For twenty or thirty seconds Robbie stood, legs splayed, gasping for breath; then he stumbled to the boulders and looked over. Twenty feet below, Cepicka lay sprawled, his limbs twisted at unnatural angles.
From where Robbie stood, Barak and Stephanie could not be seen. Straightening himself, he ran the few paces across the curve of the rocky platform and crouched again over the boulders there, to look down into the road round the corner. Stephanie was standing near the bonnet of the Ford. Her back was to the precipice and she was only a few feet from its edge. Barak stood facing her and was shaking his fist in her face. Robbie heard him shout:
'How dare you upset my plans? How dare you? You shall be disciplined for this. I'll teach you to sneak off with your boy friend. Cepicka will deal with him within the next few minutes, then we'll take you back and I'll deal with you.'
His mind whirling, Robbie wondered how he could possibly get the better of Barak. To scramble down the chimney to the road would have been suicidal. He would have had a bullet in him before he could get within yards of his enemy. From where he stood, up on the shoulder of the mountain, he could see the road winding away for a considerable distance in both directions, and it was empty. During the two hours or more since he and Stephanie had set out from Olympia, they had met only one coachload of tourists, three lorries and one private car, and the traffic going in their direction could be assumed to be no more frequent. The odds were, therefore, against Barak's being forced to abandon his hold-up through a vehicle arriving on the scene in the next ten minutes or quarter of an hour.
As Robbie's glance swept the distant road, he suddenly caught sight of a solitary figure some way to his left and about half a mile away on the slope above it. The man was evidently a goatherd and from up there he must have had a clear view of Robbie's struggle with Cepicka, but he was too far off to be called on for immediate assistance. Swinging round again, Robbie once more stared down at Stephanie and her husband.
Her voice, shrill with anger, came up to him clearly: 'You murderous brute! I'll stay with you no longer! I'm sick to death of you and the Party and all its filthy work. But don't think you can get me sent back to Czechoslovakia. I know too much about you. If you refuse me my freedom or fake a lying report about me, I'll give Janos chapter and verse about the bribes you've taken. Then it's you who'll be sent back, and you'll find yourself in the uranium mines.'
For the space of a minute they stood glaring at one another, and there was complete silence on the mountainside. Then Barak took a pace forward. Suddenly his hand shot out. It landed on Stephanie's chest. She staggered back. Robbie saw the earth on the edge of the precipice crumble under her heel. Her eyes instantly became round with terror. Her mouth opened wide and she gave a piercing shriek. Then, as though a trap-door had opened under her, and with her hands wildly clutching empty air, she shot downwards into the abyss.
Barak stepped back and passed a hand over his eyes. Robbie, twenty feet above him, remained for some seconds paralysed by horror at the awful scene he had witnessed. Then he found his voice and shouted:
'You fiend! You fiend! I'll kill you for this. I'll kill you! I'll kill you! I swear I will!'
Swinging round, Barak stared up at him. His hand went to his shoulder holster and he jerked out a gun. It was not the small pistol he had wrested from Stephanie, but a big blue-barrelled automatic. As he raised it, Robbie ducked down behind the boulder. Realizing that Robbie was well under cover, Barak did not fire, but Robbie heard his footsteps as he walked quickly round the corner of the cliff to the gully. A loud exclamation told Robbie that he had just come upon Cepicka's body.
Robbie wondered if his enemy would come up the chimney. On all fours he wriggled over to the boulder nearest to it, to be ready for him; but after he had crouched behind it for a minute, the footsteps moved away. For what seemed an age he continued to crouch there, then he heard the engine of a car start up. Crawling quickly back to the other side of the bastion, he risked a quick look over.
Barak was seated at the wheel of the Mercedes. He had run it back as far as it would go. As Robbie watched him, he let in the clutch and sent the big car forward, so that it hit the bonnet of the Ford sideways on with a loud metallic clang. According to the rule of the road in Greece, a vehicle going towards Olympia on that route would have had the right to the inner side; so, had the Mercedes not blocked the way, Stephanie would have passed it on the outer. In consequence, the Ford had been halted alongside the precipice and only some four feet from it. On the Mercedes charging it, the front wheels slithered another two feet nearer the edge. Backing the Mercedes, Barak charged the Ford again. This time one of its wheels went over and it tilted sharply, retaining a precarious balance only owing to its weight. For the third time, Barak launched the Mercedes at it. Churning up a cloud of small stones and dust, its whole body lifted, showing for a moment its underside, then it disappeared without a sound into the gorge far below.
Robbie had no doubts about Barak's reason for forcing the Ford over the precipice. Fie meant to account for Stephanie's death by an accident. The battered buffers of his own car could be produced as evidence that there had been one, and Stephanie might easily have tried to jump out, or have been thrown clear, as the Ford went over.
As Robbie was thinking that he must get to the police as soon as he possibly could, a motor horn sounded. Unnoticed by him, a lorry coming from the direction of Olympia had approached to within a few hundred yards. Standing up, he waved and shouted to the driver; but the man had his eyes fixed on the road ahead and a moment later, had he glanced up, the roof of the cab would have prevented him from seeing Robbie.
Neither, to Robbie's surprise, did the driver notice Cepicka's body and pull up. Then, on looking over, he saw that it was no longer there. Evidently, on finding it, Barak had removed it, and either pushed it over the precipice or carried it to his car. Meanwhile, on hearing the long hoot, he had backed the Mercedes alongside the rock face and, rounding the corner, the lorry ran past him on its way, the driver still in ignorance that his arrival there five minutes earlier might have prevented a ghastly tragedy.
When the lorry had passed, Barak ran the Mercedes to and fro again several times, until he had turned it round; then, at a slow pace, he drove off towards Tripolis. As he did so, Robbie could see, through the back window of the car, a pink cropped head lolling forward and rolling limply from side to side. This confirmed his idea that Barak might have carried Cepicka's body to the car and hoisted it into the back seat. But Barak drove no more than three hundred yards, then he pulled up and got out.
The cliff on which Robbie stood was not continuous. The edge sloped down to the level of the road further on, and it was just at that point that Barak had halted the Mercedes. By taking this longer way round, instead of struggling up the chimney, he had only to walk up the slope to reach Robbie's redoubt. Although Robbie's brain was still half-bemused by Stephanie's terrible death, he realized his enemy's intention. In his hands lay Barak's life. As long as he remained alive, he could charge Barak with murder; therefore, to be safe, Barak dare not leave him unaccounted for. He was coming up the slope to hunt out and kill him.