A Rough Shoot (7 page)

The night was clear, with a niggling northwest wind which was damp and cold out of all proportion to its strength. The four men didn’t lie out again on the edge of their airstrip; they retired to the comfortable shelter of the boundary hedge.

It was their distance from the beacons and the top of the down that gave Sandorski his crazy inspiration. He suddenly slapped me on the back.

“Why not?” he asked me in a yell of a whisper. “Why not?”

His tone was all full of irresponsible cavalry tactics. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he suggested chasing Hiart over the downs with a lance. I replied that I’d tell him why not at once, if I knew what he was proposing.

“Why not shift the beacons?”

“Wreck the plane?”

“Hell, no! Welcome it! Reception committee, ha? We ought to have three minutes. Might have much more.”

I protested at the outrageous gamble.

“Gamble? What gamble? They can’t know the plane is coming down in the wrong place till it’s down there.”

“But why? What’s the objective?”

“Muck ‘em up! What else? Sit on our backsides in a bramble bush? Just see him land and take off again? Pah! That’s what Hiart would do. We want to know what or whom they are flying over. Well, go and grab the lot. Can’t do any harm.”

“Oh, can’t it!” I said.

“What? Still thinking of Riemann’s home from home? Good God, man, are you going to put your miserable private affairs before service to your country?”

I never in my life heard such a lousy argument. I was still by no means convinced that I was serving my country, and even less that his wild scheme would benefit anyone but the four men waiting in the boundary hedge. Yet he left me with no possible reply. I didn’t wonder the Poles made him a general. He could only be that or a trooper. All other ranks are supposed to think with their brains.

“Now where shall we make the poor beggar land?” he asked cheerfully, as if it were all settled.

“There’s only one possible place. Where the down continues the other side of the northern hedge. But there are cows there.”

“Well, if he hits one, he hits one. What do you know about radio beacons?”

“Nothing.”

“Stands to reason that if they work in one place, they work in another. Ha? Doesn’t it? And they can be dropped -by parachute and work–I know that. So if we carry ‘em carefully and level ‘em up, we ought to be all right.”

“Suppose they come and look at them again?”

“Well, they didn’t last night, so why should they tonight?”

“Have we time?” I protested as a last effort.

“Not if you stand there,” he hissed, “arguing in bloody whispers all night.”

We lifted the southern beacon and its supports, and made a detour round the landing strip, following the grass track along the edge of the down below which I had sat with Sandorski on the day of our meeting. The lights twinkled in the village below, and the headlights of cars flicked their white sheets over trees and stream. All the time I listened for the plane. Once we both cursed, but it was an air liner on its way to the north.

We set up the beacon in the northern hedge. The supports were admirably fitted for their purpose. Their sharp points bit firmly into the turf of the bank; with two long legs, one short and one slightly shorter, we had the thing straight enough for any practical use.

In the dark kaffir kraal of bramble bushes it wasn’t so easy to find the other beacon, and the time was now half-past nine. We made a lot of impatient noise, but the party sitting in the boundary hedge were too far away to hear us. At last we got it, and fixed it up on the very brink of the valley. Here the steep escarpment swept round to the east, abruptly ending Blossom’s down. We could only give that unknown and unfortunate pilot something under four hundred yards, instead of the five to six hundred that the proper reception committee had allowed. After we got the beacon in position, I paced out the distance and shifted a couple of sleepy cows. There were no other obstacles so long as the pilot stayed bang on his line and could stop before he plunged into the valley.

We then had time to sit down and work out the odds. If the plane landed according to the signals from the beacons, and if it didn’t go over the edge–two very bigifs– we had rather more than the three minutes which Peter Sandorski had demanded. The four men in the boundary hedge would come up to the level of their airstrip when they expected or heard the plane, but even there they would be a quarter of a mile from us, plus the distance that the plane traveled. When the pilot overshot their strip, they would think he meant to turn and come back, so that they wouldn’t begin to run up until he actually landed. Sandorski’s plan began to look less like a nightmare.

A little after ten the plane circled once, and came in over the hedge like a great silent owl. The pilot revved up as he touched, and taxied forward till his wing was nearly over the beacon. He saw or sensed the appalling drop in front of him, lurched round, switched on his light and spent an intolerable time maneuvering into a position where there wasn’t a cow or a thorn bush or sudden death in front of him.

As soon as his wheels came to rest, he put out his light. I suppose he had been instructed not to use it, and to trust to the beacon signals. We hammered excitedly on the door. Sandorski left it to me to do the talking in case his voice should be recognized. I sounded, he said, just like any other blasted Englishman. The rest of him was safely unrecognizable. In the dark he was a shapeless mass of sweaters and windbreakers, and his small head was extinguished between cap and muffler.

The door was opened from within, and a man peered doubtfully out into the night.

“Quick!” I shouted. “We haven’t a moment. Police on the way! Jump, man!”

He dropped to the ground, carrying a small suitcase with him.

“Anything else?”

“It is all,” the stranger answered.

The pilot stuck his head out.

”Here!” he protested. “Call this a landing strip? Not again! I’m not a–”

“Get out of here, you fool!” I yelled hysterically. “You’ll be arrested in a minute. Get out!”

“What’s ahead?”

“Three hundred yards and then a hedge. Jump it if you can’t fly it.”

“Cripes!” he said. “I’ll bring a horse next time.”

We had created a fine atmosphere of alarm and despondency. The plane roared and began to move. The pilot flooded the turf with light again, and revealed the real reception committee running towards us less than a hundred yards away. With the engine ticking over, it had been impossible for us to hear their movements.

He took no risk of being stopped. I wonder he didn’t kill the lot of them. But he cleared the hedge. While we ran I heard the steady drone of the plane in its safe and lonely world, and envied him.

We took the nearest way, straight down the slope. That for the moment increased our lead. I seized the passenger’s suitcase and got rid of it into a thick holly which I knew I could find again even in the dark. Relieved of that, he ran like a man with a guilty conscience.

We swerved back, following the contour line below the copse where my innocent statistician had sat and counted traffic, and began to pound up the slope at an angle. This was stumbling, not running; and our pursuers drew up into close touch. They couldn’t see us–or only as occasional bulks against the sky–but they couldn’t fail to hear us.

They had had time to think and began to call:

“Lex! Lex!”

“That vos the voice of Peenk,” said the passenger in a firm Central European accent, and half stopping.

I shoved him on.

“Run, Lex! Pink’s the police informer. I’m getting you to Heyne-Hassingham.”

Thank the Lord he was high up in the party! That name seemed to be immediate proof of my bona fides. He crashed along the side of that hill like a startled heifer, through bush and over rabbit hole. We increased our lead a bit, and I took a chance on being where I thought I was. I pulled them round behind a thorn brake, through a gap in the furze and down onto the ground. As we dropped flat on the turf, Lex gave a muffled cry of pain.

“Damn these thorns!” hissed Sandorski.

He dug me in the ribs and held out, behind our friend’s back, a little syringe with which he had just jabbed him in the thigh.

The hunt passed us, then checked and turned back. They knew, as soon as they stopped to listen, that we must have gone to ground on the hillside. In the stillness of the night you could hear a man charging across country half a mile away. If only we could have reached the springy turf of the green track above us, we could have run–or jumped or danced, for that matter–without a sound.

They closed in, and flashed torches quickly on and off. They were wise not to spoil their night sight, and it may be, too, that they feared we were armed and desperate. All they could see was a formless black mass of thorn and furze, forbidding search. The twisting track into the heart of it, worn down by the persistent feet of little animals and an occasional sheep, was clear enough from where we lay, but indistinguishable from outside. Two of them were above us and two below us. They made a halfhearted attempt to beat the patch, but the furze was stiff and centuries old; we might have been surrounded by a lion-proof thorn fence.

It was as well that Sandorski’s syringe had done its work, for they started to ask Lex what the devil he thought he was doing. They couldn’t say very much, for they didn’t know who was with him or why the plane had come down in the wrong place or why it had immediately and frantically taken off again. Indeed they couldn’t be certain that Lex had ever got out of the plane at all-–and from their point of view we might be three unknown enemies, or Lex and two. Sandorski’s cavalry tactics had landed us in the most God-awful defenseless position, but at least they had bewitched the opposing force into a nightmare world where nothing made sense.

Hiart’s querulous voice, above us, said:

“For heaven’s sake, don’t go throwing names about!”

Pink, from below us and in a furious temper, told him to beggar off home to his bleeding nanny.

All the same, it wasn’t funny. True, they couldn’t see us till they stepped on us, but they had only to wait till daylight or till we grew impatient.

We heard somebody moving round our patch of cover and giving orders in whispers. I think it was Hiart, for their next move showed a certain subtlety. They shifted noisily about until we hadn’t the faintest notion where any single one of them was, and then preserved the most absolute, disciplined silence.

We were out of the wind on that slope, and there wasn’t a sound. A rare car rushed along the road in the valley beneath. A sheep coughed on the lower ground by the stream. This went on for half an hour. At least I found it to be only half an hour when I looked at my watch. I thought it must be nearly dawn. Strain on the nerves has no time.

Then Lex began to thrash about in his dreamland, and somebody above us closed in towards the sound. I hung onto Lex’s legs and Sandorski lay across his chest and arms. Pink must have been near enough to hear Lex’s heavy breathing. He shot in our general direction, and scored a bull. He hit the rectangle between Sandorski’s legs, Lex’s body and my arms. It wasn’t his fault that there was nothing but turf in it.

The shot was the breaking point for somebody else who had been frozen and terrified like ourselves. A roe deer, away to our left in a patch of thick stuff where one of us easily might have been but was not, broke cover and crashed away. Sandorski, instantaneously appreciating what the enemy would think, broke cover too and went after it, drawing off two of the watchers; they might, if he had given them a moment to think, have spotted the first disturbance as that of an animal, but they couldn’t distinguish the noises–since one was followed immediately by another –and could only assume that two of us had gone.

Right! Make it a third, I thought! And down the hill I went–after, of course, the interval of some seconds which I needed to catch up with Sandorski’s brilliance. I drew off the other two sentries, one of whom was Pink. His naval language was unmistakable. I led them up again to the turf, and there, where I could run silently, easily lost them.

I listened. I could hear Pink and his companion blundering through a bit of heavy plowland that lay between me and the airstrip. I guessed that he had given up the pursuit as hopeless–which it was–and was returning to the party’s rendezvous under the boundary hedge.

There was no knowing what Sandorski would do, for we had not arranged any rendezvous at all. Whether he heard my escape or not, however, it wasn’t likely he would lose touch for long with the unconscious Lex. Meanwhile the position was chaotic. Scattered over half a square mile of down and plow and thicket were Sandorski and myself and the disorganized reception committee, none of us knowing where the others were, and all anxious to find out. Additional complications were Lex snoring in the bushes and his bag in the holly tree.

Lex gave a heave and a rumble. In the night silence which had now become more absolute and hostile than ever, that noise seemed as outrageous a signal as any flashing light. I decided to shift him at once, while I could be sure that my own section of empty space was really empty. I carried him down the hill and left him in the open, where his odd noises would sound like those of the sheep, memorizing his position as well as I could without any very definite landmarks to go by.

I settled down on the edge of the turf track above our temporary hiding place. After a bit, Hiart, tall enough to recognize, came flitting cautiously over the grass with one of his men. They stopped and listened at the right spot, gave it up and vanished northwards along the track.

Where were they going? Well, if Hiart had the intelligence Sandorski attributed to him–and I was immensely impressed by his finding, in a world that all looked alike, the exact patch where we had been–then he would guess that the only explanation of the aircraft coming down in the wrong place and being expected there by unknown persons must be that the beacons had been moved. Having checked that, he would try to find them–for they were evidence that must at all costs be removed–and carry them off to his car. It wouldn’t take him long to discover the one in the open on the edge of the slope, and then the tracks of the landing wheels would lead him somewhere near the other in the hedge.