‘You should have been nice,’ he said. ‘Could be you’ll live to regret that you weren’t. But I’m not promising.’
‘I think rape is precisely your style.’
She peeled off her protective underwear and stood before him wearing only her bra and panties. After the warmth of the water-heated underwear, the cold took her breath away. Only one thing was sustaining Swift. The suits had one major design limitation: Virtually the only way to have a pee was to take it off or go in the suit. To rape her Boyd would surely have to remove his own suit. That might be her only opportunity.
‘Come on,’ he growled. ‘The rest of it.’
Swift unfastened her bra and threw it onto the ground. Quickly she stepped out of her panties and, shivering, endured his penetrating gaze. She was sure now: The cold definitely had the edge. But there were maybe worse ways to die than cold. Surely it would be like going to sleep.
‘Nice,’ said Boyd. ‘Very nice indeed. You and me are going to have a little party. Now get down on your hands and knees and start praying that this cold doesn’t affect me, or I’m likely to kill you out of sheer frustration.’
She did as she was told. But straight away her eyes searched the ground for the gun.
‘Do you always blame the cold for your obvious inadequacies?’ she said through chattering teeth.
Boyd moved around the back of her and chuckled.
‘Keep talking. In just a few moments your ass is going to start paying me back for some of those smart remarks, lady. The more you say now, the more it’s going to hurt. And you better understand something right now. Giving hurt is what I get off on. So talk all you like, Swifty. But just keep your eyes on the ground.’
‘What’s the matter? Shy or something? You’re forgetting. I’m an anthropologist. I’ve seen an ape’s dick before.’
She trembled with fear and cold as she heard something thrown on the ground. It was the control unit for his suit. Then her heart gave a leap. The gun. She could see her gun. It was lying on a clump of flowering white sandwort, no more than five or six metres from her right hand, and looking for all the world like a gift from the fairies.
Boyd was laughing.
‘That’s it. Keep your Bogart coming, Swifty. I’ll be ready to get you warm again in a tick.’
She heard him wrestling with his backpack life support. Taking it off by yourself was like trying to take off a straitjacket. You needed to be almost double-jointed. Virtually the only way she had found of doing it easily was to lie down on the ground and lean hard onto her elbow to force her hand back over her shoulder as far as it would go. It was a lot easier simply to have someone help you.
Boyd cursed out loud as he reached the same conclusion.
It was Swift’s cue to run.
She was running before she had time to have second thoughts about her chances of surviving at low temperatures without clothing. But she had managed to grab the gun.
Instinctively she started to zigzag.
A couple of seconds later the tree beside her was pitted with small explosions of wood and sap as Boyd started firing from the hip.
She felt the freezing cold breeze on her bare breasts and limbs as, her heart thumping, she hurdled a fallen tree trunk and then took off at another tangent, sprinting through the trees. While she was running, it didn’t feel too cold. It was when she stopped that her problems would begin. Missing her footing she slipped, somersaulted, and like an expert marksman, stood up returning fire in the direction she had come from. The gun hardly flinched as it set about its task, for it seemed to Swift that she had very little to do except point the thing, and although she was hardly aware of pulling the trigger once, she fired eight shots in less time than it would have taken her to play a piano scale.
Expecting a volley of bullets to come after her, she took off again, ducking under branches, sidestepping trees, and all the time aware of the sulphurous smell of cordite, as if the air itself had been galvanized by the gunfire. The next second she was lying on her back, hearing another shot, and thinking she must have been hit until she looked above her ringing head and saw the branch of a tree sticking out like a tollgate. In her desperation to escape from Boyd she had run headfirst into the outstretched arm of the forest’s own Checkpoint Charlie.
She sat up and touched her head instinctively and found a Koh-i-noor-sized bump and a small trickle of blood. But recognizing the strong stink of the vegetation around her, she saw her little tunnel of rhododendrons and fallen trees again and quickly crawled inside.
Man’s oldest sanctuaries were natural woods. Hidden in the tunnel and lying on a bed of ferns. Swift felt safe enough to draw an ice-cold breath and lie in wait for him. She touched the bump on her head again and winced. Sanctuary had never felt so tender, or so bitterly cold. How long could she survive with only a bed of ferns to cover her naked body? Perhaps an hour or two at the most. Unless Boyd came looking for her, she was going to have to go looking for him or her clothes — or die of cold.
‘Come on, you bastard,’ she said, holding the gun at arm’s length along the ground in front of her.
Only the gun looked different now. The slide looked as if it had stuck, leaving the short barrel sticking out like a cigar’s end.
It took a moment or two for the meaning of the gun’s shape to pierce the shivering euphoria she felt at having escaped. The realization that she was out of ammunition chilled her to the bone. She was waiting to ambush a man with an empty gun. She must have emptied the whole magazine when she fell and returned fire.
‘Shit.’
Swift gouged the gun into the ground in sheer frustration and tried to think what to do next. Lie there and quickly freeze to death. Or surrender and hope that after he had used her he might let her live.
‘Fat chance of that,’ she muttered, and closed her eyes. The starkness of the choice facing her was followed by the perception that it would all be ended soon.
Advancing through the forest, Boyd tried to guess how many shots she had fired.
Upon leaving ABC he had handed Ang Tsering the.38-calibre Beretta he had used to kill Miles Jameson. The automatic had a double-action magazine containing ten rounds. Swift had fired another eight shots. So the question was, how many shots had Tsering fired before giving up his weapon, if any? He had to assume that she still had two shots at the most. Enough to make the hunt interesting. He hoped he would find her in time before she froze to death. Her body would be no good to him then.
His keen and experienced eyes soon picked out her trail. The occasional footprint in the snow. And the little pile of empty brass, like the droppings of some metallic animal, where she had stopped to fire back at him. Kneeling down, he collected the empty cases to make sure. Eight. If she had fired eight she might have fired her whole magazine out of plain fear. She was probably staring at an empty gun right now. She was probably near enough to hear him.
He stood up again, startling a pale-grey-and-white bird with a black head, which flew away with a loud flapping of wings. The noise almost cost him another bullet. It was just a snow pigeon.
‘I know you’re somewhere,’ he shouted. ‘Why don’t you come out and we can get it over with? If I have to come and find you, it’s going to be hard on your body. You hear me?’
He paused, ears straining for a reply, but there was only silence. Patiently, Boyd stood stock-still, as if he knew that something would soon give her away. He did not have to wait long.
Another bird, only this time running across the ground from a dense clump of trees and bushes, coming toward him, racing to escape someone else, and veering away from Boyd at the last moment.