Bannerman was relieved to make it to the railway line by the shore without causing himself any more injury than the bad bruising to his left knee caused when he had slipped and gone down heavily on it while negotiating one of the rock falls. He found a hollow to shelter in and had the soup from the Thermos, cupping both hands round the mug so as to make as much use of the heat as possible. The soup was followed by a Mars bar and a cigarette.
With his back against a rock, Bannerman propped his rucksack between his knees and got out the Geiger counter. MacLeod had also given him a few specimen containers which he could use to take soil samples back if necessary. He brought these out and stuffed them into one of his jacket pockets where they would be more readily accessible. He had already decided that the sensible thing to do would be to walk as far west along the shore as he intended to monitor and then turn round and carry out a slow sweep with the counter on the way back. That way he would have the wind behind him on the actual slow monitoring leg.
Making sure that all his zips and toggles were properly closed and tightened, he leaned forward, bowed his head and set off into the wind. He had barely gone a hundred metres when a sudden loud noise penetrated his hood and startled him so much that he lost his footing; he stumbled and fell to the ground. A freight train, which he hadn’t heard because of the wind, rolled past on the single-track line. Its driver looked out of the cab but did not acknowledge him.
Bannerman got slowly to his feet and watched the trucks trundle by. The train seemed to consist mainly of fuel wagons and empty hoppers on their way up to the quarry. Bannerman silently gave thanks that he hadn’t been walking on the line at the time. The locomotive would have hit him before he had heard it. He reached what he thought was a reasonable point to start working back from. If there had been any contamination of Inverladdie from the sea he would be bound to pick up signs of radioactivity in the four hundred metres or so of the shore that he planned to scan. He knelt down to take the lens cap off the Geiger counter’s sensor.
The cap was a bit tight because the cold had made the plastic hard and unyielding so he laid down the meter by his side while he wrestled with it. Suddenly the glass on the meter shattered and the whole box jumped up into the air. Bannerman looked at the instrument stupidly as if it had been subject to the attentions of a poltergeist. ‘What the …’ he exclaimed before realizing in a searing flash of panic what had really happened. A high velocity bullet had hit the Geiger counter! Someone had shot at him!
It seemed that his capacity to coordinate his limb movements was deserting him just when he needed it most. His arms and legs insisted on trying to behave independently as he half ran, half stumbled his way up the shore and over the railway line to tumble down into the first gulley that presented itself. It was his misfortune that it happened to have a puddle of water in the foot of it. There was a layer of ice on its surface but it gave way when he crashed down on it and he found himself kneeling in icy water. It was deep enough to cover his calf muscles and he felt them contract and threaten cramp in protest as he pressed his face to the muddy wall of his refuge.
As the seconds passed in silence, apart from the sound of his breathing, Bannerman became aware of the pain and discomfort afflicting him. These had been ignored as secondary considerations in his desperation to get out of sight of the gunman but now they screamed for his attention. He had come down heavily on his already bruised left knee and it was throbbing. Both his legs from the knees down had become numb with cold and his back was aching through holding himself against the wall of the gulley at an uncomfortable angle. He couldn’t stay like this for ever but, on the other hand, he would be a sitting target for the gunman if he broke cover.
Perhaps the gunman wasn’t there any more, thought Bannerman as what seemed like an eternity passed without any further shooting. His breathing quietened and he became aware of gulls wheeling above him in the wind. The analogy with vultures circling a dying man was inescapable, although he could only have been hiding for four or five minutes. His body was insisting that he move, so, very slowly, he edged himself up on the frozen mud wall and looked over the lip of the gulley. He was rewarded with a face full of grit as a bullet slammed into the ground less than a metre in front of him. He tumbled back down into the icy puddle and let out a cry of anguish as his injured knee took yet another knock.
Bannerman could hardly see through tears of frustration and pain but he fought to get a grip on himself and tried to consider his position as logically as he could in the circumstances. It was a crisis and he had to deal with it. At the time of the first bullet he had no idea where it had come from; the Geiger meter had just exploded and jumped up before his eyes. The second bullet had, however, given away the gunman’s position because of the way the grit had flown up from the impact point. His attacker was almost due west of him. Big deal, thought Bannerman cynically. The truth was that if his attacker wanted to come down and finish him off there and then there was nothing he could do to stop him. The question was, did he?
Bannerman looked at his watch and had cause to rue his disdain for modern digital watches and their shockproof, waterproof casings. His own stylish, traditional watch had stopped. The blob of water under the cover glass told him why. He swore, looked up at the sky and tried to guess the time. Somewhere around two in the afternoon, he reckoned. In a couple of hours it would start to get dark. That was his only hope of escape. But if he were to have any chance at all of getting out under cover of dark he would have to get himself out of the icy puddle and get his circulation going. At the moment hypothermia and frostbite seemed a more likely scenario than escape.
It occurred to Bannerman that his attacker might have had that in mind. If he were to die of exposure it would look like an accident. There would be no inconvenient bullet holes to be explained away. Was that the reason the gunman did not appear to be interested in advancing on him? Was his plan to keep him pinned down until nature took its course?
Bannerman put his theory to the test by raising himself cautiously, once more, to the rim of the gulley. He was rewarded with a bullet a couple of metres away. The sound of the report was no nearer and the direction of the grit spurt had not changed; the gunman hadn’t moved.
Survival against the elements was now the name of the game. He had to get through the next couple of hours as best he could and still be fit enough for a trek back to Inverladdie in darkness. As a start, he crawled along the bottom of the gulley and pulled himself out of the water and up on to a small rocky ledge where, if he kept himself bent over, he could still be out of sight of his attacker. With great difficulty he managed to loosen the straps of his rucksack with numb fingers and got out the unopened coffee Thermos. He removed the cap slowly so that he wouldn’t spill any and poured some steaming coffee into it. Each burning sip was like a life-giving transfusion.
As soon as he had finished, Bannerman took off his boots and peeled off his wet socks. He put them to one side and replaced them with his spare pair from the rucksack, then he emptied the water out of his boots and laced them back on. He spent the next few minutes massaging his calves vigorously until the circulation returned to his legs bringing with it an agonizing pain which made him throw his head back against the wall of the gulley and screw his face up tight until the pain began to subside.