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 dummy1
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 dummy1
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 dummy1
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 sour, 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!
dummy1
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—
dummy1
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—?