“Muck ‘em up! What else? Sit on our backsides in a bramble bush? Just see him land and take off again? Pah! That’s what Hiart would do. We want to know what or whom they are flying over. Well, go and grab the lot. Can’t do any harm.”
“Oh, can’t it!” I said.
“What? Still thinking of Riemann’s home from home? Good God, man, are you going to put your miserable private affairs before service to your country?”
I never in my life heard such a lousy argument. I was still by no means convinced that I was serving my country, and even less that his wild scheme would benefit anyone but the four men waiting in the boundary hedge. Yet he left me with no possible reply. I didn’t wonder the Poles made him a general. He could only be that or a trooper. All other ranks are supposed to think with their brains.
“Now where shall we make the poor beggar land?” he asked cheerfully, as if it were all settled.
“There’s only one possible place. Where the down continues the other side of the northern hedge. But there are cows there.”
“Well, if he hits one, he hits one. What do you know about radio beacons?”
“Nothing.”
“Stands to reason that if they work in one place, they work in another. Ha? Doesn’t it? And they can be dropped -by parachute and work–I know that. So if we carry ‘em carefully and level ‘em up, we ought to be all right.”
“Suppose they come and look at them again?”
“Well, they didn’t last night, so why should they tonight?”
“Have we time?” I protested as a last effort.
“Not if you stand there,” he hissed, “arguing in bloody whispers all night.”
We lifted the southern beacon and its supports, and made a detour round the landing strip, following the grass track along the edge of the down below which I had sat with Sandorski on the day of our meeting. The lights twinkled in the village below, and the headlights of cars flicked their white sheets over trees and stream. All the time I listened for the plane. Once we both cursed, but it was an air liner on its way to the north.
We set up the beacon in the northern hedge. The supports were admirably fitted for their purpose. Their sharp points bit firmly into the turf of the bank; with two long legs, one short and one slightly shorter, we had the thing straight enough for any practical use.
In the dark kaffir kraal of bramble bushes it wasn’t so easy to find the other beacon, and the time was now half-past nine. We made a lot of impatient noise, but the party sitting in the boundary hedge were too far away to hear us. At last we got it, and fixed it up on the very brink of the valley. Here the steep escarpment swept round to the east, abruptly ending Blossom’s down. We could only give that unknown and unfortunate pilot something under four hundred yards, instead of the five to six hundred that the proper reception committee had allowed. After we got the beacon in position, I paced out the distance and shifted a couple of sleepy cows. There were no other obstacles so long as the pilot stayed bang on his line and could stop before he plunged into the valley.
We then had time to sit down and work out the odds. If the plane landed according to the signals from the beacons, and if it didn’t go over the edge–two very bigifs– we had rather more than the three minutes which Peter Sandorski had demanded. The four men in the boundary hedge would come up to the level of their airstrip when they expected or heard the plane, but even there they would be a quarter of a mile from us, plus the distance that the plane traveled. When the pilot overshot their strip, they would think he meant to turn and come back, so that they wouldn’t begin to run up until he actually landed. Sandorski’s plan began to look less like a nightmare.
A little after ten the plane circled once, and came in over the hedge like a great silent owl. The pilot revved up as he touched, and taxied forward till his wing was nearly over the beacon. He saw or sensed the appalling drop in front of him, lurched round, switched on his light and spent an intolerable time maneuvering into a position where there wasn’t a cow or a thorn bush or sudden death in front of him.
As soon as his wheels came to rest, he put out his light. I suppose he had been instructed not to use it, and to trust to the beacon signals. We hammered excitedly on the door. Sandorski left it to me to do the talking in case his voice should be recognized. I sounded, he said, just like any other blasted Englishman. The rest of him was safely unrecognizable. In the dark he was a shapeless mass of sweaters and windbreakers, and his small head was extinguished between cap and muffler.
The door was opened from within, and a man peered doubtfully out into the night.
“Quick!” I shouted. “We haven’t a moment. Police on the way! Jump, man!”
He dropped to the ground, carrying a small suitcase with him.
“Anything else?”
“It is all,” the stranger answered.
The pilot stuck his head out.
”Here!” he protested. “Call this a landing strip? Not again! I’m not a–”
“Get out of here, you fool!” I yelled hysterically. “You’ll be arrested in a minute. Get out!”
“What’s ahead?”
“Three hundred yards and then a hedge. Jump it if you can’t fly it.”
“Cripes!” he said. “I’ll bring a horse next time.”
We had created a fine atmosphere of alarm and despondency. The plane roared and began to move. The pilot flooded the turf with light again, and revealed the real reception committee running towards us less than a hundred yards away. With the engine ticking over, it had been impossible for us to hear their movements.
He took no risk of being stopped. I wonder he didn’t kill the lot of them. But he cleared the hedge. While we ran I heard the steady drone of the plane in its safe and lonely world, and envied him.
We took the nearest way, straight down the slope. That for the moment increased our lead. I seized the passenger’s suitcase and got rid of it into a thick holly which I knew I could find again even in the dark. Relieved of that, he ran like a man with a guilty conscience.
We swerved back, following the contour line below the copse where my innocent statistician had sat and counted traffic, and began to pound up the slope at an angle. This was stumbling, not running; and our pursuers drew up into close touch. They couldn’t see us–or only as occasional bulks against the sky–but they couldn’t fail to hear us.
They had had time to think and began to call:
“Lex! Lex!”
“That vos the voice of Peenk,” said the passenger in a firm Central European accent, and half stopping.
I shoved him on.
“Run, Lex! Pink’s the police informer. I’m getting you to Heyne-Hassingham.”
Thank the Lord he was high up in the party! That name seemed to be immediate proof of my bona fides. He crashed along the side of that hill like a startled heifer, through bush and over rabbit hole. We increased our lead a bit, and I took a chance on being where I thought I was. I pulled them round behind a thorn brake, through a gap in the furze and down onto the ground. As we dropped flat on the turf, Lex gave a muffled cry of pain.
“Damn these thorns!” hissed Sandorski.
He dug me in the ribs and held out, behind our friend’s back, a little syringe with which he had just jabbed him in the thigh.
The hunt passed us, then checked and turned back. They knew, as soon as they stopped to listen, that we must have gone to ground on the hillside. In the stillness of the night you could hear a man charging across country half a mile away. If only we could have reached the springy turf of the green track above us, we could have run–or jumped or danced, for that matter–without a sound.
They closed in, and flashed torches quickly on and off. They were wise not to spoil their night sight, and it may be, too, that they feared we were armed and desperate. All they could see was a formless black mass of thorn and furze, forbidding search. The twisting track into the heart of it, worn down by the persistent feet of little animals and an occasional sheep, was clear enough from where we lay, but indistinguishable from outside. Two of them were above us and two below us. They made a halfhearted attempt to beat the patch, but the furze was stiff and centuries old; we might have been surrounded by a lion-proof thorn fence.