They were facing forward from the doorway again and watching me. I didn't think there was much chance of identifying them until they came close and if they came close it could be too late because if they were operationally trained they'd know how to kill.
Harrison. Hunter. Chepstow.
Gut-think: ignore.
They moved again, one going north and one south along me opposite pavement. In ten seconds they were out of sight because I was a few yards into the mouth of the alley and was therefore blinkered beyond a thirty-degree vector, I listened for them, Nothing.
Nothing close.
The rattle of a cab.
A Ship on the Hudson, Silence again.
Then their footsteps.
I walked halfway down the alley and turned round.
From this position I could assess their approach and if I thought they were professionals I could turn again and get out of the alley at the other end.
They became visible, their silhouettes moving against the back-lighting of the street behind them. They came quickly but were not running. There was a certain discipline in the way they walked. I couldn't see any sign of a weapon and certainly neither of them was holding a gun: their silhouettes were sharp and I could see their hands swinging freely as they walked.
They looked confident and I now assumed they were professionals. Their quick footsteps were taking on a strange echo and it alerted me: they were closer than they looked. I turned and began my run but stopped dead when I saw the two other men coming the other way.
Chapter Eleven: ZADE
The sky throbbed.
I lifted the bottle. It took all my strength The bottle was empty.
Light flared on the glass, blinding me… It came from the lamp.
The tall lamps burned in the sky, searing my eyes.
The man beside me stank.
My feet were in the gutter, one sock half off.
'Shit, man, git your ass outa here.'
'Shuddup,' I said, 'or I'll smash you.'
He stank of alcohol and vomit.
I lifted the bottle again, moaning.
'Shit, man,' he said.
He thought there was wine in the bottle, thought it was his.
'I'll smash you to a pulp,' I said, 'if you don't shuddup,'
He was dangerous.
He could get me killed.
My head throbbed and the sky throbbed.
But there wasn't any blood. Not enough for them to see.
Tyres squealed faintly at the intersection.
I saw one of them coming again, and lifted the bottle.
Consciousness began gaining now, faster, because of the danger.
He came past, walking steadily. I watched his feet.
His feet were at eye-level.
If he looked down, that would be it.
Finis.
His heel into my face: finis.
He stopped.
I looked up at him obliquely, squinting, my eyes almost shut against the blinding light, the bottle blazing. I didn't recognize him: he was one of the four who had been in the alley. One of the three still alive.
And he wouldn't recognize me either, I knew that. We'd all been moving very fast and it had been half dark. But he'd see, if he looked down, that my clothes weren't filthy and torn. He'd see other signs that I hadn't been lying here for months, night after night for months, dying the way I wanted.
But there was nothing more that I could do except wait. My present position was as vulnerable as it had been before in the alley but that was academic. Fire, frying pan, so forth.
The organism had looked after itself without my having to do any more thinking. I'd done me necessary amount of thinking first and then given the instructions to the organism and it had taken over. With two of them coming at me from each end of the alley there'd been no point in waiting till they closed on me at their own pace. The only chance lay in immediate and very aggressive action and I had made my run flat out, choosing this end of the alley because the street at the other end had exposure zones that I wanted to leave alone.
I didn't know if the two men behind me had started running: it didn't make any difference because I was going so hard that they wouldn't gain on me. The strength of the opposition had now been halved and there were only two people to deal with. They'd both stopped and were waiting and I think one of them was pulling a gun as I reached them.
The techniques of unarmed combat taught at Norfolk are based partly on karate. I have only used them twice to save my life, once in Warsaw and once in Hong Kong. In those instances there was only one adversary. Here there were two. There is nothing new about the primordial components of speed and surprise: they are essential to any attack, by whatever technique. Two further psychological components come into play when life is actually threatened: the instinct to survive, and the ability to relax and allow the primitive animal to perform in its own right.
In civilized society the will to take life is seldom conscious. Most murders are committed by relatives or close friends of the victim and the motivation is subconscious, an expression of rage, jealousy, humiliation, so forth. The need is not to kill but to relieve the psyche of its stress, and to do it in the quickest and surest way available.
The animal will do it consciously in order to survive.
There is no name, at Norfolk, for the extended techniques based on classic karate. Most of them are psychological and the most effective is this ability to relax and leave the animal to protect itself: not by defensive tactics but by the most implacable ferocity. In brief it might be termed the invocation of blood-lust.
There is probably a spin-off involved: the instillation of fear in the adversary. As I reached the two men I was an animal totally committed to killing them and I would believe that my whole body projected a degree of menace that would give them doubts.
Doubts at the instant of lethal combat can be critical.
Basically I used the tobi-mae-geri and was in the air with my feet at the knife-edge angle when I crashed into them. The man on the right died immediately and this was to be expected because I am right-handed and since if wasn't possible to aim a specific blow at both of them I aimed it at this one and he had no chance. The most effective weapon I had for the other man was my left knee, the leg doubled, because it isn't possible to perform the tobi-mae-geri with both feet: the body has left the ground and the balance has to be maintained.
I don't think the knee connected. But the momentum was there and the animal had killed only one of its adversaries and its life was still in jeopardy and it wanted to go on killing and I felt my left foot strike into softness before I landed and there was a clatter of metal and someone moaning as I spun and bounced, hitting the ground and getting up and going headlong out of the alley, the organism still performing at peak effectiveness and thinking for itself as I dragged my collar up and my tie off, sliding across the pavement to where the winos were huddled in the bleak light of the lamp, one shoe coming off and then the other as I dropped across the gutter where the empty bottle was lying.
The thing had been done half consciously and without rehearsal, but habit and experience came into play and issued some of the instructions during the six or seven seconds available before the other two men came from the alley in a headlong run. In a situation where there is no time to hide, the routine action is to change the image and make the new one conspicuous.
I raised the bottle again, shutting my eyes.
He went on standing there.