Gunner Kelly Read online

  Not to panic, Benedikt admonished himself.

  He switched off his torch and extended his arms on each side of him, adjusting his position until he lost contact with the side closest to where he had landed. Even with the torch as an extension to one hand he couldn’t touch both walls simultaneously, and the same applied when he swivelled through ninety degrees.

  More than two metres wide each way, then. And probably three metres deep. And sheer-walled.

  He stood absolutely still, counting off his heart-beats until he was sure he could hear no sound but the thump in his own chest. He had seemed to descend with a great crashing noise, yet most of that must have been in his own ears, and if there was no sentry near the pit his fall might yet be unnoticed.

  Not to panic, then!

  He shifted his feet. At least he had fallen soft, into what felt underfoot like a mixture of wet broken earth and leaves; and now he was standing almost knee deep in the wreckage of the false floor of the wood above him, through which he had plunged.

  Damn it to hell! It was anger, not panic, which momentarily clogged his throat and his thinking: To be caught like this, in the oldest, simplest trap of all—like an animal!

  With an effort of will he swallowed his anger and cleared his head. Wasting time on that foolish emotion only compounded his difficulties. And, given time, there was no trap from which a thinking animal could not escape—

  He risked the torch again. Down here, at least, it would not betray him far and wide, as it would have done up above, so long as he kept the beam down—

  The walls were pale and chalky: this was ideal ground for digging without revetment, like that into which Grandpapa must have dug in France all those years ago, for his Siegfried Stellung—

  Above him, almost within reach—perhaps within reach, the remains of the lattice of woven branches which had supported the deceptive roof of the trap gaped downwards: it had been so well-fabricated that he had not dislodged the whole construction in his fall—

  If he could reach up and pull the whole of it down … would that raise him high enough … or provide him with anything he could use—?

  He studied the lattice, shading the beam of his torch with his hand. A single leaf, detaching itself from the thick layer which had concealed the trap, floated down on to him, brushing past his cheek. With a spasm of despair he saw that it was too far above him, undeniably built by someone who knew his business—someone who had calculated a structure just strong enough to bear that treacherous carpet of leaves, which had at first yielded under him like the rest of the forest floor, and then had welcomed him into the pit when it was too late.

  He fought back the despair as it edged him again towards that other trap of panic from which he had already forced himself back.

  This was not on the Other Side: he was not Benedikt Schneider, whose print-out and voice-print and finger-prints and photograph were all on the A10 KGB Red Code—

  This was Thomas Wiesehöfer, and this was England—and if that was also Dr David Audley’s England it was Colonel Butler’s England too—

  So … what could they do to him, anyway—Dr David Audley—and Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, and Gunner Kelly, and Benje’s Dad smoking on the river-bank—? What could they do to him?

  So … perhaps what he ought to do, as Thomas Wiesehöfer—as innocent Thomas Wiesehöfer—was to shout ‘Help’ at the top of his voice, and be Thomas Wiesehöfer thereafter—

  What he did do was to uncover the full beam of his torch, as Thomas Wiesehöfer might have done, to examine the unexpected man-trap into which he had fallen.

  Another leaf, and then a whole handful of leaves, descended from above with a dry scraping sound, as though dislodged by the light itself. And there, high up and half-hidden amongst the sagging lattice-work on the edge of the pit in the nearest corner to where he had fallen, was the end of a rope-ladder!

  Benedikt cursed himself for not noticing it immediately, as an innocent Thomas Wiesehöfer would surely have done once he had collected his wits after plunging into the pit. In the direct beam of the torch there was no doubt about it: it was a genuine and undoubted rope-ladder, its rungs stretched and mud-stained with previous use by the diggers of the pit!

  It was hardly believable, even for amateurs … but someone had been careless again, failing to draw up the rope-ladder which the diggers had used—failing to draw it up that last half-metre, to the lip of the pit—?

  Unless—he frowned to himself as an alternative possibility, even more unbelievable, intruded into his mind—unless this wasn’t a man-trap at all—?

  An animal-trap? If it was a man-trap then that rope-ladder had no place in it. But an animal-trap—

  Yet what sort of animal was there in Duntisbury Chase that they might want to trap—if everything which he and Colonel Butler had imagined was no more than an illusion of a fevered sense of insecurity? There were no wild boar in England, there were only foxes and deer … But was this how the English trapped those creatures out of season?

  He shook his head. Man or animal, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting out of the pit while there was still time to do so: Thomas and Benedikt were both agreed on that!

  He turned the torch to the debris in which he stood, foraging among the branches of the fallen part of the lattice. With the right extension to his arm the rope-ladder was well within reach, and after that everything depended on whether it was firmly anchored above, sufficiently to bear his weight, or merely piled for removal with that careless end enticing him to disappointment.

  He hooked the end of the branch over the rung and pulled gently. The rope bowed, and then tautened as he increased the pressure. A quantity of leaves and assorted duff from the forest floor above descended on him, together with small hard fragments of chalk from the lip of the pit. For a moment the rope-ladder resisted him while it sorted itself out, then it came free with a sudden rush-and-slither, bringing down a miniature deluge of the same mixture with it, including a larger lump of chalk which struck him sharply and painfully on the cheekbone. The noise of it all, confined within the almost-enclosed space of the pit, seemed as deafening as his orginal fall, so that when the silence came back once more and lengthened again into safety he marvelled at his continued good fortune.

  Then reason asserted itself. Man-trap or animal-trap, there must be others like it in other likely places: traps sited like this one, which used the natural forest obstacles to funnel the quarry along convenient routes into them. But the village’s manpower available over every twenty-four hours of light and darkness must be strictly limited, and most of it would have to be used to cover the open country which could not be man-trapped, so that the traps would only be checked at intervals. Not for Duntisbury Royal the vicious anti-personnel mines, and voracious dogs, and merciless heat-seeking sensors of the Other Side’s frontier, thank God!

  And, once again, he had been lucky nevertheless, to fall into this trap between checks, with time to spare (or perhaps the police raid had dislocated the schedule?)—and luckiest of all to fall into this particular trap, of all others, in which their carelessness had again cancelled out their ingenuity.

  But now there was no more time to lose if he was to capitalise on that good fortune: he had to cut his losses and run with what he had—

  He stuffed the torch back into his pocket and reached for the rope-ladder, fumbling in the dark over the rough chalk wall of the pit until his fingers closed on it.

  Already his mind was ranging freely above him, mapping out his route to safety: straight up the nearest ridge to the south was the shortest way, but he no longer trusted any part of Duntisbury Royal along which he hadn’t travelled this night, so back along the path by which he had come was the way he intended to leave, wading the River Addle below the footbridge. The SAS cylinder with his wet-suit inside it was safely moored out of sight and could be left to Colonel Butler to recover at his leisure as his problem: the rule now was the same rule for any operation which had gone so
ur, with the priority on getting the human material out, regardless of loss of equipment. And this time he was the human material—

  Get out quickly, or go to ground if you can’t get out!

  He grasped the vertical of the rope ladder firmly, at full stretch, and felt for the lowest rung with his left foot—by God, he had gone to ground literally already, but it was out of ground and away that he wanted to go now!

  The rope-ladder stretched under his weight, tapering and twisting as all rope-ladders did, but he was ready for its distortion from his training—compared with that these few metres would be a piece of cake—

  His left shoulder banged against the hard wall of the pit— this was the crucial moment when he would really find out whether the damn thing was properly anchored, as he raised his right foot to find the next rung.

  It was holding—his foot found the rung—

  He was going to get out of the pit—

  More of the debris from above cascaded down on him. But one more stretch, and he would be at ground-level again—out of the man-trap at last.

  The rope-ladder gave way not quite in the same instant of time when the tremendous concussive bang exploded above him: he was already in mid-air, falling backwards, when the sound of it enveloped him, so that in the moment he had no understanding of where the sound came from—above, or below, or inside—

  Then he was on his back, bouncing off the wreckage which cushioned his fall for half another instant, until his head hit the chalk wall behind him, starting another explosion inside his head to mingle with the echoes of the explosion outside—

  He came back to full consciousness in a matter of seconds, but into total confusion: he was aware only that he had threshed about wildly, half-stunned and enmeshed equally in panic and the rope-ladder, which had followed him down into the pit, twining round him like a living thing in the darkness.

  Yet it was the awareness—the understanding that he was still alive—which created the confusion. His head hurt, but it hurt high up at the back, where it had struck the wall of the pit: it didn’t hurt because it had been blown to pieces by that shot from above. That shot—?

  But, anyway, there was no sound from above now. The echoes of the explosion and the ringing in his ears had both died away into an unnatural silence.

  Yet he wasn’t dead—he could move his legs and his arms and his hands and his fingers—he could feel the leaves and branches beneath him, and he could hear them rasp and crunch beneath him … against that other silence—

  God damn! It hadn’t been a shot at all—there was no one up there, above him. God damn!

  He shook the blasphemy from his head and sat up, fumbling in his pocket for his torch.

  Of course there were other pits like this—other man-traps waiting for their quarry. But they couldn’t cover all of them, so they had rigged up a trap-within-a-trap: the convenient rope-ladder offering its help to any thinking animal which might fall into the pit by day or night… Only the other end of the ladder wasn’t anchored at all—it was simply attached to some sort of explosive device, set in the same fashion as a trip-flare, but attached in this case to a warning maroon which would betray the intelligent prisoner as soon as he put his full weight on it.

  Benedikt ground his teeth in anger with himself—and with Audley—Colonel Butler had warned him that Audley would be tricky—and then with Colonel Butler, and everyone from Herzner at the Embassy—just a little job for Colonel Butler, Captain Schneider—to Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and Benje’s Dad … and even Thomas Wiesehöfer—

  Thomas Wiesehöfer—

  Now they would be coming, summoned by that ear-splitting warning— and coming quickly—

  Still no sound from above.

  He brushed the dirt from his face. There was an egg on the back of his head which was tender to the touch of his fingertips—and … and a slightly raised contusion on his cheekbone, where the lump of chalk had hit him: it even boasted a sticky crater where the chalk had cut into his flesh—

  But there was no more time for thought: someone was coming—he could hear voices—

  “Help!” shouted Thomas Wiesehöfer, lost on his evening stroll in a foreign country and trapped in an incomprehensible pit.

  And now there was light as well as sound above—and he must get rid of his own tell-tale torch—

  “Help!” He stuffed the torch under the debris beneath him, and stood up on top of it, steadying himself on the nearest wall. “Help!” He achieved a note of desperation which was too close to the truth for comfortable analysis.

  The light intensified, finally shiningdown directly into his eyes.

  “Grüss Gott!” exclaimed Thomas Wiesehöfer fervently. “Please! I haff fallen into—into this place—this hole in the ground! Please to help me—I am wounded and bleeding.”

  The beam of the torch explored him.

  “Please to help me!” appealed Thomas Wiesehöfer.

  There was a pause above.

  “Please—”

  “It’s that bloody Jerry.” The voice ignored his appeal.

  “What?” Another voice.

  “That Jerry—from this afternoon … the one that was nosing around … the one that was in the Bells.”

  “What?” A second light entered the pit, fixing itself on Thomas Wiesehöfer. “You’m right.”

  “Please!” Thomas Wiesehöfer was running out of steam.

  “What’ll us do with ‘im, then?” The rich country voice behind the second torch also ignored his appeal.

  “Knock the bugger on the ‘ead an’ fill in the bloody ‘ole, I would, if I ’ad my way,” said the first speaker uncompromisingly.

  “Looks like someone’s already given ‘im one for starters. See ’is face there?”

  “Ah, I see’d it. Must ‘a done that when ’e went in. Serve ‘im right!” The first speaker was clearly unmoved by the state of their captive’s appearance. “Serve the bugger right!”

  Thomas Wiesehöfer decided to get angry. “You up there— do you not hear me? I haff fallen in this hole—you will help me out at once, please!”

  “Arr! So you fell into the ‘ole, did you now, Mister?” The first speaker echoed him unsympathetically. “An’ what was you doin‘ out ’ere in the first place, eh?”

  “Poachin‘ on the Old Squire’s land, that’s Miss Becky’s now, mebbe?” The second speaker chuckled grimly. “Bloody foreigner—poachin’ on Miss Becky’s land! This’ll learn ‘im, then!”

  “What?” They were playing with him, the swine! “I do not understand—?”

  “Arr? Nor you don’t, don’t you?” The first speaker chipped in. “Well then … you just bide where you are, Mister—you just bide there—see?” The torch flashed out. “Keep clear of anyone we catches, is what they said—just make sure they stays where they are ‘til we can cast an eye on ’em—so that’s what us’ll do.”

  They? Damn them!

  “You down there—” the words descended through the darkness, which was once again complete “—I got a 12-bore an‘ I knows how to use it. So you stay quiet then … understand?”

  Benedikt suddenly understood all too well. If the situation in the Chase was as Colonel Butler had believed it to be … and everything which had happened to him confirmed that now beyond all doubt … then this trap had been built for a very dangerous animal, and the night-guards would have been warned to take no chances with it. Of course, being the amateurs they were, they had forgotten half their instructions immediately and had taken a careless look at their catch, chattering like monkeys; but now native caution had reasserted itself, edged with apprehension.

  So … however Thomas Wiesehöfer might have reacted to that threat in all his injured innocence, Benedikt Schneider wasn’t about to argue with a shot-gun in the hands of a nervous peasant. Even the prospect of crossing swords at a disadvantage with Audley was to be preferred to that: here in England, with Colonel Butler as his last resort (however humiliating that might be, and more so than his p
resent predicament), he could survive failure there. But a shot-gun was something else, and there would be no surviving that.

  So … better to use what time he had to compose himself, and to rehearse the Wiesehöfer story, weak though it was.

  Audley wouldn’t believe it, of course. But that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t accept it, if he judged the risk of turning the mysterious Wiesehöfer loose more acceptable than detaining him, which carried the equal risk of alerting whoever had sent him to—

  No. That was wishful thinking, because the risks weren’t equal—because he already knew too much about the Chase’s defences.

  So Audley must detain him … at least so long as he stuck to his Wiesehöfer cover … until the real target came into sight.

  Therefore, at the right moment, he would have to abandon Wiesehöfer for Schneider, in the role Colonel Butler had prepared for just such an emergency—

  Benedikt frowned in the darkness as the thought struck him that Colonel Butler might have reckoned all along that his tricky Dr David Audley would catch him. In which case—

  His ears, attuned to the slightest variation in the pattern of occasional sounds from above, caught something different, diverting him from further contemplation of the idea that Colonel Butler might have been playing a deeper game: someone else was whispering up there—but stretching his hearing to its limits he still couldn’t make out individual words, only the contrast of the new sound with the gravelly undertones of the two countrymen—it was softer, almost liquid …it was a sound which, if amplified, would become a clear, high-pitched cry, where theirs would become an Anglo-Saxon bellow.

  “Well now, let’s be seeing you then!”

  A light shone into Benedikt’s face, blinding him again. But it came from a different direction—the light came from one side of the pit, the voice from the other.

  “Easy now!” The voice tightened as Benedikt raised on£ hand to shade his eyes. “Let’s be seeing the other hand then, if you please! Because there’s a gun on you—slowly now—and I wouldn’t like for it to go off.”