They had had time to think and began to calclass="underline"
“Lex! Lex!”
“That vos the voice of Peenk,” said the passenger in a firm Central European accent, and half stopping.
I shoved him on.
“Run, Lex! Pink’s the police informer. I’m getting you to Heyne-Hassingham.”
Thank the Lord he was high up in the party! That name seemed to be immediate proof of my bona fides. He crashed along the side of that hill like a startled heifer, through bush and over rabbit hole. We increased our lead a bit, and I took a chance on being where I thought I was. I pulled them round behind a thorn brake, through a gap in the furze and down onto the ground. As we dropped flat on the turf, Lex gave a muffled cry of pain.
“Damn these thorns!” hissed Sandorski.
He dug me in the ribs and held out, behind our friend’s back, a little syringe with which he had just jabbed him in the thigh.
The hunt passed us, then checked and turned back. They knew, as soon as they stopped to listen, that we must have gone to ground on the hillside. In the stillness of the night you could hear a man charging across country half a mile away. If only we could have reached the springy turf of the green track above us, we could have run–or jumped or danced, for that matter–without a sound.
They closed in, and flashed torches quickly on and off. They were wise not to spoil their night sight, and it may be, too, that they feared we were armed and desperate. All they could see was a formless black mass of thorn and furze, forbidding search. The twisting track into the heart of it, worn down by the persistent feet of little animals and an occasional sheep, was clear enough from where we lay, but indistinguishable from outside. Two of them were above us and two below us. They made a halfhearted attempt to beat the patch, but the furze was stiff and centuries old; we might have been surrounded by a lion-proof thorn fence.
It was as well that Sandorski’s syringe had done its work, for they started to ask Lex what the devil he thought he was doing. They couldn’t say very much, for they didn’t know who was with him or why the plane had come down in the wrong place or why it had immediately and frantically taken off again. Indeed they couldn’t be certain that Lex had ever got out of the plane at all-–and from their point of view we might be three unknown enemies, or Lex and two. Sandorski’s cavalry tactics had landed us in the most God-awful defenseless position, but at least they had bewitched the opposing force into a nightmare world where nothing made sense.
Hiart’s querulous voice, above us, said:
“For heaven’s sake, don’t go throwing names about!”
Pink, from below us and in a furious temper, told him to beggar off home to his bleeding nanny.
All the same, it wasn’t funny. True, they couldn’t see us till they stepped on us, but they had only to wait till daylight or till we grew impatient.
We heard somebody moving round our patch of cover and giving orders in whispers. I think it was Hiart, for their next move showed a certain subtlety. They shifted noisily about until we hadn’t the faintest notion where any single one of them was, and then preserved the most absolute, disciplined silence.
We were out of the wind on that slope, and there wasn’t a sound. A rare car rushed along the road in the valley beneath. A sheep coughed on the lower ground by the stream. This went on for half an hour. At least I found it to be only half an hour when I looked at my watch. I thought it must be nearly dawn. Strain on the nerves has no time.
Then Lex began to thrash about in his dreamland, and somebody above us closed in towards the sound. I hung onto Lex’s legs and Sandorski lay across his chest and arms. Pink must have been near enough to hear Lex’s heavy breathing. He shot in our general direction, and scored a bull. He hit the rectangle between Sandorski’s legs, Lex’s body and my arms. It wasn’t his fault that there was nothing but turf in it.
The shot was the breaking point for somebody else who had been frozen and terrified like ourselves. A roe deer, away to our left in a patch of thick stuff where one of us easily might have been but was not, broke cover and crashed away. Sandorski, instantaneously appreciating what the enemy would think, broke cover too and went after it, drawing off two of the watchers; they might, if he had given them a moment to think, have spotted the first disturbance as that of an animal, but they couldn’t distinguish the noises–since one was followed immediately by another –and could only assume that two of us had gone.
Right! Make it a third, I thought! And down the hill I went–after, of course, the interval of some seconds which I needed to catch up with Sandorski’s brilliance. I drew off the other two sentries, one of whom was Pink. His naval language was unmistakable. I led them up again to the turf, and there, where I could run silently, easily lost them.
I listened. I could hear Pink and his companion blundering through a bit of heavy plowland that lay between me and the airstrip. I guessed that he had given up the pursuit as hopeless–which it was–and was returning to the party’s rendezvous under the boundary hedge.
There was no knowing what Sandorski would do, for we had not arranged any rendezvous at all. Whether he heard my escape or not, however, it wasn’t likely he would lose touch for long with the unconscious Lex. Meanwhile the position was chaotic. Scattered over half a square mile of down and plow and thicket were Sandorski and myself and the disorganized reception committee, none of us knowing where the others were, and all anxious to find out. Additional complications were Lex snoring in the bushes and his bag in the holly tree.
Lex gave a heave and a rumble. In the night silence which had now become more absolute and hostile than ever, that noise seemed as outrageous a signal as any flashing light. I decided to shift him at once, while I could be sure that my own section of empty space was really empty. I carried him down the hill and left him in the open, where his odd noises would sound like those of the sheep, memorizing his position as well as I could without any very definite landmarks to go by.
I settled down on the edge of the turf track above our temporary hiding place. After a bit, Hiart, tall enough to recognize, came flitting cautiously over the grass with one of his men. They stopped and listened at the right spot, gave it up and vanished northwards along the track.
Where were they going? Well, if Hiart had the intelligence Sandorski attributed to him–and I was immensely impressed by his finding, in a world that all looked alike, the exact patch where we had been–then he would guess that the only explanation of the aircraft coming down in the wrong place and being expected there by unknown persons must be that the beacons had been moved. Having checked that, he would try to find them–for they were evidence that must at all costs be removed–and carry them off to his car. It wouldn’t take him long to discover the one in the open on the edge of the slope, and then the tracks of the landing wheels would lead him somewhere near the other in the hedge.
I hoped that Sandorski might be close behind Hiart, but he was not. I waited and waited, feeling all the time that we might be within a few yards of each other, and each afraid to break the silence. I needn’t have worried. When Sandorski did come, it was boldly down the track, and singing in a low, but not nearly low enough voice some preposterous chorus:
One day in October I wasn’t so sober.
“For the Lord’s sake!” I protested. “English folk song,” he answered. “Learned it from my governess. They’re miles away and busy. Have a cigarette!”