A man was launching himself from the shadow behind the seats, cosh raised. Kazan flung himself to one side. His tiny sleep gun spat once. The dart hit the man in the neck. Kazan parried the down-slashing arm, thrusting the man away from him with such force that he plummeted through the open hatchway. In that same moment, searing pain lashed the back of his bead. Count Kazan pitched forward, dazed.
The helicopter then lifted swiftly, sending him headlong against the strutting, thus completing his collapse.
He came out of the blackness slowly. The rush of cold air through the open hatch helped to revive him quickly, but Kazan was too old a hand to show he was awake. The pilot had to turn at an awkward angle before he could see Kazan, and this gave him plenty of warning; so Kazan took his time, inhaling deeply and letting the throbbing ache pass away. He glimpsed the terrain through the opening and was surprised to recognize the beaches and hills of Monte Carlo. He must have been unconscious for a long time.
Slowly he edged a few inches at a time to a position directly behind the pilot, making it almost impossible for the man to sight him quickly. But Gaston became suspicious. He glanced back, hefting a stubby automatic.
"Don't try anything," he warned. "I'm putting down in a few minutes. If we crash, you'll be killed first—I'll see to that."
Kazan fired once, then leapt, his hand a searing edge slashing across the back of Gaston's neck. The gun fired upwards. The bullet sped through the perspex canopy and pinged off one of the rotor blades.
The helicopter juddered and began to slip sideways, then dipped sharply earthwards. Kazan had to use all his supple strength to roll the senseless pilot clear of the controls and then fight the now dangerously sliding chopper. The whole frame juddered as the chipped rotor caused an uneven swing. He cut power as low as he dared and kept the machine dipping and sliding in slowly descending spirals. A forest passed beneath him––then miraculously a tiny apron of a landing site appeared on his port side.
The thought occurred to him that this was the very landing site for which Gaston had been aiming. Kazan shrugged.
After all, whoever was waiting would not know Gaston was not in control. The radio was off, and to ground watchers the chopper obviously was in trouble. He snatched vital seconds to secure the gun lying between the seats before he coasted the machine to a lop-sided landing and switched off. The helicopter scuttled sideways, hopping crab-like. The action shot Kazan out of the hatchway.
He landed, cat-like, rolled several times to give his body impetus and any marksman a difficult target, then scrabbled to his feet and raced for the trees. He went deep among them to a small clearing with paths leading across it and sat beside a bush, gulping in air. Once his breath was under control he pulled out his communicator and called up Paris H.Q.
"Channel D—Channel D. Hear me. Kazan, helicopter, in woods north about twenty kilometers from Monte Carlo. Chopper damaged. Am making my way to a road. Will contact when clear of woods." Suddenly he saw movements glinting among the trees. Movements from all sides of him. He watched them come closer and closer until they ringed him with a circle of shimmering metal-clad forms.
"Mon Dieu!" said Kazan. "Rush me also a can opener—I am surrounded by canned goods! Over and out."
CHAPTER FIVE: THE PLUS FACTOR
DARTMOOR rain has a quality all its own. There is Dartmoor fog, and Dartmoor mist, and Dartmoor haze. Low cloud sweeping over the tors often will provide a mixture of all four, giving areas of sheets of penetrating rain over the highest points. On the slopes these will produce a form of fog—actually a whitish shroud of miniscule moisture globules which lies on clothing, hair, beards or eyebrows in tiny quivering haloes.
In the depressions and hollows and over the rare level areas of ground this becomes a fairy mist—light, gossamer, and cruelly unreliable. It will caress you damply one minute, give a glowing effect around you, causing an illusion of sunshine about to burst through the clouds. The next minute you are lost and stumbling through a thick grey wall. Then, according to your proximity to a tor, the wind direction and force, it will speed away, allowing you to discover you should have been on a track somewhere else. As you hurry towards another path, thankful for deliverance, the fairy mist swoops up behind you, to again wrap you in its ghostie embrace.
You forge ahead in a straight line, not realizing that one of the most joyous results of being caught in it is that you immediately walk in a circle. You usually discover this when you sink oozily in a patch of bog, or break your leg in fissure or over a rock. For the walker caught on Dartmoor in such conditions there is one golden rule—don't. Don't walk, don't move. Stay put.
The so-called enlightened Victorians knew all about Dartmoor. They knew and appreciated its wild beauty, its sweep of purple-gold, undulating to the serene summer horizon. Here, a man could walk free with only the sky and the wheeling hawks above him, the heather beneath his feet, the shy ballet dance of gamboling sheep over the hillside, and the tumbling streams, fish-laden, joyously bubbling. Which is why they built a massive grey granite prison to house the most desperate of their criminals here on Dartmoor.
There are more houses now, but the prison still stands, the moors and quarries around it—an ugly, monstrous excrement of a monument to the glory of justice and retribution so beloved by those who built it. Occasionally some prisoners escape. A few have succeeded in breaking out of the moor itself, and reaching towns. But mostly they run from working parties outside the prison, seeking shelter in the fairy mist which proves to be a more unholy prison than the grey granite walls. Many are only too glad to be recaptured. Some die—lonely and afraid in the sibilant silence of the rain and mist—or lie wracked with pneumonia after falling into the river Dart—from which the moor is named—and slowly collapse in the shivering mist.
April Dancer had read a lot about Dartmoor. In her student days she had visited the prison as part of her studies on criminal codes, patterns and behaviors as well as to aid her work on a social science degree. She could, in fact, have told Dr. Karadin a lot about Dartmoor. She'd stayed in at least three of the villages and hiked over its tors from each direction, as she also had done on Exmoor—a northerly range of hills and moors edged by the Bristol Channel. So she wondered why Karadin and the obviously wealthy organization behind him had chosen a house on Dartmoor as a research base.
Remoteness, quietness, away from prying eyes and gossiping mouths—those were reasonable factors; but were offset by the conditions of climate, time taken to reach town centers and London, and the normal difficulties of provisioning and communications, for in the very bad winters many parts of Dartmoor are cut off. Yet, she reasoned, organizations calculate all factors and their decisions are reached on the plus factor. What was the plus factor of Moorfell? If her own hunch was right, the climate itself could be this plus factor.
For that matter, why England at all? Karadin was French. Wouldn't he know of many isolated places in France? April Dancer had not yet received sufficient proof that THRUSH was the organization back of Karadin, but there were pointers which made her feel it safer to assume that this—whatever it was—had all the mark of a THRUSH project. And THRUSH had the world to choose from. She didn't believe for one moment that research into air pollution was Dr. Karadin's sole purpose in England. The British were well aware of their own air-pollution problems. Still, they might welcome Karadin and grant him certain facilities—such as permits to obtain drugs or chemicals needed for research, or to smooth the way a little by allowing a helicopter to land and take off near his base.