‘What’s happening?’
The policeman’s face was greasy with sweat. He did not know, he said. He had been told on the radio to reinforce police who were cooperating with the army on the other side of the hill.
‘Go ahead.’
The policeman saluted and trudged away towards his companion who was waiting breast high in the bracken, a blue midget in the vast slope of green. They continued in the direction of the hill. Parallel to them, Holmes and Tirov ploughed a difficult course over sand, grass and heather, struggling through the drifts of bracken if they could not find a way round. Neither spoke. There was nothing to say.
A quarter of an hour later when they were halfway up the hill there was a grinding angry noise ahead of them and a helicopter came up over the screen of trees and began to hover about a hundred feet above the tops of the pines. Then another joined it and remained for a moment as though it was in consultation with the first machine and then swung away, but they could still hear it somewhere out of sight on the reverse slope. The first machine stayed where it was. The sun glinted like a sword on its blades. It hung so steadily in the air that it appeared as though it had been pinned against the sky and could not move from the magnet of the treetops which held a balance of forces underneath its body. It swayed, very gently, to and fro.
Under the pines, on the crest, was Inspector Post.
Holmes hardly recognized him. Post was a changed man. He had lost his jacket and was in shirt sleeves. His forearms were torn and scratched — bramble and thorn marks covered them — his face had been burned a deep brick red and was running in sweat and grimed with sandy brown dust. His trousers were filthy with mud and sopping wet from the knees down as though he had been wading.
‘For God’s sake, keep down,’ shouted Post, as Holmes and Tirov came over the crest. The urgency of his voice and gestures rather than the words caused them to scramble in an undignified manner on hands and knees to his side, where he was taking cover under a screen of bell heather. Above the heather fluttered a red admiral butterfly. Beyond this was the distant valley, the calm blue lake with its green shores, the hills on the far side.
‘He’s up there,’ said Inspector Post. ‘He’s had two of us already. The army are sending men up the other side to cut him off. The tall pine with the yellow patch halfway up. There’s a rock to the right. He’s there.’
Seven hundred yards away there was a pine with a yellow patch and a rock and a tumble of grass and heather and something that fluttered up and down over the heather. Red admiral butterflies. But nothing else moved, either on the hill crest, on the sloping heather and bracken-covered sides of the hill, or in the valley. The blue surface of the reservoir was like a mirror, reflecting the bright mirror of the sky. Crouching in the dust, under the hot sun, Holmes heard the story of what had happened to Post and his men during the past twelve hectic hours.
The army had been unhelpful. There had been complete chaos among the men of the Third Infantry Division. Some had been at Lyneham. Some were on their way. Others had still been in the barracks. The orders they had received to have medical checks and to change the contents of their water-bottles and containers sounded to the commanding officer as though someone at headquarters had gone out of his mind. Inspector Post and two flying squad cars, arriving after the checks had been accomplished, came in for the full blast of the army’s indignation. Fortunately by then the men of the Reserve had all left for Lyneham. But the remaining depot staff had been furious, physically exhausted by all the extra work, and almost deliberately obstructive.
It had taken several urgent phone calls to the Ministry of Defence to obtain permission for Post to carry out his orders to search the lake.
At first Post himself had been depressed and irritable, without any belief whatsoever in his mission. He had deployed his men along the lakeside with torches, under the scornful and contemptuous eyes of an adjutant and two staff officers, and had set his little line of men wavering off into the darkness without any hope of finding anything. Progress had been slow. By midnight they had hardly covered more than a few hundred yards. They had been torn by brambles and wire, had fallen into ditches and got bogged and bitten by gnats.
Post had seen the blaze of Uplands over the hills and had wondered what it was. It was about that time they discovered their first body. They did not know who it was and they lugged it back through the darkness to the barracks and got out the officer of the guard and found a makeshift mortuary. By then the army were beginning to take things seriously. A dead body was an argument they understood. In addition to this they had also had several messages from the Chief of Defence Staff about cooperation with the police. When Post went back to his search, about a hundred sleepy but excited troopers went with him. In all, by daybreak, they had found five more bodies. Three of them were Africans. The other two men were Tirov’s. Post did not know who they were at the time as they carried nothing to identify them.
‘It looked to me,’ said Post, speaking urgently, in a whisper, ‘as though there had been a battle.’
He had been able to piece together the sequence of events with an admirable precision. It had started with the arrival of the fish tank lorry the previous afternoon. Only one man, the driver, an African, had been visible on the lorry, so that presumably the other Africans had been waiting in the woods. Post, with the aid of advice later from Pendlebury, had reckoned that they were allowing six hours for the permeation of the reservoir and the first drawing off of the contaminated water through the main feed past the pumping station. In a larger reservoir supplying a city the time would have been anything between eighteen to forty-eight hours. Brooklakes was easier to calculate as there was only one feed pipe and one main source of distribution. Six hours would have coincided with the last few hours at the barracks of the men of the Third Infantry Division before they left for the airfield. The timing had been right. They would draw fresh water before leaving. On that basis, the water supplies carried by the fourteen hundred paratroopers en route for East Africa would have contained the LSD in solution drawn directly from the contaminated reservoir.
On the lorry were five forty-gallon tanks, each containing fifty trout. The LSD capsules were intended to be attached by small clips to the dorsal fin of each fish. As the fish were released and moved off into the lake the LSD capsules would begin to dissolve.
The fish were never released. The five forty-gallon tanks filled with trout were still on the lorry up in the woods. The LSD capsules had never been attached to their fins. They were still in sealed cardboard boxes in the driving cab of the lorry. The driver of the lorry was dead and the window of the cab shattered and the cardboard boxes lay stuck hard in a pool of congealed blood.
Inspector Post told the tale in whispers urgently, breathlessly, as he stared without any slacking of attention through the heather at the pine on the hillside seven hundred yards away. ‘As I worked it out," he said, ‘there was one African drove the lorry in through the gates. He drove it up by the lake. There he was joined by two other Africans. They were about to get the tanks off the lorry, when they were ambushed.’
An outburst of firing came from the reverse slopes of the hill. Inspector Post bedded his rifle further down on the heather in front of him and waited. The helicopter swung slightly in the air. It was over the trees behind them but the men in it could see what was going on seven hundred yards away by the pine tree. If there was any movement they would report it on the radio receiver which lay by Inspector Post’s elbow. Meanwhile the helicopter was staying out of range. The man under the tree could take pot shots at it if he wanted but he would be wasting ammunition without much purpose. That was, if he was still there and if he wanted to shoot at the helicopter.
After a while Inspector Post relaxed and went on talking. ‘That’s the fellow that’s done the damage. He’s pretty smart. Got two of my men. One’ll live and one maybe won’t. Five hundred yards and a running target and he got both. The fellow can shoot. That’s why we ain
’t taking any chances.’
The radio by the inspector’s elbow sputtered and a harsh voice spoke, oddly distorted and somehow inhuman in the sunlight: ‘Two platoons coming up the other side of the hill.’
‘Here it is, then,’ said Inspector Post and gripped his rifle. ‘You and the gentleman had better keep down, Mr Holmes. No good exposing yourself. That fellow up there is desperate. He’ll shoot to kill. There’s no nonsense about getting him to surrender. I lost two men trying that and I ain’t trying it again.’
Firing came from the hill. Holmes recognized the rattle of an automatic between the crack of rifles. The firing was curiously remote and muffled. The beauty of the hillside seemed undisturbed, the firing unreal.
‘They’ll pin him down,’ said Post. ‘It’ll give us the chance of a shot. Nobody’s going to start frontal rushes with this fellow.’
Tirov lay watching the hill. He was beginning to sweat hard under the sun. His fingers were dug deep into the sandy soil. He flicked out a hand at a red admiral butterfly fluttering close to his nose. Tirov was wishing he had a gun. For Holmes, it was an odd experience, lying by the side of the Russian, watching Post with a borrowed army rifle cuddling the butt to his cheek and wriggling himself into a more comfortable position. Hunting was infectious. The mood of the chase made him feel the need of a weapon.
‘There he goes!’
The radio at Post’s side spat out the words into the sunlight, making them jump, but still they could see nothing. Post scrambled to his knees, resting his left elbow on his left knee, rifle steady to his shoulder, muzzle low, waiting.
Post lifted his rifle level, took careful aim, and fired. The explosion was loud, like the violent explosion of a stone into fragments, cracking the eardrums, so that the silence after the explosion took on a different quality, a numbed expectancy, a remoteness.
‘There he is!’
A man was running towards them, bent low, only his head visible above the heather, a black thing bobbing up and down, sometimes coming into view, sometimes hidden. Post fired again, and missed.
‘Gone to your right,’ said the voice from the radio. ‘Get down to the right to cut him off. He’s moving over the crest by those two trees.’
The helicopter swung over them, blades whirring, and swung away towards the crest, lilting and swinging in the clear bright sky, trying to keep the figure on the hillside in sight.
‘There he goes,’ said Post, and fired a third shot. He swore violently as he pulled back the bolt. The cartridge case, ejected, flashed bronze in the sunlight as it fell.
The men on the reverse side of the slope, making a laborious climb to the ridge, were still out of sight. The fugitive could either break into the valley towards the distant lake, come along the ridge towards Inspector Post and his men, or risk the open country to the right through the bracken, over which Holmes and Tirov had come from the road. They hardly needed the helicopter to tell them which way the fugitive would go. He would make for the road. The men in the helicopter and Inspector Post seemed to become aware of the escape route at about the same time.
Inspector Post rose to his feet and ran, diagonally, for the cover of a tree fifty yards to his right. A bullet yelped and screamed as it ricocheted overhead into the valley, the noise falling away into the distance. Looking over to his left, Holmes could see a platoon of soldiers working their way up the valley in extended order like little green insects moving up the hill. Behind them were a scatter of police and two civilian figures who he guessed were Morrison and Lamb, though it was too far away to identify them with any certainty.
Tirov was on his feet and moving towards Post, who was lying at the base of the tree fifty yards off. When he got within ten yards of Post, Tirov knelt down on one knee and remained like that, like a worshipper, the trees making the columns, the light and the bell heather and the red admiral butterflies the colour of stained glass, and Tirov kneeling.
Five hundred yards ahead of them a man broke out of the bracken and ran, at an incredible speed, bending double, down the slope of the hill towards the next patch. It was well done. He had about a hundred yards of open scree and heath to cover running at an angle to Inspector Post and his men. Post was standing up, firing with one man firing by his side, another man running towards the fugitive to head him off. Holmes glimpsed the helicopter sliding over to keep the running man in view. The noise of the firing and of the helicopter rose to a new racking violence of sound. Tirov remained on his knees. He could see everything kneeling, see the bullets striking sparks from the stones on the far side of the slope.
Half-way to the bracken the running man stumbled and fell and someone shouted in triumph, a snarling high-pitched sound, but the man tumbled and rolled and turned over and was on his feet again, dodging and weaving in his tracks, apparently unhurt and unscathed. Whether he had done it deliberately or not they could not tell, but he had disorganized their aim and gained a precious twenty yards. He was very near the bracken now and the bracken at that point was high.
Post stopped firing and began to run and instinctively Holmes followed and caught him up, jogging along by his side. Post was putting a new clip into the rifle as he ran. He was cursing and swearing with the excitement, waving his arms, shouting orders. The two other police, carrying their rifles, fanned out into wider and wider positions, forming a rough half circle, converging on the bracken at different points. Tirov had linked up with the man on Post’s left. Holmes kept by Post, a few yards away, as though the gap between them was a safety precaution which would not draw a shot at them both. It was something he did instinctively, without thought or plan. Two men bunched together would make a better target than if they kept a yard or so apart.
The ground was treacherous, full of loose stones, awkwardly shaped boulders, light drifts of scree and gravel which moved and slipped when trodden on. There were rabbit holes, hummocks, and tussocks of grass growing on old burrows. Post, running hard, not looking at the ground, slipped and fell heavily. He was up again in a moment, took two steps and collapsed on his side. When Holmes reached him he was sitting, white-faced, clutching his ankle and cursing. Holmes bent over him. Almost supplicatingly, Post held out the rifle. Holmes took it without thinking.
The feel of the heavy rifle in his hands made some subtle difference to his emotions. He was being offered the means of preservation, with the rifle in his hands, his fingers curling about the stock, feeling the warm wood and the warm efficiency of the metal. Holmes patted Post on the shoulder, said something — though he was not certain what it was — and ran on towards the bracken. By the time he was able to resolve more of his emotions it was too late to turn back, to do anything else but to run in the general direction in which he had last seen the fugitive. In front, so close he could see the curling individual fronds, was the deep screen of bracken, thick and deep, menacing.
Holmes looked round. One policeman was in sight, a bare hundred yards away, but there was no sign of Tirov or the other. The close companionship and comfort which they had shared on the crest of the hill was strangely broken in the valley. He was on his own. Somewhere in front, somewhere in the bracken, was an armed and desperate man. He looked upwards to the helicopter, hoping for guidance. The helicopter was about two hundred yards to his left. Holmes could see the men in the helicopter gesticulating and pointing. The fugitive was somewhere ahead.
Holmes plunged into the bracken. The topmost fronds were as high as his face. A cloud of small black flies flew up around him as he disturbed the bracken and buzzed and dashed themselves against him, buzzing into his eyes and ears. The bracken made it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. He was moving blind into a green jungle and somewhere ahead, perhaps silent now and preparing an ambush for him, was the fugitive. In the bracken, under the protective screen of the blinding flies, the man seemed less of a fugitive than on the crest of the hill. He stopped and listened. He had a sense of danger. The noise from the helicopter cut out all other sounds except the buzzing of
the flies.
He went on. The bracken stems caught and tripped him. Paths opened up and closed through the fronds. More flies clustered round his head until he was half blinded by them. The sweat poured down his face. He was struggling to keep his feet, to keep a sense of direction, to follow the line towards the helicopter which seemed to be leading him into impenetrable tangles, and the farther he went the more flies were disturbed and the thicker grew the maddening swarms about his head. He was trapped now by his own impetuous, rush. What he should have done — he realized too late — was to have skirted round the thickest parts until he found one of the broad sheep tracks and followed that. Even if it had not lead entirely in the direction which he wanted, a broad track would have given him room to manoeuvre, to move freely. Where he was now he was hardly moving at all. He struggled on, beating his way forward with the butt of the rifle, smashing and struggling, blinded by sweat and flies and a thick choking seed-dust which seemed to rise from the harsh stems of the bracken itself. He had a growing fear that under certain circumstances he was simply inviting an ambush. He was a sitting target. His one hope was the helicopter. There it was, two or three hundred feet up, swaying from side to side, about a hundred or so yards ahead. He thought he heard the sound of a rifle. Perhaps the fugitive had fired at the helicopter to keep it from coming too close. Perhaps one of the policemen had spotted the figure in the bracken and tried a quick shot. It was impossible to say.
The world was a tangle of green clutching stems, rigid obstructions about his feet, tripping and grabbing at him, sweat and flies blinding him, the sound of his anguished breathing drowning even the harsh roaring of the helicopter. There was a roaring in his ears. He fell once, twice, three times. He struggled, leapt, kicked his way forward. There was nothing to do but struggle and sweat and kick and he fell again and again, losing sense of direction and purpose, rising only to follow the whirring in the sky. The helicopter seemed closer. A man was leaning out of the window waving. Holmes dashed the sweat from his eyes and beat at the flies. The man was signalling a message, but the movements of his arms were only confusing. The helicopter rose abruptly as though to get out of the way.
The Shepherd File Page 17