Authors: Eric Ambler
That was it. I saw the van windshield bursting and a red smear that had been Guido’s blue shirt rising in the driver’s seat as everything tilted. Then, the van settled back on its
springs and ran along the edge of the road until it hit one of the concrete snow markers that lined the outer shoulder of the bend. However, Bourger’s driver did not bother to wait for that. The moment the van had left the centre of the road, the Citroën had passed it and was streaking after us up the hill.
I looked at Zander. His face was white and pinched and the simper ghastly. ‘Guido volunteered,’ he said, ‘volunteered freely.’ When no one said anything he touched Simone’s shoulder. ‘They’ve killed Guido.’
‘I heard the automatic fire, patron.’ Her effort to stay cool and calm was only just successful. She was very angry. ‘Our handsome young shepherd told you that they only had revolvers. Did you believe him, patron?’
‘No, but I thought they would save their real firepower to surprise us. Jean-Pierre will be upset. He never approved of involving Guido in operations outside the Paris office. But Guido appealed to me. He was ambitious. He wanted field experience.’
‘In what?’ I asked. ‘Gang warfare?’
‘In covert negotiation, the kind of business which he knew from his work with us to be the most profitable.’
‘All I know about him is that he cooked lunch the other day in the safe house in Stresa. What was his job for you in Paris?’
‘He was an accountant, a first-class young man, Jean-Pierre’s right hand on taxation matters. He will be greatly missed.’ He paused as if suddenly struck by the pious banality of what he was saying, then hurried on. ‘What gun was that, the gun Bourger had? Did you recognize it?’
‘I thought that it might be an Uzi. Hard to say.’
‘Yes, it could have been that.’
But he wasn’t really wondering about the gun. He was wondering if we were thinking the same things as he was – that he had made several gross errors of judgement, underestimated an enemy of known quality, thrown away a good life uselessly – and asking himself how much our confidence
in him had been shaken. The young people were chattering excitedly as they unpacked the other three rifles and he snapped an order that shut them up. No loss of confidence in him there. To them, no doubt, Guido had been of no more value or importance than the Pacioli driver they had kicked and beaten on their patron’s behalf.
‘I can see the calvary,’ Simone said. ‘There, straight ahead, with the pointed roof. Do you still want me to turn off there?’
‘Certainly.’ He sounded surprised that she should ask.
‘They’re going to catch up with us now. They’ll see us make the turn.’
‘They may not. Put your foot down. We could still lose them.’
‘They’re faster than we are on the straight and on the corners. They’re bound to see us. And there’s no effective cover on that hillside until we get to the trees.’
‘Then get to the trees. If we can’t hide ourselves, we can at least take the high ground before they can get to it.’
The track we turned on to had once been the approach to a hill farm, but that had been long ago. The old wheel ruts beneath the weeds had been made by carts, not tractors, and the thin patches of top soil left on the stony slopes below the tree-line had been taken over by crabgrass and scrub. Two or three hundred yards from the road we came to the roofless walls of a stone barn. Not far beyond stood the brick hearth and chimney of what had been a wooden house. A tourist authority information board, with its own neat shingle roof and a trash can standing by it, gave the traveller a variety of hints, tips and instructions. Caravans were forbidden to park there and camping was permitted only in designated places. Lighting cooking fires was forbidden as was shooting without the permission of the Landesfremdenverkehrsamt. A pointing plywood finger showed us the way to a hikers’ trail up through the woods, a trail which led to a ridge road (
Höhenweg
, 1063
m) along the Karawanken hills. On the trail and ridge road, bicycles and motorcycles were forbidden. It said nothing about station-wagons.
The hikers’ trail ran through the trees diagonally across the face of the hillside. We lurched up past another pointing-finger signpost through a fringe of saplings. From there on, the trees were bigger and grew closer together. The trail was narrowing and becoming a ledge along the contour line.
Simone, wrestling with the wheel, nearly stalled once because she had forgotten to shift down into first, but she recovered. The killing of Guido had shaken her, but only shaken her. If I had been driving, that would have been it. I was by then scared witless and the man we called ‘patron’ had become, for me, a callous and complacent bungler. The assault rifles the young people were crooning over behind my head would turn out to be useless because they had brought the wrong ammunition or because the firing pins were missing. I knew it. We had been ‘followed’ ahead by a second Rasmuk team which was, at that very moment, quietly waiting up on the high ground our wise patron had urged us to occupy, carefully positioned in ambush and all set to slaughter the lot of us.
The wagon rocked wildly, side-swiped a tree and stopped. I looked down at the track below and saw the Bourger Citroën turning off the road after us. Simone had been right, our patron fatuously optimistic.
‘Attention to me,’ he said. ‘We leave the transport here and quickly deploy.’ To Simone, he went on: ‘We also take care to hold our fire until I give the signal. The shepherd should be made to suffer maximum surprise and shock when the sheep turn around and start to bite him.’ To me, he said: ‘We will all go up the hill, please, well away from our transport. Don’t use it as cover. If you will help us carry some of the ammunition, so much the better, but don’t try to take anything else. When they reach the hikers’ trail, stop moving. Just lie flat on the ground behind the thickest tree
you can find and remain absolutely still.’
All four of them had rifles now and there was a smear of oil on one sleeve of Zander’s beautiful mohair suit. I took one of the ammunition boxes, as he had asked, and started off. The hillside beneath the trees was covered with feathery undergrowth above a soft bed of decaying pine needles that was rather slippery. The ammunition box was also heavier than I had expected. After about a hundred yards’ climbing I stopped to get my breath and looked back.
The Rasmuk team had stopped by the signs and their driver was turning their car. The other three were already out and looking up in our direction. They were all carrying the same type of machine pistol and had what looked like CB transceiver mikes clipped to their coat lapels. Bourger had a pair of binoculars. He raised them to his eyes.
That started me climbing again. The others were all somewhere ahead of me. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear movement still. I struggled up to a small clearing. There were no trees anywhere near me with trunks thick enough to stop bullets that could rip through the bodywork of a van. What I was probably looking for at that moment was a giant redwood. What I settled for instead was a hole in the ground, or rather a shallow depression in it, behind the remains of a foresters’ trestle that had at some time been used for stacking cordwood.
Suddenly, everything was very quiet. Peering around I couldn’t see any of the others. I couldn’t even hear them any more. I even forgot the discomfort of the can of film digging into my stomach. I was already scared. Now I panicked and started to get up.
There was a sharp ‘Psst!’ from somewhere near me and Simone said: ‘Keep your head down.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘To the right of us. Keep your head down and keep quiet.’
By moving slightly to the left I found that I could see below the trestle without raising my head. Bourger and one of his
team were climbing up the hill below the trail towards the station-wagon. They were being slow and careful. I guessed that the other two members of the team were already across the trail and out on the flanks, moving up to get behind us. They knew roughly where we were hidden. They had seen the station-wagon stop on the trail. From that point we could have continued along the trail on foot. They knew that we hadn’t done so because from where they were a long stretch of the trail was plainly visible. If we had continued along it we would have been plainly visible too. So, since we weren’t visible, we were somewhere on the hillside. All they had to do was narrow the field a bit, then flush us out and finish the job.
Bourger was near the wagon now and went down on one knee to peer under it. It was over at an angle. I suppose he wanted to see if it was still mobile or whether we had run aground on the crankcase. Then he went up close to it and looked inside.
Our baggage was all there but nothing to show that a few minutes earlier there had been guns and ammunition along with it. It all looked – as, I then realized, Zander had thoughtfully intended it to look – as if the killing of Guido had rendered us all witless enough to turn into a blind alley, ditch our transportation and try to hide. Bourger could not know that I had been the only really witless member of our group. Now, he scanned the hillside above and said something to the man with him. Then, he moved out slowly on to the trail and stood there with his arms raised as if signalling a big pincer movement to someone he could see higher up the hill.
Oddly enough, I knew exactly what he was trying to do. It was possible that one or more of us was armed. Men with backgrounds like Zander’s, he would have reasoned, often had a taste for hand guns, and that young Berber of his might very well share it. Anyway, he would see if he could draw fire. The chance of his being hit must have seemed to him acceptably small and the rewards for taking that chance
worth having. The leader prepared to draw fire himself often has no need to give orders. Once he had fooled us into giving away our position on the hillside all he would have to give his men would be a nod. They would do the rest. It would be a quick, clean, troublefree operation, a credit to Rasmuk and, of course, to Raoul Bourger. The trick of drawing enemy fire has long been a standard infantry tactic. The only time it doesn’t work is when it is used against a highly disciplined enemy who also knows about drawing fire and how to run it to his own advantage.
All the same, I did wonder why Zander hadn’t been tempted by that chance of disposing of the whiz-kid assassin there and then. It took me a moment to see why he had held his fire. Killing Bourger and the man with him would simply have warned the other two members of the team that they were up against more than hand guns. They would then have known at once what had to be done. The Citroën had been parked safely behind the stone walls of the old barn. All they would have to do would be to get to the radio in it, call for reinforcements and keep the trail covered until they arrived. The Italian team now waiting across the border could have been with us in less than an hour. We could have stayed where we were or we could have gone for a hike along the ridge road, but there would have been nothing we could have done to get out of that place alive.
No. It was
our
side that was going to have to draw fire, and suddenly I heard us doing so.
Simone was calling to Bourger. She was calling in Arabic so I didn’t know precisely what she was saying, but I knew enough to make out the sense of it.
‘Brother Bourger?’ she called. ‘Brother Raoul? How much is Rasmuk paying you to kill us?’
Her voice reverberated strangely across the hillside. If I hadn’t seen her climbing up there with only a rifle and her shoulder bag stuffed with ammunition I would have thought she was speaking into a loud-hailer.
The effect on Bourger was startling. He leaped sideways and landed in a crouch which became almost instantly a roll. Then, he had disappeared over the edge of the trail. At the same moment, a burst of automatic fire from his man on our left flank ripped through the low branches of a tree a few yards away.
‘Oh, Brother Raoul,’ Simone wailed, ‘why do your masters wish to take our lives? They will never be paid, you know, never. Why do you risk so much for so little?’
She had moved. I could tell that from the voice. Another burst of fire tore into the trees, this time near enough to shower me with pine needles. Then, I saw Bourger scuttle across the trail directly below us. He was signalling to someone on our left as he went.
Simone laughed. ‘Oh Brother Raoul,’ she called, ‘be careful. Be careful or you will shoot your friends.’
But he already knew about the dangers of cross-fire and was pressing a button behind the CB mike on his lapel.
The two men working their way along the hillside to get behind us must have been very near because, although he spoke quietly into his mike, I could hear his voice quacking through their speakers. One of them was only a few yards above me.
There followed a brief silence. Then Zander opened fire.
I had my head down and was staring fixedly at the trail. That was because the underbrush was very thin and I was afraid that the man above me might see my face if I looked up. So, I saw Bourger die. I didn’t see him hit. What happened was that his body landed on the trail as if it had been tossed there by some monster who had no further use for it.
The noise of the firing went on for only about five seconds, I think. Then there was silence again. From quite near me, through the singing in my ears, there came the double click of a magazine being changed.
‘Are you all right?’ Simone asked.
‘Yes. Are you?’
She got to her feet and pointed up the hill with her rifle. ‘Is he dead? We’d better be sure. I’ll keep you covered if you’ll have a look.’
I scrambled up to the place she was pointing at. The first thing I saw was the man’s machine pistol lying on the ground. He was beyond it. Half his head had gone and the blood was still bubbling out of an artery in his neck.
‘He’s dead enough,’ I said. ‘So’s Bourger. Did you get him too?’
‘That was the patron. The young people will have dealt with the others, but we will wait here for orders.’
We stood there saying nothing until Zander called up from the trail.