The Tightrope Men. Desmond Bagley
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with tall conifers and equally tall deciduous trees with whitish trunks which he assumed to be birches, although he could have been wrong, botany not being his subject. There was a trail leading away from the car park which appeared to be well trodden. Soon the trees closed around him and, on looking back, the restaurant was out of sight.
The trail forked and, tossing a mental coin, he took the route to the right. After walking for a further ten minutes he stopped and again wondered what the hell he was doing. Just because he had found a crude doll in a car he was walking through a forest on a mountain in Norway. It was bloody ridiculous.
It had been the redhead’s casual theory that the doll had been left in the car by a previous hirer. But what previous hirer? The car was obviously new. The doll had been left in a prominent position and there was the note to go with it with the significant reference to the ‘Drammen Dolly’.
Early morning – that’s what the note had said. But how early was early? Come out, come out, wherever you are, my little Drammen Dolly. Wave your magic wand and take me back to Hampstead.
He turned around and trudged back to the fork in the path and this time took the route to the left. The air was fresh and clean after the rain. Drops of water sparkled prismatically on the leaves as the sun struck them and occasionally, as he passed under a tree, a miniature shower would sprinkle him.
And he saw nothing but trees.
He came to another fork in the trail and stopped, wondering what to do. There was a sound behind him as of a twig breaking and he swung around and stared back along the trail but saw nothing as he peered into the dappled forest, shading his eyes from the sun. He turned away but heard another sound to his right and out of the corner of his eye saw something dark moving very fast among the trees.
Behind him he heard footsteps and whirled around to find himself under savage attack. Almost upon him was a big man, a six-footer with broad shoulders, his right hand uplifted and holding what appeared to be a short club.
Denison was thirty-six, which is no age to indulge in serious fisticuffs. He also led a sedentary life which meant that his wind was not good, although it was better than it might have been because he did not smoke. Yet his reflexes were fast enough. What really saved him, though, was that in his time he had been a middling-good middleweight boxer who had won most of his amateur fights by sheer driving aggression.
The last two days had been frustrating for a man of his aggressive tendencies. He had been in a mist with nothing visible to fight and this had gnawed at him. Now that he had something to fight – someone to fight – his instincts took over.
Which is why, instead of jumping back under the attack, unexpectedly he went in low, blocked the descending arm with his own left arm and sank his right fist into his attacker’s belly just below the sternum. The man’s breath came out of him with a gasp and he doubled up on the ground wheezing and making retching noises.
Denison wasted no time, but ran for it back to the car park, aware that his were not the only feet that made those thudding noises on the trail. He did not waste time by looking back but just put his head down and ran. To his left he was aware of a man bounding down the hill dodging trees and doing his best to cut him off – what was worse, he seemed to be succeeding.
Denison put on an extra burst of speed but it was no use – the man leaped on to the trail about fifteen yards ahead. Denison heard his pursuer pounding behind and knew that if he stopped he would be trapped, so he bored on up the trail without slackening pace.
When the man ahead realized that Denison did not intend to stop a look of surprise came over his face and his hand plucked at his waist and he dropped into a crouch. Sun gleamed off the blade of the knife he held in his right hand. Denison ran full tilt at him and made as to break to the man’s left – the safe side – but at the last minute he sold him the dummy and broke away on the knife side.
He nearly got through unscathed because the man bought it. But at the last moment he lashed out with the knife and Denison felt a hot pain across his flank. Yet he had got past and plunged along the trail with undiminished speed, hoping to God he would not trip over an exposed tree root. There is nothing like being chased by a man with a knife to put wings on the feet.
There were three of them. The big man he had laid out with a blow to the solar plexus would not be good for anything for at least two minutes and probably longer. That left the knifer and the other man who had chased him. Behind he heard cries but ahead he saw the roof of the restaurant just coming in sight over the rise.
His wind was going fast and he knew he could not keep up this sprint for long. He burst out into the car park and headed for his car, thankful there was now firm footing. A car door slammed and he risked a glance to the left and saw the man who had been reading the newspaper in the parked car beginning to run towards him.
He fumbled hastily for his car key and thanked God when it slipped smoothly into the lock. He dived behind the wheel and slammed the door with one hand while stabbing the key at the ignition lock with the other – this time he missed and had to fumble again. The man outside hammered on the window and then tugged at the door handle. Denison held the door closed with straining muscles and brought over his other hand quickly to snap down the door catch.
He had dropped the car key on the floor and groped for it. His lungs were hurting and he gasped for breath, and the pain in his side suddenly sharpened, but somewhere at the back of his mind cool logic told him that he was reasonably safe, that no one could get into a locked car before he took off – always provided he could find that damned key.
His fingers brushed against it and he grabbed it, brought it up, and rammed it into the ignition lock. Cool logic evaporated fast when he saw the man stand back and produce an automatic pistol. Denison frantically pumped his foot on the clutch, slammed into first gear, and took off in a tyre-burning squeal even before he had a finger on the wheel. The car weaved drunkenly across the car park then straightened out and dived into the Spiralen tunnel like a rabbit down a hole.
Denison’s last glimpse of daylight in the rear-view mirror showed him the other car beginning to move with two doors open and his pursuers piling in. That would be the ferret after the rabbit.
It took him about ten seconds, after he hit the curve, to know he was going too fast. The gradient was one in ten and the curve radius only a hundred and fifteen feet, turning away to the right so that he was on the inside. His speed was such that centrifugal force tended to throw the car sideways over the centre line, and if anything was coming up he would surely hit it.
He could be compared to a man on a bobsled going down the Cresta Run – with some important differences. The Cresta Run is designed so that the walls can be climbed; here the walls were of jagged, untrimmed rock and one touch at speed would surely wreck the car. The Cresta Run does not have two-way traffic with a continuous blind corner a mile long, and the competitors are not pursued by men with guns – if they were, more records might be broken.
So Denison reluctantly eased his foot on the accelerator and risked a glance in his mirror. The driver of the car behind was more foolhardy than he and was not worrying about up-traffic. He was barrelling down the centre line and catching up fast. Denison fed more fuel to the engine, twisted the wheel and wondered if he could sustain a sideways drift a mile long.
The walls of the tunnel were a blur and the lights flicked by and he caught sight of an illuminated number 5. Four more circuits to go before the bottom. The car jolted and pitched suddenly and he fought the wheel which had taken on a life of its own. It did it again and he heard a nasty sound from the rear. He was being rammed. There was another sound as sheet metal ripped and the car slewed across the whole width of the tunnel.
He heard – and felt – the crunch as the rear off-side of the car slammed into the opposite wall, but Denison was not particularly worried about the property of the Hertz Company at that moment because he saw the dipped headlights of a vehicle coming up the Spiralen towards him. He juggled madly with wheel, clutch and accelerator and shot off to the other side of the tunnel again, scraping across the front of the tour bus that was coming up. There was a brief vignette of the driver of the bus, his mouth open and his eyes staring,