Gunner Kelly

merely piled for removal with that careless end enticing him to disappointment.

He hooked the end of the branch over the rung and pulled gently.

The rope bowed, and then tautened as he increased the pressure. A quantity of leaves and assorted duff from the forest floor above descended on him, together with small hard fragments of chalk from the lip of the pit. For a moment the rope-ladder resisted him while it sorted itself out, then it came free with a sudden rush-and-slither, bringing down a miniature deluge of the same mixture with it, including a larger lump of chalk which struck him sharply and painfully on the cheekbone. The noise of it all, confined within the almost-enclosed space of the pit, seemed as deafening as his orginal fall, so that when the silence came back once more and lengthened again into safety he marvelled at his continued good fortune.

Then reason asserted itself. Man-trap or animal-trap, there must be others like it in other likely places: traps sited like this one, which used the natural forest obstacles to funnel the quarry along convenient routes into them. But the village’s manpower available over every twenty-four hours of light and darkness must be strictly limited, and most of it would have to be used to cover the open country which could not be man-trapped, so that the traps would only be checked at intervals. Not for Duntisbury Royal the vicious anti-personnel mines, and voracious dogs, and merciless heat-seeking sensors of the Other Side’s frontier, thank God!

And, once again, he had been lucky nevertheless, to fall into this dummy1

trap between checks, with time to spare (or perhaps the police raid had dislocated the schedule?)—and luckiest of all to fall into this particular trap, of all others, in which their carelessness had again cancelled out their ingenuity.

But now there was no more time to lose if he was to capitalise on that good fortune: he had to cut his losses and run with what he had

—

He stuffed the torch back into his pocket and reached for the rope-ladder, fumbling in the dark over the rough chalk wall of the pit until his fingers closed on it.

Already his mind was ranging freely above him, mapping out his route to safety: straight up the nearest ridge to the south was the shortest way, but he no longer trusted any part of Duntisbury Royal along which he hadn’t travelled this night, so back along the path by which he had come was the way he intended to leave, wading the River Addle below the footbridge. The SAS cylinder with his wet-suit inside it was safely moored out of sight and could be left to Colonel Butler to recover at his leisure as his problem: the rule now was the same rule for any operation which had gone sour, with the priority on getting the human material out, regardless of loss of equipment. And this time he was the human material—

Get out quickly, or go to ground if you can’t get out!

He grasped the vertical of the rope ladder firmly, at full stretch, and felt for the lowest rung with his left foot— by God, he had gone to ground literally already, but it was out of ground and away that he wanted to go now!

dummy1

The rope-ladder stretched under his weight, tapering and twisting as all rope-ladders did, but he was ready for its distortion from his training—compared with that these few metres would be a piece of cake—

His left shoulder banged against the hard wall of the pit— this was the crucial moment when he would really find out whether the damn thing was properly anchored, as he raised his right foot to find the next rung.

It was holding—his foot found the rung—

He was going to get out of the pit—

More of the debris from above cascaded down on him. But one more stretch, and he would be at ground-level again— out of the man-trap at last.

The rope-ladder gave way not quite in the same instant of time when the tremendous concussive bang exploded above him: he was already in mid-air, falling backwards, when the sound of it enveloped him, so that in the moment he had no understanding of where the sound came from—above, or below, or inside—

Then he was on his back, bouncing off the wreckage which cushioned his fall for half another instant, until his head hit the chalk wall behind him, starting another explosion inside his head to mingle with the echoes of the explosion outside—

dummy1

He came back to full consciousness in a matter of seconds, but into total confusion: he was aware only that he had threshed about wildly, half-stunned and enmeshed equally in panic and the rope-ladder, which had followed him down into the pit, twining round him like a living thing in the darkness.

Yet it was the awareness—the understanding that he was still alive

—which created the confusion. His head hurt, but it hurt high up at the back, where it had struck the wall of the pit: it didn’t hurt because it had been blown to pieces by that shot from above. That shot—?

But, anyway, there was no sound from above now. The echoes of the explosion and the ringing in his ears had both died away into an unnatural silence.

Yet he wasn’t dead—he could move his legs and his arms and his hands and his fingers—he could feel the leaves and branches beneath him, and he could hear them rasp and crunch beneath him . . . against that other silence—

God damn! It hadn’t been a shot at all—there was no one up there, above him. God damn!

He shook the blasphemy from his head and sat up, fumbling in his pocket for his torch.

Of course there were other pits like this—other man-traps waiting for their quarry. But they couldn’t cover all of them, so they had rigged up a trap-within-a-trap: the convenient rope-ladder offering its help to any thinking animal which might fall into the pit by day or night. . . Only the other end of the ladder wasn’t anchored at all dummy1

—it was simply attached to some sort of explosive device, set in the same fashion as a trip-flare, but attached in this case to a warning maroon which would betray the intelligent prisoner as soon as he put his full weight on it.

Benedikt ground his teeth in anger with himself—and with Audley