Operation Pax (8 page)

There were now at least two men quite close to him. One was talking rapidly and the other was giving monosyllabic answers. It sounded like some sort of briefing. Routh was puzzled, for he got no impression that the place was being actively searched. The voices broke off and in a moment were succeeded by a new sound, impossible to interpret. A large door was being pushed back on rollers. At the same time light flooded through the chinks of the tarpaulin. Routh held his breath. An extraordinary possibility, alarming yet carrying with it a wild hope, had flashed upon him. Suppose that…

The two men were talking again, and this time he could hear snatches of what they said.

‘Surely he can’t get far?’

‘Probably not. But the devil of it is, he got hold of some keys. So if by any chance he reached the ring fence before the current went on–’

‘The current! You don’t mean to say they’ve turned on that? They told me that was only for the greatest crisis of all.’

‘Get in and don’t waste time.’ The floor beneath Routh lurched suddenly and there was the sound of a door closing. More faintly, the same voice continued. ‘It
is
the greatest crisis of all – only not just as we’ve expected it. This fellow is the crack agent of something pretty big. And there’s the point. He mustn’t be killed. He may have hidden this thing already. Or he may simply have thrown it away. That’s why we must have him back alive. Ready?’

‘Ready.’

‘Go out fairly rapidly and then come more slowly in again.’

Exultant and trembling, Routh hardly dared to breathe. There could be no doubt about the incredible truth. He was going to be driven straight out of this abominable place – yard, gardens, sinister ring-fence, park, boundary wall and all – he was going to be driven straight out of it in search of himself! The fools – the bloody fools! He lay absolutely rigid. Close to his fingers, he knew, was the heavy wrench or spanner that he would eventually raise to bring crashing down on his unconscious chauffeur’s skull. And then, having pitched him into a ditch, he would drive the car himself hell for leather to London. Oh triumphant and all-powerful Routh!

The car was moving. It appeared to be coasting out of the garage. Lying on this hard floor, Routh thought, made the suspension feel funny. He had to brace his body more firmly still so as not to give himself away. But what did it matter if he was in for an uncomfortable ten minutes? Only provided –

The engine burst into life. For a full minute it appeared to race unbearably. Routh waited for the gears to engage, the clutch to be let in, the first swift acceleration that might send him lurching or rolling dangerously backwards. But nothing happened. The sense of something quite unapprehended in his situation possessed him. The whole movement was queer. And under his nose –

He stared again, and there was no doubt of it. Part of the flooring on which he lay was for some reason of a transparent substance – glass or perspex. He could see the road beneath him, studded with cats’ eyes. Only the road was green – was as green as the rubber in that endless corridor… His eyes adjusted their focus and he saw what was really there. The two sides of the road were two broad green paddocks. The cats’ eyes were the tops of white fencing posts dividing them. Routh, in fact, was suspended in air.

The discovery was a terrific shock. Nausea gripped him and for a horrible moment he thought that he must vomit. The line of posts slipped sideways across his field of vision. He stared below him in fascination. The earth had swung round like a compass card and was now almost motionless. His tired mind, making a conscious effort of analysis, grasped the implication that he himself must be motionless too. In fact the craft in which he had hidden himself was a helicopter.

For a moment Routh closed his eyes. He was awed at the extent of his enemies’ resources. But he himself had held out against them now – as it seemed – for hours. And he still had his astounding chance of triumph. He had nothing to do but rise from his lurking place, hit his unsuspecting pilot hard on the head, take charge of the machine –

But at this his nerve failed him. The thought of hanging high in air alone, with a set of unfamiliar and inexplicable controls between himself and disaster – this was something he found he couldn’t take. In any case he had better wait. The fellow had been told to ‘go out fairly rapidly’. That meant, presumably, outside the boundaries of the estate below him. He must bide his time until they were outside that formidable stone wall. The moment to act would be then.

The helicopter was moving again. It was passing directly over the house, and not thirty feet above the chimneys. The size and nondescript character of the place were now fully apparent. Routh was aware of a sprawling system of stone and tile ridges, irregularly disposed and alternating with broad, flat expanses of lead. His eye caught the long, low, bitumen-covered roof of the building whence his flight had begun; and beyond he had a glimpse of the lake. Then the helicopter passed over the front of the house. Above the apex of the gleaming white pediment that had been his first impression of the place rose a flagstaff. Against this a white-coated man was steadying himself as he swept the nearer grounds with a pair of binoculars. The man looked up and waved as the machine passed over him. Routh drew back nervously, fearful that his lurking face might be discerned peering through the perspex. But already the roof had vanished.

Still he dared not move. He had to master a nervous impulse to get a glimpse of the pilot, to estimate from his manner of controlling the machine the chance of bluffing and intimidating him, to study the skull it might be desirable to fracture at a blow. Crouched still beneath his tarpaulin, he had already chosen his weapon for that – a heavy spanner, straight-ended and about a foot long. In his imagination he cautiously poised it, swung it in the air. His breath quickened at the thought of it. He realized, with a strange spasm of moral horror and a dark excitement, that there was a bloodlust in him; that he had killed one man and would willingly kill another. It was part of his new stature, part of the Routh by whom the seventy-bob swindler had been magnificently succeeded…

There was a queer sound in his ears. For a second he was puzzled, and then realized with terror that what he had heard was his own laughter. He had laughed aloud in a malevolent glee – and with the ear of his enemy within three feet of him. He realized a new danger – the danger that he might go light-headed, hysterical, mad. He lay still as death, biting hard at a wrist.

The fellow had heard nothing. He would have earphones, of course; for he was in some sort of short-wave contact with the people below. Indeed it looked as if he had received instructions to change his course of action. For he was not flying straight out of the grounds as Routh had hoped. He was moving gradually out on a spiral. There was no other explanation of the circular movement of the terrain below. And the helicopter was an incomparable machine to hunt with. It hovered at will. Several times it sank to within a few feet of the ground to investigate – Routh supposed – one or another suspicious appearance. Nothing, surely, could escape observation so miraculously armed – not Deilos, crouched among his rocks; not even the most timid mammal yet known on this earth… Routh frowned into the perspex, obscurely conscious of some unresolved perplexity deep in his mind. But at that moment he saw the ring-fence.

It looked something that a child could leap. But Routh knew how formidable it was. And if it really held some electrical charge, as the conversation he had overheard suggested, then it was now insuperable. But the enemy was plainly reckoning with the possibility that he had made such good speed before the first alarm spread that he had actually got through it. Grabbing those keys had been a lucky move after all. But for that, they would scarcely trouble to send the helicopter beyond the fence and the wall.

And here
was
the wall. They were actually over and beyond it. Routh trembled at the full realization of how far he had got – of how tantalizingly near to safety he had come. The fellow was going to circle the park – perhaps to range swiftly over the scanty system of roads and lanes bounding it and running away from it. Nobody could stir on these without detection. While the helicopter was in the air only thick woodland would give secure cover to a moving figure. And of that there seemed to be comparatively little in these parts. Below, everything was bare, still, empty.

Routh’s field of vision was restricted, but as the hunt progressed he realized that one suspicious object after another was being spotted, pursued, and then inspected at close quarters. It seemed impossible that so systematic a process would not ultimately succeed, and Routh presently recognized in himself a fresh anxiety so irrational that it appalled him. He was in a fever lest at any moment Routh should be spotted and caught. A swoop upon two lovers couched high on a haystack set his heart beating wildly; his mouth went dry as the helicopter casually followed and hovered over a schoolchild on a bicycle. Any one of the few figures animating this quiet countryside might be
him
. He bit again at his wrist, fighting this ghastly treachery to his own elementary sense of identity.

And then an astounding thing happened. Once more the ground had risen up to meet him – and this time it was coming nearer than ever before. There was a lane, a hedge – and protruding from the hedge a dark patch oddly like a human leg. It was this that was to be spied at – this and… The wild doubt lasted only a fraction of a second. What lay below was the Douglas. And the dark splash was one of the leggings he had kicked off when his first fatal madness of that morning had come upon him.

He was delivered from all madness now. He threw off the tarpaulin and rose. The pilot swung round and his eyes dilated. He threw up an arm and at the same time spoke rapidly into the wireless transmitter slung on his chest. Routh hit him and he crumpled in his seat. The helicopter was about twenty feet up. It suddenly looked a very long way.

Routh scrambled over the unconscious man. A wrong touch on the controls and he might soar again. He peered under the instrument panel and saw a tangle of thin cables and insulated wires. He thrust the spanner among them and twisted it – twisted it with all his might again and again. The engine raced, choked, faded out. The earth rose and dealt the helicopter a single shattering blow.

The machine had landed squarely on its belly in the lane. Routh flung himself on a door and tumbled into open air. He saw the Douglas not ten yards away and he gave a weak, exultant cry.

He turned back to the helicopter’s cabin, in panic lest the pilot should have recovered, should be reaching for a gun. But the man was insensible. Routh stared at him and his exultation turned to senseless rage. He scrambled half into the cabin once more and with his bare hands pummelled the unconscious face. Then a revulsion took him. He clawed ineffectively at the body, striving to heave it into a position of greater ease. It was like lead. He dropped back to the ground and ran to the two-stroke.

The engine started at a kick. Its familiar rhythm steadied him and he found himself once more thinking clearly. There was acute danger still – and the more acute because he had made a bad slip. If only he had managed to rise behind the pilot quietly and get him unawares – or if, for that matter, the fellow had lacked the guts and presence of mind to make that quick revealing mutter into his radio – the position would be a good deal more comfortable. As it was, the enemy already had a fair idea of what had happened.

There was nobody in sight. But at any moment the situation might transform itself; he was, after all, no more than ten minutes’ walk from that horrible wall. His first job was to get on an arterial road and merge himself in some southward-bound stream of traffic. Nobody, he recalled, was going to put a bullet in him from a distance. The swine were determined to have him alive… He shivered, and shoved the two-stroke across the grass verge to the road. His quickest route lay straight ahead. But that way lay the entrance to the fatal lane down which the girl had turned that morning, the lane to the abominable Milton – Milton Porcorum. He could see the mouth of it now. And up there, at any moment, might come some swift-moving reinforcement of his pursuers.

He turned the head of the Douglas and faced the helicopter once more. It lay like an enormous crippled insect, slightly canted over and with its rotorblades quite still. As he opened the throttle and ducked he glanced sideways into the cabin. With a shock he realized that the pilot had come to. He was in the act of hauling himself up in his seat. For the second time his eyes – now glazed and painfully apprehending – crossed Routh’s. Then he was gone. Routh cursed his own folly. He ought to have made sure of smashing the radio. Unless the fellow was too dazed to take in what he had seen, he would presently be reporting the direction in which the fugitive was heading.

Routh rode on, getting everything out of the old two-stroke that he safely could. It was still early afternoon. Yet the day had already stretched through aeons. His head swam and the wheel wobbled. He had to steady himself on the unfolding ribbon of time, steady himself on the unfolding ribbon of road. His breakfast had been a cup of tea and a scrap of toast. If he didn’t get something soon he would faint. He had gone for several miles without seeing anybody – not even a distant labourer in the fields. But now a figure was approaching on a bicycle. Again Routh’s front wheel wobbled. The figure approached and raised an arm. Routh ducked and shied. It was a clergyman, gesturing Christian brotherhood.
Major Road Ahead
. Thank goodness for that.

There was an AA telephone kiosk on the corner, and beyond it a big sign advertising a roadhouse farther north. Close by this an old man was leaning on a gate, idly watching whatever traffic went by. Routh, remembering his senseless fear of the clergyman, glanced at him boldly. A shepherd or something of that sort, Routh thought – and rejoiced in the further proof that harmless folk existed. And here, going south at thirty-yard intervals, were four lorries with enormous loads of bricks. He would let two pass and then cut in. The shepherd was looking at him with a mild, patriarchal benevolence. Routh gave him a condescending wave and swung in behind the second lorry. The shepherd had put a hand behind his head and was doing something to his stick, cocking it in air. The lorries were travelling fast. Routh opened the throttle. He had gone a mile or more before it came to him that if the old man were indeed a shepherd then he, Routh, was the sheep. The affair on the old man’s back was a walkie-talkie. He was reporting on Routh’s movements now.