Running Blind / The Freedom Trap. Desmond Bagley
with a rifle pushed before him, the barrel resting on a folded jacket; the other sat farther back tinkering with a walkie-talkie. He had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth.
I withdrew my head and considered. One man I might have tackled – two together were going to be tricky, especially without a gun. I moved carefully and found a better place from which to observe and where I would be less conspicuous – two rocks came almost together but not quite, and I had a peephole an inch across.
The man with the rifle was very still and very patient. I could imagine that he was an experienced hunter and had spent many hours on hillsides like this waiting for his quarry to move within range. The other man was more fidgety; he eased his buttocks on the rock on which he was sitting, he scratched, he slapped at an insect which settled on his leg, and he fiddled with the walkie-talkie.
At the bottom of the ridge I saw something moving and held my breath. The man with the rifle saw it, too, and I could see the slight tautening of his muscles as he tensed. It was Elin. She came out of cover from under the cliff and walked towards the Land-Rover.
I cursed to myself and wondered what the hell she thought she was doing. The man with the rifle settled the butt firmly into his shoulder and took aim, following her all the way with his eye glued to the telescopic sight. If he pulled that trigger I would take my chances and jump the bastard there and then.
Elin got to the Land-Rover and climbed inside. Within a minute she came out again and began to walk back towards the cliff. Half-way there she called out and tossed something into the air. I was too far away to see what it was but I thought it was a packet of cigarettes. The joker with the rifle would be sure of what it was because he was equipped with one of the biggest telescopic sights I had ever seen.
Elin vanished from sight below and I let out my breath. She had deliberately play-acted to convince these gunmen that I was still there below, even if out of sight. And it worked, too. The rifleman visibly relaxed and turned over and said something to the other man. I couldn’t hear what was said because he spoke in low tones, but the fidget laughed loudly.
He was having trouble with the walkie-talkie. He extended the antenna, clicked switches and turned knobs, and then tossed it aside on to the moss. He spoke to the rifleman and pointed upwards, and the rifleman nodded. Then he stood up and turned to climb towards me.
I noted the direction he was taking, then turned my head to find a place to ambush him. There was a boulder just behind me about three feet high, so I pulled away from my peephole and dropped behind it in a crouch and took a firm hold of the cosh. I could hear him coming because he wasn’t making much attempt to move quietly. His boots crunched on the ground and once there was a flow of gravel as he slipped and I heard a muttered curse. Then there was a change in the light as his shadow fell across me, and I rose up behind him and hit him.
There’s quite a bit of nonsense talked about hitting men on the head. From some accounts – film and TV script writers – it’s practically as safe as an anaesthetic used in an operating theatre; all that happens is a brief spell of unconsciousness followed by a headache not worse than a good hangover. A pity it isn’t so because if it were the hospital anaesthetists would be able to dispense with the elaborate equipment with which they are now lumbered in favour of the time-honoured blunt instrument.
Unconsciousness is achieved by imparting a sharp acceleration to the skull bone so that it collides with the contents – the brain. This results in varying degrees of brain damage ranging from slight concussion to death, and there is always lasting damage, however slight. The blow must be quite heavy and, since men vary, a blow that will make one man merely dizzy will kill another. The trouble is that until you’ve administered the blow you don’t know what you’ve done.
I wasn’t in any mood for messing about so I hit this character hard. His knees buckled under him and he collapsed, and I caught him before he hit the ground. I eased him down and turned him so that he lay on his back. A mangled cigar sagged sideways from his mouth, half bitten through, and blood trickled from the cigar butt to show he had bitten his tongue. He was still breathing.
I patted his pockets and came upon the familiar hard shape, and drew forth an automatic pistol – a Smith & Wesson .38, the twin to the one I had taken from Lindholm. I checked the magazine to see if it was full and then worked the action to put a bullet into the breech.
The collapsed figure at my feet wasn’t going to be much use to anybody even if he did wake up, so I didn’t have to worry about him. All I had to do now was to take care of Daniel Boone – the man with the rifle. I returned to my peephole to see what he was doing.
He was doing precisely what he had been doing ever since I had seen him – contemplating the Land-Rover with inexhaustible patience. I stood up and walked into the hollow, gun first. I didn’t worry overmuch about keeping quiet; speed was more important than quietness and I reckoned he might be more alarmed if I pussyfooted around than if I crunched up behind him.
He didn’t even turn his head. All he did was to say in a flat Western drawl, ‘You forgotten something, Joe?’
I caught my jaw before it sagged too far. A Russian I expected; an American I didn’t. But this was no time to worry about nationalities – a man who throws bullets at you is automatically a bastard, and whether he’s a Russian bastard or an American bastard makes little difference. I just said curtly, ‘Turn around, but leave the rifle where it is or you’ll have a hole in you.’
He went very still, but the only part of him that he turned was his head. He had china-blue eyes in a tanned, narrow face and he looked ideal for type-casting as Pop’s eldest son in a TV horse opera. He also looked dangerous. ‘I’ll be goddamned!’ he said softly.
‘You certainly will be if you don’t take your hands off that rifle,’ I said. ‘Spread your arms out as though you were being crucified.’
He looked at the pistol in my hand and reluctantly extended his arms. A man prone in that position finds it difficult to get up quickly. ‘Where’s Joe?’ he asked.
‘He’s gone beddy-byes.’ I walked over to him and put the muzzle of the pistol to the nape of his neck and I felt him shudder. That didn’t mean much; it didn’t mean he was afraid – I shudder involuntarily when Elin kisses me on the nape of the neck. ‘Just keep quiet,’ I advised, and picked up the rifle.
I didn’t have time to examine it closely then, but I did afterwards, and it was certainly some weapon. It had a mixed ancestry and probably had started life as a Browning, but a good gunsmith had put in a lot of time in reworking it, giving it such refinements as a sculptured stock with a hole in it to put your thumb, and other fancy items. It was a bit like the man said, ‘I have my grandfather’s axe – my father replaced the blade and I gave it a new haft.’
What it had ended up as was the complete long-range assassin’s kit. It was bolt action because it was a gun for a man who picks his target and who can shoot well enough not to want to send a second bullet after the first in too much of a hurry. It was chambered for a .375 magnum load, a heavy 300 grain bullet with a big charge behind it – high velocity, low trajectory. This rifle in good hands could reach out half a mile and snuff out a man’s life if the light was good and the air still.
To help the aforesaid good hands was a fantastic telescopic sight – a variable-powered monster with a top magnification of 30. To use it when fully racked out would need a man with no nerves – and thus no tremble – or a solid bench rest. The scope was equipped with its own range-finding system, a multiple mounting of graduated dots on the vertical cross hair for various ranges, and was sighted in at five hundred yards.
It was a hell of a lot of gun.
I straightened and rested the muzzle of the rifle lightly against my friend’s spine. ‘That’s your gun you can feel,’ I said. ‘You don’t need me to tell you what would happen if I pulled the trigger.’
His head was turned sideways and I saw a light film of sweat coating the tan. He didn’t need to let his imagination work because he was a good craftsman and knew his tools enough to know