But a moment later, as Shaw took aim on him, he steadied up.
Shaw saw the pin-point of fire as Rencke’s gun jerked and almost simultaneously he felt the agonizing thuds as the bullets took him. He rolled over on the ground with both his shoulders shattered. Then his right knee-cap disappeared, splintered into fragments by another heavy bullet. Rencke stopped shooting then, and through a mask of pain Shaw watched Ingrid take up the gun he himself had dropped when his shoulders went. Her face was hard and tight and very determined. She fired with cool deliberation, avoiding by a miracle the bullets the Swiss was now sending across again, and she got Rencke in his gun-hand. Dropping the gun, the Swiss turned and ran.
Ingrid looked down at Shaw. “Now,” she said, “I am going to disobey orders. I shall be back. Do not worry. I am going to kill Rencke.”
He licked at his lips, felt his blood soaking into the earth. There was nothing he could do to stop her or help her. The girl disappeared from his field of vision and he heard the shooting. With a desperate effort he rolled over, forcing his pain-filled body on to his stomach so that he could watch. The girl was going like the wind, her long-legged, supple body easily outrunning the heavy Swiss. Now she had picked up Rencke’s sub-machine-gun… and she was shooting expertly. She was shooting, not to kill Rencke— but to deflect him from his path through the gateway and to urge him the way she wanted him to go, worrying him with lead like a dog driving a flock of sheep into a pen.
At first Shaw didn’t understand and then something dawned and in amazement he turned his head, painfully, to look at the vast, drooping beam-plate.
That was the way the girl was driving Rencke! Maybe when the Swiss had taken her from the cell that night he had told her about the Mazurov Beam’s odd magnetic side-effect. Maybe he’d have done that to scare her. Maybe… Shaw’s thoughts were verging, he felt, on delirium… maybe a girl could be threatened with being loaded down with metal and sucked into that magnetic field. But now the boot was on the other foot… it wasn’t going to work, though. Rencke wasn’t made of metal… maybe Ingrid just had an idea the beam per se would be enough to kill Rencke.
Rencke, as it happened, didn’t need to be made of metal anyway.
Suddenly the great plate shifted, shifted as Shaw watched, moving with a jolt to lean farther over on the drooping stalk, and after that everything seemed to happen at once. The heavy wire fence was now within the field of the Mazurov Beam — and the beam was still very much
alive. The treble-banked barricade ripped from out of the earth and streamed raggedly towards the plate, which was already drawing metal particles from the fresh stretch of ground on which it was now concentrated. The barbs of the fence missed Ingrid by inches but they gathered up Rencke, who went over as if hit by a tank.
Shaw almost forgot his pain.
Rencke, wrapped now in a cocoon of barbs, was being carried through the air towards the plate, fast. He was completely helpless, like a baby, unable to do anything to stop himself. And he was screaming… he was screaming from sheer terror and from the excruciating agony of the tight-bound wire barbs and of the millions of minute metal particles that went flinging across the space and drove into and through his protesting body. The screaming didn’t last long, however; it ended very abruptly when those particles pierced Rencke’s skull and drove through his brain. He was pierced like a pincushion in every square centimetre of his flesh and bone and sinew, and when finally he embedded soggily in the metal growth on the plate, he was no more than a shredded, bloodied mass of trembling and very dead flesh that quickly vanished as more and more metal was collected.
Shaw lost consciousness then.
Ingrid, still carrying the gun loosely in her hands, came back to him and knelt by his side on the cold, bare ground. “Smith,” she said. “Oh, Smith.…” She kissed his dead-white cheeks. Now, at last, the Kurilean fog was rolling in — thick whorls of vapour that seemed to grow from the earth and the surrounding sea to lift in ghostly wreaths to the sky. In a few minutes Ingrid couldn’t see the plate or its stalk. She did what she could for Shaw and then she sat by his side and they waited there for the Americans to come.