He wasn't here yet.
He must be very close now.
The mountains were silent under the rising warmth of the morning; I would have expected more bird-life here; the sound of birds is reassuring, reminding of spring, when the world is new again and nothing can go wrong.
There was open terrain below, where my flying jacket had gone jerking through the air; he could make his approach from that direction in almost a straight line without any risk, even if I were armed. Cautious bastard.
So cautious, perhaps, that he was making a wide detour and climbing to higher ground; then he would be close enough to put one straight into me with great force, at close range.
Has there been any further signal from the executive?
No.
How long has it been?
Two and a half hours.
Do we write him off
Not yet. Not yet. Give me a chance.
The scent of the pines was heavy on the air as the day grew warmer. I wondered if you'd noticed it. Isn't it lovely? Safe under her stones and unafraid.
Something snapped and I jerked my head and stared at the rocks to my left, heart thudding and breath held as I waited.
Nothing there. Tree bark cracking in the warmth, or dead timber splitting.
Perhaps I should have tried making a break to the west, clambering through the tumbled rock and making a run for it across the open ground beyond, dodging like a hare while he tried to keep me centred in the sights.
Trickle of sweat; it had sprung from the skin when the sharp sound had come a minute ago. I wiped it away from my eyes and manned the peephole again and saw him.
He was standing perfectly still, looking at the marks on the ground; then in a moment he raised his head, gazing across the wall I had built, across the hidden glint of my eye. He looked like a Korean, young and athletic in a striped track suit and running shoes; the long Remington was slung at the horizontal in both hands, ready to swing up and fire.
I narrowed my eye until the lids were almost together, and watched him as his head turned slowly to note the stones of my wall, studying them for a while and then passing on. The distance between us was some hundred feet. He began moving again, his head going down to follow my tracks, and when he turned to his left, towards the ledge where I was waiting, I brought my eye down to the third peephole and watched him from there.
He stopped again, lifting his head and turning it by degrees to look around him, glancing across my shadowed eye and surveying the heights at my back. It was five or six minutes before he was satisfied; then he moved on again with his head lowered, until he saw the dark bloodspots I had left directly beneath the ledge; and now he stopped.
An hour ago I had brushed the ledge free of loose stones, and measured the distance from the rock wall to the edge; it was the distance necessary to give momentum for the leap. The time estimated was three seconds, but if I controlled my breathing he would see me before he heard me, and that wouldn't give him long enough to swing the gun up and take aim; he shouldn't see me for at least half the total estimated time: for at least one second and a half; and he would need more than that. It was a long rifle and weighed ten or eleven pounds and he'd have to swing it upwards against the inertia.
Of course he might move faster than I'd reckoned, and make use of the final half second before I was on him and blocking the swing of the gun. In that case I would drop straight against the muzzle and receive the shot at point blank range. The issue was unpredictable.
His head was still lowered and I took a slow breath and whipped the muscles into movement, clearing the edge and dropping with my feet going first. He probably died before he hit the ground because I kicked downwards with my right boot and felt its impact on the side of his neck: he was much slower than I'd estimated and had only got as far as turning his head to look upwards as his peripheral vision had warned him of the changing light factor. I heard the snap of his neck and was briefly aware of sequential images: the shine of the rifle barrel swinging; the gold-rimmed sunglasses hitting the ground and for an instant showing the reflection of his face before the lenses shattered against the stones; his body meeting its shadow and blotting it out.
I span full circle, breaking my fall with a shoulder roll and getting up as the two men on the track stopped dead and brought their revolvers into the aim.
20: March
Dead weight.
The sun was much higher now, its heat throbbing in the air. I had begun making an effort not to look at my watch.
Dead weight on my back.
If he had started from the monastery at the time we had made our drop, it had taken him two hours to reach the area where he'd begun hunting me. It was going to take longer than that for him to return; much longer.
The sun beat down on the three of us. Four of us. One on my back.
Sometimes the two men spoke to each other, a few short words in low tones that I didn't understand; but the tone of the human voice is a language in itself, and universal; and I knew they were talking about the man on my back; there was grief in their voices for him, and hate for the man who had murdered him. I suppose they felt it was rough poetic justice, making me carry his body.
One of them walked ahead, springing easily across the uneven rock in his cushioned track shoes while I laboured and stumbled under my burden; the other man followed me, and my back was already bruised from the prodding of the long rifle. Sweat trickled on me, stinging my eyes so that they watered all the time, making the flat grey rocks look like a stream bed in the wavering light. I would have said we'd been moving for three hours now, maybe rather less, because time dragged under the dead weight.
They had tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for half an hour; then one of them had raised his revolver to aim at the centre of my forehead and I'd looked down the barrel and begun counting, for something to do; but the other man had spoken to him sharply, with authority, and the gun had been lowered. I was to be taken to the monastery, I suppose he had said, and dealt with there. The tone of the man's voice had sounded like an order, and it occurred to me that they might be military personnel out of uniform, possibly North Koreans whose uniform in the South would get them arrested.
I had tried them with English, French, German and Russian as we'd started the march out, but had got no reaction. We had moved off as soon as they'd gestured to me to lift the dead marksman and sling him across my back; they'd seen nothing of the haversack, higher up on the ledge behind the wall I'd built, and I hadn't tried to retrieve it; that radio would have been embarrassing: it wouldn't have suited the cover I was working out.
Staggering now across the uneven ground, the stones rippling under the tears flooding my eyes.
The sun's heat rising towards noon.
Dead march.
One of his arms began swinging like a pendulum to the measure of my pace, his hand brushing across and across my chest as if he were trying to catch my attention; but he had nothing more to say to me, and I had nothing to say to him; we'd both been professionals and the match had been fairly even; he'd come close to blowing my head off, so I'd broken his neck, a good enough answer. But his arm was beginning to irritate me and I grasped his hand, a little too late to show friendship.
The man ahead of me was following the oblique cleft towards the south-east, the way de Haven had told me I should go, the way I would have gone alone if these two hadn't heard the marksman's shots, and come down to see if he needed help. Twice in the last hour I'd seen the glint of blue-grey tiles higher on the ridge; we must have climbed most of the thousand feet from the flat area below where my heavy friend had hunted me.