by Adam Hall
He would try, in any case, to reach higher ground. That would take him towards the east, towards the ridge on the mountain; I must watch for him there.
Sound of a hammer blow and stone shards flew and I dropped flat. Close. That was close. He was higher than I’d thought, and could see more than I’d thought. I stayed motionless, not knowing whether he was so high that he could still see me, whether he was now swinging the long barrel down and moving the cross-hairs to centre on the back of my head, moving his finger inside the trigger-guard and starting to apply pressure to the spring. Time had slowed down, because I was at the frontier of existence and extinction, a place where, for all of us, man-made time loses its rhythm and real time does the reckoning; if the finger of the other creature out there moved by a further eighth of an inch, the intricate computer inside my skull would become a mess of nerve tissue of interest only to a carrion crow.
The sweet scent of pinewood on the air, and the sound of a bird calling from the lower ground where there was scrub for its habitat.
Perhaps he wasn’t absolutely sure that this shape was the right one among the kaleidoscope of rock and shadow; he was waiting for me to move before he contracted his finger.
I suppose he was one of the perimeter guards, patrolling the monastery’s environment. Or he could have come down from there, from the ridge, to hunt me.
I think I saw a light from the direction of the monastery; then either it went out or the mist hid it again. You know what I’m saying. They might have seen us.
He wasn’t simply a hunter out for game; he’d seen enough of me to know I was human, a biped.
Hammer blow and rock splinters fluting through the air and I moved now and very fast while he was reloading and taking aim again: it was the only chance because the bullet had tugged at my dark woollen helmet and I’d heard the whine of its passage and if I went on lying there he’d put the next one into the back of my head. Scuttling like a crab, looking for lower ground, the stones scattering from under my hands and knees and boots, my breathing desperate and my eyes darting for shadow as his gun coughed again and rock chipped close to my face and a splinter cut into my cheek: I was in his sights and if I lay still he’d steady the aim and make the kill so I kept moving, sliding across shale and dragging my own weight forward with hands like claws, hooking at the ground and tearing stones away and hooking again as fast as I could while he was reloading and taking aim and the gun coughed and my leg twitched to the tug of the bullet and I got up and ran low, dodging from cover to cover in the few seconds he’d need to reload, now drop, there’s a chance here and there’s shadow.
Sweat running on me. Lie still.
Time slowing.
My eyes were shut, because death is a kind of sleep and I’d composed myself; then after a while they opened again without my willing them; I was aware of the stones in front of my face, and a tuft of grass where a small green spider was clinging, and the bright copper bullet. It had ricocheted and fallen well ahead of me as I’d made my run, and I picked it up; it had mushroomed a little after hitting something soft, perhaps a tree bole, but it still had the look of a 6 or 7mm projectile, long in proportion to its diameter and designed for high velocity at long range, with enough mass to counteract wind bucking; it was still warm from the friction of its impact, and nestled comfortably in my fingers, more comfortably than it would have nestled in my brain.
He was a confident man, and trained; this bullet wasn’t from a hunter’s gun: he was a professional marksman, a technician in death-dealing capable of placing one of these copper artifacts into the body of any man of Tung’s choosing: a president, a general, an ambassador. Or into mine.
Blood on the stones from my ripped cheek, not black in the moonlight as hers had been, but crimson in the sun. I turned three of the stones over and picked up three more and went on, crawling towards a group of boulders where the sun threw shadow from the east as I noted incidentally that I was still alive, and must therefore be out of sight here. I left the three bloodied stones in my track and turned at right angles, moving for deeper shadow and at last turning to face the way I’d come, my back propped against a rock and my eyes narrowed to reduce their reflected light.
There was the mountain, and the encircling ridge, and a mass of rock below it where some ancient slide had tumbled it towards the foothills. I kept perfectly still now, moving only my eyes, because he should be there somewhere and I wanted to see him, or at least see the place where he was; I’d taken a risk in turning round to face him, and I wanted to profit. I was taking a risk now, even in keeping still, because if I could see him, or the place where he was, he could see me, or the shadow where I was sitting. But it was no good my trying to run from him blindly through these rocks; I could run into his fire whenever I changed direction. I had to know where he was, so that I could move accordingly, putting rock after rock across his line of vision until I was out of range and could wait for night.
“There isn’t much of a choice,” Ferris had told me in my final briefing. “There’s only one man we want, and we can send only one man in to get him. London’s quite adamant about risking innocent life, and there could be fifty monks at the monastery who know nothing about him except that he’s asked for shelter.”
The shadows up there were longer, vertically, as the sun climbed on the far side. Two birds were circling, predators, towards the north; so he wouldn’t be there; they wouldn’t have liked the noise of his rifle. There was an area of low bush nearer the south, and I watched it carefully for minutes because a man can miss his footing on a loose rock and disturb foliage. I couldn’t hope to pick up the glint of his scope sight, if he was using one; the only reflection would come from the sides of the gun, at obtuse angles, because the sun was somewhere behind him.
“What we want you to do,” Ferris had told me in the air-conditioned room at the Air Force base, “is to reach Tung and talk to him.”
Through the slits in my lids I traversed the pupils from left to right and back, left to right, covering the rocks below the ridge and moving down each time, from left to right. If he moved I would see him, at this distance; and he’d have no qualms about leaving cover: the most I’d have on me would be a revolver.
“We want to know Tung’s motives in the two assassinations. We want to know if there are further killings planned, and who the victims are to be.”
Something was moving among the shadows of the rocks, halfway up the slope to the ridge; the disturbance in the pattern of light and shade was so slight that I could detect it only at the periphery of my vision where the receptors sought only movement, not form. He was in that area somewhere, so it wouldn’t be an animal: all wildlife would have left his environment, slinking or burrowing or flying up, long before now. I watched the movement, closing my eyes at intervals to rest them.
“We know Tung has got a short-wave radio transceiver,” Ferris had told me, “but we can’t find his wavelength; otherwise we could have parleyed with him. Any attempt to put a chopper down at the monastery would risk the lives of the crew, and that would only be acceptable if we asked for help from NATO. The assassination of the American Ambassador has gained us certain facilities affordable to us by the US Air Force, though not of combat status; we believe Tung Kuofeng may have ordered the death of the Ambassador and we’d like to stop him ordering further - possibly American - deaths.”
The movement had stopped, but now I could detect form: the head and one shoulder of a man, with the glint of a reflection where the crook of his right arm would be; it looked more like a skull than a living head, and it took me a moment to realise that the dark eye sockets were in fact sunglasses; there was no reflection from them because the sun was behind him. He was facing in this direction, watching me as I was watching him. The distance was perhaps a thousand yards and he was some hundred feet higher than I was, dominating the environment with the muzzle of his gun.
But now I knew where he was, and what I would have to do.
“So th
e US Air Force has agreed to overfly the monastery by night, and drop you and the guide. It’s the only access we’ve got for you. Your objective is to reach Tung Kuofeng and talk to him. London knows he has an overall plan, of which the two political assassinations were components. We want to know what that plan is.”
The man with the sunglasses was still watching me with his rifle at rest; if I moved he’d have ample time to bring it into the aim. I proved this as an exercise: I picked up a stone the size of a fist and lobbed it into the full sunlight and within two seconds of its falling a bullet smashed into the rock just above it and dropped inert to the ground, smoking. It would be too hot to pick up, though I didn’t need to examine it to know that the copper nose was flattened by the dead-angle impact, because of its force; even a .22 can push a bullet a mile away but at the end of its flight it has no more velocity than a tossed pebble; the long-range rifle is designed to produce a very high remaining velocity and that one over there could put a projectile through a man’s body at. More than a thousand yards.
I sat still again in the shadow, listening to the bird calling in the scrub to the west of me, and watching the man lower his gun.
“If you can get the better of Tung Kuofeng, we’ll send in a chopper for you. Otherwise you must try making your own way out. If possible you should relay what information you can get to the Embassy on 5051 kHz, using Tung’s radio, and duplicate it on our own wavelength. Tung should be dispatched only if you’re certain he won’t talk or has nothing more to tell you. I shall hold myself ready to interrogate him at the monastery or wherever you can bring him; as you know, my expertise has been proved effective.”
Watching the man, I knew what to do now. If I moved to the north or south I would move directly into his fire; if I moved to the east I’d be going towards him; behind me, to the west, there was a series of low rock ridges and then open ground running two or three miles into the foothills of the next mountain range, and if I moved that way he would pick me off before I could reach cover. There was no way out in any direction, and he knew that.
I watched him.
“Control realises,” Ferris had told me, “that the odds against you are rather high; that was why he wanted you for Jade One, and no one else. You can opt out, at this stage, as you know; but it wouldn’t mean we’d then send Youngquist in, simply because we don’t think Youngquist could do it; we think that you can.”
Bloody Control for you. Pat on the back and good luck, lad, we know you can do it, never fear, bloody London for you, this was a last ditch operation: throw the executive in and see what happens, never know your luck.
The man with the sunglasses hadn’t moved. He knew where I was but he couldn’t see me; more accurately, he could see me but he couldn’t tell rock from shadow, from this darker shadow that was his quarry.
Not strictly true of course: London knows what it’s doing; it was just that I was lonely now, and scared; there was something almost acceptable about getting shot in the back of the head: one minute you were part of all this metaphysical extravaganza and the next minute you were a hunk of chemicals with no awareness of the transition; but if I sat here staring into his gun he might eventually define my shape, and fire, and in the final millisecond I might see the thing coming for me, much too fast to give me time to dodge it: a gleam of copper light in the sunshine increasing in diameter until there it was right in front of me and moving at the speed of sound, its small mass warm from the detonation and the friction through the rifling of the barrel, its rate of spin slowing over the distance to a thousand feet per second and its initial degree of pitch damped out by gyroscopic action as it poised in timelessness an inch in front of my brow before it touched the skin and found the skull and broke the skull and found the brain and blew away the universe on this fine summer’s day.
But I would have to stay facing him, for a bit longer. And I would have to move, just a little, and with great care. I had to face him because I had to see when the gun came up, so that I could get the timing right; and I had to move, just a little, to get my flying jacket off. He wasn’t using a scope sight: he was using his naked eye; if he’d had a scope sight I’d have seen him aiming the gun all the time, trying to find me; even so, I must move with great care.
Nothing more awkward than getting out of sleeves.
He didn’t move. I would see the glint along the barrel if he raised the gun, and have time to drop low and forward, decreasing the target profile. First sleeve.
He would be, I suppose, annoyed by now. They’d sent him down here to deal with me before I could get too close and do any damage, and even if I’d had a revolver on me there would have been no chance of a duel: he could stay out of range with that thing and make a remote kill. But I was still alive and he was aware of that: the stone I’d thrown had fooled him for two seconds - the time he’d needed to aim and fire - but he’d seen what it was immediately afterwards. So he was probably annoyed, which was an advantage to me: you bring a flicker of emotion to the gunsight and you’ll fire a foot wide. Second sleeve.
The timing was critical and I waited, drawing five deep breaths; then I raised the flying jacket and passed it slowly in front of me and to one side to let the shoulder catch the sunlight; a reflection sparked from his rifle as he brought it immediately into the aim and fired, and I had to wait through the next second while the bullet travelled the distance between us and tore the jacket from my left hand as I let it go, one sleeve flying out before it fell to the ground.
I dropped with it and kept still.
There was no second shot.
After a minute I crawled sideways to the shelter of deeper rock, dragging the jacket after me and leaving tracks. The leg wound was superficial and the blood had already started to congeal; I had to open it with my nails and wait for it to ooze before I could squeeze a trickle onto the stones. In an hour I made a dozen yards, taking my time and waiting for the blood to come, squeezing and moving on with the toes of my boots dragging at the shale. Above me now was a ledge some ten feet high with a sheer drop to the west, facing the buttress that hid me from his sight; it was the best that was offered.
There was antibiotic cream in the medical kit and I smeared it on the wound and bandaged it before I climbed to the ledge, pulling the jacket after me. My wristwatch was in my pocket and I fished for it and put it on again. It showed 06:49 as I settled face down and began waiting for him.
Chapter 19
Vigil
Eagle to Jade One.
Playing bricks.
Eagle to Jade One.
One on top of another.
He would take his time, of course. I might be armed.
Eagle to Jade One.
A fourth stone, to bridge the lower three. Playing bricks with the boulders, the small ones; but it didn’t have to be too fancy; it had to look natural.
Where the hell is Ferris?
07:12.
Eagle to Jade One.
In another hour the sun would clear the bluff to the east of my position and I would no longer be in shade. But then he wouldn’t see me, because of the boulders. The set was live, crackling. I wanted more than that, for God’s sake. This thing was a lifeline.
Eagle to Jade One.
The peephole was too big: all I wanted was -
Jade One to Eagle. You’re very faint.
And very relieved.
Eagle to Jade One. DH is dead. My present situation extremely hazardous. Will report if possible.
Repeat that.
Did so. He acknowledged and we broke.
Within the next half hour I completed the low rock wall; it was built on the assumption that he would pick up the tracks I’d left for him and follow them to the area immediately below the ledge where I was waiting; I could sight through the rocks in three places, and if he looked up, all he would see was my eye, and my eye would be in shadow, and it would be narrowed. If he was a cautious man he would circle the whole area first and climb to higher ground; in that case he w
ould see me; but there was nothing I could do about that, except hide up in a foxhole and wait until he found me; there was no point.
Very faint because of the mountains. Up at the monastery, if I could reach it, the reception and transmission would be a lot better. It had been good to hear his voice, even faintly.
The executive signalled at 07:14 to say his situation was extremely hazardous. That was the last we heard of him.
Ignore. Too much bloody imagination. Eye on the ball.
07:46.
09:51.
He wasn’t here yet.
He must be very close now.
The mountains were silent under the rising warmth of the morning; I would have expected more bird-life here; the sound of birds is reassuring, reminding of spring, when the world is new again and nothing can go wrong.
There was open terrain below, where my flying jacket had gone jerking through the air; he could make his approach from that direction in almost a straight line without any risk, even if I were armed. Cautious bastard.
So cautious, perhaps, that he was making a wide detour and climbing to higher ground; then he would be close enough to put one straight into me with great force, at close range.
Has there been any further signal from the executive?
No.
How long has it been?
Two and a half hours.
Do we write him off
Not yet. Not yet. Give me a chance.
The scent of the pines was heavy on the air as the day grew warmer. I wondered if you’d noticed it. Isn’t it lovely? Safe under her stones and unafraid.
Something snapped and I jerked my head and stared at the rocks to my left, heart thudding and breath held as I waited.
Nothing there. Tree bark cracking in the warmth, or dead timber splitting.
Perhaps I should have tried making a break to the west, clambering through the tumbled rock and making a run for it across the open ground beyond, dodging like a hare while he tried to keep me centred in the sights.