Gunner Kelly

his own chest. He had seemed to descend with a great crashing noise, yet most of that must have been in his own ears, and if there was no sentry near the pit his fall might yet be unnoticed.

Not to panic, then!

He shifted his feet. At least he had fallen soft, into what felt underfoot like a mixture of wet broken earth and leaves; and now he was standing almost knee deep in the wreckage of the false floor of the wood above him, through which he had plunged.

Damn it to hell! It was anger, not panic, which momentarily dummy1

clogged his throat and his thinking: To be caught like this, in the oldest, simplest trap of all— like an animal!

With an effort of will he swallowed his anger and cleared his head.

Wasting time on that foolish emotion only compounded his difficulties. And, given time, there was no trap from which a thinking animal could not escape—

He risked the torch again. Down here, at least, it would not betray him far and wide, as it would have done up above, so long as he kept the beam down—

The walls were pale and chalky: this was ideal ground for digging without revetment, like that into which Grandpapa must have dug in France all those years ago, for his Siegfried Stellung—

Above him, almost within reach—perhaps within reach, the remains of the lattice of woven branches which had supported the deceptive roof of the trap gaped downwards: it had been so well-fabricated that he had not dislodged the whole construction in his fall—

If he could reach up and pull the whole of it down . . . would that raise him high enough ... or provide him with anything he could use

—?

He studied the lattice, shading the beam of his torch with his hand.

A single leaf, detaching itself from the thick layer which had concealed the trap, floated down on to him, brushing past his cheek. With a spasm of despair he saw that it was too far above him, undeniably built by someone who knew his business—

someone who had calculated a structure just strong enough to bear dummy1

that treacherous carpet of leaves, which had at first yielded under him like the rest of the forest floor, and then had welcomed him into the pit when it was too late.

He fought back the despair as it edged him again towards that other trap of panic from which he had already forced himself back.

This was not on the Other Side: he was not Benedikt Schneider, whose print-out and voice-print and finger-prints and photograph were all on the A10 KGB Red Code—

This was Thomas Wiesehofer, and this was England— and if that was also Dr David Audley’s England it was Colonel Butler’s England too—

So . . . what could they do to him, anyway— Dr David Audley— and Miss Rebecca Maxwell- Smith, and Gunner Kelly, and Benje’s Dad smoking on the river-bank— ? What could they do to him?

So ... perhaps what he ought to do, as Thomas Wiesehofer—as innocent Thomas Wiesehofer—was to shout ‘ Help’ at the top of his voice, and be Thomas Wiesehofer thereafter—

What he did do was to uncover the full beam of his torch, as Thomas Wiesehofer might have done, to examine the unexpected man-trap into which he had fallen.

Another leaf, and then a whole handful of leaves, descended from above with a dry scraping sound, as though dislodged by the light itself. And there, high up and half-hidden amongst the sagging lattice-work on the edge of the pit in the nearest corner to where he had fallen, was the end of a rope-ladder!

Benedikt cursed himself for not noticing it immediately, as an dummy1

innocent Thomas Wiesehofer would surely have done once he had collected his wits after plunging into the pit. In the direct beam of the torch there was no doubt about it: it was a genuine and undoubted rope-ladder, its rungs stretched and mud-stained with previous use by the diggers of the pit!

It was hardly believable, even for amateurs . . . but someone had been careless again, failing to draw up the rope-ladder which the diggers had used—failing to draw it up that last half-metre, to the lip of the pit—?

Unless—he frowned to himself as an alternative possibility, even more unbelievable, intruded into his mind— unless this wasn’t a man-trap at all—?

An animal-trap? If it was a man-trap then that rope-ladder had no place in it. But an animal-trap—

Yet what sort of animal was there in Duntisbury Chase that they might want to trap—if everything which he and Colonel Butler had imagined was no more than an illusion of a fevered sense of insecurity? There were no wild boar in England, there were only foxes and deer . . . But was this how the English trapped those creatures out of season?

He shook his head. Man or animal, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting out of the pit while there was still time to do so: Thomas and Benedikt were both agreed on that!

He turned the torch to the debris in which he stood, foraging among the branches of the fallen part of the lattice. With the right extension to his arm the rope-ladder was well within reach, and dummy1

after that everything depended on whether it was firmly anchored above, sufficiently to bear his weight, or