I moved forward along the line of four to within a hundred feet of the fence. Then I laid my coat and suitcase on the ground and sat down on the coat with my back to the bole of a swamp-maple sort of tree.
The searchlight was a good distance away—at least a couple of hundred yards to the right. It touched this point of fence and moved on a few more yards, intersecting the beam of the next light, then sweeping back across its arc. The light it threw was somewhat dissipated and considerably weaker than at points nearer the tower.
The towers stood above the treetops on wooden lattice structures; there were platforms halfway up and I’d seen similar towers in Germany. There would be a shoulder-wide hole in the platform and a rope ladder fixed to it. When the guard went up he drew the ladder up after him. It prevented insurgents from storming the platforms and taking over the machine guns. The tower would be manned by two sentries: one on the light and one on the gun. The range to this point in the fence was approximately two hundred yards from the tower to my right and nearly two hundred and fifty from the tower to my left. A machine gun is not precise at that range but of course if you throw enough bullets you have a good chance that one of them will hit whatever you’re aiming at. These were probably Kalkashnikov guns with a high rate of fire.
The open cut between Russian trees and Turkish ones had been timbered off and bulldozed to weeds. It was about fifty yards wide, a swath with the fence running down its center. Pudovkin had suggested the main line of defense was the mine field; the fence was secondary but I had to remember that electrified top strand. The three-strand fence stood about a yard high or a little better on wooden posts set eight or ten feet apart. You had to run twenty or thirty yards, get through the lower gap in the fence, and cross another twenty-yard flat into the farther trees.
I timed the searchlight sweeps. They didn’t work in unison; they didn’t always cross each other because sometimes they were both moving in the same direction. It made the intervals impossible to time precisely.
Generally it seemed about thirty seconds from the time one light hit the end of its arc and the time it made a complete circuit to that point again. Since the light crossed this point in the fence twice at this end of its arc it meant there was about a twenty-five second dark interval—provided the second light was moving in a pattern directly opposite to that of the first. That coincidence seemed to take place every ten or twelve minutes.
I had several hours to make these calculations and I made them with cool aplomb. The insensate stupidity had not worn off.
It was a warm night but I shivered through it.
I made my plan on the basis of a shallow depression in the earth about eight feet this side of the fence. When the lights crossed the little hollow they left it in shadow. It was a few feet to one side of the straight line of the four trees and that meant it might contain a land mine and so I spent at least two hours working on alternative ideas but none of them worked; it kept coming back to that hollow because I wasn’t going to have time to make the whole run in one go, not when I had to stop and get through the fence midway. The strands were less than a foot apart and you couldn’t simply dive through them. I was going to have to make it in two runs and the only place I could stop was in that hollow. If there was a mine in it I wouldn’t have to concern myself about getting through the fence.
At an ordinary walking pace you cover about five feet a second. Sprinting over short distances you can multiply that by four. If I ran full tilt I could reach the fence in four seconds, take seventeen seconds to get through the fence and still have four seconds to sprint to the far trees without being picked up by the light. But Pudovkin had pointed out the fallacy in that. The first thing they’d see—light or no light—would be a running figure. You had to move slowly.
Walking slowly it would take me at least fifteen seconds to reach the fence. That was why I had to use the depression.
Behind me the sky pinked up with heavy clouds: dusk, then dawn. Fear began to pump the sweat out of me now.
I had to wait for that moment when the searchlights were almost equaled by the growing daylight: when everything merged into a common murk.
The trees made a mosaic against the clouds. I left my coat on the ground; it would only impede me on the barbed wire. I picked up the suitcase.
Sky merged with earth along the uncertain eastern horizon. I turned away from it and faced the fence. The beams were no longer visible but you could still see the yellow disc of light sliding along the ground, growing parabolically longer as it approached the end of its swing. It was no longer distinct at the verges and I knew it was time to go; never mind the synchronization of the farther light.
Up on one knee. I’d studied the line all night; I’d memorized it. The only place I might hit a mine was the hollow. Reckless: the hell with it, go.
The light swept past the hollow, faded, came back faintly. When it crossed the hollow again on its return sweep I walked out of the trees.
I moved low to the ground and slowly, very slowly, bent double with my breathing tight and shallow, my sphincter contracted, my palms damp, sweat running in my eyes. I kept looking both ways at the towers because if a light or a gun muzzle began to swing too fast my way I was going to run for it.
The cliché is that time slows to a crawl in such circumstances: that one’s feet seem to drag leadenly, every lurching step is an agony of needle-pierced nerves, all the muscles are drawn so tight they twang with vibration and the impulse to break and run wildly is almost overpowering. The cliché is true. There is no way to remember it all clearly but it lasted subjective hours. I had the suitcase clutched to my chest as if it would shield me against bullets; I moved like a man about to retch—and I was ready to. Somewhere in my head a clock was at work and at hourly intervals I knew another second had passed—yet at the same time the instants raced by in such a blur that I knew I wouldn’t nearly have time to reach the hollow before the lights came swinging back and the guns opened up.…
When the pale searchlight pinned me I was lying bolt still in the hollow because they would spot movement before anything else. I didn’t stir—and the light moved on. There was no land mine, but I didn’t even think of that until after I was belly-flat in the depression.
I felt it return across my back: felt it because I’m sure I didn’t see it. The daylight seemed to be strengthening with incredible haste. They would spot me now without the lights.…
Wait now until they’ve begun to turn and look another way—wait for the light to circle away. Now. Up. Three strides to the fence. I went against it prone—laid my knee across the bottom strand to bend it down; lifted the upper strand.
The sudden noise of a man’s shout tore a gash through the fabric of the dawn. I could not look up: I could not. It was like burying my face in the pillow, that inability to look—as if by not looking I would prevent them from shooting.… I rolled through the narrow gap in the wire. My suitcase caught and jerked me around and I knew there was no way to free it and I left it there and ran—ran, diving and zigzagging with my soles slipping on the damp weeds, legs pumping, arms driving, my eyes only on the Turkish wood that meant life.
The stutter of the machine gun was curiously far off but then above the roar of my ears I heard the bullets whack past me and I learned that all the writings are wrong: bullets don’t whiz or whistle or fan the air, they crack like explosives when they go by—a sonic boom. I listened with compulsive curiosity to this phenomenon and then I was tumbling, sliding in among the trees and the guns were chipping bark and twigs above my head: I scrambled and pawed into the wood and at some indeterminate moment the guns stopped and I was alive.