The Pekin Target q-10

by Adam Hall

  "Yes." But she knew that half my mind was still circling, looking for an escape, an escape for her that didn't demand her life.

  "I'd say you'd be in full sight of the monastery, anywhere on that ridge, with one exception. There was a long shadow crossing it at an angle, starting just north of the middle and going obliquely south-east — in other words, towards the monastery. One thing I can tell you for sure: the monastery is something like five hundred feet above that ridge; six hundred at the most. Did you notice the ring formation?"

  "Where?" The only escape was an escape for me: to leave her, and let her keep her word to them in any way she wanted, and let her do it alone. There was no choice there either.

  "The rings on the mountains here," she said. "Clive, you'd better listen — there's no time to think about anything else. The ridges go up the mountains here in a typical ring system, though it's been mostly obliterated by time. You might be able to reach the monastery by following the oblique cleft towards the south-east, out of sight from the ridge. Okay?"

  I was rolling up the bandage. "Yes. I'll try that."

  "If it doesn't work, then you'll have to climb straight up from the north or south. That's when you'll need the extra pitons. There's no sheer rockface anywhere, except that bit we hit when we came down. You've got something like forty-five minutes of darkness left, to stow the chutes and conceal them." She looked away. "And me."

  I put the roll of lint back into the bag, and pulled the zip. One had to keep order.

  "I'll remember what you've advised. I'll try the cleft."

  "It could work. But don't try it while it's still dark; there's a nasty bit between here and where it begins; it's where the rock goes sheer down."

  "I'll wait till daylight."

  "That's about it, then." She turned her head and looked at me again. "Except that I've got a last request. I want you to make love to me."

  I'd noticed a movement in the mist here, not long ago; there was a bluff of rock throwing its shadow across the ground where we were, and the shadow was creeping as the moon lowered towards the mountains in the west. I suppose a wind was getting up, though hardly what you'd call a wind: just a stirring of the air, its movement playing on the insubstantial vapours, giving them the life of ghosts. There'd been the hint of woodsmoke, too, before, coming from one of the villages, one of the villages that was so close that we could smell its fires, so far that she would never see it; now there was the scent of pines on the air; or it had been here too, before, but overlayed by the bitterness of the smoke. Make love, yes, a certain logic in that, the way she saw things; I was beginning to know her nature.

  I'd been quiet for too long, because she said, "Of course I might not be your type. I don't want you to think I'm- you know — sort of soliciting." She tried a laugh but it didn't quite come off.

  I told her quickly, "Certainly you're my type. You'd be anyone's. Newcomb could hardly keep his eye on the navigation, as you must have noticed."

  "You were very well brought up."

  "Last dance, is that it?"

  "Last drink, or whatever. Last anything I can get. I'm not one to go out with a whimper."

  But I knew it was more than that; it was her sense of affirmation, of life at the death. It had been a good party, and she wasn't going to leave until the music stopped.

  "Can you smell the pines?" I asked her.

  "Yes. I wondered if you'd noticed. Isn't it lovely?" She was lifting her hand to me and I kissed her fingers; they were deathly cold: there'd been a certain degree of shock, and I think anyone else would have passed out by now.

  "We'll have to look out for your leg," I said.

  "You bet. Forget the missionary position, but thank God there are plenty of other ways." She was trying to reach for one of the haversacks, and I got it for her. "Put it under my head, Clive; there's no need to be uncomfy." Then the tears began, as she let everything go; there was no grief in this, I thought, and no self-pity, but just the gathering sense of loneliness that even she couldn't hold back; and perhaps it was a sign that she could now trust me enough to let me hear tier cry, knowing I wouldn't think of it as weakness. I remember being surprised, as I put my mouth on hers, that her tears could feel so warm against the coldness of her face, and so tender in someone so strong.

  "Clive," she said in a moment, "we're strangers, but it doesn't mean we can't find some kind of love, just while it lasts. Do what you can."

  Her blood was black in the moonlight, pooling among the stones. My hand was over her wrist, held loosely there, and I don't know why; to stop the rhythmic spurting from staining her flying suit — one must, yes, keep order; or to tempt me to deny all her arguments and grip with sudden force and reach with my other hand for the pressure point and then a tourniquet and somehow carry her through the mountains; or simply to ease the soreness for her, by the comfort of touching.

  "I could have done a lot worse, Clive." The strength was leaving her voice.

  "A lot worse?"

  "Than finding you, for the last dance."

  Her cropped head turned sideways on the haversack, but she straightened it to look up at me, like someone falling asleep and then waking because the time wasn't right.

  "I wouldn't have wanted anyone else to be here now," I told her.

  "It was a privilege."

  "A privilege?" A little dry laugh came. "Oh God, I'm in such a mess." Her lips could scarcely open now. "You must try the cleft in the ridge, Clive… the way I said…»

  "Yes." Her head fell sideways again but this time she let it stay there, and closed her eyes. "Sleep well," I said.

  "Dizzy… Clive?"

  "I'm here." I lay beside her, covering her as much as I could so that she'd know she wasn't' alone. She felt like a child in my arms.

  "Clive… good luck…»

  The sunrise was beautiful, a filling of the sky with saffron and then rose and then a flood of blinding light across the peaks to the east.

  I had stowed the two chutes together and spread rocks over them, and sorted out what extra equipment I'd take along. Helen de Haven was over there, where the heaped stones were catching the first light of the day. I turned away and moved through the rocky terrain, keeping clear of the sheer face and the drop below it.

  In an hour I had reached the bottom of the ridge, where she had told me I should go, and rested for a moment against an outcrop; then the shot came and splinters of stone cut through the air near my face and I dropped flat.

  18: Hunt

  I didn't move.

  The splinters were still falling, one of them humming through the air with the loudness of a bee, its sharp edges spinning from the impact of the bullet until it struck ground and skittered across the shale.

  Incoming data, item one: no echo to the shot.

  He was in cover. There would have been an echo, otherwise, from the sheer rockface between here and the ridge higher up. He was shooting from cover but not from the monastery or anywhere near it: from here the monastery was out of sight above the ridge and a thousand feet higher. He was shooting from a north vector: without raising my head I could see the chipped rock, a few feet south of where I was lying prone.

  Moving my eyes only, I looked for the bullet; if I could find it I could learn a lot more about him, and where he was.

  At some time during the ritual of love she had said, Don't pity me; I can't stand that; besides, this could be the last time for you too.

  There were grasses, higher towards the ridge, and I lay watching them; but their movement was so slight that I couldn't hope to tell the wind's direction; I took deeper breaths, alert for the smell of burnt powder, but as yet there was nothing; even if the wind were from the north he might be too far away for the scent to carry.

  The sun was four diameters high, north-east by east and approaching the mountain; it would clear the peak in another hour, and I couldn't hope for shadow. The ground here was still moist from the receding mist, and I began digging into the soil between the rocks,
using one of the sharp splinters his bullet had chipped from the rock; no thanks to him for the convenience: that bullet had been meant for my brain.

  As soon as I had enough loose soil I began caking it over the buckles of the haversacks and the binocular case to take away the shine; then I smeared my face and hands, taking my time: he wouldn't come close yet, in case I had a gun.

  He was using a long-distance rifle; its sound had been a heavy cough rather than a bark, and the chip in the rock was larger than a watch face. He knew I was still alive; to have placed the shot that close he must have seen enough of me to notice how I'd gone down, dropping voluntarily for cover, not spinning or toppling with an arm flung out. He would have reloaded by now, waiting to see what I did.

  There were no real options. He was waiting for me to show him any one of the four most dangerous aspects of a hunted man: movement, reflection, colour and human shape. But I couldn't stay here; he wouldn't wait beyond a certain time; there would be the moment when he'd believe I was wounded, and then he'd come slowly, using all available cover until he could see I was either unconscious or unarmed. I had to be gone by then.

  I checked the time at 06:17 and took my watch off and put it into my pocket before I moved. There was a wall of rock extending a long way to my left, so I covered fifty yards at a low crouch, scuffling my boots into the shale and dragging their toes across grasses to leave them bent; then as the terrain became firm rock I turned at right angles and went for a cleft running south at an angle and providing cover for twenty yards before it finished in a slope of fallen boulders. I would have to climb there, or come back if I had to climb too high.

  He might be using a scope sight; that would change things a great deal; it could mean he was farther away than it seemed, and knew there was no real cover here for me, none that could lead me clear; he'd be content to use me for sport, and watch me go from rock to rock like a rat in a maze. If he were shooting from a great distance it meant he must be on higher ground, and could see beyond my immediate cover to flat terrain where he could finally bring me down.

  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 Kuo-feng 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.