, ‘Where’s my gun?’

  Kennikin shrugged. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘You must have taken it from Stewart.’

  ‘Oh, that one.’ Kennikin pulled it from his pocket. ‘Is this it?’

  Slade took the pistol and walked over to me. ‘Hold his right hand against the wall,’ he said, and held up his bandaged hand before my eyes. ‘You did that, Stewart, so you know what’s going to happen now.’

  A hard hand pinned my wrist to the wall and Slade raised his gun. I had just sense enough and time enough to stop making a fist and to spread my fingers so he wouldn’t shoot through them before he pulled the trigger and I took the bullet in the palm of my hand. Curiously enough, after the first stabbing shock it didn’t hurt. All I felt was a dead numbness from shoulder to finger-tip. It would hurt soon enough as the shock wore off, but it didn’t hurt then.

  My head swam and I heard Elin scream, but the cry seemed to come from a long way away. When I opened my eyes I saw Slade looking at me unsmilingly. He said curtly, ‘Take him back to his chair.’ It had been a purely vindictive act of revenge and now it was over and he was back to business as usual.

  I was dumped back into the chair and I raised my head to see Elin leaning against the chimney piece with tears streaming down her face. Then Slade moved between us and I lost sight of her.

  ‘You know too much, Stewart,’ he said. ‘So you must die—you know that.’

  ‘I know you’ll do your best,’ I said dully. I now knew why Slade had cracked in the hotel room because the same thing was happening to me. I found I couldn’t string two consecutive thoughts together to make sense and I had a blinding headache. The penetration of a bullet into flesh has that effect.

  Slade said, ‘Who knows about me—apart from the girl?’

  ‘No one,’ I said. ‘What about the girl?’

  He shrugged. ‘You’ll be buried in the same grave.’ He turned to Kennikin. ‘He might be telling the truth. He’s been on the run and he hasn’t had a chance to let anyone know.’

  ‘He might have written a letter,’ said Kennikin doubtfully.

  ‘That’s a risk I’ll have to take. I don’t think Taggart has any suspicions. He might be annoyed because I’ve dropped out of sight but that will be all. I’ll be a good boy and take the next plane back to London.’ He lifted his wounded hand and grinned tightly at Kennikin. ‘And I’ll blame this on you. I’ve been wounded trying to save this fool.’ He reached out and kicked my leg.

  ‘What about the electronic equipment?’

  ‘What about it?’

  Kennikin took out his cigarette case and selected a cigarette. ‘It seems a pity not to complete the operation as planned. Stewartsen knows where it is, and I can get the information from him.’

  ‘So you could,’ said Slade thoughtfully. He looked down at me. ‘Where is it, Stewart?’

  ‘It’s where you won’t find it.’

  ‘That car wasn’t searched,’ said Kennikin. ‘When you were found in the boot everything else was forgotten.’ He snapped out orders and his two men left the room. ‘If it’s in the car they’ll find it.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s in the car,’ said Slade.

  ‘I didn’t think you were in the car,’ said Kennikin waspishly. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find it there.’

  ‘You may be right,’ said Slade. His voice indicated that he didn’t think so. He bent over me. ‘You’re going to die, Stewart—you may depend upon it. But there are many ways of dying. Tell us where the package is and you’ll die cleanly and quickly. If not, I’ll let Kennikin work on you.’

  I kept my mouth firmly shut because I knew that if I opened it he would see the tremulous lower lip that is a sign of fear.

  He stood aside. ‘Very well. You can have him, Kennikin.’ A vindictive note entered his voice. ‘The best way to do it is to shoot him to pieces slowly. He threatened to do it to me.’

  Kennikin stepped in front of me, gun in hand. ‘Well, Alan; we come to the end of the road, you and I. Where is the radar equipment?’

  Even then when facing his gun I noted that new piece of information. Radar equipment. I screwed up my face and managed a smile. ‘Got another cigarette. Vaslav?’

  No answering smile crossed his face. His eyes were bleak and his mouth was set in grim lines. He had the face of an executioner. ‘There is no time for tradition—we are done with that foolery.’

  I looked past him. Elin was still standing there, forgotten, and there was an expression of desperation on her face. But her hand was inside her anorak and coming out slowly, grasping something. The jolting realization came that she still had the gun!

  That was enough to bring me to my senses fast. When all hope is gone and there is nothing more to look forward to than death one sinks into a morass of fatalism as I had done. But given the faintest hint that all is not lost and then a man can act—and my action now was to talk and talk fast.

  I turned my head and spoke to Slade. I had to attract his attention to me so he would not even think of looking at Elin. ‘Can’t you stop him?’ I pleaded.

  ‘You can stop him. All you have to do is to tell him what we want to know.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘I’ll still die, anyway.’

  ‘But easier,’ said Slade. ‘Quickly and without pain.’

  I looked back to Kennikin and, over his shoulder, saw that Elin had now withdrawn the pistol and it was in plain sight. She was fiddling with it and I hoped to God she remembered the sequence of actions she would have to go through before it would fire.

  ‘Vaslav,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t do this to an old mate. Not you.’

  His pistol centred on my belly and then dropped lower. ‘You don’t have to guess to know where I’m going to put the first bullet,’ he said. His voice was deadly quiet. ‘I’m just following Slade’s orders—and my own inclination.’

  ‘Tell us,’ urged Slade, leaning forward.

  I heard the snap of metal as Elin pulled back the slide of the pistol. So did Kennikin and he began to turn. Elin held the pistol in both hands and at arm’s length and as Kennikin began his turn she fired and kept on firing.

  I distinctly heard the impact of the first bullet in Kennikin’s back. His hand tightened convulsively around his gun and it exploded in my face, the bullet burying itself in the arm of the chair next to my elbow. By then I was moving. I dived for Slade head first and rammed him in the paunch. My skull was harder than his belly and the breath came out of him in a great whoosh and he folded up and lay gasping on the floor.

  I rolled over, aware that Elin was still shooting and that bullets were still whanging across the room. ‘Stop!’ I yelled.

  I scooped up Slade’s popgun and came up under Elin’s elbow, grabbing her by the wrist. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop!’

  I think she had shot off the whole magazine. The opposite wall was pock-marked and Kennikin lay in front of the chair in which I had been sitting. He lay face upwards gazing sightlessly at the ceiling. Elin had hit him twice more which was hardly surprising, considering she had been shooting at a range of less than six feet. Come to think of it, I was fortunate she hadn’t put a bullet into me. There was a ragged red spot dead centre in Kennikin’s forehead to prove he’d had the vitality to turn around and try to shoot back. Another bullet had caught him in the angle of the jaw and had blown off the bottom half of his face.

  He was very dead.

  I didn’t stop to ruminate about how in the midst of life we are in death. I dragged Elin behind me and headed for the door. The boys outside might be prepared for the odd
shot, especially after Slade’s little demonstration, but the barrage Elin had laid down would be a matter for urgent investigation and that had to be discouraged.

  At the door I let go of Elin’s wrist with my left hand and swapped it for the gun I held in my wounded right hand. With a hole through the palm I couldn’t possibly use a gun in that hand, even one with as little recoil as Slade’s gimmicked weapon. I’m a lousy pistol shot at the best of times and even worse when shooting left-handed; but one of the nice things about gun battles is that the man you’re shooting at doesn’t ask you for a proficiency certificate before he decides to duck.

  I glanced at Elin. She was obviously in a state of shock. No one can shoot a man to death without undergoing an emotional upheaval—especially for the first time, especially when a civilian, especially when a woman. I put a snap in my voice. ‘You’ll do exactly as I say without question. You’ll follow me and you’ll run like hell without any hesitation.’

  She choked back a rasping sob and nodded breathlessly, so I went out of the front door, and I went out shooting. Even as we went someone took a crack at us from the inside of the house and a bullet clipped the architrave by my ear. But I had no time to worry about that because the pair who had been sent to search the Chevrolet were heading right at me.

  I shot at them and kept on squeezing the trigger and they vanished from view, diving right and left, and we belted between them. There was a tinkle of glass as somebody decided it was quicker to smash a window than to open it, and then the bullets came after us. I dropped Slade’s gun and again grasped Elin by the wrist and forced her to follow me in a zigzag. Behind I could hear the heavy thud of boots as someone chased us.

  Then Elin was hit. The bullet pushed her forward into a stumble but, as her knees gave in, I managed to put my arm around her to hold her up. We were then ten yards from the edge of the lava flow where I had hidden the rifle, and how we managed to travel that short distance I still don’t know. Elin could still use her legs and that helped, and we scrambled up towards the top of the flow, over the mossy humps, until I stooped and laid my hands on the butt of Fleet’s rifle.

  I was jacking a round into the breech even before I got it clear of the moss. Elin fell to the ground as I swung around holding the rifle in my left hand. Even with a hole in the palm of my right hand I could still pull the trigger, and I did so to some effect.

  The magazine contained the mixed load I had carefully put into it—steel-jacketed and soft-nosed bullets. The first one that came out was jacketed; it hit the leading pursuer in the chest and went through him as though he wasn’t there. He came on for four more paces before his heart realized it had a hole in it and it was time to quit beating, then he dropped on the spot, nearly at my feet, with a surprised look on his face.

  By that time I had shot the man just behind him, and that was spectacular. A man hit by a big, soft-nosed bullet driven by a magnum charge at a range of twenty yards isn’t as much killed as disintegrated, and this character came apart at the seams. The bullet hit him in the sternum and then started to expand, lifted him clear off the ground and throwing him back four feet before lifting his spine out and splattering it over the landscape.

  Everything was suddenly quiet. The deep-throated bellow of Fleet’s gun had told everyone concerned that something new had been added to the game and they held their fire while they figured what was going on. I saw Slade by the door of the house, his hand clutched to his belly. I lifted the rifle again and took a shot at him, too quickly and with shaking hands. I missed him but gave him a hell of a fright because he ducked back in haste and there was no one to be seen.

  Then a bullet nearly parted my hair and from the sound of the report I knew someone in the house also had a rifle. I got down off the skyline and reached for Elin. She was lying on the moss, her face screwed up with pain and trying to control her laboured breathing. Her hand was at her side and, when she withdrew it, it was red with blood.

  I said. ‘Does it hurt much?’

  ‘When I breathe,’ she said with a gasp. ‘Only then.’

  That was a bad sign, yet from the apparent position of the wound she had not been hit in the lung. There wasn’t anything I could do there and then. For the next few minutes I’d be busy making sure we stayed alive for the next few minutes. There’s not much point in worrying about dying of septicaemia in the next week when you might have your head blown off in the next thirty seconds.

  I scrabbled for the box of ammunition, took the magazine from the rifle and reloaded it. The numbness had left my hand and it was now beginning to really hurt. Even the experimental flexing of my trigger finger sent a shock up my arm as though I’d grabbed a live wire, and I didn’t know if I could do much more shooting. But it’s surprising what you can do when you’re pushed to it.

  I poked my head carefully around a slab of lava and took a look at the house. Nobody and nothing moved. Just to my front lay the bodies of the men I had shot, one lying as though peacefully asleep and the other dreadfully shattered. In front of the house were the two cars; Kennikin’s car appearing to be quite normal, but Nordlinger’s Chevrolet was a bit of a wreck—they had ripped the seats out in the search for the package and the two nearer doors gaped open. I’d be running up quite a bill for damage to people’s cars.

  Those cars were less than a hundred yards away and, dearly as I wanted one of them, I knew it was hopeless to try. I also knew we couldn’t leave on foot. Apart from the fact that walking on the lava beds is a sport which even the Icelanders aren’t keen on, there was Elin to consider. I couldn’t leave her, and if we made a break for it we’d be picked up within fifteen minutes.

  Which left only one thing—since neither the Mounties nor the US Cavalry were going to show up on the horizon in the time-honoured manner, I had to fight a pitched battle against an unknown number of men securely ensconced in that house—and win.

  I studied the house. Kennikin hadn’t thought much of it as a prison. ‘Built like an eggshell,’ he had said. A couple of planks thick, a half-inch of plaster and a few inches of foamed polystyrene. Most people would regard a house as bullet-proof, but I laugh every time I see a Western film when the hero takes refuge in a clapboard hut and the baddies carefully shoot at the windows.

  Even a 9 mm bullet from a Luger will penetrate nine inches of pine board from very close range, and that’s a peewee bullet compared to the .44 fired by the Western Colt. A few well placed shots would whittle away the shack from around our hero.

  I looked at the house and wondered how those flimsy walls would stand up against the awesome power of Fleet’s rifle. The soft-nosed bullets mightn’t do much—they would tend to splash on impact; but the jacketed bullets should have a hell of a lot of penetrative power. It was time to find out, but first I had to locate that rifleman.

  I withdrew my head and looked at Elin. She seemed better now that she had her breathing under control. ‘How are you feeling now?’

  ‘My God!’ she said. ‘How do you think I feel?’

  I grinned at her with some relief. That spurt of temper showed she had improved. ‘Everything will get better from now on.’

  ‘They can hardly get worse.’

  ‘Thanks for what you did in there,’ I said. ‘It was very brave.’ Considering the attitude she had previously shown towards killing it was much more than that.

  She shivered. ‘It was horrible!’ she said in a low voice. ‘I shall see it as long as I live.’

  ‘You won’t,’ I said with certainty. ‘The mind has a knack of forgetting things like that. That’s why wars are so long and frequent. But just so you don’t have to do it again, you can do something for me.’

  ‘If I can.’

  I pointed to a lump of lava above her head. ‘Can you push that over the edge when I tell you to? But don’t expose yourself or you’ll get a bullet.’

  She looked up at the lava fragment. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Don’t do it until I say.’ I pushed the rifle ahead of me and
looked at the house. Still nothing moved and I wondered what Slade was up to. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Shove it over.’

  There was a clatter as the rock moved and rolled down the slope of the lava flow. A rifle spoke and a bullet sang overhead and then another, better aimed, struck rock splinters a little to the left. Whoever was shooting knew his work, but I had him spotted. He was in an upstairs room and, by the shadowy movement I had seen, he was kneeling at the window with his head barely showing.

  I took aim, not at the window but at the wall below it and a little to the left. I squeezed the trigger and, through the scope, saw the wood of the wall planking splinter under the impact. There was a faint cry and a shift of light at the window, and then I saw the man in full sight standing with his hands to his chest. He staggered backwards and vanished.

  I had been right—Fleet’s rifle would shoot through walls.

  I shifted sights to the downstairs rooms and methodically put a bullet into the wall alongside every window on the ground floor, just where it would be natural for a man to wait in cover. Every time I squeezed the trigger the torn sinews in my hand shrieked in protest and I relieved my feelings by bellowing at the top of my voice.

  I felt Elin tug at my trouser leg. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said worriedly.

  ‘Don’t hinder the man on the job,’ I said, and dropped back. I took out the empty magazine. ‘Fill that up—it’s difficult for me.’ These periods with an empty gun worried me and I wished Fleet had had a spare clip. To be jumped on by somebody now would be slightly disastrous.

  I saw that Elin was coping with reloading the clip with the right bullets and took a look at the house again. Someone was wailing over there and there were confused shouts. I had no doubt that the house was now filled with a considerable amount of consternation; the idea that a bullet can rip through a wall and hit the man behind it is highly unsettling for the man behind the wall.