Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

by Desmond Bagley

  ‘Here,’ said Elin, and passed me the full clip of five rounds. I slotted it into the gun and poked it forward again just in time to see a man break from the front door and take cover behind the Chevrolet. I could see his feet through the telescopic sight. The door nearer to me was swung wide open and, with a mental apology to Lee Nordlinger, I put a bullet through the car and through the metal of the opposite door. The feet moved and the man came into view and I saw it was Ilyich. His hand was at his neck and blood spurted from between his fingers. He tottered a few more steps then dropped, rolled over and lay still.

  It was becoming very difficult for me to work the bolt action with my ruined hand. I said to Elin, ‘Can you crawl over here beside me?’ She came up on my right side, and I said, ‘Lift up that lever, pull it back, and ram it forward again. But keep your head down while you’re doing it.’

  She operated the bolt while I held the rifle firm with my left hand, and she cried out as the empty brass case jumped out into her face unexpectedly. In this dot-and-carry-one manner I put another three rounds into selected points of the house where I thought they would do most damage. When Elin put the last round into the breech I took out the magazine and told her to fill it again.

  I felt happier with that one round in the breech as an insurance against emergency, and I settled down to observe the house and to compile an interim report. I had killed three men for certain, wounded another—the rifleman upstairs—and possibly yet another, judging from the moaning still coming from the house. That was five—six if Kennikin was included. I doubted if there were many more, but that didn’t mean that more weren’t on their way—someone could have used a telephone.

  I wondered if it was Slade who was doing the wailing. I knew his voice but it was difficult to tell from that inarticulate and unstructured sound. I glanced down at Elin. ‘Hurry up!’ I said.

  She was fiddling desperately. ‘One of them is stuck.’

  ‘Do your best.’ Again I peered around the rock in front of me and my eye was caught by a movement beyond the house. Someone was doing what they all ought to have done at the start of this action—getting away from the back of the house. It was only because of the sheer unexpectedness of the gun power I wielded that they hadn’t done it before—and it was dangerous because I could be outflanked.

  I racked up the telescopic sight to a greater magnification and looked at the distant figure. It was Slade and he was apparently unhurt except for his bandaged hand. He was leaping like a bloody chamois from hummock to hummock at a breakneck speed, his coat tails flying in the breeze and his arms outstretched to preserve his balance. By the convenient range-finder system built into the sight I estimated that he was a little under three hundred yards away and moving farther every second.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly to steady myself and then took aim carefully. I was in considerable pain and had difficulty in controlling the wavering sight. Three times I almost squeezed off the shot and three times I relaxed the pressure on the trigger because the sight had drifted off target.

  My father bought me my first rifle when I was twelve and, wisely, he chose a .22 single-shot. When a boy hunts rabbits and hares and knows that he has only one shot at his disposal then he also knows that the first and only shot must count, and no finer training in good shooting habits is possible. Now, again, I had only one shot available and I was back to my boyhood again, but it was no rabbit I was shooting—more like a tiger.

  It was difficult to concentrate and I felt dizzy and a wash of greyness passed momentarily in front of my eyes. I blinked and it cleared away and Slade stood out preternaturally clearly in the glass. He had begun to move away at an angle and I led him in the sight and let him run into the aiming point. There was a roaring of blood in my ears and the dizziness came again.

  My finger painfully took up the final pressure and the butt of the rifle jolted my shoulder and Slade’s nemesis streaked towards him at 2,000 miles an hour. The distant figure jerked like a marionette with suddenly cut strings, toppled over, and disappeared from sight.

  I rolled over as the roaring in my ears increased. The dizziness built up again and the recurring waves of greyness turned to black. I saw the sun glowing redly through the darkness and then I passed out, the last thing I heard being Elin’s voice crying my name.

  III

  ‘It was a deception operation,’ said Taggart.

  I was lying in a hospital bed in Keflavik and there was a guard on the door, not so much to keep me imprisoned as to shield me from prying eyes. I was a potential cause cĂlābre, a casus belli and all those other foreign phrases which the leader writers of The Times trot out so readily in moments of crisis, and all attempts were being made to keep the situation potential and to prevent it from becoming actual. All parties concerned wanted the whole thing hushed up, and if the Icelandic government knew what had been going on they were damned careful not to say so.

  Taggart was with another man, an American, whom he introduced as Arthur Ryan. I recognized Ryan; the last time I had seen him was through the sights of Fleet’s rifle—he had been standing beside a helicopter on the other side of Búdarháls ridge.

  It was the second time they had come to see me. The first time I was drowsy with dope and not very coherent, but still coherent enough to ask two questions.

  ‘How’s Elin?’

  ‘She’s all right,’ said Taggart soothingly. ‘In better shape than you are, as a matter of fact.’ He told me that the bullet had been a ricochet and had the force taken out of it; it had just penetrated the flesh and lodged between two ribs. ‘She’s as right as rain,’ said Taggart heartily.

  I looked at him with dislike but I was too wobbly to push it then. I said, ‘How did I get here?’

  Taggart glanced at Ryan who took a pipe from his pocket, looked at it uncertainly, and then put it away again. He said in a slow voice, ‘That’s quite a girl you have, Mr Stewart.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, when you passed out she didn’t know what to do. She thought about it a bit, then she loaded the rifle and started to put even more holes into that house.’

  I thought of Elin’s attitude towards killing. ‘Did she hit anyone?’

  ‘I guess not,’ said Ryan. ‘I think you did most of the damage. She shot off all the ammunition—and there was a hell of a lot of it—and then she waited a while to see what would happen. Nothing did, so she stood up and walked into the house. I think that was a very brave thing to do, Mr Stewart.’

  I thought so too.

  Ryan said, ‘She found the telephone and rang the Base, here, and contacted Commander Nordlinger. She was very forceful and got him really stirred up. He got even more stirred up when the phone went dead.’ He grimaced. ‘It’s not surprising she fainted—that place was like a slaughterhouse. Five dead and two badly wounded.’

  ‘Three wounded,’ said Taggart. ‘We found Slade afterwards.’

  Soon after that they went away because I was in no shape for serious conversation, but twenty-four hours later they were back and Taggart was talking about deception.

  ‘When can I see Elin?’ I said abruptly.

  This afternoon,’ said Taggart. ‘She’s quite all right, you know.’

  I looked at him stonily. ‘She’d better be.’

  He gave an embarrassed cough. ‘Don’t you want to know what it was all about?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would. I’d certainly like to know why the Department did its damnedest to get me killed.’ I switched my eyes to Ryan. ‘Even to the extent of getting the cooperation of the CIA.’

  ‘As I say, it was a deception operation, a scheme cooked up by a couple of American scientists.’ Taggart rubbed his chin. ‘Have you ever considered The Times crossword puzzle?’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ I said. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  Taggart smiled. ‘Let us assume it takes some maniacal genius eight hours to compile it; then it has to be set up in type, a block made, and printed in the pa
per. This involves quite a few people for a short time. Let us say that a total of forty man-hours is used up in this way—one working man-week.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So consider the consumer end of the operation. Let’s assume that ten thousand readers of The Times apply their brain power to working out the damned thing—and that each one takes an hour. That’s ten thousand hours—five man-years. You see the implication? One man-week of labour has tied up five man-years of brain power in totally unproductive activity.’ He looked at Ryan. ‘I think you can take it from there.’

  Ryan had a low, even voice. ‘There are a lot of discoveries made in the physical sciences which have no immediate application, or any conceivable application, for that matter. One example is silly putty. Have you ever seen the stuff?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ I said, wondering what they were getting at. ‘I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘It’s funny stuff,’ said Ryan. ‘You can mould it like putty, but if you leave it alone it flows like water. Furthermore, if you hit it with a hammer it shatters like glass. You’d think that a substance with such diverse properties would be useful, but so far no one has thought of a single goddamn thing to do with it.’

  ‘I believe they’re now putting it into the middle of golf balls,’ offered Taggart.

  ‘Yeah, a real technological breakthrough,’ said Ryan ironically. ‘In electronics there are quite a few effects like that. The electret, for example, carries a permanent electric charge like a magnet carries a magnetic field. That idea has been around for forty years and only now has a use been found for it. When the scientists began to kick the quantum theory around they came up with any number of odd effects—the tunnel diode, the Josephson effects, and a lot more—some of them usable and some not. A fair number of these discoveries have been made in laboratories working on defence contracts and they’re not generally known.’

  He shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Thankfully he took out his pipe and began to fill it. ‘One scientist, a guy called Davies, surveyed the field and came up with an idea. As a scientist he’s not very bright—certainly not of the first rank—but his idea was bright enough even if he merely intended it as a practical joke. He figured it was possible to put together an electronic package, utilizing a number of these mysterious but unusable effects, which would baffle a really big brain. In fact, he did put together such a package, and it took five top research men at Caltech six weeks to discover they’d been fooled.’

  I began to get the drift. ‘The deception operation.’

  Ryan nodded. ‘One of the men who was fooled was a Dr Atholl, and he saw possibilities in it. He wrote a letter to someone important and in due course the letter was passed on to us. One of the sentences in that letter is outstanding—Dr Atholl said this was a concrete example of the aphorism: “Any fool can ask a question which the wisest of men cannot answer.” Davies’s original package was relatively unsophisticated, but what we finally came up with was really complex—and it was designed to do precisely nothing.’

  I thought of how Lee Nordlinger had been baffled and began to smile. ‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Taggart.

  ‘Nothing much. Carry on.’

  Taggart said, ‘You see the principle, Stewart; it’s just like The Times crossword. The design of the package didn’t take much brain power—three scientists worked on it for a year. But if we could get it into the hands of the Russians it could tie up some of their finest minds for a hell of a long time. And the joke is that the problem was fundamentally unsolvable—there was no answer.’

  ‘But we had a problem,’ said Ryan. ‘How to get it into the hands of the Russians. We started by feeding them a line by a series of carefully controlled leaks. The word was that American scientists had invented a new form of radar with fascinating properties. It had over the horizon capability, it showed a detailed picture and not just a green blob on a screen, and it wasn’t affected by ground-level clutter and so could detect a low-level air attack. Any nation would sell its Premier’s daughter into white slavery for a gadget like that, and the Russians began to bite.’

  He pointed out of the window. ‘You see that funny antenna out there—that’s supposed to be it. The radar is supposed to be having a field test here at Keflavik, and we’ve had jet fighters skimming the waves for five hundred miles around here for the last six weeks just to add to the plausibility. And that’s when we brought you British in.’

  Taggart said, ‘We sold another story to the Russians. Our American friends were keeping this radar to themselves and we were annoyed about it, so annoyed that we decided to have a look at it ourselves. In fact, one of our agents was sent to pinch a bit of it—an important bit.’ He flicked a finger at me. ‘You, of course.’

  I swallowed. ‘You mean I was intended to let the Russians have it!’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Taggart blandly. ‘And you were handpicked. Slade pointed out—and I agreed—that you were probably not a good agent any more, but you had the advantage, for our purposes, of being known to the Russians as a good agent. Everything was set up and then you fooled everybody—us and the Russians. In fact, you were a devil of a lot better than anyone supposed.’

  I felt the outrage beginning to build up, and said deliberately, ‘You lousy, amoral son of a bitch! Why didn’t you let me in on it? It would have saved a hell of a lot of trouble.’

  He shook his head. ‘It had to look authentic.’

  ‘By God!’ I said. ‘You sold me—just as Bakayev sold Kennikin in Sweden.’ I grinned tightly. ‘It must have complicated things when Slade turned out to be a Russian agent.’

  Taggart glanced sideways at Ryan and appeared to be embarrassed. ‘Our American friends are a bit acid about that. It wrecked the operation.’ He sighed, and said plaintively, ‘Counter-espionage work is the very devil. If we don’t catch any spies then everybody is happy; but when we do our job and catch a spy then there’s a scream to high heaven that we haven’t been doing our job.’

  ‘You break my heart,’ I said. ‘You didn’t catch Slade.’

  He changed the subject quickly. ‘Well, there Slade was—in charge of the operation.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ryan. ‘In charge on both sides. What a sweet position to be in. He must have thought he couldn’t lose.’ He leaned forward. ‘You see, once the Russians knew about the operation they decided they had no objection to grabbing the package if they thought it would fool us into believing they’d been fooled. A sort of double blind thing.’

  I looked at Taggart with distaste. ‘What a bastard you are,’ I said. ‘You must have known that Kennikin would do his best to kill me.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ he said earnestly. ‘I didn’t know about Kennikin. I think Bakayev must have realized they were wasting a good man so they decided to rehabilitate him by sending him on this operation. Perhaps Slade had something to do with it too.’

  ‘He would!’ I said bitterly. ‘And because I was supposed to be a pushover they gave Kennikin a scratch team. He was complaining about that.’ I looked up. ‘And what about Jack Case?’ I demanded.

  Taggart didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘He had my orders to steer you to the Russians—that’s why he didn’t help you at Geysir. But when he talked to Slade you had already filled him up with your suspicions. He must have tried to pump Slade, but Slade is a clever man and realized it. That was the end of Case. Slade was doing everything to make sure his cover wasn’t blown and in the end you were more important to him than that damned package.’

  ‘Write off Jack Case,’ I said sourly. ‘He was a good man. When did you catch on to Slade?’

  ‘I was slow there,’ said Taggart. ‘When you telephoned me I thought you’d done your nut, but after I sent Case here I found I couldn’t get hold of Slade. He’d made himself unobtainable. That’s against all procedure so I began to look into his record. When I found he’d been in Finland as a boy and that his parents were killed durin
g the war I remembered that you’d mentioned Lonsdale and I wondered if the same trick hadn’t been played.’ He grimaced. ‘But when Case’s body was discovered with your pet knife in it, I didn’t know what the hell to think.’ He nudged Ryan. ‘The knife.’

  ‘What! Oh, yes—the knife.’ Ryan put his hand into his breast pocket and produced the sgian dubh. ‘We managed to get it from the police. I guess you’d like to have it back.’ He held it out. ‘It’s a real cute knife; I like that jewel in the hilt.’

  I took it. A Polynesian would have said it had mana; my own distant ancestors would have named it and called it Weazand Slitter or Blood Drinker, but to me it was just my grandfather’s knife and his grandfather’s before him. I laid it gently on the bedside table.

  I said to Ryan, ‘Your people shot at me. What was the idea of that?’

  ‘Hell!’ he said. ‘You’d gone crazy and the whole operation was in danger. We were floating about in a chopper above that goddamn wilderness and we saw you, and we saw the Russians chasing you, and we reckoned you had a good chance of getting clear away. So we dropped a guy to stop you in your tracks. And we couldn’t be too obvious about it because it had to look good to the Russians. We didn’t know then that the whole operation was a bust, anyway.’

  Neither Taggart nor Ryan had a grain of morality, but I didn’t expect it. I said, ‘You’re lucky to be alive. The last time I saw you was through the sights of Fleet’s rifle.’

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘I’m glad I didn’t know it at the time. Talking about Fleet; you busted him up but good—but he’ll survive.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘Fleet is sort of married to that rifle of his. He’d like to have it back.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve got to get something out of this deal. If Fleet is man enough let him come and get it.’