Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

‘Just ready,’ said Elin.

I climbed in and sat down. Sitting in that confined space gave a comforting illusion of protection, but that’s all it was – an illusion. For the second time I wished the Land-Rover had been an armoured car. From where I was sitting I could inspect the slopes of the ridge without being too obvious about it and I made the most of the opportunity.

Nothing moved among those red and grey rocks. Nobody stood up and waved or cheered. If anyone was still up there he was keeping as quiet as a mouse which, of course, was the correct thing to do. If you pump a bullet at someone you’d better scrunch yourself up small in case he starts shooting back.

But was anybody still up there? I rather thought there was. Who in his right mind would shoot a hole in the tyre of a car and then just walk away? So he was still up there, waiting and watching. But if he was still there why hadn’t he nailed me? It didn’t make much sense – unless he was just supposed to immobilize me.

I stared unseeingly at Elin who was topping up a jar with sugar. If that was so, then Kennikin had men coming in from both sides. It wouldn’t be too hard to arrange if he knew where I was – radio communication is a wonderful thing. That character up on the ridge would have been instructed to stop me so that Kennikin could catch up; and that meant he wanted me alive.

I wondered what would happen if I got into the driving seat and took off again. The odds were that another bullet would rip open another tyre. It would be easier this time on a sitting target. I didn’t take the trouble to find out – there was a limit to the number of spare tyres I carried, and the limit had already been reached.

Hoping that my chain of reasoning was not too shaky I began to make arrangements to get out from under that gun. I took Lindholm’s cosh from under the mattress where I had concealed it and put it into my pocket, then I said, ‘Let’s go and … ’ My voice came out as a hoarse croak and I cleared my throat. ‘Let’s have coffee outside.’

Elin looked up in surprise. ‘I thought we were in a hurry.’

‘We’ve been making good time,’ I said. ‘I reckon we’re far enough ahead to earn a break. I’ll take the coffee pot and the sugar; you bring the cups.’ I would have dearly loved to have taken the carbine but that would have been too obvious; an unsuspecting man doesn’t drink his coffee fully armed.

I jumped out of the rear door and Elin handed out the coffee pot and the sugar jar which I set on the rear bumper before helping her down. Her right arm was still in the sling but she could carry the cups and spoons in her left hand. I picked up the coffee pot and waved it in the general direction of the ridge. ‘Let’s go over there at the foot of the rocks.’ I made off in that direction without giving her time to argue.

We trudged over the open ground towards the ridge. I had the coffee pot in one hand and the sugar jar in the other, the picture of innocence. I also had the sgian dubh tucked into my left stocking and a cosh in my pocket, but those didn’t show. As we got nearer the ridge a miniature cliff reared up and I thought our friend up on top might be getting worried. Any moment from now he would be losing sight of us, and he might just lean forward a little to keep us in view.

I turned as though to speak to Elin and then turned back quickly, glancing upwards as I did so. There was no one to be seen but I was rewarded by the glint of something – a reflection that flickered into nothing. It might have been the sun reflecting off a surface of glassy lava, but I didn’t think so. Lava doesn’t jump around when left to its own devices – not after it has cooled off, that is.

I marked the spot and went on, not looking up again, and we came to the base of the cliff which was about twenty feet high. There was a straggly growth of birch; gnarled trees all of a foot high. In Iceland bonsai grow naturally and I’m surprised the Icelanders don’t work up an export trade to Japan. I found a clear space, set down the coffee pot and the sugar jar, then sat down and pulled up my trouser leg to extract the knife.

Elin came up. ‘What are you doing?’

I said, ‘Now don’t jump out of your pants, but there’s a character on the ridge behind us who just shot a hole in that tyre.’

Elin stared at me wordlessly. I said, ‘He can’t see us here, but I don’t think he’s worried very much about that. All he wants to do is to stop us until Kennikin arrives – and he’s doing it very well. As long as he can see the Land-Rover he knows we aren’t far away.’ I tucked the knife into the waistband of my trousers – it’s designed for a fast draw only when wearing a kilt.

Elin sank to her knees. ‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m positive. You don’t get a natural puncture like that in the side wall of a new tyre.’ I stood up and looked along the ridge. ‘I’m going to winkle out that bastard; I think I know where he is.’ I pointed to a crevice at the end of the cliff, a four-foot high crack in the rock. ‘I want you to get in there and wait. Don’t move until you hear me call – and make bloody sure it is me.’

‘And what if you don’t come back?’ she said bleakly.

She was a realist. I looked at her set face and said deliberately, ‘In that case, if nothing else happens, you stay where you are until dark, then make a break for the Land-Rover and get the hell out of here. On the other hand, if Kennikin pitches up, try to keep out of his way – and do that by keeping out of sight.’ I shrugged. ‘But I’ll try to get back.’

‘Do you have to go at all?’

I sighed. ‘We’re stuck here, Elin. As long as that joker can keep the Land-Rover covered we’re stuck. What do you want me to do? Wait here until Kennikin arrives and then just give myself up?’

‘But you’re not armed?’

I patted the hilt of the knife. ‘I’ll make out. Now, just do as I say.’ I escorted her to the cleft and saw her inside. It can’t have been very comfortable; it was a foot and a half wide by four feet high and so she had to crouch. But there are worse things than being uncomfortable.

Then I contemplated what I had to do. The ridge was seamed by gullies cut by water into the soft rock and they offered a feasible way of climbing without being seen. What I wanted to do was to get above the place where I had seen the sudden glint. In warfare – and this was war – he who holds the high ground has the advantage.

I set out, moving to the left and sticking close in to the rocks. There was a gully twenty yards along which I rejected because I knew it petered out not far up the ridge. The next one was better because it went nearly to the top, so I went into it and began to climb.

Back in the days when I was being trained I went to mountain school and my instructor said something very wise. ‘Never follow a watercourse or a stream, either uphill or downhill,’ he said. The reasoning was good. Water will take the quickest way down any hill and the quickest way is usually the steepest. Normally one sticks to the bare hillside and steers clear of ravines. Abnormally, on the other hand, one scrambles up a damned steep, slippery, waterworn crack in the rock or one gets one’s head blown off.

The sides of the ravine at the bottom of the ridge were about ten feet high, so there was no danger of being seen. But higher up the ravine was shallower and towards the end it was only about two feet deep and I was snaking upwards on my belly. When I had gone as far as I could I reckoned I was higher than the sniper, so I cautiously pushed my head around a pitted chunk of lava and assessed the situation.

Far below me on the track, and looking conspicuously isolated, was the Land-Rover. About two hundred feet to the right and a hundred feet below was the place where I thought the sniper was hiding. I couldn’t see him because of the boulders which jutted through the sandy skin of the ridge. That suited me; if I couldn’t see him then he couldn’t see me, and that screen of boulders was just what I needed to get up close.

But I didn’t rush at it. It was in my mind that there might be more than one man. Hell, there could be a dozen scattered along the top of the ridge for all I knew! I just stayed very still and got back my breath, and did a careful survey of every damned rock within sight.

Nothing moved, so I wormed my way out of cover of the ravine and headed towards the boulders, still on my belly. I got there and rested again, listening carefully. All I heard was the faraway murmur of the river in the distance. I moved again, going upwards and around the clump of boulders, and now I was holding the cosh.

I pushed my head around a rock and saw them, fifty feet below in a hollow in the hillside. One was lying down with a rifle pushed before him, the barrel resting on a folded jacket; the other sat farther back tinkering with a walkie-talkie. He had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth.

I withdrew my head and considered. One man I might have tackled – two together were going to be tricky, especially without a gun. I moved carefully and found a better place from which to observe and where I would be less conspicuous – two rocks came almost together but not quite, and I had a peephole an inch across.

The man with the rifle was very still and very patient. I could imagine that he was an experienced hunter and had spent many hours on hillsides like this waiting for his quarry to move within range. The other man was more fidgety; he eased his buttocks on the rock on which he was sitting, he scratched, he slapped at an insect which settled on his leg, and he fiddled with the walkie-talkie.

At the bottom of the ridge I saw something moving and held my breath. The man with the rifle saw it, too, and I could see the slight tautening of his muscles as he tensed. It was Elin. She came out of cover from under the cliff and walked towards the Land-Rover.

I cursed to myself and wondered what the hell she thought she was doing. The man with the rifle settled the butt firmly into his shoulder and took aim, following her all the way with his eye glued to the telescopic sight. If he pulled that trigger I would take my chances and jump the bastard there and then.

Elin got to the Land-Rover and climbed inside. Within a minute she came out again and began to walk back towards the cliff. Half-way there she called out and tossed something into the air. I was too far away to see what it was but I thought it was a packet of cigarettes. The joker with the rifle would be sure of what it was because he was equipped with one of the biggest telescopic sights I had ever seen.

Elin vanished from sight below and I let out my breath. She had deliberately play-acted to convince these gunmen that I was still there below, even if out of sight. And it worked, too. The rifleman visibly relaxed and turned over and said something to the other man. I couldn’t hear what was said because he spoke in low tones, but the fidget laughed loudly.

He was having trouble with the walkie-talkie. He extended the antenna, clicked switches and turned knobs, and then tossed it aside on to the moss. He spoke to the rifleman and pointed upwards, and the rifleman nodded. Then he stood up and turned to climb towards me.

I noted the direction he was taking, then turned my head to find a place to ambush him. There was a boulder just behind me about three feet high, so I pulled away from my peephole and dropped behind it in a crouch and took a firm hold of the cosh. I could hear him coming because he wasn’t making much attempt to move quietly. His boots crunched on the ground and once there was a flow of gravel as he slipped and I heard a muttered curse. Then there was a change in the light as his shadow fell across me, and I rose up behind him and hit him.

There’s quite a bit of nonsense talked about hitting men on the head. From some accounts – film and TV script writers – it’s practically as safe as an anaesthetic used in an operating theatre; all that happens is a brief spell of unconsciousness followed by a headache not worse than a good hangover. A pity it isn’t so because if it were the hospital anaesthetists would be able to dispense with the elaborate equipment with which they are now lumbered in favour of the time-honoured blunt instrument.

Unconsciousness is achieved by imparting a sharp acceleration to the skull bone so that it collides with the contents – the brain. This results in varying degrees of brain damage ranging from slight concussion to death, and there is always lasting damage, however slight. The blow must be quite heavy and, since men vary, a blow that will make one man merely dizzy will kill another. The trouble is that until you’ve administered the blow you don’t know what you’ve done.

I wasn’t in any mood for messing about so I hit this character hard. His knees buckled under him and he collapsed, and I caught him before he hit the ground. I eased him down and turned him so that he lay on his back. A mangled cigar sagged sideways from his mouth, half bitten through, and blood trickled from the cigar butt to show he had bitten his tongue. He was still breathing.

I patted his pockets and came upon the familiar hard shape, and drew forth an automatic pistol – a Smith & Wesson .38, the twin to the one I had taken from Lindholm. I checked the magazine to see if it was full and then worked the action to put a bullet into the breech.

The collapsed figure at my feet wasn’t going to be much use to anybody even if he did wake up, so I didn’t have to worry about him. All I had to do now was to take care of Daniel Boone – the man with the rifle. I returned to my peephole to see what he was doing.

He was doing precisely what he had been doing ever since I had seen him – contemplating the Land-Rover with inexhaustible patience. I stood up and walked into the hollow, gun first. I didn’t worry overmuch about keeping quiet; speed was more important than quietness and I reckoned he might be more alarmed if I pussyfooted around than if I crunched up behind him.

He didn’t even turn his head. All he did was to say in a flat Western drawl, ‘You forgotten something, Joe?’

I caught my jaw before it sagged too far. A Russian I expected; an American I didn’t. But this was no time to worry about nationalities – a man who throws bullets at you is automatically a bastard, and whether he’s a Russian bastard or an American bastard makes little difference. I just said curtly, ‘Turn around, but leave the rifle where it is or you’ll have a hole in you.’

He went very still, but the only part of him that he turned was his head. He had china-blue eyes in a tanned, narrow face and he looked ideal for type-casting as Pop’s eldest son in a TV horse opera. He also looked dangerous. ‘I’ll be goddamned!’ he said softly.

‘You certainly will be if you don’t take your hands off that rifle,’ I said. ‘Spread your arms out as though you were being crucified.’

He looked at the pistol in my hand and reluctantly extended his arms. A man prone in that position finds it difficult to get up quickly. ‘Where’s Joe?’ he asked.

‘He’s gone beddy-byes.’ I walked over to him and put the muzzle of the pistol to the nape of his neck and I felt him shudder. That didn’t mean much; it didn’t mean he was afraid – I shudder involuntarily when Elin kisses me on the nape of the neck. ‘Just keep quiet,’ I advised, and picked up the rifle.

I didn’t have time to examine it closely then, but I did afterwards, and it was certainly some weapon. It had a mixed ancestry and probably had started life as a Browning, but a good gunsmith had put in a lot of time in reworking it, giving it such refinements as a sculptured stock with a hole in it to put your thumb, and other fancy items. It was a bit like the man said, ‘I have my grandfather’s axe – my father replaced the blade and I gave it a new haft.’

What it had ended up as was the complete long-range assassin’s kit. It was bolt action because it was a gun for a man who picks his target and who can shoot well enough not to want to send a second bullet after the first in too much of a hurry. It was chambered for a .375 magnum load, a heavy 300 grain bullet with a big charge behind it – high velocity, low trajectory. This rifle in good hands could reach out half a mile and snuff out a man’s life if the light was good and the air still.

To help the aforesaid good hands was a fantastic telescopic sight – a variable-powered monster with a top magnification of 30. To use it when fully racked out would need a man with no nerves – and thus no tremble – or a solid bench rest. The scope was equipped with its own range-finding system, a multiple mounting of graduated dots on the vertical cross hair for various ranges, and was sighted in at five hundred yards.

It was a hell of a lot of gun.

I straightened and rested the muzzle of the rifle lightly against my friend’s spine. ‘That’s your gun you can feel,’ I said. ‘You don’t need me to tell you what would happen if I pulled the trigger.’

His head was turned sideways and I saw a light film of sweat coating the tan. He didn’t need to let his imagination work because he was a good craftsman and knew his tools enough to know what would happen – over 5,000 foot-pounds of energy would blast him clean in two.

I said, ‘Where’s Kennikin?’

‘Who?’

‘Don’t be childish,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask you again – where’s Kennikin?’

‘I don’t know any Kennikin,’ he said in a muffled voice. He found difficulty in speaking because the side of his face was pressed against the ground.

‘Think again.’

‘I tell you I don’t know him. All I was doing was following orders.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You took a shot at me.’

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘At your tyre. You’re still alive, aren’t you? I could have knocked you off any time.’

I looked down the slope at the Land-Rover. That was true; it would be like a Bisley champion shooting tin ducks at a fairground. ‘So you were instructed to stop me. Then what?’

‘Then nothing.’

I increased the pressure on his spine slightly. ‘You can do better than that.’

‘I was to wait until someone showed up and then quit and go home.’

‘And who was the someone?’

‘I don’t know – I wasn’t told.’

That sounded crazy; it was even improbable enough to be true. I said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘John Smith.’

I smiled and said, ‘All right, Johnny; start crawling – backwards and slowly. And if I see more than half an inch of daylight between your belly and the ground I’ll let you have it.’

He wriggled back slowly and painfully away from the edge and down into the hollow, and then I stopped him. Much as I would have liked to carry on the interrogation I had to put an end to it because time was wasting. I said, ‘Now, Johnny; I don’t want you to make any sudden moves because I’m a very nervous man, so just keep quite still.’

I came up on his blind side, lifted the butt of the rifle and brought it down on the back of his head. It was no way to treat such a good gun but it was the only thing I had handy. The gun butt was considerably harder than the cosh and I regretfully decided I had fractured his skull. Anyway, he wouldn’t be causing me any more trouble.

I walked over to pick up the jacket he had been using as a gun rest. It was heavy and I expected to find a pistol in the pocket, but the weight was caused by an unbroken box of rounds for the rifle. Next to the jacket was an open box. Both were unlabelled.

I checked the rifle. The magazine was designed to hold five rounds and contained four, there was one in the breech ready to pop off, and there were nineteen rounds in the opened box. Mr Smith was a professional; he had filled the magazine, jacked one into the breech, and then taken out the magazine and stuffed another round into it so he would have six rounds in hand instead of five. Not that he needed them – he had bust the tyre on a moving vehicle at over four hundred yards with just one shot.

He was a professional all right, but his name wasn’t Smith because he carried an American passport in the name of Wendell George Fleet. He also carried a pass that would get him into the more remote corners of Keflavik Naval Base, the parts which the public are discouraged from visiting. He didn’t carry a pistol; a rifleman as good as he usually despises handguns.

I put the boxes of ammunition into my pocket where they weighed heavy, and I stuck Joe’s automatic pistol into the waistband of my trousers, unloading it first so I didn’t do a Kennikin on myself. Safety catches are not all that reliable and a lot of men have ruined themselves for their wives by acting like a character in a TV drama.

I went to see how Joe was doing and found that he was still asleep and that his name wasn’t even Joe according to his passport. It turned out he was Patrick Aloysius McCarthy. I regarded him speculatively; he looked more Italian than Irish to me. Probably all the names were phoney, just as Buchner who wasn’t Graham turned out to be Philips.

McCarthy carried two spare magazines for the Smith & Wesson, both of them full, which I confiscated. I seemed to be building up quite an armoury on this expedition – from a little knife to a high-powered rifle in one week wasn’t doing too bad. Next up the scale ought to be a burp gun or possibly a fully-fledged machine-gun. I wondered how long it would take me to graduate to something really lethal, such as an Atlas ICBM.

McCarthy had been going somewhere when I thumped him. He had been trying to contact someone by radio, but the walkie-talkie had been on the blink so he’d decided to walk, and that put whoever it was not very far away. I stared up towards the top of the ridge and decided to take a look over the next rise. It was a climb of perhaps two hundred yards and when I poked my head carefully over the top I caught my breath in surprise.

The yellow US Navy helicopter was parked about four hundred yards away and two crewmen and a civilian sat in front of it, talking casually. I lifted Fleet’s rifle and looked at them through the big scope at maximum magnification. The crewmen were unimportant but I thought I might know the civilian. I didn’t, but I memorized his face for future reference.

For a moment I was tempted to tickle them up with the rifle but I shelved the idea. It would be better to depart quietly and without fuss. I didn’t want that chopper with me the rest of the way, so I withdrew and went back down the hill. I had been away quite a while and Elin would be becoming even more worried, if that were possible.

From where I was I had a good view along the track so I looked to see if Kennikin was yet in sight. He was! Through the scope I saw a minute black dot in the far distance crawling along the track, and I estimated that the jeep was about three miles away. There was a lot of mud along there and I didn’t think he’d be making much more than ten miles an hour, so that put him about fifteen minutes behind.

I went down the hillside fast.

Elin was squashed into the crack in the rock but she came out when I called. She ran over and grabbed me as though she wanted to check whether I was all in one piece and she was laughing and crying at the same time. I disentangled myself from her arms. ‘Kennikin’s not far behind; let’s move.’

I set out towards the Land-Rover at a dead run, holding Elin’s arm, but she dragged free. ‘The coffee pot!’

‘The hell with it!’ Women are funny creatures; this was not a time to be thinking of domestic economy. I grabbed her arm again and dragged her along.

Thirty seconds later I had the engine going and we were bouncing along the track too fast for either safety or comfort while I decided which potholes it would be safe to put the front wheels into. Decisions, decisions, nothing but bloody decisions – and if I decided wrongly we’d have a broken half-axle or be stuck in the mud and the jig would be up.

We bounced like hell all the way to the Tungnaá River and the traffic got thicker – one car passed us going the other way, the first we had seen since being in the Óbyggdir. That was bad because Kennikin was likely to stop it and ask the driver if he had seen a long wheelbase Land-Rover lately. It was one thing to chase me through the wilderness without knowing where I was, and quite another to know that I was actually within spitting distance. The psychological spur would stimulate his adrenal gland just that much more.