stone struck the side of his head a lancing blow that made his ears
ring, but he gritted his teeth and fought the impulse to lift his head
and look up.
He felt something warm and ticklish snaking through the short hairs
behind his right ear. It crept down his cheek like a living thing, and
it was only when it reached the corner of his mouth and he tasted the
metallic salt that he realized it was a trickle of blood.
The fine talcum dust powdered them and irritated their throats, so that
they coughed and choked in the uproar.
The dust seeped into their eyes, and they were forced to clench their
lids and keep them tightly shut.
One mass of rock the size of a wagon sprang high in the air and then
fell back close beside where they lay. The impact made the earth jump so
violently that Royan, with Nicholas's weight on top of her, was struck
in the belly and diaphragm with a force that drove the wind from her
lungs, and she thought that her ribs had been crushed.
Then gradually the downpouring of earth and rock began to subside. The
breath-stopping impact of great boulders into their shelter became less
frequent: The fine dust they were breathing began to settle. The
rumbling and roaring let up gradually, until the only sound was the slip
and slide of settling earth and rock and the burble of the river below
them.
Warily, Nicholas at last lifted his head and tried to blink the dust off
his eyelashes. Royan stiffed under him, and he crawled back to let her
sit up. They stared at each other. Their faces were caked into kabuki
masks with the antimony-white dust, and their hair was powdered like the
wigs of eighteenth-century French aristocrats.
"You are bleeding," Royan whispered, her voice husky with dust and
terror.
Nicholas lifted his hand to his face and it came away covered with a
paste of dust and blood. "It's just a nick," he said. "How are you!'
"I think I may have twisted my knee. I felt something give when we fell.
I don't think it's serious. There is very little pain."
"Men we have both been ridiculously lucky," he told her. "Nobody
deserved to survive that."
She made an effort to stand, but he restrained her with a hand on her
shoulder. "Wait! The entire slope above us is broken and unstable. Give
it time. There will be loose rocks coming down for a while yet." He
untied the Paisley bandana from around his throat and handed it to her.
"Besides which, we don't want-' But he changed his mind and did not
finish his sentence, While she wiped her face she asked shakily, "You
were going to say, besides which-?"
don't want to give those bastards
"Besides which, we up there any idea that we have survived their little
party.
Otherwise we will have them down here finishing the job, cutting
throats. Much better they believe that we snuffed it, as intended."
"Do you think- they are still up She stared at him.
there, watching us?"
"Count on it," he answered grimly. "They must be pretty chuffed with the
fact that they have at last succeeded in getting rid of you. We don't
want to pop our heads up right now and spoil it for them."
"How did you know what was going to happen?" she asked. "If you hadn't
grabbed me-' Her voice petered out.
In a few words he explained about the scrap of gelignite wrapping.
"Simplest thing in the world to pick one of the narrowest sections of
the trail and mine the cliff-' He broke Off as, faintly but
unmistakably, there came the sound of an aircraft engine and the flutter
of rotors in fully fine pitch for takeoffs
"Quickly," he snapped at her. "Get in as close as you can to the
overhang." He pushed her back against the sheltering boulder. "Lie flad'
When she obeyed without question, he lay beside her and piled loose
rubble over them both.
"Lie still. Don't move, whatever you do."
They lay and listened to the sound of the helicopter approaching, and
circling overhead. It moved up and down the valley, flying a few feet
above the surface of the river.
At one point it was directly above the ledge on which they lay, and they
were buffeted by the down-draught of the rotors.
"Looking for survivors," said Nicholas grimly. "Don't move. They haven't
spotted us yet."
"If they were watching us before the blast, they should have been able
to come directly to where we are," she whispered. They seem confused."
"They must have lost us in the dust of the avalanche and the break-up of
the cliff face. They aren't sure where we are lying." The sound of the
helicopter moved off slowly along the river, and Nicholas told her, "I
am going to risk a peep, to make sure it's the Pegasus job - not that
there can be many other choppers in this area. Keep your head down!'
He lifted his head slowly and cautiously, and one glance was sufficient
to confirm all his speculations. Half a mile upstream, the Pegasus jet
Ranger hovered over the river. It was moving slowly away from him, so
that from this angle Nicholas was unable to see through the windscreen
into the cockpit. But at that moment the engine beat changed as the
pilot changed pitch and pulled on the collective.
As the aircraft rose vertically and turned northwards, Nicholas caught a
glimpse of the passengers. Jake Helm sat in the front seat beside the
pilot, and Colonel Nogo was in the seat behind him. They were both
staring down into the river valley, but in seconds the helicopter lifted
them away and the machine disappeared beyond the ridge, flying in the
direction of the escarpment, and the sound of its engines dwindled into
silence. Nicholas crawled out from beneath the boulder and pulled Royan
to her feet.
"No more doubts. We know who we are dealing with now. That was Helm and
No in the chopper. Helm 9 almost certainly laid the gelly, and Nogo
probably led the men who hit our camp last night. Each of them doing the
job he does best," Nicholas told her. "So that confirms it.
Whoever owns Pegasus is the ugly behind all this. Helm and Nogo are
merely the stooges."
"But Nogo is an officer in the Ethiopian army," she protested.
"Welcome to Africa." He did not smile as he said it.
"Here everything is for sale at a price, including government officials
and army officers." Now he scowled so that the caked dust on his face
was dislodged and filtered down in a fine powdering. "Now, however, our
main concern is to get out of the gorge and back to civilization."
He looked up the slope. The trail above them had been obliterated
beneath the rock fall. "We can't get back that way," he told her, and
took her hand. But when he lifted her to her feet she gasped and quickly
shifted her weight to her right leg.
My knee!" Then she smiled bravely. "It will be all right.)
However, she was limping heavily as they scrambled down to the rivet,
terrified that their movements would set off another rock slide. They
ended up waist'deep in the water under the bank.
Royan stood behind Nicholas and washed the blood and dust from the wound
in his scalp. "Not too bad," she told him. "Doesn't need a stitch."
"I have a tube of Betadyne in my pack," he said. He fished it out, and
she smeared the wound with the yellow brown ointment before binding it