I think I saw a light from the direction of the monastery; then either it went out or the mist hid it again. You know what I'm saying. They might have seen us.
He wasn't simply a hunter out for game; he'd seen enough of me to know I was human, a biped.
Hammer blow and rock splinters fluting through the air and I moved now and very fast while he was reloading and taking aim again: it was the only chance because the bullet had tugged at my dark woollen helmet and I'd heard the whine of its passage and if I went on lying there he'd put the next one into the back of my head. Scuttling like a crab, looking for lower ground, the stones scattering from under my hands and knees and boots, my breathing desperate and my eyes darting for shadow as his gun coughed again and rock chipped close to my face and a splinter cut into my cheek: I was in his sights and if I lay still he'd steady the aim and make the kill so I kept moving, sliding across shale and dragging my own weight forward with hands like claws, hooking at the ground and tearing stones away and hooking again as fast as I could while he was reloading and taking aim and the gun coughed and my leg twitched to the tug of the bullet and I got up and ran low, dodging from cover to cover in the few seconds he'd need to reload, now drop, there's a chance here and there's shadow.
Sweat running on me. Lie still.
Time slowing.
My eyes were shut, because death is a kind of sleep and I'd composed myself; then after a while they opened again without my willing them; I was aware of the stones in front of my face, and a tuft of grass where a small green spider was clinging, and the bright copper bullet. It had ricocheted and fallen well ahead of me as I'd made my run, and I picked it up; it had mushroomed a little after hitting something soft, perhaps a tree bole, but it still had the look of a 6 or 7mm projectile, long in proportion to its diameter and designed for high velocity at long range, with enough mass to counteract wind bucking; it was still warm from the friction of its impact, and nestled comfortably in my fingers, more comfortably than it would have nestled in my brain.
He was a confident man, and trained; this bullet wasn't from a hunter's gun: he was a professional marksman, a technician in death-dealing capable of placing one of these copper artifacts into the body of any man of Tung's choosing: a president, a general, an ambassador. Or into mine.
Blood on the stones from my ripped cheek, not black in the moonlight as hers had been, but crimson in the sun. I turned three of the stones over and picked up three more and went on, crawling towards a group of boulders where the sun threw shadow from the east as I noted incidentally that I was still alive, and must therefore be out of sight here. I left the three bloodied stones in my track and turned at right angles, moving for deeper shadow and at last turning to face the way I'd come, my back propped against a rock and my eyes narrowed to reduce their reflected light.
There was the mountain, and the encircling ridge, and a mass of rock below it where some ancient slide had tumbled it towards the foothills. I kept perfectly still now, moving only my eyes, because he should be there somewhere and I wanted to see him, or at least see the place where he was; I'd taken a risk in turning round to face him, and I wanted to profit. I was taking a risk now, even in keeping still, because if I could see him, or the place where he was, he could see me, or the shadow where I was sitting. But it was no good my trying to run from him blindly through these rocks; I could run into his fire whenever I changed direction. I had to know where he was, so that I could move accordingly, putting rock after rock across his line of vision until I was out of range and could wait for night.
"There isn't much of a choice," Ferris had told me in my final briefing. "There's only one man we want, and we can send only one man in to get him. London's quite adamant about risking innocent life, and there could be fifty monks at the monastery who know nothing about him except that he's asked for shelter."
The shadows up there were longer, vertically, as the sun climbed on the far side. Two birds were circling, predators, towards the north; so he wouldn't be there; they wouldn't have liked the noise of his rifle. There was an area of low bush nearer the south, and I watched it carefully for minutes because a man can miss his footing on a loose rock and disturb foliage. I couldn't hope to pick up the glint of his scope sight, if he was using one; the only reflection would come from the sides of the gun, at obtuse angles, because the sun was somewhere behind him.
"What we want you to do," Ferris had told me in the air-conditioned room at the Air Force base, "is to reach Tung and talk to him."
Through the slits in my lids I traversed the pupils from left to right and back, left to right, covering the rocks below the ridge and moving down each time, from left to right. If he moved I would see him, at this distance; and he'd have no qualms about leaving cover: the most I'd have on me would be a revolver.
"We want to know Tung's motives in the two assassinations. We want to know if there are further killings planned, and who the victims are to be."
Something was moving among the shadows of the rocks, halfway up the slope to the ridge; the disturbance in the pattern of light and shade was so slight that I could detect it only at the periphery of my vision where the receptors sought only movement, not form. He was in that area somewhere, so it wouldn't be an animaclass="underline" all wildlife would have left his environment, slinking or burrowing or flying up, long before now. I watched the movement, closing my eyes at intervals to rest them.
"We know Tung has got a short-wave radio transceiver," Ferris had told me, "but we can't find his wavelength; otherwise we could have parleyed with him. Any attempt to put a chopper down at the monastery would risk the lives of the crew, and that would only be acceptable if we asked for help from NATO. The assassination of the American Ambassador has gained us certain facilities affordable to us by the US Air Force, though not of combat status; we believe Tung Kuo-feng may have ordered the death of the Ambassador and we'd like to stop him ordering further — possibly American — deaths."
The movement had stopped, but now I could detect form: the head and one shoulder of a man, with the glint of a reflection where the crook of his right arm would be; it looked more like a skull than a living head, and it took me a moment to realise that the dark eye sockets were in fact sunglasses; there was no reflection from them because the sun was behind him. He was facing in this direction, watching me as I was watching him. The distance was perhaps a thousand yards and he was some hundred feet higher than I was, dominating the environment with the muzzle of his gun.
But now I knew where he was, and what I would have to do.
"So the US Air Force has agreed to overfly the monastery by night, and drop you and the guide. It's the only access we've got for you. Your objective is to reach Tung Kuo-feng and talk to him. London knows he has an overall plan, of which the two political assassinations were components. We want to know what that plan is."
The man with the sunglasses was still watching me with his rifle at rest; if I moved he'd have ample time to bring it into the aim. I proved this as an exercise: I picked up a stone the size of a fist and lobbed it into the full sunlight and within two seconds of its falling a bullet smashed into the rock just above it and dropped inert to the ground, smoking. It would be too hot to pick up, though I didn't need to examine it to know that the copper nose was flattened by the dead-angle impact, because of its force; even a.22 can push a bullet a mile away but at the end of its flight it has no more velocity than a tossed pebble; the long-range rifle is designed to produce a very high remaining velocity and that one over there could put a projectile through a man's body at. More than a thousand yards.