The Shepherd File (18 page)

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.

Holmes came out into an open space. He felt the wind of the bullet as it whipped past his face and for a moment thought he had been hit. The impact of the wind of its flight was as harsh and violent as though it was the bullet itself which was scoring past his cheek. He heard the explosion of the rifle a split second afterwards and then the sound of the bullet whip-smacking into the bracken on his left. He flung himself backwards into cover. The helicopter was overhead, three hundred feet up, and then suddenly it swooped, coming down past Holmes, lower and lower, swooping into the line of bracken fifty yards ahead. It was creating a diversion. Holmes clutched his rifle and peered out from the bracken cover across the open space. He saw the fugitive, or rather he saw the tip of a rifle rise upwards from the fronds of bracken about fifty yards off like the tip of a periscope. Whether the man fired or not, Holmes did not know. He heard nothing. Holmes moved quickly. He broke cover and ran, bending low, across the sheep track. He flung himself down behind a screen of bracken and cautiously looked out. The man was still there. Holmes saw, with a sense of curious suspense, a drab-coloured check shirt, a pair of blue jeans, a dark grimed head. It all seemed to Holmes to be so ordinary and yet it was so different, so appallingly different Holmes lifted his rifle. It was heavy. The backsight and the foresight coincided on the coloured shirt, moved away, wavered, came back again. It was an appalling effort to attempt to keep the rifle steady. He could not do it. At that moment, the man turned, saw Holmes, lifted his rifle and fired. Holmes saw the flick of smoke but heard nothing. He was hardly conscious of firing. The man disappeared. The helicopter roared past. He was not conscious of fear. His main emotion was one of curiosity: to know whether the man had been hit. He was unaware of flies or discomfort or pain. He was roaring drunk with excitement.

He came out into the bracken where the man had been. The brown stems and the green fronds were speckled with something bright red which glistened in the sunlight, hanging on the green fronds in bright clusters, bright red specks. He touched one of the specks. It was blood. He stared at the red-brown smear on his fingers with slow comprehension. The man had been hit. Along the path ahead was a trail of the red specks which were so alarmingly unlike blood and which in their unreality brought to him more clearly than anything else that they were. There were splashes of it everywhere, splashes which had exploded and hit with force a yard or so in every direction. Holmes felt unwilling to go on. The excitement had drained out of him at the sight of the blood. To follow would be cruelty. He disliked the thought of the end. The chase, yes, but not the end.

Slowly and carefully he began to follow the trail of blood. There was no need to think of an ambush. The helicopter was hovering, moving slowly ahead, about a hundred yards away, and that was where the man was lying, or crawling, struggling to escape from his pursuers and from the growing weakness that would now be in him, the weakness that would mercifully placate and numb the anguish of his mind.