High Citadel / Landslide. Desmond Bagley
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struck off at right angles, making their way diagonally up the slope. The ground was covered with boulders and small pebbles and the going was difficult, their feet slipping as the stones shifted. O’Hara thought that one could break an ankle quite easily and a faint idea stirred at the back of his mind.
After a while they separated, O’Hara to the left and the girl to the right. For an hour they toiled among the rocks, searching for something that would give shelter against the night wind, however small. O’Hara found nothing, but he heard a faint shout from Benedetta and crossed the hillside to see what she had found.
It was not a cave, merely a fortuitous tumbling of the rocks. A large boulder had rolled from above and wedged itself between two others, forming a roof. It reminded O’Hara of a dolmen he had seen on Dartmoor, although the whole thing was very much bigger. He regarded it appreciatively. At least it would be shelter from snow and rain and it gave a little protection from the wind.
He went inside and found a hollow at the back. ‘This is good,’ he said. ‘This will hold a lot of water – maybe twenty gallons.’
He turned and looked at Benedetta. The exercise had brought some colour into her cheeks and she looked better. He produced his cigarettes. ‘Smoke?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t.’
‘Good!’ he said with satisfaction. ‘I was hoping you didn’t.’ He looked into the packet – there were eleven left. ‘I’m a selfish type, you know; I want these for myself.’
He sat down on a rock and lit his cigarette, voluptuously inhaling the smoke. Benedetta sat beside him and said, ‘I’m glad you decided to help my uncle.’
O’Hara grinned. ‘Some of us weren’t too sure. It needed a little tough reasoning to bring them round. But it was finally unanimous.’
She said in a low voice, ‘Do you think there’s any chance of our coming out of this?’
O’Hara bit his lip and was silent for a time. Then he said, ‘There’s no point in hiding the truth – I don’t think we’ve got a cat in hell’s chance. If they bust across the bridge and we’re as defenceless as we are now, we won’t have a hope.’ He waved his hand at the terrain. ‘There’s just one chance – if we split up, every man for himself heading in a different direction, then they’ll have to split up, too. This is rough country and one of us might get away to tell what happened to the rest. But that’s pretty poor consolation.’
‘Then why did you decide to fight?’ she said in wonder.
O’Hara chuckled. ‘Armstrong put up some pretty cogent arguments,’ he said, and told her about it. Then he added, ‘But I’d have fought anyway. I don’t like those boys across the river; I don’t like what they do to people. It makes no difference if their skins are yellow, white or brown – they’re all of the same stripe.’
‘Señor Forester was telling me that you fought together in Korea,’ Benedetta said.
‘We might have – we probably did. He was in an American squadron which we flew with sometimes. But I never met him.’
‘It must have been terrible,’ she said. ‘All that fighting.’
‘It wasn’t too bad,’ said O’Hara. ‘The fighting part of it.’ He smiled. ‘You do get used to being shot at, you know. I think that people can get used to anything if it goes on long enough – most things, anyway. That’s the only way wars can be fought – because people can adapt and treat the craziest things as normal. Otherwise they couldn’t go through with it.’
She nodded. ‘I know. Look at us here. Those men shoot at us and Miguel shoots back – he regards it as the normal thing to do.’
‘It is the normal thing to do,’ said O’Hara harshly. ‘The human being is a fighting animal; it’s that quality which has put him where he is – the king of this planet.’ His lips twisted. ‘It’s also the thing that’s maybe holding him back from bigger things.’ He laughed abruptly. ‘Christ, this is no time for the philosophy of war – I’d better leave that to Armstrong.’
‘You said something strange,’ said Benedetta. ‘You said that Korea wasn’t too bad – the fighting part of it. What was bad, if it wasn’t the fighting?’
O’Hara looked into the distance. ‘It was when the fighting stopped – when I stopped fighting – when I couldn’t fight any more. Then it was bad.’
‘You were a prisoner? In the hands of the Chinese? Forester said something of that.’
O’Hara said slowly, ‘I’ve killed men in combat – in hot blood – and I’ll probably do it again, and soon, at that. But what those communist bastards can do intellectually and with cold purpose is beyond …’ He shook his head irritably. ‘I prefer not to talk about it.’
He had a sudden vision of the bland, expressionless features of the Chinese lieutenant, Feng. It was something that had haunted his dreams and woken him screaming ever since Korea. It was the reason he preferred to go to sleep in a sodden, dreamless and mindless coma. He said, ‘Let’s talk about you. You speak good English – where did you learn it?’
She was aware that she had trodden on forbidden and shaky ground. ‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you, Señor O’Hara,’ she said contritely.
‘That’s all right. But less of the Señor O’Hara; my name is Tim.’
She smiled quickly. ‘I was educated in the United States, Tim. My uncle sent me there after Lopez made the revolution.’ She laughed. ‘I was taught English by a teacher very like Miss Ponsky.’
‘Now there’s a game old trout,’ said O’Hara. ‘Your uncle sent you? What about your parents?’
‘My mother died when I was a child. My father – Lopez had him shot.’
O’Hara sighed. ‘We both seem to be scraping on raw nerves, Benedetta. I’m sorry.’
She said sadly, ‘It’s the way the world is, Tim.’
He agreed sombrely. ‘Anyone who expects fair play in this world is a damn fool. That’s why we’re in this jam. Come on, let’s get back; this isn’t getting us anywhere.’ He pinched off his cigarette and carefully put the stub back in the packet.
As Benedetta rose she said, ‘Do you think that Señor Armstrong’s idea of a crossbow will work?’
‘I don’t,’ said O’Hara flatly. ‘I think that Armstrong is a romantic. He’s specialized as a theoretician in wars a thousand years gone, and I can’t think of anything more futile than that. He’s an ivory-tower man – an academician – bloodthirsty in a theoretical way, but the sight of blood will turn his stomach. And I think he’s a little bit nuts.’
III
Armstrong’s pipe gurgled as he watched Willis rooting about in the rubbish of the workshop. His heart was beating rapidly and he felt breathless, although the altitude did not seem to affect him as much as the previous time he had been at the hutted camp. His mind was turning over the minutiae of his profession – the science of killing without gunpowder. He thought coldly and clearly about the ranges, trajectories and penetrations that could be obtained from pieces of bent steel and twisted gut, and he sought to adapt the ingenious mechanisms so clearly diagrammed in his mind to the materials and needs of the moment. He looked up at the roof beams of the hut and a new idea dawned on him. But he put it aside – the crossbow came first.
Willis straightened, holding a flat spring. ‘This came from an auto – will it do for the bow?’
Armstrong tried to flex it and found it very stiff. ‘It’s very strong,’ he said. ‘Probably stronger than anything they had in the Middle Ages. This will be a very powerful weapon. Perhaps this is too strong – we must