High Citadel / Landslide. Desmond Bagley
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‘Señor O’Hara, perhaps if I gave myself to these people they would be satisfied.’
O’Hara stared at him. ‘You know they wouldn’t; they can’t let us go – knowing what we know.’
Aguillar nodded. ‘I know that; I was wondering if you did.’ He shrugged half-humorously. ‘I wanted you to convince me there is nothing to gain by it – and you have. I am sorry to have brought this upon all these innocent people.’
O’Hara made an impatient noise and Aguillar continued, ‘There comes a time when the soldier takes affairs out of the hands of the politician – all ways seem to lead to violence. So I must cease to be a politician and become a soldier. I will learn how to shoot this bow well, señor.’
‘I wouldn’t do too much, Señor Aguillar,’ said O’Hara. ‘You must conserve your strength in case we must move suddenly and quickly. You’re not in good physical shape, you know.’
Aguillar’s voice was sharp. ‘Señor, I will do what I must.’
O’Hara said no more, guessing he had touched on Spanish-American pride. He went to talk to Miss Ponsky.
She was kneeling in front of the pressure stove, apparently intent on watching a can of water boil, but her eyes were unfocused and staring far beyond. He knew what she was looking at – the steel bolt that had sprouted like a monstrous growth in the middle of a man’s back.
He said, ‘Killing another human being is a terrible thing, Miss Ponsky. I know – I’ve done it, and I was sickened for days afterwards. The first time I shot down an enemy fighter in Korea I followed him down – it was a dangerous thing to do, but I was young and inexperienced then. The Mig went down in flames, and his ejector seat didn’t work, so he opened the canopy manually and jumped out against the slipstream.
‘It was brave or desperate of that man to do that. But he had the Chinese sort of courage – or maybe the Russian courage, for all I know. You see, I didn’t know the nationality or even the colour of the man I had killed. He fell to earth, a spinning black speck. His parachute didn’t open. I knew he was a dead man.’
O’Hara moistened his lips. ‘I felt bad about that, Miss Ponsky; it sickened me. But then I thought that the same man had been trying to kill me – he nearly succeeded, too. He had pumped my plane full of holes before I got him and I crash-landed on the airstrip. I was lucky to get away with it – I spent three weeks in hospital. I finally worked it out that it was a case of him or me, and I was the lucky one. I don’t know if he would have had regrets if he had killed me – I think probably not. Those people aren’t trained to have much respect for life.’
He regarded her closely. ‘These people across the river are the same that I fought in Korea, no matter that their skins are a different colour. We have no fight with them if they will let us go in peace – but they won’t do that, Miss Ponsky. So it’s back to basics; kill or be killed and the devil take the loser. You did all right, Miss Ponsky; what you did may have saved all our lives and maybe the lives of a lot of people in this country. Who knows?’
As he lapsed into silence she turned to him and said in a husky, broken voice, ‘I’m a silly old woman, Mr O’Hara. For years I’ve been talking big, like everyone else in America, about fighting the communists; but I didn’t have to do it myself, and when it comes to doing it yourself it’s a different matter. Oh, we women cheered our American boys when they went to fight – there’s no one more bloodthirsty than one who doesn’t have to do the fighting. But when you do your own killing, it’s a dreadful thing, Mr O’Hara.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘The only thing that makes it bearable is that if you don’t kill, then you are killed. It reduces to a simple choice in the end.’
‘I realize that now, Mr O’Hara,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right now.’
‘My name is Tim,’ he said. ‘The English are pretty stuffy about getting on to first-name terms, but not we Irish.’
She gave him a tremulous smile. ‘I’m Jennifer.’
‘All right, Jenny,’ said O’Hara. ‘I’ll try not to put you in a spot like that again.’
She turned her head away and said in a muffled voice, ‘I think I’m going to cry.’ Hastily she scrambled to her feet and ran out of the shelter.
Benedetta said from behind O’Hara, ‘That was well done, Tim.’
He turned and looked at her stonily. ‘Was it? It was something that had to be done.’ He got up and stretched his legs. ‘Let’s practise with that crossbow.’
V
For the rest of the day they practised, learning to allow for wind and the effect of a change of range. Miss Ponsky tightened still further her wire-drawn nerves and became instructress, and the general level of performance improved enormously.
O’Hara went down to the gorge and, by triangulation, carefully measured the distance to the enemy vehicles and was satisfied that he had the range measured to a foot. Then he went back and measured the same distance on the ground and told everyone to practise with the bow at that range. It was one hundred and eight yards.
He said to Benedetta, ‘I’m making you my chief-of-staff – that’s a sort of glorified secretary that a general has. Have you got pencil and paper?’
She smiled and nodded, whereupon he reeled off a dozen things that had to be done. ‘You pass on that stuff to the right people in case I forget – I’ve got a hell of a lot of things on my mind right now and I might slip up on something important when the action starts.’
He set Aguillar to tying bunches of rags around half a dozen bolts, then shot them at the target to see if the rags made any difference to the accuracy of the flight. There was no appreciable difference, so he soaked one of them in paraffin and lit it before firing, but the flame was extinguished before it reached the target.
He swore and experimented further, letting the paraffin burn fiercely before he pulled the trigger. At the expense of a scorched face he finally landed three fiercely burning bolts squarely in the target and observed happily that they continued to burn.
‘We’ll have to do this in the day-time,’ he said. ‘It’ll be bloody dangerous in the dark – they’d spot the flame before we shot.’ He looked up at the sun. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to drag this thing out as long as we can.’
It was late afternoon before the enemy ventured on to the bridge again and they scattered at a shot from Rohde who, after a long sleep, had taken over again from Forester. Rohde fired another shot before sunset and then stopped on instructions from O’Hara. ‘Keep the last two bullets,’ he said. ‘We’ll need them.’
So the enemy put in three more planks and stepped up their illumination that night, although they dared not move on the bridge.
Forester awoke at dawn. He felt refreshed after having had a night’s unbroken sleep. O’Hara had insisted that he and Rohde should not stand night watches but should get as much sleep as they could. This was the day that he and Rohde were to go up to the hutted camp to get acclimatized and the next day to go on up to the mine.
He looked up at the white mountains and felt a sudden chill in his bones. He had lied to O’Hara when he said he had mountaineered in the Rockies – the highest he had climbed was to the top of the Empire State Building in an elevator. The high peaks were blindingly bright as the sun touched them and he wrinkled his eyes to see the pass that Rohde had pointed out. Rohde had said he would be sorry and Forester judged he was right; Rohde was a tough cookie and not given to exaggeration.
After cleaning up he went down to the bridge. Armstrong