'Through the gates just here.'
I had to put the heads on. There were no lamps anywhere and the shadows flickered across the piled wreckage as we turned. They were stacked six-high: Volkswagen, Mercedes, Opel, Taunus, patches of rust-red and smoke-black, smashed glass and twisted axles and burst panelling. They'd been craned into orderly blocks with alleys between them.
'Stop.'
I put out the lights as if by habit because if there was anything to be done I wanted to start accommodating visually as soon as I could.
'Stay where you are.'
They got out and I sat waiting. I hadn't been brought here to talk, to be made to talk. It wasn't a rendezvous with anyone else. They must have meant what they said: I was to be beaten up and left incapacitated. In the flat light of the moon the wreckage looked like blocks of sculpting, monuments to the dead and the injured. The glass of a headlamp caught the light, an ever-burning flame. Did they assume I didn't know anything worth talking about, worth being made to talk about? They were right. The mission was in its first stage and all I knew so far was that it was a long drop from the fourth floor of the Carlsberg and that there was a girl in Hanover with too much pride to drink any vodka. The alleys between the blocks of wreckage were quite wide, the width of a mobile crane, and a running man would have to zig-zag like a forest hare: it wasn't much better than open ground. Whereas Lovett had known a lot: he'd even known there was one due to come down in the Westheim-Pfelberg-Nohlmundt area and they'd had to make him forget.
The shadow of a hat was across the windscreen, a respectable trilby. They were standing still and listening to make sure no one would hear anything when they did it.
The shadow moved, sliding across the glass.
'You can get out of the car now.'
A little ball of silver paper flashed away and bounced.
He had a black rubber cosh in his hand, which I was expecting because it is the perfect instrument for paralysing the main joints with very little effort. The. other one was standing back with the Walther P38 trained on the driving-door. It was a cold night and we'd been travelling with the windows shut and the smell of almonds inside the car was sickly.
'Come along, now. Get out.'
Apart from the special tactics they show you at the Box of Squibs in Norfolk there are the routine exercises that most people know. The handbook is written in Basic Civil-Service and this chapter is headed: Taking Leave of a Stationary Vehicle While Under Menace of Fire-Arms. But the actual idea is sensible and can work if you're very quick so I leaned over and hit the handles of both doors at the same time and jack-knifed with my feet against the driving-door and kicked so hard that the door's inertia helped to send me backwards and out through the other side before it swung against them explosively and put them off their guard for several fractions of a second. Some people say you should leave the door shut while you go pitching out of the other one so that it makes a bullet-shield and there's a lot of point in that but for one thing they can shoo i through the window and for another thing the Norfolk Instructions are based on psychological rather than physical factors and the chief of these is the use of surprise.
They'd expected me to emerge past a slowly opened door and in fact I was moving hard in the opposite direction and the door was bursting open against the hinge-stop with a lot of noise and up to a point it worked because the first two shots went into the seats and the third rang somewhere among the wreckage in front of me as I hunched over and started the zig-zag with my hands hitting out at the stuff on each side of the alley to help the momentum while the fourth hooked at my coat and the fifth smashed some glass near my head. He was playing it the best way, keeping still and taking steady aim instead of coming after me and firing wild. Another thing that worried me was that they had a gun each and it was no good counting on the basic limitations of the P38: it's a 9-mm Luger with eight shots and so far he'd only used five but there was a near-synchronized double report now as the other one started up.
They were anxious by this time because I could hear them following but the moonlight was a help to me and a hazard to them: I wasn't doing anything that called for precision. All they'd done so far was to put one into the flesh, upper forearm. My left hand was sticky but only through hitting at the wreckage which had a lot of torn metal among it. I saw a blob on the ground and scooped it backwards and heard it smash against metal — it was a headlamp from one of the wrecks and it hadn't caught anyone in the face but it might have and you've got to try everything because people who get into a mortal situation and don't try everything are selling themselves short and that's what a lot of them die of.
One was closer to me than the other. It would be the one with fan-teeth. He was thinner. He was running faster. Barbed wire, a sweep of headlights somewhere on the other side, a lamp as high as the moon: they were all I knew. And his pelting footsteps behind. I span at right-angles along the edge of the dump, along the barbed wire, trapped in the hare-track of the dump and the wire, my shadow flickering beside me, thrown by the tall lamp, beside me and slightly ahead of me across the sculpted facade of the wrecks, then he fired again and the bullet struck and droned on, deflected and struck again and rattled among the black metal carcasses-where I ran.
An irrelevant consideration (human pride) was trying to get my attention, make me stop and swing round and go at them, but it was dangerous and the instincts knew it and went on pushing me forward. You don't need Norfolk Instructions to tell you: never run into a gun.
Only one of them now. The thin one. His friend had stopped. He would be waiting somewhere at the other side of the dump to pick me off with a close calculated shot as soon as I came into range. It was no good going down there. The tall lamp swung as I turned again, then the instincts took over completely.
Their reasoning was sound: it was a geometrical certainty that if I stayed in the maze of the wrecks I would catch a bullet in the spine or the face sooner or later, a second from now or a minute from now. The thin one wasn't firing as often as he should be: he had become a beater and he was trying to flush me straight into the other one's gun. He would do that, would be bound to do it, as long as I went on running.
Headlights swept the wire again and I saw that it was close-rigged: four or five strands with six-inch gaps. The posts were angle-iron cut sharp at the top so I put one hand on the wire itself as near as I could to a post and went over the top with a shoe fouling and the wire dipping till I let go and dropped and tried to run and couldn't; my coat was caught by more than one barb and wrenching was no good and somewhere on the edge of the vision-field I noticed the flash as he fired again and came running on but you can get a coat off quickly if a lot depends on it and I was running again, running hard, my feet on the flat surface of tarmac.
The headlights were Blinding but not too close. It was a vacuum horn, the kind that big trucks have. The tyres began dragging.
Perhaps the thin one followed because he had only two shots left in the magazine or because my coat across the wire made it easy for him. But he must have been frightened, to take no heed at all. The orders were to beat me up, to kill me only if I gave trouble. There would be nothing in the orders to countenance my getting free. So he must have been frightened of them, the controllers, to do so desperate a thing.
Or it was simple misjudgement. I knew there was time and I was clear across the road and lurching among frosted mole-hills when the big horn boomed again. Then there was the other sound, of something soft being hit, and I slowed my run, relaxing.