When he came in I used my bracket from left to right and starting low to drive upwards and across in a gouging swing to the face and saw surprise and heard his breath snatching as his head jerked back but the swing travelled on and struck nothing and I was off-balance and he knew it and hooked my leg behind the knee. The ceiling span. Somewhere the brain, cool, analytical, computer-quick, wryly reminded the poor fool body that fast action following prolonged inertia was crippled at the start. But we must do our best. He knew his locks: we were down and he worked for my throat and I knew how weak I was but he was worried and trying to speak and I wouldn't listen because they always lied: salt, petrol. Scissors now but he broke it and we rolled over and I worked for the throat again, my left hand flaring, the wound pulling open, rage moving my hands unscientifically and the knee coming up and missing — 'Freund' — and trying again and missing as he brought his arm across and T felt the lock coming on. 'Freund,' he grunted again. The light circled. They always lie. The lights flashed and I was under, and water trickled near me, and his breath was sawing, and I could do nothing. Trickling.
He moved very fast and I looked up at him. He stood warily, watching. Water soaked into my hair. It was chill on my scalp. He was holding a flask. It had fallen when we went down, spilling. He nodded, holding the flask for me to take. I got up. The bracket had been lost and I swung an empty hand at the flask but he drew it back, surprised. I stood swaying in the tilting walls and heard warning that I should consider, re-assess, brain-think trying to overcome the animal need to injure the enemy, draw his blood.
Carefully he held the flask towards me again and I considered. There was no petrol smell. This man was alone. They had always come in pairs. The flask was not empty because some had spilled on the floor, puddling beside my head.
He nodded, holding the flask. I turned away. My left hand was growing heavy, the bandage filling. I moved as far as the window and he followed: I could hear him. My breath was like blades in my throat.
'You must drink,' he said and I turned and he was holding the flask. I shook my head. He looked surprised.
Belief began. Belief in water. But if it wasn't, if I tried to drink and found it wasn't, I didn't know what I would do. I would rather not try. Not know.
He seemed to understand and raised the flask and drank, holding it at a distance from his mouth so that I should see that it wasn't a trick. Drops ran down his chin and he wiped them away. He nodded again.
It was an army flask, felt-covered metal with a strap for hitching to the belt. I took it from him and slopped the water into my mouth and tasted it and closed my eyes and drank till there was no more.
He seemed to have some small authority because there was a guard in the hall and he told me to wait, and went down the last flight of stairs, speaking to the guard, who turned and went along the lower passage. A door closed in the distance.
The building was quiet. Naked bulbs burned but the spotlights were dark. In a white-walled cellar he threw a high-voltage switch and led me to the top of some steps and into the chill night air.
'Is there more?' I asked. 'More water?'
I had emptied the flask but the thirst raged. It had been like a raindrop on a hot coal.
'Later. There's no time now.'
There were bushes, their leaves black against the sky. The moon swam beyond curdled cloud. Hs stood close to me, gripping my arm. 'Listen. Go through the fence. Do it quickly: the current is off but I must switch it on again soon. Then go across the ploughed field to the far side. Go straight across. And hurry.'
He pushed me forward.
The earth was frosty under my feet. I shook with cold. The field was wide and I lurched on, letting the weight of my body force me across the ruts. I was free but afraid it might not be true, just as I had been afraid that it might not be water. But the sky was above me and I was alone.
It began when I was halfway across: the distant clamour of alarm-bells, voices and the cry of dogs. Light swept the trees at the far border of the field. Surely I should have learned by now that they always lied.
Chapter Seventeen — THE GRAVE
The thin beams of the whip-lamps pencilled across the trees. The balls had stopped but the dogs voiced their excitement, knowing that they would soon be released because that was what the sound of the bells had always meant.
Perhaps Kohn had altered his decision or his advisers in Neueburg, Linsdorf, Hanover had counselled him that Martin had been operating alone with no back-up cell and was a subject for quick despatch rather than interrogation.
The chill of the earth seeped into me. I lay face down.
A car and then another drove fast to the gates, their sound shifting from left to right, behind me. They were military vehicles, heavy-engined, and the earth flickered under the side-wash of their searchlights.
The policy would be circumspect, a reason forwarded to the relevant authority in the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands: a politically dangerous enemy of the State, shot while attempting to escape.
The heavy engines raced, the wheels losing grip on frost-patches. Men shouted. Boots rang on metal footplates.
I began crawling forward along my rut.
Go to him and give him water and then set him running across open land, then alert the guards. Make him trust you or he may go for cover and we don't want difficulties.
For three nights the moon had been bright through the window but now a nimbus layer filtered its light and at moments the land was almost dark. If I got up and ran for cover they might not see me but I suspected the thought: it could be the onset of panic.
More vehicles were on the move.
I need not go, now, in the direction he had told me. But it was the nearest cover. They would know I was going there, to the trees on the far edge of the field, but if I took another direction they would find me sooner: their lights were already closing in at the flank. I crawled faster.
Men shouted to each other in the frosty night.
Then panic came and all I knew was that my hands clawed earth away from under me and pain began spreading from their fingers into my arms as the hard clods broke away and the smell of moisture rose. The sound was the worst: the innermost core of reason, remote from the tumult of disordered thought, heard an animal burrowing. There is cunning of a kind in panic. Earth was falling across my back, across my legs. My hands shovelled at it, hurrying to make a grave for the living. The only sounds now were the grunt of my own breath and the scrabbling of my own hands: no one was near and this was my world here in the middle of ploughed land and there was work to be done, the quarry to be buried so that the hunters should be deceived as they swung their lights and looked for a running man and gave no thought for worm or mole or this lowly beast whose only shelter was the earth.
Pain swamped my senses and I was lying still, drowning in an ebb and flow of light and dark while the bellows of my lungs reminded me that something was yet alive here, its breath rasping in the hollow of night. Then brilliance swept overhead and lit the ridge of clods my hands had churned. It swept again and I shut my eyes and the panic that had moved me to frenzy now held me paralysed.
Clear thought began. The situation was reviewed. There was nothing more to do: the final decision would now be made by circumstance, by the direction of their lights and the ability of their eyes and the line of their reasoning: they had hunted me before and knew how best to go about it but their very confidence could count against them.