High Citadel
High Citadel
Desmond Bagley
Action thriller by the classic adventure writer set in the South American Andes.When Tim O’Hara’s plane is hijacked and forced to crash land in the middle of the Andes, his troubles are only beginning. A heavily armed group of communist soldiers intent on killing one of his passengers – an influential political figure – have orders to leave no survivors. Isolated in the biting cold of the Andes, O’Hara’s party must fight for their lives with only the most primitive weapons…
DESMOND BAGLEY
High Citadel
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_650f229e-9db2-5ece-9ec8-2d5af6df061b)
HARPER
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1965
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1965
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this works.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008211141
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN 9780008211424
Version: 2016-11-23
CONTENTS
Cover (#u6eecfbe4-920f-577a-8e68-9a12e2fc07c3)
Title Page (#ufdae0da1-f511-5a7b-a3a8-67508db57f78)
Copyright (#ud65e28bf-2479-5386-bbac-5583d5adfd20)
High Citadel (#u1bf8349a-633d-5cdd-898c-d724aa41a7b8)
Dedication (#ua273c053-caff-5d0c-a555-2821f61c3449)
One (#u18f46f01-511b-5a84-90df-e01ffac6eb73)
Two (#uad640f4f-d322-57e0-bac7-edda9ee330a4)
Three (#ud545e919-f531-58d3-b290-8e8aa816c85c)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
HIGH CITADEL (#ulink_34890c77-75c1-5a8f-873a-30d449b9364c)
DEDICATION (#ulink_6b3e1699-df1b-5c63-8f26-bfa6914acd23)
To John Donaldson and Bob Knittel
ONE (#ulink_5dc33c54-a0dc-545d-be7c-cefbd7d48952)
The bell shrilled insistently.
O’Hara frowned in his sleep and burrowed deeper into the pillow. He dragged up the thin sheet which covered him, but that left his feet uncovered and there was a sleepy protest from his companion. Without opening his eyes he put his hand out to the bedside table, seized the alarm clock, and hurled it violently across the room. Then he snuggled into the pillow again.
The bell still rang.
At last he opened his eyes, coming to the realization that it was the telephone ringing. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared hatefully into the darkness. Ever since he had been in the hotel he had been asking Ramón to transfer the telephone to the bedside, and every time he had been assured that it would be done tomorrow. It had been nearly a year.
He got out of bed and padded across the room to the dressing-table without bothering to switch on the light. As he picked up the telephone he tweaked aside the window curtain and glanced outside. It was still dark and the moon was setting – he estimated it was about two hours to dawn.
He grunted into the mouthpiece: ‘O’Hara.’
‘Goddammit, what’s the matter with you?’ said Filson. ‘I’ve been trying to get you for a quarter of an hour.’
‘I was asleep,’ said O’Hara. ‘I usually sleep at night – I believe most people do, with the exception of Yankee flight managers.’
‘Very funny,’ said Filson tiredly. ‘Well, drag your ass down here – there’s a flight scheduled for dawn.’
‘What the hell – I just got back six hours ago. I’m tired.’
‘You think I’m not?’ said Filson. ‘This is important – a Samair 727 touched down in an emergency landing and the flight inspector grounded it. The passengers are mad as hornets, so the skipper and the hostess have sorted out priorities and we’ve got to take passengers to the coast. You know what a connection with Samair means to us; it could be that if we treat ’em nice they’ll use us as a regular feeder.’
‘In a pig’s eye,’ said O’Hara. ‘They’ll use you in an emergency but they’ll never put you on their timetables. All you’ll get are thanks.’
‘It’s worth trying,’ insisted Filson. ‘So get the hell down here.’
O’Hara debated whether to inform Filson that he had already exceeded his month’s flying hours and that it was only two-thirds through the month. He sighed, and said, ‘All right, I’m coming.’ It would cut no ice with Filson to plead regulations; as far as that hard-hearted character was concerned, the I.A.T.A. regulations were meant to be bent, if not broken. If he conformed to every international regulation, his two-cent firm would be permanently in the red.
Besides, O’Hara thought, this was the end of the line for him. If he lost this job survival would be difficult. There were too many broken-down pilots in South America hunting too few jobs and Filson’s string-and-sealing-wax outfit was about as low as you could get. Hell, he thought disgustedly, I’m on a bloody escalator going the wrong way – it takes all the running I can do to stay in the same place.
He put down the hand-set abruptly and looked again into the night, scanning the sky. It looked all right here, but what about the mountains? Always he thought about the mountains, those cruel mountains with their jagged white swords stretched skywards to impale him. Filson had better have a good met. report.
He walked to the door and stepped into the corridor, unlit as usual. They turned off all lights in the public rooms at eleven p.m. – it was that kind of hotel. For the millionth time he wondered what he was doing in this godforsaken country, in this tired town, in this sleazy hotel. Unconcernedly naked, he walked down towards the bathroom. In his philosophy if a woman had seen a naked man before then it didn’t matter – if she hadn’t, it was time she did. Anyway, it was dark.
He showered quickly, washing away the night sweat, and returned to his room and switched on the bedside lamp wondering if it would work. It was always a fifty per cent chance that it wouldn’t – the town’s electricity supply was very erratic. The filament glowed faintly and in the dim light he dressed – long woollen underwear, jeans, a thick shirt and a leather jacket. By the time he had finished he was sweating again in the warm tropical night. But it would be cold over the mountains.
From the dressing-table he took a metal flask and shook it tentatively. It was only half full and he frowned. He could wake Ramón and get a refill but that was not politic; for one thing Ramón did not like being wakened at night, and for another he would ask cutting questions about when his bill was going to be paid. Perhaps he could get something at the airport.
O’Hara was just leaving when he paused at the door and turned back to look at the sprawling figure in the bed. The sheet had slipped revealing dark breasts tipped a darker colour. He looked at her critically. Her olive skin had an underlying coppery sheen and he thought there was a sizeable admixture of Indian in this one. With a rueful grimace he took a thin wallet from the inside pocket of his leather jacket, extracted two notes and tossed them on the bedside table. Then he went out, closing the door quietly behind him.
II
When he pulled his battered car into the parking bay he looked with interest at the unaccustomed bright lights of the airport. The field was low-grade, classed as an emergency strip by the big operators, although to Filson it was a main base. A Samair Boeing 727 lay sleekly in front of the control tower and O’Hara looked at it enviously for a while, then switched his attention to the hangar beyond.
A Dakota was being loaded and, even at that distance, the lights were bright enough for O’Hara to see the emblem on the tail – two intertwined ‘A’s, painted artistically to look like mountain peaks. He smiled gently to himself. It was appropriate that he should fly a plane decorated with the Double-A; alcoholics of the world unite – it was a pity Filson didn’t see the joke. But Filson was very proud of his Andes Airlift and never joked about it. A humourless man, altogether.
He got out of the car and walked around to the main building to find it was full of people, tired people rudely awakened and set down in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. He pushed his way through the crowd towards Filson’s office. An American voice with a Western twang complained loudly and bitterly, ‘This is a damned disgrace – I’m going to speak to Mr Coulson about it when I get back to Rio.’
O’Hara grinned as he pushed open the door of the office. Filson was sitting at his desk in his shirt-sleeves, his face shiny with sweat. He always sweated, particularly in an emergency and since his life was in a continual state of crisis it was a wonder he didn’t melt away altogether. He looked up.
‘So you got here at last.’
‘I’m always pleased at the welcome I get,’ observed O’Hara.
Filson ignored that. ‘All right; this is the dope,’ he said. ‘I’ve contracted with Samair to take ten of their passengers to Santillana – they’re the ones who have to make connections with a ship. You’ll take number one – she’s being serviced now.’ His voice was briskly businesslike and O’Hara could tell by the way he sonorously rolled out the words ‘contracted with Samair’ that he saw himself as a big-time air operator doing business with his peers instead of what he really was – an ageing ex-pilot making a precarious living off two twenty-five-year-old rattling ex-army surplus planes.
O’Hara merely said, ‘Who’s coming with me?’
‘Grivas.’
‘That cocky little bastard.’
‘He volunteered – which is more than you did,’ snapped Filson.
‘Oh?’
‘He was here when the 727 touched down,’ said Filson. He smiled thinly at O’Hara. ‘It was his idea to put it to Samair that we take some of their more urgent passengers, so he phoned me right away. That’s the kind of quick thinking we need in this organization.’
‘I don’t like him in a plane,’ said O’Hara.
‘So you’re a better pilot,’ said Filson reluctantly. ‘That’s why you’re skipper and he’s going as co-pilot.’ He looked at the ceiling reflectively. ‘When this deal with Samair comes off maybe I’ll promote Grivas to the office. He’s too good to be a pilot.’
Filson had delusions of grandeur. O’Hara said deliberately, ‘If you think that South American Air is going to give you a feeder contract, you’re crazy. You’ll get paid for taking their passengers and you’ll get their thanks – for what they’re worth – and they’ll kiss you off fast.’
Filson pointed a pen at O’Hara. ‘You’re paid to jockey a plane – leave the heavy thinking to me.’
O’Hara gave up. ‘What happened to the 727?’
‘Something wrong with the fuel feed – they’re looking at it now.’ Filson picked up a sheaf of papers. ‘There’s a crate of machinery to go for servicing. Here’s the manifest.’
‘Christ!’ said O’Hara. ‘This is an unscheduled flight. Do you have to do this?’
‘Unscheduled or not, you’re going with a full load. Damned if I send a half empty plane when I can send a full one.’
O’Hara was mournful. ‘It’s just that I thought I’d have an easy trip for a change. You know you always overload and it’s a hell of a job going through the passes. The old bitch wallows like a hippo.’
‘You’re going at the best time,’ said Filson. ‘It’ll be worse later in the day when the sun has warmed things up. Now get the hell out of here and stop bothering me.’
O’Hara left the office. The main hall was emptying, a stream of disgruntled Samair passengers leaving for the antiquated airport bus. A few people still stood about – those would be the passengers for Santillana. O’Hara ignored them; passengers or freight, it was all one to him. He took them over the Andes and dumped them on the other side and there was no point in getting involved with them. A bus driver doesn’t mix with his passengers, he thought; and that’s all I am – a bloody vertical bus driver.
He glanced at the manifest. Filson had done it again – there were two crates and he was aghast at their weight. One of these days, he thought savagely, I’ll get an I.A.T.A. inspector up here at the right time and Filson will go for a loop. He crushed the manifest in his fist and went to inspect the Dakota.
Grivas was by the plane, lounging gracefully against the undercarriage. He straightened when he saw O’Hara and flicked his cigarette across the tarmac but did not step forward to meet him. O’Hara crossed over and said, ‘Is the cargo aboard?’
Grivas smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘Did you check it? Is it secure?’
‘Of course, Señor O’Hara. I saw to it myself.’
O’Hara grunted. He did not like Grivas, neither as a man nor as a pilot. He distrusted his smoothness, the slick patina of pseudo good breeding that covered him like a sheen from his patent leather hair and trim toothbrush moustache to his highly polished shoes. Grivas was a slim wiry man, not very tall, who always wore a smile. O’Hara distrusted the smile most of all.
‘What’s the weather?’ he asked.
Grivas looked at the sky. ‘It seems all right.’
O’Hara let acid creep into his voice. ‘A met. report would be a good thing, don’t you think?’
Grivas grinned. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said.
O’Hara watched him go, then turned to the Dakota and walked round to the cargo doors. The Dakota had been one of the most successful planes ever designed, the work-horse of the Allied forces during the war. Over ten thousand of them had fought a good war, flying countless millions of ton-miles of precious freight about the world. It was a good plane in its time, but that was long ago.
This Dakota was twenty-five years old, battered by too many air hours with too little servicing. O’Hara knew the exact amount of play in the rudder cables; he knew how to nurse the worn-out engines so as to get the best out of them – and a poor best it was; he knew the delicate technique of landing so as not to put too much strain on the weakened undercarriage. And he knew that one day the whole sorry fabric would play a murderous trick on him high over the white spears of the Andes.
He climbed into the plane and looked about the cavernous interior. There were ten seats up front, not the luxurious reclining couches of Samair but uncomfortable hard leather chairs each fitted with the safety-belt that even Filson could not skip, although he had grumbled at the added cost. The rest of the fuselage was devoted to cargo space and was at present occupied by two large crates.
O’Hara went round them testing the anchoring straps with his hand. He had a horror that one day the cargo would slide forward if he made a bad landing or hit very bad turbulence. That would be the end of any passengers who had the ill-luck to be flying Andes Airlift. He cursed as he found a loose strap. Grivas and his slipshod ways would be the end of him one day.
Having seen the cargo was secured he went forward into the cockpit and did a routine check of the instruments. A mechanic was working on the port engine so O’Hara leaned out of the side window and asked in Spanish if it was all right. The mechanic spat, then drew his finger across his throat and made a bloodcurdling sound. ‘De un momento a otro.’
He finished the instrument check and went into the hangar to find Fernandez, the chief mechanic, who usually had a bottle or two stored away, strictly against Filson’s orders. O’Hara liked Fernandez and he knew that Fernandez liked him; they got on well together and O’Hara made a point of keeping it that way – to be at loggerheads with the chief mechanic would be a passport to eternity in this job.
He chatted for a while with Fernandez, then filled his flask and took a hasty gulp from the bottle before he passed it back. Dawn was breaking as he strode back to the Dakota, and Grivas was in the cockpit fussing with the disposal of his briefcase. It’s a funny thing, thought O’Hara, that the briefcase is just as much a part of an airline pilot as it is of any city gent. His own was under his seat; all it contained was a packet of sandwiches which he had picked up at an all-night café.
‘Got the met. report?’ he asked Grivas.
Grivas passed over the sheet of paper and O’Hara said, ‘You can taxi her down to the apron.’
He studied the report. It wasn’t too bad – it wasn’t bad at all. No storms, no anomalies, no trouble – just good weather over the mountains. But O’Hara had known the meteorologists to be wrong before and there was no release of the tension within him. It was that tension, never relaxed in the air, that had kept him alive when a lot of better men had died.
As the Dakota came to a halt on the apron outside the main building, he saw Filson leading the small group of passengers. ‘See they have their seat-belts properly fastened,’ he said to Grivas.
‘I’m not a hostess,’ said Grivas sulkily.
‘When you’re sitting on this side of the cockpit you can give orders,’ said O’Hara coldly. ‘Right now you take them. And I’d like you to do a better job of securing the passengers than you did of the cargo.’
The smile left Grivas’s face, but he turned and went into the main cabin. Presently Filson came forward and thrust a form at O’Hara. ‘Sign this.’
It was the I.A.T.A. certificate of weights and fuel. O’Hara saw that Filson had cheated on the weights as usual, but made no comment and scribbled his signature. Filson said, ‘As soon as you land give me a ring. There might be return cargo.’
O’Hara nodded and Filson withdrew. There was the double slam as the door closed and O’Hara said, ‘Take her to the end of the strip.’ He switched on the radio, warming it up.
Grivas was still sulky and would not talk. He made no answer as he revved the engines and the Dakota waddled away from the main building into the darkness, ungainly and heavy on the ground. At the end of the runway O’Hara thought for a moment. Filson had not given him a flight number. To hell with it, he thought; control ought to know what’s going on. He clicked on the microphone and said, ‘A.A. special flight, destination Santillana – A.A. to San Croce control – ready to take off.’
A voice crackled tinnily in his ear. ‘San Croce control to Andes Airlift special. Permission given – time 2.33 G.M.T.’
‘Roger and out.’ He put his hand to the throttles and waggled the stick. There was a stickiness about it. Without looking at Grivas he said, ‘Take your hands off the controls.’ Then he pushed on the throttle levers and the engines roared. Four minutes later the Dakota was airborne after an excessively long run.
He stayed at the controls for an hour, personally supervising the long climb to the roof of the world. He liked to find out if the old bitch was going to spring a new surprise. Cautiously he carried out gentle, almost imperceptible evolutions, his senses attuned to the feel of the plane. Occasionally he glanced at Grivas who was sitting frozen-faced in the other seat, staring blankly through the windscreen.
At last he was satisfied and engaged the automatic pilot but spent another quarter-hour keeping a wary eye on it. It had behaved badly on the last flight but Fernandez had assured him that it was now all right. He trusted Fernandez, but not that much – it was always better to do the final check personally.
Then he relaxed and looked ahead. It was much lighter in the high air and, although the dawn was behind, the sky ahead was curiously light. O’Hara knew why; it was the snow blink as the first light of the sun caught the high white peaks of the Andes. The mountains themselves were as yet invisible, lost in the early haze rising from the jungle below.
He began to think about his passengers and he wondered if they knew what they had got themselves into. This was no pressurized jet aircraft and they were going to fly pretty high – it would be cold and the air would be thin and he hoped none of the passengers had heart trouble. Presumably Filson had warned them, although he wouldn’t put it past that bastard to keep his mouth shut. He was even too stingy to provide decent oxygen masks – there were only mouth tubes in the oxygen bottles to port and starboard.
He scratched his cheek thoughtfully. These weren’t the ordinary passengers he was used to carrying – the American mining engineers flying to San Croce and the poorer type of local businessman proud to be flying even by Andes Airlift. These were the Samair type of passengers – wealthy and not over fond of hardship. They were in a hurry, too, or they would have had more sense than to fly Andes Airlift. Perhaps he had better break his rule and go back to talk to them. When they found they weren’t going to fly over the Andes but through them they might get scared. It would be better to warn them first.
He pushed his uniform cap to the back of his head and said, ‘Take over, Grivas. I’m going to talk to the passengers.’
Grivas lifted his eyebrows – so surprised that he forgot to be sulky. He shrugged. ‘Why? What is so important about the passengers? Is this Samair?’ He laughed noiselessly. ‘But, yes, of course – you have seen the girl; you want to see her again, eh?’
‘What girl?’
‘Just a girl, a woman; very beautiful. I think I will get to know her and take her out when we arrive in – er – Santillana,’ said Grivas thoughtfully. He looked at O’Hara out of the corner of his eye.
O’Hara grunted and took the passenger manifest from his breast pocket. As he suspected, the majority were American. He went through the list rapidly. Mr and Mrs Coughlin of Challis, Idaho – tourists; Dr James Armstrong, London, England – no profession stated; Raymond Forester of New York – businessman; Señor and Señorita Montes – Argentinian and no profession stated; Miss Jennifer Ponsky of South Bridge, Connecticut – tourist; Dr Willis of California; Miguel Rohde – no stated nationality, profession – importer; Joseph Peabody of Chicago, Illinois – businessman.
He flicked his finger on the manifest and grinned at Grivas. ‘Jennifer’s a nice name – but Ponsky? I can’t see you going around with anyone called Ponsky.’
Grivas looked startled, then laughed convulsively. ‘Ah, my friend, you can have the fair Ponsky – I’ll stick to my girl.’
O’Hara looked at the list again. ‘Then it must be Señorita Montes – unless it’s Mrs Coughlin.’
Grivas chuckled, his good spirits recovered. ‘You find out for yourself.’
‘I’ll do that,’ said O’Hara. ‘Take over.’
He went back into the main cabin and was confronted by ten uplifted heads. He smiled genially, modelling himself on the Samair pilots to whom public relations was as important as flying ability. Lifting his voice above the roar of the engines, he said, ‘I suppose I ought to tell you that we’ll be reaching the mountains in about an hour. It will get cold, so I suggest you wear your overcoats. Mr Filson will have told you that this aircraft isn’t pressurized, but we don’t fly at any great height for more than an hour, so you’ll be quite all right.’
A burly man with a whisky complexion interjected, ‘No one told me that.’
O’Hara cursed Filson under his breath and broadened his smile. ‘Well, not to worry, Mr – er …’
‘Peabody – Joe Peabody.’
‘Mr Peabody. It will be quite all right. There is an oxygen mouthpiece next to every seat which I advise you to use if you feel breathing difficult. Now, it gets a bit wearying shouting like this above the engine noise, so I’ll come round and talk to you individually.’ He smiled at Peabody, who glowered back at him.
He bent to the first pair of seats on the port side. ‘Could I have your names, please?’
The first man said, ‘I’m Forester.’ The other contributed, ‘Willis.’
‘Glad to have you aboard, Dr Willis, Mr Forester.’
Forester said, ‘I didn’t bargain for this, you know. I didn’t think kites like this were still flying.’
O’Hara smiled deprecatingly. ‘Well, this is an emergency flight and it was laid on in the devil of a hurry. I’m sure it was an oversight that Mr Filson forgot to tell you that this isn’t a pressurized plane.’ Privately he was not sure of anything of the kind.
Willis said with a smile. ‘I came here to study high altitude conditions. I’m certainly starting with a bang. How high do we fly, Captain?’
‘Not more than seventeen thousand feet,’ said O’Hara. ‘We fly through the passes – we don’t go over the top. You’ll find the oxygen mouthpieces easy to use – all you do is suck.’ He smiled and turned away and found himself held. Peabody was clutching his sleeve, leaning forward over the seat behind. ‘Hey, Skipper …’
‘I’ll be with you in a moment, Mr Peabody,’ said O’Hara, and held Peabody with his eye. Peabody blinked rapidly, released his grip and subsided into his seat, and O’Hara turned to starboard.
The man was elderly, with an aquiline nose and a short grey beard. With him was a young girl of startling beauty, judging by what O’Hara could see of her face, which was not much because she was huddled deep into a fur coat. He said, ‘Señor Montes?’
The man inclined his head. ‘Don’t worry, Captain, we know what to expect.’ He waved a gloved hand. ‘You see we are well prepared. I know the Andes, señor, and I know these aircraft. I know the Andes well; I have been over them on foot and by mule – in my youth I climbed some of the high peaks – didn’t I, Benedetta?’
‘Si, tío,’ she said in a colourless voice. ‘But that was long ago. I don’t know if your heart …’
He patted her on the leg. ‘I will be all right if I relax; is that not so, Captain?’
‘Do you understand the use of this oxygen tube?’ asked O’Hara.
Montes nodded confidently, and O’Hara said, ‘Your uncle will be quite all right, Señorita Montes.’ He waited for her to reply but she made no answer, so he passed on to the seats behind.
These couldn’t be the Coughlins; they were too ill-assorted a pair to be American tourists, although the woman was undoubtedly American. O’Hara said inquiringly, ‘Miss Ponsky?’
She lifted a sharp nose and said, ‘I declare this is all wrong, Captain. You must turn back at once.’
The fixed smile on O’Hara’s face nearly slipped. ‘I fly this route regularly, Miss Ponsky,’ he said. ‘There is nothing to fear.’
But there was naked fear on her face – air fear. Sealed in the air-conditioned quietness of a modern jet-liner she could subdue it, but the primitiveness of the Dakota brought it to the surface. There was no clever decor to deceive her into thinking that she was in a drawing-room, just the stark functionalism of unpainted aluminium, battered and scratched, and with the plumbing showing like a dissected body.
O’Hara said quietly, ‘What is your profession, Miss Ponsky?’
‘I’m a school teacher back in South Bridge,’ she said. ‘I’ve been teaching there for thirty years.’
He judged she was naturally garrulous and perhaps this could be a way of conquering her fear. He glanced at the man, who said, ‘Miguel Rohde.’
He was a racial anomaly – a Spanish-German name and Spanish-German features – straw-coloured hair and beady black eyes. There had been German immigration into South America for many years and this was one of the results.
O’Hara said, ‘Do you know the Andes, Señor Rohde?’
‘Very well,’ he replied in a grating voice. He nodded ahead. ‘I lived up there for many years – now I am going back.’
O’Hara switched back to Miss Ponsky. ‘Do you teach geography, Miss Ponsky?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I do. That’s one of the reasons I came to South America on my vacation. It makes such a difference if you can describe things first-hand.’
‘Then here you have a marvellous opportunity,’ said O’Hara with enthusiasm. ‘You’ll see the Andes as you never would if you’d flown Samair. And I’m sure that Señor Rohde will point out the interesting sights.’
Rohde nodded understandingly. ‘Si, very interesting; I know it well, the mountain country.’
O’Hara smiled reassuringly at Miss Ponsky, who offered him a glimmering, tremulous smile in return. He caught a twinkle in Rohde’s black eyes as he turned to the port side again.
The man sitting next to Peabody was undoubtedly British, so O’Hara said, ‘Glad to have you with us, Dr Armstrong – Mr Peabody.’
Armstrong said, ‘Nice to hear an English accent, Captain, after all this Spa – ’
Peabody broke in. ‘I’m damned if I’m glad to be here, Skipper. What in hell kind of an airline is this, for god-sake?’
‘One run by an American, Mr Peabody,’ said O’Hara calmly. ‘As you were saying, Dr Armstrong?’
‘Never expected to see an English captain out here,’ said Armstrong.
‘Well, I’m Irish, and we tend to get about,’ said O’Hara. ‘I’d put on some warm clothing if I were you. You, too, Mr Peabody.’
Peabody laughed and suddenly burst into song. ‘“I’ve got my love to keep me warm”.’ He produced a hip flask and waved it. ‘This is as good as any top-coat.’
For a moment O’Hara saw himself in Peabody and was shocked and afraid. ‘As you wish,’ he said bleakly, and passed on to the last pair of seats opposite the luggage racks.
The Coughlins were an elderly couple, very Darby and Joanish. He must have been pushing seventy and she was not far behind, but there was a suggestion of youth about their eyes, good-humoured and with a zest for life. O’Hara said, ‘Are you all right, Mrs Coughlin?’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Aren’t we, Harry?’
‘Sure,’ said Coughlin, and looked up at O’Hara. ‘Will we be flying through the Puerto de las Aguilas?’
‘That’s right,’ said O’Hara. ‘Do you know these parts?’
Coughlin laughed. ‘Last time I was round here was in 1912. I’ve just come down to show my wife where I spent my misspent youth.’ He turned to her. ‘That means Eagle Pass, you know; it took me two weeks to get across back in 1910, and here we are doing it in an hour or two. Isn’t it wonderful?’
‘It sure is,’ Mrs Coughlin replied comfortably.
There was nothing wrong with the Coughlins, decided O’Hara, so after a few more words he went back to the cockpit. Grivas still had the plane on automatic pilot and was sitting relaxed, gazing forward at the mountains. O’Hara sat down and looked intently at the oncoming mountain wall. He checked the course and said, ‘Keep taking a bearing on Chimitaxl and let me know when it’s two hundred and ten degrees true bearing. You know the drill.’
He stared down at the ground looking for landmarks and nodded with satisfaction as he saw the sinuous, twisting course of the Rio Sangre and the railway bridge that crossed it. Flying this route by day and for so long he knew the ground by heart and knew immediately whether he was on time. He judged that the north-west wind predicted by the meteorologists was a little stronger than they had prophesied and altered course accordingly, then he jacked in the auto pilot again and relaxed. All would be quiet until Grivas came up with the required bearing on Chimitaxl. He sat in repose and watched the ground slide away behind – the dun and olive foothills, craggy bare rock, and then the shining snow-covered peaks. Presently he munched on the sandwiches he took from his briefcase. He thought of washing them down with a drink from his flask but then he thought of Peabody’s whisky-sodden face. Something inside him seemed to burst and he found that he didn’t need a drink after all.
Grivas suddenly put down the bearing compass. ‘Thirty seconds,’ he said.
O’Hara looked at the wilderness of high peaks before him, a familiar wilderness. Some of these mountains were his friends, like Chimitaxl; they pointed out his route. Others were his deadly enemies – devils and demons lurked among them compounded of down draughts, driving snow and mists. But he was not afraid because it was all familiar and he knew and understood the dangers and how to escape them.
Grivas said, ‘Now,’ and O’Hara swung the control column gently, experience telling him the correct turn. His feet automatically moved in conjunction with his hands and the Dakota swept to port in a wide, easy curve, heading for a gap in the towering wall ahead.
Grivas said softly, ‘Señor O’Hara.’
‘Don’t bother me now.’
‘But I must,’ said Grivas, and there was a tiny metallic click.
O’Hara glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and stiffened as he saw that Grivas was pointing a gun at him – a compact automatic pistol.
He jerked his head, his eyes widening in disbelief. ‘Have you gone crazy?’
Grivas’s smiled widened. ‘Does it matter?’ he said indifferently. ‘We do not go through the Puerto de las Aguilas this trip, Señor O’Hara, that is all that matters.’ His voice hardened. ‘Now steer course one-eight-four on a true bearing.’
O’Hara took a deep breath and held his course. ‘You must have gone out of your mind,’ he said. ‘Put down that gun, Grivas, and maybe we’ll forget this. I suppose I have been bearing down on you a bit too much, but that’s no reason to pull a gun. Put it away and we’ll straighten things out when we get to Santillana.’
Grivas’s teeth flashed. ‘You’re a stupid man, O’Hara; do you think I do this for personal reasons? But since you mention it, you said not long ago that sitting in the captain’s seat gave you authority.’ He lifted the gun slightly. ‘You were wrong – this gives authority; all the authority there is. Now change course or I’ll blow your head off. I can fly this aircraft too, remember.’
‘They’d hear you inside,’ said O’Hara.
‘I’ve locked the door, and what could they do? They wouldn’t take the controls from the only pilot. But that would be of no consequence to you, O’Hara – you’d be dead.’
O’Hara saw his finger tighten on the trigger and bit his lip before swinging the control column. The Dakota turned to fly south, parallel to the main backbone of the Andes. Grivas was right, damn him; there was no point in getting himself killed. But what the hell was he up to?
He settled on the bearing given by Grivas and reached forward to the auto pilot control. Grivas jerked the gun. ‘No, Señor O’Hara; you fly this aircraft – it will give you something to do.’
O’Hara drew back his hand slowly and grasped the wheel. He looked out to starboard past Grivas at the high peaks drifting by. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked grimly.
‘That is of no consequence,’ said Grivas. ‘But it is not very far. We land at an airstrip in five minutes.’
O’Hara thought about that. There was no airstrip that he knew of on this course. There were no airstrips at all this high in the mountains except for the military strips, and those were on the Pacific side of the Andes chain. He would have to wait and see.
His eyes flickered to the microphone set on its hook close to his left hand. He looked at Grivas and saw he was not wearing his earphones. If the microphone was switched on then any loud conversation would go on the air and Grivas would be unaware of it. It was definitely worth trying.
He said to Grivas, ‘There are no airstrips on this course.’ His left hand strayed from the wheel.
‘You don’t know everything, O’Hara.’
His fingers touched the microphone and he leaned over to obstruct Grivas’s vision as much as possible, pretending to study the instruments. His fingers found the switch and he snapped it over and then he leaned back and relaxed. In a loud voice he said, ‘You’ll never get away with this, Grivas; you can’t steal a whole aeroplane so easily. When this Dakota is overdue at Santillana they’ll lay on a search – you know that as well as I do.’
Grivas laughed. ‘Oh, you’re clever, O’Hara – but I was cleverer. The radio is not working, you know. I took out the tubes when you were talking to the passengers.’
O’Hara felt a sudden emptiness in the pit of his stomach. He looked at the jumble of peaks ahead and felt frightened. This was country he did not know and there would be dangers he could not recognize. He felt frightened for himself and for his passengers.
III
It was cold in the passenger cabin, and the air was thin. Señor Montes had blue lips and his face had turned grey. He sucked on the oxygen tube and his niece fumbled in her bag and produced a small bottle of pills. He smiled painfully and put a pill in his mouth, letting it dissolve on his tongue. Slowly some colour came back into his face; not a lot, but he looked better than he had before taking the pill.
In the seat behind, Miss Ponsky’s teeth were chattering, not with cold but with conversation. Already Miguel Rohde had learned much of her life history, in which he had not the slightest interest although he did not show it. He let her talk, prompting her occasionally, and all the time he regarded the back of Montes’s head with lively black eyes. At a question from Miss Ponsky he looked out of the window and suddenly frowned.
The Coughlins were also looking out of the window. Mr Coughlin said, ‘I’d have sworn we were going to head that way – through that pass. But we suddenly changed course south.’
‘It all looks the same to me,’ said Mrs Coughlin. ‘Just a lot of mountains and snow.’
Coughlin said, ‘From what I remember, El Puerto de las Aguilas is back there.’
‘Oh, Harry, I’m sure you don’t really remember. It’s nearly fifty years since you were here – and you never saw it from an airplane.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, unconvinced. ‘But it sure is funny.’
‘Now, Harry, the pilot knows what he’s doing. He looked a nice efficient young man to me.’
Coughlin continued to look from the window. He said nothing more.
James Armstrong of London, England, was becoming very bored with Joe Peabody of Chicago, Illinois. The man was a positive menace. Already he had sunk half the contents of his flask, which seemed an extraordinarily large one, and he was getting combatively drunk. ‘Whadya think of the nerve of that goddam fly-boy, chokin’ me off like that?’ he demanded. ‘Actin’ high an’ mighty jus’ like the goddam limey he is.’
Armstrong smiled gently. ‘I’m a – er – goddam limey too, you know,’ he pointed out.
‘Well, jeez, presen’ comp’ny excepted,’ said Peabody. ‘That’s always the rule, ain’t it? I ain’t got anything against you limeys really, excep’ you keep draggin’ us into your wars.’
‘I take it you read the Chicago Tribune,’ said Armstrong solemnly.
Forester and Willis did not talk much – they had nothing in common. Willis had produced a large book as soon as they exhausted their small talk and to Forester it looked heavy in all senses of the word, being mainly mathematical.
Forester had nothing to do. In front of him was an aluminium bulkhead on which an axe and a first-aid box were mounted. There was no profit in looking at that and consequently his eyes frequently strayed across the aisle to Señor Montes. His lips tightened as he noted the bad colour of Montes’s face and he looked at the first-aid box reflectively.
IV
‘There it is,’ said Grivas. ‘You land there.’
O’Hara straightened up and looked over the nose of the Dakota. Dead ahead amid a jumble of rocks and snow was a short airstrip, a mere track cut on a ledge of a mountain. He had time for the merest glimpse before it was gone behind them.
Grivas waved the gun. ‘Circle it,’ he said.
O’Hara eased the plane into an orbit round the strip and looked down at it. There were buildings down there, rough cabins in a scattered group, and there was a road leading down the mountain, twisting and turning like a snake. Someone had thoughtfully cleared the airstrip of snow, but there was no sign of life.
He judged his distance from the ground and glanced at the altimeter. ‘You’re crazy, Grivas,’ he said. ‘We can’t land on that strip.’
‘You can, O’Hara,’ said Grivas.
‘I’m damned if I’m going to. This plane’s overloaded and that strip’s at an altitude of seventeen thousand feet. It would need to be three times as long for this crate to land safely. The air’s too thin to hold us up at a slow landing speed – we’ll hit the ground at a hell of a lick and we won’t be able to pull up. We’ll shoot off the other end of the strip and crash on the side of the mountain.’
‘You can do it.’
‘To hell with you,’ said O’Hara.
Grivas lifted his gun. ‘All right, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘But I’ll have to kill you first.’
O’Hara looked at the black hole staring at him like an evil eye. He could see the rifling inside the muzzle and it looked as big as a howitzer. In spite of the cold, he was sweating and could feel rivulets of perspiration running down his back. He turned away from Grivas and studied the strip again. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.
‘You would not know if I told you,’ said Grivas. ‘You would not understand – you are English.’
O’Hara sighed. It was going to be very dicey; he might be able to get the Dakota down in approximately one piece, but Grivas wouldn’t have a chance – he’d pile it up for sure. He said, ‘All right – warn the passengers; get them to the rear of the cabin.’
‘Never mind the passengers,’ said Grivas flatly. ‘You do not think that I am going to leave this cockpit?’
O’Hara said, ‘All right, you’re calling the shots, but I warn you – don’t touch the controls by as much as a finger. You’re not a pilot’s backside – and you know it. There can be only one man flying a plane.’
‘Get on with it,’ said Grivas shortly.
‘I’ll take my own time,’ said O’Hara. ‘I want a good look before I do a damn thing.’
He orbited the airstrip four more times, watching it as it spun crazily beneath the Dakota. The passengers should know there was something wrong by this time, he thought. No ordinary airliner stood on its wingtip and twitched about like this. Maybe they’d get alarmed and someone would try to do something about it – that might give him a chance to get at Grivas. But what the passengers could do was problematical.
The strip was all too short; it was also very narrow and made for a much smaller aircraft. He would have to land on the extreme edge, his wingtip brushing a rock wall. Then there was the question of wind direction. He looked down at the cabins, hoping to detect a wisp of smoke from the chimneys, but there was nothing.
‘I’m going to go in closer – over the strip,’ he said. ‘But I’m not landing this time.’
He pulled out of orbit and circled widely to come in for a landing approach. He lined up the nose of the Dakota on the strip like a gunsight and the plane came in, fast and level. To starboard there was a blur of rock and snow and O’Hara held his breath. If the wingtip touched the rock wall that would be the end. Ahead, the strip wound underneath, as though it was being swallowed by the Dakota. There was nothing as the strip ended – just a deep valley and the blue sky. He hauled on the stick and the plane shot skyward.
The passengers will know damn well there’s something wrong now, he thought. To Grivas he said, ‘We’re not going to get this aircraft down in one piece.’
‘Just get me down safely,’ said Grivas. ‘I’m the only one who matters.’
O’Hara grinned tightly. ‘You don’t matter a damn to me.’
‘Then think of your own neck,’ said Grivas. ‘That will take care of mine, too.’
But O’Hara was thinking of ten lives in the passenger cabin. He circled widely again to make another approach and debated with himself the best way of doing this. He could come in with the undercarriage up or down. A belly-landing would be rough at that speed, but the plane would slow down faster because of the increased friction. The question was: could he hold her straight? On the other hand if he came in with the undercarriage down he would lose airspeed before he hit the deck – that was an advantage too.
He smiled grimly and decided to do both. For the first time he blessed Filson and his lousy aeroplanes. He knew to a hair how much stress the undercarriage would take; hitherto his problem had been that of putting the Dakota down gently. This time he would come in with undercarriage down, losing speed, and slam her down hard – hard enough to break off the weakened struts like matchsticks. That would give him his belly-landing, too.
He sighted the nose of the Dakota on the strip again. ‘Well, here goes nothing,’ he said. ‘Flaps down; undercarriage down.’
As the plane lost airspeed the controls felt mushy under his hands. He set his teeth and concentrated as never before.
V
As the plane tipped wing down and started to orbit the airstrip Armstrong was thrown violently against Peabody. Peabody was in the act of taking another mouthful of whisky and the neck of the flask suddenly jammed against his teeth. He spluttered and yelled incoherently and thrust hard against Armstrong.
Rohde was thrown out of his seat and found himself sitting in the aisle, together with Coughlin and Montes. He struggled to his feet, shaking his head violently, then he bent to help Montes, speaking quick Spanish. Mrs Coughlin helped her husband back to his seat.
Willis had been making a note in the margin of his book and the point of his pencil snapped as Forester lurched against him. Forester made no attempt to regain his position but looked incredulously out of the window, ignoring Willis’s feeble protests at being squashed. Forester was a big man.
The whole cabin was a babel of sound in English and Spanish, dominated by the sharp and scratchy voice of Miss Ponsky as she querulously complained. ‘I knew it,’ she screamed. ‘I knew it was all wrong.’ She began to laugh hysterically and Rohde turned from Montes and slapped her with a heavy hand. She looked at him in surprise and suddenly burst into tears.
Peabody shouted, ‘What in goddam hell is that limey doing now?’ He stared out of the window at the airstrip. ‘The bastard’s going to land.’
Rohde spoke rapidly to Montes, who seemed so shaken he was apathetic. There was a quick exchange in Spanish between Rohde and the girl, and he pointed to the door leading to the cockpit. She nodded violently and he stood up.
Mrs Coughlin was leaning forward in her seat, comforting Miss Ponsky. ‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ she kept saying. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen.’
The aircraft straightened as O’Hara came in for his first approach run. Rohde leaned over Armstrong and looked through the window, but turned as Miss Ponsky screamed in fright, looking at the blur of rock streaming past the starboard window and seeing the wingtip brushing it so closely. Then Rohde lost his balance again as O’Hara pulled the Dakota into a climb.
It was Forester who made the first constructive move. He was nearest the door leading to the cockpit and he grabbed the door handle, turned and pushed. Nothing happened. He put his shoulder to the door but was thrown away as the plane turned rapidly. O’Hara was going into his final landing approach.
Forester grabbed the axe from its clips on the bulkhead and raised it to strike, but his arm was caught by Rohde. ‘This is quicker,’ said Rohde, and lifted a heavy pistol in his other hand. He stepped in front of Forester and fired three quick shots at the lock of the door.
VI
O’Hara heard the shots a fraction of a second before the Dakota touched down. He not only heard them but saw the altimeter and the turn-and-climb indicator shiver into fragments as the bullets smashed into the instrument panel. But he had not time to see what was happening behind him because just then the heavily overloaded Dakota settled soggily at the extreme end of the strip, moving at high speed.
There was a sickening crunch and the whole air frame shuddered as the undercarriage collapsed and the plane sank on to its belly and slid with a tearing, rending sound towards the far end of the strip. O’Hara fought frantically with the controls as they kicked against his hands and feet and tried to keep the aircraft sliding in a straight line.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Grivas turn to the door, his pistol raised. O’Hara took a chance, lifted one hand from the stick and struck out blindly at Grivas. He just had time for one blow and luckily it connected somewhere; he felt the edge of his hand strike home and then he was too busy to see if he had incapacitated Grivas.
The Dakota was still moving too fast. Already it was more than halfway down the strip and O’Hara could see the emptiness ahead where the strip stopped at the lip of the valley. In desperation he swung the rudder hard over and the Dakota swerved with a loud grating sound.
He braced himself for the crash.
The starboard wingtip hit the rock wall and the Dakota spun sharply to the right. O’Hara kept the rudder forced right over and saw the rock wall coming right at him. The nose of the plane hit rock and crumpled and the safety glass in the windscreens shivered into opacity. Then something hit him on the head and he lost consciousness.
VII
He came round because someone was slapping his face. His head rocked from side to side and he wanted them to stop because it was so good to be asleep. The slapping went on and on and he moaned and tried to tell them to stop. But the slapping did not stop so he opened his eyes.
It was Forester who was administering the punishment, and, as O’Hara opened his eyes, he turned to Rohde who was standing behind him and said, ‘Keep your gun on him.’
Rohde smiled. His gun was in his hand but hanging slackly and pointing to the floor. He made no attempt to bring it up. Forester said, ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’
O’Hara painfully lifted his arm to his head. He had a bump on his skull the size of an egg. He said weakly, ‘Where’s Grivas?’
‘Who is Grivas?’
‘My co-pilot.’
‘He’s here – he’s in a bad way.’
‘I hope the bastard dies,’ said O’Hara bitterly. ‘He pulled a gun on me.’
‘You were at the controls,’ said Forester, giving him a hard look. ‘You put this plane down here – and I want to know why.’
‘It was Grivas – he forced me to do it.’
‘The señor capitan is right,’ said Rohde. ‘This man Grivas was going to shoot me and the señor capitan hit him.’ He bowed stiffly. ‘Muchas gracias.’
Forester swung round and looked at Rohde, then beyond him to Grivas. ‘Is he conscious?’
O’Hara looked across the cockpit. The side of the fuselage was caved in and a blunt spike of rock had hit Grivas in the chest, smashing his rib cage. It looked as though he wasn’t going to make it, after all. But he was conscious, all right; his eyes were open and he looked at them with hatred.
O’Hara could hear a woman screaming endlessly in the passenger cabin and someone else was moaning monotonously. ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s happened back there?’
No one answered because Grivas began to speak. He mumbled in a low whisper and blood frothed round his mouth. ‘They’ll get you,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here any minute now.’ His lips parted in a ghastly smile. ‘I’ll be all right; they’ll take me to hospital. But you – you’ll …’ He broke off in a fit of coughing and then continued: ‘… they’ll kill the lot of you.’ He lifted up his arm, the fingers curling into a fist. ‘Vivaca …’
The arm dropped flaccidly and the look of hate in his eyes deepened into surprise – surprise that he was dead.
Rohde grabbed him by the wrist and held it for a moment. ‘He’s gone,’ he said.
‘He was a lunatic,’ said O’Hara. ‘Stark, staring mad.’
The woman was still screaming and Forester said, ‘For God’s sake, let’s get everybody out of here.’
Just then the Dakota lurched sickeningly and the whole cockpit rose in the air. There was a ripping sound as the spike of rock that had killed Grivas tore at the aluminium sheathing of the fuselage. O’Hara had a sudden and horrible intuition of what was happening. ‘Nobody move,’ he shouted. ‘Everyone keep still.’
He turned to Forester. ‘Bash in those windows.’
Forester looked in surprise at the axe he was still holding as though he had forgotten it, then he raised it and struck at the opaque windscreen. The plastic filling in the glass sandwich could not withstand his assault and he made a hole big enough for a man to climb through.
O’Hara said, ‘I’ll go through – I think I know what I’ll find. Don’t either of you go back there – not yet. And call through and tell anyone who can move to come up front.’
He squeezed through the narrow gap and was astonished to find that the nose of the Dakota was missing. He twisted and crawled out on to the top of the fuselage and looked aft. The tail and one wing were hanging in space over the valley where the runway ended. The whole aircraft was delicately balanced and even as he looked the tail tipped a little and there was a ripping sound from the cockpit.
He twisted on to his stomach and wriggled so that he could look into the cockpit, his head upside-down. ‘We’re in a jam,’ he said to Forester. ‘We’re hanging over a two-hundred-foot drop, and the only thing that’s keeping the whole bloody aeroplane from tipping over is that bit of rock there.’ He indicated the rock projection driven into the side of the cockpit.
He said, ‘If anyone goes back there the extra weight might send us over because we’re balanced just like a seesaw.’
Forester turned his head and bawled, ‘Anyone who can move, come up here.’
There was a movement and Willis staggered through the door, his head bloody. Forester shouted, ‘Anyone else?’
Señorita Montes called urgently, ‘Please help my uncle – oh, please.’
Rohde drew Willis out of the way and stepped through the door. Forester said sharply, ‘Don’t go in too far.’
Rohde did not even look at him, but bent to pick up Montes who was lying by the door. He half carried, half dragged him into the cockpit and Señorita Montes followed.
Forester looked up at O’Hara. ‘It’s getting crowded in here; I think we’d better start getting people outside.’
‘We’ll get them on top first,’ said O’Hara. ‘The more weight we have at this end, the better. Let the girl come first.’
She shook her head. ‘My uncle first.’
‘For God’s sake, he’s unconscious,’ said Forester. ‘You go out – I’ll look after him.’
She shook her head stubbornly and O’Hara broke in impatiently, ‘All right, Willis, come on up here; let’s not waste time.’ His head ached and he was panting in the thin air; he was not inclined to waste time over silly girls.
He helped Willis through the smashed windscreen and saw him settle on top of the fuselage. When he looked into the cockpit again it was evident that the girl had changed her mind. Rohde was talking quietly but emphatically to her and she crossed over and O’Hara helped her out.
Armstrong came next, having made his own way to the cockpit. He said, ‘It’s a bloody shambles back there. I think the old man in the back seat is dead and his wife is pretty badly hurt. I don’t think it’s safe to move her.’
‘What about Peabody?’
‘The luggage was thrown forward on to both of us. He’s half buried under it. I tried to get him free but I couldn’t.’
O’Hara passed this on to Forester. Rohde was kneeling by Montes, trying to bring him round. Forester hesitated, then said, ‘Now we’ve got some weight at this end it might be safe for me to go back.’
O’Hara said, ‘Tread lightly.’
Forester gave a mirthless grin and went back through the door. He looked at Miss Ponsky. She was sitting rigid, her arms clutched tightly about her, her eyes staring unblinkingly at nothing. He ignored her and began to heave suitcases from the top of Peabody, being careful to stow them in the front seats. Peabody stirred and Forester shook him into consciousness, and as soon as he seemed to be able to understand, said, ‘Go into the cockpit – the cockpit, you understand,’
Peabody nodded blearily and Forester stepped a little farther aft. ‘Christ Almighty!’ he whispered, shocked at what he saw.
Coughlin was a bloody pulp. The cargo had shifted in the smash and had come forward, crushing the two back seats. Mrs Coughlin was still alive but both her legs had been cut off just below the knee. It was only because she had been leaning forward to comfort Miss Ponsky that she hadn’t been killed like her husband.
Forester felt something touch his back and turned. It was Peabody moving aft. ‘I said the cockpit, you damned fool,’ shouted Forester.
‘I wanna get outa here,’ mumbled Peabody. ‘I wanna get out. The door’s back there.’
Forester wasted no time in argument. Abruptly he jabbed at Peabody’s stomach and then brought his clenched fists down at the nape of his neck as he bent over gasping, knocking him cold. He dragged him forward to the door and said to Rohde, ‘Take care of this fool. If he causes trouble, knock him on the head.’
He went back and took Miss Ponsky by the arm. ‘Come,’ he said gently.
She rose and followed him like a somnambulist and he led her right into the cockpit and delivered her to O’Hara. Montes was now conscious and would be ready to move soon.
As soon as O’Hara reappeared Forester said, ‘I don’t think the old lady back there will make it.’
‘Get her out,’ said O’Hara tightly. ‘For God’s sake, get her out.’
So Forester went back. He didn’t know whether Mrs Coughlin was alive or dead; her body was still warm, however, so he picked her up in his arms. Blood was still spurting from her shattered shins, and when he stepped into the cockpit Rohde drew in his breath with a hiss. ‘On the seat,’ he said. ‘She needs tourniquets now – immediately.’
He took off his jacket and then his shirt and began to rip the shirt into strips, saying to Forester curtly, ‘Get the old man out.’
Forester and O’Hara helped Montes through the windscreen and then Forester turned and regarded Rohde, noting the goose-pimples on his back. ‘Clothing,’ he said to O’Hara. ‘We’ll need warm clothing. It’ll be bad up here by nightfall.’
‘Hell!’ said O’Hara. ‘That’s adding to the risk. I don’t – ’
‘He is right,’ said Rohde without turning his head. ‘If we do not have clothing we will all be dead by morning.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara. ‘Are you willing to take the risk?’
‘I’ll chance it,’ said Forester.
‘I’ll get these people on the ground first,’ said O’Hara. ‘But while you’re at it get the maps. There are some air charts of the area in the pocket next to my seat.’
Rohde grunted. ‘I’ll get those.’
O’Hara got the people from the top of the fuselage to the ground and Forester began to bring suitcases into the cockpit. Unceremoniously he heaved Peabody through the windscreen and equally carelessly O’Hara dropped him to the ground, where he lay sprawling. Then Rohde handed through the unconscious Mrs Coughlin and O’Hara was surprised at her lightness. Rohde climbed out and, taking her in his arms, jumped to the ground, cushioning the shock for her.
Forester began to hand out suitcases and O’Hara tossed them indiscriminately. Some burst open, but most survived the fall intact.
The Dakota lurched.
‘Forester,’ yelled O’Hara. ‘Come out.’
‘There’s still some more.’
‘Get out, you idiot,’ O’Hara bawled. ‘She’s going.’
He grabbed Forester’s arms and hauled him out bodily and let him go thumping to the ground. Then he jumped himself and, as he did so, the nose rose straight into the air and the plane slid over the edge of the cliff with a grinding noise and in a cloud of dust. It crashed down two hundred feet and there was a long dying rumble and then silence.
O’Hara looked at the silent people about him, then turned his eyes to the harsh and savage mountains which surrounded them. He shivered with cold as he felt the keen wind which blew from the snowfields, and then shivered for a different reason as he locked eyes with Forester. They both knew that the odds against survival were heavy and that it was probable that the escape from the Dakota was merely the prelude to a more protracted death.
VIII
‘Now, let’s hear all this from the beginning,’ said Forester.
They had moved into the nearest of the cabins. It proved bare but weatherproof, and there was a fireplace in which Armstrong had made a fire, using wood which Willis had brought from another cabin. Montes was lying in a corner being looked after by his niece, and Peabody was nursing a hangover and looking daggers at Forester.
Miss Ponsky had recovered remarkably from the rigidity of fright. When she had been dropped to the ground she had collapsed, digging her fingers into the frozen gravel in an ecstasy of relief. O’Hara judged she would never have the guts to enter an aeroplane ever again in her life. But now she was showing remarkable aptitude for sick nursing, helping Rohde to care for Mrs Coughlin.
Now there was a character, thought O’Hara; Rohde was a man of unsuspected depths. Although he was not a medical man, he had a good working knowledge of practical medicine which was now invaluable. O’Hara had immediately turned to Willis for help with Mrs Coughlin, but Willis had said, ‘Sorry, I’m a physicist – not a physician.’
‘Dr Armstrong?’ O’Hara had appealed.
Regretfully Armstrong had also shaken his head. ‘I’m a historian.’
So Rohde had taken over – the non-doctor with the medical background – and the man with the gun.
O’Hara turned his attention to Forester. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘This is the way it was,’
He told everything that had happened, right back from the take-off in San Croce, dredging from his memory everything Grivas had said. ‘I think he went off his head,’ he concluded.
Forester frowned. ‘No, it was planned,’ he contradicted. ‘And lunacy isn’t planned. Grivas knew this airstrip and he knew the course to take. You say he was at San Croce airfield when the Samair plane was grounded?’
‘That’s right – I thought it was a bit odd at the time. I mean, it was out of character for Grivas to be haunting the field in the middle of the night – he wasn’t that keen on his job.’
‘It sounds as though he knew the Samair Boeing was going to have engine trouble,’ commented Willis.
Forester looked up quickly and Willis said, ‘It’s the only logical answer – he didn’t just steal a plane, he stole the contents; and the contents of the plane were people from the Boeing. O’Hara says those big crates contain ordinary mining machinery and I doubt if Grivas would want that.’
‘That implies sabotage of the Boeing,’ said Forester. ‘If Grivas was expecting the Boeing to land at San Croce, it also implies a sizeable organization behind him.’
‘We know that already,’ said O’Hara. ‘Grivas was expecting a reception committee here. He said, “They’ll be here any minute.” But where are they?’
‘And who are they?’ asked Forester.
O’Hara thought of something else Grivas had said: ‘… they’ll kill the lot of you.’ He kept quiet about that and asked instead, ‘Remember the last thing he said – “Vivaca”? It doesn’t make sense to me. It sounds vaguely Spanish, but it’s no word I know.’
‘My Spanish is good,’ said Forester deliberately. ‘There’s no such word.’ He slapped the side of his leg irritably. ‘I’d give a lot to know what’s been going on and who’s responsible for all this.’
A weak voice came from across the room. ‘I fear, gentlemen, that in a way I am responsible.’
Everyone in the room, with the exception of Mrs Coughlin, turned to look at Señor Montes.
TWO (#ulink_eb2acd86-e7d3-50ad-b43a-4e1e078ff9f2)
Montes looked ill. He was worse than he had been in the air. His chest heaved violently as he sucked in the thin air and he had a ghastly pallor. As he opened his mouth to speak again the girl said, ‘Hush, tio, be quiet. I will tell them,’
She turned and looked across the cabin at O’Hara and Forester. ‘My uncle’s name is not Montes,’ she said levelly. ‘It is Aguillar.’ She said it as though it was an explanation, entire and complete in itself.
There was a moment of blank silence, then O’Hara snapped his fingers and said softly, ‘By God, the old eagle himself.’ He stared at the sick man.
‘Yes, Señor O’Hara,’ whispered Aguillar. ‘But a crippled eagle, I am afraid.’
‘Say, what the hell is this?’ grumbled Peabody. ‘What’s so special about him?’
Willis gave Peabody a look of dislike and got to his feet. ‘I wouldn’t have put it that way myself,’ he said. ‘But I could bear to know more.’
O’Hara said, ‘Señor Aguillar was possibly the best president this country ever had until the army took over five years ago. He got out of the country just one jump ahead of a firing squad.’
‘General Lopez always was a hasty man,’ agreed Aguillar with a weak smile.
‘You mean the government arranged all this – this jam we’re in now – just to get you?’ Willis’s voice was shrill with incredulity.
Aguillar shook his head and started to speak, but the girl said, ‘No, you must be quiet.’ She looked at O’Hara appealingly. ‘Do not question him now, señor. Can’t you see he is ill?’
‘Can you speak for your uncle?’ asked Forester gently.
She looked at the old man and he nodded. ‘What is it you want to know?’ she asked.
‘What is your uncle doing back in Cordillera?’
‘We have come to bring back good government to our country,’ she said. ‘We have come to throw out Lopez.’
O’Hara gave a short laugh. ‘To throw out Lopez,’ he said flatly. ‘Just like that. An old man and a girl are going to throw out a man with an army at his back.’ He shook his head disbelievingly.
The girl flared up. ‘What do you know about it; you are a foreigner – you know nothing. Lopez is finished – everyone in Cordillera knows it, even Lopez himself. He has been too greedy, too corrupt, and the country is sick of him.’
Forester rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘She could be right,’ he said. ‘It would take just a puff of wind to blow Lopez over right now. He’s run this country right into the ground in the last five years – just about milked it dry and salted enough money away in Swiss banks to last a couple of lifetimes. I don’t think he’d risk losing out now if it came to a showdown – if someone pushed hard enough he’d fold up and get out. I think he’d take wealth and comfort instead of power and the chance of being shot by some gun-happy student with a grievance.’
‘Lopez has bankrupted Cordillera,’ the girl said. She held up her head proudly. ‘But when my uncle appears in Santillana the people will rise, and that will be the end of Lopez.’
‘It could work,’ agreed Forester. ‘Your uncle was well liked. I suppose you’ve prepared the ground in advance.’
She nodded. ‘The Democratic Committee of Action has made all the arrangements. All that remains is for my uncle to appear in Santillana.’
‘He may not get there,’ said O’Hara. ‘Someone is trying to stop him, and if it isn’t Lopez, then who the hell is it?’
‘The comunistas,’ the girl spat out with loathing in her voice. ‘They cannot afford to let my uncle get into power again. They want Cordillera for their own.’
Forester said, ‘It figures. Lopez is a dead duck, come what may; so it’s Aguillar versus the communists with Cordillera as the stake.’
‘They are not quite ready,’ the girl said. ‘They do not have enough support among the people. During the last two years they have been infiltrating the government very cleverly and if they had their way the people would wake up one morning to find Lopez gone, leaving a communist government to take his place.’
‘Swapping one dictatorship for another,’ said Forester. ‘Very clever.’
‘But they are not yet ready to get rid of Lopez,’ she said. ‘My uncle would spoil their plans – he would get rid of Lopez and the government, too. He would hold elections for the first time in nine years. So the communists are trying to stop him.’
‘And you think Grivas was a communist?’ queried O’Hara.
Forester snapped his fingers. ‘Of course he was. That explains his last words. He was a communist, all right – Latin-American blend; when he said “vivaca” he was trying to say “Viva Castro”.’ His voice hardened. ‘And we can expect his buddies along any minute.’
‘We must leave here quickly,’ said the girl. ‘They must not find my uncle.’
O’Hara suddenly swung round and regarded Rohde, who had remained conspicuously silent. He said, ‘What do you import, Señor Rohde?’
‘It is all right, Señor O’Hara,’ said Aguillar weakly. ‘Miguel is my secretary.’
Forester looked at Rohde. ‘More like your bodyguard.’
Aguillar flapped his hand limply as though the distinction was of no consequence, and Forester said, ‘What put you on to him, O’Hara?’
‘I don’t like men who carry guns,’ said O’Hara shortly. ‘Especially men who could be communist.’ He looked around the cabin. ‘All right, are there any more jokers in the pack? What about you, Forester? You seem to know a hell of a lot about local politics for an American businessman.’
‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ said Forester. ‘If I didn’t take an interest in local politics my corporation would fire me. Having the right kind of government is important to us, and we sure as hell don’t want a commie set-up in Cordillera.’
He took out his wallet and extracted a business card which he handed to O’Hara. It informed him that Raymond Forester was the South American sales manager for the Fairfield Machine Tool Corporation.
O’Hara gave it back to him. ‘Was Grivas the only communist aboard?’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m getting at. When we were coming in to land, did any of the passengers take any special precautions for their safety?’
Forester thought about it, then shook his head. ‘Everyone seemed to be taken by surprise – I don’t think any of us knew just what was happening.’ He looked at O’Hara with respect. ‘In the circumstances that was a good question to ask.’
‘Well, I’m not a communist,’ said Miss Ponsky sharply. ‘The very idea!’
O’Hara smiled. ‘My apologies, Miss Ponsky,’ he said politely.
Rohde had been tending to Mrs Coughlin; now he stood up. ‘This lady is dying,’ he said. ‘She has lost much blood and she is in shock. And she has the soroche – the mountain-sickness. If she does not get oxygen she will surely die.’ His black eyes switched to Aguillar, who seemed to have fallen asleep. ‘The Señor also must have oxygen – he’s in grave danger.’ He looked at them. ‘We must go down the mountain. To stay at this height is very dangerous.’
O’Hara was conscious of a vicious headache and the fact that his heart was thumping rapidly. He had been long enough in the country to have heard of soroche and its effects. The lower air pressure on the mountain heights meant less oxygen, the respiratory rate went up and so did the heart-beat rate, pumping the blood faster. It killed a weak constitution.
He said slowly, ‘There were oxygen cylinders in the plane – maybe they’re not busted.’
‘Good,’ said Rohde. ‘We will look, you and I. It would be better not to move this lady if possible. But if we do not find the oxygen, then we must go down the mountain.’
Forester said, ‘We must keep a fire going – the rest of us will look for wood.’ He paused. ‘Bring some petrol from the plane – we may need it.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara.
‘Come on,’ said Forester to Peabody. ‘Let’s move.’
Peabody lay where he was, gasping. ‘I’m beat,’ he said. ‘And my head’s killing me.’
‘It’s just a hangover,’ said Forester callously. ‘Get on your feet, man.’
Rohde put his hand on Forester’s arm. ‘Soroche,’ he said warningly. ‘He will not be able to do much. Come, señor.’
O’Hara followed Rohde from the cabin and shivered in the biting air. He looked around. The airstrip was built on the only piece of level ground in the vicinity; all else was steeply shelving mountainside, and all around were the pinnacles of the high Andes, clear-cut in the cold and crystal air. They soared skyward, blindingly white against the blue where the snows lay on their flanks, and where the slope was too steep for the snow to stay was the dark grey of the rock.
It was cold, desolate and utterly lifeless. There was no restful green of vegetation, or the flick of a bird’s wing – just black, white and the blue of the sky, a hard, dark metallic blue as alien as the landscape.
O’Hara pulled his jacket closer about him and looked at the other huts. ‘What is this place?’
‘It is a mine,’ said Rohde. ‘Copper and zinc – the tunnels are over there.’ He pointed to a cliff face at the end of the airstrip and O’Hara saw the dark mouths of several tunnels driven into the cliff face. Rohde shook his head. ‘But it is too high to work – they should never have tried. No man can work well at this height; not even our mountain indios.’
‘You know this place then?’
‘I know these mountains well,’ said Rohde. ‘I was born not far from here.’
They trudged along the airstrip and before they had gone a hundred yards O’Hara felt exhausted. His head ached and he felt nauseated. He sucked the thin air into his lungs and his chest heaved.
Rohde stopped and said, ‘You must not force your breathing.’
‘What else can I do?’ said O’Hara, panting. ‘I’ve got to get enough air.’
‘Breathe naturally, without effort,’ said Rohde. ‘You will get enough air. But if you force your breathing you will wash all the carbon dioxide from your lungs, and that will upset the acid base of your blood and you will get muscle cramps. And that is very bad.’
O’Hara moderated his breathing and said, ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘I studied medicine once,’ said Rohde briefly.
They reached the far end of the strip and looked over the edge of the cliff. The Dakota was pretty well smashed up; the port wing had broken off, as had the entire tail section. Rohde studied the terrain. ‘We need not climb down the cliff; it will be easier to go round.’
It took them a long time to get to the plane and when they got there they found only one oxygen cylinder intact. It was difficult to get it free and out of the aircraft, but they managed it after chopping away a part of the fuselage with the axe that O’Hara found on the floor of the cockpit.
The gauge showed that the cylinder was only a third full and O’Hara cursed Filson and his cheese-paring, but Rohde seemed satisfied. ‘It will be enough,’ he said. ‘We can stay in the hut tonight.’
‘What happens if these communists turn up?’ asked O’Hara.
Rohde seemed unperturbed. ‘Then we will defend ourselves,’ he said equably. ‘One thing at a time, Señor O’Hara.’
‘Grivas seemed to think they were already here,’ said O’Hara. ‘I wonder what held them up?’
Rohde shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
They could not manhandle the oxygen cylinder back to the huts without help, so Rohde went back, taking with him some mouthpieces and a bottle of petrol tapped from a wing tank. O’Hara searched the fuselage, looking for anything that might be of value, particularly food. That, he thought, might turn out to be a major problem. All he found was half a slab of milk chocolate in Grivas’s seat pocket.
Rohde came back with Forester, Willis and Armstrong and they took it in turns carrying the oxygen cylinder, two by two. It was very hard work and they could only manage to move it twenty yards at a time. O’Hara estimated that back in San Croce he could have picked it up and carried it a mile, but the altitude seemed to have sucked all the strength from their muscles and they could work only a few minutes at a time before they collapsed in exhaustion.
When they got it to the hut they found that Miss Ponsky was feeding the fire with wood from a door of one of the other huts that Willis and Armstrong had torn down and smashed up laboriously with rocks. Willis was particularly glad to see the axe. ‘It’ll be easier now,’ he said.
Rohde administered oxygen to Mrs Coughlin and Aguillar. She remained unconscious, but it made a startling difference to the old man. As the colour came back to his cheeks his niece smiled for the first time since the crash.
O’Hara sat before the fire, feeling the warmth soak into him, and produced his air charts. He spread the relevant chart on the floor and pin-pointed a position with a pencilled cross. ‘That’s where we were when we changed course,’ he said. ‘We flew on a true course of one-eighty-four for a shade over five minutes.’ He drew a line on the chart. ‘We were flying at a little over two hundred knots – say, two hundred and forty miles an hour. That’s about twenty miles – so that puts us about – here.’ He made another cross.
Forester looked over his shoulder. ‘The airstrip isn’t marked on the map,’ he said.
‘Rohde said it was abandoned,’ said O’Hara.
Rohde came over and looked at the map and nodded. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘That is where we are. The road down the mountain leads to the refinery. That also is abandoned, but I think some indios live there still.’
‘How far is that?’ asked Forester.
‘About forty kilometres,’ said Rohde.
‘Twenty-five miles,’ translated Forester. ‘That’s a hell of a long way in these conditions.’
‘It will not be very bad,’ said Rohde. He put his finger on the map. ‘When we get to this valley where the river runs we will be nearly five thousand feet lower and we will breathe more easily. That is about sixteen kilometres by the road.’
‘We’ll start early tomorrow,’ said O’Hara.
Rohde agreed. ‘If we had no oxygen I would have said go now. But it would be better to stay in the shelter of this hut tonight.’
‘What about Mrs Coughlin?’ said O’Hara quietly. ‘Can we move her?’
‘We will have to move her,’ said Rohde positively. ‘She cannot live at this altitude.’
‘We’ll rig together some kind of stretcher,’ said Forester. ‘We can make a sling out of clothing and poles – or maybe use a door.’
O’Hara looked across to where Mrs Coughlin was breathing stertorously, closely watched by Miss Ponsky. His voice was harsh. ‘I’d rather that bastard Grivas was still alive if that would give her back her legs,’ he said.
II
Mrs Coughlin died during the night without regaining consciousness. They found her in the morning cold and stiff. Miss Ponsky was in tears. ‘I should have stayed awake,’ she sniffled. ‘I couldn’t sleep most of the night, and then I had to drop off.’
Rohde shook his head gravely. ‘She would have died,’ he said. ‘We could not do anything for her – none of us.’
Forester, O’Hara and Peabody scratched out a shallow grave. Peabody seemed better and O’Hara thought that maybe Forester had been right when he said that Peabody was only suffering from a hangover. However, he had to be prodded into helping to dig the grave.
It seemed that everyone had had a bad night, no one sleeping very well. Rohde said that it was another symptom of soroche and the sooner they got to a lower altitude the better. O’Hara still had a splitting headache and heartily concurred.
The oxygen cylinder was empty.
O’Hara tapped the gauge with his finger but the needle stubbornly remained at zero. He opened the cock and bent his head to listen but there was no sound from the valve. He had heard the gentle hiss of oxygen several times during the night and had assumed that Rohde had been tending to Mrs Coughlin or Aguillar.
He beckoned to Rohde. ‘Did you use all the oxygen last night?’
Rohde looked incredulously at the gauge. ‘I was saving some for today,’ he said. ‘Señor Aguillar needs it.’
O’Hara bit his lip and looked across to where Peabody sat. ‘I thought he looked pretty chipper this morning.’
Rohde growled something under his breath and took a step forward, but O’Hara caught his arm. ‘It can’t be proved,’ he said. ‘I could be wrong. And anyway, we don’t want any rows right here. Let’s get down this mountain.’ He kicked the cylinder and it clanged emptily. ‘At least we won’t have to carry this.’
He remembered the chocolate and brought it out. There were eight small squares to be divided between ten of them, so he, Rohde and Forester did without and Aguillar had two pieces. O’Hara thought that he must have had three because the girl did not appear to eat her ration.
Armstrong and Willis appeared to work well as a team. Using the axe, they had ripped some timber from one of the huts and made a rough stretcher by pushing lengths of wood through the sleeves of two overcoats. That was for Aguillar, who could not walk.
They put on all the clothes they could and left the rest in suitcases. Forester gave O’Hara a bulky overcoat. ‘Don’t mess it about if you can help it,’ he said. ‘That’s vicuna – it cost a lot of dough.’ He grinned. ‘The boss’s wife asked me to get it this trip; it’s the old man’s birthday soon.’
Peabody grumbled when he had to leave his luggage and grumbled more when O’Hara assigned him to a stretcher-carrying stint. O’Hara resisted taking a poke at him; for one thing he did not want open trouble, and for another he did not know whether he had the strength to do any damage. At the moment it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other.
So they left the huts and went down the road, turning their backs on the high peaks. The road was merely a rough track cut out of the mountainside. It wound down in a series of hairpin bends and Willis pointed out where blasting had been done on the corners. It was just wide enough to take a single vehicle but, from time to time, they came across a wide part where two trucks could pass.
O’Hara asked Rohde, ‘Did they intend to truck all the ore from the mine?’
‘They would have built a telfer,’ said Rohde. ‘An endless rope with buckets. But they were still proving the mine. Petrol engines do not work well up here – they need superchargers.’ He stopped suddenly and stared at the ground.
In a patch of snow was the track of a tyre.
‘Someone’s been up here lately,’ observed O’Hara. ‘Supercharged or not. But I knew that.’
‘How?’ Rohde demanded.
‘The airstrip had been cleared of snow.’
Rohde patted his breast and moved away without saying anything. O’Hara remembered the pistol and wondered what would happen if they came up against opposition.
Although the path was downhill and the going comparatively good, it was only possible to carry the stretcher a hundred yards at a time. Forester organized relays, and as one set of carriers collapsed exhaustedly another took over. Aguillar was in a comatose condition and the girl walked next to the stretcher, anxiously watching him. After a mile they stopped for a rest and O’Hara said to Rohde, ‘I’ve got a flask of spirits. ‘I’ve been saving it for when things really get tough. Do you think it would help the old man?’
‘Let me have it,’ said Rohde.
O’Hara took the flask from his hip and gave it to Rohde, who took off the cap and sniffed the contents. ‘Aguardiente,’ he said. ‘Not the best drink but it will do.’ He looked at O’Hara curiously. ‘Do you drink this?’
‘I’m a poor man,’ said O’Hara defensively.
Rohde smiled. ‘When I was a student I also was poor. I also drank aguardiente. But I do not recommend too much,’ He looked across at Aguillar. ‘I think we save this for later.’ He recapped the flask and handed it back to O’Hara. As O’Hara was replacing it in his pocket he saw Peabody staring at him. He smiled back pleasantly.
After a rest of half an hour they started off again. O’Hara, in the lead, looked back and thought they looked like a bunch of war refugees. Willis and Armstrong were stumbling along with the stretcher, the girl keeping pace alongside; Miss Ponsky was sticking close to Rohde, chatting as though on a Sunday afternoon walk, despite her shortness of breath, and Forester was in the rear with Peabody shambling beside him.
After the third stop O’Hara found that things were going better. His step felt lighter and his breathing eased, although the headache stayed with him. The stretcher-bearers found that they could carry for longer periods, and Aguillar had come round and was taking notice.
O’Hara mentioned this to Rohde, who pointed at the steep slopes about them. ‘We are losing a lot of height,’ he said. ‘It will get better now.’
After the fourth halt O’Hara and Forester were carrying the stretcher. Aguillar apologized in a weak voice for the inconvenience he was causing, but O’Hara forbore to answer – he needed all his breath for the job. Things weren’t that much better.
Forester suddenly stopped and O’Hara thankfully laid down the stretcher. His legs felt rubbery and the breath rasped in his throat. He grinned at Forester, who was beating his hands against his chest. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It should be warmer down in the valley.’
Forester blew on his fingers. ‘I hope so.’ He looked up at O’Hara. ‘You’re a pretty good pilot,’ he said. ‘I’ve done some flying in my time, but I don’t think I could do what you did yesterday.’
‘You might if you had a pistol at your head,’ said O’Hara with a grimace. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t leave it to Grivas – he’d have killed the lot of us, starting with me first.’
He looked past Forester and saw Rohde coming back up the road at a stumbling run, his gun in his hand. ‘Something’s happening.’
He went forward to meet Rohde, who gasped, his chest heaving. ‘There are huts here – I had forgotten them.’
O’Hara looked at the gun. ‘Do you need that?’
Rohde gave a stark smile. ‘It is possible, señor.’ He waved casually down the road with the pistol. ‘I think we should be careful. I think we should look first before doing anything. You, me, and Señor Forester.’
‘I think so too,’ said Forester. ‘Grivas said his pals would be around and this seems a likely place to meet them.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara, and looked about. There was no cover on the road but there was a jumble of rocks a little way back. ‘I think everyone else had better stick behind that lot,’ he said. ‘If anything does break, there’s no point in being caught in the open.’
They went back to shelter behind the rocks and O’Hara told everyone what was happening. He ended by saying, ‘If there’s shooting you don’t do a damned thing – you freeze and stay put. Now I know we’re not an army but we’re likely to come under fire all the same – so I’m naming Doctor Willis as second-in-command. If anything happens to us you take your orders from him.’ Willis nodded.
Aguillar’s niece was talking to Rohde, and as O’Hara went to join Forester she touched him on the arm. ‘Señor.’
He looked down at her. ‘Yes, señorita.’
‘Please be careful, you and Señor Forester. I would not want anything to happen to you because of us.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ said O’Hara. ‘Tell me, is your name the same as your uncle’s?’
‘I am Benedetta Aguillar,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘I’m Tim O’Hara. I’ll be careful.’
He joined the other two and they walked down the road to the bend. Rohde said, ‘These huts were where the miners lived. This is just about as high as a man can live permanently – a man who is acclimatized such as our mountain indios. I think we should leave the road here and approach from the side. If Grivas did have friends, here is where we will find them.’
They took to the mountainside and came upon the camp from the top. A level place had been roughly bulldozed out of the side of the mountain and there were about a dozen timber-built huts, very much like the huts by the airstrip.
‘This is no good,’ said Forester. ‘We’ll have to go over this miniature cliff before we can get at them.’
‘There’s no smoke,’ O’Hara pointed out.
‘Maybe that means something – maybe it doesn’t,’ said Forester. ‘I think that Rohde and I will go round and come up from the bottom. If anything happens, maybe you can cause a diversion from up here.’
‘What do I do?’ asked O’Hara. ‘Throw stones?’
Forester shook with silent laughter. He pointed down the slope to beyond the camp. ‘We’ll come out about there. You can see us from here but we’ll be out of sight of anyone in the camp. If all’s clear you can give us the signal to come up.’ He looked at Rohde, who nodded.
Forester and Rohde left quietly and O’Hara lay on his belly, looking down at the camp. He did not think there was anyone there. It was less than five miles up to the airstrip by the road and there was nothing to stop anybody going up there. If Grivas’s confederates were anywhere, it was not likely that they would be at this camp – but it was as well to make sure. He scanned the huts but saw no sign of movement.
Presently he saw Forester wave from the side of the rock he had indicated and he waved back. Rohde went up first, in a wide arc to come upon the camp at an angle. Then Forester moved forward in the peculiar scuttling, zigzagging run of the experienced soldier who expects to be shot at. O’Hara wondered about Forester; the man had said he could fly an aeroplane and now he was behaving like a trained infantryman. He had an eye for ground, too, and was obviously accustomed to command.
Forester disappeared behind one of the huts and then Rohde came into sight at the far end of the camp, moving warily with his gun in his hand. He too disappeared, and O’Hara felt tension. He waited for what seemed a very long time, then Forester walked out from behind the nearest hut, moving quite unconcernedly. ‘You can come down,’ he called. ‘There’s no one here.’
O’Hara let out his breath with a rush and stood up. ‘I’ll go back and get the rest of the people down here,’ he shouted, and Forester waved in assent.
O’Hara went back up the road, collected the party and took them down to the camp. Forester and Rohde were waiting in the main ‘street’ and Forester called out, ‘We’ve struck it lucky; there’s a lot of food here.’
Suddenly O’Hara realized that he hadn’t eaten for a day and a half. He did not feel particularly hungry, but he knew that if he did not eat he could not last out much longer – and neither could any of the others. To have food would make a lot of difference on the next leg of the journey.
Forester said, ‘Most of the huts are empty, but three of them are fitted out as living quarters complete with kerosene heaters.’
O’Hara looked down at the ground which was crisscrossed with tyre tracks. ‘There’s something funny going on,’ he said. ‘Rohde told me that the mine has been abandoned for a long time, yet there’s all these signs of life and no one around. What the hell’s going on?’
Forester shrugged. ‘Maybe the commie organization is slipping,’ he said. ‘The Latins have never been noted for good planning. Maybe someone’s put a spoke in their wheel.’
‘Maybe,’ said O’Hara. ‘We might as well take advantage of it. What do you think we should do now – how long should we stay here?’
Forester looked at the group entering one of the huts, then up at the sky. ‘We’re pretty beat,’ he said. ‘Maybe we ought to stay here until tomorrow. It’ll take us a while to get fed and it’ll be late before we can move out. We ought to stay here tonight and keep warm.’
‘We’ll consult Rohde,’ said O’Hara. ‘He’s the expert on mountains and altitude.’
The huts were well fitted. There were paraffin stoves, bunks, plenty of blankets and a large assortment of canned foods. On the table in one of the huts there were the remnants of a meal, the plates dirty and unwashed and frozen dregs of coffee in the bottom of tin mugs. O’Hara felt the thickness of the ice and it cracked beneath the pressure of his finger.
‘They haven’t been gone long,’ he said. ‘If the hut was unheated this stuff would have frozen to the bottom.’ He passed the mug to Rohde. ‘What do you think?’
Rohde looked at the ice closely. ‘If they turned off the heaters when they left, the hut would stay warm for a while,’ he said. He tested the ice and thought deeply. ‘I would say two days,’ he said finally.
‘Say yesterday morning,’ suggested O’Hara. ‘That would be about the time we took off from San Croce.’
Forester groaned in exasperation. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why did they go to all this trouble, make all these preparations, and then clear out? One thing’s sure: Grivas expected a reception committee – and where the hell is it?’
O’Hara said to Rohde, ‘We are thinking of staying here tonight. What do you think?’
‘It is better here than at the mine,’ said Rohde. ‘We have lost a lot of height. I would say that we are at an altitude of about four thousand metres here – or maybe a little more. That will not harm us for one night; it will be better to stay here in shelter than to stay in the open tonight, even if it is lower down the mountain.’ He contracted his brows. ‘But I suggest we keep a watch.’
Forester nodded. ‘We’ll take it in turns.’
Miss Ponsky and Benedetta were busy on the pressure stoves making hot soup. Armstrong had already got the heater going and Willis was sorting out cans of food. He called O’Hara over. ‘I thought we’d better take something with us when we leave,’ he said. ‘It might come in useful.’
‘A good idea,’ said O’Hara.
Willis grinned. ‘That’s all very well, but I can’t read Spanish. I have to go by the pictures on the labels. Someone had better check on these when I’ve got them sorted out.’
Forester and Rohde went on down the road to pick a good spot for a sentry, and when Forester came back he said, ‘Rohde’s taking the first watch. We’ve got a good place where we can see bits of road a good two miles away. And if they come up at night they’re sure to have their lights on.’
He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got six able-bodied men, so if we leave here early tomorrow, that means two-hour watches. That’s not too bad – it gives us all enough sleep.’
After they had eaten Benedetta took some food down to Rohde and O’Hara found himself next to Armstrong. ‘You said you were a historian. I suppose you’re over here to check up on the Incas,’ he said.
‘Oh, no,’ said Armstrong. ‘They’re not my line of country at all. My line is medieval history.’
‘Oh,’ said O’Hara blankly.
‘I don’t know anything about the Incas and I don’t particularly want to,’ said Armstrong frankly. He smiled gently. ‘For the past ten years I’ve never had a real holiday. I’d go on holiday like a normal man – perhaps to France or Italy – and then I’d see something interesting. I’d do a bit of investigating – and before I’d know it I’d be hard at work.’
He produced a pipe and peered dubiously into his tobacco pouch. ‘This year I decided to come to South America for a holiday. All there is here is pre-European and modern history – no medieval history at all. Clever of me, wasn’t it?’
O’Hara smiled, suspecting that Armstrong was indulging in a bit of gentle leg-pulling. ‘And what’s your line, Doctor Willis?’ he asked.
‘I’m a physicist,’ said Willis. ‘I’m interested in cosmic rays at high altitudes. I’m not getting very far with it, though.’
They were certainly a mixed lot, thought O’Hara, looking across at Miss Ponsky as she talked animatedly to Aguillar. Now there was a sight – a New England spinster schoolmarm lecturing a statesman. She would certainly have plenty to tell her pupils when she arrived back at the little schoolhouse.
‘What was this place, anyway?’ asked Willis.
‘Living quarters for the mine up on top,’ said O’Hara. ‘That’s what Rohde tells me.’
Willis nodded. ‘They had their workshops down here, too,’ he said. ‘All the machinery has gone, of course, but there are still a few bits and pieces left.’ He shivered. ‘I can’t say I’d like to work in a place like this.’
O’Hara looked about the hut. ‘Neither would I.’ He caught sight of an electric conduit tube running down a wall. ‘Where did their electricity supply come from, I wonder?’
‘They had their own plant; there’s the remains of it out back. The generator has gone – they must have salvaged it when the mine closed down. They scavenged most everything, I guess; there’s precious little left.’
Armstrong drew the last of the smoke from his failing pipe with a disconsolate gurgle. ‘Well, that’s the last of the tobacco until we get back to civilization,’ he said as he knocked out the dottle. ‘Tell me, Captain; what are you doing in this part of the world?’
‘Oh, I fly aeroplanes from anywhere to anywhere,’ said O’Hara. Not any more I don’t, he thought. As far as Filson was concerned, he was finished. Filson would never forgive a pilot who wrote off one of his aircraft, no matter what the reason. I’ve lost my job, he thought. It was a lousy job but it had kept him going, and now he’d lost it.
The girl came back and he crossed over to her. ‘Anything doing down the road?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. Miguel says everything is quiet.’
‘He’s quite a character,’ said O’Hara. ‘He certainly knows a lot about these mountains – and he knows a bit about medicine too.’
‘He was born near here,’ Benedetta said. ‘And he was a medical student until – ’ She stopped.
‘Until what?’ prompted O’Hara.
‘Until the revolution.’ She looked at her hands. ‘All his family were killed – that is why he hates Lopez. That is why he works with my uncle – he knows that my uncle will ruin Lopez.’
‘I thought he had a chip on his shoulder,’ said O’Hara.
She sighed. ‘It is a great pity about Miguel; he was going to do so much. He was very interested in the soroche, you know; he intended to study it as soon as he had taken his degree. But when the revolution came he had to leave the country and he had no money so he could not continue his studies. He worked in the Argentine for a while, and then he met my uncle. He saved my uncle’s life.’
‘Oh?’ O’Hara raised his eyebrows.
‘In the beginning Lopez knew that he was not safe while my uncle was alive. He knew that my uncle would organize an opposition – underground, you know. So wherever my uncle went he was in danger from the murderers hired by Lopez – even in the Argentine. There were several attempts to kill him, and it was one of these times that Miguel saved his life.’
O’Hara said, ‘Your uncle must have felt like another Trotsky. Joe Stalin had him bumped off in Mexico.’
‘That is right,’ she said with a grimace of distaste. ‘But they were communists, both of them. Anyway, Miguel stayed with us after that. He said that all he wanted was food to eat and a bed to sleep in, and he would help my uncle come back to Cordillera. And here we are.’
Yes, thought O’Hara; marooned up a bloody mountain with God knows what waiting at the bottom.
Presently Armstrong went out to relieve Rohde. Miss Ponsky came across to talk to O’Hara. ‘I’m sorry I behaved so stupidly in the airplane,’ she said crossly. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’
O’Hara thought there was no need to apologize for being half frightened to death; he had been bloody scared himself. But he couldn’t say that – he couldn’t even mention the word fear to her. That would be unforgivable; no one likes to be reminded of a lapse of that nature – not even a maiden lady getting on in years. He smiled and said diplomatically, ‘Not everyone would have come through an experience like that as well as you have, Miss Ponsky.’
She was mollified and he knew that she had been in fear of a rebuff. She was the kind of person who would bite on a sore tooth, not letting it alone. She smiled and said, ‘Well now, Captain O’Hara – what do you think of all this talk about communists?’
‘I think they’re capable of anything,’ said O’Hara grimly.
‘I’m going to put in a report to the State Department when I get back,’ she said. ‘You ought to hear what Señor Aguillar has been telling me about General Lopez. I think the State Department should help Señor Aguillar against General Lopez and the communists.’
‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ said O’Hara. ‘But perhaps your State Department doesn’t believe in interfering in Cordilleran affairs.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said Miss Ponsky with acerbity. ‘We’re supposed to be fighting the communists, aren’t we? Besides, Señor Aguillar assures me that he’ll hold elections as soon as General Lopez is kicked out. He’s a real democrat just like you and me.’
O’Hara wondered what would happen if another South American state did go communist. Cuban agents were filtering all through Latin America like woodworms in a piece of furniture. He tried to think of the strategic importance of Cordillera – it was on the Pacific coast and it straddled the Andes, a gun pointing to the heart of the continent. He thought the Americans would be very upset if Cordillera went communist.
Rohde came back and talked for a few minutes with Aguillar, then he crossed to O’Hara and said in a low voice, ‘Señor Aguillar would like to speak to you.’ He gestured to Forester and the three of them went to where Aguillar was resting in a bunk.
He had brightened considerably and was looking quite spry. His eyes were lively and no longer filmed with weariness, and there was a strength and authority in his voice that O’Hara had not heard before. He realized that this was a strong man; maybe not too strong in the body because he was becoming old and his body was wearing out, but he had a strong mind. O’Hara suspected that if the old man had not had a strong will, the body would have crumpled under the strain it had undergone.
Aguillar said, ‘First I must thank you gentlemen for all you have done, and I am truly sorry that I have brought this calamity upon you.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It is the innocent bystander who always suffers in the clash of our Latin politics. I am sorry that this should have happened and that you should see my country in this sad light.’
‘What else could we do?’ asked Forester. ‘We’re all in the same boat.’
‘I’m glad you see it that way,’ said Aguillar. ‘Because of what may come next. What happens if we meet up with the communists who should be here and are not?’
‘Before we come to that there’s something I’d like to query,’ said O’Hara. Aguillar raised his eyebrows and motioned him to continue, so O’Hara said deliberately, ‘How do we know they are communists? Señorita Aguillar tells me that Lopez has tried to liquidate you several times. How do you know he hasn’t got wind of your return and is having another crack at you?’
Aguillar shook his head. ‘Lopez has – in your English idiom – shot his bolt. I know. Do not forget that I am a practical politician and give me credit for knowing my own work. Lopez forgot about me several years ago and is only interested in how he can safely relinquish the reins of power and retire. As for the communists – for years I have watched them work in my country, undermining the government and wooing the people. They have not got far with the people, or they would have disposed of Lopez by now. I am their only danger and I am sure that our situation is their work.’
Forester said casually, ‘Grivas was trying to make a clenched fist salute when he died.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara. ‘But why all this rigmarole of Grivas in the first place? Why not just put a time bomb in the Dakota – that would have done the job very easily.’
Aguillar smiled. ‘Señor O’Hara, in my life as a politician I have had four bombs thrown at me and every one was defective. Our politics out here are emotional and emotion does not make for careful workmanship, even of bombs. And I am sure that even communism cannot make any difference to the native characteristics of my people. They wanted to make very sure of me and so they chose the unfortunate Grivas as their instrument. Would you have called Grivas an emotional man?’
‘I should think he was,’ said O’Hara, thinking of Grivas’s exultation even in death. ‘And he was pretty slipshod too.’
Aguillar spread his hands, certain he had made his point. But he drove it home. ‘Grivas would be happy to be given such work; it would appeal to his sense of drama – and my people have a great sense of drama. As for being – er – slipshod, Grivas bungled the first part of the operation by stupidly killing himself, and the others have bungled the rest of it by not being here to meet us.’
O’Hara rubbed his chin. As Aguillar drew the picture it made a weird kind of sense.
Aguillar said, ‘Now, my friends, we come to the next point. Supposing, on the way down this mountain, we meet these men – these communists? What happens then?’ He regarded O’Hara and Forester with bright eyes. ‘It is not your fight – you are not Cordillerans – and I am interested to know what you would do. Would you give this dago politician into the hands of his enemies or …’
‘Would we fight?’ finished Forester.
‘It is my fight,’ said O’Hara bluntly. ‘I’m not a Cordilleran, but Grivas pulled a gun on me and made me crash my plane. I didn’t like that, and I didn’t like the sight of the Coughlins. Anyway, I don’t like the sight of communists, and I think that, all in all, this is my fight.’
‘I concur,’ said Forester.
Aguillar raised his hand. ‘But it is not as easy as that, is it? There are others to take into account. Would it be fair on Miss – er – Ponsky, for instance? Now what I propose is this. Miguel, my niece and I will withdraw into another cabin while you talk it over – and I will abide by your joint decision.’
Forester looked speculatively at Peabody, who was just leaving the hut. He glanced at O’Hara, then said, ‘I think we should leave the question of fighting until there’s something to fight. It’s possible that we might just walk out of here.’
Aguillar had seen Forester’s look at Peabody. He smiled sardonically. ‘I see that you are a politician yourself, Señor Forester.’ He made a gesture of resignation. ‘Very well, we will leave the problem for the moment – but I think we will have to return to it.’
‘It’s a pity we had to come down the mountain,’ said Forester. ‘There’s sure to be an air search, and it might have been better to stay by the Dakota.’
‘We could not have lived up there,’ said Rohde.
‘I know, but it’s a pity all the same.’
‘I don’t think it makes much difference,’ said O’Hara. ‘The wreck will be difficult to spot from the air – it’s right at the foot of a cliff.’ He hesitated. ‘And I don’t know about an air search – not yet, anyway.’
Forester jerked his head. ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘Andes Airlift isn’t noted for its efficiency and Filson, my boss, isn’t good at paperwork. This flight didn’t even have a number – I remember wondering about it just before we took off. It’s on the cards that San Croce control haven’t bothered to notify Santillana to expect us.’ As he saw Forester’s expression he added, The whole set-up is shoestring and sealing-wax – it’s only a small field.’
‘But surely your boss will get worried when he doesn’t hear from you?’
‘He’ll worry,’ agreed O’Hara. ‘He told me to phone him from Santillana – but he won’t worry too much at first. There have been times when I haven’t phoned through on his say-so and had a rocket for losing cargo. But I don’t think he’ll worry about losing the plane for a couple of days at least.’
Forester blew out his cheeks. ‘Wow – what a Rube Goldberg organization. Now I really feel lost.’
Rohde said, ‘We must depend on our own efforts. I think we can be sure of that.’
‘We flew off course too,’ said O’Hara. ‘They’ll start the search north of here – when they start.’
Rohde looked at Aguillar whose eyes were closed. ‘There is nothing we can do now,’ he said. ‘But we must sleep. It will be a hard day tomorrow.’
III
Again O’Hara did not sleep very well, but at least he was resting on a mattress instead of a hard floor, with a full belly. Peabody was on watch and O’Hara was due to relieve him at two o’clock; he was glad when the time came.
He donned his leather jacket and took the vicuna coat that Forester had given him. He suspected that he would be glad of it during the next two hours. Forester was awake and waved lazily as he went out, although he did not speak.
The night air was thin and cold and O’Hara shivered as he set off down the road. As Rohde had said, the conditions for survival were better here than up by the airstrip, but it was still pretty dicey. He was aware that his heart was thumping and that his respiration rate was up. It would be much better when they got down to the quebrada, as Rohde called the lateral valley to which they were heading.
He reached the corner where he had to leave the road and headed towards the looming outcrop of rock which Rohde had picked as a vantage point. Peabody should have been perched on top of the rock and should have heard him coming, but there was no sign of his presence.
O’Hara called softly, ‘Peabody!’
There was silence.
Cautiously he circled the outcrop to get it silhouetted against the night sky. There was a lump on top of the rock which he could not quite make out. He began to climb the rock and as he reached the top he heard a muffled snore. He shook Peabody and his foot clinked on a bottle – Peabody was drunk.
‘You bloody fool,’ he said and started to slap Peabody’s face, but without appreciable result. Peabody muttered in his drunken stupor but did not recover consciousness. ‘I ought to let you die of exposure,’ whispered O’Hara viciously, but he knew he could not do that. He also knew that he could not hope to carry Peabody back to the camp by himself. He would have to get help.
He stared down the mountainside but all was quiet, so he climbed down the rock and headed back up the road. Forester was still awake and looked up inquiringly as O’Hara entered the hut. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, suddenly alert.
‘Peabody’s passed out,’ said O’Hara. ‘I’ll need help to bring him up.’
‘Damn this altitude,’ said Forester, putting on his shoes.
‘It wasn’t the altitude,’ O’Hara said coldly. ‘The bastard’s dead drunk.’
Forester muffled an imprecation. ‘Where did he get the stuff?’
‘I suppose he found it in one of the huts,’ said O’Hara. ‘I’ve still got my flask – I was saving it for Aguillar.’
‘All right,’ said Forester. ‘Let’s lug the damn fool up here.’
It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Peabody was a big, flabby man and his body lolled uncooperatively, but they managed it at last and dumped him unceremoniously in a bunk. Forester gasped and said, ‘This idiot will be the death of us all if we don’t watch him.’ He paused. ‘I’ll come down with you – it might be better to have two pairs of eyes down there right now.’
They went back and climbed up on to the rock, lying side by side and scanning the dark mountainside. For fifteen minutes they were silent, but saw and heard nothing. ‘I think it’s okay,’ said Forester at last. He shifted his position to ease his bones. ‘What do you think of the old man?’
‘He seems all right to me,’ said O’Hara.
‘He’s a good joe – a good liberal politician. If he lasts long enough he might end up by being a good liberal statesman – but liberals don’t last long in this part of the world, and I think he’s a shade too soft.’ Forester chuckled. ‘Even when it’s a matter of life and death – his life and death, not to mention his niece’s – he still sticks to democratic procedure. He wants us to vote on whether we shall hand him over to the commies. Imagine that!’
‘I wouldn’t hand anyone over to the communists,’ said O’Hara. He glanced sideways at the dark bulk of Forester. ‘You said you could fly a plane – I suppose you do it as a matter of business; company plane and all that.’
‘Hell, no,’ said Forester. ‘My outfit’s not big enough or advanced enough for that. I was in the Air Force – I flew in Korea.’
‘So did I,’ said O’Hara. ‘I was in the R.A.F.’
‘Well, what do you know.’ Forester was delighted. ‘Where were you based?’
O’Hara told him and he said, ‘Then you were flying Sabres like I was. We went on joint operations – hell, we must have flown together.’
‘Probably.’
They lay in companionable silence for a while, then Forester said, ‘Did you knock down any of those Migs? I got four, then they pulled me out. I was mad about that – I wanted to be a war hero; an ace, you know.’
‘You’ve got to get five in the American Air Force, haven’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ said Forester. ‘Did you get any?’
‘A couple,’ said O’Hara. He had shot down eight Migs but it was a part of his life he preferred to forget, so he didn’t elaborate. Forester sensed his reserve and was quiet. After a few minutes he said, ‘I think I’ll go back and get some sleep – if I can. We’ll be on our way early.’
When he had gone O’Hara stared into the darkness and thought about Korea. That had been the turning point of his life: before Korea he had been on his way up; after Korea there was just the endless slide, down to Filson and now beyond. He wondered where he would end up.
Thinking of Korea brought back Margaret and the letter. He had read the letter while on ready call on a frozen airfield. The Americans had a name for that kind of letter – they called them ‘Dear Johns’. She was quite matter-of-fact about it and said that they were adult and must be sensible about this thing – all the usual rationalizations which covered plain infidelity. Looking back on it afterwards O’Hara could see a little humour in it – not much, but some. He was one of the inglorious ten per cent of any army fighting away from home, and he had lost his wife to a civilian. But it wasn’t funny at all reading that letter on the cold airfield in Korea.
Five minutes later there was a scramble and he was in the air and thirty minutes later he was fighting. He went into battle with cold ferocity and a total lack of judgment. In three minutes he shot down two Migs, surprising them by sheer recklessness. Then a Chinese pilot with a cooler mind shot him down and he spent the rest of the war in a prison cage.
He did not like to think of that period and what had happened to him. He had come out of it with honour, but the psychiatrists had a field day with him when he got back to England. They did what they could but they could not break down the shell he had built about himself – and neither, by that time, could he break out.
And so it went – invalided out of the Air Force with a pension which he promptly commuted; the good jobs – at first – and then the poorer jobs, until he got down to Filson. And always the drink – more and more booze which had less and less effect as he tried to fill and smother the aching emptiness inside him.
He moved restlessly on the rock and heard the bottle clink. He put out his hand, picked it up and held it to the sky. It was a quarter full. He smiled. He could not get drunk on that but it would be very welcome. Yet as the fiery fluid spread and warmed his gut he felt guilty.
IV
Peabody was blearily belligerent when he woke up and found O’Hara looking at him. At first he looked defensive, then his instinct for attack took over. ‘I’m not gonna take anything from you,’ he said shakily. ‘Not from any goddam limey.’
O’Hara just looked at him. He had no wish to tax Peabody with anything. Weren’t they members of the same club? he thought sardonically. Fellow drunks. Why, we even drink from the same bottle. He felt miserable.
Rohde took a step forward and Peabody screamed, ‘And I’m not gonna take anything from a dago either.’
‘Then perhaps you’ll take it from me,’ snapped Forester. He took one stride and slapped Peabody hard on the side of the face. Peabody sagged back on the bed and looked into Forester’s cold eyes with an expression of fear and bewilderment on his face. His hand came up to touch the red blotch on his cheek. He was just going to speak when Forester pushed a finger at him. ‘Shut up! One cheep out of you and I’ll mash you into a pulp. Now get your big fat butt off that bed and get to work – and if you step out of line again I swear to God I’ll kill you.’
The ferocity in Forester’s voice had a chilling effect on Peabody. All the belligerence drained out of him. ‘I didn’t mean to –’ he began.
‘Shut up!’ said Forester and turned his back on him. ‘Let’s get this show on the road,’ he announced generally.
They took food and a pressure stove and fuel, carrying it in awkwardly contrived packs cobbled from their overcoats. O’Hara did not think that Forester’s boss would thank him for the vicuna coat, already showing signs of hard use.
Aguillar said he could walk, provided he was not asked to go too fast, so Forester took the stretcher poles and lashed them together in what he called a travois. ‘The Plains Indians used this for transport,’ he said. ‘They got along without wheels – so can we.’ He grinned. ‘They pulled with horses and we have only manpower, but it’s downhill all the way.’
The travois held a lot, much more than a man could carry, and Forester and O’Hara took first turn at pulling the triangular contraption, the apex bumping and bouncing on the stony ground. The others fell into line behind them and once more they wound their way down the mountain.
O’Hara looked at his watch – it was six a.m. He began to calculate – they had not come very far the previous day, not more than four or five miles, but they had been rested, warmed and fed, and that was all to the good. He doubted if they could make more than ten miles a day, so that meant another two days to the refinery, but they had enough food for at least four days, so they would be all right even if Aguillar slowed them down. Things seemed immeasurably brighter.
The terrain around them began to change. There were tufts of grass scattered sparsely and an occasional wild flower, and as they went on these signs of life became more frequent. They were able to move faster, too, and O’Hara said to Rohde, ‘The low altitude seems to be doing us good.’
‘That – and acclimatization,’ said Rohde. He smiled grimly. ‘If it does not kill you, you can get used to it – eventually.’
They came to one of the inevitable curves in the road and Rohde stopped and pointed to a silvery thread. ‘That is the quebrada – where the river is. We cross the river and turn north. The refinery is about twenty-four kilometres from the bridge.’
‘What’s the height above sea-level?’ asked O’Hara. He was beginning to take a great interest in the air he breathed – more interest than he had ever taken in his life.
‘About three thousand five hundred metres,’ said Rohde.
Twelve thousand feet, O’Hara thought. That’s much better.
They made good time and decided they would be able to have their midday rest and some hot food on the other side of the bridge. ‘A little over five miles in half a day,’ said Forester, chewing on a piece of jerked beef. ‘That won’t be bad going. But I hope to God that Rohde is right when he says that the refinery is still inhabited.’
‘We will be all right,’ said Rohde. ‘There is a village ten miles the other side of the refinery. Some of us can go on and bring back help if necessary.’
They pushed on and found that suddenly they were in the valley. There was no more snow and the ground was rocky, with more clumps of tough grass. The road ceased to twist and they went past many small ponds. It was appreciably warmer too, and O’Hara found that he could stride out without losing his breath.
We’ve got it made, he thought exultantly.
Soon they heard the roar of the river which carried the meltwater from the snowfields behind them and suddenly they were all gay. Miss Ponsky chattered unceasingly, exclaiming once in her high-pitched voice as she saw a bird, the first living, moving thing they had seen in two days. O’Hara heard Aguillar’s deep chuckle and even Peabody cheered up, recovering from Forester’s tonguelashing.
O’Hara found himself next to Benedetta. She smiled at him and said, ‘Who has the pressure stove? We are going to need it soon.’
He pointed back to where Willis and Armstrong were pulling the travois. ‘I packed it in there,’ he said.
They were very near the river now and he estimated that the road would have one last turn before they came to the bridge. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what’s round the corner.’
They stepped out and round the curve and O’Hara suddenly stopped. There were men and vehicles on the other side of the swollen river and the bridge was down.
A faint babble of voices arose above the river’s roar as they were seen and some of the men on the other side started to run. O’Hara saw a man reach into the back of a truck and lift out a rifle and there was a popping noise as others opened up with pistols.
He lurched violently into Benedetta, sending her flying just as the rifle cracked, and she stumbled into cover, dropping some cans in the middle of the road. As O’Hara fell after her one of the cans suddenly leaped into the air as a bullet hit it, and leaked a tomato bloodiness.
THREE (#ulink_f96fc2db-4ad5-5e91-a39c-f2f2df68138b)
O’Hara, Forester and Rohde looked down on the bridge from the cover of a group of large boulders near the edge of the river gorge. Below, the river rumbled, a green torrent of ice-water smoothly slipping past the walls it had cut over the aeons. The gorge was about fifty yards wide.
O’Hara was still shaking from the shock of being unexpectedly fired upon. He had thrown himself into the side of the road, winding himself by falling on to a can in the pocket of his overcoat. When he recovered his breath he had looked with stupefaction at the punctured can in the middle of the road, bleeding a red tomato and meat gravy. That could have been me, he thought – or Benedetta.
It was then that he started to shake.
They had crept back round the corner, keeping in cover, while rifle bullets flicked chips of granite from the road surface. Rohde was waiting for them, his gun drawn and his face anxious. He looked at Benedetta’s face and his lips drew back over his teeth in a snarl as he took a step forward.
‘Hold it,’ said Forester quietly from behind him. ‘Let’s not be too hasty.’ He put his hand on O’Hara’s arm. ‘What’s happening back there?’
O’Hara took a grip on himself. ‘I didn’t have time to see much. I think the bridge is down; there are some trucks on the other side and there seemed to be a hell of a lot of men.’
Forester scanned the ground with a practised eye. ‘There’s plenty of cover by the river – we should be able to get a good view from among those rocks without being spotted. Let’s go.’
So here they were, looking at the ant-like activity on the other side of the river. There seemed to be about twenty men; some were busy unloading thick planks from a truck, others were cutting rope into lengths. Three men had apparently been detailed off as sentries; they were standing with rifles in their hands, scanning the bank of the gorge. As they watched, one of the men must have thought he saw something move, because he raised his rifle and fired a shot.
Forester said, ‘Nervous, aren’t they? They’re firing at shadows.’
O’Hara studied the gorge. The river was deep and ran fast – it was obviously impossible to swim. One would be swept away helplessly in the grip of that rush of water and be frozen to death in ten minutes. Apart from that, there were the problems of climbing down the edge of the gorge to the water’s edge and getting up the other side, not to mention the likelihood of being shot.
He crossed the river off his mental list of possibilities and turned his attention to the bridge. It was a primitive suspension contraption with two rope catenaries strung from massive stone buttresses on each side of the gorge. From the catenaries other ropes, graded in length, supported the main roadway of the bridge which was made of planks. But there was a gap in the middle where a lot of planks were missing and the ropes dangled in the breeze.
Forester said softly, ‘That’s why they didn’t meet us at the airstrip. See the truck in the river – downstream, slapped up against the side of the gorge?’
O’Hara looked and saw the truck in the water, almost totally submerged, with a standing wave of water swirling over the top of the cab. He looked back at the bridge. ‘It seems as though it was crossing from this side when it went over.’
‘That figures,’ said Forester. ‘I reckon they’d have a couple of men to make the preliminary arrangements – stocking up the camp and so on – in readiness for the main party. When the main party was due they came down to the bridge to cross – God knows for what reason. But they didn’t make it – and they buggered the bridge, with the main party still on the other side.’
‘They’re repairing it now,’ said O’Hara. ‘Look.’
Two men crawled on to the swaying bridge pushing a plank before them. They lashed it into place with the aid of a barrage of shouted advice from terra firma and then retreated. O’Hara looked at his watch; it had taken them half an hour.
‘How many planks to go?’ he asked.
Rohde grunted. ‘About thirty.’
‘That gives us fifteen hours before they’re across,’ said O’Hara.
‘More than that,’ said Forester. ‘They’re not likely to do that trapeze act in the dark.’
Rohde took out his pistol and carefully sighted on the bridge, using his forearm as a rest. Forester said, ‘That’s no damned use – you won’t hit anything at fifty yards with a pistol.’
‘I can try,’ said Rohde.
Forester sighed. ‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘But just one shot to see how it goes. How many slugs have you got?’
‘I had two magazines with seven bullets in each,’ said Rohde. ‘I have fired three shots.’
‘You pop off another and that leaves ten. That’s not too many.’
Rohde tightened his lips stubbornly and kept the pistol where it was. Forester winked at O’Hara and said, ‘If you don’t mind I’m going to retire now. As soon as you start shooting they’re going to shoot right back.’
He withdrew slowly, then turned and lay on his back and looked at the sky, gesturing for O’Hara to join him. ‘It looks as though the time is ripe to hold our council of war,’ he said. ‘Surrender or fight. But there may be a way out of it – have you got that air chart of yours?’
O’Hara produced it. ‘We can’t cross the river – not here, at least,’ he said.
Forester spread out the chart and studied it. He put his finger down. ‘Here’s the river – and this is where we are. This bridge isn’t shown. What’s this shading by the river?’
‘That’s the gorge.’
Forester whistled. ‘Hell, it starts pretty high in the mountains, so we can’t get around it upstream. What about the other way?’
O’Hara measured off the distance roughly. ‘The gorge stretches for about eighty miles down stream, but there’s a bridge marked here – fifty miles away, as near as dammit.’
‘That’s a hell of a long way,’ commented Forester. ‘I doubt if the old man could make it – not over mountain country.’
O’Hara said, ‘And if that crowd over there have any sense they’ll have another truckload of men waiting for us if we do try it. They have the advantage of being able to travel fast on the lower roads.’
‘The bastards have got us boxed in,’ said Forester. ‘So it’s surrender or fight.’
‘I surrender to no communists,’ said O’Hara.
There was a flat report as Rohde fired his pistol and, almost immediately, an answering fusillade of rifle shots, the sound redoubled by echoes from the high ground behind. A bullet ricocheted from close by and whined over O’Hara’s head.
Rohde came slithering down. ‘I missed,’ he said.
Forester refrained from saying, ‘I told you so,’ but his expression showed it. Rohde grinned. ‘But it stopped them working on the bridge – they went back fast and the plank dropped in the river.’
‘That’s something,’ said O’Hara. ‘Maybe we can hold them off that way.’
‘For how long?’ asked Forester. ‘We can’t hold them off for ever – not with ten slugs. We’d better hold our council of war. You stay here, Miguel; but choose a different observation point – they might have spotted this one.’
O’Hara and Forester went back to the group on the road. As they approached O’Hara said in a low voice, ‘We’d better do something to ginger this lot up; they look too bloody nervous.’
There was a feeling of tension in the air. Peabody was muttering in a low voice to Miss Ponsky, who for once was silent herself. Willis was sitting on a rock, nervously tapping his foot on the ground, and Aguillar was speaking rapidly to Benedetta some little way removed from the group. The only one at ease seemed to be Armstrong, who was placidly sucking on an empty pipe, idly engaged in drawing patterns on the ground with a stick.
O’Hara crossed to Aguillar. ‘We’re going to decide what to do,’ he said. ‘As you suggested.’
Aguillar nodded gravely. ‘I said that it must happen.’
O’Hara said, ‘You’re going to be all right.’ He looked at Benedetta; her face was pale and her eyes were dark smudges in her head. He said, ‘I don’t know how long this is going to take, but why don’t you begin preparing a meal for us. We’ll all feel better when we’ve eaten.’
‘Yes, child,’ said Aguillar. ‘I will help you. I am a good cook, Señor O’Hara.’
O’Hara smiled at Benedetta. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’
He walked over to where Forester was giving a pep talk. ‘And that’s the position,’ he was saying. ‘We’re boxed in and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it – but there is always a way out of anything, using brains and determination. Anyway, it’s a case of surrender or fight. I’m going to fight – and so is Tim O’Hara here; aren’t you, Tim?’
‘I am,’ said O’Hara grimly.
‘I’m going to go round and ask your views, and you must each make your own decision,’ continued Forester. ‘What about you, Doctor Willis?’
Willis looked up and his face was strained. ‘It’s difficult, isn’t it? You see, I’m not much of a fighter. Then again, it’s a question of the odds – can we win? I don’t see much reason in putting up a fight if we’re certain of losing – and I don’t see any chance at all of our winning out.’ He paused, then said hesitantly, ‘But I’ll go with the majority vote.’
Willis, you bastard, you’re a fine example of a fencesitter, thought O’Hara.
‘Peabody?’ Forester’s voice cut like a lash.
‘What the hell has this got to do with us?’ exploded Peabody. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to risk my life for any wop politician. I say hand the bastard over and let’s get the hell out of here.’
‘What do you say, Miss Ponsky?’
She gave Peabody a look of scorn, then hesitated. All the talk seemed to be knocked out of her, leaving her curiously deflated. At last she said in a small voice, ‘I know I’m only a woman and I can’t do much in the way of fighting, and I’m scared to death – but I think we ought to fight.’ She ended in a rush and looked defiantly at Peabody. ‘And that’s my vote.’
Good for you, Miss Ponsky, cheered O’Hara silently. That’s three to fight. It’s now up to Armstrong – he can tip it for fighting or make a deadlock, depending on his vote.
‘Doctor Armstrong, what do you have to say?’ queried Forester.
Armstrong sucked on his pipe and it made an obscene noise. ‘I suppose I’m more an authority on this kind of situation than anyone present,’ he observed. ‘With the possible exception of Señor Aguillar, who at present is cooking our lunch, I see. Give me a couple of hours and I could quote a hundred parallel examples drawn from history.’
Peabody muttered in exasperation, ‘What the hell!’
‘The question at issue is whether to hand Señor Aguillar to the gentlemen on the other side of the river. The important point, as I see it affecting us, is what would they do with him? And I can’t really see that there is anything they can do with him other than kill him. Keeping high-standing politicians as prisoners went out of fashion a long time ago. Now, if they kill him they will automatically be forced to kill us. They would not dare take the risk of letting this story loose upon the world. They would be most painfully criticized, perhaps to the point of losing what they have set out to gain. In short, the people of Cordillera would not stand for it. So you see, we are not fighting for the life of Señor Aguillar; we are fighting for our own lives.’
He put his pipe back into his mouth and made another rude noise.
‘Does that mean that you are in favour of fighting?’ asked Forester.
‘Of course,’ said Armstrong in surprise. ‘Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying?’
Peabody looked at him in horror. ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘What have I got myself into?’ He buried his head in his hands.
Forester grinned at O’Hara, and said, ‘Well, Doctor Willis?’
‘I fight,’ said Willis briefly.
O’Hara chuckled. One academic man had convinced another.
Forester said, ‘Ready to change your mind, Peabody?’
Peabody looked up. ‘You really think they’re going to rub us all out?’
‘If they kill Aguillar I don’t see what else they can do,’ said Armstrong reasonably. ‘And they will kill Aguillar, you know.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Peabody in an anguish of indecision.
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Desmond Bagley
Action thriller by the classic adventure writer set in the South American Andes.When Tim O’Hara’s plane is hijacked and forced to crash land in the middle of the Andes, his troubles are only beginning. A heavily armed group of communist soldiers intent on killing one of his passengers – an influential political figure – have orders to leave no survivors. Isolated in the biting cold of the Andes, O’Hara’s party must fight for their lives with only the most primitive weapons…
DESMOND BAGLEY
High Citadel
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_650f229e-9db2-5ece-9ec8-2d5af6df061b)
HARPER
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1965
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1965
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this works.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008211141
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN 9780008211424
Version: 2016-11-23
CONTENTS
Cover (#u6eecfbe4-920f-577a-8e68-9a12e2fc07c3)
Title Page (#ufdae0da1-f511-5a7b-a3a8-67508db57f78)
Copyright (#ud65e28bf-2479-5386-bbac-5583d5adfd20)
High Citadel (#u1bf8349a-633d-5cdd-898c-d724aa41a7b8)
Dedication (#ua273c053-caff-5d0c-a555-2821f61c3449)
One (#u18f46f01-511b-5a84-90df-e01ffac6eb73)
Two (#uad640f4f-d322-57e0-bac7-edda9ee330a4)
Three (#ud545e919-f531-58d3-b290-8e8aa816c85c)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
HIGH CITADEL (#ulink_34890c77-75c1-5a8f-873a-30d449b9364c)
DEDICATION (#ulink_6b3e1699-df1b-5c63-8f26-bfa6914acd23)
To John Donaldson and Bob Knittel
ONE (#ulink_5dc33c54-a0dc-545d-be7c-cefbd7d48952)
The bell shrilled insistently.
O’Hara frowned in his sleep and burrowed deeper into the pillow. He dragged up the thin sheet which covered him, but that left his feet uncovered and there was a sleepy protest from his companion. Without opening his eyes he put his hand out to the bedside table, seized the alarm clock, and hurled it violently across the room. Then he snuggled into the pillow again.
The bell still rang.
At last he opened his eyes, coming to the realization that it was the telephone ringing. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared hatefully into the darkness. Ever since he had been in the hotel he had been asking Ramón to transfer the telephone to the bedside, and every time he had been assured that it would be done tomorrow. It had been nearly a year.
He got out of bed and padded across the room to the dressing-table without bothering to switch on the light. As he picked up the telephone he tweaked aside the window curtain and glanced outside. It was still dark and the moon was setting – he estimated it was about two hours to dawn.
He grunted into the mouthpiece: ‘O’Hara.’
‘Goddammit, what’s the matter with you?’ said Filson. ‘I’ve been trying to get you for a quarter of an hour.’
‘I was asleep,’ said O’Hara. ‘I usually sleep at night – I believe most people do, with the exception of Yankee flight managers.’
‘Very funny,’ said Filson tiredly. ‘Well, drag your ass down here – there’s a flight scheduled for dawn.’
‘What the hell – I just got back six hours ago. I’m tired.’
‘You think I’m not?’ said Filson. ‘This is important – a Samair 727 touched down in an emergency landing and the flight inspector grounded it. The passengers are mad as hornets, so the skipper and the hostess have sorted out priorities and we’ve got to take passengers to the coast. You know what a connection with Samair means to us; it could be that if we treat ’em nice they’ll use us as a regular feeder.’
‘In a pig’s eye,’ said O’Hara. ‘They’ll use you in an emergency but they’ll never put you on their timetables. All you’ll get are thanks.’
‘It’s worth trying,’ insisted Filson. ‘So get the hell down here.’
O’Hara debated whether to inform Filson that he had already exceeded his month’s flying hours and that it was only two-thirds through the month. He sighed, and said, ‘All right, I’m coming.’ It would cut no ice with Filson to plead regulations; as far as that hard-hearted character was concerned, the I.A.T.A. regulations were meant to be bent, if not broken. If he conformed to every international regulation, his two-cent firm would be permanently in the red.
Besides, O’Hara thought, this was the end of the line for him. If he lost this job survival would be difficult. There were too many broken-down pilots in South America hunting too few jobs and Filson’s string-and-sealing-wax outfit was about as low as you could get. Hell, he thought disgustedly, I’m on a bloody escalator going the wrong way – it takes all the running I can do to stay in the same place.
He put down the hand-set abruptly and looked again into the night, scanning the sky. It looked all right here, but what about the mountains? Always he thought about the mountains, those cruel mountains with their jagged white swords stretched skywards to impale him. Filson had better have a good met. report.
He walked to the door and stepped into the corridor, unlit as usual. They turned off all lights in the public rooms at eleven p.m. – it was that kind of hotel. For the millionth time he wondered what he was doing in this godforsaken country, in this tired town, in this sleazy hotel. Unconcernedly naked, he walked down towards the bathroom. In his philosophy if a woman had seen a naked man before then it didn’t matter – if she hadn’t, it was time she did. Anyway, it was dark.
He showered quickly, washing away the night sweat, and returned to his room and switched on the bedside lamp wondering if it would work. It was always a fifty per cent chance that it wouldn’t – the town’s electricity supply was very erratic. The filament glowed faintly and in the dim light he dressed – long woollen underwear, jeans, a thick shirt and a leather jacket. By the time he had finished he was sweating again in the warm tropical night. But it would be cold over the mountains.
From the dressing-table he took a metal flask and shook it tentatively. It was only half full and he frowned. He could wake Ramón and get a refill but that was not politic; for one thing Ramón did not like being wakened at night, and for another he would ask cutting questions about when his bill was going to be paid. Perhaps he could get something at the airport.
O’Hara was just leaving when he paused at the door and turned back to look at the sprawling figure in the bed. The sheet had slipped revealing dark breasts tipped a darker colour. He looked at her critically. Her olive skin had an underlying coppery sheen and he thought there was a sizeable admixture of Indian in this one. With a rueful grimace he took a thin wallet from the inside pocket of his leather jacket, extracted two notes and tossed them on the bedside table. Then he went out, closing the door quietly behind him.
II
When he pulled his battered car into the parking bay he looked with interest at the unaccustomed bright lights of the airport. The field was low-grade, classed as an emergency strip by the big operators, although to Filson it was a main base. A Samair Boeing 727 lay sleekly in front of the control tower and O’Hara looked at it enviously for a while, then switched his attention to the hangar beyond.
A Dakota was being loaded and, even at that distance, the lights were bright enough for O’Hara to see the emblem on the tail – two intertwined ‘A’s, painted artistically to look like mountain peaks. He smiled gently to himself. It was appropriate that he should fly a plane decorated with the Double-A; alcoholics of the world unite – it was a pity Filson didn’t see the joke. But Filson was very proud of his Andes Airlift and never joked about it. A humourless man, altogether.
He got out of the car and walked around to the main building to find it was full of people, tired people rudely awakened and set down in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. He pushed his way through the crowd towards Filson’s office. An American voice with a Western twang complained loudly and bitterly, ‘This is a damned disgrace – I’m going to speak to Mr Coulson about it when I get back to Rio.’
O’Hara grinned as he pushed open the door of the office. Filson was sitting at his desk in his shirt-sleeves, his face shiny with sweat. He always sweated, particularly in an emergency and since his life was in a continual state of crisis it was a wonder he didn’t melt away altogether. He looked up.
‘So you got here at last.’
‘I’m always pleased at the welcome I get,’ observed O’Hara.
Filson ignored that. ‘All right; this is the dope,’ he said. ‘I’ve contracted with Samair to take ten of their passengers to Santillana – they’re the ones who have to make connections with a ship. You’ll take number one – she’s being serviced now.’ His voice was briskly businesslike and O’Hara could tell by the way he sonorously rolled out the words ‘contracted with Samair’ that he saw himself as a big-time air operator doing business with his peers instead of what he really was – an ageing ex-pilot making a precarious living off two twenty-five-year-old rattling ex-army surplus planes.
O’Hara merely said, ‘Who’s coming with me?’
‘Grivas.’
‘That cocky little bastard.’
‘He volunteered – which is more than you did,’ snapped Filson.
‘Oh?’
‘He was here when the 727 touched down,’ said Filson. He smiled thinly at O’Hara. ‘It was his idea to put it to Samair that we take some of their more urgent passengers, so he phoned me right away. That’s the kind of quick thinking we need in this organization.’
‘I don’t like him in a plane,’ said O’Hara.
‘So you’re a better pilot,’ said Filson reluctantly. ‘That’s why you’re skipper and he’s going as co-pilot.’ He looked at the ceiling reflectively. ‘When this deal with Samair comes off maybe I’ll promote Grivas to the office. He’s too good to be a pilot.’
Filson had delusions of grandeur. O’Hara said deliberately, ‘If you think that South American Air is going to give you a feeder contract, you’re crazy. You’ll get paid for taking their passengers and you’ll get their thanks – for what they’re worth – and they’ll kiss you off fast.’
Filson pointed a pen at O’Hara. ‘You’re paid to jockey a plane – leave the heavy thinking to me.’
O’Hara gave up. ‘What happened to the 727?’
‘Something wrong with the fuel feed – they’re looking at it now.’ Filson picked up a sheaf of papers. ‘There’s a crate of machinery to go for servicing. Here’s the manifest.’
‘Christ!’ said O’Hara. ‘This is an unscheduled flight. Do you have to do this?’
‘Unscheduled or not, you’re going with a full load. Damned if I send a half empty plane when I can send a full one.’
O’Hara was mournful. ‘It’s just that I thought I’d have an easy trip for a change. You know you always overload and it’s a hell of a job going through the passes. The old bitch wallows like a hippo.’
‘You’re going at the best time,’ said Filson. ‘It’ll be worse later in the day when the sun has warmed things up. Now get the hell out of here and stop bothering me.’
O’Hara left the office. The main hall was emptying, a stream of disgruntled Samair passengers leaving for the antiquated airport bus. A few people still stood about – those would be the passengers for Santillana. O’Hara ignored them; passengers or freight, it was all one to him. He took them over the Andes and dumped them on the other side and there was no point in getting involved with them. A bus driver doesn’t mix with his passengers, he thought; and that’s all I am – a bloody vertical bus driver.
He glanced at the manifest. Filson had done it again – there were two crates and he was aghast at their weight. One of these days, he thought savagely, I’ll get an I.A.T.A. inspector up here at the right time and Filson will go for a loop. He crushed the manifest in his fist and went to inspect the Dakota.
Grivas was by the plane, lounging gracefully against the undercarriage. He straightened when he saw O’Hara and flicked his cigarette across the tarmac but did not step forward to meet him. O’Hara crossed over and said, ‘Is the cargo aboard?’
Grivas smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘Did you check it? Is it secure?’
‘Of course, Señor O’Hara. I saw to it myself.’
O’Hara grunted. He did not like Grivas, neither as a man nor as a pilot. He distrusted his smoothness, the slick patina of pseudo good breeding that covered him like a sheen from his patent leather hair and trim toothbrush moustache to his highly polished shoes. Grivas was a slim wiry man, not very tall, who always wore a smile. O’Hara distrusted the smile most of all.
‘What’s the weather?’ he asked.
Grivas looked at the sky. ‘It seems all right.’
O’Hara let acid creep into his voice. ‘A met. report would be a good thing, don’t you think?’
Grivas grinned. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said.
O’Hara watched him go, then turned to the Dakota and walked round to the cargo doors. The Dakota had been one of the most successful planes ever designed, the work-horse of the Allied forces during the war. Over ten thousand of them had fought a good war, flying countless millions of ton-miles of precious freight about the world. It was a good plane in its time, but that was long ago.
This Dakota was twenty-five years old, battered by too many air hours with too little servicing. O’Hara knew the exact amount of play in the rudder cables; he knew how to nurse the worn-out engines so as to get the best out of them – and a poor best it was; he knew the delicate technique of landing so as not to put too much strain on the weakened undercarriage. And he knew that one day the whole sorry fabric would play a murderous trick on him high over the white spears of the Andes.
He climbed into the plane and looked about the cavernous interior. There were ten seats up front, not the luxurious reclining couches of Samair but uncomfortable hard leather chairs each fitted with the safety-belt that even Filson could not skip, although he had grumbled at the added cost. The rest of the fuselage was devoted to cargo space and was at present occupied by two large crates.
O’Hara went round them testing the anchoring straps with his hand. He had a horror that one day the cargo would slide forward if he made a bad landing or hit very bad turbulence. That would be the end of any passengers who had the ill-luck to be flying Andes Airlift. He cursed as he found a loose strap. Grivas and his slipshod ways would be the end of him one day.
Having seen the cargo was secured he went forward into the cockpit and did a routine check of the instruments. A mechanic was working on the port engine so O’Hara leaned out of the side window and asked in Spanish if it was all right. The mechanic spat, then drew his finger across his throat and made a bloodcurdling sound. ‘De un momento a otro.’
He finished the instrument check and went into the hangar to find Fernandez, the chief mechanic, who usually had a bottle or two stored away, strictly against Filson’s orders. O’Hara liked Fernandez and he knew that Fernandez liked him; they got on well together and O’Hara made a point of keeping it that way – to be at loggerheads with the chief mechanic would be a passport to eternity in this job.
He chatted for a while with Fernandez, then filled his flask and took a hasty gulp from the bottle before he passed it back. Dawn was breaking as he strode back to the Dakota, and Grivas was in the cockpit fussing with the disposal of his briefcase. It’s a funny thing, thought O’Hara, that the briefcase is just as much a part of an airline pilot as it is of any city gent. His own was under his seat; all it contained was a packet of sandwiches which he had picked up at an all-night café.
‘Got the met. report?’ he asked Grivas.
Grivas passed over the sheet of paper and O’Hara said, ‘You can taxi her down to the apron.’
He studied the report. It wasn’t too bad – it wasn’t bad at all. No storms, no anomalies, no trouble – just good weather over the mountains. But O’Hara had known the meteorologists to be wrong before and there was no release of the tension within him. It was that tension, never relaxed in the air, that had kept him alive when a lot of better men had died.
As the Dakota came to a halt on the apron outside the main building, he saw Filson leading the small group of passengers. ‘See they have their seat-belts properly fastened,’ he said to Grivas.
‘I’m not a hostess,’ said Grivas sulkily.
‘When you’re sitting on this side of the cockpit you can give orders,’ said O’Hara coldly. ‘Right now you take them. And I’d like you to do a better job of securing the passengers than you did of the cargo.’
The smile left Grivas’s face, but he turned and went into the main cabin. Presently Filson came forward and thrust a form at O’Hara. ‘Sign this.’
It was the I.A.T.A. certificate of weights and fuel. O’Hara saw that Filson had cheated on the weights as usual, but made no comment and scribbled his signature. Filson said, ‘As soon as you land give me a ring. There might be return cargo.’
O’Hara nodded and Filson withdrew. There was the double slam as the door closed and O’Hara said, ‘Take her to the end of the strip.’ He switched on the radio, warming it up.
Grivas was still sulky and would not talk. He made no answer as he revved the engines and the Dakota waddled away from the main building into the darkness, ungainly and heavy on the ground. At the end of the runway O’Hara thought for a moment. Filson had not given him a flight number. To hell with it, he thought; control ought to know what’s going on. He clicked on the microphone and said, ‘A.A. special flight, destination Santillana – A.A. to San Croce control – ready to take off.’
A voice crackled tinnily in his ear. ‘San Croce control to Andes Airlift special. Permission given – time 2.33 G.M.T.’
‘Roger and out.’ He put his hand to the throttles and waggled the stick. There was a stickiness about it. Without looking at Grivas he said, ‘Take your hands off the controls.’ Then he pushed on the throttle levers and the engines roared. Four minutes later the Dakota was airborne after an excessively long run.
He stayed at the controls for an hour, personally supervising the long climb to the roof of the world. He liked to find out if the old bitch was going to spring a new surprise. Cautiously he carried out gentle, almost imperceptible evolutions, his senses attuned to the feel of the plane. Occasionally he glanced at Grivas who was sitting frozen-faced in the other seat, staring blankly through the windscreen.
At last he was satisfied and engaged the automatic pilot but spent another quarter-hour keeping a wary eye on it. It had behaved badly on the last flight but Fernandez had assured him that it was now all right. He trusted Fernandez, but not that much – it was always better to do the final check personally.
Then he relaxed and looked ahead. It was much lighter in the high air and, although the dawn was behind, the sky ahead was curiously light. O’Hara knew why; it was the snow blink as the first light of the sun caught the high white peaks of the Andes. The mountains themselves were as yet invisible, lost in the early haze rising from the jungle below.
He began to think about his passengers and he wondered if they knew what they had got themselves into. This was no pressurized jet aircraft and they were going to fly pretty high – it would be cold and the air would be thin and he hoped none of the passengers had heart trouble. Presumably Filson had warned them, although he wouldn’t put it past that bastard to keep his mouth shut. He was even too stingy to provide decent oxygen masks – there were only mouth tubes in the oxygen bottles to port and starboard.
He scratched his cheek thoughtfully. These weren’t the ordinary passengers he was used to carrying – the American mining engineers flying to San Croce and the poorer type of local businessman proud to be flying even by Andes Airlift. These were the Samair type of passengers – wealthy and not over fond of hardship. They were in a hurry, too, or they would have had more sense than to fly Andes Airlift. Perhaps he had better break his rule and go back to talk to them. When they found they weren’t going to fly over the Andes but through them they might get scared. It would be better to warn them first.
He pushed his uniform cap to the back of his head and said, ‘Take over, Grivas. I’m going to talk to the passengers.’
Grivas lifted his eyebrows – so surprised that he forgot to be sulky. He shrugged. ‘Why? What is so important about the passengers? Is this Samair?’ He laughed noiselessly. ‘But, yes, of course – you have seen the girl; you want to see her again, eh?’
‘What girl?’
‘Just a girl, a woman; very beautiful. I think I will get to know her and take her out when we arrive in – er – Santillana,’ said Grivas thoughtfully. He looked at O’Hara out of the corner of his eye.
O’Hara grunted and took the passenger manifest from his breast pocket. As he suspected, the majority were American. He went through the list rapidly. Mr and Mrs Coughlin of Challis, Idaho – tourists; Dr James Armstrong, London, England – no profession stated; Raymond Forester of New York – businessman; Señor and Señorita Montes – Argentinian and no profession stated; Miss Jennifer Ponsky of South Bridge, Connecticut – tourist; Dr Willis of California; Miguel Rohde – no stated nationality, profession – importer; Joseph Peabody of Chicago, Illinois – businessman.
He flicked his finger on the manifest and grinned at Grivas. ‘Jennifer’s a nice name – but Ponsky? I can’t see you going around with anyone called Ponsky.’
Grivas looked startled, then laughed convulsively. ‘Ah, my friend, you can have the fair Ponsky – I’ll stick to my girl.’
O’Hara looked at the list again. ‘Then it must be Señorita Montes – unless it’s Mrs Coughlin.’
Grivas chuckled, his good spirits recovered. ‘You find out for yourself.’
‘I’ll do that,’ said O’Hara. ‘Take over.’
He went back into the main cabin and was confronted by ten uplifted heads. He smiled genially, modelling himself on the Samair pilots to whom public relations was as important as flying ability. Lifting his voice above the roar of the engines, he said, ‘I suppose I ought to tell you that we’ll be reaching the mountains in about an hour. It will get cold, so I suggest you wear your overcoats. Mr Filson will have told you that this aircraft isn’t pressurized, but we don’t fly at any great height for more than an hour, so you’ll be quite all right.’
A burly man with a whisky complexion interjected, ‘No one told me that.’
O’Hara cursed Filson under his breath and broadened his smile. ‘Well, not to worry, Mr – er …’
‘Peabody – Joe Peabody.’
‘Mr Peabody. It will be quite all right. There is an oxygen mouthpiece next to every seat which I advise you to use if you feel breathing difficult. Now, it gets a bit wearying shouting like this above the engine noise, so I’ll come round and talk to you individually.’ He smiled at Peabody, who glowered back at him.
He bent to the first pair of seats on the port side. ‘Could I have your names, please?’
The first man said, ‘I’m Forester.’ The other contributed, ‘Willis.’
‘Glad to have you aboard, Dr Willis, Mr Forester.’
Forester said, ‘I didn’t bargain for this, you know. I didn’t think kites like this were still flying.’
O’Hara smiled deprecatingly. ‘Well, this is an emergency flight and it was laid on in the devil of a hurry. I’m sure it was an oversight that Mr Filson forgot to tell you that this isn’t a pressurized plane.’ Privately he was not sure of anything of the kind.
Willis said with a smile. ‘I came here to study high altitude conditions. I’m certainly starting with a bang. How high do we fly, Captain?’
‘Not more than seventeen thousand feet,’ said O’Hara. ‘We fly through the passes – we don’t go over the top. You’ll find the oxygen mouthpieces easy to use – all you do is suck.’ He smiled and turned away and found himself held. Peabody was clutching his sleeve, leaning forward over the seat behind. ‘Hey, Skipper …’
‘I’ll be with you in a moment, Mr Peabody,’ said O’Hara, and held Peabody with his eye. Peabody blinked rapidly, released his grip and subsided into his seat, and O’Hara turned to starboard.
The man was elderly, with an aquiline nose and a short grey beard. With him was a young girl of startling beauty, judging by what O’Hara could see of her face, which was not much because she was huddled deep into a fur coat. He said, ‘Señor Montes?’
The man inclined his head. ‘Don’t worry, Captain, we know what to expect.’ He waved a gloved hand. ‘You see we are well prepared. I know the Andes, señor, and I know these aircraft. I know the Andes well; I have been over them on foot and by mule – in my youth I climbed some of the high peaks – didn’t I, Benedetta?’
‘Si, tío,’ she said in a colourless voice. ‘But that was long ago. I don’t know if your heart …’
He patted her on the leg. ‘I will be all right if I relax; is that not so, Captain?’
‘Do you understand the use of this oxygen tube?’ asked O’Hara.
Montes nodded confidently, and O’Hara said, ‘Your uncle will be quite all right, Señorita Montes.’ He waited for her to reply but she made no answer, so he passed on to the seats behind.
These couldn’t be the Coughlins; they were too ill-assorted a pair to be American tourists, although the woman was undoubtedly American. O’Hara said inquiringly, ‘Miss Ponsky?’
She lifted a sharp nose and said, ‘I declare this is all wrong, Captain. You must turn back at once.’
The fixed smile on O’Hara’s face nearly slipped. ‘I fly this route regularly, Miss Ponsky,’ he said. ‘There is nothing to fear.’
But there was naked fear on her face – air fear. Sealed in the air-conditioned quietness of a modern jet-liner she could subdue it, but the primitiveness of the Dakota brought it to the surface. There was no clever decor to deceive her into thinking that she was in a drawing-room, just the stark functionalism of unpainted aluminium, battered and scratched, and with the plumbing showing like a dissected body.
O’Hara said quietly, ‘What is your profession, Miss Ponsky?’
‘I’m a school teacher back in South Bridge,’ she said. ‘I’ve been teaching there for thirty years.’
He judged she was naturally garrulous and perhaps this could be a way of conquering her fear. He glanced at the man, who said, ‘Miguel Rohde.’
He was a racial anomaly – a Spanish-German name and Spanish-German features – straw-coloured hair and beady black eyes. There had been German immigration into South America for many years and this was one of the results.
O’Hara said, ‘Do you know the Andes, Señor Rohde?’
‘Very well,’ he replied in a grating voice. He nodded ahead. ‘I lived up there for many years – now I am going back.’
O’Hara switched back to Miss Ponsky. ‘Do you teach geography, Miss Ponsky?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I do. That’s one of the reasons I came to South America on my vacation. It makes such a difference if you can describe things first-hand.’
‘Then here you have a marvellous opportunity,’ said O’Hara with enthusiasm. ‘You’ll see the Andes as you never would if you’d flown Samair. And I’m sure that Señor Rohde will point out the interesting sights.’
Rohde nodded understandingly. ‘Si, very interesting; I know it well, the mountain country.’
O’Hara smiled reassuringly at Miss Ponsky, who offered him a glimmering, tremulous smile in return. He caught a twinkle in Rohde’s black eyes as he turned to the port side again.
The man sitting next to Peabody was undoubtedly British, so O’Hara said, ‘Glad to have you with us, Dr Armstrong – Mr Peabody.’
Armstrong said, ‘Nice to hear an English accent, Captain, after all this Spa – ’
Peabody broke in. ‘I’m damned if I’m glad to be here, Skipper. What in hell kind of an airline is this, for god-sake?’
‘One run by an American, Mr Peabody,’ said O’Hara calmly. ‘As you were saying, Dr Armstrong?’
‘Never expected to see an English captain out here,’ said Armstrong.
‘Well, I’m Irish, and we tend to get about,’ said O’Hara. ‘I’d put on some warm clothing if I were you. You, too, Mr Peabody.’
Peabody laughed and suddenly burst into song. ‘“I’ve got my love to keep me warm”.’ He produced a hip flask and waved it. ‘This is as good as any top-coat.’
For a moment O’Hara saw himself in Peabody and was shocked and afraid. ‘As you wish,’ he said bleakly, and passed on to the last pair of seats opposite the luggage racks.
The Coughlins were an elderly couple, very Darby and Joanish. He must have been pushing seventy and she was not far behind, but there was a suggestion of youth about their eyes, good-humoured and with a zest for life. O’Hara said, ‘Are you all right, Mrs Coughlin?’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Aren’t we, Harry?’
‘Sure,’ said Coughlin, and looked up at O’Hara. ‘Will we be flying through the Puerto de las Aguilas?’
‘That’s right,’ said O’Hara. ‘Do you know these parts?’
Coughlin laughed. ‘Last time I was round here was in 1912. I’ve just come down to show my wife where I spent my misspent youth.’ He turned to her. ‘That means Eagle Pass, you know; it took me two weeks to get across back in 1910, and here we are doing it in an hour or two. Isn’t it wonderful?’
‘It sure is,’ Mrs Coughlin replied comfortably.
There was nothing wrong with the Coughlins, decided O’Hara, so after a few more words he went back to the cockpit. Grivas still had the plane on automatic pilot and was sitting relaxed, gazing forward at the mountains. O’Hara sat down and looked intently at the oncoming mountain wall. He checked the course and said, ‘Keep taking a bearing on Chimitaxl and let me know when it’s two hundred and ten degrees true bearing. You know the drill.’
He stared down at the ground looking for landmarks and nodded with satisfaction as he saw the sinuous, twisting course of the Rio Sangre and the railway bridge that crossed it. Flying this route by day and for so long he knew the ground by heart and knew immediately whether he was on time. He judged that the north-west wind predicted by the meteorologists was a little stronger than they had prophesied and altered course accordingly, then he jacked in the auto pilot again and relaxed. All would be quiet until Grivas came up with the required bearing on Chimitaxl. He sat in repose and watched the ground slide away behind – the dun and olive foothills, craggy bare rock, and then the shining snow-covered peaks. Presently he munched on the sandwiches he took from his briefcase. He thought of washing them down with a drink from his flask but then he thought of Peabody’s whisky-sodden face. Something inside him seemed to burst and he found that he didn’t need a drink after all.
Grivas suddenly put down the bearing compass. ‘Thirty seconds,’ he said.
O’Hara looked at the wilderness of high peaks before him, a familiar wilderness. Some of these mountains were his friends, like Chimitaxl; they pointed out his route. Others were his deadly enemies – devils and demons lurked among them compounded of down draughts, driving snow and mists. But he was not afraid because it was all familiar and he knew and understood the dangers and how to escape them.
Grivas said, ‘Now,’ and O’Hara swung the control column gently, experience telling him the correct turn. His feet automatically moved in conjunction with his hands and the Dakota swept to port in a wide, easy curve, heading for a gap in the towering wall ahead.
Grivas said softly, ‘Señor O’Hara.’
‘Don’t bother me now.’
‘But I must,’ said Grivas, and there was a tiny metallic click.
O’Hara glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and stiffened as he saw that Grivas was pointing a gun at him – a compact automatic pistol.
He jerked his head, his eyes widening in disbelief. ‘Have you gone crazy?’
Grivas’s smiled widened. ‘Does it matter?’ he said indifferently. ‘We do not go through the Puerto de las Aguilas this trip, Señor O’Hara, that is all that matters.’ His voice hardened. ‘Now steer course one-eight-four on a true bearing.’
O’Hara took a deep breath and held his course. ‘You must have gone out of your mind,’ he said. ‘Put down that gun, Grivas, and maybe we’ll forget this. I suppose I have been bearing down on you a bit too much, but that’s no reason to pull a gun. Put it away and we’ll straighten things out when we get to Santillana.’
Grivas’s teeth flashed. ‘You’re a stupid man, O’Hara; do you think I do this for personal reasons? But since you mention it, you said not long ago that sitting in the captain’s seat gave you authority.’ He lifted the gun slightly. ‘You were wrong – this gives authority; all the authority there is. Now change course or I’ll blow your head off. I can fly this aircraft too, remember.’
‘They’d hear you inside,’ said O’Hara.
‘I’ve locked the door, and what could they do? They wouldn’t take the controls from the only pilot. But that would be of no consequence to you, O’Hara – you’d be dead.’
O’Hara saw his finger tighten on the trigger and bit his lip before swinging the control column. The Dakota turned to fly south, parallel to the main backbone of the Andes. Grivas was right, damn him; there was no point in getting himself killed. But what the hell was he up to?
He settled on the bearing given by Grivas and reached forward to the auto pilot control. Grivas jerked the gun. ‘No, Señor O’Hara; you fly this aircraft – it will give you something to do.’
O’Hara drew back his hand slowly and grasped the wheel. He looked out to starboard past Grivas at the high peaks drifting by. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked grimly.
‘That is of no consequence,’ said Grivas. ‘But it is not very far. We land at an airstrip in five minutes.’
O’Hara thought about that. There was no airstrip that he knew of on this course. There were no airstrips at all this high in the mountains except for the military strips, and those were on the Pacific side of the Andes chain. He would have to wait and see.
His eyes flickered to the microphone set on its hook close to his left hand. He looked at Grivas and saw he was not wearing his earphones. If the microphone was switched on then any loud conversation would go on the air and Grivas would be unaware of it. It was definitely worth trying.
He said to Grivas, ‘There are no airstrips on this course.’ His left hand strayed from the wheel.
‘You don’t know everything, O’Hara.’
His fingers touched the microphone and he leaned over to obstruct Grivas’s vision as much as possible, pretending to study the instruments. His fingers found the switch and he snapped it over and then he leaned back and relaxed. In a loud voice he said, ‘You’ll never get away with this, Grivas; you can’t steal a whole aeroplane so easily. When this Dakota is overdue at Santillana they’ll lay on a search – you know that as well as I do.’
Grivas laughed. ‘Oh, you’re clever, O’Hara – but I was cleverer. The radio is not working, you know. I took out the tubes when you were talking to the passengers.’
O’Hara felt a sudden emptiness in the pit of his stomach. He looked at the jumble of peaks ahead and felt frightened. This was country he did not know and there would be dangers he could not recognize. He felt frightened for himself and for his passengers.
III
It was cold in the passenger cabin, and the air was thin. Señor Montes had blue lips and his face had turned grey. He sucked on the oxygen tube and his niece fumbled in her bag and produced a small bottle of pills. He smiled painfully and put a pill in his mouth, letting it dissolve on his tongue. Slowly some colour came back into his face; not a lot, but he looked better than he had before taking the pill.
In the seat behind, Miss Ponsky’s teeth were chattering, not with cold but with conversation. Already Miguel Rohde had learned much of her life history, in which he had not the slightest interest although he did not show it. He let her talk, prompting her occasionally, and all the time he regarded the back of Montes’s head with lively black eyes. At a question from Miss Ponsky he looked out of the window and suddenly frowned.
The Coughlins were also looking out of the window. Mr Coughlin said, ‘I’d have sworn we were going to head that way – through that pass. But we suddenly changed course south.’
‘It all looks the same to me,’ said Mrs Coughlin. ‘Just a lot of mountains and snow.’
Coughlin said, ‘From what I remember, El Puerto de las Aguilas is back there.’
‘Oh, Harry, I’m sure you don’t really remember. It’s nearly fifty years since you were here – and you never saw it from an airplane.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, unconvinced. ‘But it sure is funny.’
‘Now, Harry, the pilot knows what he’s doing. He looked a nice efficient young man to me.’
Coughlin continued to look from the window. He said nothing more.
James Armstrong of London, England, was becoming very bored with Joe Peabody of Chicago, Illinois. The man was a positive menace. Already he had sunk half the contents of his flask, which seemed an extraordinarily large one, and he was getting combatively drunk. ‘Whadya think of the nerve of that goddam fly-boy, chokin’ me off like that?’ he demanded. ‘Actin’ high an’ mighty jus’ like the goddam limey he is.’
Armstrong smiled gently. ‘I’m a – er – goddam limey too, you know,’ he pointed out.
‘Well, jeez, presen’ comp’ny excepted,’ said Peabody. ‘That’s always the rule, ain’t it? I ain’t got anything against you limeys really, excep’ you keep draggin’ us into your wars.’
‘I take it you read the Chicago Tribune,’ said Armstrong solemnly.
Forester and Willis did not talk much – they had nothing in common. Willis had produced a large book as soon as they exhausted their small talk and to Forester it looked heavy in all senses of the word, being mainly mathematical.
Forester had nothing to do. In front of him was an aluminium bulkhead on which an axe and a first-aid box were mounted. There was no profit in looking at that and consequently his eyes frequently strayed across the aisle to Señor Montes. His lips tightened as he noted the bad colour of Montes’s face and he looked at the first-aid box reflectively.
IV
‘There it is,’ said Grivas. ‘You land there.’
O’Hara straightened up and looked over the nose of the Dakota. Dead ahead amid a jumble of rocks and snow was a short airstrip, a mere track cut on a ledge of a mountain. He had time for the merest glimpse before it was gone behind them.
Grivas waved the gun. ‘Circle it,’ he said.
O’Hara eased the plane into an orbit round the strip and looked down at it. There were buildings down there, rough cabins in a scattered group, and there was a road leading down the mountain, twisting and turning like a snake. Someone had thoughtfully cleared the airstrip of snow, but there was no sign of life.
He judged his distance from the ground and glanced at the altimeter. ‘You’re crazy, Grivas,’ he said. ‘We can’t land on that strip.’
‘You can, O’Hara,’ said Grivas.
‘I’m damned if I’m going to. This plane’s overloaded and that strip’s at an altitude of seventeen thousand feet. It would need to be three times as long for this crate to land safely. The air’s too thin to hold us up at a slow landing speed – we’ll hit the ground at a hell of a lick and we won’t be able to pull up. We’ll shoot off the other end of the strip and crash on the side of the mountain.’
‘You can do it.’
‘To hell with you,’ said O’Hara.
Grivas lifted his gun. ‘All right, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘But I’ll have to kill you first.’
O’Hara looked at the black hole staring at him like an evil eye. He could see the rifling inside the muzzle and it looked as big as a howitzer. In spite of the cold, he was sweating and could feel rivulets of perspiration running down his back. He turned away from Grivas and studied the strip again. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.
‘You would not know if I told you,’ said Grivas. ‘You would not understand – you are English.’
O’Hara sighed. It was going to be very dicey; he might be able to get the Dakota down in approximately one piece, but Grivas wouldn’t have a chance – he’d pile it up for sure. He said, ‘All right – warn the passengers; get them to the rear of the cabin.’
‘Never mind the passengers,’ said Grivas flatly. ‘You do not think that I am going to leave this cockpit?’
O’Hara said, ‘All right, you’re calling the shots, but I warn you – don’t touch the controls by as much as a finger. You’re not a pilot’s backside – and you know it. There can be only one man flying a plane.’
‘Get on with it,’ said Grivas shortly.
‘I’ll take my own time,’ said O’Hara. ‘I want a good look before I do a damn thing.’
He orbited the airstrip four more times, watching it as it spun crazily beneath the Dakota. The passengers should know there was something wrong by this time, he thought. No ordinary airliner stood on its wingtip and twitched about like this. Maybe they’d get alarmed and someone would try to do something about it – that might give him a chance to get at Grivas. But what the passengers could do was problematical.
The strip was all too short; it was also very narrow and made for a much smaller aircraft. He would have to land on the extreme edge, his wingtip brushing a rock wall. Then there was the question of wind direction. He looked down at the cabins, hoping to detect a wisp of smoke from the chimneys, but there was nothing.
‘I’m going to go in closer – over the strip,’ he said. ‘But I’m not landing this time.’
He pulled out of orbit and circled widely to come in for a landing approach. He lined up the nose of the Dakota on the strip like a gunsight and the plane came in, fast and level. To starboard there was a blur of rock and snow and O’Hara held his breath. If the wingtip touched the rock wall that would be the end. Ahead, the strip wound underneath, as though it was being swallowed by the Dakota. There was nothing as the strip ended – just a deep valley and the blue sky. He hauled on the stick and the plane shot skyward.
The passengers will know damn well there’s something wrong now, he thought. To Grivas he said, ‘We’re not going to get this aircraft down in one piece.’
‘Just get me down safely,’ said Grivas. ‘I’m the only one who matters.’
O’Hara grinned tightly. ‘You don’t matter a damn to me.’
‘Then think of your own neck,’ said Grivas. ‘That will take care of mine, too.’
But O’Hara was thinking of ten lives in the passenger cabin. He circled widely again to make another approach and debated with himself the best way of doing this. He could come in with the undercarriage up or down. A belly-landing would be rough at that speed, but the plane would slow down faster because of the increased friction. The question was: could he hold her straight? On the other hand if he came in with the undercarriage down he would lose airspeed before he hit the deck – that was an advantage too.
He smiled grimly and decided to do both. For the first time he blessed Filson and his lousy aeroplanes. He knew to a hair how much stress the undercarriage would take; hitherto his problem had been that of putting the Dakota down gently. This time he would come in with undercarriage down, losing speed, and slam her down hard – hard enough to break off the weakened struts like matchsticks. That would give him his belly-landing, too.
He sighted the nose of the Dakota on the strip again. ‘Well, here goes nothing,’ he said. ‘Flaps down; undercarriage down.’
As the plane lost airspeed the controls felt mushy under his hands. He set his teeth and concentrated as never before.
V
As the plane tipped wing down and started to orbit the airstrip Armstrong was thrown violently against Peabody. Peabody was in the act of taking another mouthful of whisky and the neck of the flask suddenly jammed against his teeth. He spluttered and yelled incoherently and thrust hard against Armstrong.
Rohde was thrown out of his seat and found himself sitting in the aisle, together with Coughlin and Montes. He struggled to his feet, shaking his head violently, then he bent to help Montes, speaking quick Spanish. Mrs Coughlin helped her husband back to his seat.
Willis had been making a note in the margin of his book and the point of his pencil snapped as Forester lurched against him. Forester made no attempt to regain his position but looked incredulously out of the window, ignoring Willis’s feeble protests at being squashed. Forester was a big man.
The whole cabin was a babel of sound in English and Spanish, dominated by the sharp and scratchy voice of Miss Ponsky as she querulously complained. ‘I knew it,’ she screamed. ‘I knew it was all wrong.’ She began to laugh hysterically and Rohde turned from Montes and slapped her with a heavy hand. She looked at him in surprise and suddenly burst into tears.
Peabody shouted, ‘What in goddam hell is that limey doing now?’ He stared out of the window at the airstrip. ‘The bastard’s going to land.’
Rohde spoke rapidly to Montes, who seemed so shaken he was apathetic. There was a quick exchange in Spanish between Rohde and the girl, and he pointed to the door leading to the cockpit. She nodded violently and he stood up.
Mrs Coughlin was leaning forward in her seat, comforting Miss Ponsky. ‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ she kept saying. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen.’
The aircraft straightened as O’Hara came in for his first approach run. Rohde leaned over Armstrong and looked through the window, but turned as Miss Ponsky screamed in fright, looking at the blur of rock streaming past the starboard window and seeing the wingtip brushing it so closely. Then Rohde lost his balance again as O’Hara pulled the Dakota into a climb.
It was Forester who made the first constructive move. He was nearest the door leading to the cockpit and he grabbed the door handle, turned and pushed. Nothing happened. He put his shoulder to the door but was thrown away as the plane turned rapidly. O’Hara was going into his final landing approach.
Forester grabbed the axe from its clips on the bulkhead and raised it to strike, but his arm was caught by Rohde. ‘This is quicker,’ said Rohde, and lifted a heavy pistol in his other hand. He stepped in front of Forester and fired three quick shots at the lock of the door.
VI
O’Hara heard the shots a fraction of a second before the Dakota touched down. He not only heard them but saw the altimeter and the turn-and-climb indicator shiver into fragments as the bullets smashed into the instrument panel. But he had not time to see what was happening behind him because just then the heavily overloaded Dakota settled soggily at the extreme end of the strip, moving at high speed.
There was a sickening crunch and the whole air frame shuddered as the undercarriage collapsed and the plane sank on to its belly and slid with a tearing, rending sound towards the far end of the strip. O’Hara fought frantically with the controls as they kicked against his hands and feet and tried to keep the aircraft sliding in a straight line.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Grivas turn to the door, his pistol raised. O’Hara took a chance, lifted one hand from the stick and struck out blindly at Grivas. He just had time for one blow and luckily it connected somewhere; he felt the edge of his hand strike home and then he was too busy to see if he had incapacitated Grivas.
The Dakota was still moving too fast. Already it was more than halfway down the strip and O’Hara could see the emptiness ahead where the strip stopped at the lip of the valley. In desperation he swung the rudder hard over and the Dakota swerved with a loud grating sound.
He braced himself for the crash.
The starboard wingtip hit the rock wall and the Dakota spun sharply to the right. O’Hara kept the rudder forced right over and saw the rock wall coming right at him. The nose of the plane hit rock and crumpled and the safety glass in the windscreens shivered into opacity. Then something hit him on the head and he lost consciousness.
VII
He came round because someone was slapping his face. His head rocked from side to side and he wanted them to stop because it was so good to be asleep. The slapping went on and on and he moaned and tried to tell them to stop. But the slapping did not stop so he opened his eyes.
It was Forester who was administering the punishment, and, as O’Hara opened his eyes, he turned to Rohde who was standing behind him and said, ‘Keep your gun on him.’
Rohde smiled. His gun was in his hand but hanging slackly and pointing to the floor. He made no attempt to bring it up. Forester said, ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’
O’Hara painfully lifted his arm to his head. He had a bump on his skull the size of an egg. He said weakly, ‘Where’s Grivas?’
‘Who is Grivas?’
‘My co-pilot.’
‘He’s here – he’s in a bad way.’
‘I hope the bastard dies,’ said O’Hara bitterly. ‘He pulled a gun on me.’
‘You were at the controls,’ said Forester, giving him a hard look. ‘You put this plane down here – and I want to know why.’
‘It was Grivas – he forced me to do it.’
‘The señor capitan is right,’ said Rohde. ‘This man Grivas was going to shoot me and the señor capitan hit him.’ He bowed stiffly. ‘Muchas gracias.’
Forester swung round and looked at Rohde, then beyond him to Grivas. ‘Is he conscious?’
O’Hara looked across the cockpit. The side of the fuselage was caved in and a blunt spike of rock had hit Grivas in the chest, smashing his rib cage. It looked as though he wasn’t going to make it, after all. But he was conscious, all right; his eyes were open and he looked at them with hatred.
O’Hara could hear a woman screaming endlessly in the passenger cabin and someone else was moaning monotonously. ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s happened back there?’
No one answered because Grivas began to speak. He mumbled in a low whisper and blood frothed round his mouth. ‘They’ll get you,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here any minute now.’ His lips parted in a ghastly smile. ‘I’ll be all right; they’ll take me to hospital. But you – you’ll …’ He broke off in a fit of coughing and then continued: ‘… they’ll kill the lot of you.’ He lifted up his arm, the fingers curling into a fist. ‘Vivaca …’
The arm dropped flaccidly and the look of hate in his eyes deepened into surprise – surprise that he was dead.
Rohde grabbed him by the wrist and held it for a moment. ‘He’s gone,’ he said.
‘He was a lunatic,’ said O’Hara. ‘Stark, staring mad.’
The woman was still screaming and Forester said, ‘For God’s sake, let’s get everybody out of here.’
Just then the Dakota lurched sickeningly and the whole cockpit rose in the air. There was a ripping sound as the spike of rock that had killed Grivas tore at the aluminium sheathing of the fuselage. O’Hara had a sudden and horrible intuition of what was happening. ‘Nobody move,’ he shouted. ‘Everyone keep still.’
He turned to Forester. ‘Bash in those windows.’
Forester looked in surprise at the axe he was still holding as though he had forgotten it, then he raised it and struck at the opaque windscreen. The plastic filling in the glass sandwich could not withstand his assault and he made a hole big enough for a man to climb through.
O’Hara said, ‘I’ll go through – I think I know what I’ll find. Don’t either of you go back there – not yet. And call through and tell anyone who can move to come up front.’
He squeezed through the narrow gap and was astonished to find that the nose of the Dakota was missing. He twisted and crawled out on to the top of the fuselage and looked aft. The tail and one wing were hanging in space over the valley where the runway ended. The whole aircraft was delicately balanced and even as he looked the tail tipped a little and there was a ripping sound from the cockpit.
He twisted on to his stomach and wriggled so that he could look into the cockpit, his head upside-down. ‘We’re in a jam,’ he said to Forester. ‘We’re hanging over a two-hundred-foot drop, and the only thing that’s keeping the whole bloody aeroplane from tipping over is that bit of rock there.’ He indicated the rock projection driven into the side of the cockpit.
He said, ‘If anyone goes back there the extra weight might send us over because we’re balanced just like a seesaw.’
Forester turned his head and bawled, ‘Anyone who can move, come up here.’
There was a movement and Willis staggered through the door, his head bloody. Forester shouted, ‘Anyone else?’
Señorita Montes called urgently, ‘Please help my uncle – oh, please.’
Rohde drew Willis out of the way and stepped through the door. Forester said sharply, ‘Don’t go in too far.’
Rohde did not even look at him, but bent to pick up Montes who was lying by the door. He half carried, half dragged him into the cockpit and Señorita Montes followed.
Forester looked up at O’Hara. ‘It’s getting crowded in here; I think we’d better start getting people outside.’
‘We’ll get them on top first,’ said O’Hara. ‘The more weight we have at this end, the better. Let the girl come first.’
She shook her head. ‘My uncle first.’
‘For God’s sake, he’s unconscious,’ said Forester. ‘You go out – I’ll look after him.’
She shook her head stubbornly and O’Hara broke in impatiently, ‘All right, Willis, come on up here; let’s not waste time.’ His head ached and he was panting in the thin air; he was not inclined to waste time over silly girls.
He helped Willis through the smashed windscreen and saw him settle on top of the fuselage. When he looked into the cockpit again it was evident that the girl had changed her mind. Rohde was talking quietly but emphatically to her and she crossed over and O’Hara helped her out.
Armstrong came next, having made his own way to the cockpit. He said, ‘It’s a bloody shambles back there. I think the old man in the back seat is dead and his wife is pretty badly hurt. I don’t think it’s safe to move her.’
‘What about Peabody?’
‘The luggage was thrown forward on to both of us. He’s half buried under it. I tried to get him free but I couldn’t.’
O’Hara passed this on to Forester. Rohde was kneeling by Montes, trying to bring him round. Forester hesitated, then said, ‘Now we’ve got some weight at this end it might be safe for me to go back.’
O’Hara said, ‘Tread lightly.’
Forester gave a mirthless grin and went back through the door. He looked at Miss Ponsky. She was sitting rigid, her arms clutched tightly about her, her eyes staring unblinkingly at nothing. He ignored her and began to heave suitcases from the top of Peabody, being careful to stow them in the front seats. Peabody stirred and Forester shook him into consciousness, and as soon as he seemed to be able to understand, said, ‘Go into the cockpit – the cockpit, you understand,’
Peabody nodded blearily and Forester stepped a little farther aft. ‘Christ Almighty!’ he whispered, shocked at what he saw.
Coughlin was a bloody pulp. The cargo had shifted in the smash and had come forward, crushing the two back seats. Mrs Coughlin was still alive but both her legs had been cut off just below the knee. It was only because she had been leaning forward to comfort Miss Ponsky that she hadn’t been killed like her husband.
Forester felt something touch his back and turned. It was Peabody moving aft. ‘I said the cockpit, you damned fool,’ shouted Forester.
‘I wanna get outa here,’ mumbled Peabody. ‘I wanna get out. The door’s back there.’
Forester wasted no time in argument. Abruptly he jabbed at Peabody’s stomach and then brought his clenched fists down at the nape of his neck as he bent over gasping, knocking him cold. He dragged him forward to the door and said to Rohde, ‘Take care of this fool. If he causes trouble, knock him on the head.’
He went back and took Miss Ponsky by the arm. ‘Come,’ he said gently.
She rose and followed him like a somnambulist and he led her right into the cockpit and delivered her to O’Hara. Montes was now conscious and would be ready to move soon.
As soon as O’Hara reappeared Forester said, ‘I don’t think the old lady back there will make it.’
‘Get her out,’ said O’Hara tightly. ‘For God’s sake, get her out.’
So Forester went back. He didn’t know whether Mrs Coughlin was alive or dead; her body was still warm, however, so he picked her up in his arms. Blood was still spurting from her shattered shins, and when he stepped into the cockpit Rohde drew in his breath with a hiss. ‘On the seat,’ he said. ‘She needs tourniquets now – immediately.’
He took off his jacket and then his shirt and began to rip the shirt into strips, saying to Forester curtly, ‘Get the old man out.’
Forester and O’Hara helped Montes through the windscreen and then Forester turned and regarded Rohde, noting the goose-pimples on his back. ‘Clothing,’ he said to O’Hara. ‘We’ll need warm clothing. It’ll be bad up here by nightfall.’
‘Hell!’ said O’Hara. ‘That’s adding to the risk. I don’t – ’
‘He is right,’ said Rohde without turning his head. ‘If we do not have clothing we will all be dead by morning.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara. ‘Are you willing to take the risk?’
‘I’ll chance it,’ said Forester.
‘I’ll get these people on the ground first,’ said O’Hara. ‘But while you’re at it get the maps. There are some air charts of the area in the pocket next to my seat.’
Rohde grunted. ‘I’ll get those.’
O’Hara got the people from the top of the fuselage to the ground and Forester began to bring suitcases into the cockpit. Unceremoniously he heaved Peabody through the windscreen and equally carelessly O’Hara dropped him to the ground, where he lay sprawling. Then Rohde handed through the unconscious Mrs Coughlin and O’Hara was surprised at her lightness. Rohde climbed out and, taking her in his arms, jumped to the ground, cushioning the shock for her.
Forester began to hand out suitcases and O’Hara tossed them indiscriminately. Some burst open, but most survived the fall intact.
The Dakota lurched.
‘Forester,’ yelled O’Hara. ‘Come out.’
‘There’s still some more.’
‘Get out, you idiot,’ O’Hara bawled. ‘She’s going.’
He grabbed Forester’s arms and hauled him out bodily and let him go thumping to the ground. Then he jumped himself and, as he did so, the nose rose straight into the air and the plane slid over the edge of the cliff with a grinding noise and in a cloud of dust. It crashed down two hundred feet and there was a long dying rumble and then silence.
O’Hara looked at the silent people about him, then turned his eyes to the harsh and savage mountains which surrounded them. He shivered with cold as he felt the keen wind which blew from the snowfields, and then shivered for a different reason as he locked eyes with Forester. They both knew that the odds against survival were heavy and that it was probable that the escape from the Dakota was merely the prelude to a more protracted death.
VIII
‘Now, let’s hear all this from the beginning,’ said Forester.
They had moved into the nearest of the cabins. It proved bare but weatherproof, and there was a fireplace in which Armstrong had made a fire, using wood which Willis had brought from another cabin. Montes was lying in a corner being looked after by his niece, and Peabody was nursing a hangover and looking daggers at Forester.
Miss Ponsky had recovered remarkably from the rigidity of fright. When she had been dropped to the ground she had collapsed, digging her fingers into the frozen gravel in an ecstasy of relief. O’Hara judged she would never have the guts to enter an aeroplane ever again in her life. But now she was showing remarkable aptitude for sick nursing, helping Rohde to care for Mrs Coughlin.
Now there was a character, thought O’Hara; Rohde was a man of unsuspected depths. Although he was not a medical man, he had a good working knowledge of practical medicine which was now invaluable. O’Hara had immediately turned to Willis for help with Mrs Coughlin, but Willis had said, ‘Sorry, I’m a physicist – not a physician.’
‘Dr Armstrong?’ O’Hara had appealed.
Regretfully Armstrong had also shaken his head. ‘I’m a historian.’
So Rohde had taken over – the non-doctor with the medical background – and the man with the gun.
O’Hara turned his attention to Forester. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘This is the way it was,’
He told everything that had happened, right back from the take-off in San Croce, dredging from his memory everything Grivas had said. ‘I think he went off his head,’ he concluded.
Forester frowned. ‘No, it was planned,’ he contradicted. ‘And lunacy isn’t planned. Grivas knew this airstrip and he knew the course to take. You say he was at San Croce airfield when the Samair plane was grounded?’
‘That’s right – I thought it was a bit odd at the time. I mean, it was out of character for Grivas to be haunting the field in the middle of the night – he wasn’t that keen on his job.’
‘It sounds as though he knew the Samair Boeing was going to have engine trouble,’ commented Willis.
Forester looked up quickly and Willis said, ‘It’s the only logical answer – he didn’t just steal a plane, he stole the contents; and the contents of the plane were people from the Boeing. O’Hara says those big crates contain ordinary mining machinery and I doubt if Grivas would want that.’
‘That implies sabotage of the Boeing,’ said Forester. ‘If Grivas was expecting the Boeing to land at San Croce, it also implies a sizeable organization behind him.’
‘We know that already,’ said O’Hara. ‘Grivas was expecting a reception committee here. He said, “They’ll be here any minute.” But where are they?’
‘And who are they?’ asked Forester.
O’Hara thought of something else Grivas had said: ‘… they’ll kill the lot of you.’ He kept quiet about that and asked instead, ‘Remember the last thing he said – “Vivaca”? It doesn’t make sense to me. It sounds vaguely Spanish, but it’s no word I know.’
‘My Spanish is good,’ said Forester deliberately. ‘There’s no such word.’ He slapped the side of his leg irritably. ‘I’d give a lot to know what’s been going on and who’s responsible for all this.’
A weak voice came from across the room. ‘I fear, gentlemen, that in a way I am responsible.’
Everyone in the room, with the exception of Mrs Coughlin, turned to look at Señor Montes.
TWO (#ulink_eb2acd86-e7d3-50ad-b43a-4e1e078ff9f2)
Montes looked ill. He was worse than he had been in the air. His chest heaved violently as he sucked in the thin air and he had a ghastly pallor. As he opened his mouth to speak again the girl said, ‘Hush, tio, be quiet. I will tell them,’
She turned and looked across the cabin at O’Hara and Forester. ‘My uncle’s name is not Montes,’ she said levelly. ‘It is Aguillar.’ She said it as though it was an explanation, entire and complete in itself.
There was a moment of blank silence, then O’Hara snapped his fingers and said softly, ‘By God, the old eagle himself.’ He stared at the sick man.
‘Yes, Señor O’Hara,’ whispered Aguillar. ‘But a crippled eagle, I am afraid.’
‘Say, what the hell is this?’ grumbled Peabody. ‘What’s so special about him?’
Willis gave Peabody a look of dislike and got to his feet. ‘I wouldn’t have put it that way myself,’ he said. ‘But I could bear to know more.’
O’Hara said, ‘Señor Aguillar was possibly the best president this country ever had until the army took over five years ago. He got out of the country just one jump ahead of a firing squad.’
‘General Lopez always was a hasty man,’ agreed Aguillar with a weak smile.
‘You mean the government arranged all this – this jam we’re in now – just to get you?’ Willis’s voice was shrill with incredulity.
Aguillar shook his head and started to speak, but the girl said, ‘No, you must be quiet.’ She looked at O’Hara appealingly. ‘Do not question him now, señor. Can’t you see he is ill?’
‘Can you speak for your uncle?’ asked Forester gently.
She looked at the old man and he nodded. ‘What is it you want to know?’ she asked.
‘What is your uncle doing back in Cordillera?’
‘We have come to bring back good government to our country,’ she said. ‘We have come to throw out Lopez.’
O’Hara gave a short laugh. ‘To throw out Lopez,’ he said flatly. ‘Just like that. An old man and a girl are going to throw out a man with an army at his back.’ He shook his head disbelievingly.
The girl flared up. ‘What do you know about it; you are a foreigner – you know nothing. Lopez is finished – everyone in Cordillera knows it, even Lopez himself. He has been too greedy, too corrupt, and the country is sick of him.’
Forester rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘She could be right,’ he said. ‘It would take just a puff of wind to blow Lopez over right now. He’s run this country right into the ground in the last five years – just about milked it dry and salted enough money away in Swiss banks to last a couple of lifetimes. I don’t think he’d risk losing out now if it came to a showdown – if someone pushed hard enough he’d fold up and get out. I think he’d take wealth and comfort instead of power and the chance of being shot by some gun-happy student with a grievance.’
‘Lopez has bankrupted Cordillera,’ the girl said. She held up her head proudly. ‘But when my uncle appears in Santillana the people will rise, and that will be the end of Lopez.’
‘It could work,’ agreed Forester. ‘Your uncle was well liked. I suppose you’ve prepared the ground in advance.’
She nodded. ‘The Democratic Committee of Action has made all the arrangements. All that remains is for my uncle to appear in Santillana.’
‘He may not get there,’ said O’Hara. ‘Someone is trying to stop him, and if it isn’t Lopez, then who the hell is it?’
‘The comunistas,’ the girl spat out with loathing in her voice. ‘They cannot afford to let my uncle get into power again. They want Cordillera for their own.’
Forester said, ‘It figures. Lopez is a dead duck, come what may; so it’s Aguillar versus the communists with Cordillera as the stake.’
‘They are not quite ready,’ the girl said. ‘They do not have enough support among the people. During the last two years they have been infiltrating the government very cleverly and if they had their way the people would wake up one morning to find Lopez gone, leaving a communist government to take his place.’
‘Swapping one dictatorship for another,’ said Forester. ‘Very clever.’
‘But they are not yet ready to get rid of Lopez,’ she said. ‘My uncle would spoil their plans – he would get rid of Lopez and the government, too. He would hold elections for the first time in nine years. So the communists are trying to stop him.’
‘And you think Grivas was a communist?’ queried O’Hara.
Forester snapped his fingers. ‘Of course he was. That explains his last words. He was a communist, all right – Latin-American blend; when he said “vivaca” he was trying to say “Viva Castro”.’ His voice hardened. ‘And we can expect his buddies along any minute.’
‘We must leave here quickly,’ said the girl. ‘They must not find my uncle.’
O’Hara suddenly swung round and regarded Rohde, who had remained conspicuously silent. He said, ‘What do you import, Señor Rohde?’
‘It is all right, Señor O’Hara,’ said Aguillar weakly. ‘Miguel is my secretary.’
Forester looked at Rohde. ‘More like your bodyguard.’
Aguillar flapped his hand limply as though the distinction was of no consequence, and Forester said, ‘What put you on to him, O’Hara?’
‘I don’t like men who carry guns,’ said O’Hara shortly. ‘Especially men who could be communist.’ He looked around the cabin. ‘All right, are there any more jokers in the pack? What about you, Forester? You seem to know a hell of a lot about local politics for an American businessman.’
‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ said Forester. ‘If I didn’t take an interest in local politics my corporation would fire me. Having the right kind of government is important to us, and we sure as hell don’t want a commie set-up in Cordillera.’
He took out his wallet and extracted a business card which he handed to O’Hara. It informed him that Raymond Forester was the South American sales manager for the Fairfield Machine Tool Corporation.
O’Hara gave it back to him. ‘Was Grivas the only communist aboard?’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m getting at. When we were coming in to land, did any of the passengers take any special precautions for their safety?’
Forester thought about it, then shook his head. ‘Everyone seemed to be taken by surprise – I don’t think any of us knew just what was happening.’ He looked at O’Hara with respect. ‘In the circumstances that was a good question to ask.’
‘Well, I’m not a communist,’ said Miss Ponsky sharply. ‘The very idea!’
O’Hara smiled. ‘My apologies, Miss Ponsky,’ he said politely.
Rohde had been tending to Mrs Coughlin; now he stood up. ‘This lady is dying,’ he said. ‘She has lost much blood and she is in shock. And she has the soroche – the mountain-sickness. If she does not get oxygen she will surely die.’ His black eyes switched to Aguillar, who seemed to have fallen asleep. ‘The Señor also must have oxygen – he’s in grave danger.’ He looked at them. ‘We must go down the mountain. To stay at this height is very dangerous.’
O’Hara was conscious of a vicious headache and the fact that his heart was thumping rapidly. He had been long enough in the country to have heard of soroche and its effects. The lower air pressure on the mountain heights meant less oxygen, the respiratory rate went up and so did the heart-beat rate, pumping the blood faster. It killed a weak constitution.
He said slowly, ‘There were oxygen cylinders in the plane – maybe they’re not busted.’
‘Good,’ said Rohde. ‘We will look, you and I. It would be better not to move this lady if possible. But if we do not find the oxygen, then we must go down the mountain.’
Forester said, ‘We must keep a fire going – the rest of us will look for wood.’ He paused. ‘Bring some petrol from the plane – we may need it.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara.
‘Come on,’ said Forester to Peabody. ‘Let’s move.’
Peabody lay where he was, gasping. ‘I’m beat,’ he said. ‘And my head’s killing me.’
‘It’s just a hangover,’ said Forester callously. ‘Get on your feet, man.’
Rohde put his hand on Forester’s arm. ‘Soroche,’ he said warningly. ‘He will not be able to do much. Come, señor.’
O’Hara followed Rohde from the cabin and shivered in the biting air. He looked around. The airstrip was built on the only piece of level ground in the vicinity; all else was steeply shelving mountainside, and all around were the pinnacles of the high Andes, clear-cut in the cold and crystal air. They soared skyward, blindingly white against the blue where the snows lay on their flanks, and where the slope was too steep for the snow to stay was the dark grey of the rock.
It was cold, desolate and utterly lifeless. There was no restful green of vegetation, or the flick of a bird’s wing – just black, white and the blue of the sky, a hard, dark metallic blue as alien as the landscape.
O’Hara pulled his jacket closer about him and looked at the other huts. ‘What is this place?’
‘It is a mine,’ said Rohde. ‘Copper and zinc – the tunnels are over there.’ He pointed to a cliff face at the end of the airstrip and O’Hara saw the dark mouths of several tunnels driven into the cliff face. Rohde shook his head. ‘But it is too high to work – they should never have tried. No man can work well at this height; not even our mountain indios.’
‘You know this place then?’
‘I know these mountains well,’ said Rohde. ‘I was born not far from here.’
They trudged along the airstrip and before they had gone a hundred yards O’Hara felt exhausted. His head ached and he felt nauseated. He sucked the thin air into his lungs and his chest heaved.
Rohde stopped and said, ‘You must not force your breathing.’
‘What else can I do?’ said O’Hara, panting. ‘I’ve got to get enough air.’
‘Breathe naturally, without effort,’ said Rohde. ‘You will get enough air. But if you force your breathing you will wash all the carbon dioxide from your lungs, and that will upset the acid base of your blood and you will get muscle cramps. And that is very bad.’
O’Hara moderated his breathing and said, ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘I studied medicine once,’ said Rohde briefly.
They reached the far end of the strip and looked over the edge of the cliff. The Dakota was pretty well smashed up; the port wing had broken off, as had the entire tail section. Rohde studied the terrain. ‘We need not climb down the cliff; it will be easier to go round.’
It took them a long time to get to the plane and when they got there they found only one oxygen cylinder intact. It was difficult to get it free and out of the aircraft, but they managed it after chopping away a part of the fuselage with the axe that O’Hara found on the floor of the cockpit.
The gauge showed that the cylinder was only a third full and O’Hara cursed Filson and his cheese-paring, but Rohde seemed satisfied. ‘It will be enough,’ he said. ‘We can stay in the hut tonight.’
‘What happens if these communists turn up?’ asked O’Hara.
Rohde seemed unperturbed. ‘Then we will defend ourselves,’ he said equably. ‘One thing at a time, Señor O’Hara.’
‘Grivas seemed to think they were already here,’ said O’Hara. ‘I wonder what held them up?’
Rohde shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
They could not manhandle the oxygen cylinder back to the huts without help, so Rohde went back, taking with him some mouthpieces and a bottle of petrol tapped from a wing tank. O’Hara searched the fuselage, looking for anything that might be of value, particularly food. That, he thought, might turn out to be a major problem. All he found was half a slab of milk chocolate in Grivas’s seat pocket.
Rohde came back with Forester, Willis and Armstrong and they took it in turns carrying the oxygen cylinder, two by two. It was very hard work and they could only manage to move it twenty yards at a time. O’Hara estimated that back in San Croce he could have picked it up and carried it a mile, but the altitude seemed to have sucked all the strength from their muscles and they could work only a few minutes at a time before they collapsed in exhaustion.
When they got it to the hut they found that Miss Ponsky was feeding the fire with wood from a door of one of the other huts that Willis and Armstrong had torn down and smashed up laboriously with rocks. Willis was particularly glad to see the axe. ‘It’ll be easier now,’ he said.
Rohde administered oxygen to Mrs Coughlin and Aguillar. She remained unconscious, but it made a startling difference to the old man. As the colour came back to his cheeks his niece smiled for the first time since the crash.
O’Hara sat before the fire, feeling the warmth soak into him, and produced his air charts. He spread the relevant chart on the floor and pin-pointed a position with a pencilled cross. ‘That’s where we were when we changed course,’ he said. ‘We flew on a true course of one-eighty-four for a shade over five minutes.’ He drew a line on the chart. ‘We were flying at a little over two hundred knots – say, two hundred and forty miles an hour. That’s about twenty miles – so that puts us about – here.’ He made another cross.
Forester looked over his shoulder. ‘The airstrip isn’t marked on the map,’ he said.
‘Rohde said it was abandoned,’ said O’Hara.
Rohde came over and looked at the map and nodded. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘That is where we are. The road down the mountain leads to the refinery. That also is abandoned, but I think some indios live there still.’
‘How far is that?’ asked Forester.
‘About forty kilometres,’ said Rohde.
‘Twenty-five miles,’ translated Forester. ‘That’s a hell of a long way in these conditions.’
‘It will not be very bad,’ said Rohde. He put his finger on the map. ‘When we get to this valley where the river runs we will be nearly five thousand feet lower and we will breathe more easily. That is about sixteen kilometres by the road.’
‘We’ll start early tomorrow,’ said O’Hara.
Rohde agreed. ‘If we had no oxygen I would have said go now. But it would be better to stay in the shelter of this hut tonight.’
‘What about Mrs Coughlin?’ said O’Hara quietly. ‘Can we move her?’
‘We will have to move her,’ said Rohde positively. ‘She cannot live at this altitude.’
‘We’ll rig together some kind of stretcher,’ said Forester. ‘We can make a sling out of clothing and poles – or maybe use a door.’
O’Hara looked across to where Mrs Coughlin was breathing stertorously, closely watched by Miss Ponsky. His voice was harsh. ‘I’d rather that bastard Grivas was still alive if that would give her back her legs,’ he said.
II
Mrs Coughlin died during the night without regaining consciousness. They found her in the morning cold and stiff. Miss Ponsky was in tears. ‘I should have stayed awake,’ she sniffled. ‘I couldn’t sleep most of the night, and then I had to drop off.’
Rohde shook his head gravely. ‘She would have died,’ he said. ‘We could not do anything for her – none of us.’
Forester, O’Hara and Peabody scratched out a shallow grave. Peabody seemed better and O’Hara thought that maybe Forester had been right when he said that Peabody was only suffering from a hangover. However, he had to be prodded into helping to dig the grave.
It seemed that everyone had had a bad night, no one sleeping very well. Rohde said that it was another symptom of soroche and the sooner they got to a lower altitude the better. O’Hara still had a splitting headache and heartily concurred.
The oxygen cylinder was empty.
O’Hara tapped the gauge with his finger but the needle stubbornly remained at zero. He opened the cock and bent his head to listen but there was no sound from the valve. He had heard the gentle hiss of oxygen several times during the night and had assumed that Rohde had been tending to Mrs Coughlin or Aguillar.
He beckoned to Rohde. ‘Did you use all the oxygen last night?’
Rohde looked incredulously at the gauge. ‘I was saving some for today,’ he said. ‘Señor Aguillar needs it.’
O’Hara bit his lip and looked across to where Peabody sat. ‘I thought he looked pretty chipper this morning.’
Rohde growled something under his breath and took a step forward, but O’Hara caught his arm. ‘It can’t be proved,’ he said. ‘I could be wrong. And anyway, we don’t want any rows right here. Let’s get down this mountain.’ He kicked the cylinder and it clanged emptily. ‘At least we won’t have to carry this.’
He remembered the chocolate and brought it out. There were eight small squares to be divided between ten of them, so he, Rohde and Forester did without and Aguillar had two pieces. O’Hara thought that he must have had three because the girl did not appear to eat her ration.
Armstrong and Willis appeared to work well as a team. Using the axe, they had ripped some timber from one of the huts and made a rough stretcher by pushing lengths of wood through the sleeves of two overcoats. That was for Aguillar, who could not walk.
They put on all the clothes they could and left the rest in suitcases. Forester gave O’Hara a bulky overcoat. ‘Don’t mess it about if you can help it,’ he said. ‘That’s vicuna – it cost a lot of dough.’ He grinned. ‘The boss’s wife asked me to get it this trip; it’s the old man’s birthday soon.’
Peabody grumbled when he had to leave his luggage and grumbled more when O’Hara assigned him to a stretcher-carrying stint. O’Hara resisted taking a poke at him; for one thing he did not want open trouble, and for another he did not know whether he had the strength to do any damage. At the moment it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other.
So they left the huts and went down the road, turning their backs on the high peaks. The road was merely a rough track cut out of the mountainside. It wound down in a series of hairpin bends and Willis pointed out where blasting had been done on the corners. It was just wide enough to take a single vehicle but, from time to time, they came across a wide part where two trucks could pass.
O’Hara asked Rohde, ‘Did they intend to truck all the ore from the mine?’
‘They would have built a telfer,’ said Rohde. ‘An endless rope with buckets. But they were still proving the mine. Petrol engines do not work well up here – they need superchargers.’ He stopped suddenly and stared at the ground.
In a patch of snow was the track of a tyre.
‘Someone’s been up here lately,’ observed O’Hara. ‘Supercharged or not. But I knew that.’
‘How?’ Rohde demanded.
‘The airstrip had been cleared of snow.’
Rohde patted his breast and moved away without saying anything. O’Hara remembered the pistol and wondered what would happen if they came up against opposition.
Although the path was downhill and the going comparatively good, it was only possible to carry the stretcher a hundred yards at a time. Forester organized relays, and as one set of carriers collapsed exhaustedly another took over. Aguillar was in a comatose condition and the girl walked next to the stretcher, anxiously watching him. After a mile they stopped for a rest and O’Hara said to Rohde, ‘I’ve got a flask of spirits. ‘I’ve been saving it for when things really get tough. Do you think it would help the old man?’
‘Let me have it,’ said Rohde.
O’Hara took the flask from his hip and gave it to Rohde, who took off the cap and sniffed the contents. ‘Aguardiente,’ he said. ‘Not the best drink but it will do.’ He looked at O’Hara curiously. ‘Do you drink this?’
‘I’m a poor man,’ said O’Hara defensively.
Rohde smiled. ‘When I was a student I also was poor. I also drank aguardiente. But I do not recommend too much,’ He looked across at Aguillar. ‘I think we save this for later.’ He recapped the flask and handed it back to O’Hara. As O’Hara was replacing it in his pocket he saw Peabody staring at him. He smiled back pleasantly.
After a rest of half an hour they started off again. O’Hara, in the lead, looked back and thought they looked like a bunch of war refugees. Willis and Armstrong were stumbling along with the stretcher, the girl keeping pace alongside; Miss Ponsky was sticking close to Rohde, chatting as though on a Sunday afternoon walk, despite her shortness of breath, and Forester was in the rear with Peabody shambling beside him.
After the third stop O’Hara found that things were going better. His step felt lighter and his breathing eased, although the headache stayed with him. The stretcher-bearers found that they could carry for longer periods, and Aguillar had come round and was taking notice.
O’Hara mentioned this to Rohde, who pointed at the steep slopes about them. ‘We are losing a lot of height,’ he said. ‘It will get better now.’
After the fourth halt O’Hara and Forester were carrying the stretcher. Aguillar apologized in a weak voice for the inconvenience he was causing, but O’Hara forbore to answer – he needed all his breath for the job. Things weren’t that much better.
Forester suddenly stopped and O’Hara thankfully laid down the stretcher. His legs felt rubbery and the breath rasped in his throat. He grinned at Forester, who was beating his hands against his chest. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It should be warmer down in the valley.’
Forester blew on his fingers. ‘I hope so.’ He looked up at O’Hara. ‘You’re a pretty good pilot,’ he said. ‘I’ve done some flying in my time, but I don’t think I could do what you did yesterday.’
‘You might if you had a pistol at your head,’ said O’Hara with a grimace. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t leave it to Grivas – he’d have killed the lot of us, starting with me first.’
He looked past Forester and saw Rohde coming back up the road at a stumbling run, his gun in his hand. ‘Something’s happening.’
He went forward to meet Rohde, who gasped, his chest heaving. ‘There are huts here – I had forgotten them.’
O’Hara looked at the gun. ‘Do you need that?’
Rohde gave a stark smile. ‘It is possible, señor.’ He waved casually down the road with the pistol. ‘I think we should be careful. I think we should look first before doing anything. You, me, and Señor Forester.’
‘I think so too,’ said Forester. ‘Grivas said his pals would be around and this seems a likely place to meet them.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara, and looked about. There was no cover on the road but there was a jumble of rocks a little way back. ‘I think everyone else had better stick behind that lot,’ he said. ‘If anything does break, there’s no point in being caught in the open.’
They went back to shelter behind the rocks and O’Hara told everyone what was happening. He ended by saying, ‘If there’s shooting you don’t do a damned thing – you freeze and stay put. Now I know we’re not an army but we’re likely to come under fire all the same – so I’m naming Doctor Willis as second-in-command. If anything happens to us you take your orders from him.’ Willis nodded.
Aguillar’s niece was talking to Rohde, and as O’Hara went to join Forester she touched him on the arm. ‘Señor.’
He looked down at her. ‘Yes, señorita.’
‘Please be careful, you and Señor Forester. I would not want anything to happen to you because of us.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ said O’Hara. ‘Tell me, is your name the same as your uncle’s?’
‘I am Benedetta Aguillar,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘I’m Tim O’Hara. I’ll be careful.’
He joined the other two and they walked down the road to the bend. Rohde said, ‘These huts were where the miners lived. This is just about as high as a man can live permanently – a man who is acclimatized such as our mountain indios. I think we should leave the road here and approach from the side. If Grivas did have friends, here is where we will find them.’
They took to the mountainside and came upon the camp from the top. A level place had been roughly bulldozed out of the side of the mountain and there were about a dozen timber-built huts, very much like the huts by the airstrip.
‘This is no good,’ said Forester. ‘We’ll have to go over this miniature cliff before we can get at them.’
‘There’s no smoke,’ O’Hara pointed out.
‘Maybe that means something – maybe it doesn’t,’ said Forester. ‘I think that Rohde and I will go round and come up from the bottom. If anything happens, maybe you can cause a diversion from up here.’
‘What do I do?’ asked O’Hara. ‘Throw stones?’
Forester shook with silent laughter. He pointed down the slope to beyond the camp. ‘We’ll come out about there. You can see us from here but we’ll be out of sight of anyone in the camp. If all’s clear you can give us the signal to come up.’ He looked at Rohde, who nodded.
Forester and Rohde left quietly and O’Hara lay on his belly, looking down at the camp. He did not think there was anyone there. It was less than five miles up to the airstrip by the road and there was nothing to stop anybody going up there. If Grivas’s confederates were anywhere, it was not likely that they would be at this camp – but it was as well to make sure. He scanned the huts but saw no sign of movement.
Presently he saw Forester wave from the side of the rock he had indicated and he waved back. Rohde went up first, in a wide arc to come upon the camp at an angle. Then Forester moved forward in the peculiar scuttling, zigzagging run of the experienced soldier who expects to be shot at. O’Hara wondered about Forester; the man had said he could fly an aeroplane and now he was behaving like a trained infantryman. He had an eye for ground, too, and was obviously accustomed to command.
Forester disappeared behind one of the huts and then Rohde came into sight at the far end of the camp, moving warily with his gun in his hand. He too disappeared, and O’Hara felt tension. He waited for what seemed a very long time, then Forester walked out from behind the nearest hut, moving quite unconcernedly. ‘You can come down,’ he called. ‘There’s no one here.’
O’Hara let out his breath with a rush and stood up. ‘I’ll go back and get the rest of the people down here,’ he shouted, and Forester waved in assent.
O’Hara went back up the road, collected the party and took them down to the camp. Forester and Rohde were waiting in the main ‘street’ and Forester called out, ‘We’ve struck it lucky; there’s a lot of food here.’
Suddenly O’Hara realized that he hadn’t eaten for a day and a half. He did not feel particularly hungry, but he knew that if he did not eat he could not last out much longer – and neither could any of the others. To have food would make a lot of difference on the next leg of the journey.
Forester said, ‘Most of the huts are empty, but three of them are fitted out as living quarters complete with kerosene heaters.’
O’Hara looked down at the ground which was crisscrossed with tyre tracks. ‘There’s something funny going on,’ he said. ‘Rohde told me that the mine has been abandoned for a long time, yet there’s all these signs of life and no one around. What the hell’s going on?’
Forester shrugged. ‘Maybe the commie organization is slipping,’ he said. ‘The Latins have never been noted for good planning. Maybe someone’s put a spoke in their wheel.’
‘Maybe,’ said O’Hara. ‘We might as well take advantage of it. What do you think we should do now – how long should we stay here?’
Forester looked at the group entering one of the huts, then up at the sky. ‘We’re pretty beat,’ he said. ‘Maybe we ought to stay here until tomorrow. It’ll take us a while to get fed and it’ll be late before we can move out. We ought to stay here tonight and keep warm.’
‘We’ll consult Rohde,’ said O’Hara. ‘He’s the expert on mountains and altitude.’
The huts were well fitted. There were paraffin stoves, bunks, plenty of blankets and a large assortment of canned foods. On the table in one of the huts there were the remnants of a meal, the plates dirty and unwashed and frozen dregs of coffee in the bottom of tin mugs. O’Hara felt the thickness of the ice and it cracked beneath the pressure of his finger.
‘They haven’t been gone long,’ he said. ‘If the hut was unheated this stuff would have frozen to the bottom.’ He passed the mug to Rohde. ‘What do you think?’
Rohde looked at the ice closely. ‘If they turned off the heaters when they left, the hut would stay warm for a while,’ he said. He tested the ice and thought deeply. ‘I would say two days,’ he said finally.
‘Say yesterday morning,’ suggested O’Hara. ‘That would be about the time we took off from San Croce.’
Forester groaned in exasperation. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why did they go to all this trouble, make all these preparations, and then clear out? One thing’s sure: Grivas expected a reception committee – and where the hell is it?’
O’Hara said to Rohde, ‘We are thinking of staying here tonight. What do you think?’
‘It is better here than at the mine,’ said Rohde. ‘We have lost a lot of height. I would say that we are at an altitude of about four thousand metres here – or maybe a little more. That will not harm us for one night; it will be better to stay here in shelter than to stay in the open tonight, even if it is lower down the mountain.’ He contracted his brows. ‘But I suggest we keep a watch.’
Forester nodded. ‘We’ll take it in turns.’
Miss Ponsky and Benedetta were busy on the pressure stoves making hot soup. Armstrong had already got the heater going and Willis was sorting out cans of food. He called O’Hara over. ‘I thought we’d better take something with us when we leave,’ he said. ‘It might come in useful.’
‘A good idea,’ said O’Hara.
Willis grinned. ‘That’s all very well, but I can’t read Spanish. I have to go by the pictures on the labels. Someone had better check on these when I’ve got them sorted out.’
Forester and Rohde went on down the road to pick a good spot for a sentry, and when Forester came back he said, ‘Rohde’s taking the first watch. We’ve got a good place where we can see bits of road a good two miles away. And if they come up at night they’re sure to have their lights on.’
He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got six able-bodied men, so if we leave here early tomorrow, that means two-hour watches. That’s not too bad – it gives us all enough sleep.’
After they had eaten Benedetta took some food down to Rohde and O’Hara found himself next to Armstrong. ‘You said you were a historian. I suppose you’re over here to check up on the Incas,’ he said.
‘Oh, no,’ said Armstrong. ‘They’re not my line of country at all. My line is medieval history.’
‘Oh,’ said O’Hara blankly.
‘I don’t know anything about the Incas and I don’t particularly want to,’ said Armstrong frankly. He smiled gently. ‘For the past ten years I’ve never had a real holiday. I’d go on holiday like a normal man – perhaps to France or Italy – and then I’d see something interesting. I’d do a bit of investigating – and before I’d know it I’d be hard at work.’
He produced a pipe and peered dubiously into his tobacco pouch. ‘This year I decided to come to South America for a holiday. All there is here is pre-European and modern history – no medieval history at all. Clever of me, wasn’t it?’
O’Hara smiled, suspecting that Armstrong was indulging in a bit of gentle leg-pulling. ‘And what’s your line, Doctor Willis?’ he asked.
‘I’m a physicist,’ said Willis. ‘I’m interested in cosmic rays at high altitudes. I’m not getting very far with it, though.’
They were certainly a mixed lot, thought O’Hara, looking across at Miss Ponsky as she talked animatedly to Aguillar. Now there was a sight – a New England spinster schoolmarm lecturing a statesman. She would certainly have plenty to tell her pupils when she arrived back at the little schoolhouse.
‘What was this place, anyway?’ asked Willis.
‘Living quarters for the mine up on top,’ said O’Hara. ‘That’s what Rohde tells me.’
Willis nodded. ‘They had their workshops down here, too,’ he said. ‘All the machinery has gone, of course, but there are still a few bits and pieces left.’ He shivered. ‘I can’t say I’d like to work in a place like this.’
O’Hara looked about the hut. ‘Neither would I.’ He caught sight of an electric conduit tube running down a wall. ‘Where did their electricity supply come from, I wonder?’
‘They had their own plant; there’s the remains of it out back. The generator has gone – they must have salvaged it when the mine closed down. They scavenged most everything, I guess; there’s precious little left.’
Armstrong drew the last of the smoke from his failing pipe with a disconsolate gurgle. ‘Well, that’s the last of the tobacco until we get back to civilization,’ he said as he knocked out the dottle. ‘Tell me, Captain; what are you doing in this part of the world?’
‘Oh, I fly aeroplanes from anywhere to anywhere,’ said O’Hara. Not any more I don’t, he thought. As far as Filson was concerned, he was finished. Filson would never forgive a pilot who wrote off one of his aircraft, no matter what the reason. I’ve lost my job, he thought. It was a lousy job but it had kept him going, and now he’d lost it.
The girl came back and he crossed over to her. ‘Anything doing down the road?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. Miguel says everything is quiet.’
‘He’s quite a character,’ said O’Hara. ‘He certainly knows a lot about these mountains – and he knows a bit about medicine too.’
‘He was born near here,’ Benedetta said. ‘And he was a medical student until – ’ She stopped.
‘Until what?’ prompted O’Hara.
‘Until the revolution.’ She looked at her hands. ‘All his family were killed – that is why he hates Lopez. That is why he works with my uncle – he knows that my uncle will ruin Lopez.’
‘I thought he had a chip on his shoulder,’ said O’Hara.
She sighed. ‘It is a great pity about Miguel; he was going to do so much. He was very interested in the soroche, you know; he intended to study it as soon as he had taken his degree. But when the revolution came he had to leave the country and he had no money so he could not continue his studies. He worked in the Argentine for a while, and then he met my uncle. He saved my uncle’s life.’
‘Oh?’ O’Hara raised his eyebrows.
‘In the beginning Lopez knew that he was not safe while my uncle was alive. He knew that my uncle would organize an opposition – underground, you know. So wherever my uncle went he was in danger from the murderers hired by Lopez – even in the Argentine. There were several attempts to kill him, and it was one of these times that Miguel saved his life.’
O’Hara said, ‘Your uncle must have felt like another Trotsky. Joe Stalin had him bumped off in Mexico.’
‘That is right,’ she said with a grimace of distaste. ‘But they were communists, both of them. Anyway, Miguel stayed with us after that. He said that all he wanted was food to eat and a bed to sleep in, and he would help my uncle come back to Cordillera. And here we are.’
Yes, thought O’Hara; marooned up a bloody mountain with God knows what waiting at the bottom.
Presently Armstrong went out to relieve Rohde. Miss Ponsky came across to talk to O’Hara. ‘I’m sorry I behaved so stupidly in the airplane,’ she said crossly. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’
O’Hara thought there was no need to apologize for being half frightened to death; he had been bloody scared himself. But he couldn’t say that – he couldn’t even mention the word fear to her. That would be unforgivable; no one likes to be reminded of a lapse of that nature – not even a maiden lady getting on in years. He smiled and said diplomatically, ‘Not everyone would have come through an experience like that as well as you have, Miss Ponsky.’
She was mollified and he knew that she had been in fear of a rebuff. She was the kind of person who would bite on a sore tooth, not letting it alone. She smiled and said, ‘Well now, Captain O’Hara – what do you think of all this talk about communists?’
‘I think they’re capable of anything,’ said O’Hara grimly.
‘I’m going to put in a report to the State Department when I get back,’ she said. ‘You ought to hear what Señor Aguillar has been telling me about General Lopez. I think the State Department should help Señor Aguillar against General Lopez and the communists.’
‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ said O’Hara. ‘But perhaps your State Department doesn’t believe in interfering in Cordilleran affairs.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said Miss Ponsky with acerbity. ‘We’re supposed to be fighting the communists, aren’t we? Besides, Señor Aguillar assures me that he’ll hold elections as soon as General Lopez is kicked out. He’s a real democrat just like you and me.’
O’Hara wondered what would happen if another South American state did go communist. Cuban agents were filtering all through Latin America like woodworms in a piece of furniture. He tried to think of the strategic importance of Cordillera – it was on the Pacific coast and it straddled the Andes, a gun pointing to the heart of the continent. He thought the Americans would be very upset if Cordillera went communist.
Rohde came back and talked for a few minutes with Aguillar, then he crossed to O’Hara and said in a low voice, ‘Señor Aguillar would like to speak to you.’ He gestured to Forester and the three of them went to where Aguillar was resting in a bunk.
He had brightened considerably and was looking quite spry. His eyes were lively and no longer filmed with weariness, and there was a strength and authority in his voice that O’Hara had not heard before. He realized that this was a strong man; maybe not too strong in the body because he was becoming old and his body was wearing out, but he had a strong mind. O’Hara suspected that if the old man had not had a strong will, the body would have crumpled under the strain it had undergone.
Aguillar said, ‘First I must thank you gentlemen for all you have done, and I am truly sorry that I have brought this calamity upon you.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It is the innocent bystander who always suffers in the clash of our Latin politics. I am sorry that this should have happened and that you should see my country in this sad light.’
‘What else could we do?’ asked Forester. ‘We’re all in the same boat.’
‘I’m glad you see it that way,’ said Aguillar. ‘Because of what may come next. What happens if we meet up with the communists who should be here and are not?’
‘Before we come to that there’s something I’d like to query,’ said O’Hara. Aguillar raised his eyebrows and motioned him to continue, so O’Hara said deliberately, ‘How do we know they are communists? Señorita Aguillar tells me that Lopez has tried to liquidate you several times. How do you know he hasn’t got wind of your return and is having another crack at you?’
Aguillar shook his head. ‘Lopez has – in your English idiom – shot his bolt. I know. Do not forget that I am a practical politician and give me credit for knowing my own work. Lopez forgot about me several years ago and is only interested in how he can safely relinquish the reins of power and retire. As for the communists – for years I have watched them work in my country, undermining the government and wooing the people. They have not got far with the people, or they would have disposed of Lopez by now. I am their only danger and I am sure that our situation is their work.’
Forester said casually, ‘Grivas was trying to make a clenched fist salute when he died.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara. ‘But why all this rigmarole of Grivas in the first place? Why not just put a time bomb in the Dakota – that would have done the job very easily.’
Aguillar smiled. ‘Señor O’Hara, in my life as a politician I have had four bombs thrown at me and every one was defective. Our politics out here are emotional and emotion does not make for careful workmanship, even of bombs. And I am sure that even communism cannot make any difference to the native characteristics of my people. They wanted to make very sure of me and so they chose the unfortunate Grivas as their instrument. Would you have called Grivas an emotional man?’
‘I should think he was,’ said O’Hara, thinking of Grivas’s exultation even in death. ‘And he was pretty slipshod too.’
Aguillar spread his hands, certain he had made his point. But he drove it home. ‘Grivas would be happy to be given such work; it would appeal to his sense of drama – and my people have a great sense of drama. As for being – er – slipshod, Grivas bungled the first part of the operation by stupidly killing himself, and the others have bungled the rest of it by not being here to meet us.’
O’Hara rubbed his chin. As Aguillar drew the picture it made a weird kind of sense.
Aguillar said, ‘Now, my friends, we come to the next point. Supposing, on the way down this mountain, we meet these men – these communists? What happens then?’ He regarded O’Hara and Forester with bright eyes. ‘It is not your fight – you are not Cordillerans – and I am interested to know what you would do. Would you give this dago politician into the hands of his enemies or …’
‘Would we fight?’ finished Forester.
‘It is my fight,’ said O’Hara bluntly. ‘I’m not a Cordilleran, but Grivas pulled a gun on me and made me crash my plane. I didn’t like that, and I didn’t like the sight of the Coughlins. Anyway, I don’t like the sight of communists, and I think that, all in all, this is my fight.’
‘I concur,’ said Forester.
Aguillar raised his hand. ‘But it is not as easy as that, is it? There are others to take into account. Would it be fair on Miss – er – Ponsky, for instance? Now what I propose is this. Miguel, my niece and I will withdraw into another cabin while you talk it over – and I will abide by your joint decision.’
Forester looked speculatively at Peabody, who was just leaving the hut. He glanced at O’Hara, then said, ‘I think we should leave the question of fighting until there’s something to fight. It’s possible that we might just walk out of here.’
Aguillar had seen Forester’s look at Peabody. He smiled sardonically. ‘I see that you are a politician yourself, Señor Forester.’ He made a gesture of resignation. ‘Very well, we will leave the problem for the moment – but I think we will have to return to it.’
‘It’s a pity we had to come down the mountain,’ said Forester. ‘There’s sure to be an air search, and it might have been better to stay by the Dakota.’
‘We could not have lived up there,’ said Rohde.
‘I know, but it’s a pity all the same.’
‘I don’t think it makes much difference,’ said O’Hara. ‘The wreck will be difficult to spot from the air – it’s right at the foot of a cliff.’ He hesitated. ‘And I don’t know about an air search – not yet, anyway.’
Forester jerked his head. ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘Andes Airlift isn’t noted for its efficiency and Filson, my boss, isn’t good at paperwork. This flight didn’t even have a number – I remember wondering about it just before we took off. It’s on the cards that San Croce control haven’t bothered to notify Santillana to expect us.’ As he saw Forester’s expression he added, The whole set-up is shoestring and sealing-wax – it’s only a small field.’
‘But surely your boss will get worried when he doesn’t hear from you?’
‘He’ll worry,’ agreed O’Hara. ‘He told me to phone him from Santillana – but he won’t worry too much at first. There have been times when I haven’t phoned through on his say-so and had a rocket for losing cargo. But I don’t think he’ll worry about losing the plane for a couple of days at least.’
Forester blew out his cheeks. ‘Wow – what a Rube Goldberg organization. Now I really feel lost.’
Rohde said, ‘We must depend on our own efforts. I think we can be sure of that.’
‘We flew off course too,’ said O’Hara. ‘They’ll start the search north of here – when they start.’
Rohde looked at Aguillar whose eyes were closed. ‘There is nothing we can do now,’ he said. ‘But we must sleep. It will be a hard day tomorrow.’
III
Again O’Hara did not sleep very well, but at least he was resting on a mattress instead of a hard floor, with a full belly. Peabody was on watch and O’Hara was due to relieve him at two o’clock; he was glad when the time came.
He donned his leather jacket and took the vicuna coat that Forester had given him. He suspected that he would be glad of it during the next two hours. Forester was awake and waved lazily as he went out, although he did not speak.
The night air was thin and cold and O’Hara shivered as he set off down the road. As Rohde had said, the conditions for survival were better here than up by the airstrip, but it was still pretty dicey. He was aware that his heart was thumping and that his respiration rate was up. It would be much better when they got down to the quebrada, as Rohde called the lateral valley to which they were heading.
He reached the corner where he had to leave the road and headed towards the looming outcrop of rock which Rohde had picked as a vantage point. Peabody should have been perched on top of the rock and should have heard him coming, but there was no sign of his presence.
O’Hara called softly, ‘Peabody!’
There was silence.
Cautiously he circled the outcrop to get it silhouetted against the night sky. There was a lump on top of the rock which he could not quite make out. He began to climb the rock and as he reached the top he heard a muffled snore. He shook Peabody and his foot clinked on a bottle – Peabody was drunk.
‘You bloody fool,’ he said and started to slap Peabody’s face, but without appreciable result. Peabody muttered in his drunken stupor but did not recover consciousness. ‘I ought to let you die of exposure,’ whispered O’Hara viciously, but he knew he could not do that. He also knew that he could not hope to carry Peabody back to the camp by himself. He would have to get help.
He stared down the mountainside but all was quiet, so he climbed down the rock and headed back up the road. Forester was still awake and looked up inquiringly as O’Hara entered the hut. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, suddenly alert.
‘Peabody’s passed out,’ said O’Hara. ‘I’ll need help to bring him up.’
‘Damn this altitude,’ said Forester, putting on his shoes.
‘It wasn’t the altitude,’ O’Hara said coldly. ‘The bastard’s dead drunk.’
Forester muffled an imprecation. ‘Where did he get the stuff?’
‘I suppose he found it in one of the huts,’ said O’Hara. ‘I’ve still got my flask – I was saving it for Aguillar.’
‘All right,’ said Forester. ‘Let’s lug the damn fool up here.’
It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Peabody was a big, flabby man and his body lolled uncooperatively, but they managed it at last and dumped him unceremoniously in a bunk. Forester gasped and said, ‘This idiot will be the death of us all if we don’t watch him.’ He paused. ‘I’ll come down with you – it might be better to have two pairs of eyes down there right now.’
They went back and climbed up on to the rock, lying side by side and scanning the dark mountainside. For fifteen minutes they were silent, but saw and heard nothing. ‘I think it’s okay,’ said Forester at last. He shifted his position to ease his bones. ‘What do you think of the old man?’
‘He seems all right to me,’ said O’Hara.
‘He’s a good joe – a good liberal politician. If he lasts long enough he might end up by being a good liberal statesman – but liberals don’t last long in this part of the world, and I think he’s a shade too soft.’ Forester chuckled. ‘Even when it’s a matter of life and death – his life and death, not to mention his niece’s – he still sticks to democratic procedure. He wants us to vote on whether we shall hand him over to the commies. Imagine that!’
‘I wouldn’t hand anyone over to the communists,’ said O’Hara. He glanced sideways at the dark bulk of Forester. ‘You said you could fly a plane – I suppose you do it as a matter of business; company plane and all that.’
‘Hell, no,’ said Forester. ‘My outfit’s not big enough or advanced enough for that. I was in the Air Force – I flew in Korea.’
‘So did I,’ said O’Hara. ‘I was in the R.A.F.’
‘Well, what do you know.’ Forester was delighted. ‘Where were you based?’
O’Hara told him and he said, ‘Then you were flying Sabres like I was. We went on joint operations – hell, we must have flown together.’
‘Probably.’
They lay in companionable silence for a while, then Forester said, ‘Did you knock down any of those Migs? I got four, then they pulled me out. I was mad about that – I wanted to be a war hero; an ace, you know.’
‘You’ve got to get five in the American Air Force, haven’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ said Forester. ‘Did you get any?’
‘A couple,’ said O’Hara. He had shot down eight Migs but it was a part of his life he preferred to forget, so he didn’t elaborate. Forester sensed his reserve and was quiet. After a few minutes he said, ‘I think I’ll go back and get some sleep – if I can. We’ll be on our way early.’
When he had gone O’Hara stared into the darkness and thought about Korea. That had been the turning point of his life: before Korea he had been on his way up; after Korea there was just the endless slide, down to Filson and now beyond. He wondered where he would end up.
Thinking of Korea brought back Margaret and the letter. He had read the letter while on ready call on a frozen airfield. The Americans had a name for that kind of letter – they called them ‘Dear Johns’. She was quite matter-of-fact about it and said that they were adult and must be sensible about this thing – all the usual rationalizations which covered plain infidelity. Looking back on it afterwards O’Hara could see a little humour in it – not much, but some. He was one of the inglorious ten per cent of any army fighting away from home, and he had lost his wife to a civilian. But it wasn’t funny at all reading that letter on the cold airfield in Korea.
Five minutes later there was a scramble and he was in the air and thirty minutes later he was fighting. He went into battle with cold ferocity and a total lack of judgment. In three minutes he shot down two Migs, surprising them by sheer recklessness. Then a Chinese pilot with a cooler mind shot him down and he spent the rest of the war in a prison cage.
He did not like to think of that period and what had happened to him. He had come out of it with honour, but the psychiatrists had a field day with him when he got back to England. They did what they could but they could not break down the shell he had built about himself – and neither, by that time, could he break out.
And so it went – invalided out of the Air Force with a pension which he promptly commuted; the good jobs – at first – and then the poorer jobs, until he got down to Filson. And always the drink – more and more booze which had less and less effect as he tried to fill and smother the aching emptiness inside him.
He moved restlessly on the rock and heard the bottle clink. He put out his hand, picked it up and held it to the sky. It was a quarter full. He smiled. He could not get drunk on that but it would be very welcome. Yet as the fiery fluid spread and warmed his gut he felt guilty.
IV
Peabody was blearily belligerent when he woke up and found O’Hara looking at him. At first he looked defensive, then his instinct for attack took over. ‘I’m not gonna take anything from you,’ he said shakily. ‘Not from any goddam limey.’
O’Hara just looked at him. He had no wish to tax Peabody with anything. Weren’t they members of the same club? he thought sardonically. Fellow drunks. Why, we even drink from the same bottle. He felt miserable.
Rohde took a step forward and Peabody screamed, ‘And I’m not gonna take anything from a dago either.’
‘Then perhaps you’ll take it from me,’ snapped Forester. He took one stride and slapped Peabody hard on the side of the face. Peabody sagged back on the bed and looked into Forester’s cold eyes with an expression of fear and bewilderment on his face. His hand came up to touch the red blotch on his cheek. He was just going to speak when Forester pushed a finger at him. ‘Shut up! One cheep out of you and I’ll mash you into a pulp. Now get your big fat butt off that bed and get to work – and if you step out of line again I swear to God I’ll kill you.’
The ferocity in Forester’s voice had a chilling effect on Peabody. All the belligerence drained out of him. ‘I didn’t mean to –’ he began.
‘Shut up!’ said Forester and turned his back on him. ‘Let’s get this show on the road,’ he announced generally.
They took food and a pressure stove and fuel, carrying it in awkwardly contrived packs cobbled from their overcoats. O’Hara did not think that Forester’s boss would thank him for the vicuna coat, already showing signs of hard use.
Aguillar said he could walk, provided he was not asked to go too fast, so Forester took the stretcher poles and lashed them together in what he called a travois. ‘The Plains Indians used this for transport,’ he said. ‘They got along without wheels – so can we.’ He grinned. ‘They pulled with horses and we have only manpower, but it’s downhill all the way.’
The travois held a lot, much more than a man could carry, and Forester and O’Hara took first turn at pulling the triangular contraption, the apex bumping and bouncing on the stony ground. The others fell into line behind them and once more they wound their way down the mountain.
O’Hara looked at his watch – it was six a.m. He began to calculate – they had not come very far the previous day, not more than four or five miles, but they had been rested, warmed and fed, and that was all to the good. He doubted if they could make more than ten miles a day, so that meant another two days to the refinery, but they had enough food for at least four days, so they would be all right even if Aguillar slowed them down. Things seemed immeasurably brighter.
The terrain around them began to change. There were tufts of grass scattered sparsely and an occasional wild flower, and as they went on these signs of life became more frequent. They were able to move faster, too, and O’Hara said to Rohde, ‘The low altitude seems to be doing us good.’
‘That – and acclimatization,’ said Rohde. He smiled grimly. ‘If it does not kill you, you can get used to it – eventually.’
They came to one of the inevitable curves in the road and Rohde stopped and pointed to a silvery thread. ‘That is the quebrada – where the river is. We cross the river and turn north. The refinery is about twenty-four kilometres from the bridge.’
‘What’s the height above sea-level?’ asked O’Hara. He was beginning to take a great interest in the air he breathed – more interest than he had ever taken in his life.
‘About three thousand five hundred metres,’ said Rohde.
Twelve thousand feet, O’Hara thought. That’s much better.
They made good time and decided they would be able to have their midday rest and some hot food on the other side of the bridge. ‘A little over five miles in half a day,’ said Forester, chewing on a piece of jerked beef. ‘That won’t be bad going. But I hope to God that Rohde is right when he says that the refinery is still inhabited.’
‘We will be all right,’ said Rohde. ‘There is a village ten miles the other side of the refinery. Some of us can go on and bring back help if necessary.’
They pushed on and found that suddenly they were in the valley. There was no more snow and the ground was rocky, with more clumps of tough grass. The road ceased to twist and they went past many small ponds. It was appreciably warmer too, and O’Hara found that he could stride out without losing his breath.
We’ve got it made, he thought exultantly.
Soon they heard the roar of the river which carried the meltwater from the snowfields behind them and suddenly they were all gay. Miss Ponsky chattered unceasingly, exclaiming once in her high-pitched voice as she saw a bird, the first living, moving thing they had seen in two days. O’Hara heard Aguillar’s deep chuckle and even Peabody cheered up, recovering from Forester’s tonguelashing.
O’Hara found himself next to Benedetta. She smiled at him and said, ‘Who has the pressure stove? We are going to need it soon.’
He pointed back to where Willis and Armstrong were pulling the travois. ‘I packed it in there,’ he said.
They were very near the river now and he estimated that the road would have one last turn before they came to the bridge. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what’s round the corner.’
They stepped out and round the curve and O’Hara suddenly stopped. There were men and vehicles on the other side of the swollen river and the bridge was down.
A faint babble of voices arose above the river’s roar as they were seen and some of the men on the other side started to run. O’Hara saw a man reach into the back of a truck and lift out a rifle and there was a popping noise as others opened up with pistols.
He lurched violently into Benedetta, sending her flying just as the rifle cracked, and she stumbled into cover, dropping some cans in the middle of the road. As O’Hara fell after her one of the cans suddenly leaped into the air as a bullet hit it, and leaked a tomato bloodiness.
THREE (#ulink_f96fc2db-4ad5-5e91-a39c-f2f2df68138b)
O’Hara, Forester and Rohde looked down on the bridge from the cover of a group of large boulders near the edge of the river gorge. Below, the river rumbled, a green torrent of ice-water smoothly slipping past the walls it had cut over the aeons. The gorge was about fifty yards wide.
O’Hara was still shaking from the shock of being unexpectedly fired upon. He had thrown himself into the side of the road, winding himself by falling on to a can in the pocket of his overcoat. When he recovered his breath he had looked with stupefaction at the punctured can in the middle of the road, bleeding a red tomato and meat gravy. That could have been me, he thought – or Benedetta.
It was then that he started to shake.
They had crept back round the corner, keeping in cover, while rifle bullets flicked chips of granite from the road surface. Rohde was waiting for them, his gun drawn and his face anxious. He looked at Benedetta’s face and his lips drew back over his teeth in a snarl as he took a step forward.
‘Hold it,’ said Forester quietly from behind him. ‘Let’s not be too hasty.’ He put his hand on O’Hara’s arm. ‘What’s happening back there?’
O’Hara took a grip on himself. ‘I didn’t have time to see much. I think the bridge is down; there are some trucks on the other side and there seemed to be a hell of a lot of men.’
Forester scanned the ground with a practised eye. ‘There’s plenty of cover by the river – we should be able to get a good view from among those rocks without being spotted. Let’s go.’
So here they were, looking at the ant-like activity on the other side of the river. There seemed to be about twenty men; some were busy unloading thick planks from a truck, others were cutting rope into lengths. Three men had apparently been detailed off as sentries; they were standing with rifles in their hands, scanning the bank of the gorge. As they watched, one of the men must have thought he saw something move, because he raised his rifle and fired a shot.
Forester said, ‘Nervous, aren’t they? They’re firing at shadows.’
O’Hara studied the gorge. The river was deep and ran fast – it was obviously impossible to swim. One would be swept away helplessly in the grip of that rush of water and be frozen to death in ten minutes. Apart from that, there were the problems of climbing down the edge of the gorge to the water’s edge and getting up the other side, not to mention the likelihood of being shot.
He crossed the river off his mental list of possibilities and turned his attention to the bridge. It was a primitive suspension contraption with two rope catenaries strung from massive stone buttresses on each side of the gorge. From the catenaries other ropes, graded in length, supported the main roadway of the bridge which was made of planks. But there was a gap in the middle where a lot of planks were missing and the ropes dangled in the breeze.
Forester said softly, ‘That’s why they didn’t meet us at the airstrip. See the truck in the river – downstream, slapped up against the side of the gorge?’
O’Hara looked and saw the truck in the water, almost totally submerged, with a standing wave of water swirling over the top of the cab. He looked back at the bridge. ‘It seems as though it was crossing from this side when it went over.’
‘That figures,’ said Forester. ‘I reckon they’d have a couple of men to make the preliminary arrangements – stocking up the camp and so on – in readiness for the main party. When the main party was due they came down to the bridge to cross – God knows for what reason. But they didn’t make it – and they buggered the bridge, with the main party still on the other side.’
‘They’re repairing it now,’ said O’Hara. ‘Look.’
Two men crawled on to the swaying bridge pushing a plank before them. They lashed it into place with the aid of a barrage of shouted advice from terra firma and then retreated. O’Hara looked at his watch; it had taken them half an hour.
‘How many planks to go?’ he asked.
Rohde grunted. ‘About thirty.’
‘That gives us fifteen hours before they’re across,’ said O’Hara.
‘More than that,’ said Forester. ‘They’re not likely to do that trapeze act in the dark.’
Rohde took out his pistol and carefully sighted on the bridge, using his forearm as a rest. Forester said, ‘That’s no damned use – you won’t hit anything at fifty yards with a pistol.’
‘I can try,’ said Rohde.
Forester sighed. ‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘But just one shot to see how it goes. How many slugs have you got?’
‘I had two magazines with seven bullets in each,’ said Rohde. ‘I have fired three shots.’
‘You pop off another and that leaves ten. That’s not too many.’
Rohde tightened his lips stubbornly and kept the pistol where it was. Forester winked at O’Hara and said, ‘If you don’t mind I’m going to retire now. As soon as you start shooting they’re going to shoot right back.’
He withdrew slowly, then turned and lay on his back and looked at the sky, gesturing for O’Hara to join him. ‘It looks as though the time is ripe to hold our council of war,’ he said. ‘Surrender or fight. But there may be a way out of it – have you got that air chart of yours?’
O’Hara produced it. ‘We can’t cross the river – not here, at least,’ he said.
Forester spread out the chart and studied it. He put his finger down. ‘Here’s the river – and this is where we are. This bridge isn’t shown. What’s this shading by the river?’
‘That’s the gorge.’
Forester whistled. ‘Hell, it starts pretty high in the mountains, so we can’t get around it upstream. What about the other way?’
O’Hara measured off the distance roughly. ‘The gorge stretches for about eighty miles down stream, but there’s a bridge marked here – fifty miles away, as near as dammit.’
‘That’s a hell of a long way,’ commented Forester. ‘I doubt if the old man could make it – not over mountain country.’
O’Hara said, ‘And if that crowd over there have any sense they’ll have another truckload of men waiting for us if we do try it. They have the advantage of being able to travel fast on the lower roads.’
‘The bastards have got us boxed in,’ said Forester. ‘So it’s surrender or fight.’
‘I surrender to no communists,’ said O’Hara.
There was a flat report as Rohde fired his pistol and, almost immediately, an answering fusillade of rifle shots, the sound redoubled by echoes from the high ground behind. A bullet ricocheted from close by and whined over O’Hara’s head.
Rohde came slithering down. ‘I missed,’ he said.
Forester refrained from saying, ‘I told you so,’ but his expression showed it. Rohde grinned. ‘But it stopped them working on the bridge – they went back fast and the plank dropped in the river.’
‘That’s something,’ said O’Hara. ‘Maybe we can hold them off that way.’
‘For how long?’ asked Forester. ‘We can’t hold them off for ever – not with ten slugs. We’d better hold our council of war. You stay here, Miguel; but choose a different observation point – they might have spotted this one.’
O’Hara and Forester went back to the group on the road. As they approached O’Hara said in a low voice, ‘We’d better do something to ginger this lot up; they look too bloody nervous.’
There was a feeling of tension in the air. Peabody was muttering in a low voice to Miss Ponsky, who for once was silent herself. Willis was sitting on a rock, nervously tapping his foot on the ground, and Aguillar was speaking rapidly to Benedetta some little way removed from the group. The only one at ease seemed to be Armstrong, who was placidly sucking on an empty pipe, idly engaged in drawing patterns on the ground with a stick.
O’Hara crossed to Aguillar. ‘We’re going to decide what to do,’ he said. ‘As you suggested.’
Aguillar nodded gravely. ‘I said that it must happen.’
O’Hara said, ‘You’re going to be all right.’ He looked at Benedetta; her face was pale and her eyes were dark smudges in her head. He said, ‘I don’t know how long this is going to take, but why don’t you begin preparing a meal for us. We’ll all feel better when we’ve eaten.’
‘Yes, child,’ said Aguillar. ‘I will help you. I am a good cook, Señor O’Hara.’
O’Hara smiled at Benedetta. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’
He walked over to where Forester was giving a pep talk. ‘And that’s the position,’ he was saying. ‘We’re boxed in and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it – but there is always a way out of anything, using brains and determination. Anyway, it’s a case of surrender or fight. I’m going to fight – and so is Tim O’Hara here; aren’t you, Tim?’
‘I am,’ said O’Hara grimly.
‘I’m going to go round and ask your views, and you must each make your own decision,’ continued Forester. ‘What about you, Doctor Willis?’
Willis looked up and his face was strained. ‘It’s difficult, isn’t it? You see, I’m not much of a fighter. Then again, it’s a question of the odds – can we win? I don’t see much reason in putting up a fight if we’re certain of losing – and I don’t see any chance at all of our winning out.’ He paused, then said hesitantly, ‘But I’ll go with the majority vote.’
Willis, you bastard, you’re a fine example of a fencesitter, thought O’Hara.
‘Peabody?’ Forester’s voice cut like a lash.
‘What the hell has this got to do with us?’ exploded Peabody. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to risk my life for any wop politician. I say hand the bastard over and let’s get the hell out of here.’
‘What do you say, Miss Ponsky?’
She gave Peabody a look of scorn, then hesitated. All the talk seemed to be knocked out of her, leaving her curiously deflated. At last she said in a small voice, ‘I know I’m only a woman and I can’t do much in the way of fighting, and I’m scared to death – but I think we ought to fight.’ She ended in a rush and looked defiantly at Peabody. ‘And that’s my vote.’
Good for you, Miss Ponsky, cheered O’Hara silently. That’s three to fight. It’s now up to Armstrong – he can tip it for fighting or make a deadlock, depending on his vote.
‘Doctor Armstrong, what do you have to say?’ queried Forester.
Armstrong sucked on his pipe and it made an obscene noise. ‘I suppose I’m more an authority on this kind of situation than anyone present,’ he observed. ‘With the possible exception of Señor Aguillar, who at present is cooking our lunch, I see. Give me a couple of hours and I could quote a hundred parallel examples drawn from history.’
Peabody muttered in exasperation, ‘What the hell!’
‘The question at issue is whether to hand Señor Aguillar to the gentlemen on the other side of the river. The important point, as I see it affecting us, is what would they do with him? And I can’t really see that there is anything they can do with him other than kill him. Keeping high-standing politicians as prisoners went out of fashion a long time ago. Now, if they kill him they will automatically be forced to kill us. They would not dare take the risk of letting this story loose upon the world. They would be most painfully criticized, perhaps to the point of losing what they have set out to gain. In short, the people of Cordillera would not stand for it. So you see, we are not fighting for the life of Señor Aguillar; we are fighting for our own lives.’
He put his pipe back into his mouth and made another rude noise.
‘Does that mean that you are in favour of fighting?’ asked Forester.
‘Of course,’ said Armstrong in surprise. ‘Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying?’
Peabody looked at him in horror. ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘What have I got myself into?’ He buried his head in his hands.
Forester grinned at O’Hara, and said, ‘Well, Doctor Willis?’
‘I fight,’ said Willis briefly.
O’Hara chuckled. One academic man had convinced another.
Forester said, ‘Ready to change your mind, Peabody?’
Peabody looked up. ‘You really think they’re going to rub us all out?’
‘If they kill Aguillar I don’t see what else they can do,’ said Armstrong reasonably. ‘And they will kill Aguillar, you know.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Peabody in an anguish of indecision.
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Desmond Bagley
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: Action thriller by the classic adventure writer set in the South American Andes.When Tim O’Hara’s plane is hijacked and forced to crash land in the middle of the Andes, his troubles are only beginning. A heavily armed group of communist soldiers intent on killing one of his passengers – an influential political figure – have orders to leave no survivors. Isolated in the biting cold of the Andes, O’Hara’s party must fight for their lives with only the most primitive weapons…