When he reached the grass margin of the taxiway, Giles Pyott turned, almost posing with the little knot of the ground crew.
"Fingers in your ears, sir," a flight-sergeant informed him.
"What? Oh, yes."
Pyott did as instructed. The Harrier was using the runway in a standard take off, instead of its unique vertical lift, because of the extra weight of fuel that it carried. Lights winked at wingtips and belly, suddenly brighter as a heavy cloud was pulled across the early afternoon sun by the wind. Then the aircraft was rolling, slowly for a moment, then with an accelerating rush, passing them — Pyott could see the helmeted blob that was Clark's head, turned towards him — and racing on down the runway. The heat of its single twenty-one and a half thousand pound thrust Pegasus 103 turbofan engine distorted its outline like a heat haze might have done, so that the aircraft appeared to have passed behind a veil, become removed from them. It sat back almost like an animal for an instant, then sprang at the sky and its low, scudding cloud and patches of gleaming brightness. The runway was still gauzy, but the Harrier was a sharply outlined silhouette as it rose then banked to the east.
Pyott took his hands from his ears, realising that the ground crew had already begun making their way towards the hangar area, leaving him a somewhat foolishly isolated figure in an overcoat, a retired officer out for a constitutional who had strolled by mistake into a military installation. He turned on his heel, and followed the others, his imperative now to return to the room beneath the Admiralty.
The Harrier had already climbed into the lowest of the cloud and was lost from sight.
The safety offered by the trees had come to seem a kind of privileged imprisonment, the further they ran. Hyde had seen figures, three of them, drop out of the helicopter into the buffet of the rotors" down-draught in the moment he had paused at the first trees, and knew they were cut off from the car. By now, someone would have driven it out of the car park and hidden it and removed the distributor. The trees masked them — they heard the helicopter roaming in search of them every few minutes — but they bordered a long, higher stretch of barren heathland where summer fires of a drought year had exposed the land even further. Dull, patchy with snow and fern, treeless, exposed. A minefield as far as they were concerned.
When they first stopped, he had held the frightened, shivering girl against him, but even before her breathing calmed and she had drawn any comfort from the embrace, he was asking her urgently, "How well do you know the area? Can you see it in your mind's eye? Where's the nearest road? How far? Can you run? What's the shape of this plantation? What do you know? Anything!"
Roads? No, she didn't know, she couldn't explain the shape of Cannock Chase, she'd never seen a map of it —
A childhood place, he understood even as he fumed silently. She remembered it as a series of snapshots, the sight of deer, high blue skies above whitened landscapes, the fall and rise of the land only as a viewer who wished the ability to paint would perceive and remember. Useless to them now.
They followed the edge of the plantation north for almost two miles, further and further from the road and the car park and the town of Rugeley. Then the girl announced that she did not know that part of the Chase. They were north-east of the rifle range, but it was hidden from them by the trees.
"The road from Stafford to Lichfield," the girl said, her face screwed up in thought, her chest still heaving with the effort of their last run.
"What?" he said.
"It runs through the Chase." She looked up into the dark trees, as if for inspiration. She was painfully trying to remember turns in the road, bearings from her childhood, signposts. "Past Shugborough Hall — Wolseley Bridge, turn right…" She shook her head while he slapped his hands against his thighs in exasperation. Then she was looking at him, a sense of failure evident in her eyes. She added, hesitantly, "I think if we continue north, we'll hit the main road."
"Trees all the way?" he snapped, unable to restrain the sense of entrapment that glided out of the dark trees and accompanied them at every step. They were like her precious deer, confined to the trees.
She shrugged hopelessly. "I don't know."
"Oh, Christ!" She looked as if he had struck her. He added, in a tone that aspired to more gentleness, "Any wardens", gamekeepers" houses around here?" Again, she shook her head.
Beyond the trees, the afternoon was bright, dazzling off the last paper-thin sheet of snow on the higher, open ground. The chilly wind soughed through the upper branches of the firs. To the north and west, the direction of the weather, there was heavier cloud. It was a weekday afternoon, and they had seen no other people since they left the car park, which had contained just one other car. Once, they had heard a dog bark, but they had seen neither it nor its owner. A distant vehicle's engine had sawn into the silence at another point, but again they had not seen it. Hyde had never realised before how isolated he could feel in a part of the cramped island that had become his home.
"I'm ready," Tricia Quin offered.
"Okay, let's go."
Their feet crackled on fallen twigs, or crunched through the long winter's frosty humus and leaf litter. An eerie, dark green, underwater light filtered through the firs, slanting on the grey and damp-green trunks. Hyde had time to think that he could not imagine how it had ever been a magic place for the girl, before he dragged her without sound off the narrow, foot-pressed, deer-run track they were following, behind the mossy trunk of a fir. Deep ravines in the bark, its hardness against his cheek, his hand over the girl's mouth, his breath hushing her before he released her; the movement of an insect over the terrain of the bark, almost so close as to be out of focus. He held the girl against him, pulled into his body. She was shivering, and her head was cocked listening. Her breath came and went, plucking at the air lightly yet fervently; an old lady dying. He dismissed the inappropriate image.
She reached her face up to him in a parody of intimacy, and whispered in his ear, "What is it? I can't even hear the helicopter."
He tossed his head, to indicate the track and the trees in the direction they had come.
"I heard something. I don't know what. Let's hope it's an old lady out for a brisk stroll." The girl tried to smile, nudging herself closer against him. He felt her body still. He listened.
Footstep. Crack, dry and flat as snapping a seaweed pod. Then silence, then another crack. Twigs. Footstep. The timing was wrong for an old lady, a young man, even a child. Wrong for anyone simply out for a walk, taking exercise. Sounds too careful, too slow, too spaced to be anything else than cautious, careful, alert. Stalking.
His heart began to interfere with his hearing as he stifled his breathing and the adrenalin began to surge. He should have moved further off the track. It was their tracks that were being followed, easy to do for a trained man, too much leaf-mould underfoot hot to imprison the evidence of their passage, along with the deer prints, the hoof prints, the dogs" pawmarks, the ridge'd patterns of stout walking shoes. —