As I fell out of my enemies’ sight I scrabbled to get a grip on the doubled rope to soak up some of its impact, and I also twisted around so that my belly and not my spine would take the force of the line’s tightening. The rope snaked above me and I had a sudden terror that the line must have come free from the stump. I was certain I must have fallen more than the six feet I had bargained for, but then, abruptly, and with a sickening shock, the rope snapped taut. Being nylon, the doubled line stretched, but still the force was worse than a kick to the belly. I had been screaming as I fell, but the wrench of rope in my belly drove the wind clean out of me so that my tormented dying shriek was abruptly and very convincingly choked off.
In the sudden silence the rifle clattered and banged its way to the bottom of the quarry.
I struck the cliff, swung, hit the rock again, then hung motionless. I dangled like a dead thing hooked in the gut and strung up to be voided of blood. Except I was alive, and I was hurting. I felt as if the rope had ripped my stomach muscles clean out. I wanted to be sick. My vision had sheeted red and I was choking, but I dared not make a sound, or else my enemies would know I was alive and would climb down the cliff to kill me.
So I hung, and I choked back the sobs as I tried to drag a desperate breath into my aching lungs. I could hear nothing except the thumping of blood in my ears and a small, slight whimpering noise that I suddenly knew was coming from my bile-sour throat, so I clamped my mouth shut.
Then, from above me, the man in the yellow headband whooped in joyous triumph. “Way to go! Did you see that? Oh, shit! That sucker just learned to fly! Fuckin’ A!”
The sucker was trying to find a grip on the cliff face. I had levered myself upright by pulling on the taut rope. Then I felt with the tips of my boots until I discovered the small ledge beneath me and, by pushing up with my toes on that ledge, I was able to take some of the weight off the rope that was threatening to cut me in two. I managed to take in a deep and tentative breath. The absence of any sharp pain in my chest persuaded me that at least no ribs were broken, but I still feared I might have torn some muscles. The pain was excruciating, but I had to ignore it because I needed to get down to the floor of the small abandoned quarry before either Lisl or the triumphant man thought to clamber down the upper cliff to search for my corpse.
I found a finger hold for my left hand, then untied one of the bowlines. I was unsupported now and a slip on the wet rock would finish what my enemies thought they had already accomplished. I tried not to think of the void below as, slowly and agonisingly, I lowered myself until I could get a finger hold on the ledge with my right hand. I looked for holds lower down, but the rain and the hurt were blurring my vision and I dared not wait for my sight to clear. Trusting that the holds were there, I pulled the long rope free. It came reluctantly, constantly snagging on some obstruction on the upper ledge, and once it stuck so hard that I thought I might need to use my rigging knife to cut myself free, but I gave the line one last hard, smooth tug and it slithered loose. I dared not pull too hard or fast for fear that the sudden movement in the ledge’s foliage would betray my continued existence. Nor did I dare leave the rope in place in case my enemies explored the ledge. I could hear nothing from the cliff top.
The end of the rope at last fell over the rim of the quarry and collapsed on me. I let the rope dangle from my waist as I edged downward with only my toes and fingers touching the wall. The rock wall was sheeted with running water. My fingers were numb. Blood was seeping from a cut on my left hand.
I looked down, blinking my eyes to clear my vision, and I could just see the stock of my fallen rifle showing at the edge of a bush. If it had fallen another four feet to the right it would have plunged into the small pool. The rest of the quarry floor was thickly covered with scrub and my immediate concern was to reach that shelter undiscovered. A stone fell from above, suggesting that one of my enemies was scrambling down the upper and easier cliff face to make certain I was dead. I looked left and saw no quick route down to the quarry floor, then I looked right and saw, just four feet away, a buttress of rock that resembled an oversized and crooked drainpipe clinging to the quarry’s face. I made a desperate lunge, risking the emptiness below, and somehow gripped the top of the buttress, then half fell and half shimmied down to the base of the wall. The pain was making me gasp. I knew I was going too fast, and that I risked making a terrible noise as I crashed into the shrubbery on the quarry’s floor, but when I tried to slow my descent I only ripped the skin off my right palm. My boots juddered on the rock, then branches whipped at me, and, gasping and whimpering, I rolled off the rock onto a pile of stones that were covered by a thick umbrella of beech scrub. I felt a horribly sharp blow on my left wrist, and heard a distinct snapping noise at the same instant, but I dared not move to investigate the damage.
Instead I lay like a dead man. I was winded and bruised, but I was making neither noise nor movement. I hurt all over; I hurt so much that it was impossible to distinguish any particular pain in my left wrist, and thus tell if it was broken. I kept my eyes tightly closed, as though to open them would reveal unwilling news about my injuries. Rain smashed into the leaves above me, gurgled down stone gullies around me, and hissed on the black pool behind me. Chunks of stone were cascading down the cliff, evidently dislodged by my pursuers as they scrambled down to the ledge. I was sure they would not risk the climb to the quarry floor. They merely wanted some confirmation that I was indeed dead and, even if they could not see me, they would surely assume from the stillness and silence at the bottom of the pit that I had fallen to my death.
I waited. The stones stopped bouncing and falling. At last, faint through the rain, I heard Lisl’s voice way above me. “Is that his gun?”
“Yeah.”
Silence again.
“Perhaps he fell in the pool?” Lisl again.
“The sucker couldn’t fly, and the sucker sure couldn’t swim after that fall. In fact, if you think about it, that sucker isn’t much fucking good for anything anymore!” The bearded man laughed.
I counted a minute, then another, then a third. I counted to twenty minutes, and still I did not move. Nor did I hear any movement above me, but I had to assume that my enemies might have the patience to outwait me. I counted a further twenty minutes, marking the seconds with a childish chant I had learned as a Sea Scout — one coconut, two coconut, three coconut, and so on up to sixty coconuts, then back to the first coconut again. And I remembered the damp hut where as a boy I had been taught bowlines and sheepshanks and the rudiments of seamanship, and then I started counting off another coconut-marked minute of my life. Surely they had abandoned me for dead by now? Yet still I waited. The rain was remorseless, and I lay under its chill onslaught for a full hour before, bruised and cramped and cold and wet and hurting, I slowly rolled over and stared upward.
The skyline was empty.
I could hear an engine throbbing somewhere in the distance. It was too deep a throb to be one of the motorbikes and too heavy a sound for the tractor I had seen, and I wondered if the Genesis community kept a generator in the old mine buildings.
I stood. It took me a long time, because I ached all over. No one responded to the rustle of leaves and the clatter of stones dislodged by my boots as I struggled upright. It seemed I was alone and, for the moment, at least, safe.
I looked fearfully at my left wrist only to discover that it was my expensive wristwatch that had taken the full force of the blow and had been broken beyond repair. I took it off and tossed it into the black pool.
My stomach was still a belt of agony. The pain lessened if I bent double so, crouching like Quasimodo, I forced my way through the undergrowth to retrieve the rifle. It seemed undamaged, but I dared not fire a shot to test it. At the seaward side of the quarry was a smaller rock face, no more than twenty feet high, that formed the outer wall of the small excavation. It was hard to climb, and even harder because of the pain in my stomach muscles, but I inched my way up and at last I hooked an elbow over the crest and could stare down into the Desolate Straits.